The apartment is crowded with cardboard boxes, weights, and moldy training mats. The windows on the West side are fogged with crystalline sea salt, staining the lemon afternoon sunlight a dull white. All around a blanket of thin dust washes the surfaces of the room with silver.
Silver and gold, Bolin thinks, biting down on his bottom lip to keep himself from smiling.
The old man that brought them there, Toza, shuffles awkwardly at the brothers' silence. He rubs the sharp hairs at the back of his neck and out of his mouth comes a thick whine, waving his mangled free hand over the room.
"It needs some work," he says, turning to leave them. "Get to it."
His steps echo down the hatch door, and it takes to thump number five for Bolin to shake out of his trance to spin around.
"Thanks," he manages.
Toza jerks his head over his shoulder in surprise. Bolin is a bit confused by this, but it's nothing he hasn't seen before: people rarely take kindly to his words of thanks. Especially strangers.
"Uh, don't mention it," Toza says, and his eyes flicker over to Mako, who still hasn't moved since stepping into the apartment. "There's a bucket of floor wax down in a closet somewhere in the gym. It's yours."
This brings Mako to say, "No, we can't, that's too -"
"I ain't using it," Toza says dismissively, and suddenly the floor wax isn't a gift but something the boys can lift from someone else's hands, the only way they're accustomed to getting things. "Might as well let you two have it."
He said the same thing about the apartment. Bolin doesn't say anything, he just looks up at his brother and Mako is locked into place. Toza shakes his head and mutters under his breath, and the soft hollow sound of the hatch closing lets the boys know that they are now alone.
Now Mako can turn his head and meet Bolin's eyes, and Bolin breaks into a grin for the first time in his life when he sees his older brother's eyes welling with tears. Slightly embarrassed but too elated to care, Mako chokes out a weak laugh and starts to rub them away, while Bolin's laughter echoes across the room.
—-
The wax has a soft chemical smell that reminds Bolin of when Mako used to work in a leather tanning factory, and he would come home with his scarf smelling of brown acids. They dip rags into the bucket between them, pants rolled and bunched around their thighs, coats discarded on the loft where they have hidden items pilfered from the junk that used to crowd the room. The windows are all open and cleaned now, Mako having bartered with waterbenders in the arena to spray them clean in exchange for more time for practice in the gym. All that seeps into the apartment now is the collective rays of the city behind them, ebbing out into the night sky thick with exhaust.
Bolin sits back on his heels and looks out the windows, sees the stretch of the sealine to his right, glowing ochre. Up here with the windows open, their world smells of salt water from the bay. In the west, Air Temple Island is a few specks of light that burn modestly and cut off the reaching gold of the arena that flickers across the waves. Behind it, the sun was swallowed whole.
The back of Mako's neck gleams with sweat, his fingers shining with wax as he rubs a cloth rag meticulously into the hardwood. Hardwood floors, Bo, he said with a choked whisper once the place had been picked clean.
"Hey Bo?"
Bolin nods and finds that his brother is still working, so he dips his rag into the wax and continues as well. "Yeah?"
"Promise me something?"
He always poses it as a question, but Bolin has never denied his brother of a promise.
"Yeah, anything."
Mako sighs, his chest feeling oddly hollow with the feeling as dry air slides down his throat. His work stutters for a moment but kicks back in with renewed vigor, and Bolin winces when he notices this, because every pause during a job as a child meant some type of smack from an adult. He remembers when Mako would return to him at the ends of his shifts while working in factories with welts on his cheek and neck and hands, and now Mako can't feel good about taking a break in the middle of any labor.
"I don't - I don't want any of the Triple Threats coming here," Mako says, and it's pained, as if it's hard for him to even say. "It's just that, well - this is our place now."
"Ours," Bolin repeats and the word rolls around his mouth like a gumball, those fun treats that line the pockets of the Air Acolytes that would sometimes slip them into Bolin's hands when he was a child, begging for spare change and instead given candy. Soft orange robes and soft hands, and Bolin shakes the thought from his mind to focus. "Yeah, ours, got it."
"We don't need them anymore," Mako says quietly. He sits back on his heels and forces himself to take the time to twist his spine as the pops travel down each vertebrae. "Some of them are good guys but, we don't - we don't need them."
Bolin nods, because he understands, even if it's hard. Mako takes care of these things; he sorted through every box in the apartment to shuffle through anything that could be salvaged, a series of yes, yes, no, no, get rid of it, and it's just like that with people. They only have four hands between them and they can't carry everything.
"Alright. It's just us now."
Mako's head bobs in agreement and he dips his rag back into the wax, rubbing it into the floor. "Just us."