***yoko meshi 横飯 (n)- the peculiar stress of speaking a foreign language***
It takes Mako only a few days in the South Pole to realise that he wants to leave.
It isn't that Korra's family is unwelcoming or intimidating—quite the opposite, in fact. Tonraq and Senna speak little, but when they do, it is always with smiles (Mako wonders, at first, that they are so different from their daughter who can hardly keep her mouth shut). Nor is it his struggles to understand Tonraq's jibes in the Southern Water Tribe accent or whether he should even laugh at them at all, or Korra's easy slips into slang and references to stories only he and Bolin don't understand. Mako's discomfort, he thinks, is with the unicultural tradition steeped so deeply into daily life—not a thing like the Republic City slums where people hardly know their parents, let alone from which nation they originated, and the only tradition is "eat while you still have a chance".
Here Mako better understands Korra's easy admission of her privileged life: the Tribe only rarely uses currency, because the Tribe trades and shares. Hunting parties can be brother and sister, old friends, mentor and student; there is little sense of selfishness, but when one is selfish it rarely matters, for there will always be another willing to provide for those who cannot help themselves. On the rare occasions a party manages to slay an elephant-seal, it's returned in triumph to the heart of the village, where the hunter proudly offers the heart of the beast to the spirits of Tui and La before carving the meat to share with the entire tribe.
It's culture shock for a boy who was forced to learn that selfishness was the only way to survive.
He offers to help cook one night, the one way he can think to contribute, but he soon regrets the decision. Mako watches Senna's brows tug closer and closer, frowning as he continues to brush off her questions about his life in Republic City, his family, where he grew up; and it isn't until he finally snaps a short "We survived" that she falls silent and returns to skinning the rabbit-fox for the stew. Only afterwards does Mako realise that he's stepped over a line he hadn't even seen. Like Korra months ago, Senna simply hadn't known: a child's raising his brother and fighting in the streets just to eat was unthinkable, and she hadn't been aware that Mako's hunched shoulders and shorter and shorter answers had meant that her questions had painful answers.
Mako doesn't apologise to Senna, and she doesn't mention the incident again, but he notices that Korra seems to keep finding excuses to leave him alone with her parents after that. Tonraq is even gentler, if that were possible, and Senna offers to teach Mako and Bolin how to read Water Tribe script, but Mako is so alarmed by the attention that he refuses every offer and lets Bolin take them up alone instead. The only family, to Mako, is his brother; he is still learning how to care for more, which is why it takes him longer than perhaps it should have to reach the terrifying realisation that Tonraq and Senna are trying to treat him as their son.
Mako doesn't know how to be a son. His memory of his own parents is hazy: just a few flashes of learning to control a flame on his palms with his mother, wet clay under his nails from trying to toss pots with his father, but most vivid of his memories are the screams—the choking, the smell of burnt flesh, the bile in his throat and the thick smoke on his tongue—where those memories of being a son stop and the memories of becoming a caretaker begin.
"You let me love you," Korra says when she finally pulls from him the reason for his reticence, and she looks down to take his hand in hers, fingers curling tightly as she squeezes her message of just how much that means to her. "Just let them do the same."
It's much easier said than done for Mako, though he doesn't tell her that. He can let Korra love him because he loves her first. He wants to care for her, wants to show her his affection, and she wants to receive it; but he hardly knows Senna and Tonraq. When he looks at Korra—the girl he didn't just let into his life, the girl whoforced herself into his life—he understands that she has to care for the whole world,and through her so does he. Mako shies away from this line of thinking whenever he approaches it. He can't take in the whole world like that when he can barely take in a few people, but somehow Korra finds that no problem at all. Somehow Korra doesn't just love him as part of The World, but she loves him—an orphaned street rat for whom no one has ever cared but his own brother.
For now, that's enough—but when it's time to leave the South Pole, Mako follows Bolin's and Asami's examples in hugging Korra's parents goodbye.
He can begin with the basics.