Bolin had fallen asleep within minutes of getting home. Mako had washed his face, peeled off his clothing, and scowled face-down into his pillow, swinging between shapeless sleep and wakefulness, listening to his brother breathe in the still air.
He remembers being eight and looking at his hands, and then thinking of his parents – what was left of them – and looking at his hands again. Turning them over. Studying the lines on his palms, like needle-thin brushstrokes, trying to read what was written. Mako remembers holding them up to his face and suddenly understanding what his hands are capable of, and being terrified, and hiding them in his sleeves, his pockets. He remembers finding a pair of gloves in a dumpster behind a cold gleaming house and slipping them on and the effect on his mind was like shade on a searing hot day.
"Mako doesn't know any lethal forms of fire-bending," he had heard Bolin tell Korra, after she'd teased him about fire-slapping a training dummy in the face - That wouldn't save you from a flying lemur.
No. Why would he? Why would a pro-bender need to learn anything past showy tricks and harmless knock-out moves? Okay, maybe if he and Bolin were still doing work for the Triads, they might need to learn something other than punching earth disks and throwing little darts of fire, but they didn't. The fire-bending forms he knew were enough. It was enough to compete, to eat. It was enough to live. Just... enough.
He knows the statue of the Fire Lord well, serene and smooth all over until the patch of rough, unevenly cast bronze, the scar from his own father. He knows the history of his city, born from the smoking remains of a war. Fire is life, they said. Fire is energy. Fire is beauty. They said these things as they ignored two dirty children in the street and so he had to dismiss what they said as they had dismissed him at their doors, deaf to their need.
Sometimes sleeping at night is hard. Mako will wake up in a sweat and roll over in the dark to study his brother's sleeping face, Bolin's round face and snub of a nose reminding him irresistibly of a turtle-duckling. Bolin was young, he thinks. Bolin doesn't remember. He doesn't know what the smell of burnt flesh is like, the crumbling clusters of black scabs and hard white patches of bone shining through smoking pink flesh - Bolin was spared. Bolin will never be afraid of his own hands.
And on those nights, like this one, he throws the sheets off and crosses the floorboards to sit on the ledge, to watch Republic City and the islands glow and cast their soft, yellow light across the water. The floorboards creak as he pads across them and there is a quiet snap from the wood as he settles himself in the window frame.
He looks at his hands and then to the island, where she sleeps. They had seen something strange at the rally. Very strange. Something they had thought impossible, never even considered it before…
Sometimes the creases in his palms fill with ash, after he has been training for a while, and they again look like broken characters, brushstrokes pulled apart. What do they say when they are pushed back together?
He rests his head on the side of the frame and closes his eyes, the night breeze wafting in slowly, like a wave, rising and falling. Drifts. Dozes into sleep. He holds fistfuls of flame, moving silently through a dark alleyway, stepping out of a doorway, his voice rising at a couple with a small child, his shadow falling across their feet. It is a quick gesture, a fist lancing through space, illuminated and hot. They scream, a sound that jolts through him, laced with stronger pain than being electrocuted. Fire gives life, they said, more life in a few burning seconds than they had ever known before.
Mako opens his eyes and reflexively cross his arms, tucking his hands away, close to his body. He is warm all over, but cold, a creeping ensnaring touch, on the inside of his skin. Like fingertips. He closes his eyes again and this time, in the black, sleeping space between thought and feeling, he sees Amon, a masked figure that triggers a feeling of – of…
He stands still, hands at his side, and tilts his head, looking down at the hooded man – to hide a face burnt off - with starlit eyes. Please, he thinks. Take it. I understand.
And Amon reaches out and places one hand on his forehead and one on the back of his neck and Mako sinks to his knees. He hopes for peace, or something like it –