induratize (v)- to make one's own heart hardened or resistant to someone's pleas or advances, or to the idea of love.
Quiet is a luxury in all but the richest areas of Republic City, a commodity reserved for the high, secluded mansions with thick walls and spacious streets. Not every residential area, of course, is the same as the night that lives downtown, where people and Satomobiles spill onto the streets just like music and voices do well into the morning hours. Even the modest ones have their voices: the car that rumbles by the windows on getaway from an illegal trade, the sound of lightning-crickets outside the window, the lonely cat-bird spirit that cries on the street corner. They linger in ways the downtown bustle can't, breaking through the quiet of sleep, an interruption on a quiet conversation.
Four stories above the Bray borough streets, however, in one half-lit apartment, even these sounds, too, are drowned by that of hot, heavy breathing and muffled gasps for air.
Mako presses his fingertips white to the rough wooden walls behind him. He's backed inches from the window, left open to feel even the hot, muggy breeze of summer, and Korra is a too-warm wall in front of him, all hands and mouth and grip. She's worked an arm beneath his tank top—dipped her nails into his skin, pulled herself up until he has no choice but to let his head drop back to the wall and his gaze to the ceiling as he feels teeth against his neck.
"We shouldn't be doing this," Mako says, and she shoves him full back-flat against the wall. "We know what's going to happen," he continues, as she curls her other hand into his hair and drags her fingers against his scalp, pulling his head down until it hurts. "I know some things haven't changed, but we—"
"Shut up and kiss me, you ass," Korra gasps, and he meets her hard and open-mouthed with nothing more to say.
They speak, instead, through their hands. They're all fumbles, both hesitant and over-eager—Korra's fingers never stay, moving from his chest to his waist to his back—from weeks of reaching but never touching, from glances, the few times a week they see each other in the police department headquarters and turn their heads away. They know, somewhere beneath the sparks they trail along each other's skin, that it's over hadn't meant we can do this—but Korra grips Mako's upper arm so hard he know it has to bruise, and what it means is I didn't want to let you go.
Without words, this is easier. Words got them into trouble in the first place. They have always spoken better on their own through actions, and here, when nothing needs to be said, it feels safe.
Korra pulls on Mako's tank top, and he bumps his elbow against her chin as he rushes to pull it over her head. Her jaw clacks, her teeth coming together hard against his lower lip, and they gasp together—sharp breaths in through open mouths. Mako takes his chance and pushes her away, through the doorway feet away from them to his bedroom, and its his turn to curl hands in hair as she stumbles to kick off her kamitt. They're all too-tight holds and hard kisses, bruises against skin they rush to make bare, and as Korra presses him hard into his mattress Mako thinks that this is nothing like the slow intimacy they used to share. This is thirst—(she presses hard against his collar bone, he scrapes open skin along her back)—this hurts.
And in the morning, she is gone.
They rarely see each other except during these late moments. They don't look to find each other, and they certainly don't look to talk. In the daytime, when they meet again, they cast a smile and a wave for the public—if Mako watches her back a little longer, she doesn't notice, or she says nothing.
Occasionally, before they fall asleep, Korra traces words on his chest as they murmur to each other about the days that have passed since they last shared the hungry breaths and kisses of sex in the shadows of Mako's near-empty apartment. It's the only intimacy they allow themselves, the closest they have been since before Harmonic Convergence, when the angry grasps of hair and skin and rolling hips hard against the bed become quiet whispers and feather-light touches along their bruises. In these moments, they learn who they are again without each other. Mako watches the vines that grow through the cracks in the corners of his ceiling, and Korra presses her cheek over the too-fast rhythm of his heart, falling asleep mid-sentence with her arm thrown across his chest. He stays awake as long as he can, breathing in the smell of her hair and the taste of sweat and sex that lingers on his tongue; but eventually, always, Mako drifts to sleep with his chin against her head, and he wakes to a chill across his bare chest and empty sheets.
After nearly four weeks of this (a late knock on his door, unexpected—Korra, who still brings with her the pretense of work or friendly gifts—his mouth between her legs and her fingers knotted in his hair, toes curled into the covers), Mako wakes too early, cold without Korra's weight on top of him but no early sunlight filtering through the slats of the windows. He sits up. Still night, Mako realizes, and he places bare feet on the cold floor and squints towards the dim light that flickers in his kitchen.
Mako pulls a sheet with him, tucked corners around his waist, and pushes open the door into the open main room of the apartment. Korra sits, one candle lit, naked at his table, staring into a mug she cups between her hands.
"I shouldn't have done this," she says.
The silence that follows stretches thick, muffled pressure in Mako's ears until he thinks they might burst. No, you shouldn't have, he wants to tell her, because he was always going to follow her no matter what she did—could not have kept himself from falling, deep into this wordlessness—as long as she wanted to drag him with her. You should have known. But he adds nothing, because he knows, too: they've fallen hard into a trap that will never free them.
"Because now we can't stop," Korra continues, miserable as the silence felt just before, and somehow voiced confirmation makes this only worse; low in her throat, she finishes, "We can't be apart any more than we can be together."
"Then maybe this is how it should be," Mako says.
Korra looks at him. There's nothing in her expression, nothing written in her eyes but something searching, a hunt that lasts her only moments before she smiles, despite the shadows on her face, across the room.
"Come back to bed," he tells her, and Korra does. She leaves the mug, cold with half-drunk tea for Mako to find in the morning, and curls back into his arms beneath the twisted sheet Mako makes only a half effort to spread back across the rumpled bed. He presses into her, curved against her back with his arm wrapped tightly around her waist, and closes his eyes against the back of her neck, the hair that tickles his mouth and nose. He thinks, at one point, he feels her hand running along his arm as he falls asleep once more, in the hours just before dawn; but when he wakes up again to the rise of the sun and morning spirits, there's no one there.