Obligatory (delayed) response to Episode 5
Mako was used to making decisions.
He had quickly learned how important it was to improvise; how crucial it was to be anything but indecisive.
He had learned to improvise in the arena when a win came down to him and him alone. He had learned to improvise on the streets when food was scarce and money scarcer. He learned to improvise when it came to juggling a sports career and finances and a hazardous little brother. You could say that since the night his parents died Mako's whole life had been one big improvisation
Mako was used to making decisions.
That didn't make this one any easier.
Korra.
Or Asami.
The comparison was almost as impossible as it was painful. Asami took him to expensive restaurants, fancy art galleries, and her father's business galas. Afterward they usually end up walking or riding through the park. Mako doesn't mind. Even though the suit suffocates him and being surrounded by upper class citizens makes him realize just how uneducated he is.
But.
(And there is a but, though it is more commonly pronounced Kor-ra.)
He's heard Korra talk about penguin sledding and the Winter Solstice celebration. He knows her love of dancing and her infatuation with the night life of the city. He's heard her talk about long runs with Naga over never ending tundra and her desire to visit the city zoo. He knows dates with Korra would push him completely out of his comfort zone, end, on more than one occasion, in some sort of drunken incident, and possibly leave him permanently traumatized. But he also know that dates with Korra would fill an empty part of himself, leave his heart full to bursting, and his gut pained with the unfamiliar sensation of laughter.
Because there is a part of him that simply lacks.
Asami does not fill this. And he argues with himself over the idea of whether Korra would or not.
All Mako really knows is this:
Asami does not enrage him.
Asami does not frustrate him.
Asami does not make him want to grind Tahno's face in the dirt.
Asami does not make him jealous of his own brother.
Asami makes him happy (sort of).
With Asami he is content (almost).
Asami makes him worry less (about money).
Asami is safe.
Asami is stable.
Asami is pleasant.
And Asami is not Korra.
Korra, who spars with firelords. Who acts first and thinks later. Who's best friend is a polar-bear-dog. Who plays with fire like she won't get burned.
Korra is gasoline and an open flame.
She is action.
She is the roar of the ocean on the rocks.
She is the earth beneath his feet.
And when she gets too close, she is the air in his lungs.
She is trouble; the part of him that lived on the streets for ten years likes to remind him. But he knows it doesn't matter. He knows that since he won that match against the Tiger-dillos and turned to see her looking at him from the balcony that his heart was spoken for. Since that moment he's been doomed.
She is reckless and crazy and life changing. She is nothing that his life needs but everything he wants. Everything that he needs. They are inevitable. Part of him knows this, even as he fights it. He's fought the inevitable before. He has argued with fate and won. He's avoided things this way.
Things like:
Orphanages
Starvation
A narrow future working for the Triad
So far, Mako's never won anything when it comes to the Avatar. From arguments to sparring to pai-sho. He can't imagine he will fare any better against the gravity of her fate; against the inevitability of her words.
"I think we were meant for each other."
And he's not sure he wants to.