The news, when Mako receives it, comes with so little fanfare that for one wild moment he thinks it was meant expressly to catch him off his guard.
"You're on security detail for the upcoming gala. The Avatar's coming back to town," Saikhan tells him, and the stacks of paper Mako is shuffling slip out of his hands before he can catch them and fall, with as little effort, in a wide white spread before his grasp.
Saikhan is gone before Mako can recover, and he's left standing alone in his office with too much whirling through his head to be sure he's still on his feet. The Avatar—not an uncommon mention in Republic City, but only thrown around with the offhand indifference of someone reading a good book."The Avatar settled the peace talks between the Earth Kingdom satellites and main state," or "I heard the Avatar was present at the death of the old Fire Lord," or "They say she meditated in the tundras of the North Pole for two weeks straight—" Always something intangible, out of reach, but in ten years Mako has never heard something quite as definite as "The Avatar's coming back to town."
Right, he says to himself, dropping (just a little too hard) into the wooden chair in front of his desk.
She had to come back sometime, and it seemed like the best way to do it, even ten years later, was with an offhand word from a commanding officer. He'd expected a different kind of job when he'd first met her, too, one that meant preserving order on the streets that too often went ignored, where children ran numbers for criminals just so they could eat; and he'd been promised he could have it. "You've got promise," Chief Beifong had assured him. But Mako wasn't sure he'd believed her, with the exasperation dripping in her voice as she rubbed her fingers against her temples. "And you're the only one we've got who's her age. Do whatever you young people do—just keep her from making any more trouble in my city."
He'd accepted the assignment then with as much reluctance as he allowed without complaining; and he says nothing now to Saikhan either, but reaches for the notepad in the corner of his desk to scratch the reminder, SECURITY—GALA—KORRA RETURNS.
The Avatar, he decides, is barely separable in spirit from her polar bear dog. She walks like she expects the world to part for her, sinks her teeth into every sniff of movement and runs before he can even get up to follow. She calls him "city boy" and "mister fussypants" and "officer fuzz"—he calls her a headache and a pain in his ass.
"Don't listen to the big, mean jerk, Naga," she says to her polar bear dog, who whines deep in her throat and thumps her tail against the ground.
"So it's Captain Fuzz now, is it?"
She has him by the elbow before he can even register her hand on his arm, pulling him into the crowd and slipping, seamlessly, into the clink of glasses and easy curl of smoke of the people. Mako has nothing to protest (or at least his tongue doesn't) and he watches the flex and curve of her bare shoulders as she leads him closer to the band on the east side of the hall. Korra stops and turns, and for the first time in ten years he gets a good look at her, close up now in the soft lights from above. He's aware of the thinned-out roundness of her face, the jaw that's no longer too soft, and always, just as he remembers, blue eyes too bright in a dark face that smiles up at him, one corner of her mouth pulled higher than the other.
"Catching people," she says, "and you're in charge. Were you honest when you went into the interview?"
Mako looks down, and each word sticks and his throat and feels too big in his mouth. He works to make himself respond.
"I think it's the experience that earned me my title," he manages to say to her—the first time in a decade, and what he'd imagined wasn't this.
She smiles even wider and pulls him in again, steps into the rhythm of the erhu that directs the already, slow, lazy movement of the gala. "I'm just glad to see you," she says. "It's not easy to last this long, without me to watch your back."
Korra speaks with a bravado easily recognized, one that Mako heard more often accompanied with a tug down on her eyebrows and up on her lips, a wild flame-lit grin, and it's shadowed in the dim crystal lamps of City Hall. "You've definitely forgotten whose job was whose, Avatar Korra," he tells her, and she lifts her chin and rises, just a little.
On the off hours she manages to escape Tenzin, the air acolytes, and Mako after daily training, he finds her and Naga huddled somewhere on the streets. A few times he even hides his badge and lets her roll up her sleeves in the rowdiest of bars and the cheapest of noodle shops. Among people, Korra stands with her legs sprawled wide and her body forwards, lips curled up as she says to her company, "I wouldn't bet too hard on it, tough guy, not now you know who I am."
On the night-black streets, she looks as though she's searching for something, and never Mako asks. But she complains, each time he finds her, that no one ever wants her to stretch her legs alone, not even in a city in which everyone is watching. Usually he ignores her, but once he loses his temper.
"Look, you can pretend that it's all some big plan to hold you back," he snaps, hands curling in his pockets, "but at least you have people looking out for you. I'm just trying to do my job so my brother and I can eat."
Korra looks away from him then, down at the long shadows cast on the road by the yellow streetlamps up above. "I'm trying to do mine, too," she mutters, and she does not look up again for hours.
"Did you worry?" Korra asks. She takes a step closer. Her voice is low beneath the hum of the chatter and the music, and he has to dip his head to hear her.
Mako's face is warm; he blames the crowd, too clustered together even though she leads them along the edge. "About the walrus-bear population in the North Pole, maybe," he responds, shifting his weight on his back heels as the music shifts to something slower. "I didn't believe there wasn't some trick to two weeks of meditation without food in the northern tundras."
She chuckles, and Mako feels himself smiling despite the tightness in his chest with a source he just can't pinpoint.
"Is that the best rumor about me you have?" Korra demands. "I like the one about how I tried to steal the throne from the Earth Queen."
Mako thinks about Korra's procession into the gala hall, her shoulders back and high like the weight of a royal's train pulled behind her, her chin up and the attention of the room at her very command. The seventeen-year-old Avatar had been a picture of strength, wherever she went, but the twenty-seven year old was simply power, a thousand lives swirling beneath her eyes and the tips of her fingers. Command, it seemed, was nothing new. "And did you?" he asks before he can stop himself—only half teasing, because corruption fell before Korra where she walked.
"She asked me to marry her," Korra answers. "I had to say no. That's not quite the same thing."
She catches the bunch of his sleeve at his elbows, curled beneath her fingers with a wordless beckon that brings him only closer. The music now is a faint buzz in his ears and the crowds a solid backdrop against a quiet world that draws around his shoulders—cloaked around them, an unseen screen. He keeps his head down. Hers is weighed against his forehead, and he watches her hair, against the rhythm, with every step. "You're the same," she says, "like time stands still in Republic City," and Mako feels something tighten and drop in his chest at her words. The same. She's an interruption, she's right, on the constant haze of smoke that curls across glasses of whiskey and wine; he stills, but she continues to move with each beat, two steps away before she returns.
After fourteen months, Korra says there's nothing more she can learn in Republic City. Tenzin agrees.
She hasn't mastered anything, he's sure to say; but he's seen that here, in the city where Satomobile smoke drowns out all other smells and the lights are too bright to see the stars, Korra does not flourish. There is nothing here for her. Korra looks up, hiding the wild smile on her face that spreads as Ikki runs to her, and for a brief moment, she meets Mako's eyes, and she does not look away.
Korra pulls him into dark corners, from the very center of the gala to the edges of City Hall, along the shadows on the walls and against the windows that whistle slightly with the wind. He doesn't know how long the silence stretches any more than he remembers where they are, alone in the well-dressed Republic City crowd, until they're standing on the steps outside in the snow.
"You're not cold," Mako says.
It's not an observation that takes much skill. Her back and arms are bare, and her hands, flat against his chest, are neither red nor gripping too tight at his jacket for warmth. As soon as he says it, it feels stupid—she's a firebender from the Water Tribes, after all.
"Still don't believe those two weeks of meditation at the North Pole?" she teases, and she slides her hands further over up his shoulders, tilts her head to the side—and, for the first time all night, hesitates before she moves or speaks again. "…You know how to use your fire to warm yourself—it's heat, not just fire in the breath."
Korra stops again—lifts a little on her toes.
"Somehow, I'm surprised," she murmurs, a halt in the back of her throat, "that there's no story about the first time I visited the Fire Nation, where I met the old masters…"
She's too close. He can smell her breath, hot against his, and he smells alcohol and ash. He knows nothing, Mako realizes. She is ten years of mystery he wants to taste—drink in her stories like they will feed a starving man, add them to the letters on his bookshelf and see them leap, in a picture of her life, into the sky. Their mouths aren't even an inch away—he breathes in, sharply, and his top lip brushes against her lower.
Somebody yells.
Korra drops to her heels, but her hands don't drop from Mako's shoulders. It's a wordless call. She doesn't wait to listen to former Councilman Tenzin remind her of the cameras, or the President who waits to hear her approval, or the people of Republic City who came to see her, only her. Instead, she looks up at him for only a moment longer, then turns her back and reaches for the double doors.
Mako sits, hard, back against the stone until he slides into the snow beneath him. He takes no notice of the wetness or the cold that seeps into his clothes, and he stares up at the few stars still visible through the lights of the city.
He is not cold at all.