The Art of Letting Go
Note: for the anon who wanted, "(post break-up) A drunken Mako taps on Korra's window in the middle of the night, needing to be with her after he stumbles upon the his parents' case file."
This is what happens when you send me the sad prompts, folks. I wanted to do something a little less straightforward, and it became this really intense (and probably incoherent) reflection on the nature of grief. And uuuuuugh. I'm so sorry.
It would come at him, sometimes, from the most unexpected directions. Smells, in particular, brought the images roaring back—something that reminded him of his father's scent, all grass and fresh spring dirt, a waft of someone's cooking finding its way into the hall from another apartment. And all of a sudden, he would be seven years old again, and heat would start to build inside his stomach, and he would have to close his eyes for several long seconds and find his breath.
Someone—some idiot who was trying to be helpful no doubt—had told him grief was a process. And back then Mako had imagined it as a line—maybe a curving or arcing one—but a line nonetheless, extending outward from the spot where he stood toward some inevitable vanishing point. But that was bullshit, of course. As he discovered, grief was a cycle. Like everything else, it was reborn over and over again, a reliable fixture in his life even though it was recalled to existence in the strangest places and the least likely ways.
The times when it didn't come back were as surprising as the times when it did. He wore his father's scarf every day, but at some point it had ceased being a familial totem and served instead as a symbol of his own survival. He could rely on it to make him feel strong rather than sad.
But what he never expected to feel was nothing. And yet that is precisely what he felt as he held the file in his hands, fingers smoothing over paper that was ever so slightly showing its age. It had been idle—perhaps morbid—curiosity that brought it into his grasp. The file he had been looking for was from the same year, and his thumb had simply wandered forward a couple of months and found the date and then the name and then he was looking at it. There were the names and a couple of photos. And there was the statement he'd given the police. And as if from a distance he could see himself sitting in a blank room, a female officer coaxing the details out of him.
Mako could summon every second of that awful day to play back for him like one of Varrick's movers, and as he did so now what shocked him was its failure to shock. Where a voice on a street that sounded kind of like his mother's could send him cascading back into sorrow, the bare, brutal facts of it all no longer seemed to have that power. And that disturbed him.
Closing the file and putting it back in its place, he left the storage room and attempted an inventory, a topography even, of the void inside of him. All his other work was swiftly forgotten as he tried to decide if it was resolution that he felt. He didn't think so. There was no completion, no comfort in it. It was just a nothing that collected inside and seeped through his skin. Grief would have been preferable. Grief was something. Even when it sunk its teeth into him at the least opportune moments, it had reminded him that he was alive. And even if he hated himself sometimes for living, there was at least sensation in that.
He sought sensation in the bottom of a glass. And then another. And another. Bolin looked on in slightly worried confusion. Because Mako had never been a big drinker, clinging as he always did to control.
"Are you in a race with yourself or something?" the younger brother asked.
"Something like that," Mako answered. But he didn't know how to tell him that it was loss of control he was seeking, that maybe in the dulling of his faculties he'd find release, that maybe the numbness would break up and allow sensation to come spilling over him. Not feeling much like talking, he let Bolin prattle on about what was next for the movers with Varrick on the lam. A set of unasked questions flitted through his brain—Bo, do you ever think about…does is ever bother you that… He didn't know how to ask them. Bolin's health and happiness had never seemed worth the risk of revealing the pitch-black awfulness that sometimes crept into the older boy's bones.
"You should go see Korra's new place. It's nice," Bo said when his monologue took another tangent. And Mako supposed he must have made a face because Bolin suddenly looked abashed, like he'd realized a mistake.
Korra's name hung between them, and Mako could taste it in his mouth, a sudden swell of something breaking through the alcohol haze.
"Sorry," Bolin said reflexively. "I know you, uh…" he hesitated. "But you left things on good terms, right?"
"Yeah," was his only response. It was true in the sense that there had been no screaming and fighting this time, nothing thrown across the room. But how could it really be called "good" when the sound of her name made that hot, sick feeling pool inside his belly?
"What's she been up to?" he asked, leaning into the hurt of it, letting the loss of her flood him as the numbness started to recede. And as Bolin told him everything, he remembered what she smelled like, what it felt like to let her hair down and run his fingers through it. It was a dangerous game, seeing how far he could shift the equilibrium of his emotions back toward actually feeling stuff without getting overwhelmed. But he had always prided himself on his ability to keep it all in check, to feel just enough to stay alive without ever actually letting anyone know about it. And the hurt was so good this time, so sharp, so acute that he just kept asking questions.
…
Korra had never been a great sleeper, and at 2 am, she was still lying awake, the emptiness of her new apartment unnerving her. Living alone, she thought, was an experience she needed to have. And while the psychic distance from family, mentors, and ex-boyfriends was refreshing, she also felt isolated, somewhat cut off from the forces that had kept her life in motion for as long as he could remember.
She kicked off the covers and flipped over the pillow one more time, trying to get comfortable. But the room felt stifling, the air around her stagnant. And so she pushed off from the bed and went to the window, kicking a box out of the way and shoving curtains aside so that she could push it open. And when she did, she saw a face she hadn't realized she'd been wanting to see.
His skin was ghostly pale in the moonlight, and he was swaying on his feet, looking around with bloodshot eyes like he didn't quite know where he was.
"Mako, are you drunk?" she hissed. And his head snapped toward her, eyes widening with surprise, like he hadn't expected to see her.
He rubbed at his face with the back of his hand. "I guess," he said.
"Are you looking for me?"
"I don't…" he blinked three times like he expected her to disappear each time he opened his eyes. "Is this your place?"
"Yeah…"
"I was going home and then I just wound up here?"
He was scaring her. She'd never seen him this untethered. "Go around the corner to the door, and I'll let you in."
As he did so, she started making tea and dug some of the dumplings Pema had sent with her that evening out of the icebox.
When she opened the door, he almost fell inside. She pulled him by the hand toward a bare wooden table and made him sit, setting the plate of dumplings in front of him.
"What happened?" she asked as she got back to making the tea.
He was silent, his body slumped forward, collapsing in on itself. She was resisting, for the moment, the instinct to run her fingers over his scalp, to drape herself over him in comfort.
"Did you and Bolin have a fight?" she tried again, trying to think of what could possibly prompt Mako of all people to take a bath in liquor and then show up like someone's lost pet outside her window at 2 in the morning.
"Nah," he said hoarsely, almost moaning.
"Did you and Asami…"
"No." he replied so loudly and emphatically that it startled her. "There's nothing…happening there."
In spite of herself, Korra was relieved, satisfied even. She sat a steaming cup in front of him and settled into a chair, drawing bare knees up against her chest and resting her chin on them. "Then what?"
He sighed, and after a few sips of tea, he seemed a little more like himself. "I saw something at work today. Something to do with my parents, and…"
She lowered her knees and leaned forward, expecting more. He didn't offer anything else.
"It's ok to feel sad sometimes, Mako." It was a weak consolation and she knew it, even without his eyes staring at her darkly, telling her there was something she just wasn't getting and probably never would. It was a barrier between them that she never knew quite how to break, the taciturn way in which he internalized his grief and kept it hidden from her like he somehow thought it protected her.
He stared at her hand, lying limply on the table, and then to her surprise, he gently placed his own over it, fingertips delicately brushing over the bones of her wrist. It was an action that made her throat suddenly seize up and tears gather behind her eyes. But she held everything still and concentrated on the warmth of his palm resting over her knuckles, trying to will herself into emotional stasis.
"I miss you," he whispered. And it sounded almost like he was talking to a ghost, like he still didn't know where he was or that she was real.
"I'm right here," she responded, so softly that the words seemed to stop an inch from her lips. And you treat me like I don't exist.
He wasn't meeting her eyes, but she felt pain radiating off of him. She wondered if it was a pain that approximated hers. If it was the same as what she felt in the awful moments of early morning when she had to remember all over again that they were broken up. And even though she knew he was out there in the world, it was a separation that made her wonder if this was what it felt like when someone died. And it was a grief that felt truly, unspeakably private, a silent, invisible companion that followed her everywhere she went. She was alone with it always, even when he was right there in the room with her.
Her head started to ache with the effort of staying composed. She flipped her hand over so that she could return his pressure. And she was surprised when he grasped it and pulled her forward, forcing her to stand up and move closer until he was wrapping his arms around her waist, burying his face in the front of her shirt.
Korra let the tears escape from the edges of her eyes and moved her hands through his hair. And she didn't even care that she was wearing nothing but an old shirt and a pair of shorts, that his head was just below her unbound breasts. What she felt for him in that moment wasn't erotic exactly, but it was loving and it was painful in the best possible way. She felt slightly less alone with his hands on her even though for all she knew, he was grabbing at specters.
"You sleep on the bed," she offered. And I'll sleep on the couch. She helped him off with his shoes and jacket, and she nearly fell apart as she watched him stretch out over her blankets, knowing that in another life, she'd be about to follow after him, naked and wet and wanting.
As she looked back across the room, the hand-me-down sofa felt about a thousand miles away, a space of lonely exile. So she didn't pull away when he grabbed her hand one more time. And she let him pull her down next to him. There was no embrace, no declaration. He just continued to hold her hand as his breathing slowed and his face relaxed and she watched him fall asleep.
…
She was the first to wake up, the first to see the sunlight fall through the windows and create a pool of shadow in the concavity of his chest and stomach. It would have been easy, so easy, to fill that space up with her body and to let whatever might happen happen. But she forced herself out of the bed and got busy throwing food together.
As she put the kettle on the stove, she heard him stir, and then she turned to see him sit bolt upright on the bed. His head jerked back and forth, his eyes full of blank panic as he took in his surroundings. And then he saw her, and she felt his eyes appraise her, take the full measure of what she was wearing, and…
"Oh no. Oh no oh no no no no no." He covered his face with both palms, and she felt her defenses start to mount inside of her.
"What, Mako?" Her voice was a little too sharp.
"Korra…I…we shouldn't have…I'm so, so sorry." It was such a strange thing to say, too intense for what little had actually taken place the night previous.
"What exactly do you remember about last night?" She folded her arms over her chest, staring back at him as she made some guesses about what was going on inside his head.
"Didn't…didn't we…" He gestured at her state of undress and then the mess of her bed.
"Didn't you come to my apartment all shit faced and fall asleep on my bed?"
He looked at her with eyebrows meeting in the middle of his forehead. "We didn't…"
"I don't think you could have even if you'd wanted to."
For no reason that she could explain to herself, she was furious with him, her neck growing hotter the longer she looked at him, tears of rage welling up behind her eyes. Because he didn't just look sorry, he looked disgusted.
"Korra, I…"
"It was something to do with your parents and you missing me or something, but you didn't really want to talk." Her voice was firm, but she felt the need to create an escape for herself so as not to break down in front of him. "You help yourself to whatever. But I'm going to go take a shower, and if the thought of something happening between us is really that horrifying to you, then I'll thank you not to show up here in the middle of the night again. Tell Bolin to keep you on a leash or something."
His mouth was still hanging open as she turned and stomped into the bathroom, letting the door slam behind her.
…
Mako stared at that door for a long time before pushing up from the bed, gathering his shoes and jacket and leaving, his heart pounding out of sync with the ache in his head. He didn't know what to say. Whatever he had been dreaming had felt so real, the press of her skin against his so tangible that it was difficult to sort it out from whatever fragments of reality he could remember from the previous night. And he was ashamed when he felt the wetness in his underwear and realized, to his utter mortification, that whatever he had felt had really all just been him. That whatever moment of weakness he had experienced, it had been private and desperately secret.
He spent the entire day trying to sort out why she would be angry if nothing happened. And only much later in the day did it occur to him to ask why the thought of something happening had so unhinged him in the first place. Because wasn't that precisely what he wanted with every nerve in his body? Wasn't that the dream that kept him company, the dream he tried to cling to when consciousness returned to him each morning and forced him to say goodbye to a fantasy?
It was these questions and a desperate need to make amends that drove him back to her door with a sack of takeout he hoped would be accepted as a peace offering. He made sure he was showered and shaven this time, that when she saw him he would have his shit together. And he rehearsed a speech in his head about how he didn't know why he'd come to her the previous night but that he hadn't meant to "use" her like that. He would say that he respected her too much to let it ever happen again…even though nothing had really happened.
Her face was set and hard when she opened the door. She took the bag of take out and dropped it on the table. And then she stood with her arms crossed, and her eyes looked as old as the entire world.
Mako cleared his throat and began. "Korra, I respect you. I've been under a lot of stress lately, and I just want you to know that I wouldn't use you like that…"
"Shut up," she said, cutting him off, her face contorted in ways he didn't recognize.
"Huh?"
"Tell me why you're really here." It was a clearly a challenge. One that he was unprepared to face.
"I'm not following."
"You're so full of shit," she hissed at him, and she took two steps closer so that he had to look down to meet her eyes.
They stood like this, at a standoff, for minutes. He tried to break it by resuming his speech. "Korra, I don't want to hurt you…"
She cut him off with her lips mashed against his, fists balling up the fabric of his jacket. He tried to regain his footing, tried to keep up. Her mouth was hot and fierce, and all he could do was open up to her and let his hands come to rest on her waist.
Their lips smacked when Korra pulled off of him. "Tell me this isn't what you came here for," she said. "Tonight and last night."
His face felt hot, his brain fogged, and he looked back at her blankly as she searched his eyes in desperation.
"I miss you, you idiot." Her voice started to break, and he let his forehead fall against hers, the words lingering between their lips as she whispered them out. "It hurts, Mako. And I feel it all the time. And last night, you said you missed me, and it felt like I wasn't alone in this. Don't overthink it. Don't be nice. Just for once in your life tell me what you want. If I'm wrong, please, please just say it and let me be."
He felt something inside of him start to slide, start to pitch toward the chaos he craved and yet always held at bay. The fragile equilibrium between feeling nothing and feeling too much started to tip hard toward the latter.
"I want you," he heard himself say before brushing his lips against hers. "I miss you all the time." As their mouths came together again, he brought a hand to her face and pressed against her jaw, prompting her to open her mouth and let his tongue explore.
Her body slackened in his arms, and he backed her up against the table, backside coming to rest against the wood as he slid the full length of himself against her. Their lips parted, and he kissed his way down the line of her neck, lips sucking against her pulse point. Her legs came to wrap around his waist, and he let the dark secret he'd been holding at bay since he'd found the file fill the hollow behind her ear. "Korra, right now I miss you more than I miss my parents. Even though you're right here, it hurts. It hurts like dying. And I want it to stop but I don't want it to stop. If that makes any sense."
Her hold on him released, and Mako started to break inside, convinced that he had now said just enough to make himself contemptible to her. Or at least more so than he already was. He closed his eyes and prepared to be sent away, to go home and jerk off to old memories one more time. But he felt her fingers undo the buttons on his jacket, and he surrendered as she pushed it off his shoulders.
"One more time," she whispered, her eyes huge and dilated, the twilight coming through the window throwing the definition in her features into sharp relief.
His hands found the ties to her pelt, and when that was off, he let his palms slide under shirt, the warm softness of her skin wearing the edges off his sadness. "One more time," he whispered back against her lips, though he knew it was a convenient lie they were telling themselves, a promise they'd likely never be able to keep. And why should we? he thought, recklessness stealing its way into his blood, firing the arousal that he pressed between her thighs as he lifted her off the table and walked her over to the bed.
Her fingers went to work on his belt as soon as her back hit the mattress. He hovered over her and pulled her hair free, admiring the way her thick mane spilled over white sheets like ink on paper. When she drew him down on top of her, her hands and lips were bruising, pulling the hurt out of his skin and forcing more confessions to follow.
"I love you," he said, as her bindings came free and his mouth hovered over her breast. "I love you, but I'm too fucked up to be with you right now." He heard her choke back something between a sob and a moan as he wrapped his lips around her nipple. Fingers raked through his hair, and when he pulled back, her nails dug in a little. But he made a path down the plane of her stomach, and he made promises to himself, promises he wouldn't speak about how he would try to figure it all out, try to become the sort of person who could be with her and not lose himself.
With a swift tug, he removed her pants and underwear, and when he looked up, he saw that her eyes were too shiny. "Are you ok?" he asked, ready to put a halt to it all if she wasn't.
"I'm fine," she said.
He climbed back onto the bed, kneeling over her and placing his face right next to hers. Her breathing was ragged, and he listened to it closely.
"I'm afraid I'm not ever going to be able to let go of you," she said, finally.
Mako pressed his lips to her forehead, her temples, the side of her jaw. "Then don't." His hand ventured down her body, tracing the curve of her stomach and the sharp edge of her hipbone and then all the way down to the thick thatch of hair between her legs. He parted the flesh there and slipped a finger into the wetness that was forming. Her eyes closed and her head tilted back, so he kept going, venturing further inside while drawing his open mouth across her neck.
His fingers drew the wetness from deep inside her up to her clit, and she rocked her hips in time with his fingers, moans vibrating through the skin on her throat.
"Get inside me," she begged, her voice slender and far away.
"Come for me first," he insisted, watching the creases in her forehead deepen, the shape of her mouth widen as he plunged two fingers inside her and twisted as he drew them back out. Watching her come, for him, was the highest form of worship he knew. It was as much for him as it was for her. His cock was practically pulsing as he hooked his fingers inside her one more time and felt her cunt finally squeeze around the motion. He swallowed her scream in his own mouth and sighed into her as she pulled him down between her legs, his cock practically sliding all the way into her the first time their bodies met.
"Korra, this is…" His mind was starting to go blank, and he fought the instinct to pound into her with everything he had.
"Top drawer," she said, her eyes screwing shut as he pulled out of her and went in search of the condoms. It was convenient to have them close at hand, he thought, though he wondered who she'd been thinking of when she put them there, whether some part of her was prepared to move on and let someone else fill the space he'd left.
If she read that thought in his eyes when he settled back over her body, she gave no hint. And he didn't ask. Because he knew from experience that even if you couldn't quite let go, sometimes it was enough to just keep living.
Korra drew his face down with both hands and kissed him slowly, passionately, her tongue washing over his in waves. He positioned himself at her opening and pushed inside, letting the feel of her wrap around him once again. On the second thrust and the third and the next and the next, her hips came up to meet his, and he felt himself fall deeper in each time. "I love you," he said once more, and tears were blurring the edges of his vision. Her legs rose up to his hips and she drew him inside of her again and again until he buried his face in her hair and let the sensation of it all take him whole. Her hands gripped his ass as her motions became frantic, and he reached down between them to rub against her clit and bring her home. Her orgasm sent him cascading into his, and they held each other tight on the way down, breaths coming short and hot.
And when he lifted off of her, she curled in on herself, her back to him so that he could wrap around her, naked and content with what he had in that moment. There was a time to grieve and there was a time to hold on. Mako buried his face in her neck and memorized her scent, knowing he'd think of this every time he stood too close to her or when it simply came to him on a breeze. And in those moments, the memory of her would be reborn into his life. And reborn again. Until maybe, just maybe, the cycle would bring them back together. Not new exactly. But different. And hopefully better.