Thanks so much for the reviews, paper walls and the ticking clock. I appreciate them more than you know. ^^
Anyways, enjoy this. Perhaps it's not as good as Drowning, maybe I have some OOCness problems, but… well, it's longer, I guess. Also, I have a tumblr; spirit-of-snow. Don't have much, but feel free to check it out~
"What's that?"
She looks up, up, up at him (because she's sitting down on the floor and he's so tall already) and blinks once, twice at the quiet curiosity on his face.
"You're supposed to line the colors up," she says off-handedly before staring back down at the multicolored box in her hands.
"Well, you're not doing that well, are you?" he says, reaching down to grab it. "Here, let me try."
"No!" she says a bit too loudly, and it's evident that she's been at this for a bit too long. She twists and turns the red—blue—orange—green—yellow—white but she can only get most of the blues to match up on one side.
"I don't think you're supposed to do that," he remarks, reaching down for it once more. "Here—"
"Never!" she growls childishly before diving under the table.
He sighs at her antics and her legs, which are sticking out from under the table. For a moment, he considers just dragging her out, but that was kind of immature, wasn't it? And he didn't do immature.
"Come on," he sighs. "Just let me try."
"Shut up! I swear to all my past lives that I've got the second side!" she growls, and the next moment he's clutching his shin because she somehow managed to kick him without looking.
He mutters profanities under his breath and half-limps to the other side of the table.
She peers up at his legs and frowns before looking back at her cube. Yeah, she was lying to him. She even managed to mess up the first side. Again.
Before she can realize it, he's bent down just long enough to snatch the cube out of her hands. She fumes and grabs his ankle in response, making him collapse onto the floor.
Surprisingly enough, he just grins a little, not even bothering to pry his eyes from the cube as he leans against the foot of the couch. She glares at him, wriggling from underneath the table so that she's sitting at eye-level with him.
She just stares at his face for a while, but when he pays her no notice, her eyes trail down to the cube.
She snorts in frustration when she sees that he's already got most of the reds, oranges and yellows matched up. He just smiles slightly, taking way too much time (in her opinion) to sort and sift the pieces in place.
"It's like one big puzzle, isn't it?" she suddenly asks, slowly letting her head tilt to the side.
"What?" he asks, looking up at her with a slight scowl at her interrupting him. "Of course. You're supposed to line the pieces up, right? That's a puzzle."
"I mean, life," she says, leaning back a little and looking at the ceiling, as if too embarrassed to meet his eyes. "It's just one huge weight on your shoulders. An unsolvable puzzle."
He glances up at her, and his fingers absentmindedly tap against the sides of the cube like they're impatient to finish what they started
"All puzzles can be solved," he says.
"But sometimes you can't solve them alone," she says, and he's getting just a little bit scared because it's starting to look like she's in a whole other world. "You need… someone else… to help you take that weight. To figure it all out."
He just raises an eyebrow. "What?"
She just shakes her head and puts a small smile on her face, looking not at him but at the cube-shaped puzzle.
"...hey, are you okay?"
"Yeah." She points at the cube; the blue and white sides are unsolved. "Gimme that."
He only complies because she seems to be in such a strange mood.
She takes the cube in her hands and he watches her mess up all of the patterns he had managed to figure out. For a moment, he compares it to how she just busted her way in and messed up all the patterns of his life.
Then he watches her twist and turn the blues and whites until they're solid colors with two of the sides. Then she drops the cube in her lap, grabs his hands, and splays them out evenly. The next thing he knows, she's placed it in his hands and curled his fingers around it.
"You can help me figure it out," Korra offers, strangely hesitant, strangely something he always thought was not Korra, but apparently he's wrong. Did he do something? He knows by her uncharacteristic seriousness that there's some sort of hidden message in her words.
But instead of dwelling on it any more, Mako nods and begins to help finish her puzzle.