Chapter Text
Some days, he doesn’t think about her. Other days his memories of her are like shadows on the wall: commonplace, insubstantial. Like all shadows, his thoughts of her are crisp and delineated from a distance, yet become fuzzy and formless when he tries to bring himself closer. Recently, his thoughts of her are getting worse--that is, are cropping up more frequently. Mako isn’t sure why, but believes they might have something to do with the weather. Maybe he thinks about her more when the summer humidity turns the air torpid, sticky, slumbering? The heat renders his mind so porous, thoughts drip in and slide out beyond his control. When the sunlight seems particularly heavy, his daydreams do have a tendency to wander back to her.
For the most part he has a sharp mind, keen for sordid details and picking holes in testimonies--at times even cruel, vicious toward wrongdoing. None of that means a thing, however--he reserves none of his cleverness for himself. Without fail, in matters of his own heart Mako is baffled every time.
Mom.
What he remembers of her is imperfect, coming back as smooth-edged fragments, impossible to piece together. Her face is easy enough to recall--her face is more or less his face, and he sees her in the mirror every day. It’s the immaterial aspects of her that are difficult: the quality of her voice had a precise huskiness to it pitched even lower than his own, but now he can only remember it (vaguely) when he pays attention to the rasp of the motorbikes as they race each other beneath his bedroom window. He can barely remember how she smelled, either. There had been notes of sea salt maybe, a spiciness from a muscle balm she used to swear by (chronic joint pain? fingers or elbows? both? he knew once but now no longer).
Mako wants to remember the way she held her mouth when she looked at his father. Had she ever winked at him and Bolin, or was her teasing only ever reserved for Dad? Had she even been the teasing sort at all? Mako frowns. Shadows, humid air--close analogies for her, the vague ghost in his head, but not quite right. No, everything he remembers about her is waterlogged.
He is 22 now, and what he considers his true (albeit truncated) childhood seems so distant it might was well have belonged to someone else. Mako is not the boy he was. There’s too much blood and dirt beneath his fingernails now, too many callouses and scars and scrapes and aches--of body and of spirit--for him to reconcile his squint-eyed reflection with the open-faced boy in the family picture. Sometimes he’s not even sure if memories of her are worth preserving. He thinks he might corrupt what’s left of her, if keeping her memory alive means keeping her within battered, compromised him. He’d fallen so quickly, after all, from mama’s boy to criminal lackey--necessary for survival, but shameful, too. He doesn’t know if she would have understood.
What he does know is that it’s painful to have loved someone (to continue loving someone) you can barely remember. It’s painful also to know that the person you loved had loved a different you, so radically different as to be unrecognizable. If Naoki saw him now, would she see her little boy? Mako doesn’t think so. He’s 22, but largely he measures his years in terms of before and after--and those eight short, sweet years with her are now outstripped by fourteen years of living without.
Mako lies in bed, unwilling to face the long stretch of weekend before him. He hates time off--especially on hazy summer days like this. There’s no real sun outside, only the wet heat of the city and a sickly gray shine emanating through the cloud cover. Somewhere beyond his window birds are chattering in the spirit vines, greeting the morning as only the most obnoxious are able to do. A relief barge honks out in the bay, the moist air particularly conducive today to loud, sleep-shattering noises. A cabbagecar wheezes up the hill past his apartment, and he can hear the couple one apartment below him arguing over who owes who for groceries.
Mako presses his fists against his forehead, as if by applying pressure above his eyes he will stop all the noise against his ears. He wants to go back to sleep. Mako grimaces--his knuckles are bony--and tries to feel tired. He’d prefer to sleep through the weekend, as it’s the next best thing to not having a weekend at all. If he’s asleep he has no time or space for thinking or remembering, and he knows that if he dreams of her he’ll forget about it by morning. Mako squeezes his eyes tighter.
But the barge honks again, and the humidity brings her face into the blackness behind his eyes. It’s another one of those days.
Mako huffs, and in one arc swings himself out of bed. Gray light falls through his windows in uneven beams, spotlighting the pockmarks in his floor where a previous tenant ripped out the carpet. Since the calamity, cheap (in all senses of the word) real estate is abundant in Republic City. In fact, all the discerning, prestigious buildings of old downtown and ritzy uptown are no more. Only the outer boroughs survived. He doesn’t really miss his old building and its stuffy doorman, but he has to admit it’s inconvenient that his old place is now level with the sidewalk. At least his new apartment is spacious enough that he can excuse its dinginess. And even if he had the mind to, he can’t really complain--technically he’s squatting. And technically, the landlord has yet to join the cautious trickle of returning evacuees. Shuffling across the floor, Mako stubs his toe against an exposed nail.
Gritting his teeth, Mako slumps against his kitchen counter. He has been up for all of a minute and walked exactly five feet, and he’s already in a sour mood. He wants something to eat, something to drink, but his hot plate remains resolutely cold no matter how hard he jerks the dial
“Stupid junk.” Mako glares at the device with a cocked eyebrow and the mental note to toss it out later. But just as he starts to heat his kettle by hand, he groans, realization hitting him in the gut, feeling not unlike a stubbed toe. As if on cue, there comes a timid knock at his door.
“Sir?” The voice is muffled in addition to disembodied.
“Sorry!” Mako bolts upright, wipes the sleep from his eyes, and hastily tries to flatten his hair. Scrambling, he grabs a discarded work shirt off his kitchen chair and swings it on, doing the buttons up all wrong so that by the time he opens the door, one tail of his shirt hangs lower than the other. “How long have you all been waiting?”
His neighbor from across the hall takes one look at him--frenzied rictus smile (unconsciously worn and inappropriate given the circumstances), disheveled attire--and ducks apologetically. “Not long at all.”
Mako can feel the lie about as easily as he can feel it’s about 11 o’clock. “I slept in,” he winces, “I completely forgot.” Mako lurches out his doorway and in his rush neglects his shoes; the two of them make their way down the hall, passing doorways left open to keep air in circulation. The faces of Floor 2, 122 Trade St. stare out curiously at his bare feet and frenetic hair, and it’s all Mako can do to pretend as though he’s not terribly embarrassed and terribly sorry. As he passes the apartment nearest the service stairwell, the disembodied voice of one tenant exclaims, “About time!
The outer boroughs survived the invasion, but just barely. Like other neighborhoods, the Lamyai Quays, bounded by Trade St. on the south side and spirit wilds to the north, lack electricity. The city’s recovery progresses in fits and starts, and is patchy at best. For the most part, whether a building has electricity depends on whether or not it has a lightningbender in it.
Mako apologizes again once they’re in the basement. “I’m so sorry,” he says, twisting out of his stance to look at Mr. Tep. “I don’t know--it’s so hot, I just couldn’t wake up--” Mako bites his lower lip. He’s been tired lately, and not just because work has been a nightmare. Some nights he can’t sleep at all, other nights he’s out cold. It’s like his body doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore.
Well, of course, he thinks. He’s spent the last few days fishing intrepid children out of open sewer mains and stepping over still-live wires. He’ll oversee the de-evacuation of a neighborhood one hour only to re-evacuate it again the next--foundation cracks, gas leaks, angry nests of spirits in an attic is right anymore. I’ll sleep better when things make sense.
“You’re fine, son,” says Mr. Tep.
Mako blinks, refocusing. Mr. Tep’s tone is quiet but rough-backed, a contrast of amusement and approbation that is mirrored in his old, lined eyes. On his part, Mako is both grateful and resentful of the scrap of pity he sees in Mr. Tep’s wrinkled stare. “Right. Sorry again.”
Mako resumes his stance, and takes a preparatory breath.