Work Text:
Let’s say this doesn’t happen.
Let’s say Bolin and Mako don’t walk down the streets of Republic City one night when they’re small, hand-in-hand with their parents. Mother laughing softly, Father leaning down to lift Bolin onto his shoulders and hoist him high over the slow-churning crowd around them. Let’s say they don’t decide to take the short way home—it’s still light out, there’s time, we can make it before it’s too dark. Let’s say they don’t turn down that quieter street, the one lined with broken streetlamps, falling into shameful disrepair but no one cares about this part of the city where the poor families live, left to their own matters, left to squalor.
Let’s say they aren’t stopped, then. A man: tall, slender out of necessity, who knows when he last ate. His cheekbones cut at the sky above him like glass. His hands are stiff and empty at his sides, waiting, waiting.
Don’t move, he doesn’t say. Stop right there.
Let’s say Bolin’s father doesn’t set Bolin down, move in front of him, hold out his hands. Please, sir. I’ll give you anything you want, don’t hurt my family.
Let’s say Bolin won’t wonder what’s happening, won’t tug at his mother’s dress—shh, Bo, stay back—the terror in her eyes won’t shine like lightning across the blackened sky—no wait, that’s real, isn’t it? The crackle of electricity across the front of Bolin’s teeth, down his throat; his mouth tastes like wet iron after a long hard rain.
Let’s say Mako isn’t sobbing, terrified, eight-years-old and both too young and too frightened to do anything else. Their mother isn’t screaming, Bolin isn’t staring, their father isn’t lying on the ground like a broken china plate, his limbs cracked and spread across the cobblestones. Let’s say Bolin doesn’t see this; it’s a better story that way. Easier to live with afterwards.
Their mother tells them to run. Bolin doesn’t want to, his hands in her skirts, his fingers still sticky with the sweet roll she’d bought him a few minutes ago; he remembers its taste but doesn’t know what he did with it, must have dropped it. Mako takes him by the hand—let’s go, Bolin, let’s get out of here.
The fire fills the sky behind them, red hot orange terror. They run, Bolin’s heart in his throat, pounding so hard that he thinks it will bruise against his ribs. They run and they turn the corner, and let’s say they don’t look back, even if they do.
Yes—let’s say all of this doesn’t happen.
(It does, though.)
+
Stop. Put your finger on the page, hold this spot. Flick backwards through the chapters, find an earlier one, start there this time. Smooth down that dog-eared corner, a bookmark on a soft-remembered memory. Start over.
Bolin is four, screaming with laughter; Mako carries him piggyback, around and around. Their parents are tired, exhaustion pinching the lines on their foreheads. Put your brother down, Mako, their mother says, and Bolin whines; he doesn’t want to, he wants to play, don’t make me go to bed yet.
Mako considers, the color high in his cheeks, so painfully young, so heartbreakingly young. He finally obeys his mother, deposits Bolin roughly on the bedspread. They share a bedroom, always have. (Always will has forever been another thing entirely.)
“We need to be good, Bo,” Mako says seriously, in the way that small children regard things of the utmost importance—like a firefly caught between his fingers, like a secret he’s just been told. “We need to be good for Mommy and Daddy.”
“Why?” Bolin asks, but he’s bunkering down, pulling the blankets over his head.
“They’re not benders,” Mako says. He meets Bolin under the blanket fort, they’re whispering in the dark; they think their parents can’t hear them. “We have to be very good so we don’t scare them and they’ll always love us.”
Bolin scowls at him. “They will always love us, no matter what.”
“Yeah,” Mako says, bright-eyed. “But let’s be very good anyway, okay?”
They shake on it, two small children in the dark. As of yet unaware of the depths of those shadows.
+
Okay. Turn forward to where your finger is holding your spot, to where we were before. Now—let’s say all of that does happen, even though Bolin likes to think that it doesn’t. Even though he likes to pretend that it’s not true.
That’s the funny thing about the truth—you don’t have to like it, you don’t even have to agree with it, but damn it all if you can ever forget it once you know it. You’d have better luck resisting an avalanche.
+
Flip forward again, turn the pages like years; seasons change and the bay rises and falls, and somehow they make their way through it; somehow Mako sees them through.
It’s hard at first. It’d be a lie to say anything otherwise, and they know better than that. God, it’s hard.
“Don’t do that,” Mako snaps, tired and old; he’s only nine, is this sort of exhaustion possible for a nine-year-old? It must be within the realm of probability, of human endurance, because here he is, shattered, his face strained and drawn and white, telling Bolin—don’t do that, stop, don’t do that.
Bolin doesn’t listen. The pebbles at his feet dance around him, clacking together; it’s annoying and he knows it.
“Stop it!” Mako shouts, unable to stand it anymore—he’s been out all day begging, his shoulders slumped and slippery like an incline of ice, and Mako slides right off them. “Stop it, Bolin!”
Bolin drops the rocks to his feet, unceremoniously. “All right, Mom,” he says, vicious; he regrets it at once. Mako’s face crumples inwards, and he turns away. He’s shaking, his shoulders trembling, his arms clenched tightly around his waist. He’s learned to cry silently, late at night when he thinks Bolin is asleep—he doesn’t know any other way to cry, now, and his sobs escape him soundlessly, as if that means they aren’t real.
Bolin tries to fix it, something hard and painful in the back of his throat when he swallows; Mako ignores him, and Bolin watches as he retreats into himself, deeper, where nothing can touch him.
And Bolin—Bolin resolves to never say the wrong thing again, after this. To never make Mako turn in on himself like that, all inside out and wrong.
As it turns out, he’s good at it—he says all the right things, and at all the right times. He’s lighthearted. He’s silly. He’s funny. And he doesn’t let Mako forget it, because Mako could use a smile every once in a while.
(Who makes Bolin smile, you ask? Who makes sure that he’s getting a laugh in every now and then?
Well, that’s a silly question. You know the answer to that.)
+
Forward again, ever onward, the unceasing march towards destiny. Turn the pages, go on. You want to see where this goes, how the story ends. We all like to see how the story ends—will it be good in the end, we wonder. Will it be happy.
Maybe you already know how this ends, but you wish that you didn’t. That’s the worst feeling, really. The inevitability of time. But you already knew that.
Rain hisses in the flames between Mako’s outstretched hands, which threaten to go out at any second. Rainy nights are the worst. Snowy nights, at least, Mako can keep the fire going, keep them both warm. But rainy nights—the rain comes down hard, in sheets, like it’s trying to drown them or wash them out of the city altogether, into the bay. Mako curses; he might be crying, but the rain washes that away, too.
Bolin is freezing, drenched through, but he says nothing, just lets Mako curse and rub his hands together and try again, the fire sputtering out between his fingertips.
“I can’t do it,” he finally says. His hands fall to his side, trembling. “I can’t.”
“Never mind then, it’s just a little water,” Bolin says. “Look!” He turns out his hood, dumps a huge puddle of water into the street. “Look at that. That’s nothing. What do we even need a fire for anyway, what we need is some soap, we can wash right up and smell like roses in the morning.”
He shakes the water out of his eyes when he says this. It ruins the effect. God, he’s so cold, his teeth might even be chattering.
But the grim set of Mako’s mouth lessens, twists into something that would be a smirk if Mako would let it—and that’s all right, then, isn’t it.
+
The humor becomes a shield, as so many things do. When you’re vulnerable, you’ll do anything to make it look as if you’re not—as if you’re completely capable, no weaknesses here, move along now, citizen.
“Pabu thinks it’s a fantastic idea, and for that reason alone I’m going to have to disagree with you,” Bolin says, instead of saying I wish you would listen to me, Mako, why don’t you ever listen to me?
“I can’t abide the smell of ostrich-horse shit in the evening, it really takes the shine off my day—oh, never mind, that’s just you, how was the office?” when he means You should stop working with those people, you hate it, they’re running you ragged and I can’t stand to see you like this anymore on those nights when Mako comes home late, drained and smelling like manure after some Triad member pushed him into the street after the job, but with a few more coins in his pocket then they’d had that morning.
Bolin says: “Oh yeah, that? That was easy, I just thought I’d pick up a few extra coins here and there, I’ve been meaning to get a manicure in for ages, wanna join me?” when he means I’m doing this for you, all right, just let me do this one damn thing for you, you do everything for me.
Soon enough he stops saying much of anything else. Everything’s a joke; it’s easier that way.
It’s inevitable, really.
+
Forward again, just a little bit further. We’re almost to the end. There’s not much left to say.
Let’s say this is true: Mako takes care of Bolin, watches over him, the dutiful older brother. And it is true, it’s true enough—this is Mako’s burden to carry, that which thins him out and makes him older than he should be and weirder than he might be, so that he can’t commit to anything, so that his trust is hard to come by, so that he obsessively protects those he cares about, forever terrified that they’re going to be pulled away from him—that is, that they’ll go up in flames as he watches, the lightning reflecting in his eyes.
But if that is true, then so is the inverse: Bolin takes care of Mako. Mako’s too serious, too focused, too world-weary and exhausted by it all, and Bolin takes some of that and tries to relieve Mako of it, but it clings to Bolin instead, weighs him down, won’t let go. He makes Mako laugh, he makes him cringe, he makes him turn scarlet in embarrassment, and each time this makes the hard, tense line of Mako’s shoulders loosen, unravel, like twine coming free from its coil. And Bolin takes the other end of that and tugs, unraveling that tension in earnest now, desperate to lessen the load.
And if that is true—if Bolin takes care of Mako, if he tries to lessen the weight that Mako carries—then it follows that someone else has to take up the slack. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and neither is worry and fear and burdens. Those all have to go somewhere.
Just don’t ask Bolin about it, because you won’t get a straight answer. He’ll smile and shrug and curl his arms, flexing his biceps—what, you think I can’t carry a little weight, you think I got these arms for nothing? Here, look, I can lift you right up, you think I can’t? and by then you’ll be laughing so hard that you won’t remember what you asked him in the first place, which is exactly the point.
He’ll remember, of course.
That knowledge has to go somewhere.
+
Let’s say this happens, before we go. Let’s say this is true.
Eventually someone will notice what Bolin is doing and draw him out of himself, pull him out through a forest of empty suits of armor and glass like mirrors, reflected outwards. Let’s say they reach out their hand, wait for Bolin to take it. Let me lessen your burden, they’ll say. Let me help you carry it for a while.
It won’t be Mako, this person—if Mako knew about the armor Bolin has built for himself, piece-by-piece, a wall of puns, misplaced comments, jokes that shouldn’t land but do, he would be furious. He would blame himself.
Maybe this person will be her, then. All right, that works, it feels right—let’s say it is her, for the sake of the story.
Let’s say Bolin doesn’t make a joke of it for once; let’s say he takes her hand, and he smiles, and the weight on his shoulders lessens, just slightly.
It’s a happier ending, this way. Easier to bear. Yes, let’s say this is what happens.
(It doesn’t, though.)