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Mako sat on the edge of the roof of his apartment building watching the smoke from the end of his cigarette curl into the air and disappear. In the distance he could just make out the blue peaked roofs of Air Temple Island backlit by the setting sun. Flicking his ashes into the wind, Mako felt a pang of heartache ripple through his chest.
He missed Jinora.
She was gone for the fall, off on a spiritual mission in the southern Earth Kingdom. Her connection to the spirits meant that she could sense things when others couldn’t, and she had told him the spirits were uneasy in the Earth Kingdom desert. Korra was off on more important missions, so Jinora felt that it was her duty to go.
What he hadn’t expected was to miss her so strongly. She had been gone for a handful of weeks now, leaving just after the end of summer. And each day since felt the hole in his chest grow wider in the space where she belonged.
It had been a good summer though. Reconnecting with her at the farmer’s market utterly by chance had sparked something between them, something that hadn’t blazed like a wildfire but burned like a coal-burning stove: slow to build, radiating warmth, something that offered comfort and a sense of home.
The two of them had fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Yin and Yang, she affectionately called them. It truly felt like she was the piece of him that had been missing.
In the warm darkness of his bedroom, he caught her bottom lip between his teeth and cherished the gasp that left her. Their skin was sticky with summer sweat alleviated only by the breeze that came in through the open window. She was soft beneath him, her skin like satin as his hands slid over her body. He was still in his uniform; he had scarcely walked through the door before she was on him. His belt buckle was surely leaving an impression on the inside of her thigh, but clearly Jinora was too enthralled by what he was doing with his hands and mouth to care much.
They had time anyway. They had all night, if they wanted.
That summer they had become nearly inseparable. Most nights were spent swapping each other’s apartments, sharing takeout from Ding’s at Mako’s place and cooking together at Jinora’s. She liked to have the radio on when she cooked, but she didn’t put on the pro-bending game; she sang along in her sweet voice until Mako had to take her by the hand and spin her around the kitchen. Then at some point she picked up on how he always turned the game on while they were eating, catching the final half, and suddenly half way through cooking she was flipping the station.
They were both early risers, and had spent many mornings watching the dawn, sitting near the open window in her apartment sipping tea, or on the roof of his apartment as he smoked.
“Hasn’t anybody told you that those things are bad for you?” Jinora asked him once.
He looked down at the half-finished cigarette in his hand. He knew, of course, what a horrible habit it was. Lin chastised him every time she caught him smoking in the back alley behind the station.
But how could he tell her that he liked it because it was bad for him? That Mako had never planned to live to be Katara’s age? It was the thrill he had gotten being in the street gang; it was what pushed him towards pro-bending; it was the drive behind why he wanted to become a cop. It was the danger, the threat of harm and death. But then he realized he had some things to live for: his brother and his friends.
Yet even that wasn’t enough. Cigarettes would do the job slowly. It was a quiet death. It would do just fine.
Then Jinora came into his life like a drought to dry up the endless rainfall. Now he thought about how every cigarette brought him closer to death, closer to taking him from her.
He snubbed it out, unfinished. “Lots of people have. But up until now, there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t leave behind.”
She looked up at him, brown eyes turned to liquid pools of topaz in the rising sun, and he found that for once she was speechless.
He’d actually quit the damn things too. Eight weeks and counting—until tonight. Mako had stopped by the corner market on his way home without thinking too hard on it, bought the cigarettes, and came home and gone right up to the roof.
He was missing her badly tonight. Mako longed for her to hold him close; so close he could feel her heart beating against his chest. He wanted her voice in the kitchen singing to the radio so he could sing along with her. It felt hollow without her there.
He loved her; he knew that now, knew it deeply in his bones. He loved her like he’d never loved anyone or anything else before her. Never before had anyone else made his heart race like she did.
Mako thought that he would run across the desert just to hold her tonight if he could.
He stood up and tossed his cigarette into the wind before he went back inside.