The first time she sees him is at some illegal fight in the school parking lot - a fight club, named after some movie she's never seen. He moves in tight swings and pivots, eyes flickering but steady, like the flame on a candle that burns upright and steadfast on a secure wick. He has the fight three moves in and the other guy goes down against the pavement to a bellow of cheers, whistles, and claps. She sees a crinkled stack of bills shoved into his hand before his brother is asking her what she thinks of Republic City High School.

Mako is a fighter, like her. But the fight club is all boys so only afterwards, when she leans against the beat up truck in the parking lot with Bolin, is the moment she can prove it. She play fights with Bolin and sneaks in a painful jab to his ribs, and Bolin laughs it off.

Mako just frowns and says, "Not bad. C'mon Bo, it's getting late and we have work before class tomorrow."

—-

The second time she sees him, she's signing up for the wrestling team and he's the captain - and the only one to defend having a girl on the team once he watches her take down Hasook in twelve seconds flat.

Afterwards, everybody praises her for being to strong, so tough, just one of the guys even though she's a girl, but Mako doesn't. He tells her when her form is off and that she needs to think before she fights."Don't make me regret putting you on the team," cuts her and the wound bubbles over with hot blood, so she sticks her tongue out at his back when he's walking away.

She silently hopes he treats her that way because he does see her as a girl; not in the bad way the other guys on the team do, but in the way he turns pink when he sees her changing with the other guys after their first practice. He looks away and tries to glare at the benches when he jerks his thumb back and says, "The girl's locker rooms are the next one over."

—-

The third time she sees him, she's serving the worst detention punishment ever for threatening the Varsity captain of their rival school, White Falls Prep. When Mako found out about it, he was livid, but she thought fights in school parking lots were normal. It's not her fault she's been homeschooled for years.

She kind of wishes he acted more like Bolin. When Bolin found out, he went wide-eyed, his arm locking around her shoulders, dragging her off to tell the rest of the team the great news!

Tenzin wasn't happy either, but thankfully he convinced the principal that her punishment would be tutoring someone in his class rather than be suspended.

So when Mako shows up in the library with his small backpack and tattered copy of The Great Gatsbytucked under his arm, she's surprised. Mainly because she has a few classes with him, and he's always raising his hand, answering questions and sticking around after class to ask more. He's smart, so he doesn't need to be here.

His face wipes clean and emotionless at the sight of her at one of the study tables in the library, surrounded by books Tenzin told her would be helpful. Even though he's tall and a year older than everyone else in the senior class, he looks small. The grey cardigan he always wears stretches when his chest heaves with a sigh, and she notices the seams on the arms dip lower around his shoulders because it's a size too big. The scarf around his neck is thinned with age but it looks so heavy over his collarbones. He's been wearing the same pair of jeans all week, so now they're awkwardly stretched out and his legs swim in them, and Korra actually doesn't remember him wearing anything else.

He pulls out the chair at the head of the table and sits down, weight sagging for a second before he picks himself back up, expression the same as when he waits for the bell to ring during a practice fight.

Korra's still staring at him as he pulls out a mangled notebook stuffed with loose leaf papers, and a pencil nearly sharpened all the way down to the flat eraser.

"Wait, am I supposed to tutor you?" she asks.

His head lifts and his mouth is set in a tight line. "Yes. Mr. Gyatso said you're my tutor."

"He never told me that - that you where - do you need a tutor?"

He looks so annoyed but she's only asking a question, what is his deal?

"Yeah. I do," he mutters, opening his notebook and hidden behind the cover are stacks of tests and quizzes, the one on the top the essay test Mr. Gyatso gave them last week and it's covered in red marks. He flips past it quickly to try and find a clear sheet of paper to write on, but there doesn't seem to be any. He settles on a sheet scrawled with math problems and he starts scratching the dead eraser on it, smudging around the graphite and cutting green tinted, metallic scratches into the paper.

"You're not going to write on that, are you?" she asks.

He glares and in a snap she's matching it.

"What is your problem?" she asks. "I'm just asking you questions!"

His mouth opens and shuts, his expression blanking again as he looks away. He drops the pencil and battered paper, pinching his brow and shutting his eyes. He takes the moment for himself and Korra just watches him force his emotions away, packed somewhere between the restitched seams on his sweater and in the folds of his notebook.

"Sorry," he says, eyes opening and arms leaning against the table, curving around his stuff. "Should I get more paper or something?"

Korra shakes her head and dips her hand into her immense backpack, tugging out her English notebook. "Nah, I got some. You want a pen, too?"

"No, I can ask the librarian for some paper -"

"- Oh yeah, because Ms. Beifong is so generous," Korra rolls her eyes and blindly rips out a stack of paper from her notebook, handing it to him and flicking a pen across the table. "Just give it back when you're done."

He holds the pen for a moment and tips it back towards her. "I like writing in pencil."

"Tenzin hates pencil -"

"- He makes an exception for me."

Korra just frowns and takes the pen back, swapping it for a big, pink eraser. He actually looks grateful to have it, and she decides to start on a high note by flipping open her copy of The Great Gatsby.

"Alright, Tenzin said you have to read chapter three for tomorrow and write a response. So how about I read a page, you read a page, blah, blah, until we finish?"

Mako frowns. "I already read it."

"Then what are you even doing here?" Korra asks, fingers expelling her book. "Like, you're so smart. You don't need a tutor."

"I listen to the audiobooks in the gym."

So that's why sometimes he smiles out of nowhere while running on the treadmill and biting back laughter when he lifts weights. And why he uses a walkman with tapes instead of an ipod like everybody else.

"Alright," Korra sighs and picks the book back up. "I read this a few years ago so I guess we can just work on the response essay."

—-

It turns out that he can't read or write very well - in English, at least. He shows her some Chinese calligraphy because that's all he ever went to school for, copying down poems from memory, and his face lights up just the slightest touch when she says yeah, I've read Journey to the West in Mandarin. Not Cantonese, though. He also knows a bit of Japanese, but only verbally, and they get sidetracked for a while when she teaches him Inuit.

"Do you speak it at home?" he asks as she translates his name on the cardstock back of his notebook.

She shrugs. "Sometimes with my parents we kind of throw in the words. But with Tenzin's mom, Katara, I always use it."

"Why do you call Mr. Gyatso by his first name all the time?"

"Dunno. I just always knew him as Tenzin, I guess. He's supposed to teach me Baguazhang and be my languages teacher, since Katara taught me tons of Inuit languages as a kid."

"And you live with him?"

"Yup," she finishes writing his name, Bolin's, and her's, sliding it back to him. "And he usually speaks in Tibetan because he wants his kids to know it, and God, it is so hard."

"I bet," he says and stares at the names she wrote down, and his finger traces along the table and wow, that's cute, he's trying to learn his name in her language. "It's easier to learn when you're raised with it. That's how it was for Chinese, at least."

"Now that I know that you and Bolin speak Chinese, I'm going to practice with you guys," she says with a smile. "I haven't spoken to a native speaker in so long, so if I'm bad, just say so."

"Oh, Bolin doesn't speak it as well as I do," Mako says.

"Why?"

He taps the end of his pencil against his notebook, watching the line of yellow and green bleed into a small arc of color instead of answering.

"Hey," Korra says, poking him with the end of her pen. "Is Bolin just bad at it, or something?"

He shrugs. "He wasn't really raised with it like I was."

"Oh."

He's not looking at her anymore, just watching his pencil wiggle through the air. He flips it and writes something down in Chinese carefully. Something's changed and the air in the library is pressing and muffled with the sounds of crinkling plastic book jackets and snapping gum. So she tries a different approach, like when Tenzin kept teaching her to be the leaf and it actually worked in the middle of her first match.

"So, uh, can I ask why Bolin wasn't raised with it?"

He sighs, leans back in his chair, so his chin dips into the curve of his scarf but he's not annoyed with her questions anymore.

"We moved to Republic City when Bolin was five. A year later our parents died."

Now it makes sense - why they live above a gym in the center of the city, why they win easy money against their peers in fights, why Mako is obsessive about every little thing - and Korra doesn't know what else to do so she places her hand over his shoulder. He tenses for a second and the large seam shifts when he cools down.

—-

She tutors him, and they have practice every day, so they're constantly together. No one else at the school speaks Cantonese, so she passes him notes and quick sentences in the halls with her educated scrawl, trying to make him smile. She's surprised when it's not that hard, but the biggest surprise comes when he starts smiling first.

Only, he's kind of still got a thing going on with Asami Sato, who graduated last year, who went off the college while Mako stayed back because Bolin needed him to stick around when he was bullied.

He drives Korra home after a long tutoring session that delved into let's teach Mako Korean instead of English, and they stop off at McDonald's because Korra misses burgers. Bolin's CDs are the only ones in the car - or so Mako says, but he still taps his fingers against the steering wheel to Take Care by Drake like he's heard it a thousand times by choice. Once the CD ends and he's shut it off, it's just the evening sounds of the city out of their open windows, the wrappers around their burgers flapping with the breeze.

"Asami's great - I think you'd like her. She'd like you - she likes everybody."

Korra just shovels more burger into her mouth and nods, making some kind of sound of approval. She had Jinora find Asami on Facebook, and there is no way she would ever like a girl like that.

"It's just…she's at school. It's been a year since her dad left and she's doing all of this stuff."

"What stuff?" Korra asks.

He shrugs and drives slowly through the streets as they get closer to Tenzin's house, watching the inner city shrink into the suburbs. "She….she's - I don't really think we should keep seeing each other."

Yes.

"Oh?" Korra says, licking her fingers.

"Yeah. It's more like obligation now, or something - I don't know. Most of the time when we hang out we don't even do anything and -" he cuts off there and his face turns red, and Korra just laughs at him. He clears his throat loudly. "Anyway, uh, yeah. I don't know."

Korra shrugs but her heart is racing even though she's sitting still, and Mako's the only person to make her feel like she's run five miles just by talking to him. It's weird and it makes her arms feel too long, like maybe she's sitting strange, should she cross them or something?

"It sounds like - sound like you want somebody around you more. You know?" she says, and she knows she's breathing, but it feels like she's holding her breath until he answers.

He sighs, and when she glances over at him he glances over at her for a split second, and his ears are bright red like when Bolin told her Mako has the days of the week written on the inside of his underwear. So, that's something.

"Yeah. I guess so."

He still drives slow through Tenzin's neighborhood, and he shuts the truck off in the driveway.

"So, see you tomorrow," Korra says, stepping out and crumpling the wrappers and bag.

He rolls his window down the whole way and leans out of it. "We have homework in math, right?"

"Yup. Bye."

"Wait -" She does, and he freezes for a moment before shaking his head. "And I have to finish that study guide for English?"

Korra smiles and nods. "Right. Want me to get Tenzin out here to assign it again?"

It takes him a second to realize that she's joking, and when he does, his lips quirk up. "That's alright."

"Good," she laughs. "Bye, Mako. Thanks for the ride home."

"Yeah. Bye."

He only starts the car after she's disappeared inside of the house, and maybe that means something.

—-

The next day they have a match, and they win, and Korra isn't surprised by that at all because Mako's a fighter and she's a fighter. But his smile is a little too wide and his lips are thinned like he's biting them down to keep from showing his teeth, because that's just a little too much happiness. He's ready to burst though, and she wants to see it happen - watch him laugh really hard and have her be the cause.

She really doesn't care about the pretty girl at college who may or may not be waiting for him. She doesn't care that he has an English test tomorrow and he might just fail it because he's far too interested in learning her language to study. Korra cares only about learning how to be a normal teenaged girl.

She watches the bones and muscle under his skin shift as he rifles through his locker quickly in the changing rooms, talking about how great the match was, the best they've ever fought - she likes the faint scars on his skin, the way his shoulders are flushed pink.

"Do you want to go out with me tonight?" she asks and even though she hasn't said the word date yet, he freezes so he must already be thinking it.

He turns around and glances at the rest of the team, those closest to them both clearly listening in. His smile drops and his shoulders tip up and wow his chest looks even better than usual.

"Yeah, sure. Where? McDonald's?"

Korra shrugs. "Maybe. Unless there's some place better."

He bends over to tug off his shoes and he looks ridiculous, because he's adamant about keeping eye contact when he speaks. "We could go into China Town again, so Bolin can get those dumplings -"

"- No, not with Bolin," she says and there are more people listening, her heart is racing, and Mako's standing on one leg with his fingers in his shoelaces and if he goes on a date with her tonight, she'sdefinitely going to mention how stupid he looks right now. "Just me and you."

"Oh." He pulls off his shoe with a muffled pop, and stands up, holding it and staring at her with his eyes wide. "Ok. We can…still go though. Into China Town, I mean."

She's never smiled this hard before, because Mako is going on a date with her and this means a lot of new things she's ready to learn.

The air she breathes fills her like she's been holding her breath since the parking lot fight club, and she nods her head quickly. He kind of smiles back at her.

"Yeah, ok, sounds good." She walks backwards out of the boys locker room because she's not supposed to be in there, but Mako doesn't seem to mind anymore. She trips over her loose laces but catches herself, and she hears him snort shortly with a laugh. She lifts her head and he's smiling, so she waves and grins. "Ok, see you soon."

—-

Kissing Mako is probably her favorite lesson she's learned, and she's only done it once. She's assuming it's a good one because even if it is quick, she feels his tongue lick her bottom lip, so that's got to count for something.

"Woah," Mako says, stepping back. "What was that for?"

"Don't you do that on dates?" she asks.

He glances around the front steps of the restaurant they were about to enter and laughs. "Usually you kiss at the end of the date."

She does feel a spike of embarrassment in her chest, but she just steps forward and pulls open the door for him. "Whatever. I felt like kissing you now."

"Guys also hold the door open for girls," he says as he steps inside.

She follows in after him and presses her arm against his before looping it through, just because she can now and he won't say what are you doing? "Fine, I'll only kiss you at the end of every date we go on."

He holds her hand as they stand and wait for a table.

"We'll go on a lot of dates," he says, and she digs her elbow into his ribs because God that is so dorky. He laughs and winces at the same time before awkwardly kissing her on the forehead.