Summary: They continue the time-honored Ember Island tradition.

Rating: K

Notes: Late as usual, and probably cheesy and cliche up the wazoo, but it’s better than nothing! Inspired by this gifset of the Powerpuff Girls because families are too cute, guys. For Jessie, who was the first person I talked to about Makorra adoption all those ages ago and to whom Reika is copyrighted.

———

For as long as Mako had known him, Tarun had always been slim. His frame, though heavier than before they had adopted him three years ago, was still slight, with thin wrists and knobbly knees laced together with wiry sinew. He was completely opposite to Bolin’s childhood pudge, Mako noted. All defined cheekbones, pronounced clavicle, and narrow shoulders. But what particularly drew his attention were Tarun’s hands.

Pressed firmly into soft, ruddy brown clay, it was easy to see just how small Tarun’s hands were. Short, slender fingers tipped with rosy nails sunk deep into the clay, their joints leaving a multitude of small grooves. The lean flesh of his palms created terracotta expanses imprinted with crisscrossing lines and crevices. Dips of shadows and skin showed unmarred knuckles sprinkled with fine baby hairs and kissed golden by the sun after a long day of maritime play on Ember Island.

Tarun pulled his hands free, flexing his fingers lightly as he looked at his craft with satisfaction. “There! How does it look?”

Mako’s own hands, with their bulging veins and decorations of scars, finished the plate off with a lick of fire before tousling Tarun’s already windblown hair into a haphazard, disorganized mess. “It’s great, Tarun,” he said. His son beamed at him with a grin that seemed to sweeten the very air, and Mako smiled in return.

“I’m gonna go play with Reika now, okay?” Tarun looked towards his sister, who was building an elaborate volcano around her palace of sand. Noting that Korra and Kiana were nearby, curled up on the sand and watching the lapping waves of the shoreline, Mako nodded in assent, and the boy scampered off without a beat of hesitance.

He turned back to the handprint in the clay, with its gentle divots and slightly deeper impressions where he knew Tarun squeezed the clay when he wasn’t supposed to. One day those hands would no longer be so small, and one day he knew that Tarun wouldn’t need his protection any longer.

Mako felt something push against his hip, and he looked down to see Tarun’s arms wrapped tightly around his thighs. He pressed his face into the cloth of his trousers as he talked, but Mako heard his muffled words.

“Thanks, Dad.”

It was inevitable that that day would come, but he was going to be there to watch his son’s hands grow in size and become marked with diligence, strength, and integrity, and he would cherish every single moment.

“You’re welcome.”

Summary: Korra meets her prospective daughter for the first time. Adoption fic.

Rating: K

Notes: If there’s one thing I love more than ships, it’s family. For Hannah and Lari, who helped me flesh out my headcanons on these babies in their own ways.

———

Her skin was the color of wood, like the dark, sturdy cedar forests that lined the high mountains. It was rough and dull from long years ridden with loneliness and poverty, far from the gleaming, blushed cheeks of the girls in the highest echelons of class and comfort, but every cut and blemish told a story about a life shaped by the streets.

She saw short, thick hair ending just below the girl’s ears. It was matted and messy, with strands sticking out at odd angles, but relatively clean and free of lice. Its color was so dark a brown that it more closely matched the waters underneath the night sky than the deep chestnut of Korra’s own locks.

The most distinctive feature were her blue eyes, dark and turbulent and tinted with gray, like a reflection of tumbling clouds over choppy ocean waves. Despite being sunken in their sockets, from a likely combination of dehydration and lack of sleep, they were brimming with a familiar sort of steadfast determination. Korra now knew how this young girl, small, unassuming, and hidden in the sea of faces of a fast-paced city, etched herself into Mako’s mind two months ago with a single glance as he headed home from work. She was quiet but strong, like a mighty glacier carving through sediment to give rise to majesty, and Korra knew that she would continue to sculpt her way into all of their hearts. 

For now, Korra knew her just as Kiana. With her consent and godspeed to the paperwork, hopefully that would evolve to be Kiana, beloved daughter and sister.

That sounded right. Very right.

Sirimiri. n. Spanish.

A light rain, a fine drizzle.

Summary: A rare act of kindness from a stranger leads Mako to lower his guard. AU.

Rating: K+

Notes: So this started as fic for the Makorra Month prompt “Red.” Then it turned into something else entirely, so I nixed the whole “red” prompt and just went with it. Then I saw this post and went with this idea. So…happy Makorra Month?

———

“Were you waiting for someone?”

Mako glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She looked at him curiously, her blue eyes wide and inquiring. Her calloused hands turned gracefully in the air as she bent the droplets of rain into an umbrella over their heads. It was the only shelter from the sudden downpour that had occurred barely a minute ago; the shopkeepers nearest to the docks of Yue Bay knew better than to have their cloth overhangs out given the slightest hints of a storm. It had since then eased up into a light rain, but Mako was still soaked to the bone.

Summary: They needed very few words. He just took her in like she was the air he breathed. Makorra.

Rating: K

Notes: A nice little ficlet to kick off Makorra month. (Or we can be real and say I wrote it because I just wanted to. Apparently there are themes that I definitely didn’t follow.) Thanks to Hannah, Francesca, and Gabby for their words of encouragement.

———

He hadn’t seen her in a while.

The city needed her determination and strength, and she was doing her best to fill the role left to her in the wake of all that had happened in the last few months. There were policies to be overturned, bending that needed to be restored, people that needed to be brought to justice, changes to be implemented. He knew that she tried to make time for him and Bolin, and Asami, and Councilman Tenzin’s family, and everyone else, but there was only so much she could do when she belonged to the world. Republic City needed its Avatar, and it was running her ragged.

Mako’s first day on the job

Police headquarters was like he always remembered. It was neat, meticulously so, with their endless stacks of paperwork piled upon counters of smooth stone, but it still had an earthy, musty smell that lingered no matter how often the building was cleaned. Sunlight that streamed through tinted windows highlighted the muted browns of the hardwood floors and bathed swooping cream ceilings with a soft golden sheen, but it was also impossible to ignore the hard edges of glinting metal interlaced throughout the building’s entire design. It was sturdy, firm, hardy, just like all the officers under Chief Bei Fong’s command.

And now Mako was joining their ranks.

Mako never thought that he would be a cop. As a boy he dreamed of other goals, such as becoming a champion pro bender or a world renowned chef. As a young orphan he dreamed sparingly, preferring to ground himself in reality and work on preventing Bolin’s stomach from grumbling pitifully in protest. Even just six months ago, he had resigned himself to a lifetime of careful and calculated decisions because he was determined to stay ahead of the game and keep them off of the streets.

But as life would have it, things change. And those changes centered around a young, brash, stubborn Water Tribe girl named Korra.

Summary: One of the most frustrating things in the world is a vending machine that doesn’t accept your money.

Rating: K

Notes: Whoo, AUs are awesome. “Broken [or perhaps not so broken] vending machine” was one of the many AU situations I thought up and was persuaded to write before school starts tomorrow. Enjoy.

———

It was her first day on campus at Republic City University, and as a transfer student Korra was still learning all the ups and downs of the school’s finer details. The management at her apartment was nice, the food downtown was actually delicious and cheap, and the workout facilities were great, but this was definitely a problem.

Korra frowned at the vending machine and then at thin slips of paper in her hand. All she wanted was a bag of fire flakes. Was that too much to ask?

Summary: Some life lessons never go away, unintentional applications and all.

Rating: K+

Notes: Oh gosh, this took forever to write. Word count clocks in at a little under 4K. My computer was having issues, so this was all done on a temporary laptop. That’s actually why this prompt was finished before the “Alone” prompt. Anyway, enjoy the sad orphan feelings and happier past feelings and some weird gang feelings.

———

Mako cursed under his breath, small flickers of fire spilling from his mouth in his frustration. The hovering flames cast a weak glow onto Bolin’s face, which was scrunched up in agony and covered with a thin sheen of sweat. The younger boy shivered violently despite being swathed in nearly every piece of cloth available (which was few, but much better than nothing) and heaved a wracking cough before curling into a tight ball. Mako took what little comfort he could in the fact that their makeshift hut of castaway boxes, tarp, and the brick siding of a bar shielded his brother from the brunt of the chilling winds, but he felt his fingers comb deftly through the stack of yuans in front of him at an increased pace anyway.

He counted over and over and over again, frantic eyes roving over the faded ink and worn creases. The white flashes of his long, pale fingers and knobby hands speckled with an assortment of yellows and blues and greens contrasted sharply against the pink of the bills. He wasn’t sure why he forced himself to calculate their meager finances for what must have been at least the tenth time. Maybe it was the hope that he was wrong, because he didn’t go to school and maybe he was just really bad at math, and maybe they had so much more than the small stack in Mako’s hands. But the number was always the same.

He didn’t have enough.

Summary: The Atlanteans have an interesting way of learning languages. Atlantis AU.

Rating: K+

Notes: So this isn’t going to happen in my real Atlantis AU, but I thought I would give Hannah a taste of what could have been. It’s an AU of an AU. What. Also, you may see slight hints of my DC fangirl coming through, since that’s pretty much what inspired this to even be a thing. 

———

“What’s going on?” Asami asked Bolin, though the earthbender was just as completely clueless about the entire ordeal as she was.

“I don’t know. What I do know is that I want to be next,” he replied. The mechanic rolled her eyes and jabbed her elbow into Bolin’s side as hard as she could, but he was too entranced by the spectacle to retaliate.

It wasn’t every day that, after discovering Atlantis did in fact exist, being disappointed at the mile long chasm that separated them from the largest find in archaeological history, and seemingly being threatened, his brother got kissed by a girl.