Mako was dog tired.

Today, the junior had taken two 400 level exams delivered by Satan himself, spent five hours rotting away during his shift at the university gym, spent another hour and a half studying for another midterm that he was sure to fail tomorrow morning, and he still had a lab report that needed to be submitted by midnight.

'This is the last time you go for 19 credit hours, you stupid, stupid idiot,' he scolded himself viciously as he stomped upstairs to his second floor dorm room. 'Next time, use that head of yours and you won't have to die buried underneath all your textbooks.'

Mako's dorm room—room 212—was all the way at the end of the hall. When he reached the top of the stairs, he narrowed his eyes suspiciously. He lived on a relatively quiet floor, but on those days where he could hear music playing from the stairwell, he knew who was there.

Mako felt his day worsen the smallest bit.

He groaned when he reached his door at last. As he suspected, it was his room that was making all that racquet at seven in the evening. He opened up the door and quickly slipped in, slamming it behind him.

"Korra! I can hear your music all the way from the stairs! Turn it down!"

Mako's roommate, a exercise science major who went by Korra, popped her head out from inside their joint kitchen. She grinned coyly at her annoyed roommate.

"Well good," she replied before disappearing behind the wall, "nobody else has good enough taste, so I thought it'd be beneficial for all you douchebags to learn something."

"That didn't even make sense."

"Yes, it did."

"Whatever. Turn your shit off."

"No can do, buckaroo," Korra danced around the corner in time to swat Mako's hands away from her radio; warning him silently with her spatula. "Just relax, man. Take a load off."

Mako rolled his eyes.

This was what happened when you agreed to have a roommate. Mako still couldn't believe that they were still in the same living space, seeing that it was RCU's own fucking fault in the first place. 'Who even mistakenly pairs a guy and a girl together?' he thought to himself, eyeing Korra as she flitted around their kitchen with only a white camisole and a baggy pair of sweats on.

He caught himself staring appreciatively at his roommate for the umpteenth time that week.

'No, no. Danger zone. Don't go there.'

It was already bad enough having an annoying roommate who enjoyed blasting swing music from decades ago at the most inopportune times and who insisted that they played strip poker at 3am on Wednesday nights ('Mako wake up. Let's play.') and who bellyached all the damn time about the dickhead who worked with her at the little Water Tribe style restaurant down the road. Why did she have to be so attractive?

Mako may have been a stiff at times, but he wasn't blind. He knew Korra could get it. From her killer body to her dark chin-length hair to her clear blue eyes and that fucking annoying laugh that could make his head swim if he wasn't too careful, Mako knew she was dangerous to someone like him.

And he supposed that's why she grated on his nerves so easily.

He scowled as the girl passed him, bumping her hip against his as she crossed into the main suite, balancing two plates of food in each of her arms. He watched as she set them down on the coffee table and reached over the grab the remote, switching on Netflix.

Absentmindedly, Korra addressed Mako as she flipped through the options, "Mako, come here. Oh, and shut the music off. Gently. If you break my shit, I swear to Raava, you'll be pissing through a tube for the rest of this semester."

Mako scowled at the girl but obeyed nonetheless. When he took his seat next to her on the worn down sofa, he noticed that she had cooked up something for the both of them. It appeared to be seaweed noodles—a specialty of hers as a Water Tribe native, grilled arctic hen, and sea prunes. This wasn't the first time Korra had done something unreasonably nice for him without any strings attached. Mako wasn't used to having someone so casually care for him and the fact that Korra did it so effortlessly made him…

…well, it made him hate her a little less.

"You made some for me too?" he asked.

"No, I made two plates for myself," she replied sarcastically, the corner of her lips quirking upwards into a small shit-eating smirk. Mako couldn't help but to do the same.

"I hate sea prunes," he lied smoothly.

"Well, that's too damn bad," Korra said, unruffled by his claims, "You're gonna eat it and you're gonna watch some movies with me and you're gonna like it."

"You're not really giving me many options here, are you?" he quipped, breaking apart his chopsticks and digging into her admittedly delicious meal. Korra snorted, grabbed her plate, and pressed play.

"You're learning well."

Mako didn't retire to his room after that. Instead, he worked in the living room. And somewhere between typing up his hellish lab report due at midnight and Korra closely curled up by his side while binge watching Parks and Rec for the 10th time that month, Mako decided that this arrangement wasn't that bad after all.