Author's Note: This is just an itch I needed to scratch. It's long and kind of rambly, but it's romantic and smutty in parts. Enjoy.

Chapter 1

The daylight was beginning to fail as Korra approached Police Headquarters, and a stabbing pain—the first of what promised to be a fierce headache—began to throb behind her left eye. It had been a brutal week of hearings with one day left to go before the Council recessed. She was thoughtfully massaging the bridge of her nose when she saw Mako approaching, back in street clothes after his shift and jogging happily towards her. It had been a while since they'd had the opportunity for a date, and she tried to work up a veneer of enthusiasm that she couldn't quite feel behind the dullness in her brain and the creeping numbness in her body.

It had been four months since the Revolution, four months since her bending had been taken. And while she had been made whole, the process of healing Republic City had been arduous, with no end in sight.

He greeted her with a brief kiss. "How was it today?" he asked.

She smiled weakly, "Same as usual. You know."

He did know. Sort of.

When they had returned from the South Pole, the rebuilding had already begun. The Council had been re-formed—with a new Water representative—under instructions from the central governing authority of the United Republic to begin taking the necessary steps to repair infrastructure and homes and restore government services to their full function. Korra had, of course, been eager to dive in and began at what had seemed, to her, the obvious starting point: healing everyone whose bending had been taken by Amon. But then things got complicated. Then Triad members and known criminals and stepped up to be restored, and people had protested-violently, in some cases.

"What do you want to eat? Noodles?" Mako asked. Over her shoulder, she could feel passersby staring at them, though maybe she was just paranoid. There were still enough Amon sympathizers or people just looking for someone to blame for a casual walk down the street to go sideways with a quickness. No reasonable people were interested in starting something with an Avatar at the height of her powers, but not everyone in Republic City was reasonable right now. And then there was the press.

"Sure!" she said brightly. "Noodles sound great." She was hoping they could get in and out of the restaurant before the evening paper hit the newsstands. Today had not gone particularly well.

Mako wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and hers rested on his waist when she heard him suddenly suck in air through his teeth.

"What?" she said sharply. "Are you hurt?"

"It's nothing," he gasped through involuntarily gritted teeth.

"Sure thing, tough guy," she said, unbuttoning his coat and lifting up his shirt to see a bright red burn mark clumsily hidden by a hastily applied bandage. She pulled it up at the edge and saw that it was sticky and glowed unhealthily."

"An Agni Kai resisted arrest," he confessed through gritted teeth. "Don't worry about it. I've had much worse."

"Why didn't you have someone look at it?"

He sputtered something out about how his supervisor would have sent him to the hospital, where he would have been delayed at least an hour. And anyway, he'd been treating his and Bolin's burns their entire lives, and…

"So, you're going to be just fine sitting through dinner with that?"

"Of course!" he said, as she lightly touched the exposed skin and he cursed in surprise.

"Uh huh. Ok, Officer. Dinner can wait. I'm taking you home and working on that first."

She felt slightly terrible on account of his injury, but she was relieved for the excuse to avoid a crowded restaurant. And relaxing ever so slightly, she took his hand as they walked toward his and his brother's new apartment, conveniently close to headquarters.

Inside, he took his coat and shirt off. She ran the tap in the tiny kitchen and drew the water into her hands, applying it gently to his side. "Since you waited so long, this is going to hurt for a while. You're going to need to keep a decent bandage on it for at least a few more days."

"You're the boss," he grunted as the pain intensified ever so slightly under her touch before gradually subsiding.

Just then, Bo came out from his room looking like he was on a mission. "Hey, you two. It's cool if you want to call it a night early, but the LEAST you can do is check to see if I'm here before you start getting na … whoa!" His teasing was interrupted once he got a look at the gooey red splotch on his brother's skin. "Well THAT doesn't look too good."

"It's fine, Bo," Mako exhaled, blushing and a little exasperated.

"I was just running down to Narook's to get some takeout. You guys want anything?"

"My hero," sighed Korra, smiling weakly in his direction.

"Usual?"

"You know it."

Mako nodded.

"Sorry," she said when Bolin left. "I know this isn't what you had in mind." She let the water fall into the sink and run back down the drain as she checked to make sure that the burn was already starting to crust over. "All done," she said before kissing the fresh bandage and rising on her toes to gather his lips with hers and loop her arms around his neck. Just to remind her that he could, he lifted her a few inches off the ground and pressed deeper into her mouth, tracing the outline of her teeth with the tip of his tongue. She hummed and pulled away slowly, "Looks like the patient's going to live. Now put me down. I need to go wash my face."

He obeyed, and she retreated to the bathroom to splash water on herself and check the mirror to be sure that her eyes weren't still puffy and swollen from before. She wasn't sure why this day, of all days, had gotten to her, and she didn't want to have to explain herself to the guys.

When she got back to the kitchen, Mako was making tea, and she let him tell the story leading up to his war wound knowing that he would likely repeat it, with embellishments, to Bolin later on. They had a lot to catch up on after a week or so of separation, and his stories were more interesting than determining where earthbender teams would be deployed next to repair infrastructure or which boroughs were still losing power when the overtaxed grid overloaded.

The quiet of the apartment felt good. They had just moved in earlier in the month, and she had only seen the place once when she was helping them get settled. Even though it was at the center of the city, it felt eerily cut off from everything else. And though the only furniture in the room so for was the kitchen table, the old couch from the arena, and a radio, there was a shabby comfort to it all that made her body start to uncoil.

When Bolin got home, he was carrying the evening edition along with his paper sack. "Korra, you made the front page!" he said. He said it as if this was the first time.

"Did you read the headline?" she asked.

Bolin dumped his armload on the table, and the paper unrolled to reveal a picture of Korra looking stricken and the words, ARENA ATTACK VICTIM PUBLICALLY HOLDS AVATAR RESPONSIBLE FOR HUSBAND'S DEATH. She blanched. "Oh," Bolin said remorsefully before gathering it up and taking it to the waste bin. "I just saw the picture and grabbed it. I wasn't…"

"Don't sweat it," she said. "I was there. I just don't need to read about it." Her headache had become suddenly noticeable again, and she realized she needed food. Desperately. She grabbed her white box, and the three of them set about eating with abandon, Mako asking silent questions of her with his eyes as Bolin chattered about trying out new teammates. Just don't even, her glance said. It wasn't remotely worth it. This wasn't the first time, and it wouldn't be the last. She couldn't imagine why the paper would print this kind of thing except that nothing novel had come out of the Sato investigation for a while and news was getting slow.

It was nice just to listen to them talk. Opportunities for this sort of thing had become so rare, their schedules never quite lining up. It made her think wistfully of when they were just the Fire Ferrets, which wasn't even a year ago. But still.

While Mako cleaned up dinner, Korra and his brother retreated to the couch, rifled through the magazines, and turned on the radio. When he was finished, Bolin moved to the floor so that his brother could sit next to Korra. Even if he wasn't aware of just how beat she was, the fact that she wasn't mourning their spoiled date wasn't lost on Mako, and he had registered her unusual silence during dinner. Using her coat for a pillow, she let him pull her head onto his knee, take down her hair and comb his fingers through it, the sensation of his fingernails against her scalp soothing the persistent pain. If Bolin hadn't been there, she'd have rolled up her shirt and made him scratch her back.

She didn't intend to fall asleep. And in truth, she didn't really sleep so much as she dozed, fitfully, for a few minutes, an hour or so here and there, which had become something of a pattern. She heard snatches of the radio program and fragments of conversation. At some point, Mako had picked her up and carried her to his big bed, the one luxury he had allowed himself with his earnings. "Sleeping on pavement makes you appreciate a good mattress," he'd said when he bought it, but she knew she'd factored into the decision even if he'd been too shy to bring it up. Korra was aware as he helped her off with her boots and put her under the covers. When she woke up at three in the morning, she found the warm place in the crook of his shoulder and let herself be pulled back under until sunrise.

When Mako was shaving early the following morning, he heard an urgent knock on the bathroom door. "Get out of there. I need to be at City Hall in half an hour, and I need to splash water on my face or something before I head out."

"Shit," he cursed himself, realizing he should have woken her up earlier. He opened the door even though he was in nothing but a towel.

"Well, morning, handsome, but I'm late enough already," she teased. But he could see that her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with deep shadows. He wondered if she'd looked this exhausted the night before and why he hadn't noticed.

"You ok?" he asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"You talk in your sleep."

"Oh." She got defensive. "Hey, I'm sorry for crashing here without asking. It was accident, and if I kept you up..."

He tilted her head up with one finger and slowly took her bottom lip between his to shut her up."Korra, I'd gladly wake up to you every single morning even if you do carry on conversations with Pabu all night."

"What did I say?" She was trying to be light, but he cut to the point.

"Korra, it's hard for me to say this without sounding like a selfish ass, but do you think you might be working just a bit too hard lately?"

Her shoulders sagged, "Look, I know we haven't gotten to see a lot of each other, but there's not a lot I can do about it." She didn't tell him that lately her sense of irrelevance to the Council proceedings had been particularly acute. There was a lot of pain and a lot of trouble, and it felt like she had accomplished precisely dick in the few weeks since she'd finished restoring bending.

"Well, can you take a break over the holiday?"

"Tenzin wants to use it for airbending practice. The whole glider thing is turning out to be harder than I thought, and I haven't been practicing much lately, and…" her voice rose in pitch as she ran off the litany of things she needed to do and the people she needed to do it for.

Mako pressed his lips together as he threw on a fresh undershirt, the towel still wrapped around his waist, and put his hands on her shoulders. Looking serious, he moved her gently out of the doorway before walking toward the kitchen. Korra was confused but remembered the time and started cleaning herself up. She was setting her wolftails in order when he returned, took her hand, and pressed a small metal object into it.

"It's a key to the apartment," he said. "Bolin has a date tonight, and I have a late shift. If you can hold Tenzin off, you can have the place all to yourself for a while. Leave your work at City Hall. Come in disguise if you're worried about the press. I'll make sure no one bugs you."

She turned the key over in her hand skeptically. "I don't know. I promised…"

"You can use the tub," he interrupted, knowing she had eyed it with envy after months of community bathrooms on the Island and what he remembered were less than modern accommodations at the South Pole. He planted a kiss on her forehead before running off to make coffee. "Think about it."