mini LOK ficlets #2: brothers from the school of hard knocks 

The Fabulous Bending rothers are my favorite characters so I spent a lot of time dwelling on these concepts. Because I fucking love Mako and Bolin, awrite? I LOVE ‘EM TO PIECES.

2a. Mako + Bolin thievery AU. Mako and Bolin, non-bending orphan brothers from the streets, have grown into quite the adept professional catburglars, starting with pickpocketing the Republic City denizens who never suspected the grubby-cute pair of young boys, and moving on to some more sophisticated heists involving some luxuriously high-end mansions and penthouses. Mako plots and plans, strategizes and schemes; he has gotten out of scrapes by pretending to be, alternatively, a janitor, a famous pro-bender, a college student, and an Air Acolyte. Bolin is the heavy muscle on both physicality and charm; he can lift his brother over walls with ease and once picked a place clean by asking to be let inside because he was lost - ‘may I use your phone to call my brother, please?’

They get arrested for a theft that was more like a prank and sent to police headquarters (Bolin couldn’t resist, the councilman was just asking to have his airbending staff taken) and are sitting in handcuffs, waiting to be fingerprinted and photographed, when the door is thrown open and a loud protest followed by a brown, muscled girl with clear blue eyes bowls into the room. She herself is handcuffed, the back of her collar firmly in the grasp of the scowling, iron-grey Chief of Police.

The girl locks eyes with Bolin, and then Mako, curiously, and stops her protests to smile at them and shrug before she is pushed forward with an exasperated sigh. They are both stunned into breathlessness, her wordless charisma hitting them like a blow to the gut. Bolin wants to steal kisses from her lips and words from her mouth, whispers and sighs that touch on him like feathers, and feel the sleek press of her smile on his thoughts and daydreams - to steal it and hide it in a box only he can open. And Mako wants to steal her gaze, her glances and looks; he wants to fall into them and sink to the bottom, and then keep them tucked away, hidden in his coat so that he will always feel her eyes on him, those flickers of sunlit ocean water that flash and burn.

They look at each other and snap back to life, breaking through the surface of a reverie snatched from poetry (until now, they’ve never wanted to steal feelings from dead poets), and press their foreheads together, grinning. Because all at once they have thrown themselves into the clutches of something much more difficult to extract themselves from than police iron. Their spirits lift on the tide of the rising, flooding sense that they will never want to escape this feeling. Handcuffs - especially these - are a joke, and in low whispers and conspiratorial smirks, they hatch their escape, and hers.