Snapdragon feels all warm inside. She hasn't had fresh bread since she'd left Hira'a. It is still warm and it melts like butter on her tongue. It tastes like butter to. She decides that, after her collection of shiny things, palace food is her favorite thing. She dangles her legs over the beam and lets the breeze play with her hair.
"Can you scramble back in here?" Mai asks. "You're stressing me out."
"Why?"
"Aren't you afraid that you're going to fall?"
Snapdragon looks down. It wouldn't exactly be a nice fall, the rubbish beneath the beam is mostly metal bits and blades from old war and industrial machines. But if she looks down in a different direction she can see a beach and a lovely sprawl of houses. "I like it up here."
"That doesn't answer my question."
She shakes her head. "Nope, I ain't afraid. I been up here so many times. It's nice. You should come up here."
"No thanks." She replies. "I don't really care for heights."
Snapdragon shrugs. "Suit yourself. I like heights though. You get to be above everyone and usually no one can get to you so it's peaceful."
"Yeah, until you misstep." Mai shudders.
"That's why you practice down there first." She points to a small stack of crates and a brick wall. "If you do it wrong you get scrapes and bruises…"
"And broken bones?"
"Only once!" Snapdragon declares. She holes out her arm and shows the woman another scar. "It weren't so bad." She taps her chin, "But Mohi says that's only because I passed out 'n so I couldn't feel it."
"You are not helping me like heights any better."
Snapdragon scrambles her way back across the beam and into her nest. "Have the flowers come in yet?"
Mai shakes her head. "They're being delivered on a boat, it's going to take a while."
Her eyes light up, "so since we have time, will you go trinket hunting with me?"
"I was actually hoping that you'd tell me a story."
"I like telling stories. What kind do you wanna here."
"When we were at the palace, you said that you were found in a jungle."
Snapdragon nods.
"What did you mean by that?"
"I meant that I was found in a jungle. I think that I was born there." She pauses. "I don't really remember it much. I forgot a lotta things." She thinks for a moment. "But Mohi can tell you! Can I introduce you to Mohi?"
.oOo.
Mai isn't sure that she wants to meet this Mohi woman. But Snapdragon is all to enthusiastic for her to turn the woman down. Anyways, she is rather curious about the woman's origin story. And so she stands before a rundown little shack with lopsided shudders and a roof full of holes and cracks.
Snapdragon gives the door several knocks.
"C'mon in." Calls a voice. "'S open, ya know that by now, girl."
"Mohi, I brought someone for you to meet!"
"Tha flowa lady?"
The inside of the shack smells like cooking oil and scorched meat. She half expects an elephant-rat or a roach to crawl out of one of the cracks in the stained wall. But other than a clutter of clothes, old kitchenware, and some scattered scrolls the place is fairly clean. Cleaner than the decrepit exterior had hinted. She removes her shoes and sets them upon the mat by the door.
"Ya have to excuse tha mess. I tol' tha boys to help me clean it but they've been blowing that off for firebendin' and this one…" she gestures at Snapdragon, "keeps bringin' junk home."
"It ain't junk, Mohi!"
"Then wha's this?" She holds up some sort of metal plank. Perhaps a broken rafter or the blade of a propeller.
"I dunno." Snapdragon admits. "I just thought it were neat."
Mohi sets it aside with an audible groan. "She jus' tosses things on tha floor. Makes more work for her motha."
"I'm gonna pick 'em up."
"You're her mother?"
"In a manner'a speakin'." Mohi returns to her chopping block. She slices a carrot twice more and then adds, "I don't suppose she's gone 'n tol' ya that I foun' 'er in the jungle one night."
"She mentioned it." Mai sits down.
"That's what we're here for, Mohi!" Snapdragon declares. "I was hoping you could tell her the story."
"Let me jus' finish wit these carrots. Maybe ya could help me wit 'em. Or ya can start on the potatoes?"
Snapdragon picks up a knife and a potato.
"Ken ya cook?" Mohi asks.
"Not very well." Mai admits.
Mohi nods. "She was tellin' me that ya is one'a tha uppa class ladies." She gives the carrot another chop. The knife clomps on the cutting board.
"I am." Mai replies. "But I don't mind giving this a try. It beats…" sitting in the palace with Zuko, enduring his awkward attempts to clear the air. "It beats home life."
"Aye. Then grab'a board 'n a turnip. I'll tell ya a story while we choppin'."
"Leave the roots for me." Snapdragon says.
.oOo.
The night held a sweltering humidity. Moonless, cloudless, the sky was an uninterrupted canvas of stars. And the hog-monkies screeched while the toad-squirrels chittered and croaked and the crickets droned on and on.
A middle aged woman tended to her garden, to the night blooming flowers, watching the flutterbats swoop down overhead. Mohi much preferred to do her gardening at night, safe from the sun's hottest glares, safe from forced small talk with passing neighbors, and safe from the neediness of her sons-at least until the next morning.
She thought that it was boundlessly more pleasant to do yard work with fireflies for company. She'd seen far less spider-wasps too.
That night, the fireflies were particularly active, dancing in clouds like a current through the sea. She stooped down to pluck an iris. She tried not to look at the treeline, lately the jungle had been acting mighty strange. It glowed and it sang. It hummed with spirit energy, too much for her comfort. And more of it than she had seen in decades. It wasn't a bad thing necessarily, but she has always thought that it was best to just leave the spirits to themselves. Of the dark or light, they could coexist side by side, never interacting, only quietly crossing the paths of one another.
And so she had maintained peace.
Peace, a bountiful garden and sugarcane field, and a family in good health. It was a lifestyle she could never trade. How could she give up waking up to the smell of sugarcane, bamboo, and wildflower every morning? How could she give up morning strolls into town to trade her sugarcane for fish and to watch a good theater performance with her boys?
Life was well. Life was prosperous. Life was everything she could have hoped for and she was almost certain that she owed it to the respect and care she had put into a land that is so close to the world of the Spirits.
And so when the spirits tossed her a young woman, she couldn't bring herself to throw her back into the jungle. The poor thing stood at the treeline, dirty and scraggly haired. Mohi almost hadn't noticed her. She wouldn't have if not for the fireflies. They had all paused, going dark for a good while before lighting up again collectively in a spiral around the young woman.
Spirit energy radiated from her, the woman's very skin hummed with it when Mohi took her hand. Quickly, instinctively, the young woman jerked her hand away with a snarl and ducked back into the jungle.
Mohi was inclined to let her return to the jungle from which she emerged. But she was human. Only human. And Mohi thought that she must have gotten lost out there and for a very long time. Such a long time that human contact had become foreign.
Or maybe she had never had it at all. Mohi was well aware of the parents who'd abandoned their unwanted or unplanned children in the jungle.
"C'mon chil', let's get ya inside. 'S nice inside." She'd tried coaxing the woman.
She'd retreated deeper into the jungle and deeper still until Mohi had lost sight of her and was willing to venture no further. But she returned the next night and the night after. And six moons from then she caught the woman eating an unripe and raw pineapple.
She'd coaxed her into the house with a sweetly smelling fruit basket. She'd disappeared again in the middle of the night. The jungle had grown quiet, the spirit activity seeming to cease. And just when Mohi thought that the girl was gone for good, Kaz had come running into the house complaining of a naked lady in their sugarcane field.
That day Mohi hadn't taken any protest, and spirits did the woman put up a fuss. By sunset, she had the girl bathed, clothed, and seething with a feral brand of rage. Decidedly she would teach the woman some manners.
It would be quite some time before she would be able to leave the woman alone, mostly Zenyul would watch her when Mohi couldn't. And it would be much longer before she could take the woman out in public.
But when the woman finally began speaking in something other than grunts and clicks, it was a natural process. As though blockage had been cleared from a creek, speech had returned to her. Mohi had grown certain that the woman had gotten herself well and lost in that jungle, she only had to help her remember the civilized world she had once been a part of.
Her speech had been broken at first, hard to understand but she was getting there.
And then she'd gotten there.
Mostly, Mohi could forget that she had found the woman in the jungle. Mostly she was like everyone else, well groomed, clothed, and only somewhat less than well spoken.
Mostly, Mohi could return to her usual day to day endeavors. To the life she adored and cherished so well.
It was a nice home, a nice standard of living.
If only the girl hadn't had such wandering, thieving fingers.
If only the girl wasn't prone to bouts of mischief and troublemaking.
If only the jungle didn't drive the girl mad on nights when the moon was new.
It was a lifestyle she could never give up, and yet for the sake of this woman whom the spirits gifted her, she'd leave it behind.
Leave it behind for a run down shack in the unpleasantly smelling outskirts of a city much too grand for her tastes.
.oOo.
Mai supposes that it makes sense; Snapdragon's mannerisms and her taking comfort in nests and shiny things.
"Did you like her?"
"Hmm?" Mai asks.
"Mohi. Did you like Mohi?"
Mai nods, "she seems like a nice woman. She takes cares a lot about you." She wishes that her mother were as invested in her well being as Mohi is in Snapdragon's.
Snapdragon is quiet for a long while and Mai grows uncomfortable under the cloud of silence. "What's wrong?" She finally asks. "And don't try to tell me that this is a happy hush."
Snapdragon laughs but only briefly before her smile fades. "You think it's weird, don't you."
"That you used to run naked through the jungle and eat raw pineapples?"
Snapdragon nods.
"I thought it was weird to watch you eat a whole sunflower and then scamper up and into your nest."
Snapdragon frowns.
"I'm looking for strange." Mai confesses. "Everything is so boring, Snapdragon! It's the same thing every day; I would wake up and go to some council meeting with my dad or with Zuko when I was his girlfriend. I would have a nice meal and warm bath-rose scented soap every time. Sometimes I'd go for walks or talk with the other ladies in the palace. I used to talk to TyLee and that was interesting but then she left to join the Kyoshi Warriors and it was just me, Aunt Mura, Tom-Tom, and that flower shop. And then it was even more of the same routine every day." She pauses. "And then you invited yourself to work at my stall."
Snapdragon curls her bangs around her finger. "I thought that…"
"Everything was just starting to blend together one really long dull day that never ended. I can tell the difference now." Mai says. "It's not boring. You make me feel things because you're weird. I wish more people around here would just be bizarre and unpredictable. I wish I could scramble up a tower and surround myself with random items."
"You can." Snapdragon smiles. "You can visit my nest even if I'm not around. Just don't break anything."
"That's not the point, Snapdragon." Mai says. "The point is; I know that you're weird and I want you to keep doing that."
She needs her to keep doing that. Maybe if she does, she can start to break the monotony on her own.
"Keep doin' what?"
"Hoarding your knick knacks and eating more questionable parts of plants."
Snapdragon nods, "I can do that." She fidgets with her metal propeller blade. "I have to drop this off. Will you spend the night with me? I never had a sleepover before."
Mai thinks of her comfortable bed in the security of the palace. She really ought to go there. But she is casting normalcy to the side now, doing the things that her mother would likely disown her for. "And I've never slept in an abandoned factory before."
"It's really nice 'cept for when it's windy and the breezes get in the air ducts and it makes these spooky noises. And sometimes…"
"Let's just get to the factory before I have second thoughts."