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Rekindling
Chapter 2
When the morning comes
When we see what we've become
In the cold light of day we're a flame in the wind
Not the fire that we've begun
(Happier, Mershmellow)
"Make sure you always buy from Old Man Bao Rong for Jasmine because he's the only one that sells the ones that come from Sichuan."
The woman beside him nodded as she ventured a small peek inside the paper bag she was holding. She had looked a little bit confused when he had told her never to buy any other Jasmine leaves from other stores, no matter how much the vendors insisted that theirs came from Sichuan. He's tasted the tea made from their leaves before, and even though they did come close to Bao Rong's Jasmine, the subtle difference made seasoned teamakers like him sigh and lament on the lack of rich flavour.
A smile threatened to spill from his face at what his uncle would've said to him. He was becoming more and more like his uncle Iroh in that aspect, even though he had once blatantly insulted tea as merely hot leaf juice, which apparently, the old man found as blasphemous.
"What if he runs out though?" Yane asked with genuine concern in her voice.
"Then, don't buy," he answered simply.
"But won't the customers complain? I mean, majority of them order our Jasmine tea."
"The shop is called Jasmine Dragon," he shrugged. "They'll have to deal with it. They'd rather have other good tea than a Jasmine that's not the perfect, anyway. Besides, Bao Rong running out of tea is as rare as Tai Jia skipping a day of tea."
She snorted by his side, amused because Tai Jia almost never missed a day without visiting the shop.
They arrived in front of the shop's door a few minutes of silent walking later. Zuko had felt her attempting to start a conversation with the way she slightly turned her head to his direction countless times, which he had ignored, keeping his eyes glued on the path in front of him.
He fished out the keys from his back pocket and unlocked the door. The sound of the bells resounded in the empty room as the duo got inside, paper bags of tea leaves still dangling in their hands. Zuko walked straight to the pantry to deposit the leaves with Yane following close behind. He placed the bags on the table and waited for her to do the same.
"You know where to keep them, right?" he asked when she turned to him.
"Yep," she grinned, confident.
"Good. I'll just go out to get some toothpicks before we open the shop," he said, cocking his head to the direction of the tables.
"Why—" she started to ask but nodded instead, and Zuko wondered why she had always refused to ask him further questions when it was clear she wanted to know. He bit back the urge to demand her to spit it out, deciding that it wasn't worth it and stepped out of the room.
It's been weeks since Yane started working in Jasmine Dragon, and personally, he saw how much she had improved from the jittery and borderline clumsy waitress to the calmer version of her now. The light-haired woman still kept her guards up whenever she was with him, a pair of onyx eyes always wary and extremely careful each time he turned to address her.
Not that he could blame her.
Zuko had been none but hostile and cold.
When he opened the door to exit the shop, a woman came to his view and Zuko had to hold onto his barely existent patience to suppress the groan that threatened to pour out of his mouth.
The woman, on the other hand, misinterpreting his irritated scowl as panicked surprise, hacked a series of honky laughter, sounding strangely like a dying donkey.
"Zuko, boy, no need to be nervous about anything," she cooed like she was consoling a newborn. "I'm not going to check out my little Jasmine Dragon today. I just happened to walk by."
"Mrs. Wu," he deadpanned, leaning inches away as she reached out to ruin his hair.
"I told you to call me Aunt Wu," she chuckled good-naturedly. "How's our new bird?"
"Fine."
"Not giving you any trouble, is she?" the owner of the tea shop looked behind him in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the rookie waitress.
"Not much," he grumbled honestly. Other than her giving him more headaches than usual because of her irksome behavior, Yane did her job well. Most of the time, anyway. Zuko couldn't think of any complaints even if he had wanted to.
"Good to hear that, Son." She gave him a knowing smile, an unreadable one that was hitting some nerves in a way that's a bit uncomfortable. His only eyebrow scrunched forward to the midline.
The Jasmine Dragon owner had always been a little more eccentric than he'd normally encounter, and that was saying a lot since his constant bad luck forces him to come across the worst kinds of weirdos. Yet, it was rare to find someone who was willing to hire a grumpball like him, so he guessed it was fair enough. The Chinese-American woman was as patient as his uncle—that or she was just an airhead, which was more likely.
"Where are you heading?" she inquired as she folded her skinny arms together.
"Off to buy some toothpicks," he replied.
Her eyes twinkled at that. "I knew it. That's what I read from the fortune bones I burned a while ago, so I made sure to bring some for you."
She took out packets of toothpicks from her satchel before Zuko could fully weave his face into a puzzled scowl. Wu waved it in front of his gaping face and shoved them onto his hands enthusiastically. He examined the pack cautiously, as though he was holding a bomb that would detonate right in front of his face.
Wu laughed loudly at this display, and with a shake of the head, she said, "Still don't believe I can predict the future?"
She probably knew that they were running out of supplies, Zuko thought. It was that time of the month when there was a general restocking of all sorts of things, after all. Shopping had been a lot different this time, he realized just now. He had usually been alone, but now he had someone to tag along with him, to listen to the instructions he's long memorized and to actually express some interest.
Even though the woman in question had always kept her mouth shut around him, despite being a little bit chatty around customers.
"Need anything else, Son?" Wu queried when the silence bore down on them.
"No, n—nothing," he stammered, slightly embarrassed that he had spaced out like that. "Do you want to go in?"
"I've somewhere to be," she replied with a shrug. "Tell Shinayane I said hi."
"Yeah," he answered as she waved him off and went her way. Zuko stood his ground to shake the package of toothpicks, willing it to disappear into thin air before deciding that maybe Wu did predict the future.
Rolling his eyes in boredom, he turned on his foot and went back into the shop. The soft Asian background music filled his ears as he strode his way towards the tables to fill the empty toothpick holders with the new supplies. On his second table, he faintly noticed the song and realized that it was one of his mother's favorites.
The Moon Represents My Heart, he recognized with a not so subtle skip inside his chest.
The sun had always been the steady, resilient representation of their family. With a solid black flame insignia as their clan crest, the Hong Family stood tall in the business enterprises of China, literally burning down to ashes anyone who tried to pave their way to the top. Zuko couldn't deny that despite being thrown away like a useless rug, he yearned to bask in that glory that was supposed to be his by birthright.
An heir.
Too bad he was considered an undeserving defect by his own father.
His family thrived in power and influence. With one graceful flick of their hands, people fell into submission and did their bidding. Mighty, indomitable, fierce, like the sun. That was why he, as the young innocent boy he once was, had thought that his mother was a stark contrast to his family—like a white amongst the blacks, a delicate lotus in a fiery furnace, a serene moon in a row of mighty suns.
Zuko filled in the last cylinder with toothpicks before folding the plastic of remaining ones and tucking the pack under his arm. He was walking towards the pantry when something stopped him in his tracks, and he had to strain his hearing to listen to the sound intermingling almost imperceptibly with the song being played.
His narrowed eyes, both the undamaged and burnt ones, before widening them upon realizing that Yane was singing along with the lyrics. Zuko would've shrugged the thought off if she had only been humming the rhythm, or even mumbling incoherent Chinese syllables, but she wasn't.
"...的一個吻，已經打動我的心。深深的一段情，敎我思念到如今。(...kiss, has already touched my heart. A sentiment so deep, compels me to cherish it until today.)"
She was actually singing along with the lyrics with perfect pronunciation.
He felt his stomach do a backflip in the implication of that discovery alone. She knew how to speak his native language! All this time when he and Tai Jia, along with his band of tea-lovers, were casually talking about her, she had understood and had kept silent about it. A warm sensation crawled up to his cheeks and ears in stark embarrassment and humiliation.
Here he thought he had most of his verbalized thoughts, though few, about her private. No wonder it felt as if she was walking between eggshells around him.
Zuko came up to the door frame and stayed there, frozen with an opened-mouth stare as Yane continued to transfer the leaves in an airtight containers, completely oblivious of the pair of golden eyes staring through her back.
"你問我愛你有多深 ，我愛你有幾分。你去想— (You ask me how deep my love is, I love you a hundred folds. Go ahead and reflect—)"she went to an abrupt pause, the verse cutting off in the middle when she finally noticed his presence.
There was a split second of quietude between them, her face flushing beetroot red to match his, before Zuko snapped out of daze and made what seemed like an intimidating forward step to her direction.
Yane held up both hands defensively as he demanded, "You know how to speak in Chinese?"
To his surprise, she didn't deflate under his withering glance like the us
ual and answered back, "I do."
"Why didn't you tell me?" he prodded.
Half of her face twitched into a wince, and with a shrug of her shoulders, she said in a slightly dubious tone, "Because you never asked?"
He waited for her to elaborate more but she merely held his stare with a defiance that literally dared him to contradict her, or lash out on her. Zuko guessed that she did have a point. He had made it sure to veer away from any topics that opened up her or his life outside work, and that made it painfully obvious as to why she'd never share that detail about her.
Still. If she knew the language, then she could've used it to speak with the Chinese customers who had a difficult time giving their orders to her.
As if reading his mind, Yane shrugged again and explained, "I'm not very good at it, that's why I don't talk to our customers in Chinese. I feel like when I start speaking in Chinese, they'll start using those big, complicated words on me and I won't be able to understand it. So, I stick with a language I'm comfortable with. It kinda makes it easier for me to work."
"Then," he hesitated a little. "You understand the conversations?"
Yane seemed to know what he was talking about and flashed him a sheepish grin. "Just a little."
Zuko made a quick trip down his memory for any significant thing he might have said about her with Tai Jia. Other than him constantly ignoring Tai Jia's jeers, urging him to ask her out on a date, comments on how pretty the new Japanese waitress was and that Zuko could use some girls in his life, he couldn't think of anything. As far as he could recall, he didn't particularly say anything offensive about her, except that she was slow, sometimes careless and too timid.
That or he forgot.
Zuko must've looked so flabbergasted that she had to speak to fill the dead air, "It's okay, though. I mean, Tai Jia-san says really nice things about me."
Tucking the question of the suffix she added at the end of Tai Jia's name and dismissing it as a Japanese-thing, he blurted out an intelligent, "...Oh."
Yane rubbed her arm and looked away. When it was clear that Zuko wasn't going to move from his spot any time soon, she decided to proceed with the task she had left and started placing the containers in their respective cabinets.
He quietly watched her do her tasks, unsure of what else to do or ask, and finally, he sighed and made a move to walk out the room when she said, "My mom's Japanese, but she was born and raised in China. She met my dad there and well, yeah, here I am. Half-Chinese, half-Japanese hybrid."
"But you're from Japan, right?"
She smiled with something akin to pride. "Yeah, and you're from China?"
"Obviously," he grumbled as he crossed his arms. "The facial features are a dead give away."
"Chinky-eyed Asians look alike, mind you. I can't distinguish a Chinese from a Korean from a Japanese. And for the longest time, I always thought that maybe your 華語 was self-learned."
"Self-learned?" he echoed. "Do I sound like an amateur speaker to you?"
"Of course, not," she shot back almost too fast, looking slightly agitated and nervous that she insulted him. "It's just that I've been meeting a couple of Americans and people from other nations who know how to speak the language. I thought that maybe you were... I don't know, Korean who learned Chinese?"
Zuko raised his brow at her. Her tendency to babble hasn't gone unnoticed by him, and he had found it annoying, but now, it was just too ridiculous that it was almost entertaining. Yane let out a chuckle as she went back to work. He stared at her back before dropping his gaze to his feet as he considered leaving and changing to his uniform already.
"Why're you here in America?"
Her question made him falter, and the mere fact that she finally garnered enough courage to ask him something unrelated to work instilled mild shock in his demeanor. Zuko, for the first time in quite a while, went speechless. He didn't even know how to begin, and yet, even as the taboo topic for him was raised, he couldn't find it in him to suddenly put up walls like he's normally accustomed to doing. Not to mention, his identity was a secret he hid like a gruesome, atrocious scar, and that was something he could keep unlike the monstrosity forever etched on the skin of his face.
Yane turned her head at his direction, face a little troubled.
"How about you?" he asked softly.
She placed the last container beside the rest and turned her whole profile to him, her eyes not reaching his, however.
"I had problems with someone back home," Yane answered vaguely. "I chose to come here then, thinking that I could continue med school and perhaps work in Caduceus."
"You... ran away from home?"
"No, no," she denied with a few headshakes. "Not something like that."
Her story ended there. He could sense that there were more grimy details that she chose not to disclose and he'd respect that. But hearing those things about her made Zuko look at her like she was an actual person now. Not anymore just a colleague, but a human being who had her own issues, like him.
"I guess you can say we're similar," he said. "Except that it wasn't my choice."
"Ohh, uhm..." she began and trailed off, shifting from foot to foot and probably uncertain whether she was allowed to pry. "Do you... want to talk about it?" she finished awkwardly.
"No," was his fast answer.
"Ohh, okay. Well," she paused, and Zuko nearly smiled at the internal struggle that was emanating off of her like some sort of aura. "Do you live alone here? Like do you have your own place."
"I used to live with my uncle. But I kind of fucked up and," he scratched the back of his neck, humiliated. "Now I live alone."
"Oh, no, Lee," she lamented. "I hope you could fix it with him someday. He sounds like a good guy."
"Yes, he is—wait, how'd you know? I haven't said anything about him."
"You looked so sad when you mentioned him and your misunderstanding. I can only guess that he's probably been kind to you for you to... react that way."
They kept their eyes connected, each seeing the other in a new light for the first time. The comfortable silence stayed static in the air for a few more seconds until she smiled and said, "I'll go get changed. Can you check if I've done it right?"
Zuko's eyes followed her arm as she gestured at the cabinets. He nodded, and with that, she stepped out promptly before he could see the coat of moisture that started to fill her eyes.
A/N: I do not know what happened to the line break. I can't seem to find it now. Anyway, hello again! Here's the second chapter. Aunt Wu is the fortuneteller from the show, yes. She has that huge aunt energy I see from the aunties I meet. I delved on Zuko's past here in this AU a bit. As mentioned, I'll try to make this AU in parallel with canon.
The translation of the song "Moon representing my heart" by Teresa Teng is my own, so forgive me if it isn't satisfactory. I tried OTL. My Chinese is rusty now (nope, it is not my primary language). Anyway, check the song out if you can. It's one of the classics Chinese from all ages love.
Thanks for reviewing and following, juanpatino436! Your review made me really happy. I hope I don't disappoint!
Next chapter will probably be next week. Review? Thanks for reading! ^^