Work Text:
Mako fingers the edge of the fine shirt that Asami has given him and resists the urge to strip out of it. It’s too much of a tease, a slap in the face, a burning wound in the flesh -- all wrapped up as a gift. Beautiful Asami, wealthy Asami. She’s an amazing girl. Funny, daring, as smart as her cars are fast, but of course she doesn’t think about anything as mundane as money.
For Mako, it’s harder to forget these things.
The shirt’s threads are woven so tightly that he can barely make them out. The buttons shine, each individual disk buffed to perfect roundness. The silhouette is sharp, dashing; the colors deep and rich. Did machines make this outfit, or was it deft human hands?
Mako has never had clothes like this. With his parents, in his first life, at least he always had enough. Maybe his clothes were rougher, mass-produced, but they rarely required patching, and when they did, his parents were there with needle and thread and affection.
In his second life, he learned to forage for scraps. If he saw cloth like this, it was in the rubbage bin of a dressmaker’s shop, where he found scrap to sell to trinket-mongers. In his second life, Mako learned to embrace the castoffs of others, to understand that appearances mattered, that cobbling together an outfit could make you respectable enough to talk your way into a free meal. He learned to stitch scraps together himself, borrowing from a dozen castaway lives to sew a shirt for Bolin, a shirt that could earn them entrance into society, disguise their kinship with the other beggars on the streets.
Mako smooths his hands over the shirt and stares at his reflection in the mirror. Asami tosses her scraps at him, too, even if she calls them gifts; they’re just tokens, not lifelines. He thinks of what a shirt like this would mean for him and Bolin, two orphaned beggar boys. Shirts like these win respect, win favors and meals and nods of acceptance.
Asami is waiting for him.
Mako stares at the pride stirring in a resentful, ugly corner of his heart. He nods to it, accepts it, knows he can’t do anything to placate it today. Some way to start a relationship, this is. He soothes his pride, reminds it that it must wait a little while longer, must be patient. He can’t afford it, not yet.
Asami is waiting, and Mako goes to meet her.