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The thing about Mai is, everyone looks at her and assumes they know what she is.
A pretty, boring girl, dressed up in black in some sort of rebellion. A rich snob of a girl, pleased to play a doll for her parents’ wants. They don’t see the faint scars on her fingertips from her early knife throwing. They don’t see the fierce fire that’s just been pressed down inside her.
The sketchbook she carries just adds to the assumptions. A delicate little hobby for a delicate little girl, drawing simplistic things that are pretty yet vapid of emotion. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Under the covers, on the pages, there’s every shade of grey and every shade of emotion that pounds on the other side of her chest. Frustration and anger and apathy, all wrapped up in a spiral binding.
Everyone looks at her and assumes they know what she is.
She looks at everyone and then spills them all out on her pages.
Aunt Mura’s taken to dragging Mai along to her weekly Pai Sho games.
Mai doesn’t want to go. A couple of hours sitting in some tea shop, watching old people play a board game that, admittedly, Mai’s pretty good at? But Aunt Mura’s insistent, and it’s nice to be wanted. Her parents would never invite her somewhere just because they didn’t want her to be alone.
The tea shop, at least, gives her an excellent time to practise her figure studies.
The shop often has interesting shapes and features to practise, the chairs are comfortable and the background noise is too, and the tea’s not terrible either. The old man who owns this place makes and serves it before he joins in the games. She draws him a couple of times. He’s always smiling, so he doesn’t always come across perfectly in her sketches, and his laugh is the most booming she’s ever heard. He’s also the champion in this little group, unbeaten. Mai wonders if she could beat him, if she bothered playing Pai Sho again.
Three weeks in, and that’s when she sees him.
She notices him almost immediately. He’s new, or at least he’s not been here before when she’s here. He’s sat slouched at a table across the room from her, his back resting against the wall as he sits sort of sideways, glaring absentmindedly at his phone. Ever so often, he looks up at the old man who owns this place – sat only a table or so away from him – and his expression gets a little soft, affectionate. It softens the harsh line of his brow, the set of his jaw, and the scar too.
Red and flushed over his left eye, and his bangs drape slightly over it, perhaps as some sort of curtain. Mai’s eyes catch on it – of course, and maybe that’s to be expected – but it’s not the thing that keeps her eyes looking at him. It’s his face all together. He’s pretty, she thinks, and her fingers pull the sketchbook and pencil from her bag before she’s quite thought it through.
The thing is, Mai loves capturing people onto paper. A permanent recollection of every expression, every nuance and line. The utter sense of control. The drawings she creates exist only because of her hands. She creates them.
It’s not strange for her to draw in here. Something feels strange about this though. Maybe because she’s never seen him before. Maybe because he doesn’t look like the usual crowd – wearing a worn hoodie instead of something neat and pressed, young and withdrawn instead of old and confident. Maybe because of the scar.
But he’s the most interesting face she’s seen in here yet, and nothing’s going to stop her from at least trying to capture him on paper.
Mai flips open her sketchbook. Her fingers are buzzing.
Her first strokes are faint, unconfident. She’s uncertain, but then she finds her rhythm. How she wants to capture his lines, the shadows under his eyes and the delicate nature of his throat. Her pages fill up with him.
She knows nothing about him. Not his personality or the things he likes or does – the most she knows that he’s probably some other dragged in teenager, forced to wait on the side-lines while whoever he’s here with plays away. But as the minutes pull on by, she learns about his features. The way she can render his cheekbones and the narrowing of his eyes. The hair just about brushing into his face. It’s all a haze, graphite and toned paper and the sweeping of her marks. It’s only when the chairs all start clearing against tiled floor that she snaps from her haze, her hands lightly smudged in grey.
Then her hands, and the sketchbook and most of the table turns black. A shadow has fallen across her.
Mai looks up; she’s confronted with the blazing brown eyes of the boy she’s filled three pages of her sketchbook with.
There is no polite greeting or even a pause. He jumps straight into accusations.
“What were you doing?” He demands. His voice creaks, a pleasant rasp. His hands clench at his sides and she blinks calmly up at him, no stranger to intimidation.
“Excuse me?” She says, all neat and polite, and watches as his expression ties itself into knots in response.
“You-” he starts, stumbles. He can’t exactly be rude if she’s being polite, can he? Mai tucks her hands on top of her sketchbook, fingers resting over each other, all delicate bones and skin. His hands open and clench again. His throat bobs when he swallows. “You were staring at me,” he says eventually, his voice a little off step. Her intention exactly.
Mai shrugs. Refolds her hands. “Sorry. I was drawing you.”
“You were- what?” He blinks at her, rapid like bird wings. He looks a little stupid, blinking like that.
“Drawing.” She taps the sketchbook, watching as his eyes flutter down towards the sound. “You’re familiar with the concept of art, yes?” She lets a little sharpness seep into her voice.
He stares at the sketchbook for a long moment. Mai sighs, a crisp sound between her lips.
“But- why were you drawing me?”
“Why not?” Mai shrugs again. “You looked interesting.”
His expression shutters. A little too late, Mai understands how her words could come across. You looked interesting – perhaps she shouldn’t say that to a boy with a massive scar emblazoned across his face.
“Your facial structure,” she elaborates, only a slight pause before acting like she didn’t notice his shuttering expression. “It’s fairly interesting. I thought it’d make a good drawing exercise.”
“My… facial structure,” he repeats, slow and doubting. Mai nods.
“Cheekbones. Jaw. That sort of thing.” It is the truth, so it’s easy to allow her voice to be honest. Usually, she wouldn’t allow her voice to carry an emotion, but he looks like he needs it. The assurance. Especially after her insensitive comment.
“Oh,” he says. She’s not too sure he completely believes her, but then it’s not her job to make him. Across the room, she spots Aunt Mura’s beckoning smile.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she stands up, one fluid motion, tucking her sketchbook under her arm. She steps around him, her arm almost bumping against his.
She thinks she can feel his eyes boring into her back as she walks away. She doesn’t look back once, not even when Aunt Mura gives her a curious look.
“Did you have a nice time?” Aunt Mura asks, like she does every time. Mai shrugs with one shoulder.
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Aunt Mura sighs, but she doesn’t say anything else on it.
He’s there again the next time she goes. This time, he sees her first.
He’s sat in the same seat and by the time she notices, his dark eyes are staring at her. Glaring, like she’s somehow offended him by existing. Mai doesn’t even bother to shoot him a look back. It’s really not worth it.
She sits down and pulls out her sketchbook. She hasn’t opened it yet.
Somehow, it still doesn’t deter him.
His shadow is falling over her again. Mai takes her time in looking up, and finds him glaring once she’s risen her eyes to his.
“You’re drawing again,” he says. Demands might be more applicable. But his expression doesn’t quite line up with his voice, so she wonders if he’s aware that’s what he’s doing. Demanding instead of asking.
“I am,” she says measuredly. Her fingers curl around the edge of her sketchbook. She doesn’t offer up any other words just yet. Makes him think. She sees his eyes, flittering over her face and the book, the doubt hinting at the edges.
“Are you going to draw me again?” He blurts out eventually. He stares at her like a challenge. His hands twist into the bottom of his hoodie, and she supposes it’s something anxious, not meant to seep into his stare.
Mai considers him for a moment. Taps a pencil against her lips. Tracks how he follows the motion with his eyes, how he lingers on her lips for a moment.
“I might,” she says finally. “Do you have a problem with that?”
She’s the one looking at him challengingly now. Quiet and sharp and defiant, like a knife slipped from a sleeve and held against the pulsing jugular vein.
“No.” He says. Clears his throat. Glances down at the floor for a second.
“Good,” Mai says. She flips open her sketchbook, pulling out her favourite pencil. While she didn’t know if she would draw him again before he came over, she feels like she has to now. He challenged her. And anyway, he does have a nice jaw.
His shadow doesn’t stomp away. It lingers, blocking out her light. She sighs, and looks back up again.
“Can I help you?”
His gaze is heavy and intense, and she thinks glaring might be his default considering how he’s looking at her. After a moment or so, he drops into the seat opposite her, folding his arms decisively over his chest.
Mai stares at him. His legs invade her space. They’re too long, too big and he doesn’t seem to have any idea of politeness.
“What are you doing?”
“If you’re going to stare at me, I’d prefer to sit in front of you,” he grumbles, shifting until he’s comfortable. When he breathes out, some of his loose hair flutters in the breeze.
“What if I’d prefer you not to?”
He fixes her with another glare, his mouth twisted, not backing down or even deigning to answer her verbally. She thinks she’d like to draw this expression too.
Their small game of wits ends quickly. She's in no mood to prolong it.
She picks up her pencil again and starts drawing.
“What’s your name?” He asks her the fourth time she comes in. Mai glances up from where she’s rendering the exact narrowed quality of his eyes. His legs still take up far too much space underneath the table. He’s got a cup of tea with him today – jasmine, by the scent of it, and the old man had chuckled when he’d brought it over, a glint to his eyes – and he’s resting his jaw on one hand, elbow digging into the table in a way that can not be comfortable. He hasn’t spoken much to her so far. Then again, she hasn’t spoken much to him.
She’d almost wondered if they were ever going to talk. She’s still not too sure if she wants them to. She’s drawing him; that doesn’t mean she cares. But there’s no lying with her intentions, and her first thought is to answer him.
“Why do you want to know?” She says eventually, when his eyes look expectantly at her.
He stares at her, bemused. She’s starting to track his expressions by now. Not enough to understand what they all mean. If they’re like a tree, she’s found the first ring, but not the second or the third or the tenth. Familiarity breeds familiarity. Her sketchbook’s mounting with his expressions now. A soon-to-be dictionary of him.
“It’s… polite?” He says, and it sounds like he’s guessing. Mai waits for him to come up with a better reason: one that doesn’t sound like her parents came up with it. It takes him a while, his face rotating through confused to irritated to thoughtful.
“I’m Zuko,” he offers, as if that’s a better reason. He’s given her his name, so she has to give him hers? She examines him for a moment. Decides. What’s the harm?
“Mai,” she presents him with, a careless dropped gift.
“Mai,” he repeats, like he’s savouring the letters. Something about how his mouth holds her name makes her insides feel hot. She squashes it down, staring down at the page until she can look up without blush. “It’s a pretty name.”
“It’s a name,” she says flatly. He blinks at her.
“Names can be pretty,” he says. She raises one eyebrow, fluttering and faint. His cheeks redden. “Well. My mom used to say all names were pretty.”
“Even yours?” Mai asks. Because his name’s got at least a couple of different way of writing it, and she can’t imagine that the meaning she’s thinking of could be called pretty. More insulting.
He nods. Grimaces like he knows her thoughts. “Even mine. It’s written- not the way you’re probably thinking.”
“How do you write your name then?” She asks, and spins her sketchbook towards him, flipping it to an empty page. The blinking’s back, and this time his jaw’s a little slack too. She hands him the pencil, waits expectantly, her eyes enacting some sort of challenge that he can’t not take up.
His fingers hold onto the page of her sketchbook delicately. Respectfully. He writes quickly and leaves her the pencil, resting across the page. Mai takes a peek. Maybe she’d agree. That way of writing his name isn’t terrible.
She leaves his neat characters on the edge of her page, even when it comes to filling the rest of the space. Usually, she doesn’t let anyone touch her sketchbook.
But she’s let him.
He doesn’t ask to see her drawings. He never asks to see them, not after she spends the whole session on one single illustration, not after she gets him to tilt and turn his head for new angles and he huffs with some sort of light-hearted annoyance. She doesn’t want to show him anyway – her drawings have always been hers, private thoughts scribbled onto paper, her most honest and intimate strokes – but she wonders sometimes if it upsets her that he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t look very interested in her sketchbook, and yet he’s plastered over most of the pages.
She doesn’t even know much about him, not really. She knows his face and how she likes drawing the line of his shoulders and the way his collarbones catch the shadows and the way he blushes faintly every time she looks at him intently and the way he ducks his head to try and hide the embarrassment. She knows the old man who owns the shop is his uncle and he tends to drink jasmine tea, at least around her and so far he’s never asked to look at her drawings. But she doesn’t know his last name or what he does or what his hobbies are or anything like that. It’s not important maybe. He knows about the same about her, because when she’s drawing him, he’s watching her with eyes that seem to never blink and in someone else’s attitude would get a cold look slipped between the ribs and somehow he doesn’t activate that part of her. It’s not strange, no matter how much Aunt Mura tells her she should try talking to him. She doesn’t need to.
But maybe that’s all a lie. The sessions go on. She’s visiting up to three times a week. A month goes by, and things slip on by. He works in the tea shop in the day. He finds out about her part-time job at her aunt’s flower shop. He’s got two sisters. On the weekends, he practises sword fighting. He's not as abrasive as his original scowls made him out to be. He's awkward and he loves his uncle more than anything in the world and he rambles if she doesn't cut in and somehow, somehow, she likes it all.
Her pages fill up steadily with his face and her head fills up steadily with just him.
“My friend thinks you must like me,” he says suddenly one day. Mai doesn’t stop sketching the familiar lines of his hair. She’s started wondering what it might feel like. “And that’s why you’re always drawing me.”
“Your friend can’t fathom that people can draw people without liking them?” Mai says without glancing up. There’s a new speed to her heart beat that she ignores. A thought too – he talks about me to his friends? “Sounds like he’s a little dim.”
Zuko huffs a small chuckle; Mai’s lips twitch up just a little at the corners. She likes the sound of his laugh.
“He had a point,” Zuko says after a pause. “You do spend a lot of time looking at me. It seems strange, if you don’t at least… tolerate me.”
There’s a hesitation in his voice. A strange open vulnerability. It settles against Mai’s chest, burning like some warm embers. She doesn’t shift, even as she wants to.
“Maybe I tolerate you because you know how to sit still,” she counters with instead, and that’s a lie. He doesn’t sit still. Zuko moves, constantly, fidgeting or twisting or holding his tea. He frowns at her, confused for a moment because he has to know it’s not true either.
“Your friend,” she says after a pause, and just to shift the attention back onto him, “could also argue that you must like me.”
She looks up at him for this, just to see how he reacts. His expression freezes, struck through with ice, and then panic blazes. It’s cute, and then she’s the one freezing. Her blood rushes to unstick her in a second, but- cute?
“Huh?” He gapes at her. Completely unaware of the thoughts in her head.
Mai sets her hands down, just off from her page. Pushes her thoughts to one side. Settles in this, the mild embarrassment she can cause. “I sit and draw you, yes, but you sit and let me.”
Zuko flushes a delightful red. Mai’s lips curve into a smirk, unbidden on her lips but not exactly unwanted. She doesn’t mind smiling a little, not around him.
“I do, don’t I?” He says, clearing his throat. His fingers curl in against his palm. The red in his cheeks stains down his neck too.
When she tries to draw him later on, her cheeks go pink too.
Across the room, her aunt Mura plays Pai Sho against his uncle. Sometimes they’ll both glance over here and Mai’s trying not to think about what that means. They both wink at their respective relative far too much.
But Zuko makes it surprisingly easy to forget about them. His heavy presence that she’s come to look forward to. Mai, as a principle, does not get along with other people. She’s too cold for them, they say, too unfeeling and they don’t seem to understand how she works. They never seem to want to understand. While she can’t say if Zuko understands, he’s still talking to her. He still wants to talk to her.
“When did you start drawing?” He asks.
He’s slouched over the table today, chin tucked onto crossed arms. His eyes look more tired than usual, the dark shadow under his good eye an alarming shade of purple. Mai’s not drawing him today. She’s refining her last sketch. Drawing him as he is today just feels wrong.
Mai looks at him. His gaze is sincere. He’s just asking.
“My parents thought it would be a good hobby for me,” she says measuredly, each word empty of emotion. Some of her words have been stripped to nothing, and anything to do with her parents has gone through multiple acid strips. “They thought it would be delicate and beautiful, something that could make people like me.”
Zuko pulls a face. “That’s stupid.”
Mai can’t quite contain herself. She laughs, a small sound escaping her lips and the way he perks up, looking immeasurably pleased with himself, well-
“I don’t think anyone’s ever called them stupid,” she says. Other than herself, of course, but that’s only ever in the safety of her head where no one can ever hear her. Old habits die hard – criticising her parents openly? Mai’s never felt like she could.
He doesn’t know them.
So his criticism? It shouldn’t feel as nice as it does.
“My father tried to choose my hobbies too,” he says, his voice all shades of awkward. His eyes watch the table. His hand rubs over the side of his face, grazing against his scar. “So I- get it. Sort of.”
Mai looks at him for a while. His words aren’t quite stripped as badly as hers. They sound more sad than angry though, an argument had over and over until all the delusion has fled.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “I suppose you do.”
The next time she comes in, he asks if he can make her some tea.
His hand rubs at the back of his neck, his hip bumping against their usual table. She holds her sketchbook safe to her chest, a pencil tucked into her sleeve. His whole body’s vibrating with energy, or is it just nerves?
“I’m okay at it, or at least Uncle says I am. He lets me make tea for the shop anyway, and he wouldn’t if I was terrible, so-”
“You can make me tea, Zuko,” Mai cuts in. He’ll just keep rambling on if she doesn’t.
He beams at her. She doesn’t think him making her tea is a beam-worthy occasion, but she can’t say she hates his smiles. She hasn’t quite captured them on paper yet. She thinks she wants to – but to do that, she’d have to make him grin at her, enough for her to find a way to place the emotion down in graphite.
But it doesn’t seem like such a hard task when it’s him.
She sits up by the counter, her back to the old people and none of them are looking anyway. She opens her sketchbook, tapping the end of her pencil against the page. Maybe she should draw him making her tea. Maybe she won’t draw him at all today.
She doesn’t ask him what tea he’s making and she thinks he forgets he should tell her. Behind the counter, there’s a confidence in his shoulders, a confidence in how he preps the kettle, the water. Some tea leaves sit in boxes on shelves lining the walls. He’s leaning up to grab one, and his shirt’s lifting up slightly, exposing a strip of his back. Her eyes linger for far too long. Her heart is a little too quick in her chest.
And oh.
Oh.
Mai flicks through the pages of her sketchbook, her fingertips quick and hurried. The endless Zuko’s, rendered over and over and.
(She’s never drawn someone as much as she’s drawn him. She’s never wanted to draw someone as much as she wants to draw him).
She likes him.
She likes him and it’s crashing in.
She likes him.
He finishes making the tea, and the smile he gives her is small and shy. The cups are green and gold, like the rest of this place. Carefully he slides the cups across the counter. Comes around to take a seat next to her, his shoulder bumping against hers. One of his hands rests lightly against his leg, so close. If she wanted to, she could pick it up and hold it.
She might want to.
Just to feel like it’d be like. Holding his hand. She’s never held a boy’s hand before, and she’s never much wanted to either. But she’s never wanted to draw someone as much as she’s drawn him, so maybe it’ll be the same if she holds his hand.
She makes her decision. Her hand slides down and into his. Graphite smudged fingers linking through with tea kettle warm ones. He jolts with surprise, his fingers tightening on instinct. It’s a nice pressure.
“Uh-” he starts. Mai raises the tea cup to her lips with her free hand and sips at the hot liquid. He’s right. It’s not terrible.
“Don’t think too hard about it,” she tells him softly once she’s swallowed. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his darting at her. The warmth. The surprised wideness. The delighted grin. And she likes him, and she finds it all cute.
So she’s holding his hand. She’s holding his hand and her sketchbook is filled with him and maybe coming to Pai Sho nights with her aunt wasn’t such a bad thing in the end.