Keep Calm and Bake Egg Tarts 3/?
Part 3: Tao
Word Count: ~1K
Previous: Part 1 ( Wufan), Part 2 ( Jongdae)
Zitao comes into their lives like the summer storm that chases him into the bakery the lonely Tuesday that Minseok is working. They take turns working single shifts on Tuesdays because for some reason the bakery gets less business on Tuesday than on any other day of the week. Yixing says this is because Chinese people don’t eat sweets on Tuesdays but Minseok has long learned not to believe everything that Yixing says.
Like Korea, Changsha in the summer is prone to sudden brutal downpours in which buckets of water drop on hapless people from skies that were clear barely minutes ago. It is a rain that is as mercurial as it is merciless, a bad combination from any perspective. It is in the middle of one such downpour that a long stretch of a boy comes crashing into the bakery, doors banging behind him. Minseok blanches, but not so much at the teen’s stormy appearance as the mess he brings with him. The once pristine floor that Minseok had mopped only minutes ago is now sprayed across an astonishing distance with water, mud and leaves. There’s nearly a ten foot radius of debris extending from the teen's boot-clad feet.
The dirtier-of-floors mumbles something something too fast and low in Chinese for Minseok’s mind to translate before squelching appallingly to one of the nearby tables. He leaves a visible trail behind him. Sighing, Minseok grabs the mop and bucket.
The boy hasn’t asked for anything the entire time Minseok cleaned, looking more interested in gazing off into the distance in a tragically noble way. This would have been more successful if he didn’t look so much like an overgrown cat that had lost a fight with a bathtub. The boy shakes his head when Minseok asks him if he would like anything to eat or drink, and actually pushes away the menu Minseok gives him like its a particularly nasty meal that he doesn’t want to swallow. He doesn’t leave though, and the cloud of misery around him is so thick that it’s almost visible. He picks and mopes at his wet clothes as if they might disappear if he hopes enough.
Even though the boy is just wasting time until the storm is over Minseok doesn’t feel comfortable leaving him alone in the bakery looking so forlorn, so he gets a tray and piles it with tarts and cream puffs and even a couple generous cups of mousse. After a beat of deliberation, Minseok also slips a few of the egg tarts onto the tray.
It’s satisfying to see the boy’s dark feline eyes go wide when the small mountain of pastries is slid before him. Minseok gives him an encouraging look as he hands him a fork. He doesn’t trust the boy's hands to be very clean considering the mess he had to mop up earlier.
Luhan and Jongdae’s pastries look good up close and they smell even better. A person would have to have nerves of steel to withstand their baked items. The boy puts up an admirable show acting reluctant, but eventually he attacks the tray of pastries like a starving person. Minseok knows he’s not imaging the moan he hears when one of the egg tarts are tried. He laughs quietly to himself because he had the same reaction the first time he tried the egg tarts.
“Name.” Minseok jumps when the teen suddenly pops up in front of him, looming over the redhead's much shorter stature. Minseok instinctively leans back.
“W-what?”
The boy huffs in impatience and demands more than asks, “What is your name?” He seems to catch on that he’s getting into Minseok’s personal space (maybe by the way he's almost bent backwards), so he steps back and bounces a little on the balls of his feet as if every second it takes to respond to his question is a waste of time. He really is very tall, like Wufan, except Wufan is tall in the way where everything has been sized up. This kid looks like someone took a regular high school student and pulled all his limbs like taffy.
“My name is Minseok,” he gives easily. What he actually says is the Chinese phrase with his Korean name. He’s so used to speaking in the bakery’s odd mix of Chinese and Korean that he hardly notices its incongruence anymore. Minseok realizes his mistake when the tall boy scrunches his face up in confusion.
The boy tries his name and garbles it pretty badly, sounding remarkably like Jongdae when he attempts Chinese. “Min-seok. Min. Seok,” Minseok repeats slowly, with clear emphasis on each syllable. Somehow the boy still butchers the pronunciation, and by the increasing frustration on his face, he is fully aware of it.
Finally, the boy clicks his tongue and snaps, “Baozi! I’m just going to call you Baozi from now on! Your name is too annoying to say.” It only takes a moment for Minseok to remember why the term sounds so familiar. Baozi = steamed bun. Wow, he thinks, when did the kid get a chance to chat with Luhan?
Shrugging, he says good-naturedly, “I feel like I’m destined to be called Baozi." There’s worse things to be nicknamed. For example, Exhibit A: Wufan. The kid, who later declares himself to be Huang Zitao, makes another face since Minseok naturally used the Korean word for “destined”, not knowing the Chinese word.
“It’s 注定的,” Zitao says too quickly for Minseok to catch. To his bewildered expression, Zitao exhales heavily through his nose and takes on a long-suffering look. “I guess I’ll have to teach you proper Chinese, since whoever you learned from wasn’t very good at teaching,” Zitao says, though the enthused tilt to his eyes belies his tone. Since he has such a heavy-lidded gaze, Minseok expected Zitao to be the kind of person to have stoic as his main expression, but his face is surprisingly emotive. He flits from sad to annoyed to happy in an obvious, no, more like an honest way. This is probably how Minseok was able to immediately guess Zitao to be younger than him despite his tall height. His honest expressions inadvertently revealed his youth.
Minseok wonders how Zitao will react when he finds out Minseok is older than him. He is quietly pleased by the thought of being called gege.
Next