Title: December
Characters: Hak Foo/Jade
Rating: PG
Word Count: 500+
Summary: Ten years down the line, Hak Foo finds it surprising that a woman even interests him.
December
***
There were a number of things in his life Hak Foo found surprising. Losing to someone not trained by the Yellow Crane Master, for one. Losing to more than one someone, even. Running into magic and demons. Continually running into Chow, Finn, and Ratso, despite leaving Valmont's employ over ten years ago. Meeting a woman who interested him.
Meeting a man who interested him would also have been surprising, he had to admit. People simply never registered that way for him. There were opponents, there were friends, there were rivals (strictly limited to two people - Tohru and Lu Shé.) There were employers and businessfolk, and all sorts of other people he had to interact with to get through the day. There were people who considered him an enemy, though he himself saw no reason to get that personal.
There were students. Five years ago, the Black Tiger decided he was getting too long in the tooth for mercenary work. There were greys in his red hair, and he hurt more mornings than he didn't. Opening a dojo seemed utterly natural. Opening it on the other side of the continent from San Francisco just seemed like the smart thing to do.
With students had come Jade Chan. Not immediately and not intending to; he hadn't wanted to teach her when she first showed up, and she hadn't known who the dojo's master was. Their first fight almost destroyed the dojo, and their second one hadn't gone much better. By their third fight, she was willing to accept him as a teacher. By their fourth, he was willing to accept her as a student.
Their fifth fight ended with a kiss and the young woman fleeing in mortification while he stared in bemusement.
He shrugged it off as the Chan girl being strange. That covered most everything she did, from jumping out of airplanes to fighting demons to, apparently, kissing opponents-turned-teachers.
Jade didn't turn up for their next session. He grunted, turned the rest of his classes for the night over to an advanced student, and went out in the New York winter to find her. He didn't have the slightest idea of where to start looking for her, but he'd either find her sooner or later, or the sun would rise and he'd go home.
He found her in Central Park. For a moment, she looked at him like a deer caught in the headlights, then she did the most surprising thing he had ever seen her do - she ran.
He chased. He didn't know what to do if he caught her - a stern lecture on discipline was appropriate but not what his instincts were screaming for.
He was not as swift as he once was, but the snow hindered her more than it did him. He cheated, after all, and used a touch of flight to keep from sinking into the damn stuff.
Jade zigged when she should have zagged, and he siezed her arms. She kicked back like a mule, hitting his knee hard and then yanking him off-balance. He barely avoided tumbling into the snow, then she hit him like a ton of bricks. He went down hard with Jade on top of him, and her mouth hit his like a blow.
Hak Foo surprised himself by kissing back.
-End-
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