tea

Navi

She had learned patience throughout her life. Learned the value of waiting for the right second. Of staying hidden until the opportune moment. How to hold your cards close to your chest until you could take the whole pot. Or for her opponent to get distracted enough that she could slip in the ace up her sleeve that was going to skew things in her favour, unnoticed. 

For some reason that hadn’t translated across to the simple art of making tea. 

Navi dumps the leaves into the pot, clumsily and ungraciously as they spill over the side. She never boils the water first and has to wait impatiently. More often than not she’ll wander off and find something better to do. This whole process takes too long. It’s only a few minutes of her long life but she’d much rather be doing something else. 

She forgets it most of the time. Comes back to the water boiling over and sometimes burns herself when taking it off the heat. The water splashes as she pours it over the leaves and she gets annoyed at having to clean it all up. The sharp taste is masked with way too much milk and honey, but she seems satisfied enough and would hardly complain if this was brought to her. 

She’d never had the luxury of time to sit back and enjoy a nice cup of tea. Never had to learn. Even while she was off pretending to be someone else she’d always left the task to another person. She never truly learned to appreciate it the way most people did. 

Tatl tries not to grimace when she brings him a cup. He smiles politely back at her, thanks her, then disposes of it after she leaves the room. He knows she’s trying to be a good sister and doesn’t want to take that away from her. Or maybe she knows exactly what she’s doing and is torturing him on purpose with terrible tea. It was hard to tell with her sometimes. 

Tatl

Tanithel tries, really earnestly, whenever he’s tasked with making tea. He approaches it like he would any job. Makes a list in his head and plans out all the steps, trying to factor in any missteps that may throw him off course.

It was just tea. It shouldn’t have needed this much preparation. It shouldn’t have been this difficult. The end result, more often than not, is less than satisfactory. He just doesn’t understand it.

The thing with tea is that it hadn’t mattered when he was in the army. Usually it was cold. Sometimes it was muddy. They took what they were given and there were hardly any complaints. That wasn’t to say he enjoyed terrible tea, far from it. But if he had no other choice he would put up with it.

Living in the Tower now meant he should have a choice. And while some of the other mercenaries were kind enough to share with him if they made too much, he would oftentimes find himself in a situation where he was stuck making his own tea.

He ticks off each ingredient in his head as he goes. Boiled water? Check. Tea leaves? Check. Tea pot? Where the hells did they keep tea pots in here anyway- oh here. Check. Measure it out carefully and wait exactly two minutes for the tea to steep in the water. Or was it three minutes? Shit. Surely an extra minute wouldn’t change the taste too much? Now to carefully, meticulously, withdraw the leaves so it wouldn’t extract too much of that bitter flavour. There, he had to have gotten it right this time.

He takes a breath before tasting it. This nervous anticipation before it hits his tongue and he swirls it around in his mouth like some sort of wine.

It’s too bitter. He frowns. Hangs his head in shame. What was he doing wrong? He couldn’t serve this to his guest. He dumps the entire batch and starts over. He was going to get it right, even if it killed him.