Richard Dragon
The staircase behind the tea shop was narrow enough that his shoulders brushed both walls, and the woman running the counter downstairs had looked at him like he was lost and then looked at him like he was lying when he said he wasn't, and the Cantonese pop coming through the floor was loud enough to feel in his teeth.
Hong Kong in August was a different planet.
After the mountain everything was too much. The noise, the density, the heat sitting wet on his skin every time he stepped outside. Mong Kok was the loudest neighborhood in the loudest city he'd been in and the air tasted like diesel and cooking oil and someone's laundry and he'd been here for three days and his body was still recalibrating. Sea level. His lungs didn't know what to do with this much oxygen and the humidity made his shirt stick to his back and stay there.
Shiva's recommendation had been one sentence. Written on the back of a training schedule in her small precise hand. There is a man in Hong Kong who will teach you what I cannot. The space I leave empty, he fills.
He'd found the tea shop on his second day. Nathan Road, south side, between a watch repair place and a shop that sold phone cases. The sign was in Cantonese and English and the English said GOLDEN FLOWER TEA which was a translation that had given up halfway through.
The stairs ended at a door. He knocked.
"It's open."
American. Midwestern, maybe. Flat vowels.
Richard Dragon was sitting on a bamboo mat with a cast iron kettle between his knees and a view of the harbor through a window that needed washing.
Sixty-something. Lean from decades of precise movement and not much extra. Grey hair cropped short, a face that had been hard once and was now just lived-in. Plain white shirt, cotton pants, no shoes. He was pouring tea into a cup that was smaller than an egg.
The room was bamboo mats, a low table, books in three languages on a shelf, a pair of worn shoes by the door. The window was open and the harbor glittered below and the noise from Nathan Road came up through everything. No training equipment. He'd expected mats, heavy bags, wooden dummies. There was a kettle.
"Sandra sent you." Dragon poured a second cup without looking up.
"She did."
"Sit."
He sat. The mat was harder than it looked. Dragon pushed the small cup toward him and the tea was dark and tasted like smoke and earth and he drank it because you drank what was offered.
Dragon watched him drink. Then he asked the question nobody else had asked in three years of training under killers and spies and a man who'd lived for centuries.
"Why do you fight?"
He didn't have a good answer.
He had answers. Several. They'd gotten him through conversations with Ducard and Ra's and they'd been true enough for the people hearing them. Ducard got strategic necessity. Ra's got whatever Ra's wanted about destiny. Shiva never asked because Shiva didn't care about why.
Dragon sat there with the harbor behind him and his hands on his knees and waited.
"Because I know what's coming."
"What's coming?"
"Things I can't stop if I'm not ready."
"What things?"
He didn't answer that one. Dragon didn't push. He picked up the kettle and poured more tea and the silence lasted long enough for a boat horn to sound in the harbor and fade.
"Sandra told me you're gifted. She said the body compensates for deficits it shouldn't be able to compensate for." He sipped. "She said you're interesting, which from Sandra is practically a marriage proposal."
He almost laughed.
"You've been trained by people who wanted to use what you are. I'm interested in who's driving." Dragon set his cup down. "The body is a vehicle. I don't teach vehicles."
Three months.
The work was nothing like the League. No combat drills, no conditioning, no sparring partners. Dragon taught in the space between deciding and doing. The fraction of a breath where the body had committed to an action and the mind could still change it.
"Your hand is already moving," Dragon said, catching his wrist mid-strike in the second week. "The decision to throw happened here." He pressed two fingers to the inside of the wrist, on the tendon. "The decision not to kill happens here." He pressed the same fingers to his temple. "The gap is where you're going to learn to live."
Shiva's cascade reading was about prediction. Reading the space between another person's decision and act. Dragon was training him to read his own.
"You can decide to kill and then decide not to in the same breath," Dragon said one morning. The harbor was grey and a container ship was sitting in the channel with birds on it. "That's mastery. Any fighter can choose not to kill before the fight starts. Choosing not to after you've already started the killing stroke is different. Most people who can do it learned it too late."
He trained on bamboo mats with the tea cooling and the noise from Nathan Road below and Dragon correcting his breathing one word at a time. Inhale. Hold. A man sitting inside his own decisions and looking at them.
Every mentor before Dragon had wanted to use him. Ducard wanted a protégé. Kirigi wanted proof of method. Shiva wanted data. Ra's wanted a successor. Dragon wanted nothing. He taught because teaching was what he did and the tea was there and the room was there and the harbor was there and if the student showed up he taught and if the student didn't show up he poured tea anyway.
Dragon noticed the body. The speed, the recovery. He watched. Then he moved past it.
"What you do with your body when nobody's watching is more interesting than what the body can do." He poured tea. The kettle was cast iron and weighed more than it should and Dragon handled it one-handed like it was empty.
He liked Dragon. He'd respected Ducard, been afraid of Shiva, and the thing he'd felt around Ra's was closer to watching a snake through glass than admiration. Dragon was different. Sixty-something, lived above a tea shop, owned nothing, needed nothing. Spoke about violence plainly and poured tea and sometimes told stories about Sandra when she was young and still thought fighting was about winning.
"She was twenty and she'd killed more people than she could count and she came to O-Sensei and said she wanted to be the best," Dragon said one evening. Harbor orange. His cup in both hands. "O-Sensei asked her what she'd do when she was the best. She didn't have an answer. Twenty years later she still doesn't."
A street cleaner passed below the window. An old woman on the corner across the street was folding cardboard boxes flat, stacking them into a cart. She'd been there every evening he'd looked. Same corner. Same cart. She didn't look up.
Julia's letter arrived in the second month.
Single page. Cream paper. The penmanship hadn't changed in two years. Operational first, personal last, white space between.
Geneva station is closing. Reassignment pending. The ambassador's wife asked about you, which means my cover is either very good or very compromised. Ducard says you'll be in Hong Kong through autumn. I told him I didn't know. He didn't believe me either.
White space.
He sounds like someone who fights the way I run operations. Carefully.
She'd been reading his letters about Dragon. Profiled a man she'd never met through secondhand accounts and landed on carefully. Julia.
He folded the letter and put it in the bag with the others.
The bar was on Sai Yeung Choi Street. Basement level, the kind of place that had been there long enough that the wood of the bar top was soft and the stools didn't match. He went because Dragon told him to go watch people and because three months of tea and philosophy had left him wanting a beer that tasted like a beer.
The bartender was a woman. Late twenties, short hair, arms that said she did more than pour drinks. She put the beer down and looked at his hands first, then his shoulders, then his face.
"Trouble?" Cantonese-accented English.
"No."
"Good. The last fighter who came in here tried to impress a girl by putting his fist through the wall. I made him pay for the drywall and the girl left with someone else."
She moved down the bar. He drank the beer. Cold and simple and good. The place was half full. Someone's phone plugged into a speaker playing something with a bass line he didn't recognize. A man at the end of the bar reading a newspaper and mouthing the words. A couple near the window arguing about directions in voices low enough to be about something else. The wooden bar top was carved with initials and ring marks and a long scratch that went from one end to about the middle and stopped. Someone had started a project and quit.
The bartender came back. Leaned on her side of the bar. She had a tattoo on the inside of her left wrist, Chinese characters, the ink old enough to have gone slightly blue at the edges.
"You here long?"
"Couple more weeks."
"Shame."
She meant it casually and the space was there, left open. Six months ago on the mountain he would have been too buried in jasmine to notice anything else.
He noticed. He didn't take it.
Talia came first. The jasmine was gone from his clothes now, months gone, washed out and faded and replaced by Hong Kong's humidity and the smoky tea and Nathan Road's exhaust. But it came back when he wasn't expecting it. Her hand on his chest. Come back. The weight of her asleep on him while he counted her breaths.
And then Zatanna was there. No gap. No transition. Zee's loose handwriting on the envelope and the rabbit with the backpack and singed eyebrows and the last letter, the one that arrived at Dragon's two weeks ago: I did real magic today. Real real. Stage magic is tricks. This was something else. I wish I could show you. The rabbit on that letter had been wearing a top hat and the top hat had a tiny star on it and she'd drawn it carefully enough that the star had five points.
Jasmine and ink. The woman who said beloved and the girl who drew rabbits. He'd been carrying both of them for months and this was the first time they'd arrived in the same breath and he sat on the stool in a basement bar in Mong Kok and didn't know what to do with that.
He finished the beer. Put money on the bar. The bartender picked it up without comment and he went up the stairs into the noise and the heat.
Dragon was still awake when he climbed the stairs above the tea shop. Sitting. Tea. The harbor dark and lit.
"Learn anything?"
He sat down and took the cup that was offered.
"Working on it."
Dragon's mouth moved. Half a smile.
"Good answer."