Melted: A MaxTul AU story

Three: Reunion (Max)

The surprise reunion with his friends had taken an hour, and Max looked fondly around at the clutter he had helped create before starting to pick up some of the pieces of tissue paper on the floor. His visit had taken up too much of their time, partly because of his little accident which made him late, and partly because he had assumed that everyone would just take their presents and move on, leaving more conversations for when they were planning to go out tomorrow night. However, everyone wanted to talk to him and to each other about their presents, especially the one he had for his "uncle," Pongpat Tappitak.

Pongpat Tappitak wasn't really Max's uncle. Max had lived with Pongpat and his family for his three  years of upper secondary education when his mother decided that he needed to move to the city to go to a better school. She proclaimed her son too smart for the school in their small town and wanted him to go to university as well, so she saved and called around to all her friends to find out options for her son. Pongpat's family were looking to make some money, and Max needed a place to stay. But it became more than that.

Pongpat and his family didn't treat him like a boarder but like one of their sons/brothers. In fact, other than his mother, Max felt like they were more like a family than his real family members back home. He was also appreciative of them because this didn't change when one painful night he told them he was gay and that he knew that was also the other reason why his mother wanted him to leave their village.

Max had spit this out in tears after a phone call where he was talking to his mother on the phone, and he could hear his drunk father screaming at her for talking to their unnatural son. Pongpat's wife, Clara, a Swiss woman who had went to Thailand to teach and stayed when she fell in love with Pongpat, had just shook her head in sympathy and made him raclette, his new favorite dish. Pongpat had just squeezed his shoulder and patted him on his back in silence, allowing him to cry.

The present he had given Pongpat was a video that his family had made for him. His wife and his two children, 18-year-old Ohm and 14-year-old Ramida, had been living in Switzerland for a year now because of Ramida's health needs. Max had been wanting to get him a new phone, so that he could video chat with them, but Pongpat wouldn't take it. So when he visited the other Tappitaks a month ago, they made a video for him to bring and made Max promise to teach Pongpat how to use Skype.

Max looked over at Pongpat who really should be getting back to work but who instead was still watching the video and smiled. He worried about his uncle. Part of the reason he was on this team was his resistance to learning new technology and his "old" way of doing things. He wasn't ambitious but really just wanted to save enough money to be able to send to his family. His temperament, which focused more on relationship building than profit, had fit in well with Shilapath Corporation when he first started but not so much in the last 5-8 years.

However, now when Max looked at him, he seemed to have aged. Aged much more than Max would have expected in the 6 months since he has seen him. Max reminded himself that he was going to have to ask him about that. He had thought Clara's worry that her husband wasn't taking care of himself was unfounded, but maybe she could feel a change. They say when people have been married for a long time, they knew things about each other without having to see them. Looking at his uncle, Max wondered if that were true.

As Max walked around picking up tissue paper, he looked at the other team members in their new space. There was Sukrit, who had worked in the sales department five years before and had been on this team for four years, Wannarot who had been at the company for three years and on the team for two, and Ann Thongprasom, the newest member but who had a total of eleven years with the company.

Sukrit was looking at the toys that Max had brought him for his kids. He had been married for 4 years, and his wife had given birth to twins two years ago. They were healthy now, but there had been complications with the birth, which had taken much of their savings, so they really couldn't afford much extra. Max always tried to bring something for the kids and his wife when he came back.