Gilded Ashes

Something in her chest had been doing a strange thing for the last minute or so. Not warmth, exactly. Not recognition, exactly. Something like both of them, mixed in a weird way. The feeling of meeting a person at a station where you had been told you were meeting a stranger, and finding that they looked at you and felt just the way an old friend would, before either of you could explain why.

She had no word for it.

Instead, Hikari just opened her free hand.

The palm came to rest on the floorboard halfway between them. Empty, palm up. The kind of offer that did not need to be explained.

The lizard looked at the hand, then at her face, then it looked at the hand again.

"Are you going to ask why I’m doing this?" it said, and its voice had quieted by an increment. "Or are we just going to let it happen and not discuss it?"

"I’m not going to ask. Raizen will probably tell me more later."

"Good. Because I’d have to lie, and I’m in too poor a structural state to lie convincingly tonight."

It limped across the small distance between them. The walk was clumsy on the front half, the missing tail throwing its balance off. After a few failed steps and mostly dragging itself on the floor, the lizard reached her palm. After a second of what looked like last-minute thinking, it stepped onto it. The body weighed almost nothing. The scales were cool, but the neck was strangely warm, the contact unfamiliar and oddly intimate.

It curled into her palm.

She brought the hand toward her chest, slowly, without committing to a final position. The lizard’s body shifted in her palm, settling deeper into the curl, one open eye watching her face patiently, as if after walked very far to get here, it could allow itself to be tired.

"He told you about me," the lizard said. "recently...?"

"Mostly that, yes. How did you~"

"Of course. Let me guess, he mentioned the dying-heroically part as if it was the only nice thing I did. The good parts - my unmatched contributions to hurrying his sorry arse up in that damned aircraft, my philosophical work when I saw those files, my critical role in his social development - none of these will appear in any eulogy he composes. He is selective, and I absolutely hate it!"

The lizard gestured with its small head every word it blurted out.

"No – Raizen made sure to tell me about those other parts, too. Also..." Hikari leaned a little closer to the thing, throwing a look behind her, making sure they weren’t waking Raizen up. "he sounded like he missed you."

"...Mmhyeah, whatever. He’s bad at missing things in a way other people can see. Also, it’s been... What? A couple dozen hours?"

The lizard’s eyes drifted briefly toward Raizen’s sleeping form on the mattress, held there for a second, then returned to Hikari’s face.

She watched its body. The thing’s still-open eye kept finding her. Even when the conversation looped, even when it commented on the kitchen, even when it complained about the structural state of its new legs, the lizard’s eye kept settling back on her, and the small ruined body in her hand kept making microscopic adjustments to be closer to her, to press against her thumb, to feel her pulse through the skin.

It did not seem to know it was doing it, and she did not point it out.

The same strange quiet thing kept moving in her chest. It felt as if she’d met the thing before. A long time ago, maybe – or another form of this lizard. She couldn’t remember. But her body did.

The lizard yawned. The motion was small and oddly endearing, the tiny mouth opening to reveal a row of very fine teeth and a tongue that flickered out and back in a single motion.

"I’m going to be honest with you," it said. "I have been awake for what I believe is three times more than you have been. I had intended to greet him first. Then I saw you, and... Hm... Revised my plans."

"Don’t wake him."

"I wasn’t going to – he sleeps badly. He needs this one."

"...How do you know he sleeps badly."

The lizard’s eyes crinkled at the corner - the closest thing its current face could manage to a smile.

"I’ll let you in for a little secret. But promise you won’t tell him?"

"...Fine, I promise." Hikari rolled her eyes.

"Well, you see – I have lived in his head for a long time now. I know a lot of things about him that he hasn’t even told you. None of them are going to be a problem, of course. Most of them are flattering!"

Hikari almost smiled. It didn’t make sense what the lizard was saying – lived inside his head? Maybe it was just a tiny bit tired and blurting out nonsense...

The lizard yawned again. The ruined form was clearly burning through whatever fragment of energy had carried it here, and the new body was negotiating its first sleep with the eagerness of a creature that had been promised this moment for a week.

"One last thing," it said. Its voice had softened further. "Don’t tell him about the part where I came to you first. He had enough these days."

Hikari watched it for a long moment.

"Okay."

"Yeah, fine, now good night." The reptile eye closed.

The breathing settled into a slow, uneven rhythm a few seconds later, the small body going completely still in her palm except for the tiny rise and fall of its sides.

Hikari took the last step slowly, lowered herself onto her own mattress, and settled the lizard into an improvised protected pocket of the blanket against her shoulder, arranging the cover so that it looked like a halfhearted nest.

She lay down on her side, her mind running with dozens of tangled thoughts.

Across the small gap between the mattresses, Raizen was still asleep, face was turned toward her. His hand had fallen out from beneath the blanket during the rearrangement, and his fingers were resting on the edge of his mattress, half-curled, half-extended into the space between them.

Hikari reached across the gap.

Her hand settled on his. Raizen shifted once in his sleep, and his fingers turned beneath hers and laced through.

The lizard breathed slowly against her shoulder, falling asleep in less than half a minute. Raizen’s breath reached her other hand. The three of them lay there in the warm half-light of the attic - the boy asleep, the creature asleep, the girl awake - and the small ruined body in the pocket of her blanket adjusted itself, in its sleep, until one of its tiny front feet came to rest, very lightly, against the side of her neck.

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