Work Text:
Minyard was infuriating.
Most people on base grew accustomed to having no secrets. In fact, that was one of the first things they warned you about at induction. If you don’t like washing your dirty laundry in public, this may not be the place for you. Neil had accepted it with an attitude that should have washed him out in the first three months, but he’d accepted it nonetheless.
(That might have been because he’d been bonded to the third strongest dragon ever recorded, and she’d shown no inclination towards settling down into a normal life. It might have been because David Wymack had fought the rest of the council for him and Hera with a ferocity that implied he had no idea who Neil really was. It might even have been because the council had wanted to claim all the power, and none of the notoriety, of Nathaniel Wesninski’s only child. All Neil cared about was that Hera and he were allowed to learn to fight.)
When humans had first bonded dragons, they had been shocked that these great beasts – whose claws made up a quarter of their body weight, who could breathe fire at will, who could read minds (which had been a surprise for Kayleigh Day when she met the dragon she would eventually bond with) – preferred any serious fights to occur within the sanctity of their own minds.
Which meant that Hera would come back to their quarters with gashes down her side and Neil would assume that she’d had a mild disagreement over whose dinner was whose, and do nothing but spray her down with some antibac. It was when she slinked in unhurt physically, with her brain literally bleeding over into his that he knew something had hurt her badly enough that she couldn’t hold on to her otherwise impenetrable mental fortress.
What it also meant was that the night after the council’s decision to allow them to stay, Hera kept him up all night, forcing him to relive that night in Baltimore until she could throw it at him and have him bounce back within seconds. She’d comforted him after, when his brain felt like it’d been strained through so much cheesecloth. It’s the only way, she’d said, matter of factly, we’re at a disadvantage as is. So Neil had dragged himself up the next morning and reconstructed the labyrinth of his mind before the morning sessions started.
Now, four years later and a permanent member on Wymack’s squad, Neil’s cocktail of lies and half-truths served to distract even the most seasoned fighters when they were in the ring with him and Hera. Some days, it barely felt like a warm up when he and Hera had to fight some of the student combos.
Not Minyard, though. No, he strolled onto the training ground with his dragon like he owned the place, and strolled off after wiping out a whole squad without even breaking a sweat. When training against him and Smoke, Neil slammed into the stone wall of their minds multiple times, using all the power he had, creating illusions and trying to find a crack in their mental defences to force through, but everything he sent through rebounded harmlessly.
Then, just when Hera was beginning to tire, Andrew and Smoke would throw out a single attack, fluid in the way Neil’s pointed barbs could never achieve, and leave Neil and Hera in a heap on the ground. He normally lit a cigarette as he ambled off the training field, just to rub salt in the wound of Neil’s pride.
Hera huffed, a curl of smoke leaving her nostrils. It’s not just out pride that matters. She reminded him. If we are no better than a water dragon, how will we ever hope to defend the skies?
“Because,” Neil said, also for the nth time, “when we fight in the sky, we’ll be fighting against organisms that have no mental defences whatsoever. Not some jumped-up fisherman whose primary socialisation failed so spectacularly he can’t link with anyone except his dragon.”
The resounding bang from further down the living quarters meant that Hera had amplified the fisherman comment loudly enough that Smoke heard and was expressing his anger by slamming his body into the wall. Repeatedly. (Which would have been, you know, dangerous if all dragon-adjacent buildings hadn’t been dragon built and cured with dragon fire. And also, it was an excellent prelude to a migraine, which was no joke when you had absorbed the powers of the telepathic creature you were bonded to.)
The clack-clack-clack of Minyard’s heeled boots coincided neatly with Smoke’s last thwump as he stormed up to Neil’s quarters to fling the door open.
Neil rolled his eyes at Hera, waiting for the inevitable stare down between a beast who didn’t need to moisten her irises and a puny human, who was still unfortunately a part of Neil’s squad.
It was a ridiculous rule of Wymack’s which forced dragons and their riders to train in squads with dragons from other specialisations. This meant that Neil and Hera (fliers) had to train with Andrew and Smoke (divers), Kevin and Queen (diggers), and Jean and Bruise, who were technically telepathic ground control because Bruise was so traumatised he’d never settled on a particular element.
Hera, of course, had settled within minutes of being born – hard not to, in her situation – but Neil was so proud of her for it, nonetheless.
He shook himself out of his reverie as Minyard banged out again, evidently tired of glaring at Neil and Hera with no response forthcoming. Hera rolled her eyes at him mentally and the combined eye rolls of Minyard and Smoke hit Neil almost simultaneously, somewhat watered down after passing through Smoke’s and Hera’s minds.
He shook his head, using one of Hera’s spikes to push to his feet. “I don’t even want to know,” he told her, making his way to his desk, “I have training schedules to organise.”
With Dan off-world with her partner and their dragons, Wymack had promoted Neil to squadron leader, a job that came with a sulky Minyard, an insufferable Day, and infinite requests to use the training grounds, or to spar with him or Minyard.
Neil waited with immense anticipation for the day he could make all this Dan’s problem again (and maybe get to take Hera on an off-world mission. Her telepathy was evolved enough now that they would be the perfect ambassadorial team. If, and only if, they could find someone willing to spend more than two hours in their combined presence, and then get that rider to agree to be their back-up for the necessary seven months required for most off-world negotiations).
Hera blinked an eye open at him as he placed the last of the requests in the denied pile. We have to do something about them.
“The trainees who keep bothering me?” Neil asked, purposefully misunderstanding her and proving once again why no one was willing to accompany them on off-world missions.
Smoke and that rider of his.
“I don’t see what we could possibly do about it,” Neil said, wishing he had more requests to go through.
Hera’s mild attraction towards Smoke and blossomed into full blown antagonism the minute she’d realised he was better than her in any kind of fight they would have. The first time Wymack had put the four of them in the ring together, Neil and Hera had limped off, barely able to keep their mental shields up and struggling to walk in a straight line.
It would have been amusing had Neil watched it happen to anyone else. As it happened, when Hera realised they were going up against a pair of impenetrable mental shields, she had changed tactics and attacked with her claws and freezing gusts of breath. In return, Andrew and leapt at Neil and battered him into the ground, while Smoke stood firm against everything Hera threw at him. It had been impossible to keep up with the two of them.
It had also been the last time Neil saw the two of them put that much effort into a fight.
Which made him feel marginally better and Hera feel exceedingly bitter.
All it meant was that the two of them had drilled extensively for the two years since then, and now often topped the unofficial leaderboards on base. (So long as they hadn’t duelled Minyard and Smoke that week, of course.)
In any case, Hera’s obsession with Minyard was tangentially related to the fact that she could, and did, get any dragon she wanted to roll over on their belly for her, except for Smoke. Smoke’s only interest lay in whether or not he could swagger off the field at the end of a fight.
That’s not the point, Hera said, in response to his reference to her embarrassingly obvious crush. The point is that you need to do something about that obnoxious man.
“Ooh, yes sorry,” Neil said, “let me just rework his entire personality. Give me a minute to create a machine for that, would you?”
Hera hummed thoughtfully, lowering the temperature of the room by about 3 degrees. You could.
“I’m sorry?”
You know, Renee was talking about with Starburst the other day. How she reworked her entire thought process by discouraging negative thoughts and rewarding herself for positive ones.
“I think that only works if the person involved is aware and onboard with it.” Also, Neil wasn’t aware that Minyard liked anything well enough for it to count as a reward in his books.
That guy’s dog wasn’t on board with it, Hera mused. Not as far as I know. Then again, I can’t read canine minds, now can I. Maybe he really, really enjoyed being made to salivate at the sound of a bell.
“You’re so funny,” Neil sighed.
But the seed had been planted, and that was all that Hera needed.
~
Josten was infuriating.
He had swanned in four years ago, lugging the largest scandal in the ETF – extra-terrestrial fighter (yes, Kayleigh Day was brilliant but lacking in imagination to a level that made it obvious that Kevin Day was her son) – world behind him, and within three weeks he and that dragon of his had pushed Andrew and Smoke to their limits, impressed Wymack enough that the man begged to have them on his squadron, and had nearly driven Andrew to murder (again) with his stupid little smart quips.
Smoke blew smoke out of his nostrils, the same colour as the scales on his belly. They’re plotting, he informed Andrew. She’s not even shielding her mind from me.
Andrew tilted back in his chair and kicked his feet up on one of Smoke’s claws. “Let them. We’re better.”
If Smoke could have smirked, he would have. As it was, he lifted one corner of his mouth, revealing a double row of tiny, sharp teeth, perfect for shredding anyone fool enough to reach inside.
Andrew shook his head. “What are they plotting?”
Smoke’s grin spread to the other side of his mouth, almost the width of Andrew’s bed, taking up barely a hundredth of a room built to Smoke’s dimensions. They want to train good behaviour into us, he said, barely concealing his amusement. They’re wondering what the best kind of incentive would be for you.
Andrew’s eyes narrowed. He’d never taken well to people attempting to force him into the boxes they wanted him in. But Josten had never been disrespectful to him regarding his boundaries, only showing flagrant disrespect in every other area of their lives. It would be interesting to see what they tried to gain his cooperation, and whether or not it would give Andrew a legitimate reason to finally stab the insufferable smirk off Josten’s face.
Smoke huffed lightly, making Andrew very glad for the industrial-grade ventilators built into their quarters. They think you might like chocolate.
Andrew didn’t bother to reply to that verbally. He just opened his mental walls and blasted Smoke (and Hera through Smoke, and Josten through Hera) with an image of a clear sunny day, Smoke and him out in the water, and the blessed quietness that filled his ears whenever they sank below the waves. It was hard to really underscore the importance of the silence through telepathy, but Andrew figured they knew him well enough to understand that much by now.
He received a tinkle of a laugh in return, and rolled his eyes, slamming his mental shields back down.
Smoke's lip curled upward in displeasure, but Andrew ignored the massive hint from his dragon in favour of turning back to his lesson plan for the upcoming week. Having reached his eleventh year with Smoke, and his fourth year under Wymack, he'd been given more responsibilities than ever before. He did not like it.
Smoke shook his head as Andrew's dismissal of what he felt was a very interesting avenue to explore, but settled down for a nap soon enough.
The next day, Andrew was on guard for any trick that the flier pair might try, but fortunately the only contact he had with them was when they swapped training grounds with their respective classes.
As for their dragons, well, Hera had a habit of swooping down from out of nowhere and yanking on one of Smoke's fins, then sweeping away again before the flightless dragon had a chance to retaliate. Andrew had found it, if not adorable, tolerable when it began four years ago, but now with the dragons hitting maturity and him feeling older than ever, it was getting tiresome.
Get it over with, he told Smoke halfway through exercises with the first years. It’s getting irritating.
Smoke’s resistance to the suggestion would start up a long-argued fight between the two of them, that they could never quite come to a conclusion on. Fortunately for Andrew, he was as stubborn as any dragon and could easily have a fully-fledged, throwing-furniture-through-the-walls level telepathic fight with Smoke while they led drills for the junior ETFs.
Smoke started out placid this time, disguising his frustration with Andrew. You really should talk to Josten before Hera and I start anything.
It will not be a problem, Andrew said dismissively. I’ll just lock myself up in the rooms they have specifically for this for the three days it takes you to get it all out and if he tries anything I’ll stab him.
It was true. Not all pairs were equally compatible, and occasionally dragons or riders had feelings that weren’t shared by their other halves. Like when Renee had started up a relationship with Reynolds, and Starburst had no intention of ever being near another dragon. And after that, when Reynolds had to deal with the fallout of her dragon going after Gordon’s obnoxiously orange dragon. But again, that was why they had built the telepathy-blocking rooms. Reynolds in one room, Gordon in another, and the rest of the base shaking a little as two massive beasts rolled each other over for three days straight.
Smoke hesitated. Then he projected an image of the scene Andrew had just been thinking of, this time highlighting how much older the other two dragons were. Hera and I are younger. Much younger.
This was true. It was really rare for a rider to be born before their dragon, but both Josten and him had been children before their dragons had hatched. There was a crazy story out there that Hera had hatched in midair and immediately settled on her element, taking off into the sky, but Andrew was sure that was just a rumour.
Smoke had, of course, hatched under Andrew’s bed, stashed there because Andrew had been 90% sure his egg was actually an unusually large rock and 100% sure that something like a dragon would never happen to him. The first thing Smoke had done was commit murder, and then, while Andrew was washing the blood off his fucking beagle-sized dragon, Smoke had settled on water as his element.
After that, naming him Smoke was just ironic enough that the two of them found it funny. That it confused the hell out of everyone else was just a bonus.
Smoke nudged him with his tail, nearly throwing him off his stance. Much younger, he emphasised.
Okay, and?
Smoke made a noise that translated best as a human sucking their teeth before delivering some bad news. When projected telepathically, it made Andrew feel like someone was banging on his brainstem with a metal pan. It would be more like a month for, well, teenagers like us.
Andrew was abruptly horrified. A month without his telepathy would feel like torture. A month without Smoke was unthinkable.
It would help, Smoke ventured, if the two of you joined in.
It really was times like this that Andrew realised how good Renee had it to be bonded to a dragon who was several decades older than her. Sure, her lifespan was shortened significantly, but when the first generation of riders hadn’t even started to die of natural causes yet, that wasn’t going to be a problem for another century at least. At least she didn’t have to deal with Starburst going through puberty.
Leaving aside the fact that you sound insane, Andrew said, deciding it was time to start throwing some furniture around in their shared headspace, you cannot really think I would fuck anyone, let alone Josten, for a month?
It would come down to two weeks if you helped out. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Smoke rejoined with all the confidence of a barely-grown man telling Wymack that no, he definitely wasn’t smuggling a bottle of vodka back onto base.
I’m not getting in bed with Josten for one hour, let alone two weeks. Do you realise how ridiculous you sound?
There’s the other thing, Smoke said, which was the mental equivalent of throwing a television at Andrew.
Andrew shut the door in Smoke’s face and turned back to his class. “That’s all for today. We’ll take this to the lake next class. If you and your dragon don’t train together every day, you may drown and I won’t be held responsible. Dismissed.”
He walked away, ignoring Smoke’s steps behind him. It always felt uncanny walking through the doors of the training ground. Obviously, they had been built to accommodate the larger of the two species, so walking through them as a human was an exercise in humility. Today that feeling of smallness was mixed in with enough rage at Smoke to almost extinguish any awe he felt at the majesty of dragons.
This was probably why when Josten and Hera passed them on the way into the ring, he instinctively gave them the standard instructor-to-instructor greeting he’d been withholding from them for almost 8 months now. Smoke huffed smugly from behind him and Josten smiled at him, saccharine sweet.
He tossed something at Andrew, and the shock of the entire interaction had him fumbling the catch. He looked at it in shock, then looked up in time to catch Hera winking at him as they passed.
“How’s fishing, Smoke?” Neil called back cheerfully as the gates closed behind them.
“Do not answer that,” Andrew said under his breath.
Smoke’s head waved from side to side as he turned to follow Andrew. I wouldn’t.
Then, he shoved his not inconsiderable bulk at Andrew to try and get a better look at what he was holding. Andrew held it out, palm up, for inspection. It was an old school button game, the kind that had been fading out as more and more game companies focussed on dragons as a selling point. It was cheap, but hard to procure, more so when you lived on a floating base in the middle of the Pacific.
He shoved the purple monstrosity into his pocket and kept walking towards their quarters.
~
Well, what could Neil say?
A lot, Hera supplied.
When Allison had called him from the States and offered to bring him anything he needed, he probably shouldn’t have abused her generosity and asked from gag gifts. In his defence, Flats was massive and could have probably flown across the Pacific carrying a fighter jet. A few trinkets would not be the end of him. Then again, the teasing he and Hera would have to suffer for the next few weeks was the real cost of asking the Reynolds duo for anything.
And it had been absolutely worth it to see the shock on Minyard’s face, the way he fumbled to catch the little game, the shared amusement that had passed between Smoke and Hera, and the satisfaction Neil got from his parting shot at Smoke.
It was rude, Hera chided, because somehow despite being younger than him, she was the voice of reason in their relationship.
What’s he going to do? Neil asked, starting his warmups. Is he going to suddenly reply to me, inside my own mind?
Hera didn’t reply, but her displeasure was clear in his mind.
Neil ignored the unease he felt at speaking so offhandedly about linking but it really unnerved him that Minyard hadn’t linked with a single dragon other than Smoke.
If Hera had the muscles for it, her lips would have thinned. When Kayleigh and David first linked it was seen as the most sacred thing to happen for the dragons in millennia. You mustn’t mock someone for trauma curbing their ability to link.
Hera wasn’t wrong. Neil sighed as he dropped down into a squat; strangely, riding around for hours without a saddle made it necessary for him to have incredibly strong legs. In the beginning, the humans had realised dragons were their closest, friendliest allies when the skies opened up with extraterrestrial visitors. At first, the telepathic bond was limited to one dragon and one human. It was only chance that Kayleigh Day, one of the first digger, had realised that she could extend her telepathic bond to anyone whom she had a close relationship with.
Previously, any rider-to-rider communication during training had happened through their dragons, who weren’t held to the same restraints as the humans. Now though, humans could not only communicate with their own dragons but also link with other riders, and the dragons of those riders. Of course, the one caveat was that the riders communicating had to have some sort of emotional bond, most often based on trust, but occasionally the link could be established between two random riders in emergencies, working the same way adrenaline did.
It was also why they trained to break through each other’s telepathic shields. Because if you could establish the link that way with an enemy, they were effectively helpless. It was also why riders never tried too hard to break shields during training. There was nothing worse than pushing hard enough to link with Kevin or, god forbid, Minyard, or equally bad, Neil himself. Of course, there was training to get rid of an accidental or forced link, but just hours in Neil’s head would send a sage running for the hills.
It was also why pairs like Dan and Matt were preferred for off planet missions like the one they were currently on. If you were negotiating a treaty on foreign ground, it helped when all the members of the quad could communicate with each other at will, and not have to treat communication like a game of telephone. And somehow, having a link with another person made it harder for a stranger to break your shields.
The weird thing was, Minyard had family on base. His twin brother worked in medical, and his cousin did something that involved a lot of gaiety and a few too many trips to Germany every year. And rumour had it, he hadn’t even linked up with them. Even Neil, who could admit he hadn’t had many relationships with people he trusted had begun to hear faint echoes of Matt’s thoughts before he’d left.
He shook his head. It confused him, though, because he could have sworn Smoke had nearly answered him just now. But that would be ridiculous, because Minyard cannot possibly trust me that much.
I notice your trust for him isn’t coming into question, Hera said a little bitchily. She was annoyed whenever the topic of linking came up. She didn’t much care for Matt’s dragon, a cute little yellow digger who preened when introducing herself as Buttercup. She assumed, incorrectly, that Neil linking with Minyard would get her a companion whom she actually liked.
It’s not like you can’t talk to Smoke right now, he said, a complete non-sequitur unless one’s conversation partner was in one’s own head.
It’s different. We can feel the displeasure coming off the two of you the whole time. Hera paused. Also, I don’t want to talk to him.
Right, Neil said, watching Wymack’s newest batch of problem children stumble onto the training ground, trying to look tall and failing miserably next to their house-sized dragons. Sure you don’t.
As much as he didn’t want to, he would have to corner Renee and talk to her privately soon.
~
Andrew kicked his feet up on his desk, leaning back in his chair. He had a new book that he wanted to finish before his and Smoke’s swim tonight. Smoke, however, had other ideas. He brought his head as close to floor level as his short neck would allow and stared Andrew directly in the eye. In the beginning he had found it funny to bare his shark teeth at the same time, but it didn’t quite have the same effect it used to when his teeth were the length of Andrew’s arm.
I wasn’t talking about the Thing. He said, closest to apology he would come. I was talking about the other, other thing.
Which is, Andrew said, too drained to speak or to inject emotion into his voice.
That we can’t go off planet before I’ve gone through this. Neither can they. Doesn’t have to be Hera, but it’s going to be someone, and soon. His tone turned whiny. It’s practically a rite of passage. Either you lock yourself away and prolong it for both of us, or you join in and we’re both happy.
Andrew sighed. He had grown a lot since Smoke had started puberty a year or so ago, mostly in realising that dragons had fewer taboos than humans did. Smoke had fewer cautions about letting people in too, and Andrew would prefer his dragon grow up unaffected by his own problems. He knew what he was inevitably going to agree to. He also knew the effect that a month of isolation would have on his psyche.
It wasn’t like anyone else was going to sign up for a month of what was, essentially, solitary confinement, leave alone with someone as abrasive as him.
You should do what feels right, he told Smoke tiredly. I’ll see you on the other side.
I’m going to get laid, man, Smoke said. I’m not leaving you for the wars.
Over the next month or so, Smoke showed no inclination towards Hera, or any other dragon for that matter. In fact, he actively shied away from any contact with other dragons, spending his time almost exclusively with Andrew.
Over the next month or so, if Andrew made an itemised list of the things he had received from the Josten pair (mostly in return for the breed of politeness that could only be classified as the bare minimum), it would look something like this:
1 pair of pink fuzzy handwarmers (human sized)
1 pair of pink fuzzy clawwarmers (dragon sized; unnecessary for a fire-breather)
2 boxes worth of nerds clusters (handed out piece by piece in return for morning greetings)
3 cupcakes (handed to him arbitrarily on evening patrol)
1 box of cigarettes (left outside their quarters the day one of his students nearly had drowned)
3 more retro games that were kind of hard to put down
By Friday, Andrew was about ready to see if a dragon’s scales would fall out if you shook her hard enough (and really, she deserved it, because if it was anyone’s duty to contain Josten’s insanity, it was his nature-assigned helicopter-sized life partner). Come Friday though, he soon realised he had more worries than how to descale a dragon.
He was on his way to his weekly, human-only training with Renee, when out of nowhere, a arm shot out of the wall and dragged him into a telepathy-proof room.
“No,” he almost groaned, because he’d been counting on Smoke’s reticence to last for another week at least.
“No,” Josten assured him. “I just need to talk to you without our dragons interfering.”
“I’d like to interfere with your dragon,” Andrew said, not lightly. “When will she learn it’s her job to contain your insanity.”
“It’s working, isn’t it?” Josten said, wide-eyed. “I mean, you haven’t threatened to stab me once this conversation. Have a gummy bear.”
Andrew smacked it out of his hand.
Josten looked injured, but picked it off the carpet and put it in his mouth.
“We need to talk,” Josten said, serious around the lint-y gummy in his mouth.
“Oh no, are you breaking up with me?” Andrew said, deadpan. “I wish you wouldn’t. Smoke has his heart set on Hera.”
“Hera has her heart set on Smoke. Only thing is, she doesn’t seem to know it.”
Andrew blinked at him. Had he missed all the scale-pulling, fin-grabbing the two had been engaging in?
“Look,” Neil sighed. “It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t her, I guess. She just thinks she hates him because he’s better than her.”
“He is,” Andrew said, smug in his superiority.
Neil’s fist clenched briefly, an echo of what his shields did when Andrew got too close to something truthful. “Maybe this is why he isn’t getting laid. She would like him more if he was less of an asshole.”
“He wouldn’t be him if he was less of an asshole,” Andrew said staunchly.
Neil shrugged, as if he was any less of an asshole. “Anyway, listen. It’s going to take them a month to work through their dragon puberty hormones, and I don’t think either of us want to be cooped up in isolation so our dragons can live out their wild teenage dream.”
“I’m not fucking you, Josten.”
“Ditto.” He had the audacity to sound disgusted; Andrew didn’t think he was that bad an option. “I don’t swing that way.” He paused. “Or any way.”
“Like Starburst.”
Neil nodded. “Like Starburst.”
Andrew nodded back, then made to shove past him to the door. “Good talk Josten. Neither of us wants to be in solitary, but we’ll suck it up because-” Well, because Smoke was a part of his soul and he would give him anything in his power if it made him happy, and because he was sure Neil was the same way about Hera, but thinking it was different to saying it out loud to a colleague, “because we have to. Think of it as a step in our career development. I’ll think of you fondly when I’m on my thirtieth day of eating boiled oats and our dragons have crushed half the trees in the area.”
Neil reached to grab his arm, and stopped himself before Andrew could flinch away, which was really the only reason he stayed to listen to the rest of the argument.
“I spoke to Renee. She said when Flats and Blast had their fling, Allison and Seth had to be locked in here too.”
“It’s a small base, Josten. I know the gossip.”
“Right,” Neil said, slowly. “The thing is, they were given two options. One was to quarantine separately, of course. The other was to room with each other, and have someone to talk to, even if they couldn’t access their telepathy.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow. “Hard luck that they hate each other.”
“But we don’t.” Neil said, halfway to cheerful in the way that meant he was taking great pleasure in being a little shit. “And we’d have to be quarantined for a lot longer than three days.”
“You want to spend a month alone with me?” And to think, he’d been wondering about Josten’s sanity this past week. He should have tied him up and taken him in for a checkup.
“Can you think of anyone else who would willingly cut off their telepathy to spend a month with either of us?”
Weird little (thoughtful) gifts aside, he had a point. The one man who seemed to tolerate Neil would be off planet for several more months, and Andrew didn’t think he could stand asking Aaron to sacrifice a full month of telepathy, only so they could sit in the same room and snipe at each other.
Andrew shrugged, which seemed to pass for acquiescence. “Now you just have to break it to Hera that she’s been flirting with my dragon for the almost four years now.”
Neil’s smile was different out of the ring, softer, less likely to slice. “She’ll figure it out when I tell her where I’ll be for the next month.”
“Let me know when you’re doing it, so Smoke and I can stand out of blast radius,” Andrew opened the door, before raising his hand in a two-fingered salute, “with popcorn.”
It explained why the gummies were thrown at him more violently than normal.
~
Hera’s reaction to the news probably warranted the popcorn Minyard and Smoke brought along, as they stood outside the gates to the training ground and watched her try to burn everything in a fifty-metre radius. Neil was not so lucky, given that he was the one bound to her for life, but at least she steered clear of giving him frostbite or attempting to freeze his blood in his veins.
In some incredibly primal way, it was yet another flirtation tactic. Neil could tell that deep down in Hera’s mind, she knew this was the best way to demonstrate her strength to a potential mate. He also knew that, if he knew anything about Smoke, the shark-like dragon was unimpressed, given that, taking into account their varying sizes, he was stronger than Hera. He came dangerously close to being hit in the face by her massive swinging tail for that thought, but it was worth it for the way Minyard flinched at the motion.
Look, Neil told her, either Minyard and I spend a month together for no good reason and then you make me do it all over again when you do decide to do it for real, or you use the opportunity we’re giving you and go after the dragon you’ve been pining for. Either way, I’m going to isolate with Minyard for a month so it really is your choice what you do with your time while I’m gone.
Her tail came close to dislocating his spine, this time, and by dislocating, he meant relocating his spine several miles from the rest of his body. This time, both Smoke and Minyard took a step forward, clearly unused to their peculiar form of tough love. Neil smirked at them, before it softened a smile when one of Hera’s claws nudged at the backs of his knees.
Thank you, she said softly.
Neil rolled his eyes. Just don’t blow it.
You don’t blow it. She rejoined, stomping regally toward the diver pair. Great opportunity for linking.
The next thing Neil felt couldn’t be described without the aid of a dictionary that hadn’t been invented yet. It was akin to the ground splitting around a digger as they burrowed their way out under the feet of an enemy, but more. It might have been the famed leviathan hauling itself out of the depths, sending spillover that drowned all bystanders. It was the feeling of realising you were flying directly into a storm and refusing to turn around, because what could be stronger than a dragon? It was that, and more.
Andrew turned to him. “I suspect we have less than five minutes before an incongruence migraine hits.”
“Less than,” Neil agreed.
They turned and walked toward the facility together.
~
The isolation room offered was less a room and more an entire apartment, complete with kitchen and a human sized training ground. Andrew spent most of the first day prowling around, investigating his new quarters, followed closely by Neil, who looked at everything with the same amount of suspicion that Andrew did. It wasn’t until the blinds automatically closed that they realised it was dark and neither of them had bothered to cook. So the first night really was boiled oats, like Andrew’d feared.
And so, before they turned in for the night, Andrew sat the two of them down and worked out a schedule for the next month, that left cleaning to the automatic dust vents, but split the cooking and washing equally between the two of them. It was less than a half hour before he decided that Neil was far less annoying when his thoughts weren’t being reflected through two dragons into Andrew’s head. Like this, he didn’t have to know whether the little redhead was planning his murder or bitching about his inability to socialise.
Neil still bitched about the fact that he still had to make schedules, despite being given a month’s leave from his job, which, to hear him tell him, seemed to revolve around making schedules only to have to redo them less than a month later.
Even after that was done, Neil was surprisingly willing to share a workspace, and later in the night, the workout space. He was so quiet that Andrew often looked up from his own reading to double check that he was still there. Whether this was him trying to make the next month easier on the both of them, or an effect of his connection with Hera being temporarily severed, Andrew had yet to decide.
By the time he had finished his nighttime workout (internal clock thrown slightly off by Smoke’s absence), Andrew was exhausted, with a little something niggling away in the back of his mind. Something that had the potential to grow into a full-blown panic attack if left unattended for too long. So, before he got into the starched white bed that resembled a hospital bed a little too much, he sat on the floor and leaned against the cold hard wall and allowed himself 10 minutes of worry for Smoke.
It was the first time since he was 13 years old that Andrew was separated from Smoke and he felt his absence like a part of his brain had been excised. A while ago, when Aaron had been going through his ‘I’m learning medicine so I must be smarter than you’ phase, he had told Andrew that it was physically impossible for your brain to hurt. The only things that could hurt were nerves. For the moment, and the rest of his life, Andrew would leave that puzzle to people smarter than him, and instead ruminate on the place at the top of his brain stem that lay empty after housing Smoke for 11 years.
He checked the lock on his door thrice before laying down in the cold bedsheets, not warmed by the breath of an overeager dragon, and cursed himself for his paranoia. Turned out, he hadn’t been working on it; it was just incredibly hard to feel scared when you knew for certain that you had a bodyguard who was several times bigger than any threat you were scared of. Then again. Once bonded, riders and dragons expected to live and die together, so perhaps it wouldn’t be relevant once he rejoined Smoke.
The only reason he was in isolation in the first place was because the incongruence in their shared mental space would be much more if Smoke was experiencing intense emotions while Andrew wasn’t than the incongruence they would feel from spending a month apart. At least, after this, they could debrief together and share enough memories that their shared space would settle back into the sort of sentence-finishing thought process they normally shared.
(Not that Andrew had ever sat down and wondered what it was like to fuck a dragon. But he supposed he was going to find out anyway.)
Now, Andrew tossed and turned, missing the charred meat smell that was Smoke’s breath, infiltrating everything Andrew owned, and the in and out of his stomach as he stretched out next to Andrew’s bed. Of course, when they had been building their shared quarters, they had shifted the bed this way and that until Smoke had found a position he liked, stretched out through the entire room, head pointed towards the door and soft underbelly guarded by Andrew’s body. It worked for them.
Andrew was lost without it.
The other thing that was uncanny about the isolation rooms, he thought, as he stared at the ceiling in the dark, was the fact that he could see the ceiling. Smoke liked to stretch, which involved getting up onto his hind legs, and stretching every single appendage upwards. This of course, had warranted a ceiling that Andrew had to squint to catch a glimpse of, and as a result, the ceiling of the very human sized isolation room felt claustrophobic.
Of course, in some ways this was better, because earlier today when Andrew had left his coffee mug on one side of the living room, he hadn’t needed to cross an entire football field to get it back. Even so, hatred of light cardio aside, he felt he would rather cross and ocean for his coffee mug than sit in a coffin of a room without Smoke by his side. He sighed and thumped his head back against his pillow.
After another hour of lying on his back, wondering if the ceiling was slowly lowering, he heard a clattering coming from the shared kitchen. Andrew figured a conversation with his living partner couldn’t possibly make anything worse, and groped for his slippers in the dark.
He shuffled out of his room, only to blink in surprise when Neil whirled around and pulled a gun on him.
“Forgot I was here?”
Neil put the firearm away, looking sheepish, and where had he even got a gun from? “Thought you were someone else.”
“Clearly,” Andrew grumbled, brushing past him to brew a mug of tea for himself.
Neil slid a single piece of candy corn towards him, and considered that adequate payment for the past ten minutes. “Can’t sleep?”
Andrew ignored him and added a second teabag to his mug.
“Me either.”
“Really? And here I thought you pulled a gun on me in your sleep.”
Neil laughed. “I might, if you sneak into my room. The reflexes never really go away, you know.”
“Is that a threat?” Andrew asked, sure that even sans Smoke, he could take Josten down easy.
Neil sat down at the table, wrapping his fingers around his mug. He looked strangely vulnerable for someone who’d just threatened to shoot Andrew. Twice.
~
“People like to gossip about it,” Neil said contemplatively to Minyard’s back, “but she really did hatch in midair. It’s why I named her Hera, you know.”
Someone who wasn’t an ETF would never, ever understand what it was like to be separated from the mind you had been bonded to for 16 years. It was like going through withdrawal, except the addiction wasn’t based on chemicals or hormones or whatever, it was literally that Neil was used to thinking with two brains and the removal of one brain was really doing a number on him.
Andrew turned to lean against the counter, and Neil didn’t know how to tell him it was easier to talk to him when those eyes, gold in the dimmed lights, weren’t focussed on him. “Your dragon’s a flier, and you named her after the wife of the god who controls the sky. Imaginative.”
Neil smiled, the same smile he knew graced his face during fights. “Her name isn’t Hera.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow, but refused to show any curiosity.
“I can’t tell you for free,” Neil hinted, dearly missing the easy back and forth that he shared with Hera. “You’ll have to give me something in return.”
Andrew blinked. Slow, like a dragon. Neil almost thought he wouldn’t answer, but eventually he said, slowly, like he knew it was the funniest thing since Laurel and Hardy, “I named him Smoke before his abilities developed. We thought it would be a funny name for a water dragon.”
Neil couldn’t stop the small huff of laughter that escaped him. “I always assumed it was a particularly unimaginative name.”
Andrew raised the mug in his direction, a cheers or an invitation to speak, before turning to rummage through one of the cupboards.
“We bonded at a very low point in my life,” Neil said, allowing the memory of his father standing over the mangled corpse of his mother’s dragon to ricochet harmlessly off his mental shields and back into the depths of his subconscious, “so when she arrived, I thought, here’s someone who’s going to show them. She didn’t like Harbinger, so we settled on a name that I could shorten.”
“Which was?”
“Herald of Doom.”
“She’s registered like that?”
Neil laughed. “She is.”
Andrew turned back around, bag of mini marshmallows in hand. He brought them over to the table and poured a small pile in front of Neil before sticking his hand into the bag. He looked like he wanted to ask a question but was holding himself back.
Neil raised an eyebrow at him, and popped one of the marshmallows.
“She wasn’t really laid in midair.”
“Of course not,” Neil said, relishing the relief on his face. “The egg would have broken on impact. No, she was laid in a very safe nest on the American west coast. The egg fell off the back of a dragon on a flight across the Atlantic. I suspect a few seconds later and she might have been a water dragon herself.”
Andrew rolled his eyes. “The first time Smoke had a meal he grew three sizes. We had no idea there was a correct way to feed a dragon.”
Neil shook his head. He was boasting about his, admittedly beautiful, talented dragon, and Andrew was telling him the most embarrassing things about him and his dragon. Neil almost wanted to ask how old he’s been when Smoke had hatched; he didn’t seem to have known anything about raising a dragon. But, he felt, it had been enough honesty for one evening.
~
The second day, Neil made a pasta that has Andrew serving seconds.
Andrew told him about the first time Smoke took him hunting.
Neil told him how Hera wished she could link with dogs.
~
The third night, Neil made two mugs of coffee.
Andrew pinned him 19 times in a row, and was only stopped from going for the twentieth time by Neil’s bruised ego.
Neil found a small button game in his room when he retired to lick his wounds.
~
The end of the week came fast enough that Andrew wondered how much his sense of time has been affected.
He told Neil what it feels like to swim past a shark and realise that you’re both bigger and stronger than it.
Neil described flying through a storm secure in the knowledge that they were the strongest out there.
~
Neil dreamed of swimming circles around the most beautiful predator of the ocean; same colour, but minute compared to the beautiful grey dragon buoying him up.
He avoided Minyard the rest of the day and spent the day forcing his sore body through double his normal training regimen.
~
Andrew knew he would fuck it up eventually.
He spent the day leaning against different walls and pretending to himself that he could feel the slow expansion and contraction of the concrete, in the breathing pattern of an animal that breathed infrequently but deeply.
When the winds buffeted him awake, he found a mug of coffee and a closed bedroom door waiting for him outside.
~
The third week, Andrew caught him before he could take his food and retreat to his room.
Neil confessed that he had felt Andrew’s dreams. He didn’t want to force a link with anyone who didn’t want it, and certainly not in circumstances like theirs.
Andrew told him the wind felt good on his face in that moment just before the storm hit.
~
The last week they started a game where they guessed how much they would owe Wymack in damages.
Neil would say a number, and Andrew would have to name everything Smoke and Hera had destroyed that would add up to that amount.
Then they would swap roles.
~
Neil knew they were both awaiting the last day of their confinement eagerly, and as much as he was desperate to feel Hera’s mind brush up against his once more, he wasn’t at all eager to get back to his job of trainer to junior ETFs.
Andrew nodded in commiseration over coffee that night, even though, apart from their one conversation about it, he had been staunchly ignoring the massive, telepathic elephant in the room.
~
Andrew took a deep breath when the doors opened, as if that alone would allow the scent of charred meat and smog into the room. What did happen was two snouts jostling for space in the incredibly tiny doorway, one grey and pointed, and the other squarish and bluey-white.
“Sorted?” Neil’s voice came from behind him.
And both dragons answered in unison, and it washed over Andrew like dropping off a dragon’s back in midair, committing to the freefall because there was someone waiting to swoop in and catch you.
As they walked back to their quarters, he closed his eyes and breathed out; in the mind he shared with Smoke, the concrete, bomb-proof walls of which were now brushing against the ever-shifting, labyrinthine mind of the other two, he asked his dragon if he was happy with the way things turned out.
Hera turned her massive head to look at him with a large red eye. Are you not?
But in their shared space, Smoke was happy. No longer throwing televisions. And Andrew, well, Andrew and Smoke were so rarely in disagreement on anything. He had known the answer before the isolation chambers had opened.
The answer was that the only thing that could penetrate his defences was the absolute truth, and what could be more so than a consummate liar choosing over and over to be truthful?
He blinked at Hera once, slow, and caught the gummy bear that Neil threw at him. The answer had always been them.