Beetle, Part Two: Sycha

This is PG-13
Warning for some violence and straight talk about relationships. It's PG-13, I promise, but if you don't want to hear about ruined muscles, depression, and kissing, don't read. I refuse to use the badges.

Intro (Same as Part One)
I wrote this from a prompt Firefly Writings gave me: ''your character is a fantasy hero who acquires a disability. ''I have to say, I'm really interested in where it's going. But here is the blurb:

Ael is a cynical girl, permanently crippled in an incident she entirely blames on someone else. The old Ael was famous, member of a vigilante crime-fighting group, tamer of dragons, a success story. The new Ael reads a lot of poorly written books, eats leftovers, and turns away from the life she once loved. She's still reminded of it, though; her roommate has refused to leave the aforementioned vigilante group, the Mambas, and no one as scarred as Ael is going to forget.

This story will follow Ael as she starts to reconnect with the world, finds a path, and falls in love with a perfect soul or two. I'm probably not going to update much, but I'll keep writing.

There are no chapters. Deal with it.

Part one is here: Beetle.

City of Gallina, Western Kabi, 71st day of Spring, Year of the Finch
The problem, again, in the end, turns out to be Beetle. She doesn’t like the idea that I won’t be able to sneak out as much to visit with another person watching me. Beetle turns out to have a possessive streak (dragons are hoarders, so this makes sense) and takes to trapping me in the sewers to keep me from leaving. She even takes me croc hunting, once. I cling to her back the whole time, feet wedged in her plating, as water and dragon fire sprays everywhere. The sound is horrific, but Beetle is so excited by the whole thing I have a great time. The crocs are heavier than Beetle but about as long, and when her wings open to fill the spill chamber the crocs are hiding in, the world fills completely with slimy stone and firelight through translucent wings. It’s not a fair fight.

Luro’s resigned himself to me going off on unexplained adventures that end with me soaked, filthy, and laughing to myself. Luro was a serious rebel as a teen, I think. I think his idea of rebelling was to sneak to the next town and learn midwifing, but he gets that I’m renouncing self-imposed captivity. He also has a dangerous streak, as shown by his Mamba career. He does bother to ask, though, around the 70th.

“So, Ael… explanation?”

I look up at him with a lot of fake innocence on my muddy, dripping face. “What exactly?” Beetle and I did a rodeo today, until we figured out that the best way for me to hang on it to slip down to hang on her belly, between her first and second foreleg pairs. My fingers are bleeding from the sharpest bits of Beetle’s scales and she accidentally drenched me in firespit-- luckily I was in the water, so I shed my shirt to soak and got off with light burns and huge holes in my clothes. I think I have to scrap it.

“Ael, you’re bleeding,” Luro says. He blots off some of the blood off of the cut on my fourth finger and frowns. His gift shivers through me, stinging in my cuts and burns and the sore forming on my lower lip. “Burns? Are you burned?”

Most of the time I like his power. Sometimes it’s slightly annoying. “Just a bit, but I’m good.”

“No, you’re not.” Luro forces me to the bathroom and has me lay flat on the floor. He’s been at the hospital a lot, helping with Sycha and Kanatora and then all the random strangers he never knows, but that never stops him from healing little things. He scolds me about infection as he cleans my burns (apparently Kanatora’s burns are infected, and it’s bad) and seals them. I’ve gotten really good at pain, and I ignore it as we banter.

“Can I ask what you got into?” Luro asks, holding up my tattered shirt as he pushes me under the shower and turns on the water. I push my hair off my face and tilt my head so the water rushes through it.

“Do you honestly expect an answer?” I cup my hands and splash my face. The water stings my newly closed cuts, but Luro’s done a good job. Luro sighs and leans over to help me clean my hair.

“I will find out,” he tells me. I snort.

“I’m not telling you,” I say. “So, good luck.”

Luro looks offended, but he keeps scrubbing out my hair. “I’m not useless.”

“You’re really helpful,” I agree.

“But you won’t tell me?”

“It’s not important. I’m just getting out of the house.”

“And getting covered in mud and scrapes and burns. Acid burns? They healed like acid burns.”

I shove him off and we both laugh, that choked social laugh that we have the exact same. The same makes both of us laugh for real, my giggle and Luro’s shout.

“I’m in a better mood,” I offer, stilling so Luro can finish shampooing my hair. “Isn’t that worth a bit of mystery?”

Luro curses. Not a bad word, really, but Luro only curses when he’s shocked.

“Just tell me.” I splash in the little puddle accumulating around the drain, cleaning dirty soap off my feet. When he doesn’t, I look at him. “C’mon, Luro.”

He bites his lip. “I… remembered lots of things I should have told you already?” He says it like a question. Now I’m curious.

“I promise to be good,” I say. I force myself into a kneel and rinse my hair.

“So,” Luro starts, and then pauses a long beat to order his thoughts. He lists everything really fast. “I met Kita’s family, and they liked me, and I’m sort of dating Kita now, but kind of really, and Sycha is coming tomorrow, because they have to discharge her and you already said it was okay.” He takes a breath, waiting for me to react.

Kita, that I knew already. Well, not the details, but I know Luro. If someone has the slightest interest in him and he has any feelings in return, he goes all in. Every time. Sometimes without asking important questions about underage laws or transmittable diseases. Sycha doesn’t surprise me either; Luro keeps saying how well she’s healed. And I did say she could come, even if I didn’t really have a choice. So instead of freaking out like Luro apparently thinks I’m going to, I change the subject.

“Want me to make Sycha dinner tomorrow? Do you know if she likes Spice Islands stuff, or am I just stereotyping?” I’ve been known to do that. But I love Rakaburalow food, and, really, Spice Islands food can be awesome.

“That might be stereotyping,” Luro says, but he’s stumped too. “Maybe not, just to be safe. I don’t know if she even thinks she’s Spice Island. I don’t consider myself Gabbarid, but if you look at me that’s it, right?”

“Well, I’m very much Rakaburalow,” I say, “but makes sense. I will make something Kabian, then.” Luro agrees and helps me turn off the water. He hands me a towel.

Luro has to help me dry my hair, because my right arm, the one that got bitten through, never healed exactly right and I have trouble controlling my fingers when they’re behind my head. Usually I let it drip all over my clothes until it gives up and dries already, but Luro is still relieved I didn’t freak and in a helpful mood. As I struggle back into my clothes, Luro gathers up his medical stuff.

“You okay, Ael?”

“Yeah, I’m good. Thanks for your help.”

“No problem!” Luro says, but he taps a sealed cut along my thumb. “I still want answers, and I’m going to wait you out.”

“One of us’ll forget eventually,” I say. Luro shrugs. I wriggle to get all the way into my pants. It probably won’t be me, not with Beetle to remind me.

***

I wake up screaming and on the floor, every shadow woven in teeth. Dragons with bites full of lightning and dingos scaled in dust and blue and memories of voices, all of it tangled together.

You should have gone the other way, then.

	Stay away from that child.

	She doesn’t know anything!

	Why didn’t you tell us?

	You have to hold your tongue!

''	Go away, Aeleerisi. You’ve picked your side.''

	Squishy two-leg meat evil?

''	You can’t call it murder! It wasn’t a person!''

My door bursts open and hesitant fingers brush my shoulder. “Ael?” I should know this person, but the voice is like one in my head and I curl up tight. My whole body shakes.

“You can cry,” the person says. “I’m here. I’m here for you.”

I do cry, until my breathing is fragile and my cheek is warm against a quiet lap and I’m all dried out. I feel like a summer riverbed, cracked and dusty. Luro-- that’s the person next to me, Luro-- runs his thumb down my forehead. “I’m sorry,” he says.

I shudder against him, but words are too much work and I cannot ask if he’s sorry for the things he’s said that put him into my nightmares. The nightmares aren’t as sharp now, dulled a little, dragon claws instead of broken glass. I can hear them, though. Luro sighs.

“I should be able to heal this,” he mutters, mostly to himself. I work on breathing. Breathing is hard. I can think now, a little, enough to remember that Luro cannot heal nightmares. He thinks he should be able to, but I’m not so sure. Healers can’t solve anything, and that includes a lot inside heads.

When I’m breathing almost calmly again, Luro scoots away and lets me sit up. “You didn’t throw up that time,” he says, trying and failing to lighten the mood.

I just shake my head and breathe.

“Why are you like that?” Luro asks. He asks sometimes, but my answer is always different. I clench my eyes shut and force out the answer for this time. The words are so obvious.

“Scars you can’t see hurt more than the ones you can.” The scars in my skin tingle. I rub my arm, but the motion hurts more than it’s worth, so I drop my hand. Everything hurts. Luro touches my forehead again.

“Do you hurt?” When I nod, he frowns, even in the dark. My night vision is really good. “I should be able to tell,” he complains. “Well, you did hit your head on the floor. Can I try that?”

I give Luro permission and he goes to work. His gift feels wonderful, all the reality I need. It’s not like his gift acts like a drug, though. It feels like a river or something, an insect, maybe, is shivering through you, knitting up your injuries and replacing pain with a swirl. I’ve gotten used to it, but some people loathe it. I always think these people need to shut up and let Luro heal. He’s really good.

I’m exhausted, and Luro, while fully capable of picking me up, is also pretty done. He pulls my blankets off my bed and sets them up on the floor. I roll up like a pastry in my favorite quilt, and Luro fusses and pesters and bumps into my wheelchair until I pull him down beside me. “There’s plenty of bed,” I say. Luro’s sigh fills the space between us, but he drags a knitted blanket from under my bed and flops on that. He always stays until I go back to sleep.

“Night,” I mumble.

“Night,” he answers, and I settle into my blankets. The floor is hard under my quilt, but I can hear Luro breathing. He sounds a bit like Beetle, even the little snuffle at the end of every inhale. That makes me smile in the dark. I love my friends.

***

I guess Luro must’ve fallen asleep before I did, because when I wake up he’s still on my floor. I didn’t notice in the dark, but his pajamas are adorable; fleecy pants and a shirt that three hundred percent belonged to his older sister, once upon a time. Then again, half of his shirts either belonged to his sisters (he has four older ones-- this explains everything you need to know about his personality) or a previous boyfriend (of which I’ve lost count-- this also explains a lot). Or that one girl, about two years back, who bounced in, slept with Luro, made out with me, and left the next day with a random guy she knew on the street, abandoning all her things. I think she’s the reason Luro hasn’t had another girl, at least not until Kita.

I try to get into my wheelchair on my own; however, since someone needs to invent a stealth wheelchair, it rolls into my dresser with lots of noise and wakes up Luro. He tries to help. We bicker over it for longer than needed, but it serves as a great distraction as I clamber in on my own, stealthy like. No need to invent a stealth Ael.

Apparently I’m in a mood, and not the funk that usually follows a really bad night. I’m in that mood where I lapse into my Rakaburalow dialect to scold the bread I’m cutting, protest any instruction to change out of my pajamas, and quote proverbs that used to drive me out of my mind. Luro doesn’t like this mood. Cheerful Ael alarms him.

“I’m bringing Sycha after I do morning shift,” Luro says over tea and bread.

“Sure,” I say. “She’s staying in the spare room, right?”

“She’s probably going to stay on the couch for a while,” he says, “but yeah, eventually. She can do stairs, but her energy’s going to be way down. She’s done a lot of healing really fast.”

“Dragons never learned to fly by chasing rabbits,” I say, which is the absolute best proverb ever. It means almost anything you want it to, if you think about it long enough. In this case, it means that going too fast in one direction closes off others. I think the proverb had ‘pademelon’ instead of ‘rabbit’ before the Gabbarids introduced rabbits, but same idea. Pademelons are just cuter.

“Ael makes no sense,” Luro says in the exact same voice. I take a deliberate bite of bread slathered in butter and don’t bother responding.

It’s raining again outside, which isn’t surprising, not really. I’ve given up assuming how many rainy days we can have in a year. The answer is exactly the one any dragon would give: all of them. I know Beetle doesn’t have gills, and the sewers are starting to flood, so I’m worried about her.

“You’re leaving?” I ask as Luro stands and brushes a hand through his curls. His hair is almost but not quite long enough to tie back, and it keeps bouncing in his face.

“Morning shift,” he reminds me.

“Don’t work to exhaustion,” I warn. “You’d better entertain Sycha, because her and I will end up tearing each other to pieces if you’re not there.”

Luro frowns at me. “I thought you were getting along.”

I grin at him. “We were. But we’re both rather inclined to debate, and I don’t think either of us likes to be the first to blink, so…”

“This was a bad idea, wasn’t it?” Luro looks up, like he’s asking the gods.

“It’ll be fun,” I say. “Now, go save everyone.”

He grabs his bag and boots. “You’re contradictory as anything this morning, Ael.”