The human had escaped.
Tina sank back down, the fire in the back of her throat going out, emotions warring within her. No human ... that was good, wasn't it? After all, it meant she didn't have to worry anymore. She was free. She had almost become a nervous wreck, and what for?
And yet ... why did she feel so empty? Why did she feel so cold, so disappointed?
She turned mournfully, suddenly understanding that this turn of events heralded the complete collapse of her diet. Already her mouth was watering. Bugger it. She would have a blow-out. She knew a great fast-food cattle outlet that did home deliveries. She wouldn't even have to leave her cave. She would just sprawl on her hoard and eat her junky food and read the rest of her magazine and things wouldn't be so bad and ...
And something caught her eye as she turned.
Something very small, very delicate, very still, poking out of the darkness in the cupboard, just protruding into the light. It was ... It looked like ...
She peered closer.
It was a hand. A human hand. It lay prone, pale and still, and so tiny and delicate it made Tina's heart ache.
Hardly daring to breathe, she pushed the door gently with her snout, and it swung fully open, allowing a greater slice of light to fall into the cupboard. The hand grew an arm, and the arm a shoulder, and the shoulder became buried under a great mass of dark, dishevelled hair, and ...
And the human hadn't escaped after all.
The human had died there.
That was her first thought. It was dead. It was dead, and she had killed it.
Of course. How could she have been so stupid? What water had there been in the cupboard, what food? She had been so caught up in her own worrying, she hadn't stopped to consider the unbending biological mathematics of keeping a pet, any pet. How long had it been since she had shut it away in the cupboard? Two days, nearly three. How long was that in human time?
But then—or was she imagining it?—no! The chest was moving! Only slightly, but it was moving!
That meant the creature was breathing! It was still alive!
She did not know why this knowledge filled her with such joy. Simple, unthinking joy. There was no logic to it—her life was complicated by it; and yet, there it was: joy.
She moved forward and gently, more gently that she could have imagined possible, she nuzzled at the creature with her snout. The figure stirred and turned, rolling onto its back.
The eyelids fluttered for a moment, and the little human moaned. But then it shuffled and stilled again.
It's too weak. It must be half-starved, it must need water.
Moving quickly, an urgent, desperate energy suddenly powering her, Tina rushed to the kitchen and came back carrying a cup filled with water. She placed it next to the human. It was the smallest one she could find, but it still dwarfed the small creature. It looked like a miniature swimming pool.
Now what?
Carefully, very gently, Tina reached out and gave the human a prod.
It moaned but did not wake.
I'm too late.
The creature would die. It would surely die, and why that should matter when she had been resolved on killing it anyway was a question she would not even let herself wonder. She blocked the thought as soon as it began to rise.
She felt a wail building up inside her. The human shouldn't die. It just shouldn't.
But if it wouldn't wake up, if it wouldn't drink, then what could she ...?
Her arm moved almost before she willed it, her claws coming carefully together, clamping the human around the chest so delicately that the skin hardly puckered.
It will drown, a traitorous part of her mind screamed. But what choice did she have?
She lifted the human like a rag doll, and dropped it into the cup of water.
There was a small, sad plop.
The human slid beneath the surface of the water and disappeared.
Tina stared anxiously at the water. The seconds ticked away. The ripples widened, slowed, faded.
Come on. Please, please, please ...
Nothing.
The water was still. The creature was dead. It was over.
Tina felt tears pricking suddenly at the back of her eyes...
And then with a bursting, a gasping, an explosion of air, the human surfaced.
Tina grinned, a helpless, foolish grin. It had worked! The human was revived!
It was coughing and choking and—it appeared— being violently sick. But it was alive.
It was so tiny. She peered closer. She had never thought much about human faces before, but they were so expressive. How could so many features be crammed into such a small space? It was strange, alien, not at all like a dragon face, with its beautiful, stern, intelligent curves and scales. No, this human face was squat, flat; ugly, she realised, by dragon standards ... And yet ... And yet, there was something compelling, something uncanny and interesting about those thin red lips, those delicate tufts of hair above those dark eyes, about the sheer mobility of the whole, the way the components were in constant flux, shifting from one form to the next, never staying fixed ...
Tina couldn't quite make out all the minute details. She had to get closer.
Now the human had stopped being sick, though it was still coughing, its mouth contorting strangely into a gaping O, the eyes bulging out obscenely. It was fascinating. Why had she never looked closely at a human face before? They were so odd.
She moved closer still ... and the human's eyes flickered, and Tina realised that the face that she had been observing was observing her back.
Tina had not thought it possible that those eyes could get any bigger, but they did. She could see the whites quite clearly—and how odd that was, to have eyes that were not just white or black or brown, but all three, all at once, one circle within the other!
Then the mouth opened, and a little red tongue came out, and the screaming began.
*~*~*
Tina looked at all the water. It would take time to rectify that. It had soaked the cupboard floor, and was running in little rivulets out into the main cavern. However could she clean it all up? Maybe she would just have to use lots of paper, soak it up. But wasn't that awfully, well, menial? She was a dragon, after all. She thought of what Suzie, her best friend from her college days, would do. Suzie would evaporate it. No question. She'd just open her mouth and zap! A few gouts of flame, a few tendrils of steam, problem solved.
But Suzie was cool. That was the difficulty. It would work for Suzie, no question. But if awkward, klutzy Tina tried it ...
Stop it! Cleaning up the water is not the real problem! The real problem is ...
Tina licked her lips and stared at the upside-down cup that had she had used so recently to successfully revive the human, and reflected on how versatile an object it was.
Refreshing drinks container, human-size pool, and now ... a neat little way to stop a human screaming.
Except it hadn't stopped the screaming, of course. It had just made the screaming a bit more muffled. And, what was worse, it seemed to Tina a profoundly, well, un-dragonish thing to do.
Certainly not something Suzie would have done to stop a human screaming. It was effete, somehow, a little pathetic. If she had really wanted the thing to be quiet, why hadn't she just squished it?
But then, if she had wanted it dead, why had she gone to such trouble to revive it?
Tina sighed. The more she thought about it, the more confused she felt.
It would be so much easier to think if the bloody creature would stop shouting!
Maybe she could reason with it? That didn't feel quite right, either, but she had to do something, after all, the girls would be back soon ...
Tina crouched down towards the glass and very carefully tilted it so that a little gap appeared at one edge. At once, the muffled screaming stopped.
"Hello?" said Tina, tentatively.
There was silence.
Tina was struggling to remember what sh
e knew about humans. They were intelligent, weren't they? She remembered the ones she had seen in the zoo had lived in simple little communities. They even showed rudimentary traces of culture. She remembered a clever pet human she had seen on Krathnor's Got Talent that had even been able to read books and jump through hoops. And looking back to those few, terrifying moments when she had first found the humans trespassing in her cave, hadn't they shouted things to each other? If that was true, then this one must be able to speak!
Emboldened by her line of thought, Tina tried again, more confidently.
"Human?" she said. "Little human under the cup? Can you hear me?"
There was a pause.
Then came a reply, in a small but surprisingly deep voice.
"No."
This was not an answer Tina had been expecting, and she found herself wrong-footed for a few moments, until she mustered the wherewith to counter with, "I think you are."
There was more silence.
"Prove it," came the little voice at last.
Encouraged that obfuscation was at least a step up from screaming, Tina began to feel she was getting into her stride.
"I think I could do that," said Tina. "If I wanted to, I mean. But I'm worried that if I do that, you'll start screaming again."
"No I won't," replied the voice, instantly. "I'm not here. No one's here. If I were here, that would mean that I was not safely at home having a rather unpleasant nightmare. And as I am fairly certain that that is where I actually am, it is reasonably safe to assume that I will not start screaming again, as I am not, as has previously been established, actually here."
"Is that a promise?" asked Tina, cautiously. "I mean, if I lift the cup up, you're not going to suddenly decide that you are here, after all?"
"I can't make promises," replied the voice. "I'm not here, after all. But I can say I'm pretty certain about it."
Tina thought about this for a moment.
She shrugged.
"OK," she said, and lifted the cup into the air.
The human was crouched beneath. It looked very small and slender. Tina peered at it, marvelling at the way the black hair had clumped together in sodden tails. Its clothes were soaking, and they stuck to the delicate creature in odd ways, outlining and emphasising the curves of the flesh beneath. Tina felt a stab of pity. It was so tiny, so vulnerable. It must have been freezing.
Tina licked her lips, waiting for the screaming to begin again, ready to slam the cup down once more at the first hint of noise. But the human was quiet. It kept its head down, buried in its soaking cloak, and did not look up.
"Are you still not there?" asked Tina, when the silence had become uncomfortably long.
"I'm not sure," said the little human. "I think so. It's difficult to tell."
Poor little thing. No wonder if it's having problems thinking properly. It's been half starved, half-drowned, and now it's probably scared senseless about what I'm going to do to it.
"It's OK," she said, trying to sound reassuring. "I'm not going to eat you or anything. I'm on a diet, actually."
The human's head twitched. Slowly, very slowly, the neck bent backwards, until at last those two strange eyes were regarding Tina carefully. They were a wonder, those eyes. So tiny, so dark and so white at the same time. They ... sparkled, somehow.
"You're on a diet," the human repeated flatly. It didn't sound like a question. Tina had the sudden strong urge to justify herself.
"Well, I'm not doing anything drastic, obviously," she gave a little laugh that she meant to be ironic and waved vaguely at her belly with a wing. "Slow and steady, like they say. Don't try and do too much at once. Just cut down on a few naughty things. Less carbs, more exercise. I'm taking classes," she added, a note of defiance in her voice.
Tina shook herself inwardly. What are you scared of? You're worried that this human is going to laugh at your diet? Tina, you really are a silly girl!
But it was strange. For some reason, she found that it did matter to her what the human thought. How absurd! And yet, there it was.
The human snorted, and lowered its head back down slowly into the folds of its sodden cloak.
"Diets," it said morosely. "How I hate diets. Loathsome things. They always start off OK. In the beginning it's easy. But those last few pounds ..."
The human looked up again, shaking its head despairingly, and trailed off. Then it shrugged its shoulders, and for the first time a hint of a smile was there, a fleeting flash of white teeth, a glimmering in those dark eyes.
"I don't think you need to worry about losing weight, though," said the human.
"Really?" said Tina, genuinely touched. "From the front I look OK, I just hate it when I catch a glimpse of myself in profile. I feel so fat. And my tail is just ... it's a disgrace, really. Nothing near what a dragon should look like."
Tina realised she was hunching her shoulders, and forced herself to relax.
The human rolled those exquisite dark eyes.
"Here we go again," it said. "Another example. Another casualty."
"What?" said Tina. "What do you mean?"
"Well, who says?" asked the human. It drummed its fingers quickly on its chest, agitated. "Who says what a dragon should look like? I mean, you're a dragon, aren't you?"
Tina nodded.
"Exactly. And what do you look like?"
"Um ... me?" hazarded Tina.
"Correct, yes, you look like you. You are you, and you are a dragon: ergo, a dragon looks like you."
Tina, who only had a vague idea what ergo meant, but who liked the overall direction the argument was taking, nodded enthusiastically. Then she sagged.
"But in the magazines ..."
"Aha!" exclaimed the human. "Now we come to the heart of things! Listen, you don't need to worry about what anyone else thinks you should look like! As long as you're happy with how you feel, what's the problem?"
The human had risen to its feet, and actually come a few steps forward, all previous terror forgotten, an earnest look in its eyes.
"Well ..." began Tina uncertainly, then she froze.
From the cavern mouth, a clanging noise indicated that the front gate was being opened.
The human paused, head tilted curiously to one side.
"Who's that?" it asked, a hint of caution creeping back into its voice.
"Those are my flatmates," said Tina. She sighed. "They are definitely not on a diet."
"Oh."
"Yes."
There was a pause.
"You haven't got any of those magazines that made you feel fat, have you?" asked the human hopefully. "Maybe we could convince them ..."
Tina shook her head.
What should she do?
"I think," she said slowly, "that the safest thing for you to be right now would be a tea-bag."
She just had time to fill the cup up with water again before her flatmates found her.
*~*~*
"Kate?" repeated Tina uncertainly. "Isn't that a bit of a ... of, well, a dragonish name? I thought you humans were called things like Nacrathorn or ... or Butrex the Wise, odd names like that ..."
She trailed off. Kate was looking at her with those strange, piercing eyes.
"What are you saying?" she replied flatly. "Are you saying that just because I wasn't born with wings and a tail, that I have to have some stupid human name that you have to have a degree in ancient languages to be able to pronounce?"
Tina smiled and looked away, leaning back on the grass and staring at the blue sky overhead. They were alone in a meadow, far out from the hustle and bustle of the town, and Tina found she was enjoying the little human's company more than she would have thought possible. It was only yesterday that she had spirited her out of the storage cupboard and past her flatmates, but it seemed to her that they had known one another much longer. Maybe it was something to do with their short life spans, Tina wondered, then pushed the thought away quickly. She didn't want to think about that.
Anyway,
this feeling of getting to know one another quickly was why it had come as a shock when she had suddenly realised they did not know one another's names.
"No, I'm not saying that," Tina said softly. "I'm not a ... a speciesist or anything. It's just, well, the humans you read about in books, or the ones in the zoo—"
"All have those awful old-fashioned names." Kate paused, and looked sheepish. "Actually, Kate isn't the name I was born with. I changed it when I was eighteen, when I left home."
"Really?" asked Tina, rolling to face the little human again. "What name were you born with?"
Kate paused, then mumbled in a very small voice.
"What?" asked Tina.
"Smeelor, Tamer of Worlds."
Tina blinked, snorted a laugh, tried to call it back, realised it was pointless, and collapsed into fits of helpless giggling.
"Hey! Don't be mean! I mean, after all, what sort of a name is Tina?"
Tina looked at her flatly. Kate sighed.
"Fine," she said. "I admit it. There's nothing wrong with Tina. It's a perfectly good name."
They both laid back down, and were silent for a few moments. Tina could feel the warmth of the small human body next to her flank. It felt good, somehow. Comfortable.
"Where is your home?" asked Tina, suddenly struck by the thought.
Kate shrugged, a little too quickly. "Haven't got one. Not anymore. Not sure I ever really had one, if I'm honest. I grew up in a town, oh, miles away."
She waved one arm vaguely, then let it drop back to the grass by her side.
"I never really fit in there, if I'm honest," Kate said, turning on her side, and looking up at Tina. "My family, they were an uncivilised bunch. I mean, I was adopted, actually. They looked after me OK, they were never cruel or anything."
"What was the problem, then?" asked Tina
"They were all obsessed with bloody questing," Kate said, shaking her head. "I mean, not that there's anything wrong with it. That's fine if it's what you're into. But I thought, there must be more to life, you know? But no, it was always, 'Smeelor, why can't you be more like your brother Kantrex and slay some big giant beasty?' , 'Smeelor, we're all going to reclaim the Jewel of Minimaz from the Dread Snake of Zah', 'Smeelor, have you finished forging that magic sword yet?'"
Modern Serpents Talk Things Through Page 2