it's lonely being an orphan. no family of your own, no home to go to, but most of all no one to hold your hand when you need it most. when supernatural children are left to fend for themselves they are sent to an orphanage designated to hide the children's identities until of age before setting out for the human world and "acting" the role of a peaceful and non-mythical citizen. when muse a, a dysfunctional dragon who can't shape shift meets muse b, a large werewolf with a big heart to match his size something sparks between the two, though impossibly different from each other, they become inseparable. as time goes on muse a begins to notice how her heart seems to flutter whenever muse b is around or how nice he looks first thing in the morning, despite the whole drooling deal. without muse b's knowledge, muse a has fallen in love however, muse a grows restless in the orphanage, starting fights or going missing from her room for days on end. one night, she decides that she will run away to live her life as she pleases and marches to muse b's room to tell him her decision, instead she finds him outside gazing at the stars. after waving her over, looking her in the eye and hooking his pinky with her's, muse b makes her promise something - that they would always be together. the next day, muse a was gone never to be heard from again until muse b stumbles upon an illegal boxing match years later.
A fool fights with fists rather than using his wits. It was amusing, this little proverb and her English teacher had thought so too when she decided to be a poet one late autumn. The small women, with fragile glass features and bubbling, laughing green eyes had giggled in such a faint way it was a mere whisper, but Max heard it as if a gun had been shot next to her ear. “Oh Max, only dragons try to figure out their problems with more violence. It’s quite incompetent actually” had been her reply to Max as the girl tried to explain that maybe if the boy in the class’s most recent story had stood up for himself when the bully came every day to hurt him, he wouldn’t have had to hide behind dumpsters and dark hallways, lying to his parents about why he was covered in bruises and scrapes when the antagonist did eventually find him.
The tree sprite fluttered her way to the black board, steps falling with grace as if she were dancing upon water, so soft and light like a butterfly’s wings brushing against tickled skin. “It’s probably why they’re a dying species”, said Ms. Adelaide in a pitied note turning back to the front row where Max sat, but Max wasn’t in her seat. The dragon had jumped over her teacher’s desk without a sound, not even a creak grunted by aging wooden floor boards and before one student could cry out a warning, Max spat in Ms. Adelaide’s porcelain face and raised a clenched fist which had ended with Ms. Adelaide’s perfect jaw swinging effortlessly in the air as she was guided out of the room by two of her students and Max being restrained by the rest of her peers as she screamed bloody murder, her threats mingled with endless tears and a heavy heart.
Ms. Adelaide never came back to teach her English class and Max was placed into solitude for three months seen as a threat to the other orphans and staff. That proverb was used often, mostly in Max’s general direction when she seemed ready to start another fight which she replied with a shrug and a question. “Remember what happened to Ms. Adelaide?” She then would promptly beat the hell out of the smart-ass and walk herself back to her confinement.
Thing was she wasn’t in the solitary room now and instead of staring at a blank blue wall, she clutched a folded shirt and rocked on her heels, eyes closed in front of a gaping backpack. “How do I even tell him”, she mumbled to the empty air and nothing but a cold, gentle wind hovering though an opened window replied. It had been two years since the Ms. Adelaide incident and two years since Aiden walked up to her as she left a classroom holding a folder of homework and asked as to why he had never seen her before. Max’s laughter turned to dead silence as she explained that she broke a teacher’s face which in turn he laughed saying she wasn’t very bright. Max smacked him with the folder, puffing with bloated pride as she tensed as if to jump on him until a teacher poked his head out the doorway and the dragon had disappeared as if turned ghost.
“Yeah, I’m not very bright”, she admitted later making it her goal to find him and give him a piece of her mind. “But at least I don’t look like someone threw bleach on my face.” It was lame, turning into the same bully that chased around the boy in the book, but she was lonely so very lonely. In bitter resentment towards her differences and pain she took it out against a stranger she just met, someone looking at her with an odd expression across what seemed like a scarred face that made her lower lip jut out and eyes water and sting. “You’re stupid, yah know!?” she yelled rubbing her cheeks from trickling tears. “Kids are scared of me, adults are scared of me! You should be scared of me and yet you’re actin’ like your brave or something! You’re stupid! Stupid, stupid, stup-!!” Her nose twisted and an angry sob knotted in her stomach as he placed a hand on her shoulder, white threads of hair falling over his forehead and smiling like an angel.
Her friendship with Aiden was new, like a stumbling calf that tripped and skirted across dewed grass. She hated him for making her feel like a monster and not taking her bait to hit her or at least shout, but the hate swirled into an unbreakable friendship, unlikely and odd but perfect. Until now, until Max decided that she was leaving the orphanage without him and forgetting about this life. Problem was, she didn’t want to forget him.
“I’m going to run away, Aiden and I thought that the night of my escape would be the perfect time to tell you. Who doesn’t like a surprise, right?” she snarled throwing her hands into the air as she tossed the shirt to the ground. It was horrid and villainous, but she wasn’t going to back out of this, not for him not for anyone. This was her life, her choice and like hell would anything deter her now.
She took a breath, long and exaggerated like a warrior about to charge into a battle and walked out the door and through a moonlit hallway. She could hear tiny snores slip through cracks, orphaned children sleeping as a shadow slinked away with no intention to be discovered. Silver eyes snapped back and forth, apprehension maybe that someone would find her, possibly figure out her plan and stop her. She shuddered, a mix of relief and dread following as she looked to knock on his door but instead glanced out a window and found him, gazing at the star lite sky as if it would burst forth with all the answers to the universe and only gift them to him.
“Idiot”, she muttered and rushed down the stairs, each step taken with care until she reached the ground floor and walked out into winter nipped air. She grew smaller in that split second, hugging herself in a tight protective shield with bare arms as her courage shrinked to that of a small mouse. Max watched his back, unsure of what to say or where to start and she was tempted to turn around before he even caught glimpse of her, but her feet seemed to move on their own and there she stood, looking at the stars with her casual attitude of ‘I don’t give a damn’. Her heart thumped against her chest, pushing an unsteady rhythm and she could feel heat traveling to her cheeks and neck, but thankfully the night disguised it. She wavered a glance, a mist of fogged cloud lifting as she spoke through chattering teeth.
“Don’t you even get cold? It feels like it’s freaking below zero out here and it doesn't even phase you.”
The sky held no boundaries. Beyond the atmosphere, beyond the gravity that pulled Aiden to the ground, there was only the void. Every tiny speckle of light glittered in the silky black sky. That area of the world, where the orphanage was rested, held little light pollution, so the sky was always almost glowing with stars.
He was lost in his moment. Time was nothing at night, in a bitter cold air that the young man couldn’t even be bothered by. For one thing, high body temperature created a protection of sorts, an imperviousness to the cold; but even if he didn’t constantly feel like his skin was on fire to the touch of others, he wouldn’t even care. Every exhale exited his body in a cloud of steam, fading quickly into nothing, pushed towards the endless sky. His head was tilted far back, with bright, luminescent eyes ever so slowly moving across the incredible display.
Aiden was no creature to fear. Despite having always been bigger than the other kids, and even though he seemed to carry a natural, yet lean muscularity due to his kind, he was a gentle, insightful spirit. The contrasting markings of lighter skin, lost pigmentation, along some parts of his body did give an excuse for children to make fun of him in the past, when he was still small. But now, he was growing exponentially – and yet, he remained placid in every endeavor he went through. He’d of course had his close calls, moments that could’ve contributed to the caution other children felt. After all, no person, especially a growing teenager, could keep in all of those negative emotions forever; he sometimes came too close to breaking out of his composure, and hurting people. Much of the time, it was over things like his friends.
Or, well .. his one friend in particular, Max, the dragon girl.
Max seemed to just love to get into trouble, and every single time that she did, it was his job to pull her out of the fight and resolve the situation. It’d happened for a long time since they’d met, that day that he’d approached her out of his own quiet curiosity. He could still hear her voice, loud and sneering, and the whap of the folder against his cheek.
They were changing. Both of them. They’d changed a lot since they’d met, honestly. Max seemed to always keep her fire, though. She would always be the small, angry, strong girl that he’d met that first day. The one who bit off more than she could chew literally every time a bad situation arose, who roped herself into fights that always went too far. The stars above had brought on this little bought of nostalgia. A warmth seemed to fill his heart at the thoughts. He pulled in a chilly breath and sighed, his eyes remaining locked on the clear pocket of space all around. A smile tugged at the corners of his lips. She was so weird, and so endearing. Ever since he actually properly spoke to her, when she’d cried her eyes out in anger at him and his kindness, a curiosity had sprouted. There had to be more to her, and ever since then, he couldn’t shake that feeling. No matter how much he’d tried, no matter how much trouble she dragged him into, that little urge to search for more stayed strong above all.
.. He was doing it again. That thing where he trails off, thinking about his friends, thinking about Max in specific most of the time. He sniffled. His fingers, woven together in his lap, flexed gently, becoming stiffer with sitting still for so long. He was sitting with his legs criss-crossed, on soft grass that would be dewy by morning. It was a silent night, so he could hear everything – enhanced senses with a deathly quiet atmosphere made any tiny shift far more noticeable.
This became evident when the creaking of a door sucked him out of his deep pool of thoughts. He blinked once, realizing both the ache in his neck from craning it back and the fact that a presence was approaching him. He tilted his head down, stretching the muscles of his neck and taking in soft, but deep inhales of the air. His mouth opened a sliver to taste the scents of the air more clearly. At first, his shoulders tensed, thinking that it was one of the caretakers coming out to retrieve him; it seemed unlikely, with how cautiously he always snuck out, but it was certainly possible. But, no. The scent that was carried to him, faint, but growing stronger, was a familiar one that filled him with the same warmth he had thinking back to making his close friend. It was her scent, Max’s scent, that he had caught in that moment – sharp, smelling of the scorched bark of a tree and the smoke that would rise from it, but with something underneath that made an instinct rise in him. One of protectiveness, one of home.
Her footsteps in the grass drew near, until her voice, like a melody to his ears, sang underneath the sparkling sky. "Don’t you even get cold? It feels like it’s freaking below zero out here and it don’t even phase you.” It was a snappy, gruff tone that she always carried on the surface, with much deeper meaning underneath that he could never decipher without her describing it.
His head tilted back and his eyes darted towards her, glowing amber as they always did. His expression was neutral, calm, with a faint etching of inquisitiveness along his features. In a playful gesture, he flashed her a grin. “I’m literally always scorching hot, remember?” He twisted himself around a tad to face her better. “You called me a .. ,like a walking campfire or something just a few days ago.” His own voice was soft, with it’s own complex strength underneath, cool and mysterious. For them being close to the same age, he was already a fair bit smarter than other young boys like himself. Among his warmth at seeing his friend, he also felt a pang of curiosity. Max didn’t often come out to join him under the stars, on those nights that he would go. She thought it was dumb, just staring at a bunch of lights in the sky. She would sometimes come out and watch, on rare moments when they talked about what felt like everything.
But, despite his mild curiosity, he turned himself back the way he was facing and patted the spot next to him, as if offering for her to sit next to him. He had no clue whether she would accept or not; she was so unpredictable, you could never know what her next reaction to something you did would be. He knew that she’d most likely either coldly, stubbornly refuse, or would grumpily plop down beside him – but even then, he couldn’t know for sure.
He had fallen silent. His eyes trained back up onto the sky again, not quite as high up as he’d been doing for most of the night, but high enough. Again, it felt as though it was just him and the universe, with an extra person that had yet to join him on his reflections.
What a horrid mistake – no, this was more complex than that. It had to be a nightmare. A demented, twisted dream where the only person she ever grew to trust, the person she loved had become her greatest obstacle in her course to freedom. There were shadows, torn demons that dripped hesitation draping over her shoulders, weighing her very soul to the pits and she feared that if she looked him in the eyes he would see the truth behind a mask of indifference. Her hands fell only to gripe each other, nails biting through numb skin before taking a small hiss of breath, seeping emotions wiped back to the depths and pulling on her usual husky tone, notes of tease bouncing to and fro.
“Geez, aren’t you cheeky. I guess then you won’t mind me stealing some of the heat, eh campfire?” She in absolute boldness, stepped next to him and rather than sitting down by his side, fell ungracefully into his lap only to be left gasping sharply in pain. “Oh my gosh. You’re like some kind of thorny cushion”, she wheezed rolling to over so she could face the stars, lazily rubbing aching ribs. She could have sworn that was a good idea – the conclusion was unsatisfactory as his knee seemed more like a knife than a mere bone.
Sneaking a glance at Aidan, she felt her heart pounding as if drumming out a need to be heeded in woeful warning – don’t do this, but she ignored it and focused on what to say next, how to say the truth without giving away the truth. It was thick, this fog of silence but in reality, it was the most comforting as she gave up on tentative sentences and began measuring out his features – hell, she was memorizing them and in a tangled mess of misgivings, regret, and lonely happiness she found that her reason for coming out here was becoming dim, like a small light flickering as it moved further and further away into the dark. She was thankful for it.
She patted his cheek, slightly shocked that she found lean muscle instead of the baby fat she had first seen him with. She had forgotten that both of them were growing up and in that pitiful moment, she cup his face with a cold hand, thumb sweeping over and over again the cream colored patch that made him so unique. “There’s nothing up there you know? Just burning gases of light that will go dark in time and galaxies you can’t see. You might just even get lost looking into the dark for too long.”
A pause. Was she talking about him or herself? Getting lost in a world of vivid imagination, not even knowing if what you’re looking at is truly there. Dreaming up an adventure when you already had one right in front of you. She sighed, something mixed with exasperation and a feeling she couldn’t describe. It was making her chest squeeze, tighten around the air within her lungs until she felt like she would cry.
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author's note
i'm the worst partner ever.
i'm sorry for not replying until like 3 weeks later?
