The dragon's name

"Imagine a man comes to your life, destroys everything, leaves you to suffer for what seems like an eternity, and then after many years he returns as a hero to repeat the history. How would you feel?"

The girl sitting in front of him seemed genuinely compassionate. "I would feel terrible to see him back," she said and looked back at him expectantly.

"Now imagine, for many reasons, you cannot stay angry at him, you cannot be rude towards him, you cannot blame him for everything that happened, you cannot ban him from your territory, and most importantly you cannot tell him that it all was his fault. How would you feel now?"

The girl's face changed. She looked baffled and uncomfortable. "Confused, a little sympathetic, maybe just angry at myself? I am not sure."

"Exactly. And do you know what the worst part is?"

The girl shook her head. Her innocent green eyes stared at him with an unnamed emotion.

"At some point, you realise that you actually love him. Not the romantic kind, or the obsession, or the hate-turned-into-something-intense type of love. You just love his being, and sometimes thank the universe for his existence."

"Huh?" she would have said something else if her taxi had not arrived. She thanked him, shared her phone number, requested him to take care of himself, and left. She turned to see him one last time, and gave her a smile, something so sweet and pure that it made Vee feel guilty.

"She fell for you," said Henry. His translucent shape hovered over the counter now. "Even though she didn't understand a thing that you said."

"Don't you ever get jealous?" Vee asked him in a tired voice.

A passing by maid stopped for an instant, only to realise that it was not directed to her. Throwing a strange look she left.

"Jealous of what?" Henry asked. After all these years, still, now his face was that of a teenager. He was twenty-four when they met. Vee was twenty-three. When he was frozen in time, the same thing happened to Vee. so many had lost because of the sin they committed.

"If you mean the continuous flirting, then my answer is no. I am not exactly available, and you are still alive."

Vee frowned. Something about the comment – which was true – made him utterly upset and irritable. He threw the pen in his hand loudly and pushed his chair violently. "Marissa, I am going out. If someone comes for check-in, you will attend them." He left the hotel without waiting for an answer from the twenty-three years newbie. She probably had something to say, but Vee didn't wait to hear her out.

She was a graduate of an ace hotel management school. She should be able to manage these small things. She had, at least, somebody to train her in the practical applications of what she learned at her school. After the first, when Vee took charge of the hotel, there was nobody sane enough to train him, help him or even support him. His only support, Henry had gone into limbo. He was alone.

There were times in the past when Henry had shown ownership over Vee. he had reacted, at times violently, when he saw Vee with others. Those days, Henry had no form. The rage of the phantom earned the hotel a reputation for being haunted. One night, after a one-night stand with a boarder, Vee first saw Henry, wailing and thrashing around debris in the alley behind the hotel.

When Vee realised that he could not touch him, or hold him, he broke into sobs himself. His heart was shattered. Since that night, Vee had a different side that he hid carefully, affectionately; it was the side only Henry could see.

"I stopped getting jealous since the day he claimed his name." Henry's whisper brought a flowery breeze in his direction."

Vee said wistfully, "I miss those days when you'd get mad at me for even talking to others."

"That was when we were both young. It was new love, fresh and young, innocent and somewhat ignorant. We didn't know better. Of course, we'd get jealous of each other." Henry laughed and soared along with Vee. "We have grown up now. Even though we don't look like it."

Vee wanted to hold his hand. He took a deep breath and asked, "You felt it too when he claimed his name?"

"Of course, we are all connected to him in a way."

Vee would talk more, but a black Rolls Royce blocked his path. A young man in a suit climbed out of the beast's belly and asked him, "Is Master Maxime available in the hotel right now?"

"I am not sure. Since his lover has appeared, he has become a ghost. Don't expect to wag his tail for you lot anymore." He ignored the man's venomous contempt and walked forward.

"That was Lady Pallas, you shouldn't have ignored her like that. She is already fuming about the fact that Max sat at the same dining table as her sister. Who knows what she will do when she loses her temper."

Vee made a face and replied, "That old bat can screw herself and her sister. Once the curse is broken, she is going to die of old age and STDs, and I will poison her bitch of a sister myself."

Henry stayed quiet. He would have started a fight over it if he was in his regular state. But now he didn't care anymore. He knew Vee was not the beast he tried to appear like. Even in the past, he would come up with an excuse every time the master's house tried to assign him a dirty job. Not that it mattered, but it showed what kind of person Vee was.

"Sometimes, I feel bad for them. The old kin, I mean. They made one mistake and suffered for almost a century." Henry's voice sounded like a wistful song in his ears. He snorted.

"Ordering to kill someone is not a small mistake," he said. A couple of people passed him with selfie sticks and cameras, capturing everything around them.

"They did what they thought was right. They thought that Max broke the code of nature, and it needed to be rectified. They probably thought of it as weeding the garden or something. Who knew, they were warranting a dragon's curse."

To some extent, Henry was right. But that did not pardon the sin of committing a murder. Once the dragon was here in their plain, he was life under human laws, and human laws never allowed anyone to be killed just for falling in love. Maybe in the past centuries, when homosexuality was seen as a crime, they didn't care about that.

They were scared to have him around. That was it. They were proud to call themselves the descendants of myths and legends. When a real legend came between them, they were just too scared to accept it — accept him. That was it.

"What was it like? When did he claim his name? Everybody makes such a big deal of it." Vee looked up above him where Henry was floating. He felt it too, but that was probably different from what they felt.

"It was like an electric shock. It was intense like suddenly I had touched something very hot, and there was a powerful shockwave in my body. I mean in my existence. I mean –"

"I get it," Vee stopped him raising his hand, and said, "I felt that too. That's it?"

"Everywhere there was a golden flash. There was this searing heat everywhere. Everyone, every soul that is somehow touched by the dragon felt that heat. And when he said it, his name, it kept echoing in our ears. We tried to shut the noise down, but it was everywhere. It was in the air, water, and even the soil vibrated when he said his name. We looked at the sky and his name reverberated from the blue nothingness. The leaves in the trees, the petals of the flowers, the waves in the rivers, and all the music in this town kept on repeating the name somehow."

Vee remembered that year. It was abnormally hot; the tourists, the locals who belonged to the new kin, and the weather department – everyone was equally baffled by the sudden climatic change. They could not hear all the noises in the air as the old kin did. They could not even see the flashes of golden lights.

"And then we heard the whispers. We still can't tell what scared us more, the fact that he was coming back, or the way nature reacted to him. That day we all realised how a dragon is connected to nature."

Vee felt anxious suddenly. Henry was right. Even though his return was a blessing for them, it was also a huge risk. He was never a rational soul. Dragons were in charge of preserving and maintaining a balance of nature. But he was the contradiction of balance.

Vee didn't care about the balance though. "When I heard him claiming his name, the only thought that crossed my mind was what I was going to do when I see you in your own form again."

"I wonder when will it happen." Henry sighed, and the voice sounded like a whisper blown away with the wind.

Vee clenched his fists. "It was bound to happen. A dragon's name is a nuke. There's no way it won't work, especially when it is said by him. It will destroy everything old and stale. Don't you see, it has already started."