Fragment 61

Old Jose collected the growlers full of water from the bartender. The jugs were designed for beer refills before the new virus put a damper on reusable bags and containers, but they would do a fine job of keeping water cool.

He lingered a moment to enjoy the song that the young man on stage was singing. The tune was from another time, old when he was young, but it spoke to him more than it had when he'd first heard it. The youngster was also putting a lilt into the words that belonged to another place as well as another time, and he was really good.

People in this era instinctively camouflaged themselves with conformity. Accents were sanded away to the best of their ability, and jeans and t-shirts were common in a hundred countries. Everyone wanted to be different, to be seen as an individual, but at the same time, no one wanted to stand out too much.

The young woman who turned away from the stage rather abruptly was an excellent example of that. Her almost metallic hair called for attention, but her clothes were conservative. She returned his gaze with surprising intensity.

Jose felt nervous beneath her intensely curious stare, and oddly, it reminded him of another exceedingly curious gaze.

"You smell…" she began but then hesitated uncertainly.

Jose felt an uncustomary heat rise in his weathered cheeks. He very likely did smell, but few people had ever commented on it from six paces away. He instinctively took a step backward as she stepped forward, crowding the personal space of the person behind him at the bar even further.

He froze when she opened her already open eyes like a cat, or like an alien from television back when all the aliens had human shapes because CGI didn't exist yet. Only… Jose had never found any of those frightening. This was like meeting the gaze of a tiger without any barrier. Her eyes spoke to nerves at the base of his spine.

Old, despite her smooth skin, dangerous, despite her small soft hands, and utterly inhuman in that moment. She stalked closer, and suddenly a short stream of water shot over his shoulder and hit her in the face. A breath he hadn't realized he'd taken escaped him as she blinked against the onslaught, and closed that otherness in her eyes.

"Social distancing," the bartender reminded almost nonchalantly.

The copper haired woman, who wasn't quite human, took a long step back and pouted cutely as she raised a hand to scrub at her face. Jose shifted sideways so that he wasn't crowding the bar as closely, but he didn't dare step toward her.

"What's he smell like?" a familiar girl's voice asked.

Jose blinked and dared a glance over his shoulder. It took him a moment to recognize her face. It wasn't just that she was plumper and cleaner than the last time he'd seen her. It was her interested and amused expression that had changed Anne's face the most.

"Like he's been wearing dragon hide recently," the copper haired one replied sharply. "I thought you left?"

Jose froze. There was only one thing he'd been wearing recently that wasn't on him now. The shell the dangerous stranger had given him.

"I had to pee, hu- normal people do that," Anne replied dryly. Her voice shifted as she addressed Jose apologetically with a trace of guilt, "And hi, um, I've been meaning to…" She waved her hands helplessly in Jose' peripheral vision. "…visit, I guess?"

Jose blinked. He felt disoriented by Anne's normality in the face of the dangerous copper haired woman, and her apparent awareness that the woman was not exactly human.

The woman tossed her coppery hair and huffed, "You know him? Does, ah, Amaru spend time with him often?"

Jose dared to turn away from her long enough to watch Anne's face as she insisted with confusion, "I know Old Jose, and he's a good person. But as far as I know Amaru spends most of his time up on the mountain."

Their conversation was necessarily loud because of the required spacing among the bar's patrons, and people were giving all three of them disapproving looks. The copper haired woman returned her gaze to the young singer on the stage as he belted the chorus verse out with more energy and volume.

"Sorry," Anne whispered loudly.

Jose glanced at the stage and lowered his voice as he asked nervously, "Amaru?" The name sounded vaguely Japanese or something, which didn't really match the large dangerous person who had given him the shell, but he had been a foreigner.

"You won't believe me, but he's actually a really old dragon," Anne confided.

--

Chris felt tired when he finished the last song. Utterly bone weary. The energy he had spent wasn't exactly gone, it still hovered in the room intangible and yet tangible in some way, as it was reflected in the relaxed smiles on the faces surrounding him.

Even if it was a small thing, this moment of harmony was gifted to them by music, despite, or perhaps in spite of, the glasses of poison that they had downed during the performance. Not that any of them thought of the alcohol as a poison, but then, they were human.

Hunger tugged at the edges of his skin, and he was very aware that he had woken from his sleep far too early. He still didn't know why he'd woken decades before he'd expected to, and neither did Amaru, although they had theories.

Tanwen and Anne had come to listen for a while, but had gotten into some sort of dispute with an older looking man with traces of the streets in his manner and his attire. They had left again after only a couple of songs. He did not feel like dealing with the noisy older dragon while tired and hungry, but even though she and Anne were already gone, he was afraid that they were probably waiting in Mac's apartment.

Mac himself was waving and smiling from his usual spot at the bar. Chris smiled back, and made his way across the floor occupied by widely scattered tables. Even Bobby was smiling as she set a glass of water and plate full of uncut fruit and vegetables on the bar.

Chris' own smile widened.

"She's quite a beauty," Mac stated as Chris took the seat beside him.

Chris paused with a carrot halfway to his mouth, and glanced at Bobby. "Who?"

"The… lady who's visiting us?" Mac replied.

Across the bar Bobby raised an expressive eyebrow. Chris shrugged. He wasn't sure what to say. Mac should know as well as anyone that surface appearance didn't matter much for people who could change on a whim if they wanted to.

--

He looked at the small blossoms on the tree that had five kinds of wood twining together to form it's trunk, and wondered whether he should ask them to just leave it like that, or get someone to cut it out of the floor and move it to the garden before they moved back to that area.

The dragons had utterly ruined parts of the floor beyond belief with their attempts to restore the claw marks the emperor had left in the floor, but neither he nor any of the soldiers who had been assigned to the historical palace could bring themselves to object. Living legends stood before their eyes performing magic that they had thought existed only in stories. It wasn't trickery or illusion either.

He caught a paper thin shaving of parqueted wood that drifted within reach on the light breeze that came from the garden outside, and held it between his wrinkled fingers. He no longer feared that he was ill and hallucinating the dragons in front of him, but he still hadn't returned home. If he could have, he would even have called his family to come and live in the historical buildings with him now.

The dragon he had chosen to serve was not an all knowing god, but he was a quite worthy being in his own way. The newcomer was quite colorful, a rainbow of fur and scales, with an air of distracted urgency about him.

He wasn't sure what to think when the colorful one suddenly began waving a broken cell phone, that he'd pulled out of nowhere, at the dragon who had declared himself emperor. One of the soldiers who had escorted the new dragon to the old palace twitched at the sight of it, and he looked more closely. The phone looked like… that was a bullet wasn't it?

He gulped. The soldiers had arrived with some minor wounds, and he'd overheard them mentioning someone who'd been shot and had to stay behind, but he wondered who had been brave and stupid enough to shoot at a dragon. His emperor beckoned and he stepped forward.

"Please see if you can find a replacement for this device," the emperor instructed.

The other dragon held the broken phone out with an amazingly reluctant expression. He reached out to take it as though he had no fear of the long claws that tipped the fingers of the dragon's surprisingly small hands, and wanted to heave a sigh of relief when the dragon released the device. He quickly carried it to the doorway and then hesitated and looked back.

He didn't want to leave the room, but at least now they actually did seem to be successfully repairing the floor… visually at least. The age and artistry of the historical parquet could never be restored even if it appeared identical. He shook his head and stepped out. Dragons were rebuilding the floor from wood grown out of the original surface. Mere human craftsmanship could never replace that.