[Original Fiction] Breathing

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Original Work
SERIES: FOTSM Verse
RATING: General Audiences
WORDCOUNT: 503
PAIRING(S): -
CHARACTER(S): Alamatheï, Alamatheï’s father (and his dragon Tu’aran), Alamatheï’s dragon
GENRE: Bittersweet fluff?
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None
SUMMARY: There are things Alamatheï can feel that others can’t.
DEDICATION(S): -
NOTE(S): This is a rewrite of this piece from 2010, originally posted last June :P

Alamatheï giggles when his feet land on the dark ground and a soft tingle climbs up his legs, slips between his toes into his shins and the bones of his knees like ants racing in his blood.

“What is it, baby?”

“It tickles!” Alamatheï laughs, covering his mouth with chubby fingers, “There’s something in the ground!”

He giggles again, hopping from foot to foot to escape the odd sensation even as he goes to retrieve his dragon—only a hatchling still. She doesn’t even have a name, yet—from under Tu'aran’s left wing. The tickles in his legs don’t ease up though, rising and falling like a dragon between wing strokes, and it reminds Alamatheï of his nights in the egg farm, heat from the shells tucked into his stomach, his back, his neck. He smiles.

“I don’t know what it is,” he says with a giggle, toe squirming in his sandals, “but I like it!”

Alamatheï’s father stands very straight by his side, his back rigid under the pristine wine-red and white tunic. He looks all serious and grim, like always, but the amber of his skin looks duller today, and his hair lost some of its snowy shine. When he looks down at Alamatheï though, it is with the same shiny eyes and downward tilt to his lips, and the hand he uses to muss up Alamatheï’s brown hair is as rough as ever.

“It’s your mother’s gift,” he sighs with a nod at the mountain-like trunk in front of them, mottled with houses and palaces hidden in the branches, “It’s yours to understand.”

He takes his hand off in his custom, abrupt way—like it was never really there in the first place—and Matheï’s gaze falls to his feet and the thick sheet of rotten leaves poking between his toes, questions crawling in his mind like skargnes on his feet. If this came from his mother, he knows, Alathian won’t answer any more question on the topic.

It’s the tree.

Matheï spins on his heels and turns back to Tu'aran, whose large, scaly head has tilted, his better ear turned toward the higher branches.

“What is it doing?”

It breathes.

Alamatheï follows the dragon’s gaze up, toward the topmost branches of the queen-tree where elves and leafers swing from one branch to the next, run between leaves taller than they are and call each other out with sounding horns and shrieks of laughter. The light is different here—it tastes greener on his skin, wetter too—but the people in the trees look like falling stars and the earthly feel of dead leaves fills Matheï with the same rush of happiness as sunrise does—like breakfast, only better.

He stares into the sunlight filtering through the branches and thinks of his mother’s green eyes, her earth-colored skin. Maybe one day, she’ll come back, and he’ll be able to ask if she can feel the tree breathing, too. For now, he turns to Tu'aran, grins, and says:

“I like it.”