Amaru looked at the entrance to the apartments and complained mildly in dragon, "I will be forced to maintain my compression this tightly the entire time I'm in there."

Language lessons first, Chris decided as he looked the other dragon over. Amaru looked like a large, but fairly ordinary man. He was still dressed in the strange outfit, but now Chris knew that the other dragon created wrinkles of his own skin, and shaped and colored it like clothing, instead of folding his clothes into a pocket of himself and carrying them along. He wondered why he'd never thought of trying that. It would have come in very handy at a few points during several of his human lifetimes.

It took him a moment of effort to adjust his own throat to ask, "Is it difficult for you?"

Amaru replied almost grudgingly, "I do not have a good balance yet in this form, so it takes more energy. I suppose that I can maintain it for several days if needed."

"After Anne is recovered, I can go to the mountain every day instead," Chris replied as he opened the door.

"Why return to this place every day?" Amaru asked with a baffled expression as he followed Chris inside.

Chris wondered how to answer. It is convenient? It is my home for now? I have internet access here? "There are useful things and friends." Not that Anne was a friend exactly, not yet, but it was simpler to group her with Mac for now. "Wait here while I check on her," he instructed with a gesture toward the living area.

Amaru looked around the large room and commented, "For a little one, this is a decently sized cave I guess."

Chris hesitated at the door to the guest room. Cave? Dragons had words for so many concepts, surely they had a word for room. He tried to come up with one for a moment, but failed. After a moment he shook his head and opened the door to check on Anne.

He frowned at the half full glass of water beside the bed as he approached the still form. Even from here he could tell immediately that it wasn't the cold stillness of death, because her breath was an audible whistling wheeze. He was a little worried that their voices hadn't woken her though.

When he got close enough to see her face, he stared. There were smears like blood. After a breath, he noticed that her fist was clutching a spoon, and she was curled up around a small carton of melted ice cream dregs. It wasn't the dried brown of blood, it was chocolate.

Exasperation warred with amusement. On the plus side, she was doing well enough to have found food on her own, and had felt hungry enough to eat it. The downside was that the cold would increase the congestion in her lungs. Her breaths were shallow and noisy, and she still looked feverish.

He gently removed the damp carton from the bedding and her loose grasp and set it aside. Then he picked up the small thermometer and reached out to rub it against her forehead.

--

Anne woke up suddenly, and flailed her arms at whatever had touched her face. A moment later she flailed with more purpose toward the blurry figure leaning over her. She would have screamed, with fear or anger, she wasn't sure, but the scream died in her throat as the soothing voice apologized and insisted, "It is just me."

"Chris?" she croaked doubtfully.

"Yes," he assured her. "I am just trying to take your temperature, okay?"

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"Your hair," she pointed at the dark color that had replaced the shining gold.

"I colored it to match Juan's ID photos," he explained as though it were as ordinary as changing his shirt.

She glared at him, as she reached for the tissues and realized that she was still gripping her ice cream spoon. She let herself be distracted for a moment while she hunted a little frantically for the carton that she didn't remember finishing, until she saw it sitting beside her glass.

She used the tissue to mop gingerly at her crusted nose, and glared at Chris again before reaching for the glass. "I thought you were going to steal from him," she complained. "Why are you using his ID?"

"I will be stealing a lot of things from him. I will just be using his identity to do it," Chris explained.

Anne shook her head and argued, "Disguises like that only work in stories and shows."

"It would be easier if I could take his hand first, but I will manage," Chris told her confidently. He sounded amused.

She squinted at him, and wondered if his eyes were a different color. The ripples made it hard to focus, but she was pretty sure they were brown. Brown was a common color, but she felt like they hadn't been brown before, although she couldn't think what color they had been. She shook her head again, and froze as a strange sound came from the living room.

She didn't know how to describe the humming vibration that might have sounded like a trill at a higher pitch. A much higher pitch. Something at the back of her brain insisted that the source was large and scary. Chris had turned his head toward the door, but he hadn't flinched like she had.

"What was that?" she asked warily.

Even though she couldn't get her eyes to focus properly on his face, she could see his wide grin as he suggested lightly, "A grumpy old dragon."

"Dragon," she repeated flatly. She remembered him claiming to be a dragon according to an older dragon before.

"We'll be working on language lessons. You don't have to worry about making either of us sick," he assured her.

Anne glared at him again. "I need to pee!" she announced abruptly. It wasn't even a lie. The amount of energy it took to get off the bed and stomp, or at least stagger toward the door was embarrassing though. Especially when Chris just clucked his tongue at her and didn't move to help.

She didn't know what she'd been expecting. His roommate, the mysterious Mac maybe. But what she saw when she pulled herself through the doorway was… not a person. Not a dragon. It was a golden sea of light in the center of the room.

Waves of clear water rippled through the entire room, making everything within it waver as though she were trying… to look at Chris. Somehow she forced her head to turn away from that golden sea and look back at him for a moment. The ripples around his features were small and merely glimmered compared to the radiance that pulled her gaze back into the living room.

A brief burst of that strange sound stirred the waves that rolled out of the golden sea at the center of the room. It was a sea too, vast, and deep. Impossibly large and yet impossibly small. The bright golden core of the watery light of the sea occupied a relatively small portion of the room.

"Dragons are made of water?" she whispered as her knees buckled and she fell toward the floor.

--

Chris reached out and caught Anne as she fell.

Amaru looked faintly surprised as he gazed at them. "You told her that we are dragons?" he asked in dragon.

Anne shuddered as though the words were a physical wave that shook her body. Chris answered the older dragon in English, "Yes, I told her that we are dragons." He expected Anne to look up at him when he said it, but her eyes were fixed on Amaru. "This is Anne. She seems to see water when she looks at us?" he added questioningly as he carried her toward the bathroom.

Anne nodded after a moment. "You ripple, but… but… there are waves," she choked out. Her head was turning to keep her gaze on Amaru as they passed the older dragon.

He paused in front of the bathroom door and struggled to balance her while getting a hand free to open it.

"Sea water?" Amaru asked.

"No, they sound the same, but I said she sees water when she looks at us," Chris replied in dragon so that the older dragon could understand.

Anne gave a squeak and stared up at him in horror. At least, he took it for horror, since she was shivering uncontrollably and pushing herself away from his chest. He dropped her gently back onto her own feet, and released her slowly, wary against another fall.

She stepped backward through the bathroom door, and then reached out to snatch the knob and pull it shut between them with a solid thump.

He could hear her voice clearly enough when she shouted loud enough to make her raspy voice crack, "I need a few minutes!"

Amaru asked incredulously, "Your friend is one of the wise?"

Chris blinked, and spun on one heel as he blurted, "What?"