It wasn’t until they were done choosing where to camp and setting up their enormous tents that Vermonysis would let anybody look at his leg in earnest.

Caltyr knew as soon as he examined it that Vermonysis should have let them look at it much sooner. The white from his bone was plainly visible.

Fellithe, Vallath and Shriken had quickly slinked away to their tents. They hadn’t wanted to draw any human or demon attention to themselves, so they’d flown to a spot on the map bare of any human or demon dots. It was overgrown and woodsy, with bits of scrap being eaten up by a thick layer of moss.

The long, straight grass told them that this area hadn’t been traversed in quite some time. So they assembled their tents. They were silly to look at, because they were so large they dwarfed some human buildings and structures, but that was why they had searched so long for somewhere secluded.

If Caltyr had to guess, it was past midnight now.

“You really should have let me look at this earlier,” Caltyr chastised the yellow-and-red dragon with a withering glance. He could see his muscles bending and moving in real time whenever he moved his injured leg.

“I didn’t want to, man. Shriken is a huge introvert and I can tell he’s wanted to go be alone somewhere for the last… I don’t know, since an hour after we left. And I knew as soon as anyone took a look at it, it’d be a big thing and no one would set up camp, and then Shriken wouldn’t have anywhere to go to be on his own.” Vemonysis placed a hand behind his neck with a part-grin-part wince. His canines flashed and in the dark of the night, he almost looked intimidating.

Caltyr remembered when he had thought of him as such, when they were younger. The title of ‘first in the class’ had made him seem much less approachable than he had turned out to be.

“I think you having a chunk missing from your leg is more important than someone needing alone time,” the water dragon decided, and he said it in a way that made it sound like he was scolding him. Which he supposed he was.

“I figured you’d say that. But it’s not bleeding as much as I thought it would, so maybe it’s fine.” He shrugged. His golden shoulder scales fanned out.

“It’s not fine. Dragons just don’t bleed much. Miss Tavren told me it was because we’re mostly just made to be mana crystal hosts, so we don’t have as many veins as humans do, and our organs work differently.” Her name passed through his teeth before he noticed it, but he wanted to suck it back in as soon as it did. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work that way. Vermonysis had already heard.

He decided moving on to another subject would suffice. “Light magic can fuse together what’s already there, but it can’t create any new flesh. I’ll do what I can, but it’s going to look… different.”

“I know this is kind of a taboo topic for you, but would you be able to create the new flesh with your other magic?”

Caltyr felt himself tense at the question. He didn’t know what kind of expression he was making, but he doubted he looked especially happy on the outside. “I haven’t used that in years, Vermonysis. I might not even be able to call upon it anymore. All the red’s left my scales.”

“Could you try? Because I haven’t even shown you the underside yet, and that’s worse.” The fire dragon smiled again, which Caltyr was beginning to learn was his reaction when a normal person—or dragon, but Miss Tavren had been adamant that dragons were people too, and humans didn’t own consciousness or personhood—would frown.

“What if the red comes back? I really can’t have Kraven seeing as I tried using my fleshomagic again. He’s been pretty clear about what that would mean for my housing situation.” The water dragon remembered how he had wanted to make him see a therapist for even mentioning what he had done during show and tell, and that had been the brightest his disposition had ever been toward his unique mana.

“It’s not going to stain you after one use, and if it does, I’ll talk to him myself. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Kraven and I are close. He might even be more upset if we didn’t try to fix me using whatever stuff we have at our disposal.” Vermonysis nodded desperately.

Caltyr pulled in a drawn out, shaky breath, Truthfully, he wanted to know if the power was lost to him completely. “If you’re sure you’ll defend me, fine. But I can’t guarantee this will work.”

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“I will. Just heal me, man. It’s getting hard not to scream, and I’d really rather not wake anyone up.” Vermonysis’ eyes sealed shut in a grimace, and even his fake, put-on joy melted away. Deep creases appeared in his forehead and beside his eyes.

Caltyr held his hands out in preparation, not because he needed to, but rather so he would have something to catch himself with if he passed out. All the warmth in him had been replaced with a sinking feeling that made his scales crawl.

He took the deepest breath his lungs would allow, and then tried to cast.

And it was easier than he ever thought it would be. He concentrated on using his light and water to soothe the burnt areas from where the struggle had left Vermonysis’ ankle charred, and pumped in new, unmarred mass. He manipulated it easily, like clay, and it sprung forth as readily and smoothly as his water magic did; which he had been born with.

Adrenaline pumped through him. A strange heartbeat-like feeling squeezed his palms and temples at once. He had thought he’d lost the affinity with lack of use, but instead it felt like he’d been holding in a dam of mana that just wanted to be free.

Caltyr checked that the meat he’d added back into the ankle looked smooth, sealed and uninterrupted before fusing the outer layer of scales together. He blasted his innards with healing light just to make sure everything was in its place, and wouldn’t break down as soon as he stepped on it.

“I think… I think that’s done. Try walking on it.”

“That was amazing,” Vermonysis breathed in shock. He’d been watching the whole thing transpire and he couldn’t think of any other word to describe it. His leg looked new, better even than his body after Miss Tavren’s dying mana explosion repaired him. “I can’t even see any seams.”

“Don’t get too excited. You haven’t tried walking around yet. The rebuilding part is always harder than the disassembling.” The blue dragon checked his arms to see if he had remained blue, and a surprising feeling of disappointment flashed through him when he saw only blue scales tipped with white, like a wave.

It felt like a disservice to this part of himself to seal it back away, with no remnant to remember it by. But what else could he do?

And besides; he had quite enough memories of his fleshomagic for a lifetime. Sometimes, when he slept, his mind even hinted that there were even more buried in there somewhere. And with the heart-pounding dread and searing guilt that always filled him when he even tried to think about them, he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember them.

Some things were best left buried.

“It feels fine, man,” Vermonysis balked, followed by a true, actually-happy smile. Apparently, while Caltyr had been falling into a pit of his own thoughts, Vermonysis had stood up to test his healing job. “Better than fine. It feels good as new. I’ve always had some pain there, but it’s– gone. Completely gone.”

“Did you have pain there even before… what happened?” He still couldn’t bring himself to describe it fully, especially out loud.

“Oh, yeah.” Vermonysis flexed the newly-healed leg out to test it out at new angles, but it just kept working. “Between my parents hitting me and the humans trying to dismember me, I’ve always had some chronic pain stuff. Might even be kind of weird not being in pain in this leg compared to all the rest.”

“Oh.” The explanation felt heavy in the air. Even if Vermonysis’ parents had been bitter about the color of his scales, Caltyr hadn’t put two and two together that they would ever have been violent towards him.

“That’s part of why I always thought Sara was ridiculous when she started calling you evil. You have the power to do stuff like this, and yet you just used it on a mouse in a controlled setting, and on healing me.

“My parents didn’t even have cool flesh powers and they were still awful to me. I’ve never seen you hurt anyone on purpose. The evil is in the action and the type of person you are, not in the type of mana.” The fire-and-lightning dragon’s brows twitched with a far-off annoyance at Sara’s antics.

Caltyr’s eyes widened. It had never occurred to him that Vermonysis could have been defending him against Sara. They always seemed so close, since they ate lunch together and sat at the same table. Most of the times he saw Vermonysis, he was with Sara. But lately, it was Sara seeing Vermonysis with him instead.

“Thanks for saying that,” he choked out.

He could feel his eyes putting in a valiant effort to start bawling, and he wasn’t going to let himself have a full-on breakdown. He had other questions, like why Vemronysis was even friends with Sara and whether they had actually talked about him not being a threat before, but he knew if he opened his mouth his dumb face would start spewing sadness water. Or, in this case, something more complicated than just sadness water.

“I’m going to go.” Caltyr slipped quickly off to the tent he’d set up and slithered inside the zippered opening, which he quickly shut.

He felt bad for not explaining himself further, but if Vermonysis put up with Sara’s bullshit on the regular, surely he would still be there in the morning for when his face was less prone to leaking.

“Oh,” he heard his friend say, “okay.”

He heard him crisply through the fabric of his tent, which made him wonder briefly how asleep the other dragons truly were, and how well they could keep a secret if they’d heard what he had just done.

But he couldn’t even make himself care, especially after he realized he had just thought of Vermonysis as his friend. He face-leaked silently into his thin camping mattress until he opened his eyes and beams of light were streaking through the fabric of his tent.