Dainin hung back a little, watching Path move down the beach. I feel like today has been a good day for us. He picked up something white, but it was a shard of a shell. He moved forward, looking for something she might be impressed by. Actually, for the most part, this has been a great day considering I got her to go from Miss “I won’t like it” to “I’ll try it” today. He watched her moving down the beach, crouching down from time to time, and he smiled a little.
I guess I really have not done this since my mother brought me to my father’s house, he thought as he watched the wind pick up Path’s hair and blow it to the side, showing off the cross-lacing of the ribbon, which was pink, and matched the highlights in her hair. I have not thought about her in so long, he thought, catching some of his own gold hair and pushing it back behind his ear. Did I decide to bring Path down here because I dreamed about her?
He worked his way along the beach, thinking how the ocean air had been something he wanted to smell again when he had first wandered through Dyran to here, but it had not reminded him of home when he had first started to breathe it in. He supposed it had been too long. He picked up a perfectly smooth blue-green stone and pocketed it. He continued his way down the water and found himself thinking about the last day he had spent with her.
Dainin looked up at his mother, they were standing just far enough from the small, mostly meant for servants, the eastern gateway to a castle that… well, she said that it was his father’s. She had been evasive about why she was coming here, bringing him on such a long journey with various merchant caravans. She had been crying a lot. There was an insecure feeling deep in the pit of his stomach, but he didn’t know what to do except follow her lead.
At home, he didn’t have friends, because he was different, but as they had passed through towns and his mother had been so furtive and focused on keeping their cloak hoods up, he sensed that he -really- wouldn’t fit in here.
And now, they were just standing here, after all that walking and all the stays in random roadside inns, and she was just staring at the gate like it might hold some sort of secret or answer to her life.
Dainin swallowed, kept quiet, and kept looking up at her.
Finally, she knelt down, and her eyes were so glassy that he could see himself roughly reflected in them. They had the same kind of gold hair, almost the same shade, but his face was different than hers - broader, less angular, and delicate. His ears weren’t like hers either, with less point on them, less length, and closer to a human’s. A human’s because his father was human. He’d never met his father. She had clear spots like a big cat on her body, but his were almost non-existent. He had never looked like any of the elves from home.
“I want to tell you something,” she said in a tone that was so on the edge of sobbing that he felt his own eyes starting to tear up, but he tried to hold it in. He compressed the sensation as hard as he could toward the center of his chest and begged himself not to cry in front of her. She didn’t like it, and it wouldn’t make… whatever this was better.
But she didn’t continue, instead she just clutched him close, smooshing him roughly against her body, and pressed his face half-suffocatingly against her neck. “I can’t keep you. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m sorry. I was never meant to be a mother, and I just can’t bare the accountability for you anymore. He more than owes me for what he did, and I just can’t take it anymore. I have to be free. I can’t do it,” she said again and again as if it would make it clear.
He couldn’t feel anything, he felt a coldness creeping over his heart and constricting around his chest. He didn’t want to move, he was afraid that the moment he moved, it would break this moment, and she would let go and disappear. That coldness spread through him, dried his eyes, caught his breath, and accelerated his heart. He focused on that, what it was like to feel all these things inside of himself - instead of thinking about what he actually felt. He clung to the physical sensations like they could fence out the emotions that were trying to crowd into his every sensibility.
“I… wanna tell you to be strong, you know, tougher than me. You can do that, can’t you? You’ll be all right. You can take care of yourself. I… I can tell you one thing. It’ll help you. It’s the most important thing I learned, and if you know that now, you’ll be fine, even without me. Right? Right?”
She repeated it insistently, and he knew somewhere from a deep foggy emotional panic that she wanted him to respond. “Right,” he said faintly, not certain at all this moment what he was agreeing to.
She sobbed on him harder, hot tears splattering against his shoulder and she squeezed him so hard his nose hurt as she crushed him against her shoulder and neck. He wanted her to let him go; he didn’t want her to let him go. “You remember one thing, all right? I know it’s going to be hard because you will be different than pretty much everyone else, but, you remember this, and you’ll be fine, all right?” she said raggedly.
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He didn’t even dare swallow, or move, he was afraid to breathe. He waited, realizing that there was an end coming soon to… it seemed like everything he had ever known.
“Just… smile. If you smile, you can always convince them it’s all right, that you’re all right, and it’ll cover up everything that’s wrong.”
And then she smiled at him, among those tears gushing out of her eyes, smiled at him with that big, radiant, fake smile that would be the last thing he remembered of her. She put a parchment in his hands and pushed him toward the gate.
He found himself standing and staring at it, feeling sick and frozen somehow as he realized that she was just going to leave him here, by himself. “Mom, I don’t wanna go,” he said, tears starting to overflow as he turned back, where he expected she would be behind him still.
But she was gone, and he was all by himself. His tears dried instantly once again as a cold fear settled over his chest, and he realized she was gone. For a moment, he wondered about running after her, about calling out for her. But behind him, there was a busy city full of people he was sure wouldn’t like him because he wasn’t really quite a human.
He turned back to the gate, that sick feeling of fear all through his whole body… and he took one more ragged breath. And… he smiled. He walked feeling as if he was floating, scrubbing his face with his right sleeve to erase all the tears and all signs of them, and he smiled like it was the only thing left to him in all the world. In his left hand, he gripped that parchment so hard it crinkled in his fingers.
She was gone.
“Dainin?”
He came out of his rumination when Path called to him. You are nothing like either of my mothers, he thought as she grinned at him, holding a conch shell with an angry little familiar looking creature waving its claws and chirping.
“I wonder how the one became so big,” she said as she gently touched the exposed back to stop it from curling around and pinching her finger.
“I am not sure. Mysteera called that creature a sea god.”
“Like a forest god?”
“I guess?” he said uncertainly. “It became lumped in the same blessing as the one I got for fighting off a maddened forest god.”
“It did not try to talk though. I always heard Forest Gods could talk.”
Dainin shook his head, “Some of them do. Some of them do not. I guess the theory is that the magic in the world is experiencing a change. Either way, there is little we can do about it except try to react the best way that we can, so I am not going to worry about it too much,” he smiled.
“I don’t really like it when you smile that way.” Path declared as she bent down and let the hermit crab scrabble away from them. “And not I pre-judged that I would not like it, but that I have seen it several times, and I do not like it.”
Dainin blinked. Then, he changed the subject, “What else did you find?”
She had it bundled in part of her skirt, which was now wet and sandy. I guess you have never been raised to take care of clothes and scales probably just rinse off generally. She had an assortment of fan shells and some nautilus kind which she put into his hands. “This one is my favorite,” she said, showing him a black oyster shell that was rainbow shimmery on the inside.
“We should see if we can find you some abalone jewelry,” he said. “So, all these things for the hoard?”
She contemplated it, “All of it feels too fragile to last on our travels.”
“Well, we could pick up a box?” he handed them back to her and reached into his own pouch and drew out the rounded stones he had found, including a piece of cloudy pink quarts that had been worn smooth with the blue-green stone and several similar shells. “Then they can live cushioned inside as a souvenir?”
She would contemplate that and then nod. She picked out two perfectly white ones, one had a little chip out of it, but she seemed to want it anyway. Then she kept a pale brown shell with black spots in the shape of a nautilus, both stones, and the oyster shell she had found. “This much?”
“Sure,” he took them from her and carefully placed them in a pocket. “Did you have fun?”
“Well, sand on skin is only a little unpleasant, though I notice that it is difficult to brush off. And… I guess as a dragon, I did not really think to pay attention to these kinds of little things. So, I think… yes, I had some fun. I am glad you brought me here. Also, you found the prettiest things,” she pointed to the stones, “so, I suppose you win.”
Dainin smiled. “Let’s get back on the cobble streets and then I’ll rinse the sand off of your skin. Then we can go to the bathhouse, which I know you have been looking forward to all day,” he teased.
He couldn’t help but chuckle as she pushed him a bit. “Every time I forget about how mad that has made me, you bring it up,” she pouted.
“You’ll do fine.”
She sighed at him.
She let him pick her up as they got to the rough area of the grass and scraggy brush, and she put her arm around his shoulders, and he felt a lightness in his heart.