One big load of laundry later, Aaron lay in bed, waiting for sleep. It didn’t come easy. His mind was teeming with anxious thoughts about a number of different things bothering him. It would grab onto one concern, squeeze it in frustration, then move onto the next. Sometimes it kept going, sometimes it turned around and grabbed one that had already passed.
On the upside, he wasn’t alone in trying to endure these not-quite-racing thoughts, which was a change from the usual state of things in his experience.
“What’s wrong?” Baby Bear asked from his position sprawled across the back of Aaron’s head.
“Nothing’s wrong, not exactly,” Aaron said. “I just have a lot on my mind.”
The bear’s paws pitter-pattered softly against the sides of his head, like he was playing the bass drum in a marching band.
“Tell me about it,” Bear said.
“It’s just… a lot of things piling up on top of each other, I guess. All these people are counting on me, putting themselves in danger for me, and I’m worried that I won’t be able to live up to their expectations.”
“What would make you think that?” Bear asked. “I happen to think you’re pretty great.”
“Where do I start?” Aaron sighed. “I’m barely able to defend myself, so I’m worried about going into this dungeon. And I’m struggling to figure out this memory thing to find the sceptre, too, which I have to do or this whole Primus thing is dead in the water. And I couldn’t perform even the simplest magic Tia tried to teach me no matter how much I tried. Plus, I’m starting to freeze up and panic at the mere suggestion of danger. Not actual danger, but anything my brain can interpret as a potential danger.”
Baby Bear scoffed, his breath — or whatever it was — puffing against Aaron’s head. “Pfft. Is that all?”
That wasn’t all.
Aaron had stopped himself from giving voice to the thing that had been worrying him the most. It was a terrifying thought, one Aaron didn’t want to be real. He tried to brush past it — to refuse to even acknowledge it — yet his thoughts swung back to it more than any other concern.
What it might mean about who Aaron was as a person was profoundly troubling. Baby Bear probably wouldn’t judge him for it, but that didn’t make it any easier to share.
Aaron didn’t know how deep his mental connection with the sapient teddy bear went, but he should have guessed his oldest friend would sense he was holding something back.
“Is that all?” Bear insisted.
He could refuse to answer, he thought, but what would that say about him? Other than sexual stuff — which had always felt too weird to form any kind of association with his teddy bear, even by talking about it — he’d never held back from sharing anything with his childhood toy. Could there be a more damning confirmation of his fears than being unwilling to share this, Aaron’s deepest fear?
“No, that’s not all,” he finally said. “The worst part is… back in Sacramento, when I was attacked the first time, I killed someone. I was– I hadn’t lost control of my temper and it wasn’t on purpose, but… I still killed someone.” He paused for a moment, swallowing hard before forcing himself to explain the rest. “That would be bad enough, but… but the thing that’s bothering me most about it is that… is that it’s not bothering me. Since Tia restored my memories of the attack yesterday, I haven’t thought about it one single time, not until I got into bed tonight.”
“Why is that the worst part?” Baby Bear asked, his tone confused.
“Because it’s not supposed to be this easy,” Aaron breathed. “There has to be something seriously wrong with a person if they can take a life as casually as I did and… and it has to be way, way worse for the killing not to bother them. Before last night I could have made excuses for myself — I didn’t consciously remember what happened; I’d been trying to survive other, newer threats; whatever else could come to mind — but today? Today there was no immediate danger. So in all those hours goofing around with the delver trio or Alice or Tia, I should’ve felt something. I should have at least had the occasional thought about the guy I killed.”
He paused again. Not for breath, but to force himself to name the thing he feared. To give it an explicit form. “I’m worried that all of that means I don’t really have a conscience. Like it’s just something I’ve been faking this entire time and I did it so well I even started to fool myself. And the thing that’s so fucked up and makes this so frightening, is that when I think back on my childhood, I feel like maybe a strong case could be made that that’s true.”
“That’s a lot of feelings, Aaron,” Bear said. “It’s okay to have all kinds of feelings and it’s good that you’re not trying to smoosh them into a dark corner where you can ignore them. Yay for you!” The teddy bear squeezed the back of Aaron’s head in a gentle hug. “But you have to remember that feelings aren’t always honest; they’ll fib to you. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real or, um… uh… believable…”
“Valid?” Aaron offered.
“Right! Feelings are real and valid, but that doesn’t make them true. I said that part — which I think is important and you need to hear — but now I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong and dumb for believing any of it.”
Baby Bear patted Aaron on the back of the head consolingly but continued before Aaron could respond.
“So first, the dungeon is scary and I’m nervous for you, too. It doesn’t sound very snuggly. Not very snuggly, at all. But! You’ll have people with you who do that sort of thing for fun or whatever so it probably won’t be that bad. The memory thing has to be frustrating, but you’re forgetting that you’ve already accessed that old memory stuff more than once. That means this is just a riddle you need more time to figure out, not that it’s something you can’t figure out like those stupid eye puzzle thingies. Same thing goes for the magic stuff — you’ve already done magic that was way cooler than some dumb light bulb thing, so all you really need is more practice.”
“What cooler magic have I done, Bear?”
Bear tapped Aaron’s head lightly as he presented his list. “You saw through secret ninja stealth magic, twice; you talked to a dragon under a lake in the forest; and, you made that emo stick that broke open the bug box thing.”
“I guess,” Aaron conceded. “I don’t know if I could conjure that weapon again so that might not really count. I definitely wouldn’t call it an ‘emo stick,’ though, I was thinking something more like the ‘hateful blade’ or the ‘anxiety knife.’ Based on what it felt like, anyways. Besides, getting down to that cavern in Yosemite was more about innate drakus powers than doing magic.”
“Don’t argue with me when I’m giving you affirmations,” Bear complained, smacking Aaron’s head vigorously with his soft paws. “You did extra cool magic stuff! Besides, did you learn how to ride a bike or swim in a day? Or how to do math? Sometimes you have to work at things. I mean even I wasn’t always as snuggly as I am now; it took practice to know the best ways to do the snuggles.”
“Alright, Bear, I see your point.”
“Good,” Bear said with a harrumph. “Now the last stuff, the more seriouser stuff… that is really complicated stuff, for sure. I won’t say you were never a selfish jerk when you were growing up, but you had a conscience. Who would know better than me whether you worried about how other people felt or whether things you had done were wrong? Your problem was never that you didn’t know if something you did was bad or didn’t care if they were, it was that you had trouble stopping yourself. It was never that you didn’t have a conscience, it was that your conscience tried to overthink everything so it was slower to get involved than your knee-jerk reactions.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“That’s still not great, Bear.”
“Maybe not, but it means you’re not some psycho killer,” Bear said. “And you’re forgetting two very important things. The first one is that you put a lot of effort into training your conscience to be better at restraining your immediate instincts. The other one — which is more important — is that you have things to help you deal with all these worries you never had before. Like me! I’m here, ready with snuggles and cuteness and friendship, and no matter how bad things are, snuggles can always make them better, one at a time.”
Aaron snorted and Baby Bear bapped him on the back of the head again before patting his hair more gently.
“It’s true! Snuggling the Baby Bear is like the most effective therapy ever, except it’s much fuzzier and it’s free,” Bear said. “Now, you get some sleepies. Tomorrow’s another big day.”
Aaron yawned deeply and sighed as exhaled. Baby Bear was right — there was too much to do before they went delving and Aaron needed rest to be ready for it.
With Bear’s help, he’d put most of his concerns out of his thoughts for the moment, so he was ready to slip into the still, deep waters of a calm mind. Aaron drifted off to sleep so quickly after that he didn’t even have time to worry about whether he’d be attacked in his dreams.
Thankfully, the night passed without incident. As far as Aaron could tell, anyway.
He was loosely scheduled to have a meeting with Alice, Tia, and the delvers once he was awake and dressed to go over any new developments from last night, so he’d know one way or the other soon enough.
Baby Bear demanded attention before Aaron could get out of bed and into the shower, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. He cuddled and played with the bear for a few minutes, then got ready for the day. Once he was dressed, he offered a silent prayer of gratitude to that guy who’d blown up on social media a few years back for hot takes about menswear and dudebro fashion. Knowing even a little bit about what to look for to get the kind of pants he wanted had made his wardrobe shopping so much more efficient and effective.
Once he was dressed, he saw he had a message from Tia, which she must have sent while he was showering. Alice had passed word to everyone as soon as Aaron had woken up — something she must have known from watching his dreams — and Tia had convinced everyone to have their meeting over breakfast up on the roof.
Aaron was almost out the door before he remembered the protocols Kiara had drilled him over. He stopped to send a message to the security group chat, letting them know he was heading to the roof, and had several thumbs up in response before he’d finished climbing the two flights of stairs.
There were quite a few more people out on the roof than he’d been expecting, a dozen in total other than Alice, Tia, and the three delvers. They all took seats around a pair of picnic tables that had been dragged together. The tables had several platters on them, each piled with various breakfast foods — scrambled eggs, waffles, pancakes, French toast, bacon, ham, biscuits and gravy, and other assorted pastries.
As they began to eat, Kiara walked him through a quick round of introductions. Aaron knew he’d be hard pressed to remember everyone after just one meeting, but did his best to commit names and faces to memory. There new people were divided into three distinct groups.
The first was introduced as the second security team, a group of five, each with a vibe that made Aaron think of bikers, all long hair, leather, and denim. One of them had a particularly large —and bendy! — tobacco pipe clamped in his mouth, an older sort with a white rim around the collar of a flared bowl.
The next, a group of four, was the third security squad. At first glance, they came across as business types in their plain-but-fashionable suits. After interacting with them for a few minutes, Aaron revised his impression to something more military than finance, just dressed up in civilian suits. They were too crisp, too upright, too straight-laced, even. Literally, if you got a look at the plain black Oxfords all four were wearing. Aaron suspected each of them owned at least one other pair of similar shoes, but made of leather that was way more glossy when polished; he could practically picture shoes that gleamed as if they were made of black glass.
Last to be introduced was a trio who had a style and demeanor far more familiar to Aaron. They were nerds. Clearly and obviously nerds. Not necessarily the brand of gamer nerd he was most accustomed to, but definitely from a branch of the nerd evolutionary tree not far removed from it. They likely had a shared ancestor that wore hoodies more than any other single item of clothing. Naturally, they were more laid back and casual than the other two groups; one of them had even come to the meeting wearing pajama pants and fluffy slippers!
The first two groups — the bikers and the hedge fund soldiers — were the security details that covered the night shift. Albert, Griffin, and Kiara covered Aaron more than full time — pretty much as long as he was out and about during the day — and the other two alternated who had primary duties the rest of the time. The group of nerds handled any logistics or support that might be needed and were on call pretty much around the clock.
When he heard about the scheduling, Aaron felt like he had to say something.
“So you’re all working twelve hour shifts — or more — seven days a week?” he asked. “I appreciate the dedication, but that sounds like some real Grade A bullshit. Do you want me to crawl up Barrett’s ass about better staffing and time management?”
Even after a round of reassurances, Aaron wasn’t satisfied. He tried to impress on everyone that he was on their side and he’d go to bat for them, but all twelve of the security people were adamant. The delvers had to join the conversation to get Aaron to let the matter drop.
“This isn’t just a job where you clock in, do your work, and clock out,” Griffin said earnestly. “This is important work. The kind of important that’s less than once-in-a-lifetime. Most people won’t ever have a chance to do something as impactful in their lives.”
Albert picked up the thread, talking around a mouthful of pancakes. “Griffin, Kiara, and me have had a chance to get to know you the past few days, so don’t think this is some kind of messiah thing. We know you’re just a guy and that this isn’t some kind of ‘Chosen One Who Will Save Us from the Wrath of the Whatever from High Atop the Thing’ situation. But we also know there’s a chance you can be so much more than just some guy. And that can only happen if you survive to complete your Tribulations.”
“We need a Primus,” Kiara said. “The Drakon has gone way too long without a full and formal executive branch, if you want to think of it that way. Too many things have fallen through the cracks in all those years. This is our chance — you are our chance — to maybe pull some of it back together and rebuild the foundation of our future.”
Even Tia had two cents to throw on the pile. “They’re not wrong, Aaron. We’re so much less than we could be and drakus have been suffering for it for years. Without getting too deep into the weeds on our whole situation, just think about this for a second — if it’s not unusual for drakus to live as long as Zeke, isn’t it weird none of us that you’ve met have been even close to a century old, let alone as old as he is?”
That brought Aaron up short. Hard. He hadn’t considered that, actually.
In fact, he hadn’t really been sure how old anyone he’d met so far was, with the exceptions of Mallory and Barrett. Now that Tia mentioned it, though, none of the drakus he’d met struck him as being much older than he was. So where were the older dragons?
One of the bikers spoke up before Aaron could follow that train of thought for long. “Our numbers for this mission are being kept small for consistency, flexibility, and stability, but also because it requires a diverse range of talents operating at very high levels. While each team has to be capable of reacting to any number of threats, our best defense is keeping anyone from noticing you’re here at all.”
“New York is big,” Tia added. “Eight and half million people live in the City and another ten or eleven million in the greater metro area. If you go by the conventional wisdom that mythics are about one percent of that total, that’s between eighty and almost one hundred ninety thousand. Assume five percent of the population are nominally magic-capable humans and that’s another four hundred thousand to just under a million on top of that.”
“And that rule of thumb doesn’t account for things like the fact that New York is one of if not the most prominent of all the global cities,” Kiara added. “Which would push those numbers higher.”
Albert snorted. “Yeah, you’re likely to see a lot more weirdos here than in Milwaukee or Houston.”
“Which is why we’ve got the teams on this that we do,” the biker said. “It’s not because the Cordus is a shitty boss; it’s for operational security.”
One of the buttoned-up military suits spoke up. “Speaking of operational security, I believe Miss Carroll had a report to present. Unless there’s anything else more pressing?”
She left the question hanging, a single, immaculately sculpted eyebrow raised. She hadn’t addressed Aaron specifically, but he got the message.
He held his hands up in surrender and went back to his French toast. He wasn’t thrilled that all these people had basically put their lives on hold for his benefit, but he had at least gained a better perspective on why they were doing it and could respect their choice.
With that settled, all eyes at the table turned to the beautiful redhead, the woman of Aaron’s dreams, as it were.