dot.

26: Rambling

  Dot scampered over to the shaken man, forced to make the first move as Felix refused to walk an inch.

  When Tiro had first taken him in, he had been standing and staring absentmindedly at the floor, but that had soon changed when he had messily sat down and placed his hands in his lap, choosing to stare at them in silence instead.

  "It's gone?"

  What is?

  Felix seemed to be asking himself a question, still acting very strangely. What had they done to him out there? Had he been drugged?

  Although he no longer craved physical touch as much, Dot thought that Felix probably needed some comfort right now and climbed into his lap, wrapping his wings around the man's torso and letting him rest his head on his back.

  He kept himself there, calming Felix down and comforting him as he slowly came back to life and found his speech again.

  "Look." He held up his right hand, making Dot jolt at the sight of a missing finger. They had chopped it off? Why?

  As if reading his mind, Felix gave a weird, barking sort of laugh and hugged Dot tighter with the left arm, keeping his right in the air. "I've no bloody idea why they did it. Had the decency to give me some painkillers, at least. But she didn't want to. Tiro had to convince her. I'm pretty sure there's something going on between them because the atmosphere in that room got real weird real fast."

  Felix's rambling habit had returned with a vengeance, sentences tripping over themselves in their eagerness to spill from his mouth.

  "I mean, are they dating? Married? I thought she didn't like him much honestly but you know maybe it makes sense? They're both crazy, I mean, l-look what she did, and, and he didn't really give me any information but he did give a warning but he didn't do anything to stop it so I? Was like? Very very confused haha."

  He was shaking a little, so Dot gently took the tip of the index finger of the hand into his mouth and bit it slightly so he could hold it, dragging it towards him and then tucking it under his chin so that the man didn't have to look at it anymore.

  "Owie, aha, you're biting me, haha. It tickles. How hard do you think you could bite if you really tried? Could you kill me? You could probably kill me. Would you? Not unless I made you really really annoyed, I guess, but what if I caught you at the wrong time? Would you kill me then? Would you?"

  Dot shook his head, wrapping his wings around tighter to try and offer the man as much comfort as he could. Felix hugged him back and nested his face in the crook of his neck, apologising as he did so.

  "I'm sorry. I know you're not a fan of touching much anymore... but thank you for this. I'm going on a bit, I know, but I think I'm just... shocked? Is that the right word?" He gave a false laugh and then groaned, pulling Dot closer for comfort. "I have no idea what I'm on about. Thank you, though. I appreciate this."

  After a while, Dot began to feel uncomfortable with the prolonged contact, but decided to stay there, for Felix's sake. While the loss of his finger was jarring for the both of them, it was an unspoken understanding that it could have been worse. Nimue- and certainly Tiro- were capable of causing great pain with little thought behind it: that was something Dot had reasoned since the experiments began.

  But still, the question remained: Why had they taken it? To control him? To scare him? It was the very fact they could use the stolen digit for anything they wanted that caused a thick unease in the air between the two.

  Felix groaned again and sighed heavily, squeezing Dot ever tighter in his dispair. "I only came here for the money. If I'd known how awful the people here were... I never would have signed up in the first place. The only bad thing about not coming is that I never would have met you. But they have to let me leave, right? My family would have reported me missing by now, I swear- they must find me eventually. There's no way I'll be kept here until I die, right? Right." The man was trying to comfort himself more than anything.

  Dot was getting very uncomfortable with the hug now, but Felix still needed him, so he stayed. The more he talked about how he was sure they'd have to let him leave at some point, the more his insides squirmed and writhed. What about him? Nimue owned him. There would be no one trying to rescue the boy that didn't exist.

  "Y'know, I've been thinking," Felix began, clearly on the same page as his hybrid friend, "Do you have human rights? Like, they're this list of all the things all human beings have the right to. You're certainly not given all of them here, but you're not exactly human, so I don't know if you'd even count."

  The hybrid finally grew too uncomfortable with the hug to continue and backed away from Felix, hoping he was stable enough to be able to stay lively and not go back to being the silent, shocked figure he had been when he first entered the room.

  "I want to take you home with me. I think you would like my family- and they'd certainly like you. My dad might question you for a bit, but he'd come around eventually. Only if it's just to please my mum. They really love each other, so he'd accept you just to make her happy even if he didn't exactly like you in the first place."

  Dot scurried back over to the other side of the room and retrieved the neon card before returning and sitting with his legs underneath him in front of Felix. 'wat wod i do with your family' he asked, eager to keep him talking- if only to entertain a hopeless daydream.

  "Well, first thing first, Leander would question you to hell and back. He's interested in these sort of things- science and all that. His dream is to be a doctor, like mum, and I think he'll get there eventually. He's certainly got the brains for it."

  "My mum just likes anything she can mother. She'd treat you like her third son- I'm sure she'd forget you're part bat at some point and try to send you to school or ask about your homework. My dad's a bit more... wary, I'd say, but as I mentioned before if my mum likes you, he'll find a way to love you too, eventually."

  'wat is skol'

  "School? It's somewhere kids go to learn, but I don't think anyone really likes it that much..."

  The conversation went on for hours, the pair both hoping and looking towards a future that was almost certainly never coming to light.