Dragonet Drabbles

Chapter 8

Flame hefted a squirming Chromis under his wing and pointed a talon at the firescales dragon. "You!" he yelled in a mix of shock, confusion, recognition, and a little fear. It was a very loaded 'you'.

"Don't you 'you' me," Peril shot back and pointed her talon at him. "I'm 'you-ing' you!" Peril blinked a few times and then whispered to the small dragonet at her side, "Wait, who is this?"

"Who is this?!" Flame repeated with outrage. He lowered his talon and lifted his chin, trying to hide his wounded ego. "You don't remember me?! I was harassed by you and the rest of that Jade Winglet back at the Academy. You forgot me?"

"I didn't forget you!" Peril sat back and swished her tail aggressively. "I just forgot your name, that's all. You can't expect me to remember stuff like that! I'm busy remembering other important stuff and that was, like, a year ago so don't get all yelly shouty at me. Besides," she glanced at Umber, "I forgot his name, too."

"It's Umber," Umber said pleasantly as if she had asked him how the weather was.

"And this is Flam," Chromis supplied and patted Flame's arm proudly.

"Yeah, I'm Flam - shit - Flame! I meant Flame."

Peril snorted and Flame glared, but then stopped himself once he realized that, one, Peril was immune to glares and, two, glaring at a firescales dragon was not a very good self-preservation choice.

"Did you hear me sing, Flam?" Chromis suddenly asked, obviously bored with the conversation that wasn't about him. "I is good?"

Flame reflected on this, remembering what had propelled him up the stairs in the first place. "You mean the screaming?"

"Singing!" Chromis and, surprisingly, Cliff said at the same time.

The prince of the SkyWings flared his wings out dramatically. "We were practicing a duet I wrote all by myself." His eyes brightened and he said, "Wanna hear us sing it?"

"NO!" Peril stood up like a startled bird, a layer of smoke peeling off her scales. "I mean - no thanks. It's not that I didn't LOVE listening to you two sing for the past hour but the song is just... so good. Yeah, it's TOO good. If I listen to it anymore I'll probably explode and die and get guts all over the place and that would be yuck."

Cliff seemed to give this due consideration. "Hm. OK. No explosioning would be best I think." And with that they were all spared an explosioning by song, which suited Flame just fine.

"Well, thanks for watching my brother or...whatever the hell was going on here," Flame said and began to push Chromis gently towards the exit. "Wish I could stay and chat but... I really don't want to. Come on, you two, let's go," he said to Umber and Chromis.

But Umber and Chromis stayed firmly rooted in place.

"Noooooo!!" Chromis wailed and flung himself on the ground. "I don't wanna go!! I wanna play with Cliff and sing and jump on Queen Ruby's bed again!"

"And I want to ask Peril about Clay," Umber said. "She sees him more often than I do, and he's kind of terrible and remembering to reply to my letters."

"Clay?" Peril perked. Carefully she glided down to the lower level and Flame felt the temperature of the air around him spike. "Yeah. Sure. I can talk about Clay. In a normal way. I'm guessing that means you don't want to hear about his beautiful eyes and sweet smile and how good his hugs are. You probably want to hear stuff like, what he eats for breakfast or how he almost caught a moose once but then got distracted by a goat and caught neither and cried about it...or maybe I should just let you ask the questions."