#its horrible that she has a fancy very important telescope

[notstinky]

[Left on Thea’s bed after Van has gone to work is this, along with a poorly drawn DIY movie ticket, for you know, when they watch that movie] 

I don’t know if this is like, good, good but it says STEM! And space is STEM. Anyway, I hope the clouds go away so you can look at the stars and Jupiter and stuff! Please show me Mars sometime!! 

- Van 

(not like the car) 

[ganymedesclock]

          “A dragon! A dragon in the castle!”

          As if it weren’t awful news, every gossip in town flocked to the well, chattering like so many birds before a tray of seeds.

          “I heard it was a kitchen fire-”

          “A kitchen fire up the royal tower? I pick berries up by the castle, that’s nowhere near the kitchens-”

          “Daft girl, I thought I told you to leave that be! You remember what happened to the old millet picker!”

          “The queen’s not going to cut my hands off over an apron full of blackberries, now, is she? They all fall to the ground, anyway, nobody minds them- sorry, what were you saying, Anna, about the dragon?”

          Anna bobbed her head eagerly, pigtails flying half out of her cap. “Edie saw it. She was emptying the chamber pots, and looked up away from the smell, and there it was- big as a tree and white like milk, swept right over the castle and out to the hills, and next she knew it, half the tower was burning, they had to evacuate the prince and all the lords, the smoke was terrible-”

          And she went on like this, in her squeaky voice, captivating everyone, so neatly and efficiently that they did not notice the washer-woman, whom everyone knew was a half-wit who could barely speak, put down her washing, stand up, and take off into the trees.

--

          Distances for a dragon were not the same as distances for a human, even if the dragon happened to be using small human legs at the time. A human’s senses were, for the most part, bound by two axes; up and down were only of so much relevance to something whose ancestors had disavowed themselves from both trees and the ocean some time ago. Up was generally more important than down, but either way, these things were governed by the ground.

          The average dragon had a lot more opinions about up and down, and Dethel, at this moment, was of the impression that she ought to be going up as fast as possible right now, but unfortunately, when the village was all full of noise because of SOMEONE, going up first required a great deal of forwards. So, forwards she went, pounding her sensible washer-woman shoes over small hills and across gullies and making quite a mess of her only set of clothes that she’d have to mend later, first well, and then badly, and it was really all going to be quite a mess, but finally there was the old stone wall that had meant quite another thing to the people who’d laid it originally, but right now it was just a convenient metric for how much forwards was enough forwards.

          Dethel split her skin, and tossed it to a low tree as if it were a blanket she might have been washing, and took wing. Shedding a skin left the body uncomfortably wet, but the sun was warm and bright, particularly as she crossed over the trees, and it dried her off quickly, back to the burnt and gilded shades of red she was properly. Now, the going was easy, and she was home in a matter of minutes, through the narrow cracks in the rock that had, until very recently, done a lovely job convincing humans that there were absolutely no caves in these mountains. “ESMER!”

          Esmer’s head snaked out, disrupting the curtains about her horns. “I thought you were still out,” she said, in the dreamy tone that was especially prominent when she had no idea she was in trouble.

          “I was out! I was working a perfectly serviceable job and now I’m going to have to contrive some reason I wandered off, all on account of you!”

          The rest of Esmer’s body trotted out to catch up with her head. Esmer was a very beautiful dragon. She was not, as Anna (or Edie) said, white as milk, but the pearly silver of twilight, ever so slightly violet along the ridge of her spine to moonstone colors along her smooth-scaled belly. Dethel was reasonably certain if there was a reason Esmer could be quite so dense, it was because she had been born beautiful enough that it distracted everyone from being mad at her. “Well, that’s fine. You should come, come see my treasure.”

          “Treasure? You raided a castle about treasure?” Dethel followed, incredulous, still spitting mad she reassured herself, but the faintest spark of curious. Also, one had to take initiative catching up with Esmer; Dethel was a perfectly sized dragon, but if there was one way the villagers were right, it was that Esmer was in fact very large. Bounding along to keep up with Esmer’s great, languid strides, she kept up her questions: “We have plenty of nice treasures. More of them than anyone else I know, in fact, because you keep going off like this, and I told you that you should talk to me about this, so we can plan it out-”

          “I remember!” And it was reassuring to see Esmer bob her head in faint sheepishness. “And I know. I didn’t mean to make any sort of trouble.”

          Dethel sighed, long, and hard, but there weren’t any cinders to it. “I know. You never mean to.”

          “And I’ll take responsibility for this, like always. I just… this is different, alright? You really have to come see.”

          “I’m coming. I’m seeing.”

          They moved past the lying room, Esmer making a short hop and Dethel a much longer one to reach the landing up to the observatory. That gave Dethel a bit of pause, internally if not externally; the observatory was Esmer’s most special room, besides the library.

          Maybe it really was something special or different-

          -Dethel snapped that thought up like it was a stray sheep on a cliff’s edge. No, absolutely not, she was being cross with Esmer first. She was not going to forgive her for everything, especially when this could create a horrible amount of trouble for the both of them…

          And, yet, it was hard to be mad at Esmer in the observatory that they had painted together, below the great telescope that had been so much trouble and bartering and arguing to procure, that she had been so delighted that she’d pranced all about the room warbling about the stars-

          -there were reasons aside from beauty, admittedly, that Dethel herself could not always stay mad at Esmer.

          Now, Esmer swept aside, piling her great length in several coils all about a side alcove that she had clearly cleared in a great hurry, shuffling other precious things off to the side to take refuge on other shelves. From this angle, Dethel could not see what was in the little box there, only Esmer’s delighted expression, but she had a bad feeling when she realized that the bottom of the box was curved, and that a moment later Esmer hooked the dewclaw of one wing ever-so-gently over the edge and began rocking it.

          Dethel climbed the shelf, and leaned her head over.

          “This is what you set a castle on fire for.”

          Esmer shushed her hurriedly. “You’ll wake it, it’s sleeping.”

          Dethel looked back at the doughy, squash-faced little mound of thing that would someday be a fully grown human.

          She looked back to Esmer, and lowered her voice accordingly. “This?”

          “Isn’t it lovely?”

          “Esmer-” a pause. Scrutiny. “Are you going broody over a baby human?”

          “It gets lonely here, doesn’t it?”

          “You are. You’re going broody. Blood of the earth, Esmer, you sound like my grandmother.”

          She looked back at the cradle. “What are we even going to feed it?”

          “Yes, yes, it doesn’t have any teeth yet, I checked. I’ll have to stew the meat, to make it soft enough-”

          “It probably can’t even eat meat yet, it’s not like a hatchling.”

          Esmer looked alarmed. “What? No, oh no, it’s- it’s biggish, isn’t it? Look, it’s the size of my claw-”

          “That’s little. Little for a human.” Dethel sniffed it, and the creature squirmed in its sleep. “Might be brand new. I’d say a month or so.”

          “What- but- how could they-” Esmer swallowed. “Dethel, you don’t understand, it was crying and crying- the room was cold! Cold enough for me to feel it, and they just left it there and locked the door!” Her eyes were wide and frantic.

          Dethel looked closer, and realized that the baby was not, in fact, swaddled in a blanket, but in one of Esmer’s tapestries. “We’re going to have to fix that,” she said, more making the note for herself than anything, “it needs proper bedclothes. And something to wrap its bottom in, before it poops.”

          Esmer blinked. “It’ll tell us, won’t it?”

          Dethel laughed until Esmer shushed her, and the infant shifted and squalled. “It won’t know it has to go until it’s gone, Es! Humans are completely useless for at least a year. We’ll have to get milk to feed it, and something to put the coals in to keep it warm, because it can’t touch those, and something to wrap its bottom, and a lot of those, because it’ll keep going whenever it needs to wherever it is right then-”

          She didn’t expect any of that would actually stop Esmer, but rather, Esmer’s resolve seemed to strengthen. “Alright. I can do that. We can do that. Better than leaving it there.”

          There was something behind Esmer’s eyes that Dethel had seen before, and that betrayed a truth worse than she had been expecting: this was not, in fact, a flight of fancy about a pretty trinket.

          Then the shadow was gone, and Esmer peered at her warily. “Er- what… kind of milk, do little humans need? Does it have to be human milk, or could we find a goat, or-”

          At that precise moment, the baby pooped, and, as that woke it up, began crying.

          It was going to be a very long year.