It was dark outside. The rain pattered against the roof of the house with a vengeance. Touya felt how close it was; a stark, now-unfamiliar contrast to the unreachable ceilings of the palace.

He sighed, heavily. Years and years and years.

“Touya!”

There, it was. The castle hadn’t entirely left him. No, he would never wish it had. He wouldn’t . Truthfully. Honestly.

Z - or Zero, to court documents and those with a death wish - called him into the bedroom, where he was in the process of straddling N. Touya turned on his heel but Z snapped, “Come help me, he ate something,” and Touya turned on his heel again.

N - or Natural to court documents and unfamiliar elders - looked up at, through Touya with wide eyes. His tongue lolled by sharp teeth, held wide open by Z. “If he’s eaten something, it’s long gone now,” Touya intoned.

“Get it out of him,” Z growled. “I don’t know what it was. What if it was a rat?”

“I don’t think he can get sick, Z.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Fretting doesn’t suit you…”

“ Someone has to.” Z bit when he was mad. Z bit when he was stressed. Z bit when he was upset. He let go of N, though, and N’s jaw shut with a clack.

“Unnecessary worry is a burden for everyone,” Touya said.

N rolled over, knocking Z off of him without even a breath. “Touya,” He uttered.

“I’m coming.” Still a baby brat - both of them were, though it was more of a relief for N to be. To have something like want behind those empty eyes, even if it was needy and babyish. Touya took his hands, mindful of his claws, and pulled N to his feet.

“Touya,” He uttered, with something like gratitude as he clung closer. Pointedly, away from Z, though more of an animalistic avoidance than intentional insult. Z growled up at him anyway.

“Yes,” Touya thumbed along the rough skin of his knuckles. “Are you hungry?” N was always hungry. He just looked at, past Touya, blank.

There was a butcher in town. For hefty royal gold he didn’t mind selling whole cows’ worth of meat to them as often as N needed it, no questions asked. He ate a lot, and ate it raw. Z’s fretting was just how he tried to do something, because watching N - his N, their N - eat entirely like a beast, blood-smeared and tearing meat between his glinting teeth and sharp claws, blue eyes wild and utterly devoid of even the pleasure of eating…all Touya could feel was utter helplessness.

There just wasn’t anything that could be done for him, but fretting and trying and waiting. That was all Touya and Z did. What they could do, day in and day out.

Sometimes Z grasped Touya, and choked - confessed , without emotion but with tremendous pain, about what happened when Touya wasn’t let close - as a mere handmaiden, even as N’s. “He screamed,” Z said, with no weight or pitch. Words said like they would disappear, fade away into the night. “I could hear him in there. He screamed. I haven’t heard him since.” Looking right through Touya, but not at nothing like N. At something Touya never saw, something that shouldn’t have been seen; something that shouldn’t have happened.

Something that should have happened to Z, according to him. But N never could sit still when something was wrong.

N lost himself that day, and a little of Z went with him, and a little of Touya went with them, and N wasn't the dragon he used to be, the dragon he was after that, but he still wasn't back, and Touya never would be himself again because he was still with N, wherever he went back then. If the N that was here now was only the corpse left behind, then Touya would lay with him for as long as he remained; Z had long since been putrefacted by his own guilt.

“Touya,” N pushed the table away from him. It grated against the wood floor loudly. There was no real intent tk his words - the meow of a cat, the bark of a dog, the "Touya"s of N. He never said Z's name.

“Yes, I’m coming.”

Washing the blood and meat-stench off of him in the stream was good enough. N let Touya move him any which way, which he couldn’t understand but was thankful for. He could never beat N in a battle of strength. The blood on his cheeks was washed away without fuss, even when Touya had to press at the scales peppered there.

When they got back inside, Z had locked the bedroom door again. “He’s studying,” Touya told N in a hush. N blinked, slowly. “You’ll just nap on a mat.”

He did, curling his tail around him. Now, the house was quiet. Touya rested, too, in the couch. What would his mother think about this all - cavernous claw marks on the wall Touya’s height was marked on as he grew, a former dragon napping on the floor Touya played on with her, a crown prince researching magic in the bedroom she put him to sleep in?

He offered this place for its seclusion; rather, he felt the ghosts of his childhood constantly through it all. What would little Touya think about N, someone trapped in the spaces between animal, spirit, and human? She would probably be obsessed with him. To himself, Touya snorted.