Quick warning: this is dark.

The fear is dangerously familiar. It tastes of home, of hushed, delicate footsteps down a long hallway past his father's room, of opulent meals eaten in utter silence, of meeting riotous eyes bigger than his head, the low sound of fire in a throat.

Gunther swallows. That tastes familiar too, achingly so. His tongue passes gently again over the split lip, testing how bad it is — but that had been years ago, he's older now and his father wouldn't dare. No one would.

That's why it's awful. How quickly fear remembers his veins despite its years away, how it slips right back into his blood. It's been so long, so long and yet — his head is spinning, he remembers nothing and everything, he can think of hiding beneath the bench in his kitchen, knees to chest, eyes watchful, even though he can't have been more than six, but it's just as clear as ten minutes ago — but he can't remember how he got here.

Jane's dead, he thinks. It's comforting in some sickening way, as if his bones have been stretched, pulled and wound around each other, and now they are in a position they never should be, but at least they are finally still. This is a new world, one where his lungs have been twisted up in ribs, where he can't move his ankle without feeling a dull ache all the way up his spine.

Jane is dead, he thinks again. He hopes. It would be easier. Because if she isn't — but he can't, there is something thick and dark in his brain, protective, horrid, that can't let him finish.

Dead, he prays. He is not a fool, and he knows how it works, how people work —

Organs on the inside. He imagines if his hands hadn't been bound he would have grabbed them — slippery and wet, he thinks, but he shouldn't, he really shouldn't — and shoved them back in.

It wouldn't have worked. He's not a fool, and his hands were bound anyways, and it all is what it is. He is what he is. Just the one eye now, he's guessing, and fingers certainly don't grow back either.

He breathes in. At least one cracked rib, and perhaps a punctured lung. Good to take inventory, as any competent merchant knows. How else is one to know if the servants are stealing? Always count the jewels before bed.

He counts. In, two, three, four. Out. Two. Three comes harder. He's shuddering, he can't remember what number he was on, and if he keeps gasping like that he'll never get any sort of accurate measure.

Jane is dead. He knows. He knows a lot of things: in his heart, in his stomach, in his hands — hatred, hunger, metal. The softness of silk, whispers. Kisses. The quiet smell of smoke and sweat.

His head knows Jane is dead. Nowhere else wants to admit it yet, but he's too clever to believe all the other stupid bits.

He counts again. It works this time; he's not dead, after all. He isn't. Not even a little bit, impossible as that seems. He hasn't lost a single thing he needs to live.

Well. One thing, perhaps. But he had survived without her before, and he can certainly manage it now. Damned if he won't.

He does wish, though, that he wasn't so terrified. He wishes he would stop shaking. It's only making him hurt more, rattling up the broken parts, needlessly wasting energy.

He sees it eventually out of his good eye. He isn't tied up anymore — they thought he was dead, he guesses, and hadn't he passed out? It's likely. He'd kept his eye closed because he didn't want to see anything anymore. He used to watch his father endlessly, always out of the corner of his eye, aware aware because if he wasn't, if he didn't move quickly enough, if he hadn't heard the warning twist of tone —

He's crying. Did that just start? He can't remember. He's alive. He shouldn't be, he shouldn't be. His eye is streaming, and he wishes it were tears, but he tastes again at the corner of his mouth fresh blood.

He used to always watch. He wanted to watch the flood as it hit, to have the moment to run.

He'd watched her be sliced open.

He's decided he doesn't want to watch any longer. It didn't do anyone any good, so honestly, what's another eye gone? He wishes they were both ruined. There's a thin film over the bad one, and in it Jane falls again and again. She's standing. She's on her knees. It's over. It starts again.

But the other eye is open now. It saw something, and it won't close. He cranes his head as high as it'll go and tries squinting.

"Dragon," he says.

He's no fool. The wings are obvious. They clip back, together, a marvel of nature, and the dive is endless, harrowing, mesmerizing — he understands now why mice sometimes look up at the descending talons and freeze in wonder.

The ground shakes like thunder. His head flops back and lands on hard dirt. "You came too late. Jane is dead."

Dragon up close is blurred. A wavering patch of green. "I came for you."

Gunther frowns. Wrong. Oddly wrong, and honestly rather cruel — even he, in his worst moments, would not lie so blatantly when there was nothing to be gained.

"Dead. She's —"

"I know."

Dragon's teeth are showing. His mouth is wide, cavernous with fangs, molars, too many, too big, and yet bare. It's not a smile. It's not anything. He can't really smile, though Jane always managed to convince herself and anyone who would listen that he had lips enough for it.

There's blood stained down in his gums. Fabric hangs from between two teeth at the side of his mouth.

Dragon chewed on someone. On people. The thought of it had always horrified Gunther as a distinct though unlikely possibility — that any sentient creature of that size, no matter how herbivorous, could choose to use its teeth for something other than vegetables.

Gunther's laughing. Laughing. It's fucked. Utterly fucked. He can't, he can't —

He's sobbing. "Sorry," he says, "sorry—"

Dragon gives him a minute. Or perhaps he doesn't. Time is something that already happened, somewhere off above in a great room where someone wearing white with steepled palms weighed them all and found them lacking.

"We have to…" he's coming back to it finally, and he's reaching forward, he wants to grab something to pull himself up, but his hand just swipes uselessly over smooth scales.

Dragon nudges him up. Over his nose, a foothold in his jaw. Gunther's sitting where Jane sits. Sat.

He gets to the point finally, after his mind has spun on through half-broken pathways that lead ineffectively to nowhere. "We have to reorganize, strike back."

"Against who? Everyone is dead."

It had been an army. Thousands.

Gunther swallows. He tastes blood. It's there forever now, probably. "All of them?"

Around them, far off beyond this particular stretch of trees, the land is burning. He hadn't noticed. His eye was closed.

"I finished what was left."

Gunther has never before appreciated how light Dragon's voice normally sounds. Like a child almost, shiny, impulsive. It sounds old now. Death has many enemies, Gunther thinks, but Dragon is not one of them, not now.

"Where will you go?" Gunther asks — everyone knows Dragon stayed only for Jane. The kingdom is burning. There is nothing much for anyone here.

Dragon's answer is low. Quiet. The rumble still thrums through his neck, and Gunther can feel it against his skin. "Anywhere. Away. Right?"

The question at the end twists something in Gunther, the guts he still has that Jane doesn't; this is why she always loved Dragon. He's monstrous. Eternal. And yet afraid, and yet alone, and yet uncertain —

Gunther isn't terrified any longer. His hands are loose around Dragon's horns, even the hand that's missing a pinky. His trembles have slowed. It's over. Everything is. "Me too?"

"If you want."

Gunther thinks.

"No one else did. I offered. Jester. The smith. The princess, even."

That isn't very many names. Gunther wonders if that's all who's left, wonders how many worlds have been born and died while he's been a breathing corpse on a ghost of a battlefield.

He should stay. He should fight. Jane would.

"She would," Dragon agrees.

He's talking out loud. He shakes his head and the world goes wonderfully dim for a second. He sees the fires as if through the silk screen in his father's room, as if from under water. "But she's dead, isn't she? It doesn't matter what she would have done."

Dragon says nothing.

Neither does he.

Taking off feels like nothing he's ever experienced. His stomach drops away. His heart soars. The ground falls beneath them and they rise up, up, beyond. The smoke spirals around them, the ash paints the earth below, and then it passes. Beneath them is green once more.

It's over. It starts again.