Smell the Oranges

3

"-Eeew, it's still twitching." Joe sneered, prodding out with the stick again. The squirrel made a horrific, squeaking noise and hissed at him when he stuck the jagged end inside the wound. The animal had dragged itself across the whole of the lane and had just met the sidewalk by the time he had found it and started poking it, like it was a test subject in some sick experiment. "You want to poke it too, Mitch?"

Mitchell just shook his head and stayed on the outskirts of the exchange, kicking pebbles off the sidewalk, occasionally sparing the dying animal a glance as the other boy tortured it.

"It looks like it got hit by something real big." Robert knelt beside the rodent, sniggering under his breath. Every time he smiled, the dimples he had came out in full light. Their mother used to think they were cute. Mitchell hated them because he only saw them when Robert was having a good time. Robert only had a good time when something else was miserable. "You think like an SUV or…?"

"That shit's from an eighteen-wheeler, forget anything else." Joe twisted the stick into the ragged remnants of the squirrel's rear legs. It shivered once and didn't move. "And I think I got its guts on my sole. Shit."

"Well, look what you did. It's dead! It ain't no more fun anyways." Robert spat, standing up. "C'mon, Mitch, if you don't move your ass we're gonna' miss the ten showing."

"I'm coming." Mitchell watched the dead squirrel as the trio passed it, and Joe tossed his stick into a gutter. He fixated on the crimson, browning stain that spread from where the animal had been hit to where it currently sat. Its eyes were still open, and its teeth bared. It looked more vicious in death than it had in life.

"So, you doing anything after the movie, Joe?" Robert asked.

"No, why?" Joe flicked his blonde hair from his face, watching the only car on the street that night pass down the road sluggishly. The years would prove unkind to then little Joe Miskozy. He had always been an ugly son of a bitch before the addiction to cocaine did him in just a month after the boys graduated school. But back then, at the here and now, he still had some good looks underneath all the dirt on his cheeks and the grease in his hair. It was enough for Robert, even before he understood exactly what was happening to his own identity.

"You wanna' hang out after the movie?" Robert pressed.

"Why?"

"I dunno', I think you're a cool guy."

"You're so gay, Rob." Mitchell grunted.

Robert swung on his heel and punched his brother in the face. Mitchell toppled like a pile of bricks, nursing a bruised cheek and a bloody lip, his sneakers clapping on the sidewalk with the sharpness of gunshots.

"Don't call me that!" Robert shouted. "Just shut up, you little pussy. I bet you've never even been laid."

"One of us hasn't." Mitchell gripped at his face on the ground, staring daggers at Rob through the darkness enveloping the street. Mitchell rarely cried when he was a child. It took a lot to even get a quiver from his lower lip.

Robert kicked him in the ribs and snarled something unintelligible, grabbing Joe by the arm and yanking him away.

"C'mon, man, forget him." Rob sneered. "We'll go by ourselves."

"Whatever." Joe chuckled, shrugging the other boy's arm away.

Mitchell watched them until they rounded a corner, and the street lamps failed to illuminate them in the surreal yellow light they provided. Nothing but darkness, row houses and the distant-sounding of car horns.

Oh, and the dead squirrel Joe poked to finality with that stick.

Mitchell stared at the corpse just down the sidewalk for a while, still lying on the pavement. He snorted and righted himself, dusting off his jacket and his long brown hair. Normally, he'd be checking his phone and swiping through mounds of distractive bullshit. But this was 1991, touch-screen phones hadn't been on the market then and wouldn't be for several years.

He pulled out the little HotWheels car- a 1968 Camaro model in deep red –that he kept on his keychain, and fiddled with the tiny wheels, walking the opposite way to start heading for home. He gave the squirrel a wide berth, shoving his chain back in his pocket and sighing heavily.

Their rowhouse wasn't too far away from Calif Avenue. It was just past the abandoned section of homes with the wrecked Mercedes in the fifth driveway and the little Frankfurt Park that literally nobody in the area used. Well, except for kids smoking pot and hiding it from their parents between semesters, and that Gallade and his partner who came there every Saturday to practice moves on the wreckage of what had once been the playground jungle gym.

Mitchell was too isolated really to pursue any kind of meaningful pastimes at this age. Other kids either made him angry, pushed him around like Rob did or shunned him because they thought he was- 'Gross' –or something.

If he'd been older, it probably would've bothered him more. But having friends, and, most of all, girlfriends, rarely sparked anything in him seeing as he had-

"Gotchya'~!"

Mitchell stumbled forwards when something indescribably warm and large pounced on him from an alleyway. His attacker hollered in excitement, and a pair of arms tipped with talons wrapped around his chest and held on tightly.

The boy smiled for the first time that evening and hugged Saedi's arms against his chest, turning his head over to bop his cheek against the Charmeleon's stubby snout.

"I got you, Mitch." She stuck her tongue out at him, her tailflame illuminating the street amber as it swished to and fro behind them.

"You got me." Mitchell chuckled. "How did you know where I was?"

"I wasn't following you or anything." Saedi didn't attempt to mask her lie as she stepped off him. The Charmeleon was just a head shorter than him at this point. She gave a fang-filled smile and punched him on the arm. "And I certainly wasn't planning on jumping into the theater and plopping my lizardy butt right next to yours in the dark."

"You could've come too." He defended.

"Not with Rob." She hummed, her tone matching little to her statement. "Sooooo, what happened? Why'd your brother knock you over this time?"

"I called him gay." Mitchell shrugged, gesturing for her to walk with him.

"Oh, that again." Saedi nodded, folding her arms over her chest and waddling beside him. She peered at the bruise on his cheek over her only winter gear. She had a little red scarf she used to wear back then. It was tightly wrapped around her neck and shoulders, its loose end fluttering in a slight breeze overtaking the street. "I can't really say I blame him too much. You shouldn't be so mean to him."

"He's the one who can't control himself." Mitchell rolled his eyes. "You know, the other day, he started playing N64 with me, and because he lost, he threw a full cup of soda at me. Who does that?"

"Rob does that." Saedi giggled. "He's your brother, Mitch, you both love each other anyhow, right?"

Mitchell didn't answer her. He just shoved his hands in his pockets and huffed, licking away the last of the blood on his lip.

"I didn't want to see that stupid movie anyway."

"Now I know that's a lie." Saedi hummed, rubbing her flank all over him like a cat seeking attention. Her cute little lizard head popped up from the crease between his elbow and his hip. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he laughed as he leaned down and gave her a kiss on the nose. "-Mitch~!" –She cried, tearing out of his arms and blushing furiously. "I hate when you do that!"

"I know that's a lie." He countered. "And really, it's fine. I don't need a movie to have a good night."

"But Metal Char is your favorite superhero." She shook her head. "You have all her comics, and that poster over your bed. That lewd, crude and revealing poster-"

"Shut up." He play-shoved her. Saedi giggled even louder than before. "It's just a stupid poster I found in the thrift store for like two bucks."

"Soooo, you like Charizards, there's nothing wrong with that, Mitchie'."

"Don't call me that." He groaned. "Mom doesn't even call me that anymore."

'Cause mom is never home.

"But you do like Charizards, right?" Saedi pressed, watching him as they stopped at a crosswalk, waiting for the red hand to blink away for the little green man. "They're your favorite Pokemon out of the whole bunch. Why else would you have brought me home, huh?"

"They're… okay." He shrugged. Saedi gawked with mock offense.

"Just o-kay?! Your room is like a giant Metal Char book cover plastered over a panorama! You don't just sell yourself short after all that."

"What's the big deal about it, Saedi? She's just a cool superheroine who I look up to." Mitchell gestured to the dark, grungy streets surrounding them. "At least she's above all… this."

"Above what? The Hood?" Saedi sniggered. "Yeah, I guess kicking supervillain butt helps along your paycheck enough for it."

"Careful how loud you say that."

"The part about the balls-deep salary, or the HOOD~?" –She shouted, cackling when he stuffed his sleeve into her chops. "Alright! Alright, I give!"

The safety sign changed. No cars were there to stop anyhow as they crossed, the Charmeleon practically skipping beside him.

"Soooo, maybe you and me can go to the movies sometime instead."

Mitchell glanced over at her and examined how she looked. Saedi had her snout lowered and a half-smile half-frown over her features. Her fangs were chattering. Back then, of course, he never understood what particularly had her so nervous.

Nowadays, he could kick himself for not seeing signs even a moron could pick out. But back then the taboo of what was becoming of them didn't reveal itself so obviously. It didn't compute in his young mind, even with the crush he had on the racially different superhero of his dreams.

Back then it was the 90's slum banks of San Locisco. The last thing on Mitchell's worry list was the potential emotional tsunami brewing inside his Pokemon. It was only much later, around when he hit age 15, and Saedi 17, that her body started to fill out, and she evolved, and the two of them started to touch one another.

Right now was one of the last memories he had of the Innocence Period, right before things had taken a turn for the best, and subsequently collapsed into a turn for the worst possible outcome imaginable.

"J-Jeez', it's c-cold out here." Saedi chattered, smiling as she hugged her scarf and gazed lovingly up at him. "I was tailing you guys the whole time you were out. Just a lonely little Charmeleon out on the streets in the frigid winter…"

"Who told you to leave the house without your coat?"

"I hate that coat, Mitch! It looks like a little doggie sweater you'd put on Fido during Christmas. They design Pokemon coats like crap." Saedi shivered. "S-So what about that movie?"

"Yes, we can go." Mitchell opened the side of his jacket, and Saedi squeaked cutely as she threw herself inside his apparel and hugged him closely, burying her snout in his armpit. He always kept up on his hygiene. So it smelled like the deodorant brand he used. Somewhat citrus-ie. Perhaps that was where Saedi first started to get her style going. Even though she was his senior by two years, she was still smaller than him in her lesser evolution. Having Mitchell-Rides was a highlight of her days.

"I get to go to the movies with my Mitchell." The Charmeleon muffled happily. "Carry me!"

Mitchell hooked his arms and grunted when she tossed off her feet and landed in them, giggling like a little school girl as she wrapped his coat around them and bundled into his scrawny chest.

"Here, I can warm you up too." Saedi shoved her tailflame inside the coat, and the biological fire flickered harmlessly against his shirt inside. Now, Mitchell looked like a walking lantern with the light billowing inside his coat-tent. "Is that better, Mitchell?"

"Yeah." He leaned down and pecked her between the eyes. Saedi practically had a meltdown of hysterics inside his coat, sounding like a panicking sheep as she meekly covered her snout to try and hide the blush.

"H-Hey, Mitchell?"

"Yes, Saedi."

"I love you lots."

"I love you t-"

Outside the family home, Mitchell could already hear it. Muffled, prevalent shouting, and the heavy thud of a table being flipped over. The lights from the front door and windows flooded from the porch across the little lawn. Every so often, a pair of shadows would flicker across the orange plains and vanish on the other side.

Glass broke, and the high pitched shriek of his mother's voice pierced the night.

His father must have been drinking again.

"Oh no, now what?" Saedi grumbled, puffing her cheeks and peaking over the neckline of his jacket.

"Dad's drunk." Mitchell said nonchalantly. "I guess that means we're outside for longer."

"Mitchell, is that you?" An elderly lady peered out from the neighboring home's front door, reading spectacles perched on her tiny little nose. The wafting scent of cat piss immediately invaded the street, and a pair of tabbies whisked outside to further their business past the crone's ankles. "Do you need me to call the police again?"

"I'm not going inside right now, Ms. Doetid, but thanks." Mitchell smiled politely, bouncing Saedi in his arms as she peered at the older lady from his coat. "I'll be back in a little while. If they're still screaming, than yeah, the cops might need a ring."

"Be safe, Mitchell." Ms. Doetid held a thumbs up and jammed a cigar in her mouth before letting the rickety screen door slam behind her. Typical lifetime resident old lady of San Locisco's mixed neighborhoods. That crusty bag wouldn't blink at an assault rifle being leveled in her face.

Crusty, but kind hearted to folks.

As long as you weren't Asian, however. Ms. Doetid was a bigot if there ever was one, hollering up storms about no-good gooks.

But then again, everyone in Mitchell's old neighborhood hated somebody for the pure reasons of hating. Color, race, and species were all mixed together in a great old mess of distention and fury.

It was one of the reasons he'd moved all the way to the other coast as soon as he'd been old enough. It didn't help that his parents would later have followed him. He had always planned to grab Saedi and get her the hell out of there with no attachments whatsoever.

"You wanna' go see that movie?" He asked her as he walked them away from his loud, lit-up house.

"But isn't your brother still there-"

"Let's go to the theater by Arby's."

"Okay!" Saedi nuzzled him and licked his chin. "We can't have you missing out on Metal Char, can't we? And now, I have you all to myself."

Mitchell chuckled as the lizard's tongue swept over his chin. A little girlie kiss. Something so innocent, that they started out with.

"My Mitchell."

And now, he had to wake up, and forget this beautiful moment.

-0-0-0-0-0-

Mitchell came to with a tiny jolt. His skin was molten with sweat, but cold at the same time. He instinctively reached out and clenched all the empty sheets he was swaddled in.

"Saedi…?" –He groggily asked.

Tossing himself from the blankets, he hissed when sunlight blared in his face from his bedroom window. The blinds were wide open, all the way to the top of the rim. He never drew them up these days because he rarely got out of bed when he didn't absolutely need to.

Waking up to his room being alight, and opening his drawers to find the usual whirlwind mess of underwear and shirts inside neatly folded in piles of squares was disorienting, at the least. The smell of something cooking stabbed him in the nose, and so, lumbering like the undead from his room, he shouldered his door aside and gazed into his little kitchen.

Hunched over the tiny counter was a curvy Charizard several times his size. Her big tail was idly sweeping the floor in bored loops, occasionally brushing against the legs of the two kitchen chairs behind her. She was wearing a pair of exercise pants and a sweatshirt that he didn't remember her having. Straining, gray colored articles of clothing that barely kept her femininity concealed. He saw that she hadn't even slipped her tail through the third hole in the back of the pants, and so they were riding up its base, revealing the tops of her jiggly, orange ass cheeks to the morning light.

"Yes, hello, I'm calling in reference to a patient named Mitchell Hoems, he has an appointment today at 10:00 AM? Yes, I can hold."

Saedi sounded like a completely different person when she was on the phone. She didn't even glance at him as she shouldered her cellphone, and flipped her wrist, giving the eggs simmering in the pan before her a good swish across the surface of the metal.

Mitchell walked over to her and peered past her flank at the eggs, he brushed her with his face and stuck his nose in the gap between her arm and her chest, inhaling her normal citrus scent like an addict.

"Hi, Samantha, it's Saedi~. How are you, babe?" Saedi took a claw off the pan handle to wave him away dismissively, like she was shooing an errant fruit fly. "I'm okay. You know, the usual toil and grind of school life. It's actually going pretty good. I mean, it could be going better…"

Mitchell winced as he- downtrodden –paced over to the table and took his usual seat, waiting for breakfast like a good suicidal little shit.

"-That's why I'm calling, he's under the weather and won't be able to make it today. I hope you understand." Saedi cupped the receiver and nodded her snout at the fridge. "Can you get out the bacon, please~?" –She mouthed, and Mitchell almost tripped over his own foot to get on it. "I'm glad to hear it's no trouble. I don't know when at the moment, we're going to have to leave it open. Uh-huh. No. Good to hear, Samantha. Okay, have a good day, honey, you too, buhbye."

Click- went her phone.

Mitchell cautiously placed the defrosted bacon strips on the counter and fidgeted with his fingers before daring to speak.

"You didn't have to make me breakfast you know-"

"Yes hi, I'm calling in reference to an estimate on a door replacement." Saedi had the phone up to her fin again, smiling professionally as she deposited the eggs on a pair of plates with her little spatula. "Oh that's okay, take your time, sir."

"Saedi, I-"

Crssshkkk~! –she ripped open the bacon packaging with those wicked talons. The sound made him shiver in his own skin and he backed off.

"Yes, hello. My name's Saedi, I called yesterday about the little door incident? Yes, how are you? Good. Well, you see, my boyfriend lives in a little one-person bungalow and his door got ripped right off its hinges. Yessir, right through the wood, he spent all night picking up the pieces." The Charizardess sounded like she was chirping as she described the horrors of the previous night. She scraped most of the pan clean and- holding it on the scalding underside –bobbed it over the sink until all the egg shreds fell out.

Cooking was certainly more of an easy task when you were a fire-type and you didn't have to worry about getting scorched. As she laid the bacon strips in one at a time, they started to spit at her, and one of the blazing droplets of oil snagged her right on the forearm.

She didn't even look at it before she raised her arm up and licked it away quickly. She resumed her conversation on the phone.

"I'm just calling about the time on Monday, is there a way we can push that forwards to Tuesday? Our schedule's gone a little haywire. …Mmhmm. Yes. That sounds like a perfect time for the estimate. Of course." She listed off his address again and confirmed the hour precisely, before bidding the other end goodbye with a Click. "Ugh, the moment you're a woman, those contractors become so patronizing."

The dragon glanced at the table, as if just remembering Mitchell was there. Her smile was wide, but ultimately cardboard.

"Good morning, Mitchell. How did you sleep?" She sang in her usual chipper mood.

"Mmkay." He grunted, scratching at his hair. "Did you make a clothes trip or something?"

Saedi paused as she bustled over to the table and deposited the plates. She looked down at herself and giggled, adjusting her shirt to strain her weighty breasts against it, no doubt to intentionally drive him up a wall.

"When you were still in the E.R." She shrugged, like it was a piece of unimportant gossip. "I thought- perhaps against my better judgment –that they might keep you for a few nights, and so I had some clothes sitting in my car. Now I get to use them here. But at least they weren't wasted~."

The last part of that sentence came out sing-song. Mitchell winced when the plate smacked sharply on the table underneath his chin. The Charizardess swept to the other side and engulfed the poor chair there with her colossal backside. He could hear the legs straining even from where he was.

But that was why he had bought those chairs, so long ago, on a shoestring budget. They were tough things, garden chairs really, meant for outdoors activities with legs of metal. He had never been able to afford Poke-size chairs specifically built for the larger species.

Saedi had always made due when she used to stay here, kind of like now, cooking him meals, sitting and watching movies with him on the couch, playing that old copy of Scrabble that had been sitting unused in his coat closet for over a year, and, of course, having raunchy, interspecies sex with him in almost any room of the bungalow.

Mitchell recalled the freedom of being able to screw in the kitchen. Normally, it was people with children who had to worry about things like that being taken away. How had it all come to that when it was still just two souls in the little bungalow?

"Those eggs aren't going to eat themselves."

Mitchell blinked, startled, as Saedi's voice found its way through his defenses. She was chewing quaintly over a mouthful of her own cooking, not even sparing him the time of day as she clicked away at her little phone.

"Why'd you push the estimate back?" Mitchell picked up a little plastic fork and toyed with the edge of his egg pile. Saedi always cooked in Pokeportions. So of course, the eggs on his plate were enough for one Charizard, but one Charizard had the appetite of a freaking platoon. Add in the bacon, and you had a schmorgesborg that was as big as his head.

A few years ago, this would've been perfect.

When did he stop loving his Charizard's cooking?

As he popped a forkful in his face and chewed slowly, he remembered. Never. The problem was, he was a cunt, and he had driven her off like one. Can't exactly reap the benefits of someone else's goldmine.

That estimate. Focus.

"Did you hear me?" Saedi huffed, putting down her phone. She had her chin on her knuckles as she ate, glaring at him with this passive-aggressive kind of expression. He figured Saedi was so positively angry that she couldn't even look a certain way without tens of other emotions shoving in to have their part.

"Say it again, please, I'm sorry." He croaked.

"I pushed it back because I felt like it." Which was a peeved woman's fancy way of saying; your schedule is mine, you depraved, up-the-ass-taking little bitch, and you'll deal with it purely because I say so. "It clashes with your time stamp on Monday that I have worked out. We can't have that, so I bumped it."

"What other plans did you make?"

Saedi didn't immediately answer him. Her eyes were glazing over the floor nearby the stove where all the blood had been. There were ghosts in her pupils, like she was having visions of what would always have been there until the day this house became dust.

"Do you see that?"

Mitchell swallowed a last mouthful of eggs when her phone was shoved in his face. It was a small PNG image that she had opened up from some browser window, or a file path.

He didn't even know that dinosaur could save images. And he wasn't talking about the dragon herself in such poor taste.

"What is it?" He asked stupidly, his eyes darting around a colorful poster board with little pixilated people gathered around a table, with a sunny afternoon blooming in the window overlooking them. He knew exactly what it was. He was just being difficult again.

"Mitchell-" She started to growl.

"I'm sorry, I know what it is." He coughed, wiping his lips with a napkin. "You want me to go to group therapy?"

"It's the first step in our new plan." The Charizardess swept her fin piercings with a flick of her wrist and brought her phone back, tapping a few more keys as her eyes lingered across the tiny screen.

"We have a new plan?"

"Of course we do." She smiled briefly. "A new plan to get your life in working order, I reckon. Last night was very instructive for me, so after all that happened, I should actually be thanking you somewhat."

"Huh." He almost dropped his fork. "I don't think I understa-"

"You're not required to understand." Saedi informed him very curtly, putting her phone down again and for good this time as she ate the last of her breakfast. "This is all being put into action by me, and only me. Because as our lives have proven, incompetence runs in your blood, and I will not sit by and allow it to destroy the only person in your family worth saving. Starting later this afternoon, we're going with Plan B."

"Plan… B?" He asked dryly. There was probably meant to be a lot of weight behind what she was saying, but Mitchell was drunk on dread twenty-four-seven. There wasn't much that he did every day just for the sake of going along with it and hoping a car ran him down at the first opportunity.

What most people didn't realize, was that the life of someone broken rarely revolved around horrid, swirling images of shadowy doom and cackling madness.

Usually, it was a lot of sitting around with the feeling that the world was turning without you, and that nobody was looking back for you. Cries for help were overrated when humanity (and by extension, Pokemanity) was deaf. Nobody in the world handled someone else's despair properly.

That was why, if nothing else, Saedi's proclamation made him more anxious than angry or bothered.

The weird thing with such deep-seated depression was that other emotions constantly got blended in with the more entrenched consistencies of anger, hatred, loathing and madness. You knew that you loved the people trying to help you. But you watched as your body did what it wanted through a glass wall. The horror of being eaten alive inside, was the lows you had to observe yourself sink to, before the actions of anyone else.

The drive to end one's own life was, at its core, an obvious self-deconstruction of everything good you had accomplished. It was hard to recover from that nagging knowledge that you were never getting better. Many would say; impossible.

"Plan B." Saedi gave her first genuine smile in a long, damned time. Mitchell felt his chest ache as his heart swelled at the sight. Something about how that smile would spread down Saedi's snout to the edges of her jaw was just… fantastic to him.

Saedi was beautiful all the time, but she wasn't just beautiful, she was beautiful when she was happy. She had such an elegant, yet pudgy face all at the same time. It was lithe, like her arms and her ankles, sinewy and prehensile, to match her draconic and long neck.

Forgetting some of the darker stuff for just a second; could someone fall in love with the same person twice? Fuck yes.

"Luckily for both of us, school's taught me the art of deeper knowledge." Saedi nodded down at her phone and scooped up the last bite on her plate, speaking muffled over bacon-mush. "We're going this as a learning experience, and a beginning of the end."

"End of what?" He asked sourly.

"An end of your crisis, not your life. Rigorous scheduling and dietary habits are going to pull you through it all, Mitchell. And I'm going to be there for every step of the way, as it is." Saedi hummed some real laughter, and her wings flapped behind her as she gave him a cutesy edge of her shoulders. The world could be ending, and that dragoness could lighten the mood. "What do you say to that?"

"I need to go to the bathroom."

-0-0-0-0-0-

Mitchell was sure to lay his face on the edge of the cool porcelain making his bathroom sink as he sat on the bowl. The only upside to having a bathroom smaller than Mighty Mouse's shitter was that you could be drunk as fuck, and technically, you could never really teeter over.

The toilet was against your ass, a sink was basically jutting into your lap and the toiletries cabinet that he'd picked up at a flea market years ago was there to catch your elbow. No sweat and no chance. At least until you teetered towards the shower, that was a little farther away to the right. But there was a nice unwashed shag rug to soften your fall should that have happened.

Did his bathroom always stink this badly?

Fttttt~ -Mitchell allowed himself a weak chuckle into the sink's porcelain ribs. At least he hadn't come in here to vomit. Wasting Saedi's cooking was like taking the Holy Grail and pissing in it right under Jesus' nose.

How's that fairing for you, Christ? You absent-living cocksucker.

Mitchell flushed and got around cleaning himself up. He took as long as was possible for washing his hands, and paused at the bathroom door back to his room.

Saedi's premonitions had him on edge. Plan B? How long had she been conjuring that up last night? And could she have been planning it for longer? He and she hadn't had much contact for the last month since her semester had started, and she'd moved into on-campus housing with Bridget.

Some of that was because of the fact that she was tired sharing what was clearly a one-person home (and a one-human sized home at that) with him all the time, but she had mostly left because of a fight they'd had.

Granted, before she split, Mitchell hadn't tried to hurt himself for the better half of a year. His old self-employment as a graphic designer falling through had done the trick, and while he was basically living off of his own content royalties at this point, the inability to solely sustain himself on his own passion had been… catastrophically bad.

Combine that with throwing out the only love of his life, and the fact that his family had left him for dead, and you had a prime possibility for a Let's Tie a Belt around my Throat and Squeeze! –shitshow to unfold.

Damn it, he fucking hated being alive. He betted Robert didn't have to deal with this shit. Everything he'd said about him- while hurtful –was painfully true.

Mitchell was a bumfuck loser, leeching off the ooey-gooey love of his Charizard girlfriend. The only person in the literal world who gave a rat's ass about him, and this was how he treated-

Crk-eeeeekk- he threw the door open and stopped in the arch. Saedi was sitting on the foot of his bed, pulling on her sandals, her tail brushing through all the sheets as she worked between fixing her footwear and adjusting the strap of her bra.

She certainly wasn't making this abstinence easier.

This was probably the first of many stiffies he was going to have to suffer through today.

-By the way, since when did depression make him so horny?

"The good news is, the first thing I had planned today isn't starting for the next hour, and it's only twenty minutes away. So we have time to get ready." Saedi was either oblivious to or ignoring the concentrative indecisiveness he was currently suffering. She arched her magnificent back as she craned her arms to work on the strap of her boulder-holder, pushing out the twin creamy globes adorning her chest so much that the cups covering their ducts strained. "You're not seriously just going to stand there and not help me with this, are you?"

Mitchell coughed with what sounded like the fender of a car being slammed by a sledgehammer. He hurried over and jumped onto the bed, kneeling behind her as he clasped the little hook on the back of the black, oversized bra and latched it into place.

"Busty girls have it the worst." Saedi clicked her tongue, resting her foot on her knee to play with her sandal, her caramel-taloned toes wriggling. "They rarely have an exact size at the stores you happen to find, and on top of it, it kills your back. I mean, look at me. A Charizard in her mid-twenties? Where's the mercy? I certainly didn't get any at the evolutionary table. Do you remember, a few years ago just after high school-" –She giggled. "-and it was, I dunno', eleven-o-clock on a Wednesday night? And I had you run into Macy's looking for my cup size, and- *snicker* -you asked the lady behind the counter, if they carried-"

Saedi was losing her composure as she squinted her face from the hysterics, struggling to contain her laughter.

"-You asked her if they carried: Big dragon-momma size Double-Z landslide stoppers~!" The Charizard let reams of soot curl through her teeth as she howled in musing, pinching between her eyes and rocking on the bed. "-And I couldn't believe you actually said that to her~!"

Mitchell let go of the straps and hung his hands by his sides as he watched her crack herself up. He smiled, and summarily shuddered when it felt like someone hacked at a wall of ice that hadn't been touched in millennia.

Mitchell hummed a little as he doted on his Pokemon, watching her calm down and brush not tears of despair, but ones of joy, from her eyes, and this time before she put on mascara to ruin.

Before he knew what was happening, his hands were back on the straps, and the hook slipped metallically from its roost. Saedi jolted, like she had when he had snapped at her in the hospitable room. She was quiet as the bra slouched over her sizable dragoness-chest, and Mitchell's scrawny hands worked circles around her scapulas, just above the wing joint, because he knew she liked it there.

Saedi's breathing became uneven, and her wings spread out, a reaction Charizards had when they were presenting themselves, preening to be as large as possible when they felt… aroused by a known mate.

Mitchell was on autopilot. He leaned forwards and nestled his face into her carotid, inhaling reams of the sweet citrus smell she always had. He thumbed her muscles quaintly and with a trained hand, a completely different person in the blink of an eye.

His Charizardess was arching her mighty back, her breasts drooping like uninstructed clay over the tantalizingly defined edge of her ribcage. Mitchell slid his hands under her wiry arms and hitched his thumbs on her waist, allowing his fingers to slide over the soft paunch of her belly, where it was slightly rounded, as to properly adjust for the carrying of eggs.

"-M-Mitchell…." Saedi murmured, quivering as he wedged his pencil-like hips into the gap between the base of her juicy, thick tail and the orange globe that was her butt cheek. The little thin pair of panties down there did nothing to block the obvious girth of his dick poking her in the honeypot. The dragon rumbled deeply in her chest, and by instinct, the rest of her huge tail swirled up onto the bed and began to orbit him again, and again, until it had completely snaked around his body and entrenched him to drag him as close to her as possible.

Mitchell bit her neck and dry-humped her in a growing frenzy to relive something that he had taken away from himself for so long. Saedi was becoming comatose as any shreds of humor she had left abandoned her system, and her aching body longed for her recently absent mate to breed her.

Saedi grit her fangs and gasped, her tongue popping out and slithering in the air as heat overtook her veins. The beginnings of a fervent coat of perspiration began to glisten her creamy and orange scales.

He dragged the center strap of the panties to the side, fighting with the tail hole to snap it over one of her colossal flesh-globes and free up her forbidden grove for his choosing. Mitchell had a thumb hooked under his pajamas rim when Saedi gasped loudly.

Her tail uncoiled from him in one swift motion. It swung from the left and batted him off his own bed with the ease of a bundled newspaper besieging a little house spider.

Thwack~! –and Mitchell sailed across the room and tumbled on his ass onto the floor, dazed and confused, sporting a twitching, unsatisfied boner that painfully tented his sleepwear.

Shaking his head, he looked up at see Saedi struggling to hook her bra herself, and basically undo everything he'd fought through over the last minute or so. She turned her nose up to him as she fixed her little panties and swept her piercings from her face. She stood up, flicked her tail, and hugged herself protectively, glancing down at him over the fleshy mounds of her dragon boobs.

"W-Whatever it is you think we've reconciled," She stammered, her claw quivering as she reached over and snatched her purse off his nightstand. "you're telling yourself lies, Mitchell Hoems. We have work to do today. Get dressed and meet me outside when you're ready."

When he curled up in a ball and didn't respond, she nudged his knee with her sandal.

"Move your ass."

Then she stepped into the foyer. Mitchell heard her scoff at the wreck that was the front door, before she crossed the bungalow and found her exit. The back slammed shut, and he was alone in his house again, like normal.

No, he clawed at his hair and shivered to suppress a sob. This is anything but normal.

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