Limitless Evolution As a Snake

She reaches for me properly now, hands cupping under my midsection with a gentleness that shouldn’t be possible from someone with her strength. Her fingers are cool, and the contact against my heated scales is immediate relief. I didn’t realise how much everything hurt until it started not hurting.

”Inside,” she says, and it’s not a request.

The shack is exactly how I expected, which means exactly how Lyra keeps it: organised chaos. A narrow bed pushed against one wall, covered in a blanket that might once have been blue. A small desk cluttered with case files, a cracked tablet, and three mugs in various states of emptiness. A hot plate in the corner, currently off. The walls are bare concrete, same as every other shack in Twawi, but she’s pinned things to them: maps, notes, though it looks like there’s something new, a little red snake.

She helps me on the bed and disappears into the shack’s single other room, a closet-sized space that serves as her precinct office, storage, and apparently now a medical station. I hear drawers opening, something clinking, the rustle of fabric.

She returns with a first-aid kit that’s seen better decades. The red cross on the lid is faded to pink, and one of the hinges is held together with electrical tape. Inside: gauze, antiseptic, a roll of medical tape, and a small jar of something opaque and green that I’ve never seen before.

”Family remedy,” she says, catching my look. ”Don’t ask what’s in it. It works.”

”Famous last words.”

”Famous last words are what got you into this state.” She sits on the edge of the bed, knees touching my coils, and uncaps the jar. The smell hits me: herbs, something sharp and medicinal, underneath it all the faint tang of hocus-pocus. Not strong hocus-pocus. The kind that’s been diluted through generations of folk remedy, but hocus-pocus nonetheless.

Her hands find the worst of the cracks first. The scale near my midsection that’s already fallen off, leaving a patch of sensitive under-scale exposed. She dips two fingers into the green goop and applies it with a touch so careful I barely feel it, just the cool spread of the remedy, sinking into the damaged tissue with a tingling that’s not quite pain and not quite relief but something in between.

”Hold still,” she murmurs, though I wasn’t moving. Her thumb traces the edge of another crack, feeling for depth, for instability. Her brow is furrowed, which looks very cute.

”I was exploring,” I pleaded, because the silence is starting to feel heavy. ”Found an old church ruin in the deep tunnels. There was a gargoyle. I had a staring contest with it.”

Her hands pause. ”A staring contest.”

”Yeah.”

”With a statue.”

”It was a very expressive statue.”

She resumes applying the remedy, but the corner of her mouth twitches.

”And the cracks?” she asks. ”The wing? Did the statue do that too?”

”There was a gator. Sewer gator, big. Really big. Like, prehistoric big.”

Her hands stop entirely. She looks at me, really looks, and I see the moment the cop in her processes what I’ve just said against the geography of the Undercity, against threat classifications, against the fact that I am currently in multiple pieces on her bed.

”Matt.” Just my name again, but this time it’s full of something I can’t quite name fear, certainly, but underneath it a kind of furious, helpless love that makes my chest tighten in a way that has nothing to do with physical injury.

”It’s handled,” I assured, which is technically true if you define handled as turned into soup inside its own skin.

She doesn’t ask for details; her hands resume their work, slower now, almost reverent.

”The gargoyle was asking for it; you should’ve seen the way it looked at me. Total judgy rock energy.”

She laughs. It’s small, startled, the kind of laugh that escapes when you’re trying to be serious and someone says something so stupid it short-circuits your anger. Her hand finds the back of my head, fingers threading between my scales in that spot behind my hood, and that makes my entire nervous system go quiet.

”Idiot,” she says, with so much affection it barely qualifies as an insult.

”You’re an idiot.”

”Yeah.” Her thumb traces the line of my jaw, careful around the fangs. ”Mine.”

Ahhh, my heart, can snakes get butterflies? This is peak.

The remedy is working. I can feel it: the tingling spreading through the cracked scales, not quite healing them but stabilising, sealing the fractures, taking the raw edge off the pain. My wing settles properly in its pocket for the first time since the fight, the mechanism clicking back into alignment with a sound that’s half-relief, half-embarrassment.

Lyra caps the jar and sets it aside. Her hands don’t leave me. One rests on my midsection, palm flat against my scales, feeling the rise and fall of whatever passes for breathing in a snake. The other stays at the back of my head, fingers still working that spot that turns my brain to static.

I coil around her, carefully, mindful of my injuries. My body finds its way against her leg, then her waist, settling into the space between her arm and her side. She leans into the contact, her cool skin against my warmer scales, and I feel the bond between us hum at a frequency too low to hear but too present to ignore.

Not the dependency. Not the mechanical need the System built into her. Something underneath it, something that was there before the bond and would be there after, something that has nothing to do with venom or scales or cosmic reincarnation mechanics run by a drunk koala with a broken manual.

Her breathing slows against me, evens out, and the tension bleeds out of her shoulders one inch at a time until she’s fully gone, mouth slightly open, one hand still tangled in my scales even in sleep.

I stay very still partly because I don’t want to wake her. Mostly because moving right now feels like it would ruin something.

Then Old Mate decides now is the time.

[System: WELL NOW THE SHIELA’S ASLEEP LET’S SHED THAT SKIN AND FIX YA UP, I RECKON SHE’S DUE FOR ANOTHER BONE- I MEAN BOND, ACTUALLY MATE? YOU SHOULD PROBABLY JUST GO AHEAD AND-]

Old mate, shut up.

[System: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA]