Turns out having a dragon share a headspace with you doesn’t mean unlimited access.
Big brother made that very clear the moment I tried pushing for a second conversation right after the first one.
Ten minutes.
That’s what you can handle right now without frying something important in that tiny skull of yours.
We’ll work up to more.
Ten minutes a day?
That’s it?
That’s plenty, for now.
You want theory, you’ll get theory.
You want to actually awaken anything, that takes more than a chat — it takes your body catching up to what your soul’s already carrying.
So: ten minutes.
Every day, without fail, of him walking me through the barest basics of what magic even was in this world — how it moved, how it built, how a body needed to learn to hold it before it could ever hope to shape it into something useful.
No flashy powers yet.
No distortion, no dragon-borrowed strength.
Just theory, and a very patient, very old voice telling me to stop trying to force something my body wasn’t ready for yet.
Fine.
Baby steps.
Story of my whole life apparently.
That evening, though, had nothing to do with magic at all.
It started with bread, like most things in this cell did.
Rob had gotten his hands on an extra piece somehow — never asked how, learned better than to ask about that kind of thing — and was in the middle of splitting it among everyone when Millianna, mouth half full, turned to Erza with the kind of blunt curiosity only a kid could manage.
“What’s your last name, Erza?” Erza went quiet.
Not the startled kind of quiet from her first night here — just small.
Like the question had found a soft spot she hadn’t expected anyone to poke at.
“I don’t have one,” she said, eventually, picking at the edge of her own piece of bread instead of looking at anyone.
“Never did.
Nobody ever gave me one.” The cell went a little quiet at that.
Even Rob’s wyvern story instincts seemed to know better than to fill the silence this time.
Well.
Guess it’s now or never.
“I don’t really have one either,” I said, and every head turned toward me instead, which was honestly worse, but too late to back out now.
“Jack isn’t even really my name.
It’s just what a lady at an orphanage called me, before all this.
I’ve been meaning to actually pick something for myself.
Just haven’t landed on it yet.” “So neither of us have one,” Erza said quietly.
Not quite a question.
“Guess not.” There was a pause, and then — because apparently five-year-old me had decided this was the moment for grand gestures — I just said it.
“Scarlet.” Erza blinked at me.
“What?” “Scarlet.
As a last name.
For you.” I nodded toward her hair, feeling only slightly ridiculous about it.
“Fits.
Color’s kind of your whole thing.” She stared at me for a long moment, like she was testing the weight of the word, rolling it around before deciding whether to accept it.
“…Erza Scarlet,” she said, finally, quiet, almost to herself.
Then, a small, genuine smile — the first real one I think I’d actually seen from her.
“I like it.” There it is.
Log that one as a win.
It wasn’t much.
Just kids in a cell, trading names and small kindnesses in a place that mostly tried to strip both away from everyone who ended up here.
But something in the air had shifted a little, loosened, like the six of us had quietly decided to actually be something to each other instead of just people sharing a cage.
It got even more crowded a few days later, when the guards tossed in another kid — small, nervous, flinching at every sound.
Sho, he said his name was, once he’d stopped shaking long enough to talk.
Millianna had him half-adopted within the hour, Rob had a wyvern story ready before the kid even finished introducing himself, and just like that, the group was seven instead of six.
Getting crowded in here.
Guess that’s just how found families work, though.
You don’t really choose the size of them.
That night, once everyone else had drifted off, I found my ten minutes with big brother again, running through the same slow, patient theory as always — how to feel the magic sitting dormant somewhere inside a body too young to properly hold it yet, how to stop grabbing at it like an idiot and instead just…
wait, and listen, and let it come when it was ready.
Slow going.
But everyone in this cell just got a little more mine to protect.
Guess I’d better hurry up and get strong enough to actually do it.