Akira’s POV The housing unit was a ten minute walk from the main guild, which I had not done until today because the first two weeks had been full of missions and calibration and Sena and the particular discipline of not thinking about things I had decided not to think about, and somewhere in that sequence I had let the visits fall to the bottom of the list.
The system reminded me this morning with a single line that appeared while I was making tea.
[Beast Bond maintenance: recommended.
Neglect of active beast bonds may affect communication channels.] I read it and put my cup down and left soon after.
I didn’t have enough mana points to keep Gleam hidden in a well space.
So for now, I had to visit.
The unit was purpose-built for bonded beasts, which meant it was larger than it looked from the outside and significantly better ventilated, with ceilings high enough to accommodate wings and flooring that had clearly been replaced more than once by something that could handle weight.
Kael had ensured Gleam’s successful transfer and had also made sure she was comfortably placed.
He might be weird, but I owed that to him.
A handler at the front desk confirmed Gleam’s location without looking up from his screen, the manner of someone who processed unusual things daily and had stopped recognizing them as unusual.
I found her in the rear enclosure.
She was lying down, which she had been doing the last time I saw her in the Stoner Guild hall, and she tracked me across the space with those blue eyes the same way she had then… unhurried, complete, the gaze of something that had decided it had sufficient time to look at whatever it was looking at.
I crossed the enclosure and sat on the floor near her head, close enough that the ambient warmth of her came through clearly.
“I should have come sooner.
I’m sorry.
There are no excuses for not visiting.
Even during your transfer,” I said as I folded my legs while sitting.
She looked at me.
Then something happened that I was not prepared for, which was becoming a pattern with Gleam.
The words didn’t come through my ears.
They arrived somewhere lower than that, in the chest, in the same register as the bond’s pressure-and-warmth communication but shaped, structured, carrying the specific weight of language rather than just feeling.
Four words, arriving with the patient deliberateness of something choosing them carefully.
‘You smell like trouble.’ I sat very still.
The bond hummed between us, present and steady, and I looked at her blue eyes and she looked back at me and the words were just there.
As if they had always been able to get through and had simply been waiting for the channel to open.
“You can talk,” I said.
She blinked once.
Slowly.
“I really don’t know what to say.
I have always had a problem with…,” I pause.
“Communication channels.” I continued when I found the right way to phrase it.
The next words came at the same pace, each one landing separately.
‘The man who watches you from a distance… has a Phoenix.
She is a problem.’ I opened my mouth and closed it.
The man who watched from a distance was not a description I was going to pretend required clarification.
“Kael’s Phoenix,” I said.
“A problem how?” I had learnt that he had bonded with the last female phoenix from others.
Gleam’s words just confirmed it.
Gleam looked at me with the expression that I was going to come to understand meant she had said what she intended to say and was not going to elaborate.
Her tail moved once across the floor, a slow displacement of air.
Then, ‘I am hungry.’ “Right.” I stood up.
“Where does the handler keep the feed?” The handler, when I found him, looked at me with the mild surprise of someone not accustomed to bonded hunters handling feeding directly.
I told him I had it.
He showed me where the feed was stored and returned to his screen with the air of someone who had learned not to ask questions about things that were going to happen regardless of his opinion.
I fed Gleam.
I wouldn’t lie, but her food seemed weird.
Glowing balls that seemed to be infused with an essence unknown.
I would ask about that later.
She ate with the focused attention she gave everything, which was to say completely, and I sat nearby and watched and tried to determine how I felt about the fact that my bonded Celestial Dragon had just said eight words to me and two of them were related to Kael.
Someone even I didn’t seem to understand.
When she finished she settled back into the lying position and looked at me, and the expectation in the look was clear enough without words.
I sat back down on the floor beside her.
“Fine,” I said.
“What do you want to know?” She said nothing.
She looked at me with those deep blue eyes and the bond carried something that wasn’t a question exactly… more an openness.
A quality of attention that made room.
So I told her.
I figured if I couldn’t trust my own bonded beast, then there was no reason for me to bond with her in the first place.
Plus, she was one of the first missions the system had given me.
I told her about Earth the way I had never told anyone about Earth, not the edited version I gave in the hospital to my mother here, not the shape of it that I had let Kael read in fragments from my background file.
I told her the real version, the one that started before the rooftop, before the scholarship, before my mother’s diagnosis.
The version that started with being nine years old and watching a door close and understanding without the words for it yet that certain things were now different in a permanent way and that the correct response to that was to start managing.
I told her about the colour-coded schedule.
About the four income sources.
About the particular quality of being reliable in a way that people only valued when they needed something from it.
About the acceptance letter and my mother crying and the feeling of something that was almost yes instead of not yet.
About deferring it.
About the word terminal arriving and sitting with it for three days before letting myself feel it.
About the rooftop.
The hands.
The half-second of nothing.
The rain.
Gleam listened.
She didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, didn’t send anything through the bond that shaped itself into words.
But the bond itself was present throughout in a way that was different from its usual ambient register… fuller, the way a room filled with attention feels different from a room that happens to contain someone.
She was listening with everything she had.
I could feel it.
I talked for a long time.
Longer than I had planned, which had been not at all, since I had come here to do feed maintenance and bond maintenance and had not expected to find a communication channel that had apparently been waiting for me to use it.
When I finished, the enclosure was quiet.
The late afternoon light was coming through the high vents at an angle that had shifted since I arrived, which told me more time had passed than I had tracked.
Gleam’s eyes were steady on me.
“That’s all of it.” I smiled quietly as a fuzzy feeling washed over me.
A pause.
Long enough that I thought she might not respond.
Then, arriving in the same careful register as before.
‘You carried it for a long time.’ “Yes.” ‘You put it down yet?’ I thought about this.
About whether that was true.
About the dreams that were becoming less frequent, about the man on the road who had been walking away and was now standing still.
“I’m trying to,” I said.
She held my gaze for a moment longer.
Then she lowered her head to the floor in the slow deliberate way of something that had concluded what it was doing and was now simply being present, and her exhale was warm and moved my hair slightly and I sat next to her and looked at the slant of light through the vents and didn’t say anything else.
We stayed like that for another hour.
The handler knocked at six to signal the end of visiting hours.
I stood up and brushed the floor dust from my jacket and looked at Gleam, who looked back at me with those blue eyes that had been onyx when she chose me and were now the specific deep colour of something that had decided.
“I’ll come back,” I said.
The bond sent something back that wasn’t words.
Something that felt like of course, in the register of something that had never doubted it.
I went home through the evening city and thought about ‘you smell like trouble’ and ‘the man who watches you has a Phoenix and she is a problem’ and wondered what exactly the Phoenix was a problem for.
I thought about the fact that I had just told a dragon the story of my death in complete and unedited detail and she had received it with the quality of something for whom the information changed nothing important.
She had already decided, in the beast hall, before she knew any of it.
That sat with me the whole walk home in a way I didn’t have a clean word for but that felt, if I was being precise about it, like the beginning of something.