Chapter 448: Then We Try

"Oh, FINALLY," the lizard suddenly said, eye still closed, "you remembered I exist."

"Excuse me? I always remember you exist," Raizen said, settling onto the floor beside the mattress. "Also, you’re very loud for someone half the size of my palm."

"I am exactly the right volume for my circumstances." The lizard cracked open its one eye, found him, and let it drift half-shut again. "You, on the other hand, abandoned me in an attic for an entire morning. I had nothing to do but listen to this household fall apart through the floorboards. It was educational."

"You were asleep."

"I was resting, there’s a difference. I heard everything."

Raizen leaned back against the side of the bed. "Did you?"

"All of it. Allow me to summarize:" The lizard shifted slightly in its nest, settling into the unmistakable posture of something about to give a lecture. "It began with a crisis involving bread. Quite catastrophic, by the sound of it. A young man - the loud one, the one who narrates his own life - spent several minutes demanding to know the location of bread that, I gather, did not exist. There was real anguish - I felt bad for him."

"That’s Arashi. And there was bread, he just couldn’t find it cause sometimes he makes you think he’s legally blind sometimes"

"Tragic either way. Then there was a period of relative calm, followed by -" the lizard paused for effect, "- what I can only describe as a woman being violently attacked by a cupboard. Enormous noise, metal everywhere. A struggle, possibly a small war."

Raizen closed his eyes and bit his lower lip. "That wasn’t a war."

"It sounded like a war."

"That was Hikari. Trying on armour."

"Trying on armour. Voluntarily. This early in the morning. Why!?"

"She found it in Kori’s closet, and probably wanted to see if it fit."

"And the avalanche?"

"...There was an incident. With a door."

The lizard’s eye opened fully now, fixing on him with delighted interest. "An incident, huh? Go on."

"No."

"You opened a door, didn’t you. You opened a door and something happened and you’ve been carrying it around all morning like a man who can’t look his own reflection in the eye."

"I’m not talking about the door."

"Fascinating. Fascinating. I’ll get it out of the girl later, she likes me." The lizard settled back, thoroughly pleased with itself. "After the door war, there was the spoon."

"You heard the spoon?"

"I heard a great deal of laughter and the word spoon used approximately nine times. I assembled the rest. I assume you gave Kori a spoon. I assume it was a stupid spoon. I assume she loved it, because she has questionable taste, which is the only explanation for why she keeps any of you around."

"It’s a very good spoon."

"It is certainly a spoon. I just don’t know what kind." The lizard’s eye drifted toward the window. "And then, just before you finally remembered I exist, there was a dragon. A small, loud, metal dragon. Carrying something heavy. A woman riding it shouting cheerfully about some "clearance forms" she falsified. I have constructed an entire theory about that one but I’m saving it."

"That’s probably for the best."

"It involves a nice conspiracy, though."

"It usually does."

The lizard made a small satisfied sound and tried to adjust its position to face him more directly - pushing up with its one front leg, shifting its weight to turn -

- and the weight went wrong.

Without the back half to counterbalance, the small body tipped forward off the front leg and face-planted gently into the fold of the blanket with a soft fwump. The cover slid half off. For a second the lizard just lay there, head buried in fabric, the missing rear of its body suddenly very visible in the slant of the window light.

Silence.

"You saw nothing," the lizard said, muffled.

Raizen laughed - and then the laugh caught somewhere in his chest and didn’t quite finish, because the lizard was struggling to right itself with one leg and couldn’t quite manage it, and he had to reach out and gently tip it back upright with one finger. The body weighed almost nothing. The scabbed-over half passed under his fingertip, smooth and cool and wrong.

The lizard resettled itself with as much dignity as it could reclaim, which wasn’t much.

Raizen kept his finger near it.

"Does it actually hurt...?" he asked, not joking now.

"It’s an inconvenience, that’s for sure."

"That’s not what I asked."

The lizard was quiet for a moment. "It’s manageable. The reforming does most of the work on its own. It’s slow. It itches in places I no longer have, which is a strange thing to experience, but manageable."

Raizen looked at the missing half for a long moment.

"I could try to heal you."

The eye snapped to him. "No."

"I’ve never done it before. But I could -"

"You’ve never done it before?" The lizard’s voice climbed. "You want to test healing - a discipline you have never attempted - on a half-disintegrated creature held together by sheer willpower and spite? Absolutely not. No. Find a frog. Practice on a frog."

"I’m not practicing on a frog."

"We’re not compatible, clodsprocket. That’s the part you’re not grasping. Your Eon and whatever leftovers I run on - they are not the same substance. You’d be pouring water onto an oil fire. Best case, nothing happens. Worst case, you make this -" it gestured at itself with its remaining front leg, "- considerably worse, and I have very little left to lose at the worse end of the scale."

"I made you."

The lizard went still.

"During random training, some time ago, yes. You came out of one of my Eon attempts. You’re not separate from it - you came from it. From me." Raizen held its eye. "If anyone’s Eon is going to be compatible with whatever you run on, it’s mine. By definition."

The lizard didn’t answer right away. Its eye looked straight into his, and for a moment the sarcasm was entirely gone - replaced by something quieter and more careful, the look of a creature that had a counter-argument and had decided, for reasons of its own, not to say it out loud.

"That’s not -" it started, and stopped. "It’s more complicated than that."

"Then explain it."

"...I’d rather not."

"Then we try."