Page 75 of Nine-Tenths

Icompose a letter. I spend an hour getting the email addresses of every major reporter and newspaper in Upper Canada I can find. Hit send. It lingers in my inbox. Server issues. Won't go. I send a test email to Hadi, some random jumble of bullshit asking how the crowds are at work. It goes through.

"Fuck," I sob, hands shaking, as I dial 911.

The operator laughs me off, and when I try to call the non-emergency line, my call won't connect. The robotic voice bleeps obnoxiously and tells me that number is blocked. I try from Hadi's landline, and when I reach an officer, I'm told to stop wasting their time.

All my life I've known that dragons run the world, but in a sort of vague, abstract way. They head Business Associations, theyown land that they manage for municipalities, they have parallel parliaments and support human governments, they write policy and invest in charities, they create structure. What I didn't realize is that they don't just run the world… theycontrolit.

So much of what I know about dragons has been fed to me by those very dragons themselves. It's the ultimate propaganda machine, and I've been raised inside of it.

I spend the rest of the night trying to reach out to someone,anyonewho might help, and can't. The news is playing a loop of me looking like hot garbage whispering "We didn't break up", delusional and desperate. The commentators insinuate that Dav's brief blip of a reappearance was just that—a blip. And that I’m a mistake he's retreating from.

Lies!

…aren't they?

Dav would come back to me if he could.

Right?

He loves me. He said so. Even if I never got to say it back.

After a shitty, nightmare-plagued sleep on Hadi’s sofa, I expect to have to elbow my way through a sea of cameras and obscene shouting the next day. But when I leave the building, there's nothing but footprints scoured into the trampled grass. I slink home, hollowed out by the perpetual fear that I’m worth abandoning, and drop into bed, missing the warm comfort of Dav with an ache that's physical. I yearn for the way we curled together, heads sharing a pillow and the small gap between our bodies cupping our world, our future, and all its possibilities.

Mum visits for a few days. She believes what the news says, tells me I'm better off, while I lay on the sofa with my head in her lap. She doesn’t say ‘I told you so’, and I don't try to tell her the truth. What would be the point?

After she goes home, Gem and Stu call every night. They trade off, as if they're on self-harm watch.

Huh.

They're probably on self-harm watch.

Another week passes. Then two.

I talk to Dr. Chen every other day, and on the days it's not her, it's Dike, or Mau, or both "just popping by" with takeout and beer, or new video games to try, or some academic journal article to read aloud and mock.

I try very hard not to resent everyone.

They only want to make sure I'm healthy.

Fuck.

I just want to sleep.

I sleep too much.

With nothing better to do, I go back to work.

Our popularity has remained the same, but now it's not because of the coffee. I don’t want to be gawked at, so I stay in the kitchen, hiding in the stainless steel cave like Dav did. I roast. I bake. I call, I post to social media, I email. Letters are returned unopened. Security won’t let me get close to government buildings. (Though, even I know better than to rock up to Chorley Park and bang on Lt. Gov. Scumbag’s door.)

I reach out fruitlessly, work resentfully, sleep fitfully, and miss Dav terribly.

By the fourth week, I’m mad at myself.

How could I let him mean so much to me, how could we spend so much time together, and I know so goddamned little about him? His home address, his family’s names, I don't even know what his dragonshape looks like. Why didn’t I push more? Why didn’t Icaremore?

It's stupid, but Dav never got to tell me what it is that "I've done it again" meant, and I think that out of everything, that's what pisses me off most. He promised me he would explain, and they wouldn't let him keep that promise.

The sharp pain of missing Dav turns into something else, something resentful and moldy. It feels like giving up. I'm just human, after all. What can I do if the Draconic Powers That Be want to do something horrible to the man that I love? (Yes, I still love him, and they can choke on it.) Shit-all. And it's wretched.

---