The dragon in him
It's like multiple personality disorder, but cooler.
“You’re supposed to have your hands on your keyboard, Mr Tiamatson.”
Drake turned his office armchair. He already knew who was there, but he couldn’t help it. The standing, suit-and-tie-wearing profile of his team manager was observing him from the top of his senior position, his eyes staring at his subordinate’s hands, which were daring being on a cup of coffee.
Drake held a curse. He had been typing non-stop until just five seconds ago, there was nothing wrong with what he was doing. But Mr Karoshi had to step into the open space just now and conclude Drake was procrastinating.
Out of instinct, he tried to defend himself. “I’ve been writing code the whole morning, you can see it here,” and he pointed at the monitor, showing off two windows of long series of lines in a monospaced font. Mr Karoshi gave it a quick look, and then concluded:
“This was supposed to be completed yesterday. Why are you still working on it?”
“We had that severe bug to correct yesterday.”
“And then you went back home like if there was no deadline to meet?”
Drake held his tongue. He could have said a million things, like having appointments, being mentally exhausted, but he knew it was useless. Mr Karoshi seemed to be there more to tease his subordinates than to actually make sure projects were done. He knew for certain the teams he had assigned all underperformed. But nobody dared admitting it explicitly there.
“Finish it before the end of the day.”
“Yes...sir.”
Before miserably putting his hands back on the keyboard, Drake felt a foreign presence within his mind. He didn’t startle: it was a constant presence in his life. Unfortunately, it would often beg him to take kinds of action that would not be considered acceptable in human society.
Bite him.
I can’t, Drake replied mentally, pretending to read the code while Mr Karoshi moved on to other of his coworkers.
It wasn’t easy having the spirit of a dragon within you. Drake had never asked for it - he had had it since he was born, and it would take a miracle to have it removed, that is, the possibility that dragon reawakening would happen during his lifespan. Drake was a ‘dormant’: one of the few humans in the world who had the privilege of hosting a dragon spirit in their body, a temporary solution decided centuries ago by dragonkind to wait for the moment they’d be safe in the world again. He was born at the same moment when another dormant died, hence the dragon spirit moved in his body. That meant that Drake had to keep a dragon calm all the time and satisfy his dragon needs in the safest way possible, constantly having to avoid letting him take decisions for him at wrong moments. Like biting his hideous boss.
That human is not fair, the dragon replied, you should defeat him.
That’s not how humans work, Gryrvorth, Drake replied annoyed, calling the dragon with his name, how many times do I have to tell you?
He remembered when he was a kid, those times when Gryrvorth had encouraged him to solve disputes with his schoolmates by biting. Even after countless detention, one school suspension and having Drake being called ‘Nosferatu’, the dragon still was convinced it was the most logical way to solve an issue. It was hard to make a two thousand years old dragon change his mind.
Finally, lunch break. Drake got up, sure this time Mr Karoshi would have nothing to say, and proceeded to the company cafeteria. As he stayed in queue with other men he knew nothing about, he prayed that they wouldn’t serve a certain dish. Not because he didn’t like it, but because Gryrvorth always had something to say about it.
“Ma’am, what’s on today?” He asked the chef, a middle-aged woman filling up a big tray.
“Chicken pasta.”
Damn! He swore internally. He still maintained a credible human composure, managing to say “Thank you ma’am,” and smiling, but as he sat down and began eating, Gryrvorth had something to say.
Why no raw?
You just never learn, do you? Cried Drake while chewing on the pieces of chicken. I’m not going to eat raw meat just because you prefer it. First, I may get salmonella, second, the one who has a mouth is me.
And he continued eating, ignoring the dragon for the rest of the lunch break.
The rest of the working day continued as every day. Write code, get blamed by Mr Hiroki, exchange some polite conversation with coworkers he cared nothing about but had to be nice with. When he left, it was 7 PM. Drake left the office making a pair of forced goodbye’s, then took the car (If you flew you would be faster, Gryrvorth loved to say) and then finally home.
Having a dragon inside you meant having to do some unconventional choices – some of which could be quite costly. Drake couldn’t go live in a tiny studio apartment in the middle of the city: he had tried it when he was young, and in a handful of days Gryrvorth had gone mad from the lack of contact with nature, so much that Drake kept finding himself walking in the direction of parks, rivers and anything with grass even when he needed to go somewhere else. If only I could ask for a disability pension, he often thought, but who would ever believe me? It was already enough having to force Gryrvorth to staying with him in that cramped office five days a week, a place that was the antithesis of everything dragon, without making him stay in another cramped apartment building at night too.
So Drake took the motorway, far, far away from the big city, and then left for a series of roads that became less and less trafficked, until he drove on a dirt road that lead to a solitary house in the woods. His home, whose mortgage was the reason he still stick to working there.
Hunt? Gryrvorth asked, at the very moment Drake got out of his car.
“Yes,” he said, relieved to finally be able to speak to him loudly. It was dinner time, after all.
Admittedly, that was for Drake the only part about having a dragon spirit he actually had fun with. Since his childhood, he had needed to learn to appease Gryrvorth’s predator nature by actively looking for food in the woods, so that he even had a hunting license. Many wouldn’t have agreed with him, but he never had a choice; nevertheless he couldn’t deny there was a certain satisfaction in a successful kill, even if that satisfaction came much more from Gryrvorth than himself. Now it was summer, still some months before he was legally allowed to hunt large prey, but the woods around had plenty of bunnies jumping among the trees.
So Drake changed his clothes from his blue attire to a mimetic suite, and dived into the forest around his house. He had to do it bare hands, since that was how dragons did it. Gryrvorth helped him tracking the rabbits hopping around, telling him where to go, how to move and when to jump over.
That night, it took around fifteen minutes to catch one. A strong wave of self-accomplishment hit him while he broke the unfortunate rabbit’s neck, giving it a quick date. First from the dragon, then from himself. He got up and walked back home, where he’d clean it and cook it.
Will you try eating it raw-
“NO,” he shouted annoyed.
If anything, that was a friday, so he’d have two days alone where he could be one with nature and the dragon in him. All his weekends were spent among the woods. Drake wondered what it would be to have only one mind, to be able to do human things like living in cities, attending parties and so on without feeling that sense of discomfort and frustration Gryrvorth always returned in such situations. He didn’t even dare getting a wife, for she would be required to renounce too many commodities and share too many strange things.
“How likely is it that you dragons shall return before I die?” he asked, even if he had been told the answer a million times.
_Still not ready, _ Gryrvorth replied.
“What will happen when you do, if I’m still alive?”
You’ll be saved.
Drake kept cutting the rabbit’s internal organs, not wanting to know more about what that vaguely menacing answer meant. All he wanted to do was finishing quickly there so he could at least relax a bit on the sofa and not having to be human and dragon at the same time, even if for just a handful of hours.