Chapter 449: I'll Be Damned

The lizard let out a long, theatrical, deeply put-upon sigh - the sigh of something that had lost an argument it knew it was going to lose from the start, but still wanted full credit for resisting.

"Fine. Fine. One attempt. A small one. The smallest possible amount of whatever you're about to do." It fixed him with its one eye. "And when this goes spectacularly wrong, I want it on record that I objected with my whole chest. Which, I'll remind you, is most of what I currently have."

"Noted."

"With my whole chest, Raizen."

"Noted."

Raizen shifted closer, until he was crouched right over the nest, and held his hand above the small curled body. He closed his eyes for a moment, reaching for the feeling he reached for in training - the warmth low in his chest, the slow pull of Eon gathering toward his hands. It came easier than usual. It came almost eagerly, flowing up through his arm and pooling at his fingertips, and a faint light began to bloom in the air just above the lizard's body.

The lizard watched it gather with its one eye, said nothing, and went very still.

Raizen didn't have a name for the place he was reaching toward, only a direction. It was the same direction he'd reached the day the lizard first appeared - back during a training drill that had gone nowhere, when he'd pushed past the edge of his usual Eon and something had answered from a part of himself he'd never found before. He'd assumed, afterward, that it was just a deeper reserve, a door he'd accidentally opened and never quite found again.

He found it now.

It was further in than ordinary Eon, past the warm familiar reserve he drew from for everything else, in a quiet inward space he had no memory of building. He expected it to feel empty - a hollow he'd stumbled into once and was now revisiting out of necessity.

But it wasn't empty.

He couldn't have said what filled it. Not a voice, not a shape, nothing he could point to. Just the faint, unmistakable sense that the space was occupied - that something rested there, the way a room can feel lived-in even when you can't see anyone in it. The feeling should have frightened him. Instead it felt almost familiar, the way the cloud-glow had felt familiar to Hikari, the way the song over Ukai had felt like a lullaby he half-remembered.

The Eon that came up was the same Eon he always used - warm, bright, his - but as it flowed toward his hands, something came up with it.

It came from the lower part of his chest, behind the sternum, the spot that had been faintly tight for some days now, and that he'd been dismissing as fatigue since the moment he'd stepped off the aircraft. A second current, threading up alongside the first. Where his Eon was warm, this was the opposite of warm - not cold exactly, but the absence of warmth, a thin dark thread that wound through the bright one and made the whole flow feel heavier, denser, more.

He didn't understand it. He didn't try to. In the moment it just felt like effort - like he was pulling Eon from both ends at once, like drawing through a straw from both sides until the pressure built somewhere it shouldn't. Overuse, that was all he could name it as. He was reaching too deep, drawing too hard, and his body was protesting the way bodies protested being asked for more than they wanted to give.

It hurt. The light gathered above the lizard's body, brighter now, threaded faintly with something that didn't catch the light the way the rest of it did - a black thread running through the glow, there and not there at the same time. Raizen's jaw clenched. The pressure behind his sternum climbed. He kept the flow steady, lowered his hand a fraction, and let the gathered Eon settle over the small curled shape in the nest.

The lizard's body took it.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the scabbed-over half - the smooth, strange, sealed edge where the body simply stopped - began, very slowly, to move.

It didn't grow the way Raizen expected, didn't extend cleanly outward like a drawing being finished. It came in pulses, in fits, the dark sealed edge softening and rippling like the surface of disturbed water, then reaching, then settling. An outline of the hip. The start of a spine. The process looked less like healing and more like something remembering its own shape and reassembling itself by force of recollection, and every pulse of it drew harder on the current running up through Raizen's chest.

The pain sharpened, but he breathed through it. The space he was drawing from gave and gave, the bright current and the dark one braided together, and he had the distant, unsettling sense that the dark thread was the part the lizard's body actually wanted - that the warm Eon was carrying it, but the thing underneath was what the reforming was reaching for. He didn't know why he thought that, but it was still there.

The hip finished. The spine extended. The dark sealed edge worked its way down what had been a stump and began, slowly, to draw out the structure of a rear leg - bone first, a pale suggestion of it under forming tissue, then the rest closing over it in those same rippling pulses.

Sweat had started at Raizen's hairline. His arm was beginning to shake. The pressure in his chest had become a deep, grinding ache, like a muscle worked long past its limit, and a faint ringing had risen in his ears that he was too focused to notice. He gritted his teeth and held the flow. Almost. The second rear leg was forming now, faster than the first, the body learning its own shape as it went.

The tail came last.

It uncoiled out of the base of the spine in a single long pulse, the dark edge racing down its length and the scales closing over it from base to tip, and then -

- it stopped.

The light winked out. The dark thread snapped back down into Raizen's chest like a released cord, and the warm current cut off with it, and Raizen pitched forward over the nest with a sharp, ragged gasp, catching himself on one hand against the mattress.

He knelt there, chest heaving, the ache behind his sternum slowly unclenching, the ringing in his ears fading down to nothing. His arm trembled. His vision swam at the edges for a second and then settled.

He looked down.

In the nest, in the slant of the window light, the lizard lay curled and whole.

All of it. The full body, head to tail, four legs, the long tail tucked neatly around its side. The black, scale-like skin caught the light cleanly now, unbroken, no weird sealed edge, no missing half. It looked exactly as it had in Ukai - small, complete, and entirely intact.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

Then the lizard slowly lifted its head, turned to look at its own newly-restored tail with an expression of frank astonishment, flicked it once to confirm it was real, and looked back up at Raizen, who was still gasping over the nest with sweat dripping off his chin.

"...Huh," the lizard said quietly. "Well. I'll be damned."