Chapter Text
Madeline bounced slightly from foot to foot, staring up at the mountain looming before her. Somewhere, there echoed the distant crash of falling icicles on metal.. The loud noise worsened her perpetual headache, making the base of her ears sting and her human form slightly harder to hold.
Scratching at the perpetually itchy spot on her chin, she contemplated the climb ahead of her. She was already tired, and she was only partway through the city. On the other hand, her winter gloves had already proven useful, so at least she knew she hadn’t been greedy buying them. (Everyone knew dragons were greedy. Madeline fought against it as hard as she could, but she sometimes found herself buying something she didn’t strictly need anyways; she always gave it away as soon as she could push herself to, but she’d prefer if she never brought them in the first place.)
For a moment she wondered if this was a good idea. Maybe she should’ve just stayed home. The thought brought with it a whole tangled mess of unpleasant feelings. Going home before she’d finished this climb was not an option.
She took a deep breath, resettled her pack and jacket (she wasn’t sure how she was stretching out her clothes, but they were definitely looser than when she brought them), scratched at her chin again, and went back to climbing.
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Madeline leapt out of the strange star jelly blob and hit the musty, greenish brick wall with a dull thump, raising a cloud of dust.
Not for the first time, she regretted figuring out she could jump out of the space jelly. The pleasant jolt of impact was not worth having to cough and sputter.
It was strangely quiet, here; even the sound of the wind outside was muted. Madeline was abruptly nervous. She forced it down- it was just a quiet room, what right did she have to be scared?
She focused on her breathing for a moment, then dashed up through the hole in the ceiling to the room above.
It turned out to contain a long-dead campfire, complete with a pot on it. Slumped beside it was a skeleton- probably a human skeleton- and what looked like a freshly-dead dragon, slumped on opposite sides of the long-dead fire.
That was not what Madeline had needed to see, even with all the other bones she’d seen in cages around the mysterious castle. Madeline wasn’t sure what was worse: that the dragon appeared to be intact, while its...friend(?) had rotted away to just a skeleton, or that it was the first time she’d ever seen a fully-dragon-form dragon outside of a mirror, and despite everything she had to momentarily fight the absurd urge to touch the corpse, or that the dragon appeared to look similar to her own dragon form- two legs, two leathery wings with three-fingered hands, feathery mane, short muzzle, same horn shape on the pronged, blunt-ended, antlerlike horns on top of their head and with chinspikes only a little different from hers- and so it was horribly easy to imagine herself in its place. The main difference was that the corpse was an incredibly pale lavender and purple to Madeline’s white and red. It was even wearing snow pants and a puffer jacket, like herself, although in a different shape and colour.
After what felt like far too long, staring in sick, fascinated horror at the bodies, Madeline spun around and began trying to plan her route for leaving the room. There was one of the space jelly blocks sectioning the room into two halves, and she’d have to dash through.
...Turning away had made her feel no less nauseous.
Abruptly, Madeline was hit with a wave of dizziness, and from somewhere behind her, a voice rang out.
“Madeline, darling, slow down.”
Turning cautiously, Madeline saw nobody there, only the two bodies.
“Who said that?”
To her surprise, the dragon that she’d assumed was dead lifted its head just enough to be noticable. A little of the omnipresent dust had settled on its horns and feathery mane.
The dizziness and sick feeling lessened slightly, but didn’t clear up entirely, as the dragon claimed to be merely a concerned observer.
The other dragon shook itself- Madeline ignored the urge to ask to touch it- and leapt into the air without even a single wingbeat, transforming as it did into a humanoid shape Madeline had seen before.
Less than an hour ago, in fact, in the mirror.
She still found herself asking if her partially-transformed doppelganger was her, though.
“I’m part of you,” she said, smiling smugly.
“Oh, the awful, monstrous, dragon part? I wondered why you looked so creepy.”
The personification of Madeline’s draconicness looked like she was about to cry, for a moment, before her face hardened into anger. Madeline counted that as a victory, despite the sudden tightness in her throat.
“This...This is just what I look like, okay? It’s what I am. You can’t get rid of me. Deal with it.”
Madeline almost laughed. “I’ve been human for over three years now, so I think you’re losing.”
Her dragon-self rolled her eyes. “Madeline, sweetie. Just because you’re in human form doesn’t mean you’re human. You’re just as dragon as I am, and someday you won’t be able to keep pretending. But, look, forget about it. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally get out of your head.”
She paused, then put on what, on a human, Madeline would call a worried face. But she was the personification of Madeline’s dragon nature, so it had to be fake, or a trap. Everyone knew dragons were cruel; Madeline was pretty sure her ability to actually care about people as people was from her two human grandparents, and very sure they were why her family were all generally good people.
“But, look, I’m worried about us,” her reflection said, in a voice that Madeline could almost take for actual concern. “We need a hobby- and more in our life in general- but this? You’re gonna get yourself killed.”
Madeline rolled her eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, but I need to climb this Mountain.”
Her reflection dropped the pretense of concern and started laughing at her. “You are many things, darling, but you are not a mountain climber.”
“Who says I can’t be?” Madeline almost hissed at her, before catching herself and the draconic anger and shoving it aside. She’d been doing so well, too.
Her reflection bit back her laughter and pasted the concerned face back on. “I know it’s not your strong suit, especially not now, but be reasonable for once. You have no idea what you’re getting into. You can’t handle this.”
Madeline wasn’t able to bite back all her anger, this time, insisting that that was why she needed to do this- even though it sounded hollow to her own ears.
The omnipresent headache had been joined by an ache in her fingertips and toes.
“Clearly, you’re not just the evil, dragon part of me, but the lazy and weak part too.”
“I’m none of those. I’m the pragmatic part. And I’m trying to be diplomatic here.” Madeline’s reflection stalked forwards, stepping past the long-dead fire and leaning forwards until her face was inches from Madeline’s own. She found herself unable to step backwards, frozen to the spot, but she was so dizzy that she wasn’t sure she’d stay upright if she actually managed to take a step anyways.
“Let’s go home. Together.” Her reflection said, tilting her head. Madeline was somehow sure that she wasn’t referring to her own house.
Madeline managed to find the strength to step back, and the dizziness and sick feeling vanished like dew under a blowtorch. Something shifted in her doppelganger’s face, and ignoring every bit of advice she’d ever read about large predators, Madeline turned tail and ran.
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Madeline stared at Mr. Oshiro as he begged her to stay in his hotel. She could see a mirror against the wall behind him. It was tilted such that she couldn’t see her reflection anymore, but she had an irrational suspicion that it wasn’t reflecting just the wall.
“Mr. Oshiro, I’ve already been sidetracked too long,” she said, somewhat surprised that she really didn’t want to stay, despite this specific room clearly being actually well-kept and offered to her for half-price, despite how tired she was. (Mr. Oshiro seemed stuck in the past. Had he even adjusted his prices for inflation since the hotel was properly open decades ago?)
She did want the paintings from the walls, though, so she supposed that was where the draconic greed that she had to have was going.
(Everyone knew dragons were greedy.)
Madeline heard faint footsteps, muffled as if through glass. Oh, no. She’d thought she’d entirely dreamt her malevolent reflection, but who else could it be?
There was the crash of breaking glass and her doppelganger leapt out of the mirror, twisting around to float suspended in the air directly opposite Madeline. She was half-transformed- horned, clawed, dragon-eyed, and with distinctly inhuman ears- and Madeline hated her for revealing that she could do that.
“Madeline, sweetie, forget this loser.”
Madeline hated those ‘endearments’. How dare she talk to Madeline as if she actually cared?
Mr. Oshiro sunk to his knees. He seemed devastated by the schoolyard-grade insult. Madeline stared, what was probably draconic aggression warring with the simple fact that there was someone upset and on the floor.
Her reflection continued insulting him, and while Madeline did agree that the resort was clearly in poor shape, watching her reflection flare her wings and puff up, teeth half-bared in a snarl, ears pinned back against her head, to tell him that nobody would want to stay here made her wonder if she was thinking of it too poorly. She was certainly saying it too cruelly.
Madeline stepped forward to comfort Mr. Oshiro, and he began to insist that he was busy and that she should leave. Madeline’s reflection appeared to take that as an excuse to further damage his hotel, breaking open a hole in the ceiling.
The worst part, Madeline thought as she clambered out, was probably the fact that she could follow the logic.
As soon as she got to the roof, her reflection simply appeared out of thin air. Incongruously, this involved purple glitter. Some of it stuck to her reflection’s feathers, even as she insisted that Madeline owed her a favour, and that there was a list, as if she’d ever done anything positive for Madeline in her entire existence.
“Leave me alone. Entirely.”
Madeline turned and began to run away, but found herself walking alongside her reflection within moments, as she asked a question Madeline had no answer for: “I thought you were sooooo determined to keep climbing, and now all of a sudden, you’re some weirdo’s therapist?”
So she just asked her why she wouldn’t go away.
“Well, Ma-” was all her reflection could get out, before Mr. Oshiro showed back up.
He had a single question- why had she helped so much, only for ‘her’ to be so cruel, and before Madeline could actually answer, her reflection started laughing.
“Oh, give it a break. Don’t you get it? She only helps people to try to pretend she’s human. That’s all she does anything for. She NEVER cared about you!”
“SHUT UP!” Madeline roared. That was not true. She really had cared about Mr. Oshiro, even if a lot of what she’d been doing had been partially motivated by trying to do the opposite of what her draconic nature tried to make her do. “I just wanted to help…”
Her reflection smirked, insulted them both, and then vanished in a puff of purple glitter, leaving Madeline to take the consequences.
The consequences turned out to be Mr. Oshiro going berserk and trying to kill her.
Goddamn Madeline hated her reflection.