Chapter Text
One week later, Madeline was starting to settle into her new routine. It was still being interrupted a lot by shopping trips, new items, and doctor’s appointments; she’d gotten a new, dragon, doctor, who had been outright surprised at Madeline having been up to mountain climbing in the state she was in.
She’d come to terms with liking the cricket bars, and was planning to experiment with baking with cricket flour. She’d picked out new paint for the walls with only a minor panic attack (quickly brought under control with the feather exercise) about possibly picking a different bad colour, gotten another two rocks to go along with the three she’d found on Mt. Celeste (and gotten a shelf just for them, as well as varnished them all to keep them looking their best), and brought more kitchen supplies.
The first two days back, she still was off work. She’d expected to need recovery time after the mountain climbing, but instead she felt energized, to the point where she was feeling restless despite all the blisters and running around with shopping trips and changing doctors and making sure she hadn’t messed herself up too badly.
By the time she actually had work again, she was starting to feel a familiar dull, boring emptiness. It wasn’t as severe as she was used to, but she prepared herself for a pattern of a few good days at a time followed by downswings that didn’t hit the lows she’d gotten used to.
Less than an hour into her first day back, she had already discovered that actually she’d just been bored; her work was highly mentally demanding and within hours she was feeling much better, and also like she wanted to do very little else.
Some of her coworkers turned out to be following Theo’s instapix and word quickly got around that she was a dragon. This lead to some very awkward conversations, but it also led to Madeline being able to be only partially transformed or even in dragon form at work, which was very helpful. She still couldn’t comfortably stay in human form for more than a few hours, and a sudden interest in hoods and hats couldn’t cover for her forever.
(It also lead to bored coworkers stuck waiting for their code to compile changing what games they tried to rope Madeline into, if she wasn’t actively working. Madeline discovered that she liked chasing frisbees and being tossed around like a javelin.)
By the end of the week, Madeline was unpleasantly surprised to find herself completely out of her backlog of work. It probably hadn’t helped that she’d been taking it home and doing it for fun. She tried emailing her boss for more work, and upon not getting an answer in half an hour began begging extra work off her coworkers.
She was glad to get a few responses. Playing with bored coworkers just didn’t provide the same satisfying intellectual crunch as more work.
(To her surprise, over the next few days she was given over fifty recommendations for puzzle games from many different coworkers, some of whom she hadn’t talked to in months. She loved them; it gave her something to do when she ran out of work and still wanted something high-mental-effort, or when she was at home.)
After several months of her new life, Madeline felt better than she had for over a decade. She’d had a scare in spring where she’d dropped almost all her feathers in about three days, including the ‘fur’ on her wing membrane (which was actually very hairlike feathers), but after some googling and a worried doctor’s appointment it turned out to be her spring moult colliding with a cold she’d had. (She had discovered that she’d been treating her feathers wrong and they needed less washing with soap and more oiling. She was surprised to discover how much better that made them look.)
Her summer coat turned out to be much less full-body fluff than her winter coat, with most of her body being scaly. She was glad- her feathers were warm, which would have been a problem in summer.
She picked up new hobbies of archery and baking, signed up to a rock-climbing club, and invested in a breadmaker. Archery turned out to be very calming as a hobby; Madeline wished she’d picked it up sooner.
She’d had to buy new shirts, as all the archery and wing exercises and rock-climbing she did resulted in her building up enough upper-body muscle that they all became too tight when previously they’d all been too loose. She’d put off getting new ones, at first- partially because of sentimental reasons, and partially because she liked how it looked in dragon form, or when paired with a baggy vest. Then one of her favourite ones ripped when she stretched and she had to admit that they really didn’t fit anymore.
Theo visited over the summer, which Madeline greatly enjoyed. He even helped her work up the courage to be in dragon form outside more, including finding a dragon hangout. She was honestly surprised at how much of a relief it was to have dragon friends.
She still had bad days. But, after everything...
She was happy.