He awoke to a dream. The dark was warm and cozy. The ground was a soft pillow, folding around him like a cocoon and sealing in his nebulous senses.
It was a terrible light. It was a terrible dream. But... the next dream was safe, and quiet.
A familiar mechanical purr brought him back. It was a faint hum, waveless and unobtrusive, like the core of a seashell--a prevalent vacuous noise. It was a sound he could relate to, and did unwind with many times, to close a long day with rest.
It was just like his...
His eyes opened, and in a flourish of awareness he was there. There was a dull slate ahead of him and a cushioned pallet to his back.
He was... in a bed.
His vision drifted over the ceiling of his environment. Plain gray slabs met four short walls. A solitary fluorescent rod glowed high and dim on the spot of wall overlooking his feet, casting gentle highlights and pallid shadows upon the creases and valleys of his crumpled blanket. Another, obscure light source set the far corner ablaze with unflinching gold.
His head drowsily shifted to the left, leveling his sight with a glass pane opposite the bed that opened into an abyssal black. The dust of a white diamond was sown over the dark expanse; its sparkling grains were too fractional and numerous to ever hope to count.
Stars... It was night? No--this was space. He was in a ship. The subtle breath of the ventilation system and the muffled roar of the engines supported this revelation. Everything about the room's make and size was so familiar, as well, that he could have sworn he was aboard the Great Fox, in one of the massive ship's spare quarters.
But, this couldn't be...
His eyes floated along the outer wall, falling into the lamp-lit corner. A stout character sat at the desk there, his back to the room's waking occupant. A flickering glance to the other corners confirmed that no others were with him.
He sat up, a menial task that immediately became a rough chore. His limbs were sore, stiff, and stubborn towards his orders, but with an aching heave he accomplished it. He drank two gulps of air before the blurry room quit swaying and the body in the corner was focused again.
The furred silhouette was seated at a moderately high desk, one barely in reach of his short stature. He was busy over something there that was obscured from the bed's vantage point, and only the wiggling cap of a pen would occasionally peek around the edge of the figure's arm. The figure set aside the utensil, growled thoughtfully, and reached to scratch one of the tall ears lazily drooping over his brow.
He tried to call out. His voice was rusted, however, and a cough was procured before a word. The wheezing sound was just enough to attract the other's attention. The chair swiveled around, and the body upon it looked to his bedridden companion with wide-eyed amazement. He lumbered out of his lofty seat and bounced to the bedside before his sentences could finish.
"Fox! You're awake! Thank goodness you're okay. You don't know how worried everyone's been."
Awake... Awake! He was looking at a ghost. His eyes stung, and the room was blurry again. Maybe he was crying. He wasn't sure. He felt like he was still dreaming.
The other, suddenly observant, checked his upbeat demeanor and sat on the rim of the bed, applying a gentle paw to his friend's shoulder.
"You okay? Fox?"
His jaw worked without him.
"P-Peppy..."
The consoling paw became part of a full embrace as Fox fell into the hare's shoulder and began to sob. Everything was too much, and the whole story fell out in fragmented gasps. "Oh... I... Peppy I... and the light, it..."
The hare, though startled, preserved his tact by quietly holding the fox and enduring his blubbering tale. When Fox eventually ran out of words, Peppy smoothed the matted orange fur on his back and mumbled general comforts. "It's all right. It was just a dream, you know. Everything's fine now."
Just a dream...
Fox disposition was tamed by reality, and he crawled out of Peppy's arms with refreshed strength. His gaze shied to the floor, his awkward position finally catching up to him.
"You okay now?" the hare asked a third time.
"Um..." Fox cleared his throat. "...yeah. Sorry."
Peppy chuckled, his good humor returning. "Oh, that's alright. It's understandable, I suppose. I'm just glad you're all right. Like I said, we've been in a fit here for a while, wonderin' if you were gonna come around."
The fox's ears clung to the light notes of the hare's voice, and his glance picked up, at once interested.
"We?"
"Yeah, you know--me and the guys. We were about to call a doctor, but Falco said we weren't gonna have none of that--whatever was up his tail feathers I don't know, and Slippy said we were out of--"
"Falco? Slippy? They're here?"
The hare's face twitched, struck by the obvious question. "Well where else would they be?" He laughed and flipped a thumb towards the window. "There's no where else they can get to, 'less they want to take a walk outside." He punctuated the thought with another chuckle.
Fox set his mind on track, ready to collect the facts. "What happened?"
Peppy straightened, his train of thought again derailed by the enquiry. "Ah, well... You don't remember?"
The reflective pause was taken as a negative answer, so the hare launched into his version of events.
"Well, we were just going over our next assignment--remember that dispatch from Katina?"
Bill...
"--and you and Slippy started down towards the bay to tune up the arwings, or something like that. You two just got there when Slippy said you fell over, right on the floor of the docking bay. Passed clean out, you remember? I guess you wouldn't. Why, you've been out ever since! Been almost a week now, and I told those two rascals that if you weren't awake by tomorrow, I was gonna call--"
"A week?!"
"Well, five days," Peppy amended his exaggeration with an exact figure. "Six by tomorrow morning. I told Slippy I was goin' try to signal the nearest outpost to try and find a doctor if you weren't better by then--that Sector X be damned! Slippy said we couldn't get calls past the radiation fields if we tried. I was thinkin' about getting a tele' across the good ol' fashioned way, you know what I mean? Would have to take one of the arwings, but not that big a deal. Was working on a 'gram just a second ago, in fact. Otherwise we'd have to turn the whole ship around and head back towards Fortuna to get in signal range--"
"Five days??" Fox couldn't get past it.
Everything was just a dream.
Peppy backtracked to pick up his response. "Well, yeah. That was a long time to be out of it, I suppose. Now that I think about it, this must be a lot to hit you with all at once. You sure you're okay?"
Just a dream.
He slowly nodded as a distant look passed over his features and his gaze fell into nowhere. "Yeah... I think I'll be okay. I think..."
The congenial hare patted Fox's shoulder. "Glad to hear it." He started towards the door. "I'd better go let the guys know 'bout, uh, you know. Let me know if there's anything you need when I get back." With that he was gone, and Fox was left in the company of the Great Fox's ambient noises.
Just a dream.
Fox remained as he was for an impassive silence, his thoughts lost to the peaceful spell. He sighed and clicked his parched tongue against the roof of his mouth. He was actually quite thirsty. A glass of water would be nice. He regretted not putting in such a simple request before the hare sped out the door.
Deciding that he had been confined to the bed long enough, he sought to make himself active. He listlessly pulled himself together and rolled out of his blanket. His bare feet tasted the cold floor and a shiver touched him. It was then that he noticed he was clad only in a pair of long breeches, and that the room was chilled enough to warrant a little more clothing. He found that much piled neatly into a vacant chair by the window.
The fox shuffled that way, his pace as steady as a toddler. He was envious of the chair's ability to hold its own weight as he reached for its support. Clutching the chair's spine, he secured his footing with its aid. Once sure of his place, he tugged off the jacket the chair was wearing and wormed into it, himself. It was his own, he discovered as soon as it fit comfortably around his shoulders. Fox sighed, relishing its familiar texture. A stare drifted out the window and perused the heavens.
"None of it was real..."
Upon putting it to words, he felt immediately relieved, as if stating so made it so, and he could thereby expel the hardships of the past few days from his concern. He was home, and safe, and so were his teammates. Everyone was okay. That was all that mattered.
But... was it fair to forget? So much had happened... but then, so much didn't.
The fox yawned, stretched his back, and dropped his flexed fists into his pockets. What did it matter? A dream is only a dream. It doesn't mean anything. He was asleep for so long, it was probably the product of delirium; a fever can give the mind many strange impressions. How did he get sick, anyway? He hoped it was nothing too serious. He didn't want to worry about it now.
It was just a dream...
His left knuckles encountered a cool, foreign knot amid the linen cloth. He wrapped his digits around it and brought it into the room's warm light, balancing the weight on his open palm.
All his newfound convictions were dispelled and the former theories and notions were recalled, as his eyes beheld what reality refused to believe and his dreams had only begun to accept.
In his hand lay a small, red stone.
She had a lot of time to think about what happened. It was too long for her tastes, but just enough to understand some things while she wallowed in her losses. Tribal affairs, now trivial to her, would make for light conversation with the passing trees as she traced the hot jungle's winding footpath.
After the fighting died down and the dragons evacuated, Queen Lucia's clan and the Piewas (those that were left) marched back to the scene of the battle to collect the bodies. Miya didn't stick around for the obsequies. She had seen enough. There would be the survivors, and their families, mourning over the slaughter. The population of widows and orphans would be a little larger, now, and they would have their own losses to contend with, but Miya was done with suffering. She didn't want any part of it. Some foregone reminiscence recalled her foster family, but that rebellious memory was quickly repressed.
Besides, she wasn't sure if Lucia still took Miya for a traitor, so the pink yoshi avoided any confrontations and slipped away through the bushes. Being an outlaw, Miya eventually concluded, wasn't very different from the way she was living before, so she wasn't troubled by it.
Living alone, on the other hand...
Above all things, her thoughts returned again and again to her late guardian. Why did he need her help to summon Marawok? She figured, at last, that he didn't, but she was still needed, in a different sense. They were always together until that point; it only made sense for her to be with him then and hear his final words.
Her musings then flowed to the king of dragons, and the curious events following his resurrection. Her mind's eye could still see the great monster, sitting on a cloud above the battlefield, staring down... She could still feel his gaze, burning into hers, as if there was something in her worth Marawok's interest.
Such bright yellow eyes... Those eyes would be impressed upon her memories for the rest of her life. She would see them again, in dreams, and wonder...
The jungle path opened onto a wide sandy sidewalk and the watery road beyond it. The highway's breadth reached for infinity, and its many foam-crested potholes smoothed into a fine horizon as they approached the sun. The bright crescent was already diving into night, and on its descent it painted the vista with a gold that tinted the pearly white beach a pale yellow.
West Beach...
Perhaps it was ironic, she thought, that her aimless wandering took her to where it all began. The beach was pristine, its clean sand unmarred by blood and strife. The fine grains felt like powdered silk between her toes. She stood at the shore of her native land, never feeling quite as estranged from it as she did now.
Where would she go? How would she live? What would she do now?
"Meekachu..." she whimpered, "I'm so lost..."
A glimmer was caught in the tear pooling in the corner of her eye. She blinked and turned to find it. Half-buried over yonder, in a heap of sand, was a shiny artifact whose insistent flickers entreated a passer-by to unearth it. As Miya's encroaching shadow fell across the treasure its reflected light was extinguished, leaving its shape more clearly defined. The yoshi bent over the item, inspected its exposed half closely, then dug her hand into the loose earth and fished out the trinket. As the excess sand sifted between her fingers and unveiled her discovery, Miya wondered over its origin.
Such a pretty, amber stone.
Author's notes:
Now, I could go on ahead and criticize this fanfic all day. I know the plot is full of holes. I know I employed cheap story devices, and sometimes the characters moved on without any real motive (I can't even remember why they went to M'hakashan). Two villains I brought into the story--Queen Lucia and General Lakemp--don't become seriously involved at all, and just fade out towards the end. I senselessly killed off main characters, just for the sake of doing so (or "shock value," as it has been called). Sara (Tieka) falls off the face of the fic completely, and I don't even attempt to justify her disappearance. I even broke the forbidden "fourth wall" with a lame and utterly inexplicable pop culture reference. The ending was forced (I'd like to say "rushed" but that couldn't be further from the truth), and understandably so, because I wrote the finale about four years after I lost interest in the story.
I'm not flagellating my own fic because I hate it (if I really hated it, I wouldn't have posted it at all). The point is that this is (was?) my first full-length fanfic. I started writing it in Jr. High, when all my writing experience leading up to then consisted of school essay papers and a four-page one-night-stand giving an online alias a background story. So, as crappy and corny as everything might have turned out, it wasn't so bad for a first run, IMHO. If nothing, it was good practice, and I learned a lot about things NOT to do when telling a story.
It was also an interesting experience, I'd say, to return to this fic my senior year and finish it, because the last five or so chapters illustrate how much I may or may not have improved since I started writing. It's really difficult to pull a crummy story together in the last couple of chapters, but at least I tried, eh? A note I wrote to myself when outlining the final scenes read like this:
"...I'm overthinking the ending to a story that was never based on extended thought."
On that note, I'll let y'all move on with your lives. I know that's what I'll be doing.
-Da Dog Girl (Miya)