The dragon cocks its head, pissed.
She is not surprised that she assigns the creature human emotions. Her father has been calling the PASIV a she for years, and keeps the battered old thing wedged between his bookshelf and his belt collection under the quaint misconception Phillipa needs his guidance to use it. Its creations remain as crisp as the day she first tasted them: thirty feet of sleek red hide above her, the wind stringing her hair with cinnamon, summer heat dampening her toes with sweat and wolfing the air out of her lungs.
"Hey," she says, holding out her hands. "Meow?"
The dragon takes this as an insult to its species and opens its maw. She dives before the fireball can torch her new haircut to her scalp, a flurry of dirt and thistle as she hits the ground rolling, and clings to her safety mantra. Never go into a fight alone. "Mal," she yells, hoping that dream logic will reflexively blind the dragon to her for a few seconds, because she hasn't a sliver of sight with her face crushed into the earth. She is a girl against a legend that has lurked thousands of years of human thought, and unlike Uncle Arthur, she has not mastered the joy of big fucking guns. Conjuring a shade on her side only evens the odds.
Mal comes. Mal carries a sword sharp enough to slice onions. Phillipa drags herself face-up and nods, and Mal steps right under the dragon, inhales its fire, its sulfur breath. Skewers it through the throat as neatly as stabbing chicken with a fork.
Phillipa wakes, cold in the air conditioning endemic to suburbia, and counts her fingers to be sure they are all in place, her birthdays to be sure she understands how time passes, the sounds of the house to be sure she is alone.
She battles schoolwork by day and supernatural phenomena by night, in the fantastical hours when she is home and Dominic Cobb is not. She never runs out of monsters to fight: krakens, demons, the occasional vampire when she grows tired of the books that make up the state of the art in teenage romance, and Mal is a constant by her side, alternately aiding her with sneak attacks and a collection of blades that, Phillipa supposes, says something about her. She takes up fencing and discovers, startled, that she is good at it, and that being intensely good at it makes her no friends. She learns geometry, Russian wars, poetry; she repeats spare lines under her breath, the thing itself and not the myth, and thinks of Mal whose curls are always shining.
"Class, can anyone give us an example of personification?" the teacher asks.
She closes her eyes and recalls her father's warning. I dreamed about your mother until I got better. She was a manifestation of—abnormal guilt, Phillipa. I don't want you to use this machine, because sometimes she'll show up in here and try to hurt you. Do you understand?
But something about escaping from two tons of oversized sasquatch unclenches her heart. She isn't James, who earns perfect grades on every test and treats his memory of Mal like a whiff of something embarrassing, to be publicly disowned and forgotten, so he can posterboard his science fair projects without hearing an edge of oh, poor child pity in the judges. He never dreams.
By definition, projections and mythical creatures are not real. Phillipa knows this by eight years of age and should have it mentally engraved, by instinct, by fifteen. Which is why she should be shocked by neither her digestion by a werewolf or that this time Mal does not answer her even with the thing's teeth breaking her spine, ripping her apart so quickly she hasn't even formulated a pain response before being dropped into the real world. Consciousness cuts in instead, sharp as a knife. She fumbles for the lead and pushes it back into her wrist, heedless of proper hygiene. Her chest has been scoured clean; fuck bacteria on her skin.
The world opens behind her eyelids like a frog under dissection. There is a desert, and sky nearly white to the horizon, and a rock on which she sits and tries to calm herself waiting for monsters.
What comes is her mother.
"Mal," she says, because she should be calm enough not to shout I didn't enjoy being dog food, and she doesn't know how to say you are the only person I have ever relied on, and you let me be eaten alive.
"It is a rather strange experience," Mal says, agreeably, as though Phillipa had indeed spoken. "Were you prepared for it?"
Phillipa considers several responses, discards them. Perhaps Mal can hear them all anyway. "No." She kicks at the sand, which rises in a cloud that slips around Mal's figure like nothing can touch her. "Why did you," betray me, "stay away? Is there some kind of meter on mom help I've run out on now that I'm too old?"
"Oh," Mal says, "I cannot complete your battles for you forever. But I would not abandon you. You have never forsaken me."
"That felt a lot like being forsaken, in case you've never enjoyed the experience," Phillipa says.
"I would have liked to ease your transition. But I cannot." She slips her fingers into Phillipa's, calloused and warm, the distance suddenly closed. "This was the age at which I began dreaming, and all Miles told me was that I had to take a leap of faith alone. Phillipa," says Mal—and she has never before in a dream heard her name, her own, aching for definition—"do you wish to do so? Or will we fight today?"
"Forever?"
"Until we are equals," Mal says. "Until you believe you can continue without me."
"Mal," she says, a year later, and hefts in her hands the weight of self-belief.
A/N: All feedback is deeply appreciated.
Originally written for tricksterquinn as part of the Purimgifts exchange, February 2013.