A/N: Welcome back to procrastination, staring my eternal writers block. More dragon stuffs this time, with very unbalanced tone because I'd actually been trying to write this chapter for 3 months. Writing is hard boys.
DarkLonewolf: Take ur pills baka. I'm real glad someone was carrying the torch while I was gone! Good on you! If the writers block gets too bad I might end up just hopping off this for a while and starting a whole new fuckin story of vampshit.
Cloy552: I said a little less stockholmy, but it's a vampire romance story, so there's definitely going to be a bit of it always around. I'm glad you liked it.
GeminiAlchemist: But have I ever truly been alive?
Nah man Sucy is the head hauncho. Its the oldey timey times so countess and other female titles carry a certain feeling of being second to a male, the Queen of the Night is second to no one. Kind of like Sir Integra yeah.
Raphael Antonello: High praise! Thank you my friend, I'll try and make the next chapter of Rosebois equally as flowery. Vampires have often been associated with that kind of satanic seduction and mind control; I like to think of it as trickery with the soul more than mind lasers. Tampering with someone's soul is an incredibly invasive thing, and I think all of us at some level fear the possibility of suddenly not being the same person we were before; different memories, morals, and goals. We know who we are, and if that could be suddenly changed I imagine it to be truly traumatic.
Living in a perpetually dark and silent forest alongside a dangerous apex predator required a few adjustments, mentally speaking.
The first of these adjustments was waking up every single 'morning' to endless darkness and suppressing the urge to cower and cry in terror. Though the thick canopy, built by layer upon layer of deep green and burnt brown, blocked any attempt by the sun to cast her loving rays upon the forest floor, she did still exist, and life remained elsewhere in the world.
The second adjustment was reminding oneself constantly that despite the aforementioned apex predator's disinterest in preying upon scrawny squires and generally amicable attitude, she was in fact still a dragon. This fact was paramount, and directly lead into the third adjustment: a dragon has different wants, needs, and thoughts than humans, treating them like just a larger human or assuming anything would only cause problems.
It was because of this second adjustment that Akko came to enjoy sitting quietly beside her draconic companion and listening as she told a story from her nearly bottomless well of tales, built up over the many hundreds of years she had been alive.
Many of these tales concerned the great beast's numerous failed interactions with humans before she found her current hideaway amongst the darkness; her black scales inspired terror in most and contempt in others, often leading to arrows wedged in her onyx hide or blood staining her claws.
"-but she didn't let up; hated that something like me existed I guess." The dragon explained dryly, slapping her tail once against the grass with a grumpy puff of air through her nostrils.
"So I ate her."
The brunette's head tilted dejectedly, resting against Sucy's neck and sighing as she looked down at the dirt. No matter how much her attacker deserved to die, the thought of a knight coming to slay her friend brought up horrible realizations about her own attempt.
If she had not been so weak of heart, so easy to convince or fool, perhaps her life would have ended the same way.
"Hey." Sucy's low gravely tones ripped into her tenant's brooding mind, bringing her back to the silence of their shared forest home. "If talking about this is just going to upset you..."
"No, no, it's alright! I was just-" Akko sat up straight, pressing her index fingers together as she grasped for normalcy lost.
Sucy's neck lifted up and twisted back, her snout brushing gently against the crown of the brunette's head. "Forget about it. Tell me how the garden's coming along."
Akko's little slice of paradise wasn't what anyone would call extravagant. it was a small clearing in the canopy, maybe three metres of light across at the highest point of the day; the thick damp grass had been slowly tilled away with shaped rocks and sticks, leaving behind a rough square of soft soil where their stolen seeds could grow.
Despite its simplicity, the great beast could tell that the messy pile of dirt and it's eventual success meant a lot to her companion; therein making the decision to let Akko tend to it all on her own.
A dragon would be no help when it came to nurturing life.
"I've worked so hard on it! I can't wait to show you!" Just like that, Atsuko's melancholy train of thought was entirely diverted, her ruby red eyes somehow sparkling despite the lack of light for them to reflect.
"...Maybe later." Sucy mumbled, curling her neck in the opposite direction and closing her eye. The brunette oft called her lazy or likened her to a "giant scaly sloth", something any proud dragon would be offended by; she could slay a million sloths in but an afternoon, she just chose not to.
The great serpent couldn't really deny being lazy, but preferred the term 'unmotivated' herself.
"Suuuucyyyyy! Let's go nowww!" Akko whined, hopping up to her feet and uselessly pulling at the dragon's neck to no avail. "I want to show you all the progress I've made!"
Keeping her eyelids firmly closed, Sucy squirmed and forced the girl's arms off of her. "I've decided to sleep right now, find something else to do."
"Let's have a race then!" Akko offered, climbing up onto the beast's head to stare at her closed eyelids "All the way to the clearing. If I win, you have to sit and talk to me while I work on it."
Puffing a scorching plume of smoke from her nostrils, the dragon shook her head, sending Akko rolling back down into the grass; kicking up dirt as she landed.
"What do I get if I win?"
The brunette coughed, spinning around on her bottom to face her hopeful gardening partner.
"Hmm..." She pondered, folding her arms and lifting her hand to her chin in a over-dramatic fashion; she already had an idea of what would convince her scaly sloth. "We could fly over to the lake and I could give you a nice bath?"
That actually got Sucy to open her eye, just a tiny bit however, analogous to a human squinting their eyes in suspicion. They were both silent for a moment, two very different lifeforms sitting in a dark and damp forest with only the faint sound of the wind to accompany them.
Suddenly the great beast reared her entire body up to her full height, looking down upon the human beneath her with a far too human looking grin for Akko's comfort.
"You're on."
Sound was rare in the dark forest, a fact anyone visiting for any period of time had to adjust to quickly or drive themselves mad, but at the current moment, with the warmth of a high noon sun leaking through the canopy, that serenity had been thrown to the wind and shattered.
Sucy slithered through the forest behind her tenant, knocking over trees and crushing fallen branches beneath her claws just as the brunette had finished hopping over or weaving through them. The girl certainly had no small store of energy, moving through uneven terrain faster than something ten times her size with giggles and smiles to spare.
"Hurry up Sucy! Or I'm gonna beat you there!" She laughed, ducking under a tree root and twisting around to see how close the beast was to her.
It would be a horrifying sight to most mortal things: an apex predator, with scales black as the void, barreling forward towards you; razor sharp teeth mere feet from snapping down shut over you; but Akko was very much not like most mortal things.
She giggled again, leaping and swinging on a particularly bendy branch, hoping to land on a large fallen tree where she could run without worry of roots.
However, letting go of the branch, her boots did not touch down on solid wood, instead being scooped up long before she could hit the ground by a long spine of black scales.
The ride was far from smooth; the beast's movements swung Akko back and forth as she rampaged through anything in her way, but the brunette could do nothing but hold on and cheer, forgetting the race and the garden and the humans that abandoned her to simply enjoy the ride.
Sucy slowed down eventually, coming to a graceful stop just before she was about to trample their only source of flavour in a desert of tasteless yet filling trash.
The messy square of before had been tidied up, small sticks and branches tied together to make a protective fence and supports for the plants to grow on. Many of these supports had small sprouts beginning to grow beside them, tiny lives lovingly cared for every step of the way.
Sucy could see plain as day just how much effort her companion had put into something as silly as how the animals she caught tasted after being magically enhanced. Humans truly could be fascinating creatures when they had something they truly cared for.
"You're sitting further back on my body you know." The dragon pointed out suddenly and with an incredibly smug tone. "That means I win."
The brunette's mouth flapped open and closed a few times, attempting to come up with an argument before inevitably conceding, sealing her lips in a pout and crossing her arms.
"...was gonna wash you anyway." She mumbled quietly, causing another rare sound to echo through the forest.
The laugh of a dragon.
A/N: Save me from this procrastination writers block loop, it is truly hell.