On that note, I have not forgotten the other two drabbles I owe. Still want to write them, but I was never told which dragons, and I'm blanking on a Chris/Sable idea.

Anyway, let's see what I get



Gilles woke with a jerk, one of the sharp, too scared to breathe jerks with which he'd once woken every night. For too many years, it was because he had always known when his father, fresh from a dose of his coca powder, had slunk into his room to watch him in the night--occasionally he had done more than watch.

Then, it had taken him too many years to realize that his father was no longer there to watch him. Strike him. Uncle Sangre had saved him from that, and more besides.

Later, when that fear had finally begun to fade, he had woken too scared to scream because he just knew his father had discovered his secret. In his dreams, Stregoni was dead. Beaten. Shot. Stabbed. Hanged. More deaths than he cared to recall, he had dreamed. Too enthralled to stay away, too terrified to stay close.

Now, these moments of waking in terror came less often, but they still came. Hard to remember his father was not simply gone, but dead. Gone forever, never to threaten or hurt or take from him again.

But the guilt lingered. His mother's death. His father's addiction. His father's hate. That his Uncle had been the one to do the killing, in the end.

That he had Stregoni, fast asleep, warm and reassuring alongside him, when his father had died depressed and angry and mad from the coca powder.

Did he deserve to be happy?

Gilles reached out in the dark and found Stregoni's hand, never quite the same after his father had thrust it into the fire just to make Gilles listen to the screams of pain.

He still could not think about that night, not without shaking. Tasting and smelling the laudunum his father had forced him to drink, smelling as Stregoni's hand burned, hearing the cruel hate in his father's voice, the underlying madness and despair...

Did he deserve to be happy? Probably not, but he'd come too far now to give Stregoni up.