Lists

Lists
SupernovaSwirls137
Please note that the following story contains mentions/depictions of racism, homophobia, transphobia, child ab/se, war and death. Take care of yourselves while reading it.
Notes
- Lists is set in an alternate universe approximately 7000 A.S.
- Fuelled by their mistrust in magic, dragons have made new leaps and bounds in technology.
- The NightWings are currently ahead in terms of technological development, using the MudWings to provide them with supplies and cheap labour.
- Trade between Pyrrhia and Pantala is at its best.
- The IceWings, HiveWings, SilkWings, LeafWings, NightWings and SkyWings have all abolished their monarchies. The MudWings are in the midst of a civil war.
- The other tribes have opted to stay neutral, though the SeaWings provide humanitarian aid to both sides.
- Many fear that if the NightWings or the HiveWings join the war, Pyrrhia may be destroyed. 
- The dragonets have faded into ancient legends, and Darkstalker is nothing more than a myth to scare young dragonets.
More Notes
- This story stars two of my SeaWing OCs, Waterfall and Cascade (Cas is going to appear in chapter two, so stay tuned)/
- They were originally created for a roleplay on canon, but I fell in love with them both and wanted to tell more of their story.
- Lists is based more around character interaction and development than actual plot, so if you're hoping for a massive war-stopping adventure with magical powers and world-saving you should probably find a different fanfic.
- It will also tackle themes such as ab/se and internalized homophobia (for those of you who haven't already figured this out, Waterfall is the protagonist and also incredibly gay).
- Feel free to request for your character to appear in a future chapter, and if you'd like more information on the AU or the plan for this fanfic go ahead and leave a comment.
- Feedback and comments are always appreciated, whether positive or negative (that being said. please do stay respectful though)
- If you notice any errors please let me know!
Chapter One
Waterfall had always liked lists. They were logical, and helped to statistically document her life. They were there for her from the moment she woke in the morning up to the moment she went to sleep each night. They told her all the things she needed to do, and all the things she might have to do, and all the things she could do, and all the things she shouldn't do. Lists weren't like dragons. They could never decide you weren't good enough for them. They couldn't shout at you if you did something wrong. They couldn't reach out and hit you if they were in a bad mood. Lists were logical, and Waterfall liked logic.
She had been making lists for as long as she could remember. She'd just written to-do lists, at first, mostly. There was Homework (978 items, stacked up over the years), Chores (193 items, separated chronologically into seasons, months, and days of the week), Daily Routines (1095 items) and a couple others, though nothing worth keeping.
And then there were the more important lists. 38 notebooks, hidden under a floorboard in her old room. She'd had to leave them all behind, of course, but they were as much a part of her as her talons and wings. There was List of Things Mother Doesn't Like Me Doing (218 items), List of Professions for a 3-year-old Dragonet That I Could Do (39 items, most of them illegal), List of Places to Go If I Leave Home (1 item, with a large line scribbled over it), List of Signs that Father is Angry (57 items), List of Reasons I Don't Belong Here (Waterfall was too scared to count the number of items on that particular list) and countless more. 38 notebooks more, to be precise. 
And then she and her siblings had run away. And then they had left her. She hadn't had the heart to write any more lists after that.
Life without lists was hard. There was nothing to tell her what she had to get done each day. Nothing to explain the dragons around her. Nothing to record the rules of that card game they all seemed to be playing. Nothing to write to fill the endless hours of nothingness that stretched on and on and on before her. The world was scary, and unpredictable, and she couldn't chart it or make sense of it. For the first time in her life, she was completely and utterly alone.
It was a long time before she started writing again. At first, she told herself it was only because she couldn't afford paper on the meagre scrapings she got from the odd jobs they offered to 7-year-old SeaWings travelling far from home. The pretence had gone on so long that she'd even started to believe it, the line between fiction and reality blurring at the edges unrecognisably. But when she was finally starting face to face with a piece of paper, it was terrifying. As if there was nothing, just an empty hole inside her, so large that no words could ever fill it. 
For the past week, she'd been working for a charity, a center for the MudWings who had been badly wounded in battle, though how long her job would last was another matter entirely. Probably until the company went bust, or she needed a change of air. It was the first company she'd been with that worked with any tribe except SeaWings, but after the initial shock, she'd found that for all her family had said, MudWings really weren't any different to her own tribe. They looked different, definitely, and their accent was still strange and foreign to her ears, and their culture was as far removed from the cold, distant family hierarchies of the SeaWing societes as you could probably get, but at their heart, they were still dragons, just like her. They all had the same worries, the same fears, the same hopes, the same basic needs. She'd learnt a lot from working with them. It made her wonder, sometimes, what other lies her family had told her.
The center was made of corrugated metal, and the groans and scufflings of every dragon were echoed throughout it, eerily amplified. It was dark inside, and the overhead lights fizzled weakly, a mass of sparks and broken wires. Faint whispers of sunlight poured in through the cracks in the walls, along with a freezing breeze that cut straight through Waterfall's scales. The dirt under her talons was gritty and dry, and a couple of beetles scampered across her path. She shivered. It was impossible to get well in a place like this. They all knew that, really, even the workers with their stupid smiles, even the doctors with their fancy equipment, even the MudWings huddling under their blankets sipping soup and talking about what they'd do when they got back home. But if you were going to die, it had to be better to die among friends and family, with dragons bringing you warm soup than on the cold, harsh battle-ground. That was the thing about caring, she supposed- it didn't really help, but it felt like it did.
She signed in for work that morning staggering with exhaustion, eyes almost half-closed. A couple of her co-workers noticed and asked her about it, but she pushed them away in what she hoped was a polite manner and forced herself into something resembling correct posture. She paced over to the kitchen stall and began dishing out soup. 
She'd only been at the center for a week, but she knew some of the workers had been there for years. She didn't know how they could do it. How they could face getting up again and again and again just to go back here. Probably only desperation or madness could drive anyone to do that to themselves.
Snippets of speech and song floated over to her, distorted by the distance. Someone somewhere- multiple someones, she thought, but it was hard to tell- was singing a song about love and hope and loss and despair that made her heart twist painfully. She could hear MudWings everywhere talking to their sibs, telling stories of long-ago-triumphs or gasping out dying wishes to their remaining family members. The walls seemed to be caving in around her, and she struggled for air. Tomorrow, perhaps, she would move on to a new job.
Almost an hour into her shift, she noticed an old MudWing huddled alone in a corner, wings pressed tightly over her head. A scar, still clearly fresh, curved down her neck to a resting place directly over her heart. She clearly wasn't going to survive long. 
"Here," Waterfall said quietly, sliding over to her with a bowl of soup. "Drink this."
There was a silence. The MudWing looked up, and Waterfall realized with a shock what scars and exhaustion had done well to hide- she was young, barely Waterfall's age. Too young to die. She spoke in a hauntingly cracked voice. "Why?"
"It's food. It's good for you. It's got-"
"No. I mean, why?" the MudWing said hoarsely, barely above a whisper. "Why am I here? Why are you here? Why are you doing this?" She paused, and took a deep, shuddering breath.  "Why do you care?"
Waterfall didn't quite know how to answer this. She shrugged. "Well, someone has to."
"No they don't," the MudWing said matter-of-factly. 
"No. They don't."
They sat in silence for a moment. "I'm Swamp, by the way." the MudWing said. "Not that it matters. I'll be dead soon."
"Don't say that."
They fell into another silence. Swamp grabbed the bowl off Waterfall and began to slurp it up noisily. 
"I'm Waterfall," she said eventually. Swamp didn't reply.
It was another couple minutes before either of them spoke. 
"It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" Swamp didn't seem to want an answer. Her voice sounded like dry gravel scraping across metal- scratchy, rasping, and out of place. "It always is. Perfect day to die."
"Stop saying that," Waterall snapped. 
"Dragons who have time left to live, they don't appreciate the sky," Swamp said. "You should appreciate the sky. It's beautiful, Waterfall, bloody beautiful. You think you understand, but you don't!"
"Swamp, calm down-"
"No I bloody well won't calm down! 'Cause it's the sunrises, the sunrises, the sunrises that are the best. Dragons like you, dragons like everyone here with your stupid smiles, you can't appreciate a good sunrise." She stopped abruptly, coughing slightly, eyes half closed, and for a terrifying moment Waterfall thought that she had died. The moment passed, and Swamp took a slow shaky breath in. "You know, remind me of my sister." Her voice was barely above a whisper this time, and Waterfall had to lean in close to hear her.
"I do?"
"Yeah. Yeah, you do." It didn't seem like Swamp was going to elaborate, but she spoke again in that same, almost silent voice. "She was a coward."
"And I remind you of her?" Waterfall couldn't hide that she was genuinely hurt by Swamp's estimation of her character.
"Oh, she was brave enough on the battlefield. Brave enough with a weapon in her hand. Brave enough to save us all, again and again and again but- she could never talk about her feelings. She overthought everything, made even the simplest of tasks a nightmare. She'd just," Swamp paused to take in another breath. "Run away from all her problems. Run away from everything that upset her. Pretend that it didn't exist."
"I don't see how that has to do with-"
"Look, do you want some advice?"
With some effort, Waterfall bit back a snarky response describing exactly where Swamp could shove her moons-blasted advice. Whatever the advice was, she probably did need it. "Fine."
"Don't keep running away from what makes you happy. Sienna missed her chance. Don't miss yours."
They fell into silence again. Swamp finished off her bowl of soup. 
"Hey, Waterfall?"
"Yeah?"
"This is gonna sound stupid." Swamp's voice sounded strained and distorted, a pale imitation of itself, like something viewed through a long tunnel of curved glass. "But when you get out of here- look at the sunrise for me, okay? I'll miss it."
Waterfall didn't know how to answer that. "Get some rest," she said, and her voice sounded as shaky as she felt. "Look, you might feel better after some sleep."
It was only an hour later that they told her Swamp was dead.
"That's life, isn't it?" Trout said, crossing her name out nonchalantly on his clipboard. "Dragons live, and dragons die. We're not a hospital, Waterfall. MudWings are only sent here if they're beyond saving. They keep the healthy ones there so they can recover and go back to fighting."
She'd get a new job tomorrow, Waterfall decided. Somewhere at a restaurant, maybe, a nice, clean restaurant with smiling dragons and cheerful music. She'd run away like the coward her parents had always told her she was, like the coward Swamp had known her to be even within seconds of meeting. 
It was odd, this hollow feeling in her chest. As though really there shouldn't be anything left, like the world should have collapsed long, long ago, but somehow, there it was. Her parents had always believed firmly in the Stelli, a place where all the pure souls went after they had died. But her parents had also believed that MudWings were inferior beasts, so perhaps there was quite a lot they were wrong about.
When her shift was finally over, she grabbed a quill from the soup stall, fished a receipt out of the bin, staggered out of the center and sat down under the willow tree to write the List of Questions. It certainly wasn't a masterpiece. It barely even qualified as a list- it was just the word "why" repeated over and over again until the ink ran out- but it was the closest she'd come to a list since she'd escaped from her parents. It was a start, and that was enough.
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Incomplete)
Category:Fanfictions (Fanon)
Category:Mature Content