Icelus woke up before his brothers did. He often did this, despite his best efforts. Sleep usually evaded him. It was early, though. He could see the faintest sliver of light filtering through the windows of the containment chamber they’d slept in. The food leftover from their feeding upon arrival was all cleaned up, though. Icelus tried not to feel disappointed.  

The room was decorated like a human room instead of like an animal’s, or at least Icelus thought it was. He’d only seen pictures of human habitation in his training. This place was a lot less… stark than those pictures were. There were photos on the walls of the dragons with three humans at varying ages, and comfy chairs. There were stairs that went up and down beside the entryway where Pom was sprawled. A large counter guarded a large and shining kitchen tucked into a corner.

Pom lay between them and the foyer, face angled to guard the door, even as he slept. Iceleus explored the area when everything went floaty the night before. He’d seen a door with big glass panels, through which he could see the streets and cars outside. He expected the dragons to take them to the Undercity, not a house on a human street. Did all Dragons live in places like this? He didn’t know. But Icelus did know that he liked the light streaming through the window onto his back. 

Lamis was curled up in an armchair that looked stuffed with clouds, a blanket laid over her that she wrested a leg out of at some point in the night. Her mouth hung open as she snored, long tongue lolling between a gap in the front of her sharp teeth. Dio had been on the couch when they’d fallen asleep, but was nowhere to be found now. Chi also wasn’t within eyeline from where they lay.

Last night, Pom nudged the little dragons onto a large cushion beside the couch, layering blankets over them as they drifted off to sleep. Icelus sniffed, pawing at the blankets over them. There were more than before he’d fallen asleep. His claws tangled in a strangely textured blanket, ropy and braided and soft; nothing like the plastic tarps or utilitarian cotton they were given before.

He couldn’t escape his siblings without waking them. The moment he tried to dislodge his leg from Moros’ grip, all three of his brothers stirred. Icelus purred an apology while Deimos blindly groped for him, finding his shoulder before his eyes could open.

“Where are you going?” Deimos whispered, even quieter than usual. Icelus had to lean his head down more to hear. Neither Pom nor Lamis moved from their rest.

“I wanna look around.” Icelus kept his volume low as well. “Just to look… They didn’t tell us we had to stay here.”

“They haven’t told us where we can go,” Deimos insisted.

Icelus considered this. “I won’t go up the stairs.” 

Stairs were another ‘room’ according to humans, but surely the space they were in now would be okay? The dragons hadn’t minded them exploring before.

Deimos puffed out a breath of air. “Fine,” he allowed. “But be quiet.”

Icelus nodded quickly and extracted the rest of himself from the wyrm pile. He slunk on all fours to stay low and small, peering around the back of the couch. There was a table there with all sorts of little items and photos on it. He perched on his knees to get a better look at them all.

There were little dragons carved from gemstones and rock, some sort of jar with sticks poking out that smelled of lemon and oranges, a photo of the dragons much younger all dressed in different strange clothes with a human hugging them all against him, a pretty wooden box full of tissues, and another photo of the same human again, older and accompanied by a taller fae with goat hooves. They held hands in front of a fancy building, dressed in fancier clothes.

Icelus committed the faces to memory, then poked at the little gemstone dragons. He’d heard that fae could make rocks talk and turn humans into unnatural things, though the PSS never actually showed Icelus any proof outside of his learning modules. The gemstone dragons, though, did not tattle on him to the bigger dragons, so he left them be. 

He wondered if he could learn to do those things. He and his brothers never showed any signs of magic, despite Knight’s best efforts. Nothing like the floaty magic he’d seen from Lamis, or Dio’s purple screens that could see right through their bodies, or the way Chi could make doors to anywhere.

A queasy feeling in his stomach made Icelus turn away from the display.

Would the dragons want them, if they figured out Icelus couldn’t do those things? Were he and his brothers broken, just like the PSS said they were? Were they not dragon enough? Were they too much… other?

Icelus wasn’t sure the kitchen counted as another room or not, but when he poked a toe into the area, there were no alarms that blared or angry dragons coming after him, so he slunk around the corner to inspect it.

Last night the kitchen was chaotic, full of food and dirty dishes and cooking utensils that Icelus had never even seen before. Now it was clean and sparkling, with stained towels hanging off the two stacked ovens and a pair of thick cloth mitts shaped like big round orange bird beaks hanging off the wall. 

He remembered the fridge making a loud sound when Lamis had opened it the night before, so he bypassed that and peeked into some of the lower cabinets. He found chemicals, though not anything he recognized from bomb making training, aluminum trays, bowls and wooden cutting boards, and devices that he couldn’t begin to guess at the purpose of. One looked like a bone saw with rotating blades, and he quickly put it back.

He abandoned the cabinets and crossed the kitchen to a window just above the counter. He climbed carefully up onto the counter, peering through the glass at the grey sky. The sky was always blue in his learning modules. Icelus’s attention shifted back indoors. A strange mobile of crystals and glass hung in the window, catching the edge of the morning’s light and scattering faint rainbows across the hardwood floors.

Icelus settled down on the counter to watch the rainbows flutter and move, the vent in the ceiling providing enough of a breeze to move the glass mobile. Icelus rested his arms atop one of the cooking machines with a smooth metal dome above a bowl, then his chin on his arms as he watched light slowly begin to peek through the window and spill onto the warm floors.

The rainbows grew stronger as more light filled the space, and Icelus finally looked over his shoulder towards the source.

The sky was no longer grey. Sunlight, brighter than anything, broke through the clouds. He had to squint against the first morning rays peeking over the fence in the back garden. The sky was changing colors, not just lighting up slowly from black to gray to white like the lights in the conservatory did. The sky was changing, going from purple and pink to red and orange and yellow, and finally a misty blue.

The world blurred, and Icelus blinked, wiping at his eyes. The sun was getting too bright to keep watching, anyway. It was nothing like their fake sun, which felt like a dull form of torture now that he’d seen a real sunrise.

The rainbows continued to dance on the floor and he watched them while the sun rose behind him and began warming his back. His scales lifted, and his eyelid grew heavy with contentment.

In the chair, Lamis loudly yawned, making Icelus' eye fly open. She stretched her long arms back and back, spine arching over the arm of the squashy chair until her hands met the carpeted floor. With a grunt, she backflipped out of the chair and to her feet. Her hands raised above her head in silent victory, then she yawned again, and shuffled towards the connected kitchen. 

Icelus heard the cold box open, and Lamis move things inside around, before it closed again. More sounds of metal banging and eggs cracking filled the air, and Icelus felt certain any sounds from his own movements would be hidden.

He slipped off the counter and hurried on all fours back across the kitchen and out into the living room. He paused by the couch to sulk at the loss of his spot, then checked on Pom to see if he showed any sign of waking. The large dragon’s eyes were still closed, breathing even.

Icelus inched his way towards the stairs, eye flicking over to where Deimos dozed back off. Moros was watching him, but Icelus had no doubt Moros wasn’t going to tell. If he took a quick peek.

Poking his head around the corner to look up the stairwell showed nothing terribly exciting. More photos and some art lined the wall, while the bannister was decorated with twinkling little fairy lights that kept them from being in total darkness last night. The top of the stairs opened up into another room that he couldn’t get a good look at.

If he strained his ears, Icelus thought he could hear breathing further up the stairs. Maybe that was where Chi and Dio went.