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Fly High	By : IcarusComplex Category: 1 through F > Dinotopia Views: 1458 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own any incarnation of Dinotopia (book, miniseries, TV series); James Gurney does. Similarly, I don't own characters, places, or a dinosaur, and I make no money from this. At all.

Chapter List
- 1-Runaway
- 2-Tomorrow
- 3-Luck
- 4-Elf
- 5-Joke
- 6-Secret
- 5
- 6
Sorry for the hiatus. University does get in the way of these things...

97 – Secret

      When he found Romana again, it was on a ledge away from the main settlement overlooking the Skybaxes nesting spires. She sat with her back to the cliff face, legs dangling in the wind, watching the great pre-birds swoop and soar. David gave the precipitous edge a nervous look and sidled along until he could ease himself down next to her. She didn’t shy away.
     Across the canyons the Skybax called and cried to each other, voices coarse and mournful on the wind. They sat in silence for a long time, soaking up the warmth of the red rock and tasting the hot dry wind David had long since ceased to think of as dead. It was as alive to him now as the crying Skybax below: sharp and bitter with the taste of sand and tobosa grass from the plains.
     “Nothing they teach you can prepare you for that,” Romana said eventually. “They tell you, ‘the carnivores are coming’. Or show you pictures. ‘This is what a carnivore can do.’ But you can’t possibly comprehend. Not really. Not the magnitude of what you’re going to see.”
     “…Volcaneum?”
     Her fingers trembled on the ledge lip. “The patrols got there too late.”
     The statement was one Romana herself had made more than once, and yet she didn’t seem comforted.
     They’d all done the PTSD song and dance. Them, and every man and woman in Canyon City: long, uncomfortable sessions with counsellors weeding out insecurities and future problems.
     Romana had been cleared, just like David.
     But he still woke in a sweat some nights. Not because of the carnivores—his dreams involved long dark spaces; weight pressing inexorably in, his chest constricting, brackish water burning in his nose. Every time was a panicked struggle upupup! that ended abruptly when he lurched up gasping, one hand to his throat. And on those nights he woke, he sometimes heard Romana.
     Her sobbing moans came lowly through the cell wall. Some nights they faded. Some nights they cut off abruptly and he knew she’d woken like he had. On rare nights, the sobs rose to a cry that was nearly a scream. The sudden quiet that followed these was oppressive. David sat with feet on the floor in the dark, then, until he heard footsteps scuff in the corridor. Then he would get up and follow. After a time, he became acquainted with the particulars of the visions that drove Romana from bed night after night.
     They both suffered in their own way. To David there was a solidarity of sorts in that; the idea that suffering was never quite too great to be borne if it was shared. But Romana obviously did not feel the same. To look at her now, one would say she struggled against her memories in a vacuum: alone and unassisted.
     “If we’d been there—if we’d been faster—”
     Casting about for something to say, David was forced to admit that there was nothing. Nothing that hadn’t been said already or just smacked of insincerity.
     Romana pulled her hands into her lap where they balled into a fist. “If I’d been a better pilot, we might have been in time to warn them. We could have saved the people. All those people…
     “Do you know that in one particular case, my father saved over a hundred people from a Brachiosaur stampede?” she asked suddenly, changing tack so fast David nearly got whiplash.
     He shook his head.
     In Romana’s lap, her hands twisted. Her eyes trailed intently over the creases. “My mother ferried jinka to outlying settlements during an epidemic a few years after that. All the land-going saurians were ill themselves or couldn’t be risked by entering an infected zone. Half the Corps was down. Between them, my mother and a single squadron saved scores of tiny settlements from dying out completely.”
      “I,” she spat, voice cracking, “couldn’t save a single person in Volcaneum. Not one.”
     Now David understood—or as close as he could come to it. He’d read the reports from Volcaneum, including the one from Romana’s own hand. The numbers alone evoked a montage of the worst of the war footage he’d ever seen back in the outside world. Without being there, though, or seeing someone else’s memories, he didn’t think he’d ever truly understand.
     Romana’s nightly screams made him think he didn’t want to.
     Her fingernails had carved red crescents into the meat of her palms. “If I can’t even do that, how could I possibly live up to their legacy? If I’m not living up to them, I’m…I’m nothing.”
     “You’re not nothing.” Screw tact, he was going to say something. “You’re one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen. Better than me. Maybe.”
     The last part was a joke, but it got the response he was looking for.
     Romana hiccupped a laugh and looked over at him, finally. Around her mouth was bloodless, and her eyesockets were sunken and purple as if she hadn’t slept properly in months – which David was well aware she hadn’t – but she hadn’t cried.
     “And if you want to keep it that way,” he forded on, pressing the advantage while he had it and rising (cautiously) to his feet, “you’d better keep practising. Which means you need to eat something or you’re going to fall off that mighty brute you call a Skybax.”
     “It’s not Zudon’s fault,” Romana defended. Her heart clearly wasn’t in it though. “He’s over-protective, that’s all. He doesn’t trust that ghost of yours.”
     “Well, he better get used to him. If we’re going to be wingmates, they’re going to be spending a lot more time together.” He extended a hand down to Romana and pulled her to her feet when she took it. “Come on. Let’s go see what’s on for lunch before Max and Oskrim eat it all.”
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TBC, believe it or not. I was trying to evoke the wonderful Eggshells by Julia456 (I'm apparently not allowed to 'direct' you there, so no URL) but it seems my style is irreperably heavy-handed. Must work on that...
- 5
- 6
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Fly High

97 – Secret