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Nox dreams when he's not careful. Of the abbot, who's not an actual abbot. He's not religious and nor was he but—
"Call me Abbot," the man said in his clipped accent, wry amusement dancing in familiar brown eyes, "it means 'father', the angmo say."
"You're not my father," Nox mumbled, but Abbot couldn't care less. He got his English mixed up at times, not that he cared, not when his heart ached for a home thousand of miles away, not when people saw the yellow tinge of his skin and his sharp eyes and decided he was nonhuman, less than.
He was anything but. He hid the sun in his chest when they spat on him, buried the pulse of the earth he knew so well in the grooves of his fingertips when they mocked his heritage, stuffed thrown-away buns under his jacket when they refused to willingly give their scraps to him. Nox thought it was humiliating to be treated that way, and then Abbot would turn around and offer him all his food.
Abbot was a pest, Nox decided, one that wouldn't leave him alone. He kept stuffing buns and snacks at him even when he didn't want it. But Nox swallowed them all down when he saw the blooming bruises under Abbot's tattered sleeves.
At night, when the streets were deserted and the wind bit into their skin, Abbot told Nox of the sleeping dragon inside him. The dragon slept in the slope of his sharp eyes, flew the yellow plains of his skin, coiled around the heart that only knew echoes of a language whose tones rose and fell like the rolling landscape of their shared home.
"That's not home," Nox argued once, muttering and wincing beneath his breath as Abbot pressed unknown herbs to his wounds, "I don't even know where I'm from."
Abbot's lips curl into what he supposed was a smile. "But home knows you."
And that was that, even though Nox still didn't understand. Abbot spoke in riddles and strange imagery, phrases half-translated and metaphors awkwardly transposed into English.
Nox dreams in fragments. He wakes up with tears running down his face, and his heart beating a song he heard once long ago. It shouldn't be beating, not now, not when his heart is metal and every feature of himself that reminded him of Abbot and his faraway home is robbed of its colour and its warmth.
Nox dreams when he's not careful. He doesn't want to dream. Dreaming casts him into the past — patchy, holey — and he only finds horror when he realises how much he's forgotten.
He struggles to remember Abbot's name, but he remembers his warm smile and his rough hands. He wonders where Abbot is now? How is he doing, is he well? Is he looking for Nox?
Nox doesn't know how many days, or months, or years have passed since then. He hopes Abbot is well. He hopes he will see Abbot soon.