The Dragon Tattoo

We ended up in an abandoned old warehouse which, according to the sign out front, was due to be demolished in three months. He took me down to the lower level, a basement level, and revealed that there was some sort of little bedroom thing in it. He said he’d hidden out here as a child before the others found him, and he hadn’t been back since. Because of that, he thought that we would be safe from them, whoever they were, for a while.

He left to go find some food, leaving me a strict order not to leave, which I was inclined to obey because of the tone of voice he had used as he’d said it. It wasn’t completely threatening, but also laced with a hint of worry that I had definitely not expected from my captor. It was then that I think I started to trust him just a tiny bit, even though he’d tried to kill me. It wasn’t consciously, but it happened and I couldn’t do anything about it because he’d done nothing unkind to me other than tackle me.

I spent the time while he was gone to think about him.

He was mysterious, that much I knew for certain. I didn’t even know his name, how old he was, where he came from, or why the dragon running up my right side was so important to him. I knew nothing about him except for what he looked like, and it was disconcerting to have such an unconscious trust of the man who had threatened to kill me before he’d seen the marking I possessed.

My captor hadn’t done anything to scare me since admitting that he was going to kill me, and then saying the others would kill me. I wanted to know who these others were, why they would want to kill me when I hadn’t knowingly done anything to them. Perhaps strangest of all, though, was that I wanted desperately to know more about the brown haired man with the alluring gold-flecked green eyes who seemed so violent and bloodthirsty at our first meeting but then so uncertain since. His uncertainty made him human, and it made me fear him a little less and want to know him a little more.

I lay back on the bed that he had used when he was young, which he told me I would use while we were here, and racked my brain for anything about him. I had never seen him before, I was sure. I was probably just some random person he was going to mug, kill, and then make disappear from the face of the earth. That’s probably why so many more people had been going missing; he and the others he mentioned must have been killing them and disposing of the bodies so well that none of them were found. And even though I knew this with a certainty in my heart, I couldn’t bring myself to fear him as much as I had in the beginning. There was something about him that just made me incapable of having hard feelings toward him. Again, it was very disconcerting.

At that moment, the man strode into the room so purposefully that I was scared out of my wits at the complete silence he’d managed to accomplish that feat in. I wasn’t scared of him, no, but of how quietly he was able to move in a creaky, weakening old building. I hadn’t even noticed he had returned until I glanced at the doorway and saw him striding down the hall, just as he was about to enter the little room.

“Jesus!” I nearly shrieked, shooting straight up on the bed with the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. “Can’t you make some sort of sound so I know you’re there?!”

I was kind of surprised when he chuckled a little, dropping the plastic sack on the small table on the opposite side of the room. Reaching in, he tossed a Red Delicious apple at me without saying a word. I caught it one-handed, looking at it briefly, contemplating for a brief moment that it might have been poisoned, then shrugged and took a bite of it after wiping it on my shirt. When I next glanced up, he had an apple of his own, a Granny Smith, and was leaning casually against the wall as he ate it.

Unconsciously, I’d been watching him eat, and I pulled my gaze away to focus more fully on my own apple. My eyes just had that tendency to wander when he was around, and I really needed to stop it. It was much the same with my imagination, because while he was gone I’d had a short spell where I’d thought about what he’d look like shirtless, which was kind of odd when sometimes it felt as though he knew what I was thinking. I took another glance at him, and my curiosity overpowered my good sense.

I swallowed my current bite and finally asked the simplest question that had been plaguing me.

“What’s your name?”

He blinked and looked up, as though assuring himself that I was really addressing him, then swallowed his own bite of apple.

“Don’t think you need to know that,” he shrugged, taking another bite.

“I want to,” I said childishly, facing him. “I want to know more about you if I’m going to be spending any amount of time with you at all! Besides, you expect me to just follow you blindly. Wouldn’t there at least be a little more trust in this whole thing if you told me your name? My name’s Dawn! See, it’s not that hard. I just…I don’t like how this whole thing feels, and if you’d just tell me—”

“Leon.”

“—your name—what?”

“My name’s Leon,” he said slowly, enunciating and undoubtedly reveling in my momentary state of being taken aback by his answer. “Are you happy now? And what if I don’t like this any more than you do? I could let you go, but you’ll be dead soon. And I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they find us here, anyway, so you might be dead soon no matter what we do, but I’d rather keep you alive for a little longer anyway.”

“Why will they kill me?” I asked exasperatedly, gesticulating agitatedly with my hands, one of which still held my apple. “What have I done? Is there something wrong with me? Is it because I’m associated with you now, and do they just not like you at all, or is it just because I’m a normal person who doesn’t have to hide out in order to live a quiet and semi-peaceful life?”

“It’s because they don’t think there are any left,” he said simply, and frustration tweaked a little in my mind because he’d said much the same before we’d gotten here.

“Any what left, exactly?”

There was a silence that stretched for several long moments. I wanted to pull my hair out, but the pained expression on his face stopped me from being too frustrated. My impatience nearly got the better of me again, and I had opened my mouth to speak, to ask the same question again, when he finally answered me.

“Not now,” Leon shook his head, his kind of shaggy and unkempt hair shaking a little as he did so and falling in his eyes. He ran a hand through, pulling the brown strands away from his face, before continuing a little reluctantly, “I can’t tell you right now. You wouldn’t believe me, and you’d think I was crazy. Especially if I told you certain parts of it.”

I groaned, but I let it slide against the will of my impatient side. I took another bite of my apple and after a quick look in my direction, Leon did the same.

I let myself wonder yet again what this was all about. I didn’t feel like I was in any danger from Leon, which was in itself very disconcerting, just to reiterate. He just seemed to exude an aura that calmed me, even when I should have been frantic about who he was and why he brought me here. If it let myself, I could get lost in those eyes. They were gorgeous eyes, the type that made you understand the saying that eyes were the windows to the soul, but not in the way you’d think. You couldn’t tell everything about him from looking into his eyes, but you felt as though he knew everything about you when he looked into yours—at least that’s how I felt when he gave me that calmly calculating stare that seemed to just fit on his face.

Silence continued as I still sat cross-legged on the cot facing him but not really looking at him, thinking. Something about this whole thing was connected to my tattoo—and the word tattoo is used loosely when associated with the marking, because there wasn’t any needle or ink involved. So I started to wonder about that, too. How did a tattoo just appear one day? Or over a span of two or three weeks, like it had for me? What sort of otherworldly force could have been at work here for something so strange and abnormal to happen to a person like me, who had lived an ordinary life up until the moment that Leon had tackled me?

I let out a soft sigh, which attracted my now not nameless companion’s attention briefly, and continued to mull things over in my head.

The rest of the night passed in silence, with Leon taking a blanket from a hidden nook in the room and spreading out near the door to sleep. The thought crossed my mind briefly about how uncomfortable his night would be, but I let it go. He’d so kindly offered me the only cot, so I wouldn’t be ungrateful enough to complain and anyway, he had been the one to tackle me to the hard ground and kidnap me, so I deserved it a bit more than he did at the moment.

I let myself lie back on the bed and I fell asleep soon after my head hit the pillow.