Paper Dreams

A deathly screech of claws sliding against metal, followed by the softer sound of paper tearing and crunching, roused me from my sleep. I didn't know what to think at first, hearing what seemed to be scrunched-up balls of paper being tossed across a room, hard enough to audibly bounce off the wall that separated my bedroom from the main living space.

I lay still, eyes staring blindly into the dark. A faint light seeped through the crack underneath the bedroom door, sickly yellow. From the colour, I knew it was coming from my old, moth-eaten lamp, the one that desperately needed its batteries replaced but hadn't because I never remembered.

The scraping and tearing sounds were eventually replaced by heavy, shuddering breaths. Anguished breaths, coming from someone who no longer cared if their misery was overheard or not. With anyone else, I would have assumed they were sobbing – the cadence of the breaths implied that – but I knew there were no tears involved here.

I pushed my light blanket away and clambered out of breath, feeling pleasantly cool wooden floorboards under my bare feet. I rarely wore socks – it was hard enough just finding shoes designed for a dragonman's feet, even when I filed my claws down to blunt stumps.

The ragged breathing continued without change or interruption as I groped my way out of the room, squinting against the yellow light that flooded my eyes when I opened the door.

The living room was a mess. More so than it usually was. The sofa was misaligned, as if someone had kicked it hard enough to slightly move it across the floor. Both of the cushions that normally sat on the sofa had been tossed across the room. Piled up against the wall was a collection of screwed-up paper balls, most of which had visible lines of ink writing, but they were all torn and twisted so badly that it was hard to make out what the writing had originally been.

More scraps of paper lay on the floor, the couch, and the dining table. Whoever responsible had been writing furiously, perhaps for hours, and had finally reached a point where all the pent-up emotions had exploded out of them. It wasn't pretty.

I lifted my eyes from the chaos of my living room and saw a bulky figure crouched over the table. Stalgator's head hung low, and his whole frame trembled with a familiar emotion. The heavy, rasping breaths I'd heard were coming from him. His eyes were open, and their sapphire luminescence stretched across the table, somehow brighter than the old lamp's glow.

At first, I didn't know what to say. I wasn't even sure whether I should try approaching him or not. Then instinct overrode logic and sent me towards the table, my footsteps almost silent on the carpeted floor. Speaking up felt wrong, but so did everything else about this situation.

'I think you've had enough for tonight.'

Stal's head lifted slightly, but remained low enough to avoid looking me straight in the eyes. The strange lighting in the room threw his shadow – complete with long, jagged spikes and skeletal wings – into sharp relief on the wall behind him.

'Yeah, enough,' he said, voice slow and grumbling. Empty of any clear emotion. 'Enough for good, I think.'

'What?' I rested my bare forearms on the table. 'What does that mean?'

'This is a waste of time. I'm not getting anywhere. The crap I'm writing now is no better than the shit I wrote five years ago. I'm just not improving. There's no point in writing songs any more. It's obviously not something I'm supposed to do.'

Emotion had begun to creep back into Stal's voice, and it was heavy with self-pity, resentment, and something painfully raw.

'You have improved, man. You've improved by miles. You just can't see it right now because you're having a bad moment. You know that you'll get over it eventually, and then you'll see how much you've improved.'

A soft snort came from the dragon opposite me. 'What if I'm just deluded? What if everyone's just telling me I'm a good songwriter to... to make me feel better? You're my best friend. You wouldn't tell me I suck – you'd keep on trying to support me no matter what.'

'Over fifty people came to The Golden Claw to watch our gig last month. Do you think they'd spend all evening watching us perform just to be nice? Because they felt sorry for us? They came because they liked our music, and that means they liked your songs.'

'Oh, come on. Not all of our tracks even have lyrics. Maybe they just came for the instrumentals, and tolerated my shitty songs in between. I've got the lyrical skill of a twelve-year-old girl, and I don't need anyone to tell me that.'

'Some of them were singing along to your songs. And clapping. And I didn't see anyone turn away or lose interest when we switched off an instrumental track to a lyrical one.'

Stal went quiet, seemingly having no response to my argument. But his demeanour alone told me that he wasn't ready to believe it. This wasn't the first time I'd been forced to pep-talk him into feeling more confident about his music, but each time, it seemed to get harder. As the months rolled by and we continued to achieve nothing more than small-time local success, I could feel Stal's stress levels rising. He was on the verge of breaking up the band and walking away from everything we had managed to achieve.

I reached forwards across the table and laid a hand in front of him, not even sure what I was trying to accomplish with the gesture, but wanting to tear his attention away from his inner thoughts somehow. He fixed his gaze on my hand for a moment, eyes dimming slightly. Then he twisted his head away and, with a short sigh, grasped my hand in his own much larger forepaw and squeezed it in a wordless signal of gratitude.

'You don't have to listen to me spewing this crap, Gray,' he said as he let go.

'Nobody said I had to. But if I didn't want to, then I don't really deserve to be your friend. Or bandmate.'

Stal's eyes dimmed even further, and I could tell that he was struggling to keep himself alert. 'Sorry about your living room. Looks like a – a freaking explosion happened in here.'

I don't doubt that, man, I thought, as I joined him in surveying the mess of papers and overturned furniture. It had been an explosion of raw emotion – combined fury, frustration and self-pity – but an explosion nonetheless. 'Look, just stay here and get some rest. You'll feel fine in the morning, and I'll try my best to help you with this song, OK? Maybe all you need is someone to go through the lyrics with you and switch some words around.'

Stal grunted. 'Thanks. Geez, man, you know you're the only one I'd actually allow to see my half-finished crappy lyrics? That stuff's too personal for me to let anyone else look at.'

'I know.'

'I – I need to crash. I'll clean this mess up in the morning, alright? First thing I do when I wake up.'

'Alright. Sleep well.' Tired, I pushed myself away from the table and lurched back towards my bedroom door. 'Just try to get this all out of your mind, and forget about it. For now. I'll help you with the song tomorrow. It'll come together in the end, you'll see.'

A growl came from deep in Stal's throat; exasperation mixed with affection. 'Go to bed, will you? I'll be fine.' His eyes had darkened almost completely now, leaving them as mostly black sclera with the faintest ring of blue in the middle. He was dropping into the unresponsive state that was the closest thing his species had to sleep.

I muttered a word of goodnight before retreating back into my room. As I climbed into bed, I wondered – just for a moment – what the future of our band was going to be. Like Stal, I struggled to believe that we would ever make it to stardom. It felt like an unrealistic goal to aim for, and that was saying a lot; I didn't normally consider myself a real pessimist.

But maybe fame and glory wasn't what we needed to aim for. Maybe the biggest challenge, the thing that would shape all of our lives, was learning to accept that fame just wasn't for us. I guess I'll have to wait and see.