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Chores. Everyone in the family had chores. For his older siblings- his parent’s first clutch- it was hunting, along with most of his cousins. Siblings from the younger clutch and the other less experienced fliers gathered firewood. The rest usually helped clear out the ashes and keep the caves clean. On top of that, someone always had to keep an eye on all the younglings to make sure they weren’t getting into trouble, and there were constant lessons from the family’s elders on hunting, language, weather, navigation, you name it.
But Toby was special, not just because of his inhuman abilities but because of his very human stature. Toby couldn’t hunt, he couldn’t fly, he couldn’t even leave the caves without getting a ride, and his tiny hands were terribly inefficient at cleaning. But everyone in his family had chores, and he was no exception. He had to pull his weight; however light that was.
Well as it turns out, even though his hands might not be so useful for cleaning out caves, he was exceptionally good at cleaning more… hard to reach places.
“Remember to be careful with him, dear; your belly might be kind to him, but your teeth won’t be if you catch him between them.”
His mother loomed over them, like a mountain in her own right, gazing down with loving eyes. Warnings like that used to scare Toby, especially when he was really little, but he’d done this hundreds of times by now- easily dozens with Lorn alone- and he had long gotten over his fear. Besides, it wasn’t dragons her size he really had to watch out for, it was the smaller ones that couldn’t really fit him all the way inside yet.
“Don’t worry, I will,” Lorn replied. Then she looked down at her little brother. “You ready, Toby?”
The boy nodded and smiled, so the young dragoness lowered her head to the ground and opened her jaws wide, letting her tongue slip out from her maw to form a safe bridge for her human sibling to cross.
Lorn was one of Toby’s younger siblings, not actually younger than he was, but rather from their parent’s second, most recent set of eggs. While bigger than a few of their cousins, her clutch-mates were considerably smaller than their older kin. A maturing dragon like Clak had a mouth that could comfortably hold Toby’s little form with room to spare, but Lorn’s was just about his size- her throat just barely large enough to swallow him in one gulp, though she normally preferred to take two.
Toby got onto all fours and climbed onto the slimy, red carpet. It lifted him off the ground and gently pulled him inside, Lorn’s jagged upper teeth passing like stalactites overhead as he was carried over her lower ones. He glanced at her throat for a moment before turning around to face the outside world again, and more precisely, the dragoness’s teeth.
He started by looking over the bottom row, those were usually the easiest. Spotting a stubborn tuft of fur, which had quite obviously been licked to death in an attempt to dislodge it, he crawled over. Reaching out with one hand he took a firm hold on the hair, and with one solid tug upwards, he yanked the pesky bit of pelt out from its crevice.
A satisfied, purring-like sound came up the dragon’s neck, vibrating the squishy flesh on which he crouched. A few stray strands were left behind, so he quickly gathered them up, peeling them off the slimy gumline. Once the area was clean, he balled everything up, twisted to look over his shoulder and tossed the wad over the curve of his sister’s tongue. He heard the tiniest squelch as the flesh behind him twitched, the straggling crumb being sent down to follow the long-digested meal it had once been a part of.
Toby turned back and looked over the rest of the bottom row. He didn’t find anything else out of place, so he shifted to the upper row, sitting upright on the young dragoness’s tongue and tilting his head upwards to examine the looming, white guillotines. Something quickly caught his attention. The boy stood and put a hand against the roof of his sister’s mouth, which rose from behind at a steep angle.
“Can you close down a little?” Toby asked. The jaws began moving together, very slowly. Toby let his hand slide across the dragon’s palate as it descended, until the highest teeth were comfortably within reach, then he stiffened his arm and pressed back against the imposing wall of flesh. Lorn, receiving his signal, stilled her maw.
Toby took a step forward onto the edge of her tongue and felt the squishy organ flinch in anticipation. He could tell his sister was nervous.
“Be gentle with that one, it kinda hurts,” Lorn requested, her words vibrating around him.
“Okay,” Toby called back, eyeing the obstruction with concern. It was a large shard of bone, stuck tightly between the widest parts of two teeth, and it was digging into the dragon’s swollen gums, definitely not something that seemed pleasant. To test the waters, the boy reached out and- as gently as he could- touched the afflicted flesh.
“Ow!!” Lorn yelped. Her tongue recoiled backwards in pain, throwing him off his feet. Luckily he didn’t land on anything sharp, just splashed into the growing pool of saliva that always came to greet him sooner or later.
“I told you to be gentle!” she complained.
“Sorry! I swear I barely touched it,” he replied, standing back up as her mouth relaxed around him. He eyed the bone again, there seemed to be a pretty good handhold on the far end. “I think I can get it out, but this might hurt again,” he said.
“…Okay, do it,” she said after a moment of hesitation.
He walked back up to the edge of her maw, a pool of warm drool sloshing around his ankles. Doing his best not to move it yet, he reached out and grabbed the bone with both hands.
“Ready?”
“Uh-huh…”
“One… Two… Three!”
Toby pulled as hard as he could and the bone sprang loose, sending him tumbling back to land with a splat against his sister’s tongue. But the pain had been much worse than Lorn had expected, without thinking she threw her head up to the sky and cried out.
*ROAR*!!
Toby quickly slid down the length of her tongue, along with the pool of saliva that had built up during his work. As the liquid rushed over the dragoness’s windpipe she gagged, clenched up her throat, and reflexively: swallowed. Her brother was halfway down her esophagus before the coughing dragon even realized what had happened. She felt the sizable bulge slink down her neck and merge into her chest, slipping through into her stomach.
“Toby? Are you alright?” she asked after clearing the last of the drool from her throat.
He didn’t reply.
“Toby!?” she called, much louder and with notable concern.
“I GOT IT SIS!” he called back in an unnecessarily loud voice. “BUT YOU ROARED SO LOUD THAT I CAN’T REALLY HEAR TOO WELL.”
The dragoness took a moment to explore the spot with her tongue. Sure enough, the pesky crumb was gone. Her gums still hurt a bit, but it was nothing compared to what she had been feeling the last few days.
“Nice job, Toby! You’re the best! Sorry for freaking out and swallowing you like that!”
“THAT’S FINE. I THINK I’M JUST GONNA TAKE A BREAK AND WAIT FOR MY EARS TO STOP RINGING.”
“Go ahead! My belly is all yours!”
Toby let himself glow a little brighter, illuminating the squishy folds of his sister’s stomach. Curled up in a ball, the rippling walls cradled him from all sides. He looked over at his left hand, still clutching the broken piece of bone like his life depended on it. As his heart stopped pounding, he released his grip, letting the scrap slip down into the dragon’s digestive soup.
It would dissolve in there, but he wouldn’t.