The Daily Inconveniences of an Au Ra: Mixed Race Housing
Living in the Scion's dorms was... hard. Keshet had never felt his otherness quite as much as when he moved in with his comrades. They were all understanding, and they certainly did their best, but Keshet could never quite shake the knowledge that he was different. Both in terms of upbringing, and of anatomy.
Most people, when they bunked with roommates or in communal lodging, had to worry about things like their housemates snoring or eating their food. Keshet... well, the accommodations to his living space were a little bit more drastic than those of your average hyur.
The low ceilings he had learned to live with, for the most part. He still sometimes smacked his head when entering a doorway, but most buildings across Eorzea were not built for someone of his height, and he'd grown more or less accustomed to ducking. He shared plenty of long-suffering looks with the Boulder brothers, but ultimately, there was relatively little he could do to keep from whacking his head besides just remembering to stoop. Though the brain cells he lost every time he forgot made it harder and harder with each passing day, or so he liked to claim.
And he did like being able to help out the others. Sometimes, when Tataru was baking, he'd sit in the kitchen with her and fetch whatever she needed from the upper cupboards, because the only person who struggled more with the geography of the Rising Stones was her. She'd feed him all the best of her creations in exchange, and he always got first dibs at mealtime - though by then he was often so stuffed full of stolen mouthfuls that he could barely eat the meal he'd helped prepare.
The biggest issue, though, came when it was time to bed down. The snoring he could live with - he was used to sleeping in a camp full of people, with only thin fabric walls to divide them (if that). And he’d grown sufficiently used to sleeping indoors that the inability to see the sky didn't bother him as much as it used to, though he still preferred to sleep outside whenever he could get away with it. The problem was that he slept with a bunch of people from frigid Sharlayan, and that meant he froze his damned tail off every time he lay down to sleep.
Back on the Steppe, he was used to dozing in the blazing sun, sprawled out on a hot rock and basking in the heat, just like a real lizard. Trying to sleep here, with only the blankets of his self-made nest to warm him, was like trying to sleep half-submerged in a river: not bloody comfortable. But it was a shared space and he was keenly aware that he was the odd man out in that regard, so he kept his complaints to himself and tried to soak up as much sun as he could during the day.
He should have known his friends better than that.
"What's this?" The glowing red lamp towering beside his nest of blankets commanded Keshet's attention as soon as he stepped foot into the dorm, scattering all thoughts of the day's training exercises to the wind. Tataru beamed at him from across the room, hands on her hips and that cunning glint in her eyes that always made him just a little bit nervous. It seemed that this time, though, it had been turned in his favor.
Thancred bumped him jovially with his shoulder, urging him forwards. "You don't think we didn't notice how uncomfortable you are sleeping here, did you? Friends pay attention to that sort of thing."
The heat that radiated from the lamp became obvious as Keshet stepped towards it, nervousness turning to incredulity as he drew near. "Is this..."
"A heat lamp," Urianger supplied for him, scratching bashfully at his head. "We thought it might provide thee some comfort."
"He means that we asked around in the Firmament to find out what the dragons use to keep warm, and Marcelloix suggested this," Alisaie said. "A lizard's a lizard, no matter its scales, right?"
Keshet was too distracted by the warmth that radiated from the lamp to offer more than a half-hearted, "Right," in response. Nhaama, it was so warm. The heat soaked into his scales and eased the tension in his muscles. Gods, he just wanted to... well, that was the point, wasn't it?
He curled up in front of it, uncaring for the half-hidden smirks of his audience as he curled his tail over his thigh and turned his face towards the glow. Less than a minute later, the quiet sound of snoring drifted from the contented Au Ra. Tataru grinned, waving the others away. "Looks like it was worth the effort."
(By the time she returned to head to bed herself, she found G'raha and Y'shtola curled up in front of the heater as well, the three of them cuddled into a comfortable pile before it. Maybe they'd have to get a few more heaters to go around.)
Read the rest of the series on Ao3!
