The day you met Jane Crocker, she was three human years old, and there appeared to be a mustache growing on her upper lip. You were a bright wiggler and knew mustaches were a human secondary sex characteristic. Hers was long and silky and sable-brown. You weren't fooled.
She looked at you, in your red dragon hoodie with the spiked tail, as if you were the crucial clue to a mystery she was determined to solve. You lashed your tail and roared so loud her mustache fluttered. She narrowed her eyes, turned to the tall male human who was holding her hand, and said to him, "I see you met my partner."
Your partnership was bad news for criminals and even worse for genre boundaries. As juveniles, you played up the action: gunfights, fire-breathing, car crashes, airplane collisions. Things got cerebral after puberty and pupation: you'd go on arguing about meta-juridical praxis and the Euthyphro dilemma until your perp died of boredom right there on the dirty asphalt. Then you'd have to eat the body, to hide the evidence.
As adults, you finally had the financial wherewithal to perfect your costumes. Then you went arm in arm down those badly dressed streets, a malacca stick setting off Jane's tweed, your legislacerator's uniform correct down to the dragonhead cane. Power and justice flashed from the edges of your perfect silhouettes, dissolving wrongdoing everywhere in a six-block radius. Sometimes, on a bright red rhinestone-studded leash, you walked an albino iguana named Pyralspite.
You gave thirty years to the league of legislacerators, and then you retired into full-time dragonhood. You outlived several Pyralspites. Jane's mustache and bow tie collections grew vast, encyclopedic.
This afternoon, Jane purrs along beside you in her powder-blue mobility scooter, an immaculate shine on her brown loafers, a hardboiled glint in her cloudy eye. Her crisp fedora rests in her lap. Age and infirmity have not weakened her commitment to her noirsona. You're in a cherry-red bathrobe and dragon-blotched boxers. You don't really need a costume anymore. The mighty dragon is no longer separable from your own bones and teeth and incandescent eyes.
You roll into the dayroom and up to the parakeet cage like it's genpop. Jane sets the hand brake, takes a silver-barreled pen out of her breast pocket, and starts doing slow-motion flip tricks between her knuckles. While the parakeets rustle and cheep, peering at the flashes of sunlight reflecting off Jane's pen, you sidle up and press yourself to the cage's surface. Your nose and horn-tips stick through the gaps in the mesh. You give an encouraging squeak, tilting your horns to make a tempting perch. One inmate, your perp now, comes and lands, fluffs his yellow breast, stretches out his leg, and settles down. Jane applauds solemnly and discreetly with one flat hand against her thigh.
"We shouldn't waste time with questions," you whisper, and loll out your tongue to try and grab some photons off the criminal scum standing on your left horn. You clutch at the square wire mesh, disregarding the tiny lances of the arthritis in your knuckles, and slurp the air. "He stinks of lies." You move your head minutely, tilting your horn a few more degrees toward vertical. The lowlife shuffles his feet further out toward the tip. "Why don't I just eat him now."
"Our only lead?" Jane's voice is thick with phlegmatic deliberation.
"He probably doesn't know anything. Send a message to the lawbreakers." Your unoccupied horn scrapes free of the mesh. The cork pops off its tip and falls among the seed hulls and splatters on the newspaper floor of the cage. You stand bent sideways with your horn nearly vertical, firmly clasped in the crook's tiny claws.
"What message?" Jane asks.
"That they are crunchy," you hiss. A tremor makes your horn rattle against the wire.
Jane touches a lever and wrrrrrs gently forward. "Start talking, thug," she murmurs, catching the bird's eye. He cocks his head and gives a harsh chirp.
You suddenly point your horns straight forward, making the suspect flutter and scrabble for a new grip. "Is that all you know!" you whisper-shout, shoving your horns forward until they wedge in the mesh.
"Don't," Jane says very softly, bumping her knee against your leg.
You sigh, let go of the mesh, and twist your head in an elegant dragonlike gesture to get free. The criminal takes a deep swoop to a new perch. You turn and lower yourself to the arm of Jane's scooter, folding one leg stylishly over the other, despite the ache in your hips and knees.
You play the rest of the scene straight verbal, in quiet voices, lingering on the punishing ethical quandaries and graphic depictions of violence. You end up in Jane's soft lap, whispering in her ear, her answers rumbling through your torso pillar. "The functioning of Alternia is superior in every way," you tell her. She rests her heavy hand on your head between the horns.
It won't be long before the oxygen mask will strip Jane of her lines. But it won't matter that much. Dialogue's just part of the costume, part of the role. It was never the mustache and fedora that made Jane who she was. She'll be an inert hemisphere under a hospital sheet, you'll be a clutch of bones in a bright-red hoodie perched on the chair by her bed, but the strength and righteousness radiating from the pair of you will still vaporize injustice out to the county line.
She'll swell and recede in the wide bed, slow as a tide. Skeletal medical apparatii will stand vigil at her head. They'll breathe, drip, and glow, as if each were taking over one of the functions of life.
You'll reach down the neck of your hoodie and haul out Pyralspite V. When you set him on the bedside table by the tissue box, he'll turn himself to face the bed, placing his dry articulated feet with vegetative care.
"I see you met my partner," you'll say to him fiercely, and Jane will smile.