Ibnoxe and Holoxe were guests of Lottie, so her parents expected some minimum courtesy from her. Come out of the garage to eat meals at the table. Sleep at night. Really basic expectations which the teenage girl could not manage. After a few days of this, the dragon brothers grew more concerned about their friend and advocate.

"Is Mr. Bouchard going to kick us out?" Holoxe asked.

"No!" Ibnoxe said at once to dismiss the worry. "I think he just said that so Charlotte would be more motivated to be present around the house. Josie insists on keeping Victoria here. Lottie's mom definitely wouldn't let anything bad happen to us!"

"Have you seen Charlotte since that day?" Holoxe asked. "Speaking of Victoria, I already talked to her, but she said that she had nothing to do with her since the confrontation."

"I don't think that's it. Lottie seemed okay afterward," Ibnoxe said. Something had clearly gone wrong between then and now.

The dragon brothers had a mystery to solve, so they left the privacy of their room. A few hours past noon, it was still too early for Lottie to be awake. Ibnoxe and Holoxe found her mom in the yard.

"Hey Josie," they called in unison.

"Hello boys!" The trowel stuck up in the flowerbed as she clapped some dirt off her gloves. Her eyes flitted between them as she asked, "Which of you is Ibnoxe and Holoxe?"

Ibnoxe raised a clawed hand first. "I'm Ibnoxe."

Holoxe did the same gesture as he said, "Holoxe."

"Great! By any chance did you come to help me in the garden? I can show you how if you're interested."

"Not exactly," Holoxe began.

"But we can help!" Ibnoxe finished.

Their claws could work as natural handrakes to uproot the weeds. The dragon brothers tried to make themselves useful in whatever capacity they could around the house to repay the Bouchard's kindness. While they enjoyed the fresh air and sunshine, Ibnoxe got straight to the point. "Do you know what's going on with your daughter?"

Josie finished planting a fresh impatien. Her motion stilled as she sat and stared at it for a while. "Yes. I had a chat with her the other day."

"What's going on? Why haven't we seen her?" Holoxe snapped hastily, all the while busting the roots off some weeds.

Ibnoxe had paused the garden work so that he would not make a similar mistake. "If it's something you're able to tell us, we'd like to know what's troubling Charlotte. Maybe we can help."

Those forlorn, pitying eyes of Charlotte's mom focused first on Holoxe, then Ibnoxe in turn. "Have you ever learned something so terrible it makes you sad?"

They both pondered the question. "Ibnoxe's mind was drawing a blank. Holoxe did not say anything either. It was not the habit of the dragon brother to dwell on things that could not be helped. "Is that what happened to Lottie?" he asked.

A grim nod confirmed it. "Admittedly, she was researching the sub-dragon species. It's not anything you boys have to worry about—no more than you have already experienced."

Ibnoxe and Holoxe looked to each other as if one of them would be able to decipher the cryptic message. "We don't really follow," Ibnoxe began.

As it turned out, Holoxe had a better interpretation of what Josie meant. "We were disposable to the power company. We're sub-dragons. Did this come as a surprise to Lottie?"

Josie had no more to say on the topic. Her weak smile could not erase the discussion. If anything, her attempt to gloss over it heightened the sense of dread in their hearts. No matter how cheerfully Charlotte's mom tried to talk to them about the different types of plants in her garden, their minds were elsewhere.

***

Lottie's silence was broken the very next day. She came down for breakfast in the morning and stared at her pancakes with exhausted eyes. The banana eyes and whipped cream smile of her pancake stared back.

"Cheer up and eat up!" Josie chimed around the table.

Charlotte slowly picked at her food but did not eat much. Any conversation that tried to include her around the table quickly died out. She hardly muttered a word between poking at her food. Once Ibnoxe and Holoxe had finished eating, she got up and followed them. "Can we meet in the garage?" she asked in a small voice.

"Of course!" they said in unison. Though her behavior worried them, at least Lottie seemed to be coming out of her shell from the past few days.

Before the three of them could slink off to the garage, Josie called out to her daughter. "Are you sure you want to tell them?"

"They deserve to know." Lottie hung her head while she held the door open for them. When they gathered round her workplace in the garage, her hands folded in a serious manner yet would not stop fidgeting.

She began with a generic question about their past. "Do you remember much before you worked at Grandesia Power Company?"

"Well, yes," That was only two years ago, so it was only natural that they had an existent memory. Ibnoxe said, "I completed my training at the Bioenginesis Labs. I'm assuming you did too?" He glanced at Holoxe who nodded.

In a manner evoking great care, Lottie had her hands tented together as she asked, "Did they do anything… bad to you there? Were any experiments conducted on either of you?"

"No." Concerned, Ibnoxed flitted his eyes to his brother at his side.

"Me neither."

A small sigh of relief left Ibnoxe's lips.

Lottie let out a more dramatic one. Her shoulders slouched in a more relaxed way, evident of a weight removed. "Well, I'm glad nothing happened to either of you, at least."

Now that he generally knew the direction of this conversation, a taste of bile accumulated at the back of Ibnoxe's throat. "Vie," he cooed to the vul and swished his tail to entice her over.

All the vuls charged and piled on top of Ibnoxe, Holoxe, and Lottie. Normally, they would have laughed, but the atmosphere of the garage was too oppressive. The vuls seemed to sense the negative emotions and squirmed in their laps. Try as they might to lighten the mood, even vul cuteness could not sway the worry from their minds.

"Is sub-dragon rage mode related to some bad experiments?" Ibnoxe asked.

"Yes and no," Lottie decided to say after some consideration. "As we've talked about before, sub-dragons as a species were developed in a bad experiment. Rage syndrome is an epigenetic characteristic which can affect your psychology."

While Ibnoxe understood that it was something inherent to their species, he did not know the difference between something genetic and epigenetic. "What's the difference?"

Charlotte explained that it would depend on their environment whether they entered rage mode or not. "If you're never exposed to the triggers which turn on those genes, you'll be the same as normal. If you are exposed to it though, then a switch will flip in your brain and turn on rage mode."

"So how do we do that?" Holoxe exclaimed as though it were something desirable.

In contrast, the bad feeling in Ibnoxe's gut compelled him to ask, "How do we avoid that?"

"Ibnoxe is right," Lottie said. "Rage syndrome is something you never want to happen. It's onset is caused by a traumatic loss of close social connections, and the change is irreversible."

"You mean…." Holoxe trailed off in favor of casting a sad gance to Ibnoxe.

He felt the exact same way; Ibnoxe did not even want to consider the implications of that. Losing his brother was unthinkable. If such a tragedy would drive them to madness, it only seemed like a fitting reaction.

"Bioenginesis Labs conducted studies on the sub-dragons that they developed to see what would trigger rage syndrome. Even if an individual sub-dragon is… tortured to death, he doesn't enter that state. As soon as sub-dragons are pair-bonded, the one made to watch will fall into rage mode if his partner is tortured comparatively mildly. They attack everything in sight indiscriminately, not even able to recognize the friend that they were trying to protect at times."

Lottie continued, "I believe this reaction has everything to do with how you were made. While you might not remember this consciously—I hope not anyway—it's definitely been burned into your subconscious. The first thing you ever experienced was having your soul violently torn into thousands of pieces and put into their own vessels. The studies concluded that sub-dragons are unable to handle friendship or meaningful social connections in any capacity, and it's best to keep them in total isolation."

"Of course that's a bunch of malarkey!" Charlotte shouted to round off her spiel.

One thing dominated Ibnoxe's mind: the first clone that he had met face to face, eX-0057. That sub-dragon had acted deranged. His attack had seemed unwarranted at the time, but now Ibnoxe understood. Before Ibnoxe and Holoxe had met, eX-0057 must have already made a connection with one of their fellow clones. His friend must have been among those who had died outside Reactor Central during the Disco Menace's diversion. Victoria had killed eX-0057's friend, as dear to him as Holoxe was to Ibnoxe.

Even the vuls seemed to still in horror at the described pathology of rage syndrome. Ibnoxe gripped Vie so tight that his claws pinched off some tufts of fur. Her yelp brought him back to the present.

Gasping, he got up which naturally dumped Vie on the floor. The vul kit caught herself as gracefully as a cat landing on her feet. Ibnoxe walked out of the dismal garage in search of someplace where he felt like he could breathe.

THe door slammed after him, leaving Holoxe and Charlotte blinking in shock.

"Is Ibnoxe okay?" Lottie asked in a great deal of concern. She struggled to jump up with her crutch.

Holxoe was already standing and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. "I know what's wrong. You stay here. I'll talk to him." He left the garage and caught up to his brother in their bedroom.

Back turned to him, Ibnoxe had both wings hunkered around his frame. The room was dark. A soft blue glow illuminated his draconic face when Holoxe drew nearer. The dragon soul shard was held between Ibnoxe's two shaky hands. His claws clinked against each other and the crystalline surface.

Without a word, Holoxe hovered at his side. His presence was enough for Ibnoxe to stop shaking.

His tail swished in agitation. Ibnoxe did not have the slightest clue how to handle this new understanding of past events. In a ghostly voice, he spoke what was on his mind. "I killed him. I killed 57 just because he had a friend who died."

"You had no other choice," Holoxe said stoically. "I saw how that other sub-dragon attacked you. He refused to yield and would've killed you if he could."

"But he made a friend in secret, just like you and me! Victoria killed his friend, and I killed him." There were some tears welling in his eyes. Ibnoxe had never cried in human form, much less in sub-dragon form before. He did not know it was possible, yet some warmish tears snuck from the corners when he blinked rapidly with both sets of eyelids. "Sorry," Ibnoxe whispered.

In all respect, it made no sense why he was like this. The death of eX-0057 should not affect him adversely. Ibnoxe had killed countless times and watched his clones die around him constantly. He should feel numb to it, yet the sub-dragon that he had personally killed looked exactly like him. eX-0057 had even had a friend as dear as his own brother.

"It wasn't your fault," Holxoe reiterated in a calm, authoritative voice. "You were left with no other choice. You had to defend yourself."

"I… know." Ibnoxe admitted at last.

Timidly, Holoxe put a hand on his far shoulder so that his arm draped over his brother's back.

After a deep breath, his head started to feel like normal. "Thanks Holoxe. I'm fine." Ibnoxe moved to shove the soul shard back into the drawer of the nightstand. A strong claw wrapped around his wrist to stop him.

"You've been staring at that thing too much. I don't think it's healthy for you to keep it."

"What're you saying?"

"Let's get rid of it," Holoxe stated simply, as if he had forgotten everything that it stood for.

"No!" The roar tore from Ibnoxe's jaws in great offense. "I already killed eX-0057 in life. I won't insult him in death." More calmly, he continued, "Besides, this is a fragment of our same soul—mine and yours. It'd be wrong to throw it away."

"Fine." Holoxe relented with a sigh. Whenever he gazed upon it, his eyes started to linger in the same allure which drew Ibnoxe to it. "Just keep that thing out of my sight. Let's go outside! Today's sunny."

"Yeah, sure. Let's do that."

Ibnoxe and Holoxe stopped by the garage to collect the vuls and let Charlotte know what they were up to. Then, they sprawled out on the rocks in the backyard. As their scales soaked up the sun, the worries faded from their mind.

Both Ibnoxe and Holoxe arrived at the same conclusion. Sub-dragon rage syndrome was nothing for them to worry about because they would never let anything happen to each other.