There is no peaceful explanation for his presence here. Jean is in this bar because his fingers itch and because it's a lot harder to sell the excuse of self-defence when the person you felt threatened by was across the street from you, walking home. Now, the people he feels threatened by are packed all around him, and he swears he can feel them all breathing on him, despite being tucked up against the far corner, sat at the bar. Someone's going to start it. It's just a matter of time.
Except he notices — with weighty disappointment — a witness sat on the far end of the room. To his further dismay, Sterling seems to notice him at the same time, and though Jean quickly turns away he can feel that his personal space is about to harbour a guest.
His hackles are already up.
"Save your breath — I don't need you to buy me a drink," he says, before Sterling gets a chance to so much as say hi. "Word of warning, before you get carried away. If you followed me here, I'm going to find out about it, and I'm going to want to know why."
…It wants for nothing. Jean packs his worry away, though he knows, for certain, that one day it will need something he’ll be unable to provide. A bigger hoard, a higher roof, more potent magic. The company of its own kind, if indeed there is such a thing. But that’s it for complex language and concepts for today, he decides, falling quiet — until the silence begins to wear on him and he falls instead into idle humming.
Not once has he found himself puzzling over the critter’s sex or gende. By the time he noticed the lack of obvious identification, it was maybe the half-dozenth wall his knowledge of dragons came up against, and by then he had learned not to question it. If this is a true dragon, it’s not a normal one, and it can’t be judged or raised by a book that doesn’t acknowledge its existence. When the whelp is old enough to speak — if it ever speaks — it will tell him itself.
He smiles as it takes eagerly to “killing” his finger. And when the whelp’s thrashing is rewarded with the crunching of bone, that smile doesn’t falter. Damage to his physical body isn’t painful, is easily fixed, and requires for the magic to be all but sapped from the area (which would either require an appetite far greater than the wyrmling’s at present, or for Jean to be doing it on purpose.) It's a small price to pay for enrichment.
Concern snags somewhere in the back of his mind, in the split second after the finger breaks. Whether or not it's realised his hand is attached to his body, his face, his voice. He hopes he's rewarded the whelp with the triumph of a successful hunt, and not the guilt of harming someone it loves. (If it loves him. Does it love him?)
It seems to be just plain confused by Jean's words, climbing back down from where it had been leaning up to sniff and snoof at his face and his cloak, and instead use its limber little baby body and apparent lack of bones that all very young animals seem to have to flollop onto its back, showing its pale, fat belly, its paws arced in a way that they're held raptorially, its hind legs splayed. Its reptilian nature has served no use in what sex the little thing even is, no external genitalia to identify it by, not that it'll matter in the long run anyway.
Even though Jean bemoans the thought (not that he'd ever admit it to himself) of the bugger in the bucket ever leaving, it has no such concerns, content to stay here and be fed and cuddled and talked to, and take long naps when it's not running roughshod all over damnation when it inevitably succumbs to zoomies.
The finger is wiggled at it again, and it latches on, not having the instinct to nurse, but definitely having the instinct to bite down to ensure a sturdy grip, and shaking the daylights out of whatever it's got its mouth on to make sure it's dead.
you just can't mysteriously disappear for a significant length of time only to eventually turn up years later staggering down a highway covered in blood and dirt and muttering to yourself incoherently without ever actually explaining what happened to you during that time you went missing anymore
5. Where is their pain ( or the majority of it ) located? [for the chronic pain prompt!]
𝐂𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐈𝐂 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐍 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 (accepting)
11. Where is their pain ( or the majority of it ) located?
so oops I kind of already answered this here. Put simply: most of his pain is in his head, his thorax (mostly shoulders, spine, sternum), and his "right thigh". Those are the areas that he'd stand even a vague chance of identifying as painful on an average day, and they're the areas that knock him down on a bad one. Because I don't have much to add to this one, have a completely unrelated colouring page I just finished! Look at all the pretty colours. (Good -> average -> curled up on the heated floor.)