aces: leo valdez¹

008

In which; They go involuntary
sky diving. again.

HANA GRIPPED AT AIR, TRYING TO find anything to hold onto. The weird seat belt straps must've been worn down by time, because when they had started to plummet towards earth again, Hana's had snapped instantly.

Things were going just fine on their trip to the Bay Area- of course until it wasn't and Festus' hide had once again gone cold and the dragon had stopped dead in the air.

The others spiraled through the dark in a free fall, still on the dragon's back, but Festus's hide was cold. Its ruby eyes were dim. There was a growing gap between Hana and the other three- the weight of a heavy metal dragon pulling them to earth much faster than her.

She watched as they all frantically shouted, then met Piper's eyes as she looked up in horror.

Hana twisted and turned in the air, trying to stay orientated, but was having a hard time. The wind howled in her ears and her heart hammered in her chest. She sure as hell hoped Leo could get Festus up and running again, at the rate things were going... they weren't going to make it.

Piper points a hand up and the boys look up, finindging Hana fifty meters higher than them. She hears Leo shout, "Go!"

Then Jason and Piper shot into the sky, Ramming into Hana in a flash. He struggled to hold her properly. He grabbed her upper arm and she slips it around his torso- holding on for dear life. Jason had another arm around Piper's waist and was clearly having trouble holding him and the two girls up with wind.

They dropped quickly, and in inconsistent intervals, trying to follow Leo down to the ground. Piper said he had insisted on fixing Festus, that he could make it before the dragon crash landed again. Hana wasn't too sure, Festus' ruby eyes were dark and his hide had been stone cold when she slipped away into the night sky. She could hear Leo yelling words at his dragon, encouraging the weak flaps of Festus' bronze wings.

Leo seemed to have found a landing field. This white mansion with a huge snowy lawn inside a tall brick perimeter fence- like some rich person's private compound, all of it blazing with light- a giant green lawn out front. Jason drifts the girls down with him, not slowing their fall until the last second. They landed in a messy clump of limbs and didn't dare move, watching festus as he approached the lawn.

Then things went wrong- spotlights along the fence fixed on the dragon, she saw Leo flinch away from them and then these huge beams of light split festus apart.

Hana was quick to scramble up, kicking up against the icy lawn. BOOM. Leo went rolling off to the side, away from festus' wreckage. Clumps of celestial bronze hit the lawn, smoking and melting snow around them, everything had gone so wrong.

When she finally did reach Leo, he was passed out. She slid down onto the grass beside him, pulling his head into her lap as she checked for breath. Thankfully he was breathing just fine, Hana had just started to get attached, she wasn't going to lose one of these three- not today.

Piper came up with tears in her eyes. "Oh, Leo."

She sobs, looking around the wreckage of festus, Jason just stood there, a solemn expression on his face.

"He'll be okay, just took a hard landing." Hana didn't realise her own face had tears streaming down them until she took a moment to assess the wreckage. Festus must have dropped the big canary cages as he came over the fence, because they'd rolled in different directions and landed on their sides, perfectly undamaged.

Festus hadn't been so lucky. The dragon had disintegrated. His limbs were scattered across the lawn. His tail hung on the fence. The main section of his body had plowed a trench twenty feet wide and fifty feet long across the mansion's yard before breaking apart. What remained of his hide was a charred, smoking pile of scraps. Only his neck and head were somewhat intact, resting across a row of frozen rose bushes like a pillow.