Chapter Text
When Roman was singing to ‘wake him up when it’s all over’, he absolutely did not mean when humanity was over. Sure, he knew that he’d be cursed to an enchanted sleep, but he hadn’t expected to actually sleep the full ten thousand years!
Sure, he was aromantic, but his parents had told him that he was too young to know, and that his true love would find him in no time. He didn’t expect to wake up to his palace practically crumbling around him, and when he walked outside, it became apparent that no humans had been in the area for quite some time, it looked almost completely untouched, baring the unusually large trail reminiscent of snake tracks. He shuddered, starting to look around some more, to see if he could find any traces of other people.
He started shouting after maybe 3 hours of fruitless searching
“HELLO? PLEASE? I need to know that I’m not alone..” His voice cracked slightly, and he hugged himself. He started to loathe his parents
It was their fault that he was cursed at such a young age, they were the ones who were rude to people of lower status everyday until when they inevitably said the wrong thing to the wrong person, the witch took it out on their newborn son. They were the ones who accepted his fate for him, didn’t even look for an alternative. He wondered if they mourned when he didn’t wake up in their lifetime, he wondered if they got people to look after him when they couldn’t, he wondered when they stopped looking after him. He wondered what his friends had thought when he had fallen down in the middle of conversation and not woken up, he wondered if they mourned. He had never told them of his curse.
He sat down, wiping his eyes on his jacket, uncaring that it was a very expensive brand. That didn’t matter if he was the last human in a post-apocalyptic world. The trees were higher in the sky than he had ever seen them, thicker than he had ever seen them, even. He looked for a way out of the woods, and a few hours later, he found a large clearing, perhaps half a mile across, both lengthways and otherwise. It was covered in large rocks, some sticks and logs, and a small deep hole in the ground.
He noticed the tail all too late. It blended in beautifully, it was the same shade of dark grey as the rock it was hidden under, with yellow spots that matched the grass and leaves. He froze when it had started moving towards him, wrapping around him, not entirely painfully, but not exactly comfortably either. He started squirming in the grip, hearing the low hissing that surrounded him. A giant snake. Just wonderful.
He was brought to the head of the giant snake, except that’s not what it was. It looked somewhat like a snake, slitted pupils and all, scales all the way up it, but its face was shaped more like a face than a snake’s head, though there wasn’t really a nose there, nor was there hair, or other human-like attributes Its mouth was slightly more human-like than snake-like, with both incredibly sharp teeth (that probably had venom in them and oh god he was gonna die) and blunt ones.
He carried on squirming, until the coils tightened around him, restricting his movement. He was brought closer to its face and he tried to lean away, even trying to lean down to bite the coils wrapped around his torso, but nothing worked. The snake thing squinted at him through reptilian eyes that closed the wrong way, before its eyes widened considerably. It started hissing repetitively, almost like speech, before transferring him from the coils of its tail to arms that he had only just noticed. The arms were like whole separate snakes of their own, with hands that were more like lizard feet than anything else. He shuddered, trying to squirm out of the grip, but the giant creature just looked down at him and started slithering somewhere else.
It took the monster a few minutes to travel a distance that would’ve taken him at least an hour.
He was placed down on the floor with two giant snake-people surrounding him and staring at him. The snakes were hissing to each other, looking to be having somewhat of a conversation. He tried to back away from their gaze, but just ended up backing into dark blue scales. This snake-person looked different, having slightly more prominently human features, but it still wouldn’t pass for human at all, no matter how human it seemed compared to the other. Just because it had more of a nose and its pupils were less slit, didn’t mean that it was any less horrifying at least
It leaned closer to him, as if trying to inspect him. Its tongue flicked out, likely for smelling him, and he flinched. This close, however, he noticed the lighter scales around the eyes, looking somewhat like glasses. He kept trying to lean away from the large snake-thing invading his space. It reached out to touch him and he panicked, running towards the middle of the circle constructed of snake tails. A noise was heard, something like a sigh and he was constricted in the coils of a snake again.
He struggled against the yellow scales, almost starting to cry. He missed other humans, these snake creatures were overwhelming and terrifying. He was set down again and yet more hissing was heard. He curled in on himself and cried for real this time. He could see the snakes retreat, but he couldn’t work up the energy to run. They’d capture him either way. He stubbornly wiped his eyes, but the tears kept falling
--
Janus was trying to nap in his nest, but there was some sort of animal near him. And it was noisy. He groaned, grabbing it with his tail and grumbling a small complaint at getting woken up, before bringing it closer to his face.
It may have been because he was half asleep, or because it kept wriggling, but at first he did not recognise the animal in his grasp. He gently tightened his grasp, trying to get it to stop moving so he could see it better. He brought it closer, ignoring the attempts at harming him, and squinted at it, before he gasped.
There was no way that a known extinct species was the one interrupting his mid-afternoon nap.
“Okay, what do I do in this situation? Gods, this is so weird, okay, okay, I need to get it to Logan, he’s smart, right? He can help” he mumbled to himself
He picked it up in his arms, instead of keeping it in his coils, and slithered as fast as he could to his friend’s nest. The human was still wriggling and he looked down at it, concerned. This was the only known member of a supposedly extinct species. He supposed that now it was only critically endangered, not extinct, but the point still stood. He needed to keep it safe.
He arrived in the other naga’s nest within a few minutes, immediately locating him by the shimmer of scales curled around a tree.
“Logan! I have an emergency!” he shouted, and Logan rushed over to him, before noticing he had something in his arms
“What happened? What’s that?” The human was placed on the floor in-between them and he started explaining what had happened, looking down at the human, only to see it seemingly trying to back away. He supposed they probably did look like predators to the poor thing
Logan leaned down to look at the human, flicking his tongue out briefly, helping to identify if it really was human or not. He reached out, presumably to pick it up and it ran. Logan sighed, and Janus caught it with his tail. Once Logan told him to, he put it down, and it started leaking. His human was leaking.
Logan sighed once again “A human stress response. I feel we should refrain from picking it up, as that obviously triggers some form of stress, and I would rather not have it dying of shock under our care. We need to prepare a suitable habitat for it, where it wouldn’t leave, and it needs to be under constant surveillance, we can’t lose this creature. We need to keep it alive as long as possible, otherwise it really will be the end of humans” He spoke, letting the human keep leaking.
Janus was tasked with watching it as Logan went to gather human-safe materials based on what was known about human dens before they went extinct. As far as it was known, they had been extinct for well over five hundred years, so to just find one mid-nap was incredibly absurd, even by his standards
He lied on his stomach to watch it. It was fascinating how he shared DNA with such a small being. It was watching him in turn, backing away from him cautiously. He slowly, as to not alert and panic it, curled his tail in a circle, effectively trapping it so it wouldn’t get lost and hurt itself. It backed into his scales and turned around to look at them, before looking more around him like it was trying to find a way out.
It ended up just sitting down in the middle and looking up at him. He gently cooed at it. He didn’t know why some nagas in the past would’ve tried to hunt them into extinction, they were so cute.
Logan slithered back into the nest, carrying a few things in his hands, logs and rocks and plants. He set them down, starting to arrange them in a vague formation, and going over to Janus and the human
“How has it been doing? Has it stopped stressing as much?”
Janus nodded
“It hasn’t been doing the leaking thing, but I think it’s still nervous around us” Logan managed a smile
“That makes sense, we are technically predators to it. At least it’s not crying anymore, do you wanna help me build a den for it?” He offered, holding out some materials. Janus shook his head, and gestured to his tail still trapping the human
Logan considered this “I guess, maybe den building can wait until we do a medical evaluation”