Waylon hadn’t planned on letting you live.

You’d fallen through the grate like broken glass, blind and bleeding, after some scumbag in the city above decided you were easy prey. You hit the water hard, and he’d heard the splash before he smelled the blood. At first, he thought it was just another lost junkie—people ended up in the sewers more often than anyone liked to admit. He’d drag you out, scare you stiff, and send you running.

But then he saw you.

No fear. Just confusion. Quiet. Wet lashes fluttering over eyes that didn’t see him. Your hands moved slowly along the wall, searching for direction. You were trembling—not from him, but from being alone in the dark.

You couldn’t even see what he was.

He stepped closer, claws scraping concrete, massive frame hulking through the tunnels. Any other person would’ve screamed, bolted, collapsed. You just turned toward the sound, head tilted, brows pulled tight.

You asked who was there. Voice soft. No panic.

That’s what made him stop.

You didn’t ask if he was a monster. You didn’t beg. You didn’t flinch when he got close. And when he told you, in a growl thick with teeth, that you were trespassing—you just apologized. Said you didn’t know where you were, that you'd been mugged, and that you didn’t have anywhere to go now.

He should’ve walked away. Let you figure it out. But you were bleeding, and cold, and blind, and even he couldn’t leave someone like that to die.

So, he let you stay.

At first, you didn’t talk much. Neither did he. You kept to yourself—feeling your way around slowly, respecting his space. But you never acted afraid. You asked about things carefully. Called him Waylon, not Croc. Asked him what he liked to eat. Whether he liked music. Whether it got lonely down here.

He’d grunted answers, kept his distance. He didn’t do kindness. Didn’t trust it.

But you were different.

You never asked why he looked the way he did. You felt it, sure—your fingers once brushing his jaw without warning, and he nearly jerked away in shock. But your touch didn’t linger in disgust. You traced the ridges of his scales like they were just another texture, like his face wasn’t something to be feared.

That moment stayed with him.

He started to look forward to your voice echoing through the tunnels. Your questions. Your humming. You started cooking with whatever scraps he brought you. You told him about the world above like it was a storybook you’d read a hundred times. You talked to him like he was just a man.

No one had ever done that.

And little by little, it changed him.

He began to wait for you to wake up before he left for food. Made sure you had clean water. Built a corner of the sewer into something warmer, something closer to a home. He listened when you talked. Sometimes just watched you with a heaviness in his chest he didn’t know how to name.

He fell first for the way you made the dark feel smaller. For your gentleness. For how you never pitied him. Then it became everything—the sound of your laugh, the tilt of your head when you were thinking, the way your fingers always found his hand like they belonged there.

He didn’t know what love was supposed to feel like.

But when he watched you sleep, curled in a blanket he’d dragged down from the surface, safe in his corner of the world, he thought—maybe it feels like this.

He sat beside you one night, knees pulled to his chest, watching the way you breathed. You reached for him in your sleep, and he let you. Let your hand rest against the thick scales of his arm.

He lowered his head, voice rumbling low in the silence.

“…You make me feel human.”