I started hoarding before I even knew what the word meant. Not in the messy, tragic way people talk about in documentaries, but something quieter. Softer. Just keeping things. Things that didn't look like much to anyone else.
A bottle cap from a soda Astra bought me once. A paperclip she bent into a star shape during a boring class. The wrapper from the candy she handed me on a day when I couldn't stop crying and didn't know why.
I kept them. All of them. Lined them up on a shelf I'd repurposed from an old bookcase in my room. There were rows, layers, patterns only I could see. When I was little, I used to imagine the objects whispered to each other at night—shared secrets only I'd understand.
Astra didn't know about the shelf. I made sure of that.
She knew other things, of course. That I was half-dragon. That my tail got twitchy when I was upset. That my scales shimmered green-gold when I wasn't paying attention. But she didn't know about the shelf. She didn't know I still had the ring.
It wasn't much of a ring. A cheap plastic replica of some fantasy movie she loved—one I never watched. She tossed it to me as a joke when we were younger, said it came free with her order. I caught it. Slid it on. Kept it.
And then one day, it wasn't there.
I don't remember taking it off. I don't remember moving it. Just that I looked at my hand, and the weight of it was gone. I checked the shelf. It wasn't there. I checked my desk drawer, the pockets of the jeans I wore last Tuesday, the lining of my backpack.
Nothing.
The panic came slow, then all at once. By the time Astra came home, the living room was already half-upturned—pillows tossed, rug bunched, couch cushions dissected.
She stopped in the doorway. Blinked. Took in the wreckage. The shimmer of scale on my forearms. The quiet twitch of my tail.
"Oh no," she said, not unkindly.
"I lost it," I said, too quickly. "It's not—it's not what it looks like."
She stepped over a pile of laundry. "What did you lose?"
"The ring," I said. "The one you gave me. Years ago."
Her brow furrowed. "That junky plastic one?"
I nodded.
She laughed, then caught herself. Her face softened. "You still had that?"
"I kept it," I said, defensively. Then quieter: "I keep a lot of things."
There was a beat of silence.
"Because of the dragon thing?"
I didn't answer. Just kept pulling at the threads of the couch cushion, like I might unravel the moment and start over.
"You think it's a stereotype," she said. "The hoarding thing."
"It is a stereotype."
"So what?"
I looked at her. She wasn't mocking. Just curious.
"It's not about stuff," I said. "It's about meaning. I don't even like that movie. But you gave me the ring. And that made it... something else."
She sat down beside me, careful not to crush a scatter of old receipts I'd pulled from my coat pockets.
"Jackson," she said, "you're not a collection of stereotypes. You're not a punchline in some human storybook. You're a person. You're allowed to hold on to what matters to you."
"It just felt like..." I swallowed. "Like if I told anyone, they'd think I was proving them right. That dragons can't help themselves. That we're greedy. Obsessive."
"But that's not why you kept it."
"No."
She leaned over. Hugged me. I let her.
It wasn't long, and she didn't say anything else. Just sat there with me in the middle of the disaster I'd made, like it wasn't a disaster at all.
Then she pulled back.
"Jackson," she said slowly, pointing, "what's on your finger?"
I looked down.
The ring was there.
Plain. Silly. Shining a little under the afternoon light.
"Oh," I said.
She sighed. "You complete disaster."
But she was smiling when she said it.