Reply To: The Land Before Time XX: Tale of a Spiketail
CHAPTER ONE: SPIKE ALONE
Twelve years later, Spike wandered with his older sister Ducky and his friends. She wasn’t his real sister, for she was a Swimmer and he was a Spiketail. He had never met his family before, any of them. The first face he’d seen when hatching had been Ducky’s. He always saw her as a sister. He regarded Ducky’s family as his own. Still, sometimes, he lay awake at night, wondering if somewhere, out there, somebody was alive in his family.
Everyone in the group had some family. Littlefoot had his father, a foster brother Shorty and a foster sister Dayo, his third cousin Ali and her mother, and his grandparents. Petrie had his mother, all of his siblings, and his uncle Pterano. Ducky had all of her family, including her annoying aunt who sleep swam and blabbed a hundred miles a minute with gusts up to 300 and her grumpy uncle Phoebus. Ducky also had at least 24 siblings. Cera had her dad, Topps, who was stubborn and liked to argue, her older sister Olivia, her nephew and niece Dana and Dinah, her step mother Tria, and her step-sister Tricia, as well as her grandfather Tryus. He himself had nobody. He was like Guido in that regard.
He was shy and didn’t like to talk much. Still, he almost wanted to break his habit of not talking so that he could listen to the green food so that he could talk to Ducky. Her name had been his first word. His bond with her was very strong.
Spike went off to get green food. Eating always helped. He did it as a habit, a habit to hide his pain of having nobody. He’d eaten a lot as a kid, mainly as he liked it. He’d kept this up even into the Time of Great Growing as a coping mechanism for dealing with being, as he thought, the very last of his family. It bothered him. He wasn’t one to envy others and so wasn’t spiteful that his friends all had family and he didn’t. Still, it bothered him.
Lately, he’d put on some weight, as he didn’t just burn it off anymore now that he was older. Ducky had put him on an exercise program, and he’d lost weight, though the exercise was annoying as he had to keep going up and down the Great Wall. It had put off a lot of weight, but it still didn’t help.
“Don’t worry Spike. We will keep trying. We will. We will.” she had said. He was afraid of that. Still, he needed some way to cope.
As night fell, he looked at a star. He hoped that somewhere, somehow, there would be someone that was a Spiketail that he could call family. As he went to bed, he wished that he could be like his sister and have someone as kin. He went off to sleep. His sleep rumbles annoyed his sister and she put leaves over her ears to drone out the sound.
