Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

An Offering of Dragons	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 8786 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 10
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eleven—Antipodean Opaleye
            “Would you like to help me feed an Opaleye hatchling?”
            Draco blinked, and then blinked again. At least this time he was fully rested. He and Harry had got to New Zealand at an absurd time that made even Harry agree they needed rest before they went and saw the dragons. And then they’d actually spent a day wandering around talking to wizards and contemplating the scenery before they turned to the dragon sanctuary, on the banks of a wide river in a green valley.
            “I thought their mothers raised them.” Draco stared down at the glittering, flailing things at the Dragon-Keeper’s feet. He had never realized dragon hatchlings could be so small. Even the Welsh Green ones he had seen hatch looked bigger than that.
            “Oh, most of the time, yes,” said Annie Wilson, the Dragon-Keeper who had welcomed them. “But we’ve been taking some of the eggs away from the mothers lately so they’ll lay more. That way, there are two clutches where there might have only been one.” One of the hatchlings snapped at her foot with needle-like teeth. Wilson smiled and moved her foot. “One of the advantages to dragonhide boots,” she added. Draco supposed he must have looked a little pale.
            “Is there a population problem?” That was Harry, already getting down on one knee and extending a hand full of minced meat. Two squabbling dragonets snatched the same piece of meat, even as small as they were, and tugged it back and forth.
            “More that we want to make sure there won’t be one. Do you want to join us, Mr. Malfoy?”
            “Um. Yes. I suppose.”
            Draco made sure to keep a careful eye on Wilson’s hand position as he held out the meat. However useful the boots were, she hadn’t offered them dragonhide gloves.
            It was like feeding a mess of jewels with teeth and claws and stubby wings. Their scales flashed so brilliantly in the sunlight that Draco found it hard to look directly at them. Even their eyes were jeweled, although more like a mixture of rubies and emeralds and sapphires than the diamonds their scales resembled.
            “Now,” said Wilson softly, when the struggles had slowed a little. “The hatchlings are getting full. Here’s something you can only do when they’re this quiet.” She reached out to one of the smaller ones who lay near her, belly up and legs running in the air in what looked like a dream.
            Carefully, she tickled around the edge of its jaw and cheeks. The dragon made a soft noise that sounded almost like a giggle and turned its head, letting Wilson touch what looked like soft skin instead of simply faceted scales. Wilson grinned at them, exhilarated, but made sure not to look away from the dragon.
            “Try it.”
            Draco chose a hatchling even smaller than she had, but the reaction was the same. The dragonet apparently thought he was some kind of beneficial rock, as long as it was staring off into full-fed bliss and not looking directly at him. Harry was laughing softly as he boldly petted one of their bulging stomachs. Draco found himself smiling whether or not he wanted to.
            “That’s it,” said Wilson, and sat back on her heels. She had stopped petting the hatchling herself, Draco noticed, but for once, he didn’t think a Dragon-Keeper was trying to avoid danger while exposing them to it. “You’re good at this.”
            The dragon’s skin was soft and warm and rippling under his hand, like more solid water. Draco looked down, marveling. The hatchling dug its shoulders into the ground and rolled a little more towards him, chirping sleepily.
            “This is one of the joys of this job,” said Wilson. Her head was bowed forwards so Draco couldn’t much of her face. But her voice told the truth of what she was saying. “We always have to be careful and respectful of the dragons, of course. But we also get to see them in all sorts of moods and conditions. I wouldn’t give this up for anything else.”
            Harry beamed at her, and then at Draco. Draco wasn’t sure what kind of message he was meant to be getting at the moment, so he only raised his eyebrows back. Then he looked hastily down as he felt the dragonet roll again.
            It had only gone to sleep, though. Draco tickled its chin one more time before he withdrew his hand.
            “But cautious and respectful are good things at all times, of course,” said Wilson. Draco found he could ignore the amusement in her voice.
*
            Harry crouched and raised his eyebrows at Wilson. She’d brought them away from the small site on the bank of the stream where they’d fed the hatchlings to this larger one. Boulders slanted away in front of them down to a small island, marshy and swarming with grass, that stuck out from the bank. The water danced in front of them, and there was another Dragon-Keeper there with larger hatchlings frolicking about his feet. Harry thought they were the size of a small dog.
            “Is it safe to handle them when they’re that large?” Harry asked. He’d thought, from what Wilson said, that it was only the smallest ones the Dragon-Keepers bothered to touch.
            “They need to learn to hunt, in the way their parents would teach them. Right now, at that age, the ones we’ve raised still look to us. It takes a lot of training to raise them essentially wild, but at the same time, we can teach them that humans don’t make good prey. It’s worth it.”
            Harry hid a smile. He knew Wilson was saying that it was worth it from a human point of view, but from the way her face glowed, also working with the dragons was its own kind of pleasure.
            “Can we join you, Graham?” Wilson called out.
            Graham turned around slowly, ignoring the way the hatchlings reared up and put their forepaws on his knees. Harry supposed he must be wearing dragonhide trousers and cloak, as well. “If you promise that your guests aren’t going to be frightened by some of the things I’ll need to do. And if they have proper protective clothing, of course.”
            Wilson muttered something under her breath and cast several spells with rapid flicks of her wand. Harry made a mental note to ask her what they were later, so he could cast them if he wanted. They might be dead useful on Auror cases.
            “There. Now your trousers and cloaks are dragonhide, as are your boots. Come with me.”
            “Nice how she just knew we wouldn’t be frightened,” Draco muttered, leaning towards Harry as they walked down among the boulders.
            “Well, you did show her how brave you were playing with the hatchlings.”
            Draco shot him an incredulous glance. Harry didn’t have time to ask him what it was for—he did think Draco was brave—before they were up next to Wilson and Graham, and a hatchling came over to sniff his boots.
            “They need to be taught to fly,” Graham was saying, in the kind of steady lecturing tone that told Harry how many times he’d given this speech before. “At the same time, they need to be taught how to hunt along with it, or they’ll never be good hunters on the wing. So we use a variation of falconry training.”
            He reached down and picked up something Harry supposed was a glove. But it looked more like a war gauntlet, with wood and steel wrapped around it in an intricate weave Harry thought was Transfigured. Graham slid his hand into it, studied the fit for a minute, nodded, and reached down for one of the hatchlings.
            It grabbed onto his glove in a way that made Harry wince automatically. Wilson smiled at him. “This is why we train and wear the gloves,” she said, and tilted her head back as if she wanted to watch the moment when Graham raised the hatchling against the sky.
            “Like this,” said Graham. Then he used his wand to cast another spell.
            A cage Harry hadn’t even seen at Graham’s feet burst open, and some kind of small, fat bird took off across the stream-bank, down the island and into the water. The other dragonets tried to chase after it, but they were too slow and startled. Harry didn’t think he knew what the bird was himself. A quail?
            Graham abruptly snapped his hand down.
            The hatchling he’d been holding, with no support suddenly beneath it, hissed and catapulted into the air, flapping its wings. It turned and skimmed to the left, then to the right, and then oriented on something Harry couldn’t see and threw itself forwards.
            The quick ripples in the grass apparently marked where the bird was running. For a few seconds, they all watched in tense silence as the hatchling chased its prey. Harry could feel the thick tension smothering him. Even Draco leaned on his toes as if he would have liked to help the dragonet chase the bird down.
            “There.”
            Graham said the word in such a tone of satisfaction that Harry smiled. Yes, he could feel the release of tension at the same time as the hatchling wrapped itself around something much smaller that thrashed and fluttered. Then the dragonet bit down, and the struggling stopped, and Harry heard the crunching as the little dragon started eating.
            “That’s one with advanced training,” Graham said. “It’s very different with one that hasn’t had it, of course.” He picked up another hatchling, who balanced with its wings continually fluttering on his glove, and once again released a creature from the cage.
            It wasn’t a bird this time, but a hopping thing that blurred away. The hatchling Graham held crouched, then leaped.
            It didn’t open its wings in time, and although it did manage to glide instead of just crash, it ended up landing on the edge of the little island, half-in and half-out of the water. It beat and cried until Graham waded down to rescue it. Then it glared at his glove and breathed out a little flame as if the glove had done something to it.
            Harry jumped, but Wilson leaned towards him. “The glove has charms that protect it from the flame, too,” she murmured.
            Harry relaxed and nodded. Of course they would have to. Graham had picked up the hatchling by its tail, in fact, and draped it back over the glove. The dragonet clung with its feet and scowled at nothing as Graham walked back.
            “There are other kinds of enchantments on the glove, too,” said Draco abruptly. “Glamours? It seems strange.”
            Harry gave Draco a sideways, impressed glance. He hadn’t felt the glamours at all.
            “Ones to make it look like stone from a dragon’s perspective,” said Graham, with a smile at Draco that made Draco preen. “They need to feel as if they’re flying from stone ledges when they hunt. It’s one of their natural tactics, and we want to encourage them to be as natural as possible.”
            “They can’t smell the truth beneath the glamours?”
            “They don’t have that keen a sense of smell when they’re this age. That comes later. They mostly hunt by sight now.”
            Harry watched as Graham released another hopping creature, and the dragon took off after it. This time, the hatchling made it more of the way, but still missed the strike. It apparently had a small tantrum in the water once it had landed, raising its neck and shaking it back and forth, stamping with its feet, and shrieking.
            “It takes them a long time,” Graham said comfortably, and reached for another hatchling. “But they’ll get it in the end.” He smiled at the hatchling who had killed the bird, which was already looking around as if asking where the next meal would come from. “They’ll hunt a lot less when they get older, but bigger meals. They’re so cute when they’re this age.”
            “How long did it take you to construct a glove like that?”
            Wilson was more than willing to answer Draco’s questions, which meant Harry could lean on a rock and watch Graham patiently releasing creature after creature, launching the dragonets after them, and training others simply to sit on the glove instead of trying to leap off right away. This was more the sort of thing he had envisioned when he first invited Draco on this holiday, he thought. Watching dragons do the sort of things dragons did, while experienced Dragon-Keepers explained them.
            A young dragon clutched the glove for a second, leaped off, and downed its prey in a glittering rush of wings and feet.
            Harry smiled, and then blinked as Graham turned and offered him the glove.
            “Er, I don’t have any training,” Harry tried to explain. Maybe the training in New Zealand’s Ministry was different and they assumed he would know how to handle dangerous magical creatures just because he was an Auror.
            “I know that,” said Graham. “I’ll guide you through this. When you’re wearing a glove this thick and dealing with hatchlings this young, the danger is minimal, anyway.”
            “What happened to always being cautious and respectful?”
            Harry muttered the words as he fit the glove onto his hand, not intending Graham to overhear him, but Graham snickered anyway, and shook his head. “There are limits to that, too, or you’d never be able to work with dragons at all. You would always be jumpy, wondering where the next disaster is going to come from. Really, the main thing I wish they emphasized when they were training our new candidates as Dragon-Keepers was the necessity of being calm. We get too many people who think ‘alert’ is enough.”
            Harry nodded and watched as the glove settled around his arm, the straps sliding into place and the glamours locking at the same time. Now that he was paying attention, he could feel them, the flickers of small, expressive magic that made the glove look like stone even to him if he turned his head fast enough.
            “Now. Make sure you always aim the dragon at the prey. Keep a calm expression on your face. They can interpret an upset one. Lift your arm and brace it—yes, like that, against the weight. No, turn a bit more sideways. They hate flying straight into the sun.”
            Harry snorted a little. Yeah, brace against the weight. When it was already making a cramped feeling flow up his arm and his shoulder muscles burn.
            But then the dragon lifted its head and turned it back and forth with a darting tongue, and Harry smiled. He didn’t care what Graham had said about the Opaleyes mostly hunting by sight at this stage in their lives; this one looked like any predator testing the air.
            The hatchling shone. Harry looked at the talons clenched on his glove and shook his head. He knew they were dangerous and the glove was necessary, but like this, all he could think of was how beautiful they were and how well they would serve the dragon when it went flying to hunt.
            “…Mr. Potter, are you listening to me?”
            “You’re getting ready to release the prey, and I should brace against the weight and not aim the dragon at the sun, but aim him at the prey instead.”
            “I suppose you are.” Graham’s eyes at least held understanding, and Harry relaxed. “Now. here we are!”
            When he sang the last word, he waved his wand, and the cage released again. This time, it was another bird, Harry saw, but this one didn’t run down the riverbank. It turned and flew along the river instead.
            Harry drew his arm back a little and felt the dragon tense, claws gripping the glove, its whole body shifting.
            Harry threw the dragon after the bird, ignoring the way Graham said something about how stone ledges didn’t throw dragons, and they should try to avoid doing it, too, so that they would still give the hatchlings a natural experience.
            But it was such a thrill. There was the blaze of sunlight on scales right in front of Harry’s eyes, and then the shift of his arm muscles, and the shift of the dragon’s muscles at the same time, and the way his wings flared out, and then he was flying in front of Harry, hard and high and aimed.
            And the moment when he leaped—
            There were no words for that, Harry thought. The dragon took his heart with it, and he watched with aching eyes as the dragon flew straight after the bird, not moving at all from its path no matter how much the bird dodged, wings pumping faster and faster.
            In the end, that was what lost it the prey. The bird flew left, the dragon turned after it, and then suddenly the bird went right and up, and the dragon couldn’t follow in time. Harry blinked for the first time since the hatchling had taken flight from his glove as the long, slender wings threw back the sunlight in a single, dazzling flash and the hatchling screamed in frustration.
            It didn’t throw a tantrum like the one Harry had seen miss the hopping creature, but it did dig its claws into the grass beneath it and rip so hard that Harry saw stems fly up around it.
            “A good try for the first time,” said Graham, and held out his hand for the glove. Harry unstrapped it reluctantly, handing it back with a shake of his arm. It wasn’t that he had enjoyed wearing the glove so much, but losing the weight was like losing the last trace of the moment when the dragon had flown.
            “I think you would make a natural Dragon-Keeper if you wanted to pursue that path, Mr. Potter.”
            Harry knew that Draco would be looking anxiously at him from his conversation with Wilson, not because he could feel the gaze, but simply because this was something Draco would be afraid of. But Harry shook his head and smiled.
            “I’m perfectly happy with my current life. But thanks. I just wanted to touch wildness for a second, and now I’ve had the chance.”
*
            Draco had enjoyed his discussion with Dragon-Keeper Wilson. He used glamours in his business to make his mechanical animals look more realistic, of course, but there were some glamours here he hadn’t thought of. He hadn’t known any that would make an object look more realistic to animals rather than humans.
            But he had known exactly where Harry was at all times, and when he turned around and saw the expression on Harry’s face, when he heard Graham’s words, when he saw the way Harry fixed on that dragon hatchling…
            He clipped his conversation off enough that Wilson stared at him in confusion, but Draco didn’t apologize. And she didn’t ask. She just stood there while Draco vibrated in anticipation of Harry’s answer.
            And then it came, and Draco thought he felt something new.
            He understood.
            The way that Harry flung himself into risk, and why he wanted to see dragons, and even why he had been willing to take a chance on someone like Draco, when his friends probably thought he should be dating someone else, someone more suitable.
            Harry wanted to touch wildness. That didn’t mean he needed to be surrounded by it all the time, or that he couldn’t like other things, or that he didn’t need other things and people in his life. It was just that this was part of the way he was.
            And that meant Draco could understand and accept both parts of Harry, too, and the way that he acted when he was with dragons wasn’t the way he would necessarily act when they were alone.
            He grinned at Harry, and Harry grinned back, in the moment before they turned to renew their conversations with their respective Dragon-Keepers.
*
Jan: Thank you! And they do continue to get different things.
SP777: It’s not so much that I’m stuck as that the plot is ridiculous. It involves Harry becoming a Veela because a whole series of stupid coincidences happens, and then he gets put in what is essentially Veela finishing school to learn what’s appropriate and how to control his allure and so on. Along the way, Draco tries to be his teacher, which doesn’t work well. It’s so silly. I can’t think of a way to make it less silly, either.
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An Offering of Dragons