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.

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Chapter Four—Norwegian Ridgeback
            “Watch. And you’ll see something remarkable.”
            Harry nodded in return to their guide’s murmur. As far as he was concerned, they’d seen something remarkable already. Ask Idasson had led them up into the mountains and to the edge of the long, placid stretch of pure blue water with only brief instructions about the best places to put their hands and feet on the trail. And he’d done it so smoothly that even Draco had ceased to worry about falling, at least from his contented expression as he leaned against Harry’s side.
            Then there was the shimmer of the water, and the small wake cutting across it that looked like an invisible boat was making it.
            Oh yeah, and there was the dragon crouched on the side of the mountain, gaze fixed on that wake.
            Harry eyed it in appreciation. It was the first time he had been this close to a dragon without it trying to charge him in one way or another. The dragon’s scales glinted a rich, warm brown, like the earth he had sometimes dug in when he was responsible for taking care of Aunt Petunia’s garden. The long ridge on its back had a shadowy hue. And its claws curled into the stone as it leaned forwards, poised for a moment, and then leaped.
            It was a strange leap, Harry thought. Its wings opened, but only a little, so that it sort of clapped down into the water rather than gliding or flying. Then it twisted its head and plunged it underwater in the same motion. Harry saw a distorted reflection of its jaw shining beneath the surface for a second.
            When the dragon pulled its neck and lifted it up, Harry could see its fangs—which were venomous, Ask had warned them—sunken firmly to the jawline in the neck of a heavy, gleaming seal.
            Draco gasped a little. Ask reached out a warning hand, but the dragon didn’t appear to have heard them, or to be determined to pay attention if it had. It backed up from the water, snapping its neck back and forth. The seal had almost stopped jerking. Harry wondered if it had died from the poison or the broken neck the dragon seemed intent on giving it, and then decided that it didn’t matter.
            Ask sighed out slowly and stood up. “Come,” he said. “We can approach it more easily now.”
            Harry blinked. He was using a Translation Charm that he and Draco had cast on each other the minute they arrived in Norway, and Harry knew that Draco’s wandwork was impeccable, but he still thought the magic must have malfunctioned. “We can go up to a feeding dragon?”
            Ask smiled, although the smile was more in his eyes than on his face. “Isn’t that what you came here to do?”
            “Well, see them,” said Draco at once and loudly. Harry turned his head to smile at him. At the moment, he found himself more in agreement with Draco than with Ask, as strange as that was. “It doesn’t mean that we need to get that close to a feeding one.”
            “I thought dragons were very aggressive over their food,” Harry added, mostly because Ask was standing up and he thought they were probably going up to the dragon no matter what anyone said.
            “Not this one,” said Ask. “Of course you know that they’re not as aggressive as Hungarian Horntails, for all that they look a little like them.”
            Harry did remember reading that, but since his memories of the Hungarian Horntail were pretty vivid and the closest he had been to a Norwegian Ridgeback was Norberta when she was a baby, he didn’t really want to get more closely acquainted. But Ask was strolling patiently, stubbornly, down the hill. Harry grumbled under his breath and followed.
            Ask went straight up to the edge of the water, and then waved his wand and murmured something that Harry couldn’t hear, but which didn’t sound like an incantation. The clear blue water pulled back from a series of large stones that led across the fjord, or whatever it really was. Ask hopped onto the first one, and made a beckoning motion behind his back with one hand without turning around to see if they were following. His gaze was fixed on the dragon.
            “I hope he knows what he’s doing,” Draco muttered.
            Since he was following Harry without any complaint, this time, and because Harry secretly agreed, he nodded and took Draco’s hand. They crossed after Ask and came to the downslope beneath the dragon. Seal blood trickled slowly and messily over the rocks as the dragon raised its head to look at them.
            Ask bowed from the waist and held his hands out. Harry couldn’t hope noting, uneasily, that he was exposing the curve of his neck when he did that, the same place the Ridgeback had bitten the seal.
            “Do the same,” he hissed out of the corner of his mouth.
            Harry promptly did, nudging Draco in the side with his elbow when Draco hesitated. For a second, Harry had thought this was going to be like Draco refusing to bow before Buckbeak all over again.
            There were long moments when Harry thought he could feel the dragon considering which muscle in his neck would make the most tempting target. Then it grunted and turned back to ripping gory chunks out of the dead seal.
            The smile on Ask’s face as he straightened up made Harry certain of one thing. “That wasn’t in the usual books about dragons that I consulted,” he murmured. “And that’s something you—you helped invent, didn’t you?” He was almost sure. “You worked out the best way to approach Norwegian Ridgebacks just so that you could come up and stand next to them like this sometimes.”
            “Yes.” Ask never looked away from the Ridgeback. “Magnificent beasts.”
            “They are,” Harry agreed. The Ridgeback looked as if its face was coated with bloody drool, its tail swishing back and forth, and its neck bent at an angle Harry would have thought was impossible as its fangs sliced delicately through what might be sinew holding the seal together. “But I’m still amazed that someone took the trouble to come up with a way of approaching them. How many people died so you could do it?”
            Ask’s face twitched a little. “Two volunteers.”
            Harry shrugged, and ended up saying nothing. They had probably been Dragon-Keepers, and their deaths were probably indistinguishable from the other kinds of deaths that had happened at a dragon reservation. He turned back to watch the Ridgeback flay skin and muscle from a flipper with one small, smooth tug.
            Then the dragon’s head came up, and its chest creaked a little.
            “Run,” Ask said, and darted off to the side, spinning and leaping around like a rabbit.
            Harry flung himself to the ground. He pulled Draco with him. He raised a shield above their heads that heated and turned transparent with the glow of the fire in the exact moment before the flame crashed against it.
            Fuck, what is it with dragons trying to kill us? This was supposed to be a relaxing holiday!
*
            Draco flinched as he felt his hair singeing and standing on end. He knew Harry’s shield would probably keep the dragonfire off him if it had so far, but the fire poured on and on, and Harry couldn’t keep this up forever.
            “You have to move!” Ask called from further away.
            Draco took a deep breath and touched Harry’s elbow. Harry nodded to show he’d heard without taking his eyes off the dragon. Draco didn’t even know how he was managing to look at it; its fangs and mouth glowed so brightly in the wake of the fire and its eyes were only distorted embers when Draco sneaked a glance.
            Draco began to move backwards on his elbows and heels. It hurt. But then, it was better than the pain that would come if they were consumed by dragonfire.
            Harry followed a second later. Apparently the dragon had stopped its flames because it needed to breathe, and at the same moment Harry let the shield he’d raised fray away into wisps of uselessness and conjured another one. The dragon coughed, and more fire slammed against that. Harry ignored it, his eyes fastened on the dragon’s mouth.
            “I have a plan,” he told Draco.
            “Oh, good.”
            “Shut up, this is a good one,” Harry said, and Draco kept quiet because there was nothing else to do and he had no plan, not so much because he trusted Harry to know what was a sane plan and what wasn’t. “When the dragon pauses to breathe next time, turn and run like hell. Don’t look back, and try to hold your breath as much as you can.”
            That sounded like a good plan to Draco, with one exception. “What about you?”
            “Keep running!”
            The Ridgeback had indeed paused to draw in its breath. Harry turned and whipped back towards it, and Draco put down his head and pushed his legs to move. He was cursing in his mind. Hadn’t Harry promised just the other day that he wouldn’t take this kind of risk?
            When Draco heard coughing and sneezing and choking behind him, he did have to turn around and glance over his shoulder. He was in time to see the dragon rear backwards and start clawing at its nostrils, much the way that the Hebridean Black had when Harry had jumped on its nose. But this time, Harry had released something towards the dragon.
            Draco caught his breath, and sneezed.
            Black pepper. Where the hell did he find a spell that did that?
            Draco choked again, and Harry streamed past him, grabbing his arm and tugging him onwards. Draco felt himself splashing knee-deep in water a second later. He grimaced. They could have run to the water and probably fended off the risks of the dragonfire there, without Harry taking the chances that he did to cast the pepper into the dragon’s nostrils.
            The Ridgeback didn’t follow them. It gave one more tremendous sneeze that roasted the air behind Draco, and then, when Draco chanced turning around in the water to look back over his shoulder, it returned to its meal. It did drag the remains of the carcass a little further away from the fjord, as if it thought it would have more privacy that way.
            Draco was perfectly willing to give it all the privacy it needed.
*
            “You’ve perfected a way of approaching the dragon, huh?”
            Ask surveyed Harry for a moment, saying nothing. Harry just stared back. He wondered what Ask had expected. Someone who would simply slump back and do whatever Ask said he should, right after almost being burned alive by a dragon?
            Well. I wanted to come to a country where being the Boy-Who-Lived means nothing. And I got my wish.
            Harry swallowed back the sigh he wanted to give. He had expected the basic protection that Dragon-Keepers would exercise around a dangerous beast, though.
            “He doesn’t react like that often,” Ask said, and his posture straightened as he turned and gestured to Draco. “And neither of you are wounded.”
            Harry opened his mouth to speak, but he felt Draco’s slight, restraining hand on his shoulder. Harry glanced at him, and saw Draco cock his head, his eyelids flicking for the barest moment.
            Harry had learned to trust that look. He’d only seen it a few times, but they were times of extreme stress that had turned out all right thanks to Draco. He took a step back.
            Draco nodded to him and turned to face Ask. His face had gone remote. “How long have you trained to approach the dragons?”
            “For seven years.” Ask seemed to think he was speaking to someone who shared the same side as him, although how he could when there was no spark in Draco’s eyes…
            Harry forced down his irritation and listened. He knew that Draco was trying to do something specific here, and in another moment, he might figure out what it was.
            “And how many visitors have you brought to commune with the dragons and approach them when they were feeding?” Draco continued, in swift, precise words that reminded Harry of the times he had heard an advocate speak in a courtroom.
            For the first time, Ask hesitated.
            Harry thought he saw what Draco was doing. He grinned and leaned back a little, removing himself from the conversation, letting Draco have the floor.
            “Not many visitors ask to be brought that close,” Ask said. “But when I heard that you’d come to the sanctuary and wanted to see dragons—really see them, you weren’t trying to steal eggs or make a profit on dragonhide or horn—then I thought I’d show you something beautiful.”
            “We did want to see something beautiful,” Draco said. “We could have watched it safely enough and beautifully enough from the very first hill where we began. Why did you insist on going closer? Bringing us closer? Why not go up and greet him by yourself? That’s what a MacFusty did when we visited the Hebridean Blacks, and it went fine.”
            Harry bit the inside of his cheek as he heard that particular characterization of their visit with Firewing. On the other hand, he supposed Ask wouldn’t check with the MacFustys, and it wouldn’t matter much if he did.
            “I wanted to share something I don’t get to share,” Ask said, and then his eyes suddenly glittered and his voice rose. “Even the others think I’m crazy! I only wanted to share something that appealed to me.”
            “The other Dragon-Keepers?” Draco asked, as if sympathetic.
            Ask nodded, and leaned around Draco to appeal to Harry. “I saw it in your face, when we watched him grab the seal. You can appreciate that kind of predatory grace and the way that he moves. You wanted to go closer.”
            “That’s not the same thing as doing it,” Harry said, and then shut his mouth when he saw Draco’s hand twitch behind his back. He really did need to be quiet and let Draco get on with things.
            “I don’t want you to cower before me,” Draco said. “Or grovel, or pay us anything. The important part is the apology. I want you to acknowledge that what you did was beautiful, but also dangerous. And pinpoint what you did wrong, because at some point in the future it could be you that the dragon tries to eat.”
            Ask paused and leaned around Draco to look at Harry again. “Is he real?”
            “He is, and you can’t have him,” Harry said. He knew he was probably looking at Draco with a soppy expression on his face. At least, Draco would call it that. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he knew Draco was doing this for him.
            On a holiday it hadn’t been his idea to come on. After being almost eaten by a dragon.
            Harry decided that this was as good a moment as any to find out that he was in love with Draco.
*
            “Well.” Ask cleared his throat. His eyes were uncomfortable, as uncomfortable as the twitching muscles around his mouth, probably, but Draco didn’t think he needed to take account of that. He was far more impressed with the burning feeling of Harry’s stare boring into his back. It was hard not to turn around and kiss Harry and see what happened.
            “What happened?” Draco prompted. “And about that apology…”
            “I’m sorry.” Ask gave the words without any more prompting, which was something that let Draco believe he meant them. “I don’t know what went wrong. I’ve approached that one when he’s feeding before and as long as I act impressed and awed with his power, he’s never attacked. Maybe he felt that you weren’t being sufficiently impressed.”
            Draco gave Ask an icy smile. He had spoken the truth about not wanting to destroy the man’s dignity or bank account, but that last insinuation was unacceptable. “Had you ever approached him with visitors before?”
            “You know the answer to that.”
            “Then what right,” Draco asked quietly, “did you have to bring visitors near him, without explaining what we needed to do to act sufficiently impressed?”
            After a long, choking moment—well, presumably choking for Ask; Draco didn’t think it had to be for him—Ask inclined his head. Draco nodded. His heart was still pounding chaotically, but he no longer saw the vision of the dragon’s mouth looming above him, ready to incinerate him.
            “I apologize for doing something untested,” Ask said. “And I will do research and figure out what went wrong before I bring visitors near the dragons again.”
            “Good,” Draco told him quietly, and then tried out a smile that wasn’t as icy as the previous one. “It’s not that I think you endangered our lives on purpose. But showing off a dragon isn’t something to try until you have more practice.”
            “I know that. I’m the Dragon-Keeper, not you.”
            “If you knew it, as in understood it, then today wouldn’t have happened,” Draco said, and his voice wasn’t loud, but Ask jumped as if it was.
            For one moment more, they traded glares, and then Ask nodded. “I’m happy that you weren’t hurt,” he added abruptly, and turned away. He closed the door to the little hostel Harry and Draco were staying in behind him.
            “Well.”
            Draco lifted his head. He knew Harry had come up behind him and was resting his hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t turn around yet. He could see Ask on the path that ran down the slope, since it was on the other side of their window, and he was curious to see what he would do.
            Ask paused for a second, appeared to mutter something to himself—or maybe someone invisible and standing under a Disillusionment Charm near him—and then turned and began to climb the slope on the path that led past the hostel. He was going towards another Dragon-Keeper, Draco judged, and he would report what had happened and ask for help in figuring it out. Or at least report what had happened.
            A happy ending, all in all.
            “It really makes you look hot when you’re defending me like that,” Harry whispered into his ear.
            “How would you know what I look like?” Draco finally turned around and rested his hands lightly on Harry’s shoulders. “You were looking at the back of my head.”
            “I just know.” Harry bowed his head a little and sucked at the top of Draco’s ear. “But I did want to know why you wanted an apology instead of something more substantial.”
            Draco sighed and gathered his scattered thoughts, easier to do when Harry wasn’t acting like his ear was a delicious sweet. “Because you wouldn’t want me to do that to him. And because we didn’t get hurt, but he needed to understand that I was displeased with what had happened to you.”
            “And you.”
            “Yes.” Draco looked up at Harry’s chin, then his eyes. This point was too important to look elsewhere while he made it, because then there was the chance that Harry wouldn’t really listen to him. “You defend us with magic like filling a dragon’s mouth with black pepper and your bravery. This is the only way I have to defend us.”
            “It’s still hot,” Harry said, and in the kiss that followed, Draco felt as if he was the one whose mouth had been filled with black pepper.
            It was, unexpectedly, nice.
            And then he had more important things to worry about, and he could stop thinking both about what would have happened if the Ridgeback had been a little faster and what was going to happen on their next visit to a dragon preserve.
*
nari-chan: Thanks! At least this time Draco got to do something about it.
SP777: Thank you!
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An Offering of Dragons