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An Offering of Dragons	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 8786 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter List
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Chapter Seven—Hungarian Horntail
            You would never know dragons lived here if you were only looking in one direction, Harry thought. In front of him, the Northern Hungarian Mountains were covered with marching trees. They were green enough and deep enough that Harry understood why the Dragon-Keepers had chosen to put their reserve here. It looked like beautiful country for a dragon to fly over and hunt in. Even Horntails, the vicious bastards.
            But then he turned and looked behind him, and…well.
            The slopes beneath him on the south were decorated with clawed-down trees. Small fires still smoldered there. Their guide, Szabó Margit, who had told them to call her Margit, had said that a pair of courting Horntails had recently left the area.
            “Courting?” Draco had asked.
            Margit ducked her head and shrugged. “Better than fighting,” she said. “In the case of fighting, we would have a dragon corpse to take care of as well.”
            “How do you keep them hidden from Muggles at all?” Harry asked her now, as she led them on a roundabout trail that looked as if it plunged into the trees immediately beneath them. Harry had already turned several corners that looked out on sudden views and startling valleys, though, so he was willing to bet it didn’t.
            “It’s a battle.” Margit blew a thin strand of dark hair out of her face and turned to look at him, walking confidently backwards on the path. Draco muttered something about “showing off,” but Harry didn’t think that was it. Margit was just so comfortable on the trails that she thought everyone must have the same level of comfort. “We make use of Muggle-Repelling Charms. We have to keep going in and altering maps. The Muggles around here don’t know how big the country actually is.” She shrugged. “I understand that many other Dragon-Keepers do the same thing in other countries.”
            “Maybe they do,” Harry said, startled. It wasn’t something he had studied. “But what about the fires back there?”
            “Charms to contain smoke, smother the flames as soon as we can, and a dragon who likes to eat ash,” said Margit promptly. “And if you want to call it lucky, the humans they eat are mostly wizards, who the Muggle government isn’t likely to miss anyway.”
            Draco visibly shuddered. For that matter, Harry was remembering the Horntail he had fought, and feeling much the same way. If he had gone down its gullet, he doubted any trace of him would have remained, even ashes.
            “May I ask a question?”
            Harry blinked and turned back to Margit. “Sure. Although I don’t know how much help I’ll be. I only looked up some things about the dragons in each country, not how the Keepers kept them away from Muggles.”
            Margit smiled, but her eyes were intense. She hopped over a pebble and turned forwards again. Without surprise, Harry saw a gleaming wall of steel and stone ahead that hadn’t been at all visible from above. “If you fear these dragons so much, why are you here?”
            “I want to give myself something wild,” Harry said. “Something different to see. And then I invited Draco to come with me for much the same reason.”
            “I am not wild.” Draco sounded a little offended.
            Harry turned back to him and smiled. “I know. Not even your hair.” He waited until Draco had obviously controlled the impulse to raise his hand and check on his hair, then whispered, “I wanted to teach myself to see you differently.”
            Draco’s face softened, and for a second he stood looking at Harry as though he had forgotten what waited ahead. Harry slung an arm around his shoulder, and they kept waiting.
            “I can promise they are wild.” Margit walked up to what looked like a corner of the wall in front of them and laid her wand against it. It took long moments before a hidden gate rumbled back and let them in, much longer than Harry had seen with similar charms in Britain. “You need to keep well back.” She darted Harry a glance. “Even if you fought one once.”
            Harry nodded, not really surprised she’d heard about that. “So you got told by someone who was there?”
            “Yes. A distinctive name, at least for someone who watched you ride a Firebolt around a Horntail.” Margit frowned at him. “And we’ve heard a few things from our colleagues more recently. We’re not in Sweden now. We won’t ask you to participate in recapturing one of our dragons, even on the slight chance that one of them got out while you’re here.”
            “Good,” said Harry and Draco at the same time.
            Harry didn’t look at Draco, but he could feel the delight in Draco’s hand where it gripped his arm. He smiled and looked around at the sanctuary that Margit had led them into, wondering how the wall could contain creatures who could fly.
            He saw after a moment. The wall bulked solidly along the ground, but the real containment extended above that. Harry saw the lazy swirls of magic traveling back and forth, cloudy blue and black. They didn’t stay in one place, and sometimes the air where they were looked clear. But they would always come back in a few minutes.
            “I’ve never seen a defense like that,” Draco murmured, awed.
            “One of the sorts of magic that some of our ancestors used against people who wanted to conquer us.” Margit was smiling grimly, staring up at the top of the wall. “We fought alongside Muggles then. They’ve forgotten it, of course. But watch.” She scooped up one of the pebbles from the ground in front of them and threw it at the wall, muttering a spell that caused it to rise abruptly.
            The pebble hit the swirling black-and-blue shapes, and in an instant the whole top of the wall was covered with them as they flared into being. Harry blinked and shaded his eyes. It looked like lightning connected them, and the shapes closed on the pebble, moving what might have been serpentine heads back and forth. In a few seconds, the pebble had disappeared.
            “Do you ever lose any dragons to your own defenses?” Draco asked, a question that made Harry smile at him. It was an interesting question, and one that proved Draco was getting interested in this for itself, not just because Harry had dragged him along and he had no choice.
            “No,” said Margit. “The younger ones can’t fly well enough to get beyond the wall, and the older ones aren’t stubborn enough to need more than two shocks.” She turned around to walk on.
            “Yet the fire was beyond the wall,” Draco said, cautiously, as if he was afraid of annoying Margit.
            Also a good thought, Harry decided, and one that he hadn’t even considered. He squeezed Draco’s hand as he listened for Margit’s reply.
            “We have to let a few of them out at a time when they want to mate or fight,” said Margit, shaking her head as she turned down a slope that was mostly loose rock and dirt with a few toppled logs at the bottom. Harry followed her cautiously. “Leave them behind the wall, and the others will start thinking they have a right to interfere. And it is not pretty when that happens.” She sounded grim.
            Harry could imagine it. “Are there protections to stop the Horntails from coming right up to us?”
            Margit’s answer got lost in a violent crackling of wood from below. She promptly flung a hand back at them and drew her wand. Harry was more than happy to hold still, although it was difficult when he was crouched halfway down the hill. Draco, who was in a better position, caught his arm and helped him maintain his position.
            Beneath them, a young Horntail surfaced. It had to be young, Harry thought. At least, it was a lot smaller than the one that had been in the Tournament. It had a struggling shape in its mouth.
            The Horntail creaked its neck to the side and bit down, and Harry made out a flash of white. He really hoped that meant it was a sheep and not a helpless wizard in white robes.
            Yes, it was. A moment later, Harry could hear the thing’s terrified bleating. The only bad thing—well, the worst thing—was that it was still alive while the Horntail was playing with it.
            “Can’t you do something?” Harry breathed to Margit, who was standing in front of them as if she wanted to block the Horntail from seeing him and Draco.
            “Do what?” Margit shook her head, eyes on the dragon. There was a strange expression on her face, Harry thought. Not the love that had been there for Rask when she looked at the Swedish Short-Snout, or the kind of weird trust in Firewing that Allison MacFusty had. Just a silent, patient waiting, and a breathless expectancy. “They always play with their prey alive. Like cats. Do you try to stop a cat with a mouse?”
            Harry said nothing, because at the moment, for some reason, he could think of nothing but Crookshanks and Scabbers.
            He watched, instead, as the dragon jammed its jaws down on the sheep and finally bit deeply enough to bring an end to its struggles. The dragon tore and shook its head, and one piece of the body spun down until it landed at its feet. The dragon reared up, using one hooked joint of its wing to shove the sheep’s body more deeply into its mouth.
            Blood gushed down its black scales. There was such absolute wildness in its eyes that Harry couldn’t look away from them. But he leaned against Draco to show that he hadn’t forgotten him.
            “Ah,” Margit breathed a second later. “It’s Crackskull. We thought she had got a little…testy lately.”
            “Is she named for cracking sheep skulls?” Harry asked cautiously, backing one step when it seemed the Horntail’s head was swinging towards him. But a second later, she turned and started to move back into the forest, so she probably hadn’t seen him. “Or human?”
            “Neither.” Margit pointed. Harry could see a long, thin line winding down the back of the Horntail’s head, now that he was looking. “See that? A scar from one of her clutchmates. She was lucky to escape with only that much. She was the smallest of the hatchlings in her clutch.”
            “How old is she now?” Draco’s voice was firm, and Harry turned to look at him. Like Margit, he was standing with his eyes practically fixed on Crackskull as she moved away, but he didn’t seem breathlessly frightened.
            “Oh, fifteen years,” said Margit, starting to move down the hill again. “On the cusp of maturity. She won’t lay her eggs for a few years yet, but she’ll start courting, and then she’ll become even more violent.”
            Margit sounded dreamy. Harry shook his head. “I wanted to see them, but I don’t think I could ever be as comfortable around them as you are.”
            “Since you had to fight a Horntail when you were a teenager, probably not.”
            “One would think that was enough exposure to dragons for a lifetime,” Draco muttered. Surprisingly, it was Margit who answered and not Harry.
            “A Horntail destroyed my family’s home,” she said quietly, moving ahead around a bend in the path. Harry didn’t think it was his imagination that she held her wand more tightly until she could see that there was no dragon ahead of them, and more loosely afterwards. “My father was a poacher who specialized in eggs just about to hatch. That was before the bans on trading were so tightly enforced. Our house was a few miles from the border of the sanctuary, and the mother came looking for us.”
            “What happened?” Harry hated to sound like he was a kid begging for a story, but he assumed Margit had a reason for telling them this, anyway.
            Margit turned and smiled at him, one elbow braced on the tree. “The mother took off the top of the house. She loomed over us. I remember feeling as if I was going to fall into her nostrils. Just one of them. She was that big. I thought—she could crush me and never notice. She could eat me, too, of course, but what mattered most was the indifference.”
            “Why did it matter?” Draco asked. He was looking at Margit as if he thought she was crazier than Harry. Harry appreciated that he at least had a sliding scale.
            “Because I realized there were people and creatures in the world that would never care about me.” Margit shrugged a little and reached back to scratch her shoulder blade. “I was the sort of child who worried so much about little things like whether my sister had stolen my favorite toy. After I looked up into the dragon’s face, I realized there was so much else in the world. And I stood there, and I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to be closer to her.”
            “Well, I reckon there are people who like thunderstorms and giant waves in the ocean, too.”
            Harry grinned. Draco sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “But you seem so cautious around them,” he told Margit.
            “The dragon took her eggs back, and she lifted them in one claw. Then she breathed and set everything we owned at the time on fire. My father had anticipated something like that, and he had an escape tunnel dug.”
            Margit hunched her shoulders for a second. “So I admire them, but yes, I am cautious around them. Because of one, we were poor for years, and my father didn’t dare go back to his trade. That one dragon had his scent now, and she would have hunted him down if he set foot in the sanctuary again.”
            She turned back to the trail. Harry followed her thoughtfully.
            “I take it back. There are plenty of crazy people in the world. And I thought you were unique.”
            Harry shook his head a little. “But she’s not crazy for the same reason I am. She’s thought about why.”
            Draco gave him a startled glance. Maybe just because I said that I was thinking, Harry thought, and caught his hand, and squeezed once, and let go.
            All these years, he had held people away because he worried about whether they would be hurt if he died on a case. But he had chosen to make things deeper with Draco, and that meant he had to at least think about what he was doing and why he was doing it.
*
            Maybe it was Margit’s story, but when they came up to the feeding dragons—safely hidden behind a Disillusionment Charm and another one that would mask their scent—Draco felt as if he was really seeing beauty for the first time on their journey.
            One massive Horntail crouched over something that might once have been a deer, head lowered and tearing at it. She kept swallowing one bite and then tossing another at a pair of smaller dragons next to her. They squabbled over things, flaming each other’s muzzles and then retreating to growl at each other.
            But still, they were beautiful. Their scales shone as they were made of black velvet. They sat up on their haunches and flapped their wings so hard that it made it seem as if they were doing it just for the joy of it. Even when they rolled each over and over, beating and scratching their shoulders and tails, Draco thought they were each as strong as the other. It was fun to watch.
            The mother dragon seemed to share his opinion. She lay there with her claws steeped in blood, one wing dipping in and out when she wasn’t using her jaws to tear up the prey. Once she issued a warning hiss when the larger hatchling had the smaller one pinned on the ground and was moving a talon towards its eyes. The larger one paused, and the smaller one slipped away with an indignant squeal.
            “I thought the hatchlings didn’t often stay with their mother,” Harry whispered.
            “Most of them don’t.” Margit shook her head and reached out to cast a spell that would probably—at least Draco hoped so—keep the dragons from hearing them. “But sometimes the smaller ones remain for several months, or even a few years. These ones were small compared to their clutchmates at the time.”
            The mother Horntail ripped another gobbet of muscle and tissue away from the carcass, tossed it into the air, and then snapped it in half as it was coming down. Each hatchling snagged a half and then staggered away from each other, still squealing. Then they seemed to think that the other one had the better piece, and started circling each other and snarling. Draco snickered.
            Margit smiled at him. “Yes, this is one reason I like to watch them. They’re not human, and I wouldn’t ever make the mistake of thinking they are, but it is fun to think about how jealous and selfish they are. Like children.”
            Draco was about to reply, but then he saw the way the dragon mother had turned her head and focused on them. He held his breath and tapped Margit on the shoulder, pointing out the small flames that were beginning to pool around her jaws.
            “Yes, I should do something about that,” said Margit, unintimidated, and then canceled the charms that were on her and rose to her feet. “You stay here,” she added over her shoulder. “They’re at their best when they have just one human to focus on.”
            “Shit.”
            Draco nodded in response to Harry’s comment, glad to find they agreed for once, and watched as Margit almost sashayed up to the dragons.
            The Horntail lay there, watching her, motionless except for the twitching of her tail. The two hatchlings weren’t so still. They both tumbled behind their mother, and then stuck their heads, as one, over her back to watch Margit. The smaller one acted as if it would flap towards her, but the mother gave a grumble without moving her eyes, and the hatchling sat back.
            Margit approached casually, and then sat down on the rocks and cast another spell. Draco didn’t see any result from it until he saw a small rabbit flying towards Margit. Margit killed it with another charm, one that glowed orange.
            When she began to rip the fur off, the mother lowered her head and went back to eating. The two hatchlings came out and watched Margit with snapping jaws until their mother tossed them another piece of the deer, at which point they decided that was better than rabbit and swallowed it whole.
            “Wow.”
            This time, Harry sounded breathless. Draco leaned on him, hoping that Margit wouldn’t actually feel she had to carry the charade through by eating raw rabbit, but also understanding, now, why she might want to.
            But she didn’t. She sat with it in her lap and watched the dragons squabbling and eating and playing in front of her.
            Draco shifted. He could feel himself still exquisitely aware of how much space there was between him and the dragons. He watched their teeth and could imagine how they would feel crunching into his bones and muscles. He could imagine screaming if one of them even looked as if it would loom above him the way that Margit had described that mother dragon looming above her house.
            But at the same time, he could feel himself becoming more used to being balanced on that edge. He didn’t have to be absolutely safe or feel like it was going to crumble underneath him. Harry wasn’t in danger right now. Or they weren’t in more danger than Margit. Margit was doing this because she loved the dragons, but also so they could see them.
            And when Draco looked back at the dragons, he could see the beauty in things other than the color of their scales or eyes. Their wings and claws moved perfectly. They ate and then rested and played, the mother dragon doing the former with her head curled in the shadow of her wings, the hatchlings tumbling each other over and practicing flight with little short runs.
            It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. It can be both.
            Draco’s tension slipped away from him as he sat there. He didn’t miss it.
*
Jan: Harry can leave the danger behind if he thinks about how Draco is feeling and why he does things. He has to admit that he doesn’t have as well-thought-out a response to danger as Margit does.
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An Offering of Dragons