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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
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Eight—Romanian Longhorn
            “Harry!”
            Harry closed his eyes and laughed as Charlie’s backslaps nearly knocked him to the ground. “Hey, Charlie,” he said, and stepped back as he nodded to Draco. “Can I introduce Draco Malfoy, my partner?” It was the best word he could come up with to describe Draco at the moment. If nothing else, they were sharing their holiday at the moment.
            Charlie nodded to Draco with a distant smile. Harry was glad. Charlie didn’t have any reason to like Draco, but no reason to dislike him, either. He had gone back to Romania the minute the war in Britain was done, and he’d never been around in Hogwarts at the same time Draco was to be bullied.
            “Now,” said Charlie, spinning to face Harry again. “You said that you came here to see dragons. I’ve got two dragons for you.”
            “Just two?” Draco muttered.
            Harry squeezed him on the arm, hearing and understanding the tone in his voice, but Charlie either didn’t or was just determined to ignore it. “Well, there are plenty of others in the reserve, but these two are special.” He waved his hand out the window, but when Harry looked out, there were only the Carpathian Mountains he and Draco had been seeing plenty of so far. “They’re ready to mate.”
            Harry thought he could feel the heat of Draco’s blush from here. He cleared his own throat. “I thought dragons were dangerous when they were doing that?”
            “Why would—oh. You just came from the Hungarian Horntail reserve.” Charlie waved his hand through the air again. “No, Horntails are pretty dangerous! But not Longhorns, not in the same way. They’ll fight, of course. That’s part of dragon courtship. But they’re not dangerous to anyone except each other. And they’re amazing to watch.”

            Harry swallowed back his own smile. Charlie talking about Hungarian Horntails sounded like Ron talking about any Quidditch teams other than the Cannons. “Okay. Where can we watch them from?”
            “There’s an observation platform!” Charlie popped to his feet again from his partial slump against the wall. “Come on!”
            Harry followed Charlie out, and glanced back once at Draco, who had a grim, pale face. “Are you going to be all right with this?”
            “As long as it really is an observation platform and not down among them,” Draco muttered, shaking his head. “I never heard that Romanian Longhorns are easy to get along with, even if they also aren’t all that dangerous. Are you going to be satisfied with staying back from them?”
            Harry thought of the way that Margit had sat when she was watching the Horntails. That was the kind of attitude he would like to have towards dragons, he thought: cautious but respectful. He thought it was probably the attitude Charlie did have, it was just that he was also excited about them. “I will.”
            “Then I will.”
*
            Draco clutched the thin railing in front of him, and wished desperately that it was higher. When he had heard Weasley talking about an “observation platform,” he had, perhaps foolishly, pictured something rather like a high balcony off a structure like the Astronomy Tower. He had thought it would be high in the air, safely distant from the place where the dragons clashed.
            Instead, it stuck out of the side of a mountain, essentially a ledge with a tiny fence around it. There was nothing to keep a dragon from flying down and trying to pluck them off it. Draco squinted at the sky, but couldn’t make out even the faintest shimmer of defensive magic.
            “Harry?” he whispered, but Harry was talking excitedly to Weasley and didn’t hear him. Draco gloomily faced down the ravine again.
            At least the view was magnificent, he had to admit. A deep, narrow valley sprawled in front of him, the sides draped with small trees and huge boulders and tiny, sparkling streams that turned into equally tiny waterfalls as they plunged downwards. There were rich browns, deep greens, shimmering blacks wherever Draco looked.
            As he watched, one patch of green stirred and reached lazily upwards. Even after staring blankly for a moment, it took Draco too long to recognize it.
            Then he pointed and whispered, “Look!” He would shove Harry later for suggesting that he had whimpered it.
            Harry leaned over the side of the railing and strained his eyes. “I don’t see—”
            But the wave of dark green moved again, and revealed itself not as trees bending in the wind, which Draco had first thought it was, but as a wing. And then two gleams of gold appeared right next to it, and a pair of jaws opened, and a long mouth yawned.
            Draco found himself staring down a dragon’s throat, but without the sense of terror that he would have felt before, when just being around a dragon was enough to make him bolt. He locked his fingers onto the railing and watched the Longhorn flap from lower ledge to lower ledge.
            “Well-spotted, Malfoy!” Weasley pounded him on the back the way he had Harry when they met. Draco dug his fingers into the stone and didn’t fall over the edge, no thanks to Weasley. “There they are!” Then Weasley himself leaned with dizzy danger over the railing and squinted as if he thought there was something else down there.
            Draco was just getting ready to snatch at his robe when Weasley whooped and pointed. “There he is!”
            “He” was a second dragon climbing rapidly out of the ravine, his wings stiffly spread like the sails of a kite. The other dragon Draco had already seen, who seemed to be the female, dropped her neck and snuffled towards him, then turned her back with a wriggle of her tail Draco could only describe as “saucy.”
            The next minute, they were racing into the sky, past the observation platform.
            Draco had the impression of a green Hogwarts Express dashing just a meter in front of his face, accompanied by a sparkle of gold horns and a scrape of claws that nearly tore him free to plunge down and down. Not because the dragons were malicious, he thought, locking his hands again, but simply because they were loud, and playful, and didn’t look around that often.
            His heart pounding like an out-of-control clock, he turned around with his back to the metal and watched the dragons sport overhead.
            “Yes, that’s it,” Weasley muttered, like he was a proud parent urging a child on to perform their first spell.
            Draco looked over at Harry, and found that he was smiling—but at Draco, not the dragons. He squeezed his hand and murmured, “Are you all right?”
            “Yes,” Draco could say. “Just startled.” And he even turned back to the mating dragons above them with a determination to see this through.
            Honestly, though, in a few minutes he forgot himself in the sheer beauty of the dance.
*
            Harry watched as the Longhorn Charlie had said was female spread her wings and floated a few body-lengths in front of the male. Her head was turned and her horns glittering like two beams of sunlight along her flank. Her tail stirred and swished the air as though she was conducting an orchestra.
            And then she turned over on her back, wings beating more heavily than over, and flicked her tail to the side.
            That must have impressed the male somehow. He stuck out his neck and bellowed fire.
            Harry ducked as it curled above him, although he knew it didn’t come close to singeing his hair. And it didn’t singe the female, either. She rolled over and over in the midst of the stream of flame—maybe her scales protected her from it—and craned her neck back in enjoyment. Her paws beat like her wings, scrabbling at the air, and she rolled over again and then dropped like a stone towards the bottom of the ravine.
            The male fell after her.
            Then, whirling around in a dizzying spiral that made Harry think of some of the better Quidditch players he’d known, the female was back from beneath him, although she brushed the male’s side with a wing as she passed. The male turned and gently scraped one of her legs with his teeth. Harry supposed it had to be gentle, at least. There was no blood or torn scales following the motion of her leg down.
            The female dragon tucked her wings in around her body and fell again. The male was spinning around her now, sometimes flying upside-down, in a way Harry hadn’t known dragons could do; it didn’t seem as if he was beating his wings at all. More like there was a huge column of warm air somewhere beneath him helping him rise.
            “Harry?”
            Draco was leaning against him now, whispering. Harry put an arm around him without taking his eyes from the dragons. Now they were hovering in front of each other with their necks extended and their muzzles lightly brushing. “Yes?”
            “This isn’t so bad.”
            Harry smiled and kissed the top of Draco’s head. “I know.”
            “It’s bloody rare, is what it is,” said Charlie, leaning forwards so that his arms were draped all the way over the railing. Looking at him, Harry got a sudden flash of what he was certain Charlie would have liked to do most: grow his own wings, leap over the side, and fly just beneath the dragons to observe them dancing.
            Maybe he would still stay at a distance. But Harry had the definite impression now that the Dragon-Keepers who thought they should stay at a respectful distance, like Margit, were more uncommon than the risk-taking ones.
            The Longhorns were entwining their necks now, their heads cocked so that their horns didn’t tangle. Only when they’d got to the very end of their necks, Harry thought, did they bow so that their horns brushed against each other. Or maybe interlocked. They were high enough that Harry could see what they were doing, but not hear very well.
            For endless seconds, the Longhorns swayed back and forth, gleaming green and gold, the small amount of sunlight that fell into the ravine still managing to flash dazzlingly off their horns and wings. Then they abruptly broke apart and began flying side-by-side, more tilted than anything, their bodies parallel to the ground.
            “How can they do that?” Draco murmured.
            Charlie began some long explanation about average scale density and wing-lift that Harry didn’t bother listening to. He was more than content to lean on the railing himself and watch as the Longhorns swayed back and forth to invisible music, more like one large round creature with four wings than two separate, lithe ones.
            They rose higher and higher, until they were against the sun that hung directly over the ravine and Harry had to squint. He saw one—he could no longer tell which one—slant up and hang in the air, and the other one fly towards them, fitting themselves upside-down under the higher one.
            “The female’s on top, the male’s below,” Charlie murmured.
            In the end, though, Harry didn’t need to know details like that to enjoy the sight of the dragons sweeping back and forth on the wing, or the way they tumbled towards the ground, interlocked, a second later. Draco made a sharp noise when they passed close to the observation platform, the way he had earlier, but Harry wrapped one arm around him, and he swallowed with a grimace.
            Harry found himself listening for a crash, but of course, these were dragons and they wouldn’t die from a simple, natural fall. When he looked again, they were both lying together on the floor of the ravine, their scales already blending with the trees again, and licking each other’s muzzles. Then the female (Harry thought) bowed her head and let the male clean her horns free of imaginary grime.
            “They’re fascinating to watch,” Charlie said. “I could do this all day.”
            And they did stay there for most of the afternoon, watching as the male flew away, came back with a shaggy thing dangling from his claws that Harry thought was a brown bear, and offered it to the female. The female ate delicately, dragging a few pieces of meat through a slit in the belly. Harry supposed they were the choicest parts of the bear. The male mostly munched fur and muscle and stared at her with an expression that Harry supposed you could describe as besotted if you could read dragon faces.
            Finally, when the dragons had moved away into the forest, Charlie drew back and turned to look at them. He didn’t seem to notice that he had dents in his skin along the elbows, or that his grin was kind of dreamy. He looked almost the way Hermione used to look at Lockhart, Harry thought, amused.
            “Come on. I’ll give you dinner, and tomorrow I’ll take you to meet Norberta.”
*
            Dinner, Draco had to admit, was pretty good, including lobster with melted butter that made him want to gobble up thirds. He limited himself to seconds, though, and watched the way that Weasley watched him.
            Draco had wondered if this one of Harry’s friends, who hadn’t been in Britain in years and didn’t know how happy Draco made Harry, would object to their relationship. But it didn’t seem to be so.
            And they weren’t talking about ordinary things, anyway, Draco realized slowly. At least, not the ordinary things he had thought they would talk about. Harry didn’t mention any Auror cases. He talked about funny things that had happened with his other friends, and why he had wanted to come see dragons, and even things he and Draco had done together. Weasley laughed as uproariously at the things not about his family as at the things about them.
            And if he did give Draco a sneaking, glinting glance now and then, Draco didn’t think it was hostile.
            But then Harry excused himself to go to the bathroom, which was an adventure to find in the little, twisty maze of different caves where Weasley lived, and Weasley turned and leaned towards Draco. Draco looked at him. Weasley nodded once and asked, “You’re not just with him for the fame and money, are you?”
            Draco had to laugh. “Does it look as if I am?”
            “Well, no. But Harry’s told me about a few times when he got taken in and fooled for a while.”
            “He won’t with me. I want—what he wants. While he wanted to keep me at a distance because he was worried about what would happen if someone else found out about his cases, I went along with that. Now I’m going along with his desire to get to know me and take less risks.”
            Weasley sipped moodily at the heavy mead that he’d had imported from somewhere else. Or maybe he hadn’t. Draco had to admit that he knew little about Romanian drinks, and less when he had tried a sip and didn’t like it. “Harry told you all that?”
            “Yes.” Draco wasn’t going to demean himself by asking what part Weasley meant, specifically.
            “What kind of cases was he working that he didn’t want you to know about?”
            “Cases where he almost died.” Draco grimaced. He supposed some of those situations were probably even worse than the ones Harry had involved himself in on this holiday, but that just made them nightmarish for Draco to think about. “He told me that it’s been enough times he’s lost count. But he’s also promised to try and hold himself back from just charging in. He did that a few times with dragons, and I told him I didn’t like it.”
            “He should have been a Dragon-Keeper. The way he looks at them…”
            Draco kept diplomatically silent. As far as he could tell, for everyone they’d met, becoming a Dragon-Keeper involved loving dragons more than anything else. And he thought Harry, no matter how much he liked risk and magical creatures, loved some other things more.
            Like me.
            Harry came back from the bathroom then, and stood in the arched entrance of the dining cavern looking back and forth between them. “What were you saying about me, Charlie?”
            “I asked Malfoy a few questions, that’s all.” Weasley faced Harry and winked at him. “And he gave me good answers, too. Now, what’s this you told me about Mum deciding she wants to adopt a child?”
            Draco was glad enough to sink into the background as Harry and Weasley went off into some discussion of family politics that Draco couldn’t follow, since he only knew half the names. He was just glad that Weasley had apparently judged him and not found him wanting.
*
            “Careful,” Charlie warned as Harry slipped a little on the rocks that tumbled under his feet. “Female Ridgebacks are sometimes more dangerous even when they don’t have a clutch of eggs or a kill to defend.”
            Harry only nodded, thinking about the Ridgeback they’d seen eating the seal in Norway. Although, to be fair, he hadn’t known whether that one was male or female, not for certain.
            The dragon that sprawled in the small valley ahead of them, bathing in the waterfall that cascaded down the cliff and tumbling on her back to let the water run down onto her belly, looked nothing like the small dragon Harry had helped take up to the Astronomy tower. She just looked like a dragon. Harry felt a small stab of disappointment. He would have liked to think that something of Hagrid’s “baby” survived in her.
            But then Norberta looked up and saw them, at the same moment as Charlie whistled. Harry looked at him and saw him tossing a bucket down the cliff. The smell from the bucket was nauseatingly familiar. It was the brandy-and-chicken-blood mixture that Hagrid had given Norberta when she was a hatchling.
            The dragon stuck a claw out and delicately hooked the bucket from midair, before any of the liquid inside could spill. Then she tilted it down into her throat. Harry thought she would crunch the bucket with her gigantic teeth as well, but instead she chirped and hummed, balanced the bucket on the edge of her jaw for a second, and ended up tossing it back to Charlie, who caught it from the air and grinned.
            “Are the tame ones always tamer around humans?” Draco asked. Harry looked at him out of the corner of his eye, and grinned. He thought Draco looked as though his worldview had been recently adjusted. Well, maybe hearing the booming equivalent of tiny baby chirps from an adult dragon would do that.
            “I wouldn’t call any dragon tame,” said Charlie, catching the bucket and putting it behind him. “But the ones who were around humans as babies do tend to lose most of their fear of them, yes. Not always for good reasons, of course,” he added, and then winced as Norberta abruptly pushed herself to her feet and padded over towards them.
            See? Harry wanted to say to Draco, as Norberta’s jaws loomed over them and she bent down to sniff. Now we’re close to the mouth of a fire-breathing dragon and I didn’t even do anything this time!
            But he wouldn’t say that, because it would make him an arsehole. Instead, he reached up and brushed his hand carefully along the side of the dragon’s head. Norberta only turned her head to regard him with one eye, and then turned and nudged the bucket sitting behind Charlie emphatically, arching her whole neck over him to do it.
            “She wants more,” Charlie chuckled. “I’ll go and get more.” He nodded to Harry and Draco. “Walk backwards, slowly. Don’t run. She can probably smell your fear, but at the moment, she’s more interested in getting something to eat.”
            “Which probably means us,” Draco moaned just at the edge of Harry’s hearing.
            But he managed to back up—they both did—and ended up near Charlie’s house again. Charlie nodded to them and ducked inside to get more blood and brandy. Harry just stood there looking up at Norberta.
            Norberta waited, ignoring them now. Her whole gaze was focused on the cave entrance where Charlie had disappeared.
            She’s still beautiful, Harry thought, and reached over and held Draco’s hand. That much hasn’t changed, even if a lot of other things have.
            And when Charlie came out and gave Norberta her treat while he scratched gently behind her eye-ridges, Harry had to smile. No, Dragon-Keeping wouldn’t ever be the life for him, but he could see why it attracted other people.
            He glanced at Draco out of the corner of his eye. Draco was watching him instead of the dragon.
            Harry thought he could understand that silent message: Are you sorry you chose me?
            And he had to shake his head, because while Dragon-Keeping was attractive and so was risk, Draco was more so.
            Draco seemed to let out a breath he might have been holding since Norway, and smiled.
*
Jan: Thank you!
SP777: Yes, that is a bit of a concern, isn’t it? ;)
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An Offering of Dragons