Sleeping Dragons Lie

    When he was eleven, Draco Malfoy fell in love.

    It was completely unintential, but ultimately inevitable. A chance encounter that would seal his fate for years to come.

    To think he first laid eyes on his beloved in such a mundane locale.

    After all, Hagrid's hut wasn't exactly the most romantic setting ever.

    Draco had just wanted to catch Potter and his cronies in the act, dig up some nice dirt to send back to his father, maybe take a few points from Gryffindor.

    He'd had to pile up stones and stand on his tiptoes just to see in the window, peeking through the gap in the curtains with his calves straining. He recognized the egg of a Norwegian Ridgeback immediately, of course - although that oaf Hagrid probably thought it was a Hebridean Black, or something. The sight of the hatching nearly sent him tumbling over backwards in shock. So black! Such scales! The famous ridge was only a few scales near the hatchling's wingpoint, like baby teeth on a kitten, but still clearly visible. Slightly boxy snout, but still well-formed, and an excellent flamer, it looked like. Draco squinted. Did it have the residual webbing on its' toes? Yes, it did.

    He swooned. His blood raced, his breath came quickly, his lungs were on fire, his loins - well, at eleven, Draco wasn't entirely sure what loins were supposed to do in these circumstances, or even where they were, but he was quite sure they were doing something to commemorate the occasion.

    His heart was so full of love, he felt like it would burst. No, hatch.

    Draco stayed glued to the window until Hagrid spotted him.

    He ran all the way back to the Slytherin tower, already hatching plans to see his beloved again.

    Of course, the seeds for all this had been planted a long time ago.

                        ---

    Draco Phinneas Julian Malfoy had been named after Draco Adrian Easterling Black, who happened to be the closest direct ancestor Narcissa and Lucius had in common.

    Draco B. had been mad for dragons, and petitioned ardently for a reversal of the edict banning their breeding his entire adult life. He went on expeditions to watch them, he collected (and wrote) books on their habits and peculiarities, he commisioned paintings of them, and he even spent two years in Scotland with the MacFusty clan, studying the local Hebridean Blacks.

    Consequently, when Draco (Malfoy) was growing up, every single birthday, Christmas, and many other holidays besides, he was given Dragon Presents by every single relative on both sides of the family.

    Dragon baby mobiles. Plush dragons. Enchanted toy dragons with flapping wings and swishing tails. Picturebooks of various dragon species. Self-telling storybooks about dragons, starring dragons, or otherwise featuring dragons prominently. Inordinate amounts of clothes with dragons on them. Fuzzy dragon pyjamas, complete with wings, tail, horns, and even tiny felt claws on the feet - which he had gotten to wear exactly once before his mother had them burned.

    His nursery was painted with a huge, bright mural of a Chinese Fireball that frolicked happily across the walls, occasionally devouring a stylized pig that, on the whole, looked overjoyed to be eaten by such a magnificent creature.

    Hebridean Blacks and Welsh Greens chased each other across the ceiling of his bedroom, and the paintings Draco B. had comissioned hung on his walls.

    All of this probably ought to have conditioned Draco to despise dragons, or roll his eyes and mutter "oh, not ANOTHER one!" every time he received yet another illustrated copy of Draco Dormiens: Sleeping Dragons, And Where They Lie, or at the very least become massively indifferent to the scaled beasts due to simple saturation and over-exposure. Draco, after all, wasn't the world's most biddable child.

    So his enthusiasm for the scaley beasts was as much of a suprise to him as it was to everyone else. By age four, he could identify every species on sight, and would correct any adult he happened to hear mistaking a Norwegian Ridgeback for a Hebridean Black. By age five, he knew which breed fed on what animals, where they hunted, how they hunted, and was determinedly badgering Lucius to take the family to Australia so Draco could see an Opaleye.

    At age eight, as he was reading his latest acquisition from Flourish & Blotts, he turned the page to a glossy illustration of two Hebridean Blacks curled up around each other, the smaller male atop his male, tales twined together. The illustration turned out to be one of a four-page all-color inset, depicting all stages of the mating process in addition to highly anatomical cutaways, and Draco felt the fascinated twinges of what any psychologist would instantly recognize as imprinting.

                        ---

    As if he would have left his true love in the meaty hands of that half-giant oaf without checking up on her.

    Her, damnit - apparently Hagrid's stupidity extended to some sort of congenital inability to check anal scales. On second thought, Draco decided, it was better that way. The thought of Hagrid poking around the Ridgeback's anal scales made him queasy.

    The Ridgeback - that was how he thought of her. Unlike SOME oversized, underbrained people, he understood that you couldn't just name a dragon. They weren't dogs. Maybe, someday, if he was very lucky (and lived long enough), she'd tell him her name.

    Which is why he didn't run howling to Dumbledore the night after first laying eyes on her. As much as he despised leaving the black-scaled beauty in that horrible hut, it was his best way of keeping access to her.

    Access he exploited routinely, with the help of Crabbe and Goyle as lookouts or occasional distractions. Draco memorized Hagrid's schedule and took to studying the groundskeeper's habits with the zeal he usually reserved for the latest book on Fireball socialization.

    Hagrid off for a little chat with the centaurs? Time to skive Charms, head to the hut, and bring his girl a few freshly brained voles.

    Hagrid in a meeting with Dumbledore? Excellent chance to give the Ridgeback a good once-over with a scale brush and thunder god vine oil.

    Hagrid taking Fang for a walk around the lake? Duck into the hut, scritch the dragon under her jawline and watch her wing-flutter with pleasure.

    For two weeks, Draco was in heaven.

                        ---

    He recieved his first broom at eight, deemed an age old enough to be mindful of the responsibility required to fly. (Read: Lucius caught him zooming past the study window.)

    Draco took to flying immediately, suprising absolutely no one except a flock of migrating ducks. Unlike most juvenille wizards, though, his thoughts weren't of Quidditch or Maurice Mulciber's Magical Aerial Circus; they were of thermals and air pressure, and what it would be like to feel the sun on his wings as he stretched and banked along a current of warm air.

    By nine, he still occasionally got in accidents when he forgot that flying by broomstick didn't really work the way it was supposed to, and his attemps to glide or ride a thermal up into the air ended with him on his arse on the ground.

    He loved flying, and eventually he loved Quidditch, but it was never quite what it should have been.

                        ---

    Three weeks after he fell in love, Crabbe and Goyle brought him a copy of The Letter.

    Romania. ROMANIA! It was immoral, it was unconscionable, it was tragic, it was unfair.

    He paced the Slytherin common room and considered his options. The Castle was stone, after all. Housing the Ridgeback in the Slytherin dorms would have worked well enough until she was a year or so old - and at that point he'd just take her back to Malfoy Manor. Father would understand, of course.

    The only problem was keeping it from Hagrid and Potter and his idiot friends. And he wasn't good enough to work an Anti-Locator Charm, either. Not to mention, didn't Hogwarts have anti-Beast spells on it?

    In the end, of course, he did what he had to do. He also started pricing vacation packages to Romania.

    But he never forgave Hagrid for it. Ever.

                        ---

    He really wasn't supposed to have been an Animagus. Technically, he wasn't an Animagus - he was the just victim-cum-survivor of a Soul Evocation transfiguration that happened to bump up against the Black hereditary talent for the Animagus spell and had decided to stick around.

    Voldemort - or Harry, he wasn't really sure, didn't want to be, and never asked - had intended it as punishment, torture, and recruitment all rolled into one; had really never intended for Draco to change back at all.

    His bones had warped and knitted themselves into new shapes. His muscles and flesh ripped and tore themselves covering his new frame. Acid and fire roiled in his belly, and he'd realized that being a dragon was like constantly having just thrown up bile. His head lengthened and grew horns, while his nose was crushed and yanked and pulled up by the nostrils. His mind split open, and his eyes sharpened to faceted razors, and in the end what held him together through it all, kept him Draco, was the fact that he'd been trying to think like a dragon ever since he'd first stolen his father's broomstick at eight years old.

    Occasionally he wondered what he would have been if he'd come by it the honest way. Very few wizards had the talent to become Animagi; of those that did, few could withstand the power of a transformation into a magical Beast. The incredible strain put on the body was as nothing to the stresses put on the mind. Squeezing your human's psyche into a dog's brain was one thing; feeling your mind get squashed under the sheer predatory glory of a dragon's mind or the burning scope of a phoenix's psyche was something altogether different again.

    When he was feeling particularly honest with himself, he could admit he'd have probably been some kind of iguana.

    He could never quite manage to say thank you, though.

                         ---

    The first weeks and months after the war, Draco wore a lot of t-shirts. T- shirts with dragons on them.

    Everyone in the world was going for Auror, but Shacklebolt just told him to wait. Trials wouldn't start until well into the fall, and he'd been injured, hadn't he?

    So he took a flat in muggle London, and started reading up on dragon species that didn't exist, and buying ten quid t-shirts that were three sizes too big and on which sprawled such absurd impossibilities as four-legged, winged dragons with three sets of horns and purple and gold scales.

    His mother never commented on his attire, when he went back for silent Sunday dinners, but Draco didn't really mind. The t-shirts covered the scars and the bandages quite well.

    If he started collecting those horrid little pewter statues, then he'd be worried.

                        ---

    After Manchester, they went to Romania. For a vacation.

    Shacklebolt had insisted. None of them had taken more than a few days off for years.

    On the whole it was less horrible than Draco had been expecting, but mostly it was one of the few options they had left. Draco'd never - ever - really be welcome at the Burrow, even after he and Arthur had bonded over muggle avionics. He didn't want to be welcome, anyway. Even Ginny couldn't stand much more than a few hours visit, anymore.

    They might have gone to McGonagall; she was too old and too tired to put up the kind of fuss Weasely and Granger did - but Hogwarts had its' ghosts, too.

    Snape, Draco was convinced, would never, ever die, and he couldn't spend two minutes in the man's company without screaming at him over Pansy. Not an option.

    There was always Longbottom and Lovegood, who were at least accepting (even if they were excellent examples of that saying about being so open-minded your brain might fall out); but over the years, they'd become something of Potter's, his and his alone, although they were all too damn nice to say so. Besides, when Potter visited them he wasn't Potter, and Draco rather suspected they weren't really themselves either, and he just honestly didn't want to know.

    They could have gone to some nice commercial resort alone together, somewhere with white sands and an aqua ocean and people who spoke with charming accents; but there really wouldn't have been a point. They were alone together all the time.

    So they wound up in Romania, on the doorstep of Charlie and Fleur Weasely's gigantic sprawling cabin-ranch-converted-barn-loft-thing, and it wasn't as horrible as Draco had been expecting.

                        ---

    Charlie wasn't, unlike the other remaining Weasely brother, prone to Making Remarks. He was prone to Getting Pissed And Telling Amusing And Scatalogical Dragon Stories, which on the whole Draco quite approved of. As an added bonus, he was a damn good flyer and always willing to play pick-up games of Quidditch.

    Fleur was also inexplicably nice to him, possibly because he was the only adult for miles who spoke fluent French, and also possibly because her extremely disturbing and very, very blond children had less explicably decided they liked him, too.

    Ginny and Potter both found this incredibly amusing. Especially when he'd interrupt a heated discussion with one of the other Dragon-keepers to answer some childish interrogative in French. Especially especially when it had been asked in English in the first place.

    Bastards. He had no idea how he put up with them.

    One night, when they were both pissed and pissing after a long evening of roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and drinking beautifully labelled Romanian beer, Draco asked Charlie if he remembered the Ridgeback.

    "What, Norbert? Course I do. She's still around - had three clutches so far. Only one of 'em with our other Ridgeback. Has a thing for Longhorns, I guess..."

    The next morning, Draco declared he was going off camping for a few days, and oh-by-the-way, Charlie, don't hit the new Welsh Green with any stunning spells. He's not tagged for a reason.

    Bill Two and Geniveve were extremely put out they weren't allowed to watch him transform.          It was just too intimate to do publically.                              ---                              Two days out into the reserve, he found her. It wasn't easy; she laired in a sharp valley between two thick stone ridges, both prone to rockfall. He'd rode a jet of cool air down, tucking his wings in and gliding, before stretching them back out and back-winging on the landing. A freshly dead buck deer was clamped firmly in his jaws.

    He crawled up to a hundred meters outside her lair entrance on his belly, wings held tightly to his back, neck down.

    She eyed him; he eyed her back.

    She sniffed the wind for his scent. She blinked. She sniffed again, this time flicking out her tongue.

    He scuttled forward a few meters.

    She mantled.

    He crawled a bit further, and threw the deer in front of her with a flick of his head.

    She sniffed it a few times. Sniffed it again. Nudged it with her snout. Then, ripped off a strip of flesh from the flank.

    She chewed, swallowed, and gave a short little flame - the world's most delicate burp.

    Very deliberately, she lowered her head, tore the carcass in two, and tossed the smaller half in his direction. Several meters up from where he was.

    He crawled forward on his belly, and took a few tenative nibbles from his half.          -Thanks, love. So, what's your name?-