Chapter Text
Draco’s first memory was a plume of blue fire. With it came the brush of a warm, leathery wing, and the sound of his mother’s voice in his ears, a low, maternal rumble. Her breath was a whiff of brimstone and ash. Her underbelly was a pale cerulean shade that matched the jewel-bright radiance of her large, unblinking eyes, eyes that watched over him with both sternness and tenderness.
Dragon mothers were notoriously fierce, after all. And to Draco, who was then only a mewling, snivelling, sticky mess, she seemed the epitome of all power and grace. Her very shape was an immensity, as though the entire universe had poured itself into the mold of her form—stars, planets and all. Her scales certainly glittered like stars in the dim, pre-dawn light, and she had a strange gravity to her, as though any creature foolish enough to look her in the eye would be drawn in helplessly for the devouring. She was beautiful and terrifying, and Draco adored her with all the blind, animal devotion of a newborn.
For Draco himself was barely hatched, his own scales soft and unformed, itchy with the remnants of drying amniotic fluid and thin flakes of broken eggshell that had gotten stuck in the creases of his wings. His mother picked them clean with her enormous, deadly, elegant talons, with such care that not once did she hurt him. Draco’s own claws were tiny, translucent and bendy, useless compared to his mother’s, which were dagger-sharp and unyielding and massive, each talon as big as Draco’s foot.
Draco was only an infant, but even so, he envied her. He, too, wanted to be beautiful and terrifying.
Draco was fortunate that he was a weredragon, for he would not have understood such emotions as a baby. Had he been born in his human form, the ancient knowledge he held within his dragon bones—knowledge passed down by blood, from generation to generation—would not be within his human mind’s reach. Not until he got older, anyway, and his human psyche developed its own intelligence.
As it was, Draco decided to enjoy being small instead of resenting it. Being small did have its perks. He nestled closer under his mother’s wing, soaking in her heat and letting out a short, high-pitched, pleased rumble of his own… except that it was more a chirp than a rumble. Embarrassed, he distracted himself by snapping up the raw minced meat that he had been offered on an ornate brass platter. As he grew sated, his eyes became heavy again.
The world was perfect in that instant—just him, his mother and his full belly. He wanted for nothing.
Outside their cave, it was raining, and the gentle breeze that blew inwards carried on it a soothing mist, bearing the fresh scent of evergreen forests and pine trees. The rising sun cast questing fingers over the horizon, weaving delicate strands of sunlight through the falling raindrops, like threads of gold woven through diamonds.
Behind Draco, from deeper within the cave, emanated the dull glow of his mother’s hoard, of the many lovely and shiny objects she had collected over the years. He was even familiar with some of their names, as she had been telling him stories about them as he drowsed—overflowing treasure chests, gem-encrusted goblets and gilded crowns. A hoard worthy of the Drakoi, his mother’s ancestors.
Draco listened with half an ear as he beheld the sunrise through the mouth of the cave. Maybe it was only so arresting because it was his first sunrise; he would later associate it with the colour of his mother’s frost-white, nigh-golden hair—or her human form’s hair, rather.
The dusky valley beyond the cave’s entrance lightened, as though the valley was a cup into which light was flowing, gradually gathering at the bottom in a pool of shimmering green. It was beautiful, even glimpsed through the rain’s semi-transparent veil. This land was beautiful, and it called to Draco like the summons of a faraway song, heard too long ago to remember its exact words.
Only later would Draco learn that they were in France, in the forest of Mont Ventoux, where his mother’s ancestors were from. Weredragons always returned to their ancestors’ lands to give birth. It was tradition. More than that, it was sensible; there was a security in the old magic of his ancestors, who had painstakingly built layers upon layers of defensive wards around mountain caves just like this one, caves that allowed weredragons to go through the birthing process uninterrupted.
It was only after Draco’s second meal of mince that he discovered, upon burping, that he could make fire, too. It emerged in a puff of smoke, the flame silvery instead of blue like his mother’s. The sudden flash of fire right in front of his nose startled him so badly that he rolled backwards, into a ball, fetching up against his mother’s spiky tail.
She curled it around him protectively even as she laughed. “Are you afraid of fire, hatchling? You are fire. To fear fire is to fear yourself.” She became quiet, pensive. “Then again, too many of our kind have been taught to fear themselves. Perhaps fear has become necessary.”
“B-but,” Draco asked, gaining the gift of speech with the rapidity that only weredragons could achieve at such a young age, “wh-what if the fire burns? What if it comes from somewhere else? What if it isn’t my fire?”
His mother shrugged, serene, her gigantic wings moving with her shoulders. Had Draco not been tucked within their shadow, he would have been knocked aside. “The world is full of fire, my love. It is up to you whether you let it light your path, or whether you let it burn you to ashes.”
It was this advice of his mother’s that would stay with Draco, always, even after he learned that she was also a woman named Narcissa, and that he was also a boy named Draco—a boy with a body that felt oddly… soft-boiled, not hard enough or armoured enough but fragile and helpless, a snail without its shell.
Then he got used to it, and he wasn’t sure if that was worse. Sometimes, after moving into Malfoy Manor, he had nightmares in which he was a boy who only dreamed he was a dragon, and was not in fact a real dragon. His mother had cast a spell on him to keep him stuck in his human form until he matured enough to control his transformations. Draco knew it was for his own good, but he despised it. It felt like being trapped in the world’s softest cage. And with every year that passed, the walls of the cage closed in on him even more, too narrow to accommodate his nonexistent wings.
***
Draco did not meet his mother’s dragon self again for many, many years. For all that she claimed weredragons should not fear themselves, she feared revealing herself—and, therefore, her offspring—to humanity. She feared it more than anything. She told Draco tales of dragon-hunters, of cruel, greedy men, and warned him never to trust a human unless it was his mate. A very carefully chosen, bound-by-an-Unbreakable-Vow mate.
The Drakoi could not mate with ordinary dragons; that would be akin to mating with beasts. No, they could mate only with other weredragons, or with magical humans, and humans were preferred because they gave weredragons shelter in the human world and a more thorough cover identity. Wizards and witches thus made the ideal mates. Muggles were out of the question; they had no magic in them, and would not survive a mating with a weredragon.
Not that Draco knew what a ‘mating’ was, precisely, except that it seemed exceedingly dangerous and not worth the effort. He was already four. He was wise in such matters.
***
Narcissa’s human version was, ironically, the strongest proponent of un-dragon-like behaviour. Draco assumed it was because only the most convincing, human-seeming behaviour would shelter her and her son from potentially fatal suspicion. And so she trained Draco in subterfuge, and trained him, and trained him, and Draco sometimes doubted that the dragon he had met in his first memory—the feral creature that had birthed him—was indeed the same Narcissa Malfoy who dabbed her mouth primly with monogrammed napkins, who arranged flowers in vases with all the daintiness her slender human fingers could afford, and whose manners were so flawless that she might have been the living embodiment of an etiquette manual.
Only when he was five did Narcissa take him out onto the grounds of Malfoy Manor to teach Draco how to fly. She cast a mixed Disillusionment and Silencing charm vast enough to encircle the estate, but did not yet remove the spell that was keeping Draco human. Draco was all but vibrating with impatience. At last, he would be free! At last! At last!
“Here, at home,” she instructed him, “you may transform into a dragon and fly on occasion, but only after asking my permission and ensuring that I have erected the appropriate barriers, such as this Disillusionment charm, to conceal you. In Hogwarts, however, when you do go there…” Her expression became severe. “There will be no transforming. There will be no flying.”
“What if there’s an emergency?” Draco piped up. He was bobbing restlessly on his stubby, stupid little human toes, aching to transform again, to be wild again, to fly as his imagination and his instinct bade him to. He had never flown before, but he had dreamed of flying. Oh, had he dreamed. “What if there’s a fire?”
Narcissa’s mouth twitched. “For a dragon, you remain strangely fearful of fire.”
“Still,” Draco insisted mulishly. “It’s a valid point. What about emergencies?”
“Fine.” Narcissa sighed. “You may fly at Hogwarts—emergencies only. And by ‘emergencies,’ I mean being reasonably certain of your own death approaching within seconds. Seconds. Not minutes, not hours. If there is an alternative to saving yourself that does not expose what you are, then you must choose it, regardless of how difficult it may be. I do not want you transforming at every threat, or because you get into an immature hormonal fight with some adolescent rival of yours. You are only permitted to transform if your very existence is in clear and present danger.”
“What about other people’s lives?” Draco asked, because he couldn’t just save his own hide during an emergency and forget everyone else, especially given that he could probably fly them all out of there.
“Leave them,” Narcissa said grimly, and it shocked Draco, though he could see the sorrow in her eyes as she said it. “Hatchling… You cannot risk yourself, myself, and what remains of the Drakoi line for the lives of a handful of humans.”
“Even beloved humans?” Even Father? Draco did not dare ask.
“Yes,” said Narcissa, after a pause. “Even them.”
Liar, Draco thought accusingly, even as he hoped that his mother was a liar, because the alternative was untenable. Surely she would not leave her mate to die alone, even if they had been separated for years, even if Lucius had been missing, even if Draco had never met him.
“Dragons must make sacrifices for the clan,” Narcissa said quietly, and not without remorse. “We are all but extinct. We cannot lose more of our kin.”
Draco didn’t offer his own opinion, for it would not be welcome; he would risk more. Instead, he allowed his mother to distract him with flying lessons.
They walked to the centre of the Quidditch pitch, where Draco had yet to be permitted to whizz about on his broom, as his mother had wished to teach him flying as a dragon, first, so that he did not acquire any ‘bad habits’ (her phrase, not his) from human flying and seek to apply them to his dragon-flight.
“Your template for flying must be that of a dragon’s,” Narcissa emphasised. “It should lay the foundation for your body’s memory of flight. Human flying is easy, as it is done using the broom as a crutch, but if you become too dependent on that crutch, your learning of dragon-flight will suffer. Hence, we will begin with dragon-flight, and you can learn how to fly with a broom after you have mastered the basic principles of independent flight.”
“Yes, yes,” Draco said impatiently.
“The wind…” Narcissa rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, as if feeling the texture of the breeze. “The wind itself is a substance; it has a weight and a momentum as hefty as that of a ship’s wheel, and only upon mastering that wheel will you be able to fly safely. If you are not the captain of the ship, the master of the waves, then the wheel will spin uncontrollably and carry you with it into death and disaster.”
“Um, what’s a bigger disaster than death?”
Narcissa regarded him solemnly. “Pray that you never find out.”
Well. That was reassuring.
“Off with your clothes, now. And turn around.”
Draco obeyed more swiftly than he’d ever obeyed any command of his mother’s—which was saying something, since Narcissa did not tolerate anything less than efficiency—and when he turned back, he found his mother’s clothing folded neatly on a toadstool enlarged into a makeshift table, and his mother standing there in all her colossal dragon glory, towering over him like a fortress.
Blue. All blue, her scales glinting like sapphires. She bowed her strong, graceful neck until her snout was right in front of him. Her nostrils were huge, each nostril the size of his face.
Then she snorted, a huff of blue-tinged smoke, and Draco stumbled back and fell on his behind. It had been years. Years. Since his hatching, he hadn’t seen—
Draco jumped up, propelling himself off the ground and throwing his arms around her neck, although they didn’t even go halfway around. “Mama,” he whispered, and she went still. He had only ever called Narcissa ‘mother’.
“You have missed me, my hatchling,” she said quietly, the brimstone-and-ash rumble of her voice so longed-for, a memory brought to life. The most precious memory of all.
“Yes.” Draco retreated, wiping at his eyes self-consciously. Sentiment was not to be indulged—not only because it was inappropriate in polite society, but because it was hazardous. Weredragons, like many werecreatures, were more likely to transform spontaneously if powerful feelings were involved. If they were not controlled.
At least, that was what Narcissa had taught him. Except that now, with her neck curving around him like an embrace, she seemed to be indulging in sentiment, too. “Go on, child. Transform. I have removed the magical collar I had placed on you, a collar you must have hated as much as I once hated my own. Show me the form you showed me when you hatched. Show it to me proudly.”
Draco took in a shuddering breath. He withdrew about eight feet to create enough space for what he estimated would be his dragon body, and transformed.
Narcissa did not need to teach him how to do it; it was natural, like taking a breath after being underwater, both sweet and desperate, and he gulped and gulped and gulped. When he opened his eyes after shutting them (when had he shut them?), he found the ground farther beneath him, and his nose flooded by an excess of smells. His eyes were able to see so far and with such crystal clarity that he could see beyond the Malfoy estate into the township beyond. There was a cockerel-shaped weathervane on the steeple of the tallest roof.
Draco blinked. The blink was slower than his human blink, and double-lidded, besides. Like having not one, but two veils lifted from his vision.
Narcissa padded over to him. “You see and hear and smell as a hunter does. You are a predator, Draco. Never forget. You must curb your appetites, or you may endanger others.”
A mouse darted through the grass at the edge of the Quidditch pitch, a streak of brown through the verdant green, and Draco’s eyes flicked to it immediately. His pupils expanded so rapidly that it felt as though his brain were being punched with the sight of that mouse. His stomach grumbled, and he was unexpectedly hungry. Those sandwiches he’d had for lunch mustn’t have been filling enough… Ham sandwich… Cheese sandwich… Mouse sandwich…
“Draco,” warned his mother, and he snapped back to awareness.
“Oh! Um.” Draco coughed, and a bright silver flame erupted from his mouth. He staggered backwards. “Fire!”
“Of course, Draco, you are a dragon. Now, spread your wings.”
His wings gave a weak, infantile flutter. They’d never had practice, after all.
“Harder. With all the force you have in you, or your wings will not lift you off the ground.” Narcissa demonstrated, stretching out her own wings and giving a mighty flap that had her launching upwards, the wind generated by her ascent sending a ripple through the grass around her, like a goddess emerging from the earth.
Draco watched, jaw hanging open, as Narcissa flew through the air around him and then maintained her position, hovering above him. “Try it, Draco!” she called down to him.
And Draco tried. He tried, and tried, and tried, and only fifteen attempts later, panting and miserable, did his relatively smaller body rise up. He felt the rise like butterflies in his belly, a presaging of ecstasy, and abruptly, all his misery was replaced by excitement. He flapped harder, and harder, and there! The ground began to drop away beneath him!
“I’m flying!” he shouted, and this time, he did not shy away from the silver fire that streamed out of his mouth as he whooped. “Mother, look!”
“I am looking,” she answered dryly, but with a measure of pride that had Draco preening. He swooped like she did, whirled and ducked and dipped and rolled, following her every move. Before long, they were soaring together, higher and higher, until the Quidditch pitch disappeared beneath them only to replaced by clouds.
He was flying. He was flying, and the clouds were as shivery-cool and damp as wet cotton, but far more insubstantial. They melted away before the heat of his breath, opening up for him as though he were a hot knife slicing through butter. Not for an instant did they obscure his eyesight. Flight was made for him, and he was made for flight.
This was where he belonged. The scent of ozone and electricity zinged through his nerves like a flush of the most intoxicating power, and though he knew he was only a child, he felt full-grown and just as powerful as his mother in this moment. The sun did not blind his dragon eyes but instead gave everything he saw a blazing purple after-shadow, painting the sky like a canvas both alien and wonderful, a scene out of a dream.
As his mother led him downwards again, circling around the Malfoy estate and spiralling down towards the lake behind the manor, Draco strained to speed up, eager to see his own reflection in the lake. To truly see himself.
And he did.
There, in the glimmering water, he saw a white arrow arcing through the air, and as he dove close enough to skim his talons in the water—what a thrilling splash of coldness against his legs!—he saw what the arrow was.
It was him. He was an alabaster dragon, white all over, with scales so fine that they were scarcely visible, as though he were formed of white silk instead of leather. His talons and his eyes were a burning silver hue that matched the colour of his flames. The ridges on his forehead were regal and pronounced, culminating in a pair of long, tapering, unicorn-like horns, as white as the rest of him, as white as Malfoy Manor’s resident peacocks.
“I’m beautiful,” he said to himself, in shock.
Narcissa laughed. Loud, raucous and joyous, the air around her reverberating like thunder. Draco stared at her, for he had hardly ever heard her laugh as a human, and never like that. “Hatchling,” she said, her words still brimming with breathless laughter, “perhaps I should have named you Narcissus, after all. Though that would have been rather… narcissistic of me.” And she was laughing again.
The sound etched itself into Draco’s mind, which grabbed onto it greedily, as if onto a new addition to a hoard. He had made his mother laugh. Granted, she was laughing at him, but it was still his greatest achievement to date. He was confident that even in the future, when he had a mate and a hatchling of his own, it would remain amongst his greatest achievements.
He was right.
***
It was on Draco’s sixth birthday that he met his father. His human father. Apparently, Lucius had been abroad, although Draco could not imagine leaving a child of his own unvisited for six whole years. When Draco asked about it, Narcissa merely nodded at her impeccably clad spouse and said serenely, “We had a disagreement.” Her eyes sharpened. “But it is now resolved, is it not, dear husband? Given that you promised not to return until it was?”
Lucius still did not look away from his son. He gazed at Draco with wonder, longing, and a peculiar sort of pain that would take Draco more than a decade to recognise as love.
“Wh-what was the disagreement about?” Draco asked his apparent father, still clinging to his mother’s skirt.
“My employer,” Lucius replied. “Narcissa preferred that I work… elsewhere.”
“Employer?” Narcissa sneered. “That monster would have killed Draco and myself for our hearts had he ever discovered us. If you had continued working for him, we wouldn’t ever have been safe.”
“Indeed.” Lucius slumped and addressed Draco again. “That was why I… That’s where I was, all along. I finally managed to engineer an exit from my employer’s organisation.”
Narcissa scoffed. “Engineer an exit? He died due to his own stupidity. What puzzles me is why you have reappeared five years after his death, when you could have done so earlier.”
“His death was not the death of his organisation,” Lucius said sharply. “I had to construct a believable story to render me… compromised in their eyes, not through any failing of my own—as that would have got me killed, and likely you and Draco, too—but due to tragic circumstances.”
A menacing, thorny amusement lightened Narcissa’s expression. “I look forward to learning what ‘tragic circumstances’ you invented, as the wizarding world has been treating you like a missing person for the past half a decade, after his death. Even the Aurors do not know what happened to you… and neither, I must point out, do I.” Narcissa’s tone was as dry as it was cutting.
Lucius grimaced. “The Aurors know as of today. As soon as I escaped from the Death Eaters, I visited the Aurors and testified in exchange for immunity from prosecution. I have come here directly from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. The Death Eaters should be captured and tried within the next twenty-four hours, as the Aurors dare not delay the raid lest the Death Eaters move their current headquarters. Only when they are all rotting in Azkaban can I be assured of your safety, and Draco’s. Until they are incarcerated, I suggest we remain within the manor’s wards.”
Narcissa harrumphed. “So we will be under voluntary house arrest.”
“For no more than a week, yes.” Lucius glanced at Draco, as if unable to stop his eyes from straying to his son. “Come here,” he said roughly, and Draco noted with startlement that his father’s eyelashes were damp. He was on the verge of crying. A grown man! Draco had never even seen his own mother cry. “I am no stranger, son of mine. You are a Malfoy and a Drakoi. You are mine as much as you are your mother’s.”
Draco noticed the distinct lack of the term ‘ours’ in describing his parents’ joint claim on him, but he inched forward nonetheless, hesitant at witnessing such an unseemly display of emotion (his mother had taught him that such displays were unseemly) from a stranger. Lucius might have fathered him, but he was still a stranger.
Lucius sunk to his knees as Draco reached him, and then Lucius simply looked at him, and looked and looked, as though drinking his fill after eons of thirst. Then, slowly, tentatively, Lucius lifted his hand and carefully cupped Draco’s face, ghosting a thumb over his cheekbone and across into Draco’s hair.
“So soft,” Lucius marvelled. “Are you made of gossamer, perchance?”
“He was even softer to the touch as an infant,” Narcissa said, and Lucius’s features clouded over with regret.
“I should have been there. I should have been there, Draco. I’m sorry.”
No excuses. No evasions. It was those simple words—so simple despite coming from such a sophisticated and complicated man—that undid some knot within Draco. Suddenly his arms were around his father’s shoulders, and his father was hugging him back.
This time, Lucius’s tears did flow, dampening Draco’s shirt, and Draco experienced a surge of protectiveness. Draco’s mother clearly did not need protection, but this man did, impoverished as he was despite being dressed like a prince; he was starved for affection, for the sight of his own child. This man, who could not sprout wings and talons at will, who could not breathe fire, who was even weaker as an adult than Draco had been as a hatchling.
Mine, Draco’s dragon-mind whispered in the recesses of his consciousness.
Being claimed by a dragon was not an insignificant event. Dragons weren’t exactly renowned for letting go; they hoarded and they hoarded, and they guarded their hoard viciously. While Draco had already begun accumulating a modest hoard of his own—trinkets, mostly, pretty stones and seashells and strips of shiny, discarded Christmas wrapping paper that surrounded, like a nest, the single, blazing ruby pendant that he had stolen from his mother’s jewellery box—it was only now, upon meeting his father, that Draco realised there was an inner hoard, as well. People that roused in him the same urge to protect. He could not call them a hoard in the typical sense. He could not hide them away in a cave, away from all harm.
But he could rend and rip any that sought to harm them.
When Lucius pulled back from the hug, Draco smiled, his teeth a bit sharper than usual.
Lucius’s eyes widened. “There it is,” he said faintly. “Your mother’s smile.”
Ah. So it must be terrifying.
Draco beamed.
***
When Draco was seven, he accidentally incinerated his mother’s rose garden. Since then, she became very particular about teaching him self-control.
“Weredragons can’t go gallivanting around the world, setting fire to things,” Narcissa scolded him. “It’s undignified. We aren’t the simple beasts most dragons are. Restraint and decorum must triumph over instinct and violence.”
What followed was a series of gruelling years in which Narcissa did her utmost to prepare her fledgling dragon-boy for a world populated by humans that would, upon uncovering the truth, be petrified of him.
Draco secretly relished the idea of scaring the wits out of people, but his mother, ever the mind-reader, subjected him to her icy glare whenever she suspected him of such childishness.
It wasn’t as though Draco didn’t know that weredragons were hunted, and that their organs—especially their flaming, giant hearts—were harvested for potions that granted near-immortality. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know that every aspiring Dark Lord would happily make mincemeat out of him at the first available opportunity. It wasn’t as though Draco didn’t know how important it was to keep his true nature hidden.
It was just… He fantasised about being open about himself, sometimes. He indulged in the occasional daydream of soaring above the spires of Hogwarts, his wings unfurled majestically against the backdrop of a suitably fiery sunset, filling the tiny onlookers beneath him with awe.
Draco dreamt of fighting off evildoers, of being a noble-yet-intimidating creature, of having tales sung about him by the Weird Sisters of the future. (And possibly the present.) He dreamt of fame and power. He dreamt of making men’s knees tremble with fear… or reverence. Or both. Both was good.
Of course, it wasn’t until he was much older that Draco realised he’d also like to make men’s knees tremble with lust, but that was neither here nor there. His chances of finding a mate were infinitesimal, because not only would he have to win the undying love of a wizard powerful enough to survive a mating with a weredragon, but he would have to persuade said wizard to make an Unbreakable Vow to never reveal Draco’s identity.
Narcissa had found Lucius and had extracted the Vow from him under what Draco subtly intuited were less-than-ideal conditions, given the coldness that persisted between his parents. Lucius certainly hadn’t harboured an “undying love” for Narcissa; it was likely some combination of desire and strategy, which Narcissa had manipulated to her gain. She had required a human of sufficient standing and strength to bear a hatchling, and by mating with her, Lucius was guaranteed an heir of great magical aptitude.
It was an arrangement. It worked.
Draco could not imagine nesting with a spouse so cool towards him. Beneath Draco’s moon-pale skin burned an ever-present craving for his other half, a half he was convinced existed within reach. For him, undying love was a necessity. It wasn’t an option.
His mother chastised him for his foolishness. So Draco learned to hide it, as he’d learned to hide so much.
At any rate, by the time Draco’s invitation to Hogwarts arrived, Draco was an accomplished liar, in control of his animal side and capable of concealing it even under the most trying conditions.
Naturally, conditions became trying very quickly. Reality had a way of rising to meet one’s expectations.
