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Blaine hates to remain too long in one place.
He despises the monotony of the routine that inevitably comes with living in a specific house in the middle of a specific small town and always seeing the same people while going back and forth from it. He has never considered it romantic. Average behavior is dull at best. And he's not dull, nor he's average fort hat matter, thank you very much.
When he was younger, he promised himself he would never settle and that he would live his life for himself alone, doing only what he wanted exactly when he wanted to. And yet, for some reason, he managed to get stuck with not one, but two kids who want to play home with him, three dragons and a tent so big that looks dangerously too much like a home. Now every time he puts down the tent, he needs to remain in the same place for at least two or three weeks because he can't spend hours setting it just to pick everything up and leave the next day.
Besides, male dragons are territorial, which means that every time you stop somewhere, they make that their territory. And every time you want to leave, you have to convince them to abdicate. Not a funny thing to do, definitely.
The only good thing is the money. They usually stop by towns that have a dragon problem and solve it. Sometimes wild dragons don't stay in their lane and they hunt farm animals instead of deer or mountain lions. People tend to get upset by that, especially because hunting for a dragon involves a lot of fire, which spreads easily to houses made of wood and straw. Blaine and his boys come in with their three domesticated dragons – which bring an equal amount of puzzlement, fear and awe – kill the mean dragon and then stay for a while to patrol the area; officially to make sure there are no other specimens around, unofficially to make good use of the tent mentioned above.
And they get paid for all that, handsomely.
But Blaine didn't become a dragon hunter to patrol the perimeter of godforsaken small villages in the middle of nowhere, did he? Dragons destroyed his city, killed the people he loved, reduced his entire country to cinder, and he wanted them dead. He trained to take them down, to cut them open and steal their fire, to leave nothing but carcasses. He lives for the hunt, he hates the fucking beasts – his own excluded – and he wants action, not this retirement gig.
“You're sulking,” Leo chuckles, flying by on Shoneah. The dragon shines golden under the sun. He
grew even bigger in the past few months. He's still nowhere near Eamon, who's massive, but he's starting to become a small unit on his own.
“I don't sulk, kid,” Blaine says, trying to school his face not to show that he is indeed sulking.
“Are you bored?” Leo chuckles again. He has no problem patrolling. In fact, it might be his dream job. Riding his dragon is one of his favorite things to do. He's got so good at it, that he started doing acrobatic stances. He can fly standing up now. Or upside down. He's teaching Shoneah how to toss him and retrieve him. They are rapidly becoming a circus act and patrolling gives them the opportunity to train.
“I'm not—Can you stop spiraling around? You're getting on my nerves!”
Leo sighs and he brings Shoneah to fly next to Eamon. “Can I come over?”
Blaine should say no and hope he'll be left to his brooding, but the truth is that at this point he has grown quite fond of both Leo and Cody, and unless he's angry with them because they're acting like toddlers, he can't easily pass the chance to be close to them. He won't be caught dead admitting it, though. So he nods, showing just some mild interest.
Leo simply pats his dragon's neck and then he steps onto Blaine's as if they weren't hundreds of feet above ground. Shoneah simply veers and then zooms forward, hunting for tiny birds.
“One of these days, you're going to fall,” Blaine comments, annoyed but admittedly also a little in awe. This kid would hardly know how to ride a horse when he met him. Now he can single-handedly incapacitate an adult beast with a couple of arrows while he strolls on the back of his dragon mid-flight.
“And he's going to catch me,” Leo says, wrapping his arms around Blaine's waist. “That's what we're training for anyway. It will be incredibly useful when we go hunting. Also, I'm learning how to hold on to him with just my legs, but I'm not quite there yet.”
“You've got time, then, since apparently we're never going to hunt again,” Blaine snorts.
“Uh, someone's moody,” Leo chuckles. “Do you feel like it's time for us to go?”
“It was time to go two weeks ago, but your smaller counterpart decided to get the fever,” Blaine frowns as they fly over a lake. Shoneah is having fun spiraling down at an incredible speed, diving into the water and coming out from the other end while holding a month worth of fish in his mouth. Medhi, on the other hand, is sniffing every single tree-top as if they were flowers. Cody is chuckling on his back. Sometimes those two make Blaine wonder.
“I've told you he's a liability,” Leo nods, knowingly. “We should leave him here. He's got everything he needs. He'll be happy.”
Blaine rolls his eyes. “Boy, please. You were ball-deep in him less than ten hours ago. Don't try and convince me you don't want him around.”
“What does it have to do with anything? I fuck him not to kill him, that doesn't mean I like him.”
“Yeah, right, as if—” Blaine is about to say that for two people who have mutual murdering feelings with each other, Leo and Cody spend a great deal of time with their cock in each other's mouth, and that's a great show of trust. But Shoneah comes suddenly out of the lake like a missile, spitting fire and crashing into Medhi's trajectory, sending him spinning out of control. “What the fuck...?”
“Shoneah! Be careful!” Leo screams at him, “You know your brother can barely fly!”
As a response, the dragon turns around and flies directly towards them, only to avoid them at the last second, growling in their faces.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?” Blaine asks.
“I don't know,” Leo frowns, worriedly as he starts crouching. “Get me to him.”
It's not an easy task because Shoneah keeps moving at double the speed he normally would, growling and hissing. “Leo, I don't think this is a good idea,” he says as he gets closer. “He looks angry.”
“Just get closer!”
Blaine pushes Eamon forward, even though the dragon doesn't seem happy to approach his brother. But as soon as they are within reaching distance, Shoneah turns his huge head and spits fire at them. It's only thanks to Blaine's reflexes that they don't get roasted on the spot. “Fuck! What the hell?”
“What is going on?!” Cody reaches them, Medhi whining underneath him. He's usually very sensible to the changes around him, exactly like Cody, but unlike his rider, he has no ability to adapt to them, and he's often scared if he feels the other two dragons are either angry or scared.
Leo frowns as he keeps staring at Shoneah, who snarls and growls and occasionally spits fires a little too close to them or the the tree tops. “That's not Shoneah. He's never been aggressive. Something's wrong.”
“Maybe he's just wrong in the head,” Cody comments. “He is your dragon after all.”
“Is that why your dragon is retarded?” Leo replies.
“Oh, you didn't—”
“Shut up! Both of you!” Blaine snaps. “He's flying away!”
“Shoneah!” Leo calls him, “Come here, boy!”
For a moment it seems like the dragon is obeying. The beast circles back to them quickly, but then he lets out a mighty growl in Leo's face, a clear warning to stay away. Leo has never seen his bared fangs so close, except for when Shoneah yawned in his face, and there was no danger in that. “Shoneah...” he murmurs, confused. “What's going on?”
Blaine's got no time to wonder what's going on inside the lizard brain of a giant lizard, because the beast is moving back towards the village, unsupervised and clearly out of control. “It's going back!” He says, sending Eamon after him. Something is not right and at the same time it is extremely familiar, which is a combination he would never want to experience.
“Shoneah!” Leo calls him again. “Shit! Do you think he got offended because I'm riding with you? He can be sensitive sometimes.”
“Given that it is your dragon, I wouldn't put it past him,” Blaine groans. “But it seems worse than that. Look at him. He's bumping into trees.”
They go after Shoneah all the way back to the village. Even if the dragon weren't so perfectly on their line of sight, it wouldn't be a problem to follow the line of fallen trees. It seems like he doesn't know where he's going or that he's very upset with the local woods.
Things don't get any better when he reaches the village.
He's flying too low, and the moment he gets to the first houses, the wind generated by his wings flapping sends shingles to fly too. Market stalls are overthrown. Small dogs are suddenly airborne. It's chaos. Kids are pushed inside the houses while said houses get uncovered. Soldiers come running while people start screaming, and over it all the sound of the anti-aircraft siren blaring – an item, this one, left from the war, and for a reason, that's now being used with enthusiasm by someone who knows nothing about dragons and had clearly been waiting for this very moment all his life.
One thing people always forget – although it's understandable to forget such a thing when a two-tons beast is coming after you – is that dragons are extremely sensible to sound. They are, in fact, extremely sensible to basically anything, but sounds can really set them off. It has to do with them not having ears and with sound emitting vibrations. Certain noises get to their head and make them mad. That's the reason why most of anti-dragon devices do not rely on sound, because if you want to keep a dragon away from your home, you don't want to make him mad and murderous with an alarm.
That is also why anti-craft sirens were dismissed very early on during the war, because it was clear that they had the opposite effect. Instead of keeping the dragons away, they would rile them up. After the first few cities were razed to the ground by a thunder of dragons, visuals deterrents were started to be used. As fun as it sounds, giant scarecrows are what works.
“Cody, get on the ground and have them turn the fucking alarm off!” Blaine orders. “And take everyone inside the church. It will be useful for once.”
As Medhi lands in the square, the only place that's big enough for him to do that, Leo hears the unmistakable sound of fire building. “Oh no,” he says, searching for his dragon with his eyes.
“What?”
“He's about to fire.”
“Fuck!”
Dragons generate fire through a gland in their neck, which is cold by default and gets progressively warmer in seconds through a chemical process that they trigger voluntarily whenever they need to. And the telltale sign of that happening is a low buzzing. It's almost undetectable by the untrained ear, but dragons hunter needs to recognize it. And Leo knows especially well the sound Shoneah makes whenever he's seconds away from firing out because he's been almost burned more than once.
The first flame is short, but intense enough to singe the roofs. Then, Shoneah circles around and as he flies over the village, low enough that the villagers no doubt can see his eyes are blue, he sets fire to everything. The place goes up in flames so quickly that they don't have time to do anything. Looking at the scene from Eamon's back, it looks like a giant matchstick. One second there are houses, a market, a park. The next is all flames.
Having destroyed everything, Shoneah seems satisfied and with one last growl, he flies away.
“This is some fucking bad publicity,” Blaine hisses, while below them people are shouting, and fretting to put out the fire.
“Blaine, we need to help these people!” Cody joins them with an alarmed Medhi. “The village is almost gone.”
“It's not a great loss. What do they do? Grow sugar beets?”
“Blaine!” Cody calls him in shock.
“Fine! Let's save the shithole,” he rolls his eyes. “Let's bring water from the lake.”
“What about Shoneah?” Leo asks.
“Let him be, for the moment. Later we're gonna find out what the fuck is wrong with him.”
*
It takes them four trips from the lake – the dragons bringing water into their mouths and spraying it over the burning buildings – to put out the fire. It takes Blaine a lot more to convince the head of the village that this was not all a complicated stunt to scam him of more money.
By the time Blaine gets back to the tent where Leo and Cody are waiting for him, he's exhausted, furious and quite comprehensibly fed up with the place, the job and, partially, with the kind of life he's living right now. “That asshole!” He says, kicking off his shoes and dropping on the pile of mattresses and pillows that is their nest. “He demands that we pay for all the damage.”
“Well, Shoneah did destroy half the village,” Cody murmurs, hesitantly.
“So? He's a dragon, not a gerbil,” Blaine replies. “Or are we forgetting that he's a wild animal? There's always the chance that they do something like this. In fact, statistically speaking, it's already a miracle one of them hasn't eaten one of us yet.”
“You know it's not the same thing,” Cody continues, trying to be reasonable. “They are dragons, but they are our dragons. They are almost domesticated. We've got a responsibility. We brought them here.”
“Correction. We brought them here to help them with another dragon, which we did. I don't know what's gotten into that thick head, but this is an occupational hazard. Sometimes damages happen.”
“That was not Shoneah,” Leo speaks for the first time since they came back to the tent. “He's a good dragon. He's well behaved and very friendly. He would never hurt anyone.”
“Tell that to the burned people out there.”
“I'm telling you, something is wrong with him and we should try and understand what it is!”
“That is a problem for tomorrow,” Blaine says. “Now I just want to sleep.”
“We don't even know where he is right now, Blaine!” Leo stands up, in half a panic. “We can't wait! By tomorrow he could be half the world from here! We will lose him!”
Blaine looks at him with annoyance. If there's something he can't stand is when Leo becomes too emotional, which happens a awful lot more than he would like. Even worse when it's clear that he doesn't trust Blaine. Blaine hates that with a passion. “He's nesting on the mountains,” he snarls. “Eamon and I checked on him before we called it a night. He looked restless and unsettled, but he was tucked in for the night. He won't go anywhere. The fact that he remained nearby means that, no matter whatever his brain is telling him, he still feels part of the pack.”
Leo looks at him pouting a little. “Thank you,” he mutters, aggressively.
“You're welcome,” is Blaine's equally aggressive response. “Now, lie the fuck down and sleep. We're dealing with this tomorrow.”
*
The next day they go to see Shoneah as planned very early in the morning. Partially because they don't want to miss him in case he decides he's done with the pack, but mostly because Blaine wants to avoid the head of the village. So, they leave for the mountains at dawn.
Luckily, Shoneah is still there, curled around himself. He looks like a giant cat, with his barbed tail covering his eyes. Blaine didn't lie, he really did nest, literally. He made a proper bed for himself, using rocks as if he planned to stay there for a long time.
“I'm going to talk to him,” Leo declares, preparing himself to get off Eamon's back.
“I don't know, kiddo,” Blaine seems hesitant. “He doesn't look in the mood. Let me handle this.”
“He's my dragon,” Leo insists. “I wanna do it.”
Blaine doesn't have much to protest about that. He's worried and he feels responsible for the kids – against his will, but still – but he's proud of Leo for wanting to fix the problem firsthand. “Fine, but be careful. He's not himself, so don't interact as you would normally do with him.”
Leo nods as he steps onto the rock. Shoneah stirs, but he doesn't unwrap himself. Leo walks slowly, giving him time to read him and recognize him. You don't want to sneak upon a sleeping dragon ever, let alone when he seems already angry for whatever reason.
“Sho, it's me,” he calls gently. “Leo, remember?”
Shoneah raises his huge head and huffs, irritated. His eyes are a bit clouded and he doesn't look pleased. He seems to consider the tiny human a few feet away from him and decide he doesn't like him very much. He growls.
“I'm not going to hurt you,” Leo goes on as he moves around him. He's looking for wounds that might have made the dragon crazy with pain, but he can't see any. “I just want to know what's wrong, boy.”
Shoneah growls louder, his teeth fully visible now.
This is a very weird sight. Since he was a baby dragon, Shoneah has always been the easy-going one between the three.
Eamon is the alpha, so he's never silly, never goofy. He's got a good character, but he's really stern and serious. You can be around him, but you can't really play with him because he takes his role of head of the pack very seriously, so his main focus is always the protection of all the members of the group. He doesn't get distracted. And he only gets orders from Blaine, who's the only creature that he perceives above himself.
Medhi is precious. He's a careful dragon, who does things with the utmost care. He's a dragon with the soul of a much smaller, more delicate being. He plays around, but like a bunny would. He's not aggressive in the slightest and he gets scared very easily. He's cute, but he's no fun – unless you're Cody, who can spend hours just hanging in a meadow smelling flowers with him.
Shoneah is the most outgoing. He's strong and he's playful and he loves to interact with humans. He was the first one among the three of them to understand human speech. He can't talk, obviously, but he understands and he responds in his own way. Leo can have entire conversations with him at times. And not once since he came out of his egg, he has ever shown his teeth to Leo for whatever reason. The two of them used to wrestle for fun when Shoneah was still an acceptable size to do that.
Shoneah is not an aggressive dragon, not with Leo. Not with his humans. And seeing him like that is painful.
That's why Leo gets distracted. He's too saddened by the way Shoneah is reacting to really pay attention to the sign. A part of him wants to believe that this is not really happening, that Shoneah won't hurt him. But his head snaps forward, and if Leo doesn't lose an arm or a leg is only because Blaine is there to pull him away from the rock.
“Leo! For fuck's sake, I told you!” Blaine helps him sit back behind himself on Eamon as they fly away.
“No! Wait! Go back!” Leo turns to see Shoneah firing at them as a warning. “Go back! We need to help him!”
Blaine doesn't answer to that.
*
The mood of the village has changed drastically after Shoneah's attack.
Cody can't say it was his favorite place on Earth before, but he certainly liked it better than he does now. People are glaring at him in the streets, and that's despite the fact that he is the only one of the three of them that's helping them. They don't trust him anymore, as if it had been his dragon to do all the damage. He can't blame them really, but it's annoying. And it's also unfair that he was left here to tend to the wounded and to help rebuild while Blaine and Leo went to check on Shoneah.
Someone had to stay though, so here he is.
Shoneah fired on the village just once, setting fire to a few houses on the main street, which means that the rest of the damage – the biggest part – the fire did on its own. Not that this changes anything. They are still responsible for the loss of seven buildings, among which there was the granary. There's gonna be a steep price to pay, if Blaine will stick around long enough for that. At least there are no dead.
As he walks back to their tent to make lunch, he passes by a group of kids that are struggling to convince their small dog to go back inside. Cody has played with them several times in the past week. He met them because of the puppy, who had wondered in their enclosure one day and made friends with Medhi. It was a silly day, with the dog playing fetch with Medhi, Shoneah trying to participate to the game but being too big for that, and Eamon watching them with a look of patience on his stern face.
“Is everything alright?” Cody asks.
One of the kids, Robin, looks at him hesitantly. His parents must have told him he's a bad person now, but it's hard to look at Cody and think that. “It's the dog,” he says. “He doesn't obey anymore.”
Cody looks at the pup, that's growling and backing off. “Maybe he's just scared,” he offers. “It's been a scary day for everybody. Leave him be, he'll come around.”
The kids takes a few steps back. The dog snorts one more time, and then he walks back to his kennel, where he gets down and starts munching on fish head.
“See? Just give him time.”
Cody smiles at them, but the kids don't smile back. He sighs, trying to embrace the fact that he's a villain now. It's not a good feeling, nor one he has ever looked for. Evil is not a good look on him.
As he gets closer to the tent, he hears raised voices. Leo seems really upset – it's not his usual whining – and Blaine sounds incredibly more reasonable and patient than he usually is with him. This must be serious.
“You can't be serious!” Leo screams. “Do you even listen to yourself?!”
“Leo, I understand you're upset. I don't like the idea more than you do, believe me, but there are no other options.”
“You don't want to look for them!”
“We tried!” Blaine insists, sighing.
“We went to him once! Once, Blaine! And that's it? We could wait longer, maybe it's just a phase! It's been less than forty-eight hours and you're already giving up! What if it was one of us?”
“Don't be stupid, now! That would be different!”
“How?!” Leo screams. “Shoneah is part of the family too!”
“Yeah, but he's not human!”
Cody enters the tent carefully, lest one of the two throws something or scream in his face. They're standing one in front of the other next to the fire pit. Leo is extremely agitated. “Hi,” he waves a little. “It didn't... work, I assume.”
Blaine sighs, shaking his head. “No. He's still aggressive and extremely territorial,” Blaine explains. “And he didn't recognize Leo, which is a bad sign.”
“He did recognize me!” Leo protests. “He just didn't want me around.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it's not!”
Blaine sits down on the bed and reaches out for him. “Listen, kiddo, either he recognized you or not, the reaction he had towards you was not good. It is your dragon, you raised him, he's not supposed to assault you the way he did.”
“That's why we need to keep trying. He's clearly not himself!” Leo backs away from him. “We should help him, not kill him!”
“What? Cody says in shock.
“He wants to kill him!” Leo repeats towards Cody. “That is his solution!”
“I don't want to, but I see no other options,” Blaine says calmly. “Right now, he's out of control and that makes him dangerous. We tried approaching him and he almost torn Leo's head off. We can't just leave him be like that. He could attack again.”
“How can you say that!?” Leo screeches.
“Sometimes these things happen, Leo. He's an animal, and not one of the most reasonable at that,” Blaine goes on. “Who knows what went off in his head? Dragons are not supposed to be pets, they're wild beasts. They're supposed to be aggressive predators. Maybe this is him turning to his true nature. Maybe this is what he should have been since the beginning. And we need to deal with it. He's not a dog who suddenly started biting and could just be given a muzzle.”
“Wait a second. What did you just say?” Cody asks.
“I mean that we can't keep him the way he is right now,” Blaine explains.
“No, the dog. What did you say about the dog?”
Blaine frowns, confused. “It was a simile. A dog that becomes aggressive, could be kept on a leash or muzzled. You can't do that to a dragon. He needs to be put down before he kills someone.”
“The dog...” Cody muses.
“It's really not that important. It was just a way to explain—”
“Shh,” Cody shushes him, which makes Blaine frown. “What was he doing when he went crazy?”
“Playing,” Leo says. “At the lake. He was diving and fishing.”
“Did he eat something?”
“I don't know. Probably. A fish, maybe,” Leo frowns confused. “Why?”
Cody doesn't answer to that. He throws himself out of the tent running, forcing them to follow him. He gets back to the house where he met the kids. The dog is still there where he left him. He growls at him, but Cody is so driven that he doesn't care. He approaches him with such determination that is the dog that moves away, leaving his meal there.
“Who gave him this?” Cody asks the kids, showing them the fish head.
Robin shrugs. “He's always stealing scraps at the market,” he says. “Maybe he got it himself from the fishermen there.”
Cody turns around and he starts running again, bringing the fish head with him. “Cody, what's going on?” Leo asks.
“I have an idea,” Cody says. “Could be nothing.”
They follow him to the market, or at least what's left of it after Shoneah's fire games. The few remaining stalls are now forming a tiny circle in a secondary square at the very edge of the village. The fisherman is cleaning a giant squid when Cody drops the fish head on his counter. “What is this?”
The man looks up and makes a face either at them or the fish, it's not clear. “Hard to say from what's left of it,” he answers. “But if I had to guess, I'd say it's a silver-striped spine eel. It's a local lake fish.”
“Is it poisonous?”
“No,” the man shakes his head. “A lot of our traditional food is eel-based.”
“Oh,” Cody seems disappointed. Leo and Blaine don't know why, but they are too because he is.
“But you need to know how to cook it,” the man goes on. “It needs to be cleaned properly and then processed for the right amount of time, following a very specific recipe, before it can be eaten. Otherwise the toxins get to your head.”
“Toxins? So it is poisonous!”
“It won't kill you, but it'll make you see things,” the man explains. “Some people seek that kind of thrill, but it's not healthy if you ask me.”
“Are animals affected too?”
The fisherman throws the squid in a basket and he grabs another to clean. “Oh sure, squids use the eels to get high.”
“What?” Leo frowns. “Animals do that?”
“Animals are weird, man.”
“What's the antidote?” Cody asks again. “For the toxins, I mean.”
The fisherman shrugs. “They usually wear off on their own in a couple of days,” he says. “But milk helps. Milk and a drop of honey. That's what my grandma gave my grandpa when he was eel-stoned. Not that the bastard deserved to be saved by the monsters he saw when he hallucinated. I would have left him to shit himself screaming. But my grandma was an angel—”
“Yes, it's all very interesting,” Cody cuts him off. “But we have to go. Thank you for the information.”
The fisherman seems annoyed by the interruption, and he suddenly remembers who they are. “Do you plan on repaying all the damage your dragon made to this place?”
“We are trying to prevent him from doing some more,” Cody says, not answering the question at all. Then, the three of them hurry to leave, lest the rest of the market corners them, asking for compensation.
“We're gonna need some milk,” Leo reasons.
“Gallons of it,” Blaine snorts.
“And a way to give it to him,” Cody goes on.
It's not an easy task. Shoneah destroyed a great deal of provisions and the villagers are not keen to give up what little milk they still have. So, they're forced to fly around the whole region, collecting milk in several barrels, all the while hoping that Shoneah won't leave his nest and go causing more panic somewhere else. It takes them the whole day, but at sunset they have collected a pool worth of milk, which they leave near Shoneah, who doesn't forget to growl and hiss at them.
For more than an hour they wait for him to be even mildly interested in their offer.
They're about to give up – or at least they're about to brace for the fact that they will have to wait for the toxins to wear off and, possibly, they will have to defend the village from Shoneah again until then – when the dragon sniffs the milk. He frowns puzzled, and then he licks it.
They can see on his muzzle the exact moment when milk makes his brain explode and his body instinctively recognizes it as a good thing for him. Besides, it's sweet which is always a bonus.
As he starts lapping at it, eagerly, Blaine, Leo and Cody let out the breath they were collectively holding.
“He's gonna be alright,” Cody smiles, bumping his shoulder against Leo's.
Leo smiles back at him. “Thank you,” he murmurs.
Blaine watches them both, and the stoned dragon too, and once again he wonders how the hell his life did get to this. He was cool once, was he not? He sighs, “Once he's back to normal, we're packing and leaving,” he declares.
“What about the damages?”
“That seems like someone else's problem,” he says, climbing on Eamon. “But if you want, you can stay and fix everything while I go sunbathing on the beach.”
Leo doesn't care and Cody could protest, but he doesn't want to be left here, so they both stay quiet.
A little holiday, after all, seems like a very good idea.