Chapter Text
Young dragons are born with soft scales. Thin and flexible, able to withstand rough-housing, able to bend without breaking. Baby scales required less care, would sooner regrow than shed. They didn’t harden into the armor of legend until adulthood, around 16 or 17. Only then could they withstand scrapes and bumps and blaster fire.
(Benten had been shot in the back of the head, no scales present to deflect.)
Young scales still bruised though. Still dented and buckled when grabbed with a strong enough hand. Still scraped and tore under sharp claws.
Hyperion City was far from the worst place to be a dragon. The Outer Rim was far more distrusting of their draconic citizens, and Earth was still mired in old tradition and fairytales. But the domes of Mars weren’t conducive to any winged creature, and even armor of scales had chinks for radiation to seep through. Hyperion was safe enough, certainly, but it was no place for flight. It was enough to drive any dragon mad.
Juno had theorized as to whether or not Sarah Steel had ever gotten to truly fly. They all knew how- the gentle gliding from rooftop to rooftop, the narrow squeezes between buildings so close you could hardly move your wings. Never fully shifting, there wasn’t space enough for that. There was just a little room between the rooftops and the dome, barely a sky to speak of. Was it the torment of a life lived trapped on the ground, wings dragging behind you? Or had Sarah had a chance to fly before, to see a real sky and taste it for herself, and it was losing that sky that had truly broken her down?
When Jet found him, Juno was more than halfway to fully shifting. The radiation beating down had triggered the defense mechanisms his body still allowed him, pulling scales to the tops of his shoulders and following the length of his spine. Most of his face had been swarmed as well, but there was only so much of it that could be covered before it pulled into a snout. A weight alongside his temples suggested that his horns had been brought along with the shift, and a similar tugging revealed that his tail and wings were just as desperate to join them. But it wouldn’t do to give the sun any more skin to scorch, scale-protected or not.
Juno met Jet with his claws on display, human hands long gone in favor of sharp points and broad scaled joints. There was no real threat in them to Jet, not with the way he looked at Juno with a blank expression that with more experience could be described as concern. But the detective kept his hands far away from himself, stretched between the lady and the stranger with the motorbike.
“It is just as dangerous for your kind to be out here without shielding than it is for mine,” he said, offering a hand to help Juno to his feet. “I unfortunately do not have a helmet capable of fitting over your horns, so I will be driving slower. As such, we will have to leave quickly to ensure that we are not late.”
There were more dragons in the Cerberus Province than Juno had seen in one place at one time- more even than he’d ever seen at all. That didn’t make hiding Juno any easier or any less of a priority. They’d even had to wait just outside the providence while Juno regained control of his shifting enough that he could pull a hood over his head without his horns getting in the way.
It wasn’t even a relief to see more of his kind here, really. There were always traits a dragon couldn’t shift away, physical quirks that made feigning humanity impossible, that let them be picked out of a crowd. Juno had his eyes--as gold as his scales, sometimes slitted when his anger got the best of him--as well as the trail of scales that ran down the back of his spine.
(He wondered if it was the flash of slitted, reptilian eyes that made Peter Nureyev find his rage so attractive.)
Benten’s shoulders had been sprinkled with vibrant ruby red scales, the tips of his horns poking out through corkscrew curls. Sarah’s eyes had been the same as Juno’s, her horns a slightly taller mirror to Ben’s. In Juno’s memory, her hands were also constantly warped with blood red scales and talons, her eyes perpetually slitted in anger.
Most of the dragons in the Cerberus Province looked more draconic even when shifted than any of the Steels had ever been. The full, whorling length of horns, entire limbs encased in scales, even a monstrous length of a tail dragging through the dirt. Worse still, every feature was just as rife as radiation damage, same as every swathe of skin was burnt with it. Horns were pitted and misshapen; scales warped as if half-melted, blackened with toxic soot. Even full wings hung limp from hunched shoulders, their membranes shredded and decayed. It all seemed too much for a dragon’s more humanoid form. Juno’s eyes and scales were hidden by a hood and a downturned gaze, but these patches of scales were all-encompassing, wings and tails too big for the bodies they were saddled upon.
But more than the warped burnt flesh, this was what terrified Juno. The idea that the scales his instincts summoned were just as susceptible to the damage the sun beat down. Even worse, that their damage made them harder to hide, would drag him down perhaps more than burnt skin. Juno felt stuck in place, eyes fixed on red scales that crinkled and charred like old paper. Like this, they were almost indistinguishable from the red and black of open sores, but the perversion of the scales he’d always thought of as armor was somehow worse.
(Would that have been him if Jet had left him in the desert? Just a burned and mangled monstrosity, dust and sand filling in the gaps in his corroded corpse?)
Buddy Aurinko was possibly the first dragon Juno had met that made both a handsome woman and dragon. One horn curled back from her uncovered temple, arching back over carefully styled red curls and flicking up in a point just behind her. Copper scales crept out from under her hairline and from the sliver of skin that peeked out under the cautious wave that obscured the other half of her face. The one eye she had showing was a deep brown- remarkably human.
“Close your mouth, dear, it isn’t wise to give the radiation easier access to your lungs.” The fingernails she was drumming on the countertop were more akin to claws.
What Juno managed to stammer in response was “Your eyeshadow matches your scales.” Buddy let out a laugh, sliding a glass across the counter to him.
“Not all of our scales match our eyes, so some of us can get away with it.” Juno raised a hand, scrubbing it down the side of his face to find any loose scales he hadn’t yet shifted away. Buddy laughed again, taking a sip of her own drink, as coppery as her hair.
There was something disarming about the way she clicked her claws against the glass, the prideful challenge in her eyes that flashed whenever Juno’s eyes lingered on her horn or scales.
“That cybernetic isn’t half as disarming as your real eye,” Buddy continued, no longer looking at him. “Like a dead woman’s eye.” She took another slow sip. “And yet you’re so set on keeping Jet and I at an angle where it’s the only eye we see.” Juno spluttered.
“I am not,” he spat, jostling his drink as he did. Buddy snorted.
“You’re not the first dragon I’ve met who’s ashamed. Though very few of those I’ve met were raised by our kind. I won’t-” she continued, raising her voice over Juno’s complaints. “-ask you to explain. It’s just something that I noticed when I looked into hiring you. I’ve been called a bit of a- bleeding heart, we’ll say, when it comes to those like us.”
Juno’s mind flipped back to Sarah Steel, paranoid as she was. Always hasty to pull Ben’s hood over his horns, telling Juno to keep his eyes down. Protective, Ben called her. That it was the same instinct that drove Juno to snap when Ben touched his stuff that made Sarah snap and growl. It wasn’t a comparison Juno liked, not when it was their mother’s claws more often than not that dented their scales. Not when it was second nature to summon them to their wrists and arms just to keep her from breaking skin, just as it was to pretend to sleep when she came home late. Sometimes she would snap at them when she caught them with wings and tails out, stretching them under the cover of blankets in the night just to relieve some of the tension. Other times she would ask why they kept them tucked back, demanding to know why they were ashamed.
“Little monsters,” she had said proudly, helping peel away their first shed. “Look at my little dragonlings.” And then, barely a week later, those same fingers would stab into still raw scales, hot as fire.
“Ashamed” was one thing. But looking in the mirror and meeting eyes that made a perfect mirror of Sarah Steel’s was another. Knowing it would take less than a second to let them slip into the slits that still lurked just out of sight, those draconic eyes that he still saw in his sleep. It had almost been a relief to lose one, knowing that his gaze would never be the same as hers again.
But the eyes didn’t mean anything. Those were just a reminder of what lurked out of sight. The seizing, clawing, grasping urge to grab something and not let go. The streak that Benten would call “protective” that made Juno want to dig his claws and heels in. A greedy, selfish instinct that Sarah had passed on along with the fire in her chest and the scales on her shoulders.
“So you dragged me out here to lecture me on lizard self love, then?” Juno snapped, focusing on his drink and giving up the pretense of hiding his one gold eye. With as long as it had been since he’d slept, it was hard to tell if it was flashing.
“Oh no. I want to offer you a job.”