Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The boy reached back, trying to feel the skin beneath the loose folds of his shirt. He fingered the knobs gingerly, trying to feel for the texture, though his elbow was high in the air and wavering awkwardly as he did. Of course the place was right between his shoulder blades, the hardest place to reach.

There. He stopped. Lightly he felt again. Yes, there. Scaly, beyond doubt.

He touched the rough patch a moment longer before pulling his hand up and out, right to his hair just above his forehead. His brow furrowed in focus as he rubbed with both his hands, finally focusing in from general feeling to making small circles above his temples. He wasn’t sure, but possibly there were little raised symmetrical bits. Maybe.

“Kai,” said a quiet voice behind him.

He turned. There was really no explanation for how those increasingly clawlike feet made no sound on the sandy earth, but there you were, you could never hear Jay coming. Kai pulled his hands down quickly, a little guilty without reason.

“It’ll happen faster than you want,” Jay said. His bright blue eyes that seemed to always focus too much on you matched the scales on his face that slowly but surely had been overtaking his freckles lately. “Is it bothering you?”

“No,” Kai sighed, “I’m just impatient, you know that already. And it won’t happen too fast. We want to get home, don’t we?”

The desert silence slid by, calm and cool in the predawn mist.

“Right,” Jay answered at length, steady and sad.

Kai sighed, hanging his head dramatically and causing his unkempt, long-grown hair to flop over his dark brown eyes. “Please, lighten up,” he groaned. “You can fly. You can fly. And we’re going home as soon as we all change. Life’s not all bad.”

Jay still looked distant, but then he turned his gaze to meet Kai abruptly. “Thank you,” he said. “I know.”

He turned, the horned bottom tips of his wide blue and yellow wings scuffing the sand in two neat lines as he went. Kai watched him go and sighed, sitting down dejected on a scrap of battered wood.

Behind him loomed shadowy the bulk of a ruined half ship; beside him were scattered remnants and fragments of boards and sharp metal and glass all beginning to sift down in the soft sand; beyond that was only the haze of the horizon, the monochrome landscape, the vague suggestion of the steep upward-jutting rock pillars that were now filmed in lavender mist.

He was on the outside of camp; the others were all on the other side of the ship’s hull in a slightly protected area where they had built it up. Usually he was never one to slip away by himself, but lately… lately he’d been feeling like a bit of an outsider. It was more lonely to be with them, sometimes, than to be by himself. Not one of them as they changed and he didn’t. Not left out, more as if they weren’t themselves and he was the only one left.

“Maybe that’s what ‘claim’ meant,” he mumbled, mulling again for the hundredth time the words of the dragon to the child. It will bring you home but change you, free you as it claims you. The boy’s white-gold eyes had snapped as he stood, facing them only partly, telling them from what their point of view sounded like only a deep deep putting resonance coming quiet from the thick-scaled red throat. Are you afraid?

Cole had said “Heck, no” and now Kai could scarcely recognize him as the same soul. Zane had solemnly, almost reverently, shaken his head and he too was more knob and scale than anything. Kai had said boldly, “I’m not afraid,” and though not fast enough, he felt, it was happening to him.

Jay had hesitated and looking at him you knew how his heart felt. He wasn’t afraid of changing, he wanted home as much as everyone else. It was the permanence that he didn’t like.

That was then, five days ago, and now he was resigned. And very, very different.

Though they all were. Before you had four boys, ‘older teenagers’ they classed themselves, rather an average group. Tall and wiry, looking strong but somewhat hollow from being stranded and starved for so long, with bright eyes nonetheless and capable, scarred hands. Now there was only one that still matched that description, and even Kai wasn’t entirely normal-looking by now. Oddly strained, stretched-looking humps in his back and hands starting to subtly change shape, his skin gaining a burnished red hue in slow shades; nothing striking as yet but it was starting.

Then Jay. Similar, only with blue and yellow, at first, and now he was decidedly half dragon. His feet had flattened and elongated, starting to look more like rough, knobby talons in some infantile state. His hair was parted differently now, tucked around and behind the thick, hard horns curving up and back, and alongside each horn was a thin feeler, almost like an antennae. The bones of his face were slowly forming and raising, just half a degree. His fingers were becoming longer and knuckly, and he fidgeted with them from time to time as he always had. And of course the wings. The flaps of thick skin and scale. Kai was certainly jealous there.

Cole was farther along and just enough was human about his appearance to make him look strange, misplaced. Nearly the shape of a dragon but still in the lines of a human. His shoulders had grown wider to accommodate the broad and powerful wings of an earth dragon; his face pushed out trying to find the jawline of the beast; elbows and knees and tail and horns made him seem like a puppy with too many limbs, too big of paws. His scruffy and uncut black hair was constantly slipping over his forehead and eyes—his eyes which had simultaneously become darker and brighter, larger and smaller—his eyes in which you learned the shifting was pain. They were the same dark warm brown but streaks of olive and orange spread out like cracks or rivers from his slitting pupils. And nearly all of him was covered in hard, almost scabby scales, except patches on his face and arms which made him look incomplete, mottled.

Ice dragons apparently made for a much smoother and sleeker change, or maybe it was just Zane. Either way, he looked nearly flawless going between flesh and ice, as if he’d been made for it. The long scales of white didn’t change his already pale color too terribly much, and the harder angular lines of his face took well to the streaks of grey and blue that followed them.

Kai sighed restlessly and stood. He might as well go to the others.

Before he quite turned the corner there was a scuffling heard from the camp, then a heavy soft rush of air, then above the wall of shipwreck rose the white wings flapping, heaving wind and mist beneath them. Zane’s eyes were pale, clear, strained. He rose to the eclipse-darkened sun, his silhouette strange. He left.

Kai shook the sand-dust from his hair and continued on, the knobs between his shoulders itching tight with impatience. He rubbed them, hoping to untense them a little, but didn’t think anything of the leaving.

Around the red-burning fire were Jay with his blue and yellow wings outstretched, the small child Wu who was prodding the embers with a stick, and Cole huddled up a little ways back. Kai looked twice at him. He wasn’t certain, but he seemed a little taller, bigger, even when sitting curled up to sleep. His dark, veined wings were wrapped around him limply.

Wu turned first. “Kai, I’m hungry,” he said. “Did you find any food?”

“No, sorry,” Kai said thoughtlessly. He sat down in between the two.

“We should leave soon,” the boy murmured, staring at, past Kai. “In the next few days.”

“Because of food?” Kai asked.

Wu only looked, then suddenly shrugged and returned to the fire. Flakes shattered from the porcelain logs as he stabbed at them.

“Well, if it’s been five days already and none of us is dragon yet, how are we going to leave so soon?” Kai persisted. “Maybe the other three can manage to fly and carry you, but what about me?”

There was empty desert morning for an answer. Eventually he sighed again.

“Where’d Zane go, by the way?” he asked a minute later.

Momentary quiet as if each expected the other to answer.

“He didn’t say,” answered Wu. “Probably just a flight.”

“I can’t blame him,” complained Kai.

Wu almost laughed at him. “Your wings are coming, Kai,” he assured him in his baby voice. Then a little shy pause. “Can I ride when they do?”

Kai smiled. “Sure.”

Then soon his smile faded as the silence grew back. Something was odd, off, different in it. He couldn’t figure out what.

Chapter Text

Maybe Wu had known. It wouldn’t surprise Kai.

But that afternoon when the sun was its hottest and they were hiding from its rays and the equally predatory creatures searching for a weak meal, it came so suddenly he thought something heavy and hot and sharp had been suddenly dropped on him.

He bent his head to the ground and took in a sharp gasp, breathing in sand. There was a taut ripping sound as something in his back shifted with a grinding of bones. He felt something raw and burning and cold hovering above him, and hot streams running all over his back regardless of his clothes.

He didn’t hear the soft hurried shuffling of someone approaching him, nor did he see the shadow slide over the sand in front of him. He only knew someone had come when there was a heavy hand on his head, then shoulder—as if the hand had misjudged the distance, landed on his head only by mistake.

Kai looked up through the black fire pain and there was Cole.

“What is it?”

“I—don’t know,” Kai coughed hoarsely, all the wind out of him, trying to speak through the grit cutting his mouth. “On my back, is—what fell—what happened?"

Cole turned him around with his uncertain hands. He was quiet.

“Is—something broken?”

“You’re okay,” Cole said in his new quiet voice.

“What?”

“You can fly when they aren’t so raw.”

Kai half turned but winced when the bleeding, half-scaled wings scraped against the rock shading him.

It was two painful days before the wings were ready, covered fully by burnished, almost glowing scales. And as the days went on, the pain increased, even after the wings were fully formed—his skin cracking as it became scaly and hard, joints fusing and inverting and appearing, bones thickening, limbs twisting, horns pushing out. All felt of bone-on-bone, soreness like he’d never known, and he’d known a lot of pain.

Yet at the same time he gradually stopped reacting as the pain became a part of him as vital and inseparable as breath. Looking at Cole and Jay he started to understand them more, to realize they had had this for days now.

Kai figured out what was odd in the quiet firelight evenings. Hardly anyone spoke.

In fact, one night when his wings had finally settled, he realized suddenly—it had been days since Cole had said a word.

“Cole,” he said, suddenly afraid.

The dragon raised his head. Really he was a dragon, and only a ghost of a human now, the ghost of a past form hovering on a dragon.

Kai thought—how could he make him talk? “What are you going to do when we get back?”

He got a blank look in return.

“You know, when we get home.”

“We are,” he breathed uncertainly.

“No, we aren’t.” But an odd feeling that he was wrong filled him. “We need to help the ones back home.”

Recognition lit the brown-ember eyes. “Lloyd… a sister…”

“Nya,” Kai nodded.

Cole shook his head slightly. “Sorry, things…names… don’t matter…”

“It’s fine.”

Kai had his answer. Cole still had a voice but that was obviously no longer his language. And he didn't realize it then, but that was the last time he would hear words from his friend.

“You need to learn to fly,” Jay said quietly. His voice was lower these days like a sober version of his old voice. “We’ll leave soon.”

“What about Zane?” asked Kai.

“Oh.” Jay thought; he’d forgotten. “He’ll come.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.” Jay stood and pulled his wings taut. “Are you ready?”

“Now?” asked Kai in surprise.

“Now,” and he lifted off in a fluid motion.

Kai tried to figure out how to copy him but he couldn’t remember the subtle muscle movements let alone copy them. So instead he just tensed something in his arms and shoulders and found himself taking off. The ground dropped and the sky widened, he opened his arms, and found it all strangely natural.

Looking around, he found Jay not too far away, snaking through the yellow afternoon. He went over and joined him, and before long they had an efficient flying practice going on. Kai was spinning and rolling and diving and stretching, shouting to the empty air and sweeping through fields of wind. If he closed his eyes he could forget he existed.

They had gone rather far from camp, but it was still in sight as a peck on the blonde desert, when Jay pronounced them to be done and started back. But Kai stopped him and asked for a little longer.

“Let’s just land and rest for a bit,” he said. “It’s not like there’s anything else to do at camp. Nobody will miss us.”

“Sensei,” Jay said.

“He won’t mind.”

“Fine,” and Jay turned. They sped to a sheer cliff and Jay pulled up and landed flawlessly. Kai did so with a near collision. But they were both seated on the cliff edge, overlooking the vast and formless desert.

The freedom of the flight had lifted Kai’s spirits and for a moment he forgot the world, except for its beauty. It was again the silence that caught up to him and reminded him.

“You guys don’t hardly ever talk anymore,” he said.

Jay didn’t move, didn’t even glance over, Jay who was always overanimated in every conversation. “It’s not necessary,” he replied.

“But it’s lonely,” Kai admitted.

Jay looked like he was trying to remember something from long ago, but couldn’t quite place it. He shrugged his shoulders and wings.

“You’ll think differently soon enough,” he said.

There was a hesitant pressing quiet. Jay had never been Kai's first choice for a companion, but he'd found a surprising amount of comfort in him recently. Probably because he was still at least slightly human, but maybe because he still...seemed to care. Was that it, Kai asked himself, was Jay's empathy so much that it showed through despite the seemingly deadening state of being a dragon? Was he a comfort because he still felt?

Kai looked at his profile from the corner of his eye. If he hadn't watched the change, his half-silhouetted face would have been unrecognizable. It was different shapes altogether.

Maybe he'd always been a comfort, and now was the first Kai was noticing.

“I miss you all,” Kai whispered, hardly audible.

“You won’t” was all he got in response, but the blue and yellow eyes were breaking.

Chapter Text

He did think differently after a time and he couldn’t recall things like why they were here and who he used to be, but he knew there were little things—small things—in another place that were being hurt, and he knew they couldn’t stop it themselves. They needed to be helped, or else… he wasn’t sure. But they needed help.

The day the missing one came back they left. He was silent, just landed noiselessly among the others, a large, sleek ice dragon.

A shadow then passed over them all like fire and they looked up to see another dragon, many times larger than themselves, landing on the ground and sending a storm of sand and dust into the small one’s face. He was like the ones being hurt in another world, only his quiet was dragonlike at times. He went to the enormous red-black dragon, placing his tiny hand on her hard cheek with a mixture of fearlessness, deep respect, and…love. It was his mother.

Soon he turned and came to the other four, looking rather heartbroken in his clear gold eyes, though his face was almost smiling. He went to each in turn, saying things that went unheard. He came to the last one, and petting the fire dragon on the nose, he said, “Kai.”

That was…something, he remembered.

“We’ve both grown. And she is here. So riding with you will have to wait.” He smiled sadly. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, meaning more than he spoke.

He felt like he was watching through his eyes, indirect, almost sleepily, like he couldn’t understand or remember or focus. And in fact his flame-licked eyes did look vacant, much as the others’ had for a while. But Zane’s were certainly frigid and snapping and bright now, and Cole’s were warming up, waking up; Jay’s were far away still but it was different than the slack of before.

The mother turned her head and the little one ran to her and they were off into the sky. Clouds whirled by their heads and tails. They caught each others’ slipstreams. They were one in and with the air, and at once everything brightened and pulled—

The sky opened and Lloyd looked up through blood and stone to see watery gold and then very solid forms emerging from it. The tight, spinning shapes unfolded and he gasped at their wingspans.

Dragons. That meant only one thing.

His brothers had come back.

He fought the rest of his fights like a different warrior knowing they had returned. The crumbled alleys all echoed with roars of battle, and then victory. And when the last stroke of blade had been made, and all had fallen, he ran to the open, ignoring—not even noticing—all his wounds. Nya the same. And the dragons wheeled in the sky and lowered and landed, and they ran to see them again, the brothers they had lost.

Only, when they came up to the feet of the beasts, nobody jumped down from their backs.

Kai looked at them. They were so little, so little—smaller than Wu—they were so vulnerable despite their battered armor. They were bruised and bloodied, their own red and opponents’ staining their clothes and faces. The pure light of joy that shone in their eyes only made them even smaller.

But the light quickly gradated to confusion, and then puzzlement, and when it turned to fear Kai stirred with instinctive protectiveness and heard the others do the same. Jay was pressed back behind Kai and Cole as if scared.

Another flapping filled the air and the littles looked up, ran again when they saw a human figure atop Firstbourne, stopped hesitantly when they didn’t recognize him. He slid down and spoke. Their little voices answered quietly—then the girl gave a happy shout of recognition.

Kai lifted his head and his eyes were bright, so bright, hearing her voice. Jay winced at it, a shudder that ran through the long, lithe, thin, dark blue dragon. They remembered, they knew her, suddenly more clearly than ever. That was Nya, and she was still as much Kai’s sister as ever she had been. And Lloyd, still as much his little brother.

Kai only then realized how this would hurt them.

They talked, but their voices didn’t carry more than a murmur, a tone, over the rest of the sounds around them. Wu was telling them. And they looked over to the beasts many times taller than themselves, and they didn’t quite believe it, and Nya was looking for blue, and Kai caught Lloyd’s green eye and Lloyd suddenly realized it really was them, and he took two halting steps and sank limply to the street. Nya turned to him for half a moment but she couldn’t pay attention to anything right then, and Cole pushed a horn into Jay’s shoulder, telling him to move. He finally did and he came to a full stop when he saw her; a dragon’s full stop stops the air and breath around him. She stared at him, Lloyd looked over from where he was kneeling half collapsed on the pavement, she walked up to the dragon with words dying by the mile on her lips. He pulled back and she startled, pulling her hands in and shoulders up. She waited and stepped closer again, seeking the boy she used to know in the eyes of a cold-blooded beast of wing and war and cracking light. She said his name and touched his nose with a shaking hand that looked tiny next to his scales, then found him all at once and started crying from a broken heart.

Though it hurt more than the pain of changing had, they stayed. And things were different, but they made it work. It helped that, after all the death they had been through lately, it was enough simply to be alive in the same room as each other.

But fully adjusting took time and pain. For Lloyd it was a little easier—Lloyd the boy who was dragon himself. He would sit with them quietly, preferring it to talking, especially after so much had happened to his soul. He had broken, that was for certain. But the quiet brothers would talk in dragon ways that fit him more easily than words, and their hot breaths and teasing nudges on his back helped stretch his sore wings. Then they were all together at nights sometimes when he couldn’t sleep and they didn’t have to, and he’d talk and talk, and they’d sort of wrestle, and he’d end up panting and actually laughing on the ground, then talk a little more, then they’d hear the difference in his breathing and guard the sleeping boy protectively.

Nya at first was undecided if she wanted to be always with Jay or always away from him, but after a while of hiding, she soon spent all her time, working and training and spare and sleeping, near him, and they somehow still had the same harmony as long ago when all was whole. And once he got over his fear, of her or himself or whatever it was, he was following her every move as she went around working. He would nose her soft hair when she was sitting, watch her brightly as she talked to him. Neither was going to let go of the other’s heart, and neither of them seemed to even notice their differences once they’d adjusted. It had something of childlikeness in it, of innocence, the love between the girl and the cloud-blue dragon. She sang for him and in return he would keep her memory for a thousand years.

One night just before dawn, a soft step woke Kai from a light doze. He listened, recognizing the steps as Wu’s. A hand petted his side.

“Well,” the old man’s voice said in a whisper, “how about that ride?”

They stepped over Lloyd who didn’t wake up, Wu climbed on, they opened the door, and were up above the clouds. Far, far below, the quiet monastery slept in mist, and the sun warmed the horizon as it waited to break into day.

~the end~