Archive of Our Own

Their least favourite part about restarting the monarchy is getting so much focus from the faunoid association. The association wants to interview them constantly, send different kinds of faunoids to their door and have an article about them on every single faunoid newspaper, different interviews for every different country’s association.

Rufus gets them to tone it down a little bit, and limits it to one big article they’ll translate, that only focuses on Rufus and his history. He reluctantly poses for one of the photos with Unna, with the condition that her whole thing doesn’t get talked about. He only tells the reporters that she’s his wife, and is to rule with him, be his queen.

He doesn’t answer the questions he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t entertain conversation about his possible future kids, doesn’t go into detail about the tragedy of his family, and doesn’t mention his pet dragons, or the prophecy they were protecting.

His email inbox and incoming calls and messages never cease. He gets a new phone and only shares the new number with his hoard. The old one gets left in silent mode and he only checks it on Mondays, to skim through the messages, see if there’s something that seems urgent.

At the same time he’s still worrying about the coronation, restoring the castle, hiring more personnel, getting himself a fucking assistant to do all of that for him.

He doesn’t like being so busy.

When Tim is 19 he gets a text from Maria that consists of a PDF and shocked expletives. He takes the risk of opening the file. It’s not like any possible malware could do much more than corrupt his way to contact Maria, and he doesn’t think Maria would do that intentionally.

The file is a scan of a newspaper and the first thing to draw Tim’s eye are the photos. Most of them are of a hunky white boy with red dreadlocks and skin that’s covered in tattoos of snakes, and a castle. One is of him and a slim and athletic looking ginger girl. The next thing he checks is the name of the newspaper. Faunoid news doesn’t really inspire confidence in him, but who’s he to tell what’s true about the faunoid community? He’s only ever spoken to one faunoid purposefully.

The PDF he received doesn’t include the name of the article. He thinks it must’ve been a spread on the previous page and Maria skipped scanning it in favour of getting the news to Tim faster. He reads the article.

What it boils down to is this:

1. The last true monarch of faunoids died in 1967 and his successors never took to their royal duties, moving away from the dragon’s castle in Finland and changing their names to more subtle ones, only using their true surname in situations where they wanted to utilize their high status.

2. Without a living dragon king, the existence of the fire element slowly sunk out of public faunoid knowledge.

3. The three sons of the last monarch died in 1973, 1999 and 2001, respectively. It was presumed that the hunters who attacked them also killed all of their family members, and dragon faunoids – and with them the fire element – came to extinction in 2001.

4. The great-grandson of the last dragon king, Rufus Yrjänä, is now 21 years old. His family was killed in 2001 and he lives in Finland. His grandmother is the only living paternal relative that he knows of. He has just announced his continued existence to the whole of the Faunoid Association.

5. Following the announcement, the Association has asked Yrjänä to reclaim the crown and become the king of faunoids. He has accepted, and the coronation is going to be held in Finland, at the old castle.

As always, when presented with new information, Tim does some research about it.

He’d recognized the name Yrjänä. It isn’t a typical American name, but his family isn’t a typical American family either, now is it. It’s the surname his grandparents used before they moved to America and changed it to Drake. It’s the surname he would have, had his great-grandfather not been killed. He looks into the family archives he kept and there it is, the name of the last dragon king, printed right there on his family tree.

He looks at the names on the Drake family tree – there are the Drakes in America, the Yrjänäs in Finland and the Sarajas in Russia. Judging by the death dates in the documents he thinks that Rufus, the new king, is commonly called Rufus Saraja instead of Yrjänä. After all, the article said that the newer generations only used the royal name when they wanted to take advantage of it. Maybe that’s also why Rufus wanted to be king, to further make use of from those benefits. He hopes not. He wants his second cousin, his only paternal relative, to be more sensible than that. He wants the faunoid hierarchy to hold their upcoming king responsible for his actions and not let him abuse his power.

The name is interesting, too. He finds out that the Yrjänä last name comes from the legend of Saint George and the dragon, is the Finnish translation of Saint George’s name. He’d always thought it silly that he was a dragon and his name was just a synonym for a dragon, but it makes a lot of sense now that he’s looked into the original family name.

To Tim, the most important part about that is this: he has a living relative, a second cousin. He wants to meet him, no matter how much it costs and how much he’ll have to travel for it. He’ll meet the future king of faunoids.

It's rare for Rufus to hear the doorbell ring. Not because people don't have things to say to Rufus and his hoard, but because he lets everyone who has anything to do at his residence know about the reaction Tiivi and Taavi have to the doorbell (and the people who are bound to follow the sound), and has them text him to let them in, if they don't know the door code.

When the doorbell rings, middle of the day on a Saturday, he immediately has two very excited beasts leaving his lap and bounding towards the door of the castle.

He doesn't let them out with him. He feels mean doing it, but it's a necessary evil when he doesn't know who's at the door. Letting a total stranger see the dragons could be disastrous.

The gates are tall and imposing when Tim approaches them. They’re not nearly as glamorous as those of Wayne manor but they're the gates that hide behind them the only other person like him, whom he knows of.

He's more anxious than he's ever been about meeting another person. Even when that person was Nightwing and he was trying to convince him to be Robin again. Even when the other person was Batman and he was trying to stop him from getting himself killed. Even when that person was Jason, come back from the dead. Even when he first went to speak to Maria, after letting her think he was dead for years.

It matters more to him than anything, and he’s more scared about it than he has been during any of the apocalypses he’s been a part of preventing.

During an apocalypse it’s clear what he has to do. Follow Bruce’s orders, keep his own team on task.

Now, he just knows he doesn’t want to make a bad impression on his second cousin. He doesn't know how he can do that, though. He doesn't know how much English his cousin knows, how aware he is of his bloodline, how volatile he might be towards strangers at his doorstep.

All he knows is this: he wants to have a relationship with his cousin. And he'll have to make a good impression to do that.

The boy at his door seems young. Insecure. Dangerous. He stands like a hunter does, like he knows how to fight, but that’s neither here nor there, since faunoids do have to be capable of defending themselves, too.

Rufus knows Ronni is aware of the visitor, the bat's ears must've heard him even before he rang the bell, but he wonders if he's gone out of his way to actually look at the boy, decide that he doesn't need to do anything about it, even as their only current security.

Maybe the vampire just heard Rufus reacting to the bell and decided not to interfere. That dick.

When Rufus approaches the front gate, the kid's eyes, surprisingly, don't travel up and around Rufus to gauge his aura. He just looks nervously at his approach, fiddling with his fingers.

So not a hunter, then, if he's not phased by the sudden sight of a 50-metre tall pyre in front of him, through which a muscled guy is just barely visible, which, according to Iivari, is how he looks to hunters.

“MitäWhat?” he asks.

"Are you Rufus Yrjänä? Or do you prefer Saraja?" the guy asks. It takes a while for him to actually understand what he's saying. He hadn't expected to hear English, and the kid absolutely butchers his name while trying to say it, Yrjänä turning into Jurtsaana and Saraja into Saraaja.

"Yes. I’m Rufus Saraja."

“Hello,” he says. “My name is Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne. I’m a descendant of the Yrjänä family members that moved to America in 1967.” His pronunciation is wrong again.

The future king looks very threatening as he approaches Tim at the gate. Bright red dreadlocks surround his face, his eyes slitted, and slightly glowing as he stalks his way to the gate.

He’s startlingly short-spoken and fairly fluent in English, if the way he demands Tim for proof of relation is any way to judge.

Rufus handles his body like a fighter does. He’s bulked with muscle, probably has a very regular gym schedule he keeps to, and, like Tim, he doesn’t have any physical scars. His attitude seems like that of a defender, which very much fits with Tim’s own assumptions of their kind. Dragons have their hoards and they work to keep them safe, even if it takes a lot of work.

He has to prove himself in three ways.

He's taken to a skate ramp in the middle of nowhere by the apparent chameleon and hunter of Rufus' hoard, and has to spit fire there. Him being able to spit fire without Rufus' presence will prove he's not a chameleon. Rufus' chameleon being able to spit fire with just the three of them there will further prove him as a dragon. And the hunter being able to see his aura the whole time will seal the proof.

Once he's proved the validity of his claims as a dragon faunoid, he is allowed into the estate, for him to explain the papers he brought to Rufus. He shows where all their great grandparents are on the papers, tells him all the information he gathered about Rufus’ own family and their visit to Russia before settling back in Finland. He tells him the little he found about their great uncle’s family, who stayed in Finland after their great grandfathers murder, and what happened to them.

And, last but not least, he tells Rufus about his own family in the USA.

The kid is weird. Well, he's not even actually a kid, he's just two years younger than Rufus, but he still looks so young. And he’s really weird.

Timothy seems fully okay with having to prove the validity of his statement in multiple ways, before Rufus even accepts to have a proper conversation with him. Rufus hopes it's because the kid understands that it's because he has been told, all throughout his life, that there are no more living dragon faunoids.

Timothy proves himself as a dragon, six ways to Sunday. Nemo tells him about the power he feels surging through his veins in Timothy's presence and about the controlled way he spit the fire he had had to, to prove himself. Apparently it had looked a lot more controlled and practiced than Nemo's ever can, that he's ever seen Rufus do. Iivari tells him about the skyscraper of a fire he sees in Timothy's aura. His aura has less substance, the kid can be seen more easily through the fire, but his flames burn higher, brighter, everywhere else.

The kid tells Rufus about their family history in a clinical, detached way. The death of their great grandfather, the previous king, in 1967 is just one of the many events he breezes right through, along with the death of their great uncle in 1973. He’s a bit more sympathetic when he talks through everything he knows about Rufus’ family, and their slaughter in 2001. Quickly he moves onto his own side of the family, the American branch who Rufus had thought died in 1999.

As it turns out, Kaarlo had had one son more than Rufus and his family had known about.

“My dad was born human,” Timothy tells him. “After he died, I went through his office and found some files deep in a cabinet, detailing the medical examination Charles –,” it’s weird to hear his great uncle’s translated English name, “–had made on him in his youth. It isn’t fully conclusive but they thought it was a combination of a mutation and being born premature, that prevented him from becoming a faunoid.

“The mutation wasn’t hereditary and so I was born a faunoid,” he concludes.

Rufus is lucky enough to know all the words Timothy uses. He hasn’t really studied biology or family vocab but the terms are simple enough that high school English classes and context clues are enough to clue him in on what those few words mean.

“So Charles–,” It’s even weirder to say the English name, “–just hid his sons existence because he wasn’t a faunoid? That doesn’t– Well, okay, it does make sense. The Yrjänä family was paranoid enough about there being enough fire spirits for their kids without knowing about that. They would’ve killed even more of their family members.”

“Christ,” Timothy curses. “They actually did that? Killed other dragon faunoids to free spirits for their kids?”

“I mean, yeah. My dad didn’t do it but everyone beside him did, as far as I know. My dad would’ve too, if he wasn’t so sure that his cousins’, your uncles’, souls hadn’t been claimed by hunters or other dragon faunoids.”

“Fuck,” he breathes. “That’s brutal.”

“That’s the way being a dragon faunoid has worked for centuries, Timothy. It’s normal.”

“Tim. And it shouldn’t be.”

“Didn’t you say you’re from Gotham?” Rufus rebukes.

“Yeah, what about it?”

“The crime capital of the world?”

Tim shrugs.

“So to you it’s normal to worry about getting robbed or kidnapped or poisoned everyday?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, that’s not normal.”

“Sure it is. It’s Gotham, and I’m one of the adopted heirs of the Wayne family. And a millionaire in my own right, since my parents died. Of course the rogues would wanna kidnap me,” Tim reasons.

“That’s not normal,” Rufus repeats.

Tim likes his new cousin.

Rufus is reasonably paranoid, straightforward and kinda funny. He’s grumpy, kinda like Jason, and so very protective of his hoard.

Tim is only allowed into the castle the next day, after proving he’s not wearing a chameleon amulet. He’s glad that vigilantism has made him so comfortable undressing in front of people. The chameleon Rufus ordered to make sure Tim is the same person he was yesterday seems more uncomfortable with it than Tim has ever been about seeing someone’s body.

He isn’t sure which one of them is weird for it.

Probably both, he guesses, since he knows Finns go to sauna naked with each other.

“I gotta warn you, if you seem at all interested in Unna, Rufus will try to kill you,” The chameleon, Nemo, tells him.

“Of course. We dragons are possessive of our hoard.”

“It’s worse with them. Unna is… hard to resist for all faunoids. Pheromonically speaking.” Nemo speaks English like someone who’s lived in an English-speaking country for a long time, better than Rufus had, and even he had been good.

“She has an aphrodisiac effect?”

“Exactly.”

Tim huffs a laugh. “Yeah, I can deal with that.”

Nemo scoffs at him.

“What? I can. I live in Gotham. Poison Ivy throws aphrodisiacs at me at least once a month.”

“Okay,” Nemo coalesces, speeding up his pace. “You can deal with that.”

Rufus is scared of letting Tim meet Unna. He knows how everyone reacts to the female faunoid, and he’s seen how much more it affects people who have dragon faunoid in their system, even through just being a chameleon (though Nemo’s thing could’ve also been unrelated to the dragonisms he got from Rufus).

Rufus tries to tell himself it’s just paranoia, just his internal dragon freaking out for no reason, and goes to meet Tim at the front door. Tiivi and Taavi are upstairs, and Rufus delights in the thought of letting the beasts scare him.

As a vigilante, Tim has known about dragons’ existence for a long time. As a dragon faunoid, he’s suspected far longer. He knows they’re real, and he’s rescued quite a few from exotic dealers. He’s glad they haven’t had to save one since getting Damian, since they’d have their own pet dragon if they had.

The dragons that glide to the castle entrance when Tim is let in are a surprise, but they’re well behaved. Tim doesn’t even have to perform the submissive behaviour he’s learned for them to let him pet them. They quickly wrap themselves around him, purring deep into his ear.

Tim lets his vision change, lets the hum of fire enter his throat as he scratches one in between the horns, the other under it’s jaw. He breathes smoke at them and the purring gets even louder.

He doesn’t think he’d mind having pets like this at the manor.

When Nemo escorts Tim inside, and the dragons soar through the house, Rufus is surprised that Tim doesn’t even flinch before reaching out to let the dragons smell him, and starting to pet them.

Rufus turns to Nemo to ask whether he’d told the guy. “He’s crazy,” Nemo mouths in answer.

Rufus doesn’t think he’s exaggerating when he turns back to look at the guy wrapped in purring dragons, petting them and purring back at them.

Crazy feels like an understatement.

It’s not like his dragons either. They’re excitable about humans, yes, but they’re more playful, and very touch averse with strangers.

Though they did let Rufus touch them quite fast when they first met…

He stares at Tim and his dragons for a long while before the slitted red eyes peek through his eyelids and he asks, “What are these two sweethearts called?”

Rufus has a quick mental breakdown about it. Sure, he himself had been fairly quick to accept the dragons into his horde after rescuing them from the grandmaster, but he had been scared of them before discovering he could control them with some power displays and a grip on their chained leashes, while they were still very much bound into the floor with no way to reach him.

And then there’s this guy. He walks into a foreign castle and gets stormed by two no longer malnourished dragons, and his only reaction is to start petting them.

That’s seriously weird behaviour.

“They’re named Tiivi and Taavi,” Rufus tells him belatedly. Tim hums, repeats the names back at the dragons, treasures the reactions they have to hearing their names, shakes himself out of the adoration and refocuses on the people around him.

“So. We had things to do?” he asks, barely stopping himself from clapping his hands together. That doesn’t go well with most animals, and dragons haven’t been any different in his previous experiences.

“Yeah…” Rufus murmurs. And starts walking along the hallway again.

Tim follows, letting the two dragons keep hanging onto him, even though they are heavy. He’s a vigilante, he can handle it.

At the entrance to the next room Rufus turns to him, and even though Tim’s sure he’s sensed the dragons’ position with his thermal senses, he seems to jump at their continued presence.

“Okay, so, öö, my horde is in this room. Please be mindful about– about everyone, actually. If you cause any conflict I will kick you out.”

“Sounds fair.”

Rufus commands the dragons in Finnish and they scamper off, back where they came from. And then they walk into the room.

The seven imprints of body heat turn into people in the big sitting room.

Nemo is sitting on another couch with the red haired girl Tim saw on the article with Rufus. Another couch is populated with a hunk of a biker and a tattooed girl. On the third couch, an athletic guy is lounging on top of Iivari, and with them–

“Kaikki, tää on TimEveryone, this is Tim. Tim, here are Unna, Ronni, Eden, Vikke and–”

“Predator?”

Rufus can’t help the grin spreading on his face.“Suthan tunnistetaanYou’re recognized,” he teases.

“Mä niin tapan Mumakin kun mä nään senI’ll so kill Mumak the next time I see him,” Joone mutters. He turns to Tim, “Call me Joone.”

“I crossed the whole country to come see Black Magpie on your club tour on the West Coast.”

“Yeah?” Joone practically beams.

“Yeah! You were amazing! And I’ve seen clips of your solo gigs with the looper. It’d be so amazing to see that live! You deserve a lot bigger venues.”

“Thanks!”

“And you met Iivari and Nemo already,” Rufus continues, as if Tim hadn’t just fully interrupted him.

“Oh, oh!” Vikke shouts, shooting off the couch. “You wanna guess our… What’s the word? Ruffe, mikä vittu on voimaeläinwhat the fuck is a faunotype–”

“Faunotype.”

“Yeah, you wanna guess our faunotypes?”

“Well, I already know Nemo’s a chameleon, and Iivari a hunter, even though that technically isn’t a faunotype,” Tim starts. “And of course that Rufus is a dragon.”

“Of course,” Unna scoffs. It must be weird for everyone that Tim knows him because he’s a dragon, didn’t have to spend months getting to know him before getting to know his faunotype. It’ll take some getting used to for him, too, to be more recognized among faunoids, and for people to know his element, his faunotype. He goes to sit next to Unna.

Tim turns toward Vikke. “You’re as hyperactive as my friend with super speed. You must like a horse or something.”

“Got it in one!” Vikke grins. Rufus knows already that he’s going to be smug about being the first one Tim categorized.

“Predator’s always dressed in so many shiny things that I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been wondering if he’s a magpie for years.”

Joone nods slowly. “VittuFuck.”

“It’s actually thematically ironic that out of the two of us, it isn’t me who’s living with a bat faunoid,” Tim laughs, gesturing towards Ronni. Ronni’s in a surprisingly good mood, as he just grunts on his spot at the couch, instead of picking a fight with Tim for saying that. He must’ve fed recently. Or Eden’s keeping him humane. Maybe both. Oh. Definitely both. He shouldn’t’ve focused in their direction. Fuck.

“Why?” Eden asks.

“Oh, I live in Gotham. You know, where Batman lives.”

“Shiiit,” Eden breathes out.

“Yeah.”

“You still haven’t guessed Eden and Unna’s faunotypes,” Vikke points out. Rufus turns to glare at him. He’s sure most of his horde does, too.

Tim just shrugs. “Eden seems like a predatory fish of sorts. And Unna reminds me of the squirrels that I’ve met.” Unna grabs onto Rufus’ hand probably hard enough to bruise.

“Eden’s 46% piranha,” Nemo tells him.

Tim noticed how tense everyone got when Vikke brought up Unna’s faunotype, and how much worse it got when he said she was a squirrel.

He doesn’t know why that is. Do they think he’s transphobic? He has been a girl many times, with his chameleon amulet. Of course he wouldn’t tell these people about Caroline Hill, but still. And he knows other trans faunoids, Maria even being the first faunoid he ever got to know.

“Can we do a pronoun check?” he blurts out. “I’m genderfluid, and mostly use he/them.”

There’s something openly delighted in Joone’s gaze when he starts, “I use any pronouns. The weirder the better.”

“He/they,” says the hunter beside him.

“He/it,” laughs the horse splayed on the back of their couch

“He/him,” says Ronni.

And next to him Eden states, “She/them.”

“He/him,” says Nemo.

“Same,” states Rufus.

Tim pretends not to notice the comforting way he’s squeezing Unna’s hand and petting along her back as she carefully says, “She/her.”

“Awesome! Thanks for letting me know.”

Maybe getting to know Tim isn’t as bad as Rufus thought it would be. Tim doesn’t question how Unna, a girl, can be a faunoid. He doesn’t challenge Rufus’ position as the future king, and he’s quick to find a way to de-escalate any situation.

But there has probably been a miscommunication at some point. Before this, everyone who learned that Unna was a faunoid would freak out about there being a female faunoid. Tim hadn’t even questioned it, just asked for everyone’s pronouns after learning that she was a faunoid, too.

And, he’d been freaky good at guessing everyone’s faunotypes. If Rufus didn’t know for sure that Tim was a dragon, he would’ve thought he was a hunter.

It’s still a couple of days before Tim’s scheduled to go back to America when Rufus tells him, “We got Tiivi and Taavi from a hunter city where they were guarding an ancient faunoid prophecy. I don’t remember the exact wording but the message was pretty much just ‘25 years after a dragon faunoid and a female faunoid meet each other, the faunoids have overtaken the hunters.”

And just as freakily as before, Tim immediately knows, “And Unna is that female. I thought she was just trans.”

“Yeah. Unna was genetically engineered to be a female faunoid by some hunters who didn’t know about the prophecy.”

“Oh. If she’s ever interested in meeting other people who technically count as clones, let me know, and I’ll set something up.”

“You know clones?”

“I mean, it’s Gotham.”

Yeah, Rufus’ cousin is weird.

When Tim gets back to Gotham, he first notifies Rufus that he’s home safe. He goes home and digs out the burner he uses with Maria.

Since he faked his death, he hasn’t responded to any of her messages, even though they are frequent, and often very informational.

He doesn’t really have a reason to keep ghosting her anymore. Since he told the Waynes about his true identity, many years ago already, it’s become public knowledge that he didn’t die in the plane crash. There’d been plenty front page news articles about it, and Maria sends him a message every time he ends up on the front page.

But he hasn’t responded since he faked his death.

“Thank you,” he writes. “He’ll be a good king. I’m proud to be his cousin.”