It ain't easy being green. (for cleflink!)
Way back in 2011, cleflink wrote the lovely The Heart of Everything, a story in which the reader cannot help but in love with engineer!Jared and dragon!Jensen. Fortunately for Jared, dragon!Jensen's draconian temperament lies much closer to Draco than Vermithrax Pejorative. "Heart" has already been blessed by the addition of onceuponarhi's glowing, gorgeous art, but one scene in particular set my imagination afire, and, well . . . stuff happened.
So cleflink, creator of dragons and empaths and superheroes, have the first art of 2013. (art which should have been completed well before 2012 rang out, but Jensen!dragons be HARD, baby.)
(click to embiggen.)
Jensen smiled. "I'm going to remember you, my Jared. Thank you." He stepped back a handful of steps and looked at Jared with those green, green eyes. "Run," he whispered, and then he changed.
Jared ended up flat on his ass, eyes and mouth round as saucers when a pair of leathery wings exploded out of Jensen's back with an almighty tearing of fabric. Jensen's hands and knees hit the floor and his whole body shuddered, shifted, altered, growing larger and longer until the room could barely contain him. Skin gave way to a sea of green scales, emerald green, and glossy with a metallic copper sheen that seemed somehow terribly familiar. Then Jensen gave himself a shake and fanned out a pair of enormous, leathery wings. The whole thing hadn't taken more than a handful of seconds.
And, impossibly, Jared knew exactly what he was looking at.
"Dragon," Jared breathed, and Jensen looked down at him from a good ten feet above him as if to say 'about time you figured it out'.
With thanks to:
- Badass author cleflink, whose words inspired my pencil. Thanks again for the lovely Christmas gift that was your “The Heart of Everything” timestamp, and please allow me to return the favor by visualizing one of my favorite scenes from the original fic.
- Badass beta quickreaver, who whomped the bugs out of the initial sketch (dragons fly, but they sure ain’t birds) and helped breathe fire into dragon!Jensen.
- Badass fellow soundtrack enthusiast, pompeygirl27, who, almost fourteen years ago (yikes!), introduced me to Randy Edelman’s elegant and noble score for Dragonheart. Perfect music (with perfect title!) was fantastic background ambiance for descending into fantasy.