Gift for fairandfey part 1 of 3
Title: Mutual aggravation (must be better than having nothing in common)
Author/Artist: sweetjerry
Gift for : fairandfey
Pairing(s)/Characters: Merritt, Evariste/Merritt, Raphael/Luvander, Anastasia/Natalia, sort of Rook/Thom, if you squint
Summary: There seemed to be no one in the entire world that annoyed Evariste as much as Merritt did. So of course the man had to be in love with him! Well, Merritt was sure there was a flaw somewhere in that logic, but who was he to question his elders and self-proclaimed betters?
Prompt: fairandfey wanted airman life and dragons and whatnot, and she put downd Evariste/Merritt as one of her pairings. So this is what I inflict upon her, and she has no one but herself to blame!
Rating: R
Word count: 20048
Warnings: Swearing, excessive and unecessary use of itallics, strange and possibly feral metaphors, dragon lesbianism, and there might just be sexings in there somewhere too.
Author/Artist's notes: EHGAD WHY IS THIS SO LONG? I don't know why I do this to myself and others, I really don't. Oh, and plot? What is that?
Prologue
Chief Sergeant Adamo’s office was sparse, spartan. It was a no-nonsense-place, and he was a no-nonsense man, and the look he was giving the young man in front of him made him shift uncomfortably from his right foot to his left. The fingers of his right hand were drumming incessantly against his thigh.
“You’re the second candidate for Vachir,” the Sergeant said, quickly rifling through the papers in front of him with more skill than his large, callused hands suggested. “Or rather, you were the second candidate.” He waited for a reaction to this, but the young man just looked even more nervous, his drumming hand settling into an almost frantic tempo. Adamo raised his eyebrows slightly, and his expression said that he suddenly got why this one hadn’t been the primary candidate. “Now,” he continued slowly, staring down at a file as if he didn’t already know what he was going to say next, “it looks like you’re first in line. Congratulations,” he glanced again at the paper, “Merritt. For now, at least.”
Finally the young man spoke up. “Uh… what happened to… y’know, the other candidate? Er, sir.”
The Sergeant raised his eyebrows a bit further this time, and amusement flashed briefly in his eyes. “Nothing as gruesome as you’re imagining at the moment, I think. He was simply a bit… let’s say too confident in his abilities, shall we? Vachir is not as… finicky as some of the girls, but she detests cocky bastards who think they own the whole Airman already. She told him so and made sure he knew she fucking meant it, that’s all.”
The young man swallowed nervously, and underneath the veritable swarm of freckles that covered his face and neck, he looked very pale. “I see, sir. And… when will I meet’er, sir?”
The older man snorted. “Don’t overdo the ‘sir’s, or the other boys’ll peg you for an ass-kisser. That is, if you survive today. As soon as we’re done here, you’ll get to see her.”
By now the kid was so pale that it looked as if his freckles were about to start dropping off him like dead leaves any time soon, but he nodded shortly and then lifted his chin, saying, “Yessir,” in as steady a voice as he could manage during the circumstances. His hand was still drumming against his thigh, but it was more controlled now, less panicked. To the amused Adamo, it looked as if the young man was truly preparing himself to walk to his death. He decided to say nothing about it. A little fear was only healthy, given the situation.
“You need to sign a few papers first, of course,” he said, handing over a stack of documents, whereof a healthy percentage concerned the candidate willfully signing over any and all responsibility for any material, physiological and mental damage that he might sustain from the city of Thremedon, the Dragon Corps and th’Esar and onto himself. Thankfully, the boy sat down and started signing them without so much as glancing at their content. A bit of nerves was only good, but Adamo had a feeling that if pushed even further, there were two very attractive - or, rather, involuntary - alternatives which would speedily present themselves to Merritt. The first included Adamo having to explain to th’Esar why the second recruit in a week had run screaming from the building; the second would merely bring about that he’d have to buy a new chair in the place of the one Merritt was currently occupying, since you never really got the smell out. The latter was unquestionably to prefer to the former, but it would nonetheless be pretty fucking awkward, and so he’d rather not spook the boy any worse.
“Right then, kid,” he said briskly once Merritt was done with the paperwork, getting to his feet and clapping his hands together. “Let’s meet the lady herself, then.”
Chapter One
Merritt would be lying if he said he wasn’t terrified the first time he saw Vachir. She was huge and deadly, and clearly designed for the very particular purpose of turning live things into very, very dead things. Her bronze scales gleamed in the bright white light, and she moved in a way that nothing that was alive would, but not like any kind of machinery he’d ever seen either. As he approached on shaky legs she raised her head and looked down at him imperiously, swaying gently back and forth to get a look at him and looking for all the world like one of the dancing snakes that you could sometimes see performing at carnivals. Only there was no man with a flute big enough to control this beast in the entire world.
“What’s that?” she demanded in a voice like the wind through the rafters in the barn back home. She extended a leg towards him, touching a claw to his skin, and Merritt had to concentrate very hard to not jump, or scream in terror, or piss himself, or possibly do some kind of a combination of all three. He was scared so stiff that his foot froze in the middle of its nervous tapping, ending up in a rather awkward angle. “That’d better not be some kind of disease. Just because I’m no damn prima donna like some girls I could mention, I’m not going to put up with having a fucking diseased rider.” She glared over his shoulder at the Chief Sergeant with her bronze-on-scarlet eyes. Merritt wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear the bastard chuckling.
“T’ain’t no disease,” he said, trying to keep the edge of sulkiness out of his voice but not quite managing. “S’just freckles. They’re s’posed to be there.”
“Oh really?” the dragon said, sounding amused. “Ugly as sin, of course. But fuck, I’m not vain like that bitch Erdeni with her jumped-up little pretty-boy anyhow.” She poked him thoughtfully in the chest with her claw, hard enough to bruise. Merritt rubbed at the sore skin through his shirt, trying not to glare at her. He was being insulted by a giant metal lizard. Somehow, that just didn’t seem right. But then again, since she was a giant metal lizard, there wasn’t much that he could do about it anywhichways.
“Can’t help the way I looks, ma’am,” he said, rather sourly.
“I suppose not,” she said with a lift of her wings that looked rather like a shrug. “But are you any strong, then? You think you could be any good in a battle, kid?”
Merritt crossed his arms, starting to drum his left-hand fingers against his upper right arm as he did so. “What you think ’m here for? If I hadn’t got the training and been damn good at it, you think I would be standing ‘ere?”
She tilted her head. “I’m sure that the Chief Sergeant warned you about being cocky. Did he tell you exactly what I did to the upstart before you?”
Merritt swallowed, but by now he was far too annoyed to do the smart thing and apologize. “S’not so much being cocky as not taking crap, the way I see it,” he said, glowering up at her. “You’re jerking me about, ma’am, and I don’t like it. Either you decide to try me and find out if I’m any fucking good, or you say fuck my mother and send me on my way without messing about with me. S’not harder than so.”
The dragon blinked, seeming taken aback, and then she suddenly laughed. It was a hissing, spitting kind of laughter, like water on fire, but laughter nonetheless. “Well, you’ve got big steely balls on you, kid, I’ve got to give you that,” she creaked, lowering her head a bit to take a closer look at him. Light gleamed off her red, pointed teeth. “But no fucking manners what so ever. You haven’t even told me your name yet.”
“Name’s Merritt,” he said, trying not to show how close he was right now to fainting with a mixture of relief and lingering dread. “And you didn’t give me yours, ma’am, which you should’of if we’re to be introduced proper-like.”
She snorted a puff of white, sharp-smelling smoke at him, but answered nonetheless. “Very well, then. Proper-like, as you say. You may call me Vachir. Now get some gear on and we’ll see how good you are, my unattractive potential rider.”
He grinned at her, finally convinced that she wasn’t going to decapitate him with a sweep of one giant wing, the relief perhaps making him just the tiniest bit careless. “I have to say, you’ll probably be both the biggest and ugliest girl I’ve ever had between my legs, Vachir, but I promise not to make a fuss about it.” He thought he heard Adamo groan behind him, but Vachir gave a little whirring snicker.
“If you survive, little Merritt, I promise it’ll be the best ride anyone’s ever given you.”
***
And it was.
It was amazing.
After all the training he’d had, there was still nothing that could’ve prepared him for actually flying. It reminded him a bit of riding a horse in the feeling of freedom and power it brought with it, the rush of joy that was speed and wind and two bodies moving with one another like dancing. But Vachir didn’t move like any horse he’d ever ridden before. Her every move was smoother, swifter, but her turns were sharp and brutal like nothing he’d experienced, and she had a few more dimensions to move in than your everyday beast.
She did a few tricks that he was certain were designed to terrify him - and they did, but he was still pretty sure she was going rather easy on him. If she truly had wanted to frighten him she could have flipped over and dropped like a stone or something similarly sadistic, but she didn’t. It hurt his pride a bit, but several hundred feet up in the air was not a place where you decided to prove some stupid point, especially if you were a damn rookie and your thighs were already starting to ache. No, that was decidedly a good time to be a bit fucking humble and learn to be grateful that your dragon wasn’t trying to kill you.
“This is amazing,” he called out to her, feeling that she ought to know that he did appreciate the ride. Maybe that way, she would be less inclined to insult him.
“You sit like you don’t know your ass from your face,” she pointed out dryly over the rushing of the wind. “Not that I can blame you much, I’m finding it a bit hard myself, but fucking concentrate or I’ll drop you in the ocean.”
Apparently not.
“I’m concentrating as much as I can over your damn creaking,” he shot back, rather untruthfully, because she flew surprisingly quietly for a huge monster made out of metal and gears. “You must be rustier than my old aunt Reginalda’s cunt.” He quickly pushed away the unbidden thought that if his mother ever heard him speak like this, she was going to scour his mouth with lye.
He was a soldier now, after all. He was allowed to talk dirty. It was practic’ly mandatory.
Vachir snorted, and the smoke from her nostrils quickly dissipated in the wind. “I should drop you in the ocean. Maybe a bit of salt water would wash away those unsightly blotches from your face. Might wash clean that tar pit of a mouth you have too.” And before he could retort to that, she dove, and he had to focus all his attention on not losing the contents of his bowels all over her.
He was sure she wouldn’t like that much, and then she might just make real of her threats. Anycase, he didn’t care to find out.
***
Merritt thought things went rather smoothly from then on. He had to sign a few more papers, and send a letter home asking for his stuff to be sent over to the Airman as quickly as possible. His mother would know what needed to be done, probably better than he did himself. And then he had to sign yet another paper saying that he had received his flying gear and uniforms, both ceremonial and functional; however, Adamo said this was complete bullshit because he was guaranteed to completely ruin every single piece of equipment except the ceremonial uniform within months, or he wasn’t doing things right.
Then he had only to wait for the nervous kitchen personnel to air out his new room and fetch bedclothes and the likes from the storage area on the lower levels. Adamo herded him into the place’s common room in a manner that smacked somewhat of a tired parent telling him to go play with the other children and leave the grownups alone. Not that he thought that the other men were going to even acknowledge him anytime soon - at least he hoped so. After all, he wasn’t so arse-backward that he couldn’t figure out what being a newbie at a place like this entailed.
As he stepped out into the haphazardly furnished room, a handful of men looked up from their doings and then, as if they had rehearsed it beforehand, simultaneously turned away with apparent disinterest. Two of them - a short, wiry fellow with flaxen hair and his brown-haired and pretty-faced companion - were apparently in the middle of a game of darts. Two others, one dark and sharp-faced, the other fair, tall and lanky, were of all things bickering quietly over a jigsaw puzzle. The last one was sitting cross-legged on a couch, reading a fancy-looking book, every once in a while brushing his curly hair out of his eyes in a distracted fashion. Deciding that he was the one least likely to take much notice of him, Merritt shuffled over in his direction and found himself an armchair to bury himself in.
Later, he would realize exactly how big a mistake he’d made right there.
“Well, look at what, as they say, the cat has dragged in,” remarked the reader, but despite his words, he didn’t so much as glance at Merritt. No, he very pointedly finished the page, searched in his vest for a bookmark, and placed it daintily between the pages before finally looking up. Merritt’s first impression of him was that he was probably an altogether decent fellow, who was nonetheless intending to act like an absolute ass right about now. But then, as the other man took him in, his nose wrinkling at the sight of Merritt’s clothes - which sure as all hell didn’t have nearly as much lace or mother-of-fucking-pearl buttons tacked on as his did - Merritt quickly revised his opinion. He was clearly just an ass, no two ways and nothing decent about it.
“Honestly, was there ever a time when there was some class to the new recruits?” he lamented to no one in particular, rolling his eyes skyward. A dart whizzed past his ear only moments later, and he exclaimed in hurt dignity, frowning at the perpetrator.
“Yeah, there was, and then they recruited you, Raphael,” the brown-haired man by the dart-board said with an easy grin in his direction. “Things have been going downhill pretty fast since then. Now don’t be a fucking ass. It’ll be hard enough for the poor duckling without your delightful personality adding to it.” The man leered at Merritt, raising his eyebrows. “I’m Niall, resident pretty-boy, or so I’ve been told, and you…” he said, his grin stretching even wider, his full lips parting to reveal white teeth. “Well, you’re just lucky to be here, aren’t you?”
Before Merritt had any chance to reply, the man who had been playing Niall sketched a short, sloppy bow in his general direction. “I’m Luvander, and before you waste any breath telling me your name, you should know that I’m still going to call you ‘lamb chop’ until you’ve stopped being so… ah, tender.” He smirked, and Niall laughed, boxing him on the shoulder. “As for and Raphael, you can just ignore him. That’s what we all do.” Raphael glared at him, and when Luvander only replied with a lewd gesture, he opened his book again, making clear that as far as he was concerned, there was no one else in the room. No one of importance anyway. Both Niall and Luvander appeared to be used to this, and simply turned their attention back to Merritt, who wished fervently that he knew what to say. “I…” he began, but was immediately interrupted by an annoyed sigh from the other end of the room. The black-haired man looked up from the jigsaw for a moment to spear him with an impatient and somewhat hostile stare.
“I’m Jeannot. Don’t disturb me. I don’t like people wasting my time.” And with that, he turned back to what he was doing, his body language indicating that even that short statement had been a waste of his time, and he wasn’t even going to forget it.
His companion darted a distracted look at Merritt, and then down again. “Evariste. Could you stop tapping your foot like that? You’re ruining my concentration.”
Niall snorted loudly. “Don’t worry, honey,” he said to Merritt with a wink. “Evariste normally wouldn’t notice a dragon crashing through the wall unless it knocked over his chair. Would you, Evariste?”
There was no answer. Luvander and Niall laughed, and Merritt thought maybe it was time for him to actually say something. “Er…” he began, but Niall slung an arm around his shoulders, and Luvander flung the door out to the corridor open with a flourish.
“Come along, lamb chop,” he said with a wide smile. “Let us give you the grand tour.”
***
They began by dragging him back down to the dragon pens, and while he was still nervous as all hell, he had to admit that he was a bit curious about the other dragons. Meeting Vachir had been an experience that went so deep and was so complicated and frightening that he wasn’t sure he’d ever make sense of it, and while he had a hunch that meeting the other dragons weren’t even going to come near it, they still had to be something pretty damn amazing.
“What was up with him?” he asked as they walked, because he figured that if he was ever going to be allowed room to speak, he had better start making himself some room of his own.
“Who? Oh, Raphael,” Luvander said, grimacing sourly. “He’s the living, breathing evidence that sometimes even dragons get things wrong. He’s just a jumped-up little twerp who thinks he’s better than the rest of us because he had a formal education.” He spat on the floor to bring emphasis to his words, and most particularly to his general opinion of Raphael.
“Well, that’s not really all of it,” Niall conceded. “The reason he went after you in particular has less to do with him being a jerkoff, and more to do with that except you and another man, he’s the newest around here. And that would be peaches and cream for him if that other man was the sort of man who’d allow himself to be fucked around with like most newbies are. Only he ain’t, so Raphael’s had to be the new guy for quite some time now.”
“And that gets his perfumed little panties in a twist like anything,” Luvander filled in with a laugh, and Niall grinned.
“Yeah. So that’s why. He’s just trying to stake his claim at being above you in the natural order of things - which he is, mind.”
“You ain’t near vicious enough to not be treated like the rookie you are, lamb chop,” Luvander agreed. “Which puts you pretty fucking low right at the moment, let me tell you, because I like the damn Ke Han better’n I do Raphael.”
Merritt didn’t argue with them; there didn’t seem much point in it really. He was pretty sure that he didn’t have the faintest clue how one did hold one’s own against twelve people who were set on torturing you, especially if one among their group was the kind of person who did know how to manage that. Sometimes you just had to suck it up and realize that you didn’t stand a chance, and this felt like one of those occasions.
At least they hadn’t done anything nasty yet. He’d have to enjoy it while he still could.
They encountered another of the men in the corridor on the way to the pens. He was created after a larger-than-life scale which rather suggested to the mind that he was a very lifelike, ambulating statue. When he saw Merritt tagging along like an unwanted puppy, he smiled the friendly, relaxed smile of a man who’d never won a fight against anyone in his entire life, because no man yet had been stupid enough to challenge him to one. “I see you already got your hands on the new recruit. Figures it would be you two bastards.”
Luvander grinned smugly at him, performing a sort of half-bow in mid-step. “I’m glad to see you’re appreciating our effort, Ghislain.”
Ghislain grinned right back at him. “I’m sure he will too.”
That didn’t sound too promising.
But then they descended down a flight of stairs into the machine hall, and Merritt forgot all about his worries. The first time he’d seen this place, only a couple of hours earlier, he’d fallen in love with it, and just like the first time, it now stole his breath away and left him dazed. It wasn’t grand or dramatic or anything like that, just a long hall with a highly vaulted ceiling, where young men in blue servant’s smocks ran to and fro, and with fenced-off areas on either side where the separate dragons where kept. You could see the tips of the wings of the larger dragons over the solid metal barriers, and it was the sound of them moving - the whirr of cogs and metal clanging against metal - and the smell of the place - fuel and smoke and ash - that made Merritt’s heartbeat quicken, and so did the hand tapping against his thigh. He could see Vachir’s pen at the far end of the hall, the copper of her wings catching the light as she moved, but Luvander and Niall led him instead to the pen located directly by the door. He could see no flash of wings over the railing here, and Luvander’s words as he opened the door explained why.
“This is where the swifts are kept. All three of ‘em, sine they don’t take up as much space as the rest of the ladies.” He slipped inside, gesturing at them to follow with a sudden authority that suggested to Merritt that his dragon was inside there. He was proven right, too, as Luvander grinned hugely and hurried over to a sleek, bronze-coloured dragon resting almost right by the door. She lifted her head as he approached, blinked slowly, and then lowered it again.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said in a deeply unimpressed voice.
“Yesfir, beauty among beauties,” Luvander replied cheerfully. “Just bringing around the newest recruit and showing him the sights, nothing to worry your sweet little head about.”
She flicked the tip of her tail at him in a way that must have hurt, but Luvander seemed quite used to it, and barely winced. “Don’t patronize me, you insolent, good-for-nothing philanderer,” she snapped, glaring at him, and then turned her head to inspect Merritt. “You, Freckles,” she said, showing that at least she was aware that he wasn’t, in fact, diseased, “what’s your name?”
“Merritt, ma’am,” he replied, a bit thrown by her cold demeanour.
“And he knows how to keep a civil tongue in his head, too. Well, that’ll pass, I imagine. You’re big sister’s new boy, then?”
“The magicians that made Vachir and Yesfir were married,” Niall explained when Merritt hesitated, looking slightly puzzled. “So they usually refer to each other as sisters.”
“I see,” he said, feeling stupid. “Well, in that case, yes I am.”
“I like him,” a new voice chimed in. While Yesfir’s voice had been somewhat higher in pitch than Vachir’s, this one had an almost flute-like quality, with an exited-sounding tremble to it. He turned his head in its direction, and found himself staring at not one, but two dragons, lying side by side with their necks entwined in an almost... affectionate manner? Only one of them had her eyes open; a blue-and-silver dragon, even smaller and more delicate than Yesfir, who was watching him attentively with her large, dark-blue eyes. “I’m Anastasia,” she said, and it somewhat surprised Merritt to hear a dragon sound cheerful. “Welcome to the Dragon Corps, Merritt.”
“Please,” Yesfir said, sounding disgusted. “This is not a day-care centre, Anastasia, so stop treating the new recruits as babies.” She pitched her voice higher in a nastily accurate imitation of the other dragon. “‘Welcome to the Dragon Corps, we are all delighted to see you, why don’t you join us later for tea?’” A valve on her neck let out a hissing pillar of steam, and Merritt got the feeling that this was something quite rude, like a human mimicking spewing noises to get their opinion of someone else across.
“There’s no need to be like that,” Anastasia said, sounding offended. Her statement was followed by a long, lethal hiss, but it didn’t come from her. And suddenly Luvander had frozen, looking incredibly nervous, his gaze fixed on the third dragon in the pen.
She was amazingly pretty, Merritt thought, her scales a glittering green accented with bronze details. Of course she wasn’t as fine as his Vachir, but it was still very evident that someone had gone out of their way to decorate this particular girl a bit extra. But all these were secondary thoughts, an undercurrent of nonsensical babble that was mostly drowned out by the conflicting instincts of, on one side, getting out of there fast and, on the other, to not turn his back at her. She was rearing her head in a distinctly hostile way, her tail swishing back and forth, smacking into the floor with a sound like a sledgehammer, and Luvander was going paler by the second.
“Now, Natalia...” Niall said a bit desperately from the door, trying to distract her.
“Bitch,” Natalia snarled, glaring at Yesfir. The tone of her voice made Merritt suddenly recall, with groin-aching clarity, the time his sister had found him reading her diary. This was white-hot female rage at its worst. He knew all the dragons were called “she”, but there was something particularly... woman-like with this one; the kind of woman whose husband could be expected to only ever say ‘Yes dear’ and constantly cower in balls-shrivelling terror whenever she so much as looked at him.
“Yeah, she is a bit,” Luvander agreed, earning another admonishing smack from Yesfir’s tail. “But there is no reason to get so worked up, really.”
“She insulted my Anastasia,” Natalia replied in a whirring growl, lifting her wings threateningly, and Niall elbowed Merritt in the stomach, gesturing for him to start backing toward the door, while he inched a bit closer to Luvander. “Maybe tearing you apart would be suitable punishment? My rider doesn’t like you anyway.”
“Ah well, see, there’s no need for that,” the blond replied, nervously licking his lips. “Look, I bet Yesfir’s sorry about what she said, ain’t she?”
There was a short, terrible pause, and then Yesfir snorted again, turning her head away. “I suppose I am.”
“And I’m sure Anastasia wouldn’t like it if there was bloodshed in here, would she?” Luvander hurriedly continued.
Anastasia sighed a thin puff of steam, resting her head against Natalia’s neck. “That would be inadvisable,” she conceded, closing her eyes. Natalia looked down at her for a moment, and then slowly lowered her wings.
“Very well then,” she said, snapping her jaw in an irritable manner. “I suppose it would be.”
As soon as she turned her attention fully to Anastasia, Luvander gave Yesfir a grateful pat - for which he received a smack over the ass from her tail - and then hurried towards the gate. Merritt was already out by then, Niall holding the door open until Luvander was out, and then hastily slamming it shut with a relieved sigh.
“Bastion, Luvander, someone needs to have those two separated from Yesfir quick-like, before she makes real of going after one of us. It’s bad enough with all the muck boys she keeps sending to the medics.” Then he turned to Merritt, grinning hugely at the wild-eyed terror that he couldn’t quite hide. “That was lovely Natalia. The only way she’s any better than the famous Havemercy, as far as I’ve seen, is that she actually gives you a fair warning before tearing your head off. Well, most of the time.”
Luvander wrinkled his nose. “That, and she ain’t as picky about her riders as Havemercy is.
Obviously.”
Merritt was starting to suspect that he knew who Natalia’s rider was.
Niall shrugged, indicating that he had no opinion on that. “Well, she sure didn’t kill as many candidates. Mind, you’ve gotta hand it to Raphael. I was there when she picked him, you know. She was having one of her hissy fits, looking just about ready to murder, and he just walked right up to her, took her head between his hands, and started telling her how lovely and sweet she were as if he was reciting a poem to some real nice lady that he wanted to bone. And she all but rolled over on her back and let ‘im scratch her stomach. If that’s what happens when he tries his poetry crap on human ladies, then I wouldn’t mind if he taught me a bit of it.”
“Maybe she just recognized another bad-tempered bitch when she saw ‘im?” Merritt suggested, trying to sound cockier than he felt. Luvander hooted with laughter, and Niall grinned, smacking Merritt over the shoulder in a not entirely unfriendly manner.
“Careful, newbie,” he said, sounding amused, “talk like that is reserved for the big boys what can handle it.”
But Merritt knew he’d just earned himself a few points in Luvander’s book, at least. That was something that he had to keep in mind. If he ever needed to win the man over to his side in something, insulting Raphael seemed like a fairly good way of doing it. “Anyway, what was up with those two?” he nodded back at the door to the pen. “Anastasia and Natalia, I mean. They sort of acted like... well.”
“Yeah, it’s really strange, that,” Niall said. “Amery and Raphael don’t quite know what to make of it. It’s a bit embarrassing when your dragon is cuddling up to someone else’s, I imagine. But they let them be, since Natalia would make mince-meat out of any fucker what tried to stop ‘em.” He shrugged, apparently dismissing the whole thing. “Now come along, Freckles,” he added with a grin.
“Chastity’s next.”
Chastity was huge, glittering silver like the lake back home when the sun was high, leaning her horned, elegant head close to have a look at him. “A bit green around the gills, poor boy,” she said, her voice warm and maternal. “You sure he’s up for this, boys?”
“Well, either he is, or we’ll notice pretty soon,” Niall said carelessly.
“Yeah, right when we’re scraping him off a rock in the Cobalts,” Luvander said, grinning from ear to ear.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Merritt muttered sourly at him. “Real encouraging, that.”
“Now, be nice, boys,” Chastity said with chuckle like a hammer striking steel. “Got to learn how to walk before you can fly, remember? I didn’t see either of you looking so cocky when you were in his boots. At least his are still dry.”
Merritt kept his face locked in a convincing mask of puzzlement, as if he had no idea what Chastity had just implied, while Niall and Luvander glared mutinously up at the laughing dragon. If he laughed now, he was sure that he’d be dead by the end of the week, and flying wouldn’t have anything to do with it. However, he did file away the information for later use. There would come a time when he was no longer the newbie, after all.
After they had exited rather hurriedly, Luvander and Niall still looking rather ruffled, they moved on to Illarion, Evariste’s dragon. She was made of some almost white metal, and in the sharp glare of the light-strips lining the ceiling she almost hurt the eyes to look at, as if someone had snatched a star out of the sky and locked her up down there.
In contradiction to her startling appearance, she said very little, and whatever few words they managed to coax out of her were spoken in a quiet, surprisingly gentle murmur. But Merritt felt her eyes on him the entire time, examining him with needle sharpness, and had a feeling that this girl did a lot of thinking which she kept to herself.
Ironic, since her rider had seemed rather dim.
Thoushalt was quiet for a long while when they first entered too. Then her golden tail darted out, gently nudging Merritt’s chin upwards as she leaned forward, her catlike eyes with their narrow black pupils staring into his brown ones. “I like his hair,” she decided eventually, ruffling it with the very tip of her tail. “Tell Vachir that I approve.”
And that appeared to be it. Niall told him, once they’d left the pen, that if she hadn’t approved, she would probably have made a jab at his nuts instead. Merritt winced, and made a mental note of being very polite to Thoushalt whenever he had to talk to her.
Outside the next pen, Luvander stopped for a moment, hesitating. “Okay, lamb chop, here’s a piece of advice that might just make sure you’ll be in one piece when the month is through. Be real fucking careful if you’ve ever got to enter this pen, okay?”
“Right,” Merritt said. “‘Nother bitchy dragon?”
“What, Cassie?” Niall and Luvander both laughed. “Hell no. She’s as sweet as it’s possible for a girl to be without being made out of sugar and fucking chocolate swirls.”
“Yeah,” Luvander agreed, starting to push the door open. “No, what you’ve got to worry about in here...” He didn’t get further than that before a glittering object sped past his head and bounced off the opposite wall with a clatter. Merritt picked it up, and then almost dropped it again when he realized what it was. A damn knife! Someone in there was throwing knives? “What you’ve got to worry about in here,” Luvander carried on as if that was nothing out of the ordinary, “is the rider. Hey, Ivory, ‘s just us. Stop that shit.”
“You should’ve said,” an unimpressed voice drawled, each syllable laden with dry amusement. “It would have broken my poor heart if I’d accidentally’ve had your eye out. You’d look ridiculous with an eyepatch, for a start.”
“Thanks for the concern,” Luvander said caustically, swinging the door open. “It’s really too much. Oh, and make sure you aim for the newbie next time. I’m sure you didn’t make enough of an impression just now.”
Merritt peered in over Luvander’s shoulder. The dragon inside was the same size as Vachir, made out of a dark, pearly grey metal. Draped on her back was a man who looked like he’d been made by the magician that created Illarion, except the look in his eye reminded more of Natalia. It was the kind of look that suggested that had he been a house, he would’ve been falling over, on account of being more than just a few bricks short of a proper foundation. He smiled coldly at Merritt, who shivered and fought a sudden urge to duck. “Oh,” he said loftily, “you’ve found my knife.”
“Uh, yeah,” Merritt said, trying not to look at the thing in his hand. “D’you want it back?”
“Just put it on the shelf over there,” Ivory replied, already letting his gaze drift away from Merritt with a bored air. “I’ve got more.”
Merritt didn’t see any knives on him, but decided that he really didn’t want any demonstrations as to where he was hiding them. Those were some really tight pants he was wearing. So he just did as he was told.
“Hey, Cass,” Niall said, looking up at the dragon with a wide grin. “This here’s Merritt, Vachir’s new boy. We’re just bringing him around here so he can admire you a bit.”
The dragon turned her head to look at Merritt, who nodded hesitantly, and then she... giggled. Actually, honestly to Regina giggled. “He looks cute,” she said coyly, tilting her head to the side in a strangely girlish way. “Doesn’t he look cute, my sweet?” she cooed happily, looking over her shoulder at Ivory.
The important thing, Merritt told himself, was to not laugh at the raving lunatic, no matter how hysterically funny the situation was.
“Whatever you say, Cassiopeia,” Ivory replied solemnly, not sounding nearly as unhinged when he was speaking to her, but that didn’t say much, really. Then he gave Merritt a very direct look, one eyebrow lifted slightly, shifting in a way that suggested that wherever he was keeping his knives, he was allowing for better access in case they should be needed. Merritt found that it suddenly was very easy not to laugh. What wasn’t going to be so easy, he reflected, was forgetting that this had ever happened, but he would certainly try his best, and maybe he wouldn’t have to sleep with one eye open for the rest of his life.
“The thing about Cassie,” Niall said as they left the pen, “is that the magician that made her was fucking unhinged. As in, more than most. She’s been here a couple of times, and she keeps calling Cass her daughter. For real. For all we know, she really thinks she is her daughter. And this has made Cass a little weird, in a way that dragons generally aren’t. I mean, they’re all a bit batshit, because they’re fucking dragons, but Cass is the only one who’ll... well, cry. I know it sounds insane, but she really does if something upsets her. And that’s made Ivory - who, you might have gathered, didn’t exactly have all his marbles in the first place - go overboard a bit when it comes to being protective. He’s been known to cut muck-boys up just for looking at her funny.”
Merritt blinked. “Wow. That’s... real damn cracked.”
“This is the Airman, lamb chop,” Luvander said with a laugh. “You have to be pretty damn out of it to be here in the first place. Oh, and speaking of cracked...” he added, nodding towards the next pen in line. Niall gave his shoulder a quick, hard punch.
“Show some respect for the lady,” he said in an even, cheerful voice that suggested that he would dislocate Luvander’s jaw next if he didn’t do as he said.
“Is that you, Niall?” a dragon’s voice said inside the pen. “Are you here to take me up, or have you come here to break a girl’s heart, as is your habit?”
“Ah, honey,” Niall said with a grin, sliding the door open, “you know how much I love playing hard-to-get.”
“Cocktease,” the dragon inside accused him, loping her tail around his waist and tugging him inside, while he laughed and made absolutely no effort of resisting. Luvander and Merritt followed him inside after a few moments, only to find Niall perched on the joint where his dragon’s powerful front legs met her body.
“As you may have guessed,” he said, leaning back with his arms folded behind his head, “this is my beautiful Erdeni, whose sheer brilliance is obviously beyond Luvander’s very limited grasp of understanding, and therefore intimidates him.”
Luvander snorted derisively, but the dragon laughed, much louder and wilder than any of the other dragons, and said, “Let’s knock the newbie out of the air, Niall. I am sure I could catch him before he hits the ground. Besides, it’s been too long since I’ve been allowed to have some fun.”
Niall chuckled. “That’s because the last time you had fun, my dear, Anastasia almost crashed into a treetop. Amery still isn’t speaking to me, you know, and we can’t fly out with Natalia since she keeps attacking you on sight.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Erdeni lamented. “But still. Wasn’t it a blast?”
“That it was,” Niall agreed, grinning. It was then that Merritt realized that Niall, for all his charm and, well, style, wasn’t the sort of man that would stop while he still had a head - or at least a head that was the generally approved standard of shape and design, as opposed to, say, flatter and a lot more colourful.
Merritt sent Luvander an alarmed look, and the other man replied with rolling his eyes and making the universal gesture for “absolutely, seven-ways-from-Sunday, right-up-a-tree batshit cracked”. This earned him another hard punch on the shoulder from Niall, who’d slid down easily from his perch, and a playful poke from in the side from Erdeni that would probably leave him sore for days. He did not look amused.
After that, it seemed to Merritt that he was through the most traumatizing experiences among the dragons. Compassus - Ghislain’s dragon, and appropriately huge - just seemed overall amused, by him as well as Niall and Luvander’s efforts to scare him. She laughed loudly when they suggested when they suggested that she should pick up Merritt to give him some perspective on how tiny he was, and then she picked up Luvander instead. I think I like dragons, Merritt thought decisively as they left the pen, Luvander still swearing under his breath.
Spiridon was very affectionate, bordering on flirtatious, which felt more than just a bit weird. A several-ton metal lizard definitely had no business making eyes at people. Proudmouth, the sergeant’s dragon, had a cunning way about her, and rattled out a few sly jibes at Niall and Luvander which Merritt understood nothing of, but which made his two guides very eager to get out of there again. Jeannot’s dragon, Al Atan, barely acknowledged that they were there at all, humming softly to herself in what sounded like Old Ramanthine, her red-on-gold eyes half closed.
As they stopped outside the pen right next to Vachir’s, Merritt was pretty certain he’d already figured out what came next. “Let me guess,” he ventured, glancing at the multitude of warning signs hanging on the door. “We don’t go in there, right?”
Niall grimaced. “Correct, newbie. In there,” he gestured behind him with a toss of his head, “resides the bitch herself, the oh-so-appropriately named Havemercy. No one goes in there except some really unfortunate much boys, Amery, who she for some reason likes, and her rider, Rook.”
“Only because you’re all fucking cowards,” said an amused voice from inside the pen, and Merritt jumped. “And I don’t have any time for cowards.”
“Call me overly cautious, dear,” Niall half sing-songed at the dragon, “but I rather like my head where I have it.”
“Up you ass, then, pretty-boy,” was the immediate reply, edged with cruel-sounding laughter. “Or at least someone’s ass.”
“Quite a charmer, our Havemercy, as you can hear,” Niall said to Merritt in an undertone. “And you should probably know that her rider-”
But he didn’t get further than this before Luvander interrupted him with a wave of his hand. “We probably shouldn’t bother,” he said pointedly. “Ain’t like he won’t find out soon enough anyways, right?”
Niall hesitated, but then shrugged. “I s’pose so. Come on, newbie, it’s only polite to say hello to your own lady too.” He loped an arm around Merritt’s shoulders and dragged him along, and Merritt knew better than to ask them what that had been all about. They probably wouldn’t answer, and it would just make him come off as overly anxious, so he kept mum. As Luvander had said, sooner or later, he probably would find out, right?