by J. R Fox
Peter kneeled before her, his eyes on her unicorn as he noticed all the rips and smudges on it. “I don’t think anyone likes having their stuff stolen,” he agreed. “Right?” he asked her classmates, and they hesitantly nodded. “But,” he said, pointing to the tapestry. “Dragons are vicious – they don’t play nice even if they aren’t threatened.”
The little girl just shook her head. “They just want to protect their treasure,” she said firmly. “They’re selfless.”
Selfless enough to trap someone in a bond brace. “Maybe,” he said to the little girl. Standing, he ushered them on to the last part of the exhibit and forced a smile. “Now, who knows why the knight was so scared to go to the doctor?”
Chapter Six
Peter had been living with Gabriel for a month when he started to notice…things.
At first, it was just a quickening of his heartbeat, picking up speed whenever Gabriel entered a room. Then it was the way that his gut would squeeze when Gabe bowed to him (something the dragon did whenever they hadn’t seen each other for more than five minutes). But the last straw was really when he felt his shoulder blades literally flutter. He ripped off his shirt and awkwardly bent his body until he could see exactly what was going on in the mirror.
He had wings.
“You asshole!” he roared, crashing into Gabriel’s study with a shove of the doors. Gabe was sitting behind his desk, his wings out in a stretch as he wrote.
“Peter,” he sighed, standing up. “I really—Wait, are you crying?”
Peter tried to hide his face, the bond brace shining as he wiped his eyes with it. As Gabriel skirted out from around his desk and ran forward, Peter whirled around and pointed at his back. “What did you d-do to me?” he demanded, his voice a stuttering sob.
“It’s your blood,” Gabriel hastened to explain, turning Peter back around so that he could look him in the eye. “That’s all it is, Peter – your blood is awakening, and your wings are one of the physical attributes—”
“One?” Peter cried. “There are more?”
“Well,” Gabriel frowned, as if unsure of what to say. “Like all dragons, soon you’ll be able to shift into your proper form. If you want,” he rushed to add.
“Proper form?” Peter shook his head, throwing Gabriel’s hands off of him. “No, this is my proper form! I’m not—”
“You are,” Gabriel told him, bending to Peter’s shorter height to bring their foreheads together. And damn, if that didn’t make Peter’s heart go into overtime. “Please, try to understand. One is not worse than the other.”
“Oh, no? Is that why you waited to find a dragon blood instead of getting with a human?” Peter demanded.
“Peter,” Gabriel frowned, as if puzzled by Peter’s words. “I liked you long before I realized that you were a dragon. It was why I accepted your company on the first day we met, do you remember? You asked to come back and visit me.”
Peter remembered. He closed his eyes in the face of Gabriel’s prying ones and admitted nothing.
“Finding out that you were a dragon blood was a lucky mistake,” Gabe admitted with a laugh. “And even then I didn’t think that you had enough in you to activate the brace bond—”
“Yet you only became interested when I did,” Peter huffed, getting his tears under control.
“What? No,” Gabriel said fiercely. “I had been planning to, I mean…” Gabe blushed, and Peter stared. “But then you found the brace, and I knew what it would do to you, what would start to happen.” As he spoke, Peter could feel the edges of one of Gabriel’s wings brushing up against his back, finding his own miniscule ones. “What the awakening would entail.”
“So, what? I’m just supposed to accept all of this?” Peter dared Gabriel, his eyes narrowed.
“Peter,” Gabriel sighed. “There’s a chance that you could’ve gone your whole life as a human like your ancestors before you, but there’s also a chance that you would’ve awakened on your own.”
“A fat chance,” Peter snorted.
“But a chance nonetheless,” Gabriel said, kissing the omega’s forehead. Peter felt his wings flap pathetically against his skin, and flushed. “They’ll grow,” Gabriel added, misunderstanding his embarrassment. “Don’t worry.”
As Gabriel withdrew and Peter watched the dragon’s enormous wings drag the floor behind him, he couldn’t help but feel like that was exactly why he should worry.
Gabriel was weird, after that. Or maybe it was Peter himself, he really couldn’t be sure. He found himself looking for the dragon in the giant manor, actively seeking him out and feeling his heart skip whenever he found him. Gabriel himself seemed oblivious, but he was always happy to see Peter nonetheless.
“Oh, Peter, just in time,” Gabriel ushered him into the kitchen. Peter moved from around the corner and walked up behind him shyly, not missing the way that the dragon’s arm muscles rolled to reach a bowl on the top shelf. “Here,” he said, handing Peter the dish. He accepted it with a blush, the heat of Gabriel’s fingers seeping into his own when they brushed hands.
Peter peered over the taller man’s shoulder to see what he was doing. “Uh, should it be smoking like that?”
“Back up, back up,” Gabriel urged him back with leather gloved hands, repeating the two words calmly like a ritual. Bending down, he opened the oven door and pulled out a cookie sheet, a chain burned black in the middle of the tray. Peter stared at the damaged thing, trying to think of the most polite way to point out that it was ruined.
“Perfect!” Gabriel beamed, ripping off his gloves. With smoke still rising from it, Gabriel seized the ends of the chain and held it up.
“No!” Peter yelled, grabbing his elbow. Gabriel glanced down at him.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said, gripping it easily. “Look.” With a deep breath, he blew on the chain stretched out between his hands, and Peter could only gape as a single gust of blue fire left Gabriel’s mouth to overtake the blackened item. He watched, transfixed, as the blue flames crept up the chain to dissolve the charred remains and reveal a giant sapphire, held in place by a silver thread.
“There,” Gabriel said, waiting for the fire to eat itself out before turning to Peter with it. “For you. To match your eyes,” he smiled.
“For me?” he repeated dumbly, accepting the feather-light piece of jewelry.
“Oh, here,” Gabriel said, moving to wind it around Peter’s bond brace. It was thrumming with light, as if trying to match Peter’s heartbeat with each flicker. Tying it off at the end, Gabriel stood back up to admire his work. Peter looked down, unsurprised to find that the blue gem was the biggest among the jewels that’d been long interlaid into the gold. “Each one represents a bond,” Gabriel said, turning back to the oven to turn off the dials. “A true dragon bond.”
“So, what?” Peter asked, eyeing the sapphire sitting atop the gold brace. “It’ll just mold itself in there?”
Gabriel shrugged with a small smile. “Something like that.”
It was another two weeks before Peter stopped going to work.
He found that he didn’t like being outside of the manor, for one thing. Outside, among the oblivious and the greedy where it was suffocating, void of the odd atmosphere of magic and fire the manor grounds possessed. And the tour guide jokes had only gotten worse, turning the job monotonous and intolerable.
Not to mention his wings.
“I don’t care if you go to work,” Gabriel had tried to tell him, a warm hand on top of the layers of blankets Peter had buried himself under. “But you have to go outside.”
“Yeah?” Peter growled, suddenly flipping the sheets off of himself so that he could spread his indigo wings to their true length. When he walked they would barely hit the back of his knees, but wide and outstretched, they were as long as he was tall. Luckily they were light, easily forgotten except for when he became angry. That was then they’d flap hard enough to lift him off the ground, keeping his feet in a hover above the floor until he
calmed down enough for them to stop.
“And how,” Peter growled, “Do you propose that I go outside with these on my back?”
Peter sighed with a smile. “You have to learn to—”
“Besides,” Peter cut him off with a huff. “You don’t really care if I leave. That’s why you brought me here.”
Gabriel didn’t answer right away, and Peter knew by his silence that it was true. The man was a dragon, and as selfless as he tried to be, Gabriel was still just an arrogant beast set on guarding his treasure horde. Something that Peter had long learned that he was a part of.
“You don’t have to leave the manor,” Gabriel said as he ran his fingers over the edges of Peter’s wings. “Take a walk in the gardens – I have some ruins from Pompeii near the roses.” When Peter just gave him a look, he added, “Pieces of a temple that needed an abundance of magic to survive.”
“How kind,” Peter snorted.
“Peter,” Gabriel said, leaning himself over Peter’s back. It made him shiver in anticipation and drop to the bed, bumping the brace with his chin as he threw his arms under his head. The gem that Gabe had given him, the sapphire, had yet to mix with the bond brace, and it awkwardly sat atop the gold by its string.
Moving his lips to Peter’s ear, Gabriel whispered, “I have to go to work. And you need to get out of bed.”
Peter waited until Gabriel’s footsteps retreated from the room before he sat up properly and stretched his arms and wings as one.
Standing, he considered going to the garden. He had always had a thing for roses.
Chapter Seven
Gabriel left Peter often for work, more than Peter could ever remember going himself. Still, museums, he knew, worked like theme parks – they were open on holidays and always through the weekends.
“Why do you even work?” Peter had asked him once. “You have a manor – you’re a dragon. I imagine you have lots of gold.” Not to mention that the man could also apparently produce sapphires from his oven like hot cakes.
“I do not work at the museum for the long hours or the minimal pay,” Gabriel had replied with a sympathetic smile. He’d known why Peter was asking, and he’d set his briefcase down to give a proper answer. “Half of the hidden artifacts in that vault are my own. The museum has the tools and the technology to keep them safe. It’s a win-win, has been since I started taking odd museum jobs fifty years ago.”
It explained why Peter had yet to find a treasure room, no matter how many times he’d explored the manor. Though, that locked basement was still a possibility.
“Stop that,” Gabriel had scolded him gently for the twentieth time one night, taking a seat on the couch across from him.
Peter had huffed and crossed his arms, but he couldn’t resist licking his lips. He’d been chewing on the bond brace again.
“It’s something that all dragons go through,” Gabriel had explained the first time that Peter had caught himself doing it. “Well, all young dragons. They usually grow out of it after their fortieth year or so. I never thought that the awakening would make you—”
“What?” Peter had sighed, kicking off his shoes to lie on the couch. “Develop bad habits?”
It had only gotten worse from there. It wasn’t long before Peter had started dreaming about gold – hording it, swimming in it – even drowning in it. Gabriel called it Midas’ Disease, and while the joke wasn’t lost on Peter, he still couldn’t help but wonder if it would ever end.
After a few months the addiction began to fade slightly, only to be replaced with something much more troublesome.
A desire for one tall redheaded dragon, a man with two brown eyes and a sharp pair of wings.
Peter could admit that he’d started to develop a crush for the man just before the bond brace had jumped up and attacked him. Now that they were dragons and, supposedly, mates, he wasn’t sure how to feel. It was like the choice had been taken away from him, and the more Gabriel tried to push it on him the more Peter fought it.
Still, he’d never been able to stop a blush whenever Gabriel stepped too close, or calm his heart when the dragon would fly through the front door and announce that he was home.
It drove Peter crazy.
So, when Gabriel came home one night, Peter asked the question that’d been bugging him since the beginning.
“Are you gay?” he said in his best nonchalant manner. Gabriel paused from where he was hanging his jacket, but straightened quickly enough to turn to Peter.
“I’m gay for you,” he said with a wink, making Peter’s heart skip.
“You know what I mean,” he said with a growl, his wings flapping at his sides.
“And I’m telling you,” Gabriel said with a laugh. “That dragons have a bond brace for a reason – otherwise, there are too many options.”
“Are you saying—”
“We’re bisexual,” Gabriel shrugged.
“Huh,” Peter clicked his tongue. Ever since Gabriel had told him all about bond braces and dragons, he’d imagined a dragon council full of traditionalists with outdated opinions. It was an odd relief to know that in Gabriel’s society, they were just another normal couple.
“Uh, so,” Peter said quickly, stopping Gabriel as he moved to leave the room. “You like me?” he asked, leaning on the information that he’d just been given like liquid courage.
“Haven’t I already said so?” Gabriel asked, his giant wings unfurling to overlap Peter’s. “I liked you even before I knew that you were dragon blood—”
Peter cut him off with a kiss. It was messy, and certainly not his best, but it made Gabriel’s eyes widen and his wings shake. “I like you, too,” Peter whispered.
It was with a flurry of wings that Peter found himself on Gabriel’s bed, his back pressed against the mattress. Gabriel’s face was inches from his own, and his eyes were searching, narrowed in suspicion.
“Like me?” he asked. “Or love me?”
Peter didn’t answer, but he could feel his cheeks flush with heat. Gabriel seemed to find his answer in the face he made.
“Me too,” he said.
Peter could feel his heart blossom as Gabriel kissed him. It was gentle, at first, until the dragon slid his hands under Peter’s blonde hair and pulled him closer. His lips turned searing, and he ground their mouths together with a rumble in his throat. Peter could feel a tingle between his shoulder blades, right where his wings sprouted, and he shivered in delight from the sensation.
“Gabriel,” he breathed, clawing at the dragon’s wings. Gabriel just chuckled and kissed him again. Peter gave into it wholly, a need curling in his belly, and he could only whimper as he felt Gabriel reach between them and palm the bulge in his pants.
“You’re so excited,” Gabriel panted as he nudged Peter’s thighs wider apart.
“You’re the one with a fire in his pants,” Peter mumbled, using his elbows to sit up while he spread his legs.
“Fire, hmm?” Gabriel asked, and Peter didn’t miss the sudden black smoke wafting out of his open mouth.
“If you fucking breathe fire, I swear to god,” Peter warned.
Gabriel just chuckled, and the smoke stopped. “Here,” he said, “Let’s get you out of those clothes.”
As Peter fought with the button on his pants, Gabriel moved back and pulled off his shirt, tossing it to the floor while he popped the zipper on his slacks and kicked them off to join it. Peter had barely shoved his trousers down to his knees when Gabriel grabbed the bottom of his pants and yanked, effectively stripping Peter’s lower half.
“I need…” Peter swallowed, his heart hammering in his chest. “Gabe, I—”
“I know,” Gabriel smiled, and it was with a slow shove of his underwear that he freed his dick. Peter stared as it bobbed against Gabe’s stomach, angry and red between his legs.
“You didn’t tell me that dragons were, um,” Peter cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Well endowed?” Gabriel asked with a smirk. “I thought it obvi
ous.”
“Oh, yeah,” Peter snorted. “I’m sure they talk about it in all the old stories.”
“No,” Gabriel laughed, bending forward to lick Peter’s neck. “I meant by my wings. You know what they say,” he hummed.
“Uh, I don’t,” Peter reminded him.
“Ah, right,” Gabriel nodded, and rather than explain he simply moved further up the bed to reach for the nightstand. Peter didn’t see what he grabbed, but his suspicions were confirmed when he felt wet fingers at his entrance a moment later. Gabriel seemed to pause then, but Peter wasn’t having it and he jutted his hips out, bumping himself against Gabriel’s hand.
“C’mon,” Peter demanded. Gabriel didn’t keep him waiting.
Peter hissed as Gabriel pressed into him, the dragon’s brown eyes turning a deep black as he watched Peter’s face. Peter accepted him completely, groaning at the wriggling fingers pressing tightly inside his passage. Gabriel stilled at the noise, but Peter whined for him to continue. “It’s just been a while,” he ground out, twisting in the sheets under Gabriel’s ministrations. “Don’t stop.”
Gabriel’s nostril’s flared at his words, and he gave a small thrust of his fingers in response, bending them at the crook. Peter sucked in a breath as his wings fluttered against the bed.
Gabriel kept at it, and Peter keened at the persistent curling of fingers that Gabriel would withdraw just to thrust back in. Peter could only take so much, and it wasn’t long before he was pulling at Gabriel’s shoulders, demanding for him to stop and start all at once. Gabriel removed his fingers, and climbed over Peter properly so that his cock bumped against the smaller man’s inner thigh.
“Wait,” Peter pressed a flat hand against Gabriel’s chest. “Wait, there’s…” He reached, frowning, and felt Gabriel between them. Gabriel sighed at his touch, but Peter furrowed his eyebrows. “Take it off,” he demanded, his blunt nails catching the condom.