Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/13651908.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Original_Work
  Relationship:
      Original_Male_Character/Original_Male_Character
  Additional Tags:
      Mostly_not_chronological_with_the_rest_of_the_series, dragon_and_human,
      They_make_friends, and_other_things
  Series:
      Part 10 of How_Best_to_Use_a_Sword
  Stats:
      Published: 2018-02-12 Updated: 2018-03-11 Chapters: 3/13 Words: 4318
****** Not All Dragons Kidnap Princes; Some Just Want to Make Friends ******
by AntagonizedPenguin
Summary
     Travis heard that everyone was going off to find the dragon that
     kidnapped the princess, so he went off to find him too.
     The difference was, Travis wasn't going to slay the dragon. He wanted
     to be its friend.
Notes
     I bet you weren't expecting a new story! But here we are. This one
     isn't going to be full-length; I currently have it clocked at 13
     chapters. I just wanted to show some fun backstory for two side
     characters in the main series.
     Credit also to my Tumblr friend Gamerkun0525, with whom I've talked
     about these characters a lot before writing them.
     Like the tags say, this story isn't happening alongside the main
     chronology. It's mostly placed in the very early chapters of the
     series for now.
***** Not All Dragons Kidnap Princes; Some Just Want to Make Friends *****
This was really cool.
It was mostly just rocks and dirt and stuff, but it was a mountain in a range
of mountains and Travis had never climbed a mountain before. Now here he was,
climbing a mountain, and it was cool.
Admittedly, it wasn’t as cool as it would be if he’d found a dragon, but still.
Travis knew that other people thought it was silly, his plan. But he didn’t
care. He didn’t want to hear that it was unrealistic or silly or that he should
just stay home. He was tired of just staying home, and he was old enough that
he wasn’t going to do that anymore just because he’d been told to.
Everyone was all in an uproar because the princess had been kidnapped by a
dragon and was looking all over the countryside for her. They were going to
kill the dragon, which Travis thought was too bad because dragons were awesome,
and it had probably only kidnapped the princess because it was lonely.
Which was why Travis planned to make friends with it. That way, the dragon
could give the princess back and still have friends and nobody would have to
kill it.
Dragons were huge, so Travis hadn’t thought they’d be good at hiding, but
apparently they were because after a few days in the mountains, he hadn’t found
a single one, except for maybe seeing one flying in the distance yesterday, but
that might just have been a bird.
Travis was choosing to pretend it was a dragon, though. It was cooler that way
and he saw birds all the time. He hadn’t come all the way out to these
mountains to look at birds.
The guys running he orphanage he lived at called Travis ‘energetic,’ which he’d
recently learned was probably secret code for ‘annoying,’ but he was finding
that he was less and less energetic the more he slogged through these
mountains. It got harder and harder, especially as he went higher up, and he
had already taken more breaks today than he had all day yesterday, and it
wasn’t lunchtime yet.
“Ugh,” Travis said to himself, sitting down on a rock and deciding that it was
lunchtime now. He reached into his bag and rooted around for his supplies,
deciding that he had enough for a few more days if he was careful, then he’d
have to go down the mountain again or figure out how hunting worked so he could
eat birds. It probably wasn’t that bad and he’d eaten chickens and stuff before
and they tasted okay. Whatever weird mountain birds lived here in the mountains
probably tasted pretty much like that.
Looking out over the vista from the ledge he was on, Travis sighed. “Where are
you, dragons?”
No dragons presented themselves to answer his question, and he sighed again and
started eating, not really tasting the food as he chewed, grateful that nobody
was around to accuse him of pouting. He wasn’t pouting, he was just expressing
his perfectly reasonable disappointment at the lack of dragons.
“Everyone’s going to laugh at me if I go home without a dragon friend,” Travis
muttered when he finished eating. He may or may not have spent more than a
little bit of time bragging about how he was going to be the first guy in the
world to make friends with a dragon, and promising to bring the dragon home to
prove it to everyone.
Looking back, he may or may not have been goaded into that by some of his
friends at the orphanage who hadn’t believed in him. He had to find a dragon
out here to make friends with, because if he didn’t, he was going to have to go
back home alone and the friends he already had were going to say he was a liar
and laugh at him.
“Where are you, dragons?” Travis called out again, his voice echoing across the
mountains. He startled some more dumb birds into flight, but no dragons
answered his call so he sighed, packed his stuff away, took a minute to pee off
the side of the cliff and then, tucking himself back into his pants as he
walked since there was nobody here to tackle him for letting it hang out for a
second.
Travis liked all his friends and he liked the orphanage and the town and
everything, but some parts of being off on his own were pretty good. Nobody was
making sure he had the exact right pee etiquette, nobody teased him if he tried
to sleep naked, and he didn’t have to sneak away in the night or carefully
check to make sure people were sleeping before he played with himself. There
was something to be said for that, and for the fact that he should just shoot
his stuff right off the side of a mountain and not have to deal with cleaning
it up. They weren’t good enough reasons to stop him from going home or
anything, but the freedom that he’d never had before was pretty cool.
This as a pretty wide path that had a pretty steep incline, but it wasn’t hard
to climb at least so Travis kept walking, keeping his eyes peeled for caves,
since that was where dragons lived, and watching the sky to see if any flew by.
Nothing so far, as usual. Mountains were cool, but they’d be cooler with
dragons.
Travis didn’t regret this, not at all. Even if he didn’t find anything, he was
glad that he’d done it and come here and seen all this and proven that he
totally could take care of himself and see the world if he wanted. But whoever
said that the journey was more important than the destination might have been
right, but obviously their destination hadn’t included dragons or they probably
wouldn’t have said that.
Their destination had probably been a monastery or something. People in stories
with important morals were always looking for famous monasteries and becoming
monks and stuff.
Travis was just contemplating how he definitely wouldn’t go on a trip like this
just to look for a monastery when he rounded a bend in the path and nearly fell
into the cave that was there. “Oh.” If he’d just kept climbing for a bit
instead of stopping for lunch, he could have found his earlier.
Oh, well. He was here now and that was what mattered. There were still some
hours of sunlight left, so there was time to look around. Maybe there was a
dragon inside!
Excited again, Travis hurried into the mouth of the cave, peering around. There
wasn’t much inside, but it did smell a bit funny. Caves all smelled funny, in
Travis’s experience.
“Hello?” Travis called, because if there was a dragon here, he didn’t want to
surprise it and get cooked. They weren’t friends yet and people didn’t much
like it when someone just wandered into their house, so Travis couldn’t imagine
that dragons were much different. “Is anyone home?” He knew there probably
wasn’t, there hadn’t been anyone home in any of the other caves he’d gone to.
“I’m not here to kill you or anything! I promise! I just wanted to meet you!
Hello?”
There was no answer as usual, and Travis gave a resigned sigh. “I just want to
meet a dragon,” he muttered, kicking at a loose stone as he turned around.
When he back was turned, Travis heard a scratching sound, some rocks shifting.
“Um…”
Jumping a little, Travis turned back around, prepared to do…something, but he
wasn’t sure what. That definitely hadn’t been his voice. Maybe it was someone
who’d been kidnapped by a dragon?
There, near the back of the cave. There was a head poking over a rock
outcropping, peering at him. It was a boy about his age, maybe a little
younger, with white hair. And horns, long horns that came up out of his
forehead and curved above his hair. “Hi,” the boy said, sounding nervous.
“Did…were you looking for a specific dragon, or…”
***** Big and Scary Don’t Make the Dragon *****
Travis stared at the strange horned boy. The boy stared back at him. They both
stared at each other for a good long while. The boy blinked.
“Oh, wow!” Travis said, stepping back and pointing at the strange boy. “You
have horns!”
The boy nodded awkwardly, looking at Travis funny. “All dragons have horns.”
“You’re a dragon?” Travis squinted at him. “I thought dragons were…you know…”
he mimed wings with his arms, puffing himself up to indicate size. “Big. And
scaly, and big. And like, lizards with claws and tails and stuff. And big.”
He was pretty sure, if nothing else, that they didn’t look like human boys with
horns.
“I’m not done growing,” the boy said, a little defensive, giving Travis a
frown. He shifted behind his rock. “My sire looks like that. And I have a
tail.”
“Really?” Travis peered at him some more, but the boy was still mostly hiding
behind that rock, so he didn’t see anything. “Can I see?”
“I guess,” the boy said, and he stepped out from behind the rock. The first
thing Travis noticed was that he did indeed have a tail, a long, scaled tail
that dragged on the ground a little, about as thick around as Travis’s arm. It
was a light grey to match his horns.
“Oh, wow…” Travis said, taking a step closer to get a better look at it. That
was when he noticed the second thing, which was that the boy was butt naked
without that rock to hide him. “Um. Oh, sorry! I can turn around if you want to
get dressed!”
“Dressed?”
“Um, like. Put clothes on?” Travis asked. He wasn’t embarrassed or anything, it
wasn’t like he’d never seen a naked boy before; there were a lot of other boys
at the orphanage and they only had a few rooms to sleep in and all bathed
together usually. He just knew that sometimes people were shy. Probably this
boy wasn’t shy if he’d just wandered out into the open skyclad, but sometimes
people forgot and Travis had kind of barged into his house.
“Clothes?” the boy asked. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s like…” Travis frowned a little, then pointed at himself. “Like this.”
“Like your fur?”
“It’s not fur, it’s…” Travis didn’t know what it was. Plants, probably. But he
could sense that he’d confuse the boy if he said that. “Nevermind. Do you just
never cover yourself up, then?”
“No. Why would I? I’d get hot.”
He had a point. Travis nodded, deciding that if the strange boy wasn’t shy
about being naked, then it didn’t bother him either. “Okay. So…you really are a
dragon?”
“Yes,” the dragon boy said slowly. “I already said that. Are humans all this
dumb?”
“Hey! I’m not dumb!” Travis said, crossing his arms. “I’ve never seen a dragon
before!”
“Oh.” The dragon boy looked him up and down. “Well, I’ve never seen a human
before. Um. Dragons don’t all look like me. Most of us look like you were
saying before.”
Travis nodded, assured that he hadn’t been totally wrong about how the world
worked. “So…why don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” the dragon boy said, looking down at himself, which was when
Travis noticed the third important thing—despite being kind of short, the
dragon boy was bigger than him in one particularly noticeable way. “I just
don’t, I guess?”
Well, that was a good enough answer for Travis. It wasn’t like he could shake
answers out of him if there weren’t anyway. “Okay. My name’s Travis.”
“I’m…” the dragon boy growled something that sounded half like a roar and half
like sounds that people made.
Travis blinked. “Um. I don’t think I can say that. Sorry.”
The dragon boy giggled. He was cuter than Travis had thought dragons would be.
“That’s okay. I guess we’re not the same all the way through.”
The horns and tail and dick too big for his frame had already suggested that
they weren’t the same even some of the way through, but Travis nodded, trying
to stop looking at that. It was obviously just because he was a dragon, that
was all. Travis was a perfectly respectable size for a human boy, easily in the
middle of the pack of boys his age at the orphanage. “Um. Can I call you Joey?”
Travis had almost sort of heard something like that in the jumble of sounds.
“Sure, if that’s easier for you,” Joey said, tail swishing back and forth. “Um.
Do you want to come inside, or…”
“Sure!” Travis didn’t mean to raise his voice, and he stepped inside the cave.
“This is a nice cave.”
“I guess so,” Joey said, looking around again. “It’s not as nice as the one me
and my sire used to live in, but he made me leave a few weeks ago.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Joey looked sad for a minute. “He told me I was too old to live
with him, and that he had better things to do than nurse me anymore.”
That kind of made Travis sad too, and he slipped his pack off, setting it
gently on the ground. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Joey said, looking away. He sat down, cross-legged, tail wrapped
around himself. “It’s just what happens. I always knew when I got old enough
I’d have to live by myself.”
Travis shook his head. “Nobody should have to live by themselves.”
Joey blinked at him. His eyes seemed really big, but Travis was pretty sure it
was his imagination. “You’re by yourself.”
That struck Travis kind of hard, and he took a second to answer. “Uh. Yeah.
Well, I had an orphanage that I lived at, and stuff. So it’s not like I’m by
myself.”
“You’re by yourself right now.”
“That’s because I came looking for dragons!” Travis blushed a little. He hadn’t
really expected the dragons to look this much like him. He hadn’t really
expected that he’d be having a conversation with one. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to
yell.”
“That’s okay.” Joey giggled again. “What are you going to do now that you found
a dragon?”
“Um…” It took Travis a second to remember that he’d had a whole plan. “Well, I
was hoping I could make friends.”
“You want to be my friend?”
Travis looked at Joey. Joey was not the kind of dragon he’d imagined. He’d
imagined someone bigger (not like that), scalier, scarier. But Joey’s face had
kind of lit up at that question, and now he couldn’t really remember why he’d
imagined any of that. Joey was just enough dragon for him. “Yeah. Can we?”
“Sure!” Joey grinned, stood up and leapt on Travis, knocking him hard to the
ground and holding him there, hands on Travis’s shoulders. “I’ve never had a
human friend before!”
Joey’s smile was infectious, and Travis couldn’t help but laugh. “I’ve never
had a dragon friend before either.”
“This is going to be awesome!” Joey sat there for a minute as if expecting
something, but then he got up, pulling Travis by the hand. “Come on, I’ll show
you everything in the cave!”
Joey was not the dragon Travis had expected. He was better.
***** It Is a Well Documented Fact that Dragons Don’t Give a Shit about Your
Societal Norms *****
Hanging out with Joey was a lot of fun. Travis had been doing it for two days
now and they were the best two days of his life. They chatted about everything,
Travis told Joey all about humans and Joey told him all about dragons. Travis
had learned so much about dragons. Apparently boy dragons were smaller than
girl dragons and had to compete for mates, and dragon ladies liked piles of
treasure, and that was why dragons hoarded treasure and stuff.
Joey only knew one other dragon who looked like a human, and he could change
back and forth whenever he wanted to, which was fucking awesome. It was
probably a power Joey would have when he was older, he said.
Besides that, he knew that dragons really liked to collect things and didn’t
like to share, and they usually didn’t live to close to each other or they
fought, which sounded lonely to Travis. But since he wasn’t a dragon, he could
stay near Joey without any fighting, which was awesome.
The whole thing was awesome, Travis loved it.
He and Joey were kind of inseparable, partly because the cave wasn’t very big
so it wasn’t like they could get away from each other, but also because they
didn’t really want to get away from each other. They ate together and slept
near each other and even went out to pee off the cliff together. After just two
days, Travis was pretty sure that Joey was the best buddy he’d ever had. He was
the kind of friend Travis could tell embarrassing stories to without fear that
they’d be used against him later, or wrestle with without it being weird when
they ended up on top of each other, or burp and scratch in front of without
getting called gross. It was great.
“And then Cory said, ‘Travis, if you eat that, what are we going to feed the
sheep?’”
Joey was tilting over laughing at Travis’s story, and he leaned against
Travis’s shoulder as he did. Even Travis was laughing, though it hadn’t been
funny when it had happened to him. “Didn’t it taste funny? I can’t believe you
didn’t notice!”
“I was hungry!” Travis said, holding out an arm to demonstrate how hungry he’d
been. He wasn’t hungry now, they’d just finished eating lunch. “It was just a
misunderstanding.”
“You’re funny,” Joey said, still chuckling. He pulled away from Travis, then
made a face and leaned back in, sniffing him. “You smell different today.”
“Do I?” Travis lifted up his arm and sniffed himself.
“Yep.”
Oh. He did smell a bit bad. “I guess I need a bath,” he said, laughing
nervously. Travis wasn’t necessarily the best at remembering to wash. And he
may have…not bathed much since he’d left the orphanage. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay!” Joey leapt up, grinning. “We can wash together! Come on, I’ll show
you where there’s a great pond.”
“Sure, okay.” Travis got up and followed Joey out of the cave.
“It’s actually the only pond,” Joey told him as they headed off down the trail
along the cliffside. “There’s another one kind of far away, but it’s kind of
far away. This one is close, and it’s super nice! It’s really pretty and the
water is clean and there’s a waterfall to play in. You’re going to love it,
Travis, it’s awesome!”
Awesome was a word Travis had taught Joey, and he was very proud of that fact.
He didn’t exactly know why Joey spoke Daolo if he was a dragon, and why he only
spoke most of it instead of all of it, but there it was. There was probably a
reason, if he asked. “I can’t wait to see it,” Travis said, smiling back
because it was hard not to smile when Joey was. “It sounds great!”
Joey nodded and kept leading Travis along the path, banking suddenly into a
cleft Travis wouldn’t have seen on his own, which lead to a treacherous decline
full of loose rocks that Joey had no trouble not slipping on in his bare feet,
which made Travis determined not to slip in his boots either. They got to the
bottom without incident and Joey pulled him around a bend, under a stone arch
and around another corner, and then Travis was nearly blinded.
The pond was sparkling in the sunlight, water clear as light, rippling thanks
to the promised waterfall, which reached up about ten feet, feeding the pond
from what Travis assumed was snowmelt above. “It’s really pretty…” Travis said,
looking at it in awe for a second.
“Yeah!” Joey tugged at Travis, pulling him towards the water. “Come on, get in!
You can’t wash on the shore!”
“Right,” Travis laughed. “Sure. Give me a second.” And he reached down, lifted
his shirt over his head and tossed it aside, then sat to get his boots off.
Joey was staring at him like he’d grown a second head. “What…”
“What?” Travis asked, prying one boot free.
“How did you take your fur off like that?” Joey exclaimed, pointing at Travis’s
discarded shirt. “Can all humans do that?”
“Yes?” Travis looked at his shirt, and then back at Joey, who wasn’t wearing
any clothes. Right. “I told you before, it’s not fur. It’s just clothes. Humans
wear them because we don’t have fur.”
“Where…” Joey seemed vaguely horrified as Travis removed his other boot. “Where
do you get it?”
“We make it,” Travis hoped Joey didn’t ask more than that, because he had no
idea how clothes were made. They just were. “Sometimes out of fur from animals,
but not always.”
“Wow…” Joey was watching Travis raptly, clearly intending to observe the entire
undressing process. “Why?”
“Um…” Travis stood up, started unlacing his pants. Having Joey stare at him was
a bit awkward, but it wasn’t like he was shy. Even he was a dragon, Joey was a
guy too. “So we don’t get cold, mostly? But also because we’re kind of supposed
to. If you go around with no clothes on even when it’s hot, people glare at you
and stuff.”
Joey nodded along, watching Travis’s pants as they hit the ground and he
stepped out of them, kicking them aside, and then his eyes moved up to Travis’s
smallclothes. “I won’t glare at you,” he promised.
Travis hadn’t been planning to strut around naked, but he smiled. “Thanks.” He
dropped the smallclothes too, adding them to his pile of clothes. “Alright,
let’s get in the water.”
“Yeah!” Joey was still kind of looking at Travis, mostly at Travis’s dick.
Travis chose to believe that it was because he lived alone and had never seen
another one before. Curiosity was pretty normal, after all.
The two of them darted into the water, which Travis regretted because he’d been
right, this was definitely snowmelt water, and it was cold. But it didn’t seem
to deter Joey and so Travis wasn’t going to let it get to him either, and he
charged in with Joey, diving under the chest-deep water when Joey did.
Joey grabbed him under water and started to wrestle, and Travis giggled and
grabbed him back, dunking Joey further under the surface in his effort to get
up. They played really aggressively for a good while, chasing each other,
splashing, making a lot of noise. Joey kept challenging him to sit under the
waterfall for a long time, which Travis never did as long as Joey (Joey had
practice, it wasn’t a fair contest). He also used his tail to grab Travis’s
legs and win most of their wrestling matches, which was also cheating, but
Travis never called him on it, even when Joey would jump on Travis’s back and
demand rides around the pond when he won.
It was fun. It was a lot more fun than baths usually were, and since Travis
didn’t have any soap with him, he didn’t have much choice but to have fun.
Eventually his toes started to go numb, so he dragged Joey out of the water.
“We can come here again tomorrow,” he promised. “I just can’t feel my feet.”
“Okay…” Joey pouted, following Travis out of the water. When they were on the
shore, he grinned and leapt onto Travis’s back. “Carry me back to the cave?”
“Oof!” Travis staggered, trying to right himself under Joey’s weight. He was
heavier than he should be. Maybe it was the tail that was currently wrapping
itself around Travis’s waist. “Joey…”
“You lost all the wrestling matches, now you have to carry me back,” Joey
insisted, smug on Travis’s back.
Travis sighed. He supposed that was far. “Okay, okay. Get down so I can put my
clothes on and then I’ll carry you back?”
“Why?”
Travis blinked. “I thought you wanted me to carry you.”
“No, why do you have to put your clothes back on?” Joey asked, peering around
Travis from behind.
“Uh…because I do?”
“It’s not cold and I’m not going to get mad,” Joey told him, quite reasonably.
“Besides, they’re stinky and you’re clean. And I like you better like this, you
look more like me.”
Travis…couldn’t argue against any of that. And he didn’t really have any
particular attachment to clothes, really. They were just something he wore.
“Well…okay.” He crouched, awkward with Joey on his back, and scooped them all
up. They did stink a little bit.
With effort, he stood again. “I’m going to be sweaty again by the time we get
back,” he complained.
“Guess we’ll have to have a bath again tomorrow, then,” Joey said, resting his
chin on Travis’s shoulder. “Let’s go!”
“I’m going, I’m going.” Travis started up the path that would take them to the
cave, mostly focused on not dropping Joey or cutting his bare feet on the rock.
“Hey,” Joey said, eyes pointed down. “Have you noticed that mine’s bigger than
yours?”
Travis nearly dumped him on the ground right there. “Is it?” he asked,
pretending he didn’t know. “I didn’t notice.”
“Yeah, and you’re bigger than me everywhere else, so it’s funny, is all.”
“Must be a dragon thing,” Travis gritted.
“I guess,” Joey said, smiling. His dragon thing was pressed right up against
Travis’s back, which Travis couldn’t help but be aware of now. “Let’s eat when
we get back, I’m hungry.”
“We just had lunch.”
“But I’m hungry again,” Joey repeated.
“Okay, okay.” Travis laughed, forgetting his annoyance. They were friends.
Little things like clothes and size didn’t matter as long as they had fun.
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