when you were once unknown (newt x percival, 878 words)
At first he is just a boy, and you care not for what makes him distinct from the other humans. Your eyes are keen, but you do not notice that his eyes are as vibrant as new spring grass or that his freckles dot his face like stars. All you know is that this boy is in your cave, and you must protect your treasure. Such is the nature of dragons.
But he does not do anything except lay a small goat at the entrance before fleeing. You sense no wrongdoing, so you eat it. At the time, you do not wonder how he might have known that your mate had died the previous winter, and that you had difficult hunting as she had. You do not know how long he has watched you.
He starts to come almost every day after that, and you let him, amused by this small creature who brings you food, who is barely bigger than the animals he brings. He does not even glance at your treasure, only stares up at you with what you learn to be wonder. You let him creep closer. You let him touch. And you listen, when he speaks in the quiet of the sunset, even though only half the words of humans make sense to you.
He tells you of fear, of looming war. He tells you of a longing to fly as you do, far away from his little village on the mountainside. He tells you about a girl more beautiful than any sunrise, and how it's the prospect of seeing her smile that makes him stay.
You unfold one wing and use it to bring him closer. He feels like a cool rock against your side. The boy sighs, and you wonder when he has become a man.
He asks if you hate humans, and maybe once you did, for humans destroy more than they give, have slaughtered your parents for the sole crime of causing fear. But you cannot hate this boy, who teaches you about the good things his kind can make. He brings a flute and plays a song that makes something in your blood rise and sway. He tells you stories, the lore of his people, and there is a touch of a smile in his voice whenever they involve dragons.
But most of all he teaches you how to see a human for all of the good they can be: the way a father holds his daughter, a child's sweet innocence, how people will help others in need without asking anything in return - like a boy and a starving dragon.
Then one day, the boy is gone.
You wait for him for a week before you venture outside your cave and see the smolders of his village. The war has finally reached your mountain, and most likely, him as well.
Such is the nature of humans. They live, they end, they begin again, ready to continue on in their destructive ways. You should not mourn the death of one.
Yet you do. You mourn him for years to come, your cries shaking the skies as you search for a glimpse of your human in the greenery down below. Your cave lies empty in your last days, for there is no gold that would have gleamed as brightly as his eyes, no gem that would have shimmered as beautifully as his laugh.
All you want, in the end, is to hear his soft voice again, to feel his hand on your scales.
Many, many years later you will find him again. Or rather, he will find you, be the one to draw your limp body from the ashes of your prison, restore you to your rightful place amongst your friends and coworkers. (Like before, you have no family to speak of.) He will linger, unable to let you be. Perhaps he senses the wild creature you once were - or the one you had half-become in your captivity.
After a year, you will find that you are unable to let him go. This strange man, who does not know how to make friends but manages to gather a constellation of people willing to go to any length for him, who puts the life of a single creature before his own, who does not meet your eyes but will look at your scars more openly than anyone else. You cannot help but think there is something familiar about the way his eyes glow after you kiss him for the first time, but that cannot be true, because there has never been someone like Newt Scamander. Not in your lifetime.
And when that lifetime ends, and another begins, the dice will roll again. Perhaps he will be a woman this time. Perhaps you will have blond hair. You might meet as round-faced children, or as wizened old men. All the possibilities, but always just the two of you. Learning to care, to treasure the smallest moments, to find those things that transcend time and death and anything you could have ever known: his laugh, the outline of his long fingers in the moonlight, the feeling of his body slotted against yours.
Such is the nature of love, yours.
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