Dragon's Blood ch. 1 2 3 4
dragon!sylus x omega!reader
tags: don't have to know canon or omegaverse lore, but starting w ch. 1 will explain everything, identity crisis, depressive episode, talk of oviposition/pregnancy/loss, Sylus has little bedside manner
Ao3 if you prefer
“What this? You’re nesting? Going into heat soon?”
He poked your side with a staff when you still wouldn’t answer.
Your soul felt like dead weight when he last carried you home from work.
And after that, you hadn’t left your bed. Not even for a different one.
Kept a blanket over your face, unable to look at the flowers he’d brought for you. Probably in attempt to stamp out the sting he felt from the bond.
He saved your life just to be tortured by it. So long as your heart kept beating.
“I don’t need my soul anymore.”
“I don’t want it either. Its taste would be pathetic.”
“Do I smell bad, too?”
“Hmm? What is this about?”
You broke down, the pressure of tears building in your skull. Tried to suppress it with a sniffle, rubbed the cartilidge of your nose that healed in its melted shape.
Every goddamn thing you smelled since getting burned was just a phantom in your head. Psychosomatic ghosts.
They nearly misled you into incorrectly treating a patient.
Maybe you did, some earlier time when no one was there to catch the mistake.
How the fuck could you be a good omega without scent awareness? A doctor? A parent?
Stuck in eternal sensory deprivation without even knowing it. Maybe hurting innocent people as a result. Betas who trained for years and enhanced their sense of smell might fill in your absence. It was better than nothing, better than the fractal you’d become.
Resigned to leave a letter on the desk in apology and… left. Wandered the familiar brick-lain streets under dull lamplight— you knew, objectively, that the light was dull. That it hadn’t changed, the flames were the same as ever, but each post felt like a spotlight on your face until he showed up.
You climbed on without a word, numbed yourself to the heat of his chest, afraid to shatter and sob into it. He didn’t say anything either, but you could feel the vibration of grumbles under his breath. Perhaps lucky that the bond only went one way. Whatever Sylus felt was not your business.
Maybe it would be, if you bit him back someday, left a mark on his scent patch. One that you’d never be able to sense, not in the future not in the past. Every judgment you made on his character came from… What? Your heart? The brain? Just gambling with your life, because it was almost over when you met. Twice, within the first… Hours, at most. Or maybe you were wrong about that.
It had ended there. Before you even arrived to the abyss. It ended beneath white spires, with a white candle beneath your nose, wrists bound to a white pillar. All symbols of the blank slate of nothing it had made you there.
They shamed you for your scent glands. Removed the patch with no ointment, no ritual, just a harsh and sudden tear.
The last scent you would ever know was that of your own pain.
No wonder the mark hurt so bad and flared up so awful that he couldn’t sleep. The membrane was already raw, given no time to heal, no medicine or bandage or anything.
At least that healed by now. But you couldn’t even judge your own health by it, couldn’t tell whether a scent patch stopped working. He poked you again.
“Your omega identity sounds fragile. What’s the point of it?”
“Go away.”
You buried yourself further under the covers, away from whatever dragon logic or existential crisis he was spewing.
You had enough of that on your own.
Had nothing to fucking plan ahead for. Nothing to worry about anymore. You weren’t even a functional omega, could never measure up to a dragon mother. The egg would falter and eject itself in pieces. Or it absorbed into nothing already.
It didn’t matter whether Sylus wanted to ever hatch a child.
You heard his groan, but the sound was foggy and distant.
Days passed with no sign of your dragon. You didn’t count them.
He might have other homes, far enough to find asylum from the bond.
Maybe the instinct to stay close disappeared as his egg disintegrated.
Maybe he gave up on you, a soul forever bitter, unaware of its own taste.
The least you could do was leave this place presentable for when he did eventually return to it. Clear away the evidence of your depression, washing the sheets, clothes you had been wearing for maybe weeks on end, and yourself.
But, really… There was no safe way down, not that you could find. The options were to jump — with your luck that meant surviving with more injuries, or to stay and inevitably rot in the area. Eventually become one more skeleton to display in a pit of gold.
So you went back to bed, feeling utterly abandoned. By yourself, by every dream and desire you once had.
Surrounded by his things, you still couldn’t smell the person who saved you. It was infuriating, nerves numbed to even pass the time yearning.
“A gift.”
You thought you were hearing things, like the way you’d been smelling phantoms. But turning your head from where palms pressed into your eyes proved otherwise.
“May I sit there?”
He waited to join you on the mattress, to place something bigger than his head into your hands.
“This might have some answers for you.”
Smooth and round, patterns engraved into the old shell, texture almost like volcanic rock. No… It reminded you of bone. And the moon.
“This is…”
“A mummy. Petrified egg, abandoned before it was ready to hatch. I was able to locate more of them, so don’t worry about splicing for your tests.”
“Oh…” It no longer felt relevant to you. But learning from this without endangering anyone could give your life purpose… or not. The taste of grief was dense.
“Why do you sound uncertain?”
“Can I take these down to research with others?”
“Be my guest. But if what you really need is a microscope and a nose, I can get them for you.”
Did you really have the ambition? This unheard of opportunity might be wasted on you.
“If they won’t believe the truth, then just say you’re a distant scholar or something.”
Sylus scoffed. It wasn’t a total lie, but it was boring.
