people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.
people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.
people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.
people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.
warnings; detail + lore + prose heavy, humanoid dragons, comfort, character death (not mc or dragon), power imbalance (technically), huge age gap (technically), mentor x student relationship (adults tho)
wc; 1,800
check a/n info on smutty part two!
please reblog + interact with this piece!!!
Your mentor confessed to you that there were few things more humbling than being called a "latent magic-user" by the dragons.
This had been inspired after an audience with the dragon queen in a place far away from the human realm, mere weeks after discovering you even possessed the ability to harness magic at all. You had stopped a pickpocket taking gold coins from an old woman, and a runaway carriage from crashing into a cabbage stand by freezing time in bouts of fright. Both the incidents and your life changed on that very same day.
"It has been fifty years, Theodore, and you've brought us another little human that you wish for us to take under our wings. I'm sensing an undesirable pattern from you, old friend," spoke the dragon queen from her throne of green adamantine. While her words bled contempt, her voice held great fondness and amusement. She was breathtaking and black as night with scales glittering light like the cosmos in the sky. Shining jewels and silver ornamented her body.
She was the Mother of the Cosmos. Mother of Magic. Mother of Dragons. An ancient being who had known the love and hatred of mankind, yet still regarded it with softness that splintered through distrust. You did not think your species deserved that much grace.
You did not think you had even earned the right to look upon her, so you stayed with your head bowed low throughout the entirety of your audience with her. Speaking not a word. Observing nothing but the sound of her voice and letting the weight of it settle over you. You stared at the toes of your boots as the conversation shifted, an exchange of compromises between your mentor and her—likely two of the most powerful beings in the world.
"Tell me, what benefit will the dragons receive in caring for your pupil, Theodore?" asked the dragon queen.
Theodore, a middle-aged man with black hair and strange eyes, replied with certainty, "I know you may have concerns with this one's age. There is no educational background. I have only started discovering what this one's capable of. There is potential to unlock something great. Something far greater than either of us has experienced in a long time. Time manipulation."
The dragon queen emitted a soft hum in her throat, of intrigue piqued. "Is that so? What dangerous magic. What dangerous magic to be possessed by one who does not know how to wield it. I see." She seemed to think very deeply of the matter for a moment, then gestured across the spacious throne room to a group of seven dragons standing near the doors, her offspring.
"Very well, say nothing more. My most skilled son will take over mentorship for the time being. But, Theodore," said the dragon queen, worrying your mentor into asking her to finish speaking, "latent magic-users are often undeveloped for life. With magic so severe in the hands of someone like this, if we do not see progress, I cannot promise you will see this one again."
That day had been seven months ago, and you were still alive, somehow. Your former mentor was sure to send letters your way via flying serpents at least once a week to confirm you hadn't been put six feet under just yet. For a dragon, the order to kill you could be fulfilled with little effort by snapping your neck with their bare hands. But, you'd made enough progress to avoid that fate, you supposed.
"Perhaps the next thing I teach you is how to stay focused on what I'm saying," said the second son, one of five dragon princes. He had accepted his responsibility as your new mentor without uproar, but even if it had been apparent to you from the beginning, when he refused to acknowledge you beyond 'the human' for four months, that he much preferred to be left to his own devices.
But he had warmed to you. This change had superseded the previous nature of your relationship, which had been all distance and wariness. At the time, he wouldn't come within any proximity to you without a glare from the tail of his eye and then widen the gulf between you. He had been rude, uncompromising, and frustratingly difficult to please to the point that you'd begged your mentor—your true mentor—to retrieve you, making sure your tears fell onto the parchment and smeared the black ink you wrote with.
Unfortunately, he saw potential in you and only validated the dragon prince's daunting teachings. So, you were left there in that realm, feeling abandoned, overworked, and worst of all, disliked. There was something particularly nefarious about showing up at the same place every day, knowing the one person meant to help you didn't care for you at all.
"Apologies, Roth," you told him with a sheepish smile, waving your hand to drop a quill you'd absently frozen in time midair as it fell from the desk. "I guess my mind is elsewhere today. I don't mean any offense."
Before, Roth would've continued to chastise you; speak of the disrespect all humans had in common, and ask impossible things of you just to assure you knew your place. But now was different; he looked at you differently, sometimes sniffed the air as you would walk past, as though something fragrant had wafted off of you to him.
"What worries you?" he asked.
You looked at him, at his large stature and the iridescent scales covering parts of his humanoid body, and the hard protrusions growing from the sides of his head like horns. "Apart from my survival, you mean?"
"I've told you that won't happen as long as you listen to me well," he said. "I have no complaints about your progress and how you typically conduct yourself. I have no reason to speak of any concerns to Mother, so I will not."
As reassuring as that was to hear, particularly in these kindly new tones of voice he used on you, death wasn't any sort of concern in your mind as of now. Not your own, at least.
"Theodore hasn't sent me mail in almost a month. It's extraordinarily unlike him, Roth. I was supposed to receive something today; mail is always scheduled for today." You looked towards the purpling sky; dusk was approaching, and with it the fleeting window of opportunity for late mail to arrive. "I wonder if he's alright."
"If you ask it of me, I will request that Mother send out a messenger to the human realm to his last known place of residency. But, sorcerers like him do not like to stay in one place very long. He has likely begun another pilgrimage to the northern lands of Noss," said Roth, with presumed helpfulness.
Roth was the type that you would call back home a "fixer". He wanted to offer solutions and set them in motion, likely a side-effect of his background in strategy. You knew very little of his history aside from leading the dragons to war and victory against the Celestials hundreds of years ago.
Now, these residual tendencies showed in utterly benign and slightly annoying ways. It was clear that his new favorite way to endure his retirement was by improving your magical prowess. He had mostly succeeded in that venture and, as of late, had started to deviate from it somewhat. Or, rather, he seemed as distracted as you were sometimes, like he had thoughts in his mind that he couldn't rid himself of, no matter how hard he forced them away.
You thought he looked at you a little too long when that happened, setting a surge of warmth through your body and up your neck when you'd notice, and he would still stare.
That same warmth wrapped you now, crawling up to your ears and cheeks as he looked at you with staunch determination and solemnity. You understood in that moment that he wanted to be useful to you, for you to rely on him for something beyond academia.
So, you let him. A dragon messenger was dispatched less than an hour afterwards and returned two days later with devastating news: Theodore's remains had been discovered between the borders of Noss and Uverlon, city-states perpetually at war with one another and striking down anyone regardless of affiliations.
"You have… my deepest condolences. I know his importance to you was great," said Roth upon visiting you the evening that you found out. You had defied the queen's orders to continue with your education that day. Roth later said that he had to talk her out of a rage, but it hadn't been too difficult, as she was also grieving Theodore's death. "May he be guided home by what he believed in the most. Now, I've heard from the servants that you haven't eaten today. I will return shortly with something befitting a human in mourning—"
"Don't go, please," you said, pushing aside your pride and embarrassment, and rose from the small writing desk where you'd been rereading old letters for hours. You had already cried as much as you were capable of; now you simply felt hollow—a vast emptiness widening like a chasm in your chest. It felt like a deep and dark place where, if you ventured too far, you would never come out of it again. "I don't need food right now. I… I need," you scoffed and raised and dropped your hand in one motion—"I don't know what I need right now. But, please, stay with me. I don't want to be alone. I feel awful."
"What do you want me to do?" asked Roth. He hadn't expected his company to be the one that you would want at a time like this. His sisters had a far more empathetic nature than he did, yet you did not want them. You wanted him. "There is nothing that I can offer you that others cannot provide as well, perhaps more to the needs of a human."
Even now, while you were engulfed in the depths of despair, Roth was unable to be any way other than just how he was. You thought that was what you needed the most right now. Someone who wasn't going to try to alter the pitch of their voice, or speak to you too softly, or try to touch you too much.
Your eyes reddened with tears again despite a sudden burst of laughter. You knew when you wrapped your arms around him, he would not know how to reciprocate with kindness, as a dragon's skin was as hard as adamantine, and they treated one another roughly. Their ways of loving were aggressive and physical in a way that would hurt someone like you, but you wanted the comfort of that, anyway.
To your surprise, he returned your embrace gingerly and said nothing of it
a/n: I went back and forth between writing comfort or grief sex, so I decided to end sort of neutrally instead but enough to be able to lead up to a smutty second part if people are interested.
it would likely have a lot of hints of size kink and breeding kink in there, possibly some other stuff if folks ask for it.
one thing I didn't realize I didn't do was really give a huge detailed description of Roth like I would most characters and I apologize for that. I did try to fit in a tiny bit, so a second part would let me really dig into details about what he and other dragons look like
if there's anything I discussed in this little fic you would like to have explored more thoroughly in the next own, let me know and I will! I have a whole shitslew of lore
anyway, hopefully I'll see u in the next one, ciao!
