Chapter Text
Scott is a small, unimportant child born on a woody, warm island. No one knows who his parents are, and while none step up to take him in, most every house in the village is open to him.
Every child is his sibling. Every adult a caretaker. Every family-owned dragon is his own, but also not, in a way difficult to pinpoint, or explain. In his hands but floating in air, fluttering away. True yet untrue.
He sleeps on couches in front of warm fires. He sleeps on smooth wooden floors. He sleeps in guest beds. And sometimes, he just sleeps on the ground, in the leaves, outside.
Growing up, Scott knows that he is a small, unimportant child. He knows the island he lives on. He knows the people who let him inside on cold winter nights. He knows what is safe to eat and what isn’t.
Growing up, Scott knows only what is, except for the times when he is obsessed with poppies in early spring, or tripping over his feet to stare down craggy cliffs, or the times when he believes, truly believes, that he has wings. Soft and feathery and white.
One day, he’s reading a book on icy climate dragons, and all he can see behind his eyes is the blurry, frigid expanse of snowcapped mountains. The way the cold digs into his skin like claws. The way his lungs and teeth freeze. The way it all should bend to his will.
And then he blinks, shrugs, and continues to read.
Things come to him in bursts, in small hints, in the way he weaves flower crowns and knows the names of things he shouldn’t by heart.
Scott is a small, unimportant boy, but he remembers being a king.
It doesn’t bother him much. He’s just focused on the dragons.
When Scott dies, he thinks he sees something. He thinks that he sees a place where he did not have to die. He thinks he sees a life where he did not have to try so hard.
He doesn’t see it for long. Only a moment.
When Scott dies, he is born again.
As are the others.
But not all of the others die as quickly as he does.
Scott sits cross-legged in the library, a book in hand.
The librarian tends to the bookshelves. While their village is small, and while they don’t have many books, they have just enough for a library, however minuscule. The librarian’s hands thumb across the spines, counting silently and under his breath.
“So…,” Scott starts, “the monstrous nightmares, are there any… around here?”
Morgan, the librarian who—during the majority of his time, really—idly befriends dragons and traps wild boar, pauses, hands stilling in place.
“Not on this island,” he answers. “But a few islands that way,” he points southwest with an index finger, “there’s a handful flying around.”
A moment of still silence.
“D’you think they would like me?” Scott asks.
Morgan snorts, going back to his counting. “With your hair? They could mistake you for one of their own.”
With a hand, Scott reaches up to touch his hair. It’s the same as he has always remembered it being. “Because it’s blue?”
“Because it’s blue,” Morgan nods. “And because your eyes are, too. You don’t look normal.”
Scott is well aware. He looks like himself.
“Okay, well,” Scott taps the page of his book impatiently, “what about the timberjacks? I know there are some on the island. Would they like me?” Morgan knows the dragons, so he should know.
Woody, and with deciduous leaves. That’s the island’s climate. Scott has known coniferous trees longer, but he’s growing up on this island. He’ll grow used to it.
“They’ll like you if they like you,” Morgan retorts, smoothly. “Just don’t get scorched trying to play chief, child.”
Child.
Scott is thirteen. He remembers being older.
“My advice? Tame the smaller ones before you try tacklin’ a beast.”
Something small.
Scott can do that.
Terrible terrors, small. They like shiny things.
Scott can find shiny things.
Knee deep in river water, he cradles a sparkling, orange stone in both hands, close to his chest.
This new life, this second chance, he wants to covet it. It lives in his ribcage, with all of the hope, and all of the fear.
Terrible terrors, the small hellions, were named that way because they are that way.
Scott stares, unimpressed, as the one he’s trying to train eats half of a squirrel. Only half.
He had been trying to teach the terror, named Owen, how to spin. Halfway through, Owen had flown off, upwards, only to return a few moments later with a dead squirrel, hung limp in his mouth.
Happily, Owen prances over, dropping the bottom half of its body at Scott’s knees.
Exasperated, Scott sighs.
They sit in a clearing. In the trees above them, symphonies of early morning birdsong pierce the air.
Around Owen’s neck is the orange, sparkling stone, wrapped in thin fishing line and catching the sunlight. Scott rests his cheek on his hand, hunched over to stare down hard at the terrible terror.
Wind rustles the leaves, rustles Scott’s hair. Everywhere, there is a gentle, hissing susurration.
I guess he doesn’t hate me, he figures.
Still.
“I don’t want that.”
Owen doesn’t understand language. He’s a terrible terror.
Scott starts to understand dragons better. The way they think and act.
Sometimes, he sleeps with Owen—and the other seven members of his pack—curled around him, or tucked against his side. The villagers don’t allow all of them in their homes, but the dragons are completely against splitting up. Scott can either sleep outside, with all of them, or inside, with none of them.
When he sleeps inside, the dragons perch on the roof.
It reminds him of trying to understand his god, the golden stag, and all of Aeor’s intricacies. The complicated nature of those stranger than yourself.
Not to say that Scott is normal, but still.
One day, he’s walking through the forests of the island, Owen perched on his shoulder, and he runs into Morgan, tending to his traps. Wings dug into the tree above him is an adult timberjack, the dragon with two threateningly large wings, no legs, and a dextrous, prehensile tail, wrapped around the tree’s bark. It stares down at Morgan, a perpetual dull rumble in its chest. Morgan appears unbothered.
Scott, mindfully, slows to a stop a few feet away, tilting his head up at the beast. Sunlight streams through the trees in rays, lighting the creature a bright, fiery yellow. In his chest, a dull curiosity, and an all encompassing awe. On his shoulder, Owen chitters uncertainly, hunching closer against Scott’s body. Soothingly, he runs a hand along Owen’s scales.
It’s cool out. No breeze. It’s all so beautiful.
“Morgan, sir?”
Morgan barely spares him a glance, hands tanged in string for a snare. “Yes, son?”
“Have you trained that dragon?”
The timberjack huffs, eyes in calm slits, as it stares at them, body glued to the bark.
Morgan side eyes him. “This one loves to be wild, but she shadows me.” A sigh. “I think she’s just bored.”
Scott can’t help but smile. “Bored?” She’s a very large and pretty dragon, but Scott hasn’t seen many dragons.
“Bored,” Morgan echoes. “I see you’ve been training that terrible terror. How’s that been?”
Owen squawks, heat singing Scott’s ear as the dragon gives a tiny puff of fire, claws digging through the frabric of Scott’s old beige capelet as the tiny creature puffs up defensively, posturing.
Exasperated, Scott gives him another pet. “It’s… it’s been.”
Morgan cackles. “Of course! It’s a terrible terror! They’re a true test of patience, for any trainer.” The librarian’s eyes focus in on him, a young boy on a small island in a small town, mere weeks away from being freshly fourteen. “It’ll be good for you, boy. Keep at it.”
Scott wants to fly again.
He remembers being able to fly and he wants to fly again.
Anyone would call him mad. Anyone would name him insane. But Scott’s dealt with that before.
Advisors who wouldn’t listen to him. Magic that disobeyed him. A twin pair of gods that needed him as a pawn.
He died for peace, for joy, for happiness. He wants to live for it, now.
He’s here, and he’s so young, and he’s much older, but he struggles with maturity regardless. It’s his body, he thinks, which allows him to think idiotic plans are good ideas, but he knows his place and he knows where he wants to be.
He doesn’t hate his island. He doesn’t resent it. It doesn’t make him feel small, it makes him feel his own size.
But he also wants to see more. He wants to fly again. He wants to see all he can.
This time, let his death be for himself. He can be content with anything, just let him die for his own whims.
They talk of dragon riders, of dragon hunters, of islands and islands and a whole world of dragons.
The first time—as far as Scott can remember—he was born in winter and he grew up in an empire that had little hope for him or themselves.
The second time—as far as Scott can remember—this time, the village doctor loves to remind him that he was born the first day of spring, and every time he asks what do you think I should do?, the villagers say whatever you think you’re best at.
He doesn’t know what became of Rivendell. He doesn’t know what happened to the other empires.
But he died.
It isn’t really his problem anymore, is it?
One day, Scott, fourteen, is fishing. Owen is on the other side of the river, scratching up a tree, when suddenly, he hears from his side the telltale sound of something being dragged.
Scott blinks. He takes a deep breath, and then he turns his head.
A child is trying to steal his basket of fish.
Not just any child, a child with scales, and wings, and no legs. A child the size of two cupped hands. A child with its teeth dug into the dried reed of the basket Scott’s been using to store his catches, struggling with two sharp wings and a terribly cute writhing, flicking, thrashing tail.
Scott sighs. Timberjack. Timberjack baby. Where is its mother. Scott is going to die.
On instinct, Scott whistles gently at it. Its head whips up, and it pauses its theft.
They make eye contact.
Slowly, very slowly, Scott reaches out a hand, his fishing rod still gripped tightly in the other. The baby timberjack glares him down, warily, as his hand makes contact with the basket, before he starts to gradually pull it back towards himself.
A moment of stillness, with nothing but the sound of the basket moving across the gritty ground. Then, the timberwing realizes that its haul is moving away from itself, and its fighting resurges like a very small, very violent typhoon. That is to say, its intense writhing kicks up dust.
Scott pauses, then whistles the same tune.
The child hesitates, staring up at him with two large eyes.
Scott whistles a third time.
This time, when Scott begins dragging the basket towards himself, the timberjack fledgling has a moment of stillness before it makes an adorable leap over the basket’s edge, landing in the pile of six or so fish.
He drags the basket back to side, where it had been earlier, and he whistles that same tune. A lilting tune where the pitch goes up, down, down, up, up.
There’s a tug on his fishing line. Scott turns most of his attention back towards the river.
When he drags in the fish and drops it in the basket with the others, the baby timberjack makes an absolutely adorable squeaky roar, sharp teeth digging into the scales and even sharper wings curling inwards to slice the fish into pieces. In the short amount of time it took to catch the fish, the others were already dispatched, the basket a graveyard of bloody fish guts and bones.
Scott can’t help himself. He smiles fondly, then casts the line again.
“Okay, Codfather,” he snarks, to no one who could understand.
The timberjack stays in the basket. It eats everything Scott manages to catch.
When Owen returns for a treat, the two tiny dragons get into a tussle, where Scott has to break them up with promises of fish, several taught commands, and many whistles.
When the child’s mother finds them, Scott recognizes her. She, the one who shadowed Morgan, appears from the thicket silently, and when she creeps up and stares the group down—Owen on Scott’s shoulders, Scott’s hand petting and soothing the baby timberjack against a bent leg, Scott’s clothes ragged and singed and torn, skin scratched up—she huffs, curling around the three of them, sheltering them with strong, heat-resistant wings from the midday sun.
It’s peaceful. It’s nice.
Both mother and child like his whistle.
Does it have to do with trees falling?
When he catches fish, he shares the earnings among the three dragons in rotation, even if Owen gets snippy about it.
Scott likes the feeling of safety. He likes having no worries. It’s more than a breath of fresh air, it’s a whole second life.
He calls the timberjack child Jimmy. Just for fun.
It’s nostalgic; fishing with Jimmy.