Chapter Text
In retrospect, running away was a stupid decision.
Ochako knows this, naturally, as she thwacks a tree branch away with a pulse of magic from her staff, sending it hurtling into the descending sunset. She wears her mostly pink traveling clothes, hood pulled over her head, and clutches her staff close to herself as she goes. Running away was foolish, because now she doesn’t know where she’s going.
Her dark maroon boots weren’t made for long-term hiking. She’s got a leather satchel with maybe three days’ worth of food, but she’s already been gone for most of one. She’s putting off sleeping, because she has no idea how to set up a camp, and she has no tent, anyway.
Her decision to leave was rash and impulsive, slipping out through the garden under cover of magic and the early morning darkness. If she had put even a little thought into things, she could’ve brought a lot more in her pack by enchanting it to be smaller. She was just scrambling, though, panicking and terrified.
Her staff has three little jewels in it - one red, one green, and one blue - and they amplify her mana and output. As the sun draws below the horizon, she shivers, throwing a little magelight over her head, the animated psuedo-star bouncing with her movements. Then she holds her staff precariously with two hands again, pursing her lips.
She's in unbelievable danger right now, she realizes, her veins suddenly feeling icy. She’s a young woman just into adulthood, she’s alone, and she has… fairly minimal combat skills. She has some formal self-defense schooling, tutored by a variety of people at her home through her late adolescence. But she’s never actually fought, and she’s short, inexperienced, and abruptly terrified again.
Because Ochako Uraraka is a princess, nominally the heir to the Kingdom of Uravity, and she is all alone out here.
Any self-respecting bandit group would jump at the chance to get at her. Never mind the ransom, she shudders imagining what they’d do with her before that part. She’s already running from obnoxious men, and those are the royal brats proposing to marry her for political gain.
Though, ‘royal’ is maybe being generous. Prince Shouto is certainly very regal, and he has a striking appearance, with his bizarre, black and white, demonic mask… thing on his left side. He’s been cursed, though everyone is too polite to discuss it within earshot. He arrived wearing fine blue and white clothing, embroidered in gold, with his entourage of enchanted armor ‘knights’ and Keigo Takami, his keeper and bodyguard. They were the first party to arrive, so Ochako thought things might be… manageable, albeit undesirable.
She initially figured it couldn’t go any worse than the proposition that had come from the Kingdom of Ingenium had gone, anyway. That had just been a bit of a chore, until they lost interest. The Kingdom of Endeavor seems much more intent on pursuing the matter, though. It all comes down to land, political favors, and the threat of war looming behind it all.
Prince Shouto was devastatingly unenthused with her when they were introduced, so she looked at him and saw a painfully dull, sexless, loveless marriage with a young man more interested in a book or the dirt between his feet than her. The only thing that got him talking, when she got a brief moment to chat with him only accompanied by Tsuyu and Keigo as chaperones, was his obvious distaste for his father, and his lack of tact in expressing that.
There’s definitely a lot worse things he could be, she has learned in her life, but it’s certainly not an enticing prospect to spend the rest of her life shackled to a rude prince with daddy issues. Not that she has much say in the matter.
And it’s not that he’s… mean. He seemed nice enough, she supposes, just blunt and uncaring about what others really want. He was aware of the social standards expected of him as a prince regarding her, and he was generally cordial towards her, albeit cold and vaguely condescending. Everyone is too respectful to ask about how he became cursed, including Ochako. She just gets the distinct sense that he’s not interested in her or anything else, except maybe plotting his father’s murder in his idle daydreams.
Whenever he talked about his father, his demonic mask would pulse a soft sapphire blue.
His animosity towards his father is probably justified, though, based on what she does know. Prince Shouto is the heir to the Kingdom of Endeavor, but King Enji would see her become ‘consort’ to his son. The Kingdom of Uravity is comparatively small and weak, so the message is clear: she would not be anybody particularly important, and Uravity would be subsumed into Endeavor as a client state. Prince Shouto might even be expected to take other wives, looking for one to be ‘a proper queen.’
Ochako has heard rumors among the chambermaids that that’s why Queen Rei has disappeared from the Kingdom of Endeavor, after all. She's wary of meeting the same fate.
Meanwhile, the other potential suitor was the young dragon rider named Katsuki, heir of the Bakugou Clan. They arrived a few days after Prince Shouto, and it complicated matters greatly, given that they arrived unannounced on the backs of a pair of dragons with a band of barbarian warriors, barely one step above bandits. The way they looked at her and the maids of the castle - even her mother, when Queen Uraraka addressed the court - makes her want to retch.
Katsuki took one look at her, and she felt not unlike how a chicken probably feels when the farmer eyes it for slaughter. She couldn’t really understand Katsuki that well, but his intentions were clear enough. She imagines she would spend a very miserable life generally moving between his lap and his tent, being groped and displayed as the trophy she would be.
He’s… attractive enough, she supposes, wearing furs, beads, and a red cape like his mother, his muscular chest exposed. The problem is that he’s always snarling and barking at people, like an animal. But looks aren’t everything, either.
His gaze makes her skin crawl, and he clearly views her as prey. She made a point not to be in a room alone with him, because she suspects that ‘social tact’ isn’t a strong suit of his, based on how much he likes to yell and carry on. She’d give him five minutes, maybe, before she’d expect him to be trying to shove her to her knees in front of him.
She’s just… tired. She’s tired of being a political pawn and a ‘thing’ to these ‘noblemen.’ Her parents love her dearly, but the kingdom has fallen on hard times. Without a male heir - and she is very tired of hearing about that - and with foreign troops massed on the border, they have few options. The Kingdom of Endeavor commands powerful armies and many mages, while the Bakugou Clan holds the power of dragons.
Chieftain Mitsuki arrived on the back of a brown dragon she called ‘Masaru,’ and she all but demanded that she be allowed to take Ochako with her for her son, lest the Kingdom of Uravity face her wrath. She openly declared that she planned to carry Ochako back over her shoulder, like a sack of grain, and Ochako inferred that that’s all she amounts to, to them.
It took a large amount of negotiating to get Chieftain Mitsuki to agree to formal marriage proposal discussions, all with the competing party from the Kingdom of Endeavor breathing down her parents’ necks, too.
That was what prompted Ochako to flee. She doesn’t plan to spend the rest of her life playing the good little ignored political mistress to an uncaring, cursed prince or being used by a barbarian brat who can’t keep his hands to himself. Both of them would just view her as a vessel for heirs, anyway. Maybe it will cost the Kingdom of Uravity a lot, but… Ochako wants better for herself.
She’s ashamed of how selfish she is, and she wishes she had… power. Some way to legitimize herself as the rightful future ruler of the kingdom without needing a male partner to be her keeper. Some way to protect her people without having to sacrifice herself in the process.
But alas, as she looks up at a fairly imposing mountain tucked away in this dying forest, she does not have that luxury. She has magical powers - mostly wind-based, though she can do mundane enchanting and general sorcery, like telekinesis and gravity manipulation, too - but they’re not enough to turn the tide of a battle.
She’s heard that Prince Shouto’s elder brother, Prince Touya, once incinerated an entire opposing army, before he… disappeared. She’ll probably never be that powerful, though, since neither of her parents really are, either.
It’s of no consequence. The reasons for why Prince Shouto is now the next in line, not Prince Touya, are irrelevant to her. At least they’re not trying to marry her off to a man almost a decade older than her in that respect, though.
Prince Shouto just wants to scheme against his father. She can empathize with him feeling tired of the status quo, but not with his coldness towards the plights of others. Katsuki just wants power; she’s been told that having a legitimate marriage to a young woman capable of bearing children will pave the way for him to take over the clan. Ochako cares for none of it.
She launches herself gracefully up the mountainside, releasing her gravity magic with a gentle gust of wind to control her descent. Her pink clothes flutter as she goes. Like this, soaring through the falling night, she feels free.
She lands on two feet and surveys the area. She saw this little cliff side from below, and her intuition pays off, because there’s a cave here. She walks forward, but she's keenly aware of her surroundings, too. She can’t afford to get sloppy now.
She passed a caravan earlier, and she could feel the eyes of the older men leading it on her. She is, ultimately, prey out here. All these distasteful men would treat her like Katsuki, or worse. She resolves that if she is unfortunate enough to get dragged back, but she somehow makes it in one piece, she will have to jump at the chance to be with Prince Shouto as soon as she can.
He might ignore her for the rest of her life, but at least he wouldn’t be cruel… she hopes. Just distant and dismissive. She could handle that, even if she’d very much so rather not. She’s not so naive to think that she might marry for love, but she also doesn’t want to be married off to the first man who shows up at her parents’ doorstep with enough swords and magic. Anybody who would want to claim her as a political pawn certainly isn’t someone she’d want to be intimate with or carry the children of, no matter their personal disposition.
There’s some water dripping from the ceiling of the cave as she enters it, though she smells… something else. It disrupts her idle wallowing. So she focuses, trying to identify the smells, relying on her rudimentary alchemy education.
There’s burning sulfur, a smell she only knows from the alchemy labs of Mei Hatsume, and her mad magical experiments. There’s… honey? No, it’s not quite that, just a very… sweet aroma that feels like it calls to her, singing in a way that she feels it thrumming in her veins. Definitely magic, then.
She throws a protective barrier of mana up around her, and the effect dissipates. She can still smell it, and it’s still terribly enticing, just not magically compelling. But with the effect dampened, now she also smells… copper.
She swallows and crouches down, killing her magelight with a flick of her staff. Then she considers her options. She could just turn and leave, except she isn’t likely to find any other shelter for the night. She also isn’t about to risk the next group of people she runs into not being old, leering men in a caravan, but young, dangerous bandits who would have their way with her, before ransoming her off, or worse.
She also could just sleep right here, except the rock isn’t comfortable here, it’s wet, and she’s wary of being right near the entrance. It would be better to find somewhere out of sight, in case anyone else comes exploring up here.
There’s also the fact that there’s a magical presence here. Magical creatures often have powerful auras that can charm, stupefy, or immobilize someone without countermagic. Ochako is practiced enough to defend against something small to moderately sized, but something big…
She swallows and thinks of how much that sweet scent is coming from deeper in, mixing with the copper. If she lets up on her magical defense, she would start to feel light-headed and drawn towards it, eventually. For most magical beings, it’s typically a defensive or hunting mechanism. For others… it could be something much worse.
She decides that she will proceed until the path opens up into a corner for her to sleep, and no farther. That should be safe enough. She can cast an immobile ward once she decides where she wants to sleep, so that she doesn’t have to personally keep it up.
She crouches low as she advances, guiding herself with a gloved hand against the wall. She only has one maroon glove, in such a damn hurry that she couldn’t find the other one. So she holds her staff in her left, bare hand as she goes, breathing slowly in and out through her mouth, trying to temper the smell.
When the cave opens up, she doesn’t quite stifle the gasp that slips from her mouth at the sight she finds.
There is a large hole in the ceiling, looking old, like something broke through it a long time ago. But all around, there are ancient pieces of pottery and debris… some broken eggs. It’s a nest of some kind, though most of it looks like it hasn’t been disturbed in many years. In the center, however, there is a raised platform, which looks like it was made with magic, not by erosion.
On top of that platform lies a dragon, mostly dark green, its head and long neck lolled against the rock, and its breathing shallow. Its wings are pathetically crumpled and torn apart, trying ineffectually to cover itself with one, the other pinned underneath it. Most striking is that it’s covered in scorch marks and painful looking wounds, centered on its massive, softer, lighter green chest, where a large spear has pierced it, still impaled inside it.
On a human, that’s roughly where the heart would be. Dragons have more than one, though, albeit the secondary hearts are smaller and weaker. Still, she winces at the way crimson, oily liquid oozes from the wound onto the rocky platform, coating it slowly. It shimmers with a little bit of rainbow in the moonlight. The dragon looks and sounds like it’s struggling for breath as it tries to rest, probably having some lung damage as well. It can heal a lot, she knows from her reading, but only if the spear is removed…
The dragon is illuminated by the starry blue night, the ethereal moonlight shining down from above. Ochako’s lips part at how… serene the scene is. She is not one to question fate at a time like this, and she feels like she was probably meant to be standing here, except she doesn’t know what to do now.
Court Magister Mirai would probably suggest performing a self-scrying spell to see her immediate future. He’s really good with scrying, astrology, and general fate-related magic. That’s why he’s one of the kingdom’s greatest mages, having left the service of Lord Yagi some years ago. Her parents trust his advice a lot, and so does she, except she’s not very good at scrying yet.
She wonders, what would Lord Yagi do? Well, probably slay the dragon. He’s famous for slaying the great and terrible wyrm, Shigaraki, which fashioned itself All for One, the ultimate magical evil, a demon lord. Lord Yagi died in the process, unfortunately, and his vast Kingdom of Yuuei splintered after the fact.
Endeavor is the largest breakaway, with Uravity being one of the smallest. That’s relatively recent history, but in the chaos that followed, much of it has already been mythologized, the recorded accounts fragmented and poorly documented. Lord Yagi forged an era of peace and prosperity, though it has descended into infighting and cruelty in the wake of his death.
Ochako sighs. She’s fallen back into her memorized history lessons, because she’s nervous. Fate is a fickle thing, more of a representation of the collective metaphysical will of humanity and its shared magical footprint than a strict, fixed track that reality moves down. Fate can be countermanded, it's just really hard, and it usually requires immense magic, or specific circumstances orchestrated by higher beings. So if fate wants her here, she should do something specific, but what?
The dragon conveniently answers that question when its eye shoots open, glowing a brilliant viridian in the moonlight. Ochako goes stock still, horrified, but she can’t force herself to move. Her body is screaming at her to run, but her fight-or-flight instincts short out in the face of one of humanity's historical nightmares.
The prey freezing up in the presence of the ultimate predator.
Some groups, like the Bakugou Clan, have supposedly 'tamed' dragons. They guard their secrets closely, but some of it is understood by civilized scholars. Really, they have enslaved specific members, selectively breeding them by force to generate more docile off-spring. It’s a brutal but effective way to utilize a majestic, intelligent, and devastatingly dangerous creature for warfare. The precise nature of how they breed the dragons is not known, however.
Some things about dragon biology are fairly well-understood by those who study magical creatures. They are large, can use magic like a human, can project powerful elemental attacks from their mouths, and their magical auras can take on many different properties, often subconsciously. More outlandish claims insist that they can shapeshift into humanoid forms and take on human mates, sometimes even seeking out a human harem like they do golden hoards. This has been deemed unlikely by scholars, though it would explain the breeding thing.
Ochako considers these notions through a haze, her mind grasping for coherent logic in her mortal terror, as she sinks to her knees, the dragon’s large head and neck craning towards her. It’s not that big - for a dragon - but neither is the room, comparatively, and it can reach her with its jaws without getting up. She trembles, her magic barrier collapsing in her fear, and it turns its head to eye her with one massive emerald iris.
“I… Please, don’t hurt me,” Ochako chokes out, reduced to begging as sweat rolls down her face. The dragon’s magic sharpens, and she recognizes it as a truth-telling spell. Her pupils blow wide, and she realizes she will be forced to answer whatever it asks her.
Who are you?
The dragon’s voice echoes in her head, rather than being spoken aloud, and it gives her a headache. She expected it to be a deep voice, but it’s somewhat high, more like a very young man’s than the ancient terror she was expecting. That doesn’t make it any less frightening with its power, though.
“I’m… Princess Ochako Uraraka… of the Kingdom of Uravity…” Tears leak from her eyes, the magical intensity so strong that she feels like her head swims. It’s like a pressure, hot and all directed at her, and it’s entirely unpleasant.
Did you come to hurt me?
“No… I ran away from home. I didn’t know you were here.”
The dragon blinks slowly, and its eye feels like it's as big as her face this close. It has two long horns that run back over its angular skull, and two more that curl down around the sides of its head. Up close, she can see the way the individual scales run along its body, hard and subtly varying shades of green, like a suit of armor. She sniffles and lets out a little sob when it bares its massive, jagged teeth at her, each one as long as her forearms. Its breath smells like death and brimstone.
She regrets not telling her parents that she loves them one last time, before she left.
Why should I let you live?
Ochako whimpers, her tears and sweat dripping down her chin. Her staff shakes in her hand, but the question is open-ended enough that she gets a bit more choice in how to answer, as long as it’s true.
“You’re… you’re hurt. I hate seeing anyone unhappy. I… I want to help you… Please, have mercy.”
The dragon makes a low rumbling noise, then the magical effect abruptly ends. She coughs heavily, clutching at her neck as she gasps for breath, not so much in pain but feeling like she just needs water. Like she was drowning under thousands of gallons of ocean, but now there's no water left inside her as it recedes. She lets her staff clatter to the ground, bracing herself on one hand, the stone floor freezing against her skin even through a glove.
The dragon is drawing in all the heat, she realizes, as she looks up in confusion. A shiver wracks her body, but this one isn’t from fear. She realizes that it… That he isn’t doing it on purpose. It’s probably an instinctive attempt to gather enough magic to heal from the residual energy around him.
That won’t work when he’s still got an intrusive object lodged in him, though, and she pities him a little bit. It wouldn’t be a good way to go. Dragons are hard to kill, but in his case, that would just make his death long and full of suffering.
She thinks he’s a ‘he,’ at least. He has a rather soothing, soft voice, underneath the layers of magical power. She gets the sense that he doesn’t want to hurt her, he’s just afraid, too. She has minimal basis for that yet, but it’s a vaguely comforting idea. She'll take refuge in anything she can get to put that image of his teeth out of her mind.
“What… What happened to you?“ She asks, still struggling for air. She licks her lips, trying to remember how to make her lungs work again. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth from the residual magic.
One of the egg-thief clans came through and saw me hunting for food. Tried to take me. I fought back. I was meant to be… a trophy for their golden prince. They’ve been looking for me.
“Ah… That’s probably Clan Bakugou. They wanted to marry me off to the heir, Katsuki. He… he planned to take me whether or not I wanted to… participate.”
The dragon has retracted his head, but his pupils contract at her words, catching her double meaning. She notes absently that he has a little membrane on his eyes, like a lizard. She should write that down for the books back home. She's always wanted to contribute to serious scholarship.
The thought is melancholy, because she somehow doubts she’ll be going home, however.
“Mister Dragon, can you—“
Deku.
Ochako blinks, caught off-guard. She mouths ‘you can do it?’ at him, slightly confused, and he makes… some kind of noise. Perhaps of surprise? She can’t tell. He doesn’t seem unhappy with her, though.
That’s what they called me. It’s not the first time the egg-thief clans came for me. I knew the golden prince when I was younger. We were meant to be partners, except he stopped seeing me as an equal. He saw me as… a thing.
“Ah, yeah… that tracks,” Ochako mutters, holding her arms tightly, remembering how Katsuki leered at her, teeth bared, like he wanted to eat her. It’s not a pleasant memory. “So you’re… Oh. You must be one of the ones they… hatched later? So you escaped?”
The dragon nods, and she’s surprised. She immediately feels silly. He’s intelligent! But the action is unexpectedly… human.
“So you don’t have any family, Deku?” The dragon shakes his head. He’s still laying on his side, one wing awkwardly pinned underneath him, but he has raised his neck to look at her as they talk. His range of motion looks uncomfortably limited by the spear. “I’m sorry… Well, let me help you.”
She finds that thinking of… him as ‘the dragon’ doesn’t work when he just admitted he’s all alone in the world, and he’s so terribly hurt. He’s just remarkably human-like, despite his appearance, and it makes it easier to empathize with him, at least a little bit.
She picks herself up and dusts herself off, pulling her staff up off the ground with telekinesis right into her hand. It makes a little singing clang noise as the force affects it, then she walks carefully over. She keeps her palms out and flat, staff balanced between her fingers, to signal that she’s not a threat.
She can feel Deku’s gaze on her the entire time, very measured and curious. She no longer feels like she’s in danger, though she certainly could be if she makes the wrong move. Her boots splash on some of the pooled blood when she steps onto the platform, but she ignores it, knowing it’ll distract her otherwise.
She approaches him, gently reaching out with her right, gloved hand, setting it against his stomach, and he makes another low rumbling noise.
I’m… I’m very injured. I’m… It hurts…
“I see that, Deku” Ochako murmurs, saddened by what she can assess up close. They burned and cut him a lot, clearly with heavy-duty magical weapons or tools to cut through his armored scales. Some of it doesn’t look like battle wounds, either. The damage is too uniform and predictable for that. He has what looks like a brand mark on his right forearm, etched into the scales, deforming them with sinister-looking magic, so she frowns. “What did they do to you…”
It’s not really a question, and he doesn’t take it as one. She looks back up at him, craning her neck back to see properly, and she sees how vulnerable his eyes are. She realizes that, absent her intervention, he might not be able to take care of himself at all.
She realizes that her standing here, her hand on his stomach, is an extraordinary act of trust… or maybe desperation.
But fate is a fickle thing.
“Okay… let’s start with something easy,” she murmurs, sidestepping and gently reaching for his wing. He flaps it away from her, and she shields her face from the dust and blood that is kicked up. “I’m sorry. Did that hurt?”
She didn’t actually make contact with him, but she’s really asking if she made him uncomfortable. She drops her arm to look up at him, and he just ducks his head, looking… bashful. It’s strange to assign human emotions to such a clearly inhuman creature, yet she can’t dwell on that right now. She just needs him to understand that she really does want to help him.
My wings… are sensitive. They… they hurt a lot. Please be careful with them…
“I’ll be careful,” she says in a quiet, soothing voice. Deku stares back at her with his big, pretty, reptilian eyes down his snout. Distantly, she thinks they remind her of a cat’s eye, though unnaturally brilliant and vivid in their color, pulsing magically in their irises. They… sparkle in the moonlight, like shooting stars. For a moment, she loses her train of thought, then she continues, “I promise.”
She doesn’t point out to him that it would take one devastatingly quick motion for him to have her in jaws. She shivers at the mental image of his teeth sinking into her, drawing vicious red from her fragile body. It would be unimaginably painful, and not necessarily quick if he didn’t want it to be.
She’s in so much absurd danger right now, but he’s the one acting vulnerable. Maybe it’s because she could walk away, but he would be trapped here.
But she doesn’t have anywhere to go, so perhaps she can’t, either.
He lowers his wing down to her, and she reaches out to touch it with her bare hand, staff shifted to the other one. As she makes contact, it doesn’t feel as she might’ve expected. It’s… leathery, though she brushes her fingertips against the scales of the bone-y outer part. There’s a weight to it, though it seems… underdeveloped. It's also shredded, dripping sickening, oily blood, like a demented spider web wet from the morning dew.
“You should have more armor on this bit, no? Deku?” She looks back up and over at him, curious. Her hood falls down behind her head and he just stares at her for several moments. Maybe she wasn’t phrasing it properly; he doesn’t seem to have heard her. She realizes maybe she should clarify. He’s probably distracted, because his wings are fragile and she’s touching them. “We have books back home about dragons. They had drawings. I figure maybe some of it isn’t accurate, though…”
I was born premature, Deku says, sounding like he has been slightly dazed. Now that his voice isn’t laced with so much magic, it feels… warm in Ochako’s head. It makes her want to melt a little bit, like he’s standing behind her with hands on her shoulder and whispering into her ear. She doesn’t think he’s doing that on purpose, though, as his actual ‘voice’ is very earnest and almost… boyish. My egg did not form properly, and my mother… I was taken from her shortly after my shell cracked too soon.
“Oh, Deku… I’m so sorry. Humans… Scholars don’t know much about how dragons are raised.” She shrugs, feeling helpless. “That’s what the books say, anyway.”
Properly, dragons travel in small groups. Like…
“Like birds?” Ochako asks, but Deku slowly shakes his head.
Birds typically travel together, but they raise their young independently. Dragons lay eggs, and we go through mating cycles… very slowly. We live a long time. So we raise our young collectively, temporarily settling down until the fledglings can follow the group.
“Oh, wow,” Ochako says, looking up at him with an awed smile. He makes that rumbling noise again, and she dimly wonders if he’s chuckling. “You’re so smart!”
Dragons are intelligent creatures… Deku says, sounding miffed. Ochako just laughs, closing her eyes to smile sincerely at him.
“No, I mean… You sound like a scholar! Can you read?”
I can. I guess you could call me a scholar. Dragons don’t have societies like humans, but we do have… history. Culture. Rituals. Stories. The egg-thief clans want to turn us into pets, though.
“Oh,” Ochako says, opening her eyes. That's so… tragic. She hates the idea of history and knowledge being lost to time forever, all thanks to the greed of petty men.
Deku lowers his head down towards her, probably trying to get a better look at her, and she impulsively reaches up towards it. He freezes, so she goes still. But he doesn’t move away, so she sets her bare hand against his head, rubbing her thumb across his scales. He feels like he’s made of ridged steel, though he also seems… malnourished. The word her mind reaches for is… ‘damaged.’
“You said ‘properly.’ But you call them ‘egg-thieves.’ What do you mean, Deku?”
The egg-thief clans force dragons to breed for physical traits and magical power, like you might breed dogs for warfare. When dragons aren’t available, or when we refuse to breed with each other, they breed us with powerful mages, instead.
She gapes like a fish at him, going rigid. She infers that by ‘breed,’ he doesn’t mean that the dragons get much say in the matter. The Bakugou Clan has such remarkably powerful mages now, emphasizing the strong and mighty in their society, but to bring the dragons to heel…
“So they treat you like cattle, then,” Ochako murmurs. It’s not really a question. “Is that why you ran away?”
She looks over his form, and she wonders how breeding dragons with mages even works. He doesn’t… have any visible genitalia, never mind that he’s several times the size of a person. She shudders, pushing the thoughts away.
I was meant to lay with a female dragon named Himiko. I… did not want to. When I first ran away they were planning to pair me with a human woman, instead, or simply force me to be Kacc— Katsuki’s mount for battle. Deku momentarily looks away as Ochako’s eyebrow rises. He sounded like he was going to call Katsuki some kind of… nickname? Katsuki and I were friends, growing up. He became arrogant and cruel when he learned his destiny as the inheritor of All Might’s legacy.
Ochako blinks quickly, confused. ‘All Might’ is what the barbarian clans refer to Lord Yagi as, she has gathered. A description of strength and will, enshrining his image in massive bronze statues of him at his greatest. They idolize the great power he wielded, and they look at him as a symbol of victory, the manifestation and avatar of their god of war.
The Kingdom of Uravity has a statue of him, too, but it’s as he died at Mount Kamino: half-emaciated and wounded by magic, standing with his boot on All for One’s neck, with his enchanted sword, One for All, in All for One’s chin, the sword about to break lengthwise down the middle from the strain. They immortalize him not as a symbol of victory, but as one of salvation and sacrifice. Legends say that Lord Yagi received One for All from an archangel who sleeps under a lake, though the sword is presumed lost to time now, shattered in its final battle.
“Inherit All Might’s legacy…?” Ochako whispers, confused and curious.
Katsuki certainly spoke like someone who believed himself destined for great things, when she could understand him, given his constant yelling and accent. Maybe he has seen his own fate, and it drove him to become awful, to see others as objects and stepping stones for his ‘inevitable rise.’
He wouldn’t be the first; the subjects of many tragic plays are young men - always men - who did the same. The trouble with that is that fate is flexible: it’s a strong suggestion backed by the collective magic of humanity, not an immutable truth.
Still, she imagines a young Katsuki, wrapped up in his mother's cloak, playing with a baby version of Deku the dragon, a sickly little creature, still eager to belong. She imagines them happy, embracing and chasing each other about, and she’s so saddened by the image. The politics of greed, magic, and reducing people to commodities taints everything, and she’s tired of it.
She turns and touches Deku’s wing again, startling him slightly. He doesn’t pull away, though, just… vibrating. Like a person shivering. Her magic radiates out in waves, and she watches his wing knit back together, blood, bone, and sinew emerging from glowing pink and green light, reforming into the proper shape. It's both disgusting and enrapturing to watch, the sound wet and visceral.
Deku releases a harsh growling sound, so she jumps, but she doesn’t stop. It probably hurts, but it needs to be done. Healing isn’t supposed to hurt, but it depends on what's being healed. A person can regenerate a limb with magic, but healing borrows both from the healer and the person being healed. A person with weak magic can’t be healed that much in one sitting. But a dragon…
Accordingly, she runs out of magic before he does, and her knees buckle, unprepared for how all of her strength leaves her. She hits the ground on her hands with a splash. The blood pooling around him is nasty and makes her want to retch, except she’s so tired that her body can’t be bothered. She realizes that she’s gonna pass out, sooner or later. She's just too weak to do this all at once, and it makes her sad.
Are you alright, Princess Uraraka? Ochako chuckles at his formality, waving a hand at him. She wouldn’t mind if he calls her ‘Ochako,’ but if that’s how he wants to be, so be it. You should rest. I… I feel a lot better, but I’m not ready…
He’s not ready to pull the spear out. He doesn’t say it, but she nods, following his train of logic, albeit at a delay through her growing haze. That’s okay, because she’s in no shape to try right now, anyway.
Her head spins and she’s dizzy, so she knows she needs sleep, both to physically recover and to restore her magic. She decides to simply curl up on the cold floor, searching for a clean spot away from where gravity pools his blood. The way Deku passively sucks the thermal energy out of the room leaves her breathless, and she feels sick, unable to cope with it now that she’s drained.
Princess Uraraka? You can’t stay like that. You’ll… you’ll catch a cold…
Ochako chuckles again, completely out of it now. Apparently he knows. He probably can’t control it, just like that sweet scent that now fills her nostrils and leaves her delirious. Her eyelids feel heavy, and she doesn’t acknowledge him. She’s just… numb. Maybe she'll just never wake up from this, her last act done out of simple altruism. That seems romantic, in the fairy tale sense that she enjoyed reading about in the library back home.
It’s nice that he’s worried about her. It’s a sincere, pure worry, like her parents had for her, before their lives became complicated by court politics. Not the insincere, dull worry of people who only see her as a title, a vector for noble childbearing, and a doorway to the further accumulation of land and power. She decides that Deku seems truly kind, a novel idea for something as dangerous as him.
She vaguely senses an appendage snaking under her, lifting her entire body. She lolls, limp and spent, as his tail slips under her stomach and between her legs to prevent her from falling. He brings her over next to him, mindful of the mess, and she breathes harshly at how warm he is. Then he deposits her where he can use his hand to reposition her.
She’s barely conscious, shivering uncontrollably, though his proximity is helping. He very carefully tilts her with his talons, so that she's curled into the fetal position, then he covers her protectively with his claw and curls his neck around her. The warmth seeps into her, and she sighs, finally slipping into sleep.
It’s the first decent rest she’s gotten in days, even if she’s stiff when she wakes up from laying on rock without padding.