Chapter Text
Autumn is slowly making place for the twenty-fifth winter of Leon's life when the elders decide that the Great Dragon of the Northern Mountains needs to be paid a tribute in form of a human.
It has been one hundred years precisely since the last human has been offered up to the beast living in the mountains up north, one that barely anyone in history has ever laid eyes upon for it supposedly lays dormant for a hundred years before once again threatening to destroy their small town of Postwick, nay, the entire kingdom of Galar, even. At least that is what the elders and the history books say.
It being Leon's twenty-fifth winter means that Hop just turned fourteen last month, which led the elders to decide that he was old enough to be offered to the dragon.
They didn't allow Leon to speak to him. Not even their mother, who is besides herself with grief that she is going to lose one of her sons to a fate so vaguely defined that no-one knows to tell what use the dragon has for humans; whether he devours them to quell his hunger for another hundred years, or something else.
Leon has been this town's champion for six years, protecting it against all manners of beasts and bandits; been training to become a knight since he was old enough to hold a sword. His duty is towards the people of Postwick, and this feels like abandoning his duty.
But more so than the people of Postwick, he has sworn to always protect his little brother.
It is his duty towards Hop that has him offering himself up to be given to the dragon in his stead.
"Lee!"
Hop yells after him when they take him away to the altar deep in the mountains. The trek does not stop for Leon to say his last goodbyes – it's probably for the better. He's not sure he wants his last time seeing Hop being tainted by grief. He's a good kid. Resilient as their father died, resilient in the face of bullies trying to tear him down for not being as skilled with the sword as his brother, resilient when sickness struck the town two winters ago and he assisted in treating the affected. He's going to endure the loss. Leon is certain of it.
As for him… He'll have to, too.
At the altar, they speak a prayer to the dragon, the Bringer Of Storms, the One Whose Wings Stir Up The Dust Of Fallen Kingdoms, the One Who Apparently Couldn't Care Less About Humans Until He Gets Bored After One-Hundred Years, Leon thinks sardonically as he mumbles along.
After the prayer, the elders shoot him looks of various amounts of pity and regret – then they leave, for it is tradition that only those offered to the dragon may set eyes upon it.
Leon belatedly realises that through all that happened, he never really thought about the dragon itself, what it was like, what it even wanted a sacrifice for. Due to the very same tradition, witness accounts are accordingly spare.
Well, as it turns out, the dragon is in fact huge. Leon already expected the descriptions of 'wings large enough to blanket the sky' to be the exaggerations that they clearly are, but still, face to face with a beast of legends as it approaches from the sky, tears through the ropes (even though Leon went voluntarily, the elders still tied him to the altar to ensure he wouldn't make a run for it as soon as they were out of sight) and lifts him into the air, clasped in its claws, Leon feels the kind of limb-freezing fear he last experienced as a ten-year old facing his first wolf of many.
'At least,' he thinks as the wind whips through his hair, 'At least Hop doesn't have to go through this.'
While Leon has never been scared of heights, he is still relieved when he is dumped rather unceremoniously on the hard, rocky floor of the dragon's lair.
Less relieving is the thought that now comes the revelation of whether said dragon wants to eat him or not. He stumbles to his feet and tries to keep a brave face as it folds its leathery wings, huffs, and turns to inspect him.
The question of whether the beast understands human language at all answers itself right then.
"Never seen a dragon before, have you?"
Leon flinches as the dragon's voice fills the cave, a low rumble that nevertheless shakes the rock underneath his feet.
"No," he answers, and is proud of how steady his voice manages to sound.
The dragon's charcoal-grey scales shift in the low light coming in from an opening in the rock above.
"I figured," it, no, he says. Leon didn't think dragons could grin, but this one certainly does – and it's a terrifying sight, exposing two rows of teeth as wide as Leon's upper arm and as sharp as the tip of his sword, by the looks of it.
"Staring like that makes you look dumb, you know."
The tinge of anger Leon feels makes him forget his fear for a moment. "What do you want from me?" he asks the dragon, who continues grinning as he stares down at him.
"Well, tiny human, who knows," he rumbles, lowering his voice to a purr. "I've just slept for a hundred years, and I've been feeling quite hungry after waking up..."
The dragon does not eat him.
In fact, the dragon treats Leon with a surprising amount of hospitality. He leaves several times a day, catching food for them both, and permits him to make himself a bed from fabrics borrowed from his hoard – the dragon's hoard, unlike its owner, is exactly what Leon expected it to be like, gold and jewels and books and all kinds of other treasures piled above each other on the floor of a huge hall-like cavern inside the mountain.
Leon is tasked with polishing gemstones sometimes, or sorting through scrolls. He's not food, he has learned, but a servant – most of his time he spends scrubbing the dragon's steel-hard scales, a task that doesn't seem to have an end to it due to the beast's sheer size. Leon wonders how his predecessors fared – whether they spent all the rest of their lives up here, scrubbing dragon scales until they died.
He wonders whether they also had to let the damned beast insult their abilities while they worked.
"You can't keep me here forever," Leon says after a few days spent inside the mountain lair, while scrubbing on a particularly tough patch of dirt.
A large teal eye opens lazily to look at him, but the dragon says nothing. It feels like a taunt, so Leon glares.
"I'm going to return home, and you won't stop me."
That finally gets the dragon talking.
"I won't?"
The beast's amused voice comes as a rumble, echoing from the walls of smooth rock.
"And how are you going to get past me, little human? Me, the Great Dragon of the Northern Mountains?"
The huge, scaled snout moves closer as the dragon turns his head to look at Leon proper.
"How are you going to descend down the cliffs all without help? How are you going to find your way to the closest human settlement all on your own, many wing-beats away?"
Leon keeps glaring – there isn't anything else he can do, and it distracts him from how his heartbeat speeds up at the sound of the dragon's voice.
"As if I'm going to just tell you that," he says, sounding more confident than he feels.
Terrifyingly, the dragon just laughs. Leon resists holding his ears closed at the noise; it shakes the mountain like rolling thunder and Leon wonders whether it could cause a rockslide.
"So you have no idea yourself," the dragon says once he's stopped laughing, with that infuriating smug grin that shows too many teeth.
Leon silently continues scrubbing.
"My name's Raihan, by the way."
The human glances at him, brows furrowing – Raihan can't tell whether in confusion or annoyance. Maybe he's still insulted because of earlier, when Raihan caught him at the mouth of the cave about to try climbing down the sheer cliff face. That would have just resulted in him plummeting to his death, so Raihan snatched him up by the sleeve and pulled him back into the cave. He hasn't spoken a word with him since.
"As much as I like hearing you calling me 'Great Dragon', I think my actual name is enough for now."
The human huffs and looks away again.
Raihan clicks his tongue. "And you?" he asks, annoyed that the human won't pick up on his cue. He didn't expect humans to be this stubborn, and if he's being honest, he's a bit impressed by this one's determination to ignore him. Only a tiny bit, though.
"Alright, I'll keep calling you 'tiny human', then. Oh," he starts grinning as the thought occurs to him, "What about 'pipsqueak'?"
The human mutters something, expression stormy.
"What was that?"
"Leon," the human repeats, more loudly this time.
"Leon," Raihan tests, and finds it quite pleasing to say. "See, that wasn't so difficult now, was it?"
The human – Leon – sends him a scathing look and doesn't say another word for the rest of the day.
"Why do you even want to return so badly?" Raihan asks a few days later, after he stopped Leon from diving into the icy stream flowing through one of the side caves, the one they get their drinking water from. Raihan knows it flows down the cave system for a long, long time; far too long for even a dragon to hold their breath that entire while.
Leon sits next to a quickly-lit fire, soaked from head to toe. He looks quite pathetic like that. Raihan rifles through his hoard and throws him a heavy fur-lined cape that probably belonged to some human royal once; Raihan doesn't know and doesn't care. It's not like it was of any use to him until now.
Leon slings it around his shoulders with a dour look on his face, half sheepish and half miserable. He looks like he wants to say something for a moment, then shuts his mouth again.
"I know I wouldn't be in a hurry to get back to the people who tied me to an altar for a big bad dragon to eat," Raihan prompts.
"You don't understand," Leon says, and he's right. Raihan doesn't understand. Why would he risk his life for people who forfeited it? Is that something all humans do, or is it just this one?
Maybe Raihan has to try a bit harder to make him want to stay here instead, so he doesn't find a third possible way to kill himself. That would just be a waste; Raihan greatly enjoys it when the human scrubs his scales, especially under his chin.
Hopefully he won't get sick after this endeavour. Humans can get sick, can't they?
Raihan nudges Leon a bit closer to the fire, ignoring his indignant protests, and breathes a hot puff of air in his direction that has the human pulling a face – so Raihan does it again, just to annoy him.
Maybe Leon's town is like a dragon's hoard to him – an intrinsic part of his being he feels pulled to and feels compelled to protect.
Raihan asks him about it, but Leon only snorts.
One of those days, the human finally chooses to speak.
"I have someone important I need to return to," he says, mouth drawn into a tight line while he polishes Raihan's claws with a piece of cloth.
"Oh?"
Raihan narrows his eyes, but tries not to make his interest show too obviously, so he stays where he is.
"Let me guess," he rumbles, "You were promised to get married before the evil dragon took you away? Like in the stories." He grins, showing his teeth. "Do I have to worry about a lady knight in shining armour coming to poke me with one of those silly little toothpicks you humans call weapons?"
But Leon does not respond to the taunt. It seems like he's refusing to look at Raihan, which serves to annoy the latter more than if he'd fired back an insult. Bitterness paints his features.
"Come on," Raihan needles, "at least tell me some details. Is she beautiful?"
Leon finally looks at him, and the torchlight reflected in his golden eyes makes him look somewhat wild, so much so that Raihan finds it very difficult to look away.
"Only if you answer a question first," he says.
Part of Raihan knows that he should feel offended by the audacity and probably dangle Leon from the cave ceiling for his disrespect, but for some reason, he finds it in himself to humour him.
"Then ask."
"Are dragons capable of feeling love?"
Raihan laughs.
He pulls his claws away, almost knocking Leon over in the progress. "What kind of question is that?" he demands, smirking to fight the feeling of unease spreading in his chest.
"One I would like an answer to," Leon says, unphased. It's…
Raihan shakes his head to himself and huffs. "Silly nonsense."
"Well, are you?"
Leon won't let up, it seems. Raihan peers at him and sees the challenge in his expression.
"Dragons love their hoard," he says at length, and after all, that's not a lie.
Still it feels uncomfortable to state it out loud, and Raihan isn't sure why.
Leon scoffs, glancing at the pile of gathered treasures Raihan is currently residing upon. It feels like another insult, one that, as much as he loathes to admit it, actually affects him.
"I answered your question," he says quickly, before Leon can get the idea to pry. "Now will you finally share something about that very special woman of yours?"
Leon shoots him a wry smile. "He's not bad-looking, but his personality is what I like about him."
A he, huh?
Raihan huffs out a laugh. "Not a lady knight coming to slay me, then. Apart from the fact that no human can reach the top of Hammerlocke Peak without my help, anyway."
He demonstratively inspects his claws, finding them to be perfectly shiny, but shoves them at Leon to keep polishing, anyway.
The human glares at him, but complies – but it doesn't feel like a victory to Raihan, who starts to think he should go for a flight instead, to clear his head. Far away from Leon, far away from the sleeping doubts he roused from their dormancy within Raihan's heart.
Leon often stares in the direction of the cave entrance with a quiet determination on his face, and Raihan knows that he will never stop trying to go and return to what he was forced to leave behind.
Is that love?
Winter has wrapped its freezing claws tightly around the mountains.
Outside the cave mouth, a snowstorm rages. It actually manages to discourage Leon from attempting any climbing, never mind the fact that Raihan has easily retrieved him every time he tried.
Inside the cave it is surprisingly cozy, as long as Leon doesn't venture into the largest hall, the one in which Raihan keeps his hoard. The dragon, despite the location of his lair, does not seem to like the cold, either. He has his scaled tail coiled around Leon as they both doze next to a lit fire that makes being inside the caves much more bearable.
Raihan is slower, lazier in the cold: Leon has noticed as much. The knowledge won't really help him, though. He can't leave during this kind of weather, and even if he managed to slay the dragon (he's already searched his piles of treasure for a suitable blade), he'd quickly run out of food.
Admittedly, despite everything, the thought of killing Raihan doesn't sit right with him, either. The dragon may have kidnapped him, but he is clearly not evil – two facts that are difficult to accept in relation to each other. All dragons are evil, it is said.
As if on cue, Raihan sighs, his scaled flank heaving with the action.
"Hey," he mutters – a low rumble transferring from his body to Leon's. "I've been meaning to tell you something, actually."
"...What is it?" Leon watches as one huge teal eye slowly opens and meets his own.
"I don't actually know what I'm supposed to do with you," the dragon confesses.
Leon just blinks at him, unsure about what to make of that, and Raihan huffs. "You're the first human I've had," he says, and closes his eye again.
Leon looks at him, confused. "But… I'm not the first one that has been offered to the Great Dragon of the Northern Mountains."
"It's an inherited title," Raihan sighs. "Before me, my father was the Great Dragon. Before him, it was my grandmother."
"Then why did you come down to the valley, to the altar? Why did you take me up here?"
Raihan twitches – it looks like a shrug. "It's what dragons do, I suppose. At least I've been told so."
"You don't sound convinced."
The dragon draws his brows together, which would look quite intimidating if Leon weren't already so used to his expressions. "What do you even know about dragons?"
"Not much," Leon readily admits. "What do you know about humans?"
Raihan only sighs again.
The fire crackles, and Leon leans his head against the dragon's flank and closes his eyes.
Maybe he can bear to wait until spring.
"Hey."
Leon grumbles under his breath, eyelids still heavy with sleep. He rolls over and pulls the thick fur cloak he's sleeping under up to his chin.
"Hey," the now-familiar voice nags again. "Shorty. Pipsqueak. Wakey-wakey."
Leon huffs in response, still keeping his eyes shut. He's never been an early bird, and cohabiting with an overgrown reptile during winter doesn't help the matter at all.
"Leon."
Grumbling, Leon finally rouses.
Raihan's scaled snout hovers at a distance of only two sword-lengths from him and now comes even closer, only for Leon to push his nose away.
"I'm getting up, stop pestering me already."
The dragon grins at him.
"Say, do humans have a winter sleep, too?"
Leon sighs. "No, you big lizard." He puts on a too-wide smile and sees with some amount of satisfaction that Raihan recoils at the sight. "Now, what ever-important task do you have for me today? Need your horns polished? Or your back scratched?"
"Careful, or I'll have you do both," the dragon growls, but he looks more amused than anything else. "Actually, I don't need either. The storms have cleared for the first time. I want to go stretch my wings a bit."
"Well, then do that." Leon yawns. "I'm not stopping you."
"Obviously not," Raihan says, rolling his eyes. "I woke you because maybe you'd like to come along."
Leon stills.
"Come along? On a flight? Outside?"
"No, I was planning to fly a round through the caves," Raihan deadpans.
"Ha, ha," Leon says, but inside he's feeling incredibly giddy – a tiny part of which, to be fair, may also be fear. He still remembers the experience that was his flight here, clasped in the dragon's claws.
But on the other hand, he has yearned for outside air and the open sky above him since before the winter storms started.
"Well?"
Raihan eyes him expectantly, and Leon can't bring himself to say no.
The dragon's eyes sparkle.
"Climb onto my back."
The wind, staggeringly cold at this height above the ground, bites at every exposed patch of skin, but Leon barely notices.
The mountains below him are a breathtaking sight, still imposing even from this perspective – it sends a small pang through him, knowing that traversing them by foot will be arduous, if not impossible.
But right now, he is soaring above them, almost as high as the clouds, and his worries melt away for the moment.
The clouds are a thick blanket that covers the sun and that will probably unload more snow upon the world later on, but occasionally a small beam of light breaks through them. Whenever that happens, Raihan hollers and dives for it, having Leon needing to cling to one of the spines on his back with all his might. While he does wish that Raihan would fly a bit less exuberantly for his sake, it's honestly a joy to experience the dragon this happy.
"I missed this so much!"
The winter has been long for both of them, it seems.
With a heavy heart Leon thinks about how he has been gone from Postwick for an entire season now. He hopes the neighbours helped his family out now that they have to get by without him. This year's harvest hasn't been the best, and with Hop still only in training, their income is small.
Leon looks towards the horizon, towards where the mountains turn into hills and the hills make way for the trees of the Slumbering Weald. Somewhere beyond it, his mother and Hop are probably still believing that he will never return.
After that, he finds it difficult to enjoy the rest of the flight – and he thinks Raihan notices, too. Where the latter has been cheerfully flying difficult manoeuvres previously, he now settles into a gentler pace as he makes a turn back towards the imposing silhouette of Hammerlocke Peak.
"It looks like it will start snowing again soon. You haven't frozen solid up there, have you?"
Leon doubts that he could even hear an answer over the wind, so he taps his scales twice instead in the hope that he will notice. He should: While cleaning, Leon found that the scales around his wing joints are quite sensitive.
"Ah, you're still alive. Good to know," the dragon quips, but it lacks most of his usual humour.
They are both silent for the rest of the flight back.
After their return, later that day, Raihan finds Leon at the cave entrance again.
Fortunately, it doesn't look like he's actively planning to climb down the cliff face this time, but Raihan knows why he's looking out so forlornly over the mountains.
Raihan settles down next to him. Though Leon doesn't acknowledge his presence, Raihan sees his shoulders slump just the tiniest bit.
It's funny how Raihan is able to notice those little things now.
He keeps looking – not at the view he's seen a thousand times, but at Leon's profile. He doesn't see himself tiring of that sight anytime soon, and it occurs to him how that might be a strange thing to think. He's a dragon, after all, and supposed to find himself drawn to riches, to knowledge and stories. Not a worryingly mortal human with too much determination and bonds that draw him far away from here.
Have his ancestors ever found themselves in a similar situation, Raihan wonders?
He can't remember his father ever warning him about this when telling him about the deal the dragons of old have made with the humans beyond the mountains. Indeed his father told him very little, always being of the opinion that the best way to learn was to figure things out by yourself. With hindsight, it was probably for the best that Raihan learned so quickly to be independent from him.
Right now, though… Right now, Raihan would really appreciate a pointer.
He feels like he should be saying something – but everything that comes to his mind seems stupid or inadequate. His only company up here for many years have been birds, and those don't exactly talk much. Let alone about sensitive topics.
He'd hoped that Leon would enjoy flying as much as he does, and to his defence, it didn't seem like he hated it, at least. Raihan also hoped it would help take his mind off of certain things after a long winter cooped up inside, but the opposite seems to have happened.
It's quite strange: Everything remains the same, and yet there is an inscrutable feeling of loss that digs itself a home inside of him, hollow and aching.
The joy brought by the first sunbeams of spring is replaced by the dawning realisation that the waning of winter brings with it the end of something precious and, ultimately, fleeting.
Leon asked him if dragons could love, and Raihan was too proud to tell him the truth (too scared, perhaps): That there must be something wrong with him, because he does not love his hoard. It's his father's, his grandmother's, his ancestors' gathered treasure, but it holds no meaning to him beyond that. Dragons love their hoards, but he doesn't, because he must be broken.
It really is the cruellest thing to figure out that he does love something in the same moment that he realises he must let it go.
The winds have picked up again and are tearing at Leon's hair until he finally relents and retreats back into the caves.
Earlier was just a small reprieve from the harsh storms, and now winter shows that it is not quite ready to leave the mountains yet.
The plains and valleys, though, would already be experiencing spring weather. Far away, the vegetables in his mother's garden must be sprouting by now. The sheep would be roaming the pastures, perhaps also spring's first lambs – Leon misses them dearly, even as he chose the life of a fighter instead of that of a farmer or shepherd.
He finds Raihan curled up next to a fire in one of the halls, probably asleep after their flight. He sat with Leon for a long while before retreating without a word, and the latter doesn't really know what to make of it.
When he approaches, the dragon shifts and blinks open his eyes – not asleep, after all.
"You're back," he mutters, and Leon feels distinctly like he's missing something. Raihan's voice doesn't usually have such a sombre tone to it. It doesn't suit him.
The dragon shifts his tail so that it frames a perfectly human-sized nook by his side. Leon takes it as the invitation that it is, and, after a short moment of deliberation, walks over and settles against the dragon's scaled flank like in the countless previous winter nights.
Both of them are silent for a peaceful, yet heavy moment.
Until Raihan decides to speak up.
"Once the snow melts, you're going to leave, aren't you?"
Leon cranes his neck to meet his eyes. Surprisingly, they don't hold any mockery, not even exasperation.
"Yes," he confesses quietly, with none of the defiance of the previous times he assured the dragon of that. It would feel out of place right here, right now.
Raihan doesn't even sound like he wants to argue against it.
But they've had this argument often enough that the dragon's next words still come as a shock.
"Well, if you want to go back to your fellow humans so badly, I guess I'll have to let you."
Leon needs a moment to regain his composure. "Raihan…"
"But!" the dragon interrupts him before he can be too moved, "I'm coming with you."
"Coming with me?" Leon echoes, uncomprehending for a moment before the words and their meaning truly settle in.
"You want to come with me to Postwick?!"
"Yep," Raihan says, grinning.
"But… why? Your home is here… and so is your hoard! You can't take all that with you."
The grin vanishes off the dragon's face and makes way for a serious expression as he lowers his head to be level with Leon.
"I don't care about that stupid hoard."
He takes a deep breath, and Leon can only stare dumbly as the grin returns for a small moment.
"It feels good to finally say that."
'Dragons love their hoard,' Leon recalls, and only now puts two and two together. Raihan never spent much time actually guarding his treasure, the treasure that he – probably, in large parts – inherited from the previous Great Dragons.
Granted, he'd known back when Raihan had told him that that it wasn't truly the answer to his question. He believed to have found it nowadays: Raihan loves flying, he loves the warmth of the sun as well as the fury of the storms, and he loves his home – which Leon always believed was here, in the caves in Hammerlocke Peak.
He feels his face heat up.
"You can't mean that," Leon protests. But the mischief has already returned to Raihan's eyes, probably once he saw Leon's expression.
"I do," he says. "I'm coming with you, and you won't stop me."
Leon furrows his brows at having his own words thrown back at him like that, but the dragon isn't even done yet.
"Besides, you won't even make it back without my help."
"Hey!"
"You know it's true."
He is probably right about that, but that doesn't mean Leon would admit it so readily. Admitting that travelling by air would make the whole thing much more easy though, well, he can give that one to Raihan.
Leon suddenly finds himself struck with images of the Great Dragon landing in the middle of Postwick's town square. He'd take down a few roofs in the process, that much is certain, and while the thought in itself is quite funny, the consequences of it actually happening wouldn't be.
"You'd not be welcomed very warmly," Leon says, cringing at the images coming to his mind unbidden. He's not, after all, the only one in Postwick able to handle a sword, and as much as the Great Dragon commands respect, that probably wouldn't stop anyone from trying to chase away the giant winged lizard destroying people's homes.
Raihan cackles.
"No. Like this, probably not."
The scaled flank behind Leon moves, and then it's suddenly gone, to the effect that the latter almost falls over.
"How about this, though?"
Immediately, Raihan's voice sounds… strange. The same, but smaller. It's quieter, and there's less of an echo to it.
Leon turns his head to see what happened… and for the first moment, thinks that Raihan has vanished somehow, which should be impossible given his size.
"Over here," Raihan says to his left, an amused lilt to his strangely altered voice.
Leon looks… and has to catch himself from falling over a second time.
Where there used to be a dragon now stands a man. And Leon wouldn't believe that the two are one and the same being, if it weren't for the teal eyes he learned to read so well during this past winter.
Raihan gives him a lazy wave. "You think this will do it?"
He laughs when Leon just continues to stare at this absurdity, and the latter feels his face heat up – not from annoyance, but because Raihan as a human… well, he looks good. Really good. To the point it's making Leon's mind think embarrassing thoughts. Human Raihan's skin is tan, and his hair the same shade of dark grey as his scales – and while his teeth may look just a little bit too sharp still, his grin is just on the right side of charming.
Oh, and then there's the fact that he is, of course, naked.
Leon finally manages to tear his eyes away.
"Only if you put some clothes on!"
"...Right. Of course." Raihan clears his throat. "I'm sure there's something in the hoard. Let me go look."
In departing (and Leon still isn't looking), he calls back over his shoulder, "Sorry… I'm not exactly used to this."
He sounds appropriately sheepish, though that is funny coming from him.
"Were you always able to do that?" Leon asks him once he returns, clad in a too-short dark cloak. Even in human shape he's a good bit taller than Leon.
Raihan shrugs, says, "Yes, though I've never done it before… never saw a reason for it," and poof, he's a dragon again – the cloak hilariously hanging off one of the spines on his back, now looking absurdly small.
"This feels much more comfortable. But now you know that walking among humans won't be a problem for me."
He sounds very proud of himself.
Leon slowly shakes his head, both relieved and disappointed (and disappointed at himself for feeling disappointed) that Raihan is a dragon again.
"So you're actually serious about coming with me."
"Of course I am. Then I can learn more about how humans live..."
He pulls a face.
"...And you can go back to that guy that's so special to you," he finishes, still grimacing.
Leon feels his eyebrows rise. He's been vague before and did it on purpose, but he didn't think Raihan would get as miffed about it as he evidently is.
If he didn't know it any better, he'd say Raihan was pouting – no, scratch that, the Great Dragon of the Northern Mountains is definitely pouting.
Leon can't help it – he starts laughing.
"What's so funny?!"
Raihan's insulted tone makes Leon laugh even harder, and it takes a while for him to calm down. The dragon stares at him the entire time, positively appalled. Leon wishes he'd have his human shape right now, just so he could see what human Raihan's face would look like right now.
Once he finally manages to stop laughing, he looks up at Raihan, grins at him, and says,
"His name is Hop, and he's my brother."