Chapter Text
Tommy wishes the twins would stop watching him. They might think they’re being subtle about it, half-hidden behind what remains of the house, or watching him from the corner of their eyes while they’re pretending they’re busy working, sorting through what is salvageable of what remains inside the house, but Tommy can still feel their eyes on him like ice water underneath his scales.
He wants to snap his teeth at them, scare them off and scare them away like he’s done to the wild boar and inquisitive fox that think the newborn lambs in the meadow might make for easy pickings, but that would make Kristin sad. And Phil too. He’s… nice, to say the least, and he hasn’t thrown stones at Tommy and he doesn’t hide the fact when he looks at Tommy, and instead of hiding he comes all the way down the hillside and stands near the river where Tommy is perched on the edge, ears flicking between him and the way the wind makes his robe swish and the splashes of fish in the shallows.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry for startling you earlier,” Phil says. He doesn’t sound afraid. Apologetic; like if he had ears the same as Tommy they’d be pressed back against his head. “I’m sorry for what the boys did as well. They’ll apologise too, when you’re willing to hear them out,” which explains a little as to why the twins are only watching and not getting any closer. Tommy suspects that Phil and Kristin had something to do with that, and he’s grateful. He doesn’t really want to be near either of them now. Not that he thinks they’re going to throw rocks at him again.
Phil doesn’t push any further than that, hesitating a moment, like he wants to say more, or maybe reach out and ruffle Tommy’s scales just as Kristin does on occasion, but instead he steps away, and heads, not to the windmill, but to the house and helps Technoblade to clear out more of their possessions and ferry them up to the house.
Tommy turns his back and keeps watching the fish. He doesn’t hurry to slap them out of the water with his tail, knowing that once he’s got enough food for the humans and him too then he’ll have to go and find something else to do to occupy his time, but he’s already spent most of the morning dragging the tree over to the firewood pile, and he can’t keep clearing out the house when Phil and the twins are working on that. He’s trying to stay away from them, currently, so putting himself right in between them sounds stupid.
He could go and sit with Kristin, but then she’ll ask questions and Tommy doesn’t know how he feels about telling her that her sons threw stones at him. She’ll probably be angry, or upset at them, and then in turn they’ll just be angrier at Tommy, so he keeps himself at the riverside and he keeps slapping the water with his tail until there is a good handful of fish drying out on the bank.
Kristin comes down the hillside then—slow, still pained from getting hurt during the storm—but much sturdier than the day before and Tommy doesn’t worry as much as he did before, and she sits with him a while, having tucked the fish up in a stretch of cloth so that they’ll be kept from flies and birds and anything else that might fancy itself a taste before Kristin takes the fish back up the hill.
Tommy thought she’d encourage him to go and talk to her sons, less pushing, more gently guiding, but she doesn’t. She just trails shapes on his scales and talks to fill the silence, telling Tommy that he won’t have to work so hard now that the others have returned home. She’s trying to encourage him into conversation, Tommy knows, but he’s not ready just yet.
He does, however, take her up on her invitation to head back up the hill, under the pretence that she needs help. She carries the fish, wrapped up in one arm while she steadies her other hand against Tommy’s shoulder, the pair of them moving slow, walking up the trail towards the house because there is no stove, and no way to cook inside the windmill.
Outside, Technoblade and Phil have worked together to shift the dining table, having slipped it on its `back while Wil is trying to figure out how to replace the legs. Tommy gives them a wide berth, to the point that he enters the house through the hole left by the tree instead of the front door like Kristin, but she doesn’t say anything and neither do the others so Tommy doesn’t focus. He just shuffles over to his bed, pawing softly at the debris and the sodden blankets that are still underneath what remains of the stairs, kicking them out of the way so it’s just flagstone, dirt and old straw beneath him, pillowing his head on his front paws, content to watch as Kristin busies herself in what remains of the kitchen.
Phil, Technoblade and Wil still work to help clean, as there is no real way of getting around the fact that they only have the shell of a house and they’ll need to clear as much of it out as they can before they even start work on repairs, but they’re attentive enough to give Tommy a wide berth where they can.
It’s a familiar routine that follows them for the next few days; Phil, Techno and Wil working on the house while Kristin gets her strength back, with Tommy hovering on the edge. He mainly helps Kristin, helping her down to the river when she wants to wash the clothes and sheets in the river, or being the one to herd the sheep and cows in and out of their paddock, all the while partially ignoring the twins where they watch him as he goes.
They’ve apologised—had done so on the first night, when they’d all piled into the windmill come nightfall—Tommy accepting with a dip of his head before promptly slipping back out of the door and informing Kristin that he’d prefer to sleep in his nest, since it’s not raining. More space, he’d said. It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t the whole truth either.
At least Technoblade respects Tommy’s desire for distance, and doesn’t push. Wilbur is less patient, although no less respectful and despite the fact that he can’t exactly understand Tommy, he does try and talk to him, or at the very least fill the silence whenever they’re close enough. Tommy doesn’t know how to feel about it. He knows that Wilbur is trying. He also can’t be certain if this is Wilbur trying to make amends, or trying to keep his mother happy.
This is probably why dragons only stay with princesses that are alone, Tommy thinks to himself, a week after, sat up on the hill near the windmill, watching where Wil and Technoblade are up on the roof of the house. They’ve fixed a beam to the central roof, and now working on adding more to reinforce the structure so that they can start replacing the straw, and eventually the tile, although Phil said that will be a while yet as they’ll have to travel back to the next town over, as they don’t have the means to make them themselves.
Maybe dragons aren’t meant for ordinary people, which is why Tommy can only speak to his princess, and why he hadn’t heard much about others from his mother in the short time that she’d spent trying to teach him about the outside world when he wasn’t chasing frogs in rain puddles. But Tommy doesn’t want to go and find anyone else, he thinks, folding his front paws more firmly underneath his chin, decidedly more miserable at that thought. He wants to stay here, with Kristin. He wants to listen to her stories and share his own, wants to sit in front of the fire when it’s cold and steal scraps of food from her cooking when she’s not looking, and he wants to be able to swim in the stream, and maybe he wants to be friends with the twins and Kristin said he’d be, and he wants to follow Technoblade and Phil into the woods when they go hunting, and he wants to listen to the songs that Wilbur plays on his lute.
Despite his fear, he wants to be friends. Despite not being able to speak to them, he’d like to try.
So Tommy stops hiding.
When the others stop for lunch, Tommy comes and sits near them. He lets them look and looks in turn. Wilbur shares his apple with him, cutting it into slices and placing it near enough that Tommy just has to turn his head and snuffle at the grass to inhale the smaller pieces. He amuses himself by letting his tail flop back and forth after noticing Technoblade watching it with the focus of a cat stalking it’s prey, and shares that amusement with Phil and Kristin when she comes over, with a lot more elegance and a lot less pain than these last few days.
She gives Tommy a gracious, pleased smile when she sees what he’s doing, and even if this is to be disastrous, it won’t be Tommy’s fault.
He sticks around when food has consumed, and the boys return to the roof in the hopes of fixing the last few support beams before the wind can pick up. They’ve been lucky, so far, that there hasn’t been another rain spell nor brisk winds that will halt progress of fixing the house, and Phil wants to keep up the decent pace to circumvent any unforeseen complications.
Tommy can help, and it’s with this determination that takes the next beam ready to go up and carries it up, trusting in the stone and frame already in place to be his steps up to the roof. He is warmed when Phil tells him to mind his step so he doesn’t fall, somehow, having already earnt his care and concern the same as Kristin, a hand coming out to lay on his flank when he’s a little unsure about where to put one of his feet.
His hand is warm; the same kind of welcoming as Kristin’s touch and Tommy pauses a half-second when he feels it. It wasn’t like he was expecting pain, or the same stinging like the smack of a rock, but it is it’s own kind of reassuring. Just as if Phil’s immediate withdrawal and apology in case he’d stepped a line.
“It’s fine,” Tommy says, on reflex, always answering to Phil and the twins even if they can’t understand him the same as Kristin, before pushing himself fully up onto the roof without the same fear of falling as the others, because even if he can’t exactly fly just yet, he has got wings that will let him guide and a flexibility that will prevent any real injury were he to lose his footing.
Phil watches him, uncharacteristically silent. Tommy leaves him to it.
It’s easy for him, and easier for the twins, if Tommy holds the wooden beam in place while they hammer it in and secure it fast with nails and bolts and metal casings that were recycled from the old wooden beams, thankfully un-warped from when the roof caved in. They make quick work of the last few beams, until all that is left is to layer the straw for insulation and cap the roof with the tiles, although that will needed to be done once they’ve got the tiles, so as to not chance the freshly-packed straw with any coming rain, as Technoblade explains to Wilbur, who was eager to be sleeping in a real bed instead of the cots they’ve got set up on the top-floor of the windmill where they family have been sleeping these past few nights.
Tommy hasn’t had the same issue, where the lack of rain has allowed him to sleep in his nest each night, despite it being louder than usual with the open roof, although he finds himself wanting the same, if only to fill the night with the sounds of Kristin and the others, safe and sleeping above him.
Wil, bemoaning another night having to share a sleeping space with Techno, as if he didn’t sleep two foot away from him every other night before, is acting all dramatic and over-the-top and very much like how Kristin has described him, pulling Tommy’s attention from where he was about to step down off the roof. He half wants to roll his eyes, like Techno is doing, but more than that, he wants to join in, wants to tease Techno about how he snores in his sleep, wants to tease Wilbur that he’s not that much better, wants to—
“Careful!” Tommy warns, but it’s too late and he watches as Wilbur’s foot lands wrong on the beam that is just shy of wide enough, and Wilbur is clumsy enough as it is on flat ground. But Wil doesn’t understand and neither does Techno, even though he’s reaching and Wilbur is unbalanced enough that even if Techno did grab hold of him, they’d both end up falling.
Tommy moves before he’s sure, half-wincing when he puts weight on a newly-nailed beam and it creaks painfully, but at least it holds and acts as a point he can vault from, towards where Wilbur is falling, hardly having time to think about how Wilbur’s hands are warm on his scales before he’s wrapped around him, Wilbur tucked between arms, leg, tail and wings as they drop the rest of the way off of the roof and roll half-way down the hillside.
Tommy is left panting. He can feel Wilbur against him, heat almost burning him but he’s too busy trying to get air back in his lungs, a long, pathetic whine slipping out between his teeth as pain makes itself known in his back, up his spine and his forearms. Even his head, when he’s knocked it, but Tommy is a dragon, armoured with scales that he’s hurt no worse than a scrape here and a bruise there.
His empty lungs are the worse of it as he crawls off of Wilbur, careful not to misplace a foot as he heaves air, and decides it would be easier just to slump on the grass and wait for his body to sort itself out.
Beyond the pain and sudden panic of falling off of the roof is everyone else’s worry; Techno scrambling off of the roof at a much more controlled decent than his brother while Phil jogs around the side of the house and tries to keep his feet on the slope of the hillside. And Wil, who is hurt no more than the same knocked-air of his lungs, although with far less force than Tommy that sees him on his feet much quicker than Tommy, and on his knees again and Tommy’s muzzle, all thought of boundaries knocked aside as his hands run over his face, and under his chin, lifting his face up to encourage his eyes open as Wilbur fountains a thousand apologies and thanks and “are you okay Tommy?”
“’m fine. Just winded, ‘s all,” Tommy breathes, struggling because he’s still trying to breathe, forget talking. Fruitless, of course, because neither Wilbur, Techno or Phil can actually understand him, so instead he pushes his head further into Wilbur’s lap and swallows all the pained whines.
Techno comes to his knees too, and while he’s much more reserved in his worry, it’s clear. Tommy can see the want when he sees Wilbur’s hands holding Tommy’s maw, and it’s something he can fix, so he tilts his head enough so that the weight of his chin is shared by both of Kristin’s sons. It’s a pleasant discovery to find that Techno is as just as warm as the rest of them; the feeling of his hands is nothing like the sting of stone against his scales, and that Tommy was worried for no reason.
If he lets himself take more than enough time to bully his lungs back into working order then that’s his secret.