FicWad

The Dragon Tale
by Tsutsuji
Date written: February 2006
Pairings: Bakura/Ryou (possibly others to come)
Type: adventure, crossover, yaoi/slash.
Warnings: crossover
Status: in progress.
Spoilers: some for end of Yu-gi-oh and the Ancient Egypt storyline.
Disclaimer: I do not own the copyright to these characters and I'm making no profit from this fic and intend no copyright infringement.
Spell-checked and self-beta'd. Please inform me of any typos.
Archive and reposting permission: let me know if you want it.

Notes: uses Plot Bunnies #165 & #198 from The Yaoi Bunny Farm. (http://cheysuli.envy.nu/) (Bakura's and Ryou's friends don't understand why they have things like Owls and moving paintings in their home, and a dragon that Bakura once helped in the ancient past returns to find him in the present.) There will probably be a couple others added as I go along. Crossover with the Harry Potter universe - but no one goes to Hogwarts, and probably no one from Hogwarts will appear in Domino, either.




1: There's a Dragon on the Balcony!

Bakura was having a wonderful dream about himself and Ryou doing something erotic that involved their wands and a plume of phoenix feathers. He was just getting to the part where Ryou would begin moaning in that lovely, sexy way he had, when something jolted the bed and woke him up.

He didn't even bother to raise his head from under the blanket. It must have been Ryou coming back to bed after going to the bathroom, or else it was one of those earth tremors that so frequently rumbled through this little island country of Japan that was now his home. Bakura wasn't quite as used to these little earthquakes as the natives and Ryou were, but at least they didn't make him jump out of bed anymore like they used to.

Besides, he was far too sleepy and content to do any jumping just yet. That dream was still warm in his mind, mingled with the memories of what he and Ryou had actually done last night before falling asleep together. He smiled to himself as he burrowed more deeply into his pillow. A little more sleep, and then maybe they would continue from where they left off. There were still quite a few positions in The Joy of Wizard Sex that they hadn't yet tried, after all.

He felt Ryou snuggle closer against him, which was very pleasant, and then Ryou reached around and hugged him from behind, which was even better.

"Bakura!" Ryou whispered.

Bakura's smiled grew wider. Ryou must have be thinking along the same lines as he was.

Ryou shook him and whispered again, hardly louder but more urgently.

"Bakura, wake up!"

Bakura uncoiled himself and rolled onto his back before tugging the blanket off his face. Ryou hovered above him now, but he didn't look quite as loving and eager as Bakura had expected. His normally pale face was nearly as white as the hair that fell around it, and his beautiful brown eyes were as big as saucers. Maybe they were having an earthquake after all, Bakura thought with a frown.

"What's wrong?" He started to sit up.

"Sshh!" Ryou winced and hugged him hard, which made sitting up impossible. He glanced fearfully up over Bakura's shoulder. "Don't move around so much!"

"Huh?" Bakura's brain was still sleepy and he was distracted by the way Ryou clung so closely to him. If there was an earthquake, he didn't see how being quiet or not moving was going to help. "What are you so nervous about? Earthquake, or just a bad dream?"

"Neither!" Ryou shook him again in panic and frustration. "It's outside! There's something out on the balcony, something huge!" His voice rose to a whispered shriek. "I think it's a dragon!"

Bakura stared at him for a second, wondering if he'd heard correctly. Finally he realized there was a fairly simple way to find out if he had. He rolled over and looked out the window.

White gauze curtains covered the sliding glass doors from ceiling to floor, designed to satisfy Ryou's insistance on privacy while keeping the room from feeling too closed in. Bakura couldn't stand feeling closed in, especially at night. However, since the sky outside was already filled with early morning light, the shape beyond the window could be seen fairly clearly through the thin fabric. Bakura looked, then blinked and stared. Ryou was right. There was a dragon outside, lounging there on their fourth-floor balcony.

Shining scales of reddish gold covered the thick coils that filled the balcony and spilled over its edge. One great claw hung over the rail beside the potted geranium. Each of the three toes on that claw was the size of his own hand. Bakura was a little surprised the balcony hadn't collapsed under its weight.

After a long moment of fascinated staring, he finally noticed the face that stared back at him through a gap in the curtain. The long, thin snout was a lighter shade of gold than the rest of the body, the white-gold of sunbleached sand. The eyes gleamed like gold nuggets sparkling in the sun. While he watched it, the dragon's head tilted to the side, and the eyes blinked slowly closed and opened again.

"It can't be," Bakura said, more in awe than in disbelief. "It's a Sand Dragon! I heard they became extinct long ago."

"I don't care what kind it is, what's it doing on our balcony?" Ryou wailed quietly in his ear. "Even if it doesn't swoop down and eat someone, people will see it! They already think there's something weird about us, what with the owls and everything. "

Bakura chuckled softly. "Yes, I guess they do, especially after one of your Wizard's Chess knights took a swipe at the cleaning lady's finger."

"That wasn't funny! I should never have left them out like that anyway," Ryou muttered guiltily.

"And even better, that Samurai on that silk painting you insisted on leaving up in the hallway who threatened Jonouchi with his sword!" Bakura reminded him. "At least it kept him from raiding the kitchen!"

Ryou winced. "At least we convinced Jou that it was some new holographic art display, too. We've tried to be so careful not to let anyone know that we're wizards, and now we've got a dragon on the balcony. Bakura, how do we make it go away?"

"Well," Bakura said thoughtfully. He pulled out of Ryou's frightened embrace (reluctantly) and started to get out of bed. Outside the window, the dragon tilted its head the other way and blinked again. "I don't think it's going to be that easy to get rid of. We'll have to invite it inside."

"Inside!" Ryou gasped, sitting upright. "Are you kidding? You can't just bring a live dragon into the house!"

"It will be a tight fit, I agree," Bakura said calmly. He grinned; he knew Ryou was more concerned about a live, wild dragon destroying the apartment or eating one of the neighbors than about whether it would fit inside the bedroom. Every living wizard knew that even the tamest breeds of dragons hardly made house pets, and most dragons liked human for breakfast as well as anything else. But Bakura knew a few things that most other living wizards didn't know.

He approached the door slowly; the dragon blinked again and tilted its head back the other way. Bakura smiled.

"However, there's nothing else we can do at the moment," he said over his shoulder to Ryou. "If I'm not mistaken, this particular dragon is an old friend of mine. You can't expect me to just send it away when we haven't seen each other in 3,000 years."

This time only a little squeak of surprise escaped Ryou. Bakura grinned back at him before walking over to the window and sliding back the curtain, then unlatching the door. While he did this, the dragon's head rocked slowly from side to side.

"You see, he's already behaving very discreetly -- for a dragon, at least," Bakura said to reassure Ryou, who was now clutching the bedcovers around himself and shaking. "Tipping his head like that is a very subdued greeting. If he really showed his exuberance he'd be wagging his tale like a dog, and you can imagine what the neighbors would say about that!"

Bakura slid the door open. The odor of sun-heated sand enveloped him as the dragon poked its head toward him. For a moment, that scent and the light in the golden eyes took him back in time, to the days when he was a young thief searching for forgotten tombs among the rocks above the banks of the Nile.

One day, instead of old bones and gold, he found a freshly hatched golden egg instead. At the time, the baby Sand Dragon had not been much longer than his own height. It was not more than a day old, and it was weak from hunger. Bakura never knew what happened to the mother that should have been nearby to feed it and teach it to hunt. He fed the creature the scraps of meat he'd stolen that morning.

As a young thief, Bakura already knew then that it wasn't safe to stay in one place for long, but he risked it to bring more food to the dragon and watch over it for many days and nights. He helped it hunt for rodents and other desert creatures until its own instincts took over.

When the dragon regained some of its strength, it dug into the rocks nearby. Sand Dragons liked old abandoned tombs just as well as thieves did and had a better instinct for finding them. In fact, in spite of all the legends, they were the only dragons who actually liked to sleep on piles of gold. It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship that had lasted several years, until the growing dragon began to be noticed by residents of nearby towns, as had Bakura's thieving. He realized they had become liabilities to each other, and somehow the dragon seemed to understand this as well. Bakura left for richer towns along the Nile and the dragon flew off one day at sunset, heading for less populated lands to the south near the river's unkown sources. He'd never expected to see it again.

"Well, you've certainly grown and thrived since that time, I'm glad to see," Bakura said, admiring the long, thick, sinuous body draped over the balcony rail. He ran his knuckle over the ridge of the dragon's snout. It closed its eyes and rolled its head against his hand, just as the young dragon used to do.

Fortunately, as Bakura glanced around the neighborhood, he couldn't see any signs that anyone else had noticed the dragon yet. The curtains were drawn in most of the other windows facing theirs, and since it was still so early on a Sunday morning, no one was out and about in their quiet neighborhood.

The gold nugget eyes glittered as if asking him a question.

"Yes, I remember you," he said. "I wonder how you ever found me here! Well, you'd better come inside, if you don't mind a bit of a squeeze. Come in and meet my mate, Ryou!"

Bakura pulled the sliding door open wide and stepped back. The dragon stuck its head in cautiously, sniffed the room, and cocked its head at Ryou, who stared back at it in awe.

"Yes, that's Ryou," Bakura said to the dragon soothingly. "You needn't worry about him; he's much more afraid of you than you are of him, and he's harmless, I assure you."

"Afraid of me?" Ryou said incredulously. "What has a dragon got to be a afraid of a human for?"

The dragon slowly uncoiled its length and began to draw itself into the room, placing one huge claw inside the door and then the other. Ryou climbed backward off the bed and edged toward the bedroom door.

"Sand dragons are rarely violent, especially toward humans," Bakura explained. "They're normally quite placid, even timid. They prefer to spend their days sleeping, buried in the desert sand or in the shady depths of an old tomb, and coming out at night to hunt in the dark. They only attack when they're unexpectedly disturbed or startled. At least, they used to be that way long ago, in my time. Even then, there weren't many of them, although they live for thousands of years, longer than any other dragon breed. I read that they were hunted to extinction in the Middle Ages. Fortunately, it appears that isn't quite true."

Once it was all inside, the Sand Dragon nearly filled the bedroom, even though Bakura knew it was also one of the smallest breeds. Standing close by it, Bakura could see shallow, silvery marks on its hide, the scars of a long lifetime. Its large, gossamer-thin wings were nearly invisible folded against its back.

Bakura closed the door and drew the curtains. The dragon curled its long body around itself as if the room was its nest, and soon looked nearly as comfortable as Bakura had felt curled up in bed just a short time ago. It rested its head on the bed and watched as Bakura made his way over, under and around it to join Ryou at the door.

"Great," Ryou said. He looked worried, but at least he wasn't terrified any more. "Well, he does seem to like you; at least he hasn't take his eyes off of you since he entered the room, and he hasn't eaten you yet. But what are we going to do with a dragon in the bedroom?"

"For a start, we're going to feed it breakfast, like the good hosts we are," Bakura said. He put his arm around Ryou's shoulders. Ryou looked up at him doubtfully.

Bakura paused for a moment; Ryou was so appealingly flushed and tousled after being awakened from sleep and startled like this. It made him think of dragging him off to the spare bedroom to try out one of those untried positions. Unfortunately, their copy of the Joy of Wizard Sex was now somewhere under the Sand Dragon.

"Keeping a dragon as a pet isn't legal in the wizarding world, you know," Ryou said. Bakura raised an amused eyebrow at him, and Ryou sighed. "Of course, when are you ever concerned with legalities, wizard or otherwise?"

"Don't worry, I'm not about to advertise the fact that I have a supposedly extinct breed of dragon sleeping in my bedroom," Bakura said. "But I wonder why it's here at all. It must have been in hiding to have survived this long. Perhaps something has driven it from its home."

"Why did it come to you?" Ryou asked. "Do you really think it remembers you from 3,000 years ago? How did you ever make friends with a dragon in the first place?"

"I'll tell you about it while we're making breakfast," Bakura said. He turned to the dragon, who was still gazing at him, he would almost have to say, fondly. Its chin rested on one claw spread out on the bed, which sagged under its weight.

He nodded his head side to side to the dragon, which tilted its head to the left and blinked slowly at him again before it closed its eyes completely.

"He looks tired," Ryou said softly.

"Who knows how far it flew to get here?" Bakura agreed.

"We're going to need a new bedspread, and a new mattress," Ryou observed, but without much concern. He turned and looked up at Bakura again. "About breakfast, Bakura - what does a Sand Dragon eat?"

"I'll show you," Bakura said with a wink.

With his arm around Ryou's shoulders they left the bedroom together. Bakura left the door open so the Sand Dragon could hear their voices, hoping it wouldn't try to squeeze through the narrow door into the rest of the apartment as long as it knew he was nearby.

Behind him, the Sand Dragon opened one golden eye to watch him leave, then sighed contentedly and went to sleep.

Ryou allowed Bakura to lead him to the kitchen. Bakura dug into the freezer and pulled out the frozen steaks he had stashed there while Ryou set about making their own ordinary breakfast. It was fortunate that Bakura liked red meat so much, Ryou thought. He wouldn't have bought the expensive treat for himself, and a dragon probably wouldn't be very impressed with his steamed vegetables and omellete.

While he chopped and mixed ingredients and listened to Bakura muttering to himself over the best way to thaw the steaks, Ryou smiled a little and shook his head in wonder. A year ago he was merely the vessel for a vengeful Egyptian spirit, and now here he was on a Sunday morning, with that former spirit who was now his lover, making breafast for a dragon that was dozing in the bedroom.

Times like this made Ryou stop and wonder how his life had become so wonderfully strange. It had always been strange, one way or another, but it had certainly not been wonderful, not until those few days a little less than a year ago when everything he thought he knew had changed completely.


to be continued.

Next chapter, a flashback to a year ago, when Ryou's life went from Strange to Really Strange!

See the dragon! Take a look at Aislynn Goldleaf's lovely picture of the sleepy dragon at http://www.mediaminer.org/fanart/view.php?id=185899