AN: Hello! Yes, I know I've been a little absent this month, and that I should be writing a new chapter for my other story Curiosity Killed the Cat, and I promise you it will be up within the next few days. But, I had to write this for a challenge, and I really enjoyed it. While it's completed for now, I will probably come back a bit later and finish it. Probably.
Okay, it's for the Hunger Games Competition on HPFC and for round three I used the prompts: Word: divert, emotion: ecstatic, Dialogue: "She's not going to be happy about that" (I changed a few pronouns and that to this, but I think it still counts), Setting: Dragon Reserve in Romania, Weapon: fire.
A million thank yous to my brilliant beta Littleoldmeeeee for betaing this even though it's not officially what I *hired* you for. You did an awesome job!
Enjoy and review please!
Disclaimer: Anything you recognise doesn't belong to me, obviously.
O.o.O.o.O.o.O
Hermione panted heavily, putting her hands on her knees and bending forward as she finished the five-mile long run. Looking around at the other trainees, she was glad to see that she wasn't the only one who was woefully out of shape, though none of them looked quite as winded as she felt.
"Alright, gather 'round trainees!" their instructor, a big, heavily-muscled man with skin that looked as tough as leather, and a bushy moustache, called out. Gathering in a group around him with the rest of the trainees, Hermione wondered how a moustache was in any way practical, as he worked with dragons, and hair was very likely to catch fire. She herself had had to cut her bushy hair very short, so short that if you glanced quickly, without paying attention, you might mistake her for a boy.
Looking out over the exhausted-looking trainees, the big man, Balder, laughed and said, "that was just the warm up. If you can't handle that, then you have no business being here." Hermione made an effort to straighten up and get her breathing under control, and watched the other trainees attempt to do the same. She smiled slightly as she saw one young man, who looked so young he couldn't have been out of school for very long, attempt to hold his breath and stand up straight as Balder glanced at him, obviously trying to divert attention away from himself, only to give himself over to gasping breaths, supporting himself with his hands on to his knees, when Balder's gaze passed on.
When his assessing eyes landed on her, Hermione stood up straight and looked him straight in the eye, daring him to say something. He only grinned, and said, "that's better. Now, for the rest of the day, you'll be doing the kind of work that is usually given to dragon-tamers who misbehave. You'll be cleaning the nesting dragons' cages. And it has to be properly done, the mothers don't like dirty nests for their eggs, and then they might decide not to lay them and we won't have new dragons. We don't want that, do we? Or you'll be out of a job before you even get one. " He smiled widely, showing his yellow teeth, and waved a hand at the cages behind him, which were empty of dragons for the moment, but filled with soiled straw, and even from her position at the back of the group, Hermione could see the huge, old piles of dried dragon excrement. Her stomach rolled at the thought of cleaning that out.
"Well," Balder demanded, "what are you waiting for, get to it!" He pointed towards a shed where they found brooms, mops and scrubbing brushes, and Hermione went, feeling like a driven sheep, and nothing like the dragon tamer that she was training to be.
"Can we use magic?" the fair-haired boy Hermione had noticed before asked, clutching a broom the wrong way up and looking at it as if it were a very complicated piece of Arithmancy. Balder grinned a truly malicious grin, and said, "no. The dragons don't like any magic but their own imbued in their nesting areas, so you're gonna have to do it by hand." He grinned at them once more, before walking away,and calling over his shoulder, "happy cleaning!"
Hermione sighed, and tried to make her way over to the cage that looked like it was the least dirty, only to be shoved out of the way by a bigger man, who sneered at her as he walked into the area. She glared at his back and turned around to find the second cleanest one, only to see that all but one of the fourteen cages had a trainee in it, already busily working away, or, in some cases, trying to figure out which way up to hold a broom.
The only cage that remained was one that was set a little apart from the others, and even from where she stood, a good two hundred feet from it, she could smell the stench coming off of it. Cursing her small size for making her so easy to shove out of the way, Hermione made her way over to the last cage, pausing at the entrance to tie her scarf over her nose, in an attempt to block out the worst of the smell.
The cage was a mess. Dirty straw lay ankle deep on the floor, squelching unpleasantly when she stepped on it, making her glad that she had worn her dragon-hide boots today. Dragon excrement, large heaps of it, twirled into the characteristic spiral of the Chinese Fireball, (the first test that determined if you were good enough to be trained was a written test that, of course, Hermione had excelled at. She would be surprised if there were a dragon she couldn't recognise by excrement alone, not to mentions scales or eggs), seemed to be everywhere she looked. She narrowly avoided stepping in one while she tried to get to the pitchfork leaning against the wall.
Studying the mess, Hermione squared her shoulders, thanked her lucky stars that she was Muggleborn, or else she wouldn't have known the first thing about cleaning, (and she needed all her knowledge here), and began pitching forkfuls of straw into the barrel outside, which she thankfully did not have to replace each time it got full, as it seemed to empty itself as soon as she was worried that it was becoming too full.
The squishy dampness she had felt on first stepping onto the straw, turned out, thankfully, to be nothing more than a slowly leaking pipe on the floor of the cage, (which she only uncovered after an hour of pitching straw), that she quickly repaired with a patch she had found in the shed.
As she was pitching out the last of the straw, (most of the excrement went with it, being stuck to it. Hermione had never been so thankful in her life that she didn't have to scrub something), she hit something hard with the edge of the pitchfork. She frowned and carefully cleared the straw around the solid object, to reveal a black stone, which turned out to be a dragon egg as she looked closer.
She racked her brain, trying to remember which dragon lays black eggs, but the nearest thing she could come up with was the Japanese Firethrower who lays dark-blue eggs. This egg was definitely black however, and although she still had a way to go with cleaning the cage, she knew she couldn't just leave the egg there. So, tucking it under her arms, she walked out of her cage, ignoring the mutters of her fellow trainees, even Lisa, a black girl that had been fairly kind to her. Hermione ignored Lisa's shouts after her, "Balder's not going to be happy about this, come back, don't be a fool!" Instead, she made her way to the only person besides Lisa that she knew at this place: Charlie Weasley.
O.o.O.o.O.o.O
When she found him, having walked about for quite some time, asking after him and quickly ducking behind a tree to avoid Balder, it was already nearing dusk, and he had just finished wrestling a reluctant Green Dragon's jaw open to administer some medicine. Now, he was rubbing ointment onto a wound where the dragon's fire had burned him.
She waited in the deepening shadows until the other dragons tamers had walked away, before nearing him and touching his bare shoulder. He jumped up in surprise, whirling around and wincing as the burn on his side twisted, before recognising Hermione and relaxing. "Hermione, what are you doing here? What happened to your hair? Are you-" he glanced her up and down, "are you a trainee? Why?"
"Long story, and not important now." She brought out the egg from behind her back, watching as Charlie's eyes first narrowed in confusion, before his eyes widened in surprise, and he asked, a tinge of awe in his voice, "Hermione, were did you find this? Do you know what it is?"
"I found it in the nesting cage I was cleaning, and thought it best to let someone know right away."
He held out his hands, but hesitated and frowned, saying, "Why didn't you give it to your trainer then? Why did you come to me?"
Hermione blushed, looked down and said, "I, I didn't know where Balder was, and- and he didn't look like the type of person who would listen to a trainee!"
Charlie laughed, and Hermione flushed further. "Oh, now I understand. You've got Balder. I'll admit that he's downright horrid to the newbies, but once you finish training he really isn't all that bad. Just a little rough around the edges. Well, give it over, let's see whether it is what I think it is."
Hermione handed it over, and he held it gently in his hands, studying it before handing it back, and picking up his ointment again with a wide smile on his face. "It is, this is incredible!" he exclaimed, an awed look in his eyes as he stared at the egg.
"What is?" Hermione asked eagerly, staring down at the egg in her hands curiously.
"This egg is incredibly rare. So rare that some dragon tamers say it's a myth." He started applying the ointment again, drawing Hermione's attention to the burn, and she winced in sympathy at the cracked skin, but Charlie only smiled and said, "no worries. I've had worse. So will you if you if you finish your training." Thankfully, for Hermione was almost bouncing with impatient curiosity now, he continued his explanation without asking how she had ended up in training to be a dragon tamer in the first place. "It's said that a black egg will, if hatched correctly, give birth to a pure white dragon that spewslightening, not flames."
"Which dragon lays these eggs?"
"Nothing does, they just," he waved his hands about, "appear."
"How do you hatch it, then?" Hermione asked, now critically assessing the egg in her arms.
Charlie's face paled, and he said quickly, "Oh, no. You don't want to do that. They say that such a dragon cannot be controlled or tamed, and that it will wreak havoc on all around him. The only way to stop it is to kill it, and the only way to kill it is to find a way to redirect his lightening onto himself."
"But what was it-"
Footsteps hurried toward them, and Hermione hid the egg behind her back quickly, as Balder came into view, and gave an ecstatic grin, (one that made Hermione shiver in fear of all the unpleasantness it promised), when he saw her.
"Aha! Here she is! The trainee that walked off in the middle of cleaning! Think you're too good for us, do you? Well, now you get to clean all of the other cages as well. The other trainees didn't finish theirs, and you've hardly begun on yours, so off you go! Who needs sleep when they can just walk off whenever it pleases them."
Hermione glared at the ground as she followed him, glancing at Charlie as she left, to find him looking worriedly at the egg behind her back. When he saw her looking at him, he mouthed at her, "throw it away. Get rid of it."
Carefully, Hermione brought the egg out from behind her back and stared at it, trying to decide where to throw it, when she felt a pulse of warmth travel through the egg and up into her arms. An immense wave of affection for the egg hit her, and she felt nauseous as she thought of throwing it away. Charlie could say what he wanted, she wasn't throwing a dragon egg away.
"Stop dawdling girl, or do you want to feed the dragons as well?"
Hermione stuck the egg behind her back once more, and hurried on after Balder.