Author's Note: I'm going to write a second part for this, and will post it here if you guys like this one. I also might consider turning this into a series/multi-chapter story if people have specific requests/pairings within this context. Either way, I hope you like this first chapter.

Warnings: Mature Themes, OOCness for the sake of the premise (though hopefully the rest of it is in character, and if not, I apologize), etc.

Suggestive

Jae-ha was the one who had first suggested it.

Of course he was; he was the only one of them comfortable enough to make such lewd jokes while in the presence of others—and initially, a tasteless joke was all Yona had thought it was. They'd been sitting around the campfire finishing their meal, both Yun and Zeno conspicuously absent as they set up the tents at the behest of the former. Only when the two were out of earshot had Jae-ha spoken up, eyeing each of his remaining four companions with an ill-concealed grin.

Hak, predictably, was the first one to call him out on it. "What're you looking at, Droopy Eyes?"

With palm in cheek, Jae-ha aimed a glance in Yona's direction. "Nothing, really. I'm just admiring Yona's beauty in the light of the fire. Nothing that would interest you, I'm sure."

Said girl flushed, Hak scowled, Shin-ah didn't say a word, and Kija, as per usual, went extremely red at his fellow dragon's explanation. "Jae-ha! Must you always say such inappropriate things to the Princess?!"

"Inappropriate? It was merely an honest observation, Kija—don't act like you weren't doing the same thing," he teased, setting the tips of the young man's ears aflame.

"Ridiculous! I—"

"Oi, White Snake, you'd be better off not finishing that sentence. It's for your own good."

Yona sighed, subtly rolling her eyes as she turned towards the quietest of the four; she smiled at Shin-ah, eyeing his nearly empty bowl and then, with a modicum of sympathy, the troubled frown that turned down the corners of his mouth. She wasn't sure anyone else would have noticed such a minor display of emotion, but she'd had quite a bit of time to grow used to her dragons' temperaments—even down to some of the smallest details. "What's wrong, Shin-ah?"

"…Ryokuryuu…feels strange."

At that, the other three men stopped bickering, and Jae-ha raised a brow. "Oh? Nothing gets past you, does it, Shin-ah?"

"Huh? What is it? Don't tell me you've gone off and taken drugs again," Hak intoned.

"Nothing like that—though I did manage to taste some sake that was offered to me when we went to that town earlier. However…"

Yona swore she wasn't the only one who felt it—the sudden tension in the air, a heavy, warm feeling that settled over the campfire like a thick blanket of fog. Her shoulders tensed, and her eyelids felt weighed down as she glanced at the others. As odd as it was, she wouldn't dare say it was unpleasant—and, looking around, the only one she saw who seemed entirely unaffected appeared to be Hak.

Is this…the dragons…? "Jae-ha…?" There was an unspoken question in her voice.

"Ah, I apologize, Yona dear," he offered, brushing his long ponytail behind his back. "I appear to have gotten some indecent thoughts stuck in my head—and it seems to have affected the other dragons as well."

"Indecent thoughts…?" It took her a few seconds, but when she realized what he was implying (much later than Hak had, judging by the unrelenting scowl on his face) she turned bright red, and tried to stifle her instinctive gasp. "Oh. Oh. I see…"

Glancing around the campfire, she saw the truth of what he said: Shin-ah refused to even glance in her general direction, his hands fisted on his knees as Ao patted his face concernedly; Kija was in a far worse state, his face rapidly approaching the hue of a tomato as he made a valiant struggle not to meet her eyes. Ironically, Jae-ha seemed to be the one least affected by his own thoughts, not that it surprised her.

Despite the awkwardness of the situation, Yona wore a genuine smile on her face, much to Hak's obvious distaste. "There's no need to apologize," she reassured the three of them, "though I wasn't aware the dragons' bond was this extraordinary." She heard Hak choke at her choice of words. "If any of you ever need to…you know, don't feel like you have to ask to go into town. Hak does the same thing sometimes."

That did it. She heard Hak splutter, and was certain the look he was sending her could have melted steel. She apologized to him in her head, silently begging him to take one for the team. It wasn't as though she wanted to encourage them to go to those kinds of places, but if resisting the urge was such a troublesome effort, then she should try to lessen their embarrassment. It may have been at Hak's expense, but at least this way (she hoped) Kija and Shin-ah wouldn't be made to feel guilty. She doubted Jae-ha felt anything of the kind.

The green dragon returned her smile, but his was distinctly crooked. "That's very kind of you, Yona dear…but I actually had something else on my mind."

"Droopy Eyes…"

There was danger in Hak's voice, and Yona tensed when his hand tightened around the hilt of his quandao. "Hak," she chastised, "don't even think about it. The last thing we should be doing is fighting over something so inconsequential!"

"Ah, it's quite all right," Jae-ha waved his hand. "It's understandable. I don't doubt that the last thing our resident Thunder Beast wants is for you to be shared among any men that are not himself."

Yona blushed; his tone was playful, but the words were ardent—and, coupled with the sensitive information she had gleaned just moments ago, they put quite the suggestive image in her mind.

"That's enough, Jae-ha," Kija finally managed to stutter. "The Princess is—"

"Our master, yes," the older man finished, hand-waving Kija's protests. "Make no mistake: I've come to see her as worthy of following—which is exactly why, were she to request it of me, I would throw myself down at her whims all night long."

Oh my. "Jae-ha, are you drunk?" she asked.

"No, although the sight of you does far more insidious things to my mind than wine."

She was positively tongue-tied. "I, uh—"

"There's no need to answer, Yona dear," he assured her. "Just know that we dragons are not so crude as to do anything that would make you uncomfortable—well, at least not past a certain point. And…if you were to call for us, any one of us, I'm certain we'd all be equally happy to heed the request."

Afterwards, Yona couldn't sleep. Sure, it was only Yun in the tent with her, but Jae-ha's words and the others' telling silence kept her awake, rigid as a board and feeling as though several pairs of eyes were staring at her through the tent's fabric.

She recalled how quiet it had been in the moments after Jae-ha's speech, how no one had budged an inch until Zeno called and, one by one, the dragons got up and retired to their tent. It had just been her and Hak then, with Yun having already gone to sleep, and Yona had found herself surprised and more than disconcerted that her bodyguard did not say a word, not even in jest. He didn't tease her about what happened, nor did he disavow Jae-ha's inappropriate comments, and if Yona hadn't considered herself paranoid she would have thought he seemed angry with her.

But what for? It was a terribly awkward situation, there was no denying that; she couldn't blame him for being put off by what she'd said earlier regarding his rather nonexistent forays into red-light districts, but even so, total silence on his part was a bit much in response, wasn't it?

It occurred to her that Hak's behavior might be a bit simpler than she'd thought when she recalled how he'd looked at her as she went to her tent: dark blue eyes not full of annoyance or accusation, as she'd expected, but with a clouded emotion that made her heart flutter when she was finally able to pinpoint it.

Oh, dear…was that…jealousy? She wasn't sure what to think, but she preferred to believe that she wasn't as dense as Hak seemed to consider her—she could tell that, even if he hadn't said anything about it, he had wanted her to outright reject Jae-ha's offer. And when she hadn't…

If you were to call for us, any one of us, I'm certain we'd all be equally happy to heed the request.

As she shut her eyes and clutched the blanket tightly around her, Yona wondered just how true that statement really was.

She tried not to notice the furtive glances or sidelong gazes that tracked every move she made over the course of the next few days, and she certainly didn't return them. She almost wanted to, in part just to see what would come of it, in part because it was a distraction that she shouldn't—couldn't—tolerate.

It didn't take her long to figure out that it wasn't just Hak's eyes on her—it was all of them, at least the ones who had been sitting around the campfire that night. She knew, because she felt the eyes even when Hak wasn't around, when he had gone off to take a bath in a nearby stream—and the same went for when it happened that she was alone with one of the others, no matter how briefly. Shin-ah, for all his stoic attributes, was no exception. Even Kija was quieter than usual, his smiles more taut at the lips. Jae-ha was better at hiding it, but she saw that his teasing had diminished ever since that night.

The only ones who seemed entirely unchanged were Zeno and Yun—though the latter had begun to notice something was off, if his suspicious looks were any indication. If he had any inkling as to what had happened, he didn't dare broach the subject, and Yona would have been happy to have it stay that way—that is, if she could live with the constant anxious atmosphere.

Fortunately (or not), it didn't take much time for the unresolved tension to bubble to the surface.

As it happened, all it took to shatter the unspoken discomfiture between the five of them was for their party to be attacked by bandits a few days later.

Since there was a mere handful of men, none of whom looked particularly skilled, Yona and Yun felt at ease standing behind within a thicket of trees, with Zeno circling the perimeter not far off; the redhead held her bow at the ready just in case she had to pick off anyone who got too close to her comrades.

"Oi, make sure you don't hit the Thunder Beast by accident," the boy beside her droned.

Yona knew she was failing utterly at hiding her flushed face. "Am I that obvious?"

"You only looked like you were about to pass out whenever he got too close to you. Now that I think about it, the same goes for the others, except Zeno. Something's bothering you, isn't it?"

She didn't dare meet his eyes.

"…Did something happen?"

She considered finally coming clean, could even feel the words pushing at the back of her throat, but something kept her from letting them fall from her lips—nerves, probably. Definitely embarrassment, both on her part and on theirs. She felt her hands loosen around her weapon, the bow tilting towards the ground.

For as much as she had changed, she was still a coward.

"Yona!"

She whipped around, her skin flushing cold at the sudden sense of urgency in Yun's voice, only to see an unknown man bearing down on them—and momentarily froze when she saw Yun keel over, a large fist slamming his small body violently into a tree.

"Yun!" She rose her bow without thinking, her hand loading the arrow as fast as she could (please be okay, please be okay) but in the split second before she fired, the weapon was knocked out of her hands and landed in the dirt a few feet away. A hairy fist dug into her clothing and raised her to the tip of her toes; the wind was knocked cleanly out of her as she was thrown to the ground, and she struggled to simply breathe.

When she spied the glint of a blade, Yona scrambled backwards, her hands blindly searching for her discarded bow as she watched the bandit lumber towards her, sadistic smirk in place.

"Little miss!" She heard Zeno's scared cry, saw Yun's heaving body a few feet away, and in the distance, she swore she could hear the others approaching—just as her hand closed around her bow once again.

As the man raised his sword, Yona heard herself pull back on the bowstring, and the two of their weapons met their mark. She heard herself cry out in pain as the arrow pierced his heart, and an instant later he was thrown aside by a familiarly monstrous claw.

"Princess! Are you alright?!" Kija's face, pale and sick with worry, tugged at her heart, and the others followed an instant later, each one looking somehow more horrified than the last. In the background, Yona saw Zeno kneeling by Yun's side, the latter giving a casual wave of the hand as he sat up.

She tried to smile, but winced instead. "Ah…I'm fine, guys. Thank you…I'm sorry I couldn't shoot him sooner…"

"Fine?!" Hak shouldered his way to the front and fell to his knees. The others did likewise, all except for Shin-ah, who lingered stiffly in the background. "Look at you!"

She blinked. "…What?"

"You're bleeding, Yona dear," Jae-ha said, face deathly white. Shin-ah's mouth curled into a pained grimace.

"I'm…?" She recalled the pain she'd felt moments earlier, and startled when she looked down to see her sleeve soaked in blood. The second she processed it, it began to sting, and she placed her palm over the wound. Looking up at the sea of faces, she saw mournful sadness and a degree of self-loathing across each one. It added even more weight to her already-heavy guilt. "I…"

Silence settled upon them, until Yun interjected in his usual motherly fashion. "What are you all doing? Yona's injured! Now's not the time for a staring contest, all right?!"

Kija didn't stop crying the entire time Yun was bandaging her arm; it got to the point where the young doctor ordered him to stand a few feet away from the tent, though his sobs and ragged breathing were still painfully audible. At least it seemed, based on the muffled voices she could hear, that the others were trying in some small way to reassure him—especially Zeno, whose radiant presence could only be outmatched in that moment by the dark brooding one standing at the tent's entrance.

"It's mostly superficial," Yun assessed as he finished wrapping the bandages. "You got lucky. Nice aim, by the way."

Despite the circumstances, Yona found it within herself to smile. "Thank you, Yun! I'm sorry to be such a bother."

"All in a day's work for me."

The young boy got up and left, muttering something under his breath about overbearing magical beasts, and leaving Yona alone with both Hak and the palpable tension that came along with him.

Before she could even get a word out, he had already left—though she felt him linger along with the others outside the tent until Yun finally shooed them away.

She woke up hot.

She let out a gasp, wiping the beaded sweat from her brow as she sat up and untangled herself from the mess of blankets; beside her, Yun snored lightly, his own covers discarded and thrown haphazardly against the side of the tent. So it's not just me, then. Licking her lips, Yona realized her mouth was bone-dry—and, stepping outside, she found the reason being that the night air was more humid than it had been for several months. Wow—are we getting a heat wave? I feel bad for the guys, if that's the case. She made her way over to the campfire, the glowing embers fading but still providing just enough light to see by—though not enough to stop her from tripping over the person at her feet.

Yona squeaked as she fell down, landing none-too-gently on the person who had chosen to sleep looking at the stars for the night; he made a strangled noise as she knocked the air out of him.

Flustered, she cried out, "J-Jae-ha?!"

"Ah," he groaned from beneath her, "my apologies, Yona dear. I appear to have chosen an inopportune place to sleep. It was far too hot in the tent, you see—right, Kija-kun? Shin-ah?"

A few feet away, she heard the sound of two bodies shuffling in response. "It's Yona," Shin-ah said quietly.

"Princess?!" the white-haired man spluttered, his visage far clearer now that her eyes had become somewhat accustomed to the darkness. Yona had to stifle a laugh when she saw that he had wrapped himself in several layers of blankets despite the heat; his fear of bugs had not diminished at all with time, it seemed. "What are you doing out here so late?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Jae-ha crooned. "She came to see me—though I must admit, Yona dear, this is far more public than I had imagined it…"

Blushing furiously, Yona pushed herself to her feet and straightened her clothes. "I—uh, it was just hot inside the tent. That's all."

A derisive snort sounded from the area of the campfire and, turning around, Yona saw Hak's unmistakable silhouette reclining on one of the several logs that served as stools. She considered going back into the tent, would have done so, perhaps, if he had stayed silent—but she took his mockery as a challenge, and instead sauntered over to take a seat beside him.

He stiffened when they brushed shoulders. "Princess…what are you doing?"

"…"

He leaned closer, and the breath that tickled her neck and ear prompted gooseflesh to appear in its wake. "You know, all of us were really worried earlier."

Us? "…I know," she sighed, leaning forward. She heard the shuffling of feet as the three dragons got up and took their own places around the campfire; though it was somewhat intimidating, she didn't stop talking. It was time she finally got this off her mind. "I normally would have been fine. I was just…distracted. I've been distracted a lot lately, but…that's no excuse. I'm sorry for being distant the past few days. It's…stupid, how we've been acting lately. I can't help but feel that something's changed…"

"That's silly, Yona dear."

"What?"

Jae-ha took a seat on her other side, while Kija and Shin-ah occupied one of the logs across the fire-pit. "Nothing's changed. All of us are just as in love with you as we've always been—the only thing different now is that you know about it."

Her cheeks burned. In…love?

"Admittedly, we—I in particular—could have been more tactful about it, though I would argue that Hak and Kija-kun were even more obvious." Oblivious to the vocal objections he received, Jae-ha plowed on ahead. "Let's face it, Yona dear. You could have gone back into the tent with Yun, continued to pretend as though nothing had happened, but you didn't. Would you care to say why?"

Her mouth hung open, her thoughts racing faster than she could process them. "I…" She glanced up at Hak, and her heartbeat fluttered when she saw him staring down at her, his eyes glazed over in a way she'd never seen before.

"You're already aware of our feelings. As I said before, we would all be equally happy if you were to come to one of us—but that sentiment still applies if you came to all of us."

She couldn't look away this time. Jae-ha's words, Kija and Shin-ah's complaisant expressions, and Hak's intense stare—all of them rattled around in her head, far too straightforward for her to play dumb any longer. They'd laid all their cards on the table. (Well, Jae-ha had already done so a few days ago, in a way.) It was now on her to respond.

The strangest part of it all was that, as novel and confusing as the situation was, Yona was far more exhilarated by it than frightened.

"Hak…" she whispered, fisting her hand in his sleeve, "are you…really okay with this…?"

"It's not my decision to make, Princess."

She had already known as much without him needing to say it; glancing around, she saw the same answer on the faces of the others. Really, she should have noticed it long before now—that they would do whatever she asked of them, anything that would make her happy, regardless of whether or not it benefitted them. Yet they acted as if they wanted her to say yes as much as she did, instigating the conversation and asking her for a response—could she deny them this, when to do so would also mean she was denying herself? Who would benefit from it?

Yona inclined her head, hoping—knowing—that they would understand her without words; and for barely an instant, though with a surprising lack of worry, she wondered just what on Earth she had gotten herself into.

I'll post the second part here if you guys want it. I hope you liked this introduction at least, and let me know if you want me to turn this into a series.

Thanks for reading!

—Vicious Ventriloquist