So I got a little bored with the story I was working on before (Firelight, for those of you who care) and decided to try something different. I'll probably come back to Firelight at some point, but for now… dragons.
Summary: Draco and Harry have an accident in the Department of Mysteries while on the run and end up in another world entirely. And one of them is distinctly more reptilian than they remember being.
Disclaimer for the whole his because it's incredible annoying to type: I don't own anything belonging to the Harry Potter or Temeraire series, those rights go to their respective authors and whoever else might have an actual legal claim to them. I am not making any money from this, ect., ect.
They had thought they were safe. Thought that they had destroyed all of the horcruxes. Thought that the war was over and they could move on with their lives. They picked up the pieces of their shattered world and started to rebuild. Ron and Hermione got married, Harry and Ron enrolled in the Auror Academy, Ginny finished school and started playing for the Harpies. Harry even spoke at the Malfoys' trials and got Narcissa and Draco pardoned for their actions during the war, not that they had done all that much when compared to some of the other Death Eaters.
Everything went well for a few years, and then, like everything else in Harry's life, it all went to shit.
Ron was fired from the aurors for using unnecessary force on a suspect, losing Harry a partner; and when he was the principle witness at Ron's disciplinary hearing, a friend as well. Hermione and the rest of the Weasleys had taken Ron's side and left him as well. He had thought that Ginny, at least, would stay with him, but that thought died when he caught her in bed with one of the Harpies' couches. At least then he understood why their relationship had been rocky for months.
It didn't help when Harry was assigned Draco Malfoy as his replacement partner, the feud between the two families making it impossible for the Weasleys to look passed his actions.
Even then, things hadn't been too bad. After a few months Harry was able to make friends with some of his other coworkers who he had never really interacted with before; Hermione and the Weasleys taking up all of his time and preventing him from making friends outside of their group. He even found that he actually got along with his new partner, making Harry think that he truly did make a mistake on that first train ride. Draco and he had even shared a flat after Ginny kicked him out of their shared apartment and Harry refusing to spend more time than was necessary at No. 12.
And then Voldemort came back.
People panicked, there was a mass exodus from the country, including many of the Auror force. Few remained who were willing to fight against the Dark Lord once more, most figuring that if he could return from the dead not once, but twice, then he was truly unstoppable.
Draco and Harry had stayed. They fought, And, along with the Ministry, they lost. The government fell within months, with only a few pockets of resistance remaining. The British Wizarding community was tired, they didn't have the strength to fight another war so soon after the last two, and so the majority of them simply gave up.
The two partners were heavily targeted by the returned madman, Harry because he was Harry Potter, and Draco for turning traitor. Narcissa, Andromeda Tonks, and Harry's godson, Teddy were all killed in those months. They were some of the first to die, before anyone really knew what was happening, their remains being left in the Atrium at the Ministry had marked the beginning of the Third War.
All of which lead back to the present moment, Harry and Draco running through what was left of the Department of Mysteries after being ambushed on a mission to retrieve some potentially useful information from the files.
Spell fire ricocheted off the walls around them as they dived through yet another doorway, slamming the door behind them and throwing up as many locking spells as they could while running.
"Dammit!" Draco gasped as they skidded around a corned only to see more Death Eaters in front of them and changed direction again. "How did they find us!"
"Less talking," Harry grabbed his partner and hauled him out of the way of another curse. "-more running!"
They tumbled through an archway into another room, this time the door slammed shut of its own accord, abruptly silencing the yells of the Death Eaters outside.
"What was that?" Draco asked while he looked for the exit. Except… there wasn't one. "Shit. This room only has one door."
"What?" Harry saw that he was right and started cursing along with his friend. "Bloody buggering fuck, now what do we do?"
"How am I supposed to know?" Draco demanded.
"You're always the one with the plan aren't you?"
"Only because you can't be bothered to use what little intelligence you have for anything other than dodging curses! Someone has to do the thinking around here- what is that this doing!" In the center of the room was a stone pedestal. It was, in fact, the only thing in the room. On top of this pedestal was a cushion holding what looked like a very large egg.
"That's a dragon egg." Harry said. He recognized the shape from when Norbert was hatched, though this one was considerably larger than the one Hagrid had gotten his hands on. Where Norbert's egg had been only slightly larger than that of an ostrich, this one was at least three feet tall and proportionally round. Instead of the pale cream color that Harry remembered, this egg was a deep midnight blue color, interspersed with dark grey splotches and silvery striations. "That is going to one large dragon."
"Oh, well, that's great. Especially since I'm pretty sure the damn thing is hatching." Indeed, the egg was starting to shift slightly from side to side on its cushion.
Unnoticed by the two aurors the first drops of blood from their many cuts and curse wounds had made their was to the floor. As more blood followed, the thick liquid began to fill in shallow groves carved into the floor. Soon the outlines of a few runes could be seen standing out from the previously unremarkable floor. Runes that were activated by the blood and began to siphon more and more blood into the ritual circle that the two men had missed when they ran into the room.
They still didn't notice at first until the magic of the ritual circle started to put suction on their wounds to pull more blood into the runes. They glanced downward when they felt the pull only to see the steadily spreading design on the floor.
"What the-?" Harry exclaimed, he tried to pull away and step out of the circle but found that he was stuck to the ground, unable to move his feet. "What's happening?"
"How am I supposed to know? Most of the people who worked here didn't even know what they were doing half the time, and you expect me to understand what goes on in their heads?" Draco was in a similar state to Harry, fussed to the floor and rapidly losing blood. Their struggles grew weaker as their blood loss grew more severe, draining them of the energy to move.
If they had been able to spare any attention from their struggle they would have noticed that even as they grew weaker the movement of the egg on the pedestal grew stronger. Eventually all they could do was lay on the floor gasping as they lost the strength to stand.
Harry could feel his life draining away with every drop of blood that left him. It was a slow death, very different than the one he had suffered at the hands of Voldemort. Harry would almost say that he preferred the previous one, if not for the fact that he wouldn't give the homicidal maniac the satisfaction of killing him directly. His body felt cold, the edges of his wounds were like ice, and his vision was beginning to turn grey at the edges. He was fading away, about to slip into a sleep that he would never wake up from.
The last thing he saw as his eyes drifted closed for the final time, was a great hairline crack spider-webbing its way across the surface of the egg.