The Truthful Dragon
The plot bunnies for this were given me by my Pinterest friend Head Troll Hiddlebatch, who pinned a writing prompt about the dragon being the hero, and said I should do something with Benedict/Sherlock because of Desolation of Smaug. Somehow that snowballed into this... *interesting* Sherlock AU thing. I hope you enjoy it! Comments are always welcome. ~ Lilly
When Lady Molly married the king, she was beyond certain she loved him. Everyone told her what a sweet and wonderful man he was, and how much they loved him, and how much she loved him. Of course we can all tell how much you love him, Lucky Lady Molly that the king loves. So Lady Molly did the only feasible thing for a girl in love with a king to do - she married him. And she was happy. Everyone said how happy they were that she was happy, because they could tell she was. And her life continued on, happy and in love.
The woods whispered into Molly's ears, telling her stories she couldn't understand. Always whispering her destiny to her unintelligibly in the middle of the night. The stars winked at her, and the moon mocked her, and the leaves on the trees rustled with laughter night after night, cheerful over her sudden onset insomnia. Lady Molly began to walk the land at midnight, reaching through the dewy grass with her bare toes and stopping at every small brook to wash civilization from her face and hands. Always before morning she would return to the fortress, to the side of the king, and to love and happiness. She would sit by his side the next day, pale and smiling, to conduct the business of the realm. Some would have called the king's business evil, although she never caught exactly what transpired. Her heart was always too full of night songs and her eyes full of unslept sleep. Sometimes, though, when the king looked lovingly at her, she could almost see venom in the coiled recesses of his black eyes, for an instant. Sometimes when he smiled in happiness, she could see fangs. The paler and thinner and more shadowed Molly grew, the oftener she could see the danger that coated her husband like an invisible cloak. But it wasn't real, it couldn't be; she was happy and in love. Everyone knew that.
Caves were of particular interest on her night patrols. Caves were lovely, full of secrets and memories nobody remembered any more. Caves had… things… in them. There was one cave, on one night, that had a dragon in it. Lying on a bed of random precious things was this slender, dark, sharply angled dragon with ragged, crooked wings and eyes the color of the ocean after a storm. Lady Molly should have picked up her dainty skirts and run as fast as her dainty feet could carry her back to the castle and sanity. Everyone would have told her she was brave and intelligent and they would have gone to kill the dragon the next day. But Molly was not intelligent, so she stayed to talk to the dragon. It wasn't a nice dragon. It spoke to her viciously and was far too brutal for its own good. Sometimes it used her for its own gain. But it never attacked her and it always spoke the truth, no matter how much the truth hurt. Molly really loved the truth, but not everyone knew that. Molly continued to visit and talk to the dragon at night, and through the pain its acerbic comments sometimes caused her she could feel a little spark of warmth deep in her chest. It was new and unusual, but she quite liked it, and she quite liked the raggedy dragon. It was a good creature. It didn't like people, but it spent its life saving them. It didn't care, but it gave their lives back. Molly was sure, despite what she once felt, that it had a great heart under all those layers of biting sarcasm and smug superiority.
The more she found she liked spending time with the dragon and with truth, the less she liked spending time in the fortress with her husband and his hidden darkness and his subjects and their blatant stupidity. She was not happy, nor was she in love with the king. How could she have been so blind? Everyone knew, indeed. Everyone knew nothing. The dragon knew and understood them and her and the king, and he wanted nothing to do with any of them. And he was quite right about it too.
Molly ran to the cave the next night to tell the dragon that she finally understood about humankind - that they were all either deceptively evil, or stupid sheep. The king was there, and Lady Molly, with a sinking heart, hid behind a tree. She heard things there she never wanted to hear. She wanted to put her hands over her ears to stop the horrible words, but she was paralyzed and they rang out like funeral bells. "I will burn the heart out of you," spat her husband venomously. She was under no delusions as to who was the villain here. "I've been reliably informed that I don't have one," her dragon rumbled with his voice like a silken bag of granite boulders. "But we both know that's not quite true." The king, without even glancing away from the dragon, reached behind the tree and dragged a shocked Molly out by her arm. The dragon's eyes narrowed; he spewed fire at the starry sky. Lady Molly had never seen the king wear a sword before, but here one was at her throat, and now her mind could clearly see the fangs. He wasn't a king, or even a man anymore, to her: he was a spider. The sea-storm eyes of the dragon flickered with resignation. He spread his jagged wings and lifted off into the air, leaving his home and his treasure, presumably never to return. Molly almost wished he had let the king kill her; she hated to be responsible for the sadness in his eyes.
Sheathing his sword, the black-hearted king ordered her back to the castle with a hatefully venomous, victorious twinkle. As she trudged back, a thought warmed her all the way down to her freezing toes. The dragon, who understood her, who always told her the truth instead of placating her with happy lies, who was so, so far above her power to add to or detract from his fierce nature, did on some level care about her. Enough to leave his life and the people he always saved although he didn't care… He cared enough… Above the herds of all-knowing people and cunning spiders taking their oblivious meals from among them, she counted.