Dragon AU

Chapter 1

Notes:

IDK if you can believe it but we know absolutely nothing about construction sites or rules and regulations around that, so just…gasp and be shocked at the appropriate times. There’s dragons, we’re not gunning for “most realistic” awards.

Rowan

“What the fuck do you mean he chained himself to a tree?” Rowan asked, quickly lifting his hand off his expensive oak desk to avoid scratching it with his claws. He shook his hand to get them to retract as he stood up.

“I don’t know how else to say it, boss,” his foreman, Jeff, said with a sigh over the line. “There is a tree. There is a guy. There are chains. Guy used chains to attach himself to tree.”

Rowan began to pace around his office while Jeff talked.

His foot snagged on an upturned corner of his burgundy carpet, and for a second, his wings burst out, ripping his shirt into confetti and flapping around to help him remain upright.

The wind his wings produced caught the stack of papers on the edge of his desk and sent them flying all around the room.

He watched in horror as they landed on top of his shelves, under his desk, behind the wide sofa, and fluttered through the crack under his door and out into the hallway.

Rowan sank onto the armrest of the sofa and propped his elbow on his knee, pinching the bridge of his nose and poking himself in the eye with a wayward claw. He opted for a few select curse words—very classy, nothing too crazy—before standing up again.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Keep an eye on the lunatic.”

“Yeah, I don’t think he’s going anywhere.” Jeff clicked his tongue. Rowan swore he could hear screaming in the background.

“Jesus Christ.” He cut the call, shoved his phone into his pocket and ran a hand through his neatly tied hair. The ginger bun at the nape of his neck came undone and he groaned before pulling the hair tie out and redoing it as best as he could without a comb or a mirror to assist.

“Tied to a tree,” he muttered to himself as he headed toward the door. “Of course there’s a guy tied to MY damn tree. Why not someone else’s tree? Any other tree. There are so many trees in this damn city.”

He pulled his door open and stormed out, attempting to wave off the nosy lift of his secretary’s eyebrow as he rushed into the elevator. He’d find out in five seconds flat anyway. Terry just pointed to his bare chest and produced a fresh shirt out of thin air, shaking his head in quiet disapproval.

Rowan ignored the disapproval and put the shirt on mid-stride because he had no time to waste.

The project had been stalled multiple times already. The tenants of the condemned building had filed a motion to declare the building a historical landmark. That took months and had been denied in the end with an explanation that not every dilapidated stack of bricks was historically significant.

That was followed by an anonymous tip that the building had been built on the fire dragons’ sacred burial site, long forgotten and never mentioned anywhere. Rowan had scoffed, but the damage was done. The Association for Preservation of the Dragon Heritage had descended like locusts.

They’d scheduled excavations, they’d poked and prodded and searched every inch of the site until they begrudgingly had to concede there was never a single dragon buried there. Or anywhere near there.

Then came the outlandish claims that the waterline under the building was toxic, that the soil itself was filled with poison and that digging into any of it would cause damage to whoever chose to live there.

Rowan had lost several potential clients thanks to those claims.

So he was already absolutely and completely done with it.

And now, when construction could finally start, THERE WAS A MAN CHAINED TO A FUCKING TREE.

Any patience he’d had was long gone. He’d lost money. He’d lost time. He’d lost clients. And on top of that, he was tired of fielding his father’s questions about his projects and wanted something to show for the efforts he was putting into the family business.

He just couldn’t catch a damn break.

He stormed out of the elevator, catching his own reflection in the mirror opposite and realizing his eyes were blazing, the slitted pupils eclipsed by the scarlet red irises.

He blinked once to get them to behave, but there was no helping it.

He glanced down at his exposed forearms and realized his scales were also fully visible and the claws were back.

Rowan spent most of his time in his beta shift, the mixed form of dragon and human feeling most comfortable for his day to day. It was rare to see him, or any of his family for that matter, without red irises or some patch of scales peeking through their human skins.

When those patches of scales spread and added claws was another matter entirely for Rowan, tipping everyone off that he was pissed.

His throat rumbled with a slow growl, and he realized there would be no getting himself under control anytime soon.

He just needed to make sure he didn’t alpha shift into a full dragon.

Something flew at his head from the side, and he snatched it out of air before realizing it was a pretzel wrapped in a napkin.

He turned to glare at whoever had thrown it and realized it was one of their human IT techs heading back from the cafeteria.

He’d been one of Rowan’s first hires, and over the years they’d developed a decently friendly relationship.

Rowan hadn’t realized it included being pelted with baked goods. “What the hell, Danny?”

Danny pointed to Rowan’s eyes, stretching his arm high to make up for the size difference. He truly was a miniature of a human.

“Eat something,” he said. “You’re all flashy and we literally JUST had that door fixed after Bryn clawed the keypad.”

Rowan balked, turning to look at the brand-new revolving door glimmering in the sunshine. It was a beautiful door, but completely unnecessary in terms of expenses.

“I own this company,” he said petulantly anyway.

“Not yet, you don’t.” Danny shrugged. “Just trying to save your family some money. But by all means, shift mid-revolve and ruin them again. Don’t let me stop you.”

He shook his head at Rowan and walked away, muttering under his breath about “testy dragons” as he went.

Rowan scowled but did unwrap the pretzel and bite into it. Not because he needed to calm down. Because warm pretzels.

He felt instantly better and rushed out the door—without ruining them, thank you very much—to his car.

He finished the pretzel as he drove through traffic toward the construction site. He played scenario after scenario in his head of how he would get the random guy to unchain himself from the tree and let them do their jobs in peace.

They ranged from asking nicely to ripping the tree out with his bare hands and turning it into paper to wrap the guy in and ship him somewhere where he wouldn’t be able to make Rowan’s life any harder than it already was.

Not very productive, all in all, but some of the ideas did make him happier briefly, so he counted them as a win.

He left the busy administrative and business district, the tall glass buildings gradually replaced by smaller, more modest brick ones.

The streets narrowed, the concrete gave way to patches of grass and tiny stores.

He didn’t know why his company had opted to buy this piece of land so far from the opalescence of the city center, but he personally didn’t mind.

It looked calmer than his usual surroundings.

Like someone could come there and get some peace and quiet.

Well, if the chaos that came attached to the run-down building like a ghost would disappear, anyway.

He parked the car next to a van he knew belonged to his crew and stepped out, immediately realizing the commotion had not died down. There was a circle of people gathered around a tall oak tree, press included, and a voice carrying over all the other noise.

Despite screaming profanities and sounding hostile as hell, Rowan couldn’t help but think it sounded very nice to listen to.

Kind of silky and pleasant to the ear. Other than the curse words.

It sounded powerful and commanding, as if it belonged to someone larger than life.

Which nixed his “shipping” plan completely, because he did not want to even think about how much that would cost.

Rowan pushed his way through the crowd, his sheer bulk making it move for him, until he got to the front of the circle and came face-to-face with the owner of the voice.

A waifish, pale verging on translucent blond twink wrapped tightly in chains and swinging madly at Rowan’s guys whenever one of them dared to step closer to him to try and get him off the tree.

He was a sentient, very loud twig, and Rowan frowned at being forced to come all the way out here to deal with him. Any of his men could have easily moved him out of their way, tree and all.

“Boss!” Jeff called out when he spotted him, rushing over to stand next to Rowan. “Good thing you’re here.”

“This is the guy who’s been giving you trouble?” he asked, pointing.

“We were at this for hours before I called you.” Jeff sounded way too tired for someone whose only job since that morning had been arguing with a blond straw.

“He hardly looks like a threat,” Rowan said in disbelief.

“Boss—”

Rowan linked his fingers and cracked his knuckles, ready to show everyone how things were done.

“I’ll get him out of your way,” he said, charging for the waif. He was almost all the way in front of him, already reaching out to catch a flailing limb when Jeff called after him.

“Hope you’ve had your tetanus shot!”

Rowan paused at the warning, a split second of inattention, before something sharp dug into his skin.

“It bites!” Jeff said, infuriatingly cheerful for having just witnessed his boss being assaulted by a silver-eyed mop.

Rowan jerked his head up to look at the man, who stared at him as if he didn’t have a mouthful of his arm hair.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Rowan asked, arm still suspended in the air, his brain too shocked to take any steps to detach him from the bite.

“Me?!” The man spat out his arm and glared. “What am I doing?? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? There are people living in this building. People who have nowhere else to go! Have you learned nothing from all the motions and complaints about this? We do not want this building destroyed!!”

“I have all the permits,” Rowan said.

“And zero heart, apparently,” the twig said. “These people are old. Alone in the world. Did your rich, reality-challenged ass ever stop to think about where they would go?”

“No,” Rowan said honestly, because it was the truth. He had a job to do under his father’s watchful eye and his stamp of approval to do it. Outside of that, he hadn’t spared it much thought.

“Brilliant.” Disgust was written clearly on the guy’s face. “Of course they put a fucking psycho in charge. God forbid a human emotion manifest anywhere near you.”

That stung. Rowan didn’t consider himself a bad person.

“I’m not human,” he said instead, because what else was he supposed to say?

“I can see that, sasquatch.”

“I’m a dragon, not a sasquatch.” Rowan frowned. What the fuck was his brain even doing?

“You’re a fucking moron is what you are. A heartless, callous, cruel, immoral moron.”

Rowan scowled.

“Don’t think the smolder will help.” A bony finger dug into the tip of his nose. “You think being hot exempts you from human decency and it doesn’t.”

Rowan perked up. “You think I’m hot?” He shook his head. The fuck is wrong with me? “You really need to not be here,” he said instead of waiting for an answer he didn’t know why he wanted to hear.

“You really need to not be here too, and you ain’t leaving, so…”

Rowan sighed. “Look…” He trailed off, raising an eyebrow in question.

“Milo Tobitt.”

“Milo.” Rowan nodded. “I understand you care for these people, but—”

“NOPE!” Milo shook his head. “The ‘but’ erases everything you were going to say. You do not understand. You clearly have never been homeless and left with no resources and it fucking shows.”

“I have a job to do!” Rowan said.

“And I have a job to stop you from doing, big guy, so…”

Rowan threw his hands in the air and scoffed, turning his back on Milo for a moment to compose himself. The guy could talk circles around him and he had no idea how to get himself out of it.

“What if I paid you?” He whirled around, the bright idea taking shape midsentence.

“To do what?”

“To let us proceed with the project,” Rowan said, and Milo glared so hard Rowan thought his wings might have shriveled up and fallen off his back from the strength of it.

“Fuck. You,” Milo spat, and Rowan felt the venom in it sting in his gut. He didn’t like it at all.

“Hey now…”

“I will not let you tear this building down! I will not allow it. I will stay chained to this tree until the end of time if I have to, but you will NOT do it. So you can go back and tell all your rich little asshole friends to find an empty piece of land to build on, because this place is already fucking taken. Got it?”

Rowan held the intense eye contact for a suspended moment, matching wills and realizing this was a tougher opponent than anyone he had ever come across before.

He needed to regroup and think.

“Got it.” Rowan nodded as if agreeing before turning his back to Milo, a deep frown on his face. “Pack it up, boys!”

“What the fuck, boss?” Jeff asked, rushing to his side. “Respectfully.”

“Let him cool down. Let him think he’s won. I’ll handle it and we’ll be back on track. For now…let him be.”

“Are you sure?”

Rowan nodded, trying to untangle his own thoughts. “Yup.”

He got back into the car and with a final glance at Milo smiling smugly at everyone around him, he started the engine and headed back to his office.

What the fuck was his life?

Notes:

Poor sweet summer dragon. We wish you luck on your coming journey