Kala is out wandering the gardens. She mostly doesn't know what to do with her mother's estate since her passing, but the various stewards and so on do, so she lets them get on with it and tries not to feel too useless.
The garden doesn't directly help with that, but it's still nice. She closes her eyes and bends her head to smell a flower with a particularly lovely fragrance.
"It's a long story, I had a terrible mother, I know next to nothing about how the vast majority of people live that wasn't taken from, like, books."
"...that's a new one," he says, but he sounds much less irritated with this explanation available.
"Sorry. I know how to be a snotty noble at people in a way that's, you know, perfectly socially acceptable, but I'm not quite naive enough to think that would, uh, work at all with you, so."
"—without knowing that you don't know anything about how most of the world works, you asking me how hard it can possibly be to find a group of less than ten people sounds like you just haven't bothered to take two seconds to think about what it actually means that I start riots if I go places."
"Most people are less concerned than you about being polite to me when I kidnap them," he adds.
"The only thing scarier than a dragon that may or may not want to rape me to death with a dick bigger than I am is one that's pissed off at me."
...how about a dragon that's giggling helplessly? Because now she's got one of those. His grip on her doesn't waver a bit, neither loosing nor crushing, but his wings miss a beat and he levels out into a glide rather than try to keep flapping.
By the time he recovers enough to start flapping again, they're almost at his mountain. He angles down, curves around a cliffside, lands on a balcony, and—
—shifts into the form of a human, tall, handsome, well-dressed, with black hair touched by subtle glints of fire-red.
"Surprise," he says, still snickering.
"It was fun to not say, 'don't worry, I can turn human and also hot' when I inquired about dragon anatomy?"
"It was seriously frustrating! Like I am not even one of those people who categorically dislikes surprises but there is a time and a place."
"Of the ways I could've played this, I really think this one isn't that bad!"
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