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Rowan rolled his eyes. “Ruben and I traded personalities. He’s the free spirit wild child who went off to do his own thing outside the family business. After that shock to my parents, I just couldn’t imagine doing the same.”
There was something in that statement. Some kind of wistfulness that seemed to drift like smoke before being blown away.
“So you all work for the family?” Milo asked, prodding a little deeper.
“It’s how things usually go with dragons. Investment, finance, construction, law… Whatever type of high-end job you can build into a legacy is where you’ll see dragons. It’s instinctive to want to accumulate wealth, to bundle things up together and build on it. To cushion your family with material things so they’re secure.”
“Sounds nice,” Milo said, chewing slower.
“It can be. It’s also constricting, sometimes. The boundaries can be too tight, the cost of crossing them too high for some people.”
“Are you some people?” Milo asked, and Rowan froze for a moment before his shoulders slumped.
“I did what was expected of me,” he said, and that was a non-answer if Milo had ever heard one.
“But not what you wanted.”
Rowan put his fork down and crossed his arms over his chest. “Not everyone gets what they want.”
“Ruben did,” Milo said.
“Ruben is an outlier. He had to lay the groundwork for the idea very early on. Never conforming, never following. By the time he was an adult my parents were literally of the mindset that as long as he’s not on the most-wanted list, it’s fine.”
“What does he do?” Milo asked, realizing he might have pushed too far.
“He’s a concert pianist.”
Milo barked out a laugh. “Did not see that coming. Was expecting lion taming, fortune telling, birthday party clown.”
Rowan stared at him for a moment, shaking his head in wonder. “Why are you so weird?”
Milo shrugged. The words didn’t feel like they contained a barb, instead they were full of a genuine desire to understand. “It’s a gift. But I’m guessing not exactly dragon material. I legit know jack squat about my lineage or breed or whatever else. I didn’t even know I was a dragon until a couple days ago!”
“We’ll be able to work out a lot of that if we can get to your shift,” Rowan said. “Dragon breeds have specific looks to them when fully shifted. Even in human form I can probably correctly guess certain things about your dragon form.”
Milo perked up at that. “Oh? Like what?”
“Well—” Rowan carefully looked him over. It felt weirdly intimate. “You’ll probably be smaller than my dragon, leaner. That usually means quicker in flight. More agile. I’m pretty hefty so my flying is slow.”
“Sick!” Milo said. “I’m gonna be like zoom zoom zoom…!”
He demonstrated his sick flying skills by waving a fork through the air, spilling shit everywhere.
“Yes, quite.” Rowan rolled his eyes, but Milo didn’t see any real heat in it. “You’ll also probably have similar coloring to your human features. So I’d guess white, silver or pale blue.”
“Okay, but that legit tells us all the stuff,” Milo said. “What breed of dragon is small and that color?”
“There are hundreds. Breeds merged over the centuries, evolved. We can narrow it down to however many possibilities, but I doubt we’ll be able to pin it down until we actually see your shift.”
“Right.” Milo shoveled the last of the food on his plate in his mouth and stood up. “Let’s do this, then!”
“Learning first.”
Milo groaned. “But we already did that part. My brain is at capacity.”
Rowan got up from his seat and put his huge hands on Milo’s shoulders. “We’ll try something more practical instead to hold your attention.”
Milo looked first at one hand, then the other, then up into Rowan’s face, feeling excitement build. “Are we going to try the dragonizing again?”
