Legend [Hetalia]

❥ chapter VI

Your stomach growled again and made you aware of the fact that you still hadn't eaten something, let alone left the car. Giggling, you took your messenger bag from the passenger seat and got out of your car, locking it before you entered your house and then locking the front door as well.

On your way through the hallway into the kitchen, you put your bunch of keys into the multi-coloured glass bowl you had crafted in a workshop as a kid and the bag next to it on the chest of drawers. You then nimbly prepared not only one, but two sandwiches with your favourite toppings for yourself and gobbled both down in a record-breaking speed, additionally downing a full glass of your favourite soft drink.

With your hunger satisfied and your thirst quenched, you tidied up the kitchen by loading the dishwasher. Then, you went upstairs, grabbing the messenger bag from the chest of drawers and turning off the lights on your way to the stairs. After you had paid the bathroom a quick visit to make yourself ready for bed, you walked through the open door into your bedroom and took off your clothes which you discarded on the wing chair standing in a corner of the room. You threw your messenger bag with the books still in it across the room to join your clothes. You couldn't care less at the moment. A thick blanket of tiredness and exhaustion had settled over your body.

All you wanted to do was to lie down in bed and fall asleep, and you set about doing exactly this. You switched off the ceiling lamp and the bedside lamp and snuggled under the covers, closing your eyes. Unfortunately, your wish for sleep was not granted. Instead, all you did was to toss and turn in bed as you tried to fall asleep.

You had to find out that this wasn't the first time this would happen. In fact, during your first two weeks of visiting Alastair on a regular basis, every time as soon as you had time after work, you would only get off to sleep after about half an hour or even more from time to time. In the silence of the night, your mind wandered off to the dragon and wouldn't come to rest until fatigue finally overpowered you. But luckily, this stopped when you somehow got used to the fact that dragons indeed existed and you had even become friends with one.

You made a habit of visiting Alastair in his cave at least three times a week—provided that you had enough free time. These frequent trips of yours mostly went the same: You bought a few pounds of raw beef wherever possible, whether at another butcher's shop or at a supermarket, tried your hardest to ignore the funny looks the cashiers gave you, and gave the meat to the dragon who wolfed it down in one go.

You never went to the same store twice, however, because you didn't want to attract unwanted attention. This resulted in you driving to the different shops in your town and in the nearby towns as well. Plus, from now on, you always remembered to bring your own cooler so that you didn't have to borrow one from an employee again.

After each meal, the dragon would make himself comfortable on the stone ground a few feet in front of you while you took a seat on the cooler, and then he would tell you about the many things that had happened to him, about the diverse kinds of dragons he had met, and also about himself.

You learned that Alastair had grown up in Scotland—his thick Scottish accent was the most obvious sign for that—and spent most of his time in a cave somewhere deep within the country, until he had gone over to travelling the world. This way, it was more difficult for humans to accidentally find him just like you had. In exchange for these stories of his, you told him something as well—about yourself, your family, and your friends, and stories about funny or memorable things you had experienced.

Additionally, you asked him a big cluster of questions about the life as a dragon, how their society worked and so on. You wanted to know if dragons had the same understanding of family as humans ("Nae all kinds. Basilisks will even eat their own chicks if there's naethin' else tae eat."), whether the different kinds of dragons fought one another ("They used tae. But all 'at's left nowadays is scorn an' contempt an' th' occasional quarrel when they come across each other."), and similar questions.

At first, you were afraid that you were pestering him with these questions. But he repeatedly assured you that it was alright. There was so much for you to learn about dragons, so much that wasn't even mentioned in the books in the slightest, and you wanted to know it all.

Alastair opened up to you quickly and turned out to be surprisingly talkative. You approached him about it one day to which he replied that his kind was, in fact, the most talkative of all dragons, along with the Asian ones, whereas especially the frost dragons preferred to stay quiet. Though, he also added, "Well, but 'at is just generally speaking. It all comes down tae th' character ay th' respective dragon in th' end. I once met a frost dragon who loved tae gab, an' at another time, a rather reserved Japanese dragon."

However, he didn't really seem to like to talk about his brothers. He became grumpy when you mentioned them or attempted to question him about them, and you learned to be content with what little information you were able to coax out of him.

Two of his brothers were actually brothers by blood, and knuckers. The other one was a European dragon as well and the only one Alastair got along with quite well, albeit it was just because of their mutually strong dislike for their last brother, another European dragon with crippled wings who could cast magic. He refused to tell you more about them, not even their names or more details about their looks or such, thus you quickly gave up on asking more questions—after all, you didn't want to drive him up the wall.