Dragon AU
All about Wings and Fire
The Carbonells had a legacy that spanned back over hundreds of years. The family was known for their dragons, and had, admittedly, risen fairly high in Italy when that was still a done thing.
It had been three generations since one of the family had actually produced one though, which probably accounted for why his mother had even married his father. Not to say his father wasn’t a guy worth marrying. He was sure he probably had been when it had happened. It just meant that the chances of a dragon coming of that union lowered even more than they’d already been.
He blamed the fact that Dragons could change forms for this situation. At one point, hundreds of years ago, dragons had been relatively common, flying free in the skies and handling the human populace as governors and the like. Then someone got greedy, and someone else got smart, and it resulted in a clash that sent most of the dragon population in Europe underground for a century disguised as humans.
It had been a disaster and led to people marrying non-dragons, because you couldn’t just ask when you were trying to avoid being murdered for your race, and with other bloodlines fleeing to parts of the world where they were, if not less obvious, at least more welcome. Every continent had a different kind of dragon, after all, and Europe had had most of the fliers.
After the mess in the 1500s though, those flighted bloodlines were landlocked, the children either being unable to manifest their scaled forms, or worse, them being incomplete, stuck in some halfway place between human and dragon without a wing or claw in sight.
They’d become the undesirables to both races, often hiding as human and having more children with even further diluted blood.
And it had spread from country to country, that practice. Become common, until full-fledged dragons were nearly unheard of come 1900.
Which is when the first Carbonells trickled over to America, looking for better opportunities in a land that whispered of still having dragons. Smaller, flightless dragons, yes, but still dragons. Fire breathing ones even! Most other continents didn’t have those, the Carbonells being the only ones in Europe who had the skill. Ice, acid? Much more common.
Thus, no one expected Tony to become a Stark Dragon.
And he hadn’t. He hadn’t even tried, because his mother hadn’t bothered to mention it to him until he was fifteen and still hadn’t managed to switch on accident somehow. It made heading off to college a whole lot easier, running on that anger at being uninformed.
Having dragon blood was special and he wasn’t thrilled no one had told him that he was so privileged.
So he went to school, and things happened in his life that went about as one would expect. Really, the only tendency that he showed of a dragon was his sheer possessiveness. At least, that was the case right up until Obadiah got it in his head that he knew best and decided to deal with the ‘problem’ that had sprung up in the form of Tony’s sharpness, and that he wasn’t starting to flag like most people of his age and habits should be.
Which was another clue that something was not the same as others had been led to think.
Afghanistan is what cracked the whole thing wide open, though.
Dragons, you see, Tony had always been led to believe were big. That was a lie though, a mistake of distance and exaggerated historical art. Dragons really weren’t that much bigger than people. Configured differently, certainly, but ultimately just the same size.
Which really only added to his freaking out when he came to with metal in his chest and the gleam of golden scale out of the corner of his eye. His hands were still articulated for delicate work, just clawed as he held them over his head, now with a pointed face and with his tongue in a configuration that would make speaking a royal bitch.
Oh, and there was the wings too, and the fact his spine bent in completely different ways than he was used to. In all there were several things different, like his whole everything, but he managed to not freak out entirely, to get himself back to a human shape, somehow, without displacing the thing in his chest that was, actually, the last thing to garner his attention.
And not a moment too soon either, because he doubted his captors would have hesitated to add scale plucking to the agenda if they’d known.
Of course, after that, Tony was deeply displeased to find he couldn’t get back to his dragon self until well after he returned home, which accounted for his stint with the armor, and led to the mess with Obadiah…
But that didn’t mean that the moment he figured it all out that he didn’t immediately decide it would be his private secret.
For a little while anyway. Just until he knew how everything worked.
And how to make the reactor less painful when he flipped back and forth, because that, at least, still kept the shrapnel away no matter what he looked like, thank god.