#eliot has a past working in the army of the tyrant damien moreau

[vickyvicarious]

Y & AX for the trope mashup prompt that uses the letters. Parker/Hardison OR Parker/Hardison/Eliot :3

Fairy Tale + Arranged Marriage AU.

Parker is a dragon. Parker is a dragon and Hardison is the youngest son!

I think that I would go for a vague mashup/inspired by kind of thing, where it isn't based off any one particular fairy tale. Instead, I'd take a little from various stories/tropes.

Thus, we have Parker as the princess who was transformed as a child into a dragon as punishment for her father (Archie) the king's selfish lust for gold, after his greedy nature angered some fairy or something. She was meant to be a reflection of his greed and insatiable nature, physical embodiment of the way he unfairly taxed his people and wreaked havoc upon his land. And, in many ways, she did grow up to be just that. As a young dragon, Parker absolutely raided and attacked and was very dangerous for everyone. The king had to amass his knights to try and fight her off in order to protect the kingdom. They wounded her and drove her away to what they assumed was her death. It broke the king's heart to do it, but he thought he was making the hard choice necessary to do the most good.

Once she fled, though, she found a mountain nearby and built her lair. She started sneaking back in, and stealing more carefully - this, she soon learned, worked much better than flying in and fighting everyone. A much higher success rate. Also, while peasants are more likely to have sheep to eat, they don't have any cool jewels or gold. That all belongs to the royalty and nobility.

So Parker (who is a more snakey kind of slithery dragon, and possibly able to adjust her size via magic) basically becomes a dragon catburglar exclusively targeting the upper classes. Eventually they figure out that the dragon is very much not dead, and the king is admittedly very relieved about that, even though she's robbing them and the neighboring kingdoms blind. Since the dragon's defeat, he's been forced to reassess his attitude. He has another daughter and has always treasured her, driven by his sorrow over losing his first daughter, and now that he knows she never actually died he wants to do better by her.

So he sends out his knights in search of a cure. Eventually he finds some kind of magic couple (Sophie/Nate) who are super mysterious and maybe it's even hinted that one of them cast the curse in the first place? That or Nate is a totally normal man who just happens to be marries to witch/fairy/etc. Sophie. Not sure. Anyway, the knights return with the news that "he who tames the dragon" will transform her back into a person. The king, eager to get his daughter back, makes the standard fairy-tale proclamation that anyone who manages to transform her back into a human will get to marry her and inherit half his kingdom.

Hardison is a poor farmer in a family of farmers. The whole family is eager to complete this task because they really need the money - the matriarch keeps adopting orphans and there are a lot of them. Hardison is the youngest son, and kind of reluctant to bother the dragon. She hasn't hurt anyone in years, and he doesn't love the whole trading around daughters in exchange for favors thing that nobles do. Still, after his two older brothers both set out and fail, he decides to give it a go for the good of his family. He doesn't particularly expect to succeed, but he sets off on the journey regardless.

Now, in true youngest son fashion, Hardison was always seen as kind of lazy. He was a bookworm and would rig up various contraptions to do all his work while he 'lazed around' reading. (In fact, he taught himself a lot of stuff, and kept getting new books because he had some sort of trade system set up with merchants passing through/he just stole more sometimes.) He also was always kindhearted and most think he won't have the stomach for something as dangerous as defeating and taming a dragon. And he definitely doesn't - he can't fight at all.

But Hardison's approach to 'taming' is much more like the fox from The Little Prince. Rather than attempt to defeat Parker or even to outwit her and trap her in some kind of cage, he instead takes his time and slowly befriends her. He doesn't know how much she understands him/if she does at all, but he talks to her. He still rigs up various inventions but they're only to protect himself and make camping out near her cave easier. Eventually, over time, they become friends.

Still, the dragon doesn't transform back into a princess. Not until he tries to intervene to protect her from some other knight on the same quest who is attempting to start an avalanche to bury her alive while she sleeps. Hardison manages to stop the guy but in the process he gets injured/buried underground himself? The dragon comes to save him in an open fight (which she usually avoids in favor of trickery/sneaking, after her old injury), and as they demonstrate how much they both care about one another to the point of endangering themselves, she transforms back into a human.

They talk and spend time together, and wind up falling in love. But Parker is not very enthused about running a kingdom, and especially once she tells Hardison about all the ways she has seen nobles mistreating and stealing from the people they're supposed to protect over the years, he also is not super excited to give all the money back. The idea to give some of it back to the people who need it most is his, and they start a Robin Hood sort of redistribution of wealth. They take a lot of the money with them as they leave to start a life of travelling around giving it away/stealing and sharing more.

The dragon is now gone, though, and when the next quester comes back to report this to the king, he's very upset and probably just as confused. He thinks that Hardison either killed his daughter or kidnapped her, though he doesn't understand why he would do so when he's already been promised her hand in marriage and half the kingdom. Still, there's a simple solution: he hires a highly skilled mercenary to track them down and bring them back. If his daughter is alive and well, the farmer can live; if not, then Eliot is to kill him and return with his head.

Eliot hunts them down and catches them both to bring back. But Parker keeps escaping (she's very slippery) and Hardison keeps being kind at him and also very smart and useful. I think Eliot is going to become convinced that Hardison would make an excellent king - one who truly cares about the wellbeing of his people and is clever enough to figure out ways to take care of them. He ends up requesting that Hardison please come back and marry Parker, not because it's what Eliot was hired for but because he'd be so much better at it than the other candidates. (Also, he possibly falls in love with both of them.)

Either Hardison declines and Eliot joins them as their knight to protect them from other attempts to take them back... Or Hardison and Parker talk about it, and they decide to accept. They get married and he becomes king, and Parker is a queen who rules together equally or is in fact the final word since Hardison trusts her judgement more than anyone else even if she doesn't have as much interest in the day-to-day running of things. Eliot is their best knight, and sometimes all three of them disappear for days and shortly afterwards a lot of corrupt nobles find their pockets much lighter.