My Body Is A Cage Made From Scale And Bone.

My body is a cage made from scale and bone.

My brother is everything we both should have been.

There is envy sometimes. But no resentment.

Oh I love this, that's a great beginning! Thank you!!

Slightly obscure (?) fairytale: King Lindworm

In a long ago kingdom, the queen gives birth to twin boys. The younger is perfectly normal in every way. The older is a Lindworm (serpentine dragon).

The main problem is what happens when the younger twin wants to go off and find a wife (or husband, that works too). The older brother has to get married first, but none of the princesses brought before him meets his criteria; mainly that none of them are willing to actually love him. After two have been killed, the king decides to find a more expendable candidate and chooses a peasant — who then succeeds in breaking the curse by showing up dressed in ten dresses on the wedding night and insisting for every dress she takes off the dragon sheds a skin which eventually strips him down to the human underneath.

It’s a weird fairytale, but I kinda like it.

I’m going to say that in this au, the peasant is Fiddleford, Ford is the Lindworm, and Stan is the normal prince. The princesses don’t die, but Ford does attack them when they reject him as a ‘monster’. Ford has been locked up in the castle his whole life, and is unsociable and aggressive because of it. Stan is the only one able to be around him safely and calm him down when he’s upset.

Adding more onto the lindworm idea, because this was fun.

Stan usually has to be the one making sure people interacting with Ford don't piss him off (mainly by treating him like he's something subhuman) and preventing anyone from getting hurt when they do. He was the one who interrupted the attacks on the two princesses. He's not able to do the same for Fiddleford, since their dad reasons that maybe the reason the two previous attempts didn't work was because Stan got in the way. So he makes him stay away and not interfere, because even if it ends terribly Fiddleford is expendable.

Fidds did not sign up to 'probably get mauled by a dragon'. But his family are peasants, so it's no like he has much of a say in it. Luckily, he's clever, and they make a surprisingly good match.

From the country of introverts? And what kind of country is this, if it's not a secret?

I'm Swedish.

I'm not sure how true it is admittedly, but I've heard plenty of people say that Scandinavians in general and Swedes in particular are very introverted as a culture. I'm not sure how much of it is an external stereotype though. Maybe we're not all that unsocial technically, just that we tend to be more reserved in how we socialize. Small gestures are often the norm rather than big displays.

Captain, first mate, second mate.

Before everything went wrong