A/N: YES, I HAVE WATCHED HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON FIVE TIMES WITHIN THE LAST FIVE DAYS. What's it to you if I can quote along with the characters?
This little beauty occurred to me tonight while I was watching the 'See You Tomorrow' scene xD
He was patient.
He had never had to think about things like this before, so he didn't know what to tell Hiccup and even if he had known, it was doubtful the Night Fury would've told him.
Watching the fishbone embarrass himself by failing over and over was kind of fun.
Hiccup arrived at the cove nearly every day now with some new contraption that he insisted was going to help him stay on this time.
All of them failed, one by one.
Of course, there was the trial of actually getting ON Toothless to try it. Oh, no, Toothless was perfectly happy letting Hiccup ride on his back. In fact, he even lowered his head to let the boy on easier.
It was around saddles that he got twitchy.
Dragons are wild, free creatures and having an itchy leather saddle on your back is NOT a dragon's idea of fun.
Toothless hated those saddles. Hiccup had to chase him for a good fifty minutes every day before the dragon finally relented, but only because the boy was getting red-faced and out of breath.
Hiccup also made continuous prosthetic tails and remained blissfully unaware of Toothless and his undying patience. He was waiting, you see, for Hiccup to conclude the inevitable. The dragon knew he would never fly again. He had had those brief seconds of flight every day, when Hiccup came, but having to depend on a human to fly was horrible…for a while, anyway.
Once he got used to it, though, Toothless had to admit this particular human wasn't so bad.
Hiccup's own patience never showed a sign of wearing thin; in fact, with every failure, he just became more determined, more convinced he was heading for success.
"This is the one, Toothless!" he said enthusiastically one day, buckling on the prosthetic. "I know it! I feel it!"
'Would this be that same feeling that has plagued you about every other prosthetic fin before this?' Toothless asked him through a familiar moan, but the boy wasn't listening; he was tying on the tail and crawling on the dragon's back.
As he sat up there, higher above the ground than he was used to, he said, "Well, let's go, Toothless! Let's try it!"
There was a brief moment when nothing happened; but then Toothless spread his wings and took off.
They were sure to fail a few more times, but there are only so many times you can only find coal before you find a gold mine.
And Hiccup could almost smell that gold mine.
And the Night Fury was going to wait, because the gift of flight was something priceless; if only the boy could figure things out…
And until then, he wasn't bad company, the creature decided; shifting his wings to the heel of the boy's boot was no longer digging into his scaly side.
Yes, he could live with this fishbone for a while.
He would have patience.