Born Unchained (rough draft)
A DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon fanfic series by Raberba girl

A/N: This is an alternate universe. I'm not going to explain any more than that.

All the children born in this story should still be around in stories that take place later - I'm just really bad about remembering to include them. *sweatdrop* I'll try to insert them if/when I ever get around to editing the HSRMO stories properly.

PLEASE NOTE that "intersex" is the preferred term to use for humans, and "hermaphrodite" is a biological term used for non-human organisms.

Chapter 1

As if the ordinary problems of integrating dragons into Berk society weren't bad enough, things went completely insane just a few weeks after the Red Death's defeat.

It started with a pair of Nadders who suddenly jumped on each other and had sex in public, seeming to not even notice all the stunned human and vaguely interested dragon witnesses. (As would later be discovered, most of the dragons in a flock were on the same mating schedule, but there were always some outliers who were 'off-schedule' for various reasons.) Hiccup was ordered to lecture the two Nadders about propriety. They simply stared at him with blank expressions, but he did his best despite the language barrier and then hoped that would be the end of it.

Days passed, and the dragons started getting more and more restless. There were a couple more public sex incidents - the dragons seemed to have vague inclinations to take themselves aside for copulation, but didn't put much effort into hiding themselves, and didn't seem to care at all who saw them.

As Hiccup was dragged into human meetings about what to do about this growing problem, the dragons were starting to have their own anxious meetings. This was the first time their flock was approaching a mating season outside the Red Death's control, the first time they were living in a physical world rather than a dream world, and the first time they would probably be expected to mate and gestate in their 'Berk bodies.' A lot of the worry, despite the indignant assurances of Toothless and his troop, was about how their new queen would handle the generations born under his authority. Most of the rest of the worry was by and for the Zipplebacks.

"We have no seeds!" a female/female pair said in distress, "NONE! How will we impregnate our mate?!"

"We have no eggs," a male/male pair added in despair, "no eggs for our mate to fertilize, what will we do?"

Even male/female pairs didn't have an answer. "My sibling-half will fertilize our mate's egg, but I can't! How can this be?! Our mate will give life to one of my eggs, but my sibling-half has no eggs, how can this be?!"

The Zipplebacks who most desperately wanted offspring decided to take no chances - they temporarily left Berk so that they would be in a dream world when their mating haze came upon them. Only one of the absent Zippleback pairs had human partners, so the rest of them were not missed.

None of the humans had any idea yet that this was going on. Hiccup was busy being harassed by scandalized parents (particularly after an incident that happened at the school), trying to keep his temper when he heard teenagers making fun of the indiscrete dragons, and trying to defend the dragons to his father. "Dad, it wasn't like they were trying to be lewd or whatever on purpose. They're aliens, obviously they have different values than we do-"

"Just make them stop, Hiccup!"

Discouraged, Hiccup tried to get more insight from his own dragon. "Toothless, can't they just, you know, go home and have sex? We can tell them 'sex at home, not school,' right?"

"Do 'sex,' make good babies."

"...Okay, but have sex at home, not at school. Sex at home, NOT school."

Toothless frowned. "Why?"

Hiccup groaned silently. "I- I mean- Sex is, you know, private. Have sex when people won't look at you and see you, and...and make fun of you."

Toothless was starting to seem agitated. "Sex is bad, Hiccup?! Sex babies is BAD?!" He hadn't thought that any queen could be worse than the Red Death - but at least that tyrant had ALLOWED THEM TO HAVE CHILDREN. Were they now forbidden to reproduce?! Would their flock be forced to die out?!

"No," Hiccup said soothingly, "no, no, no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean- I just- Sex in front of other people is bad." Hiccup wished he had more vocabulary to work with. "Sex alone, in private, is good, okay?"

Toothless stared.

"Just tell them to have sex at home, okay? Sex at home. Okay?"

Toothless looked as if Hiccup had very politely asked him to buy the sun and give it to him as a Snoggletog present. "Sex home only?!" Then, in dream language, "This queen is crazy, VERY MUCH CRAZY, when the mating haze comes on us we have to REMEMBER to go all the way home to mate, what?! WHAT?! So much crazy queen!"

"...Did I just ask you guys to do something impossible?" Hiccup guessed.

"MAKE BABIES!" Toothless screamed at him.

"Okay, okay, all right, I'm sorry! They don't have to go home. They can have sex in the middle of the street if they want, it's okay, I'll figure something out."

"BABIES, HICCUP QUEEN BABIES, AAAAAAHHHHHHH!"

"Calm down, Toothless!"

Hiccup did not, in fact, figure anything out before mating season began in earnest.

Meatlug, the member of her troop most eager to procreate, was excited and giddy as she felt her body preparing itself. The night before the beginning of mating week, she took all her clothes off before she went to bed, hiding deep within her blankets so that Fishlegs, with his strange human fixation on clothing, wouldn't notice and make her put them on again. The minute she woke up around 3:00 a.m., fully caught up in her mating haze, she was out the door screaming to attract males before Fishlegs had even finished waking up. "Wha...? What's-? Meatlug, where are you going?!"

An hour later, the whole city was in utter chaos. Dragons were flying and running and shrieking and copulating all over the place. Meatlug was racing so quickly in her search for a mate that she didn't realize that she, a highly desirable female, was targeted by no less than three males following her trail, all strong candidates and all Matched to her. Instead, she seized Gronckle after Gronckle the instant she saw them (even some ineligible Gronckles and once, by accident, another female), crying "Match?! Match?!" and instantly rushing on to the next every time they said "No."

As the sun rose, Meatlug became desperate. She no longer cared if her mate was Matched to her or not; she just wanted, needed, babies to be growing inside her. She seized a Gronckle by sense alone, so caught up in her mating haze now that she could barely see. "MATCH?" she demanded.

"No, but-" the voice responded.

The 'but' was enough, and she already sensed that the person she held was an eligible male Gronckle. She shoved him down and started mating with him before he'd even finished giving permission. She didn't notice both of the remaining males that had targeted her finally give up when they realized that she was no longer eligible, and she certainly didn't notice the looks of disgust on their faces when they saw whom she had chosen.

Meatlug went still, panting, her mind finally returning to her as the mating haze cleared. She blinked down at her new mate, and was surprised at her choice: One Whose Breath Fells Enemies. Although he'd obviously been named after a great warrior, he himself was a runt, small and weak for a Gronckle, which was probably why he had been unmated even though he was a generation older than her. She would only be able to get two litters out of him, though she could always find a new mate for her third. She would not have chosen Axebreath if she hadn't been so desperate.

"B...babies?" he asked faintly, still looking stunned that any female at all, much less such a desirable one, had allowed him to sire her offspring.

Yes, that was the important thing. Meatlug quickly scrambled off of him and turned her attention inward. Very hesitantly, Axebreath reached to touch her belly. After a pause, Meatlug looked up and smiled at him. "Yes. Four, I think." The number had been slightly disappointing at first, until she paid more attention and realized that four offspring per litter was apparently the limit for this body, so she had actually done quite well after all.

Axebreath looked radiant, and in that moment, Meatlug felt a rush of affection for him. It wasn't his fault he was a runt, she was fertile enough to make up for his breeding deficiencies, and he seemed like he would be a responsible provider and a kind teacher for her children. Perhaps it hadn't been a mistake to take him as her mate after all.

"I will go back to my companion now, he probably misses me," she explained.

Axebreath nuzzled her. "Thank you for choosing me." Meatlug was charmed. She had never heard of anyone thanking his or her mate for the privilege of creating offspring together, and she found that she liked it. "I will be a good papa to our offspring," Axebreath promised.

"Yes!" Full of joy, Meatlug took to the air again and flew back to Fishlegs, eager to tell him of her success.

The rest of Meatlug's troop hadn't been so enthusiastic about procreating. Hookfang in particular had dressed in as many layers of clothing as he could and then insisted on going to sleep clinging to Snotlout, as if the annoyed and clueless human could protect him from what was coming. Hookfang woke up in a panic around 3:00 a.m., feeling the mating haze starting to descend on him. "SNOTLOUT! SNOTLOUT!" he screamed. Snotlout's resulting shriek of surprise pierced through the haze and provided a moment's respite.

"What is WRONG with you, you crazy dragon?! Let go of me!"

"You have to protect me you have to protect me, don't let them find me don't let me mate, please Partner please please please please...!"

Unfortunately, Snotlout on his own was no match for a dragon, especially a terrified Monstrous Nightmare. It wasn't ten minutes before Hookfang, in desperation, accidently drew blood, and he hadn't even been fighting. Horrified and repentant and furious, Hookfang screamed a curse on humans with their stupidly soft flesh and fled away in search of Toothless.

The madness had begun by then. Hookfang ducked around dragons, shying away from the shrieks of female Monstrous Nightmares no matter how distant they were, and chanted Snotlout's name over and over again in a desperate effort to ward off the mating haze. He burst into the chieftain's house, where Stoick and Hiccup were frantically running around, both trying to get dressed as they yelled into their phones, and Toothless stood in the middle of the living room with an impatient expression.

"HELP ME," Hookfang begged.

Toothless looked at him sympathetically. "You don't want to mate?"

"FIGHT ME."

Toothless had just enough presence of mind to rush at Hookfang so forcefully that they were out of the house when they started fighting. Hiccup ran out after them, shouting, but Toothless ignored him in exasperation. Hookfang was strong to begin with and was now resisting a mating haze, it was taking almost every ounce of Toothless's strength and concentration to limit the damage to them both, he didn't have time to coddle his crazy idiot queen through a situation that a queen should already know how to handle.

Hiccup clawed his fingers through his hair in frustration as he watched Toothless and Hookfang apparently trying to take each other apart. The phone in his hand rang yet again, and the only reason he answered it was because the ringtone was Astrid's.

"Ast-?"

"HICCUP, HE'S RAPING STORMFLY AND I CAN'T STOP HIM!"

"Where are you?!"

o.o.o.o.o

Stormfly woke early, unable to sleep. She lay in bed hugging Astrid for comfort until she started to feel her mating haze descend. Since she had no strong feelings about offspring one way or the other, she simply undressed and then walked out into the street, neither seeking nor fleeing, making herself available to whoever chose to mate with her.

A male rushed at her, realized they weren't Matched, and rejected her; a second male later did the same. A third male, also not Matched, tried to mate with her anyway, but Stormfly didn't like him and fought him off. Then she heard a familiar voice and turned, happy to see her human friend. "Astrid that I like."

"Stormfly!" Astrid rushed up to her. "Why are you walking around naked?! Come on, let's go back home!"

"No."

"Stormfly. We need to get out of this madhouse, and we need to get you some clothes."

"No home. No clothes," Stormfly said in frustration, wishing she knew more human words.

"Stormfly! This is insane, why is this happening?! You've all gone crazy!"

Before Stormfly could respond, she went stiff as she sensed a Matched male approaching. She was seized from behind and shoved against a wall to face the male who'd targeted her, a strong and handsome Nadder named One Who Strikes The Heart. "Match?" he demanded, too caught up in the mating haze to be certain of what was quite obvious to Stormfly's less overwhelmed senses. He was a fantastic physical specimen, and though his touch was harsh with urgency, his eyes, clouded as they were with the haze, looked directly into hers, which erased the last of her hesitation.

"Yes." Suddenly burning with the urge to bear his offspring, she clutched at him as he pressed closer and opened her legs to receive him.

"GET AWAY FROM HER!"

Both of them were shocked to be interrupted. Astrid beat at Truespear until he fell away, staring and helpless and incomplete. Both he and Stormfly were too stunned by the outrageous behavior of her friend to react.

"Stormfly, run!"

Stormfly heard the words but could not perceive them. Her body ached with the need to be filled with new life, and a whine of outrage started in her throat.

Hearing it, Truespear was spurred back into action. He knocked Astrid away and threw himself on his new mate. Stormfly offered her body to him again but was distracted by her friend's pain and distress. She stared at Astrid, who was now bleeding a little and crying and clutching her phone.

"Astrid," Stormfly whispered. She turned to her new mate to ask him to let her go, but saw that he was still deeply lost in the haze and could not be reached. She waited until he finished inseminating her, but did not stop to assess the results or speak to him. Ignoring his plaintive inquiries, she went to her friend and put her arms around her. "Astrid?"

"Oh, Stormfly! Stormfly...!"

o.o.o.o.o

Hiccup raced on foot to the park, wincing as he ran past dragons copulating or chasing each other or occasionally fighting, some of them being yelled at by humans.

He quickly found Astrid on a bench, still dressed in nightclothes and sobbing in Stormfly's arms. The Nadder, like most of the other dragons, was completely naked, but she didn't seem to be hurt. She looked only concerned for her human, and Hiccup suddenly felt sick as he wondered if he'd misunderstood, if it had been Astrid who'd been raped. He approached cautiously, reaching out a shaking hand to his girlfriend. "A...Astrid...?"

"Hiccup!" she wailed, immediately throwing herself into his arms instead. Stormfly came to embrace both humans, sandwiching Astrid between them. "I couldn't stop him...he just grabbed her and shoved her up against the wall and started- I couldn't- YOU STAY AWAY FROM US!"

Hiccup jumped, then followed Astrid's furious glare and saw an approaching male Nadder, also naked, stop in his tracks and quickly retreat again.

Truespear did not leave entirely. He perched on an empty bench and called out beseechingly to Stormfly, who ordered him to wait as she tended to her human.

Hiccup looked at Stormfly, who turned back to croon at Astrid. "Stormfly? Are you okay?"

"My Astrid is sad," Stormfly said in distress.

Hiccup gently let go of Astrid so he could drape his jacket over Stormfly's shoulders, thread her arms through the sleeves, then take the Nadder's face in his hands to catch her attention. "Stormfly, Astrid is sad because she thinks you're hurt. Are you hurt?"

"No!" Stormfly cried, sounding genuinely surprised.

Hiccup let her go and looked at Astrid. "Astrid, I think there's been a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding?! He raped her! He raped my dragon and I want-!"

"Hey, hey, Astrid, sshh! Hold on, let's ask Stormfly first before we jump to any conclusions. Stormfly? Did Truespear attack you?"

"Truespear my mate."

"...Did you want him to be your mate?"

To Hiccup's relief, Stormfly smiled. "Very good babies," she cooed. "That Truespear, good babies for us him me. And my Astrid."

Hiccup smiled back and then said to Astrid, "Astrid...I think it was consensual."

"You didn't see it! He was manhandling her, she didn't want it-"

"Astrid, what I have been seeing is a bunch of dragons acting like rabid animals who seem to calm down the minute they finish having sex. Look." He pointed at a pair of dragons across the park, who were now nuzzling and licking each other after having been snarling and screaming less than ten minutes before. "I think Stormfly's okay."

"This good thing, my Astrid," Stormfly said, her hands resting on her stomach.

Truespear dared to creep close again. Hiccup hastily got out of his way; Astrid shot him a dirty look, but didn't chase him off this time. "Babies?" the Nadder asked anxiously.

Stormfly smiled proudly. "Two," she purred. "One male and one female, I think."

Truespear purred back in satisfaction and nuzzled her belly and then her face. "I will be a good papa to our offspring."

"Yes," Stormfly agreed. "Now go away and let me comfort Friend and her male."

Truespear suddenly fixed Hiccup and Astrid with an interested look.

"You mate too," Stormfly said encouragingly, gesturing, wondering why in the world the two humans who had obviously been targeting each other for weeks now didn't look affected by the haze at all, despite the fact that they were standing so close and Astrid wasn't pregnant.

"What?!" Hiccup gasped.

"Us?! Stormfly, what-?!"

The red-faced humans were saved by the buzzing sound of an approaching Gronckle. "Fishlegs!" Hiccup called in relief.

Meatlug was now dressed in a bathrobe that Fishlegs had hastily provided for her. The moment she touched the ground, she and Stormfly ran to each other. "Babies?!" they cried at the same time. "Two!" Stormfly reported.

"Four!" They laughed and danced and embraced, sharing joy and congratulations. Truespear, losing interest now that his night's work was done, flew away to lie low for a while. He was claimed now, but the next several days would still be full of unmated females caught up in the haze, grabbing every male Nadder within reach to determine his eligibility, and it would be annoying to endure all that unnecessary manhandling. Better to hide until it was over.

Meanwhile, the three human teenagers were hastily exchanging news, then Hiccup took out his phone to look for Toothless and was surprised to find that the Night Fury and Hookfang were both in the training arena. "Let's all meet up there and try to figure out what to do." Hiccup called Snotlout and the twins, then made his own way to the arena along with Astrid, Stormfly, Fishlegs, and Meatlug.

They found Toothless there alone, curled up in front of the closed cell that had once imprisoned Monstrous Nightmares. "Toothless!"

Toothless immediately bounded to his feet and raced to greet his human. "Hiccup~!"

"Are you okay, bud?!"

"Okay."

"Where's Hookfang, isn't he here with you?"

"Hide."

The humans all looked around the arena in confusion before Hiccup focused on the Nightmare cell again. "Wait a minute." He went up to it and opened the door.

"STAY AWAY!" Hookfang howled from inside.

"...Hookfang?"

At the sound of his queen's voice, Hookfang burst into tears.

"Hookfang?" Hiccup cautiously entered and knelt down beside the Nightmare, who was huddled in a far corner of the cell. "Hey...hey, big guy," Hiccup said soothingly, stroking the dragon's heavily padded shoulder. "Are you okay? What's wrong?"

"No MATE, Queen!" Hookfang shrieked at him. "No mate! NO!"

"Okay, okay, no mate. You don't want to mate?"

Hookfang crawled onto Hiccup, nearly knocking him off balance, and buried his face in his chest.

"Um...okay..."

"Hiccup?" Fishlegs called tentatively, peering inside.

"We're okay," Hiccup called back. "Hookfang's just a little upset, but I think we're okay so far..."

Toothless flopped down on Hookfang's other side and patted his head. "It's okay," he crooned, "Queen and me and our whole troop will protect you."

"I don't want to make babies...I don't want to make babies, it's bad..."

Toothless wondered if he should brag that he was the only Night Fury in the whole flock and so didn't have to worry about stupid mating, but he finally decided that Hiccup wouldn't want him to provoke their distressed troopmate.

Astrid had just finished getting Stormfly dressed in an ill-fitting training outfit, with holes cut for the dragon's wings and tail, before Snotlout came running into the arena. "Hiccup! Hiccup! I can't find Hookfang!"

"He's in here," Hiccup called from the cell. "Didn't you try to track his chip?"

"What?" Snotlout peered into the cell. "HOOKFANG! What is wrong with you, man?" He raised his arm, but didn't have the chance to indignantly complain about the red scratches his dragon had earlier carved into his skin.

"SNOTLOUT, COMFORT ME." Hookfang pounced on his human, clutching him tightly.

"Ow! Let go!" Then, to Hiccup and Fishlegs with a big grin, "Hey, did you know there's naked chicks running all over town?"

Hiccup facepalmed and Fishlegs rolled his eyes, neither of them bothering to answer.

A minute later, Barf and Belch came running into the arena and into the closest cell, huddling together at the back of it. Before Hiccup could go to them, he was distracted by the Thorston twins parading in, both of them as naked as the dragons.

"Ruffnut!"

"Tuff, what are you doing?!"

Tuffnut waved his hand and announced grandly, "We, my friends, are simply joining in Berk's brand new, time-honored tradition!"

"As our wise dragons have so boldly proclaimed," Ruffnut chimed in, "today marks the first annual Day of the Nude, to be celebrated-"

"SHUT UP AND PUT SOME CLOTHES ON."

The twins whined a lot, but were eventually bullied into compliance. By the time they were dressed and pouting, Barf and Belch seemed to have recovered, creeping back out of their cell and permitting Hiccup to drape some towels over them, though they refused to actually put any clothes on. They seemed tired and agitated, staying pressed close against each other and shying back against the walls.

"Baby?" Stormfly inquired.

"No. Our body is wrong, our bodies are wrong, we are frightened," the Zippleback replied in unison, leaning into Meatlug when she sympathetically began to stroke their hair.

"Okay," Hiccup exhaled, feeling exhausted. "We're all here, so let's see if we can figure out WHAT IN THE WORLD is going on..."

In bits and pieces, coaxed out of their dragons with limited vocabulary and lots of outbursts, the humans were finally told that this was the first day of what was apparently going to be roughly a whole week of dragon mating. Most of the commotion was apparently from the teenage generation, who had to find mates and conceive their first set of offspring, and the older dragons who had lost their mates in the war and had to find new ones. Most of the already-mated dragons had probably already finished their business - they would have gone to sleep together the night before and awakened to mate without having to rush out into the streets.

"I guess the nudity does make sense," Fishlegs mused. "If you know you're going to be, er, putting yourself on the market the next day, and the way they seem to kind of lose their minds until they, er, do their thing, it actually kind of makes less sense to bother with clothes..."

"Yeah," Hiccup said, looking thoughtfully from the bundled-up Hookfang to the blanketed Zippleback. "But how come Barf and Belch are naked even though they seem like they don't really want to mate?"

That was when the dragons' general concern about the Zipplebacks came out. Hiccup tried to remember what that breed looked like in their homeworld - strange creatures like entwined eels - so he could sketch a picture. The dragons were eventually able to explain that Zipplebacks in their true form were simultaneous hermaphrodites, both male and female at the same time. Two Zipplebacks would mate by temporarily 'eating' or 'consuming' each other, as close as Hiccup and Fishlegs could figure out from the stilted explanations, which would result in a single offspring that was 'born' immediately at the conclusion with no gestation period.

However, in these 'Berk bodies' where biological sex was strongly compartmentalized, even the Zipplebacks themselves couldn't figure out how to mate, and it frightened some of them. Barf and Belch, though not opposed to creating offspring like Hookfang was, had become overwhelmed by anxiety when they were not immediately claimed, and were now afraid to venture out into the 'mating market' again.

"Okay," Hiccup said soothingly, "it's okay, you don't have to go out again yet. You have a whole week to figure this out, right? It'll be okay."

After that were less important details that fascinated Fishlegs and bored Snotlout, such as the mating haze (it only affected unmated dragons in proximity to potential mates, and could be resisted with great effort), the 'Matched' concept (Matched dragons were the most physically compatible, but most dragons could still mate even if they were not Matched), whether dragons were monogamous (yes; sort of; mostly), and how often mating season happened (about once every ten years for individual dragons). Hiccup would have liked to learn about it, too, but now that his friends' dragons were safe, he needed to start answering his father's phone calls and think about the city in general rather than just his own small group.

"HICCUP, I DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, BUT YOU NEED TO GET OUT HERE RIGHT NOW," Stoick bellowed through the phone, so loudly that Hiccup had to hold it at arm's length.

"Can I come with you to watch the naked chicks?" Snotlout asked, interested.

"No. You need to stay with Hookfang. Astrid, do you mind coming with me?"

Astrid looked at her partner. "How about it, girl? Are you feeling all right?"

"Go with my Astrid," Stormfly said, though she sounded a little worried.

"How about you, bud, are you okay?" Hiccup asked.

"No 'Night Fury,' only me," Toothless said, sounding like he was boasting. "No bad females take steal me away from my Hiccup!"

"Er...okay. Come on, then."

They flew back out into the thick of it, though things had calmed down slightly. Slightly. The more Hiccup paid attention, the more he realized that most of the dragons weren't really attacking each other, that their forcefulness was more from the urgency and clumsiness brought on by the haze than by anything else. Only the Nightmares were truly violent when they mated, and Toothless explained that their breed valued combat more than the others. Both females and males were expected to prove their aggression and defense in order to be considered worthy to bear or sire good offspring.

Once in midair and once on the ground, Stormfly got grabbed by Nadders who were so lost in their mating haze that they didn't realize for a minute that she was already claimed and pregnant. Astrid was furious, but the males were quick to rush off again as soon as they realized that Stormfly was ineligible.

"It's okay, Astrid. Here, Stormfly, stay between us; Toothless, warn off any Nadder who looks at us, okay?"

"Astrid not like them close to her Stormfly," Toothless purred.

"Not hurt, Astrid," Stormfly assured her, nestling in the middle of the group.

Hiccup soon discovered, to his fury, that the humans' organized efforts to control the chaos took the form of hunting down and shooting haze-caught dragons with disruptors. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" he bellowed as Toothless and Stormfly screamed. "I TOLD YOU NEVER AGAIN, NEVER AGAIN, WHY DO YOU STILL EVEN HAVE DISRUPTORS, I THOUGHT YOU SAID YOU DESTROYED THEM ALL!"

"We're not hurting them, and we can't have them running amok-!"

"THEY'RE NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG!" Hiccup was furious, and helpfully had an even angrier Night Fury and Deadly Nadder to back him up, as well as a trained warrior at his side. No one but his father put up much resistance when he seized control of the human side of the operations, and even Stoick's protests quickly became half-hearted in the face of Hiccup's iron resolve. "Get rid of those disruptors right now and let them go, I am so mad at you and we will DEFINITELY talk about this later. Tell all the humans to stay inside and just let the dragons do what they need to do, no school and no work today. Or the rest of the week. Non-lethal defense of property only, they're not trying to hurt us, they don't care about anything right now except having children!"

Under his orders, law enforcement was dispersed mostly to herd humans back into their homes and guard against accidental property damage. Hiccup assigned various people to work on schooling accommodations during the coming week for students who would be better off staying inside, alternatives for employees with essential jobs who couldn't afford to miss a whole week of work, establishing a few key routes for safe emergency transportation, the draft of a press release, the draft of a census sequence for the dragons to keep track of their reproductive status, and various other projects that he wished he himself could work on all at once.

"This is crazy, I wish I'd known about all this beforehand... Of course their ten-year mark would hit right at the worst time, wouldn't it, when we've only just started living together."

To be continued...

Author's Notes: This story is an overgrown one-shot that I had to break into three chapters because it ended up being so long.

Again, PLEASE NOTE that while "intersex" is the preferred term to use for humans, "hermaphrodite" is a biological term used for non-human organisms. (Speaking of which, there are basically two kinds of the latter: sequential hermaphrodites like clownfish, who can change their sex, and simultaneous hermaphrodites like some types of snails, who are both male and female at the same time.)

I have had ideas for the HSRMO dragon procreation stories for at least a year and a half now, but I have no idea why I finally got around to writing the first story (and all the exposition it contains) this week. Possibly because it took me this long to finish designing all the necessary new FCs. ^^; Ftr, I wrote the first draft of this fic with Meatlug's and Hookfang's mates being unnamed, then went back afterward and decided to just meld those characters with Axebreath and Butterfly from my other fics, since they fit decently enough and it's hard coming up with names for FCs. (I had been debating for a long time whether to make Butterfly Hookfang's mate or Fireworm's, but I guess Hookfang grabbed her first. :p)