A/N: I have no problems with how the first HTTYD film played out, but I like to play with "What If It Had Gone Differently" scenarios and have my own ideas to how I would have written some parts differently so here's that. This is starting from the scene titled Test Drive(Hiccup and Toothless's first flight). Everything before it is exactly the same as the movie. Enjoy~


True Calling
A How To Train Your Dragon Fanfiction


Astrid knew something was up. There was no way it wasn't. Hiccup, as she had put it to words the night before, was acting weirder than usual, as if his sudden prowess with handling dragons wasn't indication enough. Hiccup and "prowess" were not two concepts that belonged in the same sentence, unless it was describing his lack thereof.

Everyone on Berk and even some other nearby settlements belonging to allied tribes know that he is a walking disaster. An accident waiting to happen, or the accident itself, depending on who was asked about it. He had no tact in anything, and everything he tried to make better was instead screwed up ten times worse. The last time the dragons had raided their home, he had pretty much solely been responsible for the dragons making off with an entire flock of sheep, stores of fish, and for one of the big fire beacons to fall and burn their dock into the sea, and no one could be more disappointed than their chief and Hiccup's dad, Stoick the Vast.

Some days Astrid actually felt a twinge of pity for the boy. It was undoubtedly hard being the village laughing stock and increasingly useless to fulfill the needs of the village the same as everyone else, but there came a time when exasperation and annoyance overrode sympathy or pity, and Astrid was well past that point when the laughing stock of Berk, who didn't even take their war against the dragons seriously, was putting her to shame.

She took her future as a dragon slayer seriously. She worked her butt off every day to be the best among her generation's Vikings. She toiled and trained and took no disrespect from anyone. She does all she can to stay fit and prepared both mentally and physically for whatever comes her way.

Hiccup does none of those things. He bumbles and ruins every task he tries to undertake, but somehow he's showing her up as if she's the fool in dragon training.

Its not even that she's being bested that irritates her, its by whom. She could see Snotlout possibly doing better than her, assuming he'd stop flirting every time they were in class. The twins were obnoxious and purely insane but crafty, even if only selectively so. Fishlegs wasn't exactly full of bravery and battle skills, but he knew more about the dragons than anyone else their age, and knowledge was useful. At the very least, all of them were partially competent.

But of all the people to be shown up by, it had to be Hiccup, and that was what really got under her skin. She's started to almost wonder if it even really is Hiccup and not really Loki disguised in his place, come to make them all look stupid(and maybe the real Hiccup was even watching and laughing from somewhere just out of sight), but if that were true, the God of Mischief was a damn good Hiccup impersonator. It seemed like a completely ludicrous notion, but so was the idea that Hiccup actually had the stones to fight and defeat dragons and pull tricks to accomplish it that no one else had EVER seen before.

Once could have been a fluke, but his victories were clearly no accident, and when both her head and gut were in agreement, something was definitely wrong. Finding him skulking with purpose through the woods the other day - while she had been deliberately misplacing her aggression on some defenseless trees with several hard throws of her axe - with another one of his strange crafts in-hand had only further driven her suspicions.

He was up to something and she was going to find out exactly what it was, which was how she found herself trudging through the woods trying to pick up a trail of where he was running away to every day after class. She knew he was going somewhere specific, maybe even meeting with someone for some kind of secret training or something, so all she would need to do is find out the where. Once she had that part figured out, then she could find out the what and the how.

She muttered some curses about the fumbling idiot, eyes scouring the ground and low branches for some sign of a path or indicator for where he might be, when a shadow darted overhead with a loud whoosh of air, making her startle. She barely glanced up in time to see a tail quickly disappear over the top of the trees. The tail of a dragon.

It wasn't the twin tails of a Zippleback, or the short stub of a Gronkle, too large to be a Terrible Terror, and it wasn't long and narrow enough at the end to be a Natter. That only left a Monstrous Nightmare, and those were big trouble. What was one doing on the island in broad daylight? Most of the dragons only came to Berk at night, and only to raid, flying to somewhere beyond the sea fog known as Helheim's Gate at all other times, which meant its presence spelled trouble, and she needed to figure out where it was headed and possibly warn the villagers.

She gave chase through the woods, leaping logs and ducking under branches. It looked like it was headed out to sea, but she had to be sure, hoping that it was merely passing over and otherwise leaving. She was winded by the time she reached the open cliff, squinting and turning to look, but didn't see a dragon anywhere at first. A glance towards the village and strained ears told her that at least there was no dragon attack.

She lingered for a while, quieting even her breathing and standing completely still for a while to simply watch and listen for any indication of the beast, but she saw and heard nothing for several minutes and finally shook her head. It must have simply been passing through, nothing to worry over. Hiccup, however, was another matter, so she started to turn back for the trees.

Started to, but a strange noise made her stop mid-step and glance back out to see. The noise was definitely a dragon, but she pulled a blank when trying to match it to any of the dragons she knew, though she considered distance and the high winds could skew the noise and lead her to confusion. Squinting into the distance, she finally caught a glance of something diving from the clouds that hung low around the island.

It was not like any dragon she had ever seen. Jet black with long wings and fins at the end of its tail, as far as she could tell, and she could swear of seeing two heads, but short ones, unlike a Zippleback, and with one on top of the other rather than side-by-side. Plus, it was small, but it looked streamlined.

It dipped close to the sea, tilting so that one of its wing tips skimmed the surface of the waves, and was growing further away as it ducked between the legs of a tall, roofed sea stack, where gulls chattered from the clefts above in raucous complaint.

If this dragon was unknown, that meant that it was potentially very dangerous, and she needed to see if it was going to leave or stay. The last thing they needed was a dragon living directly on their island, as if hoards of them flying halfway across the sea to steal their food wasn't bad enough! She ran along the top of the cliffs to follow it, keeping her eyes on where it was headed as she ran.

Strangely enough, its flight was a lot more clumsy than she expected from the monster. It picked up speed and tried to bank to one side, then promptly ran itself straight into a sea stack, briefly stunning it into a hover before shaking it off and continuing on, only to run into a second sea stack straight afterwards, pulling back the second before impact.

Astrid couldn't help wondering if maybe the dragon could be sick or perhaps injured. She didn't know dragons to fly much near the island in the day time, but those that were spotted were much more graceful about it, even if she hated to think of the fire-breathing monsters as such.

Still, the dragon was action undeniably strange. Ironic, considering she was out here because Hiccup had been acting strange as well. A sick or strange-acting dragon was unpredictable, however, and she was all the more glad she had come out today, because the beast could very quickly become a danger to the lives of her fellow Berkians.

The beast turned its way upward now instead, beating its wings hard to gain altitude with purpose, where there was nothing to run into, until it was heading straight up in a vertical climb, letting out an off-hand roar as it ascended.

What made Astrid pause though wasn't the dragonic howl. It was something else that she could almost swear she recognized. When she listened harder, straining her ears, she knew this time, she heard a very distinctive, excited sound "y-e-s!" that was far too familiar for her liking, but she had yet to connect the dots.

How could a dragon be speaking in a human tongue? What kind of inane-?

Her moment of internal distraction was disrupted by an even clearer, frantically alarmed "STOP!", and a second later she saw the black dragon falling from the sky, but what caught her attention was that there was something else falling from just above it. Her first conclusive jump as that there had been another dragon up there, maybe that even attacked the first dragon, but it was too small to have done much damage to the larger black reptile, which was spiraling down and screeching in absolute terror, flailing helplessly to right itself.

She squinted hard and watched the smaller thing that sounded as if it was speaking, though the words were hard to discern, and twisting in the air as it fell, which she noted was green and brown and shaped like-

"Hiccup!"

No - no that was impossible - but she was watching it all and was making out his unmistakable, lanky features and could clearly hear that nasally voice of his, filled with full knowledge and panic that he was falling towards imminent death.

She gasped and covered her mouth with both hands as the black dragon spiraled in a circle, its tail whipping around and smacking him in the face to send him spinning through the sky, and didn't even realize she herself had stopped breathing in those moments as she watched both dragon and boy falling earthbound, and she might have spared more attention to the fact that, for some reason, the dragon wasn't correcting itself to fly if not for the fact that she was fixated on watching Hiccup with horror in her eyes, fully expecting to see him splatter against the rocks so that there would be little left of him afterwards.

She saw him groping for the dragon's back as the beast angled from spinning uselessly on its side to having its nose down towards the quickly approaching land and sea, and then he managed to grab something on its shoulders - she couldn't tell exactly what - and pull himself over to straddle the dragon's neck. The large beast fell into a sharp spin with its wings tucked in close until it had steadied into a straight dive, coming down way too fast, and Astrid thought for sure they would end up crashing through the trees.

The dragon snapped its wings open though, and Astrid could hear it even from a distance as they descended. Even that wasn't enough to slow them down before they disappeared into the mist, where she was almost certain they must have hit the maze of sea stacks concealed by the thick clouds of white. No way they had made it out.

She waited for what felt like hours, staring with wide eyes and praying - though she was sure it was in vain - to see some sign of survival. For a long time, there was just silence and crashing waves, and then finally, finally, a winged black shape flew out the other side, lifting itself skyward with a few flutters of its deft wings.

And then, to finally settle her fears, she heard Hiccup, cheering in glee and victory.

Admittedly, Astrid had to stop and just collect herself for a good several minutes, doubting everything she just saw.

Hiccup riding on the back of a dragon. Now she had seen everything. Literally, EVERYTHING.

She watched as, seemingly unaware, Hiccup and the dragon flew away around the back of the island, probably to land somewhere after that completely crazy stunt. She considered chasing after them and confronting Hiccup about exactly what he was doing, how he could even think to be on the back of a dragon, but then thought better of it. It didn't appear that the dragon was in any great rush to get him off and eat him, which was strange in and of itself, so she didn't think he was in any immediate danger.

This was something she couldn't keep secret though.

Someone had to know.

Stoick, especially, had to know. She couldn't give Hiccup the chance to explain it away, and he undoubtedly would at least try, so the best way to make sure he couldn't was to ambush him with the announcement that she and Stoick knew what he was doing. Something like this, especially with Hiccup involved, could only lead to worse trouble for everyone around him.

It was with that in mind she turned and sprinted back to the village, before Hiccup would even have the chance to return. He was in for a nasty surprise when he finally did return.