Disclaimer: I do not own How To Train Your Dragon. Rights belong to Cressida Cowell and DreamWorks.

Summary: Mix of Books and Movie. If Astrid hadn't followed Hiccup, then he and Toothless would have escaped. But what would happen after that?


Chapter Three

Either Hiccup had survived without being eaten by a dragon, or the Afterlife looked a lot like the inside of a Viking House.

The door opened, a large, burly woman entered, and Hiccup decided that if he wasn't dead now, he would be soon. The Bog-Burglar tribe had some very hostile history (Vikings tended to create Blood Feuds over even minor offences) with the Hairy Hooligan tribe, to which Hiccup had previously belonged, and were very enthusiastic with their insistence that the only good Hooligan was a dead one. Oddly enough, Stoik held the exact same opinion about the Bog-Burglars.

Except, the woman didn't kill him, only checked his head and informed him that he couldn't lie there all day.

From there, things only became stranger. He opened the door, nearly slamming it closed again when a Gronkle flew past. At the sound of laughter, rather than shouting, he opened it again, only to be confronted by a tall young woman stalking up to him and demanded that he get his Nightfury to stop following her dragon around. Hiccup's first thought was that she reminded him of a taller, dark-haired Astrid. A slightly gentler one, too, as although she looked angry, she didn't immediately shove a pointy weapon in his face when he didn't immediately answer.

Once he got over the shock that this Viking Tribe wasn't going to go insane and try to kill Toothless unless he tried to kill them first, he had followed her to a separate enclosure, where a female Nightfury (distinguishable by a pair of long, silver horns, and being midnight-blue, rather than pitch black) was trying to ignore Toothless, while Toothless tried everything he could think of to get her attention.

A gold Mood-Dragon was laughing at them, while avoiding a pair of Terrible Terrors, one green and one yellow, who were rolling around on the floor, fighting viciously over a large fish.

The young woman who had brought him down was watching the dragons with an expression of quiet amusement. "The other Night Fury is Firesong, and she says that your dragon is called Toothless. The mood-dragon is Stormfly; a pathological liar, though you can always tell when she turns purple, and she belongs to the Bog-Burglar Heir. The two Terrible Terrors are Brightclaw and Newtbreath. I'm Thora, by the way, I'm told that you look a lot like Hiccup, the Hairy Hooligan Heir, and you are still alive because the Chief is one of the few who actually recognize you, no one can really confirm it, and no one wants an angry, over-protective Night Fury on our hands."

That a pretty girl was even giving him the time of day, much less introducing herself, talking to him, and the explanation that she offered was enough to send Hiccup's head into a spin, though he managed to collect himself. "Pleased to meet you. Yeah, I accidentally called him toothless once, and it stuck as a name. What do you mean, your dragon told you? Do you mean that you don't kill dragons here?"

Thora shrugged. "Only if they try to kill us first. We already figured out that they make better hunting partners than enemies. We catch them as babies, train them, and get an even bigger edge over anyone who tries to attack us. They even have their own language, though Camicazi somehow taught Stormfly to speak Norse. Now, I want to hear everything about how you came to get here. Why did you run away, and how did you get a grown Night Fury to listen to you?"

Hiccup got the feeling that he would be telling this story a lot over the next few days. "Well, it all started during a dragon raid…"


Hiccup was right; he did end up recounting the tale more times than he cared to think about. First the Chiefteness, Big-Boobied Bertha wanted to know for information purposes, then what seemed like half the village followed him around until Hiccup told them. On the bright side, it was an efficient way to meet people, and he was introduced to some very interesting people.

The Heir of the Bog-Burglar tribe was a blonde girl whose hair looked as though it had never been touched by the hand of mankind, and a person louder or more hot-headed, Hiccup had yet to meet. Camicazi was a year or so younger than Hiccup, and the only person in his age group that he had met who was actually smaller than him. That didn't make her any less dangerous, however.

Camicazi could steal your underwear without you noticing until you were undressing for bed, and the Bog-Burglars no longer bothered to send out ships to retrieve her when she was captured by rival tribes, because she would have escaped and been half-way home by the time they got there. Camicazi was also an absolute menace with a sword, and could give most of the adult Vikings a run for their money, even without her very distracting habit of talking as she fought, mostly to hurl insults or to inform you of how badly you were doing and why.

For obvious reasons, most people found this very aggravating, which only caused them to lose their focus even more. Only Bertha and her sister, Bjorna, who had taught her the tactic in the first place, or Thora, who had perfected the art of tuning her cousin out, remained immune. Hiccup, who had always been good at finding ways around problems, had developed his own tactic; taunting her right back whenever he could get a word in edgeways, which usually startled Camicazi enough for Hiccup to get a hit of his own in.

There was Gundred and her brother Niell; blonde, bulky and vicious, who acted something like falconers with their tiny flock of Terrible Terrors. There was Thorvald, who was a year older than Hiccup and in the middle of writing a book on dragons. He also had a habit of trying to teach everyone Dragonese, whether they wanted to learn or not. After them came Criedhe and Nessa, the flame-haired twin children of Big Boobied Bertha's younger brother. Both were shaping up on the scrawny side, and were busy training their own dragons, so that they could eventually make up in flight what they lacked in size.

Thora, on the other hand, was not the strongest or most remarkable of women, unless you counted her quiet nature, but she was the most sympathetic to his tale. It had taken several days, and a careless remark (and Camicazi's violent response) by Criedhe, another of the Vikings-in-training, but he had finally asked her story. As it turned out, Thora knew quite a lot about losing you family and trying to fit in amongst strangers.

Viking children were given horrible names to convince trolls and other undesirables that they were not worth stealing away in the night, but Thora had not had a name at all until she was nearly five. Her parents had both been Roman slaves, before her mother had died in childbirth, leaving her to be raised mostly on the Roman War Galley where her father served the Centurion.

If Hiccup had been amazed to learn that the Bog-Burglars kept dragons as domestic pets, he had been even more shocked to find that the Romans caught dragons for food and their skin. It was during one such raid that Thora had been freed. Something had disturbed the dragons, and they had been fully awake and angry when the Romans arrived to conduct a raid on nests that were supposed to still be asleep.

The dragons had been less than obliging, and a very fierce fight had ensured. At one point, a Gronkle had dive-bombed one of the catapults, changing its aim from the dragon nests to the same rocky outcropping where Hiccup and Toothless had spent their first night, and accidentally knocking a Night Fury on its first flight out of the air.

The Fledgling Night Fury had fallen into the cradle of the great war machine, and Thora's father had seized on a desperate chance. He had grabbed his daughter, who had been hiding under the catapult, and hoisted her into the cradle. Making sure that child and dragon had a good grip on each other, he had pulled the lever with all his strength, sending them shooting into the pre-dawn sky.

The noise from the battle had alerted some of the Bog-Burglar fishermen, who had taken a small boat out to see what was going on. They had just caught a glimpse of the Roman Galley when they also caught sight of a tiny girl and a young dragon, who had missed the rocks and were now struggling to keep each other afloat. Both had been promptly dragged on board and dried off.

Unfortunately, Firesong had just escaped from a ship filled with strange humans, and had no intention of staying on this one. She had launched herself into the air, grabbing the girl-child on the way, and streaked off toward the distant beach, where several of the Bog-Burglar women were holding the annual 'Most-Dramatic-Entry-Into-Viking-Life' contest.

This was also known as the 'Whose-Baby-Made-The-Biggest-Commotion' contest, and Camicazi had been about to win, having been born all of two minutes before gumming (biting before you had teeth) the midwife, who accidentally dropped her near a small surgeon's knife, which she had promptly tried to grab it. Thankfully, she lacked the motor control to do more than reach out and scowl.

It was at this point that the Fledgling Night Fury had crash-landed among them, and the tiny child clinging to it had kicked Big-Boobied Bertha in the shins when the woman had tried to pick her up. Despite not having been born into the tribe, the Bog-Burglars were not about to let this much potential (or the chance of a pet Night Fury) go to waste.

The girl had been declared the winner of the annual contest, given the name Thora, and later adopted by Chiefteness Bertha's younger sister Bjorna. It had taken a while for Thora to really be accepted by her peers, but when you have a young Night Fury backing you up, even the most hot-headed Viking was going to think twice about picking on you.

Thora had been the first to actually ride a dragon, as most of the domesticated dragons were Terrible Terrors, Basic Browns, or Common/Garden dragons (none of which grew much larger than the average dog), and had been recently joined by Camicazi, when Stormfly had stopped growing at the size of a young tigress. Given that Stoik the Vast (O Hear His Name and Tremble, Ugh, Ugh) was not exactly prone to bragging about his son, and Hiccup was smart enough to avoid mentioning his origins, most Bog-Burglars had only to see Hiccup and Toothless fly in such perfect tandem, to have little trouble accepting him, too.

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A/N: So, three chapters in three days, lets hope that I can keep it up. In the books, there were at least five or six tribes of Vikings, and in Real History, I don't know how many; yet, in the movie, the Vikings of Berk seem to be the only ones interested in fighting and killing dragons. While Hiccup is good with Dragons, I don't think that he is quite ready to completely live among them, and the Bog-Burglars are far enough away from Berk that they won't accidentally stumble across Hiccup while out sailing. Also, Hiccup and Camicazi become good friends, so I thought it would be good to stick her in there.
Fun Fact: Yes, her name is based off the japanese word for suicide missions, and yes, there is a very good reason for that.

Thanks, Nat.