Conveyance

(rough draft)

A DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon fanfic by Raberba girl

Summary: The concept of humans having their own true language is difficult for dragons to understand.

A/N: STILL NOT THE NEXT SMALL ADDITION CHAPTER. X''D Sorry again...!

This takes place during the first day or two of Valka being on Berk, probably shortly after the "explaining dragon smells and human bathing to HiccTooth" scene at the end of Smelly.

o.o.o

"No, it's impossible! There aren't enough sounds to say everything everything everything!"

"There are," Valka insisted to the crowd of incredulous dragons who surrounded her. "I will explain. Smell my coverings; what are they telling you?"

The dragons indicated all the information they were able to read from her clothes alone. "You are two halves with your fourwing that you love, you were in the sea-king alpha's flock but now you are in our nightwing alpha's flock with us, you like to be close to your young adult male offspring our consort, you played with a two-head hatchling a little while ago, the last thing you ate was roasted sheep..." They kept going until Valka finally stopped them.

"Okay. That's what my coverings are telling you. Do you know what they're telling me?"

They waited expectantly.

Valka sniffed the sleeve of her tunic, then said, "My coverings tell me that I have been close to dragons for a while."

They kept waiting.

"No more!" she laughed. "That is the only only only thing my coverings can say to me!"

The dragons were incredulous. "You really can't smell?! Humans really can't smell AT ALL?!"

"We can barely smell anything, but we can hear. All that information my clothes told you? Now I will say it with human words." She switched to Norse. "This Stormcutter, Cloudjumper, is my dearest companion, the other half of my heart. For twenty years I was the flockling of my good and wise Bewilderbeast alpha, but now I am here in Berk's flock-"

"You're not saying anything! Only chittering!"

"Chittering is human talking," Toothless corrected uncertainly. "But you can't say all that with just chittering!"

"Yes, I can. Order me to say something in human talk, Alpha-Dragon."

"Give me obeisance."

Valka raised her voice and said loudly, "Hail, Alpha! I am proud to love and serve You."

They stared.

She laughed again. "It was obeisance! Those sounds acknowledge You as alpha and tell You that I love You and I like being Your flockling."

They couldn't believe her.

"'Hail' means acknowledge with enthusiasm. 'Alpha' means alpha. 'Love' means love, 'you' means the person I'm talking to, and the other sounds connect them so the meaning is deeper and better and clearer."

"How?!" the dragons howled, astonished and confused. "How?! How?! Crazy!"

"Use human talk to say that Half Of Me is the very much best human," Toothless demanded.

"Toothless's most favorite human is Hiccup," Valka said obediently.

Toothless considered this for a while, watched intently by his flocklings. "You said my human name and His human name," he mused. "Maybe...maybe maybe..."

"I can tell any of my human flockmates anything, without using real talk at all."

"She will do it to Consort, it will be very funny!" someone suggested, and everyone gleefully agreed.

"What do I say to him?" Valka asked.

"Tell him he must hurry and finish that long long long courtship and mate with his female and make babies! Why won't he make babies?!" Toothless and the other legacy dragons heartily agreed, and no one could understand why Valka thought this was so funny.

She finally managed to stop laughing and say, "No. Human mating can be very complicated; if I tell him that, he won't do it. I will tell him something very much easier instead."

"Tell him we will go fishing [-]." Animals' sense of and communication about location and measurement data was too complex and alien. It had never been something Valka was able to understand or convey; she'd always had to rely on Cloudjumper for that.

"I should tell him to do something that he can do right away, to show you that he understood what I said," Valka suggested. "Maybe we can offer him different kinds of food and tell him which one to choose."

After quite a lot of discussion and planning (and a fair bit of laughter), they all flew off in search of their flock consort.

Hiccup, who was standing near the Great Hall with Astrid, Gobber, Eret, and an armful of paperwork, looked all too happy to be interrupted by a horde of dragons descending around him.

Eret gulped and nervously edged closer to the other humans. Skullcrusher sniffed at him, wondering why he was so uneasy. "O-Okay then, well, guess I'd better get right on that, uh, so, see you later, Chief!" Eret tucked his own set of papers into his satchel, swung himself into the saddle, and looked relieved when Skullcrusher carried him away from the crowd of dragons willingly enough.

"You mind if we pick this back up again later, Gobber?" Hiccup asked.

"Ah, go on and play," Gobber chuckled. "I can start on my share in the meantime."

"Sorry..." Hiccup handed him a sheaf of papers, waved as the man ambled away, then set down the rest of the pile and turned to his mother. "What's up, Mom?"

Valka stood very still, moving only her lips. "Hello, Hiccup. Don't question me yet, I'll explain later. Please just follow my instructions."

"Uh, okay. Why are you standing like that, is something wrong?"

"I think that counts as a question, babe," Astrid stage-whispered, grinning.

Hiccup rolled his eyes and grinned back, then looked around in confusion at the dragons. Some of them were dumping assorted objects into a pile, and all of them seemed to have their attention fixed on Hiccup eagerly. "O-kaaay..."

"Hiccup," Valka said, still without moving. "Look through the pile, find your tunic, and give it to Toothless."

"My tunic?" Hiccup looked, saw that one of his tunics was indeed sitting in the pile, half covered by a shield. Shaking his head in good-natured confusion, he dug out the garment, walked over to his dragon, and held it out. "Happy now, bud?"

Toothless made an excited sound. Since he wasn't making a move to take it, Hiccup playfully dropped it on his head, and Toothless immediately shook the tunic to the ground.

"Now," Valka instructed, "take that piece of granite and feed it to Riv- I mean, to the purple Gronckle."

"O-kay." Hiccup obeyed, noting that more and more dragons kept eagerly joining the crowd.

"Now go kiss Astrid."

"Huh. Don't mind if I do," Hiccup said, exchanging grins with his fiancée as he headed over to her.

"Ideally, you'd have sex right now so they can all watch you make her pregnant-"

"WHAT?!" the couple exclaimed.

"-but I keep telling them that won't happen, so we'll settle for a kiss instead."

"Ooooookay."

After a pause, Valka called, "Hiccup. Hiccup! We're not quite done."

"Mmmm, but I like this one," Hiccup murmured into Astrid's lips.

"I like this one too~" Astrid agreed breathily.

"...You really need to get married soon, Hiccup," Valka remarked.

Hiccup sobered, lowering his head until it rested on Astrid's shoulder. "Yeah...we really do..." he agreed quietly, suddenly feeling his father's death and the weight of responsibility pressing heavily on him. Astrid stroked his cheek in a comforting gesture.

"Hiccup," Valka said, trying to stay patient, "it's crucial that I don't move."

He took a deep breath and raised his head, though he kept his arms around Astrid's waist. "What's the next one?"

"Tell Toothless you love him."

"Aw. I love you, bud," Hiccup said, trying to get back into a playful mood.

"Oh- No, I meant, say it the way a dragon would, not in human words. Go nuzzle him."

"Heh. Okay." Hiccup went to rub his face against the Night Fury's. "This means 'I - love - you,' huh?" he chirped.

"You really do talk," Toothless marveled, "maybe it is real talk, but it's human real talk that is different than real real talk, but both of them are still real...?!"

"Now," Valka said, "pretend to be very frightened of me."

Hiccup made a show of cowering. "Nooo, Mommy, don't be mad at meee!"

"Pretend to be angry and authoritative."

Hiccup threw back his shoulders and made a sharp gesture. "Know your place, woman!" he asserted in the older generation's accent, trying to keep a straight face when Astrid made an amused "Pfft" noise behind him.

"Pretend you love me."

"Awww, Mom, I don't have to pretend that," Hiccup crooned, going over to hug her.

"Last one. You are the flock consort. Declare this in human words, but also in a way they can understand: stand next to Toothless and flare your wings."

"My wi-?" Hiccup looked down at himself, at the flight suit he still wore under the chieftain's bearskin cloak.

He went over to Toothless, crouched briefly to slide his arms through the loops of the suit, and unfurled his wings as he stood back up. The cloak caught on his arms and spread out, nicely accentuating the gesture. "I'm the flock consort, whatever that's supposed to mean!" he yelled, a little startled when Toothless flung out his wings and crowed at the same time.

The by now enormous crowd of dragons exploded into a deafening roar of response, quickly followed by excited jumping and wing-flapping and crowing that seemed almost like applause.

"Humans really can talk!"

"I can't believe it!"

"All that chitter chitter chitter actually MEANS THINGS, real things, they can talk to each other even when they don't say anything at all...!"

When the din finally faded enough for the humans to hear each other again, Hiccup asked his mother, "What was all that about?"

"Hiccup," she laughed, clapping him on the back, "you just proved to them that we humans really do have our own language."

"Well, of course we have our own language!"

o.o.o

Author's Note that I forgot to include with Smelly: I'm pretty sure that this piece of headcanon was indirectly inspired by Robin McKinley's book Dragonhaven, which is about a teenage boy who adopts an orphaned dragon hatchling. There's one part about how they use his dirty clothes and sheets to nest the hatchling in and calm her down when they're trying to deal with her separation anxiety. I combined that with my general knowledge and observations of animals and their sense of smell.

Author's Notes for this fic, Conveyance: Once again, I tried to write more of chapter 5 of Small Addition, but once again, some of the material informed me that it was a one-shot-thank-you-very-much, instead of part of the chapter. *sweatdrop*

Valka is not the sort of character I would have expected this behavior from, but ever since I wrote chapter 4, she suddenly started throwing all these plot bunnies at me and trying to steal A Small Addition To Berk's Flock away from Squirt. Hiccup, Toothless, and Astrid are all kind of sneakily going along with it, and Squirt's not bothering to protest, because he hates being in the spotlight and is secretly relieved that they're redirecting attention away from him.

So I'm thinking, maybe I'll just corral the irrelevant Valka/HiccTooth/HiccStrid plunnies (which include most of the "Hiccup learning Dragonese" scenes) into individual ficlets, and force the focus of Small Addition back onto Squirt where it's supposed to be. Because sorry, Squirt honey, but you are the whole point of me starting that fic in the first place, and everyone loves you and wants you back onscreen, and I need to get your fic over and done with so I can move on to other stories, so deal with it.

Everything's all going to continue being posted together in the same series on AO3 and FFN anyway, so it probably won't affect your reading experience too badly. (Unless the erratic chronology bothers you.) I just wanted to explain why A Small Addition To Berk's Flock keeps being interrupted by standalone ficlets that aren't necessarily in chronological order, and also why there keeps being delays with chapter 5.

Ftr, I'm now up to 5,000 words with bulbul's fic.