A/N:
Well, this chapter was a lotta fun to write. Thank you Deadly-Bagel for beta-reading and thank you, my dear reader, for joining the party.
Toothlessgolfer, yes, we can totally expect some changes in how Hiccup and Toothless feel and behave. All along, Toothless has always been a firestarter just by being, well, Toothless, and we're soon gonna see how being in Hiccup's body enables him in various amusing ways.
Wodenfang, thanks for the references on other body swap stories. Shenanigans in abundance await! I can't believe one of those stories used some magical stone as a mechanic for causing the body swap. That author must have absolutely zero imagination. :P
Dragonrider's Fury, thanks for the kind words. I think I'll take it as a compliment that you don't even know how to respond to what just happened. (-:
Coming to Terms
Toothless lurched forward after his rider, his Firefly, who was chasing after Astrid, but a hand held him back. Firefly's dam, or "Valka" as the land-striders called her, could have physically restrained him with little effort, but she only had a few fingers on his shoulder. It was nothing more than a gesture, but it was enough to make him stop and look back at her.
"Cloudjumper and Stormfly are shadowing them, Toothless," Valka said. "Hiccup will be fine. Give Astrid some time."
Toothless slumped to the ground, leaning against a wall. "Rrrrrrrraaaaaaauughhhhhhh," he half-roared, half-groaned. He then proceeded through a fit of coughing.
Land-striders never could roar properly.
With the delicate grace that didn't seem to fit a bipedal creature without even a tail for stability, Valka lowered herself to sit next to him, balancing on her toes as she went down and folding her legs over each other, all while holding the thrashing hatchling cradled in her arms.
"How are you feeling?" She asked.
"No like!" Toothless snapped.
Valka hummed thoughtfully and then said, "You understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes."
He could tell that Valka was already fairly convinced of that, but she snorted in surprise anyway.
The previous day, when he first had contact with other land-striders since moving to Firefly's body, he was taken by surprise that he could understand what they said. As a dragon, land-striders would often speak to him, but it would have been beneath a dragon to try to learn what those sounds meant. He never understood why they would resort to a sequence of guttural grunts and singsong chittering to represent the vague eddies of thought and then require the listener to reverse the process and try to figure out what thoughts those sounds were supposed to represent. It was all so silly!
Now that he was deaf to projected thoughts, with the exception of when he was touching a dragon, he could suppose that there was some sense behind speaking.
"How do you feel…" Valka started to say, but she fell silent, clearly at a loss of words, which also meant her mind couldn't process where to go with that thought. They stared at each other, then down at the fussing hatchling she was holding.
"Lonely," Toothless said as one word came to mind, and with that word, the dam broke and his thoughts flowed, to some extent. Up until now, whenever he was called on to speak, he would put his hand on Firefly's snout and receive instructions on how to wield such an ungainly means of expressing himself. The words were there, he could tell that much. Just as he had to learn to not think about walking in order to walk, and just as Firefly had to not think about flying in order to fly, there was some ability left behind by the former occupant of this body. His life winds, the thing one could not see that gave breath and thought, had somehow nested in Firefly's body, filling in the void left as Firefly's life winds nested in the dragon's. Perhaps certain habits and instincts were so deeply-rooted that they could not be blown away. Perhaps there was some turbulence as their life winds passed by each other and there was some mixing and mingling.
"Isolated," he said, focusing hard on not thinking about how to soar on the clumsy thermals of speech. Again, for some reason, moving his lips and speaking words helped him think, and thinking helped him figure out which words to use. It was a very strange process.
"Quiet." Yes, quiet. It was so very quiet, like the deafening silence that lingers after the loud crash of lightning nearby. Toothless had always been cognizant of the passive hum emitted by almost every living creature in the general area, but in this body, there was only nothingness. All the noise in the world could not drown out the silence of not being able to hear the projected thoughts of those nearby.
He looked at Valka as he found the word he needed, "Deaf." It was unnerving that first day in this body. More than anything else, he worried that all life nearby was snuffed out, including his Firefly. There was no passive hum he could pick up, and he panicked. He quickly realized that Firefly inhabited the dragon's body, but it took a while to accept and come to terms that there could be life in the empty silence.
Valka hummed and nodded. She smiled down at the hatchling in her arms, which had started to settle down. The little thing was tired from squirming and went still in sleep. No, not a hatchling. "Baby."
"Yes, baby." Valka smiled and used her free hand to tug Toothless' hand over to the baby, guiding his fingertips into the baby's little hand, then across the face. Toothless accidentally poked the eye with a claw, still clumsy in his new and strange body, but fortunately, his claw was blunt and as deadly as a leaf. The baby squirmed at that and made a loud noise.
"Cry," Toothless said.
Valka looked at him thoughtfully. "Not only can you understand me, but you can also speak." Some instinct told him that was normally a question, but in this case, it was more like a thoughtful musing.
"Yes," Toothless said. "No." He knew he could say words, but he clearly wasn't good at it. That was what Tuffnut was trying to help with, demonstrating that the proper arrangement of words could communicate one's wants and intents. "No no no no yes." It made sense to him: one-fifth able to speak if only because the words were somehow there.
To his great astonishment, Valka seemed to understand. "We'll work on that, then. I know what it's like. I spent twenty years away from human companionship. My ability to speak was starved, but it strengthened quickly after returning to Berk."
One thought was gnawing at Toothless' mind and he finally figured out what it was. Upon learning what happened to him and Firefly, everyone would react with disbelief at first, then shock, then uncontrollable amusement at the conundrum. Valka was different.
"You good?" he asked, thumping his hand against his chest to gesture at himself. Well, that was the intent, but his fingers ended up flopping against it like fish on a rope.
Valka nodded. "It was a shock, but I've learned to elevate what I can see with my own eyes above any preconceptions. I'm forcing myself to remain calm for my own sake as well as yours and the child's." She smiled and started to gently rock the baby. "There's no doubting what happened; your mind is in Hiccup's body, and his in yours. When I touched him and heard his projected thoughts, he assured me that there was nothing lost between the two of you."
"Make me me?" Toothless asked. He knew that wasn't really something that should be able to communicate properly. There were missing words, and the order–
"I don't know if we can restore you and Hiccup back to the way you were," Valka said. Toothless' jaw dropped in surprise that she understood and she laughed at that. Her face drew downward, though, as she said, "I don't understand how touching that gemstone could have caused this in the first place. Witch's curse? Act of the gods?"
Toothless slumped. "No like."
"I do not like this," Valka corrected.
"Hate speak," Toothless grumbled.
"I hate speaking."
"I not like!"
"That's improvement!" Valka said cheerily. "But it's not good enough. Try saying, 'I don't like this.'"
"Rrrrrrrrgh!" Toothless ruffled his wings in frustration. He didn't have wings, though, and one of his arms ended up brushing past the baby, setting him off crying and thrashing. Toothless instantly pulled his hands in and wrapped them around his torso as he gave a petulant look at Valka.
As the baby settled down, Valka hummed consolingly and grabbed Toothless' hand, gently guiding it to the baby's, and those tiny fingers gripped him. The dragon-turned-land-strider couldn't help but feel a thrill at evoking such a response, and he retracted his teeth into his gums and gave his signature smile… and then realized that land-striders couldn't do that.
Valka squinted at the resulting expression and instinctively hugged the child closer to herself. "We'll have to work on that, too."
########
########
"RAAAAAA!"
THUNK!
Hiccup watched through a little gap in the dense foliage to see Astrid's ax embed its head into a tree. She had always insisted that her battle cry was an important part of aiming. As she trotted over to retrieve it, Hiccup took the opportunity to slink another few silent steps closer.
"RAAAA!"
THUNK!
The tree across the clearing took the blow with a quiver up and down the trunk. It had many gouges in it, all tightly grouped, which Hiccup could clearly see even from a hundred feet away. As Astrid trotted over to retrieve the weapon, Hiccup slunk a little closer. He felt compelled to show himself to her, but he also didn't want to disturb her. After all, Astrid could be very, well, Astrid.
"RAAAAA!"
THUNK!
Something happened, and Hiccup blinked as he reassessed his surroundings, his heart pounding. He was on his back, thrashing and kicking to right himself, at least fifty feet from where he'd stood an instant earlier. Astrid's ax handle quivered in the tree next to the one Hiccup had been hiding behind. Realization dawned that instincts must have taken over and thrown him to the side.
"A raging boar is more subtle than you!" she called over to Hiccup.
He finally found his feet – paws, whatever – and slinked over to the ax. With his teeth retracted – a trick he was ecstatic to learn on the second day – he clamped down on the handle, jerked it free, and sauntered over to Astrid to offer it to her, head low, eyes downcast.
"You know I don't like it when you look at the ground," Astrid said in a measured tone.
Hiccup snapped his eyes to hers in surprise. The way she said that made it clear that she knew who she was really talking to. She didn't like it, obviously, but she was coming around to accepting that it was so.
He forced himself to look at Astrid, to really study her up and down. He made himself look at the fierce fire burning in those deep blue eyes, the strong stance of her shoulders, the corded muscles twining up and down her arms and legs, the way the tendons rippled in her neck when she turned to look at him. Ever since puberty, whenever he caught a glimpse of her, he would have certain… feelings. On the occasions she acknowledged his existence it took all his effort to not hyperventilate and pass out.
Ever since they married, back in the Fall, Astrid thought Hiccup's reaction to her staring into his eyes was adorable, and the way he forgot how to breathe when they went to bed to consummate their marriage made her laugh as she picked him up off the floor. However, humor eventually turned to annoyance, and she focused that into a sharp four-knuckled reprimand on his shoulder every time he scrunched inward and stared at the floor under her gaze – something he would have sworn was inspired by Toothless's tail-slap whenever his rider degraded himself. She was a goddess, and to look on her divine beauty felt so wrong, like he was greedily wasting the most magnificent gift the gods had ever given by accepting her relationship with a… a… a talking fishbone!
As the bruises faded and appeared less frequently, his confidence increased. She still giggled at the slack-jawed look he would give her whenever she stretched and did her pull-ups and push-ups in the morning when they were alone, but they would train their faces and put on a business expression outside the house. A chief couldn't have his mind in the clouds when managing the affairs of his tribe, after all.
As Hiccup looked at Astrid through the eyes of a dragon, though, he felt a loss clawing at his insides, nothing more. The feelings she used to inspire by simply existing weren't there anymore. He recognized that she was very athletic, strong and fast, a fine specimen of her kind and a fierce Viking. Even now, with the general looseness of her torso that resulted from the recent delivery of their son, even when she was bloated before the delivery a week ago, she still carried an impossible combination of dignified power and stunning beauty.
However, the feelings he had come to expect every time he saw her, the fluttering of his heart and… other feelings… they simply weren't there. It made sense, of course, since he was a dragon and she wasn't. The very notion of a dragon feeling aroused at the sight of a human was as silly as the notion of a human feeling aroused at the sight of a dragon. It would be silly nonsense to expect otherwise!
Astrid stared into his eyes, into his very soul, as she slowly accepted the proferred ax. She cradled it close to her torso and turned to the side, eyes closed.
"So, you really are Hiccup, my husband, in Toothless' body?"
She opened her eyes a little bit to see him gently nodding.
"RAAAAA!"
THUNK!
Without conscious thought, HIccup took a few paces towards the ax and forced himself to grind to a halt. It was instinct to chase it, to bite down on it. He gave a coy look back at Astrid and she grinned despite the situation.
"Ha! You wanna play fetch, boy? Go ahead. Go fetch!"
Hiccup let out a little warble – which had become a jarringly natural thing to do – and loped after it, focusing on not thinking about running on four legs instead of two and balancing with the tail and keeping his wings tucked in to avoid–
He stumbled and rolled onto his back, sending chunks of sod into the air from all his thrashing. Much better than yesterday! Progress was always exciting!
Ax in mouth, he trotted back to Astrid.
"And all of you is in there?" She gestured to his head. "Everything that defines my husband, the tribe's chief, the devious little inventor? It's really you, just…" she gestured vaguely to the entirety of the Night Fury in front of her.
Hiccup rolled his eyes. You just gestured to all of me, he thought to himself.
Astrid found a nearby fallen tree to sit on and Hiccup sat on his haunches on the ground in front of her, which turned out to be more difficult and felt a lot more awkward than he had ever assumed.
"Oh, the gods must hate me," Astrid moaned. "What am I supposed to do with this?" She flailed her arms at that last word and ended up laying down, her spine balanced along the log. "What am I supposed to do with you? Or Toothless in my husband's body? How are we supposed to raise our child together? And we planned on giving him a sibling next… Summer…"
Her eyes drifted downward towards Hiccup's haunches. There was nothing there, of course, at least nothing visible on the outside. He snorted at her for where her mind had drifted for a moment – another disturbingly natural gesture.
"Don't look at me like that!" she snapped. "I had a husband to sleep with, and now he's a dragon, and his dragon is my husband, and… oh, it's so confusing and frustrating! We had things all set and then you had to..."
Hiccup wilted and whined. Astrid froze. A tense moment passed.
She quickly swung a leg over to lunge into Hiccup, wrapping her arms around his neck, and Hiccup surprised himself at a snarl that he quickly suppressed. He had to remind himself that she wasn't attacking him by going for the neck. It was only a hug, a show of affection.
Besides, this is Astrid! It's not like she would attack me… except when she's forcing me to train to fight when I don't want to. At least she never hurts me… unless I deserve it. Well, she wouldn't injure me.
Astrid tensed at the unexpected snarl, but she relaxed again along with Hiccup. "I wasn't being fair, and I really am sorry, Babe," she said. "This cannot be easy for you either. It's not like you did this on purpose." She pulled back again to examine him. "Right?"
Hiccup rolled his eyes.
Astrid huffed and nodded. "Well, I guess it is what it is, but what was with that snarling?"
He stretched his neck forward to offer his snout, a common gesture that a dragon wanted to talk to a dragon whisperer. Astrid was among the handful who could hear dragons, but it required physical contact. She held up her hand and pressed a palm to the offered snout. Though the raw thoughts he projected were above and aside from spoken language, he knew that it would be internalized as such by her.
{It caught me off-guard. I felt threatened. I'm still me, but there's a little bit of Toothless in here and he's very twitchy. It won't happen again.}
Astrid pulled back to stare into his eyes. "Good," she said. She leaned forward to hug him again, slowly this time, and they sank into each other. As she stood there, eyes closed, gently stroking his eye ridges, she gently asked, "Is it… can you… get back to yourself?"
Hiccup sighed. His general resentment at the situation was something he knew Astrid could feel through that contact. No matter what they did with that gemstone that had changed them, nothing else happened.
{I don't know. I want to go back to being me. Toothless wants to be himself. Nobody wanted this and everybody wants us restored. I want to hold our child in my human arms.} He projected a torrent of impressions, memories from the past several months of all the things he had looked forward to doing as a husband and father. He still loved Astrid, and she still loved him, but so much of the experience was denied because he was a dragon. He couldn't rock their child in his arms, sing to him, bathe him, or even feel his smooth skin. A dragon could do none of that because a dragon was designed from nose to tail to be an instrument of death.
Astrid picked up all of this in solemn silence.
"RAAAAAA!"
THUNK!
Hiccup resisted the urge to go fetch the ax. Astrid was walking over to retrieve it, anyway. It was all part of her routine to work out her feelings in a way that killed trees instead of people. He was so proud of her for exercising such restraint!
Astrid yanked her ax and half-stumbled backward. "I really shouldn't be out here, exerting myself like this." She stomped her foot, and Hiccup's Night Fury senses could feel her frustration at the slight tremor in her knees. "I need to get back to my baby and… Oh, Gothi would smack me for being so foolish." She looked at the saddle and tailfin Hiccup was still wearing. "Flying is probably a bad idea?"
Hiccup nodded emphatically. Crashing into a cliffside would be… unproductive.
"Let's walk, then. Wanna give me a ride?"
Hiccup chortled as he lowered himself to the ground. He had to remind himself that he was easily strong enough to carry Astrid; the only issue was coordinating his limbs. As long as he didn't think too hard about how to walk, instincts did all that for him. They weren't that far from the village anyway.
"This is actually the sort of treatment I could get used to," Astrid said in jest as he entered a brisk trot. "Carried around by my husband wherever I go, treated like a queen. Mush dragon pony, mush!"
Hiccup chortled and flicked one of his sensor lobes against her arm. She pressed a hand to the back of his head because she just had to hear his response to that.
{Silly woman.}
Astrid snorted. "Useless reptile."
{No stealing! That's my line.}
"That's what you think!" she declared. They settled into a moment of quiet reflection, taking in everything. She eventually broke the silence by asking, "So, how exactly did you get back to Berk anyway? Did the dragons in the search party have to carry you?"
Hiccup grumbled at that, focusing on projecting his memories from the past couple of days and finding that the distraction actually made it easier to move without stumbling. He and Toothless touched that large, shining gemstone, there was a flash, and he had an alarming moment of coming to terms with learning that he had claws and a tail and wings and they always got it the way. It took him more than a moment to realize that he was Toothless, and that Toothless was in Hiccup's body.
The biggest thing to get used to, though, was the sheer amount of noise. Toothless, other villagers, even squirrels, every living thing constantly made noise. Well, not noise as heard by the ear, but they were all projecting something all the time. When Hiccup learned to hear dragons, Toothless had expressed this as a passive mental "hum". All creatures constantly produced this hum, and with the array of sensor lobes crowning his head, he was especially adept at hearing it.
The range was so great that he could notice the hum of almost any creature on the island, and through machinations far beyond his comprehension, he intuitively knew the approximate direction and distance of every creature he focused on. The island was fairly desolate, though, being small and mountainous, unfit for habitation. However, there were trees, so there were rabbits, squirrels, and other smaller wildlife, but no humans besides Toothless. He knew that for certain because his sensor lobes seemed to move on their own, aligning in accordance with some sort of deeply-ingrained instincts, and even the fish and other sea critters were exposed to him for miles around.
No wonder Toothless is so good at hunting!
The fact that Hiccup and Toothless could communicate by projecting thoughts was a game-changer. They went through a phase of flopping around as they figured out how to use their new bodies, but they always had that connection whereby they could reassure each other and explain how to eat and drink and sleep and relieve themselves.
After they both figured out walking, for the most part, they worked on flying in earnest, knowing that Astrid would go into labor any day, a week at most according to Gothi's estimation. After some practice on land, with Toothless learning how to operate the prosthetic tailfin and Hiccup learning to not think about flying so instincts could handle the wings, they took off over the ocean.
A few dunks into the ocean later, with Toothless shivering miserably and Hiccup curled around him for warmth, they decided to rest. Moving in a different body was difficult enough without the added task of also using that body to operate the levers for the prosthetic tailfin. Poor Toothless. The next day entailed more of the same bout of failures, and the day after that, Stormfly came diving at them with squawks of joy at having finally found them.
A dozen other riders and dragons descended to the beach and it took a while to get them to understand the situation. Well, the dragons understood almost immediately, but the riders were slow to accept such a concept. Fortunately, Fishlegs was a dragon whisperer, as was Tuffnut, who happened to find the predicament to be very amusing. He insisted that they should feel honored for being Loki'd by Loki himself.
Toothless had shown great progress right before the last time they dunked into the ocean just offshore, and they managed to fly off that island along with their escort with dignity… for a few beats of the wings. Toothless kicked his foot the wrong direction on the control lever to handle a sudden gust of wind and sent them sliding off-balance, but Barf and Belch, the twin-headed Zippleback that the twins rode, was there to catch Hiccup and keep him aloft until Toothless got things figured out.
The flight back was not very long as Berk wasn't that far away. When they landed – and oh what a fiasco that was – they heard that Astrid was in labor, scrambled into Gothi's hut, and Astrid knew what happened after that. Hiccup was still upset that she had kicked him out of Gothi's hut even though he couldn't really blame her. It was not the best of times for her to come to an understanding of what happened to her husband and his dragon.
From his back, Astrid snorted at that last part of the flow of impressions she received. "Yeah, sorry about kicking you out. You know I wouldn't have if I knew."
Hiccup warbled cheerfully as he continued to trot along. Astrid still loved him and he certainly still loved her. Absolutely nothing else in all of Midgard mattered in the slightest. Somehow, they would make things work. Everything would be alright.
"So," Astrid said lightly, "what shall we name our little boy? I was thinking 'Nuffink' sounds good."
Hiccup tripped on absolutely nothing and all and sprawled out on his belly, groaning through a mouthful of sod.
Astrid giggled as she righted herself on his back. "I'll take that as a yes."
