A/N:
I know what you're thinking. "It's about time you posted, Fizz. Three weeks?! Really? What am I not paying you for?" I'm back on track, though, with a new chapter ready for my beta BEFORE posting the current one. Anyway, thanks for reading and especially thank you to those who review or PM. I love hearing from ya!
Dragonrider's Fury, thanks for dropping a line. Plenty more chaos and craziness to come, I assure you.
Toothlessgolfer, Oops, yeah, back to the cave as you suspected. I try to keep my narration terse, but maybe I should mentions such details lol.
Epclaymore, I'm not sure if I am physically capable of writing a story without throwing in at least one dream sequence. It's just such a potent storytelling mechanism!
Big Pill to Swallow
Over the years, one thing Hiccup had noticed about every dragon rider was that they always enjoyed flying, if not from the first flight with their dragon, then after they learned to conquer their fear of falling. However, while those first few flights would always be unfathomably scary and exhilarating, the intensity would eventually fade. Flying would always be fun, but after months or years, it would lose that feeling of taking a leap of faith.
Hiccup noticed it even in himself too. Sure, he always had to check if the saddle, tailfin, or rigging was too frayed and weak – his first lesson on that above the clouds was the last one he ever needed – but that thrill of flying between islands was never quite as intense as in those old days before they took down the Red Death.
However, as he flapped his wings, twisted his tail, adjusted his tailfin, and felt his rider adjust its counterpart, he felt that heart-stopping thrill again. When he was a rider, flying was a game of "Follow the Leader", but now that he was a dragon, it was like balancing on a floating log, always teetering on the edge of disaster, always reassessing and finding his balance, and that was while flying in a straight line in good weather. Add to that a rider who, despite being the master of flight his whole life, wasn't used to using a foot to control a tailfin, and the balancing act on the wobbly log suddenly became more interesting.
And yet, despite all that, Hiccup couldn't help but feel amazed at how easily he could focus on the things around him without losing focus on his flying. It was almost a passive act, as natural as breathing, to be able to notice and contemplate everything he saw and heard, to be fully attentive to the conversation around him – not just their words, but the emotions and other subtle signs he could pick up – and recall every moment in immaculately perfect detail later to comb through it at his leisure.
For example, when Fishlegs commented on how smooth and natural Hiccup's flying had become, Hiccup had replied – with Meatlug relaying his projected thoughts to her rider – that an uneventful flight was a good thing in his book. It wasn't until later that Hiccup realized just how strange it must have been for a dragon, who typically conveyed thoughts in every way except with words, to somehow mash a figure of speech into his projection, or how such an expression didn't quite fit someone in the body of a dragon. He had noticed that Fishlegs paused ever-so-slightly as his dragon relayed that projected thought to him, and that the emotions carried on Tuffnut's hum indicated that he thought that was amusing, but he didn't say anything about it.
It wasn't worth revisiting, though, since the conversation had already shifted back to what it had been for the entire flight, which was Fishlegs hardly pausing for breath to ask question after question, like "Toothless, on a scale of one to twenty, how would you rate yourself now in terms of being easily provoked?"
Toothless hummed in thought about that. "Not as hard to control feelings," he said. "Rage not push into mind as hard. Not see one threaten Firefly yet, so not sure. Hrrrr… Ten?"
"That's amazing!" Fishlegs said. "That's half compared to when you were a dragon."
Hiccup instantly reached the implication there. {The highest is twenty. His book says there is no other creature as easily provoked as you when you were in your normal body.}
Toothless crossed his arms. "I not that easy make mad."
Ruffnut awkwardly coughed and Tuffnut avoided Toothless' eyes as he cast about for some support.
"Well, you've always been…" Fishlegs started to say, but he faded off. "What I'm trying to say is that, well, you've always been kinda… Ya know, whenever someone does something you don't like, your response is always very... Toothless."
"I not know what you mean," Toothless insisted. To Hiccup's surprise, he could detect only honesty there.
"Says the one who tried to strangle me to death this morning," Fishlegs groused.
Toothless huffed at that. "I not get mad. I get even."
"You and Astrid both!"
Toothless smiled. "She is most dragon-like land-strider!"
"Nevermind," Fishlegs said, waving it off. "On a scale of one to twenty, how would you rate your memory?"
"You know," Toothless said. "You see Meatlug share memory. She crack egg. Alive then, remember then. All details, though blind and deaf. Only feel and smell… after coughing stuff out. Dragon never forget anything." He smirked. "You not remember her name sometimes."
Fishlegs flushed. "It was only one time that I forgot her name. And I was…" he paused in thought. "indisposed. I'm curious about you, though, because Meatlug has always been a dragon and still is, but not so with you."
"Hrrrr," Toothless growled, "I not know. Ten?"
"Let's try this. Can you recall… oh… how many Vikings were on the ship with you when you were sailed to dragon island?"
Toothless made a face. "Rrrr, happy memory that is." He then grinned. "I say what not so! I do sarcasm!" He sobered and frowned in thought. "Rrrr, seven? Yes, seven."
Fishlegs blinked. "Alright, I wasn't there, so I don't know why I asked that question. How about this. How many fireballs did you shoot at the Red Death that day you fought her?"
"Stupid name!" Toothless snipped.
"Whatever. Can you recall how many?"
"Rrrrr, one, two, four, seven… eight. Eight?"
Surprisingly, though Hiccup wasn't really paying attention, he could instantly recall every detail of every moment, including every time he had hunched down and closed his eyes in anticipation of one of Toothless' fireballs shooting out and exploding.
{Nine fireballs, by the way}.
"I had to update your shot count, and I think it was nine, right?" Fishlegs asked. "Oh, thanks Meatlug, if Hiccup says it's nine…" His eyes suddenly bugged out. "I wasn't going to go there yet, but Hiccup, your dragon mind is helping you remember little details?"
{Yes, I was there. Of course I remember what happened.}
"... Huh…" Fishlegs said, clearly lost in thought, but he quickly shook himself back to the present. "Alright, Toothless, and how many fireballs did you shoot at Drago's Bewilderbeast on Berk?"
"One, four, five, rrrrrr, nine… Eleven."
{Well, technically, ten fired at the Bewilderbeast, not including the one to break apart the solid chunk of ice we were trapped in.}
Hiccup was astonished to realize that he instantly knew the answer to that. The memories flowed like a gust of wind, and details instantly came together to tell him what he wanted to know. The things were seen with his human eyes and the memories were stored in his human mind, but every detail of every person and object was as clear as if he was seeing it in the moment. Hmmm...
"Rrrr, I see but not know, think but not remember!" Toothless fumed in frustration. Hiccup crooned consolingly and his rider instantly calmed down.
"So, we'll say thirteen out of twenty for recollection."
"One!" Toothless insisted. "Or lower. What less than one? Zero?"
"Pah, that's a myth," Tuffnut insisted. "Don't believe the lies."
"That not make sense," Toothless said. "What if you stand on ground, then how high are you?"
Fishlegs opened his mouth to respond, but Ruffnut cut him off with a roll of her eyes. "Well, you wouldn't be any high at all, so it's an invalid question. Duh! It's like asking what type of dragon I am when I'm not a dragon in the first place."
"But–" Fishlegs started to say.
"What if you have half mug of ale and drink half mug?" Toothless asked.
"Then–" Fishlegs started to say.
"Easy!" Tuffnut crowed. "You'd have a mug and that's it. Except there would be some still stuck to the insides, so you'd get your tongue in there and lick it up. Then people look at you like you're weird, so you cluck like a chicken until they ignore you so you can take their mug, and now you have a full mug. Problem solved!"
"But–" Fishlegs started to say.
Ruffnut shrugged and said, "I mean, if you wanted to try to force such a notion as a number, which means something, to represent nothing, then I guess you'd have zero cheese in the mug, and zero dragons, and zero brains."
"But–" Fishlegs started to say.
"I mean, you don't want to have zero brains, right Fishlegs? So how can zero be a number unless you have zero brains?"
Fishlegs stammered, "But… That… You're just trying to confuse me!"
Hiccup yawned. He had zero clues why he was even listening to this chatter.
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Hiccup arrived at the island where all this trouble started, and he was proud of himself for almost not landing so hard that his legs buckled and his belly painfully smacked against the ground.
He wanted to "look" inside the cave, and by simply willing it, his sensor lobes flared and felt around for anything he could pick up inside. If there was any living creature, it would be throwing off some sort of mental hum that he would be able to pick up. Yesterday, when he landed on Berk, he almost had a panic attack at the unfathomable deluge of information he was picking up from so many people without even trying, but he settled down when he realized it wasn't overwhelming to his new dragon brain.
The cave was home to nothing alive that Hiccup could sense aside from little critters that he could somehow identify as rats.
They took a few steps in, Hiccup leading the way, but Fishlegs said, "Hold up." He rummaged through his saddlebag and pulled out a torch. "Hey, Hiccup, can I get a light?"
Hiccup stared at him for a moment. Right, dragons could breathe fire, and not everyone could see in the dark like a Night Fury. Meatlug couldn't light the torch because hurling a glob of molten lava wasn't exactly useful or safe. Asking the Zippleback to light the torch would be explosively unproductive.
Hookfang could simply spit out a little puddle of burning fuel, but he was unavailable as he was out with Snotlout on… something… Valka said it was an "important task" she sent him on when Astrid's water broke, just to keep him out of trouble. Even after Hiccup had married Astrid, Snotlout would still flex and leer around her, and it was always quite awkward. Astrid had her bets that he might become so desperate he might even start chasing after Valka, as stupid as that sounded.
Fishlegs wiggled the torch and Hiccup shook himself back to the moment. "I've seen Toothless breathe out a narrow plume of fire before, Hiccup. Is that something you can't do right now?"
Hiccup grunted and figured he'd give it a shot, so he tried to feel around inside his mouth and neck to make it happen. Suddenly, he felt something open, and the fuel started to flow into his mouth. It just felt right, and it took him a moment to realize that he was emitting a banshee shriek that was building in intensity–
"No!" Toothless shouted as he lunged to hug Hiccup's maw. "Stop! Swallow!"
Hiccup froze, forcing himself to stop whatever it was he was doing, and swallowed the nasty stuff. It made him want to vomit.
So this is how it felt when I stopped him from killing my dad in the Kill Ring.
"I'll get a flint," Fishlegs sighed as he turned to rummage through his saddlebag.
A moment later, after some scraping and muttering, he managed to get the torch lit. Barf lowered its head to offer to hold it, and Fishlegs let the dragon grab it in its teeth. The head rose up near the ceiling of the tunnel, which wasn't that high, to cast the light farther without blinding anyone.
Hiccup knew that must have been the head that felt like being kind and charitable for now, as the other head would always be haughty and aggressive. That was a constant, that the two heads would behave differently, but they would frequently switch roles with no discernable pattern. To make matters even more confusing, even with all the resources Hiccup had at his disposal to communicate with dragons, he still couldn't make heads or tails of whether the dragon had one or two minds, and they both sounded the same to him but different at the same time.
They moved through the cave, caution clashing with excitement.
"Hey, Toothless," Fishlegs whispered, "on a scale of–"
"No," Toothless huffed in irritation. "You ask a hundred questions already." Technically, it was only nineteen, but Hiccup wasn't counting until just now when he almost instantly reviewed the entire flight over.
"Hmm, that would be a solid eighteen, then," the rotund rider muttered. Hiccup didn't even want to know what trait Fishlegs had just evaluated.
It didn't take long for them to find the chamber with the gemstone on the pedestal that had forced his soul into a dragon's body. Everyone rushed up to it as they entered the room, eager to lay their eyes on the mysterious artifact.
"Huh, well, I guess that's that," Tuffnut said.
"Yep, boring," Ruffnut sighed. "Time to go home, I guess."
"I see nothing wrong with–" Fishlegs started to say, until he noticed the expression on the twins.
Tuffnut scoffed. "But it's so anticlimactic! I was hoping it woulda been swiped by somebody and we'd have to track it down. Ya know, maybe interrogate some people, get captured by dragon trappers and figure out how to break free, the fun stuff!"
Fishlegs rolled his eyes and then nosed in to carefully examine the gemstone that was resting in its cupped stone hands. "I'll pass on that, thank you very much. I suppose, just for the sake of thoroughness, let's try having Hiccup and Toothless touch the stone to see if it puts you back in the right place? Now that it's had some time to rest… maybe?"
Tuffnut stared at it, stroking his chin. "Hey, Ruff, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
They looked at each other and grinned, then they rushed toward the gemstone, hands outstretched. Fishlegs quickly plucked them up by the scruff of their coats and said, "No! Bad Nuts!"
"Aw!"
"Spoilsport."
"Killjoy."
Fishlegs sighed as they thrashed and kicked in futility. "Hiccup, Toothless, just give it a shot before they do."
Hiccup approached the stone and nosed it as Toothless placed a palm on it. Nothing happened. Licking it made no difference – for either of them.
"... And?" Fishlegs asked.
Suddenly, the one-legged rider smiled widely and proudly declared, "It work! I Hiccup again!"
"Ugh! So boring!" Tuffnut said.
Fishlegs' eyes practically popped out of his head. "Really?! It worked? Hiccup, that's really you?!"
"Of course it worked," Ruffnut sighed. "I kinda miss the whole 'Toothless is Hiccup' gig."
"Hmm," Tuffnut drawled out, "doesn't quite roll off the tongue if ya know what I mean, sis."
Ruffnut brightened. "We could shorten it to Too–"
Fishlegs slapped a hand over each of their faces. "That's enough of your silliness!" He let out a wistful sigh. "I must admit, though, I will miss all the experiments I planned to carry out. Hiccup, Toothless, you're really back in your original bodies?"
"Yes! It work! I Hiccup and–"
Hiccup smacked his rider with his tail, sending him sprawling out on the ground where he laughed raucously. Toothless paused to look at Fishleg's glare, which only threw his hysteria to new heights.
Fishlegs dropped the twins. "Ha. Ha. Ha. So. Funny." He sighed. "If it didn't work, then I guess we copy the writing on the walls and take the stone home. Maybe Gobber or Gothi can figure something out."
"But we've hardly tried to use the soul-swapping stone again," Ruffnut whined.
"What else is there to do?" Fishlegs asked.
"Swallow it! Duh!"
Fishlegs crossed his arms. "Why would Hiccup eat the stone?"
"Why would he not eat the stone?"
The two stared at each other. "I must admit, my sister's logic makes sense," Tuffnut said
"Aww, thanks Bro."
"With this unprecedented event, we should also check if Helheim has melted while we're at it."
Ruffnut glared at him and he cringed.
Fishlegs shared a look of longsuffering with Hiccup before he pulled out a notebook and charcoal pencil from his saddlebag and started copying the various runes and drawings, tongue sticking out in concentration. Hiccup padded up to him and nosed his arm.
{You do realize you're surrounded by dragons, right?}
The rotund rider didn't even pause in his work. "Yes…"
{And dragons have a perfect memory?}
"Uh… huh…"
{And it would take only an instant for us to see every marking on every wall?}
"Mmm… hmmm…"
{And you can see what we've seen at any time in the future for reference?}
Fishlegs suddenly froze and his eyes bugged out. His pencil and notebook dropped to the ground.
"Oh," he squeaked out. "I never thought of that, but you're right!"
"So, wait, lemme get this straight," Tuffnut said, "For the past four years, ever since we learned we could hear dragons, all our time spent writing stuff was a waste of time? We could have always just said, 'Hey, you there, dragon, listen to this story so you can recite it to people word-for-word in your magical thought projections'?"
Hiccup thought about that for a moment. It actually made sense. Humans would provide inventiveness and dragons would provide perfect memory, not just of words but of images, sounds, smells, everything. Even though a dragon wouldn't live forever, all that information could be quickly shared with the next generation of dragons. Such a feat had already been pulled off by the dragons that Berk used to capture and trap in the Kill Ring for dragon training. For three hundred years, bits of knowledge were acquired over time, and as long as there was always one surviving dragon, he could pass on all that knowledge to the next ones to be captured and thrown in there.
He stared with crossed eyes, jaw hanging, limply nodding.
Fishlegs' chin was bobbing up and down, but he finally managed to say, "So, you're saying that dragons can be, like, our own… uhhh... 'personal dragon assistant'? I dunno, sounds kinda derogatory, then people will just call them PDAs.
Tuffnut snickered at that. "Can I attend your birthday celebration? Hmm, let me check my PDA. Hey, Barf, is anything else going on two days from now?"
"Well that's just great," Ruffnut said, throwing her hands up. "And now petty mortals like me who aren't dragon whisperers will be left in the dark."
"Eh, don't worry, you have your magnificent brother to guide the way."
Ruffnut socked Tuffnut, sending him into the wall to ooze to the ground.
"I suppose it does make sense, though," Fishlegs said. "Alright, Hiccup, Meatlug, BB, if you wouldn't mind sharing later, could I ask you to take a look at all the markings on the walls?"
Hiccup had already looked at every bit of every surface and was thinking about it all. A lot of it was in languages he didn't know. By comparing all that he saw on the walls against all the books that had ever passed under his eyes when trading with Johann, he recognized some of the languages to be French, Greek, and Latin, but he had no understanding of what any of it said, and there were other languages he had never seen before.
There were some crude drawings of two people with some sort of marking between them, presumably indicating the swapping of souls, and in one drawing, it was a man and a dog. Poor dog. Or maybe it was a wolf? Or a yak? The drawing wasn't exactly… good.
Still, it was encouraging to know that this had happened to past generations, which would explain why the local populace was taught that this cave was cursed and haunted. If this soul swap had happened before, it could happen again, which would surely reverse what was done, right?
Right?
There was a little bit of Norse on the walls, like a short statement about touching the stone to walk in another man's boots. Then there was something confirming Gobber's theory that the metaphorical bucket had been emptied and would need to be refilled. A short statement suggested that it was the sunlight conveniently falling on the stone through a crack in the cave ceiling, or "sky light" as it was phrased.
The writing mentioned a certain figure. One hundred. A hundred days in the body of a dragon before he could go back to having opposable thumbs would make the transition just as jarring and…
No, not a hundred days, but a hundred cycles… of the sun… Oh, so a hundred days then. No, no, there was also a mention of seasons, and a snippet about years passing with no activity from the stone...
Hiccup's jaw dropped.
A hundred seasons?! That would be twenty-five years! He would be an old man by then!
No, no, not a hundred seasons. There was that cycle, there. Someone had marked and tracked the passage of not just the individual seasons but the cycle of the seasons, hence the mention of the sun too.
Hiccup flopped to the ground and thrashed around wildly, whining loudly. It would take a hundred years to "refill the bucket".
"What is it, boy?" Fishlegs asked, his eyes wide with concern. "Err, I mean, Hiccup."
Toothless crouched over Hiccup's head and he stilled. "What make Firefly sad? Tell Toothless."
Toothless pressed his hand to Hiccup's head and Hiccup shared his epiphany.
Toothless flopped to the ground and thrashed around wildly, whining loudly. "Hundred!" he howled. "Long time! Not like!"
"What's a hundred what?" Ruffnut asked.
It took some time, but Hiccup and Toothless eventually stopped writhing around in grief and managed to compose themselves enough to communicate what they had learned.
"So, let me get this straight," Tuffnut said. "It'll take a hundred years for this stone to do its soul-swapping thing again? Aw, man, I was gonna use it to Loki someone like they've never been Loki'd before! Now I gotta find a woman and make children so they can carry on my mission."
A certain Night Fury and his rider glared and snarled at Tuffnut.
Fishlegs mused, "But if we have to wait a hundred years to use this thing again, that would make Hiccup– err, his body…"
"I believe the scientific term would be 'dead'," Ruffnut tossed in sullenly.
"Hiccu…ps body, at least," Fishlegs said, "but what of Toothless, I wonder – I mean his Night Fury body? How long do dragons live?"
That was an unknown among even the dragons themselves. Hiccup had heard from the dragons that came from the Red Death's nest about how their overlord culled the population around the age of thirty, as their minds would start to grow resilient to her control with the passage of time. The oldest dragon they knew about was Gothi's Terrible Terror, Nose, who was a subject in Gobber's "Dragon training" class for twelve years before Hiccup ended the dragon war. The Terror had once shared about how he was the eldest because he was captured around thirty years old, and if it wasn't for that, the Red Death would have soon ordered him to fly into her maw before he would become too rebellious.
No, Hiccup suddenly realized that Nose wasn't actually the eldest anymore. Cloudjumper got lucky when he "woke up" from the mind snare during a raid. The Red Death had been a little laxer back then, and the dragon was able to pull himself out of the mind snare all by himself. That was the night he snatched up Valka and flew her off, so that would have been when Hiccup wasn't even a year old, still in the crib. Therefore, Cloudjumper was about thirty when he flew off twenty years ago, making him fifty years old and the eldest of all dragons known to Hiccup.
Hiccup looked at Meatlug and Barf and Belch. {Do either of you know if Cloudjumper would be considered old? Would he be in the latter half of his life expectancy?}
Both dragons responded with a noncommittal projection of uncertainty. Nobody knew what constituted "old" for a dragon. Neither Nose nor Cloudjumper were showing any visible signs of age in their scales, hide, energy levels, or appetite. It was known that dragons started mating around fifteen years old, but if their minds started to resist the Red Death's control at thirty, maybe that was a sort of mental puberty for them, and they could live to be hundreds of years old? Maybe even thousands? It was something Hiccup never thought about. The one time someone had brought it up, Toothless sat on Hiccup until he promised that they would both die together in a blaze of glory before either of them died of old age to leave the other behind and lonely.
Head hung, tail dragging, Hiccup started to slowly plod his way out of the cavern, Toothless clenching one of his sensor lobes. Behind him, he could hear everyone jogging to catch up.
"Hiccup…" Fishlegs started to say.
"Sorry, dude," Tuffnut said forlornly.
"Maybe Hiccup's wrong," Ruffnut said hopefully. "Maybe he misunderstood?"
"No," Fishlegs said. "I checked the writing with my own eyes. And Meatlug's. It really says… Oh Hiccup, I'm sorry."
"Maybe it's the start of a new life?" Tuffnut suggested.
Nobody answered him.
