How to View Your Dragons Chapter 4
The dragons were watching images of the cove on the flat panel. "Here again?" Hookfang complained. "What's so special about this place, that we have to keep coming back here?"
"You'll see, very soon," Toothless said softly. For once, he was looking forward to seeing what the moving pictures showed him. He remembered these events like they had happened yesterday... and the memories were happy ones.
They saw Hiccup entering the cove with a shield, but no visible weapon. He quickly left the shield behind when it got stuck between the rocks. Now all he had was a fish in his hands.
"He's making me hungry," Sizzle said.
"No weapon?" Barf smirked. "Was he going to hit you with the fish if you attacked him, Toothless?"
Hiccup slowly, quietly walked across the cove, looking in all directions... except the direction where the Night Fury crouched on a rock, preparing to pounce.
"Hee hee! Now you're gonna get it, pink boy!" Hookfang grinned. But Toothless did not pounce. He climbed down the rock onto the ground, smelling the fish, resenting the human. He stopped about forty feet away and rumbled at the helpless young man before him. But Hiccup did not run. He held out the fish. Toothless sniffed it, took a few steps toward him... and then pulled away, angrily growling, "This cove is a knife-free zone!"
"How did you know he had a knife?" Meatlug asked him.
"He had one before, when he almost killed me," the Night Fury answered without taking his eyes off the screen, "so it made sense to think he still had it. That was a guess, but I knew I was right when I smelled metal on him. We dragons can smell metal when the edges are new and bare, like a knife that's been sharpened recently."
"Oh, that's right," the Gronckle nodded. "I don't smell metal on Fishlegs very often because he doesn't carry anything sharp."
"Well, I definitely smelled metal on Hiccup," Toothless went on. "I now know that he works in the Vikings' metal-making building, so it doesn't surprise me that he sharpened his blade often."
On the screen, Hiccup took his knife out of his belt and dropped it. When Toothless growled again, he kicked it into the water.
"Now he's completely defenseless," Stormfly observed.
"That little knife wouldn't be of much use against a Night Fury, anyway," Hookfang countered. "He wasn't giving up much when he gave up his knife."
"Still, when he gave up the only weapon he had, it showed a lot of trust," the Nadder said.
"Or foolishness," Belch added.
Toothless' response on the screen was to sit down and widen his eyes, a pose that had reduced more than one Viking girl to mush, exclaiming, "Oh, he's so cute!" In this context, he was clearly sending a message of, "What happens next?" But he was still a Night Fury, and he was still the most dangerous enemy the Vikings ever knew, and the Viking standing before him still had no weapon or shield.
Again Hiccup offered him the fish. The Night Fury's eyes narrowed, suspicious of any human trick that this boy might be hiding. But he was very hungry, the fish smelled delicious, and the offer of food looked sincere. He approached slowly, giving Hiccup a clear view of the inside of his gaping maw. "Huh. Toothless," he said out loud. "I could have sworn you had -"
CHOMP! "...teeth," Hiccup finished weakly. The fish was gone.
"So that's what your name means!" Stormfly exclaimed. "He thought you didn't have any teeth, so that's what he called you! It's what he still calls you!"
"Did the Vikings ever give anybody a nice-sounding name?" Meatlug wondered. "Even Hiccup was in the giving-weird-names habit."
Toothless popped his teeth in and out a few times. "It doesn't matter now," he decided. "I've gotten used to him calling me Toothless even though he knows it's not the case. Should it matter, now that I know what it means as well? I'm not going to redefine our friendship over something silly like that."
They watched as Toothless backed Hiccup up against a rock, in a very similar way to what he'd done when they first met. But instead of roaring, the Night Fury coughed three times and deposited half of the fish in Hiccup's lap. Then he backed off, sat down, and waited.
"Why does he have that disgusted look on his face?" Barf wondered. "He was okay when he was holding the whole fish; shouldn't he be even more okay, now that he's holding only half a fish?"
"Toothless," Meatlug asked, "can you tell me what was going through your mind at that point?"
"Paws," Toothless said. "This might take a minute. At that moment, I was thinking that the two of us had arranged a kind of one-dragon, one-human cease-fire in the war between the dragons and the Vikings. How long that might last, I didn't know. He was kind enough to share his food with me, so I returned the favor and shared my food with him."
"Even though you were hungry and you needed that fish?" Hookfang wondered.
"Something else that was going through my mind was curiosity," the Night Fury admitted. "None of us had ever gotten that close to a human without getting hit. This human, who was smaller than the others and should have been more afraid, was playing by a different set of rules. I didn't know what his rules were, and I wanted to know. He was unarmed, so he wasn't a threat; if he turned out to be a problem, killing him would have been half a moment's work, and then I could get back to the important stuff, namely, finding a way out of that cove so I could return to the nest. In the meantime, I wasn't having any luck escaping, so I figured I might as well play along with the human and learn what I could."
When he said, "Play," the pictures resumed. Human and dragon stared at each other wordlessly for a few seconds. Then Toothless glanced pointedly at the half-a-fish in Hiccup's lap. The boy understood the message, grimaced, and took a bite.
"Why was he so reluctant?" Barf asked. "That fish looks delicious!"
"We already knew that the Vikings ate fish," Belch added, "because they caught them and hung them on racks for us to take. I would have expected him to really chow down on that fishy."
"I can answer that," Stormfly said. "Since the war ended and we took some of the Vikings as our friends, we've learned that they like to remove the scales, the bones, and the innards, and then heat their fish over a fire before they eat them. It changes the flavor to something they like better. Personally, I think it ruins the taste; I don't understand it at all. But that's Vikings for you."
Hiccup held the bite of fish in his mouth. Toothless mimed swallowing, at which point the boy reluctantly swallowed his mouthful.
"I just realized something!" Meatlug burst out. "You two were communicating! You were telling him what you wanted him to do, and he was understanding you and doing it."
"Yeah!" Hookfang added. "You were giving the orders, and he was obeying. You had the dragon-human relationship down perfectly, right from the beginning."
"That's not the way it is!" Toothless protested. "I was calling the shots at the beginning because I had a more forceful personality than Hiccup did. He's changed a lot since then, and we relate to each other as equals now. But it wasn't all me leading and him following, even then. See?" He gestured with his wing at the flat panel. Hiccup was making the bared-teeth gesture that meant "happy" among the humans. Toothless struggled, but managed to copy the expression.
"Why did that amaze Hiccup so much?" Stormfly asked.
"Because that's when he realized that I wasn't just a stupid animal," the Night Fury replied. "That was his first clue that I'm just as intelligent as he is."
"When did you realize that?" Meatlug wondered.
"I wasn't even thinking about that," Toothless said. "I'd just made first contact with a member of a hostile species and shared food with him. We had a cease-fire in our war. I was still a prisoner in that cove, and I still couldn't fly properly. I wasn't concerned at all with the intelligence of Laboratory Subject #1, which was kind of what he meant to me at that moment. He was a curiosity, nothing more. The idea that he might impact my life in some way... that idea came later."
Hiccup stared at the smiling Night Fury, amazed. He reached out to touch him. The dragon's smile vanished, replaced by a warning snarl; then the Night Fury jumped and glided away, landing quickly before he crashed.
"No touchie!" Barf and Belch chorused.
"Why didn't you let him touch you?" Meatlug asked.
"Because I somehow knew that, if I let him touch me, that would change everything," Toothless said. "We had a cease-fire, but technically, we were still enemies. I wasn't ready for a friendly gesture like that. If we stepped over that line, I had no idea what we might find on the other side. I'll admit, it was a little bit scary to think about."
"The great unknown can be like that," Stormfly nodded.
"Anyway, it felt safer to keep him at more than arm's length," Toothless went on. "Him touching me wouldn't be a threat to my life or my health, but it might be a huge threat to my way of life. I was starting to face the possibility that I might never fly again. I didn't think I could handle two big changes at the same time."
They saw him flame a patch of ground and lay down. Then he glanced up and stared at a bird that chirped and flew away. "What was the big deal with that bird?" Belch wondered.
"Yeah!" Barf added. "You were acting like you never saw a bird before."
"The bird could fly and I couldn't," Toothless explained. "Like I said, I was beginning to realize that my flying days might be done. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention that scene to the other dragons, okay? I don't want them all thinking that I, a Night Fury, was feeling envious of a little songbird." He glared at each of the dragons in turn until they nodded. They saw Toothless look down from where the bird had been, and found Hiccup sitting far too close to him.
"Wasn't he afraid of you at all?" Meatlug asked.
"He sure isn't acting like any other Viking I ever saw," Hookfang nodded. "He's got no weapon and no shield, you're a dragon, and he's following you around! He was close enough that you could have tail-slapped him if you wanted to."
"He knew we had a cease-fire," the Night Fury explained. "Exactly what he was thinking, I don't know, but he obviously figured that our cease-fire would keep him safe, no matter what he did. He was really determined to touch me, and the fact that I could blast him into a pile of fine carbon powder didn't faze him anymore."
"Did he think you were tame?" Stormfly wanted to know.
"Obviously not," Toothless retorted. "See?" They saw Hiccup reach out to touch the Night Fury's tail, then quickly retreat when the dragon lifted his tail fin to glare at him.
The lighting on the moving pictures changed. Apparently, it was now early morning, and Toothless was waking up after hanging upside-down from a tree all night. He looked around and saw Hiccup sitting on the ground, playing with a stick.
"He must have gotten up awfully early, to be there when you woke up," Meatlug commented.
"No, I think he stayed there all night," Toothless said.
"Why would he do that?" Hookfang said, amazed.
"I think he didn't want our cease-fire to end," the Night Fury replied. "At that point, it meant a lot more to him than it did to me."
Hookfang wasn't impressed at the thought. "So you had an unspoken agreement not to kill each other for a while. So what? Why was that such a big deal to him?"
Meatlug answered that. "You saw the way the other Vikings treated him, right? He couldn't arrange a cease-fire with his own people! That truce with Toothless might have been the first act of kindness he'd received in years, so of course he didn't want it to end."
"Even though it was with his people's worst enemy?" Hookfang retorted.
"He was beginning to wonder if we were really enemies after all," Toothless cut in. "We'd always thought of each other as nothing but ruthless killers. Now we were both finding out that we might be wrong, at least in regard to some individuals. He was adjusting to that idea faster than I was. For me, it was still mostly curiosity about the enemy. He wasn't treating me like an enemy, that's for sure."
They saw Hiccup making marks in the ground with his stick. It took them a few seconds to realize that he was drawing a Night Fury's head. Toothless looked over his shoulder for a moment and burbled, and Hiccup suddenly looked nervous.
Hookfang scoffed, "I'd be nervous, too, if I was him. That was a terrible portrait he drew of you! If Snotlout drew me looking that ugly, I'd stomp on the picture, and then give him a quick puff of flame, just to make sure he got the message."
"I'm a Night Fury, not an art critic!" Toothless retorted. "Also, I wasn't looking for excuses to blast him. That's one of the differences between you and me. I didn't care if it looked like me or not. I saw it and realized that I could draw pictures in the dirt, too! I'd never thought of that before; none of us did. It was something new, and it took my mind off of my tail and my flying problems for a few minutes."
"What kind of a picture were you trying to draw?" Sizzle asked as they watched Toothless excitedly making his own marks in the ground with a small tree.
"I was trying to draw Hiccup, but it didn't come out very well," Toothless admitted. "It looked more like Bart Simpson, as drawn by Pablo Picasso. Still, it wasn't bad for a first try. When I was done, I realized it could also be a game board for the old 'Don't Step On a Crack' game that dragon hatchlings like to play."
"Do humans play that game?" Stormfly wanted to know.
"At first, I didn't think so," the Night Fury answered. "I had to tell him three times not to step on the lines! I was starting to wonder if humans are really as intelligent as we thought. But he finally got the idea, and then he played the game with more style than I ever saw in a hatchling. It was almost a dance, the way he did it. He totally lost track of where he was, and he almost backed right into me."
"I was wondering why he was spinning around so much," Sizzle commented. "I thought he was trying to impersonate a Typhoomerang."
"That reminds me," Stormfly said. "What does 'Typhoomerang' mean? Is it another one of those nasty Viking names?"
"Well, the name comes from 'typhoon,' which is a tropical storm that forms in the Pacific Ocean," Toothless thought out loud, "and 'boomerang,' which is a weapon from Australia. Neither one of those things ever got anywhere near the Northland, so the Vikings couldn't possibly know those words. Fishlegs made up the name, and where he got his information, I have absolutely no idea. He must have pulled those words out of his -"
"Ask us about that later," Stormfly cut in. "I think this part is important. He's trying to touch you again."
"Yes, and I warned him off again," Toothless said. "If I'd known that he was every bit the boar-headed, stubborn Viking that his father ever was, I might have played that scene differently, and who knows what might have happened? But watch what happened next!"
The dragons stared in silence as Hiccup looked away, closed his eyes, and held out his hand.
"Oh... my... gosh," Stormfly whispered, wide-eyed. "He's defenseless!"
"Any other dragon would have taken his hand off," Belch commented, but without his usual cocky tone.
"One chomp," Hookfang said quietly, "and he'd be a lefty forever."
"He already was a lefty," Toothless replied, just as quietly. "But do you see what he did? He knew I could bite his hand off, he half-expected me to do it, and he held it out anyway. He totally put his future and his well-being in my control." The Night Fury took a breath. "He trusted me."
"In the middle of the war, a human trusted his life to a Night Fury," Meatlug whispered. "Wow. What did that mean to you?"
"It completely blew me away," Toothless admitted. "I'd seen that Hiccup was non-violent, he was intelligent, he was curious, and he was determined. That meant that, on the inside, he might not be so very different from a lot of dragons I know. But this... this went way beyond what I'd expected. This wasn't just a truce, or a sharing of food, or an appeasing of his curiosity. With one bite, I could change his life forever, and he knew it. And he was willing to take that chance! I asked myself, 'What is so important about touching me, that he's willing to run such an awful risk?' The only answer that made any sense was, 'He really, really wants to be my friend.' He couldn't rub noses with me, the way we dragons do when we show affection, but he wanted something like it, and he was willing to risk losing his hand to get it."
"How could a dragon become friends with a human in the middle of a war?" Hookfang asked.
"I didn't know the answer to that," the black dragon said, "or to any of the other questions that flooded into my head, except for one. The one question that I could answer was, 'Am I willing to be his friend in return?' You know I'm the only one of my kind for at least a thousand miles. I didn't have any real friends in the nest. None of you mocked me or rejected me, the way Hiccup's peers did to him, but in many ways, I was as isolated as he was. I knew what it means to be lonely. I needed a friend, especially in that dark time of flightlessness, and suddenly, out of the blue, came an offer of friendship from a member of a hostile species. And how was I supposed to react to that? There was only one thing I could do."
"You chomped him?" Barf wondered.
"And missed?" Belch added.
"No, Night Furies never miss," the black dragon said. "I didn't chomp him. I showed him that he could trust me, and that I trusted him as well." They saw him lean forward, hesitate for a moment, and then make contact with Hiccup's outstretched hand. Hiccup flinched; the dragon snorted and pulled away. The moment had passed.
"But I was right," Toothless whispered. "That moment really did change everything."