How to View Your Dragons Chapter 10
At the sound of Stoick's hammer clanging against the iron bars of the training ring, every dragon winced, even though they knew they were seeing and hearing things from the past.
"Paws! Ugh! That noise!" Sizzle protested. "I'll never get used to it."
"They know we hate that noise," Meatlug agreed. "That's why they used it against us when we fought."
"At least they've stopped doing it now," Stormfly said.
"Really?" Hookfang smirked. "Tell that to Gobber! He makes that noise all day long in their metal-working building!"
"Even Hiccup does it now and then," Toothless nodded. "Sometimes it means he's making something to help me fly better. I appreciate that... but I still hate the noise."
Sizzle shook his head in irritation. "Maybe he thinks we aren't paying attention."
"Or maybe," the Night Fury guessed, "they think we don't hear the noise if we aren't right next to it. But we're just guessing. Play!"
"You know better than that, Toothless," Stormfly almost scolded him. "You, of all dragons, should know how sensitive our ears are. See?" She gestured with a wing toward the flat panel. At the sound of Stoick's metallic clang, Hookfang's eyes narrowed. It must mean a sneak attack from behind him! He instantly attacked the only human within reach, which was Hiccup. The young man screamed and ran... and, over half a mile away, Toothless heard that scream. He leaped into action.
Others were reacting as well. Stoick shoved the Vikings aside as he ran for the entrance to the ring, while Astrid used an axe to raise the portcullis enough that she could wriggle underneath it. But none were as frenzied as the Night Fury, who somehow found the strength to claw his way up and out of the cove.
"I thought you couldn't get out of there," Belch commented. "You tried everything, but you were still a prisoner in that cove!"
"I couldn't get out when it was all about me," Toothless nodded. "But to save Hiccup, I found a little extra determination that I didn't know I had."
"And that means," Meatlug concluded, "that you care more about Hiccup than you do about yourself."
After thinking for a moment, Toothless nodded. "I guess I already knew that, but no one ever put it into words before."
"Is that a proper attitude for a dragon to have?" Barf demanded.
"It's a proper attitude for me to have," the Night Fury retorted without a trace of self-consciousness.
"But that's not how we dragons are supposed to think!" Belch argued. "Our rule has always been, 'Look out for Number One!' "
"Exactly," Toothless nodded, "and I'm still following that rule. I've just redefined who 'Number One' is."
Hiccup dodged a burst of Nightmare flame, then another one, but Hookfang was getting closer. Astrid expertly kicked a hammer up into her hands, then hurled it for a perfect strike at Hookfang's head.
"Ouch?" Sizzle asked him.
"Ouch," Hookfang nodded as he watched. "That part definitely was not fun. I, for one, am very glad that she wasn't the one who was supposed to fight me that day."
"She really was good with her weapons," Stormfly said. "It's a good thing she never got to use them in the war against us."
Hookfang hesitated for a moment, then turned and chased Astrid. Stoick flung the gateway open and bellowed, "This way!" Both young Vikings ran for the exit. Astrid made it; Hiccup turned back in mindless panic from another fire-shot, ran into the middle of the ring, and was instantly captured under the Nightmare's huge claws. The dragon stuck his head down and growled, "Got you at last, you deceiving little..."
That was when they heard the rising whistle that could mean only one thing. But before anyone could yell, "Night Fury! Get down!" Toothless charged at the ring, blasted a hole through the iron bars, and leaped through the hole onto Hookfang's back. Hiccup rolled clear as the dragons fought each other.
"Did you realize I'm more than twice your size?" Hookfang asked him condescendingly.
"Did you realize you were trying to kill the most important human in the world?" Toothless countered. "For that matter, did you realize that I'm a Night Fury?" They watched Hookfang try to bite Toothless' foreleg; the black dragon used a hind leg to kick him halfway across the ring. As he regained his feet, Toothless put himself between Hiccup and Hookfang. Twice, the much bigger dragon tried to get around the Night Fury, and twice, Toothless blocked him and forced him back.
"I have no quarrel with you!" Hookfang roared. "Just let me have the human!"
"Over my dead body!" Toothless roared back.
"I can arrange that!" the Nightmare bellowed.
"Try it!" the Night Fury shot back. "It's the last mistake you'll ever make."
Hookfang hesitated, then did something he had never done before in his life. He backed off.
"Paws!" Meatlug called. "Hookfang, did you just give up? What was going through your mind?"
"Well, I was still a little dizzy from that hammer to the head," the Nightmare began. "I'd been tricked, or so I thought, into thinking that Hiccup was a peaceful human and maybe I could trust him. Then his father made that awful noise with his hammer, and I thought it was just another battle, with Hiccup as the bait in a trap of some kind. He was against me, Astrid was against me, all the other Vikings were against me... and all of a sudden, the Night Fury was against me, too. The whole world was against me! I'm not a wimp, but nobody can fight against the whole world. That's why I gave up and crawled away. If even the other dragons were against me, then what was the point of fighting? I guess they broke my spirit for a minute, and by the time I was thinking clearly again, it was too late. They'd pushed me back into my prison cell and shut the door."
"At least they didn't kill you," Sizzle said helpfully.
"No, but it was just a matter of time until they did kill me," Hookfang retorted. "For a few quick seconds, I thought maybe, just maybe, things had changed, and maybe I had something to hope for. But it was all a cruel trick, or so I thought. I can't tell you how discouraged I was. That's why I didn't even put up a fight when the Vikings pushed me back into my cell. Toothless had beaten me on the outside, and all of them together had beaten me on the inside. Play!"
As soon as Hookfang backed off, Hiccup tried to get Toothless to back off as well. "Go! Get out of here!" But Toothless was just grinning at his friend.
"You really didn't see the danger?" Stormfly asked incredulously.
"Honestly? No, I didn't," Toothless admitted. "I mean, I just fought off a Monstrous Nightmare; what could be more of a threat than that?"
"If you're just talking about threats to Hiccup," Meatlug said, "then you'd be right."
"And that's all I was thinking about," the Night Fury admitted. "I'd never faced a threat to myself before, except for the risk of being eaten by the Queen every time I flew into the nest. I wasn't thinking about me."
"You should have been," Hookfang said as they watched the Vikings throwing themselves into the ring with battle cries. "Go! Go!" Hiccup urged him desperately.
"Weren't those Vikings paying attention?" Sizzle asked. "They just watched the Night Fury save Hiccup's life - he outfought a Monstrous Nightmare! Did they seriously think they could outfight the most dangerous dragon in existence? Half of them didn't even have weapons, and a disarmed human is a dead human!"
"For that matter," Meatlug added, "did they think the Night Fury was going to turn on Hiccup after saving him, and they had to save their alpha's son from his rescuer?"
"No," Stormfly answered sadly. "They just wanted to see a dead dragon. Hiccup was supposed to provide them with one, but he refused to kill Hookfang and he ruined their party. Now they all had a chance to catch a Night Fury instead, and that was even better. Aside from Astrid and Stoick, they'd forgotten about Hiccup already."
"I sure didn't make it easy for them, you have to admit," Toothless said as he watched himself kick and tail-whip multiple Vikings out of the way as Stoick rushed toward him. He pounced, rolled, and prepared to blast the human Alpha's head off.
"Toothless, stop! No-o-o!" Hiccup screamed.
Toothless hesitated and looked back toward his friend, puzzled. In that moment, two Vikings hit the Night Fury in the head, Spitelout pinned his head to the floor, and the fight was over. Stoick stood, weaving from the impact with the dragon and the stone floor. When his eyes cleared, they were filled with a rage that approached berserker proportions.
"Put it with the others," he snarled hoarsely.
"Why didn't he kill you when he had the chance?" Meatlug asked. "After all, a dead dragon is what he wanted."
"I can't say for sure," Toothless replied, "but I think he was even angrier at Hiccup than he was at me."
Meatlug shook her huge head. "Considering how angry he always was at dragons, that must have been really something."
They saw Hiccup stumble into the darkened Mead Hall... or had he been pushed? Stoick entered, still raging. "Paws," Hookfang said.
"No, play!" Toothless cut him off. "I need to see this. I know what happened to me at this time - they shoved me into the same prison cell as Sizzle - but I have to see what happened to Hiccup."
They watched in stunned silence as Hiccup and his father went back and forth, with Hiccup trying to defend the dragons' right to exist and Stoick barely listening to a thing he said... until his son let slip the fact that he'd ridden a dragon into the nest. When Hiccup realized what he'd said, he desperately tried to talk his father out of what he knew was about to happen. Every time Stoick opened his mouth, the dragons' mouths fell open in shock a little wider, until the moment when Stoick physically threw his son halfway across the room, cast him out of the tribe, and disowned him. "You've thrown your lot in with them! You're not a Viking. You're not my son."
"Paws," Toothless whimpered. For nearly a minute, no one said anything. Sizzle finally rubbed his nose against the Night Fury's paw, trying to help him feel better somehow.
At last, Toothless found his voice, although it was tight and grief-stricken. "Did I really see that? Did Stoick really do that to Hiccup?" No one answered, but they all nodded.
Toothless stared at the floor. "Why couldn't I have killed that human when I jumped him in the ring? Would've been better, for everyone."
"Not for Hiccup," Meatlug reminded him. "He loved his father."
"Why?!" Toothless exploded. "The father obviously hated his son!"
Stormfly felt like she had to disagree. "No, he just hated us dragons, and Hiccup had taken our side. It was nothing personal."
"Of course it wasn't personal!" the Night Fury said heatedly. "With Stoick, nothing about Hiccup was personal! Hiccup was never like family to him. He was just a successor, a protege, a kind of wish fulfillment in the next generation... and a big disappointment all around, because he succeeded at being Hiccup instead of becoming a little Stoick."
"Very little!" Hookfang chuckled.
"Shut up!" Toothless snapped. "Can't you see what that scene did to Hiccup? Can't you see what it's doing to me?"
"Sorry," the Nightmare said, backing off half a step. "I wasn't thinking."
"Then take another look at that scene, and start thinking," the black dragon ordered. They all stared at the frozen scene of Hiccup lying on the Mead Hall floor, as stunned from the shock of ultimate rejection as from the blow that put him there.
At last, Meatlug asked, "Toothless, what would you have done if you'd been there?"
"In the heat of the moment, I really think I would have killed him," Toothless said slowly. "Stoick, I mean. Hiccup couldn't have talked me out of it a second time. He attacked my human friend, and there's only one penalty for that."
"Taking him for a wild ride until he says he's sorry and begs for mercy?" Stormfly asked with a hint of a chuckle.
"Okay, sometimes there are two penalties for attacking my human friend," the Night Fury admitted, and his mood began to soften. "But Stoick never would have begged for mercy or admitted he was wrong; not from just a wild ride, anyway. Not only that, but Stoick's offense was worse than Astrid's, because Astrid wasn't his father. Family are supposed to treat each other better than that. They're supposed to look out for each other."
"And Stoick wouldn't look out for Hiccup, so you would have looked out for him instead?" Barf asked.
"Yeah, something like that," Toothless said.
"Then I'm glad you weren't there," Hookfang said softly, "because if you'd killed Stoick, then Stoick never could have led that expedition to our island, the Queen would still be ruling the nest, and we'd all still be at war with each other."
Toothless glanced at him, startled. "When I told you to start thinking, that's not at all what I had in mind. But you're right. I guess everything that happened, even that awful scene, had to play out just the way we saw it, or Hiccup never could have changed our history."
Hookfang nodded. "Even I can learn something new, if you beat me over the head with it a few times." Sizzle smirked and started to say something, but the Night Fury shot him a deadly glance, and the tiny dragon decided to hold his peace for now.
After a few more seconds, Toothless said, "Play!" They watched Stoick turn his back on Hiccup, storm out of the Hall, and order, "Ready the ships!"
"And that's it?" Barf burst out.
"He just disowned his only son, and now he walks away to plan a dragon raid without even looking back, just like that?" Belch added.
"That's one serious dragon-hater," Sizzle nodded.
"He's just a hater, and nothing else," Hookfang concluded.
"That's not totally true," Meatlug objected. "Didn't he love his late wife? It sure sounded like he missed her during that nighttime conversation with Hiccup."
"Okay, so he loved one person. Big deal!" Hookfang said with a shake of his huge head. "It's just not normal for a father to turn his back on his own son, just because the son doesn't measure up to the standard that the father created for him."
They glanced at Toothless to gauge his reaction. The Night Fury looked very, very sad, but he didn't agree with them. "There are some things I know about Stoick that you don't know yet," he said. "You'll probably see those things in a few minutes, if we keep watching the moving pictures. You may change your minds about him once you know the whole story."
"You're defending the man?" Stormfly couldn't believe her ears. "A second ago, you were ready to fireball him in the face!"
"I'm standing up for the truth," Toothless replied. "I have to do that. I'm a Night Fury! Even though the man's actions in that scene made me sick to my stomach, that's only one side of him. I said I was tempted to kill him, and I meant it... but looking back on the whole situation, I'm glad I wasn't offered the chance to do it. Stoick is a complex person, not a one-dimensional cut-out, and I don't think I'm wise enough to judge him."
"What if we got a jury of his peers?" Hookfang pressed him. "Could they judge him?"
"If he was being charged with a crime, then yes, they could," Toothless said. "But we're charging him with being a heartless jerk, and that's not a crime, the last time I looked. If it was, then Stoick wouldn't be the only Viking who would deserve to be punished. Based on the way they treated Hiccup, we'd have to banish almost every Viking on this island."
"So you're giving Stoick a pass because he was no different than any other Viking?" Belch wondered.
"No, I'm giving him a pass because of some things you haven't seen yet," the black dragon answered. "Keep watching." They watched as the island of Berk turned itself inside-out, loading all of its weapons into every ship that the dragons hadn't sunk yet. More than two dozen longships began to settle deeper into the water under the weight of battering rams, catapult parts, small arms, and every Viking who could swing an axe, men and women alike.
Then they saw Toothless struggling with a leather strap that held his mouth shut. Two more Vikings slapped a thick wooden collar around his neck. The collar was chained to ring bolts in a wooden platform, which was lowered by crane onto the largest ship. Hiccup watched from above, broken-hearted, unable to intervene.
"He knew what they would probably do to me when they were done fighting the nest," Toothless explained.
Stoick glanced up at Hiccup for a moment, then pointedly turned his back on him once again. He leaned over toward Toothless and growled, "Lead us home, devil!"
"What a nice guy," Meatlug grimaced.
"What does he know about devils?" Hookfang asked.
"It takes one to know one," Stormfly said with disgust.
"Just keep watching," Toothless told them.
The fleet sailed away toward its destiny. Hiccup just stood there, motionless, staring, long after the last sail had vanished over the horizon. Then they saw Astrid standing behind him, looking almost as mournful as he was. She stood beside him in silence for a second before shaking her head and saying, "It's a mess."
"Thank you, Sister Obvious," Sizzle muttered.
She proceeded to remind him of everything he'd just lost. "Thank you for summing that up," he sighed. "Why couldn't I have killed that dragon when I found him in the woods? Would've been better, for everyone."
"Toothless, that's almost exactly what you said about killing Stoick!" Stormfly realized.
"I suppose the two of us were starting to think alike," Toothless said.
"That sounds scary," Barf and Belch decided in unison.
"Why?" the Night Fury asked them. "The two of you think alike all the time! What's wrong with two similar minds working the same way?"
"The scary part," Barf said, "is that anyone might think like Hiccup. The inside of his mind must be a scary place."
"You only say that because you don't know him like I do," Toothless said. "But let me watch this scene. I want to know what made him decide to come after me after he'd been completely beaten into the ground."
"Yup, the rest of us would have done it," Astrid said matter-of-factly. "So why didn't you?"
"I don't know," Hiccup shrugged. "I couldn't."
"That's not a answer," she hounded him.
"W- why is this so important to you all of a sudden?" he demanded.
"Because I want to remember what you say right now."
"Why was that a big deal to her?" Meatlug asked Stormfly.
"Because Hiccup had hit bottom," the Nadder replied. "Like she said, he'd just lost everything. He was as low as a human could go. She wanted to hear his answer because his words would be a window into his heart, and it was his heart that she was beginning to be drawn to. She wanted to see who the real Hiccup was, now that everything that he valued externally had been stripped away."
"Of, for the love of... I was a coward! I was weak! I wouldn't kill a dragon!"
"He said, 'wouldn't!' " Sizzle realized.
"You said, 'wouldn't' that time," Astrid also realized.
"Oh, whatever! I wouldn't! Three hundred years, and I'm the first Viking who wouldn't kill a dragon." He turned away, unwilling to look her in the eye after admitting to such an epic failure.
"Wait a second," Hookfang said. "How did he know there weren't any others like him during those three hundred years?"
Toothless answered that. "I'm sure that, if there were any other Vikings who wouldn't do what Vikings were expected to do, their names would have gone down in infamy. Children would be raised on stories about Bjorn the Coward, or Fangert the Fearful, and how no one should grow up to be like them. If Hiccup hadn't gone after me, they probably would have used his name that way... if any of them had survived, that is."
Astrid didn't give up. "First to ride one, though. So..."
Hiccup's eyes went a bit wider as he realized that, maybe, he wasn't the failure that everyone else considered him to be.
"That's how it started!" Toothless exclaimed, coming fully alert. "That's the point where he started coming up from rock-bottom! And Astrid is the one who made it happen! Stormfly, remind me to cough up a nice fish in your rider's lap the next time I see her. She earned it right there."
Hiccup turned back to her, still in failure-admitting mode, but no longer totally defeated. "I wouldn't kill him because he looked as frightened as I was. I looked at him, and I saw myself."
"Wow," Toothless whispered. "So that's why he let me live."
"That is seriously intense," Hookfang nodded.
"It's exactly like you were saying a minute ago, Toothless," Meatlug said. "Your minds really were working like one mind! From the very beginning, it's like you were..."
"It's like we were one, from the moment we laid eyes on each other," Toothless finished for her. "I knew it after a while, but the fact that he knew it, too... wow. Just wow."
"I bet he's really frightened now," the girl went on. "What are you going to do about it?"
"What could he do?" Sizzle asked. "One skinny Viking reject against a whole tribe?"
"You still don't know what he's capable of," Toothless corrected him.
"Besides," Stormfly said, "I think I know what's about to happen, and now it all makes sense."
Hiccup shrugged. "Eh, probably something stupid."
"Good," Astrid pressed him, "but you've already done that."
That was when Hiccup's face came back to life. "Then something crazy!" He turned and took off at a run.
Sizzle realized that everyone except himself and Toothless was edging toward the flat panel. "What did he come up with?" Sizzle demanded. "Did it work?"
"Actually," Meatlug said with a growing smile, "I think I know exactly what he came up with. So do Stormfly, and Hookfang, and Barf and Belch. This is the part where we come back into the story. It's the part where Hiccup really starts to act like Hiccup."
The little Terror was beside himself with curiosity. "So? What did he do? What did he do?"
"He gave up on being a Viking and went back to doing what he does best," Stormfly told him. "Namely, being Hiccup."