Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise; if you're on this site, you know the drill. Also, thanks are owed to athingofvikings, who gave me a much-appreciated sounding-board for a few aspects of my planned world-building for this particular crossover; hope you like it.

Feedback: Appreciated as always.

The Dragon of Wanheda

Sitting in the main meeting area with the familiar team of Riders, Hiccup pondered the events of the day.

It may not have seen them make much progress in their campaign against the hunters, but he felt satisfied that they'd made a difference in their own small area of the Archipelago. The Titan Wing Nightmare had been driven off, Girl Hookfang (Gods, he wished someone had come up with a better name than that) had hatched her eggs, and Snotlout and Hookfang were back together. They were going to need to give Girl Hookfang a few days with her babies before she took them somewhere else, but it didn't seem like any of their dragons were going to have trouble accepting her presence for the moment, and she in turn seemed to appreciate them easily enough so long as they didn't come too close to her nest.

Frankly, what impressed Hiccup most at this point was how well Clarke had coped with everything. Admittedly, all she'd done was go for a quick flight before the rest of them showed up, but once she'd established what was going on she'd backed off to let them handle things on their own rather than trying to step in and impose her own view on the situation. She had a strength of character and focus that put him in mind of Astrid and the other female Riders, but at the same time she wasn't arrogant enough to try and force her views on a situation until she knew the full picture, and also recognised the potential limits of her knowledge.

He still had a few questions behind where she had come from or exactly what had driven her away from her people, but so far he had no reason to believe that she was here to harm them. He'd sent Fishlegs to discreetly check up on her while she was in the tower- Meatlug might be slow, but she could be surprisingly quiet so long as she had an open space to fly in- and Clarke genuinely seemed to be focusing on her assigned task, which at least gave Hiccup some assurance that her interest in helping them was real.

"So," Astrid looked over at Hiccup with a curious stare/smile as they settled into position, "is there a reason Clarke's out there and not in here?"

"She volunteered for watch duty when I suggested we talk about the day's events first-"

"And we've had all six of us here rather than leave anyone on watch when it was only six of us on this island; I repeat, why isn't she here?"

"I can fill that in," Tuffnut raised one hand with his usual bored nonchalance when discussing a topic he thought should be obvious. "We still haven't decided if we're even going to let Clarke stick around."

"Why shouldn't we?" Fishlegs looked at the male twin in surprise.

"The fact that she's not one of us?"

"Excuse me?" Astrid looked at Tuffnut with a pointed expression. "You're going to use that when you were the one nominating her to take Snotlout's place just yesterday-?"

"Hey, I was just going with the flow; I wasn't expecting anyone to take me seriously!" Tuffnut cut in, raising his hands defensively. "I mean, I'm not saying Clarke seems like a bad person, , and Griffin's kinda cool as non-Zippleback dragons go, but none of us just got to be part of this team, OK? We spent the last few years protecting Berk and fighting the nastiest, smelliest, most disgusting and often insane dragons out there; how many times have we almost gotten killed doing it?"

"And that rules Clarke out because…?"

"Well, why should she just get to waltz in here and join us like that?" Tuffnut continued. "I mean, we never even let Gustav join and that kid spent years training for the job once he found Fanghook; this girl just stumbled across a Windstriker, tried to fight off a few hunters, and we're bending over to give her-?"

"OK, I'll stop you right there," Hiccup cut Tuffnut off. "We're not 'bending over' to give her anything. I found someone who was trying to protect an injured dragon, helped her fight off its attackers, and offered to give her somewhere she could rest and learn more about dragons after she made it clear she wasn't dangerous."

"And you can't compare her to Gustav," Astrid cut in. "I get that he's not a bad person, but everything he did was about showing that he could be part of the group without thinking about the dangers of it; Clarke's priority so far has always just been protecting Griffin, and today's events at least suggest that she's willing to do that for other dragons."

"Exactly," Hiccup nodded. "I get that we haven't had anything big to really test her since she came to the Edge, but keep in mind that she recognises enough about the situation here to realise when she should stay out of something rather than trying to butt in when she could make some ignorant mistake."

"She is a lot more cautious than half of us, certainly," Astrid smiled even as she shot the twins and Snotlout a particular stare at that comment.

"And I'm not saying that automatically qualifies her to become part of the group, but it's an important character trait we can't overlook, anyway," Hiccup continued. "I agree with Tuffnut's basic point that we shouldn't tell her all about the Dragon Eye right away, and I think we should give her a little more time to be sure we can trust her with anything bigger than watch duty, but… well, it can't hurt to see what she has to offer, and at the very least we can make sure that she knows how to take care of Griffin before she decides to move on."

"Hiccup's right," Astrid nodded.

"Big surprise…" Snotlout grumbled.

"I agree," Fishlegs added.

"Eh… can't fault that plan, I guess," Ruffnut observed. "Give her a bit more detail without telling her anything that might work against us if she decides to go nuts or pull a Heather… so long as we give her a few chances to prove herself without forcing her to do anything she wasn't going to do anyway, and it could work."

"Right…" Hiccup nodded thoughtfully for a moment before he came to a decision. "Ruff, Tuff, you'll be responsible for keeping an eye on her for the next few days."

"Us?" the twins said simultaneously.

"You're both fairly good with how to train dragons and any hand-to-hand instruction she might need when you apply yourselves, but if we have to leave the island for a while… well, to be blunt, right now we're doing better with hit-and-run tactics against the hunters, and that's not quite one of Barf and Belch's strengths."

"Hey!" the twins objected.

"No, he's right," Astrid nodded. "We're all qualified flyers by now, so there's no risk of you getting rusty if you stay behind for a while, but Zipplebacks are best when our main goal is to cause a lot of damage. When we're trying to rescue dragons as our primary objective, it might be best if we're not indiscriminately gassing our targets and blowing up boats."

"You really like taking the fun out of it, don't you?" Ruffnut glared at Hiccup.

"Just being practical," Hiccup responded. "If we encounter a big enough base within the week, I'll be sure to let you both know and Fishlegs can take over as Clarke's observer, but that same raw power means that you're the better choice to keep an eye on her if she turns out to be planning on tricking us later."

He sat back in his chair and looked thoughtfully around the group. "That said, there is something I think we should ask her about before we make a final decision one way or the other…"

As the riders flew back towards the coast, Clarke wondered if what she was about to do was the best move. When Hiccup had asked about the possibility of them going back to Arrow Station to salvage some of the metal for their own use, it had been a refreshing change to realise that he was legitimately just asking for the metal rather than making it a condition of her staying on the Edge. She was fairly sure that there was no active technology left in the station that anyone here would be able to adapt, so she didn't have to worry about giving anyone something they could set off by accident, but she still wasn't sure how much of her real past she should or even could actually share with her new friends.

I mean, the Grounders attacked us at first because they thought we came from Mount Weather, and then the Mountain attacked us because they'd spent decades thinking of themselves as being better than everyone else; how will Berk react to seeing the Station?

She'd heard nothing to indicate that these people knew the full nature of the world they lived in so far, but at the same time it was hard to be sure if that was because they just didn't know Earth's real history or if they just hadn't had a reason to talk about it. There were so many details about daily life back on the Ark or in the Coalition that nobody would have mentioned to anyone on the other side because they just didn't think about it, so why would any of these apparent Vikings have reason to tell her about the… the rain of fire that had remade the world a century ago or something like that?

God, from what she remembered of her father's stories about how the Dragon Sanctuary had been designed to give people a vast role-playing experience, it was possible that these people didn't even know about the world that had been before. After the bombs fell, assuming that the Dragon Sanctuary had come through mostly intact, maybe any survivors of the bombs had just started relying on what resources were available rather than trying to rebuild to the level of technology they'd had before? From what she could remember, the Sanctuary had been set up as though it was dragons and Vikings living together; maybe the Sanctuary's last guests had just reached a point where they believed everything around them had been records of a real history?

OK, so I'm fairly sure the original Vikings couldn't create something like that dome or Hiccup's fake leg, but there's still nothing to indicate that they started out with anything more advanced than that…

"You OK?"

"Fine," Clarke looked back at Fishlegs with a reassuring smile as the larger teen flew into position alongside her and Griffin. She'd managed to work out a basic plan to go along with Hiccup's request that relied on most of the dragons to collect what the young Viking was after, Clarke only revealing that she had an idea and asking that Astrid stay behind to guard the Edge, but she still needed to actually get to Arrow Station and confirm that her idea would work.

"I'm just…" she said, briefly trying to justify her silence before deciding to give him part of the truth. "Well, this is only my second major flight, you know."

"Yeah, it's an impressive experience, isn't it?" Fishlegs grinned as Meatlug and Griffin exchanged brief growls. "I mean, I didn't have much time to enjoy it the first time because we were worried about our parents, but all of our later flights… well, they may say Meatlug's a slow flyer, but she's always been fast enough for me."

"Hey, we all look for something different in life," Clarke nodded in understanding. "I get that Griffin doesn't have the firepower of some of the other dragons, but he's dedicated and friendly; that's what's matters to me."

"Yeah, I think we all feel that way about our dragons really," Fishlegs shrugged, reaching over to scratch behind Meatlug's ears. "Hiccup's never made a big thing about the fact that Toothless is higher in stats than most of our other dragons, Astrid tends to focus on praising Stormfly's look and friendliness than talking about things like her firepower or her spikes…"

As Fishlegs kept talking, a part of Clarke's mind continued to pay attention to his words, but the rest of her was thinking about everything she was learning about this new society. She still wasn't sure if she was ready to sign up for whatever was going on at the Edge on a full-time basis, but so far her time with the six dragon-riding Vikings was the first time she felt genuinely happy since she reached the ground. The rest of the Ark was down, her surviving people had managed to establish a defensible position with access to good resources, there was no active conflict between the Ark and the Coalition the last she'd heard, and she was learning more about the creatures she'd heard stories about ever since she was a little girl.

Granted, the fact that the Edge had a watch tower at least suggested they had some kind of enemy they had to worry about, but this far out it was unlikely that any enemies Clarke might have had to deal with back on the continent would know anything about what she'd done, so at least she wasn't likely to have to face anyone trying to kill her for destroying Mount Weather or anything like that.

I'm not ready to switch tribes completely yet, but I definitely like what I've found so far…

"We're coming in!" Hiccup called out. Looking up ahead, Clarke nodded to herself as she saw the coastline just ahead- she had no idea how Hiccup managed to navigate like that, but he knew where he was going- and gave Griffin's sides a brief squeeze with her heels to encourage him to pick up the pace. Looking up ahead, she was surprised to see that Arrow Station was actually on a promontory (or whatever the term was for a bit of land that stuck out from the main continent), with the main continent hidden in the distance, but on reflection she conceded that it made sense. Assuming that Hiccup hadn't been flying too high when he first found her, he could easily have missed the signs that he had found a larger continent and assumed that they were just on another island, and the area was wide enough that she hadn't registered it herself when she was looking for the ocean from inland.

Viewing Arrow Station from this angle, Clarke was impressed at the quality of the original station design. Considering that it had come through the atmosphere and been subjected to whatever force had been necessary to separate it from the rest of the Ark, the station's main body was mostly intact, apart from the slight holes where the pylons and other attachments had been torn off during the descent before it hit that cliff and basically 'skidded' to a halt. Clarke took a moment to look around for any sign of the dome as she drew in closer, but she could only assume that it had been lost during an earlier stage of the descent, and she didn't want to think about what might have happened to anyone who'd been in that area when they'd crashed.

I couldn't have saved anybody unless I'd been here the moment it crashed; at least this way someone can get some use out of its remains…

"This is a ship?" Snotlout looked at the station's remains in confusion.

"Yeah, that surprised me too," Hiccup observed, glancing over at Clarke. "How does that… well, work?"

"It's… complicated," Clarke shrugged.

"You don't know how your ship works?" Snotlout looked at her with a smirk. "Bit stupid, isn't it?"

"Really?" Clarke responded, looking back at him with her own slight smirk. "Do you know how Toothless's tailfin works?"

"Duh; Hiccup adjusts it with his foot-"

"But how does it do that?" Clarke cut Snotlout off. "I mean, can you explain to me in depth how Hiccup moving his foot this way or that controls how Toothless's tail catches the air and lets him fly?"

"Well… it just… I mean… he made it so…" Snotlout shook his head and folded his arms in a sulk. "Shut up, Clarke."

"My point exactly," Clarke nodded at the shortest male Viking, allowing herself an indulgent smile. "Just because you live near something every day doesn't mean you know everything about how it works. I could maybe demonstrate how to use a few things inside the Station if they hadn't been damaged in the crash, but just like you can't explain Toothless's tailfin, I don't know enough about our equipment to repair any of it for you."

"Well, we're not here to pick up anything complicated," Hiccup put in, as the dragons flew down to land beside the battered and burnt remains of Arrow station. As the other riders got off their dragons, Hiccup walked up to rap his knuckles against the hull in an experimental manner. "It's taken a few knocks, but it looks like the metal could still be useful… you're sure this wasn't a dragon attack?"

"Well… maybe it was; like I said, I was in a different ship that landed somewhere else, so I'm not sure what happened here," Clarke said; assuming that dragons could reach a sufficient temperature, dragonfire was probably a suitable substitute explanation for the damage the station had sustained during re-entry.

"Maybe…" Fishlegs looked thoughtfully at the twisted hull as Meatlug sniffed at it. "We obviously can't take this all with us, but maybe we can break off a few pieces as a test run, and then… isn't Gobber coming over soon?"

"Gobber?" Clarke repeated curiously.

"Berk's blacksmith, and basically our village's second after the chief," Astrid explained. "Hiccup was his apprentice back on Berk, and Gobber still likes to stop by and see how we're doing when he has the time."

"And like Fishlegs said, he's meant to be stopping by in a couple of days, so we can see if he's got any ideas about how we could work this metal into something," Hiccup explained, studying the damaged hull himself. "I mean, I can think of a few possibilities right now, but I'd like a second opinion before I do anything that costs us too much of our supplies…"

"But how do we get this metal anywhere?" Ruffnut asked. "I mean we're not going to carry something that big back to the Edge even with our dragons…"

"But we do have a few ways we could break it down into smaller parts," Clarke pointed out. "I mean, obviously I'm taking a few guesses about what each of your dragons are specifically capable of at their peaks, and we'd need to be careful when setting anything off, but if we can pick out a few weak points in the metal… well, I have some ideas."

"Sounds… promising," Hiccup nodded thoughtfully, before he walked over to whisper discreetly to Clarke. "Although if you wanted to melt metal, Nadders are hotter than Nightmares…"

"Yeah, I thought so," Clarke nodded, smiling in understanding at Hiccup. "I just thought that we'd need numbers, and it seemed better to leave Astrid to keep an eye on things at the Edge than Snotlout."

"…Good point," Hiccup conceded, before he turned back to the group. "OK, Clarke gave us a game plan; let's do this."

As the dragons set to work, Clarke smiled at this new proof that she was in the right place; where the 100 had fought her most of the way until they had to, and the Coalition had never truly trusted her, but she and the Riders had given each other their trust and so far neither showed any sign that they were planning any kind of betrayal.

Giving them the metal from Arrow Station wouldn't give them anything more than new metal that they could use for weapons, but when dealing with a tribe of warriors, material for new weapons couldn't be a bad thing, and it would show them that she was willing to contribute. She couldn't do much with Griffin considering that he only 'breathed' hot air rather than any kind of fire, but she could coordinate the other Riders as Hookfang and Toothless made a few precise strikes to weaken the station's hull near a few of the larger cracks caused by the original crash. Once the metal had been worn down, the humans and the other dragons moved to a safe distance before Barf and Belch breathed a large quantity of gas into the ship and triggered it, setting off an explosion that shattered the hull even further. As the other dragons and the humans collected the resulting shrapnel, Meatlug helped them pull off some of the more stubborn parts of the metal away from the main body of the station.

By the time the sun had begun to set, they had gathered a range of metal of varying shapes and sizes, with Hiccup sorting those portions according to the size, apparent quality, and what he thought he might be able to use it for. They even assembled a few branches and vines into makeshift 'bags' that they could use to carry everything back, with Hookfang and Barf and Belch carrying one lot of the metal while Meatlug and Griffin took the rest, leaving Hiccup and Toothless to lead the way back to the Edge.

Looking down at the material she'd managed to bring together for her new allies, Clarke felt a renewed sense of satisfaction at the contribution she'd made to her latest home. She wasn't entirely sure what the dragon riders had to deal with that might require them to defend themselves, but with all this metal available, and based on what she'd seen of Hiccup's inventive skill, she had faith that he'd be able to make something useful.

Actually, it might be interesting to see how dragons affect the melding process here…

AN: A straightforward chapter, but it's important to give Clarke time to establish herself as an ally; next up, Clarke will meet Gobber before one of my favourite stand-alone eps of the series…