A/N: A lot of new material was put into this chapter to accommodate the expanded headcanon and flesh out an environment the kids are going to be spending a lot of time in. So this chapter got incredibly long. Because I imposed a word limit, the old chapter two got chopped in half. The rest of it was turned into chapter three.

The new chapter title might as well be a band in-joke. Anyone know why?

Disclaimer: I do not own How to Train Your Dragon. I do own an assortment of OCs, a few of whom are trying to make me regret creating them.

How to Train Your Marching Band

Chapter Two: Starting Off on the Left Foot

Stoic had tried very hard to convince his son that marching band wasn't manly.

It was a mind-set he was stuck in. He had been raised in a very masculine environment where the virtues of contact sports (like football) had been expounded upon with near religious fervor. Stoic had been raised to believe that contact sports like football were what turned a boy into a strapping young man.

It had worked well for him. Stoic had been a football star in his high school days and an equally formidable wrestler in the off-season. His wall of muscles and his unshakeable cool head no matter the situation had earned him the nickname "Stoic the Vast". He had left a crater of an impression on the school, one that the athletic department was sure that no one would be able to fill.

As a result of his upbringing, Stoic had formed only two opinions about marching band: Band was for the kids who couldn't do actual sports. And... Band was nothing more than background noise during half-time.

Anyways, there was nothing manly about playing a musical instrument and flouncing across a football field in clothes that were a little form-fitting. Hiccup had pointed out that that was exactly what football players did, only there were no musical instruments and more body contact involved, so technically, didn't that make football a little less manly than marching band?

Stoic had tried - oh, he had tried to interest his son in various sports instead. Hiccup had broken an arm trying to catch a pass. The consensus was that he had tripped over his heels, but football had been counted out as a potential (much to Stoic's dismay). Soccer balls, baseballs and basketballs invariably headed towards his face. Swimming was a no-go since Hiccup was a sinker rather than a swimmer. Running had brought more tripping over his own feet. Anything that required excessive amounts of hand-eye coordination was simply out of question; he had been a singularly clumsy child. By the time Stoic had introduced hockey, Hiccup had flat refused to even put on the skates.

Hiccup had grown out of his clumsiness by middle school, just in time for marching band to really catch his eye. He had never been very interested in organized sports in the first place and marching band was a physical activity that wasn't a sport. It was low-impact and high endurance. He occasionally had to dodge the colorguard and mind his footing in poor weather conditions, but otherwise, he ran very little risk of injury.

Hiccup had spent much of his first season getting stared at disapprovingly and listening to comments about how he should take up a "real man's sport". The father/son relationship - which had been on shaky ground since that trip to Canada - had hit rock bottom and started to dig. Hiccup had resigned himself to an even greater distance between himself and his father; knowing that he was only at the football games for the football.

But Stoic had still come to every competition and it had slowly occurred to Hiccup that if his father was coming only for the reasons he claimed to be there for, then Stoic would not be roaring in approval with every trophy the band claimed.

In his freshman year, Hiccup had worn his father down enough to convince him to come and observe an evening of practice; even just half an hour of it. On the night that Stoic had chosen to show up early, Gobber had put the band through its paces and had made them run the show as many times as they could squeeze into the third hour. When Hiccup had staggered off the field at the end of that night, Stoic had clapped him on the shoulder and said that he had to give the band credit for being out in the twenty-degree weather with little flakes of ice spiraling down and had admitted that he wouldn't be out on a night like this without wearing thermal everything.

They still weren't quite seeing eye to eye - there were certainly days when Stoic wondered why his son couldn't have taken up an extra-curricular activity with a more manly reputation - but they were communicating again and that was the most important part. Stoic knew he couldn't very well stop his son from participating in something he loved to do without looking like an asshole, so the very least Stoic could do was make sure that his son did it right.

At times, Hiccup was sure his father was now an unrepentant band dad.

The school parking lot was practically empty when Hiccup arrived, save for about a dozen cars. The drum majors had to arrive early anyways and some of the other seniors would probably take the initiative to show up early. Hiccup wasn't the first senior to arrive early, at any rate. Climbing out of a turtle-green truck a few spots away was his fellow senior and clarinetist, Marie.

Marie was eccentric - because Hiccup's imagination lacked the capacity to come up with an appropriate adjective that adequately described her from top to bottom. Physically, she was blonde-haired, blue-eyed and compactly built, and if you could just ignore the oddities that followed her around like light-struck moths, then she was perfectly normal.

Mentally, she seemed to be little more than a collection of non-sequiturs, mad ideas, random trivia and bits of fluff. Hiccup knew there was something under the surface that possessed some substance. Trawling through Marie's mind was like looking for shells on a desolate beach. It could take most of the afternoon, but eventually you were going to find something.

That made her about as sane as most band people.

"Hey Marie!" Hiccup called. He raised his free hand in greeting when the other clarinet turned around.

"G'morning Hiccup!" Marie returned, waving. "Did you sleep last night? You look awful."

"Not really. I think I got three hours." Hiccup admitted. The initial morning rush was wearing off and now he was feeling every hour he hadn't slept. "Dad woke me up at six."

"I've been up since five." Marie said with a casual shrug, but her tone of voice gave the impression that she was claiming to be more hardcore because she had been up for the past two hours as opposed to one.

She dragged her backpack out of the passengers' seat with one hand, shut the door, and lugged the pack over her shoulders. It was an impressive feat, really, as it must have weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty pounds. The backpack looked like the kind that was normally used by European backpackers who were in it for the long haul. Hiccup knew from experience that Marie carried everything short of a small house in that backpack. If you needed anything - even the things that really shouldn't be able to fit into a backpack - Marie would have it and she would have it in different colors to boot.

"So, looking forward to this week?" she asked brightly, moving to grab her coolers out of the truck bed.

Hiccup shrugged. "Mostly. I mean, there are probably bits of it I'm not looking forward to. Do you think our rookies will survive?"

Marie thought for a moment as they started slowly across the parking lot to the school's main entrance. "I dunno. We got a metric crap-ton of rookies this year."

"We only have six." Hiccup pointed out.

"Yeah, but that's six more than we had last year." Marie reminded him pointedly. "And the year before that. And the year before that-"

"Okay, I get it. I know, we're used to a much smaller section." Hiccup said, conceding the point. At eight members, the clarinet section was at the largest it had been since their freshman year. Heck, the band was the largest it had been since their rookie year. They had lost fifteen seniors to graduation this year, but had gained a whopping thirty-two rookies in the process, bringing the number of band members to a hearty eighty-six.

"A much smaller section?" Marie repeated, snorting. "Hiccup, for three years, it was just us two and we're buddies. We get along. This is your only year as a real section leader with all the leadership challenges that come with the position."

"Okay, so humor me. We're seniors, this is our last season. We've spent the summer trying to get our rookies into shape. Now which one of them do you think will be ready to step up next year?"

"Hmm, okay, uh... I'm going to go with Ashley B. and Kate. They were probably the most focused." Marie said thoughtfully. "McCracken, Kristen and what's-her-face-"
"Amanda." Hiccup interjected.

"Amanda- And you were worried about not being able to remember all their names." Marie said, slightly teasing. "They were good to start, but they've gotten better and that's what we want. But in terms of who's going to step up as section leader, I'd give the nomination to Kate."

Then she shook her head despairingly. "I've got nothing on Ashley- Excuse me, that's 'Ashlyn'. If she'd actually shown up at the June sectionals like she was supposed to, I'd have a better opinion of her."

"Yeah, I'm supposed to talk to you about the problem you have with her." Hiccup said with a sigh.

"I don't actually have a problem with her. She's the one who hates me." Marie pointed out lightly. "I know being a rookie means you're more prone to making silly mistakes and it's easy enough to forgive them, especially since we're still early in the season, but she does not listen! I try to correct her and all she does is roll her eyes. Have you see her posture? It's atrocious! My parents would have slapped me silly if I'd walked around like that! Please Hiccup, may I slap her?"

"No, you may not. No violence against the rookies, even if they are being totally stupid." Hiccup said firmly, ignoring the way Marie's face fell. "Look, unlike you, most of us didn't grow up with active-duty military parents who taught us how to walk so straight you could balance a tennis ball on the top of your head. If it gets worse, I'll bring it up with Gobber. I'll try talking to her in the meantime."

"Oh, that won't help."

"Then we'll have a business meeting during lunch or dinner today."

"Not at dinner. Steiny's roped me into helping her with the rookie dinner today."

"That's tonight? I thought we didn't do that until Wednesday."

"Steiny's progressive. She pushed it up."

They reached the front entrance. Hiccup reached for the door first, but Marie bumped his leg with one of her coolers and asked: "Wait, are we allowed to go in this way? Or do we have to go around the back way?"

"I heard they were going to be finished with the remodel before school started." Hiccup answered, shrugging.

"Yeah, but there's still a week and a half left before school starts. They could drag it out right up to the wire." Marie said in semi-dire tones.

"There's no signs on the door anymore." Hiccup pointed out, gesturing to the pristinely clean glass. For months, the glass had been covered in warning stickers informing people that this was a construction zone and that they should not enter. The stickers had helpfully offered information of where alternate entrances could be found.

The school district had experienced a rise in student intake over the last couple of years. It had been gradual, like a slug moving across a square of sidewalk. It had been a slow-moving increase that the administration didn't really notice it until four dozen freshmen were assigned lockers that didn't exist. Of course, the problem had been bigger than forty eight lockers that didn't exist. Too many teachers were doubled up in classrooms or teaching in venues that weren't actually classrooms and therefore weren't ideal for teaching. The building in its then-incarnation had become too small for the growing community.

Construction had been ongoing for the past eighteen months. The school had grown a second floor and new classrooms and everything else had undergone a rather extensive renovation to bring the facilities into the twenty-first century.

Hiccup leaned up next to the door, cupping a hand on the glass to block out the reflection of the landscape behind him so he could look inside.

"All the temporary walls are gone." he announced. "I think we're good to go."

Without further hesitation, he pulled open the door. The breeze of air that rushed out, for once, did not smell like sawdust and plaster. And it was silent; no buzzing power tools or construction foremen shouting instructions.

It was almost eerie; the lack of what they had become so used to.

Bracing themselves for the changes, the clarinetists walked into the school and around the first corner. They glimpsed the corner of the cafeteria, but the main part of the student commons wasn't visible until they cleared the closed concessions stand.

And promptly came to an immediate, dumbstruck halt.

"Uhh... are we in the right school?" Hiccup wondered, his eyes wandering up the unfamiliar architecture as he attempted to find something familiar enough to tell him that they were indeed in the right school.

"This has warranted some clichéd language." Marie decided, her gaze drawn upwards to the newest additions to the architecture. "So... holy renovations, Batman."

"I knew they were building a second floor on top of this, but this is..." Hiccup trailed off. The changes were so extreme he already couldn't picture the student commons in its old incarnation.

"This school looks good in the twenty-first century." Marie commented.

The section leader had to nod in agreement to that.

The original student commons had been an example of poor planning and everyone postulated that the budget that hadn't been well-thought out. The lighting had been badly placed, the ceiling had been far too low (eight feet) and the furnishings had been sparse. Students had called it "The Cave", since it had been about as well-lit and comfortable as one.

The renovation of the student commons had been long overdue and the budget for it had been ve-e-ery generous. Though it meant shutting down a major artery of the school for three months of the school year, the administration had decided that the end result would far outweigh the congestion and traffic problems. The construction workers had set up temporary walls so they could work without disturbing the students too much. And to keep the students from nosing around too much.

Post-remodel, the student commons had been given an unrecognizable face-lift.

Gone were the eight-foot ceilings and badly-placed lights. The area had been drastically opened up with large skylights soaring a good thirty feet over the floor. Half-moon sofa sets had been placed around the main square, finally providing the students a comfortable place to mingle. But they had really utilized the new space by building a second floor that perched fifteen feet above the ground floor. A large piece had been cut out above the main square, allowing a great deal of natural light to illuminate the sofa sets. A floating staircase spiraled up like a weed in the corner where the restroom wall met the backstage wall.

And speaking of the cafeteria, the open room had been re-painted and re-tiled. The chairs and tables had been replaced with something a little more hard-wearing. The face-lift wasn't as extreme, but the facilities had obviously been brought forward into the new decade.

"Why couldn't they had done this five years ago?" Hiccup wondered. He felt slightly insulted that the administration had waited until the school had run out of room.

"You're asking the wrong person." Marie informed him, though she knew very well the question was rhetorical.

"Think the clocks are running on time now?"

"Doubt it."

The outline of the commons hadn't changed one iota. From where they were standing, the game gym remained behind them with the athletic offices and the changing lockers separating it from the P.E. gym. The auditorium and the concessions stand were on their right, and the cafeteria was directly to the left. The music suite was situated around the corner from the restrooms, right next to the auditorium. The only real new structural additions was the flight of stairs.

"Those," Hiccup pointed to half-moon sofa sets as they passed one. "Are probably going to be a bad idea."

"I foresee lots of steam cleaning and decontamination, followed by the administration citing a lack of proper appreciation for the fact they gave us couches and subsequently taking them away." Marie predicted.

Hiccup blinked until the meaning sank in. "It's seven in the morning." he said.

Marie shrugged. "I'm not the only person who's going to make comments to that effect."

They hung to the right and went past the restrooms and through the orange doors located there. What they entered was technically the backstage area of the auditorium (a room where performers hung out before their turn on stage), but it was connected to the band suite. This part of the school hadn't really been touched during the remodel, not with the band present during the latter half of the summer and the school had allowed a community play production to take place in the auditorium. The floors had been re-carpeted and the paint job had been tidied up, as far as Hiccup could tell. Everything had been given a good polish, even the new case for the band's State Finals trophies. (Of which there were just six from the last two decades, so the more numerous Division One Regionals trophies had been installed in the case just to make things look a little more robust.)

"Are we the first ones here?" Hiccup wondered, listening to the near silence.

"Gobber has to be here or the doors wouldn't be open." Marie pointed out.

"Probably has the drum majors upstairs in a meeting. Lecturing the poor bastards." Hiccup said while his section-mate nodded in agreement. He frowned. "Wait, who are our drum majors again? I know Steiny is; she's the conducting drum major."

"Ah, with the effort you put in to remember our rookies' names, you've forgotten who the other drum majors are." Marie concluded, leaning into the door that led into the instrument storage area and held it open for her section leader.

"Could you just tell me?"

"Beth and Josh."

"Asian Josh?"

"How many Asian Joshes are in this band?"

"Well, there is Asian Ganon."

"Yeah, but his name is Ganon."

Having asserted the difference between the two adopted Korean members of the band, Marie surged forward to claim a prime spot on the bench opposite the clarinet instrument locker. She had shoved her coolers underneath the bench and was divesting herself of her bulky backpack by the time Hiccup set his things down. While his section-mate changed into a pair of much more appropriate shoes, Hiccup opened the doors of the clarinet lockers to make sure they were still clean.

Somehow, in three years, between the two of them, they had cluttered up almost every single instrument locker in the section with water bottles, pep band music, concert music, and charts ranging from three to four years old. Chalk from seasons past had decayed into dust, spare phone number lists and theme shirt order forms had formed the bulk of the detritus while crumpled order forms of band booster fundraisers had been added in the off-season. Marie had finally snapped on Rookie Saturday and had half-bullied Hiccup into helping her de-clutter and re-organize the space. A good move, they had realized not even one minute after finishing, when Gobber had come to ask them why they were neglecting their rookies.

Marie pulled the last knot tight and jumped back to her feet, wiggling against the gel inserts until they conformed more fully to the shape of her arches.

"C'mon, let's go check out the upstairs."

Since they still had more than ninety minutes to kill and nothing better to do, Hiccup followed his section-mate out of the band suite and into the backstage area where the stairs were located.

The second floor of the band suite contained Gobber's office (they could hear his loud voice through the closed door, issuing instructions to the drum majors), a plethora of practice rooms, and a secondary concert room that housed filing cabinets upon filing cabinets of music. Though the band had been to State Finals for only six years in the last twenty-two, they were a pretty trophy-riffic marching band and had amassed quite a collection over the last two decades. These trophies gathered dust on the rows of filing cabinets, but every so often, someone ran a curious finger across the plaques and the bases and the pointy bits, so touches of platinum and steel winked in the overhead lights.

There had always been a hallway leading down to the choir teacher's office, but for some reason, it cornered unnecessarily to the left and continued along until it hit a brick wall. It was often taken as a hint that maybe once upon a time, the original construction plans had included a second floor to the student commons. The students generally agreed that the budget had run out and the constructors had bricked up what would have been a doorway.

There was now a doorway at the end of that hall, a big orange door to match the ones downstairs.

Hiccup and Marie shared a curious look. Hiccup inclined his head in a 'ladies first' gesture, so the blonde eagerly pushed the door open and stepped through.

The new second floor of the refurbished student commons really wasn't anything special to look at, but it was- well, new. It still had that proverbial new car smell. The construction hadn't quite settled, the carpet and tiles hadn't absorbed the crap from a thousand dirty shoes, and the paint wasn't faded or stained by the presence of six hundred-plus students leaning on the walls. It was fresh, new. It occurred to Hiccup that they were probably the first students to actually see the new addition.

Marie zipped around like a humming bird, rushing by Hiccup so fast that her passage left his hair ruffled. Every so often, her voice rang out from one of the new corners, exclaiming excitedly over whatever was there.

"There's seating up here for the cafeteria! Seniors only!"

"They're spoiling us, these bastards! How often d'ya think they'll keep this vending machine stocked?"

"Hey! Brand-new lockers over here! I see at least two blocks! I think they're opening up new classrooms too! And more stairs!"

"Urg! Whose bright idea was it to Lysol the bathroom half to death?"

She finally skidded to a halt in front of a stretch of wall between two doors accessing the upper balcony seating of the game gym, and admired the handiwork that had been painted there.

"And here is the obligatory butt-ugly rendering of our mascot. Hey Hiccup, d'ya think Vikings actually wore those horned helmets?"

Hiccup wandered a little closer to where Marie was standing and looked up at the rendering of the Touchstone High School mascot with the eye of an artist. The actual painting wasn't bad; it was professional work. The actual content was every possible Viking cliché put together to make a picture that shouldn't have been put up in public, much less something that was supposed to inspire school spirit.

"Well, I don't think Vikings were all that pretty." he finally said.

"Doesn't mean they had to make it sweaty, grubby-lookin' guy. Vikings were actually fairly hygienic. Baths once a week." Marie said knowledgeably. "The axe looks accurate."

"Yeah."

"Still," the clarinetist went on, obviously out to press the point as they walked away from the painting. "They could have made it a badass Viking woman instead." She grinned at Hiccup. "Like your girlfriend."

Hiccup could not hold back the long-suffering sigh. Can't get through a conversation without this coming up. What is with my friends? He wondered. "For the last time, Astrid is not my girlfriend."

"Yet." Marie stressed, smirking. "Not yet, you mean."

"She's not my girlfriend!" Hiccup repeated emphatically for the umpteenth time. Really, she wasn't. They just hung out a lot. They got together and were social. Because that was what friends did. And just because they got together without the group didn't meant they were going on dates. "I mean, I like her, but it's not like I - like her."

"You keep saying it, but I'm just not believing it." Marie said, moving to lean on the railing balcony over the main square. "Like, half the band has seen you two making big moony eyes at each other when you think no one's looking. Seriously, would it kill you to admit there's a mutual attraction there? I got twenty-three bucks riding on the outcome."

Hiccup scowled. It actually didn't surprise him that there was a bet going on, or that his section-mate had instigated it. "How long have you been betting on us?" he asked.

"Since the first occurrence of the big moony eyes." Marie replied, not even wincing under the glare he sent her. "C'mon Hiccup, I'm up against the saxophones here! You know what they're like! Asian Josh and Topher say you two won't get together until Christmas. Shelby, Jared and Taco say spring concert. And Slim says it won't happen until graduation. Katie's not betting anything, but she thinks spring break and Robert doesn't know you exist yet, I don't think. Meanwhile, I say you'll be hooked up by the end of the season. I have that much confidence in this! So prove I'm right and freaking kiss her already!"

"You are so not making me kiss Astrid."

"I'll up the bidding and chip you in ten bucks if you do it by State week."

"I'd kiss her for free."

"You'd kiss who for free?" asked the one voice Hiccup had been hoping not to hear in the middle of this sort of conversation.

-0-