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
In a strange way, Clarke was almost disappointed at how simple the flight back to the mainland had been. Considering the scale of everything she'd been through since she first met Griffin and Hiccup, returning to the mainland felt like going back to an earlier part of her life, but the wider world gave no sign that it was even aware of just how significant this particular moment was.
OK, Clarke recognised that she wasn't the most important person on the planet and the world didn't actually revolve around her, but it still felt a bit wrong that she could go from one kind of life to another this easily. The actual flight back to the remains of Arrow Station had taken a while, but once the dragons and her new friends had spent the night resting by the station, Clarke had been amazed to realise that what had taken her the better part of a week to travel only took her and her new friends a few hours to travel, even when holding back to allow Charlotte to keep up. Clarke had the other Riders land when she realised that she was getting close to familiar territory so that they wouldn't attract attention from any hunters who might try and shoot at the dragons, but she was content that they were making good progress.
"So," Hiccup looked curiously at Clarke as the group sat around the fire, the dragons on guard while the humans cooked, "we've heard a bit about how your tribe ended up here, but what can you tell us about… these people?"
"The Coalition," Clarke explained, hoping that she could find a balance between telling her new friends about the people who had defined her life before everything fell apart and bringing up any awkward details she wasn't sure how she would explain yet. "From what I gathered during my time here, they're made up of twelve tribes scattered around this continent. There are a few tribes that have a particularly tense relationship with the others, but since the current Commander took power there seems to have been a better sense of peace."
"Commander?" Astrid asked.
"The title of the head of the Coalition. The current Commander is Lexa, and she's… well, she's not much older than we are."
"Good for her," Tuffnut said with a thoughtful nod. "How'd her parents buy it?"
"That's… I don't think that's how it works here," Clarke said, suddenly realising something she'd never gotten around to asking about. "I mean, I know that Lexa was originally the second to one of the other tribal leaders before she became the Commander, but I'm not clear on how she was chosen over older candidates. From what Lexa told me, there's some kind of ritual involved in the actual choosing, but we… didn't have time to talk about it with everything else going on."
"Huh," Hiccup said, looking thoughtfully at her, only for his expression to furrow further as his expression became more reflective. "Lexa… is she the one who betrayed your people to those… other guys? The ones who were… allergic to the outside world?"
"Their leader betrayed you?" Astrid looked more sharply at Clarke. "And we're trying to talk to these people?"
"She did it to save her people," Clarke said, automatically trying to see Lexa's point of view, but sighed in frustration as she leant back. "I almost wish it was just a selfish betrayal, but it's not that simple… God, I wish it was that simple…"
"She sold you guys out to protect her own ass; seems kind of simple to me," Ruffnut pointed out.
"When Lexa and her people had been dealing with all kinds of hostility and tension from my people for ages and we both knew that our current alliance was probably only going to last as long as we had a mutual enemy to fight?" Clarke observed as she looked back at the female twin. "I don't like what she did, but even if Lexa and I… I think that we were friends, but she never had any reason to trust that the rest of my people would be as fair to her as I was… she had a real chance to stop a threat that had been attacking her people for years in exchange for a bunch of people she had no particular loyalty to…"
Lost for anything better to say, Clarke leant back and sighed in frustration, only to start in surprise when her head met something that hadn't been there when she sat down. Turning back, she smiled to see Charlotte squatting behind her, the dragon giving an affectionate but concerned rumble as she looked at her rider.
"So… you think it's worth talking to Lexa?" Hiccup looked cautiously at Clarke. "About… where you've been, I mean?"
"I'd prefer to just talk with her rather than have to go through her guards, but that… we can do that," Clarke mused, looking thoughtfully over at the dragons. "If we go in at night… I picked up a few details about where we could find her while she's alone…"
Sitting in her room in Polis Tower, Lexa could only stare at the wall and ponder how things had become so complex over the months since the fall of Mount Weather. The destruction of the mountain itself at least confirmed that nobody would try and use it as a base in future, but that didn't deal with the longer-term problems currently facing them.
At this point, the best that she could say about the current situation is that there was no way to break the current détente among the twelve tribes. The power of Wanheda would be a significant symbol if others could claim it, but for the last few months there had been nothing to indicate where Clarke Griffin had gone since Roan's last report of her presence.
Lexa still wasn't sure if Roan's claim that Wanheda had been accompanied by some new mutation was accurate or if he had just made up some story to account for his failure, but ever since that day, there had been no sign of Clarke in any of Lexa's territories. The best that Lexa could say about the current situation was that there had been no immediate trouble from Skaikru, but from what her watchers had reported she couldn't be sure if that would remain the case for long. Most notably, there were rumours that Skaikru had a new heda who was encouraging a more active campaign to assert their 'authority' on the ground, which meant that she had to take care not to provoke that rumoured new head while still dealing with threats from her own people.
When the Ice Queen came to TonDC to try and claim that Wanheda's continued survival proved that Lexa was too weak to lead, Lexa had been able to stop Nia using that particular argument by pointing out that her rival had no clearer idea where Wanheda was right now than Lexa did. Unfortunately, Lexa knew that such an argument wouldn't keep Nia satisfied for long, but there simply wasn't a better alternative available right now. She didn't want to be forced to destroy the Skaikru whose greatest 'crime', as far as she could tell, was essentially ignorance of what they should expect to find when they fell from the sky, but so many of them were so fixated on the idea that they 'should' be in charge that co-existence clearly wasn't possible. She had a few hunters keeping an eye on the skaikru camp to alert her if there was any sign of action, but with the power of Wanheda such an unknown she could at least be sure that none of her people would attack. Roan had confirmed that his mother didn't know where Wanheda was, so at least they still had that particular advantage, but if Lexa couldn't find Clarke herself…
Her thoughts were interrupted when a strange sound came from outside her room. For a moment Lexa was prepared to dismiss it as nothing more than the usual sounds of wildlife, but she quickly reminded herself that couldn't be the case when she was in her room in the tower. The point of the tower was that the Commander and her immediate associates could not be easily attacked; that sound couldn't be someone coming for a meeting as that would have been more public, and there should be no way for someone to get up to her rooms without the guards stopping them…
Lexa only had time to spin around when something broke behind her, and found herself facing what she could only think of as a large winged lizard with deep red scales, squatting on the ground with its mouth open in a low but intimidating snarl, her room's window replaced by a large hole in the wall. Lexa was ashamed to admit that she jumped back in shock at the sight, but she would later affirm that she had recalled Roan's story before she realised that the creature had someone on its back.
"Hello, Commander," Clarke Griffin- Wanheda- said from her position on the creature's back, wearing a dark red jacket in a similar colour to the scales of her new mount, stepping off the creature's back in a motion that hinted at long practice.
"Clarke," Lexa said, suddenly certain that using Clarke's title right now wouldn't help matters (and that was even assuming Clarke knew she had a title if she had been truly missing since Roan's encounter with her). "Who is your creature?"
"This is Griffin," Clarke said, smiling briefly at the creature as she laid a hand on the long, curved horn protruding from the end of the creature's snout. "He's my dragon."
"Dragon?" Lexa repeated, trying to hide her confusion as she looked at the creature more carefully. It appeared too smooth to be another mutation, like the two-faced deer that still appeared on the woods on occasion, but at the same time she somehow could not imagine such a creature just existing in the wild for so long without being discovered…
"One of many, actually," Clarke said, stroking the creature's horn before she turned back to the hole in her wall. "We're OK!"
Lexa felt like cursing the chain of reasoning that had led to her having no real guards up this high as further creatures flew into her chambers after Clarke. She had preferred the opportunity to have some time to herself without worrying about guards, reasoning that there was no way anyone could get up this far without facing the guards stationed lower down in the tower, but now she was faced with four unknowns and three large creatures. She wasn't sure if she should be more concerned about the two-headed green creature, the blue creature covered in spikes, or the black creature that seemed invisible against the night sky behind it, but the four figures riding these creatures also raised several concerns for her. Lexa had expected Clarke to have made contacts and found some interesting allies in her time away from the Coalition, but she could safely say that this was a scenario she'd never expected.
"Commander Lexa," Clarke said with a strange smile on her face as she spread her arms, "meet my new friends, the Dragon Riders of Berk."
"Hello," the young man on the black creature said, jumping off the creature to reveal a strange collection of metal and wood in place of his left leg. "Hiccup Haddock; I'm… well, I'm the guy in charge here."
"He's being modest," said the fair-haired woman on the back of the blue spiked creature, who Lexa now saw had a large axe strapped to her back. "Hiccup is the first person on our island to actually train a dragon rather than fight them, and since then… well, here we are."
"I… see," Lexa said, unsure how to feel about this news as she looked at the creatures that were apparently known as dragons. The fact that these creatures could fly suggested a reason why there were no records of Lexa's people encountering them in the past, and she had certainly never heard of 'Berk' before now, but that raised the question of how Clarke had made contact with these people in the first place.
"So you're the big-shot chief around here?" said a figure that Lexa only identified as male when it spoke, as two similar-looking figures jumped off the two-headed green creature on the other side of the room.
"I am heda," Lexa said, looking at the new arrivals in her most authoritative manner. "And you are?"
"Tuffnut and Ruffnut Thorston, riders of Barf and Belch," the other figure said, this one's voice indicating that they were apparently female as they indicated the two-headed creature.
"Astrid Hofferson," the fair-haired woman on the blue creature said as she nimbly stepped off her own mount. "This is Stormfly, and that's Toothless."
"…Toothless," Lexa repeated, looking at the black creature beside Hiccup in surprise. "He clearly-"
In response, the black creature opened his mouth and the sharp teeth seemed to retreat back into its gums, only to pop out again as the black creature growled at her.
"Bud," Hiccup said, placing a hand on the creature's neck. "We're just here to talk, OK?"
The black creature rumbled in its throat, but seemed to understand its rider's words and sat back to look at Lexa in a probing manner. As though that had been a cue of some sort, the blue and green dragons stepped back and flew off out of the hole in the wall they had created coming in.
"They'll be waiting outside the tower company while we talk," Clarke said before Lexa could ask the question. "We didn't want this to get too crowded, and we decided two dragons should be enough back-up if you had any guards up here."
"I do not," Lexa said, deciding that she had nothing to lose by being honest; if Clarke had desired her death at this time Lexa didn't doubt that the dragons could have easily just taken her out of her room and dropped her from the top of the tower. "Any conventional assassin who sought my death would have to pass through many other guards to reach this level."
"And anyone who did get up here would be known to you?" Astrid asked.
"There are certain secret passages known only to the Commander and those they have shared that information with previously, but all who know of such passages can be trusted," Lexa nodded at the other blonde before she looked at the hole in her wall with a slight smile. "For obvious reasons, nobody ever considered that someone could fly into my chambers…"
"For what it's worth, you shouldn't have to worry about that as a regular thing," Hiccup put in. "From what we've seen, there are no dragons in your territory that could be tamed by any of your potential enemies, and we're fairly sure our enemies don't even know you're here…"
"Your enemies?" Lexa looked at him with new interest. "What makes them your enemies?"
"They basically want to capture and use dragons for their own purposes," Hiccup said, once again reaching out a hand to stroke the black dragon still sitting next to him. "We… my tribe spent so long fighting dragons for the wrong reasons, and now we've made it our mission to protect them and help them because they trust us to take care of them…"
"I see," Lexa said, looking thoughtfully at the two dragons before she looked at Clarke. "And you have joined his mission?"
"My father told me stories about dragons when I was a child, and when I learned that they still existed… well, I wasn't going to give up the chance to learn more about them," Clarke said, affectionately rubbing the horn and snout of her creature- her dragon, apparently- as she spoke. "Griffin might just be the first dragon I found, but he's my friend now, and I won't let other people treat him like a thing."
"And that is why you have been away for so long?"
"That's… part of it," Clarke admitted, looking at her new companions with a soft smile before turning back to Lexa with a firm stare. "But I realised that I want to know what's been happening here with my people."
"That is… complicated," Lexa said, already anticipating that Clarke wasn't going to like her own news. "Your people have been… causing problems."
"Clarke's people?" Astrid looked at Lexa suspiciously. "I thought they were new here and you commanded twelve tribes; how could they cause you problems?"
"Their refusal to accept the situation and my own inability to convince my people to find a compromise," Lexa responded. "At this point, only the power of Wanheda can achieve balance."
"Wan-what?" Tuffnut asked.
"Isn't that… hold on, Clarke already told us that 'heda' was one of your own titles…" Hiccup looked curiously at her.
"And Wanheda is the name given to the one who caused so much death by destroying the maounon in one blow," Lexa observed, looking grimly over at Clarke.
"Oh," Clarke said, as Lexa's meaning sunk in. "So… are you saying that I'm the reason nobody's attacked my people yet?"
"Hold on; people are worshipping Clarke for killing people?" Hiccup looked uncomfortably at Lexa. "That was- she's not going to make a habit of that!"
"Her intent is not important; my people are only focused on the final result," Lexa explained, before she turned to Clarke. "In any case, with your location a mystery, the tribes were reluctant to act against your people for fear of you turning that power against them when you returned, but that will remain a concern as long as you are independent. The only solution I had to this problem was for you to publically swear your allegiance to me and swear your people in as the thirteenth clan-"
"Which wouldn't work because there's no guarantee that my people would accept that as anything more than a symbolic gesture," Clarke cut in.
"That was my concern also," Lexa nodded in acknowledgement; she still had to remind herself that many of Clarke's people were simply ignorant of the history of the Commander rather than being deliberately offensive. "However… given that you now have new allies of your own… you may be able to resolve this matter with your people on your own merits."
"Me?" Clarke looked at Lexa sceptically. "You'd trust me to do that?"
"I know that you do not revel in the power granted by the deaths you caused, and I trust that you would not have spent so much time away with these new allies if you did not wish to be something other than Wanheda," Lexa affirmed.
"That's true enough," Hiccup smiled over at Clarke. "Clarke's been working as our healer since she joined us."
"That is good," Lexa nodded at Hiccup in thanks for that information before she turned back to Clarke. "So… will you talk with your people on our behalf?"
"As in… I convince them to stand down and you can convince your people to do the same?" Clarke asked.
"The important thing at this point is peace," Lexa affirmed. "I would like for skaikru to become the Thirteenth Clan, but for now… independent peace is a reasonable compromise."
"Particularly now that I have allies of my own?"
"We're not going to-!" Hiccup began to protest.
"And like I trust Clarke not to abuse the power of Wanheda, I trust that you are not the kind of people who would abuse such power if you have earned her loyalty," Lexa observed as she looked over at Hiccup.
"I'll… take that as a compliment," the one-legged young man concluded with a cautious nod.
"Hold on a minute," Astrid cut in, looking pointedly at Lexa for a moment before she turned to Clarke. "Do you believe this?"
"Good point," Tuffnut spoke up from his position leaning against the wall. "I mean, after what you told us about what she did to you last time?"
"…There were no good solutions then," Clarke said at last, looking at Lexa in a solemn manner. "I still think you made the wrong choice… but I'll accept that it was the right one for you at the time."
Lexa nodded in acknowledgement of Clarke's own tentative acceptance of the situation. It wasn't outright forgiveness, but given the scale of what had happened Lexa wouldn't have expected that.
"As for my people…" Clarke continued, her tone hesitant but relatively confident, "if there's something I can do… someone I can talk to… we'll do what we can to calm things down."
"We?"
"We go with Clarke," Ruffnut put in, her tone suggesting she thought Lexa was stupid for even asking the question. "She's on the team."
"Besides," Hiccup put in, "if we're going to help establish this peace, we might as well be there at the start to make sure everyone's listening to Clarke."
Lexa nodded in acknowledgement of Hiccup's point, even as she hoped she wasn't making a mistake as she watched Hiccup and Clarke climb back onto their dragons while Astrid and the apparent twins went to the window and made strange noises, only to be met with responding calls from what Lexa assumed were their dragons. Watching the new arrivals return to the air on their large flying beasts, Lexa didn't even have the guidance of the past Commanders to help her speculate on what might happen now, but a part of her own self told her to trust that Clarke would carry out her request and avoid further bloodshed before anyone did something either side would regret.