The Courtship of Toothless Chapter 4

As soon as the girls left, Hiccup meant to find Toothless and start figuring out how to bring those two back together. But he got nowhere for a while. First, a Nadder and her rider came to him for help understanding each other; they were both miserable over something and couldn't get the message across to their friend. Hiccup could both comprehend and write Old Norse, so he could translate both their languages to each other, and help the Viking understand that he wasn't keeping his dragon's tail scales clean and shiny enough. He also had to make the dragon understand that the Viking was nervous about her tail spines, and she shouldn't flick them erect as a sign that she was happy to see him. Then he had to settle a dispute between Ruffnut and Tuffnut, who were fighting over whether the two heads of a Zippleback have different personalities (they usually do). Then he had to deal with a Nightmare whose child kept devouring all the small fish in the feeding trays and leaving none for the other baby dragons, even though he could have eaten bigger fish, and on and on it went. It took him over an hour to get out of Berk.

He wasn't sure where he should look for Toothless; he might be at his nest, or in the cove, or anywhere in the Northland sky. The cove was closest, so he overflew it first, and spotted his friend on the ground there, in almost the exact same place and pose in which he'd found Guana, a few hours before. He swooped down again and landed next to his friend.

"Hey, bud," he began. Toothless didn't respond.

"Oh, come on! Talk to me!" Hiccup exclaimed. He couldn't do a TrueSight because Toothless was keeping his eyes closed. "I've got a pretty good idea what's going on, and –"

"No, you don't," Toothless said sadly. "You have no idea at all."

"Oh, really?" Hiccup sat down next to his friend. "That sounds like a challenge! Let's see. You're lying here in this cove, moping all by yourself, staring at the rock where you last saw Guana, acting totally depressed and hopeless because she's gone... it looks to me like you're in love."

"Don't be ridiculous!" Toothless suddenly exclaimed. "Weren't you listening when I told you dragons don't fall in love?"

"Yeah, I heard you tell me that," Hiccup nodded. "I also heard you tell me that doing a transformation is a very complicated process that's hard to learn, and I also heard you tell me that female Night Furies lay only one egg a year. If I thought about it, I could probably come up with some other examples of things you told me that turned out to be not quite as true as you thought they were. My friend, you know a lot, but you don't know everything, do you?"

Now Toothless raised his head and stared intently at Hiccup. "That transformation you did on my tail... I admit that surprised me, but you surprised me as a human, too. Your twins are from Astrid's human heritage. But when it comes to genuine dragon affairs, without any unpredictable humans in the mix, can you really say I don't know what I'm talking about?"

Hiccup gazed back at him. Starting a TrueSight would be easy, but he wanted to keep it verbal for now. "Toothless, what you haven't realized is that, as far as you're concerned, there are no 'genuine dragon affairs, without any unpredictable humans in the mix' anymore. You've been so involved with me and Astrid, teaching us everything you know, sharing your life and your experiences with us, helping us become true Night Furies and find our destiny... didn't it ever occur to you that our relationship wasn't a one-way street? Didn't it ever occur to you that, just maybe, a little of our humanity was rubbing off on you as well?"

"What are you talking about?" Toothless demanded.

"Well, just look at you! Everything you're doing has all the earmarks of a teen-ager in love for the first time. Trust me – I have some first-hand knowledge about that. Yes, I know you're no teen-ager, but all the other signs line up perfectly. You're depressed, you're moping, you're hanging around the last place you saw her, you're telling your friends that we don't understand... This isn't something wrong or shameful that's happened to you, okay? But you'll get a lot further if you stop living in denial, accept reality as it is, and deal with it. That's what you taught me and Astrid, and it's true for you, too."

"Accept reality as it is?" Toothless' voice was bitter. Hiccup had never heard that tone from him before. "So you think you understand my reality? You think it's just about Guana? That's barely half of it!

"I spent hours trying to teach her to glide, just the same way I taught you and Astrid. She was beginning to make progress. And then you show up, and in a few minutes, you teach her to fly right out of the cove! Did you teach her to fish and shoot fire while you were at it? Is there anything worth doing that you haven't surpassed me at?

"And while you were showing her who was the better flight teacher, what was I doing back in the nest? Searching for missing baby Gronckles who turned out to be playing hide-and-seek, and consoling Nadder-green-the-drama-queen because her favorite male found another girl friend! Is that what being a Night Fury means now? Is that all I have to look forward to, for the next few hundred years?

He looked away sadly. "The nest doesn't need me. Guana doesn't need me. You don't need me." He closed his eyes and laid his head on the ground. "Nobody needs me."

For a moment, Hiccup was taken aback. His reliable, level-headed friend was taking a swan dive off the cliffs of rationality. Then he understood. Toothless' problems with Guana weren't just half of the problem; they were the cause of the other half as well. He was, indeed, in love, and because dragons normally didn't fall in love, he had no frame of reference to deal with the problems that can arise when someone is in that state. Like a teen-ager in the throes of love for the first time, he was completely overwhelmed with emotions he'd never experienced before. He had no idea how to handle those emotions, and they were coloring his perception of everything around him.

Hiccup could offer him some useful advice on that subject. The fun part would be convincing him to listen.

"Toothless, my friend, since when did friendship have anything to do with whether we needed you or not?" He crouched down in the grass so his nose was just a few inches from Toothless' nose. "I seem to remember a Viking boy who made friends with a Night Fury who could offer him nothing at all. Do you remember that boy? He worked for hours, long into the night, to make a tail so the Night Fury could fly again. Then he spent longer hours learning to fly, and improving his flight gear, risking punishment from his entire village if he got caught... and what did that Night Fury offer him in return? Can you tell me?"

He waited for Toothless to answer. The other dragon was looking at him through half-opened eyes, but he didn't speak.

"All you offered me was friendship, Toothless. Yeah, the 'flying' part was pretty cool, but it wasn't worth the price I could have paid... the price I almost did pay, once my dad found out about us. It was never about what you could give me in return. It was just about you and me, and the relationship that bound us together tighter than most married human couples.

"Will you at least admit that that part hasn't changed?"

At last, Toothless sighed, "Do you think it's that easy?" He turned away, still lost in his dark mood.

Hiccup had done his best to be patient, but it seemed like his friend wanted to be depressed. Toothless always said, "Don't fight the dragon," and the dragon that was Hiccup had had enough. He leaned over and gave Toothless' tail a mild but sharp nip. The other dragon roared in sudden fury and lashed back, but Hiccup was already three steps away and leaping into the sky. Toothless followed, his eyes reduced to tiny slits of rage.

It took twenty minutes of wild flight before he caught him. Hiccup maneuvered desperately, spinning and diving almost without regard for his own safety, while Toothless used his greater experience to repeatedly narrow the gap between them. At last, he gave one great surge forward, retracted his teeth, clamped down hard on Hiccup's tail, and swung his powerful neck, yanking Hiccup out of his flight path and literally throwing him across the sky.

Hiccup plunged and tumbled nearly a quarter of a mile before he could regain control of his flight. The moment he did, he found Toothless right behind him, ready to grab his tail again. "You really thought you could outfly me?" Toothless asked. "Seriously?"

Hiccup smiled and shook his head. "Outfly you, bud? Never. Coax some signs of life out of you? Yeah, I was hoping for that."

"I might have killed you, you know." Toothless' tone suggested that he hadn't meant to hurt Hiccup at all.

Again Hiccup shook his head, waggling his ear flaps, and dropped back to fly beside his friend. "You've already had some pretty good chances to kill me, and you never followed through. I figured it was worth the risk. I couldn't stand to see you just lying there, like death itself without the lightning."

Toothless didn't answer, but his eyes were wide open now. Hiccup straightened his wings and braced himself for the shock of receiving another being's emotions straight into his mind. TrueSight was instantaneous, but processing those emotions could take a few seconds, and if they were particularly strong emotions, they could stun a dragon as effectively as a hard blow to the head. He'd almost fallen out of the sky a minute ago; he didn't want to do it again.

As he'd expected, Toothless' feelings were close to overpowering. He felt a desperate desire to be pleasing to Guana, both because she might be his future mate and because he genuinely liked her; he was confused by her reaction to him, and even more confused by his own strong feelings for her, which were quite out of place in the heart of a dragon. His friendship with Hiccup was still strong and vibrant, but it seemed to be stained with dark streaks of...

"Envy, bud? Is that what I'm seeing?"

"Hiccup, you've become the perfect Night Fury!" Toothless burst out. "You led us in battle against the Mother and won; you've made your own nest in the middle of a Viking village; you've got an amazing mate who laid twins with her first clutch; you've got skills that most dragons never develop, even though you haven't even been a dragon for half a year yet; and you've got that amazing Hiccup brain that finds solutions to every problem, from adjusting to dragonhood to killing the Mother to... I can't even guess what you'll think of next!" He paused, and his ear flaps drooped. "You've completely eclipsed me, Hiccup. I used to be the dragon of all dragons, the one and only Night Fury! Now I'm just one in the flock, and I'm not even the best one anymore. The dragon lore-tellers will remember me as 'Toothless, who brought Hiccup into being,' and that's about it."

Hiccup slid closer to him, so their wings overlapped. "I don't know if all that is true. But even if it is, then why is it true? It's because you made me what I am. I don't just mean the transformation, and I don't just mean all the lessons in flying and fishing and fighting.

"Toothless, when we met, I was a total loser. A nobody! Hiccup the Useless! No one in my own village had any use for me at all. But you had faith in me. Faith that I could adjust to being a dragon; faith that I could learn things that no human could learn, or even imagine; faith that I could fly and fight on my own, without you beside me every step of the way. No one ever had that kind of faith in me before. Your Vortex changed me into a dragon, but your confidence in me changed me into a real person. If I've grown into something special and amazing, it's because you made me that way."

He took a breath, and tried something he'd never attempted to do as a dragon: sing. He'd never been much of a singer, and a dragon's mouth and tongue didn't lend themselves to singing, but he suddenly recalled a song he'd heard from his mother once...

"Did you ever know that you're my hero,
"And everything I would like to be?
"I can fly higher than an eagle,
" 'Cause you are the wind beneath my wings."

Most of the poetry was lost in the translation into dragon language, but the imagery was much more vivid to two beings who actually had wings. Toothless blinked hard, and spiraled down to land in the cove again. Hiccup stayed beside him all the way. When they landed, Toothless closed his eyes and rested his head against Hiccup's, the way they'd done just after Hiccup had healed Toothless' tail, and they just stood that way for a while.

"Hiccup, what am I going to do?" Toothless asked at last. "My transforming you – the thing I did that you appreciate the most – makes her think I'm a monster. I can't tell her I'm sorry when I'm not!" He backed away a few inches, but held the eye contact. "She's probably the only unattached female Night Fury within a two-week flight from here, but she's more than that. She's kept her soul undirtied from the usual Viking attitudes, very much like you've done. I think I've got a soft spot for someone who thinks like that. I like her a lot, Hiccup. I... I think I love her. That's not supposed to happen with dragons, but like you said, you've rubbed off on me. But she hates me. What am I going to do?"

Hiccup sighed. "Getting rid of girl-troubles for dragons is not at all in my line, but I will do my best to think about it. I'm sure Astrid is working on Guana, and you know how persuasive Astrid can be when she wants to be. In the meantime, we've made some progress – you're acting like Toothless again."

"You mean, opening up and talking to you?"

"Actually, I meant you throwing me halfway to the horizon, but yeah, the talking part is an improvement, too. Let's go for a nice easy flight and think about this."

o

A/N The song lyrics are from "Wind Beneath My Wings," as sung by many people, most famously Bette Midler.