I don't know why this just popped into my head, but it did and I had to write it. Please Enjoy!

Shedding Scales:

Hiccup hated it when she shed her scales. It wasn't as bad as molting, which Hiccup was thankful she was probably done with for good, but it was still awful. It was like how humans shed skin or hair, or how a dog shed its fur. They ended up absolutely everywhere. On the floor, on her desk, in her bed, in the tub… EVERYWHERE.

Hiccup woke up to another morning on the Edge and sighed. Scales peppered her pillow and sheets. It was a pain to clean up. Today seemed especially bad too. Hiccup groaned; it was gonna be a long day.

A little while later, Hiccup was at her desk. Finishing a new design for another tail-fin she was working on for Toothless, Hiccup scratched an itch at her left ear and black scales fell to the paper. She sighed and brushed them away, intent on sweeping them up later with the rest around the hut. Between her and Toothless, the floor was littered with them.

Bending to a chest beside her desk, Hiccup took out some different colored paints and what looked to be her last bottle of ink. She shook it, frowning. Not much left. Her paints seemed to be running low too. Johann wouldn't be coming by with another shipment for about another two weeks, though, so she'd just have to make the best of it. Laying them out on her desk, she began to paint the design. She ran out of ink far too quickly.

"Well, I guess that's that, huh bud?" She sat back, the bottle empty and her design not even halfway finished. In hindsight, she should have chosen something that used less black, but hindsight was 20/20. It wasn't as if her paints had been fairing too well either.

Hiccup bent over and held her head between her hands, elbows resting on either side of the paper beneath her. Scales fell, some landing on in the ink, and Hiccup felt herself sigh. She was about to try and fish them out, when something struck her. She paused. The scales almost completely blended in with the ink, the only clear difference being the blue sheen on her scales. It did make her wonder, though…

Good pigments weren't exactly easy to come by in the Archipelago. It was why she had to rely on trade to get any of her paints and preferred to just use ink for black. Standing, Hiccup began sweeping up scales and taking them to her desk, her unfinished work forgotten for the moment. Toothless rose his head up from where he was, looking at her curiously.

He trilled at her with a curious lilt, tilting his head with it. It wasn't exactly a, "What are you doing?" but similar enough in translation.

"Just testing if I can solve two problems with one stone", Hiccup answered, depositing a handful of her own scales into the mortar on her desk, then using the pestle to crush them to dust. The only question was the binding agent. She'd heard of people using egg so, using one of Chicken's eggs she'd recently laid, Hiccup cracked open the egg and began mixing the two together. Hiccup smiled, the color absolutely perfect. It was deep and rich, the pigment of the scales keeping to their color just as she'd hoped. She just hoped the consistency was right.

Taking a scrap piece of parchment and a paintbrush, Hiccup dipped it into the mixture. As she took the brush out and moved it on the page, the paint proved too viscous, and when it wasn't it was too watery and a tad grainy. Either she'd done something wrong, missed a step somewhere, or the scales just weren't binding right with the egg.

Hiccup hummed.

Toothless stood and walked up beside her. "It didn't work?"

"Nope", she cuffed.

Toothless licked her cheek to make her feel better, his large tongue going up to her hair, and Hiccup reared back, a smile on her face despite her words. "Toothless, you know that doesn't…wash out…" she trailed off, seeming to have thought of something. Cleaning out the old one, she crushed up a new batch of scales, before suddenly holding the mortar to Toothless.

"Toothless, spit in this", she told him, and Toothless looked at her like she'd gone crazy. He did it anyway, and she began mixing the same as she'd done with the egg. "Let's hope this works", she muttered, then took a paint brush and dipped it into the new solution. The color was even better than before, holding a nice shine to it as well. When she put the brush to the paper, painting a line beneath the last test, Hiccup leaped out of her chair.

"YES!" she roared and laughed. Hiccup couldn't believe it'd worked; it was perfect, and it opened a whole new door to an endless amount of colors for her. With that thought, she ran out the hut to gather as many colors of scales as she could find.

Toothless, for his part, set down, knowing she'd be back with an arm or sack full of scales ready to be turned into paint. He wasn't wrong, for Hiccup had come back with the shed scales of each one of the other riders' dragons. Within the hour, Hiccup had acquired herself with new jars of black, red, blue, green, brown, and yellow paint. She sat with a smile, then set back to work on her design for the new tail-fin she'd been working on. And for the first time, as her scales fell to her desk or the floor, Hiccup smiled.

Part 2 of Night of the Hunters coming soon!