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
With Astrid and Snotlout trying to round up the new arrivals, the twins had been put to work trying to create a pit or something that they could use to keep the Gronckles relatively contained until they could work out a better solution. Clarke had been left to basically supervise the twins; given Astrid and Snotlout's superior knowledge of the Edge, it made more sense for her to make sure the twins didn't get distracted, and Griffin was useful to help keep the gathered Gronckles contained.
Hearing a few of their calls to the dragons had given Clarke more material to work with in her growing effort to learn their 'native' language, but she still made a note that she'd need to see about asking someone for actual lessons at some point. She'd lucked out so far that Viggo apparently preferred to communicate in 'traders' tongue' rather than whatever else they used to talk to each other, but she didn't want to rely on that now that she was forming a more permanent attachment to this place. The other riders were generous enough to stick to traders' tongue when they were addressing her directly, but Clarke had a feeling that she'd have more trouble if she had to spend more time on their home island…
I'm seriously thinking about that?
The thought surprised herself, but as she stepped off Griffin to take a quick look at the latest retrieved Gronckle, Clarke had to admit that she wouldn't mind seeing where her new friends came from. The villages she'd seen back on the mainland had been nice enough, but she had to admit that there was something intriguing about the thought of seeing a society that had been defined by dragon attacks and a Viking heritage…
"Bizarre how this all happens, isn't it?" she said, looking thoughtfully at the distinctive purple Gronckle. "We all just came here trying to get away from something- because I don't believe you just flew here on a whim- and now here we all are, settling into a new and fascinating life for ourselves… all that hope and promise…"
She gave a more focused look at the Gronckle for a moment before she smiled at her latest thought. "You're a girl, right?" When the Gronckle growled at her in a manner that she chose to interpret as confirmation, Clarke reached out to give her a tentative scratch behind the 'ear'. "Then… can I call you Charlotte?"
When the Gronckle wagged its 'tail' at her, Clarke rubbed its nose in thanks. It was a small way to acknowledge the second major loss she and the rest of the Hundred had suffered when they arrived on Earth- those kids who had died in the crash and their losses to the toxic smoke had been relatively unavoidable, but Wells and Charlotte had died because of clear mistakes made by other people- but it made Clarke feel better…
When she looked back at the horizon and saw a new group of dragons flying towards the island, the only reason she knew Hiccup and Fishlegs were part of that particular group was that Toothless was clearly part of this wave of incoming dragons, the slender long-winged Night Fury a sharp contrast to the rest of the Gronckles. She didn't even need to call out to the other Riders to tell them about the sight; the twins had flown over her even as she was turning around to look for them, and she soon glimpsed Stormfly and Hookfang flying across the forest to join them. Quickly getting onto Griffin's back, Clarke prompted her dragon up into the air and followed them to the dragon's pens, landing on the ground just as Toothless, Meatlug and the other Gronckles joined the other four riders.
"What happened?" Astrid looked anxiously at the two returnees. "Is everything all right?"
"Aside from our run-in with a Catastrophic Quaken on Dark Deep, yeah, we're good," Fishlegs said with an anxious tone to his voice.
"Catastrophic what?" Tuffnut asked.
"Think a Gronckle basically the size of the Screaming Death with a large amount of spikes all over it and a double-jawed mouth," Hiccup clarified.
"That doesn't sound good," Astrid observed grimly.
"Uh… Screaming Death?" Clarke raised a curious hand. "I don't think I read about that one."
"You know what the Whispering Death is, right?" Astrid glanced at her.
"Yeah."
"The Screaming Death is basically an offshoot of the Whispering Death, but so big that it could eat a standard Whispering Death in one bite, completely white in colour, and with red eyes."
"…Yeah, that sounds terrifying," Clarke nodded in understanding, before she looked back at Hiccup and Fishlegs. "And something like that was on Dark Deep?"
"The Gronckle equivalent, but the size matches up."
"Which is why you brought more Gronckles here?" Snotlout said, looking at the new arrivals in exasperation.
"It's just a few extra Gronckles; we can handle that."
"Just a few extra?" Tuffnut repeated.
"…Did we miss something?" Hiccup looked curiously at Clarke and Astrid.
"You should probably take a look back at the main camp," Clarke indicated behind her.
"There are more Gronckles?" Fishlegs grinned as he saw the group of dragons around the camp below them, an orange-and-pink one looking particularly annoyed as it stared at another of its kind.
"You think these are other refugees from Dark Deep?" Hiccup asked.
"Well, it makes sense; there's not much else between here and there," Fishlegs observed, his grin putting Clarke in mind of Raven when she was getting particularly enthusiastic about her latest project. "Can you believe they flew all this way? Gronckles may be slow, but they are tenacious."
"Hey, don't put that rock in your mouth!" Tuffnut suddenly yelled at another orange Gronckle that had moved up to a position beside the riders. "You don't know where it's been!"
"Hiccup, these guys are out of control," Astrid looked urgently at him. "We have to get them back to their island."
"Which would involve dealing with the problem of the Quaken," Fishlegs said grimly.
"Quaken Shmaken," Snotlout said dismissively as he moved up to stand between Hiccup and Fishlegs. "You let one lousy dragon take over Meatlug's entire island?"
"It's not that simple, Snotlout-" Fishlegs protested.
"Oh, sure it is," Snotlout cut him off. "Quaken one, Mealug, BUZZ!"
Clarke had no idea how a group of people who believed they were living in a Viking culture could have retaining their knowledge of the idea that a buzzer indicated that someone had lost something, but that noise Snotlout had just made was rather distinctive.
"OK, let's just drop that to focus on the bigger problem here," Hiccup put in, stopping Clarke from analysing that question any further. "We need to wrangle all these wild Gronckles, and for the moment, I'll put the twins in charge of that."
"Awesome," Tuffnut grinned. "It'll be nice to get to know these guys a little bit better; we got off to a little bit of a rocky start on our relationship."
When the male twin laughed, Clarke was glad to see that she wasn't the only one of the other riders who didn't find that particular 'joke' funny.
"You see what I did there?" Tuffnut said as the others began to walk off. "I'll explain it later; my humour can be quite complex."
"Just be careful of Charlotte, please?" Clarke put in.
"Charlotte?" the twins asked.
"The purple female Gronckle back there," Clarke indicated the Gronckle pit with a smile. "I named her after… someone I failed to save."
"Who was she?" Ruffnut asked, the female twin looking surprisingly tentative as she asked the question.
"…She was a traumatised girl who was persuaded that the best way to deal with her fear was to kill my best friend after his father ordered the death of her parents."
"You've had a very rough life," Snotlout looked back at her with what Clarke chose to interpret as his version of sympathy.
"I survived," Clarke said with a dismissive shrug, before she looked back at the twins. "Just… I'm calling the purple one Charlotte, so please don't forget that."
"Check," Tuffnut nodded at her with a smile. "Nice name, actually; any other suggestions?"
"Nobody who really… stands out," Clarke said at last. Some of the other early victims of the Hundred's time on Earth hadn't really emotionally engaged with her to the extent that she'd want to name a dragon after them, and if she ever chose to name a dragon after Wells, Finn or Anya, she'd want to be sure she had made the right choice; Gronckles just made her consider Charlotte's untapped potential as one of the youngest of their group. "Let's just focus on keeping these guys under control and work out our next move from there."
By the end of the day, Clarke wasn't sure if they'd set their sights too high or if they just didn't have the means to properly 'control' this many dragons at once. The Gronckles themselves were friendly enough, but when dealing with dragons with a seemingly insatiable appetite for rocks of all kinds and no way to keep them safely contained on this island, it was clear that she'd underestimated just how important a one-to-one human/dragon relationship actually was. The twins seemed to be only capable of doing a limited form of damage control rather than stopping the dragons from running riot in the first place, and while Fishlegs could offer some advice from his experience with Meatlug, there were still too many dragons for the riders to keep track of on their own.
Eventually, once it seemed as though the immediate 'risk' of Gronckle-related damage had died down, Clarke left Griffin to grab some fish in the stables while she took another wander through the outpost. She was glad to see that the others' huts were relatively undamaged despite the chaos of the new arrivals, but noticed an open cupboard at the back of the stables with a few small vases of some sort in it. Her curiosity aroused, Clarke picked up one of the vases and opened it, but could only detect a strange smell that put her in mind of…
"Hookfang?" she said to herself, as she re-corked the vase and looked at it in surprise. "What is this stuff?"
After confirming that Griffin was enjoying a good meal of fish for the moment, she decided to take the vase and ask someone about it. After a brief walk, she found Hiccup and Toothless working at one of the outer edges of the outpost, but by the time she reached them, Fishlegs had joined them, an anxious expression on the large Viking's face as he spoke with the Edge leader.
"…plan was?" Fishlegs asked Hiccup as Clarke drew close enough to hear
"The plan?" Hiccup repeated in confusion.
"For Dark Deep?" Fishlegs said urgently. "The Quaken?How are we gonna get rid of it?"
"Oh, yeah," Hiccup said, turning back to the rocky outcropping nearby. "I've been thinking about that, Fishlegs, and… I'm not so sure we should. Get rid of it, that is."
"What?" Fishlegs looked at him with what Clarke knew was surprise even without being able to see her new friend's face.
"Well… I'm not sure that we have the right to interfere," Hiccup explained, putting down whatever he had in his hands as he turned back to face Fishlegs. "I mean, that's what happens in nature, all the Quaken has taken over the island for one day, maybe a bigger dragon will come along and the Quaken will be chased off. You know, who's to say?I'm sorry, Fishlegs."
Fishlegs looked at Hiccup in silence for a moment before he walked off down another path, leaving Clarke free to walk up to Hiccup herself.
"That… seemed a bit blunt, wasn't it?"
"Blunt?" Hiccup looked at her curiously. "Assuming you're talking about what I just said to Fishlegs, in what way?"
"I mean, just… telling him he couldn't do anything about the situation on Dark Deep?" Clarke explained, grateful that Hiccup wasn't just accusing her of eavesdropping. "From what I've heard, you've gotten involved in helping wild dragons out before; what makes this different?"
"Well… yeah, but in the past the dragons have needed our help because of us rather than them being dangerous in themselves," Hiccup explained. "I'm willing to argue that the Red Death was just too dangerous to be allowed to keep going, but the Screaming Death only attacked us because it was released on Berk by the Outcasts, and we had a few dragons attacking us because… certain people made mistakes…"
"Should I assume Snotlout was responsible for at least one of those?"
"He did try and sell Changewing eggs as stones of good fortune once…" Hiccup shrugged, before he continued. "Anyway, the point is that we dealt with those dragons to fix the mistakes other people had made in dealing with them, but right now… well, I haven't seen anything to suggest that the Quaken isn't just doing what nature intended for it."
"So… no way of knowing if we'd be doing the right thing to force it off the island or make things even more complicated?"
"Pretty much," Hiccup nodded, as Toothless moved in beside him in an apparent show of support. "We've had a few close calls where we landed on an island inhabited by dangerous dragons without knowing what was there, and then we just focused on getting off and leaving it in peace. With Dark Deep, I just feel that… do we have the right to force the Quaken to move on just because we already like the Gronckles?"
"…Fair point," Clarke nodded tentatively. "I mean, most of my peoples' problems could have been sorted out a lot sooner if we'd just accepted that we didn't have the right to take over the land we'd arrived on when there were people already there."
"Huh," Hiccup said, looking uncertainly at her for a moment before he noticed the vase in her hand. "Where did you get that?"
"I saw it in a cupboard in the stables; I wasn't sure what was in it, and… well, I wanted to ask," Clarke explained as she held out the vase to Hiccup. "I thought it smelled like Hookfang-"
"And you were right," Hiccup nodded at her as he took the vase from her. "It's Monstrous Nightmare gel."
"It's what?"
"Nightmares like Hookfang secret it to set themselves on fire, and we've used it to create… well, we use it to blow things up."
"Really?" Clarke looked at the jar with new apprehension and respect. "You've created explosives?"
"…Yeah?" Hiccup said, looking back at her with an expression that put Clarke in mind of the way some Grounders had looked when she or her friends had used a term that they weren't familiar with. Hiccup might understand the concept, but Clarke guessed that he hadn't defined it in that manner yet.
"And this gel can make things burn…" Clarke looked thoughtfully at the vase before she turned back to Hiccup. "Have you thought about applying this to weapons?"
"Weapons?"
"I mean, if Hookfang and other dragons can use this to set themselves on fire, maybe we could use it to create… burning weapons or something like that?" Clarke shrugged. "OK, so when I say 'we' I appreciate that I mean 'you', and you'd probably need a strong metal to make sure it doesn't melt from the heat, but if you could make it work…"
She trailed off, her mind briefly lost in the possibilities before she shook her head. "Actually, maybe it would just look cool without really adding anything to it-"
"No, that's… that could be something to think about," Hiccup nodded, a contemplative expression on his face as he studied the vase. "We've already managed to recreate Gronckle Iron since we got here, and it takes a lot to damage that after it's been forged into anything; if I could create a hollowed hilt for the weapon to store some gel, and add something that would create a spark when I wanted the sword to light up…"
As Hiccup picked up the hammer and iron bar he'd been working on earlier and began to walk back to his hut, muttering to himself as he looked at the vase in his other hand, Clarke was surprised when Toothless looked at her with an expression that the former Ark resident could only think of as resigned exasperation.
"Hey, I just thought the flaming weapon idea might be cool; how was I to know he'd start working it out that quickly?" she said, before shaking her head as she realised she was talking to a dragon. "Why am I…?"
Her voice trailed off as she took in the tentative expression on the Night Fury's face, the black dragon looking at her in a manner that she would have considered a 'You'll see' look if she had been looking at a human.
"You… you really understand this, don't you?" she said, looking cautiously at the dragon. "You actually get what we're saying to you…"
Toothless let out a rumble and shook his head in a manner that put Clarke in mind of a human saying 'obviously'.
"Whoa…" Clarke smiled at the Night Fury.
She'd assumed that Griffin had been able to understand various key terms like the idea of letting her ride him because the dragons had been genetically programmed to respond to humans in that manner in the first place. The idea that the dragons were smart enough for Toothless to understand what Hiccup was planning to do with that sword and vase and express scepticism about his rider's ability to pull it off…
Regardless of how long it would take to resolve the current situation with the Gronckles, she now had a new goal to work on; spend more time with Griffin so that she could reach the same point in their own relationship that Hiccup and Toothless had reached in their relationship.
I am a dragon rider now, after all; I might as well make sure I'm doing it properly…