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.

AN: This turned out a bit shorter than I expected, but it just didn't make sense for Clarke to be involved in the final confrontation.

The Dragon of Wanheda

Sitting in her hut as she studied the book Fishlegs had lent her, Clarke had to admit that it was rather impressive what the large boy had put together. His knowledge of English was comparatively fragmentary, and it seemed as though his area of expertise was mainly focused on what he had to know to talk with traders rather than carry out more detailed conversations, but he had used that knowledge to give her a decent framework for her subsequent lessons.

She didn't entirely like being relegated to the sidelines like this, but as Hiccup had pointed out, they weren't going to go on any missions with Gruffnut here unless they had to, as none of the Riders (with the obviously exception of Tuffnut) would have been comfortable leaving him on the island on his own (and Clarke was trying not to feel too happy about the fact that she had apparently been considered a Rider when the vote was taken into account). So long as they were all 'grounded' for a couple of days, it just made sense for Clarke to work on her language lessons in lieu of any other responsibilities.

Languages weren't a natural strength for her, and she appreciated that she'd need to talk with other people to be sure she was getting the pronunciation correct, but Clarke liked to think she was doing a good job. She'd managed to talk with Fishlegs for a while earlier to confirm that she was at least pronouncing some of the words right, and she felt that she was getting a handle on how this language compared to actual Norse. It looked as though whoever had created the language had paid lip service to the idea that the park was meant to be set in the Viking era, but hadn't been too bothered about actually doing the research to actually write the runes in genuine old Norse and had instead just loosely adapted them for English. Obviously the words themselves were pronounced differently, but there was a certain pattern she could follow…

"So you're the reason we've been using Traders' Tongue?"

"Gruffnut?" Clarke looked sharply up at her door to see the new arrival standing outside her hut. "What are you doing here?"

"Just taking in the Edge and I got a bit curious about the one person here Cousin Tuffnut hasn't told me much about," Gruffnut smiled as he began to walk inside, only for Charlotte to make a brief flight and land in front of him with a low growl.

"And who told you that it was acceptable to just walk into someone's home without asking permission?" Clarke turned around in her chair to smile at the intruder who was now subtly backing away from the large purple dragon.

"…OK, I'll keep that in mind," Gruffnut said, holding up his hands apologetically as he stepped back towards the door, even as his gaze remained fixed on Charlotte. "I thought you rode the Windstriker?"

"Griffin's my main dragon, but Charlotte and I bonded after she came here when the Gronckles had to leave their home island for a while," Clarke explained, smiling over at the purple dragon. "She's more of a… companion than a partner; she's fine just hanging around rather than going on full raids."

"So… not exactly a fighting dragon, huh?"

"Not unless she chooses to be later, and I'm not going to force her," Clarke affirmed, reaching over to scratch a spot behind Charlotte's ear that she seemed to like.

"Interesting…" Gruffnut nodded before he looked at her more intently. "So anyway, if you're new to this group, how did you get to the island in the first place?"

"Hiccup helped me protect Griffin from a… gang… that was trying to kill me and gave me a place to stay and learn more about dragons," Clarke shrugged. "Who'd turn down an offer like that?"

"Yeah, this is a great place, isn't it?" Gruffnut looked around the hut. "You seriously just got this whole hut-?"

"I never even asked for it, but that's the point," Clarke countered, fixing him with a firm stare. "I've been invited to stay here because I didn't ask for it; I never came here with an agenda beyond 'learn about the dragons', and I just can't believe how lucky I am that these people allowed me to stay here…"

"Right…" Gruffnut said, looking at her with an unreadable expression on his face before he shrugged and turned around to walk back out of the hut. "Anyway, have a good day; I got… stuff to do too!"

As the door closed behind Gruffnut, Clarke shook her head and sighed as she looked over at Charlotte.

"These guys have really weird families," she said with a wistful grin that was met with an acknowledging rumble from the Gronckle. "But hey, my mom killed my dad by accident and the guy I thought of as a brother had a crush on me for years; who am I to judge?"

Clarke wasn't sure if Charlotte actually understood her weak attempt at a joke, and even she admitted that it wasn't exactly funny, but at least she was trying to make light of it.

Considering that her only definite experience of larger families was Bellamy and Octavia (she couldn't be sure if any of the Grounders she'd met so far were related to any of the others she'd met in some way), she didn't exactly have a lot to compare these new family ties with, but she was pretty such things with Gruffnut were particularly complicated. Tuffnut and Ruffnut clearly had very different thoughts regarding their cousin and his personal qualities, which left her wondering how people could have such different opinions when they were otherwise so alike…

Woken next morning by the blaring of the twins' new morning horn, Clarke was surprised to find that she had fallen asleep at her desk; her language lessons were engaging work, but it was also challenging. Once she had put her books away, grateful that she hadn't slept on any of them, she walked out of the hut to head for the main building, only to find two figures conspicuous by their absence.

"Should I ask what happened to Gruffnut and Tuffnut?" she looked over at Ruffnut.

"When the idiot believed the show-off's tale that he wasn't trying to steal Barf and Belch from right in front of us and was just 'examining Toothless's tail-fin' when Hiccup found him in his hut later?" Ruffnut looked sceptically at Clarke. "At this point I'm not sure I want to know what Gruff's roped him into next."

"He was looking at Toothless too?" Clarke looked inquiringly at Hiccup.

"Before Tuff dragged him off to… something involving boars I'm probably better off not knowing about," Hiccup shrugged. "Everything OK?"

"Yeah," Clarke nodded. "Gruffnut dropped by my hut yesterday, but he just seemed to ask me how I'd ended up here and why I technically have two dragons. I mean, it was a bit odd, but he said Tuffnut hadn't told him much about me yet, so I didn't see any real harm in telling him a bit about why I have Griffin and Charlotte…"

"It's probably safe so long as you didn't tell him too much," Astrid nodded at Clarke. "The guy might be annoying, but if Tuffnut's been writing to him he's probably already aware of the rest of us already, and frankly…"

"You can say it; he's too much of an idiot to be a threat even if he wanted to be," Ruffnut shook her head as she looked between Astrid and Clarke. "I wouldn't trust him to be left alone with any of our dragons, but only because I don't want to deal with the hassle if one of them tried to attack him for being annoying."

"It happens," Astrid observed. "We've had to deal with Hookfang knocking Snotlout around more than once, and we're still not sure how much of that is just them being weird."

"Hey!" Snotlout yelled over at that comment, but the cool stare he received from Astrid and Clarke was enough for him to fold his arms and turn away with a frustrated mutter.

"Bad news, everyone!" Tuffnut's voice called out as the male twin walked into the clubhouse. "Gruffnut, yeah, Gruffnut had some place really awesome he had to go to… And so now he's gone. For… a while."

"I told you so," Ruffnut proclaimed.

"Oh yeah, you did," Tuffnut replied before he looked uncertainly at his sister. "Told me what?"

"That he would do what he always does," the female twin clarified as she walked over to her brother. "Show up, get you to worship him again, and then disappear."

"Well, why wouldn't I- uh… why wouldn't I worship him?" Tuffnut asked. "Gruffnut is awesome-"

"No he isn't!" Ruffnut cut her twin off. "He's a phony!"

"Uh… maybe he is a phony," Tuffnut retorted. "But if he's smart enough to fool people, that's their fault."

"…How does that even make sense?" Clarke looked sceptically at him. "Does he even stick around long enough for anyone to take him seriously long-term? The first potential leaders of my old group barely lasted a week relying on pure charisma before they made a serious mistake and everyone realised they had bigger concerns than food."

"What was the mistake?" Snotlout asked.

"My best friend ended up dead because his killer basically got bad advice from one of them."

"Huh," Tuffnut said, looking thoughtfully at her for a moment. "That's… a lot to think about… so I will just… go and think about it."

"…Did Tuffnut just become weirder?" Fishlegs looked around the room once the Viking in question had left.

"I decline to comment as you've all known him longer than me," Clarke held up her hands apologetically.

"Well… we'll keep an eye on him, but… like Fishlegs said, he's always been eccentric, so we can work with it," Hiccup shrugged as he looked over at Ruffnut. "Let's just… let us know if he does anything really odd, OK?"

"Shouldn't be too hard," Ruffnut nodded at him.

"Talking of odd things, how's the language lessons coming along?" Snotlout looked over at Clarke.

"What?" the other four Riders each gave Snotlout a firm glare.

"Hey, like you all don't think it's odd that she only speaks trader's tongue?"

"I already told you, my people spent basically all their lives on a ship before we had to land-"

"And that ship was big enough that you never had to go ashore?" Snotlout looked sceptically at her.

"It's not that implausible," Fishlegs pointed out. "With a large enough boat, I can think of a few ways that they could have set up some means of growing crops on the upper decks, and after that they could go fishing to get a meat alternative…"

"Seriously?" Snotlout rolled his eyes. "Life on a boat full-time; how does that work-?"

"It worked," Clarke cut him off, glaring indignantly at the short Viking. "It's a long and complicated story how it came about, and we had to abandon that way of life anyway because it wouldn't have kept working for much longer, but it worked, and if you think…"

She trailed off, lost for anything else to say that wouldn't risk going into more dangerous territory that might give away her secrets before she was ready. Finally she stood up with a frustrated sigh and walked out of the meeting hut, pausing to give Snotlout a final glare.

"My dad died because he had spent his life keeping that ship going and it reached the point where nobody could keep it up any more," she said, not bothering to hide her contempt at the Viking's doubts. "Just because you can't understand something doesn't mean it doesn't happen."

With that said, she walked back to her hut, mind already made up that she was going to focus on her translation efforts for a while, away from Snotlout's frustrating scepticism.

"So… that was Gruffnut earlier?" Clarke looked at the twins in surprise as she and the other Riders sat around the clubhouse, now all satisfied that their unwanted visitor had departed.

"Yeah, the idiot thought he could just walk in here and take one of our dragons to the hunters," Ruffnut rolled her eyes and smirked, leaning back to look out of the door at the dragon pens further down the island. "Like any of these guys are dumb enough for that to work…"

"Or disloyal enough that they'd just go off with the first person to come to them like that," Astrid put in.

"Didn't Heather-?" Snotlout began.

"After seeing all of our tricks; she had an in that Gruffnut didn't," Astrid corrected Snotlout sharply.

"We first met Heather when she was being forced to act as a spy by an old enemy of Berk's, and she ended up nearly stealing Stormfly because we were talking too freely about our dragons before we learned what she was there for," Hiccup explained off Clarke's questioning gaze before he turned his attention back to the matter at hand. "The point is that Gruffnut's been dealt with and that hunter ship had to retreat with nothing, and Tuffnut got to test the latest flight suit."

"It worked?" Clarke asked. After she'd finally learnt about the existence of the Dragon Eye, she'd been so caught up in reading Hiccup and Fishleg's notes on the Eye as part of her language lessons that she'd almost forgotten about the suits she'd been helping him with before that near-fateful raid.

"Oh, it worked very well," Tuffnut grinned at her in satisfaction. "I dived in there and kicked Gruffnut back and forth all the way along Barf and Belch's back!"

"And then you just dumped him… where, exactly?"

"Oh, somewhere around Dark Deep," Ruffnut grinned dismissively. "He'll probably find his way to the boat we left on the other side eventually, but in the meantime Tuff thought it'd do him some good to have a real adventure…"

Clarke briefly wondered if she should comment on the wisdom of that particular approach, but soon decided that it wasn't worth bringing the matter up. She and her people had run into a few problems with the Grounders because they didn't share the same justice system even though none of the former Ark residents had any actual authority to protest against what the natives did with their prisoners, and this time nobody was being immediately hurt and she didn't even particularly like Gruffnut.

Frankly, it was nice to have something simple after the chaos of the last attempt to steal the Eye…

Not for the first time, Viggo wondered why it was that so many of his associates seemed to be determined to keep believing that they could solve the problem of the Dragon Riders by resorting to the same old tactics as before.

Admittedly, the idea of using one of the Riders' cousins as a potential double agent had potential as a plan, but the fact that they had squandered that potential advantage on such an amateur scheme…

It was only the fact that he needed to consolidate his forces right now that stopped him inflicting a more severe punishment than transferring them from their ships to take part in the construction project. Once their outside contractor had arrived, Viggo had little doubt that he would need all hands on deck to ensure that Hiccup and his allies could never reclaim their dragons before he returned to business once again.

He'll be here in a couple of weeks; I can afford to wait to start hunting again until then…