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
It was the first time Astrid had seriously fought enemies on a boat rather than dry land (hitting Snotlout for being an idiot during past trips didn't count), but she had to admit that it had been a very engaging experience in its way. Adapting her usual combat strategies to accommodate the narrow area had been an engaging challenge, but with the dragons as back-up it wasn't hard to put the rest of Grimmel's crew on the defensive. The dragons had all been released from their cages with relative ease, and after that the opposing forces were almost pathetic as they tried to hold their own. They did their best to look intimidating, but it was only a matter of time before their weapons were discarded as the hunters fled from the creatures they had come here to trap.
"Yeah!" Astrid yelled in victory as she looked at her departing enemies, sitting astride Stormfly once again as the other Riders gathered around them.
"Now that is what I call kicking some ass!" Clarke grinned, Griffin letting out a roar of agreement.
"Kicking ass?" Fishlegs repeated in surprise.
"Just an expression my people use for when we're beating someone in a fight," Clarke explained. "It doesn't mean we actually have to kick someone in the ass, but the option's there."
"Kicking ass… I like it!" Ruffnut smiled over at the Riders' newest member. "Can we use that here too?"
"Feel free," Clarke nodded at the female twin, before she looked around the flying group in surprise. "Hey; where's-?"
"Hiccup?" Astrid would have spun around if she'd been standing rather than sitting, realising that their leader was absent. "Did anyone see-?"
"I'm here!" Hiccup's familiar voice called out, prompting the Riders to turn around. Seeing Hiccup flying on a dragon wasn't a surprise, but the fact that said dragon was something other than Toothless was a surprise on its own.
"Charlotte?" Clarke looked at her Gronckle in surprise before looking at Hiccup. "What happened? Is Toothless all right?"
"We were attacked by Grimmel and the tail control mechanism got jammed when I had to… well, jump off Toothless," Hiccup explained (Astrid noted that he at least looked legitimately ashamed at the fact that he'd jumped off what was certainly a flying dragon). "He managed to get to another island, but the fin mechanism got jammed and I don't have the tools on me to fix it…"
"And where does Charlotte fit in to this?" Astrid said, a warning edge to her voice as she looked at him.
"Uh… she caught me while I was falling with Grimmel?"
"Falling," Astrid repeated with a reinforced edge to her voice. "Are you telling us that you jumped off Toothless to force this Grimmel guy off his own dragon and ended up falling with no available dragons?"
"You know, it's not like I set out to do that; I just ended up surrounded by his Deathgrippers and there wasn't exactly a lot of options," Hiccup countered, before he gave the group an encouraging smile. "And hey, look on the positive side; we proved the naysayers wrong again."
"The what-sayers?" Snotlout asked.
"The people who keep treating dragons as beasts and monsters," Hiccup clarified, reaching over to scratch behind Charlotte's ears. "After all, Charlotte isn't 'my' dragon, so nobody can say she's just saving me because I trained her to save me; she helped me because…"
"Because she's good," Clarke said, raising a hand to wave at Charlotte, who let out a pleased rumble at this sign of approval from her more official partner. "It's like you taught me; give a dragon a chance, and you have friends for life."
"With a few exceptions," Astrid pointed out with a pointed stare at the Riders' leader. "I think we can all basically agree that trying to train Whispering Deaths isn't a great call even if we formed some kind of détente with the Screaming Death after you saved its mother."
"…Fair point," Hiccup nodded in acceptance, before he glanced down at the now partially-submerged ship and the fleeing lifeboats. "This probably won't help our reputations with the other tribes that much, though…"
"We can work on that," Astrid said, giving Hiccup a more reassuring tone of voice. "If this Grimmel guy was sent after us by the Grimborns, they're probably getting more desperate if they're hiring outsiders rather than relying on their own forces; if we make it clear that we were attacked first-"
"I need to go home."
"Home?" Fishlegs voiced the rest of the Riders' confusion as they looked at Clarke. "We're just-"
"Not… this home," Clarke said, allowing herself a brief, wistful smile as she looked at the rotund Viking before she turned to look at Hiccup in particular. "I… look, I'm sorry if it seems like I'm dumping this all on you all of a sudden, but I need to take Griffin back with me to talk with my people… and our allies."
"And… what do you need to talk with them about?" Hiccup gave Clarke a particularly pointed look.
"This is… it's a complicated story," Clarke said, taking a deep breath before she looked at the group. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you this before, but I… I wanted to get away from it all."
"You mean the war?"
"War?" Snotlout looked between Clarke and Fishlegs in surprise. "There was a war? You were part of another war before you joined us?"
"I was involved in… a few, really," Clarke admitted with an awkward shrug. "Some of them were relatively small compared to what you're thinking of, but it's a long story, and… OK, maybe dragonback isn't the best place to be having this discussion?"
"Yeah, good call," Hiccup said, looking around at the other Riders for a moment before he looked back at Clarke. "Obviously getting Toothless back is the first priority, but once we're back at the Edge, I promise you can say your piece before we do anything else."
"Fair enough," Clarke smiled back at him, even as she was clearly still anxious about something. As the dragons turned around to follow Hiccup back towards where Hiccup had last seen Toothless land, Clarke settled as easily into the flight formation as she'd become part of the current group, but Astrid was already wondering what she was about to reveal about her past.
She'd accepted that Clarke had more of a history than the obvious, but the idea that their new healer had some history in another war…
Hiccup supposed that he should just be grateful that everything had ended smoothly in the end. Once Toothless had been retrieved, the other dragons had been able to take him back to the Edge relatively easily. The last of Grimmel's forces had already retreated from the shipwreck by the time they got back, but it was easy to see that any remaining hunters wouldn't have the resources to do anything to the riders for a while. Hiccup had taken some time to fix Toothless's tail-fin so that his dragon was back to normal after the fight, but he and the others had always been aware that they still had to talk with Clarke about her previous comments.
"OK," he said, the group sitting around the meeting hut as they looked at Clarke. "So what's all this about you having been in a war before now?"
"Well… basically, I was caught up in two wars before I came here," Clarke explained, taking a final breath as she reached down to stroke Charlotte's face, the gronckle squatting beside her with a cautious yet expressive look on her face.
"Two?" Ruffnut repeated. "How'd that work?"
"When my people first… landed on the mainland, we ended up in a fight with the local tribes because we thought we were just claiming an uninhabited area."
"Well, that sucks," Snotlout said with a shrug. "So what happened?"
"My people did our best, but we kept on making mistakes, with some of us overreacting to mistakes made by the other side, and one thing led to another and the other thing led to…"
"Led to what?" Tuffnut asked, even the usually chaotic twin recognising that their healer was discussing a difficult topic.
"I killed almost an entire tribe and told myself it was in self-defence of my own people, and then I found out there was a bigger problem."
"What kind of problem?" Hiccup asked. His tone was neutral, displaying no sign of his deeper thoughts as he looked at her, but he gave an extra edge to his voice to make it clear that Clarke needed a good excuse for everything she was revealing to them right now.
"There was another group of people in that area, but they… well, how it happened is another long story, but basically they had been forced to stay inside their underground village for so long that they literally couldn't go outside," Clarke explained.
"They couldn't go outside?" Ruffnut looked at Clarke in confusion. "How does that work?"
"Well… you know how people can be allergic to certain things?"
"Oh yeah, that happens," Snotlout grinned. "We had a whole mess a bit before you joined us where we thought Fishlegs was becoming allergic to Meatlug-"
"When I was actually just having a reaction to… a new substance that was being used on her saddle," Fishlegs cut in, glaring at Snotlout before he turned back to Clarke. "Are you saying these people stayed inside because they were… allergic to something outside?"
"The best way to describe what was wrong with them is to say that they were allergic to the entire outside world," Clarke explained.
"The world?" Ruffnut raised her eyebrows in surprise. "How does that work?"
"Basically there are all kinds of things in the outside world that could make us sick, but we've just grown an immunity to them over the years," Clarke continued. "They had found out that it was possible to treat their condition, but it… well, it required taking blood from the other tribe, and then they realised that they could get around that by taking blood and bone marrow from my tribe…"
"Bone marrow?" Fishlegs' expression twisted uncomfortably at the image. "But… wouldn't that be…?"
"It would kill them," Clarke nodded. "These people basically just decided that my people and the others didn't matter so long as they were allowed to live. At least with our first enemies it was a relatively legitimate understanding and everything was reacting in self-defence; these people decided that it was easier to treat us like commodities than try and actually work with us."
"Could you have?" Astrid asked, rubbing her arms uncertainly. "I mean, if they were going to take your bone marrow…?"
"It wouldn't have been easy, and it would have taken longer, but there would have been ways we could have made it work," Clarke said, before she sighed in frustration. "But then our original opponents made a deal to give up my people so that they would be safe, and everything went by so fast… the only way to save my people was to open their own underground base to the open air and let almost four hundred people die."
The silence was almost worse than outright condemnation. Clarke had spent basically all of her time here trying to be a healer and move on from her new reputation as a killer, and how she was admitting to having caused death on a scale that probably surpassed anything any of her new friends had known.
"I'm sorry," Hiccup said at last. "That sounds… well, it sounds rough."
"You… I mean, you really didn't have a choice?" Fishlegs asked.
"They were starting to cut into my mother," Clarke said bitterly. "If I didn't act then, she would have died, and they would have kept doing it to the rest of my people."
The riders sat in silence for a few moments, considering what they had just learned, until Astrid spoke.
"You blamed yourself for things getting that far?"
"I was trying to be a leader and help people, and it all just… it went wrong," Clarke sighed, looking regretfully around at the rest of the group. "I thought that I could just… be a healer here and have a chance to do something to help people without having to take on that much responsibility… but I realised that if I keep doing that, I'm basically leaving everyone I knew behind while I try and help out another part of the world."
"And that's a bad thing?" Snotlout asked.
"It is when Grimmel was only able to do all this because he was able to convince so many other people that he was right about dragons," Clarke elaborated. "I've been helping you all because I wanted to know more about dragons… but if we're keeping that knowledge to ourselves, are we really helping the dragons? We need to help the world change its view on them if they're going to be accepted…"
"That's why you want to go back?" Hiccup asked, looking thoughtfully at Clarke.
"Like I told you, my dad was always a fan of the whole idea of the dragons when I was growing up." Clarke allowed herself a soft smile at the memory before she continued. "It might be a risk, and I'm not asking anyone to come with me, but if I can just make my people and our old enemies see that there's more to this world than what they think… if we can give ourselves a chance to grow and not stay stuck in the past…"
Hiccup exchanged glances with the others, and wasn't entirely surprised to see that only Astrid and Fishlegs looked genuinely interested in what Clarke was proposing. The twins and Snotlout seemed interested, but the way they were also looking at each other made it clear that they hadn't fully registered the scope of what was being suggested, which left Hiccup uncertain how he should divide the team up for this new mission.
Clarke had only been here for a short while, but after she'd helped them retain the Eye in particular… and he did want to give the dragons a true chance at making peace with the wider world…