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

Raven had always prided herself on being a strong person, but after everything she'd endured since that stupid shooting shit during the final battle at the dropship, she would like to know if anybody could keep putting up with all this crap. She'd been able to focus on the goal of trying to rescue their friends and stop Mount Weather immediately after the rest of the Ark came down, and the initial attempt to make their camp an actual liveable location had helped to distract her for a while, but these last few weeks, as the technical side of things was dealt with and they moved on to the more boring bits.

Raven got that Clarke would have been able to focus on this kind of thing, but she just couldn't get into it herself. She wanted to just blame Abby for screwing up her role as chancellor and doctor, but she had to face the facts that she hadn't exactly been giving herself the chance to heal properly either. Add in Pike's certainty that the grounders would attack and a large number of people were trying to mobilise against an enemy that had been an ally only a few weeks ago and had shown no sign that they actually wanted to fight any more…

OK, so there had been some tension when Pike sent some of his men into Mount Weather, but from what Raven had heard something about Clarke being missing meant that some people weren't keen on the idea of doing anything to provoke her. She didn't fully get some of the 'rules' of Grounder culture or their beliefs, but there was something about Clarke gaining some kind of power from everyone she'd killed in Mount Weather and their enemies not wanting to risk her striking back against them later if they didn't know where she was when they did something big. Raven tried to take some pride in how Pike trying to establish himself in Mount Weather was mainly a symbolic gesture as she'd managed to destroy the nuclear launch codes he might have used to further his own vendetta against the other tribes, but she knew that wouldn't hold him back for long if he got really determined to do some damage.

The thing that made that even harder was that Raven didn't know how she'd ended up getting stuck with that kind of responsibility. She was fine with putting tech together, but whatever her opinion of herself she knew that she wasn't any kind of leader or authority figure. Even if she had said Abby wasn't doing a good job, Pike and Bellamy's belief that they had to be ready to fight the Grounders wasn't going to do anyone any favours either. With grounders still tense around the former Ark residents and so many Ark residents focused on the idea that the Grounders were just primitives and they should be the ones in the charge of Earth… Raven knew it wasn't right, but she knew that she wasn't the right kind of smart to do anything about that problem.

I just want this all to stop…

She hated to feel so weak, but when ex-Chancellor Jaha had come back and started talking about the freedom from pain in the 'City of Light' he'd discovered on his time away… all his words about how just taking that chip would free them from the pain that diminished their lives and robbed them of their passions…

Was it so bad to go along with something that at least offered some kind of solution to everything she'd been through? Raven wasn't ready to just give up, but if nobody else could do anything to help her…

"Hey!" a voice called out from off to the side. "Look up there!"

For a moment, Raven felt as though her entire world had just taken a sharp knock; there was no way that anything on this world could be flying, and everything that could have come from orbit had already landed, so what the Hell could be in the sky now?

When Raven looked up, her eyes widened in shock. The sun was high enough that the sky was a brilliant blue, which made it all the easier to spot what was currently approaching them. At first Raven thought she was just looking at a strange collection of birds, but as they got closer to the camp it became increasingly obvious that they were far too large to be birds, and there even seemed to be… were people riding those things?

Raven blamed the fact that she was on the outskirts of the camp as the reason she didn't register how Pike's forces were gathering in a position to face the approaching fliers. Her immediate reaction was to be relieved that people were ready to defend them from another potential threat, but Raven swiftly rejected that thought. If she had just been thinking about how she wished people were more open to non-violent solutions, she wasn't going to just think of strangers as threats when she didn't know more about them.

She wasn't sure what she was thinking as she moved as fast as possible over to the area where Pike's forces were congregating, but even as Raven forced down the pain in her back she knew that she had to try something. Maybe she couldn't stop her people from making bad decisions when it came to the grounders, but there was still a chance to do something better with these people…

"Don't shoot!"

Raven couldn't believe her ears when she heard that voice from the air, but when she looked up, she couldn't ignore the evidence of her eyes. Even at this distance, it was possible to see that the leading orange-and-red flying creature had a blonde figure in black leather sitting on its back, and that rider's voice…

"Clarke?" Raven called out incredulously, vaguely aware that at least one other voice had called out the same thing behind her as the creature descended. Sure enough, once the creature reached the ground, Clarke Griffin had jumped off its back, holding up her hands in a placating manner as she looked around at Pike's assembled soldiers.

"We're not here to hurt anyone!" Clarke said, even as the creature moved to stand behind her, its wings- it had wings- raised in a tense manner and its lips pulled back to reveal sharp teeth as it gave a low growl.

"You come here with that thing-" Pike began, stepping forward and raising his weapon.

"He's my friend!" Clarke yelled urgently, moving to stand between Pike and the weapon as she urgently waved her arms. "He's my dragon! The Dragon Sanctuary survived and I trained Griffin; everyone out there has spent their lives with dragons!"

"Dragons?" Pike repeated, glaring at Clarke even as he kept his weapon slightly lowered. "You're having me on; they're not real-"

"She's telling the truth," another voice said as Abby walked out from behind the gathering of soldiers. There was a warm smile on the doctor's face as she looked at her daughter before turning back to Pike. "Jake was always fond of the tales of the Dragon Sanctuary."

"Dragon Sanctuary?" Pike repeated, which at least saved Raven asking that question.

"Before… everything happened, it was basically an elaborate theme park filled with genetically engineered dragons that only the very rich could even afford to visit," Abby explained (Raven couldn't believe she'd never heard of that story). "Jake's family had a pamphlet about it, and he always told Clarke stories about the dragons there when he was telling her a bedtime story…"

The older woman turned to look at the creature behind Clarke with a cautious smile. "And… the Sanctuary survived? And you… trained this dragon?"

"His name is Griffin," Clarke said, returning her mother's cautious smile with one of her own as she stepped slightly aside to let her mother look at the creature behind her. "He… I kind of had Dad in mind when I named him."

"Griffin?" one of the gathered soldiers said, prompting the now-identified Griffin to raise his head and growl at the speaker.

"I wasn't calling a dragon 'Jacob'; it sounded stupid," Clarke shrugged as she glanced upwards, as though looking for something. "Charlotte was a bit more… OK, 'cuddly' isn't quite the right word for her, but it gets the concept across… so it made more sense to give her a human name, but Griffin deserved something better."

"Oh," Abby said, clearly just as confused as Raven about what Clarke meant by that before she turned her full attention to the large creature now curled around behind Clarke. A tentative smile on her face, Abby raised her hand towards the creature, but then paused as she looked at her daughter. "C… can I…?"

"Just hold your hand like that, Mom," Clarke said, smiling in understanding as she stepped aside to indicate the dragon. Raven wondered how Clarke could be so focused on her mother that she almost seemed to be ignoring the soldiers still gathered around her, but glancing up at where the other dragons (and where had they even come from?) were still waiting above the camp, she guessed that Clarke just had faith her friends would help out if they were needed.

Raven suddenly felt ashamed of herself; she might have been wondering what she could do to help in the middle of this current mess, but Clarke seemed to have such faith that she and the others could have managed without her that it felt like she'd let her friend down. She doubted that Clarke would actually blame them for it- considering Clarke she'd just blame herself even if there probably wasn't anything she could have done- but it still hurt to think about how she'd failed…

"Wow…" Abby's voice said, drawing Raven's attention back to where the chancellor was stroking Griffin's nose and the dragon let out an appreciative rumble. "He… he's incredible…"

"Yeah, he is," Clarke smiled, before she glanced upwards. "And he's not the only one."

Following her daughter's gaze upwards to where the other dragons were flying, Abby watched with a cautious smile as Clarke waved one hand into the air. It took a moment for anyone to respond, but eventually the other dragons responded to Clarke's signal and flew down to join her on the ground, touching down as Pike's soldiers backed off to give them more space. Raven wondered what it meant that the dragon that looked like a flying purple boulder didn't have a rider, but her attention was soon focused on the other three dragons and the people on their backs. The two-headed green dragon with the apparent twins sitting on its necks was a surprise, but Raven wasn't sure if she was more impressed by the sleek black dragon or the blue dragon covered in spines.

Of course, then she saw the black dragon's rider jump off its back and display the artificial left leg, and she had something new to focus on. The strange metal-and-wood combo where his leg should have been was a bit of a shock, but the way this guy stood on it made it clear that he was comfortable with the lost limb and its replacement. Raven knew that she wouldn't be able to use the same method to sort her own leg issue, but seeing someone else manage despite a similar handicap…

Raven wouldn't call what she was feeling 'hope', exactly, but looking at Clarke standing alongside these dragons, she had a sudden sense that there was more to the world than the struggle that she'd been part of since she came to the ground. For the first time in as long as she could remember, it felt like she wasn't just thinking about how to stay alive, but the idea of having something to enjoy…

Maybe it was presumptuous, particularly when she'd never seriously thought of herself as the type to even own a regular pet (and she had a feeling that dragons were far more than any kind of 'pet'), but as Clarke turned to look at her with a warm smile, Raven had a sudden sense that things were going to get better now.

"Hey, Raven," her old friend said, walking away from the dragon to give her a brief hug, stepping back to look her over with a sympathetic smile. "How's things?"

"About what you'd expect," Raven shrugged, trying to downplay the whole thing. "It's all going crazy at times and all we can do is try and keep it from blowing up."

"So… what we do back home?" the blonde on the blue dragon said. Her voice was slightly cautious as she spoke, as though she wasn't entirely used to talking in English, but she looked between Raven and Clarke with a curious smile that suggested she at least understood the analogy.

"Well, I'm fairly sure Raven just means that the situation here is tense rather than people actually blowing stuff up, but yeah, you've got it," Clarke nodded at the other blonde.

"So," Pike put in, stepping forward to give Clarke a brief once-over, "you spent months away from your people to… play with dragons?"

"I left because I wanted to be alone and I found friends who helped me get better," Clarke corrected the older man, showing no sign that she was shocked to see another returned face from the Ark. "And we don't 'play' with dragons; we train them as partners and friends."

"But you're sure these dragons are safe?"

"They'll defend themselves if provoked, but they won't attack anyone here."

"Good," Pike nodded. "Then that gives us more firepower for when we have to confront the grounders-"

"Excuse me?" Clarke cut him off. "Confront the Grounders?"

Oh boy… Raven thought, simultaneously looking forward to seeing how Clarke would put Pike in his place and worried about how she'd do it; if she said too much and provoked Pike too quickly, things could get ugly.

"We need to establish our authority if we're going to make thing clear," Pike said firmly. "These people might not have a developed society but they've got the numerical advantage; if we can attack from the air-"

"I'm sorry, I didn't make it clear," Clarke looked firmly at Pike. "Hiccup is the one in charge; I'm just their healer."

"Hiccup?" Pike said, although Raven had a feeling she wasn't the only one who'd had to stop herself following his example.

"That would be me," the one-legged man said, stepping forward to nod politely at Pike. "Hiccup Haddock."

"Seriously?" Pike looked at the young man incredulously. "You are-?"

"The first person in our tribe to train a dragon, and he trained the most dangerous dragon we knew of," the blonde on the blue dragon cut in, folding her arms as she looked over at Pike. "Trust me, it would not be a good idea to question Hiccup's authority."

"Plus, Toothless gets mad when people are mean to his best friend," one of the two-headed dragon's riders cut in, the deeper voice suggesting that this twin was male.

"Toothless?" Abby looked at the black dragon in surprise. As though in response, the dragon opened his mouth to reveal his own teeth, only for the teeth to somehow retract back into the dragon's jaw. "Oh."

"Yeah, I think he does that so that he won't break the teeth when he's using his plasma blasts," Hiccup said with a shrug before he turned back to Pike. "The point is that we came here because Clarke wanted to see how her people are doing, but we're not here to pick sides in any kind of… local war."

"We've got enough of that crap with the hunters back home, thanks," the other rider said, this twin's voice suggesting that she was female.

"Hunters?" Raven looked at the girl twin in surprise.

"Long story," the girl twin shrugged.

"What matters," Hiccup said, giving Pike a firm stare, "is that we already spoke with the Commander about the dragons, and we're all prepared to negotiate for you guys having a more independent role in this society in exchange for everyone understanding what you all won't do. You people need to get that you can't just drop out of the sky and expect everything to go your way, but the Coalition need to realise that you have the right to your own lives and territory as well."

"We're the more advanced-!" Pike began.

"And I don't care about who has the best weapons," Hiccup cut him off. "If you're going to use strength to decide anything, you're never going to get anything done but get a lot of people killed."

"They killed us-"

"My tribe spent years killing dragons while they killed us before we learnt that there was a bigger enemy we both had to deal with," Hiccup interrupted Pike once again, his expression firm as he looked at the older man. "I ended that war because I had faith both sides wanted to find a better way; are you really going to just keep killing each other because of some stupid misunderstanding?"

"Stupid misunderstanding?" Pike looked at Hiccup as though he was resisting the urge to hit the younger man. "Do you even know what those people did to us?"

"I don't care," Hiccup retorted. "You came here thinking you were coming to uninhabited territory and the Coalition reacted to what they thought were hostile invaders; people made mistakes, but nobody here wanted to provoke a war."

"He's right," Clarke nodded in approval at Hiccup before she looked at Pike. "The Commander is willing to negotiate for a more balanced approach; do you really want to be the one responsible for starting a war that could kill even more of us, or do you want to do the mature thing and find a better way?"

Pike continued to glare at Clarke, but there was a tentativeness to his glare at the way she had phrased that particular statement. Raven knew that people weren't her best subject even before Finn had ruined their old relationship, but she got the impression that Pike basically took that comment as a dare to be more 'mature' than Lexa, who she had heard him dismiss as a 'child' more than once.

She wasn't sure if this approach was going to stop Pike pursuing his own agenda in terms of establishing the Ark survivors as a presence on the ground, but she got the distinct impression that he was going to back down a bit, at least to assure himself that he was more 'mature' than Lexa.

And in the meantime, Raven thought to herself as she turned her attention back to Griffin and the other assembled dragons, now looking curiously at the gathered soldiers around them, I get to spend more time getting to know these guys…

Maybe it wouldn't help with her pain, but for the first time in a long while, Raven felt that she was looking forward to something. She wasn't just looking for something to distract her from her personal issues, but actually genuinely enjoying the thought of spending time with Clarke again and experiencing something new with all her new friends.

Who needs the idea of that 'City of Light' stuff when we've got the reality of freaking dragons to learn more about?