#stoic

“So… how exactly do we know that dragons are, uh… monsters, evil, want to hurt us, want to destroy us?” Hiccup asked, rattling off the normal dragon description from the Book of Dragons. “Extremely dangerous, and so on?”

Stoic blinked, then looked at Hiccup with the sort of look that – normally – would be reserved for a relative who’d said something extremely thick.

He wasn’t used to turning it on Hiccup.

“They keep… attacking us,” he said. “Raiding us. Carrying off our sheep.”

“Yeah, about that,” Hiccup replied. “Because, I’ve been a Viking teenager for a while now and the general impression I get is that that’s how Vikings show that they want to become friends.”

Stoic snorted.

“Not getting on well with your friends?” he asked.

“That plural is assuming a lot, Dad,” Hiccup replied. “That… word is also making some assumptions, actually! Though you did keep telling me that all the punches and stuff were just a way of making friends – but, I wasn’t actually talking about my friends, I didn’t mean them, I was meaning to talk about the dragons.”

“And?” Stoic said.

“The point I’m making, Dad, is that… so, uh, I tried putting myself in the place of the dragons,” Hiccup said, shaking his leg and leaning awkwardly on the door frame. “And I wondered what Vikings would think if we went somewhere and the people there were firing catapults at us and shooting flaming rocks at us, and that sort of thing, and… I’ve met Vikings, dad. I’m pretty sure you’ve met Vikings!”

Stoic paused, to actually consider that.

It was one of the increasingly large number of things about this conversation which was not Normal, but he was willing to give it a go.

“...hm,” he said. “That sounds like a pretty good night out, actually.”

“That’s what I’m getting at!” Hiccup agreed, now leaning over more. “Hold on.”

“What is it?”

“Not you, I mean-” Hiccup said, then gestured at someone Stoic couldn’t see.

Or possibly just nearly fell over, the lad was gangly.

“Anyway – uhm – I think the dragons just want to be friends,” Hiccup went on, speaking very quickly. “And that they’re enough like Vikings that all we’re doing is just making them more interested.”

“Nonsense,” Stoic replied.

“Really?” Hiccup asked. “Because – uh – are you at least going to think about it before you decide that I have to be wrong?”

“I don’t need to think about it to know it’s nonsense,” Stoic said, firmly.

“Yeah, that sounds pretty Viking too,” Hiccup muttered. “Stubborn and unwilling to admit that you might be wrong about something… so, uh… what about an experiment?”

“Is this some of that scientific method stuff Gobber had you learning?” Stoic checked.

It sounded a bit suspect, to him.

“Yeah, actually,” Hiccup agreed. “But if something happens you can’t say it’s impossible, right?”

Stoic carefully considered the question.

If something happens, you can’t say it’s impossible.

“All right, so let’s accept that for the sake of argument,” he allowed. “What kind of thing?”

“So I gave a Terrible Terror a fish,” Hiccup said. “Once. And now I literally cannot get it to stop rubbing against my ankles, making a kind of purring noise, and curling up next to my bed when I go to sleep.”

Stoic blinked, looking Hiccup up and down.

“...there doesn’t seem to be a Terrible Terror rubbing against your ankles,” he said.

“Yeah, because I can’t stop it, but Toothless can,” Hiccup explained. “Because, uh, there’s this Night Fury…”

“A Night Fury?” Stoic repeated, then went back over the conversation and reprocessed this new information through it.

“...are you telling me you befriended a Night Fury?” he asked. “How?”

“I shot it down,” Hiccup replied. “And, uh… since then I’ve kind of been testing the hypothesis, that’s more of the whole science thing, and it took like eight seconds to convince the Monstrous Nightmare in the training pens that I was a cool guy to be around. I just kind of smiled and that was it?”

He shrugged, then finally lost the battle against keeping the Night Fury out of the doorframe, and the Unholy Offspring of Lightning and Death Itself slowly pushed the leaning Hiccup across the doorframe.

Then spotted Stoic, groonked something, and sat on his haunches like a giant, attentive dog mixed with a curious cat possessed of a penchant for pushing things off tables.

Stoic spent several seconds contemplating what to do, then – experimentally – threw his hammer at the beast.

It ducked, letting Hiccup topple over with a thump, then loped off after the hammer. A few seconds later, a Terror sat on the prone Hiccup’s side and curled up before visibly and very quickly going to sleep.

“You, uh… see what I mean?” Hiccup asked.

The Night Fury came back, tail swishing from side to side, and deposited the thrown hammer eagerly in front of the door before making a pleased sort of gronk-chirp.

Stoic gave up.

This was now Normal.

Making that new categorization was going to save a lot of time.