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This is Berk.
It’s your typical costal Washington town – constantly grey, with perpetual drizzle on the side, and a healthy dose of miserable cold.
Here, we’ve got a beautiful view of the sunset, an unparalleled medieval fair in the spring, and so many superheroes it’s hard to keep track of them all.
Seriously. We even have a training facility, which is where we get taught how to properly blow stuff up, how to not snark at a supervillain, and various other life-threatening courses.
(Did I mention that I fail most of them?)
Hiccup yelps as his machines blow up, backing away quickly as it starts sparking and smoking, wheezing as the smoke starts to get in his lungs.
He’d been working on a helmet system. Yeah, he was totally imitating Iron Man, but Iron Man was badass and Hiccup really liked the tech, so he adapted it to fit his needs.
So far it wasn’t really working.
See, the thing was, EMPs weren’t exactly uncommon in the Berk Mutant Superhero School and Training Facility, and Hiccup hadn’t figured out how to make his tech EMP-proof, so he’d been working on old-fashioned stuff – clockwork, gears, all that good stuff.
But he kept getting it wrong, since he was trying to power the machine with batteries instead of winding springs, and it wasn’t working so far.
Not having eyebrows sucked.
“Hey, loser.” Snotlout Jorgenson, Hiccup’s cousin and fellow mutant, smirked at him. “Having a little problem there?”
That’s Snotlout. Okay, his real name is Thomas, but he thinks it’s stupid so he calls himself Snotlout.
Which means “little snot,” which is way more stupid, but whatever.
He’s a name-caller, totally inappropriate around all of the girls, and a complete moron, if I do say so myself.
His powers involve pyrokinesis, which is kind of a typical power around here, and blowing shit up, but he’s in the good books with the teachers so they call it the “right” way to do it.
Yeah, right.
“No, no problems here,” Hiccup mutters under his breath, assessing the damage. The lithium battery was smoking, and the delicate copper wiring looked burnt, but it wasn’t that bad.
He’d had worse.
The twins stalked by, identical faces miscreant-like, sly grins creeping across their faces. “I thought last week was the worst you’ve ever blown stuff up,” Tuff says.
“I guess we were wrong,” Ruff says with a shrug, adjusting her knotted, greasy braids. “Come on, ‘Lout. We’re gonna go mess up stuff.”
“Awesome,” Snotlout says.
Really, Ruffnut and Tuffnut shouldn’t be allowed in the metalworking labs, since they’re magnetic.
No, literally. Ruff’s, like, the northern magnetic pole, and Tuff is south, or something like that.
Never trust either of them with your phones or credit cards, they wipe them clean instantly.
They can get along, but when turned against each other, they repel like – well, honestly, like north and south.
Hiccup returns to his work after watching them go, making sure that the iron of his helmet was still intact, since the twins had a tendency to warp his tech without them realizing it.
“How – how’s it coming?” Fishlegs appears at Hiccup’s elbow, and had Hiccup not been an empath with the ability to sense where people were, he would’ve jumped.
“Pretty well,” Hiccup says. “It’s only the second explosion today, but I can’t figure out what keeps going wrong.” He sets down the helmet and picks up his wrist cuff, examining the gear system that’s supposed to allow a crossbow to fold down to rest snugly against his arm, but so far that’s not working either, even though it’s running on spring tension.
This is Fishlegs, and I can confidently say that his nickname is ridiculous.
Nobody remembers where it came from, though, and nobody can remember his real name, so they just let it slide.
He’s like a walking, talking computer – I like to call him JARVIS, after Tony Stark’s AI, but he’s not quite that smart, because he can’t actually access the internet from his mind. He retains information easily, and is quick to recognize weak points, which sucks when you’re fighting him because he knows exactly where to get to you.
Fishlegs shrugs. He can’t figure out for the life of him why Hiccup’s machines keep malfunctioning. “Keep – keep it up.”
“All right, J.” Hiccup waves him off. “Now, if you value your eyebrows, I would suggest moving away?”
It’s an open invitation for Fishlegs to leave, and he takes it eagerly, moving in the direction of the others, with a cautious wave to Hiccup that the brunette kind of ignores.
He feels bad, but he’s busy.
He frowns at a broken tooth in one of his crossbow gears, cautiously taking off the gear’s cap and removing the gear, inspecting it carefully before setting it down and grabbing a new piece of iron to cut, since replacing one tooth is insanely difficult and Hiccup doesn’t want to bother fixing something that will come apart eventually anyways.
“Hey, Hiccup.”
“Hey, Astrid.” He tries to fight down his blush, but takes his jacket off and tells himself that his warmth is from the forge (yes, archaic, but he doesn’t have fabrication units) heating up and not because Astrid is there.
Okay, so Astrid’s awesome.
She’s, like, the Captain America to my Iron Man, which is stupid because Captain America and Iron Man are basically incompatible, but I ship them, so, whatever.
She can run faster, jump further, and hit harder than any normal person should be able to, and she can throw her axe with enough force to chop a tree down, which is kind of crazy, but.
(She’s awesome, gorgeous, and completely out of my league.)
Astrid rolls her shoulders and moves away. “I’m going to let Gobber know that if a fire alarm goes off, it’s your fault.”
“Okay, okay,” he mutters. Gobber’s not that bad, anyways, he was dad’s friend, and that makes him like Hiccup’s uncle, kind of, not really, but whatever.
She keeps moving, back out the door and down the hallway. “If you want to join us, I’m sure Snot will be more than happy to pound you into the mats.”
It’s a good thing that she said Snot instead of herself, Hiccup muses.
The thing is, I’m technically an empath. Which most mutants tend to look down upon, ‘cause it’s not flat-out telepathy but more vague and broad, which makes it seem stupid and weak.
Yeah, right. It was an empath that figured out why the dragons were attacking the old Berk. We’re way more awesome than most people think.
But the thing is, I’m also not technically an empath. I’m also an animal telepathist, which means I can talk into the minds of animals, and they’re pretty receptive of what I have to say.
Thing is, the telepathy only started happening a year ago. I flipped out when the guard dog started to talk to me, and I think the security guard was ready to laser-gaze me to dust.
(Kind of like Cyclops, but not really.)
Evidently, my powers are evolving, and Mom thinks it’s a great thing, since finally I’ll get to be just like everyone else.
Which was great.
And then everything changed.
Hiccup slung his backpack over his shoulder after he finished up. “You ready to go, Toothless?”
His black cat raises his head sleepily from his bed in the corner of the shop. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.” He stretches, his mostly-gone tail stretching out behind him. “Jeez, Hiccup. You demand so much.”
“I do not.” Hiccup sniffs indignantly, putting on an affronted air.
“Yeah, you kind of do. Let’s go.”
Hiccup rolls his eyes but opens the door, allowing the black cat to slip through ahead of him.
All of the mutant students stream past, and Hiccup picks up the base emotions of fear worry WHAT IS THAT THING rushing through their heads, and Hiccup widens his eyes and looks down the hallway.
“What the hell is that,” he says, as a tusk crashes through the skylight at the end of the hallway.
“I’m going to do the thing.”
“Don’t do the thing, Toothless.”
“Too bad, I’m doing the thing.” And where Toothless was standing in front of him, tense and alert, there is a massive black dragon. “Seriously, dude, that’s an alpha bent on destruction.”
Once Toothless the not-a-cat-actually-a-dragon (long, long story) points it out, Hiccup notices it. He hops on Toothless’ back – while without the tech, Toothless can’t fly, but he runs faster than Hiccup ever would – and spurs him into motion, feeling his inner thighs chafe against the sandpapery scales.
The alpha dragon croons, low and dangerous, its tusk retreating as it backed away.
“Destroy,” it murmurs into Hiccup’s mind. “Kill. Destroy.”
“No!” Hiccup yells mentally, impressing the fear of all of the students upon the mind of this massive dragon.
“Yes,” it snaps back. “Yes!”
“NO!”
“YES.”
And then his spine pops and his face feels weird, like the skin is being pulled too tight, and his canines feel really, really long.
“What did I say? NO!”
“Um, Hiccup?” Toothless skids sideways to a halt. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Yeah, you are. You’re, like, turning into a humanized alpha.”
“Okay, that’s weird,” Hiccup says, feeling the sides of his face. “What do I look like?”
“Like a half-dragon. You’ve got funny face things.” Toothless projects an image into his mind. “Plus flying squirrel-like mini wings, kind-of tusks, and spinal plates. It’s weird.”
“Do you think I could chase him off?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Toothless admits, eying up the Bewilderbeast – Hiccup thinks it’s a Bewilderbeast, Fishlegs could tell him for sure – and returning his gaze to Hiccup. “Probably. If you declare your territory, it’ll probably keep him off.”
“Great.” And then Hiccup pushed into the dragon’s mind, aware of the screaming students being protected by a frightened line of teachers, using their fear to strengthen his defenses.
The next five minutes could only be described as a really, really intense stare-off, coupled with a clash of will.
“NO!” someone shouted, loud and primal and deep. “ATTACK!”
Hiccup pushes back harder than ever, Toothless augmenting his mental push with a couple of glowing plasma blasts, and only once the Bewilderbeast turns around and leaves does Hiccup relax, the facial fins and the spinal plates and the teeth retracting, the flaps of skin underneath his arms disappearing.
The students behind him gape.
“Are we done here?” Hiccup says, waving his hands awkwardly. “Great, I, um, gotta. Yeah.”
He hurries off down the halls, Toothless in his cat form hurrying along beside him.
It’s only until he gets home that he realizes that the person yelling for the Bewilderbeast to attack was speaking mentally.
Okay, a word about my mom before you meet her.
She’s possibly the most famous animal telepathist Berk has ever raised in town. Why? Because of Cloudjumper and the rehab stables, of course.
See, the thing is, dragons used to rule Berk.
Then Vikings came and took over, slaying the beasts left and right. Generations passed, and eventually the reason for the mindless slaughter was unknown.
Then the first line of Viking mutants came to be – a genetic trait, the experts say, which is passed from parent to child even to this day, and every single one of these genes is expressed in their children, and their children after that, and their children after that.
Eventually, after a couple generations, the leading line of Berk was made up of mutants.
Soon enough, the leading line of Berk married off, pairing with different Vikings on the island, and a couple generations after that, Berkian Vikings were using hydrokinesis and telekinesis instead of axes and swords to take out dragons.
And then there was the first animal telepathist and human empath, one of my ancestors.
They – not sure if it was a dude or a girl, the books don’t say – figured out why the dragons were so bent on destruction, and helped write out a treaty that both parties felt okay about.
Dragons and Vikings have lived side-by-side ever since.
It’s rarer to see a dragon nowadays, though. They’re a dying race. Toothless is the last Night Fury, which really sucks, because Night Furies are the best. Stormcutters are exceedingly rare – Cloudjumper’s one of three that’s still left alive.
Why? Because the rest of the world hurt and killed them for sport.
So Mom takes in the injured dragons, and with the help of Cloudjumper, figures out where they came from and fixes them up.
Sometimes the wounds are too grievous for her to fix – there’s a blind Hobblegrunt in our stables that has been there for years – so she takes them in, keeps them safe.
She runs a dragon sanctuary.
And she’s a superhero, to boot:
Valka, also known as the Dragon Rider. Back in her teens, when the idea of superheroes was at its peak, she adopted the title of “vigilante” and patrolled the streets, trying to do some good with the help of Cloudjumper, who was her sidekick, if a dragon can be called a sidekick.
Dad and Mom met at a convention for Actual Superheroes twenty or so years ago. They dated for two years, got married, and then waited three years before having me.
And then, when I was fifteen, Dad died.
Mom says that Drago Bludvist killed him, that Gobber had gone looking for the school’s principal and descendant of the original Berkian mutant line, and found him murdered in an alley, a jagged hole where his large intestine should have been.
Cloudjumper had said that it was an alpha dragon, that someone had controlled it to kill Stoick.
So, to sum it up, Dad was murdered, Mom was heartbroken, and it sucked balls.
But Mom picked herself back up, started her dragon sanctuary, and now, at the age of seventeen, I’m practically an independent adult who has taken after his mother.
(Basically, I’ve put on a helmet and snuck out to beat up criminals in dark alleys, Spider-Man style.)
“Hey, mom.” Hiccup collapses on the couch. “Guess what I did today?”
“Please don’t tell me you broke your ribs again,” Valka says wryly, drying her hands on a dishcloth. “What happened?”
“Check this out.” He focuses on Toothless (the cat version of him, anyways), and feels his fingers tighten and then relax, his hearing turn a thousand times sharper, and his vision better and brighter, and his ears migrate to the top of his head. His freckles feel like something’s being pulled out of them slowly, and his nose feels squashed flat.
“That’s… odd.”
“Yeah.” He releases his focus and feels himself return to normal. “Why?”
“I don’t know, son.” She wipes down the table with the cloth. “You’re… growing, I guess. It’s not uncommon for mutants to develop more powers the older they get. This is probably the end of it, I think.”
“Thank goodness, I don’t think I could have taken a third eye,” he jokes.
Valka smiles. “I don’t think I could have taken that either.”
Hiccup rifles through his backpack and pulls out his history homework, which is about the history of mutants and their relationship with their sister school, the Xavier Institute. He sighs as he looks over the first worksheet.
Three days pass before the first knock on the door.
Hiccup hauls himself up out of his desk chair and pads down to the main floor. “Should I answer it, mom?” he yells.
“Yes!”
He doesn’t bother checking the peephole. If his mom says to answer the door, he answers the door.
“Hello, I’m Agent Coulson.”
Hiccup shrieks and slams the door in the agent’s face.
Suits are not good. Suits with tasers are worse.
“Hiccup, open the door.” Valka pops her head out of the kitchen. “He doesn’t want to tase you.”
He opens the door again with a sheepish smile. “Sorry about that, sir.” He steps aside and follows the agent into the kitchen.
“Agent Coulson. It’s nice to see you again.” Valka is pale, her face drawn, and Hiccup doesn’t like it.
“Mrs. Haddock.” He nods politely at her. “I’m here concerning the actions of your son three days ago at the Berk Mutant Superhero School and Training Facility.”
At this, Valka frowns. “Hiccup, what did you do.”
It’s not a question, it’s a statement.
“Oh, the alpha?” He tilts his head. “I scared him off, that’s when the powers manifested.”
Valka frowns deeper.
“Today we received a report about Drago Bludvist in Seattle.”
Valka pales further.
(She looks like a scowling ghost, Hiccup thinks idly.)
“He said, and I quote, ‘Night Fury! I will exact my revenge.’”
“Wait, mom, is Drago a – a telepathist?” He’s already putting the pieces together, which seem to create a horrible picture.
Valka nods. “He was my biggest rival. I don’t see what this has to do with this, though.”
“Your son is Night Fury, is he not?”
Hiccup blanches and Valka sighs. “Hiccup.”
“Yeah?”
“Seriously?”
“Yes?”
Valka sighs again and shrugs. “Continue, Agent.”
“We are led to believe that Bludvist orchestrated the attack upon the school.”
Valka sighs yet again. “That makes sense. With Stoick gone, there was no one left to protect Hiccup.”
“We are asking that you relocate to New York, where Hiccup will be a part of Project Phoenix, a project designed to bring together the best and brightest superheroes of the next generation, nurture them and protect them. Understand that this is highly confidential.”
“What level?”
“Level Seven.”
“Great.” Valka sighs again. “Hiccup, pack up. We’re going to New York.”
After this my life just gets crazy.
We take the dragons to New York, since Mom hates airplanes with the burning passion of a thousand suns, and SHIELD buys us a small house in Queens.
I’m given a few contacts – Percy Jackson, living in Midtown, Peter Parker (Spider-Man, gah), living a couple blocks down. Jack Frost, who basically shows up whenever he wants.
For the most part, I’m left to my own devices.
I set up a small place to work on my stuff in the basement, all funded by SHIELD, which is a relief because I can’t afford the equipment on my own. I finish my suit and work out the kinks, but I don’t go out to fight off crime since Spider-Man (Peter Parker) seems to have it well in hand.
I go to regular public school, Midtown Science High School. Not Xavier’s, because even though BMSSTF and Xavier’s are sister schools, Xavier’s really really dislikes the existence of us Berkians.
SHIELD doesn’t contact me for months, until –
“Get in, losers, we’re going shopping!”