This is where I belong ||httyd fanfic||

51. The unexpected plan

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"THIEVES!"

"KIDNAPPERS!"

"GODSDAMN HEATHENS!"

Those were the most common shouts out of the immediate gathering of all citizens of Berk to a meeting in the Great Hall. All Hell was breaking loose in the past hour since their gathering: people were shouting and screaming at each other, coupled with the shattering of tables from how hard the people's weary fists slammed on them. Most were even too upset to take their fills of the little food they still had, but at the very least it was wisely given to the starving children, women, and elderly who needed it. Mead went flying throughout the air, flung with all the strength of irate, disturbed Vikings only to spill all across the ground and reduce their already ruined Hall to a wet sty.

Every shout demanding answers and accusing finger was pointed right at the returning party from the formerly unknown island of Selardalr. Stoick, Gobber, and the former teens had long since told their biased story, of the young runaway turned Dragon Conqueror and manipulated 'chief,' and of the 'evil' Silent Wolf Tribe who pulled him to their corrupt views. No one really knew what to expect when the party first got off from the ship, the best they had to go on being a vague clue in the form of sheer defeat etched upon all their faces. Not even the commanding shout of their chief could quell this tempest of utter confusion, yet Stoick himself was in no mood to stop it anyway.

"This cannot stand!" The chief bellowed out. "These fools want to make a mockery of everything we stand for, spit on the graves of hundreds of noble perished warriors! Dragons as pets, dragons as companions, have you ever heard anything so insane?! Do you find this allowable?!"

Stoick had been stirring the people of Berk to reawaken their hunger for conflict and conquest, turning their outrage to his advantage, with great success. He had spoken true of his threat of war against the Silent Wolf Tribe: as much as he was willing to admit that he had made terrible mistakes in raising his son, or neglecting to do so at all as the case was, that guilt had found itself at war within his soul against an age-bolstered force that had long since established its dominance in his soul.

From those few moments of silence on the boat where the horrible feelings weighing down on him threatened to plunge him down into the ocean depths, he had recalled how quick his son had been to rush to the aid of a dragon, how he had spoken of ending the war with one's aid. And that girl, that little bitch who had the audacity to speak to him as if every title and glory he had ever won was a figment of his imagination and he was a child without the slightest clue how to wield an axe, how Hiccup himself must have felt as a child.

But at the same time, visions of that fateful day when Valka was taken, her arms helplessly gripped in the claws of that horrible four winged dragon, played over and over. When it had burned his home to cinders, when it had her cornered, too terrified to even lift the sword she had in her hand, and the last few moments she was within his sight before she vanished entirely, carried off to her gruesome fate. With each flash came a magnanimous cry like the clang of Thor's hammer against the anvil, reminding him of the truth – dragons kill, they destroy, they steal. Stoick refused to lose the last remaining blood to the dragons, or their emissaries, and if that meant slaughtering an entire tribe and burning their lands to the ground, so be it. Berk had long withheld from the practice of raiding other lands as other tribes would do, but when honor and pride called, the Hooligans would be the first to answer.