A/N: Hello all! New readers, welcome! Thank you for scrolling all the way on someone's favorites list. Old readers, if you're coming back, welcome back.

Readers new and old should note that this story is undergoing some renovations and the existing nine chapters will be slowly re-uploaded with new content and/or a general facelift. Rewrites on the existing nine chapters were actually completed a few days ago and they have grown to encompass eleven chapters. Re-uploads will happen over the next few weeks.

Chapter one sports a general face-lift to bring the background up-to-date with my solidified headcanon.

Travis Church knows not what monster he wrought upon me.

Disclaimer: I do not own How to Train Your Dragon. I do own an assortment of OCs, a few of whom are trying to make me regret creating them.

How to Train Your Marching Band

Chapter One: Setting the Stage

There was nothing quite like having the bedcovers ripped off you to serve as a morning wake-up call.

Hiccup reflexively flinched and curled up when the marginally cooler air whisked over him. He buried his face in the pillow, hiding his eyes from the early sunlight shining directly through the curtains.

"C'mon son! It's six o'clock and it's a beautiful day!" rumbled an impossibly loud voice less than a foot from his ear, causing Hiccup to pull the pillow completely over his head. He let out a grunt of a response that could have meant anything from 'I'm not conscious enough for this' to 'I'll strangle you with my bedsheets if you don't go away now'. But his tormentor was not easily deterred and proceeded to wrestle the pillow of his sleepy grip. It wasn't much of a struggle, sad to say.

"Nooo..." Hiccup protested feebly. He grabbed Floppy, the lop-winged Thunderdrum plush that had been sitting at the head of the mattress for years, ever since Hiccup had decided that he was too old to sleep with a stuffed animal. But he was far too attached to actually bin Floppy and the old plushie was always willing to faithfully serve as a sun-shield.

"Hiccup, do not make me pull you out of bed." warned the rumbling voice. It was deep and stern. It meant business.

Reluctantly, Hiccup folded back one of Floppy's wings and found that most of the immediate area had been swallowed up by a vast red beard.

"Dad..." he groaned. Of course, who else took delight in tormenting him this early in the morning? "Why did you do that?"

"You asked." Stoic replied simply. He dropped the pilfered blanket and pillow onto the floor instead of putting them back.

It took a second for Hiccup's sleep-muddled mind to catch up. Last night had been the first time he'd gone to bed before midnight in two months and he hadn't actually fallen asleep until late. Knowing that he would probably over-sleep on his own, he had asked for a wake-up call.

Just not like this.

"I need to stop asking you to do things." he mumbled.

Stoic didn't favor that with a reply and clapped a large hand on his son's exposed shoulder, shaking him out of any attempt to fall back asleep.

"It's six o'clock." he repeated. "Shower up. I want you out the door between seven-fifteen and seven-thirty."

"Seven-thirty? Dad, practice doesn't start 'til nine." Hiccup protested, putting Floppy aside and raising himself onto an elbow. "I can leave the house as late as eight-twenty-"

"You won't be doing anything of the sort, son. You're a senior this year and you're going to do this right." Stoic said firmly, his muscular arms crossed in the picture of parental stern-ness. "You have an example to set for your rookies and if arriving an hour early is the way to do it, then that's the way you're going to do it."

"My rookies are idiots." Hiccup grumbled. It was the truth. His rookies did a fabulous job of not knowing which end of the instrument to blow in to. He had been trying to whip them into shape all summer and he felt bad for leaning so heavily on Marie, his only veteran section-mate, for assistance.

"Then it'll take a good Haddock man to teach them!" Stoic boomed proudly, cuffing Hiccup so hard on the back that it completely negated his previous effort to sit up. "Make your ancestors proud! Show 'em what a Viking can do!"

"We're not Vikings!"

There was no use arguing the fact they were, in fact, descended from a tribe of Vikings who had inhabited a miserable spit of land that froze solid every winter. Direct descendants if their family name - the ever so charming moniker of 'Haddock' - had survived the centuries, more or less intact. Stoic took a great deal of pride in this knowledge. He considered it an honor to be able to say that their ancestors were true, red-blooded Viking men.

"Of course we are." Stoic said reassuringly, though Hiccup wasn't sure who his father was trying to reassure.

"Is that why you grew your beard out and adopted a Scottish accent?" he challenged

The large man froze, his mouth partially open, but it looked like the words had died en route. Hiccup must have been about five when his father had first begun to cultivate a Scottish accent, shortly after tracing the family tree back into the Viking age. But he didn't understand why his father had chosen a Scottish accent. Berk (another charming name that should not have survived as long as it already had) was really closer to Iceland than Scotland.

But the accent and the beard fit his father to a T.

"Shower. Breakfast." was Stoic's somewhat meager retaliation. It was more due to having the last word than anything else. He squeezed his way out of the bedroom and shut the door for privacy.

The second it clicked shut, Hiccup covered his face again and groaned incoherently about the unfairness of it all. He had never really been a morning person and he was certain he had become less of one as he'd gotten older. Apparently, some scientific study had proven that teenagers were biologically wired to sleep in the late hours of the morning because of something like hormonal changes and being forced to get up at six or seven o'clock for school was counter-productive. He was sixteen going on seventeen and he still couldn't make himself get up on his own, but he was pretty sure he was out-growing the excuse of hormones.

Okay Hiccup, get up. It's Monday morning, first day of band camp. You're a senior, you've been the section leader for the last three years - 'course, for the last three years, it had literally just been myself and Marie, and two clarinets does not a section make. Nonetheless, you've got responsibilities and examples to set, so get your ass out of bed and don't make Dad follow through on his threat.

The thought of Stoic returning and dragging him out of bed was enough to spur Hiccup to get up and start climbing out of bed.

He didn't roll out of bed. He never rolled out of bed. Not with that five-foot drop between him and the floor. When he'd been younger, he used to fall out of bed all the time, until Stoic finally decided he was tired of finding his son on the floor in the morning. In an effort to discourage this, a loft bed had been installed in Hiccup's room and the safety railings had done most of the work in keeping Hiccup squarely on the mattress all night.

His feet hit the carpeted floor and he stretched his limbs convulsively, loosening up every muscle until they felt like wrung-out dishrags. Then he grabbed the clothes he had left laying out the night before and hauled himself into the shower for a quick scrub.

Stoic was at the kitchen table when Hiccup finally made his way downstairs, his hair already starting to dry. The sixteen-year old paused in the doorway of the kitchen and took in what passed for a normal domestic scene around here.

It wasn't a normal scene by known standards, even for their situation. Even a widowed father who had all but reverted back to bachelor-hood might have been making a token attempt to cook up some breakfast or already had breakfast ready and had settled in to catch up on the morning news. Stoic was doing nothing of the sort. Instead, he was carefully polishing a collection of large, often serrated hunting knives, eyeballing the keen edges of the blades critically.

Hiccup wished his father wouldn't clean the collection of knives at the kitchen table. They ate food there and those knives got buried in a dragon's guts on a regular basis. The gods only knew what dribbled off them afterwards.

That and polish probably wasn't good for the digestion.

When it came to dragon hunting, Stoic Haddock was a real hands-on kind of guy. He liked to sneak up close and kill the dragon by his own strength, rather than hovering at a distance and relying on a gun. Most hunters were proud of their firearms and the distance from which they could take down a dragon; a method that was usually preferred by all involved. Nearly all the dragon targets were the ones who had gone rabid or mad or were being far too crotchety and territorial for the safety of the nearby humans. These dragons would thrash and scream and flame to the point where distance was the safest way to bring them down. But Stoic preferred his vast array of large, bladed weapons and the exciting stories that could be told from an up close and personal encounter with an angry fire-breathing reptile.

That was the Viking in him, he liked to say.

Hiccup liked to say that there was no conclusive proof that Vikings had ever hunted dragons.

He got himself a bowl of cereal and sat down opposite of the large knives. The small TV perched atop the fridge was tuned to the morning news, currently nattering about the weather. It was going to be hot and sunny all week; a slight chance of rain Saturday morning. Good, maybe that would wash out the Gay Pride parade. Hiccup had nothing against the local community of gays, lesbians and gender-confused individuals, but after a full week of band camp, no one wanted to put on their best performance face and pretend that they were actually enjoying slogging down one of the longer parade routes in their repertoire.

Marching band was exhausting business.

He finished off breakfast before the newscasters could start blathering in-depth about the Texas wildfires caused by some courting Monstrous Nightmares and gathered his things together; double-checking to make sure his lunch and water was put away in the cooler, and that his bag was packed with all the essentials. Everything else he had left up at the school.

"Dad, I'm going." Hiccup called, feeling triumphant that he was out the door at a quarter to seven.

"Wait!" Stoic hurried into the kitchen with a vicious-looking dagger in one hand. "Have you got everything?"

"Yeah, Dad. I've got everything." he called and stepped out the door into the fresh morning air.

The Haddocks lived almost in the middle of nowhere, a few long straight county roads away from the town. The nearest neighbor was three-quarters of a mile down the road and the surrounding area was mostly cornfields.

They occupied a small squat house that the real estate market listed as a "starter home". One and a half floors, one and a half-bath, and painted a shade of cremello that wasn't found in nature. The front door was forever stuck, the garage was unattached and the entire place was enclosed by old-growth trees and weeds. There was supposed to be a fence denoting the property line, but no one had found it yet.

The sunlight had a newly minted look to it and the air smelled fresh. It was been a while since Hiccup had been awake this early and he just wanted to enjoy it for a moment. But the moment never took off because of his dad trailing after him and swinging the knife like he was about to throw it.

"Do you need money for ice?"

Hiccup felt his pocket for the bills he had stuffed in there last night. "No, I'm good."

"What about gas?"

"No, I filled up the tank last night."

"Did you make your lunch?"

"Last night."

"Have you got sunscreen?"

"Dad!" Hiccup snapped out impatiently. Something was sure driving his father's mother-hen instincts up the wall this morning. "Yes, I've got everything! I've got my lunch. I've got money for dinner. Sunscreen's in my bag. I have a change of clothes. Marie's bringing a gigantic tub of chalk and I promise I won't crash my car."

"Well then, drive careful." Stoic said, a nervous glint in his eye. He had never truly liked the idea of his only son behind the wheel of a car. There was a strange wheezing noise - almost like laughter - and the large man whirled around, his expression twisting into an intense dislike. "And get off me roof ya black devil!"

Hiccup didn't have to look up to see what his father was yelling at, but he did anyways because it never felt right if he didn't look. Up on the roof was the dragon. It was back.

Not that it had ever really gone away in the first place.

The dragon was none other than the rare and elusive Night Fury, a dragon species that was most certainly not native to the American Midwest. It was said that Night Furies were more commonly found in the mountainous regions of the Alps and the Himalayas. Dragonologists knew next to nothing about the species, as they were so difficult to find and were presumed solitary by nature.

The Night Fury was a dragon right out of the myth.

And one liked to nap on the Haddocks' roof.

Hiccup was accustomed to the Night Fury's presence, though he was still a little weirded out by the fact it followed him around whenever he left the house. He didn't approach (he wasn't that dumb), but it had been around for so long it was like an old friend.

Stoic just yelled curses at it every time he laid eyes on it.

It was what amounted to affection between the dragon and the dragon Hunter.

Smiling crookedly, Hiccup stowed his cooler and backpack in the passenger's seat of his car. It seemed today had gotten off to a good start.

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