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Hiccup loses his foot on a Thursday.
Which, hey, the Berkians of olde had worshipped Thor, and Thor was an Avenger, and Thursday was Thor’s day—no, it doesn’t make any sense in his head either, but Hiccup rolls with it.
See, this is how it happens—
Hiccup is your typical (intelligent) mutant—bursting to the seams with misplaced energy, skinny as fuck, always underfoot (hey, foot pun, how funny), and hell-bent on causing trouble—and as such, he sneaks out every night to monitor the crime activity of the local supervillian population.
His dad would have a coronary if he’d known—hence the black matte leather, and the grease all up the sides of the window so it doesn’t squeak when he sneaks out, and how slowly he moves when really, all he wants to do is take down some supervillians already.
He drops to the ground outisde his bedroom window with a light thup, hesitating as he feels his father’s feelings shift in the back of his mind, confusion turning to a vague feeling of huh, no explosions, must be a bird or something, and isn’t it funny, when your father thinks you’re a bird?
At least Hiccup won’t have to sit through another of his father’s “why couldn’t you be more like Astrid—strong, brave, and tough? A real Viking!? Why’dya hafta take after your mother, eh?” speeches and that’s sad, too, that Hiccup already knows what he’s going to say before he says it.
He resolutely tamps down the feeling of proving something to his father, and closes his bedroom window gently, and sneaks off in the general direction of downtown Seattle.
Okay, so maybe the ‘supervillains’ in Seattle are just a ton of teenagers with brightly colored hair and Starbucks in one hand and their phones in the other, middle-aged women with terrible choices in the clothing department, and a couple of construction workers in fluorescent orange, and nothing Hiccup would report to his father for fear of the toppling of the Space Needle or the Columbia Tower. But Hiccup likes the idea of sneaking through dark alleys and looking for crime, even though he’s got none of Spider-Man’s (honestly pretty cool) powers (but all of his stubbornness, which just makes it worse).
Tonight, though, something’s off.
Usually, the mood in Seattle on Wednesday nights is happy—a little downtrodden from three work days and two more to come—but happy, content and caffeinated nonetheless—but there’s a pocket of hate close by, a pocket of malice, and it’s got that sour feeling that tingles at the base of Hiccup’s skull that alerts him to the way they hate on mutants.
Which, hey, not cool, he was a mutant, and he wouldn’t stand for this.
He eyes the base of a fire escape—the ladder was short, and too high up to jump to, too low to merit taking the stairs inside—then down, at the tangle of exposed pipes at the bottom.
He slips and falls off twice before he can get high enough to snag the ladder with both his hands, and hauls himself up it with a little bit of sweat. His hair hangs limply in front of his eyes, and he suddenly regrets forgetting his mask at home.
He perches on the edge of the roof before looking over into the alley, and pauses when he sees the gang and the guns.
Aw hell no.
He ducks behind the lip of the roof and tries to think this through—he doesn’t have his crossbow, and even if he did he’s not sure if it would work; he doesn’t have his mask, which means he’ll need to keep his eyes down, which means giving the advantage to the enemy.
But it could also mean submission? Hiccup’s suddenly glad for his father, who forced him to take a basic combat mentality class even though he couldn’t actually do combat, thanks to his general Hiccup-ness.
All his plans fly out the window when he feels the sudden surge of panic from… a cat?
Aw hell no.
He’s not going to let a cat be victimized by a bunch of thugs! Besides, Hiccup could tell that the cat’s a bit special—he isn’t going to let a (special) cat be victimized by a bunch of (potentially supervillainous) thugs, obviously, he’s not a cruel person, and besides, he likes cats.
Before thinking about it, he throws himself over the edge of the roof.
He has just a moment to think fuck, that was really stupid, before he lands in a dumpster, and Hiccup had never been more grateful for convenient dumpsters, seriously, he was going to petition for more conveniently-placed dumpsters, they were… convenient, and beneficial to the health of pseudo-superheroes.
He keeps his eyes down as he does an awkward commando roll out of the dumpster, and he picks up on their feelings of haughty confusion (yes, that was a thing), before he shouts, “Get away from the cat!”
One of them laughs.
“Help! Stuck,” the cat says mentally, and Hiccup starts hauling trash bags out of the dumpster, finding the pitch-black cat wedged in a crumpled cardboard box.
“Aw,” Hiccup says involuntarily, and pulls the cat out, turning around to find the barrel of a gun pointed at him.
“We’re not going to kill you,” the biggest one rumbles, and he—wait, that’s a woman—she was taller than Stoick, broader than a whole Hiccup, and he freezes, remembering all of the legends of dragons that would disguise themselves as humans or other animals, and flicks his eyes up.
Yep. Six milky blue eyes; definitely not human.
He’d never dared read the mind of a dragon before, and he didn’t want to try now. The only telepathist teacher at BMSSTF had said that dragons were ‘wily and conniving,’ and that she’d never wanted to be sucked into the blackness that was a dragon’s mind.
So Hiccup didn’t, and kept his thoughts to himself.
“I am the Red Death,” she rumbles, and fuck, his evening’s just getting better, isn’t it? A glance to his watch in the dim light of the overhead street lamp tells him it’s past midnight, which means, hey, his dad’s about to come upstairs from his basement-office and check on him, and fuck, he hadn’t put the pillows under his blankets that mimicked the way he slept with everything under the covers.
He’s fucked, isn’t he.
He takes a step to the side, the cat still under one arm—he’s limp and pliable, apparently aware of the danger they’re in—but the gun barrel follows his movements, and Hiccup says, stupidly, “So are you going to shoot me now, or what? Because seriously, suspenseful mob movies are so last year.”
The dragon-woman growls, lowers the barrel by about 60 degrees, and pulls the trigger.
Faster than Hiccup expects, the cat is out of his arms—but he’s not slinking off, as Hiccup expected, but curling back around, growing and growing and hey, Hiccup had known the cat was special.
The cat turns into a dragon with no teeth.
Which, hey, awkward, a dragon with no teeth was… toothless? Harmless, he mentally corrects, as the tail of the dragon is already sweeping around and Hiccup can see the bullets sailing towards his feet like they’re in slow motion, and the left half of the tail intercepts about half of them, the delicate membrane shredding under the force of the bullets, dark blood dripping to the ground, and about half of them bury themselves in Hiccup’s left leg.
Not cool, Hiccup has a moment to think, before he’s crumpling to the ground and the mob is laughing at him, low and grating, and the Red Death’s milky blue eyes roll back with amusement and the dragon launches itself at her, and hey, he has teeth after all.
Hiccup forces his tears back, shuddering, and the dragon roars once, long and loud, before saying to Hiccup, “Okay?”
“Yeah,” Hiccup manages, and he’s talking to a dragon, he’s talking to a dragon. He’s also bleeding, and in a lot of pain, so the dragon says “Over here,” and Hiccup stumbles over to the dragon and collapses on his broad, scaly back, and then he blacks out.
When he comes to, he’s in a hospital room and machines are beeping loudly, and he can feel people’s panic, fear, sadness, pain, death, and he blacks out again.
He wakes up again and a nurse is shoving ice chips into his mouth, and his left foot is numb and there’s an IV in his hand and no dragon in sight, so he lays back and falls asleep again.
He forgets that he left his student ID in his pocket and the piece of paper with his dad’s contact information (for this reason, in particular), and his father is there when he wakes up, wringing his hands and looking scared, and Hiccup feels like there’s pins and needles stuck all up his left leg, and when he tries to wiggle it nothing happens.
He sits up and looks down at his feet, noting the lack of a fold in the blanket where his left foot should be, and thinks with a detached calm, oh, hey, it’s going to be really fucking hard to get my driver’s license now, and looks over at his father.
There are a lot of tears and a lot of feelings that his father swamps him with—awkward, gushy, fatherly feelings, and Hiccup resolves to forget about it, because hey, his dad is here, his dad is being nice and not frustrated or disappointed, which is what Hiccup had been expecting, if he’s being honest with himself.
So he goes to physical therapy and adjusts, getting back on his feet again (ooh, another foot pun, he’ll have to save that one for later), and when he goes back to the Berk Mutant Superhero School and Training Facility, even Astrid walks on eggshells around him.
Which, hey, nice, Astrid’s looking at him with something that isn’t contempt (and Hiccup ignores the way her feelings itch under his skin), and his father doesn’t yell at him. And Hiccup hates it—because Hiccup is a creature of habit, and now he can’t go out and fight civilians supervillains, and only Gobber treats him like he’s Hiccup now, not the kid who lost his foot protecting a cat.
The cat comes back a month later, and half of his tail is gone, and Hiccup feels bad about that.
“Sorry about that, buddy,” he says when he slides open his window and hauls in the cat, who’d been scratching at the window for three whole minutes while Hiccup tried to go to the bathroom (and kind of failed, but nobody had to know about that). “You feeling okay?”
“Good,” he says back. “Whassat?” He noses the prosthetic Hiccup and Gobber had built together, and Hiccup shrugs.
“Helps me walk,” Hiccup says.
The dragon kneads the floor with tiny cat paws; Hiccup feels his aura of dejection. “No more flying,” he says. “Help fly?”
“Okay,” Hiccup says. “Show me.”
The cat grows into a dragon, and now that he’s in full daylight (well, it’s overcast outside, but semantics) Hiccup can properly see what happens—the cat rolls his shoulders, flicks his tail back and forth, and arches his back; soon enough, Toothless the cat (hey, Hiccup had never said he was particularly creative in the naming department) is a full-grown dragon, complete with plates sticking up all along the spine and half of his wide, broad tail flap missing.
“How’d you get the rest off?” Hiccup asks, awkwardly getting down on one knee to look closer at the straight edge of the tail, not the tattered flaps of skin Hiccup had seen.
Toothless-the-dragon-cat does the thing with his teeth, and Hiccup nods sagely.
“I don’t know if I can make it so that you can control it,” he says slowly, and Toothless warbles softly. Sadly. Then he brightens slightly.
“You think you make it so that you control it?”
“Of course I could,” Hiccup says instantly, and then realizes what he says. “Wait. You want me to ride you? Like in the days of yore?”
Toothless flicks his eyes up to the ceiling—an eye roll for dragons—and sighs mentally.
“Yore? For real?”
Hiccup rolls his own eyes. “Just roll with it, bud. So, what, am I supposed to be some sort of dragon vigilante?”
“Your mother, Dragon Rider. These things, they call blood,” Toothless says with a haughty nod, sitting on his haunches and looking mock-regal.
“Like, capital D, R, Dragon Rider?” Hiccup says. “Like the vigilante in the 70’s?”
“Yep.”
“My mom was the Dragon Rider,” Hiccup repeats in awe. Then he does a (totally dignified!) little victory dance, and Toothless huffs, confused.
“What in the name of—” The next word doesn’t translate, not quite, but Hiccup gets the gist. “What are you doing?!”
Hiccup pauses and gives Toothless the cat-dragon a fuck you look, which must have translated because Toothless warbles loudly.
“Shh, keep it down,” Hiccup hisses, bopping Toothless’ wide snout with the heel of his palm. But he can already hear his father clomping up the stairs from the garage, but he can already feel the way his father’s loud emotions resonate against his fingertips, and he glares at Toothless. “Do the thing.”
“Can’t,” Toothless replies. “Won’t able to shift for long time—the mortal form grows weak.”
Hiccup stares, long and hard. “Mortal,” he says faintly. Then, mentally, “Go hide in the closet. It’s big enough.”
Toothless grumbles a bit, but slinks over to the closet and forces himself to compress inside, and Hiccup shuts the closet door just as his dad walks in.
Hiccup tries to play it off as suave, but the elbow he leans against the closet door handle slips and he nearly falls on his ass. “Hi, dad, dad, hi, hi, dad.”
“You okay, son?” Stoick the Vast says, looking around furtively.
“Don’t breathe,” Hiccup conveys to Toothless. “Yeah,” he says, pulling out of the dragon’s mind. “Yeah, I’m good, I’m good, dad, no need to worry, okay, dad, yeah, dad.”
“Okay,” Stoick says with a frown. “If you say so.”
“I say so,” Hiccup says confidently, but his voice breaks and he winces. His dad raises an eyebrow.
“I’m fine, dad,” he says, and starts trying to push his father out of his room. Which, hey, is like trying to push a mountain, but Stoick goes willingly enough, and Hiccup sighs as the door closes softly.
“You’re good now, buddy.” The force of the dragon’s exhale blows the doors on the closet open, and Hiccup winces as they slam against the wall; he feels his dad’s confusion tickle the arch of his foot, just briefly, and he and Toothless sigh simultaneously.
“Now, about that tail fin,” Hiccup says.
Gobber raises one eyebrow when Hiccup asks for a couple bolts of leather and a large heap of scrap metal to melt down, but shows him to the supply room and says, “Take what ye need,” before walking away.
Once Gobber’s out of the ‘forge,’ as everybody calls the art and metalworking labs, Hiccup stumbles over to the backpack he’d placed in the corner.
“Alright, buddy, let’s do this,” Hiccup says, and Toothless skitters out, claws extended and awkward on the smooth cement floor.
“Let’s do this,” Toothless yowls, and Hiccup grins.
Hiccup’s not sure when Toothless starts talking in human-length sentences.
His advisor-fellow-mental-person had warned him about this—that pets he might have would eventually humanize, but Hiccup is actually very okay with that. He likes Toothless—he’s quick on the uptake, easy to hide once he’s in kitty form, and friendly, and Hiccup hasn’t had a friend this close since Fishlegs, and that had been a long time ago.
The first flight attempt ends disastrously, with seaweed in Hiccup’s hair and up Toothless’ nose, but Hiccup calls it a victory anyways.
The second attempt is actually kind of the same, and he learns that he has to take Toothless’ gear off before the dragon shifts back into a cat, because otherwise the metal and leather gets all warped and crinkled, and Gobber raises the other eyebrow when Hiccup asks for more leather.
Soon enough, Hiccup and Toothless are prowling the supervillain-free streets of Seattle, and Hiccup doesn’t have to worry about getting home late, because apparently Toothless can break the sound barrier if he tries hard enough.
Hiccup winces when the windows break, but it’s thrilling and his cheeks sting and he’s pretty sure his knuckles are bleeding and he needs a helmet instead of a wimpy domino mask.
Ooh, hey, a helmet.
“What do you think, bud?” Hiccup says, and holds up the helmet. The dragon considers it appraisingly.
“Nice,” he says. “Should help with the wind and the chapping.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Hiccup murmured, then picked up the angry buzzing of fear and panic thrumming in his fingertips and his palms, and he growled. “Go hide, bud,” he says, and Toothless slinks off towards the cabinet.
Gobber bursts in then, white as a sheet and his eyes wide, and Hiccup stares.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
“Yer dad was found dead last night and yer mother’s back, Hiccup,” Gobber says, and Hiccup gapes.