Hiccup heard the crackle of his father's police radio echo through the house.
"All available units to New Berk Preserve, we got a 10-57," the dispatcher recited dispassionately, and she rattled off identifying factors. Missing person. In the woods.
Hiccup was out of bed before Stoick and dressed before his father could even properly wake up. The backpack hidden in the back corner of his closet held and all manner of gear one would normally associate with a hiker, a cop, or a criminal. He strapped the backpack on and grabbed his water bottle off his nightstand.
Jimmying the window up and propping it open with the scrap wood waiting by it, Hiccup was out and biking to the New Berk Preserve as the sheriff's car pulled out of their driveway. Although it took seven minutes by road to get to the preserve from the Haddock house, Hiccup could take the back paths he'd carved with his bike tires and be there in five. The October leaves, red and yellow and brown, crunched under his tires as he pedaled. The wind whipped his hair back from where it usually lay strangely flat against his forehead. He could hear the search dogs barking from the official entrance, but he knew the best way to get in undetected was to cross anywhere along the tiny chain strung up between posts in lieu of a fence.
Hiccup left his bike at the fence and pulled his Stinger flashlight out of his backpack. His thumb ran up the engraving of his initials—HHH III—to the button. The forest, still green and lush despite the approaching winter, lit up far too brightly in the LED beam.
"Shit," Hiccup hissed. "Shit, shit, fuck." He fumbled for the button again, switching the light to low. Satisfied he wasn't found out, he took off into the forest. Though the trees and paths were familiar, each step felt like a leap of faith in the dark.
"Blonde," he recited to himself as he trekked, recalling the potential victim's details, "five-foot-five, blue sweatshirt, black leggings. Left for a jog this afternoon around 2 pm. Never came back home."
Around the short, sharp signaling barks of the police dogs, an inhuman howl of pain echoed through the trees. Hiccup's head whipped toward the sound. It was close. Without another thought, he took off running in the direction he hoped he heard it from. The light from his flashlight bounced erratically as he ran, and he narrowly avoided head-on collisions with a few trees. He felt the disappointment of his middle school gym teacher when his energy flagged, and his limbs grew heavy. The howl pierced the forest again, just a few feet to his left, beyond a barrier of flora. His hands shook despite himself as he pushed through the leaves to reveal a huge black dog caught in a steel jaw trap.
"Oh, gods," Hiccup breathed. "Hey, bud. Let's get you out of there." He fell to his knees beside the dog, who whined pathetically as it pulled against the trap. With each tug, the teeth dug deeper into the skin of its hind leg. Blood matted the fur that remained, and Hiccup had to stifle the urge to vomit at the sight of bone sticking out and skin torn away to ribbons. The dog narrowly missed taking Hiccup's fingers off as he tried to touch the trap.
"It's okay," Hiccup said in his best attempt at a soothing voice. He slid his jacket off his shoulders and wrapped it around the dog's head. With his attention back on the trap, he put his flashlight in his mouth and silently thanked his dad for every weird survivalist lesson he'd taught him over the years.
One hand on each side, his dad's voice instructed in his head. Push the levers as close to the jaws as possible. It'll give you more leverage. Deep breath. Put all your weight into it.
Hiccup didn't bother to stifle his crow of delight when the jaws opened, and the dog shot out of them like a bullet, leaving Hiccup behind and his jacket a few yards away.
"Yes!" he cried, hands in the air victoriously. He half wished his father had seen his feat, the flawless execution of rescue technique hammered in for fifteen years, but he also knew that if he had, Hiccup would be grounded for the rest of his life for following him on a call.
Missing jogger all but forgotten, Hiccup retrieved his jacket and started tracking the dog. With an injury like that, the poor thing would die without medical attention.
Pawprints in mud, leaves shifted and trampled, broken twigs, blood spatter, Stoick's voice said. Look for anything that indicates the environment has been disturbed.
The tracks led Hiccup to a gully, carved out of the forest by a creek—likely the northern leg of Raven Creek, he reasoned, which did give him significantly more hold on where exactly he was than he had before. He'd drifted too far from the official search party to even see the beams of the flashlights, although he could hear voices gradually getting louder, his father's the loudest among them. A fresh streak of mud, disturbed in a straight path down the lip of the gully, told him exactly where he needed to go.
Before he could even begin to put a path down in his mind, a growl dripping in animalistic fury tore into the air behind him. When he turned, slowly, with his hands in the air, he expected to find the dog. Instead, he was faced with a hulking man with long, dark hair tangled and matted into a strange approximation of dreadlocks. One tree-stump-sized arm hung oddly at his side, and his eyes flashed red. Hiccup froze, dropping his flashlight. He felt his heart pounding to escape his chest. He tried to take a step back and just avoided tumbling into the gully. The man took a single step forward and sniffed the air.
"A beta?" the man asked, an unfamiliar accent curling around his thick, rasping voice. He inhaled deeply through his nose again. "No. An omega. Didn't anyone ever tell you a lone wolf never survives?"
"Wha—" Hiccup's words died in his throat as the man took a step forward. He was stuck. Between the man—or whatever he was—approaching with slow, predatory steps and the gully, there was no way he could get out of this. Another growl started from his left, and Hiccup wasn't sure if he should be relieved or even more terrified to see the dog he had released from the trap. The dog's green eyes—weird, Hiccup noted even in his infinite fear—were locked on the man-thing, its sharp white teeth bared in a vicious snarl.
"The pup's got himself a pet," the man snarled. It happened in slow motion. The man took a step forward. Hiccup took a step back. The dog leapt. He could hear the fight as he fell, the tearing and rending of flesh with teeth and claws. He could hear the crash and yelp as the dog was thrown into a tree. Before his head struck the rock, he could hear all of it. From then on, it came in and out in flashes, but he fought to stay awake.
He thought he might have screamed when the boulder came down on his left leg.
The man was screaming.
There was blood on his face. Some of it was his.
Barking. Barking. Barking. Voices got closer, louder, and he heard his father call his name. He screamed when the boulder was lifted. He stopped fighting.
Hiccup woke in the hospital to a different world. A one-legged world. His stump was wrapped in gauze, and his head pounded out an ill-tempered beat. His brain was drug-addled and fluid, tying itself in knots trying to say actual words to his father.
"The dog," he eventually managed, and his dad looked sufficiently shocked. "The dog needs help."
"I had him brought to Gobber," his dad said slowly. "His leg's been amputated, but he's fine. There's nothing he can do to fix how strange he looks, though."
"We match," Hiccup slurred. "Owner?"
His dad huffed a nervous laugh. "None," he said. "No microchip, no collar, and no missing dogs reported matching his description." Hiccup smiled drunkenly.
"Keep him," he said. It wasn't a question, and he could see the exact moment when that dawned on his dad.
"Hiccup," his dad warned. And then he paused, seeming to really consider the idea. "Alright," he said. "You win."
The thing was, Hiccup wasn't ever sure if it really happened or not. He hadn't seen Astrid since her family moved away in the third grade, but she came to visit him with a bouquet of balloons and a teddy bear with one leg ripped off and sewn shut.
"Sorry," she said when he noticed it. "It was Snotlout's idea. He destroyed the leg."
"I destroyed mine," Hiccup said matter-of-factly, and he realized he might still be a little concussed when he saw the look on Astrid's face. "It doesn't hurt anymore," he assured her. She gave him a tiny smile, but it twisted into a frown. She punched his arm, but he barely felt it beneath the drugs.
"That's for scaring me," she said. Then she grabbed the front of his hospital gown and pulled him in to a quick, chaste kiss. "That's for, uh, everything else."
She was gone before the smile could finish spreading across his face.
