A nice big update now for this story's 10th chapter (!) - this took me a long time to get right, and I had a mean case of writer's block, but I'm starting to feel like the story's really starting to go where I want it to, and I think I should be able to update more frequently as I write faster.

Thanks to all my reviewers so far for giving me impetus! Keep it up PLEASE! It really is helpful.

Anyhoo, here ya go;

Hero of the Day

Chapter 10

A Name to a Face

Sunlight streamed in through the windows, and another day of difficulty began on the island of Berk.

Astrid woke slowly, her memory gradually trickling back details of the previous night's events to her. She had the vaguest of recollections of several fitful bursts of wakefulness throughout the night, and she did not feel at all well rested.

On the floor in the main hallway lay the pile of frozen fish she'd left there the night before. It was untouched – the Night Fury had been left alone with a pile of fish, and nobody to stop it eating them, and it hadn't even gone near them.

Astrid was at a loss to guess if the dragon had even slept since their magnificent last stand in the skies over the dragon's island. Certainly, whenever she'd been awake, so had the dragon, and she could only assume that in fact, the sleek black creature hadn't slept at all.

Its vigil was astounding Astrid. Hour after hour, day after day, it had stayed within feet of Hiccup, doing nothing but stare at him, and waiting for the boy to wake. Astrid got the distinct feeling that the dragon would simply continue to wait for as long as it took.

Nobody knew how long it would take – that was the other thing. The healer had told her and Stoick, in a quiet moment aside, that the trauma Hiccup had suffered was so severe that there was truthfully no way to tell if the boy would wake up at all. Leg wounds were common amongst the panoply of injuries suffered by Vikings, but it was rare that severe burning was involved as well – Astrid could only think of one other injury that was even remotely similar. It had been when she was scarcely more than a toddler, but she could remember it vividly, because the man who'd suffered that wound had died not long afterwards.

Shoving such thoughts forcefully from her mind, Astrid stood and stretched herself out, a hundred different joints clicking and popping as she did. She had hardly been comfortable the night beforehand sleeping in the chair by Hiccup's bed, but she'd made a promise to Stoick to watch over Hiccup, and she'd stood by her word.

She now admitted to herself, though she never would have admitted it to anyone else, that actually she would have done the same whether or not Stoick had asked her to. The truth of the matter was that Astrid didn't quite understand just where her intense concern for Hiccup had come from all of a sudden, but she felt some long suppressed, vague and indistinct stirrings of emotions that she had never had reason to draw on before begin to move within her. All she really knew was, at the present time she cared for his welfare more than anything else, and she simply wanted him to live – to come back to the world of the living, and be a part of the tribe like he never had been in years prior.

She had tried to justify it to herself, but the myriad of reasons she'd come up with for her behaviour, whilst all true, did not seem to tell the whole story. Yes, she felt guilty over how she'd treated him. Yes, she simply wanted to thank him. But below these quite sincere emotions she sensed lay something still more profound, and more deep. She didn't know what it was yet, and it was still but a murmuring of things perhaps to come, but it was there, and many years down the line, she would look back on these moments as the point at which so much began to change about her.

At that moment, her stomach began to rumble, as if to admonish her for getting too introspective when there were practical problems – such as not having eaten for twelve hours – to attend to, and she quietly slipped out of the front door of Hiccup's house, and across to the Great Hall.

There were not many people there – the hour was early. She spied Gobber in one corner of the cavernous hall, chatting with a rather tired-looking Spitelout. Opposite, against the far wall, the Nadder she'd befriended on the voyage back to Berk lay slumbering – the Great Hall being the warmest place in the village, it had not taken long for the dragon to find it and make itself at home.

In fact, Astrid could just make out the Terrible Terror curled up there as well.

It all seemed so peaceful, but the tension in the air could have been cut with a knife. It permeated the whole village – the sense of something amiss. Perhaps it was to be expected – there were dragons everywhere.

Wordlessly, silently, Astrid turned and walked straight back out into the open air, unable to bear the awkwardness a moment longer, and she let the door slam shut behind her.

She walked down to the cliff line, the grass beneath her feet glistening with morning dew and vibrant orange from the violently colourful sunrise, the clouds fluffy and innocent above her head and the air becalmed and still. The sounds that met her ears were gentle and quiet – the rustling of pine trees, the waves lapping at the rocks far below.

She sat down on the edge and merely thought for a while.

She was still there three hours later, and hadn't moved at all.

Thank the Gods, at least Hiccup's fever had broken.

Astrid's fit of introspection that morning had unsettled her somewhat, and true to form as far as she was concerned she'd tried to shake it off by being businesslike and productive – but nothing had worked. First, she'd tried again to feed the infuriatingly immobile dragon that was now basically a resident of the chief's house – but to no avail, and it was a similar story with Hiccup. She'd tried to gently sit him up and get some lukewarm broth into him, but all she'd succeeded in doing was pouring it down his front.

Finally, in her frustration, she'd flung herself down on the chair next to his bed and resigned herself to doing what she had already been doing for a number of days – waiting.

She cared deeply for Hiccup's wellbeing, and was taking the job of watching him very seriously indeed – Stoick had warned her that morning to not exhaust herself in the process, having seen just how much time she was actually spending with Hiccup – but she was beginning to suffer from a very acute problem. Boredom was setting in. Unconscious people do not make good company – though Hiccup had every excuse to be out cold after what he'd done – and neither do dragons that act like statues.

Sighing wearily, she cast around for something to occupy the time until the dawn, and her eyes alighted on a small, battered leather notebook lying in a semi-obscured corner of Hiccup's desk. She picked it up, and began idly flicking through the pages.

It wasn't that she was invading Hiccup's privacy - later she would look back and realize she'd simply been feeling curious about what made Hiccup tick. What exactly motivated the chief's son was one of Berk's most enduring unfathomables - and of course, she couldn't now simply talk to him and try to find out. Why she was curious in the first place, she wasn't quite sure – she hadn't been in the past – but regardless, the best she could do was put up with some sort of small window into his world - of which, this notebook was one.

The first few pages, dating from early summer, were all of machines she recognised - principally because often she and the rest of the tribe had had to contend with Hiccup wheeling them out at catastrophically inappropriate moments - such as in the middle of a raid. Amongst the beautifully-detailed line drawings was a contraption she'd heard referred to as the 'mangler' – a sort of automated bola-thrower, it looked if anything more dangerous to the person firing it than to the creature – presumably a dragon – that it was supposed to be aimed at. It seemed, to say the least, highly erratic, but Hiccup had drawn it well indeed.

Perhaps he's motivated by obsession over detail.

She turned the next page, and suddenly found herself faced with an image of herself, sketched beautifully in wild, bold yet intricate strokes of jet-black charcoal, staring back out of the paper at her. Her breath caught instantly in her throat.

She'd known for a very long time that Hiccup had what might best have been described as a 'crush' on her - it had long been a major source of irritation. But to put this much effort in? The detail was extraordinary, every spike of her armour, every strand of her hair meticulously recreated - from memory, since there was no way Astrid would ever have posed for such a sketch.

It was beautiful – one of the most unexpectedly wonderful things Astrid had ever seen, and that included the sight of Hiccup riding into battle on the back of his Night Fury, something nobody had been expecting and everyone was glad for. It was the drawing she found on the page afterwards, though, that really changed everything.

She flicked over the page, and the image that met her eyes was of an unbelievably sleek-looking Night Fury in profile - in flight. This was not in and of itself remarkable - Astrid knew all too well now what a flying Night Fury with a boy on its back looked like - but what made it suddenly interesting was the text that had been inked hurriedly into the top corner of the page. It was barely legible, but she could just make out a single word.

Toothless.

Astrid frowned anew. That was the same word that Hiccup had been repeating over and over in his feverish bouts of sleep – and now the word clearly referred to the dragon. But why had he labeled it 'toothless'? Astrid had seen time and again that in fact the Night Fury had rather a lot of very sharp teeth indeed.

"Toothless?" she asked herself, "Why T-"

To her astonishment, however, at this point she was suddenly interrupted by the softest of questioning whuffling noises from directly behind her. She spun round suddenly, caught utterly off guard, and in amazement saw the dragon – whose gaze had previously not left Hiccup since Gobber had taken the boy's leg off – looking straight at her. Its eyes and its pupils were wide and questioning. It keened softly again at her, and cocked its head curiously.

Astrid looked at the drawing, then the dragon, and then back at the drawing again, trying to make sense of it all.

Surely it wasn't...?

She could think of no other possibilities though. Why else would it have responded so suddenly to this one word?

Toothless was clearly the dragon's name.

For a moment, Astrid sat transfixed. She'd assumed her conversation on the ship with Fishlegs, about giving her Nadder – which had at that point only just arrived – a name, had been in jest, and that the very idea of naming a dragon was preposterous, even if they were indeed as friendly as they seemed to be all of a sudden. But here was a dragon responding to a human-given name – a name Hiccup had given it.

What sort of a bond must these two have had? Closer than anything he ever had with any of us.

Whose fault is that? Ours.

The thoughts whirled through Astrid's head in a barrage of emotions, fighting for space.

This dragon – this beautiful, magnificent dragon that had saved Hiccup's life – seemed so intelligent. Perhaps it was. Not for the first time in the past three days, Astrid found herself faced with the unsettling notion of a dragon being simply more caring than she had ever been.

Were we always the ones in the wrong?

There was no doubt the Vikings had always been merciless with regards to dragons, and it had always been reciprocated. However, looking at the dragon before her, Astrid couldn't shake the feeling that none of the dragons' actions had ever been out of choice. The truly evil beast was that Red Death – her own private name for it – which Hiccup and Toothless – Toothless – had killed.

Would we have been as good? If a human had saved the life of a dragon, would we have laid down our arms and tried for peace? Wouls we have been so quick to forgive?

No. We would have gone on as before, and still thought ourselves the better for doing so.

The scenarios that began to play themselves out in her head – of them finding the Night Fury by itself and mercilessly, cruelly killing it; of Hiccup dying in his fight and them killing the Night Fury by way of some sort of twisted retribution – chilled her to the bone, for she realized that they all were feasible. They all could have – would have – happened.

Toothless the Night Fury. Astrid turned the words over again and again in her head.

Of course, none of this addressed the question of why Hiccup had chosen the name Toothless in the first place. Astrid had been about to put this question into words, but the need was suddenly removed as the dragon cracked its mouth open a couple of inches, all the time looking straight at her. Astrid stared transfixed at the rows of teeth, beginning to think that the dragon was, if anything, proving her point, before suddenly and in the blink of an eye, every single one of them vanished into the dragon's gums.

Her jaw dropped.

Retractable teeth?

The dragon cocked its head at her.

That explains a lot.

For the second time in as many minutes, Astrid was struck dumb, and a million and one images flooded her imagination, all concerning just what exactly Hiccup might have had to have done to get the dragon to put such level of trust in him that it would even contemplate letting the boy near. Perhaps the other way round – or both. They trusted each other. Once again, she was utterly awestruck – thunderstruck – at the closeness of the relationship she knew existed between Hiccup and the dragon.

Toothless.

It still felt strange calling a dragon by a name, but she felt her instinctive aversion to the creatures – something that had been drilled into her, as it had into every one of them, from the moment she was old enough to understand – begin to melt away as if it had been no more robust and no less transient than the winter's snow.

Though it seems like it will never go away, that it is rooted there and there to stay, come the spring, it will all but melt away.

That rhyme was a common one amongst the little ones of the island – they had all learnt it when they were young – and though it talked about the snow, it seemed eerily applicable here.

Astrid shook her head in simple disbelief. So much – so much – was changing around her, and, she began to realize, so was she.

If Astrid thought she had been incredulous, the village's reaction, when she told them, was scarcely believable.

The range of emotions she'd seen spread out on the faces of the crowd in the tribal meeting had ranged from joyous to sullen, via confused, hysterical and interested. Nonetheless, they'd been persuaded eventually, when they heard just why the dragon had been named how it had.

She herself couldn't wait for Hiccup to wake up, if only so that he could tell them all just how he had managed to befriend the dragon in the first place. It was certain to make an interesting story; nobody was in any doubt of that.

Conversation was buzzing around the great hall – she could hear the dragon's newfound name being spoken practically every five seconds as people tried to get to grips with it.

She took the opportunity to slip quietly – unchecked – outdoors, and back to the chief's house. For some reason, she seemed recently to be preferring the peace and quiet that could be found there, rather than the incessant gossiping that could be found in the great hall almost every hour of the day, now that everyone was back from the dragon's island and there were stories to be told.

A though occurred to her on her way back. She'd finally managed to get Toothless to respond to her – perhaps now it would be willing to eat something?

With a slight smile on her face for the first time in what felt like years, she slipped away to the food stores which were, by all accounts, strictly off limits.

But so many rules had already been thrown clean out of the window. What was one more?

She'd been right.

Although Toothless had still been watching Hiccup when she walked in, he had looked at her this time as she entered and, upon catching sight of the armful of fish she was carrying, had bounded over to her and knocked her clean over in his enthusiasm.

Astrid had been sent sprawling on the floor, barely knowing what had hit her. She became aware almost immediately of what could only be described as a feeding frenzy going on behind her, where the fish had all been thrown as she'd been pole-axed by the overeager Night Fury. Turning to look, her eyes met with the sight of a dragon consuming fish at a rate that simply shouldn't have been physically possible. It wasn't even biting into them, merely swallowing. It was just as well – those fish were months old, the last of the autumn catch, although she had doubted Toothless would care, and she had been proved right.

Before she knew it, every single one of the fish was gone, and suddenly Toothless' face was inches from her own, the dragon crooning at her questioningly.

"There isn't any more, you overgrown salamander." Astrid grumbled as she hoisted herself somewhat shakily to her feet, doing her best to be disgruntled, though her heart wasn't in it.

Still slightly stunned at being knocked clean over before she'd even got in the door, Astrid stumbled over to the bedside chair and sat down heavily on it.

How on earth did Hiccup ever get control of that dragon long enough to put a harness on him?

Her thoughts wandered from there to the charred remains of the harness that they'd prised carefully off the Night Fury - so as not to hurt it more than it already was – in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Even in its bent, twisted and semi-complete state they could see how intricate it had originally been. Though none of them had voiced it, they'd all felt a silent awe at the boy – they'd known he was a decent smith, but this was better than anything they'd ever seen Gobber do, and he'd been smithing for nearly forty years. The blacksmith himself had said he was amazed at the detail.

It was impossible to recreate though – they didn't have enough to go on.

An orange glow through the windows showed that dusk was drawing slowly to a close. Astrid picked up Hiccup's notebook again and, settling herself in for another night of waiting, began to flick through the pages.

Sketch after sketch of Toothless – and few more of her as well – presented themselves, each more breathtaking than the last. On and on they went throughout the innocuous little black leather-bound book, vieing for her attention in all their beauty - until she reached the last page. On this was sketched something very different – a series of tiny, delicate and barely distinguishable diagrams. Squinting and holding the book close to her eyes, Astrid could just make out the shape of a saddle, and parts she recognised as having belonged to Toothless' harness.

Her curiosity piqued, she began rummaging around the desktop, looking for more of the same. Clearing a pile of small papers from the desk, she was astounded to discover several sheets of paper one on top of the other, each one half the size of the desk's surface, with incredibly intricate drawings of hundreds of parts and mechanisms, each of which was adorned with hundreds of scribbled labels.

The idea formed instantly in her mind. If they could do anything for Hiccup that might begin to make it up to him, it would be this.

In the morning, she knew she had some work to do.

"Gobber, can I have a word?"

It was a very cold morning, and the first of the winter's snow had fallen overnight. Around a foot of the stuff was lying on the ground, although the forge that Astrid now stood at the door of had melted the snow from an area around it, such was the heat that was given off. Astrid had left to find the blacksmith the moment she knew that he'd be at the forge. She had a favour to call in.

"Wha' is it, lass?"

Astrid took the rolls of paper out from under her arm – the diagrams of the harness she'd found the previous night – and laid them out on the table. Gobber's eyebrows shot up instantaneously and his jaw dropped.

"I found these last night on Hiccup's desk."

Gobber didn't seem to hear her. "Tha's incredible" he whispered, almost reverently. "Look at the detail…"

"Can you make it?"

That certainly got Gobber's attention, and stopped the Viking in his tracks. His eyes shot upwards and locked with hers, an astonished expression plastered on his face.

"Wha'ever for?"

"For Hiccup. You know as well as I do he's gonna want to ride Toothless the moment he's awake" said Astrid, still resolutely refusing to acknowledge the possibility that Hiccup might never wake – a possibility that had receded as the time he survived went on, but one that was nevertheless still very much there. Gobber, meanwhile, looked momentarily nonplussed at the mention of the dragon's name, before he cottoned on and he began to look deeply thoughtful.

"Astrid" the blacksmith said after a long moment of contemplative silence, "this is a long job, an' it'll take up all o' my time from now on, an' I have other contracts-"

"I'll get Stoick to speak with the village. I'm sure they'll realize Hiccup deserves to wake up to us showing at least some acceptance of what he's done. Else" she added quietly, "he'll just up and leave again."

Gobber visibly stiffened, as concerned by the thought as she was, before his shoulders slumped.

"Yeh're righ', Astrid. I'll get to it." The Viking paused. "Though there is one thing I shoul' finish first."

"What?"

By way of response, Gobber shuffled off into one of the many backrooms, and after only a moment, returned carrying something wrapped tightly in a piece of cloth.

"I jus' thought Hiccup was gonna need this most of all" the blacksmith said quietly, sadly, before slowly letting the cloth fall to the floor.

Astrid gasped. Though it looked like no example she had ever seen, she knew instantly what it was. Gobber was holding a long, delicately carved and smoothed piece of pinewood that was attached at one end to a piece of cup-shaped steel, padded on the inside, and at the other end to an intricate arrangement of sprung metalwork that culminated at the base in a flat spade-like protrusion that was unmistakeably intended as a foot.

She was looking at Hiccup's new prosthetic leg.

She felt a lump immediately form in her throat, and Gobber's expression was sombre. Such a stark and sudden reminder of Hiccup's condition could not fail to be heart-rending, and Astrid was finding this out.

Aren't I supposed to be stronger than this? I spent my entire childhood trying to be someone who wouldn't worry or care about battle wounds – indeed, someone's who'd rejoice in them.

Then again, I never did see a real battle wound in all that time.

The reality is a bit different.

And with that thought, the first tear trickled ever so slowly down her cheek.

She could make out unfinished carvings on the wood – intricate designs that were at once beautiful and soul-destroying for the memories they brought back. She could see Toothless' likeness carved into the top, and an unfinished image of Hiccup on the reverse side. If it were a purely objective exercise, she knew Hiccup would have loved the craftsmanship that had gone into making it.

As it was, even as she hoped so much for him to wake up, she dreaded it for what his reaction to learning of his injury might be.

Gobber broke the silence. "I'll get tha' harness started as well, lass, okay?" the blacksmith – Hiccup's former mentor, and the only one of any of them who'd been at least civil to the boy – said quietly. He was taking it hard as well.

It was hitting them all very hard, come to think of it. Nobody knew what the future held, and the uncertainty permeated the air and left a foul taste in the mouth.

It was a time of great worry, and all eyes were on one young man – still but a boy in reality – and whether, after all that had happened, he might just bring some hope. It was needed.

There. Hope you enjoyed - Toothless is fun to write but it's bloody hard transitioning from narrating him as 'the dragon' or 'the Night Fury' to 'Toothless'. Hope I pulled it off!

As for those waiting for Hiccup to wake up and the angst to start - that all kicks off next chapter.

As always, PLEASE REVIEW! I really do feel like it's been a worthwhile excercise when I know people have been interested enough in it to respond - even if it's dreadful! XD