Chapter 11 : See You Yesterday
-EoT-
"I finished it, bud!" Hiccup called as he clambered down into the cove.
Toothless, who had been trying to nip at the saddle strap across the base of his neck, looked up and crossed his forelegs as if nothing was amiss.
Hiccup ran over to Toothless, unfurling and presenting the new fin. "See! All done!"
Sadly, Hiccup's enthusiasm to present the tail had hidden Toothless from his view until it was too late. The massive dragon barrelled down on him, knocking him flat on his back.
"H- Hey! What-"
The dragon gave Hiccup's face a slobbery lick from chin to hairline, then bounded off toward the lake.
"Agh! Oh ew! Gaah… Why do you keep doing that?!" Hiccup complained.
Climbing to his feet, Hiccup retrieved the tailfin from where it had fallen and began to stroll over to where Toothless stood. The dragon, for his part, continued moving away, taking short hops and looking back at Hiccup with his tongue lolling.
Hiccup narrowed his eyes. "I can't put this tail on you unless you get over here, Toothless!"
Toothless barked, then took two bounding leaps further away. He wagged his tail in the air, tantalizingly far from Hiccup's reach.
The young Viking stared, perplexed, then ventured to ask, "Are you… playing?"
The Night Fury gave no sign of having heard the question, probably because he was on the far side of the lake at this point.
"If that's how it's going to be…" Hiccup took off running. "I'm gonna catch you!"
-EoT-
One game of keep-away and a wrestling match (of which Hiccup was the clear champion, clearly) later, the young Viking finally managed to get the tailfin attached to the rambunctious Night Fury's tail. After some goading, the dragon sat listlessly (though with loud complaining) as Hiccup strung a rope directly between the pedal and the tailfin.
"Alright! That should be as attached as it's going to-"
Toothless launched to his feet, throwing himself at Hiccup's own. His snout jabbed into Hiccup's calf, practically throwing the Viking onto the dragon's back as the eager reptile leaped off the ground.
"TOOTHLESS!" Hiccup shouted before he realized he should probably be figuring out how to NOT FALL OFF. He scrabbled for purchase on the saddle, managing to grab a strap and pull himself into a sitting position. By that time, though, Toothless' flight trajectory was already listing. Hiccup shoved downward on the pedal with his toes, pulling open the false fin.
It worked. Toothless corrected the roll, then shot up over the treetops and out of the cove.
"Oh! Oh, Gods!" Hiccup considered shouting out his success to the forest but realized that would likely jinx everything all over again. Right now there were no problems, and he did not want that to change. Instead, he went with the more neutral, "Toothless! We're flying!"
Apparently, though, the Gods were not smiling on Hiccup. Because the two of them were quickly running out of land near the edge of the island, Toothless decided to turn. He turned left.
The rope went slack, letting the tailfin fall shut. Even though Hiccup pressed as hard as he could on the pedal, pulling the rope as much as possible, the change in the length of the tail exceeded the slack that the pedal could control.
Perhaps a simple control solution wasn't good enough.
"OH THOR!" The two of them fell into a spiral all over again, this time out over water. "T- Toothless! Right! Right!"
Toothless flapped unevenly, trying to roll to correct the flatspin. He succeeded in spinning over, eliminating the horizontal spin by virtue of rotating on another axis, but the force of the new rotation was too much for Hiccup to hold on to the saddle.
"TOOTHLESS! OH NO! OH-"
Air rushed past as Hiccup fell past the sea cliffs on the edge of the island. Where was Toothless? The world was spinning and the rocks and water below were getting closer so fast.
And…
-EoT-
Hiccup gasped for air, then lay still. He'd been lucky. Hitting the water at that speed had knocked him unconscious. Getting pulverized against the rocks by the sea surely would not have been any fun, and probably wasn't fun for his body. Thankfully, he was once again facing the Monstrous Nightmare on the night of the raid.
He lay still, remembering how last time's inaction had made the Nightmare leave. It clambered over the ridge, crushed the remains of the bola launcher, then took off with a roar.
Step one, check.
The young Viking hopped up, jogging down to the forge. If he hurried, he could be back before Gobber even realized he'd left. That way his obedience might earn him more time in the forge. As he pushed past a couple Vikings and jumped over the pile of weapons in the forge window, a mild uproar started among said Vikings. They knew he'd been gone.
Hopefully Gobber wouldn't notice-
"Ah, lad, couldn' even handle the forge for a minute withou' me, eh?" Gobber asked, hobbling into the forge through the door like a normal Viking.
Hiccup grabbed a weapon, pretending to be busy. "Well sorry I'm so absolutely amazing at failing to manage things. Really, it takes practice."
Gobber gave a wry chuckle, taking a weapon out of Hiccup's hand and giving it a few whacks with his hammer prosthetic. "Now, see, that's the spirit that'll get you out fighting dragons!"
Hiccup paused in his work to consider that. "Failing to manage things…?"
"No!" Gobber laughed harder, tossing a sword out the window. It nicked someone's beard, their cry of indignation quickly lost in the cry of battle. "Bein' absolutely amazing at somethin'!"
He rolled his eyes. Of course Gobber had misheard that.
Later, after the raid had died down and just before Hiccup knew Gobber would drag him off to the nest hunt, the young Viking slipped out of the forge quietly. If he snuck into the storeroom, got a rope, then went back after Gobber left for the nest hunt meeting, he'd be home free to work on the saddle just about all day.
It was just his luck that Fishlegs spotted him halfway across the village square.
"Oh, hey Hiccup!" The rotund Viking seemed eager to talk about something.
"Uh… Hi?" Hiccup said. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd spoken to Fishlegs before the whole time loop had begun.
"Yeah! Hi! So. I was curious: now that we've had a raid, dragon training will start in a few days, right?"
"Sure. Yeah." Hiccup shrugged, continuing to make his way across the square. If Gobber noticed him shirking forge duty, or missing that meeting of the village...
"I was just wondering since you're Gobber's apprentice, did he - maybe - mention any of the dragons we'll be fighting against? Or the order in which we'd fight them?"
The younger Viking almost rolled his eyes. Of course Fishlegs would want to know that, and of course he'd think he was buddy enough with Gobber to know that, given that Gobber didn't notice Hiccup outside of the forge during the raid. And, on top of that, Hiccup was neither too famous nor too infamous to be talked to.
Still, he had to choose his words carefully. Anything he said might make this time around too different from the others, or might predict events that wouldn't even come to pass.
"I think we're working with… uh… something complicated the first day. The second day's a Gronckle, the third is a Zippleback."
Fishlegs' eyes filled with stars. "A mystery class dragon? On our third day?! Oh wow! What will we be doing? Anything interesting?"
Hiccup shrugged, trying to defuse the conversation. "I don't know. That's all I got."
Fishlegs deflated, then noticed the two of them were now on the far side of the square. "So, Hiccup, where are you going?"
He figured the truth couldn't hurt. "I'm going to get a rope out of the storehouse." Finding the building he was looking for, he made for the alleyway on one side.
"Uh, Hiccup?"
The young Viking turned around. Fishlegs looked concerned.
"The door is over here."
Hiccup looked between the front of the storehouse and the alleyway, then had to resist slapping himself. He wasn't stealing a basketful of fish, he was taking a rope. That was a normal thing for him to have. "Right! I… knew that! I was just wandering left and right because… I'm… really, really tired."
"Maybe you should go home, then?"
"No, no." Hiccup shook his head. "We just had a raid. It's all hands on deck, right? Gotta… fix up the town!" And build a dragon a new tailfin prosthetic, he didn't say aloud.
"A- Alright." Fishlegs looked around, noticing someone waving in the distance. "I gotta go. Bye!"
Hiccup slipped into the storehouse, found the rope he'd used the last two times for the tail prosthetic, then turned around and made his way back toward the forge.
-EoT-
"So what are you working-?"
Hiccup jumped, shoving the saddle seat he was weaving off of his desk and onto the floor behind his stool. He spun around to face the door to the forge's back room, coming face to face with, "F- Fishlegs! Oh, Gods! You scared me half to death!"
Fishlegs, being his usual meek and helpful self, was mortified by how Hiccup had tossed his work to the floor. "Oh, oh no! I didn't mean to- I can come back later…" He bustled past Hiccup, picking up and dusting off the saddle. He set it back on Hiccup's desk.
"Oh, no. Really, this is no big deal." Hiccup leaned over it as soon as Fishlegs set it down, awkwardly hiding its shape from view. "S- So what is it you wanted to talk about?"
Fishlegs wrung his hands. "Well, Gobber was complaining to Stoick about losing track of you at the meeting last night and I mentioned I saw you out by the storehouse…"
Hiccup almost considered interrupting the stream of information, but his distraction with hiding the saddle and his lack of other topics prevented any easy escape.
"So he asked what you'd said and I didn't really want to confuse anything so I mentioned you told me his training schedule and he said he hadn't even come up with a training schedule yet."
Fishlegs took a deep breath and Hiccup cut in. "He d- didn't have a schedule yet?"
Fishlegs shrugged. "Nope. Though, he thinks he's probably going to go with what you said. He told me not to tell anyone else, and to tell him whenever I found you."
Hiccup shrugged, trying to act nonchalant like Snotlout. "I guess I got busy?"
"By the way, what are you working on?"
"Oh… i- it's a-"
Fishlegs leaned over Hiccup. "It looks like a saddle! What is it even for? And that pedal, there..."
"It's nothing, really. Probably. If you could maybe just-"
Fishlegs took the rope on the pedal, following it beneath the desk to where it wrapped around a circle of metal, also with straps. "What would this saddle even fit on? It's too small for an ox, yet this metal bit is too big…"
Hiccup grabbed his arm. "Really, Fishlegs, it's nothing. Could you please just-"
The band of metal fell over, taking the coil of rope with it. This knocked over something else beneath the desk, which unfurled just far enough out of the shadow of the desk to be fully visible.
Hiccup froze. Fishlegs was way too intelligent. He'd practically memorized the book of dragons, or so his own previous attempts at this week told him. If Fishlegs recognized the fin as for a-
"No WAY!" Fishlegs exclaimed.
Hiccup hung his head. He was done for, now. He'd probably have to go jump off a cliff, or find something sharp to stab himself so that he wouldn't be seen as a traitor by the whole village.
There was no stopping the intellectual now. "Is this what I think it is?!"
-EoT-
Hiccup pressed the pedal and, in response, the fin extended. He wondered silently to himself how the day had gone so terribly, terribly wrong. Was it something in the way he'd spoken to Fishlegs? Had he been a bit too friendly giving out that information?
Did it really even matter, if he was going to end up dead and the day would start over again anyway?
"Wow, Hiccup! It's working perfectly!" Fishlegs shouted from the docks. The moonlight reflected off the water, obscuring Hiccup's view of him.
Under Hiccup, the saddle jerked. He kicked at the straps, trying to keep it in place and keep his balance. This was a terrible plan.
"Is the paddle too small? Should we have made it a little bigger?"
Hiccup resisted the urge to smash his own face in with said paddle. It was his only way of rowing the fin and saddle assembly back to the dock, after all. The saddle again tried to slip off the log, the fin upright on the back catching a draft and making controlling the thing nigh impossible. Hiccup shifted left and right, trying to correct the roll.
"This sail idea is amazing! Think of how fast a boat like that could go! Or turn!" Fishlegs exclaimed, "You're going to win the gala for sure, assuming the dragons don't burn down the docks again!"
"Yeah!" Hiccup wobbled on the log. "Absolutely amazing. No problems with this whatsoever."
"Okay, now try to row it back over to-"
Whatever Fishlegs was saying cut off as the log gave up any semblance of stability and capsized, dumping Hiccup and the fin into the water.
This excuse, the fin as a boat sail, was absolutely amazing. No problems whatsoever. Hiccup considered just not coming up, letting himself drown in the frigid ocean water.
He decided against it, given that he didn't want to build the tail and saddle over again, especially without any data on how this new design fared against the laws of flight.
-EoT-
"But why are you taking it into the woods?"
Hiccup shrugged, the sopping wet bundle of fin and saddle jumping up and down in his arms. "I just feel like storing it out here. Besides! It… uhhh… gives me an excuse for a walk, anyway."
"But I thought the point was to hide it from other people…"
"Not a literal excuse, Fishlegs. Just-"
"Isn't it really late? Maybe you should just go get some rest. I'll hide the sail!"
Hiccup looked at Fishlegs. The rotund Viking couldn't seem to tear his eyes away from the fin. He wondered if that expression on Fishlegs' face was jealousy.
"Come on, please?"
"Yeah, nope!" Hiccup started into the trees, leaving the village behind.
"Fine! I'll just figure out how to make a sail like that myself!" His hands shot to his mouth. "Did I just say that out loud?"
Hiccup shook his head. Exhausted from the day of work and sleep-deprived from the consecutive sleepless nights, he kept wandering into the forest, heading toward Raven Point and its hidden cove.
-EoT-
WHAM!
Hiccup's vision swam. The rock he'd just been slammed against dug into his shoulders and the back of his head. A massive black paw held his chest against the ground, the paw of…
How did he get here?
Hiccup had made it to the ridgeline near the cove and found no groove of soil. Toothless hadn't ended up in the usual crash situation. The young Viking had descended into the cove, assuming Toothless had hit the water and the bolas himself again.
The sleek black dragon was not free. He was still bound, crushed up against the far cliff wall by the momentum of his crash.
Great friend that he was, Hiccup had dropped the saddle and run over to free the Night Fury. But, the moment the dragon was free and the knife was well clear, Toothless had pounced him. Now it was Hiccup's turn to be trapped against the cliff wall.
Toothless reared back, sucking in a huge, dry breath. Hiccup stared, unsure what to do. Why was Toothless doing this?!
What was toothless doing?!
The dragon's head began to descend.
Hiccup barely had time to whimper, "Toothless?!"
-EoT-
A/N:
Don't panic! I'm not suddenly taking the story in a radically new direction, and Toothless is not randomly going feral. Worry not, there is a very clear motivation for this rash action that I'll explain in the next chapter.
Trust me, we're coming up on some fun stuff!