Sorry for the wait! Life took a turn for the crazy. Thanks for keeping up :)

Less than a week remained before Stoick's expected arrival. Hiccup was counting down the days.

He was working at his counter in the forge, idly doodling plans for a harpooner. Toothless dozed in a corner, stretched out contentedly like a great cat. Every so often Hiccup paused in his work to scratch at the dragon's head.

Since Toothless' return to the village Hiccup had been determinedly acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the previous few days. Either the villagers were more or less willing to take his cue, or they were simply too intimidated by Astrid to object. She was prone to glaring at anybody she felt was acting unduly nosy. Out of the corners of their eyes they looked at Toothless measuringly, but the dragon did nothing to fuel their suspicions.

Hiccup was not sure what they would tell his father. Sooner or later, Stoick would know about it.

Otherwise Berk was in fine form aside from minor crises—Snotlout somehow getting his head stuck in the arena railing, Snagrod getting hold of pewter and erupting in rashes, Grima getting into snits with the neighbors. That sort of manageable chaos.

Gobber was heating the coals, sending out sparks that seemed to tickle the sleeping dragon. Toothless grunted happily in his dreams.

"Y'done good lad, you know," murmured Gobber over his steel.

Chin in hand, Hiccup jerked out of his open-eyed dozing. "Huh?"

"I said, you've done a good job. When you're not sleeping on the job."

"I'm only sleeping on this job," Hiccup pointed out, yawning. "So I'm neglecting smithing, not chiefing."

Gobber snorted. So did the coals, sending up sparks when he gave them a push. "I mean it, though. Your dad will be proud."

Well, Berk was not aflame, that was something. Home-repair Vikings were definitely in demand now that the structures nobody had expected to last long against dragon raids were suddenly homes for the long haul. Everyone was more or less behaving, no bloodfeuds had started lately, although he was beginning to suspect that Grima the Elder was sabotaging her neighbor's turnips, which she insisted were infringing upon her own garden.

A rap sounded at the door, followed by Fishlegs sticking his head in through the opening. His head looked odd without its usual helmet. Tufts of blonde hair stood haylike in every direction. Odd, too, was his expression.

"Do you have a moment?" Without pausing for a response he went on. "There's something going on at one of the paddocks."

That was sufficient to perk both Hiccup and Gobber's interest. Hiccup pushed away his work. "What is it?"

Fishlegs mumbled, "You should probably take a look."

As both smiths rose to follow, Toothless roused and stretched, ready to pad after them. Fishlegs stopped in the doorway, looking back to the dragon. "He should stay here."

Hiccup stared in surprise. "Fishlegs, he's fine. That's all done with."

The boy looked uncomfortable. "That's not what I mean. It's—well, you should see. It might be contagious."

Contagious? Wordlessly, Hiccup and Gobber followed him out the door after Hiccup motioned for Toothless to stay put. Hiccup did not like the look on Fishlegs' face. Whenever the Viking was worried the anxiety manifested itself through prattling statistics, as it was doing now.

"There hasn't been any noticeable changes in diet or habit, no source allergies; the Zipplebacks' venom counts are still strong..." he went on like that for a while.

"Fishlegs, what are you talking about? Are the dragons sick?"

The boy only motioned to the paddock they were coming up on. Immediately there was something different. On any given day, at any given hour, a handful of dragons and their Vikings waited patiently to lift off from one of the designated stations. They were not doing so now. Hiccup noticed several Vikings milling around the paddock, looking concerned.

"We've shut down the station," said Fishlegs.

When Hiccup entered the paddock he saw the source of worry. Three dragons, a Nightmare, a Gronckle and a Zippleback, lay on their sides in the center with heaving flanks. Their pebbled skin shone dully in the sunlight. One of them made a thin, piteous noise he had never heard a dragon make before.

Hiccup hustled toward them and moved around to the Nightmare's head. Her eyes had an unusually glassy sheen to them, and she seemed to have difficulty focusing on his face. They slid away from him to something beyond.

Yes, they were sick.

Hiccup whirled around on Fishlegs and Roppke, another Viking who had come up to join them, and they took a step back. "When did this start happening?" he demanded. "Why didn't you come to me immediately?"

"It just seemed like a cold," offered Roppke.

"When?

"Last night. It was only the Nightmare at first," Fishlegs added hastily at the thunderous expression beginning to cloud Hiccup's face, "no big deal. And you weren't feeling well yesterday, we didn't want to bother you about it."

Yesterday Hiccup had spent mostly in bed, as he had the day before, feeling as though the slightest friction would shock the fear of Thor back into him all over again. To everyone in the village he'd claimed that it was only a passing illness. Even so, he was aghast.

"I don't care if I'm spewing fishguts everywhere, if something like this happens you come right to me." He struggled to keep his voice low; he didn't want to spook the dragons, who were already ill.

Fishlegs blanched but Roppke nodded. Hiccup turned back to the dragons, kneeling awkwardly to peer into the Nightmare's face. Its coloring was definitely off. He knew this one, a female called Pretty that was the favorite of some of the fiercer little girls in the village. Instead of blooming orange, it was a paler shade that stole across Pretty's snout, and her eyelids blinked back film that threatened to coat her eyes.

The other dragons were not in such a bad state, but they were not pictures of health. The poor Zippleback's heads were stretched out straight on the ground, receiving sympathetic pets from clustered Vikings. Though Hiccup suspected part of the severity was feigned to milk attention, there was no denying the symptoms of illness.

Something Fishlegs had said earlier nagged at him. "Contagious?" he asked.

The boy nodded. "First Pretty came down with it. Then this morning it was Sugs and the Zippleback."

"Ticktack," said Hiccup, remembering.

"Ticktack. First they started coughing, big hacking ones, and then they started to get really tired. And just lately their breaths have been sounding...rattly. That's when I came to get you."

Together they stared at the three dragons. Fishlegs went on to say that they'd closed off the paddock. A cluster of dragons, ones that had been present when the sickness had come over the first three, were huddled on the other side, watched carefully by Roppke for manifesting symptoms.

Suddenly Tick let out a mighty sneeze that covered Tack with gobs of goo and enveloped his head in a tiny cloud of gas, much to Tack's disgust.

Hiccup tried to think. How did humans treat illness? Fevers, Grima had said once as she tended to one of his, were a body's defense against the sickness. Reptiles did not get fevers. If dragons were like other lizards, they had to closely monitor their body temperatures by sunning and sleeping near fires.

"Right. Um, build a fire," he said, not knowing what else to do. At least it would raise their body temperatures. Did dragons get dragon pox? He'd never heard of one taking ill before.

Roppke set the clustered Vikings to work gathering wood and kindling.

"Hopefully it's just a bad cold," Hiccup said. "Something they can weather out."

"Sure," said Fishlegs. Then he looked around discreetly and lowered his voice. "But all the same...maybe we ought to uh, keep the exposed dragons here..."

It made sense. He nodded. Eventually he felt rather foolish standing there, and told Fishlegs and Roppke to let him know if things changed any. As he was leaving, Bolwer Gorm strode up to keep pace. The Viking was as big as most non-Hiccup Vikings were, and so hairy that Ruffnut had once wondered if his mother had been a troll. Upon hearing that, Stoick had guffawed and said he'd known Gorm's mother and it wasn't out of the question. What he'd been doing at the paddock Hiccup wasn't sure.

"The dragons are sick, eh?" said the big man. Hiccup didn't remember a time when Gorm had addressed him before. The man had always been content to ignore him. Before the truce, Gorm had been a dragonkiller of some renown in Berk, which was saying something as everybody had more or less been renowned dragonkillers.

"Could be nothing," Hiccup said. "We'll just keep a close watch on it."

The big man went on conversationally. "Makes you wonder. A year ago we'd have prayed for an illness to wipe out the dragons. Now a few get a bellyache and everyone gets scared."

Hiccup did not like his casual tone. "Nothing's going to wipe out the dragons. It's just a bug. We'll take care of it."

Gorm gave a massive shrug. Hiccup was beginning to wish he had the length of stride to outpace the Viking, but Gorm spared him by turning away.

"Do you like it?" he suddenly called over his shoulder. Hiccup frowned and turned around.

"Like what?"

"Playing chief. Being the boss."

Hiccup was truly startled by the question. "I don't—no?"

"So you don't like it," prompted Gorm.

"No," said Hiccup. "Um, neither. None of the above."

From the look on Gorm's face it was evident that the big Viking did not believe him. Then he turned away again.

The question was one that Hiccup hadn't even considered. It did not matter whether or not he wanted to be a chief, because he would be a chief and there was no point feeling one way or the other about it. Why would it matter to anybody else?

He remembered something unpleasant. Gorm had had a twin brother, a similarly hirsute man whose name Hiccup had trouble recalling. Bjorn, Bjorg, something close to that. Hiccup had not known him well, driven by some dim recognition of the man's nasty nature to avoid him. But the twins had been inseparable, like Ruffnut and Tuffnut, only they managed to make it through entire days with each other with no bruises, bumps or broken bones. At least, they had been inseparable until the brother died in a dragon raid not a year prior to the truce.

Some Vikings would never adjust. Sometimes Hiccup remembered that it would take another generation for the truce to really solidify.

A little time later Astrid came jogging up to him. "Gibby's at the cove," she informed him. "Toothless too. He didn't like it, but he went."

"Thank you," said Hiccup, relieved.

Astrid frowned at him and glanced around quickly to ensure they were not within hearing range of anyone else. She kept her voice low. "Is it serious?"

I hope not. "We'll keep an eye on it."

Hiccup repeated those words several times throughout the day, as concerned Vikings continually came up asking. Secrets were unheard of on Berk; something whispered to a rock could make the rounds in an hour. And like most rumors, they distorted with every telling. Knut came up to Hiccup and said he'd heard the dragons were beginning to glow in the dark. Hiccup wasn't sure where that bit came from.

Despite their best efforts during the next twenty-four hours, the dragons' colds—or flu, or pox, or whatever it could be called—stuck around stubbornly, and every paranoid bone Hiccup possessed—two hundred and six, exactly—was telling him that they were becoming a little sicker. Worse, he began to hear of dragons in other paddocks beginning to fall ill. What he couldn't understand was how the contagion was spreading—they shut down the affected station, yet the sickness had not been trapped.

Later that evening they started to bar Vikings that had been in contact with sick dragons from going anywhere near healthy ones. This proved difficult, so thoroughly had the dragons integrated themselves into village life, but it seemed to help stem the progression. Hiccup fretted about Toothless, away with Gibby in the cove, but Astrid, who steered clear of the ill ones, frequently ran to check up on them.

"What kept them healthy before?" Hiccup wondered aloud in the forge that night. "I've never heard of them getting sick."

He didn't voice his main concern, that it was an illness derived from their prolonged contact with humans. Gobber hammered a blade straight with powerful blows. "Because they didn't get sick," the big smith said. "If they had, we'd a' known about it. They lived in one big cave, remember. If so much as a Terror had gotten ill they all would have."

Interestingly, the Terrors hadn't gotten sick, Hiccup realized. Were they immune? The little beasts traveled in packs and tended to roam further away from Berk than the other dragons. Keeping them away from the paddocks was like herding cats, Terrors instinctively liked to go where they knew they shouldn't. And they got into everything. Their diets were not mostly constricted to fish, as were the other dragons', whose only foray into herbage was the occasional berry.

Terrors ate anything, including Gobber's socks, which Hiccup was beginning to suspect was largely responsible for Gobber's misplaced ideas about trolls and their intentions.

His line of thinking was interrupted when a blade clattered to the floor amid a shower of sparks and Gobber's curses.