Hey, everybody, another chapter up. I'm sorry if #42 is an angst explosion—It's a little killer (no pun intended! Sorry. That was cheesy.) even for my standards. So anyway, read on, and enjoy!

~.~

38. Enthusiasm

It was common knowledge that Hiccup was prone to reckless but undeniably heroic actions that, most of the time, turned out for the better. It was also common knowledge that these little stunts of his, no matter how impressive, were first-class ways to get a lot of people worried about him, including Astrid.

And usually Astrid, in both thanks and celebration that Hiccup had managed to make it another week without killing himself, would reward him with a non-too-gentle punch to the shoulder or whatever part of him was within punching range, followed by a quick but confident peck on the lips.

Today, however, Toothless came to the conclusion that his latest excursion with his best friend had really ticked her off, because she was a tad bit more enthusiastic than usual.

Hiccup had barely noticed her presence when, instead of going lightly for his shoulder, she swung in with a powerful right and clocked him in the head hard enough to send him staggering. Toothless could also tell that the boy was going to develop the mother of all black eyes in an hour or so.

"That," she snarled, "was for ditching me on that rock and running off to get yourself killed."

She had a point, Toothless reasoned. They had ditched her. But only for her own safety. Not that she had ever cared much about that.

Then, with just as little warning as with the punch, Astrid lunged forward, wrapped her arms around Hiccup's neck and pressed herself against him, kissing him fiercely despite the crowd that was beginning to gather around them. Hiccup, of course, didn't resist, and probably wouldn't have tried to fight her off even if his head hadn'tstill been spinning from the blow.

"And that's for everything else."

Oh, yes, Astrid was far more enthusiastic today.

39. Boring

"So. . . what do you want to do?"

"I don't know. What do you want to do?"

"No idea."

Toothless agreed. Today, anyway. Today was just one of those days where the only reasonable thing to do was to sit around with your friends and ignore all the things that people were telling you to do, and just lay there and be bored.

Even if it was rather boring.

"Yeah, so. . . um, do you think we should be doing something?"

"Probably. But that doesn't mean I will."

"True. So what do you want to do?"

"I dunno. What do you want to do?"

49. Silence

Toothless is bound in silence.

He cannot speak to humans in their own language, or in any other language that they would be capable of understanding.

Of course, he manages to make his point even without speech, with his expressive features and excess of energy—but still. For someone as opinionated and charismatic as Toothless, it's a huge blow to be incapable of holding a real conversation. He has so much to say, to talk about, to tell, and yet he is cursed with silence.

So Toothless watches, and observes, and learns, and throws in his opinion when he feels the need, but in his own way, of course. It's not a bad thing, he supposes. Toothless, because he spends so much of his time watching people instead of talking to them, notices more than anyone else in Berk. He knows things about people that even their best friends haven't seen. Toothless may not fully understand humans—he suspects that he never will; they're a very unpredictable race—but he knows more about them than they know about themselves. It isn't a bad existence, really.

But sometimes Toothless wonders, if he wasn't bound in silence, what would he be capable of?

41. Interruption

Over time, Toothless has developed an uncanny knack for walking in at the perfect moment (or absolute worst, depending on how you looked at it) in order to interrupt something important. He considers it to be a meticulous and envy-evoking skill, and even if this, too, is a matter of opinion, there is no way to deny that he is rather good at it.

For instance, when Astrid finds Hiccup laboring away in the armory where he has been working on his latest invention for most of the day. After an hour or so during which she pesters him with skeptical questions regarding why for the love of Thor he chooses to spend his time tinkering and inventing when there is so much else to pass the time and exchanging witty, mock hostile banter, she finally manages to maneuver him up against the wall, pinning him in place and stretching up to close the short distance between them when—

That's when Toothless, who has been listening outside the door for the last twenty minutes, bursts in, successfully ruining the mood.

42. Legacy

Ten years ago, there were six of them. They were the youngest generation of Berk, the youth of the village. They were the six that changed Berk forever. Who transformed a civilization. Who started a legacy. They were the heroes.

But, of course, everybody knows what happens to heroes. They rarely get the happy ending that they deserve.

Toothless knows that today is just more proof that bad things happen to good people. He watches, silent, as once again his world changes. As once again, one of those six, one of the heroes, leaves the others behind.

Tuffnut was the first to go. Barely out of his teenage years when he was killed in a freak accident, a sick, untimely twist of fate that snatched his future away, and stole him from his friends and his twin sister.

Five years and far too many close calls later it was Astrid. That had been a hard year on all of them, but Hiccup in particular had hit an all-time low. He had been enough of an emotional mess when Astrid had been killed, but when Gobber, the man who had mentored him for the last twenty-some years of his life, fell to disease not a month later, he had fallen apart.

And now—today—it was Snotlout. Not seven years after the loss of the feisty golden-haired girl, another of the six heroes met his fate.

Toothless watches with a familiar ache in his heart as Hiccup holds Ruffnut against his chest. She's eight and a half months pregnant, and has just lost her husband the the father of her first child. Fishlegs stands awkwardly beside them, and as Toothless watches them in their misery—which he shares, no doubt—the dragon longs to heal their broken hearts.

Because now there are only three. Of the six heroes who changed Berk all those years ago, only three remain to carry on the legacy.