Oooh, looky, another chapter up! #49 is dedicated to the only job in the world where you can be wrong every day and not get fired, and the whole chapter to those of you who wanted a chapter that didn't make you cry! Also - #50 is here! We're halfway to a hundred, baby! Keep up the great support you guys. Love y'all. Enjoy!

~.~

48. Cheat

Toothless focused, resisting the urge to fidget. He was not going to lose. Again. If he lost again—for the fifth time in a row—he would never be able to live it down.

He hunched on the ground, flipping his tail back and forth through the grass, and stared. And stared. And stared.

Several inches before Toothless' nose, Fishlegs stared back. And continued to do so for a truly extraordinary length of time. So they stared at one another. And stared. And stared.

And then, quite unexpectedly, Fishlegs whipped his hands up and clapped them loudly together in front of the dragon's face. Startled by the sudden action, Toothless leaped back a good six feet—and blinked.

"Yes! I win again!" Fishlegs pumped his fist in the air in celebration of winning the staring contest for the fifth straight time in a row as Toothless sulked, cursing himself for having been sucked in to being taught about staring contests in the first place and ever having been taken over by the sheer addictiveness of them. Addictive or not, his honor was at stake here. And besides, Fishlegs was a cheater anyway.

49. Weatherman

"Looks like it's gonna be sunny today!" Stoick exclaimed over breakfast.

Gobber looked up at the sky hopefully, then raised an eyebrow. "And what makes you say that?"

"Look at those clouds—those type never last longer than an hour or so. They'll be gone by noon, I bet."

"Hmm." Gobber looked doubtful.

At noon, Toothless was hunched unhappily underneath the somewhat constricted shelter of a large tree as acorn-sized hail rained down.

Not a week later, Stoick was attempting to predict the weather again.

"Not going to be much wind today I'd say, eh Hiccup?"

Hiccup bit his lip and peered outside at the thunderheads on the horizon. "Um. . ."

That, of course, was the day the kicked off tornado season. But still Stoick figured that his chances of guessing the weather right at least once were still in his favor.

"Gonna be a beautiful day, isn't it?"

Toothless, as he hid from the thunderstorm that raged outside not an hour later, decided that it really depended on your definition of the word "beautiful."

Stoick refused to give up.

"It's going to be nice out today, isn't—"

Hiccup exchanged a glance with Toothless.

Gobber, on the other hand, was a bit more blunt. "Stoick, for the love of Thor, you are good at a lot of things, like running villages and killing things that move and looking important, but you cannot predict the weather!"

The Viking chief scowled in defeat, but still had to have the last word. "Fine. It was probably just going to rain again, anyway."

It was sunny that day.

50. Methods

If there was one thing that Toothless had noticed about Vikings, it was that they were pretty early risers. Most mornings, the majority of Berk was up before the sun (something that the dragon did not understand at all—he quite enjoyed snoozing the day away. What he lacked was a quiet place to do so.)

Unfortunately, Tuffnut had missed this memo; his friends were hard-pressed to get him up before noon, let alone before the sun. Thus, his sister, with the assistance of Snotlout, Fishlegs, and Toothless, was forced to invent a variety of methods that they could use to "convince" him to roll out of bed before lunch.

Luckily for them, the possibilities were endless. When Tuffnut had first developed the habit, they had used all the usual ways: cold water, lots of screaming, bribery with food, and violence. After several weeks though, they had grown bored of these and Tuffnut had become somewhat immune to all of them, and so they had been promoted to get imaginative.

Over the next four months, Tuffnut was pelted with rocks, spit on, set on fire (that one was Toothless' idea), drenched in mud, attacked by bugs, beaten repeatedly with sticks, stripped of his clothing, and bashed with a chair (although nobody knew exactly where the inspiration for that last one had come from). To say the least, he often woke up with an extreme headache, and he went through more sets of sheets in a week than the rest of Berk put together.

The best part by far though, was that he had still not learned his lesson, and insisted on laying in bed until action was forced to be taken. And unfortunately for him and to the endless entertainment of Ruffnut, Toothless, Fishlegs, and Snotlout, the methods that could be used to get him up were many in number.

51. Fail

When Astrid spotted him, she had to do a double-take. "Toothless. . . what. . .?"

The dragon smiled sheepishly from where he sat in a tree, although 'sat' probably wasn't quite the right word. To be specific, he was stretched out uncomfortably over several limbs about twenty feet off the ground, positioned on his back with his wings at odd angles and his tail wrapped around the trunk. The branches around him were broken and splintered, and leaves fluttered to the ground.

Astrid couldn't help but stop and stare. "Toothless, what on earth are you doing?"

All the dragon could offer was an attempted look of innocence and a slight shrug, which triggered another shower of twigs and leaves, broken off by the subtle movement.

"You're stuck, aren't you?"

Toothless scowled.

Unable to help herself, Astrid burst out laughing. "Oh Toothless, that fails," she gasped through her hysterics.

Why, yes. Yes it did.

52. Listener

Once in a while, when there was nothing else to do, Toothless and Hiccup would return to the shallow valley in the woods with the lake in the center, that little crater of land that the two of them knew so well from the days they had first met. What they did there was of little importance or consequence—more often than not, Toothless would scamper about in the water, fishing and generally enjoying himself while Hiccup would lay on the grass, staring up at the clouds as he lost himself in his own thoughts.

And sometimes, on certain days, they would have a visitor. Astrid, noticing their absence in Berk, would go off to check their usual hiding places, eventually stumbling across them as they wasted away their day by the lake. She would lay down beside Hiccup, close enough so that their hips were touching, and prop her chin in her palms so that she could watch him.

"Whatcha thinking about?"

So he would tell her. Whatever it was that he had swirling around in his head at the instant she asked him, he would vocalize for her. Be it the ideas for his latest invention or how the cloud above their heads looked like a rabbit or how he was losing his touch when it came to drawing trees, whatever it was, he would tell her—often rattling on forever as he continued to vocalize this thoughts.

And in a completely uncharacteristic show of compassion and interest, no matter how unimportant Hiccup's ramblings were, Astrid would listen.