The front door creaked open.

Since I was home alone and hadn't invited anyone over, my few friends didn't drop by unannounced, and my dad wasn't due back for another week (if he managed to return at all), that wasn't really a good sign. It was probably a burglar. Well, I would stay on the sofa pretending to sleep – not much of a stretch at that point, seeing how my choice to be alone tonight was so that I could take a whole pill and float around in peace for a few hours – and hope that he would just quietly take what he was after and leave.

I couldn't even remember if I'd actually locked the door.

Footsteps padded down the hall and into the living room.

I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even. Sleep…sleep was good. Did I want to fall asleep while a burglar was in the house? I decided I didn't care.

The feet paused, and their owner sniffed the air.

The thought finally intruded my calm: is that really a burglar? Surely a burglar wouldn't announce himself with such a loud sniffing…and that was the point where Berk's reality about burglars penetrated my haze. The only burglars in Berk came and went with the few ships that still made the journey here: it was too small a town for there to be local crooks, especially seeing how everyone was armed these days.

So…not a burglar. Scott, or one of his idiot friends, pretending to be a dragon in the hopes of scaring me? If it was, I wouldn't be giving him the satisfaction of thinking he'd succeeded. I would continue the sleeping illusion until he left.

The feet headed my way. Paused. Then something prodded my cast, which was propped up on pillows.

Still not moving…

It prodded again. Then, with more boldness, it took the cast and tugged – not hard enough to yank me off the sofa, but definitely like whoever it was wanted to see if the cast would come off like a boot.

Well, I wasn't falling asleep at this point, but I still wasn't going to move. I considered peeking and decided against it.

A hand pressed against my chest; another one touched my face.

Could whoever it was be wearing…gloves, or something? The hands felt chubby – not soft, exactly, but thick and firm. They were almost more like paws than hands.

A light pressure on my jaw made my mouth open. Something slipped in – buzzing against my teeth, feeling around like it was trying to coil itself inside my head –

I jarred awake, positive that I was about to have a heart attack or something. No one was bending over me; no one was in the room. It was only a dream.

"How can you stand to have so many drugs in you?"

I nearly had another heart attack – and nearly fell off the sofa whipping around in the direction of the voice. Which was, by the way, familiar…but I was sure I'd never heard it before.

A total stranger was sitting there like he owned the place. He looked older than me by a few years, long-limbed and lean; except for how very pale his face and hands were, he also looked healthy. Every scrap of clothing he had on looked like black silk; if there was an actual color in there (and I wouldn't swear that there was), it was probably purple or blue. His combed-back hair was just as black and silky, and his eyes were a strange combination of pale and intense.

In short, he looked like a hot vampire. All he was missing were the fangs.

"Who are you?" I managed to gasp.

"Toothless," he said. At least, I think that's what he said…somehow, there was a cadence to his voice that didn't make sense. "Who are you?"

"Hiccup," I answered without thinking – then wondered why I told him that nickname. While I was at it, I wondered how on earth he got this far without knowing my name.

"Hiccup…" he echoed slowly, seeming to taste the name. Maybe he had an accent or something, because that one word seemed to have a very different sound coming from his mouth. Then he nodded, his expression changing to – well, it was like learning that I was called Hiccup answered a lot more questions than just the one he'd asked. "I see."

What exactly did he see? "Um…you did say your name was Toothless, right?" I asked – just for the sake of clarity. It was such an odd name, especially seeing that he did have teeth. Or were those false? "What…are…you doing here?"

The young man – Toothless? – looked at me curiously. "I wanted to understand. Now I do."

I flung my hands up and dropped back down onto the sofa. "Great. You understand. Fabulous."

"You don't know what I speak of?"

"Gee, how did you guess?"

"This…the sarcasm," Toothless sounded amused – and, oddly enough, like the words he was saying were foreign in his mouth. Perhaps English wasn't his first language. That would explain… "You are an interruption."

"What?" Of all the things I had ever been called, that wasn't one of them.

"A hiccup. A disruption in the Way Things Are. You change all you touch, for good or for bad. Perhaps it returns to its former state; perhaps it becomes something new. It's really up to time and chance."

Okay, I have heard all of that before; it just hadn't been phrased quite like that, and it certainly hadn't been said like it was a good thing. I sat up and looked at Toothless again. "Wow…I think you might be the first person to really like that about me."

"Why not? I was given a reconnaissance task to do – one that I did not relish completing, for it would require that I return with my findings." He shuddered lightly, a shadow crossing his face for a moment. "And I did not wish to return. Thanks to your personal intervention, I am unable to make the return journey and my life is now my own."

This conversation apparently took a sharp left when I wasn't looking. "I think I'd remember you if I'd…"

"Ah – your pardon." Toothless gestured at his elegant face. "I did not look like this when we first met; to be truthful, I don't look like this now. Your thoughts are giving me a form that allows you to accept my information without error."

"You…my…I…what…" Realizations were hitting me like arrows, way too fast and right on top of each other. My fear came back in full, and it motivated me to get up. "You – you're a dragon! You're that dragon, the Night Fury!" I ran for the door – intending to go get help, tell someone that Night Furies could shapeshift and were scary-intelligent…

Except that just as I reached the door and was in the act of flinging it open, I remembered my broken leg and connected that very real detail with the curious fact that I'd just run across the living room and down the hall with no trouble whatsoever.

This was the dream. The dragon had put my mind into some kind of dream-state and probably wouldn't let me out until it had had its way with my body.

I slid to the floor with a wail of distress, covering my head with both arms.

Toothless crouched down next to me and put his arms around me. "You're afraid of me." It wasn't a question: it was a statement, and he sounded almost sad saying it.

Great, now I felt bad for upsetting the hot-vampire dragon. I didn't shove him away – although I didn't feel comfortable with cuddling up to him.

"I was afraid of you."

That did make me jerk away. I stared at him in amazement. "You what?"

Dream-logic, evidently, had come into play now that I realized I was dreaming: we weren't sitting in my doorway, but on the spot of ground beneath Borden's house.

"When you came here that day, I was desperate." His hand brushed over my head, fingers interlacing my hair. "I did not want to return to the Nest without tribute, with or without the information I was sent to find. I…lack the aggression of my fellow Nestmates. My tributes have always been small, things I could absorb without a fuss and release quickly at the Nest so I could…slip back into the Void safely. You were the first…human…that I thought to offer as tribute."

Judging by the context, I guessed "slip back into the Void" meant teleporting. That would explain a lot. "So it wasn't you that kidnapped the human who lived here…about twelve years ago."

Toothless looked at the house. "No. I only joined the World Crossers…" his nails traced patterns on my scalp, "Three years ago, when my last 'firebreath' developed to the minimum sufficient level."

I got the…slightly unnerving sense that he was sifting through my mind, looking for terms that matched what he wanted to say so that I would understand what he was communicating. Well…why not? English clearly wasn't his first language, nor was "human" his first society. It was still unsettling; I refocused on Toothless. "Okay, so you wanted me as tribute, and you attacked me. Got that. Then what? What did I do that made…that," I gestured at the house, where – dream logic again – the grinning-skull Night Fury that haunted my worst nightmares was standing in the shadows of the doorway staring at us, "Afraid of this?" I waved at myself.

Toothless looked for a long moment at the apparition. Then he shook his head, and the door closed between us and it. "I don't look like that anymore. In that moment…while I was tapping your brain, you tapped mine – and you changed the very foundation of my name. After a week of the new core, I developed a new face and form, and an altered skill-set. That is why I can no longer cross between worlds – teleport, as you call it."

For a second, that didn't make sense. Then I remembered some old books I read (which I'm sure were fiction, but they were well-thought) that said a person's "true name" was the very essence of a person. One book in particular said that the true name was the epitome of everything a person had ever accomplished and was constantly added to – or built upon – over the course of a lifetime. Looked at that way, it made sense that something like that would be built on a foundation or around a core, right? Something that was completely out of the bearer's control, like their DNA. Like…if I had a true name like that, its "foundation" would be that I'm a human being and all the things that my particular genes make that mean. Possibly my family tree.

And I changed that for a dragon?

"How," I gasped, staring at Toothless again, "How did I change your roots? Wait, I have a better question – how did I do it without knowing that I was doing anything?"

Toothless nodded solemnly. "And that is why I feared you."

He didn't know either.

"What I have become…" he said softly, musing, "I have never seen it before. It must have perished before my time; killed off when being able to Void-slip quickly…first became a necessity."

I blinked. "Why did teleportation become so important for you guys?"

Toothless did shudder then, and hold me closer. The sky darkened and rumbled ominously, and the waves crashed up on the shore very close to us.

Looks like I wasn't the only one with un-confrontable demons: he didn't want to face his, either. Well, I could respect that…but I was getting extremely uncomfortable with something that looked this much like a male human, hugging me like a big teddy bear. Time to change the subject.

"Okay, nevermind. Uh, when I changed the roots of your name, did that have any effect on…everything else?" I couldn't see how it wouldn't: kick a new foundation under an old house and you would shake the house.

Toothless brightened a bit as he was distracted from his brooding. "Well…for a little time I was afraid my name would collapse."

How could a name collapse? Well, never mind – obviously it could, at least in whatever passed for dragon religion or superstition or whatever. I wondered what would happen to a person or creature if their name were to collapse. Nothing good, I'd imagine; we're talking about the summary of a creature's very being.

"It held, though," I prompted.

"Yes…even though I can no longer do everything I remember doing, it does not change that I did do those things. And I still want – and need – much the same things now as I did before." He thought for a moment. "All that has truly changed is what particular deeds I can and cannot add to my name."

"Are you still the same class you were before?" As soon as the question left my mouth I wanted to laugh at myself. How on earth would he know? Humans designed the classification system, not dragons.

Toothless looked at me curiously – and with a bit of his own amusement. "I don't know. What class was I before?"

With the power of dream-logic we were in Berk Academy's science lab looking over the classification system that Borden Belden had designed. There were six classes, and dragons were sorted into them based on their firing range, natural armor and overall destructive power.

"I have not actually used my firebreaths since you changed me," Toothless told me as he looked at the pictures of Boulderskin dragons. "But I have the same quill-to-curl ratio as these forms. I think I always did."

"Okay, so not a Sharpshooter and not a Tunnelmouth." I pushed aside the folders with those labels. "The rest are all about average in range."

Toothless pulled out two pictures and looked back and forth between them. "Before you changed me, I had this many spikes," he said meditatively, waving a Gronkle picture. "Afterwards, I had this many," and he gestured with a Snafflefang shot.

I cocked my head. "How tough was your hide?"

Toothless squinted at the notes, as though willing them to translate into something he recognized. Maybe he was. "Not this tough. This form," the Gronkle, "seems to have as much hard-flame as I did, but not enough soft-flame. Mine were equal – and I think they still are."

I actually understood what he meant by hard- and soft-flame – though they weren't terms I'd have used. "Hard-flame" was the clear-cut specialty of about half the Boulderskins, and was used in lesser amounts by almost all the other dragons; we humans called them cannonballs, because they could reduce a rock wall to very fine dust if a barrage of them lasted long enough. "Soft-flame" was called "petriflame" by humans; it enveloped a target, soaked into every available crack, crevice, and pore – and if the target was capable of moving, even if it was just to bend in a strong wind, it would freeze. How long the effect lasted, and how fast it set in or wore off, seemed to depend a lot on the dragon using it and what the target was.

I pushed aside the Fearflare folder (they were the Boulderskins' opposites) and held up the last two files, Destructor and Stingstrike. "Last ones." I was ignoring Mystery, because the only dragons to go in there were the ones we hadn't brought down at all and therefore had no real information.

Toothless stared blankly at the label on Stingstrike. Then he took the Destructor folder and looked through it – briefly. "Ah." He pushed it away. "I can tell you this for certain, I was not a Destructor form. The particular firebreath that dominates these forms…that flame was the last of mine to ignite."

I looked at the Stingstrike folder. "How likely do you think it is that I would, in the process of taking away your teleporting skill, completely invert your original firepower? I mean, making the breath you had in the least quantity, suddenly be your specialty?"

Toothless stared at me for a long moment, considering. "Not very. And as frightened as I was that my name would collapse…I have seen Destructors that specialized in the Breath of Death, as frightened as that. The word you use is…" his hand lifted to brush my face, "…Berserk. If that breath became my specialty when I was so frightened, I would have made of myself a target for your kind to slay – and if that happened and I was not slain before I revived, I would have looked about to see much death and destruction."

Admirable logic.

"So I was one of the…Sting-strikes, then…and I still am. Why do you call it Sting-strike?"

I thought about that. "I guess because the dragons in this class don't do much damage to us humans and our homes, overall; barely a sting. And they strike fast, getting in and out before anyone comes to fight them." I looked curiously at Toothless as something else occurred to me. "You don't have many aggressive instincts, do you? You're not a fighter, like the Destructors or even the rest of these guys," and I waved at the full-house of discarded folders. "You don't do very much damage and you don't want to do very much damage."

Toothless shook his head. "I don't want to cause damage at all. I see that more clearly now, now that I cannot return."

"I don't need to be afraid of you, then. You could live here – you'd have to hide from my dad and any other visitors, they'd probably try to kill you on sight – but most of the time I'm alone here. You'd have shelter, and I'd have a constant companion so I'm not just talking to an empty house. Even if you can't understand what I'm saying when we're not doing…this," I gestured to the room at large, "We could still live together in peace." Wow, this had all the hallmarks of being a let's-improve-relations-between-the-feuding-clans movement; I was proud of myself.

Yeah, no, actually I was sure something was going to go wrong and we'd get caught and be in big trouble.

Maybe I was lonelier than I thought, if I was so willing to go through with this despite my misgivings.

Toothless put his hand over my heart – reading my emotions, I guessed. "You…do still fear me, though…" he said cautiously, "You fear my kind. You perhaps would not be making this offer to my true face." There seemed to be a flicker of hope in those pale eyes, despite his wariness.

I shrugged. "Your kind has been raiding my kind every full moon since I was born. Fifteen years ago. I was taught to fear you my entire life, and my first real encounter with a dragon just reinforced that lesson. Fifteen years of negative association are not reversed in a day, not for humans – especially not when a traumatic experience is involved. But I'm willing to try. Before you, I never encountered a dragon personally, so at least it won't be a complete uphill battle. As for the trauma, you already said that your appearance has changed since your attack on me; the face that I associate with…a memory I don't want to think about, to be honest…it's long gone. So just looking at you won't cause a panic attack. As long as you avoid mimicking that attack too closely, I'll be fine sharing space with you." I didn't touch the part about not extending the invitation to him in the waking world. Mostly because he was probably right. But he looked human right now, even if he did look like a hot vampire, and I was okay (well, mostly okay) with talking to him.

Toothless looked long and carefully into my eyes. Deciding if I meant what I said, I supposed. Then he nodded – and smiled.

"So, uh, what do you look like now?"

Something started…moving, inside my head. Like it wanted out. It wasn't comfortable – and it was tickling the back of my mouth, threatening to set off my gag reflex. My vision blurred and darkened, everything started spinning…I felt like I was falling…

My body convulsed with a short coughing fit, jarring my cast and making my leg ache. Then I opened my eyes and looked straight into a scaly black face.

Elements of the dragon that had attacked me were still there: the facial proportions were about the same, and of course the color matched. But Toothless's eyes bulged out slightly, where before they'd been sunken in sockets that looked a bit too big. His muzzle had gotten some flesh on it, making his face look much softer and friendlier than the garish skull it had been before. The ear flaps were new, too; gentle petals folding back around what had previously been open ear canals.

He was sweet now: almost babyish for a dragon.

I giggled a bit at the cute face. Well, it was more of a wheeze; my throat was still objecting to whatever Toothless had done to hold me in the dream-state up until a moment ago. But I did smile, and I hoped he would interpret that as a friendly gesture.

Seemed that he did. With the difficulty of one who had never used muscles in a certain way, he twitched his own mouth into a smile.

"Hiccup?"

I very nearly had a heart attack at Gordon's voice. What was he doing here?

Toothless jumped very like a startled cat and stared in the direction of the voice. Fortunately the "here" was in the vicinity of the front doorstep and not in the living room – yet – so there was nothing for him to attack in a panic.

I tapped his shoulder quickly (making him spin to stare at me) and willed him to understand my gestures: I pointed at him, laid my finger across my lips, and pointed quickly at the ceiling.

People didn't look up. If Toothless could still cling to ceilings, he could avoid detection.

Toothless looked at me, looked at the doorway, and sprang for the ceiling. In a flash he was upside-down, clinging like Spider-Man and staring down at the room. I wouldn't be sure until the day I could face all of those traumatic memories without flinching, but the rest of his body seemed to not be as skeletal as it had been when I first saw it creeping on a ceiling – though the difference wasn't quite as marked as with his face.

"Hickory?" Gordon's voice was closer – calling up the stairs, I guessed.

I raised my finger to my lips again, warning Toothless to stay very quiet. To my relief and amusement, he moved one of his own pawlike hands to his mouth and shushed me back. He got it.

"In here, Gordon," I called. My voice was raspy but not suspiciously so – not like I had any idea what would rouse suspicions. "Is something the matter?"

Gordon thumped into the room. "Front door's open."

"Is it?" Should I sound innocent? No, he'd know at once I was trying to hide something. I've been told many times over the years that I'm a terrible liar. "I guess I was pretty out of it earlier." True as far as it went. I wasn't much better at skirting secrets, but at least I could do that much.

"How's the leg?"

I shrugged. "No worse." Noticing that the pile of pillows supporting it was askew (and I didn't want to think too hard about why while someone was there to analyze my face), I tried to adjust my cast. "So, um, what are you doing here?"

I hoped, at the least, I was managing to sound casual.

Gordon held up a waxed-paper bag. "I got you some takeout; figured you wouldn't want to prepare your own meals while you were still restricted to the crutches."

Good guess. I squirmed a bit to sit up. "Thanks. Will you, uh…be having dinner here?"

"Sorry, I have some paperwork to do." He set the bag on the coffee table and helped me get oriented.

Something occurred to me. About earlier that day. "Can I ask you something before you go?"

"Sure."

"You seemed to understand what Astrid was talking about when she told me not to…"

"Ah…" Gordon nodded sagely. "You want to know what was wrong with 'Fearless Astrid Hofferson,' with or without the snark."

I nodded.

"Mind you, it's not my place to say; Astrid will have to tell you herself. What I can tell you is, it probably would have been better for her whole family if Berk as a society discovered the existence of petriflame a couple of years before we did. Might not have changed what happened, but it would have changed a lot of people's perception of it." And then he left, closing the door firmly behind him.

Toothless dropped to the floor and stared after him. Then he stared curiously at my bag.

"You want some of this?" I got the burger out and rested it in my lap. Then I dumped half of the french fries into the bottom of the bag, set the carton with my burger and handed the bag to Toothless. "Fries first; they're better when they're hot."

Toothless sniffed at the inside of the bag curiously. Then he stuck his entire face in. I could hear him slurping and munching, and he looked so ridiculous with a fast-food bag on his head that I had to grin.

I made a note to myself to enter the words "fearless" and "Hofferson" into a local website's news engine the next time I dragged myself upstairs. Just at the moment, Gordon's very simple explanation made little sense – and no way was I going to be able to ask Astrid.

"Did you have any luck with girls back at the nest?" I asked the twitching ears.

Toothless looked at me – with the bag still on his face.

"Real attractive." I went back to my own fries. "I don't know about your kind, but the females of my species are weird. Or maybe it's just something Berk does to people. How can two creatures of the same species have the same language and still completely fail to understand each other?"

Toothless pulled the bag off his head and looked at my burger.

"You want this now?" I picked up the burger and unwrapped it halfway. Then I stared at it, uncertain how to begin. "What do you think, bud? I could limp my way to the kitchen and get a knife, cut it in half nice and tidy…I could try to tear it – no, that would make a mess…I could eat half of it now and you can finish in one go…"

While I was rambling Toothless had leaned carefully on me and studied the burger I was gesturing over. Suddenly his head jerked forward and – the only way I can describe what happened next is, his jaws popped out and rows of razor-sharp teeth tore a chunk out of my burger! Then he resumed his cute face and ambled away, leaving me staring in shock at a crescent burger that seemed to be roughly half what it used to be and fingers that I could hardly believe weren't bloody or missing tips.

It had happened too fast for my brain to react with a panic attack.

Five, maybe ten minutes ago I was a bit confused why my brain translated his name as Toothless. Now I was really confused.