?'s POV (AN: you'll know who it is by the next POV)

Everything hurt, but my head was worst.

All I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Every instinct I had said that was a bad idea, though. I probably had a concussion.

I should have kept my gear on last night. Not that it would have done any good – the amount he'd been drinking, I would have had to be wearing a full suit of titanium armor to protect myself from him. But at least I'd have had some protection on my joints and torso, and my helmet would have protected my face.

Had I been running around town all night? It felt like I had. The early morning twilight was just beginning to light the sky.

Nobody had looked out their window. Or if they had, nobody had invited me in for the night.

I was both relieved and hurt by that. On the one hand, I didn't want anyone to see me like this; on the other, I might need medical attention.

My chest made a very unsettling sound when I coughed.

How much had he had to drink, anyway? He didn't usually hit me so hard.

I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through my contacts list, squinting at the bright screen. It was Saturday, so I had the entire day to myself; if only someone would let me crash on their sofa for a few hours…I was completely fine, I just needed to sleep it off. On something softer than the hard unforgiving ground, which was looking more and more appealing the longer I walked.

Not her, I'd have to answer way too many questions…

She'd take pictures and post them online…

She'd freak out at my bloody nose…

He'd only let me sleep over, no questions asked, if I slept with him and I'm just not in the mood for sex…

Reality finally set in. I had spent years building a reputation for strength and aggression, telling myself and everyone around me that no one with any brains dared to cross me until I had convinced everybody. Most days, I even convinced myself. But that meant I had never shared my dirty secret with anyone. It didn't matter, I told myself; they don't need to know, I said. It was a crystal palace of popularity on an unstable foundation, with my own blood soaking into the cracks; I had turned a blind eye to the weakness, believing my own propaganda, certain that I could hold together on my own.

This beating was the deep freeze, turning the blood in the cracks to ice and splitting the foundation wide open. I had chosen to stand alone, and now there was no one to turn to when I really…

…needed it…

The phone blurred as tears filled my eyes, overflowing to mingle with my blood.

I'd admitted (to myself) that I needed help, and now I was crying because I was alone? I did have a concussion. Or maybe it was the light: everything else around me was getting brighter as the sun began to creep over the horizon, but I was still standing in shadow.

Because, I realized in the next instant, there was a house between me and the sun. It stood on top of a knoll, in full view of the rest of town but with no other houses near enough to really see who came and went there.

I was alone, this house was alone; I could stay here and sleep off these terrible bruises.

Thought was mother to the deed – although she nearly had an abortion halfway to the house when I remembered who lived in it. What on earth would he think, to see me in this state?

Well…who cared what he thought? I was already halfway there, and I didn't have anywhere else to go. I just wasn't up to sneaking back into my own house, especially since it was Saturday.

I'll just threaten to break his other leg if he asks for anything or takes pictures.

Hiccup's POV

It was actually kind of funny, in a hysterics-inducing kind of way: the Night Fury, the most feared dragon to raid the island, was scared of sleeping alone. His snuggling bothered me less in this form than it did in the dream-world when he looked more human – or, I guess, it bothered me for very different reasons. But he would not sleep on the floor, or even go down to the sofa – he wanted to share my bed.

Seemed that he needed a few guidelines in place about sleeping arrangements; while I was at it, rules would have to be established about food and facilities. Since I wouldn't need to leave the house again until Monday, that meant I had until Sunday night to fully establish what those house-rules were and…well, psych myself up to endure another French kiss from Toothless so that I could tell them to his hot-vampire telepathic form. That was my entire game plan for the weekend when I went to bed Friday night.

The very next morning – at dawn – the game plan went on hold.

When I first came to a rather groggy consciousness, I thought there was a thunderstorm. Then I realized someone was pounding on the front door.

Oh, come on – really? It's a Saturday! A sleep-in day! I tried to roll over (with Very Limited Success, thanks to my cast and my roommate) and pulled my pillow over my head.

Toothless grumbled ominously and clutched me closer.

I tried to doze off again, hoping that whoever it was would get the message and go away. It wasn't happening: the crashing continued. The problem with so much hard stone and hard metal in construction was that it echoed and reverberated. My unwanted visitor sounded like he was banging on an empty trash can, and there wasn't nearly enough carpeting to muffle the sound.

Eventually Toothless pulled the pillow off my face and looked at me sideways. He seemed to have reached the conclusion that there would be no more sleep this morning.

I curled up tighter in the blankets. "Answer it for me, would you?" I mumbled.

Toothless sat still for a moment, as though considering my words and possibly interpreting their meaning. Then he jumped off the bed and slinked out the door.

Suddenly I realized I'd just sent a dragon to greet a human. That woke me up in a hurry. I scrambled out of bed as fast as my cast would let me and stumbled out on half-oriented crutches. "Toothless, get back here!"

He came back just in time to keep me from falling down the stairs. He picked me up, crutches and all, and waddled backwards downstairs using his tail as a brace – all the while giving me this look that I interpreted as, "Be more careful."

"Yeah, yeah, I know; just…let me open the door. You stay out of sight."

I don't know if he understood me or not, but he did put me down in front of the door and sprang up to the ceiling. He was certainly determined to stay close enough to see who was making this unholy racket at five in the morning.

I wrenched the door open, several degrees beyond frustrated with having to get up this early. "Enough with the…" then my eyes took in who was on the other side of the door and my voice died of the shock.

For the rest of my life, I wouldn't know which stunned me more: that Astrid Hofferson was standing on my doorstep, or that she looked like she lost a brawl. Her nose was bloody and tears were leaving tracks through her nearly-ruined makeup, defensive wounds covered her arms, her entire stance suggested that it hurt to be up and walking…oh yeah, and I remembered that outfit – unless she owned multiples of these pieces and liked keeping them rumpled, she was still in yesterday's clothes.

I have no idea if I said anything when I saw her; all that went through my head was WHAT THE HELL?

"About time," she said in a rather poor imitation of Ms. Owns-The-World as she stalked past me. "I am sleeping on your couch for a few hours, and if you touch me or ask me any questions I will break your other leg." She found the couch, positioned herself on it with a delicacy that suggested a lot of injuries beneath the clothes, and was out like a light.

Toothless dropped down from the ceiling and stared at Astrid. Then he stared at me, probably echoing my earlier question.

"Don't look at me, I don't know what's going on here." It was like having my life turned upside-down. Again. I was used to Astrid being…well…a young goddess. A divine being of beauty and strength. No one could put a mark on her. Everyone at school liked her, or at least respected her.

So what the hell was she doing here – looking like this?

Because…she didn't want this all over the gossip net, and knew she could threaten me into silence. Made sense. She'd worked hard to establish herself as that Valkyrie, and she wouldn't want to give that up if she didn't have to.

But wouldn't it make more sense to go home looking like that? Have her parents patch her up, so that then on Monday she could stride right back into her life with nobody the wiser? I certainly wouldn't realize that she'd ever taken a beating.

That she had been beaten up, I was taking as a given: there weren't any cliffs near to town big enough to cause that kind of damage if they were fallen down, yet small enough that a hiker that careless would still be alive at the bottom.

Toothless was very carefully sniffing Astrid over when I'd finally closed the door and limped after them. He seemed to have figured out that she would hurt him – or me – if she caught anyone that close to her, but he wanted to investigate her injuries. One spot in particular, just below the ribcage, seemed to especially fascinate him. After a minute of carefully snuffling around the spot, he glided silently over to me and took my left hand; folded my fingers and considered the fist they made; and then he held his paws around it, indicating…what?

A bigger fist?

So Astrid was beaten up by someone bigger than she was. It would have to be someone a lot bigger; the closer they were to her size, the more they respected her.

I shuffled over to Astrid myself, doing my absolute best to be quiet. Toothless's sniffing had loosened her shirt over the spot; slowly, carefully, I drew it up – focusing on the task at hand as hard as I could so that I wouldn't send myself into a panic attack over what Astrid would do to me if she caught me peeking at…

A massive bruise that was the exact shape of knuckles. Of a human's left hand.

That was…definitely bigger than Scott's fist: his knuckles had been marked on me time after time, I knew what their sign looked like. It wasn't as big as the imprint my dad left on the kitchen wall once, though – nobody had hands as big as my dad's. It was maybe as big as Gordon's hand, but Gordon didn't have a left hand.

Actually, it didn't matter whose hand it was. It was an adult male's hand; that much was obvious. It made my blood boil to think that one of the grownups – who were supposed to be looking after us kids, darn it – was abusing Astrid. How could her dad let someone get away with this?

A possible answer to that hit me and made the fire in my veins turn to ice.

No.

It couldn't be.

Could it?

I lowered Astrid's shirt and looked at Toothless, willing him a very simple message: me, upstairs, at my desk.

He caught on. He bodily picked me up and carried me back upstairs.

It was time to launch that search.

"Fearless Finn Hofferson," I read.

Entering fearless and Hofferson in the same search bar had brought several dozen hits, most of them for this Finn. He had his own collection of videos covering a very long span, from his teen years to his prime, showing him doing all kinds of crazy things from insane skateboard stunts in places I've never seen to facing off against dragons alone and winning. He was also honest enough (or had enough of an overblown ego) to post videos of the stunts that didn't quite make it; in a brief skim of the "outtake" videos, it seemed that he'd broken nearly every bone in his body at least once and was regularly covered in blood and bruises when something went wrong and he crashed. Somebody commented that he was a medical marvel – all that damage, and he still risked life and limb.

"I don't know about fearless, but this Finn was reckless," I told Toothless, who was lazing on my bed waiting for me to be done watching videos. "I wonder what happened to him…"

The answer to that was in the last video: "Fearless Finn vs. Super-Flightmare," posted almost ten years ago. Flightmares were radiant creatures, but didn't normally glow; this one seemed to be reacting to an aurora, soaking up the light and becoming all the more dangerous. The green glow gave the entire video an eerie otherworldly effect.

I remembered that aurora. I remembered that dragon, in fact, or one like it: I'd watched the pretty things from my window. About half the known dragons had reacted to the aurora by absorbing its energy and becoming more devastating; most only gained a little, but some (like Flightmares and Skrills) gained a lot. The other half didn't show up on those nights, perhaps having a negative reaction to the light.

Dragons and storms are unpredictable.

Anyway. It was just like Gordon had said: Fearless Finn was all alone in plain sight, challenging the Flightmare to come and face him. No one was anywhere near him; the minute I saw that, I knew this couldn't possibly go well. Something was about to go horribly wrong, and nobody would ever get to him in time.

The bug-eyed dragon swooped down, shrieking like a banshee and blazing green-white light everywhere – mostly over where Finn was standing. He was all set to swing that axe, but as it came within range…he didn't move. It smacked his axe away with enough force to imbed it in a wall, snatched him off the ground, and flew away.

Now I understood Gordon's comment about petriflame, Thursday night. That was what had stopped Fearless Finn, I was sure of it (and so were some of the people who had left comments), but it hadn't been discovered or identified as to its purpose until almost a year after this video. And there was no body; no autopsy could be done to prove that he'd been paralyzed. His reputation was ruined.

But what did this have to do with…

"Uncle Finn!" a little girl's voice screamed in the video. It seemed familiar…then the cameraman panned in some on a five-year-old blonde with her own axe, wailing after the dragon and its catch like she'd lost her best friend.

Oh, no…

Astrid.

So that was it: Fearless Finn Hofferson was her uncle. Her father's brother, probably, since their last name was the same.

Other memories surfaced, now that I knew this: Astrid's parents divorced a couple of months after this video. Her mother died in a fishing accident that was possibly dragon-related before the custody case was finished. Astrid was living alone with her father. What had the divorce been about? This? I remembered Dad talking about it; Mrs. Hofferson didn't want to be around her husband anymore. Had she taken this loss badly, or had he and she just feared for her safety?

The custody case…had that been both wanting Astrid, or had neither of them wanted her and been trying to foist her off on each other? Surely if neither of them wanted her, Mr. Hofferson would have gotten Astrid into foster care and out of his house. But she still lived in the exact same house now as when I first noticed her – which had been a little before the accident, if I remembered the date correctly.

For one reason or another (either over his brother or his wife), Mr. Hofferson had become a very depressed, anger-management-issues person. And he was taking his troubles out on Astrid.

"You know something?" I said matter-of-fact to Toothless as I closed my laptop, "I really hate that guy, and I would love to send you to scare the crap out of him."

Toothless growled and displayed his teeth – as if he understood what I said and either didn't like it or agreed with me and was perfectly willing to do such a thing.

I slumped in my chair. "Of course, he's a dyed-in-the-wool Viking and would probably kill you, since you can't teleport. I won't ask you to take a risk like that unless I'm beyond sure you can get away clean."

Toothless slumped himself, pulling his jaws back in. If his body language was anything to go by, he'd understood at least my intent and had in fact agreed with me.

I looked at Toothless curiously as I remembered something he'd said in the dream-state before. "By the way, answer me this."

Toothless looked up, all the focus of the hunter bearing down on me. I guess he needed that much focus to understand me when his tongue wasn't down my throat.

"You said 'tributes' before. Are they all for…for food?" I hoped the answer was no. What else they might do with a living captive, I wasn't sure – but if any of the humans carried away were not killed, they might be rescued one day. If we could ever figure out the secrets of teleportation.

Toothless stared at me for a moment longer. Then he folded in on himself and looked even more upset.

Dragon sign language is pretty efficient.

I sighed. "Really? Always?"

He nearly curled into a ball. I got right away that all tributes were eaten all the time, and they probably didn't even bother to sort out "this one might be entertaining before we eat it" offerings.

So much for a rescue. Not like I hadn't already known I was grasping at straws.

"It's just wrong. Astrid shouldn't have to…she was five, there was nothing she could have done to save either her uncle or her mother. And I don't know about her mom, but there was no proof in that," a gesture at the laptop, "that she'd had any contribution to her uncle's abduction. She's as much a victim as her father in all of this, she doesn't need to suffer at his hands too."

Toothless made a noise like he agreed with me. Then he picked up one of my shirts and offered it to me.

Huh? Oh…yeah…I'm not dressed yet. I felt a flush of embarrassment as it dawned on me that I'd greeted Astrid at the door in my pajamas…but I consoled myself with the thought that she hadn't really seemed to notice, and anyway what did she expect for a five o' clock drop-in? It would have been weird if I had been dressed.

Astrid was still asleep when we came down the stairs (at about six, which was approximately my breakfast time on a weekday) to have breakfast. Well, she'd said a few hours…but to be honest, I was pretty worried. How much damage was she carrying? Did she have a concussion, or cracked ribs from that blow? I was willing to bet money on the concussion, actually, because of the emotional instability displayed on her face: Astrid Hofferson Does Not Cry.

Or at least, speaking more realistically, she only cried in times and places where no one would see her and then made sure she was picture-perfect again before going back out in public. Seriously, her attitude was inspiring enough before I figured out that she came from an abusive home; it was even more dramatic now.

Which didn't change the fact that I was worried about her injuries.

And so was Toothless – before he gave any sign of being interested in breakfast, he snuck back over to Astrid and sniffed her over carefully. If the amount of attention he gave her head was any hint, he thought she had a concussion, too. He actually dared to open his mouth and fit the back of her skull inside, as though to suck on it; I don't know if he did or not, since I didn't go any closer than the doorway, but if he did she didn't react. A couple moments later he let go and went to investigate her torso, pushing her shirt way up to clamp his mouth directly to her skin. Right on top of that knuckle print.

Something finally dawned on me. We humans had created seven classes of dragon; with the exception of Mystery, which had the ones we didn't understand, they were all paired off like three coins with a class on each side. Most of those pairings were obvious; Destructor and Stingstrike were a lot less so. I mean, everyone accepted that the one caused the most damage of any dragon and the other caused the least, but each of these classes had something they specialized in as well as something they couldn't do as well. Tunnelmouths were mostly short-range, but when they breathed their specialty fire at a longer range it expanded into rings: they could trap their prey that way, and with a lot less effort than another dragon with a different breath. Fearflares weren't all that good at defense, but with the ability to paralyze anything that might hit back they didn't have to worry about being counterattacked.

What was the Stingstrike specialty?

Toothless had called the Destructor's hallmark the Breath of Death. Could its counterpart be called a Breath of Life?

Did the Night Fury have healing properties?

It was a good thing I decided right then – with total certainty – that the logic backing that idea made sense, because Astrid nearly sent me into a panic attack a second later when she started screaming.