She was still there the next morning; I woke up to her hand running lazily over my chest and stomach. Her fingernails dragged along my scar, leaving a rather…unsettling sensation in their wake…but I kept my breathing deep and slow, wanting to prolong the moment in spite of how weird my scar felt. It was high time that I got used to someone touching that thing: around here, fingers jabbed at chests quite a lot when people were making their points. I'd be overreacting most of the time.

A crashing noise reverberated through the house, startling me rigid and making Astrid's hand tighten. It sounded like a chain of explosions.

"What the hell?" Astrid muttered into my neck.

Toothless prodded my mind, with much the same question – and I finally mustered enough alertness to register an answer.

"That's the front door. Someone's knocking."

Astrid burrowed deeper into my side, rubbing away any dents her nails might have left in my side before wrapping her arm firmly around me. "Whatever they're selling, I don't want any."

Toothless's follow-up was…similar. Only it was less irritation and more anxiety: he didn't know what was knocking, and didn't want to find out. He wanted to come out from under the bed and join me, in fact, and that was…simply not possible. My little bed wasn't big enough for three.

I sent back as much reassurance as I could before I started trying to disengage Astrid. "I should get that…"

Astrid hugged me tighter. "You should go back to sleep."

"With that racket? I can't send Toothless to get the door, and unless you want people to think this relationship has gone much farther than it actually has…"

Astrid made a noncommittal noise.

"…That leaves me."

"No," and somehow, even though her face was tucked into the curve of my neck and shoulder, she still sounded like I was being an idiot, "Toothless can't get the door for survival reasons, I can't get the door for social reasons, and you can't get the door because you can't even get down the stairs without one of us helping you. Your dad's home; he can bloody well get the door."

She had a point, but… "He won't be in a very good mood, waking up to that…"

"If they're going to make this much racket at this hour, they deserve whatever response they get."

"But if it's a legitimate complaint…a neutral-party sounding board would smooth things over before…"

Toothless prodded my mind: he'd picked up Dad's alert and extremely grouchy consciousness, making its way through the house towards the front door.

"…Oh."

"What?"

"Too late. Dad's already up."

"How…" Astrid began. Then she paused. "Mind-scouting. Right."

Dad got the first word off. The minute the explosion chain stopped, a word rolled through the house like thunder: a loud, angry roar of "WHAT?"

I didn't understand the reply voice at all – by the time it echoed upstairs it sounded like absolute gibberish, so packed with terror that I wasn't even sure if it was a man or a woman. I hoped Dad was understanding it better.

He understood something, and simultaneously understood nothing at all. "HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING AGAIN, HOFFERSON?"

Astrid went completely still beside me.

Dad stopped shouting, but I could still hear him loud and clear. "I can't believe you woke me up over an alcohol-induced nightmare. Your daughter, kidnapped? Ridiculous; and by a Night Fury, of all stupid things!"

I grinned. I had suspected this, and now I was being proven right: the truth was so insane, so outrageous, that nobody would ever believe it unless they had seen it with their own eyes or would take the word of a very reliable eyewitness. A known alcoholic, Mr. Hofferson was not a reliable witness.

"Astrid?"

"Hmm?"

"My dad will never believe we slept through all that banging and shouting, so we might as well get up: at some point really soon he's going to drop how he knows you're not kidnapped, and after that 'alcohol-induced nightmare' your dad's not going to believe you're okay until he sees you." Sensing her hesitation I added, "Nothing's going to happen while my father the Chief is standing there, if that's what you're worried about."

"I'm not worried." Proving her point, Astrid kicked the blankets off both of us and got up. Then she hauled me out of bed, grabbed some of her clothes from the pile, and slipped out – presumably to get dressed in the bathroom.

I struggled into my own clothes, shamelessly eavesdropping on the rest of the conversation through Toothless's ears. Mostly it was a riot act about Astrid being…well…so bitchy and physically hostile to people who angered her that nobody would want to steal her away against her will (and I would give him that; Astrid could summon enough attitude to be the worst hostage on the planet if she wanted), with a little "Night Fury attacks have always been on lone targets" thrown in.

Then the bombshell I was expecting.

"Of course your daughter's alive! She's been living here the past month, playing nurse to my son as restitution for breaking his leg!"

Astrid poked her head in the door, smirking at the drama on the doorstep. "Best curtain call ever. You ready to go take a bow?"

I grinned back at her. "What would you have done if I wasn't? You didn't even knock before you looked in." I picked up my crutches and gingerly hobbled over to her.

"Shouldn't you be doing without the crutches by now? It's been a month, and the cast is just not that big."

"I, um…" I paused in my doorway and lowered my voice, even though there was no reason for anyone downstairs to hear me. "It feels weird when I try to put weight on it. Not painful, but…it's…it doesn't seem to be getting any stronger."

Astrid made a face at me like she didn't quite get it, but she didn't press the issue as she took my arm and matched my gait with her own. I understood both her lack of understanding and why she didn't argue; on the one hand, how would my leg get stronger if I didn't make any effort to use it? But on the other hand, if I was capable of walking on my own there would be no reason for her to stay; the more pathetic I looked for this first show, the better.

We made quite a sight on the stairs: our walk was even, but it was clear I was only keeping balanced at that speed of descent because I had support from Astrid.

Mr. Hofferson's face was deathly pale; all the beer from last night (and probably months on end before last night) had taken a terrible toll on his health. His expression when he saw us was priceless, though: he literally could not comprehend how his daughter was here, when just last night she was carried away by a teleporting monster.

"You-you-you…" he sputtered. Then his gaze riveted on her left arm – and the bruises that hadn't faded completely yet. "What happened to your arm, girl?"

I wondered if Astrid was going to…

"Accident," she blew off casually. "If you'll excuse me, we both need breakfast before school and Hickory can't get his own dishes right now."

It wasn't that easy, of course: Dad stopped us and looked more carefully at Astrid's arm. "I didn't see these last night. They look like a boy's handprints."

Astrid shrugged again. "A couple days ago Hickory was having a bad dream, brought on by one of his panic attacks; I was rubbing his chest trying to calm him back down before he triggered another one; he grabbed my arm like a lifeline and didn't let go until he woke up. He didn't even know he was hurting me. I'd say that qualifies as accidental."

Dad made a noncommittal noise, gave me a more-stern-than-usual look, and let us continue our path to the kitchen. As we edged through the door I sighed.

"Why do I think I'm going to be hearing about this later?"

Astrid shrugged. "It was hardly your fault you had that particular panic attack; it was Scott's. If I were to blame anybody for these bruises it would probably be him." She left me standing in the middle of the kitchen and went looking for breakfast.

"Good to know." I watched Astrid bustle around the kitchen assembling bowls of cereal. "Sorry I can't help with that, by the way."

"What do you think is wrong with your leg, that you can't put any weight on it after all this time?"

"I don't know…but I have a theory."

Astrid turned to face me. "Does it have anything to do with…" her eyes flicked briefly past me, her face froze for just an instant, and she finished, "…the Night Fury attack?"

Dad's right behind me, isn't he? I took a deep breath. "Yes. For all I know, whatever he…did to me that day…interfered with my body's ability to heal. I might need this cast longer than the doctors thought." I let that air back out in a sigh as I sat down to start eating. "Which will be absolutely fantastic, being unable to run for more than two months."

"After school is out, you're going straight back to the hospital for X-rays." He really was there, and that was not a suggestion: I was getting analyzed whether I wanted to or not. And with that he went to get his own breakfast.

Astrid growled miserably and stirred her cereal. "Great, I was feeling guilty enough thinking that I'd be staring at that cast for just two months."

To the end of my days, I will never know what motivated me to say what came out next. It was an order to my dad, it was crazy, and it was an astonishingly far cry from a boy who preferred to keep his life and limbs intact – which I was, until about five weeks ago, it seems.

"Dad, if something turns out to be really wrong with my foot, tell them to take it off."

"What?"

Astrid's spoon clattered to the table as she stared at me in astonishment. "That's not funny."

"It wasn't a joke. If it turns out to be a choice between a prosthetic and dragging a mutilated limb around for a half-year, I'd rather amputate half of it. And I wouldn't blame you, Astrid: the Night Fury would ultimately be responsible for the lost limb, not you." Eventually I would stop, rethink, and second-guess; since I sounded so confident, though, I decided to run with it for now.

"Hickory," Dad swallowed, "I will take that into consideration, but…let's not get ahead of ourselves. It might not be that serious."

I couldn't help but stare in fascination: my dad was shaking in his boots. Why? Surely not because I volunteered for an amputation – he was in favor of the whole, if it can't be saved before it kills the owner then hack it off and cauterize the stump school of thought. He personally whacked off Gordon's leg, I heard, when it had been poisoned by a dragon. Saved his life.

Wait, it's not the amputation: it's me! I had finally become at least a version of the boy he thought I should be – and he wasn't ready for the change. He hadn't really thought I would ever be anything other than a hiccup, and so he wasn't prepared at all for a sign that I might be more.

"All right," I said with a shrug. "We'll see the X-rays and then we'll talk about it. Who knows? It might be my imagination and there's nothing wrong at all."

Dad looked relieved.

Good for him. My stomach was sinking rather horribly, showing disagreement with my own breezy words of nothing wrong at all.

"What do you mean, it hasn't healed?"

Those words of my Dad were the first I heard as I was wheeled back out of the X-ray room, confirming that my gut was right: all was not well inside the cast.

"I'm afraid that's all there is to it," the doctor replied, waving at a pair of photos on the wall that were presumably then-and-now images of my fracture. "The bones aren't showing any sign of fusing. And these new dark patches…I can't explain them at all."

I took control of my chair and rolled up to see for myself. Doc was right, it did look strange – like the bone, muscle, and even skin was slowly-but-surely coming apart, and leaving ever-widening holes behind. And, as both he and Dad said, the original fracture hadn't set.

"Hiccup," Dad began, objecting to my looking.

"That would actually be pretty cool if it wasn't my leg," I commented. "Looks like the only thing holding it together is the cast." I glanced at Dad. "Now what?"

At first he ignored me. "Can you fix it?"

"First we'd have to take a biopsy to establish why the tissues are coming apart. Then…" the doctor shook his head, "…it would depend on what's wrong. If this has anything to do with that Night Fury, well…there might not be any fixing it. You know these dragons and their weird venoms."

Dad sighed. "Yes…all right, get your sample. Do what you can."

Screaming. Lots of screaming.

Not human, not dragon. Metal.

Dry, brittle cracking, like a cocoon opening.

There was a human voice. Swearing in astonishment.

Against my better judgment I opened my eyes and raised my head.

Then I was screaming.

The leg wasn't just deathly white, it was dead. It was slightly crooked on the table, betraying its unhealed fracture. It was withered, and dark holes like eyes peered up; I would not have been shocked, only more horrified, if the holes really did blink or if something nasty crawled out of them. The foot was split in half nearly to the ankle, and it wasn't bleeding; I hadn't even felt it break.

Someone forced me to lie back down, and covered my nose and mouth with something.

I managed to stop screaming, but started talking instead – and getting progressively less coherent as the anesthetic took hold. I think I was demanding they get rid of the leg.

It wasn't my leg. Not anymore.

I woke with a pounding headache. Astrid was sitting by the bed, resting her head on the mattress and stroking my hand.

"Astrid?"

She bounced up and blinked curiously at me. "Hiccup?"

I cocked an eyebrow. "You were expecting somebody else in the bed?"

"Ha-ha. Just wondering if you were back." She looked relieved.

"Back? Where was I going to go with…" I sat up, my gaze veering to my feet.

Foot.

My wish had been granted. If that nightmare had indeed been reality, my foot had been too badly damaged to save and so they'd taken it off. I seemed to still have a knee, though; I could see it bending alongside its partner as I moved my legs, one short and one long.

"…One foot?"

Astrid eyed me. "You're taking this very well. Considering."

I shrugged. "Eh, who knows? Maybe the horror of this new mutilation will slap me in the face when I get back on the crutches." I rolled my eyes around the room – and suddenly fixated on the clock.

6:50.

Hadn't we gotten to the hospital at three-thirty?

I tried to add up the hours. Dad being chief was big-time convenient – we cut straight through the waiting and red tape, and I was getting X-rayed within fifteen minutes of arrival. Surely the cast came off within fifteen minutes of that, and amputation all-in-all couldn't possibly take two hours.

"Hiccup?"

I refocused on Astrid. "When was the amputation completed?"

Astrid looked at her watch. "A little after four."

"So what happened in the other two and a half hours?"

"They were either nightmares, or panic attacks, or phantom pains. You were screaming…and trying to throw yourself off the bed. The doctors were reluctant to sedate you any further than they already had, so they tied you down with soft restraints." Astrid shuddered. "Your eyes…the last time I saw those eyes, you were in the grip of one of your fits. But this time was a little better, because I could also tell you were unconscious."

"That made it better?" I could hardly imagine that Astrid could still look at me after I'd gone postal, whether I was awake or asleep.

"Sure. When you were in that panic attack that day, I got the idea that you knew exactly what you were doing and didn't care if anyone got hurt. You'd care and regret it when you came back out of it, but by then it would be too late. This, though, was more like after I dosed you…you know, when you grabbed my arm. You were asleep; you didn't know what your body was up to."

"Oh." I tried to settle against the pillows. "How did you wind up sitting with me?"

Astrid adjusted my pillows for me so that I could sit up. "That's easy. I rushed straight in here and started spouting all kinds of nonsense while I rubbed your chest, and pretty much dared the docs to throw me out while I was doing that."

I could well imagine. Death-glare of blue fire.

"And they let me be, since you really were calming down under my hands." Astrid touched my head. "You were going on and on about the Dream Alpha, by the way."

"I was?" I couldn't decide if that was good or bad – or if it would turn out to be good or bad later, when I tried to tell somebody while fully conscious.

"Yeah. Poor things, to suffer under that kind of tyranny." Her fingers laced in my hair. Stilled. "I know how that feels."

I drummed my fingers on the mattress. "I don't want a nurse at home teaching me how to walk again. I want you. You wouldn't treat me any different." Besides, if she was my assistant, she would have to stick around and then not go home to her abusive dad.

Astrid blinked at me, evidently thinking my words were a non sequitur. Then, making the connection, she let go of my hair and punched my shoulder. "Did I ask for your help?"

I laughed. "You never ask for help: I ask for help." I wondered if she'd make that leap. She didn't ask for help even when she needed it, so if I asked her…that could be construed as tricking her into accepting help, but I preferred to think of it as letting her save face. If anyone gets curious, I'm the only one in the room needing assistance.

Evidently she did get it, because she smiled. Then she shocked my breath away by kissing me, full on the lips, right as my dad walked in.