Chapter 13: Safe House

Everything ached. It felt like he'd been thrown in the dryer and set to "Express Tumble."

The pain was the only thing he could feel. He was too far gone to comprehend anything past what he could physically experience. Everything was dark. Noises and shadows pressed in at his vision, but none of them made sense. He was incredibly warm, too.

Hiccup was fading in and out of consciousness, still too out of it to realize what was happening around him.

Dreams invaded his restless, fever-induced sleep. Shapes and figures crowded his mind. A bear, large, with red hair that roared and laughed. Could bears laugh? A black dog, running ahead of him, barking like mad. It was Toothless. He tried to call out to him, but the canine didn't answer and kept running until it disappeared. He heard music suddenly. Beethoven, he thought. He turned towards it, only to come face-to-face with a massive crowd of the infected, charging in his direction, away from the music.

Hiccup turned and tried to run, only to find he wasn't moving. He looked down to see that his legs were gone from the waist down. He screamed. He could hear barking again as he turned back around. The infected had caught up to him and swallowed him whole.

Hiccup's eyes sprung open as he took in a sudden gasp of air. He was burning up. It felt like he'd been thrown in a furnace, with nothing but a cold sweat to cool him down.

His breathing was heavy, his heart racing. What was going on? Where the hell was he?

Hiccup realized that he was staring at a ceiling. One he didn't recognize. He could feel that he was surrounded by blankets and resting on some sort of mattress. That was strange. He had a distant memory of passing out beneath a coffee table in an abandoned living room. How the hell did he end up here?

He blinked a few times, trying to clear his vision as he glanced around him. There was very little light in the room. A candle was set burning in the corner as moonlight streamed in through the blinds of the window.

Hiccup felt a flood of relief as he saw Toothless curled up next to him on the bed, sleeping soundly, his furry body rising and falling with every slow breath. He glanced around the rest of the room only to find his heart stopped as his eyes landed on something sitting in the corner.

At first, he though it was some, giant, fuzzy muppet, with crazy red fur. After a second of shock, he found that it wasn't a puppet monster at all.

It was a girl.

She sat curled up on a chair in the corner of the room, surrounded by a cloud of frizzy, red hair. She was stock still, glaring at him with bright blue eyes that shone through the shadows.

Hiccup blinked. She was still there, staring at him from the shadows like some murderous wolf, not uttering a word.

Okay, he thought. So, not an hallucination.

Hiccup simply stared at her as she continued to glare at him. He wasn't sure what to say. He didn't know if he even should say anything. He didn't know who this girl was, what she was doing there—

She suddenly rose, uncurling her legs and standing up from her chair without saying anything and moved towards the door.

"No, wait," Hiccup called out, suddenly panicked. He wasn't sure why he was suddenly worried that she was leaving, only that he didn't think he wanted to be left alone when he still wasn't entirely sure what his surroundings were.

She ignored him and let the door swing shut behind her with a bang loud enough to wake Toothless. The canine lifted his head and blinked sleepily. Hiccup looked down at his dog. He glanced back up at the now closed door, half expecting the strange girl to come back. The door remained closed. Hiccup turned his attention to the straggle of fur that had just woken next to him.

"Hey, Bud, how's it going?" he asked softly as he reached a hand out to scratch Toothless's neck.

The dog was wide awake in seconds, giving a happy yip as he leaped forward to lick at Hiccup's face while barking merrily. Hiccup laughed as he was assaulted by dog kisses and wrapped his arms around his best friend.

"That worried about me, huh?"

The door of the room suddenly opened again, catching Hiccup's attention.

A figure entered the room, and Hiccup's heart nearly stopped. For a split second, he thought that the figure in the doorway had been his father. Nearly filling the entire doorway, with wild, red hair, a heavy brow and a large nose. After a split second, Hiccup managed to shake the fever from his head and remind himself that that was impossible. His dad was dead.

Hiccup managed to collect his senses and realize that this hulking figure was not his father just before the stranger let out a startling low laugh and pushed his way into the room.

"Well looky here. The lad's up an' adem!"

Hiccup had to force himself once more to remember his father was dead. The stranger's accent was eerily familiar. Strong, deep, and distinctly Scottish, just as his father's had been.

The large stranger was next to Hiccup's bed in second, letting out another laugh as he gave the boy a pat on the back that was rough enough to send him a few inches forward.

"Though we were goin' loose ya thear, laddie."

"Ah, I'm sorry, wh-who are—" Hiccup, bewildered beyond belief and desperate for any answers that could tell him where he was andexactly just what he was doing there.

"Agh, Fergus, just look at you. You're scaring the boy."

Another, unfamiliar voice came from the doorway. Hiccup turned to find a tall, elegant woman with greying hair standing in the doorway. Behind her, Hiccup could see the girl from before, glaring at him from the shadows of the hallway outside. The woman stepped forward to place a gentle hand on the large man's arm, leaving the girl to sulk in the doorway.

"Ah, Elinor dear, Aye was just—"

"I know what you were 'just,' but let the boy have some space," the woman said kindly. She turned to face Hiccup then, with warm eyes and a kind smile.

"Not to worry, laddie. You're safe now."

"H-How did you find me?" Hiccup asked, his confusion unhindered. "What happened? Where are we? I don't—"

"We found you unconscious in an abandoned house down the street—"

"Ay, just like me on none too few a good night out," the larger man named Fergus said with a chuckle, earning him a slap to the shoulder from the woman before she continued.

"You were sick and badly hurt. We patched you up as best we could and brought you along with us. We were nit too sure if you were going to make it to be honest—"

Before Hiccup could even comprehend what he was being told, there was the sound of running feet and the next thing he knew, he was surrounded by giggling, red hair, and tiny feet, jumping and climbing all over him and the bed.

"Boys!"

In the next second, the giggling and feet had disappeared, leaving Hiccup in a slight state of dizziness. As soon as he could see straight again, he looked to find three giggling, ginger triplets hiding behind the woman named Elinor.

"You mustn't mind the boys. They're usually much more behaved," she mentioned with a stern look at the three toddlers, who only giggled and gave each other high-fives.

"No, it's alright," Hiccup said with a shake of his head, his voice faint as his mind was elsewhere. "Wait, so you…saved me?"

"Just nearly," Fergus said with another chuckle. "Don't think we would'a found ya had it no' been fer this mutt," he said with a gesture towards Toothless.

Hiccup looked down at the dog in his lap, who looked back up at him, panting happily. Hiccup smiled back as he ran a hand over Toothless's head.

"I-I don't know what to say," he said, turning to look at the gaggle of strangers in front of him. "Except thank you. And Toothless and I can be on our way in—"

"Ah, no dear. Don't you think about it," Elinor ordered. "Just you wait until you're fully healed and then we can talk about what comes next."

"And remember," she added before Hiccup could object. She leaned forward and gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze. "You're safe here."

Over the next few days, Hiccup fell in and out of consciousness as he continued to battle a fever that proved relentless. When he was a awake, he managed to learn a bit more about the family that had saved him, the DunBrochs. The man as large as a bear and the woman elegant as a queen were actuality man and wife. It'd been Elinor and Fergus that had been the ones to save him and the ones to make the decision to care for and protect him. The children Hiccup had seen before were their children.

The triplets, Harris, Hubert, and Hamish, as it turned out, weren't toddlers at all, but merely small for their age of five years old. And though they rarely spoke, they somehow managed to plan elaborate pranks and adventures between themselves that always managed to off without a hitch. They were "wee devils" as the family called them, but Hiccup couldn't help but admire their ingenuity.

The eldest of the DunBroch children was the girl Hiccup had first woken to sulking in his room. Her name was Merida, but she wasn't the one to tell him that. In fact, she'd barely spoken to him at all since he'd first woken up. She'd come by every now and then to give him medicine and food, uttering barely more than a few, curt words. As far as he could tell, he wasn't the only one to be getting the cold shoulder. She seemed to get along with her father and brothers just fine, but tended to have a short fuse with the woman of the family, Elinor. Hiccup just couldn't figure out what her problem was. With him or her mother. He could tell he was a year or two younger than him, but he wasn't one to chalk moodiness up to teenage hormones. There was definitely something else in the mix.

The DunBrochs helped Hiccup as best they could, leaving him to his peaceful rest as he continued to heal. They shared their food with him and checked up on him regularly. They even left the door to his room open when he was awake, so he wouldn't feel so isolated from the rest of the house.

It'd been strange for Hiccup, to see a real family in action. Sure, he was asleep for most of the time, and when he was awake, he wasn't the most coherent. But what he did see was something rather alien to him. His family had never been much. His mother gone, it had always just been him, Toothless, and his father. Not exactly what you'd call a real family. Especially since the last few years had been hardly more than a collection of tense conversations and more fights than he could care to count. Seeing the DunBrochs, the way they worked together, the way they knew each other, the way they loved each other. It made Hiccup feel slightly strange. Not a bad strange. No, not even close. But a warm sort of strange. Seeing a family as complete as this and being invited into their folds, even if was only going to be for a short while. It gave him a sense of security. A feeling of trustworthiness and a certain faith that the world wasn't completely lost. The DunBrochs made him feel safe.

A/N: Sorry for the boring chapter, I'm still trying to get my ducks all in order and introduced before I get moving with an actual story line -.-