A/N: Aaannd...! HTTYD2 is out here in the States! Yay! I have not seen it. Spoil nothing for me. Spoil nothing for people who haven't seen it and we'll be very happy.

It's worth pointing out that much of this story here was plotted out well before we knew anything about HTTYD2, so there will be no intended spoilers to be found. Maybe some coincidences, but no spoilers. Read on without fear, lovely people.

Disclaimer: I do not own How to Train Your Dragon. I do own an assortment of OCs, a few of whom are trying to make me regret creating them.

How to Train Your Marching Band

Chapter Sixteen: Good Old-Fashioned Aimless Wandering

"So, d'you guys know about the psycho in the woods?"

"There's no psycho in the woods."

"You're lying. I don't believe you."

"Yes there is." Ruffnut said with complete conviction to her audience of rookies. "They call him Harvey Hamsterhands. He used to be a butt-doctor or something involving down there, 'til one day... One day, there was an accident when he was working on the extension on his house..."

It was a bogus story, Hiccup knew, because he had heard it every year since he was a rookie. The exact content changed depended on who was telling the story, but it was always about a former doctor of the nether regions who had gotten his fingers sliced off by a blade. Another doctor of questionable sanity had surgically attached live hamsters to his hands to fill in for his fingers. The horrible mutilation of his hands (and possibly blood poisoning from hamsters pooping directly into his veins) had driven him mad, sending him deep into the woods where he had a cabin of horrors and he carried on being a doctor on the teenagers who foolishly wandered into the woods.

That last detail changed from story to story. Harvey Hamsterhands usually continued to be a doctor with weird ideas about surgery and anesthetic, creating horrible mutant hybrids or otherwise removing parts vital to continued function. Other times, he was turned into a seriously depraved individual or just a plain old hack-and-slash-happy psychopath. The foolish teenagers usually met a grisly fate worse than death. Knowing Ruffnut, she would make up the most gruesome possible ending, just to watch the rookies squirm.

Besides, it kept the rookies out of the woods behind the school, even if they didn't believe a word Ruffnut was saying. They weren't supposed to go back there. It was private property and the uptight and overly paranoid owners had threatened to sue the school if they caught any more adventurous teens with their pants down.

Not that it stopped the upperclassmen much. It was fun to dare fellow section members to get as far as they could into the trees before they tripped one of the security lights. To no one's surprise whatsoever, it was Marie who held the record with the twins and Baker the Baritone tying for second. Both Astrid and Hiccup tied for third.

The caffeine, the sugar, and the chocolate had been flowing freely now the band was off those particular restrictions. In fact, the previously contraband items seemed to exploded from the seams of every section and generously distributed among members. By the time the sun fell, Hiccup had reached the point where he could feel the muscles along his ribcage vibrating. Jack, it appeared, was no better off. He twitched like an excitable squirrel, fingers tapping and legs jiggling. It was a small wonder he had remained sitting for this long already.

Well, maybe it wasn't.

Astrid's father had signed up to chaperone the boys tonight, so both of her parents had decided to stick around a little longer. This meant Hiccup had gotten the chance to meet the elusive younger Hofferson sister with the crush on him. His fears about her just being a little version of Astrid had been decidedly dashed at first glance. Five-year old Athalia Hofferson was practically identical to Astrid at that age - with the big blue eyes and the thick blonde hair that hung to her shoulders in two braided pigtails. But whereas Astrid had been rather rough around the edges and quite outspoken for a five-year old, Athalia was possibly the most cavity-inducing little girl Hiccup had ever met.

Astrid had surrendered temporary custody to the boys on the condition that they wouldn't feed her too much sugar (Athalia still had a set bedtime, after all, and it would be very mean to get her all sugared up before unleashing her back on Mrs. Hofferson). After a few shy smiles, Athalia had warmed up enough to claim a seat in Hiccup's lap and quietly asked him if he could draw her something pretty.

But it was Jack who was definitely more taken with the little girl. It was around small children that he really got the chance to shine. In the time it had taken Hiccup to sketch out and color the fairy princess that Athalia had decided on, Jack had cut out a storm of paper snowflakes and had fashioned enough origami flowers to create a paper daisy chain crown that he bestowed on Athalia's head with a flourishing bow, calling her "Your Majesty" the whole time.

"So, out of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and the Sandman, who do you like the best?" he asked, expertly twirling the pencil between his fingers.

"Tooth Fairy!" Athalia answered immediately, her whole face lighting up in a grin. "Astrid says she gives you money for your baby teeth an' look!" She opened her mouth wide to point to the loose tooth wiggling in her lower jaw. "It's loose!"

"Is it your first one?"

"Yep!"

"Hey, that's great! I got a whole dollar for my first tooth." Jack said happily. "But once you lose it, you have to remember to put it under your pillow before you go to bed or the Tooth Fairy won't know where to find it."

"I almost didn't." Hiccup admitted, making Jack frown. "What, everything I first heard about the Tooth Fairy I heard from Snotlout. Back then, it was smarter not to believe anything my cousin told me."

"Astrid says Snotlout's mean an' poopy!" Athalia pouted. She had heard a lot of things about the percussionist from her big sister and had decided that she didn't like him one bit.

"That's right. Snotlout is mean and poopy." Jack agreed brightly. "But--" He held up a finger. "When you have the bad luck to meet these mean, poopy people -- and you will meet a lot of them as you grow up -- you shouldn't tell them that they're mean and poopy."

Athalia frowned. "Why not? Momma says to tell the truth."

"Ah, but the mean, poopy people don't know that they're mean and poopy. They actually think they're really great, nice people with wonderful personalities. They can't see the difference." Jack explained.

"Why?" Athalia wondered.

Jack scratched his head. "Well, if you can find out why they think that way, be sure to come and tell us, okay?" He grabbed a fresh sheet of paper from the dwindling stack. "Now, I do believe you wanted a pretty picture of the Tooth Fairy."

"Yeah! Tooth Fairy! Tooth Fairy!"

"As Her Majesty commands!" The white-haired teen started to sketch. "Now the first thing you should know is the Tooth Fairy doesn't really look like a fairy. She's more like a humming bird. You know what a hummingbird looks like?"

The five-year old girl nodded enthusiastically, the daisy-chain crown slipping down her forehead. There were hummingbird feeders on their back porch and every so often, one of the little birds came buzzing in for a meal.

"Good. And she's fast like a hummingbird too. She's gotta be, 'cause there's hundreds of kids all around the world who are losing a tooth every day and she has to make sure they all get a shiny quarter. She also has a bunch of little fairies who help her collect all the teeth, but she likes to go out and do it herself."

As Jack spoke, a female figure formed within the pencil lines, taking shape at a considerable speed. He continued to chatter about the Tooth Fairy's job and her palace and her little fairies and why teeth were so important while the pencil dashed about, adding a ripple of downy fluff here, long sweeping tail feathers there. He hardly erased any lines, seeming to already know exactly where to place them. Hiccup had learned long ago not to feel jealous of this. He was a good artist but Jack could churn out incredibly detailed sketches in as little as fifteen minutes and insist that they were just doodles.

It was as sickening as it was maddening.

Athalia was torn between listening to what he was saying and watching the Tooth Fairy all but rise out of the paper, her eyes wide and her jaw hanging as she tried to do both.

"And now, some color." Jack declared. Out of the pile of colored pencils, he chose several shades of green and blue and purple, and the one pencil that could be reliably labeled 'gold', and set to work with the same speed and exactness as before.

He finished coloring in less time than it had taken to complete the initial sketch and examined it to make sure he had gotten all the lines filled in. Then he took out his camera and snapped a picture.

"Here you are, Your Majesty." Jack said, handing the picture across the table to the rapturous Athalia. "It's not great--"

"Stop saying it's not great! The whole thing took you a half-hour." Hiccup interrupted. "Stop downplaying your talent. Seriously, something like this would take me half the afternoon."

What would have been half an afternoon of work on Hiccup's part had taken Jack just forty minutes. It didn't even look like a rough sketch either. The lines were clean, the colors were strong and the shading was good. The whole thing popped beautifully. The greens faded into the darker blues and the purples became visible at the tips of the tail feathers. A single feather at the crown of the fairy's head had been colored gold. It looked like the Tooth Fairy really would just leap off the paper.

"She looks so pretty! Is that what the Tooth Fairy really looks like?" Athalia asked happily.

"You bet that's what she really looks like. I've seen her." Jack confided to the five-year old in a whisper, much to her delight.

"Will I see her?" Athalia asked excitedly, bouncing on Hiccup's legs.

Jack shrugged. "Hard to say. I got really lucky that night; Tooth's usually too busy to get to every house. Without a doubt, though, one of her little helper-fairies will come to get your tooth." he assured her. He grinned. "Hiccup squished one."

Athalia gasped and whirled around to stare accusingly at the clarinetist, her lower lip starting to wobble.

"Whoa there, Jack's a lying liar. You see that smoke? Those are his pants; they're on fire. I didn't squish one of the mini fairies, I promise." Hiccup said emphatically, praying that the little girl would not start crying. The last thing he wanted was for Astrid to come to her sister's rescue, demanding to know what they had said to upset her.

Athalia's lower lip was still wobbling. "Promise?"

"On my father's unbelievable pride in our Viking ancestry, I Hiccup Haddock, promise that I did not squish one of the Tooth Fairy's little helpers." Hiccups said solemnly.

Athalia looked relieved and convinced, because she thought the world of Hiccup and didn't think he was capable to lying. She smiled adorably at the clarinetist and went back to admiring the drawing. Yet again, Hiccup couldn't believe that this was Astrid's sister. Their personalities were night and day. He certainly didn't remember Astrid being this sweet-tempered and charming at the age of five.

"Look, look, I put the teeth in her hands and there's still bits of blood and gum attached!" Jack said, leaning across the table again to point out some of the details.

"Cool!" Athalia, contrary to initial opinion, was clearly not disgusted by that.

Hiccup sighed. "Yep, I see it now. You're Astrid's little sister all right." he muttered, shaking his head. Of course, they were sisters. It was inevitable that some things would rub off.

Eventually, Mrs. Hofferson came looking for her youngest when it was plainly past Athalia's bedtime. The little girl was already dozing in Hiccup's lap when her mother came to retrieve her. Smiling broadly, Mrs. Hofferson bent down to gather her up.

"Thank you for looking after her." she told Hiccup in a whisper.

"It was no problem." Hiccup grinned.

He made sure that Mrs. Hofferson took the drawing of the Tooth Fairy. The woman smiled at it like she was recalling a fond childhood memory and promised to get it laminated before she let Athalia hang it up in her room.

After a moment, Jack started to get to his feet.

"Okay, I can't sit any longer. I have to do something!" he said, grabbing a forlorn and neglected fun-sized candy bar off the table. He peeled off the wrapper and crammed the whole thing into his mouth.

"Yeah, I'm ready for some action." Hiccup agreed, getting to his feet, wobbling slightly as the pins-and-needles rushed in with the return of blood. "Where'd Merida and Rapunzel go?"

Jack shrugged. "Dunno, outside? What usually happens during this evening?" he asked.

"Dodgeball on the grassy knoll. The flutes and mellies recruit for flashlight tag, if you wanna run around outside in the dark football stadium." Hiccup suggested. "And I think the pool might be open, but you don't swim. There's also just good old-fashioned aimless wandering."

"I think I'm up for some aimless wandering." Jack decided, swallowing the last of the candy bar.

Ruffnut's terrifying story had ended sometime in the interim, leaving several rookies huddled on the floor in a mild fright. The storyteller herself had disappeared, along with her twin and Marie. They were probably off to lurk creepily in the darkness and make spooky noises.

Merida would be on the grassy knoll in the thick of the dodgeball game. The tubas and the percussion were regular players and the most aggressive, and thus a game of dodgeball was somewhat brutal. It appealed to the ancestral Scotsman buried deep in Merida's Scottish heart that howled for bloodshed. They wouldn't be able to drag her away until the game ended.

Rapunzel would be out with the flashlight tag group, for sure. She loved flashlight tag, but she was never able to convince her friends to play it when they did a sleep-over.

Their not-quite aimless wandering took them right outside and past the grassy knoll where the dodgeball game was in full swing. There was a lot of screaming battle cries and just plain screaming. A dozen or so unfettered teenagers descending into savagery. It was a good thing the inflated balls probably wouldn't break bones or draw blood, but it didn't change the fact that the game looked like opposing armies clashing violently on the battle field. Just with far fewer pointy objects.

"Yeah, we're not goin' over there." Hiccup decided, particularly when he saw Merida's wild red hair seemed to engulf a member of the opposing team.

"Ah, so that's how she keeps the wild hair beast sated. I knew it. The blood of man." Jack nodded, pleased that his theory was correct.

"More like the blood of a terrified rookie." Hiccup corrected, trying to discern the identity of the rookie in question. It was probably one of the pit rookies. The pit only emerged during evening practices and Hiccup didn't pay nearly enough attention to them.

"I'm not all that certain that your rookies are going to survive this season." Jack commented as they ambled away from the blood-bath. "I feel like there's this ripple-effect weirdness going on and all the ripples are reinforcing each other. Either that, or there's some kind of infectious brain disease going around. Like airborne dementia. You're all losing your minds."

"The sugar isn't helping, but we're kinda always like this on the last day of band camp." Hiccup pointed out. "I think part of it's just heat exposure. Brains half-cooked. There's also the relative fatigue, so our inhibitions aren't sticking around much. Lack of parental supervision; you'll notice that most of the adults are indoors."

And Gobber would be driving around in his little electric cart outside the school to shine a flashlight into the dark corners and discourage hanky-panky.

"And seriously, a bunch of teenagers all in one place with all that? This is tame. We aren't even smoking crack or anything." Hiccup added. A marching band could be a shockingly well behaved lot.

"So you're saying it gets worse?"

"Yeah, at midnight we'll start sacrificing the unworthy rookies to the band gods for a prosperous season."

"Wait, crack isn't something you smoke."

"I'm sure some people have tried."

"Hey. Hey, you're wearing a hoodie in the summer." Jack noticed, poking the green fabric. "And you got on me about that earlier. Who's wearing one now?"

"Shut up." Hiccup elbowed him in the side or tried to do. His friend dodged away. "It's night. The sun is not out. It got cold out here, in case you didn't notice."

"Wuss. It's what, seventy degrees out here? This is nothing, bro. Night-time temps for Nome this time of year can get down to forty."

"Ah, good thing we're not in Nome, then."

They veered in the general direction of the softball diamonds, behind the teacher parking lot. The school was set well back from the road. The further they went from the building and the violent dodgeball match, the quieter things became -- save for all the usual night-time sounds.

"I want some snow." Jack said, out of the blue.

"No. No one wants snow." Hiccup said. He had learned the perils of driving in that mess calling itself precipitation. It was awful and he wasn't looking forward to repeating it this winter.

"I want snow. I'd love a proper blizzard, just for a change. We got like one snowfall last year. It sucked. We didn't even get any days off of school. I was looking forward to a snow day!" Jack complained. "I want five feet of snow, blowing and drifting. I want a blizzard that completely shut down the roads for a week. I want to be able to enjoy my time with winter instead of watching it from inside a classroom. I mean, we get time off to enjoy summer. Why can't we have time off to enjoy winter too?"

"Christmas break?" Hiccup suggested.

Jack made a face. "Nope, can't enjoy that time. It never seems to snow around Christmas anyways." he grumbled.

It was something he had been complaining about for years, how they had never gotten hit with any significant amounts of snow. Two or three inches, then the temperatures rose and it melted within a week.

Of course, this was coming from a guy who had been born at the start of January two hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. He was used to having snow on the ground about eight months out of the year.

"Coo, coo."

Jack and Hiccup stopped short. With a bunch of young, mostly unobserved and more importantly, hormonal teenagers running around, unusual noises out of the darkness were not to be unexpected.

Bad pigeon impressions were not amid the usual assortment of unusual sounds.

"That's a pigeon, dork." came Ruffnut's harsh-sounding reprimand.

"Hey, I'm new at this." Fred responded defensively.

"Fred, what are you doing?" Hiccup asked. "With the twins? And your sister. Actually, don't tell me. It's probably better I don't know."

He could just see their outlines standing against the chain-link fence surrounding the closest softball diamond. Tuffnut was distinguishable by his slouch and Marie by her height, so it wasn't too hard to guess the identity of the other two silhouettes.

"Um, apprenticing." Fred replied, making a motion that resembled a shrug.

"Apprenticing to what?" Jack asked.

"And do you have to?"

"Yes, this is a necessary part of his high school experience." Marie said. She placed her hands on her brother's shoulders. "He will learn how to sufficiently traumatize rookies once we're gone."

"Passing the torch to the next generation." Ruffnut said proudly. "He'll hold the fort until Trent gets here."

"But he's gotta stop with the pigeon noises first. That doesn't scare anyone." Tuffnut added.

Jack frowned. "I thought you sacrificed the unworthy rookies at midnight."

"Their blood must be saturated with fear first. The band gods won't accept them if they haven't been marinating in potent, pants-wetting fear." Hiccup said flatly.

What followed was that perfect stock moment where the only sound should have been chirping crickets, but instead, they got Terrors squabbling in the distance. Then Marie started to clap slowly like she had just seen something particularly epic and praise-worthy.

"Hiccup, that was beautiful." she said. "I'm gonna needlepoint that and hang it on my wall."

Fred looked at his sister in shock. "You can needlepoint? I don't believe you, liar! You are chaos and destruction! Not creativity and innovation! It's why you're in marching band, heathen!"

"Heathen? Spare me your forked tongue, serpent!" Marie said, attempting to tower over her brother, but the height difference was only three inches. "I create what I destroy! Lies saturate the very air you breathe!"

"Tempt me not, vile seductress! The wrath of the gods will fall upon your head and smite the sin from your bones!" Fred declared in a deep, fairly sonorous voice.

"Y'know, I think with him we should foster the Ranting Priest creepy, instead of Spooky Noises." Tuffnut suggested thoughtfully.

"He's perfect for it." Ruffnut said in that quiet whispering tone of awe, like she had just seen something truly magical.

"Y'know what, we're outta here." Hiccup grabbed Jack's arm and pulled him away from the conspiring twins and the other pair of siblings who probably insulting each other in a very roundabout way.

"Does that always happen?" the white-haired teen wondered as the passionate mock arguing faded behind them.

"What, the pseudo-Shakespeare insults? Yeah, I think that's how they de-stress just from being around each other." Hiccup shrugged, running his fingers through his hair. "I don't know if it's better than the twins fighting or worse."

"Every sibling relationship I see in this band makes me increasingly glad I'm an only child." Jack realized. As far as he could tell, siblings just made each other crazy. There was stress to be found from living with a person twenty-four/seven and never really getting away from them. It was enough to deal with his parents (and while they were well-meaning, they could be overbearing). He couldn't imagine having a sibling in the mix. The only benefit he could see was that his parents would have to divide their attention between two kids. He could live with a little less focus on him every now and again.

"I think they're still playing flashlight tag up at the football stadium." Hiccup said, changing the topic. "And this night never feels exactly right if I don't get at least a little bruised."

"Ah, and we can win some brownie points with Pretzel. Excellent strategy." Jack agreed. "Race you up there."

He darted off before Hiccup could even think about running.

"Hey! Wait up you jerk!"

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