Don't own anything but OC's and story line. I adopted the plot, but I think it is scared of me. The little bunny just ran away on its own.

If you Ignored the warnings in the first chapter:

THAT'S YOUR OWN FAULT, YA IDJITS!!!

Reviews are appreciated. They give me ideas to better the story for those who enjoy reading it.

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Chapter 4: HVA

It has been two moons since I have touched any of the girls. After dinner that night, and another round of beautiful love-making in bed with my Valery, we decided that we will only take those without a child, or the child is over a year old, and who are closely bonded with their dragons. We only had two that we already knew were still with child, and only about ten had a child younger than a year. As it just so happened, they were all clean except for Camicazi, who could go home anyway due to her tribe's rules of, 'The son goes to the father, the daughter to the tribe, and we don't care if the child was born out of wedlock.' In fact, they encouraged it. Add that to the fact that only about twenty-eight were not closely bonded with their dragons, and you come out with about sixty-one that would be going home in a few days.

They did not know that, of course. My beloved and I decided that it would be a bad idea to get their hopes up, but they knew that I had decided to hive them a rare break, so they embraced it. It was decided between my mother and I, and our dragons, that we would announce their homegoing that night at dinner, and if things went to plan, they would be home by the end of the week.

I walked into the dining hall that we all shared and ate at, and as I entered, all but Astrid stood and lowered their heads to me, stubborn girl. Honestly, she was more stubborn in her resistance then Cami was, but then I suppose Cami never had a moral reason to resist taking pleasure in my presence like she does. Cami was allowed to enjoy whoever she pleased, while Astrid was supposed to wait for the man she would wed. She was supposed to be pure for her future husband, and I ruined that for her by ruining her, so I guess I can't begrudge her this little retaliation, for now.

"Good evening, sir," I heard from my right as I sat down at my table in the normal spot. One of the girls on cooking duty that day, Brunhild from Meathead, was standing to my left with a deer wineskin in her hands and she placed my meal in front of me. "Would you like some wine tonight?"

"No, thank you dear," I said, stroking her lovely auburn hair. "Why don't you and the others go sit down with your own meals. Find your place card and eat."

"Yes sir," she said, smiling. She then ran to put the wineskin down in the ice hole for the cold drinks and ran to sit with the others.

I watched as all one-hundred-one girls enjoyed their meals and conversations and I knew that this would be one of the last meals they would ever enjoy in this cavern, with these friends, sisters, that had been made. After this week, only forty would remain, and the rest would be making their way with me and my mother to their homes. It would be at that time that I start to change my path. I have decided that I would take no more women from these tribes, surely they have suffered enough. I will stop taking the women, stop the fear the young ones have of being next, and I will fall to rely solely on my beloved mother for the needs of my lust. I have been mostly relying on her these past two moons anyway.

I watch for a few more moments before clearing my throat, pounding my still-empty tankard on the table to get everyone's attention. "Excuse me, ladies," I projected, grabbing everyone's attention with a soft smile and rare, kind eyes. "I am sorry to have disturbed your conversations, but I have an announcement to make." They all looked up at me and my beloved. "If you will look at your place card, many of you will notice something different. There will be a small mark on the bottom left of the card, a dragon in flight." Many of the girls nodded and showed their cards to the others around them, just over half of the girls at each table were showing off their cards to the others, wondering what it might mean. "If your card has that mark, I have made the decision, along with my wife and the dragons, that it is time to send you home."

I could hear the many gasps and pouts among the girls, as well as whispers of joy as they all contemplated what this might mean. I continued. "I understand that I have wronged you, and your people, by taking you away from your home, and I would like to make it right." I judged their reactions, and then I continued to speak. "I will not force anyone, but at the end of the week, I will be prepared to take home any with the mark who wishes to go. It doesn't matter how many or few want to go, I will still make the trip."

Many of the girls were quiet now, thinking on it, and then one said, "Why now? We have been here for almost two years, and you realize this now, so why?"

"This is not a realization I have just made. I have known that it was wrong, known that I was hurting you and your people, but I couldn't stop. I needed that release, the power that came with taking you ladies from your homes and making you submit your will to me. For the longest time, it was the only thing that could make me feel better about myself, but no more. I will, one day, send all of you home if that is what you so desire, but I will only do so when I think you are not a threat to myself, my beloved, or the dragons. In sight of that day, I will never take another from your homes, and your people will no longer have to worry about dragon attacks because your own dragons wish to go with you."

"And is that supposed to just make everything better for us?" another called out. "We were taken from our homes, many of us just before our wedding day, and you took away our purity. Our betrothed will hate us. How are we supposed to face that? We'd be killed for simply walking into the village, especially with our dragons."

"If anyone threatened to kill you, I would kill them myself. I would not let anyone hurt you, not like I have. I don't propose to 'make everything better,' but that doesn't mean that I can't give your parents their daughters back, your brothers their sisters back, your villages their women back. I have heard it said among you before, even Berk only has two women left of childbearing age, and those two are still only children themselves. All I want to do is make things right and send you home, hopefully with more than what came with you."

"What about our children? I am one of the ones being sent home, but I have a child here. I can't just leave her."

"If you wish to take your child with you, you may, but I will not offer support in raising her if you do so. You may stay here with her, but that would deprive you of your family. If you choose to leave her here, I would be willing to provide for her and take care of her until she is of the age to decide for herself where she would like to live, and at that point, I will give her the choice of whether to stay here, or live with her mother with the other half of her family. I will take her to visit every month, so it is not as if you will be cut off, but I cannot guarantee that your family will accept her if I do send her back with you, now or later." The girl nodded sadly, but I knew she understood the choice that had to be made.

"I will leave you all to think on it. If you have any questions, come find me or my wife, and we will try our best to answer them. I will be in my room." I then picked up my plate, walked by the wine hole in the ice, grabbed the abandoned wineskin, and made my way out of the hall and toward my room. I knew things would be different from now on, and I knew that many of my children would most likely be taken away from me, but in the end, it would be for the best, for everyone.

I watched my son leave the hall, and I knew that I had to tell him. It had been far too long since my last moon's blood, and it could only be one of two things. Either I conceived those two moons ago when he brought me to bliss and made love to me, or the more likely choice, that I had finally become sterile. I had to tell him, and I had to do so now before he got drunk on that two gallon wineskin he walked out of here with.

I got up out of my chair, positioned next to my beloved's at the head table, and walked away from the hall. I knew that I would not find him in our room like he said he would be, so I instead walked to where he always did his heavy drinking, in the presence of the Bewilderbeast. It was there I would find him,and it was there he would stay until the following morning when Toothless dragged his sorry butt back to our bed.

As I walked toward the cliff, it was the 'Bewilderbeast that I saw first, his gentle-giant form rising to say hello. Him, I didn't see until I was right on top of him, and even then it took his voice to alert me of his presence. "Is it a child, or have you finally reached infertility?"

"How long have you known?" I asked as I looked down at him on a ledge just below me.

"You're a moon and a half overdue. It wasn't hard to guess."

"I realized something was wrong about three weeks ago. I didn't want to bring it up till I was sure," I said, gently stepping down to the ledge he was on. He offered his hand to help me down, then turned back to stare out into the abyss that the gentle giant rested in.

"Then which is it?"

"What?" I said looking at him.

"Pregnant or sterile, which is it?"

He wouldn't look at me. He would hardly even acknowledge me. All he did was look out into the pit at the center of the nest and continue drinking his wine. "I haven't had any of the normal symptoms. It doesn't feel like it did when I was pregnant with you. With you, I could barely go an hour without getting sick, I couldn't sleep, almost everything ached, but now I don't feel any of that. I just feel fatigued and otherwise normal."

He nodded and turned his head away to look at his dragon. He was bounding across a small field of flowers in the distance, playing with the nadder that had taken a liking to Astrid a couple moons prior. The two dragons had become close friends, but I knew Hamish wished that he could find a mate for his friend. They were so close, but there were times, especially during mating season, that my love watched as his friend stared longingly at the mates flying around in the sky, or during hatching season when the baby dragons would use their 'uncle Toothless' as a playground, and he knew he wished that it could be his hatchlings playing on top of him, or him and his mate up in the sky. "I guess now I am more like you than ever, bud," I heard him mumble under his breath, and I watched as the Night Fury's head shot up and looked in our direction. He then looked back to the other dragon, who was now with her human, roared, and glided over the gap between us to curl around his own. Hamish patted his head, sighed, and sunk against him.

The dragon cried, and I didn't have to understand his words to know that he was trying to comfort his rider. I knew that the dragon knew his longing, and he knew his dragon's, but they were different because the dragon seemed to not care about progeny. My son did, and it hurt me dearly that I could not give him any. "I'm sorry, son. I wish I could give give you a son or daughter, but you still have your children from the others."

"But they aren't our children. Sure, they might be my children, but they aren't ours." "I'm sorry son. I wish I could give you children. I really do, but I just... can't. I wish we would have tried sooner, then we might have been able to..."

"No."

"What?" I asked, confused about his sudden declaration.

"I'm glad we never tried," he said, finally looking at me. "I mean, I had always hoped, and we never really took preventative measures, but I'm glad we never tried. If the child had killed you, I didn't know if I would have been able to raise it, even if it was the only thing I had left of you. I probably would have delivered you and the child to the doorstep of my father so that you could have a proper funeral and the child could have a proper father."

"He'd probably see it as an act of war. He would see it as you laughing in his face, saying 'Hey. I knocked up your wife and then killed her. Here you go. You can have her back now, and you can raise her bastard child, cause I don't want it.' He would see it as an act of war, son, and then he would go after you and try to kill the one true heir of Berk, without even realizing that was what he was doing."

"Hah!" he laughed, and though I was glad to hear his laughter, I was not happy at what he was laughing about. "He wouldn't be able to kill me cause I would either be disappearing or killing myself on his doorstep."

"Son!"

"Don't 'Son' me! You know I can't live without you in my life! That's the whole reason we decided not to try in the first place!"

"But that doesn't mean you should kill yourself!"

"Oh, so you would want me to be miserable for the rest of my life!?"

"No! I would want you to move on and get married, truly married, and have children with whoever you decide to get married to."

He shook his head at me and sighed before continuing. "No, mom. I wouldn't be happy with someone else. If anything, I would be even more miserable..."

"Please, Mom? I can't live without you."

"I don't want you killing yourself. Even without me, there are people in this world that need you. Take these girls for example, or the rest of the incapacitated dragons, and you couldn't do that to Toothless. You can't just leave them to die, and if you kill yourself, we will never be reunited in death, ever. Killing yourself is not an honorable way to die. What it is, is a one way ticket to Hel where you will be tortured for all eternity, and if there isn't an afterlife, then you will be punishing the world you left behind. Please, don't kill yourself if I die?"

I watched him sigh, fall back against Toothless' side, and stare at the sky with resignation before he turned back to me. "Fine," he finally said. "I will try to keep living for Toothless and the rest of the dragons, but you can't use the girls to keep me alive. By the time you die, I should have them all back home, and we both know I won't last long without you, no matter how hard I try. A dragon never does without their mate."

"Alright. Thank you for trying," I said, but then I thought about something that I was curious about. "What would you do if I was pregnant?" His and his dragon's faces shot from the sky to mine and I couldn't help but laugh at the shocked and scared looks I saw on them.

I was no longer hungry after finding out that my sister was one of the people heading home, so I decided to leave the dining hall and go to the cliffs to spend time with the nadder I had grown fond of in the time I had been here. It was the same bluish nadder that had wrapped around me when I slept in the shack during the return trip, and I found that I loved her. Granted, not the kind of love I would have given Eret in our marriage if I hadn't been taken weeks before our wedding, but like a sister, or a battle buddy, or a best friend.

I decided to call her Stormfly, because the first time I saw her in the air from the ground, there was a massive storm coming down. I had been going to say hi to her and went to look here at the cliffs, when I got here, I realized that a huge storm was raging outside of the soundproofed caverns where we live and all the dragons were grounded. I called out to her, barely able to hear myself over storm, and then I looked up after hearing a small squawk. There in the sky, above the hole in the roof, was a lone blue nadder flying through the storm like she was having the time of her life. I was worried at first before I noticed how much fun she was having, and after that, I waited for her to come down. When she finally landed, I ran up to her and hugged her, and she nuzzled me just before I asked her, "Are you a little storm flyer?" She squawked in joy and the name kind of struck.

when Hamish (I soon learned that calling him Hiccup, even by accident, only made him mad... well, madder.) heard what I called her, he tried to correct me. 'Her mother actually named h...' Stormfly growled at him and hissed and he quickly backtracked. 'Okay. Stormfly it is.' He then nodded to me and said, Miss Hofferson, I'll be by your room tonight around three hours past dark.' He then walked off and I didn't see him till dinner, then he was absent until he came to my room to talk an hour later.

As I walked toward the cliff, I saw Stormfly and Toothless playing like they often did when we humans weren't around. They both looked up at me when I got a little closer and Stormfly squawked and started tottering up to me. "Stormfly!" I called. "Hey, girl. How're you doing?" She squawked again and nuzzled her head into my shoulder. Toothless roared at Stormfly and me, and we looked back just in time to see him sloppily glide over to a small ledge next to the Bewilderbeast. I looked at what else was on that ledge and I again sighed, something I had been doing a lot since coming here. Hamish and his mother were sitting there, and he was drinking again. Tonight was not going to be easy for the girl he went to see, if he went to anyone.

The first time that man took me to see the Bewilderbeast, I was shaking in fear. I soon found out that he was a gentle giant, no more a killer than the rest of the dragons in the nest. The first thing he did was purr at me and smell the air (probably looking for my scent), then he blew a large puff of frost at us and my upper body was covered in it. I soon found out that Hamish had ducked to the side before it got all over him, and his laughing told me that I probably looked ridiculous. 'He likes you,' he called in a laugh, and I scowled at him, though I wasn't stupid enough to do more. 'Sorry,' he chuckled. 'It's just that, there's only a handful of people in this entire nest that he's done that to.'

'Really?' I asked in shock. 'Who?'

'Well,' he said, taking on a thoughtful look. 'My beloved and I, of course.'

'Of course,' I told him as if it were obvious.

'Then there's Heather, and Ruffnut, and Camicazi.' I nodded. 'And then your sister and you,' he finished up, and I truly was surprised by the size of the list. There were only seven in all of the one- hundred-three people in this nest that this dragon claimed to like.

'Why so few?' I asked, and he looked at me with a sad face before answering. 'There are only those few who have never killed a dragon.'

'Never?!' I exclaimed, wondering how that was possible.

'Never,' he said before explaining further. 'Dragon lifeblood doesn't just stain clothes, it stains skin, down to your own blood. The scent can linger for years. Decades. For the whole three years after my fight with the red death, he would hardly come near me, even when the lifeblood had burned up before it touched me. By falling into the flames and burning my leg, the lifeblood burned into my charred flesh and the scent, unbearable to dragons, lingered for three years. Only the willing gift of a dragon's lifeblood can change that, and it wasn't until after I brought your sister here that he started to dust me with his mighty ice again.'

'Three years,' I whispered in disbelief, and he spoke up.

'That was only because I fell into the flames as he exploded. If you actually killed a dragon with a weapon, you would smell like it for about twenty years.'

I was in shock from those words. After that, he sent me to my room to get ready for dinner, and that night, he came to my room for the second time since I had come here. That second time, he was gentle, and I found out what my sister meant by enjoying it. He didn't take me, not again, but he certainly did show me the beauty and enjoyment of that 'sub-space' she spoke of.

I was brought out of my reverie when I heard a loud laugh coming from Hamish. He sounded somewhat wounded by something, not physical, but emotional. I looked in their direction and I heard a but of what they had been taking about.

"He wouldn't be able to kill me cause I would either be disappearing or killing myself on his doorstep." That shocked me, but when I quieted down to listen harder, I didn't like what I heard.

"Son!"

"Don't 'Son' me! You know I can't live without you in my life! That's the whole reason we decided not to try in the first place!"

"But that doesn't mean you should kill yourself!"

"Oh, so you would want me to be miserable for the rest of my life!?"

"No! I would want you to move on and get married, truly married, and have children with whoever you decide to get married to."

"Try..." I thought to myself out loud. Try what. What would make this man so upset that he would kill himself, aside from the normal 'killed someone else' problem that I found out he dealt with. And on who's doorstep. Why would he be forced to live without her? It's not like she's going somewhere, and what's so bad about trying for this something. What would cause him to have to move on, get married and have children with... Oh. He meant they didn't try to have children because he could lose her, and he wouldn't be able to live with it, so he would try to kill himself on someone's doorstep. But why would he kill himself on their doorstep? Why would they want to kill him? I mean, if she had a child, the most likely scenario would be that it would kill her at her age, and if it killed her, there would be a chance that the child survived. He said he couldn't live without her though, so he would kill himself. Does that mean that he would give up the child before then? He doesn't have a lot of choices there aside from the ladies here and... "His father. Of course." He would take the child to his father. Then he would kill himself on his doorstep.

I looked back at Stormfly, who I had been mindlessly petting on the nose, and went back to giving her all the love I thought she deserved. She nuzzled into my and I laughed and scratched her chin, careful to avoid the sweet spot. "He is one dark cookie. Isn't he, Stormfly?" She squawked her agreement to me, then she and I got up and walked back to the caverns to get ready for the week ahead.

~~~Five Days Later~~~

"I'm going to miss you, Astrid," my sister said as she and I were working together to pack the rest of her things.

"Me too. It feels like just yesterday that we found each other, and now we are trading places."

"Yeah," she sighed as she put down her things on the bed. I could tell that she wished we didn't have to 'trade places,' but it was this, or we both stay until two months from now, when I might be seen as ready to go. "I hope to see you soon."

She turned and started fiddling with her fully prepared pack that lay on her bed, and I knew she was just trying to keep from breaking down. This was one thing we were never good at, saying goodbye, so I put my hand in hers for comfort and she immediately turned on me, wrapping her arms around my neck and starting to cry. "I'm going to miss you so, so much!" she cried on my shoulder. "I wish there was some way to get him to let you come with us. I wish so much that you could come!"

"Me too," I said, trying to comfort her, "but you know I can't. I still haven't flown with Stormfly, and I don't even know if I want to."

"I know," she sniffled, trying to wipe away her tears. "It's just so hard. We find each other, and then nine weeks later, we lose each other."

"Hey," I spoke, trying to cheer her up, "at least this time we know we will see each other again."

"True," she whined.

"Just be sure to tell our family that I'm okay, and that I will see them again someday."

"I will. I'll be sure to reassure them as mu as possible that you will come back in one piece."

"Thanks," I say. "And can you tell Eret that I love him and I'm sorry for not being able to fight... to wait?"

"Eret?" she asked conspiratorially, then nodded knowingly. "I'll tell him. How much do you want him to know?"

I looked down, and I knew she understood. She would tell him everything I had told her. The beatings, the rape, my first time. Even Stormfly. All of it. She would tell him everything, and he would be given the choice to move on to something pure or wait for damaged goods.

We walked down the corridor with her four saddlebags, bedroll and her son, and when we reached the cliffs, she walked over to her dragon, a nightmare named Skyfire, and started strapping her things to the travel harness on the dragon's back. Her items would be carried right in front of her dragon's wings, and she and her toddler on Skyfire's neck.

A little Triple Strike ran up to her as we were finishing up and started crying and snapping its tail, and she laughed and patted it on the head. "Goodbye, little one," she said, but before she could do anything else, their mother came along, growled something to her nightmare, who nodded, then picked up her little Triple Strike baby and plopped him on her back with the rest of Agnes's goods. "Hah!" my sister laughed as she looked at what was happening. "Looks like his mother decided he should go with his bonded human." I looked at her, and she looked over her back at her own son.

We both laughed for a bit, and just as our laughter was calming down, Hamish came out of the corridors of our temporary home and whistled to get everyone's attention. His mother was walking with him, and by their sides, there were two dragons. One, a Night Fury with a hide as dark as night. The other, what I now know to be a Stormcutter. Smaller than others of its breed, but more powerful than most for the weight of the woman he always carried on his back. "Mount up, ladies," he called to us as he came to the front of their dragons. "We have a long way to fly before nightfall, and I don't want to get caught out there after dark."

Agnes hugged me, and we said our final goodbyes before she jumped to her dragon's neck and strapped herself in. I looked around now to notice that several other dragons had a baby dragon on their backs, and their riders had a child of theirs own. As it turned out, many of the girls with children had decided to bring their child with them, hoping that said child would be accepted into their tribe. They had taken up Hamish's offer to take their children with them, and they would decide later if they should be sent back to him.

I heard an ear splitting roar and turned to the front of the pack to see Toothless calling out to the dragons before his rider hopped on his back. All the other dragons roared in return, even those not leaving the nest for the last time, and then they all spread their wings and took flight for their rider's homes.

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