Chapter 4: Monstrous Nightmares Aren't that Different After All

"Listen," Hiccup whispered urgently from Toothless's saddle. "I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to be on Berk."

"Well then where are you supposed to be?" the Hiccup-boy asked hesitantly. Hiccup knew that if someone told him that they were an Outcast who had potentially done a dimension-swap, he would be wary of them.

And from the looks of the situation, the Hiccup-boy most likely felt the same way.

"The Bog-Burglar islands," Hiccup said quickly, naming the first location that had come to mind. "But don't worry—I'll wait until after we find Hookfang."

"Dogsbreath—"

"And my name's not Dogsbreath either," he added. "It's—it's Hiccup."

The Hiccup-boy eyes widened and he spun around to face Hiccup. "You're a hiccup too?" His voice was edged with excitement. He was smiling. "That's so cool! I—I've never met another Hiccup before! Why don't we go down? Hookfang can wait."

Toothless dived down at the slight maneuver of the Hiccup-boy's prosthetic foot. It amazed Hiccup how in-sync the boy and his dragon were.

They had made it to the far outreaches of the archipelago, where the Scottish-laced Norse language gave way to pure Gaelic. The islands here were small and rocky, only good for tying a boat up and camping for the night, perfect places for rogue Vikings and foreign pirates. It looked like they were closer to the Scottish mainland than to Berk.

The Hiccup-boy soon landed on an isle that one could walk around several times and still not have stayed a full half hour.

"So you're a hiccup?" he asked eagerly, once they both stood on semi-solid ground.

Hiccup nodded. That he was sure of.

"How did you get here?"

Hiccup laughed nervously. "Are you sure you want to hear it? It's pretty impossible."

The Hiccup-boy raised an eyebrow. "Try me."

No time was wasted on lengthy explanations. "I'm you," Hiccup said bluntly. Then he thought a bit and added for clarification, "But from an alternate dimension. So you, but not quite."

As expected, the Hiccup-boy was speechless. He stared at the ground a bit. Hiccup wondered if he was okay, or if he had even heard him. "Are you okay?"

"I…er…" His eyes widened in realization. "That actually explains a lot! You are a hiccup and you do have a dragon named Toothless. Plus," he added. "Your alternate knowledge of dragons makes you stick out a bit. Seriously, you don't know what a Monstrous Nightmare looks like?"

"I do indeed know what a Monstrous Nightmare looks like," Hiccup argued. Then, reciting from memory, he said, "Colors are emerald green, brilliant scarlet, and deepest purple and it is armed with scary fangs and extra extendable claws."

"Defenses—two; radar—none; poison—three; hunting—ten; speed—seven; fear and flight factor—"

"Very, very scary," Hiccup finished, grinning. "A ten, all the way. Trust me, the Snotlout where I'm from also has one."

The Hiccup-boy chuckled. "You'd get along well with Fishlegs, Hiccup."

"There's a reason why we're good friends." He took a deep breath, crossed his fingers, and sent a mental prayer to the gods. "Do you believe me?" If the Hiccup-boy didn't, then Hiccup himself was in a bit of a sticky situation.

"I'm skeptical," he admitted. "But I'll take your word for it—for now. Just…Just don't do anything that wouldn't make me trust you, okay?" He looked sheepish. "I really don't want Astrid berating me again for trusting a stranger."

Hiccup shook his head and then turned to the dragon Toothless, who had been watching them carefully from a distance. "Your dragon seems to trust me."

The Hiccup-boy shrugged. "That's good enough for me. Toothless has pretty good judgment when it comes to meeting new people." He smiled and reached over to scratch the dragon on that spot that dragons loved to be scratched on. Night Furies purred like a cat, Hiccup noticed. A new species of dragon meant new traits to be documented for future reference.

The two boys paused for a moment to enjoy the tranquility of the situation. Hiccup was honestly relieved. He had fretted earlier that maybe they would not get along. That maybe they would clash from being so alike or so different. It could have gone a lot worse.

"Shouldn't we get back to Snotlout?" Hiccup asked.

"Nah."

xXx

"Do you see him?"

"No."

"You're not looking hard enough!"

"Well maybe YOU should look to!" Astrid turned around to smack Snotlout in the face. "He is, after all, YOUR DRAGON, right?"

"Yeah, but you're in front of me!" he whined.

"I think I would notice a GIANT RED DRAGON flying over the sea!" Astrid was, to put it simply, exasperated. She made a mental note to make Hiccup regret pairing her up with Snotlout in the first place. The East Islands were far. Very far. In fact, they had been flying together for hours without a sight or smell of land.

"It's your dragon's fault!" accused Snotlout. "Stormfly's not a fast flyer! Of course, no one could catch up to Hookfang's incredible speed—" The dragon beneath him suddenly jerked violently, sending him clambering onto Astrid in fear of falling into the icy water below.

Yep. Flying for hours.

Astrid sighed. "Fine. Let's take a closer look." She touched Stormfly's neck gently and led her down to the ocean. The salty spray of the rough waves and loose icebergs soaked the team. He definitely would not be on fire, they assumed.

There had been no islands seen for a long time—no dirt or dust or rock jagging out of the water. Just miles and miles of H2O spread out like a blanket across the horizon. As it tucked the sun into bed, Astrid noticed that it was starting to set.

"We'd better get back to Berk," she concluded. "It's going to get dark soon."

"No!" Snotlout spat over the crashing cacophony of the waves. "We came to find Hookfang and we're not leaving until he's safe!"

"Fine!" Astrid gave in. She knew that each of the riders had a soft spot for their dragons and that she would be heartbroken if she were in Snotlout's place. "We can spend the night at the in the East Islands. Hopefully, they won't set out a search party for us." It's only a little longer, she convinced herself. They were probably almost there.

xXx

"So how's Stoick?"

"Hmm? Oh, good."

The two Hiccups had spent the past half-hour chatting about miscellaneous junk that only you and yourself would find interesting. They swapped information on dragons, laughing at the differences and marveling the similarities. Their conversation started as a tiny seedling, small talk. As it blossomed out from various innocent topics, their discussion was slowly gravitating towards touchier subjects. Like family.

"And Valhallarama?"

The Hiccup-boy looked at him; confused, awkward, and almost sad. Almost sad, but not quite. There was a slightly thoughtful look in his green eyes. "How do you think she is?" he asked.

Hiccup shrugged. If he were honest with himself, his knowledge about his own mother was close to nonexistant; he simply never had the time to get to know her. Sure he cared about Valhallarama, but he knew next to nothing about her whereabouts. Eventually he said, "I assume she's off questing?"

"Yeah," he said. "She's kinda gone."

Hiccup had the feeling of a peach pit being dropped into the depths of his stomach. "Will—will she be back soon?"

The Hiccup-boy took a deep breath. "I doubt it." The implications were understood. It did not really matter that his mother was gone and Hiccup's was not; he still felt the same.

The conversation swiveled in the opposite direction when Hiccup picked up the lighter subject of Dragonese.

"Did you know that the dragons speak their own language back in my world?"

The Hiccup-boy smiled and laughed. It did not seem he was too upset about his "dead" mother—no angst lingered in his attitude. "Really? Is that why you trying to talk to Toothless?" The dragon perked his head up at the sound of his name.

"Yessee," Hiccup responded, making an extra emphasis on the accent. He hardly got a chance to show off his linguistic skills—dragon-speaking was not much of a popular hobby back home.

He said something to Toothless. The dragon looked at him with a look of understanding, not that he could comprehend Hiccup's utterings or respond in coherent sentences. But Toothless gave off the air that he was listening very closely and very calmly.

The Hiccup-boy looked on, bewildered. "That's amazing!" he exclaimed. He had an input of questions—does this language have grammar? what kind of conjugations do they use? does every dragon speak Dragonese?—and Hiccup tried his very best to answer them, enthusiastically.

The depth of the previous moment, the not-so-small talk of Stoick and Valhallarama was entirely forgotten. The two Hiccups were talking about dragons now, and if there is one thing you do not get Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third started on, it is dragons. Both of them learned that day that when tensions rose and fell, there was one thing they could always rely on to keep them level-headed and calm: dragons.

xXx

Astrid was getting used to the quiet. A bit odd, Snotlout being quiet, but not unusual in the moment. The sun-streaked sky was giving way to the dark blue of night. There was not much light around; the stars shown especially bright.

Every odd minute, Snotlout would yawn and Astrid would roll her eyes. Who would have thought he would get tired so easily?

It caught them both off guard—Astrid shouted in surprise and Snotlout (who Astrid assumed was close to drifting off) was suddenly riled out of his half-sleep and let out a high-pitched shriek. The eerie silence of rolling waves and Stormfly's beating wings was abruptly intruded by crashing cacophony of something giant rising out of the ocean.

"What is that?" Astrid questioned loudly, watching waves roll off the monstrous thing. She did not expect Snotlout to respond, and hardly noticed when he let out a barely audible squeak.

It rose up from the depths of the ocean like a volcano. But it was not spewing lava, and looked more like a rock than anything else. It was big and a shade of greyish-purple and at first they assumed it was a ginormous slab of stone that had been pushed up onto the surface of the ocean by an earthquake or another reason, because what else could it be?

Then they saw it open its mouth.

And suddenly Astrid and Snotlout remembered that they lived in a world with dragons, and if dragons (read: fire-breathing, bat-winged, gigantic lizards with weird abilities like shooting spikes and igniting itself) existed, then it was almost a sure fact that other yet-to-be-discovered creatures probably dwelled on the earth as well. Nature sure is weird like that.

It took them longer than it should have (well, they did just have the shock of their lives and were pretty sleepy) to realize, "Oh. Maybe it is a dragon."

It was a dragon indeed and as soon as Astrid realized this, she encouraged Stormfly to get as far away as possible; no one wanted to even see if that monster could produce flames, if it could. Stormfly quickly got the message. She had been having a miniature spaz of her own, making squawking and fluttering her wings excitedly. She did not hesitate to dip down and speed in the opposite direction of the monster.

They landed on a scrappy rock of an island later, exhausted. They would have flown farther, but Stormfly was starting to tire with two passengers on her back.

Astrid and Snotlout didn't say anything. For one, they were tired. For two, they were still recovering from the shock of a lifetime. As they scanned the horizon for evidence that the behemoth of a dragon had somehow followed their tail, they sighed in relief when they saw nothing more than water.

"We should get to sleep here," Astrid stated.

Snotlout made a face. "Here? On the cold, hard rock without a blanket?"

"Well, it's either this or the water. Do you see a five-star inn?"

Her companion grumbled, but gave in. They lay down on either side Stormfly, who took her roost right in the middle of the island. It was chilly, but their energy was drained and they fell asleep quickly, trying to block out the imaginary screams of the monster-dragon from across the sea.

Stormfly, however, never slept that night. And when Astrid and Snotlout woke up the next morning, they found that the dragon that had nestled between them was gone.

xXx

It was only a matter of time before the topic came up. Hiccup was positive it would happen eventually, but that did not stop him from delaying it. He avoided it, damned its presence, but it was the Hiccup-boy who dared to bring it up.

"So about the war…"

Hiccup cringed.

"Has it ended yet?" He looked at Hiccup, genuinely interested and sincerely worried.

The words hung on the tip of Hiccup's tongue, but he dare not speak them. Ultimately, he decided that if he kept secrets from himself, than there was honestly no one he could trust—not his friends, not any allies. In a whisper, Hiccup said, "It's barely even started."

He was not sure if the Hiccup-boy had heard him, for he did not react or say anything. Their timelines, he assumed, were not entirely parallel. Maybe his lagged behind, but it certainly was not the most discernable difference between their lives.

"I'm guessing yours has. The war between Vikings and dragons, I mean. It's ended." Hiccup could not fathom such a conflict ending so peacefully, but from the way Toothless and the Hiccup-boy were so comfortable around each other, how all the dragon riders and their dragons were, he assumed that all tensions between the two species had dissolved a while ago.

"If it's ended already, it was a pretty short war," Hiccup half-joked.

"Are…are you kidding?" the Hiccup-boy finally said. "It's lasted hundreds and hundreds of years, for centuries. If yours has only just begun, ours has only just ended. We—me and Toothless—" he scratched the dragon's neck fondly, who was laying lazily on the bedrock. "—discovered the Red Death's nest and destroyed it."

Hiccup's eyes widened. "And all those dragons?"

"No, no!" the Hiccup-boy said quickly. "Just the Red Death…We had to."

Hiccup mulled this over a bit. "There…there was a dragon I killed when I was ten or eleven years old. Except he was called the Green Death. He, er, exploded from the inside out."

The Hiccup-boy's face twisted at the mental image, but he said, "Yeah, that's what kinda happened to the Red Death. It was the start of the war—lots of dragons under its control."

Hiccup smiled. "Are you sure you're Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third and not Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the First? He did a similar thing, you know."

He shook his head. "I know close to nothing about my namesakes."

"I think you should look into it. He ended the first dragon-Viking war, kind of like what you did."

The Hiccup-boy sat up straight, surprised. "Woah, woah, did you say first war? Are you—are you farther along in the time-stream than me?" He looked horrified at the prospect of "more to come".

Rigidness seized Hiccup's body as he internally gasped. It was clear that he and the Hiccup-boy were born one and the same person, admittedly a bit different in appearance and age and personality. It was now becoming increasingly obvious that their time-streams—their lives—varied dramatically. Hiccup himself had seen war, the metallic ear-scraping sound of two swords clashing, the elated panic that always plagued your mind as an Outcast. The Hiccup-boy was a brave person, which he knew. He had battled with the mightiest dragon ever to be seen and lost a leg in the process. Hiccup's eyes drifted to his left foot, flesh and blood. It was there.

The truth had been floating like a fog over the two Hiccups the entire time, waiting to be plucked and examined. Hiccup had grasped it finally, and once in his hands, found it more horrifying that he had thought it to be. The truth—Hiccup's version of it—had tidied up itself and was ready to be presented to his counterpart in a neat and organized fashion. The only thing holding it back was Hiccup himself.

Because here was a clever boy; sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, a mind that held wonderful ideas and inventions yet to be invented. And Hiccup did not want to tell him that there was a war going on back home, and when asked, "After all this time, what happened?" Hiccup did not want to respond, "Me."

He could just hear the Wodenfang's words whispering in his ear. "It was not your fault." "It wasn't entirely my fault. Some of the blame still falls to me." If he had been a little more mindful…a little more careful…if he had just thought a bit more before making decisions, everything would have gone much smoother!

The answer was simple, for now. He simply would not tell the Hiccup-boy the whole story. It was not lying, per se, but it a half-truth. A deception.

Hiccup but his lip. An action like that went against his moral values. It would be an intentionally dishonest action. Mistakes are made, but the thing is, you learn from them.

He made a decision.

And even though it was potentially at the cost of the Hiccup-boy's trust, opening up the guilt again, it would not be on Hiccup's conscience. If you know what the right thing is, do it.

And he would have. He would have told the Hiccup-boy the whole story, no half-truths or deceptions or anything. He would have told him about what was happening in his world, when the Doctor came running to them (where had he come from on such a small island?) looking much panicked.

I'm sorry for the wait! I'm sorry for the typos! I'm sorry for the plot holes! I admit, I didn't look over this one much before posting it…I just wanted to get it up. But, hey, the plot's picking up! (Yes, there is an actual plot, not just a random meeting between a bunch of characters.) If you see anything wrong with this chapter (again: in a hurry to post it), feel free to tell me in the comments! I'm going out of state for a while, so I might reread it online, but I probably won't edit it for a while. Love you guys! :D