Sharing my AILESS Whumptober fics again as I edit them! :)
Bloodless
HTTYD - Rating: T - Words: 3,379 - Edits: Fixed some typos and awkward wording, and did some minor formatting changes.
Hiccup is captured by Dragon Hunters and tied far too tightly for far too long, and the consequences are worse than anyone could have imagined.
.
While immensely grateful to be rescued by his friends, Hiccup really wished they’d had time to untie him before making their escape.
He’d spent the past couple of hours tied up in the belly of a Dragon Hunter ship, courtesy of Ryker and his men. They’d taken his leg, and Ryker had personally bound his wrists behind his back so tightly that Hiccup’s fingers immediately began to tingle.
Now, as they finally reached the safety of the Edge, he noted with concern that while his shoulder muscles screamed at him and his arms ached fiercely at their unnatural position, he couldn’t feel anything below his wrists at all. He tried to twitch his fingers and had no idea if he succeeded. His stomach gave an anxious lurch — pain, he was familiar with. He didn’t like it, but he could handle it. Complete numbness toed the line of the unknown and brought with it visions of paralysis and amputation. What if something had gone really wrong with his hands?
Snotlout had to half-carry, half-drag Hiccup to the Clubhouse, as he had only one leg and no hands to steady himself with. Toothless followed behind, a great reptilian shadow, warbling his concern.
“I’m… I’m okay, bud,” Hiccup gasped as Snotlout deposited him next to the hearth. He watched over his shoulder as his dragon nudged his bound hands; an acute panic gripped his lungs when he felt nothing at the touch. “Well,” he amended, “I’ll be okay once these ropes are off.”
Snotlout shifted behind him to get a better look at the knots. “Uh, yeah,” he said, “that’s gonna be easier said than done. You guys need to see this.”
Hiccup’s heart skipped a beat as the others gathered around him. “What?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?” Fear made his pulse pound against his ribcage like a Catastrophic Quaken.
“Oh, Thor,” Fishlegs breathed.
Hiccup felt his breath hitch. “Guys, please — just, just untie me, okay? I… I can’t feel my hands.”
In answer, Astrid sat next to him and placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “It’s not quite that simple, Hiccup. The ropes are so tight they’ve cut into your skin.”
“I’m… bleeding?”
“Yeah,” Astrid said, “but the real problem is that there’s no easy way to cut them without hurting you. Dragon teeth won’t be able to get around them, and the knots are so tight and tangled, it’s going to take a while to undo them.”
“Ah,” Hiccup said blandly, replaying all the times he’d slipped through the Dragon Hunters’ fingers. “I see my reputation proceeds me.”
.
Snotlout’s stomach turned as he watched Tuffnut attack the knots securing Hiccup’s wrists together. The Hunters had used a thin but sturdy cord, and like Astrid had said, they’d wound it so tightly around Hiccup’s wrists that it bit into his flesh. There wasn’t a lot of blood, but the broken skin illustrated how cruelly Hiccup had been treated, and Snotlout had to force down his rage.
What had Snotlout truly concerned, though, was something that Astrid hadn’t told Hiccup about. In fact, none of the gathered dragon riders had mentioned it at all except in hushed murmurs as they watched the twins work.
Hiccup’s hands.
Those deft hands that had crafted an intricate prosthetic tail, a badass, bola shooting, crossbow shield that Snotlout absolutely wasn’t in awe of, an honest-to-Odin flaming sword, and so many other complex, geeky devices that Snotlout couldn’t even name them all…
The hands that were always moving, punctuating Hiccup’s words or fidgeting as he thought, that wrote out elaborate plans and sketched insanely detailed dragons in that dumb sketchbook he never left home without…
The hands that drew up blueprints and created stupidly accurate maps…
Those hands now looked more like they belonged to a corpse — stiff and swollen, a sickly white, nimble fingers puffy and limp. And hearing that Hiccup couldn’t feel them at all? Well, Snotlout didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he knew it couldn’t be good.
Fishlegs had insisted Hiccup lie down for this, arranging a pallet on the floor so Hiccup could lie on his stomach and rest while they untied him. And since the twins had so much practice with tying and untying (mostly tying, though) knots, they’d volunteered — actually volunteered, of their own volition — to do the honors.
For once they worked in near silence, only muttering between themselves as they crouched over Hiccup, long, agile fingers working the knots. They took turns, switching out every couple of minutes or so. They actually hadn’t been lying about being good at this, but it was still taking far too long for Snotlout’s liking.
Hiccup also kept quiet as they worked, just leaned into Toothless who curled protectively beside him, but Snotlout could feel the waves of tension rolling off him. It wasn’t just the way his arms had been wrenched behind his back, his shoulders held in that uncomfortable position for hours, his upper back pinched — even Snotlout, who Fishlegs had once described as having “the emotional intelligence of a dead cod,” could see the terror oozing from Hiccup’s every pore. And though he would never admit it, even to himself, that scared Snotlout more than anything.
Say what you want about his weed of a cousin — that he was scrawny, weak, bossy, a know-it-all, annoying, stubborn as all Hel — Hiccup, the kid who had battled a behemoth dragon at fifteen and won, was as close to fearless as a Viking could get.
If Hiccup was scared…
After what felt like days but had to be closer to ten minutes, Ruffnut gave a shout of triumph and shot to her feet. Snotlout watched, queasy, as Fishlegs carefully pulled the blood-crusted rope away. Hiccup didn’t so much as flinch, which was bad, because Fishlegs had to peel the rope out of the grooved flesh, and it should have hurt.
Slowly, Fishlegs helped Hiccup sit up while Astrid maneuvered his arms in front of him, placing those dead-looking hands in his lap. Hiccup groaned through gritted teeth as the pressure on his shoulders and back eased. Snotlout figured he’d be sore for a while. He knew from unfortunate experience that muscles held in the same position for too long cramped like Hel for days afterwards — thanks, Speed Stingers, for that lovely lesson.
Snotlout averted his eyes when Astrid placed a hand on Hiccup’s cheek; the friendly gesture seemed somehow intimate in a way Snotlout couldn’t quite understand.
“Thanks, guys,” Hiccup breathed, strain etched in every contour of his body, pain scribbled in the crease between his brows and the tightness around his eyes. “I won’t question your choice of Loki as your patron ever again.”
Tuffnut rubbed his hands together in gleeful anticipation. “So does that mean we’re allowed to blow Snotlout up all we want and you won’t yell at us for it?”
“No!” everyone but the twins intoned, Snotlout’s voice in particular louder than anyone else’s.
“Boooo-ring!” Ruffnut booed.
A small smile played at one corner of Hiccup’s mouth, and despite everything, Snotlout thought for a moment that it would all be okay.
Then Hiccup winced, a finger twitching. “I… I think I’m getting some feeling back.” He didn’t sound super thrilled about it.
“That’s good, right?” Snotlout asked tentatively. No one answered, just stared at Hiccup’s swollen, pallid hands. “Right?” Snotlout demanded.
Fishlegs knelt in front of Hiccup and lifted one of his hands, turning it palm-up as he considered.
And Hiccup screamed.
.
It all happened so abruptly, Hiccup felt like he had been plucked from one world, a world of dark and terrifying quiet, of so cold it’s numb, of disquieting nothingness, and thrust into a world of painpainpain, of thousands of Fireworm dragons swarming on exposed skin, of sensations compiling on sensations, loud, buzzing, stabbing, screaming—
He had hated the lack of feeling. But now he wished it would return.
After a few minutes — or it might have been hours, days, for all he knew — the pain subsided just enough for him to return to himself, and he realized belatedly that he had been the one screaming. His face was wet with tears he hadn’t even known he’d cried, and as he blinked through them, he saw his friends gathered around him, all pale faces and huge eyes and trembling hands.
When he spoke, his voice came out thin and cracked. “What…” he panted, squeezing his eyes shut against a wave of pain, “…in Thor’s name… did you do to me?” Beside him, Toothless whined, and Hiccup felt his heart break a little at the desperate sadness in his best friend’s eyes.
Meekly, Fishlegs raised a shaking hand. There were tears in his eyes. “I moved your hand.”
Hiccup swallowed back a gasp of pain when he tried to twitch his fingers. “And?”
“And nothing!” Snotlout snapped. “He picked up your freaky little hand and you just…” He trailed off, and Hiccup knew it had to have been almost as bad to watch as it had been to experience, because Snotlout almost never found himself at a loss for words. He glanced down and got his first real look at his fishbelly white hands, all stiff and swollen, and he immediately understood Snotlout’s accurate, if insensitive, description of them.
Panic mingled with pain and a parade of bleak futures raided his mind — he’d never seen hands like these attached to a living person. What if, somehow, his hands had died? What if he lost them too? His stomach rolled and bile rose in his throat. Gods, his hands were his life, his work, his craft. If he lost both of them now… he shuddered.
“It was terrifying,” Astrid said, dragging Hiccup from the horde of what-ifs. As he regained some control, Hiccup became suddenly very aware of how closely she sat to him, how one hand rested on the curve of his neck, the other on his right arm. “You would’ve thought we were torturing you.”
Hiccup took a shaky breath. “That’s what it felt like.”
“Well, it was the most uneventful torture I’ve ever seen,” Tuff scoffed. “Usually there’s knives and whips and stuff but this was just…” He glanced at Ruff, who took his hand and lifted it to eye-level. “That,” Tuff finished. “It was that.”
Everyone stared open-mouthed at the twins for long moment before turning their attention to the more pressing issue, placing the question of when exactly Tuffnut had seen actual torture on the collective back burner.
“Fishlegs, what is going on?” Astrid asked, electric blue eyes fixed on their resident healer with an intensity that could fry an egg from ten paces.
Fishlegs chewed his bottom lip before answering, a sure sign of bad news. “Okay, I’ve never seen this done, but I know from studying under Gothi that when performing an… an amputation—” His eyes twitched the slightest bit to Hiccup’s leg, “—healers will tie something — a rope, a strip of strong fabric — above where they plan to cut. The tightness of the rope stops the blood flow to keep their patient from bleeding out.”
Hiccup tried very hard not to think about this in relation to his own missing limb.
Fishlegs continued, “And Gothi even told me that the same principle applies to slowing bleeding on bad arm and leg wounds. You tie something tight above the wound to slow the blood flow until you can sew it up or cauterize it.”
“I don’t get it,” Ruffnut announced, to the surprise of absolutely no one. For once, though, everyone else seemed to be trying to figure out exactly where Fishlegs was going with this, too.
“So… how does this help us figure out how to fix Hiccup?” Snotlout demanded. “He’s not even bleeding anymore, genius.”
“He’s getting there, Snotlout,” Astrid snapped. “Slowly,” she added, shooting Fishlegs a sharp look, “but he’s getting there.”
Catching the hint, Fishlegs hurried to finish his thought. “The thing about this method is that you can’t leave the binding on for too long. If the blood supply is cut off from a part of the body for too long, the affected area can basically, well, die. Gothi said there have been men whose hands or feet have fallen off because of this.”
A ghastly silence.
“But don’t worry — we obviously got the ropes off before it got that bad.”
“So, Hiccup’s hands aren’t just going to magically fall off?” Tuffnut clarified, sounding vaguely disappointed.
“No,” Fishlegs answered, throwing a venomous look Tuff’s way.
Tuff shuffled his feet. “Just checking.”
Fishlegs rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I don’t know exactly how to deal with Hiccup’s, uh, unique situation, but it stands to reason that elevating his hands would allow gravity to get the blood moving from his hands to the rest of his body. It should relieve all that pressure that’s built up. Theoretically.”
Biting back a cry of pain as an abused muscle in his shoulder contracted, jolting his burning hands, Hiccup gasped, “It… it’s worth a try.” His stomach twisted at the thought of moving his hands again, but he relaxed slightly when Toothless trilled and bunted his side.
Hiccup took a deep breath, fighting desperately against the urge to curl up in a protective ball around his hands. He knew in his gut that Fishlegs was right, that the way to recovery lay not in avoiding the pain, but fighting right into the very heart of it. He tried to raise one hand, choked on a yell as the small movement sent splinters of agony through the appendage.
“Guys,” he groaned. “I don’t think I can do this by myself.”
Without hesitation, Fishlegs took one hand and Astrid took the other, while Toothless moved behind him to support his back. Snotlout and the twins gathered close, offering their support by being there, by taking this seriously, by being willing to do whatever it took to make Hiccup better. It meant everything to Hiccup, and he made a mental note to tell them once this nightmare had ended
Bracing himself, he nodded at his friends and leaned back into Toothless’s flank. Astrid and Fishlegs raised his hands to his heart and held them there.
Hiccup screamed, sobbed, trembled as the unbearable pain enveloped all his senses — but he didn’t pull away from the hands holding him steady, didn’t fight the new hands that braced his arms and rubbed soothing circles into his back. He faced the pain the only way he knew how: with reckless abandon, sheer desperation, and the solid reminder of the ones who believed in him, with the assurance that no matter the outcome, he wouldn’t have to face it alone.
.
Over the course of the next hour, Hiccup experienced pain worse than anything he had ever suffered before — including after his amputation. It was like every nerve in his hands and wrists had sprung to unholy life, thrashing against his skin, flaying him alive, burning like Changewing acid through flesh and bone. The willow bark Fishlegs sent Snotlout to fetch didn’t so much as touch the pain. A couple of times he felt himself detach from his body, drifting toward the shores of unconsciousness, but then the pain would surge and he would jolt awake, wishing more than anything to sleep.
He sat there, supported on all sides by his friends, his dragon’s warm body, rumbling with comforting purrs and trills, flush against his back. He endured the pain, somehow, even though in the moment, death seemed like a kinder option.
At long last, the agony lessened, faded into what he would later only be able to describe as aggressive tingling, like he was being poked all over with a sewing needle.
His ears rang and his head swam and he felt himself succumbing to sleep at last. As he faded away, he felt — he felt! — someone touch his hand. “Look, the swelling’s going down,” he heard someone say, and he thought it might be Fishlegs. “His color is coming back!”
“So he’s gonna be okay?” Astrid’s voice sounded strange — more watery than usual. Hiccup vaguely wondered why.
“I think so. I think it worked.”
The sounds of exhausted laughter mixed with tears, of Toothless’s triumphant rumble, so deep in his chest Hiccup felt it more than heard it—
These mingled with the strange feeling in his hands, the softness of the pallet beneath him, the warmth emanating from the fire, the small, calloused hand on his brow.
Hiccup flexed his fingers as the darkness took him, just because he could.
.
After Hiccup finally fell asleep — or lost consciousness, none of them were really sure — the riders sat back, pale and shaking. Toothless occupied himself with gently licking sweat and tears from his rider’s face.
No one said anything for a good long while.
Snotlout eventually broke the silence, his voice hoarse and eyes suspiciously bright. “That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
The others murmured their assent.
“I need to clean and wrap his wrists,” Fishlegs said eventually, rising to his feet to collect his supplies. “The last thing he needs is an infection.”
After he had gone, Snotlout watched Astrid arrange Hiccup’s hands at his sides. She let her touch linger, an abnormally soft expression stealing across her face for a heartbeat.
Snotlout looked at his cousin’s hands. They looked like Hiccup’s hands again, mostly. Not so puffy and pale. Like he could wake up and start tinkering on a new project.
Snotlout closed his eyes as a wave of emotions — raw, so tangled up he could scarcely understand them — crested over him, settling so densely in his chest he couldn’t breathe.
“Next time I see Ryker,” Snotlout said, voice hollow, “I’m going to kill him.”
No one argued. Snotlout stayed by Hiccup’s side with the other riders while Fishlegs treated the wounds on his wrists. He carried a limp Hiccup to his hut, under Toothless’s careful supervision. Snotlout settled him on the bed and gently removed his boot and, after a moment of hesitation, his metal leg. Hiccup always took it off when he slept in his hut, and Snotlout knew he’d be comfier without it. Toothless settled on the floor by Hiccup’s bedside rather than heating his sleeping stone at the foot of the bed. Toothless lay his head on the edge of the bed and watched his human sleep with half-lidded eyes.
Snotlout looked down at his cousin, so small, and the echo of screams rippled through his mind. After a long moment, he left the hut, where the other riders had gathered.
“I could’ve done that,” Fishlegs said.
“I know,” said Snotlout.
A beat.
“He’s gonna be okay,” Tuff said, more earnest than Snotlout had ever heard him.
“Of course he will.” Astrid said it defiantly, like a challenge, to her friends or the gods or the Norns, Snotlout didn’t know.
“We should go,” Ruff said. “Right?”
“Yeah, he’s completely exhausted,” said Fishlegs. “He’ll probably be out for a while.”
“Okay,” said Astrid. “Let’s go back to our huts, get some rest. Toothless will let us know if he needs anything.”
.
When Hiccup woke up the next morning, he ached like he’d just crash-landed Toothless on rocky terrain, his bandaged wrists screaming at him with every move he made. But his hands, while a bit weaker than usual, were no longer stiff and swollen. It would take time to get them back to normal, but he was confident now in his recovery. Despite the pain circling his wrists, he reveled in every curl of his fingers.
He left his hut, an overjoyed Toothless in his wake. Hiccup stepped back in surprise at the sight that greeted him: All of his friends, fast asleep, curled up outside of his hut, backs against the uncomfortable outer walls. Even Snotlout, head back, mouth wide open, drool trailing down his chin.
Keeping vigil, staying close, making sure they would be right there if he needed anything during the night.
For him.
Hiccup shook his head in bewilderment, unable to keep a bemused smile off his face. He scratched Toothless under the chin, ignoring the pain in his wrists, and lowered himself down between Astrid and Snotlout, resting in the knowledge that however difficult and painful the road ahead, he wouldn’t have to face it alone.
"The Jedi imposed a false dichotomy and binary of light vs dark"
sorry you mean the basic worldbuilding???? the very basic binary that Lucas invented the Force to have ??? that binary????
The core of the Force–I mean, you got the dark side, the light side, one is selfless, one is selfish, and you wanna keep them in balance. What happens when you go to the dark side is it goes out of balance and you get really selfish and you forget about everybody.
After their road trip (see Strikers), Makoto took Haru aside to correct Haru's bad driving habits. Had to enlist Sae's help as well since Haru's case was simply that helpless.
Once she's finally safe to be on the road again, Haru and Makoto tend to take turns driving taking the rest of the team to pick up Ren/Akira and 'kidnap the willing back to Tokyo'.
Haru tries to teach Futaba when it's the gremlin's turn to learn. Everyone disliked that idea and vetoed it.
Some fluffy goop I wrote almost five(!!!!) years ago. Now includes music, because that's something I've figured out how to do in Ao3 fics
The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us. The night should be a time of peace and tranquility, a time to relax and be calm. We have need of a soothing story to banish the disturbing thoughts of the day, to set at rest our troubled minds, and put at ease our ruffled spirits.
And what sort of story shall we hear? Ah, it will be a familiar story, a story that is so very, very old, and yet it is so new. It is the old, old story of love.
"Our parents' ship went down in the Southern Sea six years ago."
"The Southern Sea? Pardon me, your Highness, but you must be mistaken. Six years ago, the King's royal ship appeared at the northernmost beach of this forest."
"Wait, WHAT? Mother and father's ship, here? Are they...are they...?"
"I'm sorry your Majesties. It is a shipwreck. You'd better come see for yourself.
