Reverse Httyd AU (Hiccup and Toothless swap injuries :))

Hey!

Your order of headcanons seem to go a little different than mine, which is fine! Just be prepared I guess that while the gist of the story stays the same for the both of us, we might have dreamed up individual details! Thank you for engaging with this, it makes me refine my thoughts and keeps me open to cool things that I might not have been able to come up with! For example, when does Hiccup return to the village in your mind? It sounds like Toothless is staying in the woods at first while Hiccup goes home. I on the other hand had wanted to drag out the ‘Hiccup going home’ part for as long as possible haha! But I’d be interested in hearing more!? Do tell O_O

In my version, I think Hiccup has no choice but to cauterize his wound himself, actually. There might be a burning piece of something left after Toothless fires a plasma blast at Hiccup and flies off, or, alternatively, Hiccup is able to make a fire and take care of his wound with it. I don’t think Toothless is around yet when the necessity to cauterize arises - Hiccup must act fast since he’s bleeding out and I imagine it’s the screams of pain that draw Toothless back in, making him think “oh shoot what did I DO to that fleshbag!??”

Afterwards, yep, that’ll be pretty traumatic. Hiccup will have to deal with the immediacy of his injury at the same time as he is trying to keep a weirdly-behaving Night Fury at bay. They’re not friends here yet, and Toothless hasn’t really got the chance to feel guilty or something because Hiccup doesn’t let him see the pain yet. Hiccup is trying to defend himself, while Toothless is sort of trying to assess what the human is doing and what he needs and how he can be helped.

I do believe that there are several attempts to return Hiccup to the village pretty early on… all for different reasons and with different outcomes. The first one will fail because Hiccup is too weak. The second one will reveal that it is impossible for Hiccup to go back without exposing Toothless and causing him to be killed by the villagers in revenge for hurting Hiccup’s leg. At the third try, Hiccup will ask Toothless “not yet”. Because by then, he’s come to understand the life of dragons, and he has become their friend, and he just wants to stay a little longer while he can.

I agree that Stoick should totally be away on the quest for the dragons’ nest at the time this story takes place. It’ll make for a nice parallel, and it will also keep Hiccup’s activities safe. Gobber and the Berkians will most definitely scour the island day and night for Hiccup, but it might be more on Hiccup’s part that he doesn’t know about it at first (while he is sick), and then decides that he doesn’t want to be found yet, for Toothless’ sake.

If you’ve read through every hc I ever wrote about this lol, in my head it’s Astrid who traces Hiccup down and reconnects the AU back to the original plot. What do you think about that?

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR THOUGHTS!!!

Have you seen this little shitty animatic I made?

This is pretty much how I imagine their first flight going. Hiccup gets frustrated over his wooden prosthetic… over how slow it makes him, over the pain it gives him, over the forced patience he needs to exert while resting and healing. It takes so. much. time. So Toothless decides to gift him the wonders of flight.

I think at this point it’s less about the anxiety of Toothless leaving, because Hiccup has accepted that the dragon is sticking around for some reason. They have forged a fragile yet beautiful bond by now. However, Hiccup always worries that since Toothless has to keep flying around Berk to hunt food for him and the like, he will be discovered and killed for good this time. And then Hiccup will have lost a friend, and be stuck on some cliff (or in the cove).

Hiccup is kinda chilling with Toothless on purpose, since this is the first time he feels accepted somewhere. The peace is overwhelming to him. If he goes back, he’ll have to explain to everyone else what happened to him, and they might not believe him without seeing Toothless… but in taking Toothless with him, he’d put his new friend in danger. It’s kind of Valka’s arc but with the definite intention of going back somehow… Hiccup just hasn’t figured out how.

All he knows is that he has been altered forever - in more than one way. And he cannot explain any of it to his Dad. Hiccup thinks to himself, while his father is away at sea, this may buy him some time. So that could be why he doesn’t attempt to go back at first.

Thank you for your lovely ask and for letting me ramble aaaahhh this is so fun! I’m only now realizing the potential of how tender and vulnerable this story has the chance to become.