A/N: Aftermaths aren't always easy, and the sorts of things these kids went through would be haunting. I decided to write these follow-up snapshots while I was still halfway through the first set, and now here they are. They don't outline everything I have in mind and are more narrative glimpses into their minds than actual scenes, but they are something at least.

If anyone wishes to offer a prompt or a request based in this AU world - before the game, during, or after, with any characters involved - I wouldn't be averse to writing more drabbles or snippets as inspiration strikes. I can't promise I'll take every request or that those I do pick up will go exactly as you might have thought or expected, but I can give it a shot and add it to this fic as though it were a themed one-shot collection. So please, review and let me know what you thought and if there's anything you're curious to see in addition to what has already been shown. :)

They woke on hospital beds five days after the start of the new school year, bodies weak and wobbly with half a summer of inactivity, minds confused and clouded with the sudden change of circumstance. Doctors and nurses came and went with questions and tests and promises that they'd be out soon enough, off to whatever physical therapy was required and expected only to call if anything unexpected happened.

Thousands had fallen into the game's trap before anyone realized anything was wrong, and thousands more had followed who had not heard the first warnings broadcast or else thought them false. Thousands had woken up all across the world, all of them remembering little of the experience save vague moments and feelings, like it was nothing more than a dream.

Six in the small town of Berk had lived the dream and remembered it clearly. Six had spent that time reaching for reality. Now they had it, with relieved families, soft beds, regular meals and baths whenever they felt the need for one – all the things they had missed in the game, whether in the privacy of their own minds or else loudly lamented while trying to sleep on the cold, hard ground yet again. They were free once more, free to live their lives without being hunted, to call a single place home and to let their attention linger on subjects other than base survival.

It was all the safety and the familiarity they had craved for nearly two months, everything they knew was Right underneath the game's illusions and lies. They were not rogues or warriors or guards or shopkeepers or outcasts – they were students, athletes and chess club members, sons and daughters and, ultimately, normal modern teens. They always had been.

So why, they wondered, why did home feel so foreign and strange?

He thought he'd feel relief.

In the game he had been a wanted man – innocent, but wanted all the same – faced with the prospect of swift execution upon capture if not death on sight. He had survived by the skin of his teeth at times, by running, by fighting, or by sticking to the shadows, under cover, well beyond the sight or notice of every living thing around him.

In reality he was nothing truly of note. The son of Berk's mayor and former chief of police, yes, a gifted student with aspirations of a degree in mechanical engineering after high school, true, an informal apprentice of sorts to a local practicing blacksmith, all right, but nothing people off the street typically knew about. He was as anonymous as one could get in a small-town environment, or so he had thought.

Either the knowledge that he had been trapped in That Game was proving to be both wide-spread and irresistibly fascinating, or else he had never realized how much attention he truly garnered, because suddenly there seemed to be eyes on him everywhere he went. They made his skin crawl until he could barely stand it, until he was so wound up that the slightest touch, the smallest sudden movement in the corner of his eye, made him want to bolt, weakened legs be damned.

The first day back at school had been hell.

Seats had long since been claimed if not assigned in every class. Government wasn't so bad; he might have been assigned to the front row, but he was also in the desk nearest the door, and something about knowing he'd have a head start out of there should anything happen was comforting. Advanced Calculus placed him toward the back and along the edge near the second story windows – less of a comfort, but something at least.

And then there was English. English, where the only empty seats left were surrounded on all sides, too far back from the door and too far away from the windows. Hiccup froze upon receiving the assignment, cataloguing escape routes in an instant and realizing that no matter which way he went he'd have to get past at least three or four other students just in a direct line across desks, never mind all the others diagonal and adjacent and easily within arms' reach of each path and while he could fight off one attacker, maybe two at a time, they would slow him down enough that the entire room could be on him by the time he got free of the first and twenty was far, far too many, and they were all looking at him.

Then he felt Astrid at his shoulder, Fishlegs just behind him, and he remembered that he was in school, in reality, where no one was armed and no one was likely to attack him, and in any event his friends would not be far away.

It was still hard to walk down the narrow aisle to his seat, hard to pay attention to the lesson when he felt every passing glance prick his skin and every sudden movement flared bright and clear in his peripheral, but he managed.

Managing was, for the time being, the best he had.

If you ever saw reason to ask Snotlout Jorgensen – and if he saw reason to answer – he'd tell you he simply didn't have nightmares. Weird dreams, sure, occasionally featuring monsters from the latest horror flick he'd watched, but he was never actually scared in them, of course. Sleep held no terror for him, oh no; he had nerves of steel.

To admit otherwise was to be less of a man, or so he feared, and so even when he came to school with shadows under his eyes it was just because he'd binged on youtube or video games half the night, with the implication that he'd done this simply because he was a teenage boy and he could – sleep was for the weak anyhow.

It wasn't because he kept dreaming the same dreams time and again. It definitely wasn't because all the nights he startled awake from one he couldn't bring himself to go back to sleep, no matter how far off morning and the shrill beep of his alarm was.

He always found himself back in that game, in his armor and helmet and shield and sword. Sometimes he was an observer trapped and helpless in his own body; sometimes he stood apart, a ghost watching himself like a stranger. Sometimes he actually felt like he was fully in control of his actions, and those were the worst because then he would see one of the others – Tuff, Ruff, Fishlegs, Astrid – and they would smile at him as he approached and he would choose to raise his sword and let it fall on them, one by one, just because he knew that they were traitors and unwanted and he was the stalwart guard, the hero of the city.

And then, when it was done and the dream was all black and white and grey splashed with vivid red and he was screaming at himself because he hadn't wanted this, screaming against the impression – nothing as coherent as a voice – that tried to tell him 'yes, yes you did,' then he would know what was behind him.

He would know, and he would not want to turn around, but he did. Every time, he did. And every time, Hiccup was there. Sometimes he would be still and cold, limp and empty, lying on the ground or slumped against a wall or, once, pinned through the chest to a tree-like scaffold with a sword Snotlout recognized as his own. Sometimes he still stood, pale and bleeding from a cut through his throat or a wound over his heart, looking at his cousin with pleading, accusing eyes.

"What happened to you?" Snotlout asked in some dreams.

You did this, the dream always said, whether he spoke or not, and he would see his own sword in his own hand, blood coating the blade even when it had remained clean and shining silver through killing the others.

You did.

And as the game closed in around him, Snotlout the guardsman, Snotlout the puppet reached out and screamed for help, his friends, his family – someone, anyone – and found nothing which hadn't already been destroyed by his own two hands. Then, just as there was almost no Snotlout left at all, he would wake up, gasping and tangled in his sheets. He would lay still until his breathing grew even and his heart rate calm, knowing that these things hadn't happened (but they could have, and what if, what if…). Then he would find something to do, something to distract himself from the feeling of his free will disappearing and the imagined memory of his own deadly failures staring at him with glassy green eyes.

Sleep was for the weak.

Sleep kept reminding him of how weak he was.

Perhaps if the game had tried to make them into things they utterly weren't, it would have hit them harder. They couldn't be sure, and they didn't really think about it much, but if they'd gotten befuddled to the point where they were turned completely into mild-mannered shop keepers like Fishlegs, or strict and honorable warriors like Astrid, or even just plain semi-responsible do-as-you're-tolds like Snotlout, maybe they'd have come away from the whole experience feeling…something different. Something worse. Something vaguely haunted, like all the rest.

But they hadn't.

The fact was, there wasn't a single thought the game put into their heads that didn't echo something they might've come up with on their own, including the possibilities of turning Hiccup in for a reward which probably didn't exist after all. Oh, they wouldn't have followed through on that one – they didn't, even when it technically wasn't their own momentary urge – but it still could have occurred to them even under normal circumstances.

Spontaneous whimsy was simply who they were, and it didn't count as betrayal when it only happened within the confines of the mind. So while the others dwelled on how easily their true selves had been overridden, how they had contemplated – even for the briefest of moments and not in their right minds – acting the ultimate enemy to a friend, how many things might have gone wrong and how many things very nearly did, the twins shrugged it all off and carried on as normal.

Normal for them, at least, which routinely involved such apparent abnormalities as sneaking into the school overnight and swapping as many teachers' desks around as they could manage before the wee hours of the morning. Thoughts came and went all the time without their direct input or consent and sometimes they were objectively terrible thoughts and there was no helping that, so why dwell when there was beautiful chaos and confusion to foment?

At the same time, they weren't stupid, however they might have acted it, nor were they blind. They knew that for some mysterious, incomprehensible reason, their friends seemed to be having difficulties, as though the game and real life were different enough to require major adjustment.

("To be fair," said Ruffnut, "it was a lot easier in there to get our hands on really destructive stuff."

"A good point, sister mine," said Tuffnut. "Just yesterday I was looking everywhere for my knives before I remembered they didn't come through with me. They would've made it a lot easier to take the pins out of those hinges.")

It wasn't hard to see the discomfort and masked fear the rest of the group felt around crowds, especially Hiccup, who often shrank back as though trying to disappear entirely from sight as he so often had in the game. While his newfound twitchiness would normally have been a tempting prospect for the twins, for some reason they didn't particularly like it.

After some deliberation, they decided that it almost made things too easy. Challenging victories were the sweetest, after all, and anybody that wound up under normal circumstances just wouldn't be in any way satisfying to surprise.

Ergo, in order to have their fun again, they had to get Hiccup – and the others in turn – to relax.

Ergo, they had to make people not look at him.

Ergo, they had to draw attention anywhere else any time he started attracting too many eyes, undoing all their previous hard work, until he got used to things again. Baby steps and all that, right? Slow exposure therapy stuff, like the people on that TV show they only watched when they were bored and there was nothing else on, hoping all the while to see the subject suddenly freak out again.

Regardless of the theoretical stuff, drawing attention to specific places at specific times was something they were not only very good at, but also something that overlapped with subjects they were very passionate about: chaos, panic, and disorder. Also explosions, when possible.

The rest of Berk had no idea why the twins so suddenly stepped up their game, nor did they notice that the most spontaneous and attention-grabbing antics always seemed to occur somewhere deliberately away from the rest of their friends. All anyone knew was that the twins had transformed abruptly from mere major annoyances to wild and unstoppable scourges of nature.

Well, anyone but their friends, who knew them well and were generally as observant as they were, if not more so in one or two cases. For the most part these turned blind eyes – or even mildly approving nods – to the twins' antics. Then Hiccup decided to speak up one day.

"Not that I don't appreciate the thought," he said to them, "but you guys really don't have to keep making things explode just so people forget I exist for a few minutes. Honestly, it's getting distracting, especially at school, and I'd rather not have to evacuate because you burned the whole place down."

"Does that mean he's better now?" Ruffnut wondered after the gangly boy left again.

"Hard to say," said Tuffnut. "I mean, he did almost jump out of his skin the other day when someone yelled 'hey you' in the hall."

"You know there's only one way to find out for sure," Ruffnut said, a devious grin crossing her face. Tuffnut echoed the grin despite having no idea what exactly she had in mind; an expression like that meant he was sure to love it.

The next day he tried a jump scare on Hiccup from behind a door and got a panicked, instinctive, and extremely accurate fist to the face for his troubles. From this the twins decided two things: one, that if Hiccup was capable of that kind of self-defense against merely being surprised, nobody should have any reason to worry about him, and two, that he was probably too much of a bother to try messing with now, unless it was from beyond arm's reach.

They still occasionally made messes elsewhere when he got too twitchy in public. This time, they figured, it was for everybody else's own good.

They had always had their favorite roles in games, given the option.

Snotlout, for instance, was invariably the group's tank. He built the buffest characters, outfitted them with the heaviest armor, and claimed for himself the biggest weapons they came across. There was never any question of it, never any surprise or mystery. Perhaps he was compensating for his lack of stature in real life – an uncharitable thought, but a tempting theory – or perhaps the desire to be the biggest guy on the virtual battlefield was just something intrinsic to his character and had nothing to do with the fact that he was the shortest among them.

The twins were similarly predictable, at least in this one thing: if the game had a rogue, thief, or trickster class of any kind, they would be in it, and they would be robbing NPCs blind and racking up bounties within minutes of gameplay start. Lacking that option, they tended toward whatever would allow them to make the biggest explosions, and not always where the explosions needed to be.

Astrid liked warriors in the middle ground – not as light as rogues but nowhere near as heavy as Snotlout. She preferred a balance between moving fast and hitting hard, defense and offense, and favored weapons and equipment that gave her that balance. She was their knight, their paladin, the precise and stalwart fighter who followed in the tank's wake and provided a second distraction when he wasn't enough.

Hiccup…Hiccup was flexible, light and quick. He played with light armor and light weaponry, at range or up close. When the structure of the game allowed it, he quickly became a jack of all trades of sorts, dabbling in multiple areas without committing solely to one or another. He never racked up enough skill points in any one style to match the more focused individuals, but it didn't matter in the end, because he could do anything which might grant them an edge in a fight. Fishlegs memorized the manuals and could tell you the stats of any boss off the top of his head, but Hiccup could take that information, arrange his equipment accordingly, and then come up with a strategy on the fly for all of them to take it down.

As for Fishlegs himself, he preferred staying out of combat and supporting his friends from afar. He hated it when monsters appeared right in his face, roaring and lashing out at close range. It startled him, made him flustered and, quite frankly, more than a little freaked out. He wasn't a warrior, a ranger, a rogue or a mage of destruction; he was their medic, their cleric, all healing and buffs and cleansing spells. He didn't fight directly, but he did his best to keep the others fighting long past the point they might have reached without that extra aid.

He didn't know how many times he saved each of them in the game. He never even tried to keep count. Administering potions and pilfered single-use spellscrolls, stumbling upon that permanent spellstone for healing and the other for shielding and making such extensive use of both that now, a step back and a world away, it was frightening to remember…

But now they were a step back and a world away. No spells, no swords, no fumbling for magic bottles and corks while a friend whimpered and bled in front of him, no throwing out a desperate spell and praying it would form between an unprotected back and a descending claw in time, praying it would hold.

Instead he watched Hiccup grit his teeth and force himself to bear the sudden anticipatory weight of a world where he could be seen whether he wished or not, where strangers looked at him, constantly casual and without a second thought, but never moved to attack. He saw the signs of Snotlout's bouts of insomnia, the way he stuck close to them all but most especially to his cousin, prowling and watchful as an angry guard dog, as if he had a debt to pay. He noticed Astrid's similar attentiveness, and that the twins' mayhem no longer seemed truly random. He wondered if living the roles they favored in games had caused those roles to follow them back into life. He wondered what that meant for him, if anything, and then he would step up behind Hiccup when their leader anticipated trouble, offering his silent support should it come. He let Snotlout fall asleep on his couch during a group study session and, when he woke up twitching and gasping, pretended nothing had happened. He tried to give Astrid breaks wherever and however he could, and he somehow found it in him to subtly encourage the twins' more…benevolent acts of chaos and destruction.

Fishlegs knew they all needed healing, and he knew that he couldn't provide it himself this time – the potions and spells were all a world away, and these were different hurts regardless – but he would do what he could, and maybe, just maybe, it would help.

She didn't remember being this close to any of them before. They had been classmates, a mixed group of casual friends perhaps, though always on different levels and in different ways from one to the next. They'd eat lunch together more often than not at school, and it was natural enough for them to snag each other for group projects when it was feasible. She'd exchange texts with them from time to time, though there was typically a reason for it on her end. Sometimes they hung out together here or there – pestered each other at part-time jobs, caught a movie, watched TV…played a game.

None of them were outsiders in the group, strictly speaking. All the same, she'd never thought herself to be particularly involved. She had other things to focus on besides leisure time – school and sports and work and more weren't just going to take care of themselves, and she had goals. They were growing up, rapidly approaching the end of high school and realizing that the great beyond was going to require things like applications and tests and forms hitherto unknown.

She didn't have it in her head that she was drifting away from the others. She hadn't made plans to cut ties or anything so severe. Still, when they extended the invitation to play that game, there might have been a vague inkling, a notion deep beneath the surface of thought, that prompted her to accept. Senior year was coming, and she would be busier than ever before. Senior year, and then they would be scattered to the winds for college or work.

Opportunities should be taken while they were there.

And then they played, and everything changed.

Something about running and fighting for each other's lives makes it so that casual friendship isn't an option anymore. You either burn out and break apart, or you fold together and become stronger.

In the game, the group had become stronger.

In reality, Astrid suddenly saw the flaws their trial had worked into her individual friends. These scared her, because if one broke, what would happen to the rest?

The game had rendered her a knight, a protector, a champion. She wasn't sure if this was arbitrary or deliberate. If the latter, she wasn't sure precisely what the Intelligence had based that decision on – her chosen character class, her athletic nature, or some inner quality it parsed in the brief moment it had to override her very mind. In the end, she decided it didn't matter; in reality, she would be what she made herself, and she would make herself their defender, for as long as they needed her.

This was her new goal, her devotion. Day by day, step by step, she made herself ready to catch their stumbles, to ward off the world if she had to. She needed to keep them safe, for all of their sakes. For her own.

Her attentiveness to all else in her life began to slip. Her grades didn't fall, thanks in part to how much time she now spent in study sessions with the others, working hard to keep their focus on the mundane, safe minutiae of schooling, but college and scholarship applications fell to the wayside, incomplete and gathering metaphorical dust. She practiced her sports without her usual competitive verve, and she'd hardly done any volunteer work since they'd returned.

She didn't really notice until Hiccup caught her alone one day, took her hands in his, and said, "We're not in the game anymore. You don't have to risk your life for us."

Hiccup, who still bristled with tense fear whenever anyone so much as looked directly at him, who had startled right out of his seat in a panic when a student abruptly sneezed during a test. Hiccup, who was the one Astrid thought the most damaged of them all, the one she protected most carefully. Hiccup, who looked her in the eyes now and feared not for himself, but for her.

He held her until she had shed all her tears and regained her breath.

The next day she made time to work on applications again, and if she gave special priority to schools in the same part of the country as Hiccup's universities of choice, well, it wouldn't be any loss of hers to be accepted to any of them, and she knew she wouldn't be the only one doing so.

She wouldn't risk her life for them – she would live it with them.