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It hurt so much to see his son hobbling around. Stoick would rather cut his own leg off, or face a horde of dragons on his own, naked and unarmed. Proper dragons, too, not these new nice ones.
He knew they were the same, but it helped to think of them as different. Sometimes he still wanted to pick up his sword and shield when he turned a corner and saw one. It wasn't logic that made him forbear, or any kind of liking for the scaly beasts.
What kept him from ever acting on the impulse that shot through every muscle, that screamed from deep inside him to kill the thing that might threaten his people, was that it was Hiccup who had paid the price for this peace. It had been too dear to ever risk it.
Sometimes that beast of Hiccup's looked at him with an ironical eye and he thought that it knew, and felt the same.
There was plenty of good to this new order of things. Dragons were a hell of a help when it came time to go viking, but a few had let themselves get put to the yoke as well. A dragon-pulled plow could go through any kind of rocky soil, and the new compost made crops grow like anything, even if the heaps sometimes burst into flames on their own. Haddock swore that one of them, a little one that liked to perch on the front of his boat, had learned how to fish. Certainly Haddock was catching more than he ever had.
Life was good now, and in his darkest moments he wondered what it said about him that he would trade it all to have his son whole again. It made him prouder than he could stand that Hiccup never thought that way, just got up and got on with things. The one time Stoick had tried to talk about it, his son had just shrugged and said, "Toothless and I match now. And Gobber keeps coming up with better and better legs for me."
Stoick had pulled him in for a hug, not able to say anything, and Hiccup had fought his way free, red but smiling. Ruffling his son's hair, Stoick thought that his wife would have been proud, despite how many mistakes he'd made, that he'd somehow raised their son to be such a good man.