Chapter 01: By a Whim of Fate

Astrid followed him into the woods to prove a point. But instead the whole world had come apart in her hands.

She told herself it was suspicion.

Because Hiccup Haddock could not simply get better.

Someone like Hiccup, Hiccup the Useless, Hiccup the Toothpick, did not simply skip training and vanish into the trees and then somehow come back knowing exactly where to scratch a Gronckle until it dropped like a stone.

There was a cheat in it.

Somewhere.

There had to be.

Because she had built the whole of her life on the principle of fairness.

Because no matter what, cheats got caught, liars got their tongues cut, and dragons got killed.

So she followed him that grey morning fully expecting justice.

Fairness.

For daring to be better than her, for cheating and weaseling and being all cool and aloof about it.

She never found the trick though.

She never would.

She lay on her stomach at the lip of a hidden cove, somewhere deep in the forest. Her fingers digging into wet moss as she looked down at a thing that should not exist in the same world as her.

Night Fury.

Black as the starless sky itself, burning spitting blue fire that danced under the dim lights of dawn.

Night Fury, the unholy offspring of lightning and death.

The shadow that had screamed out from the night over Berk for as long as anyone living could remember, the one dragon no Viking had ever seen and lived to see.

The night fury that had killed so many of their own.

She held her breath and raised her axe from its sheath, her eyes narrowed.

It was a dozen feet below her, black as a hole cut in the daylight, lying on its side in the grass with its great wings loose and its eyes half-closed.

It was defenceless.

Defenseless... Hiccup!

Where was Hiccup? Right, how could she have forgotten. She was following Hiccup and then... She looked from side to side.

Where was he? Gods, she had been following from many paces behind! Was she late? Was it already over?

She had been so focused on not getting noticed!

Astrid looked down in a hurry, searching for anything. A puddle of blood, gore, a few bones, maybe a charred corpse cooking in blue flames and a bundle of bloody clothes.

But she found nothing.

Instead, she found the chief's son was lying on its chest.

Hiccup.

Hiccup had his back to the dragon's ribs like it was a hearth he'd grown up beside and the creature's wings curled around his body and the rise and fall of his chest showed that Hiccup Haddock was very much alive.

She saw him reach out, slow and unbothered and easy, rubbing the soft scales beneath the dragon's jaw.

The deadliest abomination known to man was making a sound Astrid had no name for, a broken rumble that was almost, horribly, a purr.

But how?

The hand that was not on her axe pressed against her mouth, muffling the sound of betrayal on her lips.

Her head shaking in denial.

Was it an illusion, a trick, a joke or a spell?

Were her eyes betraying her?

Was she dreaming right then and there?

Had she finally gone insane?

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

No, she was not.

Because the dragon's eyes drifted shut, and Hiccup Haddock laughed softly at something, and there was no trap in it, no trick, nothing but the most ordinary tenderness she had seen, and that was the thing that ignited her blood on fire.

Not the man eating monster, but the boy's clueless, foolish, suicidal gentleness.

Hiccup was not the dragon's prey, very much not its gods forsaken hunter.

He was its friend.

And THAT could not be. It simply couldn't.

So she took an instinctive step away, took a short breath. She had to sprint away and tell everyone.

But before she could give so much as a step, her boot found a loose rock, and it cracked down the rock face, and everything happened at once.

She fell screaming for her life, and the dragon came off the ground in a single uncoiling motion, faster than anything that size had a right to move, wings flared, lips peeled back off teeth like white knives, a heat building in its throat that she felt in the bones of her face.

And Hiccup spun, and saw her, and for one suspended heartbeat the three of them only stared at one another across the cove: Astrid, Hiccup, and the creature of nightmares between them.

"Astrid!?"

Hiccup's voice came up to her all thin and careful, the voice you use on a spooked lamb.

Both of his hands raised, one toward her and one back toward the dragon, as if holding two impossible things apart.

And at that, the grip around her axe tightened.

"Astrid, wait." He approached; she stepped back. "It's not what it looks like. He won't hurt you, I swear it, just... please, just stay there and let me..."

But it's exactly what it looks like. Fool.

The look on Hiccup's eyes was genuine, she realised. But by that point, she was already gone, and it was already late.

She did not remember deciding to run.

She was simply running, up the rock and over the top and into the trees, her breath tearing, her axe forgotten in her white-knuckled fist, and her whole mind collapsed down to a single word repeating like a struck bell.

Treason, treason, treason.

TREASON.

Because that was the only thing it could be.

The chief had to know. The village had to know. Hiccup the Useless had gone far and beyond what everyone thought possible.

He had hidden a calamity under their noses, and the boy was the chief's only son, and there were no words in the whole of the Norse tongue for how wrong that was.

It was not her fault.

She shook her head and wiped away her tears.

None of it was her fault, none of it. She was doing the only thing she could do. Her duty.

She kept telling herself that the entire way downhill.

She would go on telling herself that, in the dark, for the rest of her life.

Hiccup ran after her until the fire in his lungs folded him over a root, and by the time he could breathe again he knew, with a flat and final certainty, that there was no version of the next hour in which he reached her first.

Toothless came up over the rim of the cove behind him in three earth-shaking leaps.

Hiccup turned around and frowned.

The dragon was wild now, pupils gone to needles, smoke leaking grey from the corners of his mouth as he shoved his snout into Hiccup's shoulder hard enough to nearly put him on the ground.

The meaning was wordless and total.

We leave. We fly. The two-legs are coming.

Now.

"I know," Hiccup whispered.

The frown of his face eased, and he pressed his forehead to the warm black skull. He realised his hands were trembling and he could not stop them. "I know, bud. I know."

We should leave, yes.

He gritted his teeth.

But what if... What if.

His feet did not budge.

He could have left right then. They had wings. They had the whole grey sky above them and a head start. He could have hauled himself into the saddle and worked the pedal and been a vanishing speck over the western shores before a single Viking laced a boot on the forest.

But the saddle was down in the cove. The tail rig, the half-leather contraption of his own making was down in the cove also.

And some smaller, more stubborn, more foolish part of him, the part that was still the chief's son, still the boy who wanted his father to look at him just once and see him, still believed, even now, that he could stand in front of all of them and explain.

That if he only chose the right words and said them in the right order, he could undo three hundred years of this in a single afternoon.

So he went back down for the saddle.

He was on his knees in the grass, hands flying through the buckles of the tail rig when the horns began to sound across the island, one peak answering the next, the familiar war call of Berk rolling out toward him over the trees.

Hiccup did not run.

He should have run.

They came over the rim of the cove like the tide coming in over a man already half-drowned.

Flock of birds took flight, the ground quaking under a hundred boots.

They are here.

Despite his size, Stoick the Vast crested the rock first, because of course he did, because there was no force in the archipelago that put the chief anywhere but the front.

Hiccup took a long breath and turned.

His father's axe was in one fist. The other arm was flung wide to hold the surge of warriors behind him.

His eyes were searching desperately over the grass, down the crevices, and finally, his eyes found the bottom of the cove.

And when they settled on his son, kneeling unharmed and unbound at the very foot of a living, breathing Night Fury, the look that crossed the chief's broad face was not, in its first instant, rage.

It was something far worse, and far softer, and it lasted only a breath before the rage came down over it like a shield, because rage was the only shape Stoick the Vast had ever learned to give his fear.

That's my boy.

That's my boy down there. Why is he not screaming? Why is he not running? Why is the beast not...

The thought would not finish.

There was no possible way to frame what he was seeing into something that made sense.

So Stoick stopped thinking and started roaring.

Because roaring he understood.

"GET AWAY FROM IT!"

His voice boomed across the cove like a falling tree.

There is no way back.

Hiccup came to his feet slowly, both hands rising, open and empty and smeared green with grass, and behind him the Night Fury dropped low and coiled, wings half-mantled, that bone-deep grunt winding up out of its chest again.

Astrid arrived at the chief's shoulder, pale to the lips.

Then Fishlegs, both hands clapped over his mouth.

Snotlout, for the first time in his loud life and silent.

Even the twins, Ruffnut and Tuffnut, who had never in living memory passed up a chance to shove one another off a high place, stood frozen and staring.

The whole of Berk's young blood, ringed along the rock, looking down.

No way back.

I have to do this.

Hiccup took a long breath.

"Dad."

Hiccup's voice hardly climbed up to them, cracking on the single word. The weight of his reality was crashing in.

"Dad, please, listen to me. Just listen, for once in your... he didn't do anything! He saved my life. He's been down here for weeks, weeks, and he hasn't hurt a single soul, he could have killed me a hundred times over and he didn't-"

"Hiccup."

They did not let him finish.

Stoick the Vast was tired. The way he uttered his son's name was as if to stop him from humiliating himself any further.

But Hiccup was too deep already.

There was no way back anymore.

His throat burned as he shouted once more. "Father, it's all wrong, the book, the training, the dragons, all of it," He gestured with his hands. "We- We've had it wrong from the very beginning, they don't want to fight us, they neve-"

"HICCUP!!!"

The thunderous rage in his father's voice landed like the blow of a hammer on his chest, and sound of the birds and the insects and the wind and the whispers all seemed to vanish into deafening silence.

Silence.

Hiccup stood there.

His arms spread and his heart hammering its last hopes against his ribs, for the first time looking up and actually seeing the ring of faces watching him.

Surrounding him. Looking down at him from above.

Old and young, every face he had ever tried, and failed, and tried again and failed again to be worthy of.

And he finally found the right name for the thing in their eyes.

It was confusion.

Not fury, though the fury was coming.

Not even fear, though there was plenty of that too.

Underneath all of it, in every single upturned face, was a pure and blank and uncomprehending bafflement.

They looked at him the way a man looks at an old fool too insane to utter anything more than gibberish and nonsense.

His father.

Astrid too.

Everyone.

The whole frightened, righteous crowd of them. He was standing staring up at them, showing them with his open hands his bare heart that everything their people knew was a lie, and they could not understand him.

Not one of them. Not even a little.

Hiccup gave a subconscious step back. The realisation came then and there and far too late.

Nothing had changed. Nothing at all.

And the fool was him for believing it could have been anything else.

Tears welled on his eyes, his knuckles white.

His voice became weak and cracked and his body felt so small and so powerless and for all his bravado and resolve he had nothing.

He was back to being Hiccup the Useless.

Back to being a kid caught stealing cookies all over again. Because to them this was nothing but another failed invention, another house burnt in flames, another gods forsaken mess for others to clean.

His whole body trembled.

Something had quietly gone out of him, before the axes, which came soon after.

Something small and steady that had burned his whole life, pinched dead between two fingers. Hiccup understood, all at once and far too late, that he had no words they could hear.

That he had never had words they could hear.

That he had spent fifteen years screaming into an impenetrable wall of stone that carried nothing back, and the stone had never, not once, been listening.

"Please," he said anyway, because hope is the last thing in a person to die, and it dies loudest of all.

"Pleas-"

He couldn't even start before a warrior near the back lost his nerve, and threw his axe at the dragon, and at once the cove turned to teeth.

He moved before he chose to.

The axe was already turning end over end through the air, aimed at the broad black target of the dragon's chest, and Hiccup's body did the only thing it knew with no shield or weapon.

"ARGH-GH!"

He put himself in the path and the flat of the blade caught him across the ribs with a sound like a maul on a chicken. The impact drove every scrap of air out of him in a noise he didn't recognise as his own, and folded him into the grass.

The world went white.

"URGH- URGH"

He tried but could not breathe.

He could not breathe, and he made himself get up anyway, because beyond his white vision he could hear the dragon roaring, and he got up, and he got up between them, back to his Night Fury, arms thrown wide, facing the whole of his village.

He was willing to die on this hill.

"STOP-!"

The word hardly tore out of him, high and splitting and childish and it hurt so much. But he did not care.

"He didn't," His ribs flared with pain. "URGH-! he didn't do anything! Look at him! He's not attacking, he's not... if you'd just look..!"

And for that terrible second, his voice tore with enough force that everyone seemed to stop.

For that one second, the cove listened.