Chapter 15: To Remain Human

They saw it coming. Of course they saw it. Hiccup did not bother to come at them faster than a walk. What were they going to do? Run?

They pulled back from him all at once, like a single terrified creature, the chains snapped taut and held them, there was nowhere for them to go.

Some of them shouted. Some of them wept. One old man was praying, fast and low. Some just stared at him with pure hatred, the ones who still had some fight left in them, hating him with the last thing they owned, for what he was so plainly about to do.

He didn't blame them. He was going to kill them, after all. He would have hated himself too.

He raised his hand.

And he told himself the things he needed to tell himself. That he could not let them go because they had seen his home, and they had seen him, the horns and the slit eyes, the abomination.

That was what the last of those human excrement had called him with his dying breaths.

Maybe he was.

None of the slavers, sorry excuses for humans, were innocent. No one was innocent, not them, not himself, not these miserable slaves. The word innocent had stopped meaning anything long ago.

"I'll make it quick," he muttered. More to himself than to any of the poor creatures.

Because even if it was his fault, all of it, his blindness, the storm, his ship, his island, his hands, it did not change what had to be done now.

Each thought followed the last, and not a single one of them was mad, and that was the thing that should have warned him, if there had been anything left awake in him to take the warning.

There was a girl in front of him.

He let himself see, for a second, before his hand ended the first of them.

She was small.

That was all. Just that. She was small. She had put herself a half-step in front of the smaller ones behind her, which was its own kind of useless courage, and she was looking up at him, and she was so, so small that he had to look down a long way to meet her eyes.

When, he thought.

When had he become so big.

Hiccup had been so small, once. Small enough to hide behind his father's leg. Small enough that the world had felt enormous and unkillable on every side of him.

…

When had this hand, raised so far above he could hardly see, become so wet with needless blood and ready to kill a thing in chains.

A creature that could not run and could not fight and had not even been given the mercy of a weapon to fight back, a thing that could only stand and look up and wait, when had that stopped being the thing he would throw his whole life away rather than do.

His hand hung in the air.

The numbness drained from his eyes, slowly, and with it came the sight of his own hands, red to the wrist, and the faces around him, broken and shackled and starving and powerless, every one of them exactly as powerless as he had been, once, on a different shore, in front of a different crowd that had already decided what he was.

He saw himself in Stoick, his father.

Stoick, who back then seemed so big as he wielded his axe ready to kill whatever sorry thing the fool did not want to understand.

And he saw himself in the girl in front of him. Small, and chained, and powerless, looking up at a monster and waiting for the world to do to her what the world always did. The boy he had been, that he had forgotten he had ever been, stood in front of him now in rags, with his own bloodied hand raised over its head.

"When."

He realized he was crying.

It surprised him, distantly. He had thought there was nothing left in him to do it with. But the salt of it was warm, and it was happening, the tears cutting clean lines down through the blood on his face, and he could not seem to stop them.

Because he was not entirely sure what they were for. For the injustice of it. For the chains, and the begging, and the long parade of frightened faces. For a world that would look at him forever and never once, not ever, choose to understand the thing it saw.

The girl had blonde hair under all the filth. He could see that now, this close. And her eyes, looking up at him, wet and terrified and furious all at once, were green. A clear, hopeful green, the green of a stone he half-remembered from somewhere a very long time ago.

She was filthy.

She reeked of weeks of dark and damp and fear. She was dressed in rags that had given up most of their work, and it came to him, stupidly, through the tears and the blood and the silence, that he had never in his life stood this close to a girl hiding so little of herself, and that he did not know where to put his eyes, and that this was, somehow, the single most mortifying thing that had ever happened to him.

A sound came out of him that was half a sob and half a condemned laugh.

The pain of the one thing and the burning embarrassment of the other would not fit inside the same moment, and the collision of them shook loose a small broken huff of something almost like a giggle, the kind the boy he used to be would have made, and it horrified him, and he could not stop that either.

The ground quaked.

A great rolling boom rolled across the shore, and heat washed over his back, and he did not have to turn to know.

A ball of blue fire had bloomed over the empty galleon, blue as nothing in the natural world burns, and the dry old ship was already going up like a torch. It would never sail anywhere ever again.

Hiccup, at once, lowered his hand.

He stepped back from the girl. From all of them. He wiped his face with the back of a red wrist, which only made it worse, and he turned, and he walked away up the shore, and he did not look back.

Because he had no answer.

Because he could not let them leave, because they had seen too much of him and of his only home. Because he could not kill them, not now, not ever, because if he did that then there was nothing left of him worth the centuries he had been given.

He would not free them and he would not murder them, and there was no third thing, except to leave, and to let them fare however the cold rock and the wide sea decided they would fare, and to not be there to watch it.

So he left.

He was most of the way back to the caves before the sound caught up with him. And it almost did not, because it was barely a whisper.

The roar of the burning ship should have drowned it. It did not. A voice, behind him, thin and cracked and rising over the fire, calling out something in a tongue he only half knew, soft and sharp and foreign, from somewhere far south of anywhere he had ever been. He caught maybe one word in three of it, and none of them made any sense, and he kept walking, and he put it out of his mind.

It was not until he was back in the depths, much later, kneeling at the well with the cold water going red around his naked and miserable self, scrubbing and scrubbing at blood that had already long since dried, that the shape of the words finally came apart for him and let him understand what he had heard.

She had been thanking him.