Chapter 03: What the Tree Returned

The first thing he knew was hunger.

Not thoughts. Not pain. Not even his own bloody name.

Before any of that there was only a vast and total hunger, older than memory, filling him from the inside the way water fills a sinking hull.

It was the hunger that woke him, and the hunger that made him move, and the hunger that drove his hand up through the white bark for the first time in a length of time he had no way to measure.

The wood gave like dry hay.

His hand broke the surface and met cold air, and the shock of it ran all the way down him.

And Hiccup Haddock, or the thing that had been Hiccup Haddock, dragged himself out of the embrace of the ancient tree and fell to the cavern floor, gasping, newborn, on his hands and knees in the pale unending light.

For a long while he could do nothing but breathe.

His memory was a fog as thick as the one that ringed the island. He reached back into it and found almost nothing: the cove, a smear of red, his father's open mouth, the cold rushing dark of the flight north, the white light leading him down through the rock. And then the tree.

And then nothing at all, a clean blank gap where months should have been, a stretch of time that had simply happened to him while he was somewhere else.

He could not remember the dreaming. He was fairly sure he had dreamed. He was fairly sure, too, that he never wanted to remember what of.

A low, broken, questioning rumble came from beside him.

Thank the gods it did.

Because Toothless was alive and well and that was all that mattered.

The dragon was pulling himself free of the roots much like he had, shaking great drifts of pale bark-dust from his scales, blinking his green eyes at the cavern as though he had never seen it before.

Hiccup understood, looking at him, that the dragon remembered no more of the lost months than he did.

They were both newly woken.

Hiccup's gaze flickered to the pale glowing wood of the tree before settling on the Night Fury's hide. His head still spinning.

"Hey," Hiccup tried to say. "Hey, bud, it's-"

The voice coming out of his lips was wrong.

For a moment Hiccup thought he might be imagining things. He tried speaking once again only to realise that it was, in fact, not his imagination.

It was deeper.

Only a little, but he had lived fifteen years inside the thin reedy pipe of his own voice, had been mocked for it his whole life, knew its exact shape the way you know the inside of your own mouth, and this was not it.

This was lower, and rougher, and it caught strangely on something at the back of his throat, some new resonance that had not been there before.

He put his hand to his neck. And then, slowly, dread rising in him cold and certain, he put his hand to his head.

His fingers found his hair, longer and fuller than it should have been, falling past his human ears, and then they found, rising up out of that hair, hard and smooth and curving back along his skull, the unmistakable shape of horns.

Hiccup screamed.

He had not meant to. It tore out of him in that wrong voice and went ringing up into the dark of the cavern, and he scrambled backward across the cold stone away from his own hands, away from his own skull.

Toothless was at his side in an instant, keening, pressing close, and Hiccup clung to the dragon's neck and shook and could not stop shaking, because his hands were still on his head, and the horns were still there.

And they were his, growing out of his own living bone, and that was not possible, that was not possible, that could not be.

"Water," he said. His voice broke on it. "I need... I have to see..."

He found the pool at the back of the cavern, where a thin thread of meltwater came down the black rock and gathered, still and dark and mirror-flat.

He knelt at the edge of it.

For a long moment he could not make himself look down. Then the hunger turned in him and the fear, and he understood that not looking would not change a single thing about anything, and he leaned out over the water and looked.

A stranger looked back.

The bones of the face were his, or at least he could find himself in them, the way you can find a child in the man he grows into.

But everything laid over those bones was wrong. His hair had gone black. Not dark; but pitch black, the seamless light-drinking black of a Night Fury's hide, falling now around a face gone lean and sharp and a little too still.

And from his brow rose the horns, two of them on each side, swept back along his skull in a small dark crown, the exact shape and curve of the crown his dragon wore.

The skin beneath had gone pale and smooth, bloodless as birch bark, scoured clean of every freckle and forge-scar of fifteen Berk winters.

And then there were his eyes.

His eyes were the worst of it. Because they were still green. Still, recognisably, his mother's green, the one thing of his he had ever been told to be proud of.

But the round dark pupil he had looked out of his whole life had drawn itself thin and vertical, slit fine as a blade, and as he watched, the slit of it widened a fraction in the dimness, the way a cat's eye opens to the dark.

And Hiccup understood that he was watching his own eye behave like an animal's, and his stomach turned over, and he had to grip the edge of the basin to keep from being sick into his own reflection.

He had seen those eyes before.

Never in a mirror, never once in his own face, but he had spent weeks in a cove learning every shift and slit of them in another skull entirely.

Yes, the eyes staring back at him out of the water were, to the last fleck, those of death and the night itself.

Hiccup did not resemble a human anymore.

Yet he was not a dragon either. A dragon he could almost have borne, for there would have been a clean sense in it, one shape traded honestly for another.

However, the thing in the water was neither. It was a boy wearing a dragon's crown; a boy's green eyes drawn to slits; a man's voice he had never grown into, rising out of a face scoured pale and other.

A monster, in the oldest and plainest sense of the word, the sense his people used in their fireside tales to mean a thing that should not be.

The miracle of his survival was no miracle at all, and the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to click together.

The slits of his eyes flickered to the soft glowing bark of the tree.

Healed was the word he reached for, because it was the only word he had, and he was a day old in this body and guessing at everything.

It was the wrong word. He was still bleeding.

Whatever it had actually done, it had taken his dying body and made, out of the parts, something else.

It was a curse.

The word came to him as he stumbled away from his own reflection.

His eyes found again the massive thing.

Because tree wasn't the word. This thing was no tree; it resembled more an animal than anything else. Its long branches had not a leaf in them, and if he looked close, he could see them move and turn and twist.

Pale and patient in the heart of the cavern, throwing its cold white light over the roots that had drawn him down and the bark that had closed over his head.

For one long moment Hiccup looked at it with something very near hatred.

He could burn it to ashes.

The thought came whole and oddly calm. He had a dragon not thirty feet away who breathed fire on command, and he could have the thing that gave birth to this abomination reduced to a column of ash before the light finished leaving the sky.

The urge sat in him, steady and cold, for the length of several breaths.

Then it thinned and vanished as fast as it had come and his slit eyes lost the ire in them.

Because it was that exact line of thought, to burn and hack and kill anything that was not understood, that made the people of Berk willing to strike at a defenceless fifteen-year-old.

That realisation disgusted him completely and utterly, to the point the matter of his cursed appearance seemed trivial in contrast.

More so because under the hatred, quiet and traitorous but right nonetheless, lay the knowledge that the tree had not let him die when it so easily could have.

Hiccup did not burn it.

But he noted, with a small cold interest, how level his hand had been on the idea.

At some point his eyes had grown used to the soft glow of the bark.

He was sitting on a far corner of the cavern, his back pressed against a ruined stone wall.

His head was a mess. Such a mess.

Everything that happened on Berk dawned on him now. His father and Gobber and Astrid and pretty much everyone that mattered and most of the people he knew.

In fact, everyone he knew.

His life there was over. At this point they must have thought him long dead, bled out in the middle of the northern sea with his dragon.

Even if he made his way back, they would never accept him back.

Not as long as he had Toothless by his side.

In fact, not even if he got rid of his best friend and somehow sailed back to Berk. They would never accept what they saw as a 'traitor'.

And that was fine.

Because nothing had changed, because his people, his friends. By the love of the gods, the very people he had been meant to lead one day as god damned chief.

They had tried their bloody best to kill his best friend.

Hiccup would never return to Berk.

Ever.

He had at least that much self-respect. He was certain of that much.

Still, the issue was not Berk. Berk could burn to ashes for all he cared. The issue was everywhere else.

"Shit."

His hands uselessly struck at his reflection.

The issue was that his life anywhere else was over. His dream of flying away and settling in a town far away from vikings was over.

Settling? Travelling? Beginning somewhere else?

Something between a scoff and a resigned sob escaped his throat.

How the ever living fuck could that happen, if he looked like a god damned mix between a man and a dragon? How?

Hiccup was not human anymore. Even the name felt foreign on his own lips.

He could hide his horns behind a hood or a helmet, he could close his eyes and pass as a blind man, he could blindfold them or mask them and he could smear his smooth unblemished pale skin with callouses and scars. Perhaps then he could be mistaken for one.

But he wasn't.

He fundamentally wasn't.

Because a human did not have slits for pupils and did not come back from the brink of death and did not have any horns, and he had to accept that before he could do anything else.

So he did.

Silently and to himself.

The fear was still there. Vast and real, and the grief was there, for the boy who had died somewhere in the white dark of the tree and not come back up.

But underneath the grief, where he expected only more grief, there was something else. Something flat and steady that looked at himself in the water and simply said, very quietly: So. What else, then?

He shook his head.

No village in the wide world would open its gates to the thing in his reflection; no mother would let this near her children.

Every shore he might once have fled toward was shut to him now as surely as Berk was, and the only door the tree had left standing open was the one he had already come through.

There was nowhere left to begin again.

There was only here and now.

When he climbed to his feet, the world sat a little lower than he remembered.

He had grown, somehow, taller by a hand than the boy who had crawled into the tree, the long bones of him drawn out longer in the dark. Still scrawny, still the same narrow rack of a frame; only pulled taller.

And Hiccup was starving.

To call it a feast would have been a gross understatement.

The island's shores were thick with fish and seals and the dumb fat seabirds that had never in their lives learned to fear a man, because no man had ever come here to teach them, and Hiccup and Toothless fell on it all like a famine ending.

Hiccup ate things he would never have touched before and did not care, he ate raw, he ate until his jaw ached, and the hunger only banked itself down a little and waited for more.

It began the very first night, and he felt it happen.

He woke deep in the depths, in the back of the caves where the light of the stars would not reach, in a black that by every rule he had ever lived by should have been total enough to lose his own hands in. And it was not.

Because at some point the cave lay a little clearer than it had before: the wet seams in the rock, the pale curl of driftwood by the cold fire-pit, the slow rise and fall of the sleeping dragon's flank.

All of it laid out plain in a soft, colourless, silver-grey wash that came from nowhere at all.

It was not light. He understood that even as he stared at it for solid minutes. It was only the way his new eyes had decided to read the dark.

He sat up slowly and held his own hand in front of his face, there in the pitch black, and saw it. Not well. Not the lines of the palm or the dirt under the nails, nothing he could have called detail. Only the shape of a hand where a hand should not have been visible at all.

He could see in the dark.

Barely. Only a little, and only close to, a thin grey clarity that gave him the shape of a thing and none of its detail, and went to nothing at all past a dozen paces.

The way he imagined the dragon sleeping soundly beside him had always been able to. Whatever else the tree had taken from him or given him, it had given him this;

He slept less, those nights, than he ever had.

He would lie down out of habit and find himself still awake hours later, clear-headed and unwearied.

It only took a few nights to realise his body did not need much sleep anymore. The thought did not unsettle him the way it should have.

"I should be dead."

The words felt foreign and wrong on his tongue. They felt like a blatant lie, and yet it was anything but.

The wounds had been deep.

Living around war-obsessed dragon-slaying vikings taught you many things. One of those was that: One did not just recover from the kinds of injuries he had been dealt.

He had seen them, caked in blood, gory, and deep, as he removed his tattered clothes to clean the mess as best as he could.

Wounds infected and re-opened, and even if they were treated correctly, they took time to scar. He had long learned that even the best warriors often succumbed to their injuries.

"..."

The healing was nearly done by the third morning out of the tree, and that alone should have been impossible.

The axe-seam down his forearm had knit itself shut; the shallow cuts and the deep bruises faded in days, clean, leaving skin so smooth and unmarked it was as if they had never been there at all.

Almost.

The left shoulder was the exception, where Spitelout's axe had split past the leather and cracked the bone beneath. The flesh closed like the rest, but the bone under it mended slower, days behind the others and then weeks, a dull heat coming and going beneath the skin.

It did not close clean.

It left a seam, a pale puckered ridge across his skin, and it did not fade that week or the next, and some part of him already knew it never would.

Every other mark of fifteen Berk winters had been rubbed away. This one, the axe meant for his dragon, would stay. The one thing his old life had left on his new body, and of course it had to be a wound.