Chapter 09: Unexpected Reaction

In the end, it was the tail fin that forced his hand.

He had been putting it off for months by that point, the way you put off a thing you would rather not look at too closely.

Alas there was no putting it off the morning Toothless dived from the cliffs and spread his wings and the rig caught a half-beat late, and they dropped a whooping hundred feet before they wrenched themselves level.

They came down hard, both of them, and could only stand there with the same thought passing between them.

Just a hand's breadth of worse luck and that fall could have broken a wing, or a leg, or snapped them both across the ragged rocks. It would not have killed either of them outright. On an island with no one else on it, that was not much of a comfort.

That was far, far too close.

Toothless's prosthetic was dying.

And it was no surprise.

The surprise was actually how it had lasted this long at all. The thing was only a prototype, a first rough answer to what he used to think an impossible problem. It was built to prove the idea and not much else.

In fact, a handful of test flights was all he had ever meant it to survive. It had carried the Night Fury through a whole winter instead.

He had mended it a hundred times, of course. However, now that he examined it closely it was clear another makeshift repair would not do the trick this time around.

The leather had gone brittle with salt and cold, the iron joints were worn to slack, and the whole of it had been put together by a fifteen-year-old with a stolen handful of nails. So it needed more than mending now.

It needed remaking, properly, in metal, and it needed remaking soon.

The island, for all its wonders, could not give him that.

It had forges, yes. He had counted at least five of them, all ancient and astonishing. Which is to say, any one of them was finer than any other forge he had ever set foot in.

The hearths stood cold and bare. He could not light a coal he did not have, or draw out iron with no hammer to draw it with, or hold the work steady with no tongs to hold it, or melt down an ore that had gone out of the world centuries before he got there.

He let a long hiss of breath out through his teeth.

Hiccup had not decided yet what to do with the centuries in front of him.

The dreams at the palace were a half-formed thing, believed on some days and just laughed at on others, he was no nearer to choosing than he had been on the sanctuary stairs a month ago.

But it made no difference to the problem on his hands.

Dream or no dream, vision or not, the fin was going to break, it was going to do so sooner rather than later, and when it broke it would break for good.

There was not a single boat or raft on the whole of the island, and the northern waters did not forgive swimmers. Not even him.

A dragon who could not fly was a dragon who could not hunt or run or live, and a hybrid with no fin and no boat was a man doomed on a rock at the edge of the world. That was not a thing he could undo later. That was forever.

So it came down, in the end, to something small and immediate. He needed metal, and coal, and tools, and there was only one place left in the world to get them.

He needed to rob someone.

They went out the next night, past the wall of fog, for the first time in many moons.

It was strange to cross it again.

The massive wall of fog had been the whole edge of his world since the night Toothless carried him through it dying, and now they slipped out the far side and the open black sea lay flat and endless ahead, and something in his chest both loosened and tightened at once.

Under the veil of the night the two of them were but a ghost.

They flew high and they flew silent. They left no sound, no shape, only a travelling patch of sky where the stars briefly went out and back.

I know it's not the right time or place for this.

But this is actually so badass.

Hiccup was not wrong. It was badass.

It would have been a different story if he was still human, of course. Without his new eyes he would have struggled to tell the difference between sky and sea, nevermind actually fly.

However, with them nothing could really hide anymore.

"There," he murmured once, his gaze slipping to the right. The low hollow moan of wind funneling around a headland far off to the east, a shape of land where the maps had left only blank water. "Another one."

Hiccup mapped it all in the back of his mind: the currents, the reefs, the scatter of islands the fog had hidden from the world along with his own. Most were empty. Bare rock, seabird colonies, the grey bones of old wrecks.

It took them travelling a lot further away to start finding settlements.

Twice he found fishing villages, small and poor and blissfully asleep. Twice he turned away without a second thought because robbing poor people was a line he wouldn't cross.

It took the better part of a week to find the harbour.

This time he could smell it before he saw it, on a wind off the south: woodsmoke and tar and rot, and under it the particular reek of a place that had too many people living too close together.

It was a crooked little port wedged into a shore on an ugly low island, sheds, longhouses, a stone jetty with three lean ships tied against it.

He took Toothless high and circled it once, reading it by ear and nose from a thousand feet up, and he knew the kind of place it was long before he had the proof.

He had the proof soon enough.

Behind the largest of the longhouses stood a low building with a barred door, and the smell that leaked out from under it was one no man or woman could help themselves but abhor.

The old slaving trade had been put down across the whole archipelago lifetimes ago; the Viking tribes were a great many ugly things, but not that, never that.

Out here, though, past the maps, in the wide and lawless rest of the world, it had never once stopped.

People. Kept like animals. There were cages along the outer wall, the kind you would build for dogs, but the shapes hunched inside them were not dogs or cattle but men, and women, and smaller shapes he could simply not name.

Something turned over in his gut, burning first and then very cold.

Hiccup's jaw had begun to ache. He had been grinding his teeth for a while without realising, and his hands had closed into fists at his sides without him telling them to.

These bastards are fucking animals.

He did not love the idea of going down.

However, turning back now to hunt for a kinder place to rob was a gamble, and he had never once in his life been able to trust his luck. The fin would not last another week.

Hiccup went down that same night.

He went in alone and on foot, a specter moving through an outpost that could not see him.

To the sleeping pirates it was close to pitch dark, yet to Hiccup, the whole of it lay open and clear as day.

All in that silver glow that was not light at all, and in absurd detail: every plank and every rope and torch laid out plain, the torches themselves only useless smudges in a clarity that was wholly his.

So he drifted between the buildings, found the smithy by the smell of cold iron and old coal, and slipped inside.

His heart was going hard and quick, but it was only the ordinary fear, the human one, the fear of being caught, and it would be over soon. He was nearly done.

He had filled a sack with the dull treasure of the place, clean parchment to draw his charcoal on and tongs and coal and good bar-stock and a hammer that sat right in his hand. Hiccup had just turned for the door when it opened.

A man stood in it.

He should have heard him coming. On any other night he would have caught the man's heartbeat from across the harbour, the drunk shuffle of his feet, the slosh of him.

But the rush and the carelessness had narrowed the whole of his attention down into the smithy, down into his hands and the work and the finishing-as-soon-as-possible, and a sense that could hold a third of a massive island could be narrowed just as easily to a single room.

He realised now he had made a fatal yet inevitable mistake.

The man was very big and half-dressed, a torch flickering in one fist, his face rosy and slow to react. He was clearly drunk.

He had probably come out to relieve himself in the night, and what he had found instead was a pair of slit green eyes catching the torchlight the way an animal's do.

For one frozen breath neither of them moved.

Hiccup could have moved.

He was faster than the man by far: He could have been past him and gone before the drunk fist tightened on the torch. But he did not.

He stood rooted.

This was the first time someone looked at him since the pale tree had made this out of his body. This was the first living soul to see what he had become.

The look that crossed his face, once he realised that his eyes were not playing tricks, was one of pure horror, the horror of a man looking at something cursed and satanic.

By the time Hiccup remembered that he could act, the man already had.

The ruffian's face twisted, his hand moved fast and practiced, and he drove a knife up at his ribs before his body had finished deciding to.

The blade met the skin over his ribs and somehow shattered, CLIRK.

The cheap iron burst apart like glass struck with a hammer, and the man's eyes had only begun to go wide when Hiccup's body, with no plan and no time and no thought in it at all, did the only thing it knew.

He hit him.

He hit the man with all he had, he barely felt himself decide to, a panicked half-swing of an arm that did not yet know what it was capable of.

The blow caught the man under the jaw, fine bright beads of blood hung an instant in the torchlight and then spattered the wood, and there was a sound, the wet eggshell give of a skull where no skull should ever give.

The man did not fly across the room the way men do in songs. His body simply dropped straight down all at once, the torch tumbling from his hand, and lay still in a way the living never lie.

The instant seemed to last an eternity.

Hiccup stood over the body with his fist still half-closed. The whole world gone silent and roaring at once.

He had seen men die before.

Being a Viking afforded you that much.

But he had never been the one that made it happen, and now it was done, in the space of a heartbeat, by his own hand with the man's blood still wet on it.

None of it fit inside him.

Not the death. Not the speed of it. His instincts had reached out past his mind and taken a life before he could so much as raise a word against it. He had not been asked. He could not take it back.

He did not breathe, for a moment. He stood and shook.

Then the shouts started somewhere across the harbour, a whistle and a roar and then another, and the old animal fear took him by the neck, he ran. He caught up the sack and went out and up the rocks to where Toothless waited.

He buckled into the saddle with hands he could not hold still, and the failing rig snapped open under his foot, and they lifted off the island and turned north, and he did not look back.

He was a long way out over the black water before he understood what he had done.

The next days he spent in the forge, in silence and the kind of numb detachment you would only see in men returned from the barbarities of war.

He lit the ancient hearth, the first fire to burn in it in longer than he could guess. The old stone took the heat and held it as though it had only been waiting.

He had what he needed now, one way or another. He drew the brittle old rig apart, piece by piece, and hammered out new joints in good iron and cut new fittings and rebuilt the whole of it stronger, lighter, better than the boy who had first cobbled it together could have.

When the rig was done he did not stop, because stopping meant thinking. He cut himself a shirt out of the coarse stuff off the sack and sewed it badly and wore it anyway, the first thing he had put over his shoulders since he fed the last of Berk to a fire.

Then plate and boiled leather for the forearms, because a man in that smithy had put a knife into his ribs and the knife had shattered.

And Hiccup had learned something from it that he did not much like: that he was hard to cut, and that hard to cut was not the same as impossible.

He worked the days and the nights both.

Hiccup had stopped sleeping almost entirely by then, not because he could not but because he would not, because the work kept his hands busy and his mind narrow, a wall to stand between himself and the inside of his own head.

But the wall did not hold the way it used to.

The dead man's last moments came to hunt him every time he let his guard down. In the orange flares of the hearth. In the few still moments no one could avoid. The eggshell sound when his skull cracked under his fist, over and over, the body dropping, and dropping, and dropping.

However, it was not the man that frightened him. It was himself.

It was the way the thing had risen up in him with no permission asked, the fear and the rage and the raw animal need to end the threat, all of it flaring white and final before he had any say.

Self-defence, he told himself, bringing the hammer down hard.

The man had struck first, he wasn't innocent and he would have killed him then and there if his blade had held.

The hammer recoiled as he brought it down again, harder.

It was self-defence.

Down again, and the iron rang and the sparks flew, and none of it was loud enough.

Because he knew it was not the whole truth, the question underneath would not stop turning, and he wondered how much of Hiccup was still human, and how much had quietly become a monster wearing his thoughts.

The answer came the way the worst answers do, and it was not in words.

The vision haunted him. He saw Toothless, in the cove. He was hurt. The tail rig fouled under a boot, his wings useless, a dozen axes rising and falling again and again and again. The deaf righteous faces of them hacked the life out of him, finding delight and glory in it.

Astrid. Stoick. Spitelout.

The dragon was pinned down, and he wailed, and none of it was any use. The sheer agony of the sound was simply unbearable.

Hiccup knew it was no nightmare.

No.

It was simply what would have happened if, by a whim of fate, they had failed to fly away in time. It was as real as his flesh and bone. And there was no way of denying it.

So he hammered harder. He convinced himself it was the work, but it was not the work anymore.

The blows came faster and wilder, the rhythm gone out of them, the sparks leaping off the iron in long bright arcs and the heat roaring in the shut forge.

And he drove more and more of himself into each swing as though he could force the thoughts out through his arm and into the anvil and be free of them.

The metal could not hold against it. The rig, the new one, the thing he had killed a man to build, cracked under a blow and then it shattered, scattering across the stone in a spray of ruined iron and scorching sparks.

And then there was nothing left to hit.

The hammer was still raised, his chest heaving.

The sound of it going was what finally stopped him, and it stopped him in a way nothing else that week had managed.

Six days of work. A man in a doorway with his skull come apart, and a sack of that man's iron, and six days bent over an anvil, and he had ended the whole of it inside one heartbeat because he could not keep hold of himself for the length of a single swing.

He crouched down among the pieces and turned one over, still hot, and made himself do the arithmetic he did not want to do. There was bar-stock in that sack for one more rig. There was not enough for two.

If he lost his grip again over this same anvil, he would have to fly south and kill somebody else for the privilege of trying a third time.

So there it is.

It gets out, and it breaks whatever happens to be nearest, and it does not care in the slightest what that thing was for.

With the outlet gone the thing he had been outrunning finally caught him, and there was nowhere left to put himself but back in that cove.

He was back.

He looked at his human hands, and his old clothes, and he knew what the small breakable boy he used to be would have done in that moment.

He had done it, near enough. He had put his own body in front of the dragon with nothing in his hands at all, and meant, with the last of his blood, to have them kill him first.

He had been ready to die for Toothless when he had nothing at all.

Nothing.

The willingness had never been the new thing in him. Only the power was new.

I wouldn't.

He grit his teeth enough to hurt.

He gathered up what was left of the rig and began anew, and then brought the hammer down again and again, faster, as if he could beat the thought flat, as if enough noise and enough fire could make the world simple again, the way it had been before.

It did not work.

The picture only sharpened, and dragged the real question up out behind it.

What would he do now? Not the boy he had so obviously ceased to be. But him. If he stood in that cove tonight, with this body and these hands that were so quick and willing to kill, and watched the axes come down on Toothless.

He knew. He had known since the smithy floor.

Hiccup would do it all over again. He would throw himself to die and he would beg and cry and roar and try all over again, to change their minds.

And yet, it would never work.

They mauled, they hacked, they were ready to burn it all to the ground. Hiccup was willing to stake his life to change their minds. All over again. Selflessly. Uselessly.

Until at some point he would cease to try. He would not spend his last breath begging for his friend's life.

So he just waded in, he didn't have any blades and he didn't need them. His hands simply took them apart, one by one, every last screaming one of them, and he would leave the grass a lake of blood and gore, and stand in it red to the shoulders if necessary.

All that would remain is the torn corpses of everyone he had ever considered family, and he would not be able to stop, and some buried part of him would not ever want to.

He would kill them.

In the end. As easily, and as willingly, as they had once tried to kill him.

He set the hammer down. His hands were shaking.

He had to cast the whole of it away, because the truth of it was too much to look at, because that thing was not a thing he could stand to be, and he did not recognise it as himself.

It did not mean what it seemed to mean, he told himself.

It was a horror dredged up by a long winter and a memories of a past that would never be, a thing that had not happened and would not.

Words are not useless.

There was another way than killing, there was always another way, and Hiccup was still himself, still the boy who had reached out an open hand and been right to.

He would keep trying.

Again and again until death claimed him. Because the moment he finally gave up on words, then Hiccup Haddock would finally and truly be dead.

A week passed, and he kept the forge doors shut and did not open them.

He did not visit the pale tree, or visit the library, or go out to wherever Toothless had taken himself. He shut the world out the only way he had left, with stone and distance, and stayed alone with the hammer and the heat and the demons that hunted him.

It did not work as well as it should have.

Hiccup could feel the dragon the whole time, a steady warm weight at the back of his mind, worried and patient and stubbornly refusing to be shut out.

Every now and then Toothless would just push something gentle down the bond, and now and then, despite himself, Hiccup would let himself ease.

It was during that week that the last of the island finished waking.

Near six months had passed since his exile. The whole of it, the dying and the tree and the long bitter winter, had run its course, and the fog that had hidden the island for as long as any chart had bothered to lie about these waters was almost gone.

It was also in the last few weeks that the first of the wild dragons had brushed the thinning edge of it, and then grown bolder, gliding high over the cliffs and never quite landing, as if testing whether the old rules still held.

And finally, in these last days, with the wall withdrawn to a low pale haze on the farthest rim of the sea, they came in earnest, in twos and threes and then in droves and packs, settling onto shores unknown.

The fog had been a wall against more than weather, and everything it had kept out was slowly finding its way back in.

The dragons came first.

The men came after.

His hearing was no good to him out there. It died somewhere past the surf, the way it died somewhere past the far ridges. The open waters past the shores were too vast and too chaotic to untangle properly from a single position.

So they flew instead.

It started as a habit and hardened into a rule: They would fly twice a day, once before dawn and once at dusk, they would take a long circuit out over the water and back.

Half a day between passes, no more. It was not much of a net, and he knew it, but it was a start.

It was on one of those dusk circuits that they found it.

A hull hove up out of the grey a long way off.

And when Toothless swung them in close enough Hiccup caught the creak and slap of her timbers and the rough drunk voices of the men crowded aboard, only then did he finally understand that the dragons had not been the only ones patiently watching the fog draw back.