"I did this."
There's so much blood.
It's never really occurred to Hiccup just how much one thing could bleed. At least not until now, when there's blood everywhere, and its even dripping from an overhanging tree for Odin's sake. Greenbrown droplets steadily trickle on the grass like some kind of sick tears.
The blood is everywhere. Spattered on the rocks, spreading on the ground and pooling in thick puddles of greenbrown around his boots. It's on him. All over him, soaking through his clothes until he feels it against his skin and he wants to tear at himself until it's not there anymore. It's coating the small knife still clenched in his trembling hands.
There's blood on his hands. How poetic.
Hiccup laughs once. Nervous and humorless. Just to see if maybe it's all a dream and a simple sound will be enough to wake him. he's just being ridiculous because he could never kill a dragon—he's just useless, brainless, bumbling Hiccup.
He looks down at the crumpled black pile of scales and mercilessly exposed organs that was once the most feared creature alive, the demon that plagued them all. Extremely dangerous, kill on sight. No one could kill it, but he did. Useless, brainless, bumbling, Hiccup-the-fishbone did all this, he brought down this mighty beast.
And now there's blood everywhere.
"I did this…" he repeats. "I killed it."
The words don't taste right as they fall from his lips. He doesn't feel like he should, like his father described to him countless times when he was little. Little-er.
He shouldn't feel numb and broken and disgusted—he should feel proud, fulfilled, powerful because he is a fucking Viking and that's what they do. They kill dragons. They've killed thousands of them.
(Murder must be too harsh a word).
Hiccup nudges the body with one foot and pulls back quickly.
"It's dead," he reminds himself aloud. "It's fucking dead."
He's repulsed by everything. the blood, the words, the knife in his hand, himself.
Gods, that dragon had even looked him in the eyes. But still he turned his head aside and thrust that knife through that black skin and it somehow seemed to slide in so easily, cutting through the layers of scales and tight muscle and veins and everything else protecting it's pounding heart. Something else seemed to take over his body, something cruel and cold, while he stabbed at the poor creature until the rise and fall of its chest slowed before stopping all together.
Now Hiccup is left to stand here and look at all that's left behind while the heart-stopping guilt tears at him and the dizzying smell of dragon's blood smothers the oxygen out of his lungs.
The knife slides from his grasp as his body seizes up and time seems to stop. He falls on his knees before the dragon. He gasps for air while burning tears pour from his eyes and he chokes out apology after apology to the mangled black body.
"I did this."
The entire village fills with drop-dead shock when Hiccup comes stumbling back covered in greenbrown blood with a dragon's heart in his hands and an unrecognizable hardness glazing his once-naïve eyes.
Stoick actually smiles and locks Hiccup in a bone-crushing embrace. "I'm proud to call you my son," he says, his voice deep and rumbling in Hiccup's ear. "To think, my son killed the Night Fury."
Hiccup doesn't respond and stays rigidly still in his father's arms.
He murdered the Night Fury.
Everyone treats him differently now. Like a hero.
It's kind of amusing the way the other teens who once hated him now flock to his side like they think that being near him will give them the power to go kill some monstrous beast. Well it would be amusing if Hiccup actually felt any emotion. He hasn't felt much of anything since it happened.
He must have lost his own heart when he cut out the dragon's.
Stoick is more than happy to listen to what his son has to say. But Hiccup doesn't talk like he used to. He's lost all desire to do so, and even when he tries, the words fail and flounder and get stuck in his throat.
His relationship with his father really hasn't changed much. Their conversations are still awkward. Still entirely one-sided and meaningless.
Hiccup still goes to the forge everyday. Technically he still has to, but now he does it without hesitation, without protest, just to maintain one shred of normality in his life.
It's a good form of release, banging on hot, heavy, sharp objects with other heavier objects. Hammering away all the pent up angst shoved down inside him and turning it into something vaguely productive.
He doesn't invent anymore. Doesn't spend his time tinkering with spare bits of metal and wood, attempting to create the perfect machine that never seemed to work, no matter how hard he ever tried.
Sometimes he finds old blueprints he'd drawn up or half-built mechanisms collecting dust in the darkest corners of Gobber's forge.
He looks at them and subsequently ignores the niggling desire in the back of his mind to finish what he started. He can't ever bring himself to touch those relics of what feels like another lifetime ago.
Hiccup would hate to smear blood stains on his innocence.
Sex is different than he expected.
Everyone in the village has been drinking tonight. Having a good time. All except for Hiccup, who's still at the blacksmith, so agonizingly sober it hurts.
He's somewhere on the line of terrified and not-all-that-shocked when the door comes flying open around midnight and Astrid stumbles in.
He doesn't say anything, just looks up from the sword he's been working on. He thinks maybe he's hallucinating, Astrid's not actually here and it's all just his rapidly slipping mind playing tricks on him.
But she's real and she's here and taking unsteady, ungraceful steps into the faint ring of candlelight surrounding him. Her hair is falling from it's usual braid, and her eyes are half-lidded and cloudy and fixed on him.
"You're different, Hiccup." Her words are slurred but still low and rolling off her tongue enticingly. "I like that."
Astrid's clumsy drunk hands move across her own body, making surprisingly quick work on all the buttons and buckles holding the thick bits of fabric in place.
She lets her clothes drop to the floor.
Hiccup's jaw falls open slightly and he can't do anything but dubiously gape at the very drunk girl in front of him.
His mind is reeling with disbelief, because there's no way in Hel that Astrid—the girl he'd fantasized about for gods-know how many years—is actually here in the shop with her clothes on the ground. She's beautiful and everything he once wanted and she's right here with him.
She's also obviously drunk, but that's entirely beside the point.
Astrid takes a wobbling step closer and at this range, he could count the freckles on her nose if he would look anywhere other than her unfocused blue eyes. He's willing himself not to look down, which is easier said than done when there's a very attractive, entirely naked girl at point-blank range whose biting her lip and running her hands up down her own body, and it's all for him, for this new Hiccup, the shell of his former self that everyone likes so much better.
Blood on a man's hands must be such a turn-on.
He falters for just a second and his eyes fall down, raking over her body.
Fuck…
He drags his eyes back up to meet Astrid's with difficulty.
Astrid is the first to close the two inch gap between them, locking her arms around his neck and covering his mouth with hers. The kiss is sloppy and uncalculated and Hiccup's not exactly sure what to do with his tongue, but Astrid probably won't remember anything in the morning, so he doesn't really care.
Astrid's mouth tastes like the mead she's been drinking. Thick and dark and heady. Her hands are everywhere, one pulling at fistfuls of his auburn hair while the other roams freely, trying to rid him of his clothes because he's wearing far too much in comparison to her.
Undressing without detaching their lips is proving nearly impossible, so he impatiently drops his pants around his ankles and fucks her against the wall, because he can. Because she's here and drunk and wet for him and this is what he's supposed to do, isn't it? He's supposed to be getting drunk and having sex and making stupid choices that he'll regret later. Like killing dragons.
Because he just doesn't fucking care anymore.
Astrid says his name a lot. In loud moans every time her bare back is slammed into the wood and overandoverandover again when she comes. She says it a few times with no real incentive, just for the sake of it, giggling when her lumbering tongue trips over the letters.
Hiccup stays relatively quiet, pressing his face into her collarbone so his strangled cry of pleasure is muffled against her pale skin.
Astrid passes out not too long afterwards.
He's almost glad that she's unconscious now. She was mumbling nonsense against his chest, having been too drunk to sit up straight anymore, before asking if the ceiling was spinning to him too and then slumping over in his lap.
His hands are shaking lightly. He needs to do something with them, so he busies the left one by running it through Astrid's hair absently, trying to focus on how the tangled waves feel between his fingers.
His eyes droop with post-orgasm drowsiness, but his mind won't let him relax. Instead, it's racing and screaming at him, begging him to feel something because he just screwed Astrid—he should feel happy or accomplished or something with a positive connotation. Yet even still, with this girl here with him, he's numb and hollowed out and losing his virginity isn't the thrill he always imagined it would be.
Hiccup pushes Astrid off of his lap as gently as possible, letting her curl on the floor in a limp heap. He rises slowly and adjusts his clothes before gathering hers.
He pauses standing over Astrid and wonders just how he can get her off of the ground and out of the blacksmith shop.
It's difficult, considering he's still just a talking fishbone, but he still manages to pull her off of the floor and half-carry-half-drag her back to his house because there's no way in Hel that he's taking her to her parents when she's naked and out cold.
Thankfully, the entire village is either passed out in a puddle of mead or so intoxicated they can barely see their own hands in front of their faces. The whole situation would be too hard to explain to any random passerby.
Once he manages to get Astrid inside the house and into his bedroom, he tries to lay her carefully on his bed, but instead, he unceremoniously drops her with a soft thwump. Hero or not, Hiccup's not exactly known for his arm strength. He pulls the blanket over Astrid after rearranging her limbs in more human-like positions and collapses beside her, fully clothed and out of breath.
Hiccup listens to Astrid's soft breathing being drowned out by his heavier breaths and prays to whatever Gods will listen that one of his will be the last.
Hiccup's rationalized the whole thing in his head so many times that he's lost count. The Night Fury was a monster, a demon, a devil, and he killed it. It was fair. It was right. What goes around comes around. Ending it's life helped everyone. He makes that his mantra and repeats it until his head pounds.
It doesn't help.
He can make excuses until Hel freezes over, lie to himself til his heart stops beating, rationalize until he can't anymore, and none of it will ever make a fucking difference because everywhere he looks, he still sees those big terrified green eyes with the cat-like pupils staring back at him.
So he's not surprised when he wakes up thrashing and sweating and choking sometime before dawn.
Astrid, still in a mead-induced coma, mumbles something inaudible and slides further under the covers.
Hiccup all but falls out of bed, his entire body shaking. He can't do this anymore, he can't keep pretending to be the hero while he suffocates on the inside and the body of the Night Fury rots six feet under the ground.
The blood is everywhere. He can feel it staining his skin and dripping from his hands. His fingernails make weak attempts to scratch it away, but it just leaves him with raw, angry red patches of skin that don't solve anything. Because it doesn't matter how much he tries or what he does, the blood will always be there. Smothering and caustic and sucking the life from his small body.
And it's all his fault.
This is what he wanted, isn't it? He wanted to kill a dragon and be admired and not hated and to win the girl and earn his father's approval. He brought this on himself. He killed the dragon and now he can't cope with what's left behind, can't keep going on like his.
Hiccup's blurry gaze lands on Astrid. Oh, Astrid, beautiful Astrid who doesn't seem to see what a monster he is. He reaches out hesitantly, fingertips so close to the wisps of blonde falling over closed eyes.
"I did this."
He pulls his hand away like she might shatter under his blood stained touch.
He has to go.
Hiccup turns and his legs carry him unconsciously, each step heavier and more desperate than the last.
It's snowing outside. He should turn around, go back in the house, not risk being alone in the middle of the night while the gods pour their frozen tears on Berk until the island sinks beneath them.
His walk gets faster and faster until breaking into a full run. Trees blur around him while the cold stings his kin and his lungs burn and he has to stop but he has to keep going.
Colors start to swim before his eyes but he keeps running because it's the most alive he's felt in days.
He's not even sure what he's running to, if anything at all.
Then something changes and stops, doubled over and fighting for every frantic breath.
He looks around and his heart stops. Even under the thick blanket of snow, he knows exactly where he is and he has a vague idea of why he came here.
He's been avoiding this very place for a reason.
He can still see the greenbrown blood dripping from the trees and pooling on the ground around that sleek black body, because not even the snow can wash away the bloodstains. Some things are permanent.
Hiccup's legs ache with fatigue and his throat is parched from all the frigid air he's forced down it. But the pain in his chest is worse, crushing his ribs under its weight and constricting around his lungs until it hurt to breathe. He's drowning in the blood and soon enough it'll be so deep that he won't be able to keep his head above it.
"I did this," he whispers hoarsely. He blinks back the hot tears searing the corners of his eyes and lowers himself onto the cold ground, feeling the snow crunch as his body sinks into it.
He curls in a tight ball with his flushed cheek pressed against his sleeve. The snow burns like fire instead of ice, but he doesn't care.
Hiccup watches the sun as it peaks over the horizon. Dawn is breaking and it won't be much longer until people notice that he's not around. Until Stoick thanks the gods that at least his son did something worth remembering. Until Astrid wakes up with a killer headache, bruises on her back, and some sick satisfaction in knowing she'd been with him on that last night. Until the village finds a new hero.
Until the blood fades from his hands and leaves him with nothing.
Until he's nothing more than just Hiccup the Useless once again.
As he lays there on his blanket of snow, he swears he can hear the beating of a dragon's wings in the distance.
Hiccup closes his eyes.
The snow stops falling.
Fin.
I kind of hate myself for thinking this up while watching this movie for the first time.
I apologize if this is similar to any other HTTYD fics out there. I haven't found any others with this plot, but it's a large fandom, and I'm sure someone else has wondered what it would've been like if Hiccup killed the Night Fury when he found it.
A big part of my inspiration for this was the song What if This Storm Ends? by Snow Patrol. It's a truly gorgeous song and the feeling it has reminds me of Hiccup's situation.
And I'm in no way condoning 15 year olds (15? 14? I'm not sure how old they're supposed to be) getting drunk/having sex/killing things.
I don't own How to Train Your Dragon.
You know, just for the record.