.
Sometimes they climb in through her window.
"Ruff! Wake up! Wake up! C'mon, the weather's perfect!"
Fishlegs? Snotlout? She can't be sure. The sky is barely rosy and she's got her eyes half open because she spent half the night bent over a desk trying to figure out a proper way to stitch in the stem of the flower on the tapestry that everyone thinks Greta is making. But she's got an image to uphold so she gets out of bed and washes her face and pulls on a helmet and walks out the door. Barf nudges her side. She waves him off.
"The next time they come in through the window, you gas them," she says. "And Belch, if you ever want a kiss from me then you'll light them up."
And two long necks twist into a lover's knot, watching her with big, eager eyes. She looks back at them endearingly for a moment, then hears the heavy footfalls of two hundred pounds of joy and her face hardens as she turns to face Fishlegs.
.
Sometimes they clap her back.
It's not that she'd mind typically, but they use excessive force, the kind that Tuff could take and she tries to keep her face straight when she can already feel the bruises forming on her shoulders and it's only when she's easing into the bathtub that she dares to check the purple skin.
"Those little turds are gonna cripple me one day," she mutters to Barf and Belch as she pours juniper oil into the tub.
.
Sometimes it's the way they talk.
"Dude, you can take the back end. We'll patrol the beach."
She just shrugs and walks off, never really saying much but stiffening up and thinking that maybe they'll notice that she is in fact female and doesn't appreciate being called 'dude'. The words are what should hurt her the least because she's felt real pain before. Broken bones, bloody nose, torn skin and all shades of misery. And 'dude' isn't really an insult, but to her it feels demeaning because she hasn't been feeling like a girl much lately and they've been saying things way worse than 'dude' and it's never really occurred to her that words hurt, too. But she knows it now. And then they run past Astrid, pausing and smiling and waving and even blown a kiss, and Ruffnut can't fight a surge of jealousy. Not because Astrid's treated like an object of affection, but because she's simply treated like she's female.
.
Astrid thinks that Ruffnut is lucky.
"They treat you like an equal," Astrid says. "I wish they'd treat me like that."
And Ruffnut just stays silent because Astrid might not feel the same way she does now if she was ever called 'dude' or invited to boys night out or had offensive jokes cracked about her feminity (or lack thereof) because her whole life, Astrid has dreamed of being one of the boys. Her whole life, Ruffnut has dreamed of being a girl.
Being a girl isn't about being handed a flower or having the door held open for her. It's about not being smacked between the shoulders like she can take it, and not having guys crawl through her window in the morning to wake her up because they can't imagine her in any situation that could be potentially awkward. It's about not having guys call her dude and making jokes about her non-existent manhood like it has a personality of its own.
"Maybe," Ruffnut says quietly.
.
Tuffnut doesn't notice anything around him usually. But sometimes, when it comes to her, he's especially sensitive. The moments are rare, and she knows they're fleeting as well, so she milks what she can out of them.
"I've always hated the name 'dude'," she says to him.
"Me, too," he says. "It's weird. Like—duuuudddeeeeee. Duuuuuuuuudddddddeeeeeee—"
"Stop it," she says, smacking the side of his head. She's almost smiling. "You're making it sound weird."
"You don't like being called 'dude'," he says, taking a seat beside her. "I don't get it."
"Because you're a dude," she says. "One of the boys."
"And you're one of the girls," he says. "So of course you don't like it."
Ruffnut is silent. Tuffnut doesn't say anything else, but he doesn't move, either.
"Ruff, Tuff!" calls a voice from the window. "Get down here! Time for the race!"
"We'll be right there!" Tuffnut yells back, but he still doesn't move from her side and that helps a little.
He doesn't leave until nearly an hour later, and he's done it so silently she doesn't even notice that he's gone. She almost misses the loaf of honeyed bread he's left in his place.
.
When she shows up at the stables the next morning, Snotlout holds the door open for her.
"Morning," he says, tipping his helmet. "Sleep well?"
"Uh…yeah…" she says, eyeing him suspiciously as she steps inside.
"Morning!" Fishlegs says, quickly rising to his full height to greet her. "Feeling better?"
"What?"
"We heard why you couldn't make it to the race yesterday," Snotlout says. "The…girl sickness."
"Hope you're doing better now," Fishlegs says. "But just in case, I got you this chamomile. If it's brewed into tea, it makes a great painkiller."
Ruffnut confusedly takes the jar of dried leaves from his hands. Tuffnut is slipping out the door and she can see the ghost of a smirk on his face.
.
Smacks on her shoulder don't come again. No one comes in through her window. 'Dude' and all of its implications are a thing of the past. She can't explain it and Tuffnut certainly never will, but perhaps it's because of the psychological connection they made between a girl on her cycle and actual girlhood. She's impressed now that she thinks on it, as she always is by Tuffnut's rare displays of affection/intelligence. As time passes their handling goes from gentle to adoring, and soon she can't stand them.
The truth of the matter is that their vying for her attention doesn't bother her and neither does the lack of smacking on the back and climbing in through the window and she most definitely doesn't miss being called 'dude'. Because she's got it now, what she's admired in Astrid. She's a girl, but she's one of the boys, too. And sometimes when she stops to think on it she smiles to herself when no one is watching because not too long ago she was thinking that being both was impossible.