Chapter One: Axes and Dragons.

She had been working in Gobbers forge every day since she was 16. It was a good viking occupation, making and fixing their weapons of war. A way to build up muscles and to earn the respect of others. The compact building contained a small living area for her in the back while the main room was stacked with weapons, various tools for shaping and sharpening, and a large forge dominating the center.

The scrawny brunette had a small baby face bedecked with freckles. Despite her keen mind, skill for design, and a knack for fixing things, she was treated as a runt by the other vikings. And while the other teens were entering puberty, it very much felt like she was once again going to be left behind.

Regardless, she was self assured that as long as she could outthink the others and make things, she would be reasonably okay. It was a pity that she sucked at everything else. Fighting, eating or drinking.. Which was, unfortunately, covered everything the other vikings did.

She had run away from her father after another argument so she went to where she most felt welcome, at the forge and away from people.

She didn't enjoy fighting with him but it felt like the chief of Berk never listened to her. It was so frustrating and annoying that they could hardly get on.
At least in the forge it was just her and sometimes Gobber. Here she could work on things in peace and get away from the daily dangers of life.

A few minutes ago they had had a short conversation about her dad not wanting to play favorites so she shouldn't ever take anything he said to heart, despite the fact that all they ever did was argue in public. Hell, she wouldn't even know the guy was a parent if they didn't eat together and sleep in the same house.

Hiccup turns an axe head around, studying the blade and running it against a grinder a few more times. Once it made the appropriate noise and look to be sparking properly, she would put it near a handle and wait for Gobber to attach the two together. Although he only had one hand, he was still vastly stronger than she was. Not to mention his immense bulk and stature meant he'd hit his head on the door many a time, much to her amusement.

Engrossed In her work, she doesn't notice that the blacksmith in question came in. A sly grin on his face.

"How's it going with the boy's? A girl like you should be looking to get married sooner rather than later." He muses as he attaches a axe head and handle together.

Hiccup pauses for a moment, she doesn't really like any of the boys of her age or has the desire to marry or go anywhere near them. Snotlout was her cousin and she was pretty sure that they were not desperate enough in the gene pool to let *that* happen. Besides, she couldn't stand his revolting humor anyway at the rare family dinners.

Tuffnut is insane full stop. While he had a pretty decent face and blonde hair, and is much taller than her, his choice of outfit and fishy smell left too much to desired. And she was pretty sure his personality would drive her to an unpleasant cliff dive!

Fishlegs, extremely large. Blonde and nerdy. A geek like her. While he would be okay to live with she also knew that they were interested in different things and she didn't really feel anything for him. And while they were somewhat friends she did not appreciate his ability to randomly spew out facts about dragons.

"I don't like any of the boys here," she grunted and gives a shrug while returning to her axe, the heat of the forge making her a little uncomfortable with a dew of sweat break out across her forehead.

"And? Just pick either the manliest or the least annoying one. It's what I would do." Gobber shrugs back while sharpening a sword he forged earlier that day.

Her mind flashes to Astrid, one of the other girls. Gorgeous with amazing blond hair and piercing blue eyes, strong and forceful.

Her mouth gets a little dry and she shifts to the side.

"Astrid is the manliest one."

Crap. She shouldn't open her mouth before thinking.

"Ha! Good joke Hiccup. Right true that is. Pity she's not a boy though". Gobber snorts and pats her on the back a little too heavily. Thankfully he thought it was a joke and that he didn't notice the reddening on her cheeks.

The thought of Astrid had made her fidget last night. Although she knew that Astrid did not like her. If Hiccup was on fire and Astrid had the only bucket in town she would wait for another fire to set.

The door to the forge opens and a familiar blonde viking with long hair and a axe comes in.

Hiccup's fidgeting redoubled.

She has to say something, anything. As Astrid comes closer with her axe, her powerful movements displaying her toned muscles.

"Hey there, welcome to our outfit. Do you need anything?" She manages to say in her calmest and controlled voice.

Astrid shrugs and levels out her axe and then switches to holding it with one hand, her dexterity has gotten good and it was really really showing right now.

"Hey. Can I get this axe sharpened, please?".

"Sure!" Hiccup answers and holds her hands out, the other girl responds by simply dropping her axe into her hands causing the smith's apprentice to stagger under the weight.

She steadies herself on a nearby grindstone before getting to work and clear the dirty, non-viking thoughts out of her head. She shouldn't be having them at all. She should be thinking about boys.

Gobber levered himself up, "I'll leave you two girls to your gabbing.
Astrid begins wandering around looking at the various weapons on display. To Hiccups credit most of the items were of her creation with Gobber simply attaching or forging the pieces that she couldn't.

Focusing on the heat of the forge in hopes of ignoring the heat of her face, she began examining the ax more closely. The blade was a bit worn down and couple of chips marred the edge but it was functional and should be okay for a couple of more hundred swings at trees; a favorite past time of Astrid's.

Said girl lets out a grunt, Hiccup looks over to see the azure clad, spiky teen bending over just enough to show off that curve of her ass.

The moment of inattention caused her to snap the axe head clean off. Her cheeks fully red with the dirty thoughts filling her mind.

She lets out a panicked squeak, quickly swapping the ruined handle for another and burying her head against the sparking axe as close as she can so the other girl can't see her face.

Hiccup grimaces, knowing that she'll have to repair the axe head as well.

Astrid was too absorbed in looking at greatswords to notice that Hiccups face had gone as bright red as the forge fire. Peering over at each of the weapons, she was resisting the urge to simply take them off the wall and wield them in glorious battle against Berks enemies. At 16 years old, Astrid would soon enter dragon training and she knows that she'll get top place. As a member of the Hofferson clan: a family famed for its shield maidens she knew that she will do her house proud.

Glancing over at the loud snap of the axe and its handle with a narrowed eyebrow.

"You didn't damage my axe did you? My mother handed that down to me"

"No I rebalanced and repaired it, it uh needed a new handle as the wood was near splintering condition" The Brunette responds back and Astrid goes back to looking around the forge, she didn't go in much as she's a warrior and not a blacksmith and she is a big believer of everything being in its place.

Letting Hiccup to work on her axe, she follows a line of better quality weapons to a small door off to the side and opens it, her curiosity getting the better of her as she hears the other girl protest about it.

"What is all of this?" She muses, a little impressed at what she finds. The room, Hiccup's presumably judging by her frantic attempts to drive her away, is stocked with drawings of weapons, posters and art wallpaper with a few small cloth pads in on a desk.

The cloth pads is the only thing she recognizes.

"It's uh a confidential place of upper level development" Hiccup stammers and brushes past as she quickly tucks the pads into a pocket.

"Of what exactly?" Astrid asks, brushing a hand over a extremely well detailed portrait of the interior of Berks stone town hall.

"Weapons! And things!"
"I see".

An image of a wheelbarrow with a tree trunk on the desk catches her eye and she lifts up one end of it. Astrid isn't sure of what to make of it and gestures over to Hiccup to explain.

"It's a bola thrower that uses twin levels as counterweights tha~"

"The mutilator right?" Saying the name of the weapon out loud stops Hiccup and she nods.

Astrid notes that the only time Hiccup hasn't been awkward or stammering is when she's talking about the thing she makes or is going to.

At the very least she feels pretty impressed by the amount of detail gone into it. It does make some sense that given the apprentice blacksmiths lack of strength and dexterity when it came to handling weapons she would instead make weapons that could compensate for her weakness.

"I like it." The Valkyrie gives a soft smile as she turns around and compliments Hiccup. While she's more of a throw-it-at-your-face girl, seeing a little bit of inside Hiccups head allows her to properly gauge the girl and she can at least respect what she's been trying to do.

It could have gone worse for Hiccup, much worse. At the very least Astrid seemed to be a little impressed by her work and drawings before they had parted ways. She had given the blonde girl her axe and explained that the reinforcement and new handle should hold it up for a couple of months and if anything went wrong she should come back to get it checked.

In all honesty it was the first proper conversation they had had in years and Hiccup dared to feel a little better about it.

Until the Dragons decided to blow off the door to the outhouse she was in. Dragon raids always happened during the evening when it was dark.

Hiccup ran through the village, the calls and cries of the battle ready villagers screaming at her to get inside or telling her to stay out of the way. She's used to what they say at this point given that her inventions so far have had a nasty habit of turning on the village, but she knows that it was only when there was a minor mistake or a flawed calibration.

During a raid her place was in the forge and so she ran to it. The hoisted torches of Berk lighting the way as she dodged the hordes of vikings running to the defenses, a burning house or two blocking her way until she bumps into the huge frame of her father, Stoick the Vast. A veritable mountain with arms and a booming voice.

"Get yourself inside, girl!"

Eventually she gets to the forge where Gobber is at the shop front taking in orders for new weapons and passing out freshly forged or repaired ones to the waiting villagers, he spots Hiccup and waves to her, mouthing that she's going to take over while he fights the dragons with the rest of the vikings.

She has no such intention in staying out, not this time. The mutilator is primed and ready and she made her calibrations earlier in the week, she will shoot down a dragon and prove that she's viking material. Prove to her dad that she doesn't need to get married to be a successful chief.

Quietly, she also wants to prove to Astrid that she's just as strong as everyone else.

Taking advantage of a massive fireball launched by a Monstrous Nightmare into a barrel of vegetables she runs inside her room and carts her bola thrower out, it's a short stubby thing with multiple levers and gears kind of like a small catapult but with a tube. She runs through her practice safety check and makes sure that its ready.

It is.

After wheeling it and dodging through multiple vikings and dragons again she needs to find a spot and park it up near the edge of village to give her maximum visibility and a place away from everyone else so the Mutilator wont accidently throw someone through a wall. Again. Eventually she locates one next to a cliff and she can feel the cold sea air from the stacks batter through her thin green tunic and ruffle her short brown hair.

Scanning the sky, she looks for a target. A Deadly Nadder of the sharp class with its beautiful hide and multiple spikes would do. Or a super hot Nightmare with a long snout and hook like appendages on its face would really bring praise to her for once.

Or a Night Fury, something that nobody has ever seen except for the whistling sound it makes while diving! Or the purple plasma blasts that never miss!

She only has one shot though and to the left of her a catapult placement explodes in a purple blast.

"I can see it!" Hiccup shouts and adjusts the firing mechanism, the gears in her head turning as she spots the cold black shape of a Night Fury preparing for another attack. She knows the height and direction it's going to fly in and all she has to do is fire when the time is right.

The chief's daughter notices the black wings of the Night Fury reflect off the fires of the machine it just destroyed in the corner of her eye and she wrenches the Mutilator to the left just in time.

She fires and the throwing weights hit it and a loud screech comes out as it flies erratically off distance to the opposite end of Berk.

Elation runs through her body as she actually hit something!
"YES I HIT IT, I HIT A DRAGON, I HIT A DRAAAGON"

Hiccup rubs her hands together with glee and looks around to see if there were any onlookers towards her amazing kill.

"Did anybody see that?".

Suddenly, a Monstrous Nightmare has crawled up the cliff behind her and it simply throws the Mutilator out of the way as Hiccup turns around in shock to see the huge reptile staring at her.

"Crap"

The freckle faced teen runs as fast as she can with the Nightmare right behind her, chomping and snarling as she traces her way back through the village screaming loudly for help or at least someone who can actually fight dragons with an axe. Thankfully the burning houses and the torches the villagers put up give ample lighting for her to see where she's going or it would be pitch black.

Eventually she reaches a open clearing and the Nightmare leaps down from a building, priming its breathe and it lets loose a red hot blast at her feet. Fortunately Hiccup manages to dodge out of the way and she desperately searches for something to hide behind before she ends up as a lean steak..

She finds a wooden pole holding a torch and hides behind it, her heart pounding as she crouches to make herself as small as possible, shivering a little in fear. She really doesn't want to be eaten, not now that she's actually shot down a dragon. The scent of charred wood fills the air around her.

It goes quiet for a few seconds and Hiccup sighs in relief, believing that the Nightmare lost her. Getting up and peering round to the her left its only when a short feel of hot air on her neck does she realize that the dragon is peeking at her from the right. She screams again and before it can either eat or cook her a massive axe with a ear bellowing war cry hits the reptile in the face.

Its Stoick the Vast and he doesn't look too pleased to see her.

Stoick closes the door to his house, the chief of Berks house after a long night of island politics, fighting dragons, damage control and another argument with his daughter. Slumping into a nearby chair overlooking his bed at the ground floor of the house he reaches for a bottle of mead, opening it and downing half the bottle in a single go.

Stoick slumps back on his chair and mentally goes over the events of the day, all the way from his morning awkward breakfast with Hiccup to him saving her from a dragon only to see the torch she had been hiding behind fall over and destroy a valuable well.

They had a very public argument after that with the chief lifting his daughter up by the shoulder and screaming in her face as to why she wasn't inside and safe. She replied with tears in her eyes that she had shot down a Night Fury and it had landed in Raven Point, that she was a true dragon fighter and that killing was in her blood. He told her that she was just seeing things and should go home after a near death experience and to leave fighting to the adults such as himself.

He can remember the light of the collapsed torch reflecting off her wild brown hair and as she continued to defend her case he was struck by a image of Valka, his dead wife taken by a dragon. For a second all he could remember was Valka telling him to protect their daughter no matter the cost.

He had simply picked up his only remaining family member as she screamed and taken her home in front of hundreds of onlookers, including her peers, before going back outside to assess the damage of the latest raid.

Now he was alone in his house, Hiccup was sleeping upstairs having locked her room. He was 45 and Stoick was starting to get tired of their dysfunctional relationship. Part of him wanted to go back in time and ask for a son like himself so he wouldn't have this problem. A good strong lad who had the same mindset: ideal chief material.

Then again, chief material means getting married and he doesn't want that to happen much either. None of the families on Berk have expressed an interest in purchasing Hiccups dowry, even at a generous price as they claimed she was unsuitable. And while he was reasonably confident the other chiefs in the archipelago would make a offer soon and undoubtedly make Berk richer with a fresh alliance and more trade, that would mean Hiccup leaving him and on her own to the mercy of whatever island of the boy she ends up with.

Chief Stoick wants Berk to be safe at all costs. But Father Stoick needs the opposite: a happy and fruitful Hiccup. He desperately wants the two to be compatible but he can't see a comprise or even a way out of it.

He has tried to talk to her about it, sitting down at the table during breakfast or dinner. But every time she's either been late, didn't eat or was just unwilling to talk with a scowl on her face. And even on the rare occasion they did talk it was always a argument with neither side willing to budge; Hiccup calling her father an oaf and Stoick telling his daughter she needed to be more traditional.

Stoick finishes the bottle of mead, letting his shoulders and muscle relax after the adrenaline filled fight , he glances around the room. His immense bulk taking up the entire chair and his house isn't that well decorated for a chief. Its fit for purpose with only a dining table and chairs with a few drawers being elaborate in any way. Well his part of the house is. He has been in Hiccups room and her attic position was always filled with drawings and sketches: beautiful ones and others that were mechanical. Items of her design that he couldn't get his head around.

He knew that his daughter sometimes unleashed those drawings into practice: building a wide variety of engineering marvels that were impressive on paper but never really worked; often ending up simply failing or causing damage to the village and he was planning to enact a ban on them. Hiccup was good at making weapons for vikings, very good ones in fact and she had been complimented for crafting axes that never failed.

He wants her to keep to that. To be in a respectable position amongst the community and to replace Gobber when the old man, his best friend, finally retires.

It would be so much easier if she was a boy, then they could relate and talk about man things.

He had to be told what to expect from a daughter as Valka was gone. One of the village elders had pulled him aside when he opened Hiccups bed sheets that morning and started screaming when he found blood. The elder briefed him on what to expect from raising a daughter: bloody sheets, irritability and mood swings at a certain time every month. And his Hiccup went from being a quiet girl to a raging demon who didn't take advice from anyone.

Stoick the Vast gets off his chair and going to bed, wishing that his wife was there to handle their rogue daughter.

After all, Valka was the same when she was growing up.

Astrid Hofferson curls up on her bed, fists balled and she needs to either punch or throw a axe at something, anything. Her blood boils and she tightly grabs a pillow with one hand and stabs it with the other.

She can't think or anything other than what happened just a few moments ago. Her parents had come in late after a discussion with the chief and she had gotten out of bed and had lain on the floorboards with the door to the downstairs cracked open a tad to listen to their conversation. She wished she hadn't listened.

While they had initially started talking about "that Hiccup girl" and how she had gone a step too far in destroying yet another part of the village, the discussion had taken a unpleasant twist as her father spoke in hushed tones about how other clans in Berk had offered him an extremely lucrative price for his daughter. Allegedly Astrid was in high demand and Snotlout Jorgenson had pleaded with his parents to offer twice as much as any other family.

Her mother retorted with how much she had wanted to be a shield maiden but her dad simply remarked that if Freydis had become one, Astrid and her little sister would have never been born and added that due to the Hofferson family tradition, they were low in numbers. And should a dragon attack killed him and his wife with Astrid being a shield maiden then they would go extinct.

Upon hearing those words the 16 year old had retreated into her bed and cried.

"How dare they! They should not determine my future, only I will" She quietly makes a promise to herself: since dragon training starts in a few days she should use all of the skills she has acquired to place #1 in the class and prove that her warrior skills will force her parents and Berk to acknowledge that she is more than worthy of becoming a shield maiden.

Calming down a little and steeling herself for the near future, Astrid Hofferson falls asleep with her mothers axe close by.

~End~

With thanks to my proofreaders:
Ginkisune
Fopdoodle
Midnight Burst
ASATanker