[Dektop version highly advised]
This story touches upon the topic of mental illness.
1
The bed she wakes up on is soft.
Too soft.
Her eyes flutter open, but instead of the dark wood of her ceiling, she is greeted by head-aching white – white everything. Propping herself on her elbows, she musters a grunt, usual strength somehow lost under strained muscles and pounding head. The battle – they won, haven't they? – but her mind is blurry. Everything…everything is blurry.
The blanket is too nice too touch, the bed does not creak with each movement. Stormfly has not popped in her head through the window and everything is just so, so white.
Her eyes adjust to the bright light and she distinguishes a line where white turns into light yellow. No, no -the walls around her are perfectly yellow, like the flowers in the meadow in the summer. Her head hurts, her vision spins – yellow meets white again. A table of some sort lazily stands on the other side of the perfectly square room – made of wood that shines when the sun lights it up just the right way, with edges smooth and flat, perfectly cut. And a black void on one thin and short leg resting upon it. She does not understand.
Where is she?
Where's Hiccup? Where's Toothless?
It's warm. It's hot.
Berk is never hot.
She sits up and listens in. Something itches. On her hand. She notes the white thing hanging off her wrist, up and down, up and down as she moves her arm. It's too big to stay in place but too small to get it off. She tries – it digs into her fingers painfully, but it does not tear apart like it should. She lets it be.
Her bare feet touch the ground. No, not the ground. Something soft. She jumps at first but settles her foot in, lets it sink in the softness. Standing up is a challenge when your world spins but she has always took up challenges and this time will be no different. Her feet wobble on the soft blanket laid on the floor. She walks up to the table. There's a drawing. In a frame. She recognizes herself, smiling, wearing a strange coat. Realistic. Too realistic. She notes every detail of her face in the picture, the freckles dotted over her cheeks, the ears, the eyes, the mouth. Her fingers reach to touch her lips. Did they look the same?
With every passing minute she understands less. And it's frustrating.
Doors. She knows doors.
Her fingers curl around the cold handle. She presses – they let go and let her out. Before she leaves, her eyes quickly scan the strange room she's been placed in but there are no weapons in sight. Her fingers form a fist, she weights it up and down – it will have to do.
The soft blanket ends and her feet touch the wooden floor of the other room. It's long and dimly-lit with an open entrance on one side and a door on the other. A voice from the opened-up space echoes and rings in her head – she quickly stumbles towards the imposing doors, seeing the sun poking into the room through a narrow, rectangular opening. Her hand catches a stick, with the middle covered in sleek material, and a curved handle made of wood. The tip looks fairly sharp. She takes it.
She is blinded by the light once she escapes the strange housing. It takes a moment for her to see, first the outline, and then the world around her.
It scares her. But it doesn't.
The buildings are tall, made of white, the once-green grass is covered by plates of lifeless gray. The surface she walks on is rough to touch. Her eyes catch a passer-by, dressed unusually, with a material hat instead of a helmet on his head, no sensible armor in sight. Her heart stops for a brief moment, expecting him to call guards – the dragon hunters could be anywhere.
But he passes by her indifferently, if not with a little sped-up pace.
"Hey – you!" she shouts to get his attention but he walks away, and only by the smallest of movements of his head as he tries not to turn around she knows she heard her.
She growls under her breath and stalks off into the unknown.
As she wanders around the strange village, the feeling of being utterly lost as well as loneliness gets unbearably strong. People, so differently looking than what she is used to, walk, chat – but stay away from her, She doesn't suppose they are dragon hunters. But – who are they? Where are they?
Whenever she tries to catch someone and ask, they leave, ignore her, or shoo away without an explanation. Some shoot worried or pitiful looks her way, the white bracelet interests them. She sees fear on their faces.
"Get away!"
"I'll call the cops!"
Cops?
Why?
Why, why, why?
There are no dragons. No signs of recent fires or battles fought either.
Her heart cries for anything familiar.
She doesn't quite fully understand how she gets into the alley by a building with a flashing sign. She's distracted. The sign distracts her, makes her head hurt even more. She wants it to stop. But it keeps flickering, and flickering, and it drives her mad, and it changes colors, and-and-
"Stop!" she clutches her head with her free hand. "Stop, stop, stop, stop."
The sign flickers again in response to her pleads. Her bare feet trudge through the paddles of muddy water and she half-blindly reaches for a wall of a building nearby. Her head bobs down, screaming with pulsating pain.
"Wait-" she hears a hushed voice, a familiar voice, and her head snaps upwards. He stands some distance away but the mop of hair and lean posture is unmistakable.
"Hiccup-"
She pulls herself away from the wall and limps his way, a warm feeling buzzing at the pit of her stomach. She sees Snotlout by his side – she found someone at last. Her foot lands crookedly on the pavement and she trips, but she can't bring herself to care.
"Hiccup! Snotlout!"
Hiccup turns around sharply, his eyes widening in surprise. She waits for a smile that never comes. Instead, he almost falls down as he takes a quick step back. Snotlout observes her from the corner of his eye, his hand on the side of his coat.
"If that's about yesterday-" Hiccup quickly says and reaches to his pocket.
"Yesterday?" Astrid tilts her head sideways. "Hiccup, what happened?"
Hiccup ignores her question and instead throws a black object her way. It falls with a muffled "thud" a foot away from her.
"H-here. You can take it." he stutters out and quickly meets eyes with his cousin. "I only took ten dollars."
"Ten-" she frowns. "Hiccup," her tone turns firmer. "We need to find Toothless and Stormfly and get back to Berk."
"Wait, hold on," Snotlout cuts in, holding up his index finger. He turns to Hiccup. "How does she know about Toothless?"
"I may have mentioned him to her yesterday," Hiccup shifts and shrugs crookedly. He points to Astrid with both of his hands. "Does it even matter right now?"
Yesterday – they keep saying yesterday. What was yesterday? The…battle?
"Look," His voice, the voice she loves so much, makes her snap her head towards him. "I-I didn't mean to…to steal. I was hungry."
Steal? Hungry? The longer she looks at him, the dirtier, messier he seems. The woolen gloves stretched over his hands are fingerless – impractical, just as his ripped pants. His cheekbones stand out against the cold air, more so than she remembers.
"I…I don't understand," her voice falters. She shivers. Outside, it's colder, much colder. "Where are we?"
Snotlout grips his cousin on the arm and brings him closer harshly. His eyes stay on her, scowl deepening.
"She's clearly out of her mind, James," he whispers through gritted teeth. "Let's just leave."
James? James, James, James… He doesn't look like a James. That's not James. What kind of name is that?
"No!" Hiccup breaks himself away and shakes his head. "No, we can't. We can't leave her like that here."
"And what- call the cops?" Snotlout snorts. "'Take care of that young lady, sir. Oh, by the way, officer, we stole her wallet yesterday.' Because that will work out just perfect. She's waving a freaking umbrella around – She. Is. Not. Safe."
She stares at them. Words they speak reach her but she doesn't understand them. Her head starts pounding again. She doesn't understand. Fire forms in her chest, angry flame, threatening to escape. She grips her weapon tighter.
"Do you think it's funny?"
"Wh-what?" Both Hiccup and Snotlout turn to look at her.
"Oh, ha-ha. You got me. Isn't it time to cut the act by now, James?" she sneers and fear crosses Hiccup's face. Her stance falters and she takes a step closer. He takes a step back. She continues, much softer. "Hiccup, come on. Enough is enough."
"Look – I think you got the wrong person. I don't know-"
"What about Toothless?" she points the tip of the thing in her hands towards them. Snotlout's eyes look ready to bulge out. "And your father, the chief? Do you 'not remember' them too?"
Her neck tingles with the word 'father'. She tries to rub it away with her free hand.
"She knows about your dad as well?" Snotlout stares at his taller companion accusingly.
"She saw the photo, It fell out of my pocket." Hiccup mutters under his nose. She sees him swallow as his whole body tenses, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "Astrid-"
"Oh, so you do know my name. Good to know."
"You told me your name yesterday," he sighs and presses his palm to his forehead. "Just like I told you about my dad, and my cat."
"You don't have a cat," is her firm response.
"Yeah. Yeah, I do." he takes out a gray rectangular thing out of his pocket. It flashes. She's mesmerized. With obvious hesitation, he takes a few steps towards her, enough for her to see a very realistic drawing of a black cat on the thing. "Toothless."
"That's not Toothless," she taps the cat, jumping slightly when something pops up on it. The surface is rough to touch, with a crack through the middle. And it's warm – very, very warm. Her stomach twists but she turns her eyes back towards Hiccup. "Toothless is a dragon."
He almost drops the cat drawing.
"Ooookay, I think it's time for us now, isn't it, Hiccup?"
Without waiting for his response, Snotlout takes a hold of Hiccup's arm and drags him away from her.
"Wait, Jack!" Hiccup holds up his finger before swiping across the gray plate with the cat drawing. .Biting his lip, he shows it to her again. "Is that Toothless?"
"Yes! That's him!" Astrid grins at the Night Fury in the picture. "How did you do it?"
"Astrid, that's a sketch I did a long time ago," he uses his finger to swipe right and the cat image pops up again. She's bewildered. "That's Toothless."
"I don't understand why you are even trying to reason with her," Snotlout cuts in, hugging his long coat closer to his chest. "She's clearly whacko."
"Where do you live?" Hiccup slides the object back into his pants, his cousin's response met with ignorance. His gaze is soft, but there is no recognition in them. He doesn't remember who she is, or who he is. She's never felt so scared, so lonely. In a desperate attempt, she gets a hold of his hand.
"Hiccup, please-" she can't bring herself to care how weak, how helpless it makes her look – no training had prepared her for this. He tugs his hand back and it feels like a knife piercing her chest, kicking the air out of her lungs. Fear flashes through his wide-open eyes. Her eyes burn, her throat clogs up. "Please…"
"I'm not- I don't-" he stumbles over his words, the ways she remembered him do, "Can you, can you show me the way you came here?"
She nods, defeated, lip caught between her teeth. She settles her weapon on her shoulder and turns around, back towards the flickering sign. Hiccup follows after her, always maintaining some distance between the two. He pulls Snotlout along with him, ignoring his words of protest.
Her distraught look catches stares from all around. She smoothens down her messy and knotted hair and fixes the mud-covered clothes, but it helps only so much. She feels exposed. It feels like a walk of shame.
She feels eyes boring a hole in her back – she knows Hiccup is staring, analyzing. She wants to tell him everything – every tiny detail. She wants to hug him, she wants to see him smile, hear him laugh.
Unable to bear the silence, she turns to them. They halt simultaneously upon her turn, wariness etched with curiosity.
"What about the dragon hunters?"
"Dragon hunters?" Hiccup repeats, arching an eyebrow.
"The football team?" Snotlout adds, his confusion mirroring the one of his cousin.
She doesn't understand. She doesn't understand. She doesn't understand.
The lifeless gray underneath her blurs for a moment, dark spots dancing before her eyes as her head pounded and her stomach revolted. She takes another two steps, her feet barely landing back on the ground. She feels a warm hand on the smaller of her back, holding her up.
She registers her feet moving, the arm that stabilizes her, his voice, close to her. And then she feels another pair of arms, stronger, bigger, getting ahold of her, leading her somewhere. She tries to fight back, throws a kick and a punch, missing both. Her weapon is nowhere to be found, and so are Hiccup and Snotlout. Her arm stings. All is blurry, so very blurry. Her limbs are heavy.
James swallows, trying to tune out the commotion from the house Astrid was lead into. Something inside him aches. He doesn't get it. Astrid's plump mother, or whoever the woman is, comes back out, red in the face from fatigue.
"Oh gods – I can't thank you enough, I haven't noticed she left the room." the woman wipes her sweaty forehead. "Her father will not be pleased."
"I- ehm," he rubs the back if his neck, hand shoved in one of the pockets of his old jeans. The last sentence, stiff and rough, makes him uneasy. "It's no problem, really."
His eyes shift to the white building. He swears he can see her looking out from the window, toying with the curtain absently.
"Is she- Will she be alright?"
The elder woman heaves a breath, brows creased. Her hand reaches to shove a loose hair into the messy bun.
"Hopefully," she nods with a sad smile. "I thought she was doing better."
"Right," he responds curtly as his head bobs up and down on his own accord. With one last, fleeting, glance towards the window, and Astrid, he takes his leave. Despite his cousin's attempts, the walk back "home" is silent. Hitting up the blonde yesterday in the bar, he would have never anticipated such outcome. His insides burn, feeling of shame boiling in his chest. But he also finds himself…longing.
He doesn't know who the Hiccup in her head is. But he sure envies him.
A/N:
This universe Astrid is a tad different one than usual.
Is "Hiccup" OOC? Yes, but Hiccup is an idealized version of the man Astrid met the night before.
There's a least one more chapter to it. Let me know what you think. ;)