Hello all! A oneshot for you here, hope you enjoy!
Grey was the sky that day, and black his heart.
Astrid's words to him scarcely an hour hence echoed in his head.
You can't go alone!
But he could, and he had, for though his tribe had ne'er seen fit to better than scorn him, and now hated him of course, they were still his family, and the only people he knew. Only he knew the threat they faced, and only he could save them from themselves.
Him and his best friend.
Black wings sheared the air beneath him, his back hunched tight over Toothless' muscular neck, their speed growing with each wingbeat. In the distance he could see the island, lacerating the horizon like a shard of glass, as yet only a silhouette but growing inexorably.
It had been amazing in itself that he'd managed to break Toothless out of the so-called Killing Ring at all. After the whole tribe had seen his attempts to calm the Monstrous Nightmare, after they'd all seen the Night Fury leap to his defence, and of course after they'd caught Toothless and strung him up in one of the pens, it had been fairly predictable that his father would round on him.
He hadn't honestly expected disownment, but it didn't much bother him, merely registered as a point of curiosity really - a footnote. That was thanks to what his father - the chieftain - had said next.
He, and anyone else who could carry a sword, were sailing to the island, with Toothless to be taken along to find the way, whether he wanted to or not, there to do battle with a dragon whose sheer size Stoick had evidently failed spectacularly to wrap his head around. Hiccup had seen the bloodlust begin to rise in the eyes opposite him and had known then there was only one thing to be done. It was suicide either way, but the brutal fact was that if they did it his way, it might just be one person who died, rather than many hundreds.
Sneaking into the Killing Ring, undoing the shackles and bolts, and bolting to the clifftop, the two of them had waited there only for the length of time it took him to properly fit the saddle and to don his own riding gear.
It had been then that Astrid had found him. She'd known instantly on seeing the two of them, of course, what he was doing - she'd seen the beast herself, she knew just as well as Hiccup what folly the chief had committed himself to - and she'd tried to stop Hiccup from going, but his own hackles were up and he'd merely cast her the saddest, most rueful of sidelong glances before leaping on his dragon and fairly hurling himself at the sky, her screams following him out to sea, her anguish all too audible.
Would he ever see her again? Such questions were of little gravity now. He'd surely soon know the answer either way, but presently he had bigger issues. They were nearly there.
All was quiet, deathly silence, but of course they knew what lurked beneath the mountain. Trusting Toothless to find the same way into it that he had before, Hiccup merely braced himself for the inevitable, and found himself astonished at how calm he was.
It was with that thought that they hurtled headlong into the cavern halfway up the almost-sheer eastern face of the volcano, and all was suddenly blackness. Toothless roared, the sound amplifying in the cave and meshing with the scream of the rushing air, and after only a couple of seconds Hiccup felt the very air itself shudder by way of response.
Suddenly, they were out into the main chamber, and there it was in all of its horrible majesty. The scarlet-red spines, those six eyes, each a human's height in diameter and yet still appearing beady and vanishing, set as they were in such an enormous head.
This head was, perhaps inevitably, currently leering furiously at them, and it was only another single second before the most almighty roar followed, sending chunks of rock falling from the ceiling as the entire mountain reverberated, the cacophony echoing round and round the chamber, and it was all Hiccup could do to just hang on.
Toothless made the decision, not him, but it must have been only a handful of seconds in total before they were screaming their way back out the way they'd come in, and Hiccup felt it as the tunnel began to disintegrate behind them. The noise of cascading stone, crashing and crunching and squealing, chased them out the volcano, a rush of air propelling them the final few metres to what only seemed like safety for the most fleeting of moments before the beast itself smashed its out of the rock below and to their left, obliterating much of what had been solid rock and sending an enormous cloud of dust broiling into the atmosphere.
It was only then, of course, that Hiccup got even the slightest idea of the true size of the Gods-be-damned thing, and his breath had hitched in his throat. It was no exaggeration to say the thing was fully half the size of the entire mountain that it had just taken a sizeable chunk out of, and not for the first time, Hiccup wondered just how on earth he'd been stupid enough to hope to achieve anything other than a particularly spectacular death.
His grip tightened on the saddle, even as the two of them swung away and upward, altitude now their concern above all else. Hiccup chanced a look back over his shoulder and was aghast to see two vast, tattered grey wings unfurling themselves either side of the beast, slowly and unsteadily as befitted their lack of use over the preceding centuries. Nonetheless, there could be only one implication - this thing, whatever it was, was capable of flight and intent on just that.
Bile rising in his throat, Hiccup turned back away, and only a couple of seconds later he felt, rather than heard, the whump as what could only have been the first of the demon's wingbeats reverberated like a drumbeat throughout the entire local atmosphere. A handful of seconds later and another followed, and then another, gaining in frequency and portending, so it seemed, of events so very dreadful to follow.
They were high now, though, very high, and as Hiccup closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the fight, against the odds and against fate itself, he and Toothless completed their overhead arc, time and momentum standing still for the longest of instants before they crested the apex of the loop and speared down into a screaming almost-vertical dive, turning height into sheer speed and hurtling towards the beast below.
Hiccup could feel the tell-tale quivering in Toothless' neck that told him a bolt of fire was being readied to issue forth from the Night Fury's mouth, and he did the best he could with his foot in the stirrup to aim the two of them, single fighting unit as they were, at the right spot. Instinct told him the wings were the most vulnerable part of what seemed a totally invulnerable creature, and it was with a grim desperation that he held on and just waited for the fight to begin.
Down and down they went. The very air seemed to blur. He clenched his hands tighter still, and thought of those people back home who had forced him to this point. He thought of his childhood, the constant sidelong glances of derision thrown his way, the whispering behind his back. He thought of all those things, and it was through his love for those very people, his people, that in spite of everything, his resolve hardened further still. Then, with Toothless' first shot finally loosing itself and rocketing forward, a projectile of purest blue fire, the battle of the ages began, and though the consequences would reverberate through all time to come, they were far from the sight or knowledge of any other souls but theirs, alone as they were, as really, they always had been.
They never found him.
Once the village had found their newly-captive Night Fury gone, they had of course assumed Hiccup had freed it and had run. The name of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III almost instantaneously became synonymous with 'traitor', and it took a long time for the frustration to abate that he had denied them the chance to lay waste to the dragons' nest, now he'd taken their only chance of ever finding it.
Of course they noticed that the dragon attacks had stopped. They thought it curious, to be sure, and it brought them happiness and plenty in time, but none of them ever made the connection between the two events.
Save for one.
She knew, of course, that the Queen dragon was dead. She knew, without having ever to see it, what he'd done, though she never dared give it voice to anyone else. She only waited, waited for him to come back to her, to prove them all wrong, to show her it was all alright. To show her that they'd have their happy ending.
If anyone had later chanced on that island, now cold and barren and silent, they would have certainly seen the enormous bones of the monster that had once reigned there, strewn all over the grey pebble beaches as if by an explosion. Perhaps, as well, they might have found a few remnants of a Night Fury skeleton, and if they really looked hard, a handful of shattered fragments of human bone. Maybe they might even have put together the chain of events and realised what really had happened. But he slipped quietly into history, into the anonymity of those who died alone, and no-one ever did chance on that island, sitting alone in the sea, pregnant only with the secrets it held, secrets of a boy, a man, with a heroism so great that he would lay himself on the line to save a people who would never even know what had happened.
She waited all her life. Her tears never dried, but he never came back.
I'd love it if you were willing to leave a review! I wrote this after it occurred to me that events would likely have been very different indeed if there had been nobody there to witness Hiccup and Toothless' battle with the Red Death... this is what, sadly, I think would have been most likely.