A/n: Oh hai, have another super-angsty Hijack fic, not like there aren't a gazillion of those or anything! ^_^ I posted this on Tumblr a while ago, then figured eh, why not just throw it here too... shitty though it may be, it is Hijack and it is drenched in pheels... that must count for something.
Who wants to live forever?
He's fifteen, still a child, bony and awkward like a wooden puppet hanging from twitching strings. His smile is lopsided, and his blush reaches all the way down to his neck. Men over three-times his width and several heads taller knock him aside, drag him by the collar of his tunic, send him staggering forward with a careless clap on the back. Other children sneer in his face and turn their fur-clad backs to him. The women roll eyes and mutter within his hearing, the girls whirl their axes with a menacing gleam in their eyes.
He entraps a beast that would char the mightiest of his people easily as a shoe falls on a beetle. He lets it go. It forgives him, and his fears begin to fall away. Where others see malice, he finds magic. He gives back what he took from the winged creature, and turns enemies to friends, ends a war, slays a monster, with no weapons and no brawn – only a sharp mind and a stout heart.
Fifteen, and his people honor the one-legged dragon rider. But they still don't know the wounded child who never wanted a part in war.
I find him in a valley, lying asleep against his dragon's black hide. His nose is round and splashed with freckles, so I smile and blow cool air over it, and watch his face scrunch blearily. It reminds me of a disgruntled kitten, twitching its tiny muzzle in distaste, and I laugh. His eyes open, leaf-green and wide, inches across from my own ocean-blues.
He screams.
He sees me.
The slumbering dragon awakens and snaps at me like a bear shielding a cub. But the boy stops the dragon before it can snatch up my head, and my one believer listens to my legend.
My name is Jack Frost. I bend the wind and paint with ice. I am unseen.
His name is Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III. He rides with dragons and rebuilds ruins. He is unheard.
We talk. He laughs and rolls his eyes and I grin and can't stand still. He remembers a story an elderly woman once told of a boy made of air, who traced over water with frost, and nipped the warmth from children's noses and ears. It left him wondering what eyes can and cannot see, and even now he had the childlike wisdom to keep asking, what if? If he felt cold wind like fingers on his face, or found patterns on frozen lakes like drawings on a canvas, who was he to say it wasn't the work of an invisible boy?
I tell him there are others like me, but only unseen to some, those who live on as long as someone can see them. No one's ever seen me before, since the moon pulled me out of oblivion. Two, maybe three centuries, I was alone. I passed the time with mischief and ice-crested art, and watched the children playing in the snow I made for them, pretending I could be a part of it. But if they came close, they always stepped right through me, like empty air.
We're not smiling anymore. But he sees me, and I hear him.
I'll meet him again tomorrow, and every tomorrow after.
He's seventeen, a young adult now, still small but not as scrawny. His shoulders have filled out more, though his limbs and middle are slender as ever. He is quiet, uncertain, but not afraid. He can speak out with a loud voice, and make his peers listen. But the people still value brawn over wit.
His best friends are a creature that cannot speak and a boy whom no one else sees. A girl kisses him a few times, but nothing comes of it. His father tries harder to connect.
Tries.
I tease him and get him to play and laugh like a little boy again. He shares ideas I'd never imagined before we met. We argue. I catch him before he falls. He touches me and I don't feel so cold. I can finish his sentences. He can read my eyes.
I am in love with him.
I've kept it secret, but he knows me. So I tell him I can't bind him to a love that he can never share with the world, that can never yield children, can never be warm. He understands, he says.
He kisses me anyway.
He's seventeen. It's a simple love. Our hands join, I kiss him everywhere I can reach, and his soft whines make me crazy. We can't stand to be apart. We make love for the first time, then I wrap around him and we whisper until we drift to sleep.
He's twenty-three. He wears armor and guards secrets. Clans wage war against his for the key to dragon domination. Even his father heeds his counsel now. He fights on dragon-back, disarming, thwarting, never wounding if he can help it. Never killing. He leads the young riders to victory after victory, and comes out more tired every time.
I can't help him.
Blizzards only hide the enemy and hinder the dragons. I can slow their ships as they approach, and throw freezing winds on their armies. But I can't touch them, and I can't hit them with the worst of winter and also shield my lover's people.
He says I am here, and that's all he needs from me.
I still wish I could fight.
His face in my hands is no longer so round, his body not so yielding. It takes on a more wiry shape under the weight of his armor. But he's still beardless and short, and I still call him a kid and make him laugh.
One day a new tactician emerges from the enemy clans. He unites several tribes together, and commands their combined forces against the place I had begun to call home. The dragon riders push them back at first, but then every spear, every arrow, every axe, flies at a single target.
The black dragon dodges the first wave, and the second, but the third is too much. Something strikes his rider, and they fall.
I dive. Fear pushes me faster than I've ever been. I snatch him up just before he reaches the earth. His dragon crashes against it, and neither man nor beast stir.
The young man in my arms bears only a heavy bruise on his head, but cannot be wakened. Invaders rush in under the confusion. A woman takes charge of the riders, and the muddled dragon ranks come together again. But the enemy takes heart at the fall of the legendary dragon tamer, and their forces begin to overwhelm even the riders.
I fly my beloved back from the fighting and try again to rouse him.
He's twenty-three, and he forces his eyes open on a battlefield.
The invaders see him rise, and superstitious hearts quake at the sight. They never saw his fall break in my arms. Belief spreads like flame that the dragon tamer is more than man, and the enemy falters.
He can barely stand, leaning into me weakly, but just standing is enough. The invaders lose. The wounded can be treated.
But I never want to let him go. He wandered so close to death that day. For the first time, it really hits me, cutting me open like a knife in my gut.
He will die.
I've known this. The words rang in my head many times. But only now do I understand what it means. One day, I will never hold him again. We'll never laugh and banter and share touches and moans and look into one another's faces, ever again. He will go away forever, and I will be stuck here always.
He looks so ragged, hardly even awake.
I never want to let him go.
He's thirty-one, and they wonder now, why has he never taken a wife?
The tribe's numbers have swelled. The chief is slowing. Everyone looks to the unwed son, vying for his approval, his guidance, or his affections. He trains new riders, showing them young how to win a dragon's loyalties and build a friendship unlike any other. The village is filled with his crafts, from children running to the hilltops with telescopes, to women tending the mill at the waterfront. His book of dragons is full.
His hair is a little longer, scruffier, and stubble lines his jaw in the mornings before he shaves.
I'm still frozen as I am.
But he loves me, never stops saying it even now – or especially now, with all the young women pursuing him.
He stands tall and speaks with steady conviction. He still blushes, his wit is still prickly, and there's still a kind of meekness in his demeanor. The armor isn't donned much, since the treaty his tribe enforced between all the clans was enacted. He wears slightly heavier furs than he used to, but they are modest next to his aging father's.
I've seen how he smiles at the young ones just learning to ride a dragon. It's so bright at first, then as the children turn and sprint into a mother's or father's arms, the smile falls a little. He spends more time than he ever used to with the youngest tribe members, his dark dragon at his side, helping him make the little ones shriek with delight and dance around in hysterical enthusiasm. There's such a gentle glow in his eyes when he's with them, and the curve of his lips sometimes turn wistful.
He's thirty-one. I should let him go.
But he makes me promise, one night, as we tangle into each other. I promise never to leave him.
He loves me, he says. And that's enough for him.
I cry.
He's forty-three.
The beginnings of wrinkles show in the edges of his face. I fish out gray hairs and laugh at his dismayed expression. He points out I'm still older by a couple centuries at least, not to mention grayer. I do look pretty good for my age though, I get him to admit.
His father passes. Tensions run high between the clans before the dragon tamer at last becomes chief, inaugurated by the elders. Everyone celebrates, knowing him to be wise and kind. They have become a people who aspire to more than muscle and blind valor. In these times of peace, reading is commonplace among the younger folk – though the old still scoff a bit and comment that in their day, they felled beasts and raiders with their jagged axes. Now the children merely read about it…
I find a small book on his desk filled with myths and legends. The last pages are written in a different pen from the rest. It's a short story about a boy who paints with frost and dances through air. The title is Jökul Frosti.
He's fifty-six, and he is the same to me as the day we first met, as he was at fifteen.
He's sixty-two, and he still laughs like a child, although his mind begins to blunt some and I tease him for his growing forgetfulness.
He's seventy-four, and he moves so slowly, now. Dragon-flight is too much for him. He keeps slipping away from the present, and each time I wonder if he'll ever come back. But he always returns to me with an astoundingly frank, sarcastic remark that has me in stitches, because it's still him, he's still with me.
He's eighty, and he doesn't wake up.
My name is Jack Frost, and once I loved a boy as long as he lived.
His name was Hiccup.
When he was fifteen, his smile was lopsided, and his blush reached all the way down to his neck.
THE END
A/n: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Excuse me I'll go die now...
Oh, the title is from a Queen song btw. It was in Highlander, so. Relevant.