This fic grew out of a prompt from a post of airport-related AUs on Tumblr: "I made a horrible first impression at the gate or in line for airport food but now we're sitting next to each other au."
What it turned into is an occasionally angsty, mostly romcom-esque modern excuse for me to write some ridiculous smut and bantering.
Warnings for mentions of cancer and some very strong language and sexual content.
Through security, across the terminal, and to the gate. Fifteen minutes until the doors closed. Fifteen minutes between him and not making this flight—he had it in the bag. He could do this! Hiccup Haddock could do this. The next flight wasn't until tomorrow morning, so really, he had to. And he'd been blessed by the randomizing algorithm in the airport computer system; in the corner of his boarding pass it read: TSA PRE-CHECK PRIORITY BOARDING. Oh yeah. He could do this.
The regular security line was one of those zigzagging, bloated, unmoving monsters—he went through the second, smaller entrance, ducked under the ropes of two or three empty rows, and only stood about ten feet from the TSA officer checking board passes and IDs right before the wall of metal detectors and body scanners. There was only one middle-aged guy and his tiny briefcase between Hiccup and that x-ray machine. He sucked in a relieved breath and tried to ignore the outraged stares of the people in the normal line to his right.
Another TSA officer appeared, and muttered something to his colleague that Hiccup just barely overheard: "…going to take breaks, we're closing this line. Only take a couple more and then close it up and send the rest down to C." And then the colleague went on his way.
Shit. Hiccup glanced between himself and the regular line, doing the math. If the officer was alternating lines, and a woman from the regular line was stepping up, and the middle-aged man went right behind her—it wasn't his turn. He'd have to go to C, wherever C was.
Panicking, he leapt after briefcase guy, cutting off the next person from the regular line—
"Excuse me?"
A feminine voice from behind him. He swung around, already on the defensive as he handed the TSA officer his boarding pass and license.
"Listen, I'm sorry, my plane leaves—" He stumbled: there was a very angry, very attractive young blonde woman glaring at him. "—my flight leaves in like twelve minutes!"
"So does mine!" she cried, doing nothing to disguise her anger. Yeah, very, very attractive. The people in line behind her cringed, uncomfortable.
The TSA officer waved her off. "No more on this line, ma'am, we're transferring everyone down to the next checkpoint."
"I was in front of him in line!"
"I've got priority boarding," Hiccup explained, backing away from her and into the security area, where he tossed his duffel on the conveyor belt. Cool how he'd gone from pissing off hot women in his daily life to pissing off hot women in random airport encounters!
"Priority boarding?" she shouted, half at Hiccup and half at the TSA officer, "What, so some rich jerk gets to make me miss my flight?"
Hiccup swung back to face her, throwing his hands up. "I'm not rich, lady, it's totally random."
"Fine, maybe you're not rich, but you're still a fucking jerk!" Behind her, a woman made a small affronted noise at her language. The TSA guy was looking alarmed but uncertain, like he'd been trained for a lot of things but not an irate, shortish blonde woman swearing loudly at another passenger.
Hiccup started tearing off his shoes, unable to fight a grin—a part of him felt weirdly satisfied, victorious over this disgruntled stranger. "Sorry, lady," he called back to her, and she gasped in fury at his smugness.
"Can you believe this guy?" she demanded of the TSA officer, who only shrugged perfunctorily.
"He's priority, ma'am."
As she was herded away with the rest of the line, Hiccup heard her say, "Yeah, what man isn't?"
Well. He fought off a twinge of guilt as an agent patted him down.
But it was hard to keep stewing in regret when he settled into his seat on the plane, out of breath and a bit sweaty after sprinting halfway across the airport to his gate, but here. He'd done it. And he had the only empty seat on the plane right next to him, which meant he could let his aching knee stretch out a bit. He pulled out his phone, set it in airplane mode, and then got out his sketchbook. He had about a dozen ideas for an ad campaign he'd just been signed on to, maybe a could he'd pursue, he wanted to have something to show the client by the end of the week.
A passing stewardess mentioned that the doors were closed and the last passenger had just made it, and Hiccup glanced forlornly at the empty seat beside him. So much for legroom. At the front of the plane, someone said, "Welcome aboard, miss." Hiccup drew a few shapes on an empty page. The company wanted something clean and modern, they said. Made him think geometric.
"Hello, priority."
His head snapped up. There, standing in the aisle by his empty seat, was the woman from security.
Fuck me, he thought desperately. She grinned but did not look very happy. More of a serial killer, you-wronged-me-and-now-I-will-bathe-in-your-blood kind of grin.
"Ooooh," he choked out, "Heeeey. You made it!"
"No thanks to you," she said, still smiling. Her voice dripped with false pleasantry. She reached up and shoved her weekender into the overhead bin—he wasn't going to look at her ass.
He looked at her ass.
As he'd suspected, it was awesome. She had an awesome ass. Yeah. Of course.
She swung into the seat beside him and he saw she had even more awesome… things: huge blue eyes, curls of soft yellow hair, ruddy cheeks. Stuff he couldn't process earlier, on account of her screaming at him. She wore a blue sweater that stretched over her chest, a nice-sized chest for a thinner woman, but she was sort of curvy, she had hips too. Couldn't have been much younger than him, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five? Hiccup hadn't gotten laid in three months, so this was all very keenly, pathetically horrible for him.
"Wow, and now you're staring at my tits, are you going for some kind of douchebag of the month award?"
When he looked up, her smile had morphed into a grimace. He glanced at the emergency exit a few rows down and wondered if this was an appropriate occasion to escape on that big yellow slide. "God. I'm sorry."
"Pft." She drew a book from her backpack and kicked it under the seat, but didn't say anything else.
Somehow he couldn't handle that this beautiful, smart (he didn't know how he knew she was smart, he just did) woman thought he was a… douchebag. That was her word, douchebag. He wasn't, he knew he wasn't, he'd just cut a few corners and accidentally let his eyes wander. Not a great first impression, but not an accurate one, either.
"Whatcha readin'?" he asked, running a nervous hand over the cover of his sketchbook.
She paused. Didn't look at him, but he could see that her eyes had stopped moving over the page. She replied, slowly, "Teaching to transgress." The plane had started to taxi.
"Ah," he said, not having a response. He had sort of hoped it was some Dan Brown novel. "What's it about?"
She still didn't glance up. "Are you going to insist on talking to me through the whole flight? Because I'll call the flight attendant." Without looking, she raised a hand above them, to the call button. He felt intimidated and, oddly, interested.
"Will you let me apologize, then?" Yeah. It was good to cut the bullshit, less messy.
Snapping her book shut, she straightened and glared. "Only if you acknowledge that I've got no obligation to accept it."
"I do."
"Then go ahead."
He nodded, gulped, and did his best. "I'm sorry I was so inconsiderate in the security line, it was your turn and I should've let you go. And I'm very pleased you made the flight in spite of my stupidity. And I'm sorry for the unsolicited…" Ogling didn't seem like a good word to use here. "Attention. Yep. I'm Hiccup, by the way," he said, extending a hand, "In case you wanted to put a name to the douchebag. Which, maybe you didn't! But now you can be more specific when you report me, or whatever."
The woman stared at his hand for a beat. "Hiccup's not a name."
"Okay, obviously it's a nickname, but everyone calls me that."
She looked at him frankly. "What good is a nickname when I report you?"
"I mean, if you yell 'Hiccup' in a crowded place, I'm the only person who's going to stand up."
Her mouth twisted into something that might've been a smile, but she caught herself in it and cleared her throat. "Okay then."
"Are you going to accept it?"
She tapped the cover of her book with a clean, unmanicured nail. "Yeah. Sure. Accepted."
"Thank you," he said, and settled back in his seat, already feeling a bit less like the goofy jackass character on a sitcom. At least he could pass this flight knowing he'd done what he could to repair things with his accidental traveling companion.
"Astrid."
The sound of her voice—a little softer, less angry, less guarded—jolted him, he sat forward and peered over at her. She was looking up the aisle, avoiding his gaze.
"What?"
"I'm Astrid."
Astrid. The glimmer of shyness gave him a weird hope, an idea that he should—do something. Anything.
He slipped his sketchbook back into his back and turned to her, smiling. "So, Astrid, what do you do for a living?"
Astrid stared at the little piece of paper he extended her way, black beveled letters in a sleek typeset. A name, an email, a phone number.
"Are you going to take it?" asked the guy, sounding amused. He had a freckle on his thumb. The line cutter. The breast starer. The really, extraordinarily good-looking fast talker with whom she'd just spent an hour and a half bantering, though it felt like twenty minutes. His jawline was unreal.
She snatched the business card from his hand, and tossed a glance outside—Ruff was waiting in the parking lot to drive her back to the apartment. She couldn't dawdle. "Holden Haddock," she read, and snorted. "Holden."
Hiccup—yeah, weirdly enough, Hiccup was better for him—pulled a face. "I put it on there for professional stuff, don't…"
She flicked the card absently, eyeing him. She'd taken it but there was a slight awkwardness as he shifted from leg to leg, like maybe he had something else to say.
"You busy tonight?"
There it was.
Astrid put a show into hesitating, and he shook his head.
"Okay, you know what, I won't make you decide—I know I'm going to be in the hotel bar tonight with a scotch and soda." He slipped the card back from her hand, fingers brushing the base of her thumb. "Let me give you the name of the place." When he pulled a pen from his pants pocket, her eyes were drawn to his crotch; Astrid swallowed hard.
He started trying to write on the back of the card against his thigh, but winced and straightened right away—she stepped forward, offering the surface of her shoulder. "Here." They used to do that in middle school, scribble notes on one another's backs. She felt him pause, before the card met the softness of her sweater and the pen moved against her. The paper rectangle, newly marked, reappeared in her palm.
"Nine o'clock. If you wanna come by and continue our conversation. Otherwise," he said, laying a hand across his (taut, perfectly proportioned) chest, "Yours truly will be drinking alone. As he often does. Except that makes me sound kind of sad, so forget I said it!" She laughed once, surprised to find him so… yeah. "See you, then. Maybe. If not, have a good life—" He gave her a wide, gorgeous grin as he backed away, and said her name with weird reverence, "Astrid." As Hiccup jogged in the direction of the taxi stand, she nodded and waved.
And watched his ass while he went. Fucking hell. She stuffed the card into her pocket and went to find her ride.
The firm that had hired him picked a bougie, hip boutique hotel, probably because they thought they needed to put their bougie, hip creative talent up in a fitting establishment.
He'd gone and dumped his bag on the bed and showered off the griminess of the plane right away. He watched the news while his hair dried and got dressed: jeans, a button-down, a cardigan. Like a typical Silicon Valley jagoff. At 8:55, he went down to the hotel bar—very edgy, suede-topped barstools and a long counter of some thick clear stone, with a layer of black shining through from the bottom. Hiccup ordered a scotch and soda and spent the next ten minutes trying to figure out what the fuck that counter was all about, rather than thinking about the relative emptiness of the room—rather than wondering if tonight it would just be the three businessmen muttering to one another at the other end of the bar, and the two young artists cozying up at a corner booth, and him. The bartender, who paradoxically wore a slick black shirt and had a large bushy beard, cleaned glasses a ways down from Hiccup and did not make eye contact.
Finally, around 9:08, the bartender's eyes went to the entrance, and Hiccup's heart punched into his throat as he turned to see who'd arrived.
"He's buying my drink."
Thank fuck. Astrid—Astrid, what an incredible name, like a goddamn princess—sidled on to the stool beside him. The bartender glanced at Hiccup. "Yeah, I am."
"And I'll have your most expensive glass of white." The guy disappeared to get her drink and he bit back a laugh. No surprises there.
Astrid seemed almost determined not to acknowledge his presence. She wore a slinky, curve-hugging black dress, short on the leg, low on the chest, and heels. A date outfit. Her blonde hair was up with a few choice tendrils falling down her cheeks. And red lipstick. He grinned into his scotch and soda.
"You really don't look like a women's studies PhD candidate, you know."
She still didn't look at him, but raised an eyebrow. "You thinking that women's studies PhD candidates look a certain way is the reason we need women's studies PhD candidates."
"You're very witty, you know."
"Stop complimenting me."
"Why?"
"Because you didn't compliment me before and I like being mean to you."
This time, he laughed. He liked this game. The bartender returned and set a huge glass of wine in front of Astrid, and he moved away down the bar, leaving them alone. She took two gulps right away. Hiccup's eyes ran down her neck, her back, to the hem of her dress and the soft white thigh it rode up. Thought of wrapping those legs around himself. "You're unbelievably beautiful," he told her.
She grimaced. "I bet you weren't this confident when you were fifteen."
He was still smiling, but it did give him pause. Had he met a siren? "How…"
"You just carry yourself like someone who hasn't always been hot but is really going for it now that he is." Hiccup couldn't help the leaping sensation in his chest. He downed the rest of his scotch.
"So you think I'm hot?"
"Obviously I think you're hot," she said, with a glare. She even glared prettily. "Would I be here if I didn't think you were hot? Do you think I like you?" Which implied that she was here because… Hiccup sat back, grinning. Sayonara, three month dry spell! Sayonara, pain and misery!
"I don't know, I thought we had a pretty good talk on the plane."
"You made me almost miss my flight."
"You accepted my apology."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"I think it means something," he said, leaning toward her. Astrid glanced at him sideways, and took another—maybe nervous—sip of wine, eyes trailing away from him and down the bar.
"I think people who hang out in bars like this must be lonely," she said lightly.
"Bars like this?" he repeated, even though he knew what she meant. He stayed close to her, kept an arm on the counter.
"Yeah." She glanced around, disdaining the high ceilings and glittery mod lighting. "This isn't a fun bar, where you'd go with friends. This is—they charge you fifteen dollars for a martini and won't even turn on the heat." The skin on her arms prickled and she shrunk with a little shiver. So he rubbed his palm over her forearm, quickly—her skin was soft. Astrid glanced up, their eyes met really properly for the first time since she'd arrived. Their arms twisted together, his fingers resting in the crook of hers, just brushing the invisible hairs there. Her lips parted—red, red lips, he wanted to be finding red lipstick all over himself come the morning.
Astrid cleared her throat and tugged her arm away from him, turning to stare back down the bar.
He caught the bartender's eye and gestured to his empty scotch and her nearly depleted wine, and the guy nodded once.
"Switching to your most expensive bourbon," she called after him, perfunctory.
"You're probably right," said Hiccup, with his best inflated sigh, pulling away from her in a show of defeat—he noted that she moved an inch toward him in reply, looking a little disappointed—ha. "We're lonely. Sad. Wonder how we're going to fix that."
"I am lonely."
Hiccup's head snapped up. The bartender returned with their second round and retreated even further away, this time. He had on an expression of trained blankness, like he was deaf to the conversations of his customers—made Hiccup wonder what sort of people he got in here. But Astrid… "I was kidding."
"I'm not." She stared at the wall of liquor bottles glinting behind the bar. "I don't do… this." She threw a look his way, and she didn't need to clarify. It suddenly occurred to him—how had he forgotten this?—that they'd only met this afternoon. "Not since undergrad, anyway. Thought I was a grown-up now. A dater," she sneered into her wine.
"I'll be an amputee in six months."
He heard the words come out of his mouth but didn't remember deciding to say them.
Somehow it just seemed like the right thing to do.
Astrid stared at him, her face opened by the astonishment and instant devastation, but he could only think how pretty she was like that—wide-eyed, mouth peeping open, a little color in her cheeks.
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah. Osteosarcoma in my left leg. It's all they can do."
Anger flashed across her face. "Are you fucking with me?"
"No."
And the anger was gone. She retreated to her wine, took a long drink, worried her lip. He saw lipstick on her fingertips. Maybe she didn't wear lipstick that much, seemed like she'd forgotten she was wearing it. "Is that painful?"
"Excruciating," he said cheerfully, sipping his drink. "Though, my knee's been hurting the most, lately. I get to keep my knee. I think it's saying it's going to miss my foot."
"Jesus fucking Christ," said Astrid, turning to him in a snap of anger, "Why'd you tell me that? You want a pity fuck or something?" He put a fast hand on her shoulder, and raised his other reassuringly. He'd freaked her out.
"No, no, I just thought it might make you feel better about being lonely."
"Well it doesn't, it just makes me feel like my problems aren't real." She put her head in her hands, elbows on the counter.
"I'm sure they're perfectly legitimate problems," he offered, pausing so that she might elaborate, but she only finished the glass of wine. He figured he shouldn't mention that he'd gotten this amputation news two days ago, and had yet to inform his family and friends. That was the lonely bit, the thing that'd made him think of it. Hiccup sat up and ran a hand through his hair. "We both know you're not going to fuck me out of pity."
"What makes you think I'm going to fuck you at all?" she replied, though the hand covering half her mouth muted its venom.
"You came here because you find me attractive. Not because you like me, because you want to talk." He added, to himself, "Though we've done plenty of that."
She drew in a breath that brought his eyes to her breasts: lovely, milky, nearly spilling out of her dress while she leaned over the counter. "Yeah." Astrid sat up, her wicked red mouth a hard line. "I don't care if you have cancer or the plague," she said, grabbing his hand and laying it against her thigh. Instinctively, he slid his palm toward the hem of her dress, not fighting the smirk. "I don't like you. Less talking."