Strongest Of Them All
(rough draft)
A DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon fanfic by Raberba girl
Summary: In the Barbaric Archipelago, defective or unwanted infants are customarily sent to their deaths. Hiccup narrowly escaped such a fate.
A/N: Your Mileage May Vary, but I feel like I should put a warning on this fic for addressing a topic that's potentially sensitive or controversial.
o.o.o
Valka's fingers nearly crushed her husband's much larger ones as she gave one last push. Stoick patted her shoulder but watched eagerly for his first glimpse of their child.
He could barely see it there in the midwife's hands. Something didn't seem right. He knew the child was being born early, it made sense that it would be a bit smaller than usual, but that small?! Was that thing even really a baby?!
Valka let out a sobbing gasp and reached for the slimy, screaming thing, digging it forcefully out of the midwife's grasp when the woman seemed reluctant to let go of it.
Stoick could still barely see the thing. Valka was cradling the newborn to her breast, one hand covering it in a shielding motion. "There, there," she cooed, "there now, love, it's all right, you made it..."
Why was she talking to it that way? Couldn't she see how small it was? Couldn't she see that after so much time and heartbreak, so many miscarriages and so much fear and hope during this pregnancy, the longest one Valka had ever managed...couldn't she see that they had still failed? "It's a runt," Stoick whispered brokenly.
"This is our child," Valka said fiercely. There was fear behind her anger, and horror rose in him as he realized that she was going to fight him on this. It was going to be hard enough even without her resistance.
"Val-"
"He's MINE!" she shouted. "He is MY SON and I won't let him be taken from me!"
"There's nothing else to be done with it," one of the women said impatiently. "Look how tiny and weak it is, Valka! It won't last the week, much less the winter!" They tried to take the infant out of her arms.
"Stoick!" she screamed, struggling. "Stoick, help me!"
He set his hands on the shoulders of the two closest women, barely refraining from jerking them away. "Take your hands off my wife," he growled.
Wide-eyed and incredulous, they obeyed their chief, falling back to watch warily. Stoick bent over his wife, who looked up at him with an expression of relief that soon changed to horror when she saw the look on his face. "Val," he said gently.
"Get away from me! Stay away, don't you dare touch him!"
He lifted his hands away for a minute, trying to get her to stop shouting. "Valka, listen to me-"
"No," she snarled, looking as fierce as a dragon. "I won't let you send him into the sea, he's alive, Stoick, he fought so hard, give him a chance! If he really won't survive the winter, at least he won't take up more than a few weeks of- No, Stoick, no, don't touch him!" She was weeping now. "I can't! Stoick, I CAN'T! I won't do this again! I'm TIRED of watching my children die, my children, Stoick, this is the only one who's ever taken a breath and he's still breathing, Stoick, don't do this to him! Don't do this to ME!"
The infant had not stopped crying the entire time. By now, its wails of confusion and discomfort had risen into deafening screams. Stoick could barely think, he needed to make that noise stop.
"Give it to me, Valka! We'll just have to try again-"
She fought, but she couldn't stop him from taking the infant from her arms. The women held her back as she screamed after him, her wild cries following him to the door and out into the night. "Don't do this, Stoick! STOICK! No!" Then, her voice made rough with venom and grief, "If you come back without that child, you will no longer have a wife."
That gave Stoick pause, and more of his heart crumbled. Then he told himself that Valka would come around, she knew deep down that it had to be this way. There was no place in this dangerous, difficult life for a child who was too weak to survive. Perhaps Valka, in her anger, would leave for a time, but he felt sure that eventually she would come back to him.
As Stoick picked up a wooden box and made his way down to the water's edge, the baby's nerve-wracking screams seemed to cling to him, echoing in the otherwise quiet night. Stoick found himself muttering to the infant as if it could understand him or would heed him. "Settle down, now...there's nothing to be done about it, so don't make a fuss..."
The shrieks continued unabated. Stoick pulled his cloak over the baby to muffle its cries, and was relieved when they diminished a bit.
On the rocky shore, he set the box down and laid the baby inside. As soon as it left the shelter of his cloak, its wails rose to screams again. Its naked body, shaking with cold, squirmed ceaselessly; tiny fists and feet beat at the air.
"I don't have a choice," Stoick growled. "What do you think is going to happen if I don't do this, hm? You'll soon end up in the same place, anyway. Better now than having to endure a day, perhaps a week of misery first."
He edged the box into the water and watched it begin to drift away. The baby's continued howls tore at his heart.
"Be quiet," he whispered. "Be quiet. What good is it to protest the inevitable-" He stopped and stared. The baby continued screaming as loudly as ever, even as it drifted farther and farther away...
He had a flash of imagination, seeing in his mind's eye the baby eventually falling still and silent with exhaustion and then with death. The child's life would fade away just as Valka's spirit was. He knew that every failed pregnancy took its toll on her, every heartbreak killed a little more of the light in her eyes...maybe this really was the last one. Maybe she really would tolerate no more grief.
And a child who protested his own death this much couldn't be an entirely hopeless case, right?
Stoick splashed through the water and seized the box. He scooped up his tiny son and tucked the freezing cold babe into his tunic. He was pleasantly surprised when the child, held between the warmth of flesh and clothing, quieted its raging screams to exhausted, dull sobs.
"It's all right now, little one," Stoick murmured, curving both hands around the child's tiny form as he slogged back to dry ground. "You're a hiccup to be sure, but you're my son, and Valka's as well, of course you won't let a thing like that stop you." He chuckled, even as a tear trickled down his cheek. "I should have already known that."
As he approached the house, one of the women hurried out to meet him. "Stoick, she won't let us near her. You must-" She stopped and stared at Stoick's tunic, where the baby's listless crying was emanating from. "Didn't you-?!"
"I'll see to Valka," Stoick said brusquely. He pushed into the house, and found the women clustered warily near the fire. Valka sat on the edge of a chair, gripping the back of it tightly as if she wanted to stand but did not have the strength to do so. There was an axe clenched in her other fist. When she lifted her face to her husband, her expression was full of cold fury for a moment - but then she heard her son's cries, and her eyes widened in astonishment.
"Val," he murmured.
She sobbed and dropped the weapon, stretching out her arms. He laid the baby in them, and as she snuggled her son to her breast and started trying to nurse him, Stoick picked her up carefully and carried her over to the bed. "Stoick," she whispered, her voice full of emotion.
"Chief, I don't understand," the midwife protested. "Didn't you send it out to the sea?!"
"Any babe with such a powerful set of lungs deserves a chance to keep proving his strength," Stoick declared. "This is my son and heir, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III."
"You're giving him a runt's name?" Valka protested. "He'll grow!" The babe had finally managed to latch onto her breast, his feeding bringing a blessed end to his cries.
"He is a runt for now. He's already earned the right to live, but someday he'll earn a title to balance out his name."
"Hiccup Horrendous Haddock," Valka mused, as if reluctantly trying to accustom herself to the name.
"The Third," Stoick reminded her. "Hiccup the Second ended a war, and Hiccup the First was the one who discovered this island on his explorations."
"I suppose it doesn't matter what his name is as long as he's alive," Valka murmured, stroking a gentle finger across her baby's skin.
Stoick kissed her temple, circling his little family in the protection of his arms. "And he will live. Forgive me, Valka. Of course our son will someday become the strongest of them all. How could he be otherwise, with parents like us?"
o.o.o
Author's Notes: In the HTTYD books, newborns who are weak or too small are supposed to be sent out to sea to die. If I remember correctly, this happened to Fishlegs (who is physically the complete opposite of DreamWorks!Fishlegs), but he ended up surviving; Hiccup was also supposed to have been abandoned at birth, but his parents broke the rules and allowed him to live.
Ever since HTTYD2 was in theaters, I've wondered whether what Valka said at Stoick's funeral (about him never doubting Hiccup's strength) was actually true or not, since, honestly, it seems a bit OOC for Stoick. (Based on his behavior in HTTYD1, he seems to have a 'judge a book by its cover' mentality, as opposed to his wife's and son's tendency to consider alternate possibilities. Or else, if he really did say that, maybe it was just a desperate attempt to comfort Valka whenever she was especially anxious about her fragile little baby.) It makes me think that she might possibly have exaggerated, because she saw how lost Hiccup was in that moment and how badly he needed some paternal encouragement, even if it wasn't 100% true.
In addition, I've had this headcanon for a little while about Stoick coming close to abandoning his undersized newborn to death, before suddenly deciding to defy custom and let him live. The reason I wrote it now is because, even though I'm a long way from writing any Hiccup-returns-to-Berk scenes in Hybrid, I've been thinking about them, experimenting with various ways to introduce Hiccup to his birth tribe. One of those involved my headcanon about him nearly being killed as a newborn, so I wanted to get this vignette out of the way first. (Not many people seem to be interested in Hybrid anymore, the response has dropped off a lot since the first chapter... *sweatdrop* I guess their expectations have been disappointed or something.)
I've been having a reeeeaaaalllly hard time with that DWTV project... The stress and anxiety is really bad, I haven't been sleeping well, and the other day my frustration sent me into a downward spiral until I'd hit one of my "I wish I'd never been born" moods...which was probably not helped by the medication I recently started taking, one of the possible side effects of which is "depressive symptoms." *sweatdrop* I should be okay in the long run, but I'll be so glad when my part in this DWTV thing is over...