I Love You This Much
A/N: This is my newest HTTYD story, based off Jimmy Wayne's 'I Love You This Much'. Yep. Featuring OOC Hiccup and Stoick.
Even at nine years old, Hiccup wouldn't have called his dad affectionate, exactly. Tough, stern, strong, decisive, stoic…
Yet despite being all these things, and having to be a chieftain as well, Stoick the Vast played the part of doting father extremely well. He loved his son, with every last inch of his hard Viking heart, and he wasn't afraid to show it, permitted they weren't in public. He rarely ever brushed his son aside for work or other matters, spending quiet nights beside the crackling fire with his little family.
But then things had changed.
Stoick's beloved wife had died, leaving him a widower and young Hiccup motherless. Her absence left a gaping hole in both their hearts, but Stoick hid his well. He threw himself into his chiefly duties, and little by little, his small son began to slide out of his life. Hiccup sat beneath the familiar tree in his front yard every evening at dusk, gazing up at the pink sky, for Berk always had the most spectacular sunsets, and waiting for his father to come home.
Whenever Stoick returned from his day in the village, the young boy would jump up instantly, running to greet him, wrapping his arms around his father in a firm hug. The first few times he did this, Stoick would smile sadly down at him, giving him an affectionate pat on his little auburn head. Hiccup would inhale his father's familiar, comforting scent, and the man would scoop him up and carry him to the house for a quiet dinner.
But there was that one time, no, that first time that Stoick didn't hug Hiccup, didn't pat him on the head, the first time that his scent wasn't familiar or comforting. Hiccup spotted his father coming up the hill, and his green eyes lit up. Scrambling up from his spot at the base of the tree, he squealed in delight. "Daddy! Daddy!" Lately, it seemed that only the boy's father could comfort him after the sudden, unexpected loss of his mother.
When Hiccup wrapped his arms around his dad's middle, Stoick didn't hug him back, and Hiccup didn't smell the comforting scent. Instead, he smelled something distinctly like mead and smoke, but he didn't draw back, not until Stoick detached himself rather calmly, pushing the boy away. He was being gentle, and Hiccup knew it, yet it still hurt when he hit the ground. He knew it was more his fault, for being physically weak, as to why he was knocked over, and not his father being rough, yet it still hurt.
"Daddy," he sat up on his elbows, trying to call after the man, but the red-bearded chieftain had disappeared into the house, leaving the door swinging shut behind him.
Hiccup sat beneath the familiar tree in his front yard, a charcoal stick in one hand, his sketchbook propped on his knees. The lines flew all over the page, the start of a new invention. He still hadn't worked out all the kinks. That would take quite a while, but it was already off to a promising start, and the twelve-year-old could scarcely wait to go back to the forge to start working on it again. Footsteps crunching on the dead autumn leaves littering the ground made him look up, spotting his father walking home, dark circles under his eyes.
The boy sighed, mostly to himself. "Hey, Dad," he greeted softly, and the chieftain looked up from the ground, merely nodding in recognition. Hiccup told himself not to be so disappointed. This was precisely what he had expected. His father had long since stopped showing him such affection, stopped spoiling him with love and attention. Hiccup knew it wasn't very Viking-ly of him, but he wanted that affection and love again, craved it, really.
He turned back to his drawing.
Hiccup heard the front door creak open, but he didn't look up. The fourteen-year-old knew there was no point. His father was probably just going to scowl at him, like he always did, and he would just feel himself shrinking down under the disapproval in the hard gray gaze. He pretended that he was completely immersed in the book he was reading, his heart pounding with every step he heard his father taking. He shouldn't have been this affected by the fact that the man might try to make conversation with him. Sometimes they did try, a bit awkwardly, and then they both parted ways, asking themselves why they had.
They'd had something good in the past, a great father-son relationship, but…it was gone, now. It had left them, died along with his mother, and he knew, just like his mother, there was no getting it back.
The Great Hall was dark when Stoick first threw him in, but his eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting, and he glared at his father's retreating back with every ounce of venom he could muster. "FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE, WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST LISTEN TO ME?!"
He seemed to be running in slow motion, his feet taking an incredibly long time to reach his father, latching onto the man's beefy arm with every bit of strength he had in his tiny hands, so unlike his father's. And though everything was happening in slow motion, it happened so fast that Hiccup didn't even know it had until afterwards, until the stinging in his cheek confirmed his suspicions, and he realized he was on the ground.
Now. Now here it was, all those years of pent-up tension, unexpressed anger and frustration, sorrow and grief and resentment and tears, all swirling around them in a room that suddenly felt too small to hold all the emotions packed within it. Hiccup didn't want to cry, so he didn't. He glared at his father with the same anger that his father's eyes held for him, a quiet loathing wiping away everything else.
"Look where listening to you has got me," Stoick snarled, his voice an awful bellow. Although the boy wouldn't admit it, it scared him, this new and harsh chieftain who had taken his father's place. He swallowed, waiting for the man's final decree.
"You're not a Viking."
"Tell me something I don't know," Hiccup bit out, unable to stop his voice from trembling.
"You're not my son."
The words were a knife, a dagger, aimed straight at Hiccup's heart. They found their target, ripping apart flesh and bone, drawing blood, puncturing the most vital organ. He flinched back from the terrible words, staring up at his father in horror before the man turned on his heel and swept from the Hall, yelling to his men, loud enough for the stricken boy in the Great Hall behind him to hear. "Ready the ships!"
The news of Hiccup being a "dragon conqueror" spread pretty quickly over the islands, and before he knew it, every other tribe he had ever heard of, and quite a few that he hadn't, were trying to get a look at him. He wasn't prepared for this, and neither was Stoick, certainly. But the unspoken agreement continued between the two:
Pretend everything is alright. Pretend we love each other.
In truth, Hiccup did love his father. More than the chieftain would ever know. It killed him. It hurt his heart to have to pretend, it hurt him so deeply to receive a smack on the face sometimes when he spoke, a careless strike that the man never even felt guilty for. It hurt. He loved his father, with a love that even he himself couldn't quite understand, because for Thor's sake, the man was hitting him whenever it struck his fancy. But he loved his father, loved him so much that even if he spread his arms to his widest extent, it wouldn't be able to hold all the affection he still held in his heart. He still craved attention from the man, still craved more than the neglect and blows that had become his normalcy. And yet, he didn't think he would ever get it again. How could they go back to what they had had before?
"Dad?" He whispered, speaking, really speaking, for the first time in months. Speaking with heart, with feeling, with an actual desire to say something.
Stoick lifted ice-cold eyes to his son's freckled, nervous face, raising a thick red eyebrow to indicate that he wanted to hear more.
"I…I…" Hiccup looked down at the floor, knowing that if he took too long that his dad was just going to brush it off as unimportant, and hurry away, but the words tumbled off his tongue. "I love you."
Stoick blinked, unsure what to say for a moment, but this didn't matter: Hiccup had enough words for both of them.
"I love you, I love you a lot. A-and I really miss you." If he hits me, he hits me. I'll be ready for it when he does, but maybe I can pull the old him back. "Do you love me, too?"
Stoick stared at him for a moment, the guilt in his eyes speaking for him. He had loved him once, but now…
Hiccup turned away, unable to bear hearing another word of the answer.
"I hate you," Hiccup screamed bitterly at the heavens, the rain pouring down, racing down his cheeks and thankfully masking the angry, sorrowful tears. "I hate you! I hate you so much! I don't miss you a bit! You don't love me, you never loved me!" All he could see, in his mind's eye, was that funeral barge floating calmly away from shore, the guilt in those gray eyes telling him all he needed to know. He could still remember how it felt, the sudden loss of hope, the great pain in his chest when he realized his father truly didn't love him anymore.
"I hate you! I said I loved you, and you wouldn't say it back! What kind of father…what kind of a father does that to his son? You hit me! You were always hitting me, no matter what I said, what I did, it was never enough since that day! You disowned me, and I saved your stupid ass and you still couldn't love me, even then! Well, I don't care anymore! I hate you!" Sobs rose in his throat, constricting his breathing, forcing him to cut his sentence short. "I hate you!"