Each Day Of Life

(rough draft)

A DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon fanfic by Raberba girl

Summary: Hiccup's mere existence has consequences for both his father and his tribe.

o.o.o

Hiccup had been looking forward to the Thing. Not only was it a rare chance for him to set foot off the island of Berk and see a different land with his own eyes, but he knew why Stoick was bringing him. The chief of the Hooligan tribe was grooming his heir. Ten-year-old Hiccup felt proud and honored to be included in an important gathering where the only other children would be other heirs, the people who would grow up to meet with him in the same place when their own time of rulership came.

Hiccup had been looking forward to it until he actually got there, and saw the other boys who outmuscled him and towered over him, and was shunted aside along with the sole female heir in the group as if the two of them were beneath notice, not even worthwhile as human beings much less heirs. Then Camicazi got mad at Hiccup for an unintended insult and nearly injured him before she realized that there was no glory to be gained in fighting a pitiful opponent such as himself, and then the other boys jeered at him even more for getting his butt kicked by a girl.

Hiccup, now completely alone and feeling like a complete failure, realized in that moment that he would never be a chieftain, that his sole qualification for leadership was the fact that he happened to be the son of a leader, and that if he were ever to inherit his father's throne, he would be chief in name only and have no real power. If he was going to be anything in this world, he was going to have to prove his worth in a different way. At this moment, all he wanted to do was go home and hide in his room and then figure out what to do with his life now.

It was while Hiccup was slumped on the beach, hidden behind a rocky outcrop, trying to muster up the courage to return to his father, that the Outcasts attacked.

Obviously they resented the fact that they had no voice in the Thing, and their attacks on the gathering were expected. By the time Savage had hauled Hiccup up to join Alvin and the other warriors, the standoff had started, the official chieftains and their warriors forming a bristling wall of weapons against the shouting, sword-waving Outcasts.

"...so maybe you'll see reason now that we have a bit of leverage, eh?" Alvin was saying. He turned to greet his second-in-command with a smug smile. As soon as he saw Hiccup, his expression faded to one of surprise and displeasure. "What're you doing with that fishbone, Savage?" he growled. "I sent you to catch a hostage."

"Hiccup!" Stoick had started shouting, his shock and worry sounding like anger to everyone except Gobber, who knew him best.

"Look at his clothes," Savage said, his tone defensive. "He's a chief's son."

Alvin's narrow gaze moved from the miserable, tiny boy in the fine tunic to the frantically shouting Hooligan chief. "Don't tell me...this is the son of Stoick the Vast!"

Hiccup stared wordlessly down at his boots.

"Hah! What an embarrassment, Stoick, eh? Has he been this pitiful since birth? I'm surprised you didn't ship him off before he could become such a blight on your reputation!"

Stoick had stopped shouting. In the long silence, Hiccup lifted his head again, feeling sick when he saw that the other tribes were murmuring in shocked realization. Stoick's secret had finally been revealed outside the boundaries of Berk, that he had rebelled against custom and allowed a weak link to be counted among the members of his tribe.

It hadn't seemed so bad when Hiccup first learned the story of his birth night, he'd always been vaguely glad that he'd been allowed to live. Yet now, standing exposed under the condemnation of the rest of the Viking world, he felt keenly that he was the cause of his father's shame. He recognized the scorn on their faces for a man who was too weak of will to deserve the title of father and chief.

"Well, I really am in a pickle now!" Alvin was laughing. "I had myself all set up to make you all see reason with the help of a hostage, but what good to me is this creature, eh? No one will fight for him."

Stoick whipped his axe through the air in a threatening gesture, Gobber immediately echoing him. The other Hooligans, looking uneasy and angry, brandished their weapons more reluctantly, watching their chief. "He is my son," Stoick ground out, backed into a corner but declaring that he would still fight with all his considerable strength. "Hiccup Horrendous Haddock is my son, and I would fight for him even against Fenrir himself!"

Then came a battle, after which not only the Outcasts, but also the Hooligans were routed. Hiccup huddled in the back of the ship on the way home, unable to look at anyone, feeling kind of like he should do everyone a favor and throw himself overboard. He knew it was his fault ('And DAD'S,' he added angrily in his thoughts) that the Hooligan tribe, on the verge of being outcast itself, was no longer welcome among the true tribes of the archipelago.

Stoick couldn't seem to bring himself to look at Hiccup or speak to him or come near him, and the Berkian warriors did little more than glare at the boy and complain to each other in voices they didn't bother to lower about what a mess they were in now.

Gobber was the only one who came to plop down beside Hiccup with a sigh and sling his arm around the boy's shoulders. "Ah, don't let it get to you, Hiccup. We don't need the other tribes, we can do just fine on our own!"

"I'm not supposed to be alive," Hiccup whispered.

Gobber chuckled. "Maybe not, but I'm glad you are."

"...What?"

"You're all that Stoick has left of your mother, lad."

Hiccup had a bitter thought that it didn't seem to be much of a purpose, hanging around solely to remind a man about the wife he would never see again.

"It was her, really, who wouldn't hear of it. Wanted you from the moment she laid eyes on you, didn't care how weak your little fists were."

"So it's her fault, then," Hiccup mumbled.

"'Course it was your father who hauled you all the way back from the shore to put you in her arms again. Said you had a fine pair of lungs on you and you'd screamed your right to live strongly enough."

Hiccup swallowed and hid his face against his knees.

"He said you'd be the strongest of them all. Guess he was wrong, but I still wouldn't say you're a waste of space, Hiccup. It's handy having you in the forge, you know? All that cleaning up you do, a real Viking wouldn't have the patience for it."

"I'm glad someone's happy I'm not a real Viking," Hiccup mumbled into his knees.

"That's the spirit, Hiccup!" With an encouraging thump on the back that accidentally jammed Hiccup's face into the knee it was resting against, which nearly broke the boy's nose and would later form a bruise, Gobber hauled himself back to his feet and stumped away.

Back home, the villagers who hadn't attended the Thing absorbed the bad news quickly. Then they went on with their lives, working to make themselves more self-sufficient than ever as they continued defending themselves against the dragons. Hiccup was in the forge from before dawn until after dusk, doing his best to avoid speaking to anyone. The rare times he and his father both happened to be awake inside the house, they barely exchanged more than a few essential words.

Then, after several days of this, Stoick accidentally burned supper and Hiccup tried to rescue the meal in vain. Then he threw down the cloth he'd been using to shield his hands from the heat and shouted at his father, "Why didn't you kill me like you were supposed to?!"

"Would you like me to kill you now?" Stoick roared back, as if it was the middle of an argument rather than their first outburst after days of silence.

"Maybe you should! Then I'd be out of your hair and everyone would be happy again and you'd be a proper chief again and we'd be a real tribe again, once I'm GONE!"

"I'm not going to get rid of my son just because a bunch of fools think they can order me around! I am chief of this tribe, my judgment rules in my own domain, and you are STAYING!"

"Why?! What good am I?! What use am I?! I'm not a real Viking, I'm a useless heir, I'm too weak to live, a chief isn't supposed to have a son who's good for NOTHING except sweeping the floor in the forge!" Hiccup turned away and flung the pot of burned food across the room so that his father wouldn't see the tears in his eyes.

It wasn't that Hiccup wanted to be killed or exiled, of course. The pain that had been twisting his heart to shreds, that kept him lying awake at night and cursing himself and wishing that he just hadn't been born at all and saved everyone the trouble, was that everyone thought he should be dead. That he was worthless and would never be able to achieve anything, and could accomplish nothing by his existence other than to shame his father and weaken his tribe. "I should be dead," he choked out.

When Stoick seized him, those huge hands dwarfing the boy's thin shoulders, Hiccup was startled and frightened, yet also had an urge to fling his arms around his father in a desperate embrace. He didn't actually move except to stiffen in apprehension.

"You are alive," Stoick growled. "For ten years, you have survived every danger that life has thrown at you. Your generation has been cut down by dragons and fire and illness and cold and blades and starvation and the sea - there are only seven of you left. And you are one of them, Hiccup. Every day you survive is more proof that you are still earning the right to live, just like you did when you were less than an hour old."

Hiccup stood there trying his hardest not to cry, and Stoick's fingers tightened uncertainly as if he had no idea whether to embrace his son or not. At last, Stoick cleared his throat roughly and let go, stepping back. He managed to locate a wedge of cheese, which he trimmed a bit of mold off before cutting into two pieces, then scrounged up a couple of slightly wrinkled apples. He handed over Hiccup's share. "Eat. We'll do a better job with supper tomorrow."

"Y...Yeah."

It took years of trying to prove himself, and even more years of succeeding, before Hiccup was able to unbury those feelings of worthlessness and get rid of them for good.

o.o.o

Author's Notes: Obviously my own views are that every single human being deserves a chance to live without having to "earn" it (as in, no one should be written off as worthless just because they don't measure up to someone else's standards), but, again, I'm having to write about a culture with a different worldview than my own.

I know that Berk starts having dealings with other tribes in the TV show, but I'm under the impression that their contact with other tribes was unusually limited during the dragon war. Of course some of that was probably because of the war, but I think it's an interesting idea that Hiccup might have damaged Berk's relationship with the other tribes as well. I'm sure they started slowly repairing the damage, particularly with Trader Johann and Oswald the Agreeable, but I think we would have seen a lot more of the other tribes if relations had been restored fully. (Bog Burglaaaaars, when are you going to debut in the show...?)

Ftr, I figure that the seventh kid in Hiccup's generation that Stoick mentioned must have died at some point in the next five years, leaving the six canon fourteen-and-fifteen-year-olds that we see in HTTYD1.

After nearly two and a half weeks, I still have not settled into my new apartment, largely due to the fact that so many things were broken when I moved in and it's taking so long to get them all fixed. But I really can't go for too long without writing, so I finally sat down to write a new fanfic when I should have been working on apartment stuff. A couple of paragraphs in, the story did that thing where, what was supposed to be a line or two of casual backstory got so long and unwieldy that I realized I would need to go back and write it out as a one-shot before I could return to the original story. XD Each Day Of Life is the second piece of fiction I started composing, and the first piece of fiction I have completed, in my new apartment. (Though of course I had to come to my parents' house and use their Internet connection to post it. XD)