Regret and Restlessness

Hiccup Haddock was regretting punching the wall.

In hindsight, it was stupid. He was angry and frustrated and wanted to hurt the most unhurt-able thing he knew of. Astrid Hofferson. But he settled for a big bunch of bricks and cement. Both were a stupid idea to take on, and he knew it when he tried.

He sat on the kitchen counter of his home, wrapping thin white strips of cloth over his raw knuckles. The bricks had scraped them up pretty badly, and regular band-aids just stung like heck, and wouldn't stick for more than a few minuets.

When he finished, he flexed his hand, getting used to the scratchy material. He scowled and studied it a bit more. "Whattya think Bud," he asked his pet, Toothless. "Makes me look pretty tough, don't you think?"

Toothless was a mutt dog, a mix of so many different breeds, he didn't favor any of them. But he was one of the most impressive dogs Hiccup had ever seen.

He was about the same size and height of a wolfhound, but he was much more intimidating than that breed. His head looked like a wolf's, but the eyes were bigger, and a deep green color. His body was built for running, long, lithe and muscular, with a thick glossy black pelt covering his entire body. The dog's tail was long and bushy, with a rusty red tip.

The dog's name was because of the number one most bizarre thing about his dog. Toothless was born with no fangs. He had all the other dog teeth, but where he should have four curved ivory weapons, there was just hardened gums. He could still do a nasty bite, though. The little teeth were small, but pointy!

Toothless was Hiccup's service dog, trained for the day Hiccup's ears went silent. He was Stoick's last gift to Hiccup, before the large man had grown disappointed in his son that was different from him in every way.

Stoick was a mountainous man, Hiccup was an under-grown twig. Hiccup was the definition of a geek in every way except for the need of glasses. Stoick was the prime example of manly. It didn't help relations between them that Stoick Haddock had never wanted a son, anyway. Hiccup was an accident. The result of a mistake the big man had made with his girlfriend. Hiccup's mother hadn't survived his birth, and Hiccup almost didn't make it ether. But the little guy had managed to pull through though.

Stoick had tried, to his credit. He'd comforted his some the day they told him one day he would go deaf at a young age. He gave Hiccup Toothless in that attempt. He raised the boy for a while. But as Hiccup drifted from the path Stoick had lead in life, enjoying stories instead of sports, he had gradually given up.

He was stuck with a son with hearing issues and was foolish enough to go and get his left leg lost. Hiccup still refused to acknowledge the circumstances of his loss of limb. They were too fantastic, to bizarre, to unexplained, too... Hiccup to be true.

But it was. And he hated the reason.

Hiccup sighed and sank to the ground, rubbing the massive dog on the top of the head in a show of affection for the beast. He panted and licked Hiccup's cheek lovingly, whining and nudging his boy like a puppy.

"Hey Bud," he said. "Remember that girl I keep telling you about? That cruel, mean one that hates my guts and wants to mount my head on a battle ax?"

Toothless growled, revealing the small but deadly rows of yellow ivory. Hiccup scratched him behind one triangular ear. "I hate her too Bud. But I also like her."

This time the black dog's respond was an unamused stare, as if he was criticizing the boy Haddock.

"Yeah, I know. What's wrong with me? I would probably make her that battle axe to lop my head off with. I'm just that pathetic."

A dry huff and a blank look was all he got for that.

"But I'm gonna be seeing a lot of her now."

Toothless's eyes widened, and he tilted his head, as if to say, you got her as a girlfriend?! Are you insane?!

"No no, Toothless," Hiccup held his hands out. "I'm not doing it by choice, belive me. If I could, I would choose Ruff or Tuff. They and Fishlegs actually seem to listen to me, if you believe that kinds stuff can happen. No, it's. He knows we hate each other, it's as if he's making an experiment. 'How long would it take cutthroat girl to murder weak nerd if forced to work together'." He spread his hands, as if picturing a newspaper headline.

He sighed and put an arm around Toothless lovingly, pulling his big furry torso onto the lad's bone thin lap, where he stayed happily. Toothless was way to big to be a lapdog, but the fact didn't seem to register with him. So, Hiccup figured he might as well embrace it.

He scratched up and down Toothless's body with curved fingers, the animal grumbling and wining with pleasure, black hairs sticking to Hiccup's clothing as he did. He loved Toothless for so many reasons. The black mutt would be his ears in a few moths. Not to mention that the animal was more intelligent than anything else on four legs, responding to English in a way that implied he understood the situation perfectly. But one of the strongest reasons was that Toothless could make Hiccup forget. Forget about the father he'd disappointed by coming out wrong, forget about the school where he felt like everyone was watching and waiting for him to mess up so they could all have some fun at his expense.

But he also made Hiccup forget about the mean, angry girl he was besotted with that hated him for existing. While the negative feeling was mutual, he couldn't help but be attracted to her strength, her will to fight for herself and for what she wanted, and the way she wouldn't take crap from anybody at all.

He envied the blond with his soul, yet he hated her as well. It was all so messed up. He sighed and took out his hearing aids, the world falling almost completely silent the moment he did. Toothless rolled to his paws and followed his charge out of the kitchen.

Hiccup didn't feel up to doing to much that night. He'd just sleep it off, and look for a way to distract himself in the morning.


Astrid Hofferson couldn't sleep.

She hardly ever slept in the first place. Ever since she got into high school, stress had seemingly hard wired her brain to never ever relax like she wanted to, as if her flight or flight instinct had been permanently switched to on.

She rolled about in her sheets, trying to force her body to rest and regain energy for the next day. If the last year and a half were anything to go by, though, she was gonna have four, maybe five hours max before she had to get up, get dressed, and run to school before her dad woke up.

Finally she shot up, gripping her sheets with white knuckles.

Why was it so hard to get to sleep. Why did she keep reliving all the things she did to Hiccup? She was plagued by all of it. That wasn't the only thing. Her father...

"Nuh-Uh," she muttered to herself. "No. Don't think about it." Because it made it real. It made the things he did to her when she showed weakness real and not just nightmares. If she didn't dwell on them to much, she could pretend they were horrible, monstrous nightmares instead of what they really were.

She gave up on sleeping for the moment, and turned on the dim, buzzing light above her. It wasn't hard, her room was so relatively tiny that the light switch beside the door was less than arms length away.

Her room was tiny, with a large mirror parallel to the bed. In the house, it was the one thing that wasn't dirty or broken. She took good care of the mirror, maintained it every day. She didn't even like a smudge on it.

It was how she evaluated herself, after all. It was how she tried to see what other people saw when they looked at her. At her best, she saw a powerful woman ready to take on the world and make it hers. She felt proud. Confident. Powerful. Like a viking of old, large and untouchable, mowing down enemies like blades of grass. She felt like nothing could stand in her way.

But in her current state, that's not what she saw staring back at her from the reflective glass. Her hair was an enormous blond rat nest. Her blue eyes were pale and bloodshot, pupils still adjusting to the sudden light as black spots danced in her vision. Her nightclothes, a mangy white T-shirt that was a little broader than her shoulders, and baggy pink sweatpants.

What she saw looking out of the mirror felt more real than the other Astrid she saw ever did. She saw someone lost and alone and so angry for reasons she couldn't even comprehend. She saw someone weak, imperfect... Damaged.

She snorted and pulled her unruly hair out of her eyes.

Stop talking nonsense, she told herself. Your not damaged. Your not flawed. Your not weak. You don't just say it, you SHOW it. Almost every boy in school is afraid of you, and all the girls are jealous of you.

Self-flatter wasn't really cheering her up, though. She sighed and shook her head, giving her reflection a half lidded, sleepy glare and a yawn. She reached beside her to the nightstand, and pulled a pair of large glasses onto her face. They were bulky, and not nearly as comfortable as her contact lenses, but she wasn't going to go put them back in.

There, now her damaged self at least looked clearer. She pushed the plastic bridge of the corrective lenses to the bridge of her own nose.

She hated the fact that her eyes were huge. That meant that her glasses also had to be freaking enormous. Almost making her look nerdy. She scowled at herself. She didn't like this image of her, without the preparations she made in the morning to look like that titan among ants. This version made her feel like the bug, like at any moment she could be squished.

She tore her eyes away from her reflection and picked up her phone. Opening it with a click, she decided to try to calm her mind with a puzzle game or something. Take her head away from her father, herself, and Hiccup.

It was only times like this, when she was too angry to be tired, that she actually felt closer to calm than the first day after her mother had left them. Left her alone with him. She hadn't said anything beforehand. One day, she'd just woken up and felt like something in her world was terribly, horribly wrong. Not even bothering to get dressed, she had raced down the stairs of their old home.

Her dad had been crying, and her mom hadn't been anywhere. She had put the pieces together. They had been fighting recently, almost coming to blows. Little Astrid had shaken her head in horror, before dashing to the door as hard as she could, just in time to see her mother climb into a car and drive off, leaving her behind. And not ever once coming back.

She hadn't even been able to call her mother after that. She never responded to any attempts at contact. This had always confused the blond. She and her mother had always been as close as any mother-daughter relationship could be. But that sudden loss of contact... Was her mother dead?

Deep thoughts had glazed her eyes over and left her thumb hovering over the game app on her phone. She sat like that for a while, but one of the things she asked herself, was would her mother be proud of what she became. The mother she had loved for ten years, not the traitorous deserter who never looked back, that is.

Would that mother be proud of a bully who tries to make herself perfect?


Astrid Hofferson had decided something.

She didn't hate Hiccup Haddock as much as she thought. She still felt a burning pit of anger for his existence smoldering in her soul, and her crush on him was still the unholy mother of does not compute, but she had decided he was... Tolerable.

That didn't mean she was suddenly stop bullying him, or try to be his friend. It didn't mean that anything was gonna change. It didn't even mean she was gonna be gentler with him now.

Hiccup Haddock needed to be shown she was the best and brightest, that he was beneath her... But she was willing to offer a cease fire on their private hate war temporarily, until the project was done.

There was no use throwing a tantrum over the fact she was paired with someone she couldn't stand, it would just be acting like a baby.

And Astrid Hofferson was not gonna act like a baby.

The next day, at school, she was still tired from her lack of sleep the previous night. In fact, her rumination a had ensured the gears in her head were turning all night long. As she approached the education building, she rubbed and blew into her gloved hands, trying to warn them up. The large fur hood over her head was more than enough to keep her ears and neck warm, but it did nothing for her numb nose and chilled skin.

She didn't care for Berk's winters.

Not at all.

As soon as she got insides she pulled the massive hood off of her head and tugged off her gloves, wiggling her fingers to try and get the blood flow to resume as normal.

The she spotted Hiccup. She walked over to the little nerd, who was leaning wearily against one of the entry hall's pillars. He didn't even notice her approach, just sighed and leaned even heavier against the doors.

It was odd. She didn't feel the same drive to make him miserable. She still planned on doing it when the cease fire was off, but she didn't feel the same need to do it right now. Maybe it was from thinking about her mother last night. It was probably only a temporary effect, though.

"Not much of a morning person?" She asked in a chilling tone. To her surprise, he didn't even turn around. In an instant, the fire in her belly was blazing again. Here she was, tired and miserable and aching all over, yet willing to extend some form of compromise, and here he was, the little eel daring to ignore her!

"Haddock, you have ten seconds to turn around and face me like a man... Fish-bone... Thing, or so help me, I'm gonna-"

He pulled a hand up to the side of his head and seemingly fiddled with his hair. He almost seemed to be pressing something, like a volume button. "-kick your arse so hard it will replace your head. Not that they're too different."

Suddenly he screamed and spun on his right foot. "A-Astrid?!" He stammered. The ballsy Hiccup from yesterday seemed to have taken a holiday and left the same victim she could-wait a second, did she just call him a victim. How long had she been doing that?!

Didn't matter. "Yes, Useless. Astrid. You may know me from such things as the freaking project we're stuck together on."

She took a deep breath, and offered her hand out to him, swallowing her pride as far down as it could go. She still wore a scowl on his face as if she were plotting his gruesome, horrifying murder.

He eyeballed her hand as if it might have been electrified. "aaaand what's this?" He asked.

"Me... Willing to work with you." When he gave her a look that blatantly screamed "No, really, what is it," she scoffed. "I'm serious here Useless. We're stuck together. You know, he's probably planned this out to see if we destroy each other. I hate you, you hate me. Like you said, the feeling's mutual. I'm not offering to he your friend, I'm just offering to stop... Harassing you until the projects done. In return, you have to stop being all..." She came up at a loss for words.

Like she said, her crush was the unholy mother of does not compute. She didn't know what it was about him that she liked, that she needed him to stop doing. "This," she decided, gesturing to the boy in general.

The stick figure of a human being took a quick glacé down at himself in shock. "You just gestured to all of me," he protested adamantly.

"Exactly. Stop being all of you. OK, deal?" She held out her hand once more.

"Um-"

"Deal," she pressed harder.

"This conversation is feeling very one-sided," he dead panned, and she shook her head. "I can make your life miserable, or we can both benefit each other. What's there to negotiate?"

"You apparently wanting me to rebuild myself from ground up.

"Deal?!" She snarled. Like a wildcat. She was offering her mortal enemy a lifeline here, and he was questioning it. Hadn't the idiot ever heard the phrase 'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth'?"

Hiccup Haddock finally sighed and shook the offered hand begrudgingly, flinging her arm away from him like it was something slimy and disgusting he'd picked up against his will. Why, exactly, did that hurt?

"Deal," he moaned.