Hiccup is just three years old when he sees his soulmate, just ten when he starts looking for her, and just fourteen when he stops. But he is seventeen years old when he finds her.
(these notes were written by sunnywinterclouds)
wow it's been a while since I wrote anything, I love soulmate timer and high school aus and I love httyd and hiccstrid (which this shall obviously be) and I love awkward father/son conversations sooo. I should update fast and astrid may get a pov or ten at some point in the future. this first chapter's style is vastly different from the rest which will be lighthearted and (hopefully) funny. review maybe? keeping in mind that my name is jolly and that the best compliment you could give me is calling my story 'jolly good' thank you xo ps probs lots of errors so point 'em if you see 'em.
"Watch it, Useless," Snotlout says as he walks past, slamming Hiccup into his own locker like he does every day. Hiccup rolls his eyes and continues on his way to class. He hasn't felt threatened by his cousin in a long time, because everyone knows you don't beat up a cripple. It's kind of a rule. He'd been bullied mercilessly right up until the day of his accident, but then he'd been out of school for six weeks (because recovery takes time) and when he'd reappeared out of nowhere with only one foot, his peers had kept their distance. Now the worst he gets is Snotlout shoving him into things regularly and insulting him in ways that he'd gotten used to back in pre-K. Hel, his universally known nickname is Hiccup, it's not like a few choice adjectives are gonna bring him down.
He really does hate Snotlout, though. First of all, he's his cousin, which means they're supposed to be friends but they're not. Second of all, Snotlout had gotten to choose his own nickname (unlike Hiccup, obviously) and he'd gone with Snotlout. Really. Good job. Third of all, he likes to push Hiccup into things and then say "watch it" which is just annoying because um, hello, he started it. And last but not least, he's got a working timer.
Hiccup knows this, because Snotlout is always bragging about it. Apparently he's going to meet her when he's nineteen, and he's like eight hundred percent positive (that's another thing Hiccup hates about his cousin, he uses impossible percentages) that she's going to be gorgeous and funny and sexually experienced and possibly a movie star. That pisses Hiccup off.
Not Snotlout's expectations, because he supposes it's okay to speculate about what you're soulmate is like, but the fact that Snotlout is a jerk. Like, he's not a horrible person, but he's certainly not very nice and he's so full of himself and he's shallow and disrespectful and kind of mean. And he gets a soulmate. And, yeah, Hiccup is small and awkward and one-legged, but he's still a nice enough guy and he personally feels as if he deserves to meet his true love a little more than his cousin does. Call him selfish, but it's the truth. Stupid Snotlout.
Hiccup supposes he's just glad that it's illegal to look at another person's timer, because Snotlout's always either teasing him about the fact that his is probably zeroed out ("who could love a hiccup?") or expressing mock sympathy for whichever poor girl's gonna end up being stuck with Hiccup as her soulmate. If he - or anyone - knew that he was right, that Hiccup really does have a zeroed out timer (although he wasn't born with it, his soulmate does exist and that's a small comfort), he'd never hear the end of it. He'd be the only known person in the whole school with a timer with ten unmoving zeros.
Well, there is one other person with a zeroed out timer, but she doesn't count. She's Astrid Hofferson, captain of the volleyball team and writing genius and also coincidentally the hottest girl in school, and no one has a doubt in their mind that she'll end up with some equally hot rich guy someday. And they also know she wasn't born with a zeroed out timer. Everyone knows that.
It'd actually hit zero on the first day of kindergarten. Hiccup had been sitting on the floor, absentmindedly watching the stream of students flow in while he'd doodled pictures of dragons and trolls and left socks when a girl had suddenly squeaked. The whole class had looked up at her, and she'd summoned over the teacher and said, in a relatively calm tone, "My timer just ran out."
Just like that, everyone in the room had been all over her, even Mrs. Jackson. Someone finding their soulmate is a huge deal for everyone, and Hiccup was probably the only one who kept his distance, too bitter about his timer being zeroed and too concentrated on the picture he was drawing. He didn't like the way the shading of the dragon's ears was turning out, he'd have to fix that...
Mrs. Jackson had asked Astrid to recount everything that'd happened since she arrived at school, so she did. "I was in the hallway, and there were tons of people, and someone sort of slammed into me and I fell into the class room and I looked around at everyone and then I remembered my timer was almost up and when I looked at it it was done."
"So they could be in this room," Mrs. Jackson had said. "Or out in the hallway."
"It's probably me," Snotlout had chimed in, and had flexed his then-nonexistent arm muscles at Astrid. She'd crinkled her face up in disgust, and Hiccup had decided he liked her.
"Did your timer zero out, too?"
"...no," Snotlout had been forced to admit, and sat back down. Astrid looked relieved.
"Anybody else? Does anybody else have a zeroed out timer?" Both she and Astrid glanced around the room nervously, and Hiccup had quickly gone back to his drawing. His timer may have been zeroed, but it wasn't because of Astrid. He'd just look stupid if he'd put his hand up then.
Although...
Eventually their teacher seemed to realize that she'd been thrown totally off-track, so she'd dropped the issue and arranged a bunch of pillows on the floor in the shape of a circle. Once everyone had sat down, Hiccup whispered a pssst at Astrid. She'd given him a quick once-over, then moved a couple pillows over to sit next to him, and he'd whispered, "I have a zeroed out timer too."
Astrid had looked him over again and winced. "So... you're my soulmate?"
"Oh, no, mine zeroed out a while ago," he'd told her, and had tried to ignore the look of relief that passed over her features. "I just thought, you know... we're both not sure who we saw. So we could look for them together."
"Um, thanks," Astrid had said, looking at him with the mild distaste of a beautiful person observing a... well, a Hiccup. "But I'm sure my soulmate's close by, I can find him myself."
Oh. "But what if he -"
"Look, I get why you'd need to worry about this kind of thing, but I'm... different. Trust me, it'll be fine."
"Okay," he'd said quietly, and watched as she'd crawled away back to her original position. He hasn't spoken to her since.
He knows that she was wrong, though. Everyone knows that Astrid hasn't managed to find her soulmate yet, because everyone knows exactly what Astrid's soulmate is going to be like. Smart. Attractive. Athletic. Popular. A couple of guys in school fit the bill, but none of them have zeroed out timers and so Astrid doesn't spare them a second glance. A lot of students date people who they know aren't their soulmates, for the experience or the memories or sometimes just the sex, but not Astrid. Astrid is a perfectionist, and anyone who isn't her soulmate isn't her perfect match and therefore isn't worth her time.
Everyone kind of wonders where her soulmate went, and as Hiccup sits down at his desk and gets out his sketchpad and a pencil, he is no exception. He wonders. Like, he'd seen his soulmate at the park, and everyone had left in a wide variety of directions and had never completely come together again and so it had been easy to see how Hiccup had never managed to discern who his soulmate had been out of the bunch of them. Astrid, on the other hand, had seen her soulmate at school, where everyone came to regularly five days out of the week and where everyone was in relatively close proximity with one another. The student body's current theory is that an older kid, maybe one in middle school or something, had been leading a younger sibling to their class on the first day and had left and had never come back and was now off at some college somewhere that Astrid might meet him at someday if she were lucky (which she was). Another rather-less-popular idea is that an adult had been at the kindergarten and he'd been Astrid's soulmate (the largest soulmate age difference on record is about thirty years, so it's plausible), but most people figure that Astrid's match is going to be perfect and an age difference like that... isn't perfect. Everyone knows Astrid is all about perfect.
Now, Hiccup likes Astrid well enough (she's kept her knowledge about his zeroed out timer on the down-low, which he really appreciates), but he's not sure if he totally agrees with her perfectionist idealisms. Like, what makes someone perfect, anyway? What makes a perfect match? Apparently your soulmate is perfect for you, and the only person you can find real, total, complete happiness with, but Hiccup hopes that isn't really the case. The chances of finding his soulmate after having a timer that's been zeroed out for nearly fifteen years are pretty slim (and downright impossible if his soulmate's timer is zeroed, too, because they can guess but how will they ever know?), and he's got no idea who or what to look for. Astrid just has to watch for a guy who seems too flawless to be true, but what's he supposed to do? Keep an eye out for a girl with a missing right foot? You know, so that they make a pair?
Speaking of missing feet, Hiccup's drawing of Toothless isn't going too awesome. He'd finally grown out of the stage where he'd drawn mythical and magical creatures all day long (except for the dragons, but that's a secret) and has moved mostly onto real-life objects and his inventions. Right now he's going back and forth between a picture of his cat - which is horribly disproportionate, his head's not nearly that big - and his own prosthetic, which he's been secretly making adjustments to for the last three months. He's finally hitting his grown spurt, which is great, but he despises having to go to hospital every other day to get his leg fitted when he's perfectly capable of doing it himself. His parents would kill him if they found out, though ("our insurance doesn't cover any leg-damage that's been caused by your tinkering, Hiccup!"), so he tends to only mess with his designs when he's in school and he slouches whenever he's around his mom. (His dad is so tall that Hiccup could grow another ten inches before he'd have to worry about him noticing.)
The bell rings, though, and school is one of the only things that Hiccup is good at so he slips his sketchbook into his backpack and replaces it with his science notebook. Hiccup likes science. He likes having real and plausible explanations for things; he likes being able to rationalize the world and he likes being able to rely on certain truths. He likes reason, which is probably why the whole soulmate-timer thing gets him so worked up. None of that crap even makes sense.
Science, though… science, he can do. He takes notes on the lesson and briefly doodles a tiny little dragon on the bottom left corner of his paper. It looks more like a winged salamander than anything else, if he's being honest with himself, so he adds tiny little curled horns to each side of his head in order to make the distinction and then dubs it a brand new dragon species. He decides to call it the Terrible Terror (not because it's scary but because it looks so bad) and makes a mental note to come up with some stats for it and add it to his Book of Dragons (which has been in the works since preschool) when he gets home. Honestly, he keeps having to staple new pages into that thing, it's getting too big to hide under his bed…
He spends the next half hour alternately paying attention and working on his new dragon (cat-sized, attack eight venom twelve), and the bell's only a few minutes from ringing and sending them all off to their next class when Ms. Woodward says, "Okay, listen up, class, because this is important."
Hiccup is successfully snapped out of his geek-fantasies, and automatically moves his hand to cover up his miniscule dragon sketch. If anyone (Snotlout) found out about his dragon thing, he'd be totally dead. His old friend Fishlegs had known about his little (big) obsession when they were younger and had even helped out with the Book of Dragons for a while, but that was in elementary school and Hiccup's pretty sure working on a giant, illustrated novel about mythical flying reptiles isn't cool anymore. Not that it was ever cool in the first place, but whatever.
"Over the next six weeks, I want you all to complete a project," Ms. Woodward continues, and the entire class groans, even Hiccup. Usually he's all up for a lengthy, research-required assignment (unless he has to present it, he's great with powerpoints but horrible with public speaking), but this is not a good time for him. He's taking two advanced math classes at the local community college, one extremely long Driver's Ed course for teens with disabilities (apparently driving with a prosthetic foot requires extra caution, although he does get to use handicapped parking spaces which is awesome), one online engineering course just for the heck of it, and almost all honors classes at his regular high school. Add that to the fact that he's up pretty much every night either messing with his leg or drawing Toothless as a dragon and you can see why he's not too thrilled about another project being added to his workload.
He's just glad he doesn't have a social life. Or friends. Or extracurricular activities. Or any real hobbies. It all leaves him a lot of time for schoolwork, yay.
"A partnered project," their teacher is saying, and the entire class perks up a little, "…for which you will be paired together alphabetically." Everyone groans again.
Hiccup is just enormously glad that this is an honors course, because that means Snotlout isn't in it and they won't be put together for both having name Haddock. He listens vaguely for his name to be read out as he discreetly moves his hand away from his paper and adds a little wart to the middle of the Terrible Terror's nose. Ooh, that looks good, maybe he'll turn it into an upright horn…
"Hayden Haddock," his teacher finally says, and he glances up a bit but doesn't stop drawing, "…and Astrid Hofferson."
Snap. Hiccup presses down too hard against his desk and his pencil lead breaks in half, poking a hole through his paper and leaving a giant mark on his drawing. He sighs, because he always likes to keep his initial sketch of a dragon for reference if nothing else, no matter how bad it is, and this little doodle is totally ruined. Why had he… oh, right. Because of Astrid. Astrid Hofferson.
He sits at the back of the class ("all the better to not be noticed," as he tells Toothless), so he freely stares at the back of Astrid's shiny blonde head for a little while without anyone catching him. Astrid Hofferson. He should have seen this coming, they're the only two in the class with last names that start with an H, but Astrid is so otherworldly that he's never even really acknowledged the fact that she gets paired with people for projects. Doesn't she just have to flip her hair at a teacher or something to get out of the assignment all-together?
Maybe Astrid feels his stare on her, or maybe she just hates him for having a last name that starts with the same initial at hers, but in any case she turns around and shoots him a quick glare before concentrating on the teacher once again. Hiccup isn't sure why, because Ms. Woodward is still just reading out names in alphabetical order and it's not exactly interesting, so he sighs and lets his head clunk down against his desk. Why couldn't he have gotten Fishlegs? They're not exactly friends anymore, but they've never been rude to each other and they definitely work well together and Ingerman is so close to Haddock, if only Astrid had been out sick for the day…
Hiccup isn't sure why exactly he's so averse to being paired up with Astrid, half the guys in school would kill for it, but she's so… well, she's a perfectionist. She's going to want their project to be absolutely polished and organized and well-thought out, and as great at Hiccup is at school he's not exactly the most task-focused person. He tends to put off doing his assignments until the last day or two before they're due, then write the thing out in a totally scatterbrained, all-over-the-place fashion in about ten minutes before spending the next couple of hours cleaning it up. That's his process, and it works for great him if his perfect GPA is anything to go by, but he gets the feeling that Astrid's not going to let him get away with that. They're going to work on this project 24/7 for the next six weeks and it's going to end up being as flawless as her complexion.
"Okay," Ms. Woodward says, as she calls out the last name and looks around to make sure no one's been left partnerless. "Now, I want you to come up in pairs and take a slip of paper for your project topic as you leave, got it?" Hiccup waits for the swarm of students to get ahead of him before stepping out into the aisle between the desks, and by the time he gets to the front of the class Astrid is already reading their sheet of paper.
He peers over her shoulder to see what it says, careful to not touch or even breathe on her, and groans when he sees the words carbon dating – method, conception, and practice. Not because he has anything against carbon dating, carbon dating is cool, but this sets him up for so many science pickup lines that he'll never be able to use without Astrid punching him the face! The topic literally has the word dating in it, the only way this could have fallen into his lap more perfectly would be if they were in a chemistry class and he could make obligatory we-have-chemistry jokes.
See, if this were any other girl (or even Fishlegs) he'd be totally comfortable making lighthearted science flirtation, because he's so generally awkward that they wouldn't take him seriously, but Astrid would. She gets guys hitting on her all the time, even though they know it's never gonna happen, and he can imagine the sneering look she'd get on her face if he even jokingly made a move on her. Geez, he's not stupid, he knows she's never going to like him, but he really really wants to use those science pickup lines. Really.
"So," Astrid says, and he bites back an are you a carbon sample? 'cause I want to date you line, "when do you want to get started?"
"Um. Whenever." Don't. Don't say it… she'll punch you, don't say it… you saw her break Snotlout's arm that one time he grabbed her ass, this won't end well for you, don't say it…
"How's today? After school."
He knew it, he knew she was going to do this to him, he knew she was going to want them to get started on this right away. Gods, and he'd wanted so bad work on the Book of Dragons and study some more for his driver's license test (he is seventeen and he can't believe he still hasn't gotten around to it yet). And he doesn't want to do any real school today, he's tired, he was up all night finishing his college Calculus homework. He can see Toothless already, warming up his bed and getting black fur all over his sheets and practically begging him to take off his leg and come cuddle with him. He'd be more than happy to oblige.
"Sounds good," he says anyway, and the image of Toothless flickers from his mind. "My place or yours?"
He immediately winces, because that came out soundly mildly suggestive and he'd already got one missing limb, but Astrid either doesn't notice or doesn't care. He's being ridiculous; she's testy, not crazed. "Mine, this time, but we should probably alternate. Here, I'll write down my address…"
She does, as well as her phone number. He, Hayden Haddock, has Astrid Hofferson's phone number. He'll probably never call it, just text her to set up dates and times or talk about their project, but still! Her phone number! It's a big deal for him, which is kind of sad.
"You can follow me home, if you'd like," she says. "You have a car, right?"
Ah, there it is. His lack of a driver's license coming back to bite him in the ass, just like he always knew it would. "Oh, uh, I walk."
"Really?" she says, and he doesn't miss the way her eyes flicker down to his leg. She's subtle, but he's gotten really good at catching it. "That's… um, nice."
"Yeah." The truth is, he'd started walking to and from school because of his leg. He'd always used to take the bus or have one of his parents drop him off on their way to work, but after he'd started having trouble walking he'd become determined to walk everywhere. It'd been painful and slow and agonizingly tedious at first, but now it's been three years since he'd lost his leg and he's just as easy on his feet as he'd been before the incident. More so, actually, because physical therapy had managed to knock a bit of the clumsiness out of him and had even instilled some of the basic coordination that he'd always lacked previously. Who says losing a leg doesn't have perks?
"Do you… want to ride with me to my place?" she asks, looking like the offer doesn't even pain her too much, and Hiccup decides she's pretty nice as long as he refrains from hitting on her with science puns. "It's pretty far, it'd take you a while to walk and I want to get started right away…"
"That's cool with me," he tells her honestly, even though he'd still rather be giving Toothless a belly rub (which cats aren't supposed to like but Toothless is an idiot so) or nerding it up with his dragon book. "I don't have my laptop, though, you'll have to email me whatever work we do."
"I'm not sure if we'll get that far, but okay." She cocks her head at him. "Aren't you going to… you know, give me your number?"
Astrid Hofferson is asking him for his number; it'd be funny if it wasn't so surreal. "Oh, um, I'll just… text you," he offers lamely, and she nods her approval. She looks like she's about to say something else when the warning bell rings, and she adjusts her backpack so that it's pulled more firmly around her shoulders.
"I guess I'll see you after class, then. Meet me by the vending machines?"
"Soda or snack?"
"They're… right next to each other, Hiccup."
"Oh. Oh, right." See, this is why he doesn't talk to people. Toothless is going to cat-laugh so hard at him for this when he tells him about it later… "Then, um, see you then."
"Bye," Astrid says before leaving, smiling in a way that's faintly amused by his awkwardness. He doesn't think he's ever seen Astrid smile in close proximity to him before, or maybe even at all, and it's enough to leave him lightheaded and staring at a wall until the late bell rings. Ah, crap.
Maybe he'll leave out everything but the smiling part for Toothless.
yup that's right I'm going for the overly-cliché project pairing of the love characters for this story. it's really just a high school au with soulmate timers so that I can pretend it has a plotline, sorry if you thought differently xo
