A DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon fanfic by Raberba girl Chapter 4 (rough draft)

A/N: Warning for brief crude language in this chapter, as well as spousal abuse.

o.o.o

Hiccup and Astrid didn't see each other all the next day except in passing or at a distance. That night, Astrid rushed him through his meal and told him they'd catch up on the accounts later. "Come on," she said, pulling him urgently toward the bedroom.

"No, Astrid."

"What do you mean, 'no'?" she stormed.

"I mean I don't want to sleep with you tonight."

"You're a married man, you don't have a choice," she said hotly. She was kind of starting to hate the way sex made her so desperate, as if it controlled her. She also couldn't understand why Hiccup, who was the man for Thor's sake, seemed to be able to do without sex more easily than she could. It was the opposite of what she'd heard all her life.

"What do you mean I don't have a choice?!" he exploded. "I don't want to have sex with you, Astrid! I'm your husband, don't I get a say in when we make love and when we don't?! I just want to go to Gobber's and go to sleep, I don't-"

He was resisting so much, trying to yank his arms out of her hands and dragging his feet and jerking away, she finally lost patience and punched him in the face. He went limp for a minute, and she was able to haul him a few more steps, but then he started struggling again, straining away from her.

"What is wrong with you?!" she cried in exasperation. She hit him again to weaken him, guiltily ignoring the blood dripping down his face, then hauled him over her shoulders to carry him more easily.

"Let go of me," he sobbed.

"It's sex!" she yelled. "You're supposed to enjoy it! Why the hell are you fighting me?! Why do I always have to do all the work in this relationship?!"

"I hate you!" he screamed like a child, still struggling. "Let me go!"

"Stop that, I'm going to drop you!"

"Don't you have any respect for me at all?! Not even as your husband, but as a human being?!"

"As far as I'm concerned, you are nothing but your dick," she snarled. "Men think with their dicks anyway, you should like that I want to make love to you every night."

"This isn't love," cried. "This - is - not - love."

He was trying to strike her in an attempt to free himself, so she slammed him as hard as she could against the wall, taking advantage of his sudden stillness to shift her grip. Now she held both his legs and one arm captive, and he wasn't strong enough to hurt her with the other arm from this angle.

She staggered and nearly dropped him when he managed to catch hold of the doorframe with his free hand. "Let go, Hiccup!"

"Put me down," he said, sounding winded.

It was hard to hit him effectively at this angle, so she dug her thumb savagely into the inside of his thigh until he gasped with pain.

"Let go," she ordered.

"Put me down," he choked out, writhing as she pressed even harder. The pain against the tender flesh of his inner thigh was excruciating, even through a layer of clothing.

"Let go, or I will put you down - so that it will be easier to knock your teeth out."

Slowly, his grip weakened enough for her to tug him the rest of the way loose and enter the room with him. "I hate you," he whimpered, "I hate you, I hate you so much..."

Once she had him on the bed and naked, she realized that she had not taken into account the possibility that he wouldn't be able to perform when he was in such a traumatized state. She ended up pretty much having to [*censored because FFN is stupid*] there in the same bed with her husband, as he glared balefully at her the whole time. "Are you finished now?" he asked coldly.

She glared back as she panted. "We could have avoided all this-" She paused and reached to wipe some blood away from his face, but he jerked his head away. "We could have avoided this," she growled, "if you'd just done your duty to me in the first place without a fuss."

"And what about your duty to me?" he said hotly. "Where in the handbook for marriage does it say it's okay for a wife to beat her husband and ignore his wishes and disrespect him and try to force him to have sex when he doesn't want to?"

"There is no 'handbook for marriage,'" she snorted, willfully ignoring the fact that there were traditions, and things everyone knew or took for granted, and...stuff that she really didn't want to think about.

"Can I go now?" he asked bitterly. "Now that I've failed you in every possible way, can I just go now? Or do you have a whip stashed around here that you need to use on me first?"

"Get out!" she yelled. "I can't stand you! I wish I'd never married you!"

"SAME HERE!"

Before she could retort, he'd stormed away.

o.o.o.o.o

Hiccup slept on the floor of the forge that night, not wanting his mentor to see him. Then, before dawn, he disappeared into the forest, and didn't reappear again until after sundown when he was too hungry to keep hiding. He wasn't equipped for hunting (he was lousy at it, anyway), and foraging hadn't gotten him far, so he was hoping to be able to throw together a quick meal before Astrid came home, then escape to the shadows of the forge again.

No such luck. She came in when he was only halfway done. They froze, staring at each other.

"...Where have you been?" she finally demanded, shakily trying to ignore the bruises on his face. She hadn't realized they'd be that bad.

"None of your business."

"You weren't in the forge, we need you to help out Gobber and keep a backlog from piling up-"

"Fine, I'll go do some makeup work right now," he said, abandoning his unfinished meal and making his way toward the back door, since she was blocking the front.

"Wait, Hiccup."

"No, I-"

"Wait," she said harshly. "Be a husband to me first, and then you can go."

"No!" he burst out. "No, I-"

She lunged for him. He ran, she caught him, she hauled him over her shoulders, and he knew better than to fight this time. The heavy bruise on his thigh throbbed when her hand simply brushed against it. He was silent, trying hard to keep from crying as she carried him to the bed and dropped him onto it. He managed to say, "I don't want to do this. I don't want to sleep with you. I don't want to, Astrid."

"Hush," she said, and started to strip off her clothes. She had learned that it was easier to get a reaction out of him if she was naked, and instead of the selfish violence of the previous night, she took care to touch him gently and reward him. The result was that she was able to get him hard this time, and she sank down onto him with a groan of relief and pleasure.

Her euphoria soon diminished when he lay passively, gripping the sheets to keep his hands off her and ignoring every instruction she gave him. "Touch me, Hiccup," she demanded.

"No."

"What's wrong with you?! Do something, don't just lie there like a dead fish!"

"Why? As far as you're concerned, I'm nothing but my dick, right? Which you are in complete possession of right now, so you should be all set."

Anger was not doing good things to her libido. She softened her voice. "Hiccup~" She touched him and kissed him. He gasped and moaned (she didn't realize that a few of the sounds he made were from pain when she agitated his injuries too much), but his fingers remained stubbornly gripping the sheets, and after she'd drawn her tongue back out of his mouth, he clamped his jaws shut whenever any part of her body, including her hair, came anywhere near his face. "Hiccup. Make love to me."

"No," he whispered. "No. No. Take your pleasure, but I will give you none."

She tightened her jaw and gave up, businesslike as she finished the sex. They stared at each other for a while, panting. Then he said, "I suppose as rapes go, that wasn't as horrible as it could have been."

"Will you stop that?" she snapped. "Men can't get raped, you know that."

"Well, then I guess I'm not a man," he stormed, "because you did just rape me, Astrid. You forced me into sex against my will, you violated me, you dishonored me - if any man had done that to any woman, you would be the first to cry rape and see that justice gets done. But I guess when it happens to me, it doesn't count because...why? Because I'm too pathetic to be a real man? Or because you're the real chief of this godforsaken island and can do whatever the hell you want to anyone you want? Or is it just because I'm such a piece of garbage that I don't deserve to have any rights at all? I might as well be a thrall, I'm worth nothing more than a bed-slave to you, maybe you should just ship me off to a tribe where slavery's legal, I'm sure the Lava-Louts would treat me better than you do!"

She might have felt more guilty if he wasn't crying again, which had the effect of evaporating any softening feelings toward him. She wanted to strangle him. She would have wondered if he was somehow a woman hidden inside a male body, except that that would be an insult to her own sex. He wasn't 'womanly,' because all the women she knew were strong and worthy of at least a grudging level of respect. This creature before her wasn't 'womanly,' he was just Hiccup, of course he'd be crazy and defective and unsatisfactory.

"You're being ridiculous. We have sex because we're married, that's all there is to it." She gazed at him in disdain as he slowly regained his composure. She wondered, as she watched him wiping at his face until he stopped crying, how she had ended up in this mess, and why things had been set up to be so impossible. Why couldn't she have just been allowed to be chief without all this fuss and bother?

Hiccup finally asked in a low voice, "Can I go now?"

"Get out," she snapped. She pulled the sheets over her and turned her back to him, but didn't hear him pause as he got dressed and left the room.

The next morning, Gobber came yawning into the forge and was surprised to find his apprentice already hard at work. "Hiccup! You're early. Making up for that no-show yesterday?"

Hiccup grunted.

"Well... I see you've made a good start, so I'll just...get busy then, eh?"

"Mm."

The morning passed as usual, until a few hours later when Gobber had his hands full at the same time a customer came up to the counter. "See to it, will you, Hiccup?" the master smith called.

There was no response, and no break in the sound of hammering on the other side of the room.

"HICCUP!"

"I'm busy," the young man said shortly.

"I'm busy, too! And I'm your boss, so I'm telling you to go see what Gunnar needs!"

"And I am flagrantly disobeying your orders."

It never even occurred to Hiccup to try to pull rank, nor to Gobber that Hiccup was technically the chief.

"Should I come back later?" Gunnar asked.

"Ach!" Cursing in frustration, Gobber interrupted his work and stomped over to the counter. "What do you want, Gunnar?"

"Just wanted to buy some nails."

Once the man had left, Gobber stormed over to his apprentice. "Do we need to have a talk, boy?"

"..."

Gobber, too impatient to consider the dangers of forcefully touching a man who had hot iron in his hands, grabbed Hiccup's shoulder and jerked him around to face him.

Then he gasped. "Hiccup!"

Hiccup stared sullenly at his boots.

Gobber gently used his arm prosthetic to tip the young man's chin back up. He helplessly inspected the large bruises blooming over Hiccup's face and the cut on the corner of his mouth. "What happened to you, lad?!"

"I fell," Hiccup said tonelessly.

"You fell."

"..."

"...Did Astrid do this to you?" Gobber asked, very softly.

Hiccup said nothing, but he clenched his teeth and his eyes glistened slightly.

"...Go on to the back and work on the accounts," Gobber murmured, his hand on Hiccup's shoulder relaxing into a comforting pat. "It's been piling up and you know I've got no head for figures, I won't be surprised if it takes you all day to sort it all out."

Hiccup quickly wiped his sleeve across his face and disappeared into the back room.

He didn't come out again until after sunset, when Astrid came to fetch her husband. Gobber stopped her at the front of the shop and said quietly, "Think carefully about what you're doing, lass."

"What are you talking about?"

"Hiccup is like a son to me. He's all I have left of my best friend. I don't like seeing him hurt."

"What do you mean he's hurt? Did he do something idiotic again and get himself burned or something?"

Gobber gave her a look that, after a while, started to make her squirm. "He...did he...say anything...?"

"He didn't have to," Gobber said shortly.

Astrid crossed the room and pushed aside the curtain to the back. She caught a glimpse of Hiccup, sitting unmoving at the desk with his face buried in his arms, surrounded by tidy stacks of paperwork. Then he was up and raging at her, cursing at her, shoving her out of the workroom and slamming the curtain shut as if it was a door.

Astrid stared, outraged, but also guilty. She'd forgotten how bad they were, the horrible bruises she had put on her husband's face, and now Gobber had seen them. Gobber knew what she had done, and she felt more ashamed now than she had when it had only been a matter between herself and Hiccup. "I..."

She trudged through the shop and stopped close to Gobber. "I...I didn't know- He's so FRAGILE!" she burst out. Then, as always, her guilt turned to anger. "What is wrong with him?! Why is he so weak?! Snotlout or the twins or Fishlegs could have handled it just fine, but you just touch Hiccup and his bones break, how in the world has he even survived this long?!"

"I think it'd be best if you went along home, Astrid," Gobber said tightly.

"What?"

"You need to go."

"..."

"Astrid. Did you love Stoick?"

"What-? Of course I did! He was the best chieftain we could have ever had!"

"How do you think he would feel if he could see the way you've been treating his son?" Gobber said quietly.

After a long moment, Astrid left without a word.

Hiccup spent that night on the pallet on Gobber's floor. Astrid spent it alone in her vast, empty bed.

To be continued...

Author's Notes: Men can get physically and sexually abused by women. It doesn't happen as often as the other way around, but it does happen, and it's not rare, either. (One reason the statistics are lower is because fewer male victims report the crimes than female victims do.)

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

Chapter 5 (rough draft)

The next evening, Astrid dragged Hiccup out of the back room of the forge and started hauling him toward their house.

"Wait, Astrid, wait, Astrid please, Astrid-"

"I'm not going to hurt you," she snapped. "I won't hit you, and I won't...I won't 'rape' you, okay? I promise. I just want to show you something, that's all."

He still protested, though he didn't struggle quite as much. She managed to get him into the house and, to his surprise, up the stairs to the loft. Then he just stood there, staring.

"...I didn't know where all your stuff used to be," she uncomfortably. "I just did the best I could, and I figure you can fix it however you like it."

Hiccup slowly moved to his old desk, touching one of the papers that had been pinned to the slab of cork on the wall. He looked around at his work and his possessions, which had been unpacked and more or less replaced.

"I think it's ridiculous, you living up here when you're a married man now," Astrid continued in an irritated tone, "but whatever; if it makes you happy, you can have it. You can have it, Hiccup. I won't touch anything in here, you can hide in here, you can...I don't know...I don't care anymore. You can be a childish brat in here, okay? I don't care. I give up, it's not worth it, I shouldn't have expected any better of you. So no more complaints. Okay, Hiccup?"

He turned and gave her an appraising look, for so long that she had to make a conscious effort to stop from squirming uncomfortably. Then he said, "Let's go down to the bedroom."

"What?"

"To have sex. We're married, so we're supposed to have sex, right?"

"Wh...What?!"

He took her hand and led her down, and he didn't smile - not once during the whole hour and a half that followed - but his hands and his tongue were all over her, and he blew her mind so often and so thoroughly that she was exhausted afterward, panting, feeling dazed and full and completely satisfied and happy.

He sat beside her, gazing down at her, looking like a man who has just purchased an unpleasant but necessary item.

Slowly, she realized what was happening. "This is how it's going to be, huh," she murmured. She loved sex - no, she desperately needed sex - and for whatever reason, he could apparently live without it. Perhaps this was some divinely-granted thing to make up for the fact that she was physically so much stronger than her husband. She understood the game now, that she couldn't just steamroll over Hiccup whenever she wanted, because if she did something he really didn't like, it was going to be the 'rape' routine or, if her conscience bothered her enough, no sex at all. If she pleased him, he would reward her with this. He had learned how to use sex as a tool and a weapon.

"I hate you," she murmured, absently trailing her fingertips over his skin.

"Likewise," he returned calmly.

She sighed. "Truce?"

"I'll play nice as long as you will."

"Okay."

"Good night."

"What?"

He got up and left the room. She heard him ascend the stairs to the loft.

"...Good night," she whispered.

o.o.o.o.o

Hiccup couldn't hide in the back room of the forge forever, and soon the whole village knew that someone had beaten him up. Most people also guessed right about who had done the beating.

"Man, you've hit a new low of pathetic, even for you," Snotlout scoffed at one point, and probably the worst thing was that he sounded almost pitying when he said it.

Hiccup avoided the Great Hall as much as possible, left all the shopping to Astrid, and spent as much time as he could in the forge, his house, or the woods. It didn't eliminate the mockery expressed by almost every man and some of the women in the village, but at least he was able to minimize having to hear it.

Astrid was not unaffected, either. One afternoon, she was trying to settle a dispute between two herders and said impatiently, "It's a perfectly reasonable compromise. Don't make me bash you two over the head just to make you see sense."

"Oooh, wouldn't want that," one of the men snickered. "You're an expert at bashing men, eh, Astrid?"

It disturbed her for a couple of reasons. First of all, because he'd neglected to call her 'Chief,' as many of the villagers had taken to doing by now, and also because it wasn't good-natured teasing - he sounded like he was mocking her along with Hiccup.

"You know what," she snapped, "since you two can't come to an agreement, I think I'll just confiscate the cattle in question and consider them tributes to the chieftain."

"What?!"

"Hey, you can't do that!"

"I JUST DID."

Shortly after that, Astrid dropped off one of her swords to be sharpened at the forge. After she had left, Hiccup stood there for a while slowly turning the weapon in his hands. He wasn't particularly angry at his wife for anything at the moment, but the general hopelessness and endless misery of his life were weighing heavily on him, and he wanted to hide for a while. He got the sword ready to be decorated, then took it aside and began engraving patterns on it, losing himself in the lengthy, meticulous work, letting his mind drift away on the soothing tides of art.

He worked steadily, with very few breaks. Whenever Astrid came by to ask about her sword, he told her brusquely that he was working on a surprise for her and she would have to make do with a different weapon in the meantime. He didn't go home in the evenings, despite Astrid coming by to get him. To show that he wasn't punishing her for anything, he always pulled her into the back room for heavy makeout sessions and quick couplings, but he would spend his nights in the forge, sleeping on the floor for a few hours and working whenever the insomnia pulled him back to consciousness again.

o.o.o.o.o

When the sword was finally finished, exhaustion seemed to crash down on Hiccup all at once. He sat for a long time, staring at his work, allowing his thoughts to get lost in the patterns. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder and heard his wife say, with something that sounded suspiciously like awe, "Hiccup...this is beautiful."

He looked up at her, but didn't move and couldn't think of anything to say.

She picked up the sword in both hands and inspected it closely, the smile growing on her face. "This is a weapon fit for a chieftain. This is gorgeous, Hiccup."

"Mm-hm." He wasn't about to point out all the mistakes he'd made. There wasn't much call for weapons ornamentation in the dragon-plagued, war-torn Barbaric Archipelago, so he wasn't exactly a master in that branch of the craft - but then again, all the other tribes also had better things to do than waste time fancying up their blades, so there was probably no more than a handful of Vikings in the whole Archipelago who could have done better. Astrid didn't seem to notice any of the flaws, anyway.

Her smile faded to a puzzled frown, and she looked back at him. "Why did you do this?"

He couldn't say that he'd done it because he'd needed to escape from the world for a while, so he just shrugged.

"Did you... Is this a - a gift for me?"

"Yes," he lied. He didn't care what happened to the sword. He couldn't lose himself in decorating it anymore, so it was useless to him now.

He was surprised at the expression that spread across her face. It was almost...tender. "Thank you, Hiccup," she whispered.

"You're welcome," he said automatically. He looked past her and realized that it was nighttime. He groaned inwardly at the thought that there was still work to do, but he couldn't back out of it. He had managed to establish the protocol that Astrid got good sex if she treated him decently, and she hadn't specifically upset him recently, so he owed her some good sex, no matter how tired he was. He was afraid of what might happen if he broke the system. Gritting his teeth, he dragged himself to his feet and started shuffling toward the house.

He made it there, and into the bedroom. He didn't make it much farther than that, though, and fell asleep before the foreplay had progressed very far.

Astrid groaned in exasperated frustration, then sighed. Her eyes fell on her beautiful new sword, lying on a bench by the wall. She smiled to see it, then glanced back at her husband.

And realized with a jolt that he had fallen asleep in her bed.

For a while, she toyed with the idea of just leaving him there, and being sure to wake up early so she could laugh at his expression when he realized he'd slept in the marriage bed he apparently hated so much.

But then she looked at the sword again, and she sobered, and finally she got to her feet and took Hiccup up to the loft, where she lowered him into his own small bed and tugged a blanket over him. She watched him sleep for a moment, then sighed and went away.

o.o.o.o.o

Approaching ships were sighted, flying the Berserk flag. There were only two vessels and they were not decked out for war, so it was likely that they were coming in peace, probably in response to Stoick's death and/or Hiccup's marriage. The treaty between the two tribes would have to be renewed, and Chief Oswald the Agreeable would need to pay his respects. In the old days, Oswald would have been a guest at the wedding feast, but as the dragon war continued to intensify, old traditions were slowly being shortchanged or even laid aside as the Hooligans struggled desperately just to survive.

In any case, an ally chief was coming, and since no one other than the Bog-Burglars would have tolerated it if Astrid presented herself as the chief of Berk, it was time for Hiccup to do some playacting. Astrid dragged him out of the forge, threw the bearskin cloak over his shoulders, fussed over it because Hiccup's stick-thin body looked ridiculous buried under the enormous furry garment, then shoved her husband down to the pier to greet Oswald as he arrived.

"Aaahhh!" the older man called, spreading his arms in a friendly way. "How good it is to see my old allies! Terrible business, eh? Terrible business, indeed. Stoick was a good man."

"He will be missed," Hiccup said a little stiffly, trying not to fidget with discomfort.

"Times have really changed, eh, Chief Hiccup," Oswald lamented, clapping an arm around Hiccup's shoulders and propelling him along as they walked. "Those beasts have taken more from you than your people and your food stores - it's a sad day indeed when a tribe can't even draw in guests to the wedding of a chieftain's son."

"You Berserks would have been the only guests, anyway," Hiccup remarked. An unfortunate incident when he was ten years old had prompted virtually all the tribes of the Barbaric Archipelago to turn their backs on Berk. Oswald was the only one who had decided not to cut off the Hooligans entirely, and Trader Johann, a foreign merchant unaffiliated with any Viking tribe, would occasionally sneak in, flying his flags to attract Berk's attention and then waiting safely out of 'raiding range' as Hooligans rowed out to trade with him. Other than that, though, the Hooligans were completely isolated.

"Haha!" Oswald laughed, clapping Hiccup painfully on the back. "Thor above, lad, I remember when you were just a little thing toddling around with Dagur-"

'More like screaming for Dad to come save me as I ran for my life,' Hiccup thought.

"-and now look at you, a full-grown married chieftain! Well. Maybe not full grown." The man laughed again and gave Hiccup a teasing punch on the arm. Hiccup's eyes watered with pain and he wished to be somewhere, anywhere else. Or maybe that the dragons would come for a raid and take everyone's attention off of him.

"Aaahhh, and here's the lovely wife, yes?" Oswald cried, finally letting go of Hiccup so he could spread his arms at the tightly smiling Astrid. "What a catch, son, I must say; what - a - catch!"

"I'm the one who's caught," Hiccup muttered under his breath.

"Welcome to Berk, Chief Oswald," Astrid said sweetly, clasping his hand. "Come along to the Great Hall, we've prepared a meal for you and your men. I'm afraid it's not a feast like you're probably accustomed to-"

"Ah, no need to apologize, girl, I know how things are for you up here," Oswald said, waving his hand dismissively. "Front lines and all. Honestly, I'm surprised you lot have lasted this long!"

"We can be rather stubborn."

The treaty was successfully renewed later that afternoon. Oswald took his leave the next day without having ever seemed to notice how awkward and withdrawn the Hooligan 'chief' was, or how everyone seemed to look to his wife first for everything. As soon as the Berserks were gone, Hiccup went home and tore off his father's cloak and shoved it out of sight.

To be continued...

Author's Notes: For the "unfortunate incident," see my one-shot Each Day Of Life. (It's the sequel to Strongest Of Them All.)

And I guess that Oswald's still alive in this AU.