A/N: Wow, you guys! I'd never expected so many people to take an interest in my story. I hope I can write this to everyone's liking.
I also wanted to point out, just to avoid confusion in this chapter, that this isn't exactly the same premise as all the other 'Hiccup ran away' AU. When I mean 'before the red death', I mean everything had happened the same up until the vikings take off with Toothless to raid the nest. The story diverges from there, and what happened on that day is all a part of the story.
(P.S. Sorry for the cliffhanger, I'm going to try and put up the next chapter in the next few days). Enjoy!
In the brief seconds it takes Toothless to ready up a plasma blast, Astrid is frozen in confusion. She'd never reacted to any kind of attack like this before; she was always the one with stellar instincts, the one that never stopped for a second during a fight.
And Hiccup, he was… Hiccup. He barely survived dragon training; he could barely swing a weapon. The only reason he got by was through his smarts. He hadn't even been able to kill the nightfury in the first place, after shooting it down all those years ago. (She'd admired that, his compassion over brutality). He couldn't hurt anyone, let alone kill them.
Now, she was in his cross-hairs.
"Hiccup!" She yells, but if the rider heard her he didn't react and it was all Astrid had to jump out of the way before she was crisped by Toothless' plasma blast. She slides over to the edge of the cliff, feeling the familiar rush of heat and wind hit her back as the fire ball narrowly missed her.
From her periphery she sees Toothless shoots upwards, sailing over her head and flying away from Berk and towards the ocean. As if he were a beacon, the dragons attacking Berk soon follow after them, and just like that, the hordes have disappeared into the darkness.
Astrid is breathless. Confused. Angry.What the hell was all that? He tried to kill her! He knew it was her, he had more than enough time to figure that out, and then he tried to kill her! Even as other Vikings made their way to the cliff's edge to see if she was still alive, she could barely hear them.
During the cleanup that night into the early morning, Astrid was completely distracted. She was just in utter shock—could it really be? After all of these years, after his sudden disappearance, was this what had become of Hiccup? It was insane to think about, she could barely wrap her head around it.
He was supposed to be dead. That's what everyone had told her, that's what all the elder Vikings said. Hiccup was a ghost returned.
But with all of the questions, there was only one thing she could think to do: she had to talk to him. No, she had to get him to talk to her. She had to know, and then, she had to stop him. But how?
She nearly dropped a load of lumber on her own foot as she stumbled over a loose rock. Ivan Thurston gave her a skeptical look, as if he couldn't even imagine a world where Astrid could trip. She smiles sheepishly, bending over and scooping up the planks.
She had to get his attention, and she knew exactly how she'd do it.
.
.
.
Ever since dragons raids had become a full-time gig, so had Gobber's job at the blacksmith's. Especially since he hadn't bothered to replace his apprentice since Hiccup had disappeared. Now he had two interns and not a moment to spare from un-bending swords and un-denting shields and fixing every kind of weapon that a Viking could conceivably break. That job took up most of his time, so much so that he'd had to pawn off the job of training the newbies.
The problem was, no one really wanted to do it. They were either too busy rebuilding houses in the wake of the recent onset of attacks or totally unwilling to spend the majority of their waking hours hearing some snot-nosed, pubescent kids whine and get chewed on by dragons. It was so below the respectable Viking; so guess who they gave the job to?
The twins, believe it or not. But then there was the whole incident with the stuffed yak and Hildi Ulfson's big toenail… and the twins were sent to work on a fishing boat far, far away from any yaks or teenagers.
So they made Astrid do it. Teaching, she quickly learned, wasn't her forte. It didn't feel right to her. But somebody had to do it, and gods knew Astrid was not going to a fishing boat.
Unfortunately, she had plans that didn't involve a group of rowdy teenagers.
"Astrid, what are we doing out here?" Gustav asks, heading the small pack of trainees as Astrid leads them down the main stretch. They were supposed to be experimenting with the 143 different poisons the changewing could generate. That was textbook classroom stuff, but a classroom was the last place Astrid needed to be today.
"Good question, Gustav." Astrid stops, spinning around to face her pack. The teens freeze in their tracks, the few at the end running into each other. "Can anyone tell me what they see?" she asks.
Of course, there was no real answer. This kind of lesson was completely made up.
"Silent Sven's Farm!"
"The catapults!"
"A DRAG—oh, wait, no, that's just a statue."
"Great," Astrid clapped her hands together in a teacher-ly manner. She had gotten quite good at faking it. "So today, I want you all to consider what the best points of defense are in the village."
"Come on, Astrid!" Gustav moans, stepping forward from the crowd of his peers. "You saw the battle yesterday; we need to learn how to fight… more! I want to stab something!"
The other kids cheer in agreement.
"Okay, okay!" The teacher raises her arms up, forcing them into fearful silence. "Just… go visit Gobber in the blacksmith's shop. I want you all to, uh, pick out a weapon you'd like to try."
Most of kids nod or (in the traditional Viking manner) grunt in acknowledgement, and head in the other direction to the blacksmith's shop. Astrid needs the kids distracted while she did what she had to do; any way to get them busy was good enough for her.
"I'll be after in a minute!" Astrid says, and just as she feels they are far enough away, she takes off to Stoick's house. While Stoick was out 'chiefing' for the day, she decided she needed to do just a little bit of 'commandeering'. By which she meant it was time for an unsolicited home invasion.
She looked around before going in, and was even more cautious as she pressed slowly on the door. When it gave open she peeked in first, sure that Stoick was out but still afraid to get caught. She had no business being here. She slipped inside and slowly put the door back in place.
Then she was up the stairs.
She wasn't sure exactly what she was looking for; only that she needed something he might want. Lo and behold, as she expected, Hiccup's room was relatively untouched apart from a few crates stacked up in the corner. The room was dusty, full of years of neglect as Stoick, for obvious reasons, probably didn't want to come up the loft. Heck, he probably didn't even fit in the loft.
She went to his desk first, shuffling through a few sheets of damp, stray paper. The notebook he'd always meticulously protected would be the best thing, but it wasn't anywhere in the area. She looked up, but the pages above Hiccup's desk were mostly gone.
She checked under the bed, under his pillow, in the dresser for that notebook. Most of his clothes were missing apart from an itchy-looking yak sweater. She checked around for his helmet, too, but there were very few places he could hide something that big. She knocked at the walls, she stomped on every floorboard. Nada.
The more she looked around… the more it seemed like the room was carefully reassembled. This was a Viking's room, for sure, but there really was no physical evidence that the room had ever even belonged to a particular Viking named Hiccup. No… there were only so many things that rats could take off with. It seemed very suspicious that Stoick would remove all of Hiccup's personal stuff and still leave the space unused.
Astrid didn't have time to do another once-over of the room when she hears the front door swing open and slam into the adjacent wall. She pulls in a shallow breath.
"Astrid? You in here?"
Oh, thank the gods it was only Gobber. Well, Gobber was supposed to be watching her kids… so that wasn't all that great, but at least it wasn't Stoick.
Astrid carefully heads down the first few steps from the loft. She pokes her head out the opening. "Uh, hey, Gobber." She waves nonchalantly.
The older Viking is standing in the threshold of the house; he looks up when he sees her on the stairs. "Y'know, the entire point of giving you the job of training the little ones was so that you'd be watching them instead of me, not… what are ya doing here, anyway?"
"Oh, you know." She finishes walking down the stairs. "I saw a, uh, sheep wander off in this direction, I was just looking for him."
Gobber scratched his head with his hook. "Really?"
"Would I lie?" Astrid shrugged.
"Huh. Y'know, I didn't know the sheep could climb the stairs these days." He sounded completely bewildered over sarcastic, and she felt relieved. Gobber was way too trusting. She slips out the door past him, and he follows as she walks over to the blacksmith's to pick up her trainees.
"I'm telling ya," The older Viking muses, shutting the chief's door behind them. "Those sheep are getting bloody smart. Forget the dragons, I bet ya they're going to be the ones to overthrow us." He says, laughing to himself.
"Yea," Astrid says quietly.
.
.
.
She was going to need a new plan. When she'd gotten to the blacksmith's with Gobber, Astrid had been able to discreetly snoop around as Gobber showed the kids the 23 different alternatives for his hook hand.
But there was nothing. The interns were clueless meatheads; they had no idea what she was talking about.
Old designs, machines, even some of the simple weapons Hiccup had made were gone or missing. It was like he'd never existed apart from the dent in his bed and his fading memory. Astrid was at a loss. There was no way to attract him to stay other than the appeal of trying to blow her up again.
She'd tried to get her mind off of him at dinner, but she just couldn't. It was crazy, how obsessed she was becoming with this. It was obviously becoming clear enough to be noticed.
"You look sad, and it's making me sad." Tuffnut observes from across the table.
(The group of her childhood had made a habit of meeting most nights for dinner, but a majority of the evenings it was usually just her, Fishlegs and Snoutlout since the twins were always away on the fishing boats... Although it was even worse when they got back, since Fishlegs and Snoutlout would fawn over Ruffnut and Astrid would be forced to share intelligent dinner conversation with Tuff).
"Great observation, Tuffnut." Astrid says, looking down at her food dejectedly. She really wasn't in the mood tonight, not for Tuff's lunacy or Snoutlout and Fishlegs incessant come-ons.
Ruff opens her mouth to say something, but when Fishlegs leans in too close she elbows him in the face hard enough to knock him back off his stool. When Snoutlout laughs, in turn she stabs his shoulder with her fork.
"AH!" Snoutlout screeches, his hand coming up to grip the fork. It was really lodged in there. "Ruff, honey, you've got to stop doing that." He says through a forced smile and heavy breaths.
Ruffnut shrugs, grinning. "It slipped again."
Tuffnut starts laughing obnoxiously, and Astrid sighs and lowers her head even more. Sometimes she was lost as to how these people became her friends.
"Are you okay, Astrid?" Ruff finally asks as Tuffnut continues to laugh and Snoutlout struggles to pull the fork out of his skin. "You're acting weird. Like…" She waves a finger in the air, trying to think of the right word. "Like, like Hiccup, before he became cool."
"Reclusive!" Tuffnut volunteers, and all activity at the table ceases as the other Vikings peer at Tuff curiously.
But that's what gets Astrid thinking. Reclusive. There may just be one thing Hiccup had left behind, after all. The one thing that could never be destroyed or stolen.
"Reclusive?" Ruffnut asks, scrunching up her nose in disgust as she looks at her brother.
Tuff raises a hand up defense. "I know big words, I read. You don't know everything about me!"
.
.
.
When the dragons inevitably attack again a few nights later, she was ready. As alarms went off and the massive court torches rose up above the village, Astrid ran the other way.
(Not from fear, don't be ridiculous).
The cove, she just knew it. The cove where he'd met Toothless and she'd discovered them both. That place had to be the only thing left on Berk that meant anything to Hiccup if it had ever meant anything to him-and if she went there, maybe he would, too. Maybe… there was no guarantee he'd even come back at all, but it was the best she had. There were no other ways she could think to get his attention. She'd never find the nightfury unless it wanted to be found.
She ran mostly in the dark, ditching her torch after the brush became too thick and she could no longer go forward without accidentally setting the forest on fire.
By the time she reaches the cove, panting lightly from her sprint, the world is pitch black and the sounds of the ensuing battle between the Vikings and the dragons can easily be heard from this distance. The village is pretty far from this point, but the dragons are loud and every once in a while she can she a quick spurt of fire or smoke from above the treeline. Berk was in the thick of it. It bothers her she can't be there.
Astrid waits.
She never expected him to show up right away (if at all), but she was beginning to get nervous as the fighting continued and nothing was happening. She stays on her feet, ready to move, ready to lunge or strike or just run back to Berk and help her tribe. She moves her hand up and down the hilt of her axe nervously. Here she was, just standing here, waiting for someone who may or may not even come.
The more she thinks about it, the more she decides it was a silly idea. She couldn't hold this over him, this cove. She couldn't destroy it, threaten it. Even if she could set it on fire or something along those lines, what would that do? It was a piece of earth, a few rocks and a small pond.
What reason would Hiccup really have to go to her?
She turns, watching the line above the trees again. Berk needed her help.
And that's when the ground shook with a sudden, heavy force. Astrid hears it and feels it and senses it before she ever sees it. Of course, no one ever saw a nightfury.
She turns around, slowly, precariously, and he's there on Toothless' back. He's still wearing the mask, but even with just the light of the stars she can see it could be no one else.
He came.