Soon after becoming a true mate to Toothless, Hicca realized that she hadn't spent any time at all inventing, and decided to fix this. Ideas were drawn up and thrown out for a few hours before she settled on something simple: armor. Her scales worked fine against cuts and scrapes, but piercing and blunt force wounds were still a danger to even full dragons. She worked on the design for a while, adding in limiters to the joints to prevent overextension. She gathered the materials she needed and didn't finish working until late that night.
Her eyes gleamed with joy and mania as she worked in the dark, hammer blows sending forge flies out with every strike, pieces of the armor taking shape under her guidance. She didn't make use of wood or coals to heat the metal but instead her own fire. She chanted as she worked, the tempo of her swings matching the song, which told tales of war and heroes long passed, and the hardship of great sea captains exploring with their brave crew.
The morning sun and Toothless found her slumped over a still cooling forge, hammer in hand and partially finished armor in pieces on a nearby tarp. She woke up before noon, had some fish, and jumped right back into her work with a grin; the only thing changed about the scene from last night was the light of the sun.
The dull black armor was finished at sunset, not beautiful, not ugly, but functional. Every detail of the armor was flawless, but it would never be called smooth. The mail that could be seen between some pieces of the armor was made of metal diamonds formed into a sheet, similar to the covering of her father's clothing. A chest piece covered her front and back, leaving openings for her back spines and wings, while her lower abdomen had overlapping plates protecting it. Her limbs were covered with eight separate pieces to protect her wrists, upper arms, shins, and thighs. The joints were surrounded by small loose plates on chains, providing lesser but still decent protection. Special shoes surrounded her feet leaving her claws exposed, and the same went for her gauntlets. The final piece, her helmet, was actually a two-part metal mask; one half covered her head, leaving room for her eyes, horns, and ears, while the other protected her jaw and throat. Solid metal plates were placed wherever possible and overlapped for better flexibility where they met. Nothing was polished, and everything retained its hammered and blackened look.
"I'm impressed you finished all of that in two days," Toothless stated, looking closely at the armor as Hicca modeled it. "I also like the look of it. You Vikings always like your metal shiny, but this is way better in my opinion."
"Yeah," Hicca replied, "I figured turning myself into a flying mirror would be a mistake, even at night, so I left it dark and rough. By the way, it's harder for a weapon to rust when it's smooth." Toothless looked at her as she said this, and looked back to her armor.
"Won't this rust easily then?"
"Surprisingly no. I've found that dragon fire makes metal unrustable whether it's shiny or rough, even when I try to make it rust." She walked over to the pond and fished around for a small metal disk. It was rough and damp, black like her armor, and devoid of any rust at all. "This has been left in the pond for a few days, and while that may be a short time for rust, there would have been something on here by now if it were normal metal." She tossed the disk into her scrap pile.
"Strange, but useful I guess," Toothless added, sniffing at her armor. "… Odd, this armor smells like dragons. I can smell you underneath it, but the armor has the musky, scaly smell of dragons embedded in it. Must be another effect of dragon fire." Hicca smelled an arm plate herself and found he was right, but the smell brought the taste of her fire to her mouth, and she realized why it smelled.
"You were half right; it smells like dragon fire itself. It brings to mind the smoke of when I was making the armor or the burn on my tongue after I took a break." Another sniff from Toothless proved her right.
"How did you pick up on-" a screaming teen thumping into the dirt behind the two startled them from their thoughts, and they whipped around to face Astrid scrambling to her feet. She was covered in moss and dirt from her landing, and her wide eyes switched quickly between Hicca and the dragon. The sun had set some time ago, probably why she said what she did as she ran for the door.
"Run Hicca! Come on, I know the way back to the - URK!" She shouted, only to be cut off by another face plant, this time because of a dragon paw holding her down, her ax flung across the cove by the force of the impact. She tried screaming for help, but Hicca put a clawed and scaly hand over her mouth, shutting her up and stunning her enough to stop struggling. The owner of the hand leaned down to her eye level.
"Hi Astrid," Hicca said, the struggles starting up again in earnest, stopping with the claws pricking near her spine, "I'm going to be honest: I wasn't expecting you to drop by. In fact, I didn't want anyone from the village to drop by. I'm going to ask how you found me later, but for now, you're going to listen, and I'm going to tell you the truth. You can either listen to it with my hand over your mouth, or you can promise to not make such an awful racket. Deal?" Astrid quickly nodded, and Hicca narrowed her eyes at her. "I mean it, Astrid. If it helps you not to scream, I promise that neither I nor Toothless will hurt you." She slowly removed her hand after Astrid nodded again, and breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay, with all of that out of the way, I've got a long story to tell and a hard thing for you to swallow.
"I better start a few months back, when I found this cove…" Hicca began telling Astrid everything that had happened in the last few months, from meeting Toothless to changing into a half-dragon, and Astrid sat there quietly like she'd promised. "… and now we find ourselves here. Toothless pinning you down, you underneath his paw, and me telling a story. You can ask questions now, but you're still not getting up until I know I can trust you." Astrid was silent for a while, thinking with a slightly angry expression, and turned to Hicca after she finished.
"Why were you out here to begin with?"
Hicca responded immediately. "Easy: Snotlout and the twins were chasing me, and I've grown to know every log in this forest after all of the times I've escaped them in here. It turns out that the threat of broken bones helps one remember vital details like the placement of streams and badger nests excellently."
"Couldn't you have spoken to your father? I'm pretty sure the chief has the most say in the village unless I'm wrong and you're the daughter of a fisherman." Hicca's sudden fit of bitter cackling as she held her sides on the ground startled her.
"Oh, what a great suggestion Astrid! Tell all of my woes to the one man in the village that hates me more than ANYONE ELSE!" She glared down at Astrid with fury. "If I told him I wasn't strong enough to handle three bullies by myself, I'd have had a fourth: my father! The man grounded me for a month once because I couldn't lift a short sword at the age of eight! He tried to get me to bulk up by putting me to work with Gobber - actually, no, he didn't put me to work with him, he dumped his problem child on his best friend, and left her there to be raised by the village nut so he could focus more on his village. Telling my father about my problems is a gods-damned death sentence!" The tears in her eyes broke free and began running down her face rapidly as she fell to her knees, sobbing silently.
Both Toothless and Astrid were in shock at Hicca's outburst, and the startling news it had contained. Toothless moved forward to comfort Hicca, and Astrid stayed in the same spot he'd left her, though she did sit up.
"Hicca… I had no idea…" Astrid muttered. "Is it that bad throughout the village?"
Hicca sniffed, nodding. Toothless had removed her helmet and was lapping at the side of her head in an attempt to stop her tears. "It is, and it has been for as long as I can remember. You've heard Snotlout and the twins call me 'Hicca the Useless,' but practically everyone else calls me the same name. I'm also known as 'Bad Luck,' 'Walking Disaster,' 'Mistake,' and simply 'Useless.' According to everyone else, I've never done a single thing in my wretched life right, and that it would have been better for everyone - father included - if the dragon that had eaten my mother had killed me in the same night." She looked Astrid in the eye but grew angry at her new expression. "Don't you dare show me pity now. You didn't when I called for help without receiving it, and I don't want you to only after you've heard my story." Hicca wiped her eyes and looked back at Astrid. "So now you know everything: my motivations, my story, my goals. What do you plan to do? Run back to that village to earn respect with the blood of me and the only being to ever show me kindness, or something that doesn't include a dragon hunt?"
The silence stretched out, Astrid's watery eyes unblinking as she thought for several minutes. An internal war was waged between her loyalty to her chief and village, and the instinct that telling them about Hicca and Toothless was wrong. Dragons obviously didn't kill on sight, as she had known her whole life, and the proof of that was being comforted in front of her by a scaly fire-breathing monster of the sky. She blinked away her tears as she looked at Hicca, swallowing hard past the knot tied in her throat.
"… I won't tell them, Hicca, but you can't go back either while you look like this. What do you plan to do," Astrid asked, voice quiet and face blank. Hicca sighed.
"I intend to leave." Hicca was emotionally drained at this point, and her voice showed it. "You're right that I can't stay here or show my face in Berk again. You can make up some story about how I was eaten, and Toothless can help me to make the cove hold more believable evidence. I'm sure there'll be a celebration after the news breaks." Hicca's words strengthened Astrid's resolve, but not in her village, in the half-dragon before her. She refused to sit and kill in a village that would treat one of its own like this.
"Then there will be two faked deaths in the village," Astrid stated, the iron in her voice making Hicca look at her. "I refuse to stay in a place where they treat anyone like this, especially the daughter of the chief. I'd thought for years that it was just those three hurting you, and I never imagined that even that was so serious. I was wrong, and I will make it up to you. For both my ignorance and stubbornness." Hicca sat for only a moment and was hugging Astrid the next.
"Thank you," she whispered, Astrid returning the hug.
Hello everyone. I've been busy with the holidays for a while now, and haven't been able to write a whole lot. I cracked down on it though and managed to finish one chapter and write another. I hope you enjoy both, and as always tell me if I make any errors or if you have suggestions for the story. See you in the next chapter!