Sorry for being a bit late with this, busy night.
00000
"Come on," Hiccup nags, and Astrid can't help but think that it makes his tone even more nasal than normal and that it's really not a good thing.
"No," she resists coercion with a matter of fact tone, smart enough to cap the anger that she really can't back up or justify.
"You seriously have to take one," he shakes the bottle of pills at her and she scowls, turning to glare at the TV, trying to erase him from her peripheral vision.
"I took the antibiotic, I don't have to take anything else."
"Oh, that's great," he gestures dramatically, face flushed and frustrated. Toothless is his trans-species twin, sitting stern and asymmetrical by Hiccup's foot, staring Astrid down like a disappointed parent. "You're just going to choose to be in excruciating pain."
"It doesn't hurt that bad," she insists, and it's true, as long as she doesn't move or breathe too deeply.
"Astrid, they wouldn't give you these if they didn't think you'd need them." She turns to glare at him, faltering on Toothless's uncomfortably serious face.
Admonished by a wolf, this is a new low.
"Make him stop lecturing me with his face," she orders, but it sounds less serious than she'd hoped as Hiccup stares her down with concerned annoyance. "Seriously…it's…just make him stop." Her knee twinges and Toothless's stare hardens further.
"Maybe you'll listen to him."
"It's not that I'm not listening," Astrid rolls her eyes and crosses her arms with slow creaking movements as she tries not to disturb her antsy knee. "I'm disagreeing, but I hear you loud and clear."
"Astrid—" He starts in that low, soothing voice that works magic on storm spooked dogs, and Astrid sneers.
"Don't 'Astrid' me—"
"Just take the pill, it'll help, I promise—"
"It doesn't hurt that bad!" She insists, wincing when the dramatic re-inflation of her lungs sends a twinge through the entire right side of her body. "I am absolutely ok—oh." Her rant stops in its tracks when Spike ambles from her post curled by the couch to line up shoulder to shoulder with Toothless.
She mimics the wolf's stern expression and Astrid sighs, head falling back against the couch with an uninhibited grunt.
Her own dog is now turning on her.
"Astrid, there's no shame in taking something—"
"I'm not ashamed!" She barks, and Spike nervously licks the side of her blue dog nose, looking more to Toothless than Hiccup, obviously torn between comforting her girl and standing strong. Toothless twitches a pointed ear her direction and she lays down, nervous smile absorbed into that preaching expression. "I'm not ashamed," Astrid repeats, voice lower in unspoken apology for making Spike nervous. "I'm just sick of feeling hazy and pathetic and stupid."
Hiccup remembers the feeling of his brain trying to slip around in his own skull, waterlogged with opiates. For that entire first day, he drifted in and out of reality, exploring that gelatinous matrix of separate and confused memories that craved assembly.
He remembers new prosthetics, staring at the huge, chalky pain pills and wondering if they had anything that could make him feel better without zombifiying him. Astrid is even smaller than he was, which is saying something, and she's far less tolerant of being altered.
Unless it's tequila.
"Half of one?" He suggests his own proven solution mildly, and the understanding tone replacing his previous frustration brings Astrid's head around to face him.
"What?"
"Try taking half of one," he repeats, pulling his pocket knife out of his pants and setting a pill on the table, neatly splitting it in two and discretely tucking the slightly smaller half back into the bottle. "It feels more like a giant Tylenol than something you bought off of a guy named Tweak."
She looks between the pill and his face, expression crumpling into an almost demure frown.
"I'm sick of you dealing with me," she admits in a too small voice, and it takes everything in Hiccup not to remind her that she had surgery two days ago and he's going to be taking care of her for a while yet. She holds a pale hand out to accept the pill with a notable lack of eye contact. "You're supposed to be doing homework and building your final project, but you're stuck in here mommy-ing me."
She knows she's an awful patient, and it's something she's earnestly trying to work on. But this morning when Hiccup woke her up at ten with a glass of water and her first round of pills, she felt like a pampered child. She hates the fact that she can't get up and walk ten feet to the kitchen by herself, and she hates just how willing he is to do it for her.
Over the years, what people think has faded into a shadow of the monstrosity that used to control her every movement and most of her thoughts. It was steadily replaced by the infinitely more reliable and far more moral gage of what Hiccup thinks.
Hiccup thinks she's weak, and that she needs medication.
Lovely.
"I'd much rather mommy you than work on that project," Hiccup tries to assure her, but the sentiment slaps her across the face and solidifies her uselessness. He watches like a hawk as she brings the pill past her lips and swallows it back with a chug of water, grimacing as the bitter aftertaste assaults her tongue. She looks back up at him with a muted red expression somewhere within the spectrum of ashamed. "I'm so done with that project for today. Honestly, I've burned out two motors. Today."
"I have no idea what that means," Astrid admits with a quiet laugh that's disconcertingly self-deprecating.
Spike relaxes at the sound, recognizing laughter no matter how morose, and pads back to the couch, curling up where she knows Astrid can reach down and scratch her ears. Toothless's mouth falls open in that disconcertingly gormless grin and he leans against Hiccup's leg, panting happily.
"Basically, it means that I have to go back to Hobby Town," Hiccup sighs, "for the fourth time this week."
"That sucks," Astrid picks her laptop off of the coffee table, wincing as her knee gives a shuddering twinge, reminding her that it's still there and still hurt, as if she could easily forget.
"I would have gotten that for you," Hiccup reminds her with an aggravated sigh, and Astrid can't think of anything but her disastrous attempts baby-sitting as a teenager.
Great, now she's clinging to the petulant child side of that stick.
"I don't need your help with everything."
"I don't mind," he insists and she looks at him with rampant disbelief. "I'm not dealing with you."
"I'm not used to being dealt with."
Like she's an issue, something to be accounted for and worked around.
She's not cut out for this.
"How many times have you helped me with this?" He gestures to his left foot and Astrid follows that line of his hand, struck with the realization that this is the same thing.
She's down and he's not.
Her leg, his leg. Both stubborn, useless, and wrong.
Podiatry is something that she never thought she'd have in common with Hiccup. She never thought she'd understand the diffuse weight of limited mobility, or the obvious embarrassment when standing is suddenly a practically athletic act in and of itself.
"A couple," she answers his question with a humbling smile. "We match now, don't we?"
"You're finally in my league," he jokes and she rolls her eyes.
"Hiccup," her tone chastises, out of sync with genuinely appreciative eyes. She's happy for the comfort, but unflinching that it won't come from Hiccup tearing himself down like he's so prone to do, even after all this time.
"You can finally come to my gimp club meetings," he grins, and somehow it's not left within Astrid to be insulted.
"Only if you guys have sweet tee-shirts."
"They're a little crooked," he laughs to himself, continuing the joke. "The guy we have on the printing press leans a little left." Astrid snorts , and no matter how persistent her anti-leg joke creed has been until now, it doesn't seem so abhorrent in the moment.
"You're horrible."
"Is the pill kicking in at all?" He asks through the weak guise of a responding laugh, hoping to bypass her bravado.
"A little," she concedes with downturned eyes. She can take a deep breath without suppressing the urge to cry, and that's a vast improvement. "Thanks for bargaining with me instead of trying to make me take it."
"Right," he nods. "I can make you do stuff because you can't beat me up…I like this."
"Ass. I could still take you," she insists, all bluster.
"Totally," he deadpans and Astrid scoffs, turning back to her computer. "How is your paper going?" Of course Astrid is back at her homework two sane days after surgery.
"It's alright," she smiles wryly at him. "I've about beaten 'A Separate Peace' to death."
"Never heard of it," Hiccup laughs sheepishly, and it's sweet subtle revenge for all that talk about motors.
"Ironically, it features a broken leg," she simplifies with a shrug.
"Your leg isn't broken." Hiccup insists and Astrid frowns.
She's sick of this thing being massive and looming, unspoken and comforted. She hates this.
"I look broken," she admits, and feels stronger rather than weaker. Words build behind the relief like a tsunami until they spill out. "It's a book about fault and the state of the world and its irrelevance to the everyday. Everyone is blaming themselves for this." She gestures to the brace and Hiccup remembers just yesterday when she blabbered on about how she could have prevented this in her slurred tone. "My trainer thinks it's her fault because I wasn't doing some strengthening exercise, and your dad feels like he should have tried to prepare me for a career ending injury, and I'm pretty sure you're guilty because you didn't magically poof to my side the second I got hurt.
"And I really wish that I could blame someone. I do. I wish it were your fault or my coach's or some lazy snow plow driver's, but it's not."
"It's just bad luck," Hiccup agrees grudgingly.
"Really shitty luck," and saying it out loud finalizes all that bitterness towards some higher power she can't help but feel spited and slighted by. The bitterness towards her newfound loathing of the concept of winter solidifies, and she's smart enough to notice the regrettable irony that she's always wanted to mock Hiccup for his personal feud with all things icy. "And you know what the worst part is?" She asks with a miserable laugh and Hiccup shrugs, happy that she's talking to him about this, but too smart to let it show right now.
"My dad keeps trying to carry you places?" He highlights his personal least favorite aspect of incapacitation.
"That is uncomfortable," Astrid laughs, "but it's the fact that I can't even get my stitches wet, so I can't shower until at least next weekend. That seems like…I shouldn't even care about being clean right now with everything else I have to worry about, but I'm just…my hair is greasy, and I hate it, and I can manage most of the rest of me with a washcloth…but I just feel gross."
Hiccup grins, because there's finally something that he can help with. He steps up beside the couch and holds a hand out. She looks at his fingers like some odd, culturally out of place offering and he looks down at her impossibly fondly.
At least she has Hiccup to take care of her.
"Come on," he waves at her with that offered hand, "as your sometimes human crutch, I'm personally invested in you being at least semi-clean," he regurgitates, and it's suddenly years ago and she's heaving him down a hallway, oblivious to the fact that her entire life is about to change again, for the better this time.
"You took my line."
"It seemed to fit," he smiles, sliding an arm behind her shoulders and under her good leg and lifting with an ease that should make Astrid furious.
She has problems summoning that anger at the moment.
"I thought we just mentioned I don't like being carried," she snips through a blush, crossing her arms.
"By my dad," he laughs, starting down the hallway with slightly strained breath. "You're just painfully bad at crutches. I can't watch that right now."
"Oh shut up," her arm winds around the back of his neck and hauls some of her weight off of his arms as he kicks open his unlatched bathroom door and unceremoniously sets her on the closed toilet seat.
He turns and unsticks his shower chair's suction cups from the floor of the tub, reversing it and looking critically at Astrid's leg before carefully jamming it back into place.
"Hmm…how much does your leg straighten?" He asks and she sheepishly shows him the stiff brace that locks her joint entirely into position.
"I'm serious, I can't get these stitches wet."
"Give me a minute," he looks at her seriously. "I'm an engineer, I can figure this out."
"Ok…" she rolls her eyes and leans back against the toilet, jiggling her good foot impatiently. Very suddenly she is again scooped into skinny arms and deposited into the shower chair. Hiccup carefully lifts her bad leg and props her heel onto the edge of the tub.
"See?" He beams at her and she nods, shifting slightly to get comfortable.
"I'm comfortable, but I really can't get this wet."
"Oh, I was thinking I'd mostly just be washing your hair," he corrects her a bit sheepishly. He gestures to the removable shower head, once again glad for the device that has made his life endlessly easier the past few years.
"You'll wash my hair?" She asks, a bit uncomfortable at her helplessness at the same time as she's glad for the sentiment. "I don't know if…I don't even have my shampoo in here."
"I can go get your shampoo," he smiles. "Or you could just use mine, because I really don't care."
"You don't have to do this."
"It's helping you wash your hair, not giving you my firstborn."
She gulps, realizing that at this point, his firstborn is her firstborn, and that mental consolidation is utterly frightening.
"I don't think anyone's washed my hair since I still needed help in the bath," she laughs, uncomfortable and avoiding eye contact.
This goes a little beyond the scope of icing her knee and feeding her pills, doesn't it?
"I'm offering," he reminds her in that gentle voice that makes her want to order him to butt out of her brain. "You're not asking me to."
"I…" she stares at her toes, resenting the way her elevated foot nearly glows unhealthy white. "This…"
Helping Hiccup has been an implicit relationship requirement as long as she and Hiccup have been in a relationship. It's something she's never really minded, and it has only been immensely frustrating when he wanders off from his leg on crutches preoccupied or adamantly refuses to tell her that there's a problem.
And he's helped her. He has helped her more than she ever could have asked for, and it's something unspoken and bonded between them.
He's never helped her like this. She hasn't been the one who needed a shoulder in years, as his school got harder and she got used to the pressure of her routine. Not to mention the glaring fact that, she's always been strong and upright, fully physically independent.
If he helps her with this, is it going to be some vast shift in their relationship? Is she suddenly going to be less or weaker or demeaned in any way?
No, she won't. She trusts Hiccup more than that.
But it'll feel like it, back in that violently independent part of her brain. The part that she's trying so hard to silence and calm.
"You don't want me to," he sighs, leaning down to remove her from the tub as chivalrously as he can. She frowns at his drooping face and holds a palm out, stopping him from lifting her.
"I can't do anything myself," she admits in a quiet, private voice. "I've never been this helpless before. Never."
"You're not helpless, you have me," he says simply and she scowls at the wall in front of her, staring into the tile grout like it's withholding a secret. "Is the wall answering?"
"You want to do this?"
"I want to help," he assures her, glancing down at her white-knuckled hand wrapped around the edge of the tub. He wants to reach out and touch her, or something, but it seems like one of those times she's silently requesting the yawning space between them.
"I owe you one," she nods resolutely, permitting the practice and leaning her head back against the shower chair and fidgeting to get comfortable.
"You don't owe me anything."
"You're going to turn down my help in the shower?" She asks with a piqued eyebrow, oddly glad when Hiccup blushes and the dynamic is restored if only briefly.
"Well, not if you put it that way," he grins and rubs a hand up the back of his neck, looking at her headedly before flicking his eyes to her knee and metering his expression. "I'll go get your shampoo."
"And conditioner," she reminds him, closing her eyes and listening to the oddly soothing click thump of his one bare foot ambling across the hallway. He's back a moment later, two bottles in hand and looking at her for approval. She nods and manages a slight smile, frowning before reaching down and tugging her shirt over her head and dropping it on the floor. "That would have gotten soaked."
"Good call," he stares at her face before the scope of his vision widens and he frowns, setting the bottles on the edge of the tub and disappearing into his bedroom. A moment later he reappears in the doorway, rolling his computer chair to the side of the tub and sitting down. "There we go."
"You've really thought this through," She tries to relax back into the chair, suddenly acutely aware of the comparatively cool air on the bare skin of her chest and stomach. She has half a mind to take her bra off and make this something intimate and familiar rather than this new brand of helpless awkward, but that implies being afraid of this new sort of closeness.
She's not.
Well, maybe not afraid. Perplexed, anxious, worried that things might shift and change. Never afraid of him.
He reaches above their head and pulls down the shower head, turning on the faucet and waiting for the stream to come to temperature. Astrid shivers as the still warming mist lights on her back through the slits in the back of the chair and Hiccup scoots the water away from her shoulders, aiming it away from her.
"That better?"
"It was fine," she assures him, feeling oddly beyond exposed, looking up at him through the lens of the peculiar angle. He must be outside more than normal lately, because his cocoa colored freckles are even thicker than she's ever seen along his cheekbones. He trimmed his beard, probably yesterday, and as much as she liked the rugged lines of it, she missed him looking clean and familiar above the masculine line of his jaw, square and strong beneath high cheekbones. He furrows thick eyebrows over those impossibly green eyes as he tests the water with his fingers, adjusting the temperature slightly. Astrid reaches back to pull the hair tie out of her ponytail and Hiccup catches her wrist.
"I got it."
"Come on, I can do that much," she pouts, flush travelling down past her collarbone as he lets her ponytail loose and rakes careful fingers through the tangles.
"Hey, this is pretty much the first thing that you're letting me do for you ever since you remembered your last name. I'm going to do it right."
"And it's not right if I take out my own hair tie?"
"Nope," and he starts carefully smoothing her hair back from her face and wetting it down with the steamy water. She can't help but groan as the sensation scratches greasy itches she didn't recognize before they were soothed and taken care of, and Hiccup grins, combing through her hair with short fingernails that barely graze her scalp and make her toes curl a little too much.
He's washing her hair, not doing anything erotic.
Not that she necessarily minds his concentrated expression, or the way that the hot water is licking across her skin and nursing every itchy groove in her scalp. She definitely doesn't mind the way he's biting his lip in concentration as he carefully gets the underside of her hair soaked through before flicking the showerhead's valve shut and letting it hang against the bathtub wall.
"Ok, that felt pretty good," she pouts quietly after the water has been off for a minute and Hiccup smiles and raises his eyebrows at the admission.
"I'm not even going to say 'I told you so'," he reaches towards the bottles on the edge of the tub and hesitates with a frown that really shouldn't be so handsome. The beard works for him, in its way, but she misses just how blatantly obvious his expressions are with a clean shaven jaw. It's like reading a magazine, instead of deciphering something through a layer of scruff. But it's a sort of deciphering that most likely requires lips. And teeth. And—"…listening?"
"Hmm?" She blinks too quickly, wondering if even half of a heavy duty painkiller is too much for her.
She has a sneaking suspicion that Hiccup is just too much for her right now. As much as she'd never admit it in a million years, being taken care of isn't exactly a turn off. She finds herself absolutely keen to repay him.
"Does shampoo or conditioner come first?" He asks, that concerned expression once again apparent on his features. She blinks rapidly to clear her mind.
"Shampoo."
"Alright…" he mumbles mostly to himself, pouring some of the clear liquid into his hand and bringing it to her scalp, clumsily wiping it across the slicked surface of her hair and massaging it in with both sets of fingers. She melts into the touch and her eyes slip shut as his hands work their way around to the back of her neck, lifting her head slightly and running the soap through the length of her hair.
She sighs happily and stretches her good leg out to prop it alongside those shockingly cold metal edges on her brace.
"This should be a thing," she mumbles, tilting her head back again as his fingernails work across the back of her scalp.
"A thing?" He laughs at her blissful expression, her lips curled into a dreamy smile.
"We should do this more," she opens her eyes and nods at him, face healthily flushed for the first time since her accident. Hiccup reaches down and reopens the showerhead valve, rinsing his hand then bringing it to her hair and laughing as she moans appreciatively.
"So we should have me wash your hair more?" He affirms, squeezing the shampoo out of the thick blonde and making sure that he wipes all of the suds away from her hairline.
"I'll do yours too," she promises with a contented hum stretching her hands above her and rolling her shoulders against the chair. A warm driblet of water runs down her spine and she frowns briefly. "It can be a tradition. Tuesday night hair washing."
"Why Tuesday?" Hiccup laughs, again turning off the showerhead and picking up the bottle of conditioner. "And how exactly does conditioner work anyway?"
"You just sort of comb it through," she tells him, once again opening her eyes and watching him open the bottle. His brow remains furrowed as he combs the opaque glob through her hair, so carefully distributing it through the soaked mass.
There's something utterly charming about the attention to detail and she lets herself get lost in his expression. It's familiar, she's seen it a million times when he's sketching out some new invention in that graph paper notebook that rarely leaves his side. She's seen it when he's crouched next to Toothless, affixing that perpetually half-finished prosthetic to the wolf's shoulder and tinkering with the straps across his torso.
She's seen it when his hand is pressing and churning against her, his eyes boring into hers as the room heats up and the world falls apart beneath her—
"Ok?"
"What?"
"You're sort of staring off into space," he lets her know, "and staring at me."
"Oh," she mumbles in response, humming to herself as he picks the water back up and starts to rinse the conditioner from her hair, combing through in long, slow strokes. "Thanks for doing this," she blurts after a too quiet moment and he smiles down at her, turning off the faucet and letting the shower head hang.
"It's no problem," he insists, reaching down and wringing as much water as he can from her thick hair before rolling to the side and grabbing his towel off of its rack. He wraps the soft terry cloth around her head and rubs gently, sopping up most of the residual water.
"Seriously, thank you."
"Seriously, it's no problem," he repeats, leaning down and kissing her forehead. It turns into something more when her hand weaves into the soft hair on the back of his head and aims his mouth downwards, lips clashing sideways, clumsy but electric at the unfamiliar angle. His hand lands against her stomach, sliding up under the band of her bra and cupping her ribcage, thumb stroking smoothly over the skin.
Her arms wind around his neck and she uses him to haul herself out of the chair, succeeding in getting closer for a brief second before her knee quakes and complains though a physical megaphone. She lets go with a groan, lips popping apart with a wet smack as she flops back onto the chair with an embarrassing whine.
"Ow, ow, ow…" she mutters, hands jumping off of his shoulders and cradling the outside of her brace as the keen pain finally subsides. Hiccup sheepishly rests a hand on her bare arm, smiling apologetically through flushed, slightly swollen lips.
"I should probably get you back to the couch," he hands her the tee-shirt off of the floor and she tugs it back over her head, grimacing as it dampens from the stray moisture against her back. Hiccup seems to understand the hurry and scoops her up as soon as she's covered, faltering slightly at lifting her from such a low seat. He adjusts his grip on her good knee and grins, obviously proud of himself.
She rolls her eyes and crosses her arms, ignoring the way that her damp but blissfully clean hair is soaking the back of her shirt.
"You just enjoy carrying me," she accuses him and he shrugs, even with her added weight.
She seethes at that detail.
"I have the right to remain silent," he claims with a too cheeky grin, carrying her back out to her sick roost in the living room .
00000
"Ok, ok, so who's this one again?" Astrid asks, sitting with her feet propped on the coffee table and feeling far livelier as her hair dries and curls slightly. She combs her fingers through the long strands, cocking her head to the side and trying to pay attention to the TV as Hiccup explains the apparently complicated on screen interactions, oblivious to the camp of the horrible eighties era effects.
"That's Lieutenant Yar," Hiccup explains with a laugh, "she's the one you liked in the last episode. The one who beat up the guys."
"Right…" Astrid nods, frowning a bit and trying to put together another strange face with a name. "And she's with the big lumpy forehead guy, right? The Stick-on?"
"Klingon," Hiccup corrects.
"There's tension there. Do they get together?" Astrid asks, cocking her head and glancing up at him through slightly frizzy bangs, fingers catching on a knot halfway down the length of her hair. "Eventually?"
"No…" he thinks for a moment before deciding to divulge, because it's not like she's going to pay attention to the rest of the episode anyway. When he was a kid, sometimes a TV show was the only thing that could keep his mind focused and somewhere else for half an hour, but Astrid's the opposite. Give her a book and she's gone for a day, but try to immerse her in the bowels of Star Fleet and she's braiding and unbraiding hair like it's an emergency. "Yar dies in the first season, right before they were supposed to spar."
"Lame," she frowns. "I feel like they'd be pretty unbeatable. Their fights would be hellish though," her head lolls further to the side, hair dancing against his lower arm. He twitches away and shoots her a look.
"That tickles."
"Sorry," she sits back up straight, gripping her hair and sliding it over her opposite shoulder. "I don't normally let it dry without braiding it. It's distracting."
"It looks good," he compliments, reaching across the cushion between them and running careful fingers above her ear, pushing a stubborn shock of bangs away from her face. "I should wash it more often." She rolls her eyes at his grin, hand landing casually against his knee and stroking at the softer patch of denim there.
"Thanks for that," her voice dips, quiet and self-conscious, no matter how much he assured her that it was nothing. "It was a huge favor."
"No big deal," he shrugs, looking back at the TV and frowning at some deep matter of plot that Astrid doesn't quite follow. If only they'd write it down, maybe it would hold her attention and she wouldn't spend the entire time distracted by the fact that aliens all look like hair models on the set of the Breakfast Club.
She glances sidelong at Hiccup, focused on the screen with those thick eyebrows furrowed into an unnaturally appealing line. He chuckles to himself after a joke she doesn't catch, leaning back against the far end of the couch, her good leg bent and folded between them. He must be reading her mind when his hand finds her knee, stroking slowly at the soft skin just above the swell of her calf, solid and warm.
She likes the way that his hand looks against her skin, pale and freckled, short fingernails glancing over her comparatively tan leg with a maddening rhythm.
"I never really thanked you…" she leads, biting her lip and leaning a little towards him, long strands of blonde tickling the back of his wrist as all sorts of thought of repaying him springing to the forefront.
"Thanked me for what?"
"For washing my hair," she reminds him, hand folding over his near her knee.
"You said thank you," he grins at her briefly before turning back to the TV, and she remembers when just looking at him through her eyelashes drew all of his attention to her like a focused laser. Her fingers slide around to grip at the soft underside of his wrist, stroking the callused ridge where it swells into the heel of his hand.
"But I didn't really thank you," she hints, raising an eyebrow at him without realizing the effect is diminished by the thick, still slightly damp bangs hanging over her forehead. "If you know what I mean…"
"Hmm?" He glances away from the TV with a slow, glazed eye blink, eyes refocussing on her face. "What do you mean?"
"Come on, Hiccup, pay attention…" she lets her fingers slide up his arm and tugs him closer by the shoulder seam of his tee-shirt. "I didn't say thank you, not really." Her fingers walk across the sharp line of his collar bone and down his chest, to land on his belt buckle with a sense of importance.
"You don't have to," he frowns at her knee, hand slipping down to a more demure roost against the slow curve of her calf. She yanks at his belt, thumbing it free of its second securing loop and looking at her carefully. "You're going to hurt yourself."
"No, I'm not," she shrugs, tugging a little more viciously at his belt. "Make this easier, and I'm even less likely to."
"I don't think—" he pauses and looks her up and down, frowning at the brace and the way her comparatively skinny thigh tugs at something reactionary in his chest. "Why the sudden…grabbing?"
"I'll grab what I feel like grabbing," she laughs, slipping her fingers underneath the waistband of his pants, thumbing his belt the rest of the way free.
"Come on, let's just watch this," he tries, and the defense feels utterly familiar, something he's used on what seems like a million late nights. Something about focusing makes Astrid frisky, and frisky sounds like it might hurt her knee. She winces slightly, as if on cue, the expression a ghost of pain flitting past the corner of her eye and he pauses, analyzing her face and trying to think about anything but the lithe fingers wiggling into his underwear. "See, this already hurts."
"Then kneel," she suggests, sitting up and patting the couch between them. "Help me out."
"Oh, so you're bored, and now you're going to molest me?" It's half of a joke, but his lower head likes the idea a little too much, lifting and attempting to escape his loosened pants.
"I'm saying thank you," she shrugs, scooting over towards him with a well-disguised wince when he doesn't follow her instruction. "Not molesting you, stop being so dramatic." Her forehead rests against the side of his ribs as she yanks the belt entirely loose and pops the button of his pants open with a practiced flick of her thumb.
"Astrid—"
"You can't even pretend you're uninterested," she unzips him and reaches her hand inside to cup the hard ridge aching to escape from the left leg of his jeans. "Unless this is how you always feel about Star Trek."
"Only sometimes," Hiccup shrugs, flushing and finally shifting his eyes away from the TV screen. "Seriously, don't hurt yourself."
"I'm not going to hurt myself," Astrid bites back a flinch as she reaches both arms forward, bracing against her good leg and trying to pull his pants down past his butt. Toothless raises his head from his nap on the other side of the room and Hiccup shushes him, cheeks bright red long after the wolf looks away and lays back down. "Little help here?" She yanks on his belt-loop until he shimmies the pants from under his seat and scoots the waistband down to his knees.
"Easy…" he warns, glancing again at her sad, braced knee, but the effect is lost in the beyond pleasant way that his voice drops when she slides him out of the slit in his boxers and into her hand. He shivers at her cold fingers on the sensitive skin, relaxing into the couch nearly bonelessly when she wraps her hand properly around him and pumps slowly.
"For you or for me?" She asks with a laugh, kissing the tip of him and snickering at the oddly timed laser sounds from the TV that coordinate with her touch. Hiccup gasps as her tongue darts out and licks across his overheated skin and she slides the first inch into her mouth before slowly letting it slip out.
"Both…"
He reaches for the remote and pauses the TV.
"Hey," she looks up, somehow peeved at the sudden silence of the room. She can taste his skin on her lips and she licks them, breathing a little harder than she really should be. Her knee twinges, irritable about being forgotten.
"What?" He looks down, and it's a mistake when everything she promised to touch throbs at the image of her hand wrapped around him, her wet lips pouting up at him.
"I was enjoying the background noise," she shrugs, thumb tracing a slow circle. Her free hand slides underneath his ass, squeezing through the thin cotton of his boxers and he jolts into her grip.
Her knee shouts its presence, an unwilling third party, and she scowls in its general direction.
"Ok?" Hiccup asks, holding his breath as his being hovers in her unwittingly tightened grip.
"Fine," she smiles, but it looks more like a grimace and he gently plucks her wrist away from his lap, wincing at the initial resistance.
"Gripping a little tight there," he laughs, hand sliding up from her wrist to grip carefully at the cap of her shoulder. "Did it hurt?"
"No—" she insists, but her voice wavers as she shifts to sit up straight, lower back clenching as if to hold her together. "I'm alright, really."
"Ok," he does his best to hide the unkempt wistfulness in his voice as he tucks his disappointedly softening self back into his underwear and tugs his pants back on. "That's obviously hurting, you're doing your pug impression."
"What pug impression?" She snaps, trying to unwrinkled a suddenly stubborn nose as she does her best to relax against the couch. "Come on, take your pants back off."
"How about I go get you another painkiller?" he offers, pushing to his feet and catching his balance with a hand on the back of the couch. "And then you can pick the movie?"
"I'm—" she pushes up with her palms, fingertips immediately turning a strained white as her knee twinges. "Alright, I—Sure."
"Ok, I'll be right back," he bends down and kisses the top of her head, breathing in the smell of her shampoo.
"I'm sorry," she shrinks down into the couch, looking purposefully at his still unbuckled belt before glancing back at his face.
"It's alright," he grins, shoulders slumping forward in muted disappointment. "I'll be right back."
"Ok," Astrid glares at her brace, adding a tick mark to the list of fun it hasn't allowed her to have.
00000
So, with that, I have a proposal for everyone. Midoriko-sama and I were talking…and it became apparent that there isn't a word for when the bow-chicka-wow-wow almost happens, but doesn't. So I would like to propose that we start calling that a melon.
So go ahead and hate on me for both those melons, too quickly cut off by that damn brace.