Chapter Four.

"Hey, Fishlegs!" Astrid set down the basket of fish she'd been carrying on her hip and jogged over to Berk's unofficial dragon know-all.

The young man, who'd been lugging a load of scrap metal to the forges, slowed to a stop when he heard his name being called. Struggling not to drop any of the precariously stacked pieces of steel, he used a knee to push a chunk back into place. "Hey, Astrid. What's going on?"

The blonde swallowed, realizing that she hadn't exactly thought the conversation through. "Need a hand?" she asked with an awkward half-laugh, reaching up to take the mountaintop of metal from his hands. Sighing in relief, he bent his knees so she could transfer some of the scraps to her own arms.

"Thanks," he told her, continuing on the path he'd been struggling down. "Gobber's been working me like a crazy man ever since we lost all those weapons in the explosion two weeks ago." Fishlegs shook his head. "I smell scrap metal in my sleep."

Astrid gave an mmm of sympathy, feeling the corners and sharp edges of steel digging into her shirtsleeves. "Still, it's nice of you to volunteer to help him with the dragons and everything. He's had a lot on his shoulders lately."

"Yeah, I'm still not ready to actually get close to the dragons, but getting to see them is cool." In the past few months, the large Viking had become Gobber's go-to guy for all of his work. An assistant, somewhat, to run his errands and do his dirty work. That was why Astrid had called his name without thinking when she saw him. She needed access to the dragons and maybe even some welding. Fishlegs could be her in.

"I was thinking," she began as they passed through the village. "I don't really mind working with the dragons so much. They don't scare me anymore, and I can handle myself if they get out of hand." Looking at him out of the corner of her eyes, she suggested, "Why don't you guys let me handle feeding them and stuff?"

Fishlegs blinked at her. They were approaching the forge, and she followed him around the back, where Gobber kept forever shrinking piles of scraps. "It sounds like a good idea to me," he told her with a shrug. "I guess you could talk to Gobber about it."

"How often do we feed them anyways?" She hoped her tone didn't sound too curious- she was already feeling suspicious gazes on her back, even if they were all in her mind.

Shrugging, he dropped his giant stack of metal onto the grass and began sorting it. "Once a day or two. The chief wants to keep them weak so they can't do much damage if they break out."

Astrid nodded, feeling the new knowledge being filed away into a list of grievances the dragons had to hold against the Vikings. It was strange, experiencing such an acute pity, and a vengeful apathy in the same heartbeat. She let the scraps in her arms fall to the ground. "Well. Okay then. Just wondering."

She thought about venturing inside the forge to talk to Gobber about the matter, but she'd left her basket of fish further back in the village, and the metal-worker didn't generally enjoy being bothered during the day anyway. With a friendly wave goodbye, she left Fishlegs and wandered back down the path they'd come. Lips pursing as she thought, she wondered about the likelihood of Legs being able to design or forge a prosthetic tail fin for Toothless. It was probably much too early in his training, though. If anything, she'd have to get one from Gobber. And that was toeing into dangerous territory.

With some tactfully requested help from Fishlegs, though, she could probably use Hiccup's knowledge of dragons to design something. Then, if she requested the tail to be made in pieces, she could put it together herself. Maybe she could even try and split some pieces between Legs and Gobber so neither of them saw the entire thing. Surely if Gobber could have six interchangeable prosthetic hands, she could figure out a way to make a tailfin for the Night Fury in the forest.

On that note, she quickly located her basket and hitched it back onto her hip. This was her least favorite part of her uneasy truce with Hiccup so far- sneaking around her own village. It would be strange for her to be seen entering the woods with such a cumbersome load and then returning empty handed. Still, she wasn't sure how much the boy and his dragon had been able to eat. Hiccup could probably hunt, but was it enough for the two of them?

The woods seemed colder that afternoon, but less foggy and treacherous. It almost looked like a different place, she thought as she moved through the trees. Not as mysterious or supernatural. Just a normal chilly day in Berk's forests.

Astrid took the back way to the cove so that she didn't have to climb down the cliff-face with the fish in tow. Instead, she was able to go down the far side and under a tunnel-like cave's mouth, which opened into the sparkling clearing. That afternoon, it seemed quiet and peaceful. Neither the Night Fury or his boy were anywhere in sight.

"Hiccup!" she called out, not wanting to shout too loud lest someone passing by happen to hear. "Hiccup, are you here?"

The wild man didn't appear, but as she walked further in, she felt eyes on her. Then she spotted Toothless perched on one of the taller sets of boulders that rested around the walls of the cove. His tail waved in a way she couldn't quite place as either territorial or curious. The Night Fury raised up on his haunches and then pounced down in front of her, crawling over with slitted eyes.

"Hey- hey there," she breathed, backing away with every step the dragon took towards her. "Hey, Toothless. I'm a friend of Hiccup's." Her heartbeat was picking up a little bit. She had her axe attached to her back, just in case something happened, but she shoved down the urge to reach for it. Holding out the basket so he could see, she tried to keep the nerves out of her voice. Where was Hiccup?

"Here you go," she whispered, seeing the dragon's ears perk with interest at the sight. "Food." With careful, steady movements, she set the basket down between them, never taking her eyes from the creature. When she pushed it over, and fish of various shapes and sizes spilled across the grass, he pulled up short.

Toothless lifted a paw and leaned forward, sniffing at the offering. Then there was a sudden and slick noise, and Astrid fell backwards with a yelp. Where the Night Fury had once had only slimy pink gums, now there flashed a row of sharp, white teeth. He snapped at a large cod, gulping it down in two bites before moving onto the next fish. It seemed that he'd lost interest in the girl, and he payed her no more mind as he filled his belly. Meanwhile, Astrid watched with wonder and alarm, scooting back until she was sitting against a boulder.

When all of the fish had been eaten, Toothless dug his head into the basket, searching for more. Astrid felt a hesitant amusement tugging at her mouth at the sight, but then he dropped the basket and whirled to look at her. She sat up, leaning back against the rock. "That's all I brought," she hissed with a bit of fear. "I don't have anything else!"

But he advanced all the same, sniffing her up and down like he had the first time he'd met her. Then he turned in a circle, laid at her feet, and rolled over onto his belly. His eyes closed, but when she didn't immediately move to pet him, like she suspected he wanted, he peeked one eye open at her. She tried to inch to the side, but when she put her hand down to push away, he took her wrist between gummy jaws and set her hand on his chest.

She breathed a laugh. "Shameless beast," she told him, her hand shaking as she felt that warm, scaly skin beneath her touch once more. It still stirred a bit of revulsion in her gut, but she didn't feel the need to snatch her arm back. Not after stroking the Nadder's horn in comfort the night before, while Hiccup rubbed a mushy poultice into her wounds. Toothless made a noise of pleasure as she lightly caressed his breast bone, too hesitant to apply any heavier pressure than her fingertips. His eyes closed once more.

"Playing nice?"

The familiar voice sent Astrid's head snapping up- sitting on the large boulder she'd leaned against was the feral man himself. His grin was lopsided, and he held something in his hands that Astrid hadn't seen before. It was like a large staff, one end tipped with a sharp, curved blade like a small scythe. And then the other side widened into a heavy looking bulb, likely used for bludgeoning. The weapon was covered in intricate carvings and even some scribbled runes, though she couldn't make them out from that distance. Hiccup leapt down and held the staff at an angle behind him as he crawled around the Night Fury.

"Where have you been?" she asked, suspicion in her tone. She didn't like the idea of him wandering around the woods alone, much less the thought that he might venture too close to the village.

"Exploring," he answered, a playfulness hidden in his expression that he seemed to know would irritate her. "I see you and Toothless have become best buds." His hand joined hers on the dragon's chest, and he trailed his palm down the soft underbelly.

Astrid pulled her hand away self consciously, though Toothless gave a dissatisfied grunt. "I came to talk to you about something. I brought food."

"I saw," Hiccup nodded. "Thanks for saving me some, Toothless." Giving the dragon a nudge, he pinned him under a sardonic glance.

"Well." Astrid unhitched the axe from her back and retrieved the package she'd smuggled beneath the weapon. "I brought the fish for him. This was for you."

Cocking his head to the side, the boy accepted the flat, cloth-covered gift and brought it to his nose to sniff. He set aside the staff. His eyebrows shot up in surprise. "What is it?"

Reaching over the happy dragon, she pulled back the corners of the napkin and unfolded it to reveal the pastries inside. "We had some left over from dinner last night," she informed him, noticing the savory scent of baked goods despite the fact that they'd been long cooled. She'd stared at them for a long moment as her mother put them out next to their breakfast, and then- swearing that it was stupid to waste food when it was so scarce- she'd wrapped up a few for the wild thing. "Those two are mutton patties. And that one's blackberry."

He continued to sniff them with obvious delight. She wrinkled her nose when his tongue darted out to give the flaky, slightly burned pastry a lick.

"Just bite it," she ordered with a growl.

He obeyed, using a flat hand to crush the entire napkin to his mouth. Though she rolled her eyes, she didn't try to correct him again. His eyes were glimmering with enthusiasm as he chewed, cheeks as full as a chipmunk's. "Mm!" he mumbled. Crumbs stuck to his lips. Another string of words followed, but through his large bite, she couldn't understand a thing.

"I guess your mother never taught you table manners?" she asked dryly, sitting her elbow on her knee and resting her chin against her fist.

"What's that?" he inquired, spitting flakes of dough all over Toothless' belly. As soon as he swallowed, he was shoving more of the pastries into his mouth.

"Table manners?" Astrid raised a brow. "No elbows on the table? Chew with your mouth closed? Take small bites...?" When not even a glimmer of recognition was mirrored in his expression, she sighed. "Maybe you really are a Viking then."

That seemed to interest him. "Vikings don't use table manners?"

It was her turn to tilt her head at him. His dark mood from the night before seemed to have slipped away. He'd been unhappy with the way the Nadder had been treated, and for a moment she thought he might lose interest in observing Berk and its people. But at the very mention of them, he seemed to snap back to his usual curiosity. "We're not the most civilized sort, no," she allowed. "Though it varies from house to house and island to island."

"So..." His expression was thoughtful, and he glanced to the ground as he chewed. "Every human on Berk is a Viking... but not every Viking is on Berk?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "For the most part."

"Hmm."

There was a moment of peaceful quiet as he finished the pastries with barely concealed delight. Astrid let her eyes move over his face, his heavy furs and dragon-scale armor, his dirty hands and long nails. She faintly wondered what he'd look like behind his wildness. At least the braids in his hair didn't look matted, and from the neck-up, his slightly tanned skin was clean. It was clear that he spent most of his life outdoors.

Toothless suddenly gave a rumble and twisted to his front. Pulling away from the two, he ambled away, and Astrid watched his asymmetrical tail whip from side to side as he moved. The Night Fury looked up at the sky for a long minute, and then seemed to exhale heavily and continue walking to a shady corner of the cove.

"I have an idea," she admitted, not looking away from the dragon. "For Toothless."

Hiccup, who'd been picking at his clothing for bits of lost pastry, snapped his gaze up to her face. "To get him out?"

Shaking her head, she reached beneath her shirt's neckline and pulled out the sketch she'd hidden earlier that day. "To make him fly." She unfolded the parchment, smoothing out the creases and setting it down in front of him. "Have you ever heard of a prosthesis?"

"No."

She pursed her lips. "You've watched the village, right?"

He gave her a wary look, telling her what she already knew.

"What about the man with the wooden leg and the hammer for an arm?"

Hiccup nodded slowly. "I've seen him once or twice. Not close up."

Astrid held out a hand, as if presenting Gobber as an example. "His hand and foot were eaten by Monstrous Nightmares," she said, "so he had a new leg and a new arm created for him. I was playing around with the idea of designing something similar for Toothless."

"That's incredible! What would you use? It would have the structure to withstand high speed winds, but also flexible enough that it could bend and move during flight." Hiccup immediately began to babble about the movement of tailfins during flight, using his hands to describe the way they fan out and collapse to either sustain height or shift to new altitudes. She could tell he'd spent an enormous amount of time studying dragons and their flight, because he seemed to know not only the physiology behind it, but the basic principles of physics involved as well. Some of the things he was explaining went over her head, and she'd put a silver down that she'd had a better education than him.

"Hiccup, Hiccup, Hiccup!" She had to stop him, throwing up her hands in front of her. "You're going too fast. I don't understand half of what you're saying."

He immediately snapped his mouth shut, his fingers held tilted midair as he demonstrated the position of a tailfin in motion. It was a little charming, and she felt something tug at the corner of her mouth. "Sorry." His eyes cut to the little drawing she'd sketched out. "Is this something you could make?"

That was when she had to shake her head, brow furrowing with disappointment. "No. But..." She picked up the piece of paper and folded it back up, slipping it back into her breast bindings. "But I might be able to get somebody else to. If we can figure out how to make it work."

His beaming smile was so bright, it made her chest feel a little warm. "We can. We will."

Astrid pressed her lips together, nodding uneasily. She had to tell herself that she could trust Hiccup, that he knew what he was doing. She had to believe that he really only wanted to end the fighting between the dragons and humans. There was no going back now, no pretending that this wasn't happening. Something had been put into motion by the gods to bring Hiccup to Berk, and Astrid was powerless to stop it.

Seeming to notice her pensiveness, the feral boy crawled forward on his hands and knees, stopping just inches from her. She was instantly uncomfortable with his closeness, but she had her back against the boulder and couldn't move. He had her cornered, but his expression was innocent, and she wondered for a brief moment what he knew about the women of his species.

But then she shook her head of that thought.

"You're thinking about serious things," he murmured, those deep green orbs seemingly piercing into her thoughts. Her heart pounded, skipping in double time when he reached a hand up to gently stroke her hair. If he noticed her discomfort, he didn't show it, petting her head like he might pet Toothless.

Astrid gave him a curt, "Yes." She would have felt safer if she hadn't taken her axe off. Now she was incapable of breaking his eye contact, and her hands groped blindly across the ground at her sides. "I worry about my village. What you could do to it."

His face fell. "You still think I'd hurt them?" After burying his fingers in her braid, his hand stilled.

She clenched her jaw. "I think you'd hurt them before you'd hurt a dragon." Though she wasn't completely happy with the way he constantly invaded her space and touched her without permission, she didn't want to give him the impression that he could scare her. "What if you're wrong about a queen controlling them? What if they're exactly what we think they are? Will you side with them? Or us?"

He didn't answer that. His mouth curled into a frown. "I'm not wrong," was all he said. "Just one flight. You'll see." His thumb moved smoothly over her hair, and then his eyes cut down to look at the blonde plait. Quiet as a ghost, he tugged until he'd freed a single golden lock. Astrid froze but didn't stop him. Her heart felt like a bird caught in the rafters of the barn, wings beating helplessly at the roof. As long as he's just inspecting, she told herself when she wanted to shove him away. As long as it's just curious.

Hiccup was almost straddling her legs, she realized with a swallow, heat rising to her cheeks. She cursed his mother's negligence for not teaching him how to interact with a woman. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her face while his eyes stared intently at the lock in his hand. He twisted and curled and wrapped it around his finger. He lifted it to the light and squinted at the colors that glinted in the sunshine. Astrid was sure her braid was ruined now, which meant that she'd have to untie and redo it before returning to the village, but she wasn't as irritated as she should have been.

"You should move," she finally said after several minutes of being subjected to his nearness. "This- this isn't how humans do things." Her words were punctuated by the sound of her trying to swallow the sudden thickness in her throat.

That worked. He dropped her hair and crawled off of her, sitting back on his heels. He was still unusually close, but it was enough space that she could begin pulling oxygen from the air again. "Why not?"

"Friends don't sit like that," she told him, trying to summon a sternness to her voice. "And they don't touch each other's hair."

"Why not?" It was like speaking to a child.

"It's not... appropriate." Her brain worked for a way to explain it to him in a way he would understand. "That's like..." It struck her how little she actually knew about the social constructs of dragons. "It's something that a dragon would do for its hatchlings. Or its mate."

Hiccup's brows raised at that. "Do you have a mate?"

The furious blush in her cheeks didn't slake. Her eyes scanned the ground for her axe, and once she spotted it, she drew it close. She didn't want to reply. There was a sore little squeeze in her chest whenever she talked about marriage or the future, and she wasn't sure that she was ready to reveal something so intimate to the wild thing yet. But because he asked, she answered. She wrung her hands in her lap.

"Yeah. I'm getting married."

!

That night, she snuck into the kill ring with another basket of fish and the jar of poultice Hiccup had mixed up. Her hands shook violently, and her mouth felt dry as dust. She'd left her axe at the door. It'd felt like removing her own arm to leave it behind.

Murmuring to herself to try and snuff out the fear, she stalked under the cobwebbed shadows of the arena's dome. One of the dragons was awake- she could hear it pacing and hissing inside its cage, but thankfully, it wasn't the Nadder. Astrid set down the jar and the basket by the door's lever. Then, wrapping her sweaty hands around the heavy steel bar, she grunted and shoved it down. The metal door clacked as it was drawn back, and she watched with a pounding heart as the bird-like dragon poked her head out of the shadows.

"It's- it's me," she whispered, praying that the creature wouldn't attack her on sight. She'd only stared at her the evening before, but Hiccup had been there to hold her in line. This time, she was on her own. "Remember me?"

Slowly, dragging the basket of fish along the stone floor, she stepped out from behind the lever so the Nadder could see her better. The dragon made a clicking chirp, tilting her head at Astrid, and then her golden eyes moved to the basket. Just like she'd done for Toothless, the girl pushed the fish forward and kicked it over at her feet. At first, the Nadder just stared at her, wary and distrusting. She even made limping shuffles back into the cage.

"No, no," Astrid cringed, inching forward. She held her hands up so that the beast could see they were empty. Then she leaned over to pick up a fish, holding the slimy thing out. "Come here, girl. It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."

When she didn't move, the Viking girl tossed the little fish inside the cave. To her surprise, the Nadder snatched the fish out of the air and swallowed it in one bite. Astrid nodded. "Okay. Okay, we can do that." She picked another good-sized fish from the pile and showed it to the dragon. When she threw it, the Nadder limped forward to catch it. "Good girl!"

At her praise, the Nadder shuffled back out of the shadows, sniffing at the little dinner. Astrid sighed with relief when the dragon began to eat on her own, though she still paused every few moments as if to check and see if the young woman still stood there. She made sure not to move and startle the thing as she ate.

"Good girl," she murmured, "good girl."

And that was the first night that Astrid thought maybe Hiccup could be right about everything.

!