AN: Thanks again to everyone that left a comment last chapter! I love hearing what you guys think of the fic, so please consider taking thirty seconds out of your day to do so! No joke, it legit helps me write more, which is to your benefit, right? XD

Heart of a Scot, Soul of a Dragon
Chapter Ten: Heavy Words

Merida went back to the great hall to check on her patients again, and made sure Selma had everything they would need for the upcoming fight that was rapidly approaching. When she stepped outside, the princess realized just how late in the day it was, and felt her stomach twist at the thought of what was to come. She had never been particularly devout, but Merida took a moment to send up a silent prayer to whomever might be listening for the safety of her family, and of their people.

Deciding Dagur had likely had enough time to himself by that point, the woman went in search of him. After asking a few of the servants, she found him by the well, hauling up a bucket of water for a waiting servant girl, who beamed in gratitude at him before refusing to allow him to carry it further for her.

The viking watched her go, then turned and came nose-to-nose with Merida. "Mer!" he practically yelped as his pulse skyrocketed in surprise. "Hel's cold realm, don't sneak up on me like that," the man wheezed as he leaned against the stone wall of the well, one hand over his heart.

Merida just grinned and rocked heel-to-toe, the very picture of innocence as she remarked, "Well, someone around here has to keep you on your toes, Dagur."

The man grimaced at her, then pushed off the well and headed towards the stairs up to the wall, princess in tow. To her amusement, Dagur was acting oddly...shy, now that he was over his initial scare. Her gesture and her father's words had apparently affected him deeply, which touched her, but left her longing for their usual easy manner.

Deciding to make an effort at bringing him back around to normal, Merida watched as the man checked over a few quivers already put in place by a parapet on the wall, ready and waiting for the archers that would be stationed there. They were, of course, full to brimming, but the viking seemed intent on checking each and every one, if only as a sort of busy work to distract himself from the turmoil of his emotions and the threat of the coming night.

"So, you broke Young Macintosh's nose?" she asked out of the blue, making him look up at her in surprise at the sudden choice in conversation. "You know," she mused, "I thought there was something a little off about his face when I greeted him earlier. His nose is crooked!"

Dagur's surprise melted into a smug smile as Merida laughed at her own observation. "Yeah, I did," he admitted. "Odin's beard it felt good too!" The viking's gaze drifted upward towards the clouds gathering overhead. "You should've seen the look on that stupid face of his when he landed flat on his arse and had my blade at his throat, blood gushing all down his front..."

Merida rolled her eyes a little as her friend crowed his triumph, but smiled all the same, amused. "So, he challenged you to a match in the ring?" she surprised. "That was stupid of him," the princess added with a snort. Surely Aodhan would have seen Dagur training his father's own men and known he couldn't possibly match the viking. She'd readily admit that the lord was talented with a blade, but there was an experienced brutality to Dagur's style that was hard to match, especially for a relatively unseasoned warrior like Young Macintosh.

"No, he's dumb, but he's not quite that dumb," Dagur ceded with a snort as he moved on to checking over spears. "I challenged him and he had to accept or look the coward," he continued with a wicked smile that told Merida her friend had known exactly what he'd been doing at the time.

Still, it wasn't like Dagur to simply go around challenging people to fights. In fact, she couldn't think of any at all during his time in Dunbroch. She'd seen him training plenty of times, and several of the castle guards had challenged him in the past (an uncommon occurance these days), but she'd never known Dagur to do the challenging.

"Why?" she asked simply, cocking her head to one side as she watched him make busy work.

The viking paused and glanced up to meet her pale blue eyes, then dropped his own again. He always did have a hard time denying Merida anything her heart desired (luckily she wasn't the type to take advantage), but he also disliked bringing up the less pleasant aspects of his life; namely the prejudice he still sometimes came up against due to his being a viking in a kingdom where 'viking' had long been synonymous with 'enemy'. It was all but nonexistent in Dunbroch these days, and only rarely occurred in the strongholds of the other clans. After all, he was there at the behest of not only the chiefs, but the king himself. Still, that didn't mean he didn't catch the occasional look or sly insult.

Aodhan, privileged to be Chief Macintosh's son as he was, got away with a great deal more than most.

Eventually, when Merida's expectant look didn't let up (she knew just how to get him to talk, blast the girl), Dagur heaved a sigh and said, "Pretty much for the same reason I almost broke his nose again today."

"Ah," the princess said, and nodded. She had figured as much, but she'd wanted to actually hear it from her friend before jumping to conclusions. "Well, unfortunately for you, Dad will have a fit if you try to break Aodhan's nose again, no matter how insulting he's being," Merida remarked thoughtfully. Dagur grimaced, but nodded, knowing she was right. "But," she continued, blue eyes bright with mischief, "Dad never said I couldn't break that big beak of his if he tries insulting you again."

Her words startled a laugh out of Dagur, and he finally stopped fiddling with the stacks of arrows and turned to look at her properly. His face had broken out into a wide grin, and he gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze of affection. "You're a real friend, you know that, Mer?"

"A girl tries," she replied airily, and they both chuckled.

The day after the anniversary of Stoick's death, everything was business as usual. No one mentioned the unusual lack of work and petitions the day before, and things went on as normal. For his part, Hiccup followed their lead and went about his daily duties with his usual energy and creative solutions.

That night, though, once his mother had retired for the evening, the chief followed Toothless up the stairs to his room and got ready for bed. Unfortunately, even after getting changed and laying under the blankets, waiting for sleep with an almost desperate sense of expectation, he remained stubbornly awake. After an hour of tossing and turning, Hiccup finally gave up and rolled out of bed, then went over to his desk.

It was quite a lot bigger than the one he'd used as a boy, but still just as covered in papers, books, and tools. Once upon a time there had been nothing but technical designs for his next project, but these days there were other documents mixed in. Lists of supplies needed for the black smiths and the healers, reports on the latest catch off the windward side of the island, and a written note from Fishlegs to remind him about the latest dragon rider class graduation coming up next month…

Hiccup considered sitting down to do a bit of drawing to distract himself, but found he didn't quite have the inspiration to come up with something new. He brushed fingertips over the tail mechanism design he'd been trying to improve for Toothless, but had hit a roadblock with. Years before he had designed a tail that would finally grant the Nightfury the ability to fly solo once more as a Snoggletog gift. After an initial scare during which the dragon had disappeared for an unprecedented stretch of time, he'd returned with a gift of his own, and promptly destroyed his rider's hard work.

While Hiccup had appreciated the sentiment at the time, after one too many close calls with Toothless unable to take off without his assistance, the chief and his Nightfury had finally compromised. Hiccup had designed a combination tail mechanism that allowed Toothless to control the false tail fin when he was alone, but disengaged whenever Hiccup rode with him. It worked like a charm, but Hiccup was never the sort to rest on his laurels when it came to his designs. Everything could always be improved. Granted, at this point, he wasn't precisely sure how, beyond a little fine tuning, but he'd figure something out.

The chief turned away from his desk and made his way quietly down the stairs on bare feet so as not to wake his mother. On his way to the fire, Hiccup grabbed up a bottle of mead left over from the day before that he had brought home with him. There wasn't much left, but he decided a little something to warm him wouldn't go amiss.

For a time, the man sat and sipped directly from the bottle, legs stretched out before him as he stared absently into the fire, thoughts of all sorts flitting across the surface of his mind. He didn't focus on any one of them in particularly until he recalled the conversation he'd had with Heather the day before. He'd felt...better, after speaking with her and admitting his sense of guilt over her brother's death. The fact that she'd told him not to blame himself for it did little to assuage the actual guilt, but just admitting it aloud had helped take a little of the weight from his heart.

Nearly finished with the bottle now, and feeling a good deal more relaxed than he had when he'd initially tried to go to bed, Hiccup's gaze drifted across the room. It looked more lived in than it had when it had been just him and Stoick for all those years, mostly thanks to his mother. She harbored guilt of her own over her twenty year absence from his life, and little gestures like making their shared home more comfortable were one way she endeavored to make it up to him. He'd tried to tell her not to take so much on herself, but she'd shut him down and then given him a new blanket on top of that, just to rub it in.

Still, he couldn't complain too much. He actually liked coming home at night, now. Sometimes he missed his place out at the Edge, but having his mother home more than made up for it.

A chest on the other side of the room caught his eye and held it. It was old and polished by both tool and years of hands trailing over its surface. Its presence was like a weight in the room, and as Hiccup sat there staring at it, he felt almost as though it were staring right back. He hadn't opened it for precisely a year, he realized abruptly, his mind slowed to a pleasant buzz by the bottle mead he'd finished off. His whole evening suddenly struck him with a deep sense of deja vu, and Hiccup recalled that he'd done almost the exact same thing this night one year before.

With a sense of inevitability, the chief set aside his bottle and pushed himself to his feet, then crossed the room to the chest. He shifted the few stray boxes and knick-knacks that had been placed on top of it, then crouched, hands resting on the lip of its lid. He hesitated, then took a breath and opened it.

The heavy scent of cedar caught his nose and made Hiccup sneeze, like it always did when he dared look in his father's trunk. Inside lay an agonizingly familiar bear fur cloak, over which the young chief trailed his fingers

I was so afraid of becoming my dad; mostly because I thought I never could.

Would Stoick really have been proud of him? Of how Berk had changed? Valka insisted he would have been, so did Gobber and his friends. It was all Hiccup could do, day in and day out to try to live up to his father's memory, as well as his expectations. Hardly a day went by that the young chief didn't regret forgoing his chance to learn more from Stoick first hand while he still could.

Establishing his rule on Berk had been a constant balancing act for Hiccup over the last two years. For longer than he cared to admit, he had nearly killed himself trying to do everything the way he thought his father would have, to take on the world from the same angle no matter how it chafed at his own sensibilities. Stoick had been a great leader, and there had been so many expectations on Hiccup's shoulders after the loss of him, and the thought of doing things any other way had seemed so...wrong.

Ho-how do you become someone that great, that brave...that selfless?

It had taken an intervention from Valka and Gobber to finally turn Hiccup from his self-destructive path. He'd been so set on keeping the people and the council happy that he'd barely noticed the toll it was taking on his heart and mind. From then on, the young chief had done his best to balance the wisdom of his father's memory against what he knew in his own heart and observed in the world around him.

The world was, after all, in a constant state of change.

I guess you can only try.

With a soft sigh, Hiccup pulled his father's cloak from within the chest, and let it pool in his lap. Most of what Stoick had been wearing that fateful day had burned with him on his funeral barge, including his helm. Valka, however, had insisted that they keep his axe and cloak. For a time, she had worn it herself, as a form of mourning before eventually putting it away in the chest.

Beneath the familiar fur were other miscellaneous things that had once belonged to his father. A hammer, a pair of old gauntlets, a set of chainmail from when he had been a younger, leaner man...This, Hiccup brushed to one side, then froze, heart dropping down into his stomach as he found something that was not his father's at the bottom of the chest.

It was a leather and steel chest piece with a distinctive skrill emblem in its center, just below the collarbone. Dagur's armor.

A chief protects his own

A soft, pained, groan escaped the man as he recognized the armor. He drew it out of the depths of the chest without thinking and turned it to the light of the fire so he could get a better look at it. How had he forgotten he had this? He'd been so surprised when Toothless had spotted it, washed up on the shore of the island Dagur had died attacking for his sake when Hiccup had been too blind to see he had been leading the riders right into Viggo's trap. They'd gone back once they were sure the remains of the hunter fleet were gone in hopes of finding Dagur, but all Hiccup had come back with was the remains of his armor.

Hiccup let his fingers trail over the heavily scarred leather and the slowly rusting steel accents, his throat tightening convulsively. After finding it, he had always intended to give it to Heather; Dagur had been her brother, after all, so it should be hers by right. Somehow, though, he had never quite found the right moment to give it to her. After his death, she had disappeared for some time, and when she'd finally returned, Heather had seemed set on not mentioning her brother, no matter how delicately (or not) her friends tried to turn the conversation in his direction.

So Hiccup had held onto it for when she was ready. But then a year had passed, and another, and the chest piece had gone from a drawer, to his wardrobe, and then eventually into Stoick's own chest. Valka, he realized, must have thought it was something from her husband's youth, since it obviously never would have fit her son. Years had passed and he'd forgotten about it…

A chief protects his own...yes, he'd done a swell job of that where Dagur was concerned. Whatever the man himself might have thought, or anyone else, for that matter, the Berserker had been one of their own. From the moment Dagur had saved him and Toothless, Hiccup had owed him a life debt, one he had tried to repay by bringing his former enemy in from the cold and teaching him the way of a dragon rider.

And yet he hadn't listened to him, so Dagur had died to save his sister from Hiccup's own idiocy…
The young chief's hands tightened convulsively on the armor, and he got to his feet, stumbling only a little from mead and lack of bloodflow to his good leg. He set it aside, then folded his father's cloak and returned it to the chest with something akin to reverence before closing the lid. He replaced everything on top of it, then grabbed up the armor again and brought it back to his room where he knew he had a leather repair kit, and some metal polish.

AN: So the bit about Snoggletog and the tail Hiccup made for Toothless is actually a reference to the "Gift of the Nightfury" short. If you haven't seen it, go look it up on youtube and give it a watch! It's fantastic XD
The parts in italics while Hiccup is going through his father's chest are, of course, quotes from his funeral speech in HTTYD2, obviously. Gets me every time man ;-;

Thanks for reading, and please remember to leave a comment if you enjoyed! I love hearing what you guys think! Sorry it was pretty short this week, lol. Next week's will be longer! Bit of a transitional chapter.