Hard Knocks

A/N: Bleaghhhhh I am sorry I am sorry that this chapter is more mindless depressing guff I'm sorry but but but the next chapter should be happier? A little? Maybe? But my keyboard has been fixed :D so that's good I guess. And I really enjoyed writing Stoick in this chapter like holy cow. And I'm drawing something for this story. It's very elaborate, and I'm still stuck on the second part, but if I work really hard I can get it finished by next week. Thanks for all the reviews!

"Stoick, no offense, but have you lost your mind?"

"No. I mean, I don't…I don't think so," the man muttered, mostly to himself, his thoughts still spinning wildly. He became steadily more excited as the idea began taking shape in his head. Hiccup's face when he heard the news. That headmistress getting removed from the orphanage, or maybe it would be discovered that she had never hurt them in the first place. In truth, Stoick would have preferred that second option, as the memory of the bruise made a boiling anger start in his blood again. If that really had come from the woman, and not from the other boys…

"Hiccup is part of the election!" Gobber fumed. "He's not a long-term sort of thing!"

"What?" His friend had done the trick of jerking him back to reality and realizing, with a sudden embarrassment, that he had made the mistake of speaking his mind. He and Gobber, when they spoke, it tended to revolve around the polls, the people, the rival candidates. Numbers and cold, hard facts. Never their thoughts, never their feelings. Why had he thought he could say that, just blurt out his idea without this kind of negative feedback? "I…I know." But Gobber you should have seen him. The way he looked at me when I said it was time to go back…I can't spend another day with him, only to bring him back at the end of it.

He caught himself this time, and didn't say the words passing through his mind.

"It's a mistake, Stoick." Gobber's voice was brusque. "You'd be making a mistake. Think about it. If you won the election because you adopted him, only to bring him right back to the orphanage after it was over, the game would be up. People would know, and—

"It's not about the election right now!" The words flew from Stoick's mouth before he could stop them, and suddenly there was silence on the other end of the phone. Yet it was true, what he'd said. He didn't want to win the election by adopting Hiccup – he wanted to keep Hiccup away from the orphanage, even if the arrangement only lasted a few weeks.

When Gobber remained silent, he hastened to explain, trying to turn things back around. "This is about that bruise. If something happened to him, if he got hurt…" But he couldn't go on. The idea was too horrible to entertain.

His friend's voice was stony. "Call Social Services, then. Get the police, or something, just don't adopt him! You'd be giving him the wrong idea."

"I'm going to do that," the man responded steadily, working to keep his voice calm. "I'm going to call Social Services based on my suspicions. But I'm also going to adopt Hiccup."

"Why?" Now Gobber just sounded exasperated. "If you're going to do all that, why adopt him, too? You've done enough for him. One more big push and the election will be won. But that big push doesn't have to be adoption."

Stoick fell silent, pondering his friend's words. How could he explain it? How could he explain that whatever he had done, whether it had been pulling him from the path of a skidding car or buying him a book, how could he explain that it hadn't been enough? He couldn't. He couldn't tell Gobber how much else he wanted to do, how much he felt like he needed to do. He needed to do more for this child, this teenage boy that had stumbled into his life and lit it up from the inside out, lit it so completely that everyone walking by could see the glowing sphere of warmth and joy that he positively radiated. He couldn't explain it, but everything he had done, it wasn't enough. It just wasn't.

"I want it to be," he said instead, holding his breath as he waited for Gobber's decree. He readjusted his grip on the phone, surprised to find that his hand was shaking slightly.

"Alright, Stoick." Gobber released a deep sigh as he spoke. "Alright."

Excitement rekindled, Stoick began to smile, already preparing to end the call.

"Just make sure…" Gobber hesitated before finishing his sentence, and Stoick hastily put the phone back to his ear. "Just make sure the election doesn't become about him, instead of the other way around."

"Oh. No. That won't happen." Stoick nodded vigorously to convince his friend, even though of course Gobber couldn't see him. He pressed 'end', and the call went dead.

Selfish.

The word haunted him, crawling all over him like an unwanted thing, bouncing around inside his head and echoing in his ears, a constant, never-ending reminder of what he had done. How could he have been so stupid? What had he thought, that by going out with Mr. Maddox, he would come back and poof! A magic wand would have been waved, and the orphanage would be back the way it used to be.

In truth, Hiccup had thought that, or something akin to it, at least. Mr. Maddox returning for him had been the figurative sun coming out after an endless rain, and he'd actually, childishly believed that those hours spent in the Thunderdrum and the sports store had been slowly erasing and rewriting all the bad things of the past twenty-four hours. And he hadn't been there at the orphanage when Mrs. Cambridge lost her temper, he hadn't been there when Gustav needed him. She hadn't hit the younger boy, of course – Hiccup would be feeling a lot angrier if she had. But now, the only person he was angry with was himself.

He was the only stability in Gustav's life, and he'd just left him there with Mrs. Cambridge. He was Gustav's only support, and he'd left him there without anything to lean on. He fell into bed that night still thinking of his mistakes, staring blankly at the ceiling, his heart aching with sadness and a sudden loneliness as his mind jumped to Gustav again.

Starlight falling heavy across his pillow, he glanced out the grimy window for a moment, watching the other boys shift restlessly all around him. So many nights he'd spent staring out that window, at all those stars, wishing on them with Gustav, wishing for his birth parents to come find him and take him away from there. He and Gustav had even fantasized about it, said maybe they were brothers who had found each other even when separated. But maybe his birth parents would never come back for him, and he would never know, Hiccup thought, falling back on his pillow. He was in the orphanage despite thirteen years of wishing, because his parents had never found him. Maybe he would be here forever, just as he always had been. Just as he always would be.

He kept waiting for Gustav to come and snuggle up next to him and ask him to sing or read to him, but the younger boy never did. He stayed on his own bunk, his breathing even and heavy, so Hiccup assumed he must be asleep.

He soon followed suit, and although his dreams were filled with sunlight, they were the bittersweet kind of dreams, dreams about a tiny cottage on the outskirts of town, with birds chirping around it and smoke rising from the chimney. Inside the cottage were two people whom he somehow knew were supposed to be his birth parents, in the dream, though he had never imagined them looking like this. The woman was tall, with a thin face and long, reddish brown hair like his, her green eyes clear and kind. She had sharply defined cheekbones and thin lips, but she was supposed to be his mother, and Hiccup thought she was beautiful.

His father was the only person he couldn't understand, for he resembled Mr. Maddox, except with different features, like a more rounded nose, to match Hiccup's, and he looked more relaxed than Hiccup had ever seen him look. He was flipping through a paperback novel while the woman, his mother, was sewing in a wooden chair in the corner, her mouth even thinner than normal as she focused on each and every stitch.

He dreamed they remembered him, the baby they had left at the orphanage thirteen years before, and he dreamed they had missed him all the time. He dreamed they held him, his mother's fingers tangling in his hair as she cried quietly into his shoulder, telling him she had never once given up hope. She was a quiet crier, though, and if it had not been for her tears, he would have assumed that she felt no emotion for the son she held. Mr. Maddox, his father in the dream, ruffled his hair and threw a ball to him in the yard and held him up on his shoulders, laughing and talking about how much he'd missed him. This struck Hiccup as very odd, as the man looked like Mr. Maddox, but couldn't be, because the man who saw him every day just wasn't an emotional man, and he would never talk of emotions.

And Hiccup awoke, alone and in the dark, the starlight having vanished now. Even the stars had rejected him. He awoke in the orphanage, just as he always had, just as he always would.