Chapter 28

DUN DUN DUN!

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"How'd we do?" Astrid asks, sauntering up beside Hiccup and resting her elbows on the hood of his car while he flicks through a stack of papers. He nods towards her, indicating that he heard her and drags his finger down a sheet, deep in thought before he turns to her.

"Five left, including Spike." He's disappointed in the left-overs, but too pleased with the overall success to keep a smile off of his face.

"Don't include Spike, she's mine," She snaps, the possessive tone feeling good on her tongue.

"Ok, four left," he amends, "Don't you want to bring Spike?" He asks looking through his windshield and checking the cleanliness of his rear seat, and she shakes her head.

"I want to have all her stuff with me when I get her," it feels dumb saying that out loud and Hiccup can't help but grin at her ridiculousness.

"Right, that's probably good," he jokes, organizing his papers with stubbornly busy hands, "because Spike isn't going to love you if you don't have a new collar for her."

"Shut up," Astrid punches him in the arm and rolls her eyes, looking down at the list of still homeless dogs. "What are we going to do with them?" She reads his mind, drumming her long fingers on the hood of the car.

"Not exactly sure," Hiccup admits, a little sad but mostly calculating as he examines situation, "I'll think about it," he submits eventually, pushing the thought into his churning subconscious. He glances at her for ideas, and gets more than a little lost in her focused expression. "Worse comes to worse we can drive them up to a shelter in Wyoming."

"Yeah, it does seem like a bit of a cop out though," she admits, and Hiccup shrugs, choosing to focus on the dogs' immediate survival. "We'll think of something," Astrid agrees, glancing behind her at the shelter. "I mean—"

"Well bye then!" Ruff shouts across the parking lot, jokingly annoyed as she waves, and Astrid sneaks a sideways look at Hiccup before standing and jogging backwards.

"I should go talk to her really quick," she announces, thinking that Ruff at least deserves to know that she was right, before turning and running over to the two of them. Hiccup can't help but watch a little wistfully, wondering just how many times he can get away with hugging her before she gets frustrated with him.

The couple is struggling to get their two newly adopted dogs to stay in the backseat. Fishlegs' diabetic senior is already snoring happily, but Ruff's hyper young pit keeps bailing out with window and trying to play with the ground. The two girls laugh about something as Astrid helps roll up the open window, and Fishlegs looks around awkwardly before shuffling towards Hiccup, hands in his pockets.

"Thanks for the help today," Hiccup starts, edging around the front bumper of his car to talk to his friend.

"No problem." Fishlegs awkwardly looks over at the girls before taking a rushed step forward and speaking in a low, urgent voice. "Astrid kissed you last night?"

"And apparently she decided to broadcast it," Hiccup mumbles, slouching deeper into his already oversized jacket.

"Well…are you going to do anything about it?" Fishlegs asks, tremendously excited and nervous for his friend. He might also be enjoying his position of relative expertise a little bit too much as he urges forward, eyes wide in his round face. "Because you have about a three day window before your chances of success plummet into the single digits."

"Thanks for that confidence boost," Hiccup wipes a nervous hand over his face, grunting to himself in a muffled, frustrated way as he glances over at his more experienced friend. "What exactly—If I wanted to do something about it…" he starts, keeping his eyes firmly on the ground as he fidgets, toe of his left shoe digging in the dirt. "How exactly—Ugh, never mind."

"Are you asking for advice?" Fishlegs asks, perplexed as he glances over at the crazy girlfriend he still only understands 22 percent of the time.

"Maybe?" Hiccup shrugs, trying to sound less awkward and failing miserably.

"Like…what kind of advice?" He needs specificity, the facts are already welling up around his brain like a flash flood.

"Like…how do I know if she even wants me to kiss—try anything?" The smaller boy asks miserably, so much hope balanced on such a pathetically small platform of experience.

"Oh, I don't know the answer to that," Fishlegs says simply, unperturbed and waiting for the next trivia question as Hiccup shoots him an incredulous look. "Well, Ruff just…huh, I'm not exactly sure if I've ever initiated physical contact," he muses quietly, and Hiccup groans.

"This is hopeless, I give up, totally fine with friends. I'm going to quit while I'm ahead," he bemoans, feeling beyond help.

"Come on," Fishlegs urges, voice still optimistic. "You could pretend to be suave, she'd probably never guess that you've never had a girlfriend, Ruff didn't bring it up with me." He declares proudly, and Hiccup hopes that he's not half that obvious.

"Pretty sure she was saving your feelings there, dude," Hiccup says through a dry laugh, and Fishlegs frowns. "Plus, I already told Astrid that I had no idea what I'm doing," he admits, wishing he could take it back…but not the hug. Just all the words that came out of his mouth in and around the duration of the hug, it'd be great if those disappeared from living memory.

"You told her that?" Fishlegs looks at him like he's the bravest man alive, and Hiccup flushes, glaring up at the other boy.

"Yeah, because Astrid and I actually say words to each other, we don't just suck each other's faces off," he retorts defensively and Fishlegs stares back.

"But Ruff is my girlfriend."

"Yeah, again, you win," he kicks at a rock, missing it entirely and stumbling forward, doing his best to play it off as a nervous shuffle, Fishlegs isn't fooled as his hand comes to his round chin, stroking pensively. "What? Pondering Thoreau over there?" Hiccup snaps, crossing his arms and wishing he'd never started talking in the first place.

"Just calculating the probability of Astrid showing up immediately and specifically at your house after breaking up with Scott," Hiccup rolls his eyes. There's not an equation for that, Fishlegs must be mocking him. "It's extremely improbable that she'd do that if she didn't like you." That's as close to fluffy inspiration as the two are going to get and Hiccup sighs.

"Point being?"

"When someone smiles at you like that, you need to chill out," Fishlegs instructs sagely, a small grin on his own face as he gestures to the girls across the parking lot. Astrid's peeking over her shoulder, grinning embarrassed in their direction as she waves at Ruff, chatter cutting off before she jogs over. "And that'd be my cue, good luck buddy." Fish leaves with a pat on his friend's shoulder, walking to Ruff's car with increasing purpose as the girl starts honking the horn impatiently.

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"Do I really have to get a cage?" Astrid doesn't like the look of the kennels in the PetSmart hallway, they're dismal and small. She's saving Spike from a cage, not putting her in some uncomfortable little prison.

"Well, you don't have to," Hiccup prods, "but they are den animals and she is crate trained…" He has spent the last fifteen minutes explaining the advantages of kennels, but it has all fallen on deaf ears.

"I'll come back and get one if she's a problem." Astrid announces with confident finality, pushing her half full cart down the hallway. She's already decided on a collar and leash, ridiculous and girly purple, food and water bowls, and a bag of midrange chicken based food. She'd been obsessed with a bison protein, grain-free blend, but Hiccup had to talk her out of it. Go from Iams to that stuff, and she'll spend her first week with a puking dog.

When Hiccup catches up to Astrid in the next aisle, she's examining raw hides like fine jewelry, tending towards the three foot long monstrosities on the top shelf. He can't help but smile at her eager to please expression and fondness grows in his chest like a bubble.

"She likes bully sticks," He grabs a package of two off of a hook and hands it to Astrid, who examines it through new mother eyes.

"What are these?" She brings them to her face to examine them more closely, almost gagging at the unexpected scent. "They smell awful." She thrusts them away from herself so forcefully they hit him in the chest.

"Bully sticks." The explanation is apparently unsuitable and she throws him a caustic look that just says 'I can read.' "They're freeze dried bull…penis." He admits like it's a shameful secret with a shrug. "Dogs are gross." She examines him for a second and then throws it in the cart, both disgusted and satisfied.

"Does she need toys?" Astrid turns to look at a wall of brightly colored squeakers and tennis balls.

"Eh, she has a couple from the shelter that you can have," he offers, and she smiles in thanks proceeding to the checkout.

It feels good to turn the bad blood of the hundred dollar bill in her pocket into something good, and she has no regrets as she insistently lugs all the bags across the dark parking lot to Hiccup's car. She loads them into the backseat, and Hiccup notices her glancing at her watch for what must be the fiftieth time since they left the shelter.

"Are you late for something?" He asks and she shrugs, shutting his door more forcefully than is really necessary.

"I've got that feeling like I'm supposed to be somewhere, you know what I mean?" That impossibly present pressure to be getting ready, or going somewhere must be left over from the dozens of Saturday nights before this one. She looks surreptitiously around the parking lot, half expecting Scott to peel around the corner and ask her why she isn't ready to go out yet.

"Not at all," he shrugs, "I never have to be anywhere."

"That must be nice," she snips, momentarily jealous.

"Do you have to go somewhere?" He asks, confused by her irritated tone.

"No." He looks at her expectantly and she sighs, leaning on his car, "I just…everyone's probably getting all costumed…" Her tone hovers somewhere between nervous and nostalgic and she laughs dryly, "Ruff was pretty excited to be a Viking again, don't be surprised if she shows up at school on Monday in a horned helmet."

"Er—if you have somewhere better to be—"

"No! That's not it at all," she insists, smile earnest, "It's just…strange. Really strange." She shrugs, staring at her toes, but her mouth keeps moving entirely without her permission. "Honestly, I hate Halloween. Well, I hate the whole dressing up, mindless drinking bullshit." Her toes slip across the newly painted yellow line in the parking lot, and she drawls on, Hiccup's eyes like lasers boring into the side of her face. "Scott…it's the only time I've seen him schedule anything, figuring out whose party is best at what time, timing when we drink so we can drive to the next one…" Talking about Scott feels too much like airing out old laundry on a date, and she clams up, shrugging as she looks up at Hiccup. "I guess…I'm just realizing that everything's…different now. When I don't show up anywhere tonight…I don't know what school is going to be like on Monday," she stumbles through the realization that should be profound, but seems unimportant.

When she doesn't make an appearance, she's truly engraving the great Astrid Hofferson's tombstone.

Hiccup looks at her curiously, before grinning with an idea.

"Come on," he waves her along with him as he crosses the suburban strip mall parking lot towards the grocery store, and she follows him cautiously. There's too much unknown in her life right now without Hiccup dragging her on unplanned escapades.

"Where are we going?" She asks, nearly trotting to keep up with his long-legged, purposeful steps.

"It's Halloween," he hops onto the curb, not stopping as he strides forward to the bins flanking the entrance of the store. "I want to carve a pumpkin." He turns back to grin at her, gap-toothed smile way too alluring to be rational.

"This is ridiculous," Astrid laughs, hanging back as Hiccup leans into one of the cardboard containers, perusing the picked over pumpkins with a critical eye.

"Come over here," he urges and she shakes her head, grin sneaking onto her face even as she looks both ways, self-consciously horrified that a group of kids from school is going to walk by.

"Seriously," she laughs, embarrassed as she edges forward, grabbing his shoulder and pulling him out of the bin. "Let's just go."

"If you don't pick out a pumpkin, I'm buying you this one," he threatens, holding a wrinkled, moldy thing a little larger than a grapefruit by its wrinkled brown stem. Astrid grimaces and flinches away from the smell, shooting Hiccup a grudging look.

"I don't want a pumpkin."

"Ok, moldy pumpkin it is, to the lady up front," he sounds like an announcer at an auction, shouting to everyone and their mother as he tries to hand her the disgusting gourd. She dodges back, reaching into the pile and grabbing the first pumpkin she sees that's not completely odious looking.

"Fine, I picked a pumpkin, can we get out of here? Or do we have to call NASA and have them tell the Mars rover?" She snaps and Hiccup grins at her smugly, tucking his own squash under his arm.

"Interplanetary broadcasting not necessary," he smugly walks into the store, and she follows, her lips twitching defiantly into a smile.

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"This is…grosser than I remember," Astrid admits, prying the newly cut lid off of her pumpkin and wrinkling her nose at the mess of seeds and pulp inside of it. Hiccup laughs at her expression, fumbling with his wallet as he tries to defend their large pizza from Toothless. He makes it to the table, nearly throwing the cardboard box down and grabbing the wolf by the ruff of his neck, tugging him backwards with the skidding sound of claws on hardwood.

"It's not that bad," he peers over the table and looks into the pumpkin. She attempts to take his word for it, reaching in and gagging when her hand touches the slimy guts, jerking away like it burned her.

"That's not going to work," she admits, pushing the pumpkin away from her and reaching for the pizza.

"Come on, you can deal with broken bones and blood," his eyes flick to her knee, "but a pumpkin is too gross?"

"Yup," she laughs, realizing that it really does sound absurd. Hiccup shakes his head at her and grabs the opened gourd, sitting down across the table.

"Fine, I'll scoop it out," An all too familiar fuzzy fond feeling rushes through Astrid and she decides to drown it in pizza rather than deal with it at the moment.

Maybe later…

She shoves that particular thought from her head with scalding pepperoni on the roof of her mouth.

"You don't have to do that."

"You think it's a favor?" He laughs sarcastically, "Now I have a practice pumpkin, I can mess this up all I want and to a good job on mine." The reflex is to threaten him that she expects perfection, but in the moment, that request seems so ridiculous that she snorts to herself, the noise drawing a peculiar look from Hiccup.

"What?" She checks her upper lip with her hand that's not holding a slice of steaming pizza. "I'm fine with that plan, I don't have to touch the pumpkin…" She struggles for a disgusting enough word, "intestines."

He laughs, picking a spoon off of the table and starts scooping along the inside of the orange flesh, removing piles of seeds and slime into a metal bowl on the table. Astrid watches, motoring through a second slice of pizza before she pulls his pumpkin in front of her, standing and using a sharp paring knife to cut a neat hexagonal lid out of the top, wiggling the piece loose with careful motions.

"Thanks," he murmurs, struggling a particularly difficult clump of seeds, his arm jerking back and elbowing him in the side when the juicy strings finally break loose.

"No problem," She wipes the honed edge of the knife on a towel and admires it, "I do like the cutting."

"Why doesn't that shock me?" He asks. In another life she was probably even scarier than she is now. He pushes the cleaned out pumpkin back to her, pulling his own across the table towards him and resuming scooping.

"Thanks," she sits down in front of her canvas, dramatically staring at the smooth orange surface before mindlessly doodling across the surface with the tip of her knife, not really cutting, more just scratching at the skin. Hiccup really does try not to stare, he tries to focus on dutifully removing seeds, "what are you staring at?" Astrid asks quietly, after a moment of tolerating—no, enjoying—his eyes drilling into her face. She blushes slightly, pushing her bangs away from her eyes with a twitchy hand.

"What are you going to carve?" He asks, diverting the awkward question, and she cocks her head, uncomprehending. "Into the pumpkin?"

"Oh, right," she shakes her head clear, "I have no idea."

"I should have never let you touch that knife," he looks at her wearily and she realizes that she's running her thumb over the edge of it, gently flirting with the sharp edge.

"I'm seventeen, Hiccup, I think I can handle a knife," even as she says it, she puts the blade down, drumming her fingers on the gourd.

"I know," he agrees, and she can't help but recognize the grudging tone of his agreement, trying to keep her from punching him. If her arms were longer, she'd punch him, but well…she'd look like she was trying awfully hard if she walked around the table to do it.

She stares into space, he did hug her earlier, and he did tell her that he wasn't experienced. That's not exactly subtle, is it? She contemplates what would end up happening if she did walk around the table, trying hard be damned—

"…strid? Are you—"

"I'm fine," she jolts back to the present, licking her suddenly uncomfortably parched lips as she searches for him. He's now standing by the lid of the pizza box, two slices in hand, fiddling with the cardboard.

"I was asking you if you were going to have more pizza." She snatches another two pieces from the box and avoids eye contact.

"Sure," she starts eating, looking absently around the room and fixating on the mellow fire crackling in the hearth. She picks up the knife, tracing a design over the surface of the pumpkin before actually biting into the flesh, enjoying the smooth slide of sharp steel. Screw college, she should be a butcher.

She carves a rough flame shape, five slivers with frayed ends meeting at some sort of point, where she guesses she'll have to create a log or something. The knife ends up in her other hand, pushing from the inside with its delicate point as she carefully wiggles the shapes out, setting them one by one in the dish along with the seeds. She's messing with the third one, meticulously preserving its jagged edge, when Hiccup's voice behind her shoulder makes her jump about a foot.

"What are—"

"Jesus, are you trying to make me cut my fingers off?" She snaps, turning around to punch him and freezing when he's right there, squinting over her shoulder like he's analyzing an impressionist painting. Her heart rate at least doubles as she tries to ignore the unassuming clean scent of him. This is ridiculous, and she remembers Ruff's blunt advice. 'Either kiss him again or tell him that you're not going to.'

The other girl is right of course, dancing around the point like it's not there isn't good for anyone, but…but she hasn't made that decision herself quite yet.

Honestly, a small part of her was sure that Hiccup was going to turn into a boy as soon as she hung around him as a single entity, not the untouchable half of a couple. She was almost hoping for the moment that he started using pick-up lines and trying to grope her, because it would bring a wonderful predictability to this new realm of interactions.

But he remained the utterly and confusingly real Hiccup she's come to know, and she's left clinging to that wobbly feeling she hoped would never start to make sense.

"What is that?" He asks, apparently unperturbed by his baffling closeness.

"It's fire," she mumbles, her elbow nudging him away from her thinking space. Nudging.

She nudged. He didn't even flinch.

She wonders if he turns her into some other, gentler version of herself, or if she's just not as brutal as she pretends to be. She's not even mad that it's probably the latter.

"Fire?" He cocks his head, "I like it." This is all still fun to him isn't it? He's still on cloud nine because…well, he's happy because she's here with him.

That thought hits her like a hammer and she struggles to keep her pensive expression together. He's happy because of her. She's making him happy by sitting here in his house, carving a pumpkin.

"Is this a date?" She blurts, wrapping her head around recent developments and finding it all to be a real stretch.

"What?" He turns the color of a tomato, and she stares at him aghast.

"It is a date! You tricked me into a date with you!" She ignores how ridiculous that sounds, as her mouth drops open, aghast. He holds his arms up in confused surrender, stepping away from her.

"I didn't!" He backpedals, eyes wide, "I swear this isn't erm…a date—" He promises awkwardly and she crosses her arms, turning back to the pumpkin she's for some reason still determined to finish carving.

"Well, especially since you cheated and didn't even ask me."

"Wait, if I had asked you—" He starts, stumbling over the insinuation that she might have said yes.

"It doesn't work like that," she instructs him, heart beating like she just sprinted a mile. Her knee complains and she uncrosses legs that she didn't realize were tightly wound together. "You can't just backtrack and ask me after I'm already committed."

"You're committed?" The room falls silent, except for Toothless' anxious wagging from his bed on the other side of the table.

"I'm halfway into carving a bonfire, aren't I?"

"True," he mumbles, and she watches him slowly pick his way around the table, sitting in front of his own pumpkin and carefully taking a knife in his hand. He thinks for a minute before turning to the wolf on the floor, and Astrid's unsure if it's meant to be diversionary or not when he starts talking to the dog, "Well, put on your best model face, bud." The wolf wags, smiling in a way that's far from threatening and Hiccup laughs. "Fierce."

Astrid looks up from her own carving to watch Hiccup plot his, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration and stealing way too much of her focus.

This is ridiculous.

Stripped down to her basest essentials, Astrid may be gentle, she may even be sweet, as Hiccup horrifyingly suggested in what feels like another century, but she's not…timid. The word makes her grimace and she stares across the table at him, eyes dead serious.

"Are you going to ask me out?" She blurts after a moment of awkward eye contact, and he looks at her like she's grown gills, sputtering in the back of his throat like a dying walrus.

"What?" The question doesn't compute in his head, like she's speaking Japanese, and it just happened to sound quite a lot like her asking him if he's going to ask her out.

Which she couldn't have, that's ridiculous.

"Are you going to ask me out?" She repeats, her voice slowing down like she's talking to a six year old. His eyes are distracting, forest green and beautiful in contrast to his crimson blush.

"Why would you ask that?" His voice cracks and she can't believe how badly she wants an answer to her question. It's irrational and stupid and…it's the first thing she's done in years without worrying about the approval of the general public.

In fact, knowing that they won't approve makes the whole thing dangerously appealing.

Not that she wouldn't have done it anyway, the shock value is just an added perk, tiny in comparison to how relieved she'll be to stop beating around the bush. Neither of them are particularly subtle, she notes, and maybe that's a good thing.

"Because I want to know," she shrugs, nonchalance ruined by her blush. She probably has crazy eyes. She can just feel how insane she probably looks. "Well, are you?"

"I don't know," Hiccup sighs, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him. But of course Astrid the insane would probably show up with a shovel and keep asking him the same insane questions. "Honestly, you're still acting like a nut-job, and I don't know if that's just you or some relationship fallout…thing," he admits and she has to admire his honesty.

"How am I acting like a nut-job?" Just because he's honest doesn't mean he can get away with accusing her of being crazy.

"You're demanding to know if –"

"I'm not demanding," she looks towards the front door, expression meaningful. "But I thought I'd made myself clear." The words are too truthful, raw like a wound in the drafty air.

"Then are you going to ask me out?" He proposes, and she stares at him like he's grown a second head.

"I made the first move, why should I have to ask you?" She veers away from the deeply disturbing 'you're the boy' argument, crossing her arms.

"I hugged you, that was the second move," he challenges and she wants to punch him. She sets down the knife and after a second of staring at it, she slides it away from her, halfway down the table. She doesn't want to slice her finger off in this moment of absolutely overwhelming frustration.

"This isn't chess," she retorts, nowhere as fierce as she'd like to be.

"I'm not the one who started counting." At this point, Hiccup isn't sure whether he's chasing or running away. He feels fenced in by a probably painful beating and the slim chance she'll actually take him up on his bravado, and he can't decide which direction is more terrifying. He has absolute proof now that he doesn't know what to do with her.

"You're so…stubborn," she seethes at him, grinding her teeth.

"You're no pushover." He answers, before he has the nerve to go back to carving his pumpkin as if he isn't driving her up the wall. She could kill him.

Is this what having feelings for someone is like? She'd stopped advancing at her first girlish crush, and this is all a bit…frantic. It feels like someone has her brain in a jar and is shaking it as fast as they can.

She didn't know it was possible to be torn between kissing someone and punching their lights out. With Scott it was always one or the other, drifting between the emotions with no strange overlap, but this is stronger, infuriatingly heady.

The knife finds its way back to her hand and she resumes carving in silence, punching out her last couple of shapes before she starts shaving down the skin of the pumpkin, creating a muted design around the already cut out portions. Neither of them say anything, and his stupid tongue is sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrates, chunks of his pumpkin joining the bowl of discarded parts.

Hiccup is trying to keep his hands from shaking, he's an idiot.

He can't help but wonder what his dad would think of him right now, sitting across the table from the prettiest girl he's ever seen and arguing with her over whether it's his turn. He knows it's juvenile…but he'd underestimated the fear of letdown. He's been building this up in his head for almost four years now, going over and over it in his mind, practicing whatever suave phrase he was sure would make her fall at his feet.

But it's nothing like that. She's nothing like that. She's insane, for one, certifiably. She's strong and beautiful and terrifying and he doesn't want her to fall at his feet. He wants her standing beside him, not trailing him like the lovesick puppy he used to be.

Then again, he's pretty sure that Astrid's incapable of trailing anyone.

He wonders what Fishlegs would say about his chances of success now that he's argued with her.

He should have walked around the table and kissed her.

He should have kissed her last night.

Above all, he's so terrified to kiss her.

It's a solid half hour before either of them says anything. Astrid fusses over her carving for at least five minutes after she makes her last real cut, smoothing and cleaning around the edges of the carefully trimmed shapes before sighing too loudly. He glances over at her and she turns her pumpkin around on the table, showing him the carved side.

"I've exhausted my artistic ability for the week," she admits, shoving her unbearable frustration under the rug for the time being. He looks up from his carving, smiling reflexively at her masterpiece. It's very clean, neatly done, and he can see her hyper-efficient knife scarring the pale shaved area.

"Definitely a fire," he comments, and she shrugs, a lazily proud smile splitting her cheeks.

"Thanks," she stares at the table, fingers tracing the wood grain before she glances back up at Hiccup. "I'm going to go find a scary movie on TV, it doesn't feel like Halloween without a little bit of gore."

"Yeah, you go do that," he ushers her off, "I'm going to stay and finish this." She stands, walking around the table to peak over his shoulder. There's a portrait of Toothless sketched into the orange gourd, completely accurate apart from the wolf's serious expression. Astrid rolls her eyes and resists the urge to smooth Hiccup's crazy hair as she saunters out of the room.

He's tempted to get up and follow her, he really is, but his nerves keep him firmly anchored to the seat as he finishes his pumpkin, even taking the fifteen minutes to try and simulate a fur texture around the wolf's orange face. When he's finally satisfied, he looks around the room to find that even Toothless has left him for the warmth of the next room, and he sighs, rubbing the heels of his palms over tired eyes before standing up, stiffly following Astrid.

The clock on the wall tells him that she's been gone at least an hour, and he's not shocked at all to find her curled up in her standard spot on the couch, snoring lightly.

He sits down on the other end of the couch, glancing her way and instantly wishing that he hadn't when his own stupidity comes crashing down like a hailstorm. She kissed him? She's too beautiful to be real, with her normally alert features soft—

"Aah!" Hiccup yelps, the graphic disembowelment of an army of zombies on the TV catching his eye. Astrid jolts awake, kicking him in the knee as she jerks up-right, looking around for what could have made him scream.

"What?" She asks after a moment, not having found anything, and he points at the screen, face embarrassingly green. Astrid fumbles with the remote, groggy cloud clearing from her vision as she flicks away from the offending channel. "It's corn syrup Hiccup, they're throwing corn syrup at each other." She wipes her eyes, stretching as she checks her watch, more than a little discombobulated.

"You fell asleep in front of that?" He asks, aghast as he tries to get his gag reflex under control.

"Corn syrup," she reiterates, rolling her eyes at his squeamishness at the same time as she's glad the dark room hides her blush. Flicking through the channels, she settles for an old black and white Frankenstein movie.

She can't help but be sympathetic towards the monster, cruel because no one gave him a chance to be kind. It makes her think of Spike, and how excited she is to take the dog home.

"If you want to go to sleep, you can go to one of the guest rooms," he offers, overly polite and she snorts.

"What? No offer of a ride home?" He shakes his head.

"I don't want you to go home." His tone catches her aback, and she can't tell whether he's flirting or protecting. Both are unreasonably nice and she sighs, turning to face him, sitting on her foot in the middle of the long couch. The awkward silence drags on, his uneasy heat radiating off of his leg and warming her knee that's almost too close for comfort. "I still can't believe you fell asleep with that…movie on," he muses, and she laughs lightly.

"I'm tired," when she glances up at him, it's purposeful. "I didn't get much sleep last night."

"Why not?" His voice is hollowly clueless, so close to the cusp of a stutter that it hurts to keep herself from punching him. She doesn't want to punch him.

She snaps. She's done talking about this over and over and over again. It's been one day dancing around something that may or may not be great and she's impatient.

"You're…ugh—" She starts to insult him, the familiar tactic of getting a rise not quite tired, but she cuts herself off, gripping his shoulders with sudden bruising hands and leaning in. When she kisses him, that delightfully unfamiliar rush flows through her, the absolute assurance that for once, everything is absolutely right.

It's enough to keep her leaning in no matter how discouraging his frightened stillness is.

When his lips move timidly against hers, it's a revelation, her death grip on his shoulders relaxing as she leans in, coaxing him along. This is what last night should have been.

She pulls away a few seconds later, wide eyed, breathless and satisfied as she sits back on her heels, smiling smugly at him. That's better.

Hiccup's main emotion of the moment is relief. She kissed him, he didn't make her mad. She's smiling at him in a way that makes him absolutely dizzy, and he grins stupidly.

"That's all it is?" He remarks quietly, expectations of lofty failure disappearing with misplaced nerves. "I could get used to that."

"All it is?" Astrid echoes him, her heart still beating like crazy in her chest as she slugs him in the arm. He barely flinches, eyes dazed to match her own blurry tunnel vision. "You're…you're insane." She's never been this out of breath, it's like she's been hit by lightning.

"I just expected…" he trails off as she twists in her seat, flopping bonelessly against his side and tugging his unfamiliarly scrawny arm around her. It's warm and unreasonably safe, and she feels her eyelids droop.

"Expected what?"

"Expected…more…I don't know, terror," he admits, his arm resting lightly against her side like she's going to shove it away. There's some sort of magic in the air, if he looks at her, she'll disappear.

"Hiccup?"

"Yeah?"

"Shut up," she finishes sweetly, before letting her head fall back against his less than padded shoulder. She doesn't stop her heavy eyelids from falling shut as she basks in a cocoon of bony warmth that she never knew she wanted.

Toothless takes immediate advantage of the cushion that Astrid vacated, slinking up onto the still warm leather and curling into a harmless looking ball, resting his chin on her extended thigh and staring at Hiccup with brilliant, accusatory eyes. The boy cautiously lets his hand slide down the side of her ribs, fingertips barely touching the soft skin above her hip where her tank top has ridden up.

The wolf blinks judgmentally.

"What are you looking at?" Hiccup blushes and points at the TV screen with his free hand, "Just watch the movie, bud. Stupid, nosy wolf." He mumbles.

Astrid smiles under the guise of sleep until it becomes a reality.

00000

It's an understatement to say I'm nervous about this one y'all…the biggest understatement in the history of Thursdays.

I don't really have anything to say except you're all wonderful, and I can't thank you enough for your kind and interested reviews, and I hope that you all like Fishlegs, he's so fun to write.

Run on sentence like a boss.

Anyway, let me know what you think of this, I couldn't get it right for the longest time…but finally the characters seemed to take over and…

I like it, probably more than I should. I hope you all do too, and I'd love to hear what you think.

Thanks!