Enormous clouds curtained the Sun and cloaked the island of Berk with a somber coloration in spectrums of dark blue, violet, pink, and faded ivory. The crowd of villagers emptied out from the arena in droves and chattered about what they had witnessed. Their excitement faded quickly as they departed the stadium and then the Hooligans continued their late afternoon by heading back to the central town to carry on with their normal tasks for the day. The sky became overcast and the icy sea surrounding the arena began to toss and turn, and then the air thickened with moisture from the frothy, upwelling ocean mists. The clouds edged grey-blue and the village prepared for an expected rain. If a downpour began, the rain would fall as sleet or snow from the temperature of the season, and no one knew which form would sprinkle upon them first. All the while, Ruffnut searched and called for Astrid in the mass of people and could not find her.
The bakers and butchers from the event passed Ruffnut as they hefted away their carts, and this gave off a true impression to Ruffnut that the arena was slowly morphing back into the empty location it had been for most of the year, and all who had been there were returning to their own places and were to never be seen in gathering for the next long while of the winter, as Ruffnut feared Astrid would be when Astrid had suddenly disappeared without notice. Ruffnut still could not see Astrid but she assumed Astrid had run home. A villager bumped into Ruffnut on pure accident, and Ruffnut apologized first, for she had been the one with her boots glued in the middle of the boardwalk from the arena like a lost puppy.
Ruffnut tantrummed for a brief moment with a finite stomp of her boot. Once again, Astrid had left her hanging. Ruffnut knew Astrid was acting highly unusual lately since her separation from Hiccup, but even this surprised her. Ruffnut missed the Astrid that could tell her anything she was thinking instead of running off and hiding all of her feelings. How was she supposed to explain her friend's wild mood swings to her little brother, who had looked so cute when he had been excited to have seemingly won Astrid's adoration even over Hiccup? She couldn't excuse Astrid's action away, not without Astrid's help, or it wouldn't seem genuine, and it didn't help that Tuffnut could read her like a book.
On the boardwalk from the arena that bridged the ocean that surrounded the perimeter of the stone island of Berk, straight-beam torches that were mounted against the boardwalk's rocky armrails continued to flame orange, creating a mood against the dim blue of the afternoon that, with the emptied volume of people, gave the picturesque appearance of a lonely seaside vigil. Ruffnut stood alone there and had little idea of what to do.
Tuffnut ran up to Ruffnut who looked pensive. The puppet of Belch on his helmet stilled its flapping as he galloped his armored feet softly before his sister he had just spotted after some careful scanning of the area.
"What happened? Where is she?" Tuffnut asked Ruffnut at close range, only a bit winded and with his words hopeful for an immediate explanation. He removed his helmet and tucked it into his elbow. His features had dimmed under the rainclouds that had threatened to leak overhead. His eyes had nearly become cobalt in the new lighting, and Ruffnut thought it made her brother look more dejected than he probably was, much in the same way that the change in weather had increased the angst of the surprising disappearance of Astrid; it seemed to create a void in the joyous afternoon that had funneled in the rainclouds to appear. Yet, there was nothing that Ruffnut thought they should be too sad about. Tuffnut had won the duel and Ruffnut thought he had done an excellent job. For the moment, she didn't want to overwhelm Tuffnut with grave possibilities that he had done his best all for nothing.
A sparse collection of lazily walking villagers strolled by as Ruffnut addressed Tuffnut's question with words full of uncertainty but sisterly support.
"I couldn't keep up with 'er." Ruffnut said with her scratchy throat that gave the false impression that she was being more grave about the situation than she intented. "I'm sure she didn't mean anything by it."
Ruffnut patted Tuffnut on the back and invited him to come home and celebrate and to worry about Astrid later. Ruffnut diverted her attention to a tiny, wriggling baby fish stuck in Tuffnut's breastplate that neither of them had discovered yet, and she plucked it free and tossed it over the boardwalk into the splashing, grey and green ocean waves below them.
Ruffnut was playing nice, Tuffnut knew. She had to know what Astrid had been thinking- -Ruffnut had the mind of a girl, and he certainly did not. Tuffnut looked indecisive as Ruffnut urged them home. He lowered his chin to think as he began to walk with her.
Never had someone made him replay a memory multiple times in his head to pick apart what had gone so terribly wrong. This time he cared. After stubbornly following Ruffnut's lead, Tuffnut's head rose to his sister and he said, "I can't just let it wait! I'll find Astrid myself, and I'll be home later."
"Don't!" Ruffnut said, hopping in his path. She was irritated that the suggestion was the first thing that popped up in Tuffnut's mind. A groan of annoyance left Ruffnut quickly that she couldn't stop. "You're only gonna say something stupider than usual. Don't make it worse." Ruffnut didn't know exactly what had been running through Astrid's mind. It was incredulous to think that someone like Tuffnut could be the reason for Astrid's distress, but Ruffnut did know that there had to be a true reason for Astrid to make her own scene, and obviously the reason was not something that Astrid wanted to share with them right away.
Tuffnut looked confused, but he didn't make a move to push past Ruffnut and run after Astrid as he had planned. He stood there and watched everyone else continue walking to their destinations along with he and Ruffnut. All of his perplexion about what had happened tumbled from his mind and out through a sigh from his lips. Tuffnut looked longingly at the sea of homebound Hooligans and he promised himself he would find Astrid the next day and find things out for himself.
Astrid, the next day, was resting by a popular lake at the border of the village and the forest with her Deadly Nadder dragon, Stormfly. The sky was still overcast from the previous day as if the heavens had still not decided if they wanted to precipitate onto the island. The lake would usually be filled with happy swimmers who wanted to cool off in hot summers, yet in the current freeze the lake was frozen solid and looked like a big mirror with white vapor emanating from its surface.
The day overall appeared dreary, but to Astrid it looked homely. Above the depression of the lake, Astrid could see the roof of her own cottage just beyond a hill to her right that began most footpaths to the surrounding forest and wilderness from the town. Ranges of trees were draped around the plot of the village and the ecosystem of the lake and were made of many towering pines that were slouching with pockets of snow. The landscape looked like a giant's hand had drizzled the area in thick and white, crystalline syrup that sparkled under the sun. At intermittent times, the snow sloughed off from offshoots of the trees beyond the lake and gave overweighted branches some relief until the next pile of snowfall would make the trees' branches sag towards the ground.
The lake's shore was not empty. There were a handful of naturally stubborn Hooligans who had come to test their luck in fishing holes within the ice of the lake that had been cut out for snagging extra catches for winter food storage even though mostly all of the marine life in the lake had migrated to warmer isles. Other bypassers were spending their time talking and giggling on the shore. A number of dragons were roaming around with their Viking riders and were burrowing their heads in snow or losing balance on the slippery and icy bank and making flapping noises with their large wings for every misstep they took after their humans that would have planted their talons on the fragile icebed of the water. The tranquility of the outside's view and the occasional sounds of laughter and snorting dragons was ideal to console Astrid's regret of the day before.
Stormfly was kicking an object unknown to Astrid, and it softly hit Astrid's side. Astrid looked down and saw it was only a pinecone. Stormfly nodded her head up-and-down Astrid to let Astrid know that she was excited to play a game of catch. Astrid knew it was important to care about what Stormfly might have found, or her dragon would discover she was truly troubled, yet Astrid felt indifferent about doing anything with the pinecone at all. Stormfly's blue, large, and horned head with a mohawk of sharp, tall spikes nudged Astrid to engage as the other humans had with their dragons in the site, and when Astrid crossed her arms onto her hiked knees and blinked lamely to the horizon, Stormfly sat, too, twitching with unused energy.
Astrid was positive she would become delirious from thinking so much. Her head felt like it was going to burst. If it were possible, Astrid wanted nothing more than to stop being inside of her head. She had sought the ambience of the lake out of habit, but she failed to remember that the lake was highly connected to her memories of her relationship with Hiccup, and that only worsened her battle with her remorse of leaving Tuffnut yesterday with no explanation.
Astrid reminisced when she had come to the lake with Hiccup and when he had brought Toothless there to play with Stormfly, for they had never gone anywhere without their dragons by their side unless they had truly wished to be alone together. There at the lake in the same place that Astrid now sat, she and Hiccup would talk about their upcoming wedding or the new names they had brainstormed for their children, if they ever had any. Astrid had wanted a brood and Hiccup had relented to extending his limit of children to two, at Astrid's insisting. They had talked about their plans for the weekend too, after they had taken care of things as self-proclaimed leaders on Dragon's Edge, a secret land on Berk that she, Hiccup and their friends, Ruffnut, Snoutlout, and Fishlegs, had found to collect their findings as a group about mysterious dragons and hidden troves on Berk that were better explored in their younger days as emerging teenagers. Astrid lifted a handful of cold, clumpy sand in her hand and let it sift from her fingers like lost time.
Astrid remembered the way that Tuffnut had said her name in quiet dread in the arena right before she had fleed from him. She considered if Tuffnut knew what she had thought then. The truth was, Astrid was deathly afraid of letting her heart be broken again, and she feared that courting Tuffnut would ruin the friendship they had forged for many years as they had both learned to be one of the tribe and had become capable fighters in Dragon Training, once upon a time when Berk had pride in killing dragons that all villagers for centuries had believed were dangerous. As changing her perception of dragons had been terrifying, changing her view of Tuffnut to something other than a close friend was even more scary.
When Astrid ever faced Hiccup again, she knew that she would be little more than a stranger to him and they would revert to their old ways since the start of Dragon Training when they both had barely reached thirteen. The only caveat that kept them from being completely rude to each other was the lasting remembrances they shared from their relationship, like the very place Astrid resided on the bank of the lake. She and Hiccup had shared not only moments of love but moments of companionship in battle and of immense trust on the multiple missions and adventures they endured with each other and with their friends for the sake of Berk and for the livelihood of their dragons. What if, Astrid pondered as she sat beside her jittery dragon, Tuffnut would change the same way? Out of nowhere, one day Tuffnut could tell her that she wasn't enough for him end any connection between them in a few sentences as Hiccup had done. Astrid would hate to be forced to drift apart from a friend she was barely beginning to know on a deeper level besides as a fellow dragonrider and the brother to one of her best friends.
Astrid gasped, "Stormfly?", when her Deadly Nadder snagged the big pinecone beside her and trotted behind her. She turned around and saw Tuffnut, who Stormfly had been drawn to because he was a familiar Viking who played with her at times with Barf and Belch, Toothless, and Hookfang when they were all together.
Tuffnut accepted Stormfly's invite to play and he hiked the pinecone she had presented him to the other side of the lake. Astrid felt a hefty wind over her head when Stormfly swooped after the seed.
"Hey, Hoff," Tuffnut called out in sake of Astrid's last name, almost in the sound of a question, from his distance. He approached her from afar slowly and unsteadily over the rocky and sandy bed of the lake.
Astrid preened her hair in place with clammy hands. She hadn't predicted Tuffnut would come looking for her, and she hadn't rehearsed what she was going to say to him yet. She heard his footsteps grow louder and then she chirped, "Hi."
Tuffnut looked normal when he settled beside her with a respectable distance. He wore a warm-looking vest and on his head was a helmet with large down-turning horns that leveled out parallel in both directions. Astrid saw he was missing the overcoat he had in the tavern. She thought that maybe he had forgotten to wear it, he didn't care about the cold as much as she had thought, or maybe he couldn't find it that night after all. His hair was still braided beneath his chin in a fool's beard, as he preferred it for the day. He wore tubby boots with heavy fur inside that he brought out for the colder months until they had been worn thin on the soles, he wore long and close-fitting burlap trousers colored dark-brown, and a dingy overtunic that was some inches longer than the one he had worn to the tavern, with frayed hems on the waist and collarbone. His shoulders were capped with spiky, metal protectants and his triceps were wrapped warm in a thick material that had an outer lining of spikes, and on his biceps were matching, smaller wraps topped with fur. To an untrained eye, Astrid thought, Tuffnut would look intimidating. He could be, she remembered, if he wished to. His greeting had sounded civil enough, but Astrid wasn't sure if he was upset or simply curious about yesterday. His placid frown didn't give much away.
Tuffnut got comfortable and crossed his legs and rested his hands in his lap. They sat there on the bank as the tension of their unspoken confrontation grew. When Tuffnut decided to speak first, he didn't sound very happy. "I have this weird feeling, like, you're avoiding me."
The charade was over, and Astrid's unbothered smile for pointless smalltalk fell. "I'm not."
"You ran like a thousand boars were about ta' eat you alive," Tuffnut said in humored scorn, sounding much like himself to Astrid. He twisted a weed in his hand. Astrid was drawn to how timid it made him look. She watched the plucked, green growth twist and turn through his fingers.
"I didn't run."
Tuffnut thought her answer was funny. He laughed in a single breath to himself and showed a benign shrug.
"Okay," Astrid admitted, feeling liberated to smile. "It's just that we were friends for a long time, Tuff, and I don't want to ruin that."
Tuffnut thought longer than Astrid thought he would about the plainest answer she could offer him.
Stormfly returned to spit the pinecone into Tuffnut's reach. He tossed the cone in the distance once more, and that time it landed on the lake. Whoops, Tuffnut thought. They both watched in caution as Stormfly tip-toed on the ice and carefully went to retrieve the seed.
Tuffnut slowly swiveled on the ground to face Astrid with his body as his eyes still focused on the sand. His tossed the weed lifeless onto the soil he had pulled it from. He said in the tone of a confession to a priest, "I'm not going to force us to be together."
"But..." Astrid peeped quickly. It didn't feel that way at all, she said inwardly. From her periphreal vision, she saw Tuffnut's helmet horns lift with his head. Her heart started to pound as she finished softly in a voice that she was hesitant that Tuffnut didn't hear, "...I want to be with you."
Tuffnut couldn't help but chuckle slightly, feeling overwhelmed that she felt the same way about him and from the sweet simplicity of the moment. Another weed curled in his hand. He felt relieved that he didn't have to ask to court Astrid outright. The question terrified him and he never thought he would bring himself to ask it to a girl who had once been Hiccup's interest. Besides, he was intimidated by her. She was a gorgeous, fearless, warrior-queen and he was only a dragon-rider that followed her commands most of the time. To his luck, Astrid had openly admitted she had the same intention to be with him. "I see," Tuffnut mumbled.
Astrid fumbled with her skirt hem where some hide had loosened and threaded. A smile played with the corner of her lips. Stormfly returned to plant the pinecone in Astrid's lap that time. Stormfly brightened because her rider looked less morose than she had earlier.
Stormfly slithered with another dragon away from Astrid's doting hand that petted her, but she stayed close by Astrid in case she was called.
After a moment of silence filled with the sounds of the small population of villagers and their dragons at the lake, Tuffnut stood. Astrid stood steadily with him.
Truthfully, Tuffnut came to Astrid that day to find an answer from her that he was looking for, and he was satisfied, but now that he discovered they were indeed on good terms, Tuffnut wanted to invite her to the Snoggletog Fest that was held on the last day of winter and was coming up quickly, but he did not know if he should say it so soon. She and Hiccup had gone for years together and he felt insecure about taking his place. He thought it better to wait for another time to ask Astrid to the festival, even if it took until Snoggletog Eve. His tongue started to stick to the roof of his mouth. He thought of not asking at all-it would be easier. Then again, he was staring at Astrid much too long to excuse himself that he had simply forgotten what he was going to say. Astrid laughed politely to end the silence between them.
"I'll see you around," Astrid said quietly with a hint of amusement.
Tuffnut was close to her and he could kiss her on the cheek if he wanted, for that is what boyfriends did after all when there were goodbyes to be said, but every display of affection he wanted to try with Astrid now felt out of place. Their first kiss had happened because they had been too dazed and highstrung from dancing to think about what they were doing. Now, any move Tuffnut thought of making seemed rehearsed. Although there were tangible feelings sparking between them, even then, he was shy to initiate anything else just yet.
While Tuffnut was processing if he should ask her his question, Astrid assumed he was being mute against his will because of his thoughts, like she had been, and she gave him a farewell. Astrid first called for Stormfly to follow her home. She could hear Stormfly's feet plonk to be near her.
"Um," Tuffnut said. He mustered the courage to look into her eyes. "Wanna go to the Snoggletog Fest with me?" Tuffnut said, laughing at the end to give himself permission to ask.
Astrid stayed in front of him, feeling heart palpitations that arose from nowhere. She recognized the feeling, the same as cold sweats or every other novice sensation that came from the beginnings of a new relationship.
Tuffnut's heart felt like it was slowly sinking the longer that Astrid took to respond. He added without thinking, "Ruffnut, Snoutlout, and Fishlegs are going too; everyone will be there!" Tuffnut regretted saying it because it made it seem like he was emphasizing that they wouldn't be alone, but it was never a problem for them to be alone before.
"Yes," Astrid said airily.
Tuffnut's boots shifted in the snow. He hadn't expected Astrid to agree, because who would want to go with him anywhere? When she didn't let him know that she was joking, Tuffnut didn't know how to react. "See you," he muttered.
With nothing else to mention, Astrid turned away and started for home and Tuffnut left in another direction, wherever that meant for him. Stormfly followed her away.
Astrid's bootsteps felt light on the crunchy snowpath back to the streets of Berk. Although Astrid was the experienced one with falling in love, Tuffnut made her feel like an amateur.
Words: 3821
Guest: Thank you for the compliment; that is sweet of you. I plan to continue, although it may take a while for new chapters because of my changing schedule.