Chapter 1

Astrid dropped to the floor, screaming at the top of her lungs and tugging at her hair to bring a frying pan swinging down into her hands. She lunged forward, flipping her wrist so that the frying pan twirled in her fingers. It broke imaginary teeth, crippled hypothetical jaws, pulverized invisible fingers. Astrid switched from beating one fake opponent to several. She rolled across the threadbare carpet, lunged to the left and the right, ducked under fists, jumped over swept legs, and ended by lifting her frying pan over her head and swinging it forward down onto an invisible skull.

Combat training was the best part of the day.

Astrid smiled as she listened to her breathing - not nearly as deep or loud as it had been when she'd secretly begun these sessions two years ago. Her mother had initially banned the activity, forcing Astrid into secrecy, so it had taken Astrid a while to realize that she would have to intensify her workouts in order to stay in fighting shape. Straightening her back, she wiped at the beads of sweat hovering on her forehead and gave the frying pan one last proud twirl. The washcloth she grabbed from the bowl beside her bed was welcoming and cool as she scrubbed at her forearms. Once satisfied, she wasted no time dropping it in the laundry basket. Today had been a cleaning day, and she wasn't about to ruin her day's efforts, no matter how meaningless she had to admit they were.

Still, it was kind of a shame that nobody but Astrid and her mother would ever see this place. Astrid liked a clean home, even if she'd never admit it. It didn't take much effort to clean, with only the two of them there and so much - so much - time on her hands. And the sunlight flowing through the cracks added a lot to the room - and Astrid too. She wouldn't call herself a sunny weather girl, but over the years she'd gained an appreciation for the permanent state of the world outside her window: clouds only dotting the expanse, and the sun stretching freely in the sky.

Freer than she was, anyway. Astrid let a grin escape her usually solemn face. Tomorrow was her birthday. And freedom was the only thing on her mind.

She glanced out the window, biting her lip as her eyebrows clenched above her eyes. If only she could get out there. She stepped to the window, perching her fists on the window frame. The golden brown stone was warm from sun exposure, and somehow the heat felt like it was flooding the lean muscles of her arms. Leaning over, she gazed at the land below... the only piece of outside she had ever seen. There it was, a fresh, inviting green. Mom sometimes graced her with a flower. Astrid always said thank you, and as tough as she wanted to present herself, she liked those flowers. Anything with that natural green was a magnet. She'd tried to duplicate it with her paints, but somehow the exact hue could never be replicated, and despite the hours of practice, she wasn't much of a painter. Her mother had made that pretty clear.

Astrid twisted, groaning happily as her back snapped with the turn, and looked around her home - her tower. She'd painted all sorts of things, all over the walls and ceiling. Astrid hung her fingers on a tiny knot in her hair. Mom said it was their greatest blessing, but to Astrid, it only helped her as a healing power and a climbing rope. The rope made it easier to reach pretty much every inch of the place, and to just trapeze about the beams above her head. The healing aided her whenever she lost her footing. That happened less and less - Astrid was naturally agile, and she'd spent many hours balancing on the beams above to improve her grace. Mom thought climbing and balancing and twisting around was incredulously and indignantly unladylike - "Astrid, I can see straight up your skirts!" - so Astrid had recently taken to such gymnastics only when Mom was out.

Which she was now. Astrid glanced out the window, towards the cave that served as an entrance to her little cove. Still no Mom. Astrid had questioned her about her doings - about any hint as to the outside world other than Mom's many horror stories and warnings - but Mom usually scolded Astrid harshly. What little information Astrid got came from the gifts her mother brought.
She twisted a bit more to squint at the angle of the sun. It was already well after midday. Mom had promised to be early today so they could spend more time together. Astrid had a plan, but at this point, she was getting too impatient to properly execute it. She perched on the windowsill, knees in a wide squat and toes curling on the stones. The sunlight warmed her dress and legs, and she sighed.

"I've cleaned, I've swept, I've polished, I've mopped, I've shined," she murmured to herself in a tortuously bored monotone. "I've read, I've painted, I've played guitar, I've knitted-" Astrid grimaced at that. "- I've had lunch, I've baked, I've sewn, I've made candles, I've played chess, I've climbed." She groaned at the ceiling. "I've read more, I've painted more, I've climbed more." Her gaze returned to the outside world. Despite her plethora of daily activities, she'd done this all before. The same things - every day. Nothing ever changed.

Astrid curled her spine and stretched toward the sky, listening to the crackling in her spine. She wanted a challenge, an adventure - a chance to prove everything she already believed about herself. She could survive the horrors of the outside world. Better than survive - she could defeat them. She knew she could do it. Nobody would touch her hair. Thugs and ruffians would cower at her feet. The plague would halt in its tracks. Poison ivy would shrink into the ground. Quicksand would petrify itself in terror. Astrid groaned at her own melodrama. Being this cooped up wasn't good for her sanity. It was a miracle she'd held on this long. If only she were allowed out there, she knew she would be fine. Her jaw clenched. She had to get out there.

Astrid couldn't spend all her days in this little corner, only hearing fragments of stories of the world beyond. She couldn't hide forever. She just- she just couldn't. That wasn't living. This cowering in a tower was not living. Being held back by fear and convention was not living. She didn't feel alive here. She needed to go.

Fingers threaded through her hair. She'd rehearsed that speech a thousand times in her head, realized it would never work on her mother, and then rehearsed it a thousand times again. The repetition had become sickening. Repetition was a mind-crushing part of her life. She idly wondered at the last time anything "new" had been introduced into her environment.

Staring out the window at the great and dangerous world beyond, she grimaced in determination. "When will my life begin?"

If he closed his eyes hard enough, maybe they'd just disappear. And yes, Hiccup knew how stupid that sounded, but he was ready for a stupidly easy solution.

"Hiccup!" As usual, no easy solutions. Hiccup could hear Snot and his gang bellowing his name from a few yards away. He quickly and quietly advanced to the next branch of the tree he was hiding in. All the adventures he'd been in recently hadn't given him any grace, per se, but his coordination skills had definitely improved. Otherwise, Hiccup would have been on the ground in a broken mess of arms and legs a long time ago.

He clutched at his leather satchel, refusing to let his mind yet again drift onto the important contents of the bag - and the reason he was being chased by three very strong, very brutal, and very furious thugs. Focus was key.

If only he could escape to the borders. Hiccup scowled and mentally scolded himself. He had one great advantage over these guys, and of course he stationed it so far away that it nearly became a hindrance for all the effort to reach it.

Hiccup glanced down and tensed to see Tuffnut Thorston at the foot of his hiding perch. The long-haired criminal was searching the bushes for Hiccup. "I'll get you, Hiccup," Tuffnut snarled. "That thing is rightfully ours, Pretty Boy."

"And we want it back," snapped an equally threatening low voice. Hiccup knew, from many run-ins with these particular adrenaline junkies, that the voice belonged to Tuffnut's twin sister, Ruffnut. They were currently cronies of the only vaguely notorious Snotlout Jorgenson, and they enjoyed any command to beat up whoever annoyed their boss. The Thorstons weren't necessarily evil. They'd just quickly figured out that beating people up and fighting without abiding by military rules only existed in one career path. When they weren't doing inconvenient things like trying to kill him, Hiccup liked them well enough.

The young man in the tree glanced at his satchel and, for the thousandth time, cursed its contents. He had to have it. It was an infuriating but true fact. Just imagining the huge trouble he'd be in if a few thugs managed to disappear with it in their grasp was making the hairs on his skin bristle. Why did it have to be so difficult to obtain and keep?

He looked around for another tree. He needed to escape these nutcases. Hiccup spotted a fairly sturdy-looking branch jutting out of a tree a few feet away from his current perch. The teen knew he wasn't athletic, but the fact that he was so lithe and skinny for his age allowed him to jumped farther than hefty people like Snotlout could. Sucking in a deep but silent gasp of air, Hiccup bent his knees. Focus, again, was ke-

"Hey, he's up there!" There was no time to plan. Hiccup launched himself into the next tree. He barely made it onto the thick wooden beam. Immediately, he picked out more branches, hopping from one to the other quickly as he could. He could hear the crashing footsteps and angry shouts of the terrible trio as they chased through the forest floor after him.

Hiccup knew this forest well enough. And even if Snot knew it too, nobody had any idea what was waiting for Hiccup at the borders of the kingdom. He could see it ahead, marked by a thin wooden fence somebody obviously only erected for aesthetic purposes. Though available sturdy branches became sparser and sparser, Hiccup was determined to escape. He stopped on a branch, took a deep breath, and let out a screeching, snarling roar. If his pursuers seemed surprised by his actions, they didn't stop to ponder their surprise. Hiccup tuned out their noise and listened. He grinned as low, burning growl responded, the kind of growl nobody noticed unless they were listening. And Hiccup was delighted to listen. Hiccup rushed ahead, chuckling confidently now. He would make it. These psychos, if he was lucky, would never see him again until this whole mess was long over. Hiccup winced a bit at that thought. His luck had never helped him much in the past. Based on who Hiccup was as a person alone, he'd definitely most likely encounter them sooner rather than later. He clenched a hand around his satchel, felt for his precious cargo, and smiled. At least he had the crown. One step at a time.

He leaped onto the final branch, and grinned. He was now officially out of danger. Wrapping his arms and legs around an adjacent tree trunk, he shimmied up into the canopy. Switching over to a taller tree, he shoved a foot onto a small branch, gazing across the forest. A black blur soared toward him. Hiccup leaped off the tree and into the air. Within seconds, he landed with a hard thunk onto his best friend and only advantage.

"Hey Toothless," Hiccup said, scratching his cheerful dragon behind the ears. "Nice timing, as usual."

The obsidian-black dragon snorted, as if assuring Hiccup that his timing was nothing if not perfect. Hiccup rubbed Toothless' back and smiled.

This – his perch atop his beloved dragon – was his favorite place in the world. This was where he belonged. Glancing around to check that nobody was noticing his huge scaly secret, he sighed happily.

"Alright, bud," Hiccup yelled over the wind whistling past them. "Let's find a place to rest, alright?"

The dragon purred in agreement. He jerked his large head to the slight left. Hiccup gazed forward to see a cluster of rocky mountains . . . with the tip of a tower pointing out from a valley between the rocky peaks.

Patting his dragon thankfully, Hiccup called, "Nice! We'll spend the night there too!" As his dragon turned towards the highlands, Hiccup briefly held the worry that somebody might live there. He immediately expelled the thought. To live in the middle of nowhere meant you had something to hide. And Hiccup knew that of everyone in this corner of earth, he was the only one with such colossal secrets.

Well. Everyone has to be wrong sometime, right?

Author's Notes: Hey! Finally decided to update this thing... again. I'll be cross-posting on here and AO3, but probably updating more regularly on AO3. Anyways, I realized y'all who have been following since the beginning deserve an update. I'll be updating the first few chapters and adding the chapters I've written (and rewritten) since then.

A few notes:

- Astrid and Hiccup will be aged up for this story - about 18-19. I tried to unionize who they are as characters with how they might change in a different environment.

- For now, each chapter will start with third-person-limited focus on Astrid and then switch to third-person-limited Hiccup.

- The setting and environment, by the way, will be a mix of Tangled and HTTYD. It will be explained in-universe, so stay tuned.

- The first few chapters are crazy short, but they get much longer as the story progresses.

- Updates are on Monday. That being said, I will probably take some breaks during this upcoming 2021 holiday season. I'm also currently Eternals trash, so my brain is absolutely flooded with Eternals. Writing anything else has been a struggle.

- If you see any errors, just keep in mind I don't have a beta-reader at the moment.

- If you see me writing romance (which this story will have) and think, "I thought this writer is asexual" - don't worry, I still am. I'm also just a sucker for a good fictional couple dynamic.

- I heard that disclaimers are now obsolete, but just in case: I don't own How To Train Your Dragon or Tangled.