Hiccup, Snoutlout, and Ruffnut kept their eyes on both unsuspecting Dragonriders and tried to make as little noise as possible. Hiccup saw Astrid gasp. Her face morphed from one of shock to humored confusion.

"Is this already our last day?", Hiccup heard Astrid ask Tuffnut.

"I think. I wasn't really keeping count." Tuffnut replied weakly. Hiccup had said there were three nights they were to be stationed at Dragon Edge's watch-post, yet every night had felt like the first, filled with long conversations and ending with them awakening with a face coated in sand.

"You were dug in like a tick," Tuffnut laughed briefly to Astrid. He hoped his quote lifted the tension of the novel sleeping arrangement they had put themselves in unknowingly.

Astrid hadn't registered what Tuffnut said, but she did hear the snarky tone in his voice that had probably been about how soundly she had slept on him. "Sorry, Tuff," Astrid said, leveling up from Tuffnut.

"I don't mind," Tuffnut insisted in a voice like sandpaper, staying still in his comfortable nest of warm granules. "It's not like anyone's watching." Ruffnut had slept on his chest many times before. He thought, why should Astrid be any different if she felt sleepy? In the next while, they could return to being indifferent companions who rode dragons and took orders from Hiccup Haddock. Right now she looked perfectly content to use his body like a pillow of chicken feathers.

Astrid hesitantly lowered back down onto Tuffnut's ribcage. His chest had been warm and his clothes were soft on her face. She wouldn't dream of asking to stay there any longer than a little while, though, in fear that he would think she preferred to be nearer to him than far away while they were stationed on patrol. This place is a mess, Astrid saw. The wind had blown her snacks and pockmarked the seashore with broken wafers. She eye-scanned their fizzled campsite for her weapon. "Have you seen my axe?"

Ruffnut, Snoutlout, and Hiccup sandwiched together in sight of Astrid's axe that was a foot from them and lodged in a sandbar.

"There's something shiny by that bush. It could be over there," Tuffnut croaked. How the heck it had ended up stuck in a shrub, he didn't know. He rested his eyelids together and convinced himself he would return to the Edge in the next ten minutes. His hand sensed the texture of Astrid's shirt under his fingertips, and he immediately halted his grazing when he and Astrid were aware of his movements. Tuffnut interrupted their jittery reflection of the moment by asking, "have you...seen my helmet?"

Astrid turned her head to see his helmet lodged beside his shoulder under a cake of sand. Brown clumps of beach-soil sloughed from it when she dug her fingers beneath the ground to lift it up. She covered Tuffnut's entire face with his helmet and snickered.

Tuffnut heard Astrid release a small chuckle of satisfaction, and he adjusted the helmet away from his eyes so he could see. "Thanks a lot." He said, blinking sand from his eyes. "Weren't we talking about something, before we both, y'know..." Tuffnut swallowed his dried saliva and felt particles of seasalt slither down his throat. He missed being unconscious so he wouldn't notice how parched his mouth had gotten while he slept. "...conked out?"

Astrid lowered her chin on her piled hands on top of Tuffnut's ribcage and thought to herself. Astrid remembered the tooth pendant he was touching the previous night. She saw it with new meaning as it rested beneath his collar and valleyed up and down with his somber breaths. She let the calming crash and sizzle of ocean waves fill the reverent silence that fell between them. "We were talking about your mom," she recalled quietly.

"Oh yeah," Tuffnut said. "She was a warrior, like Dad, but she died in that invasion before me and Ruff were eight. Dad was never really how he used to be since then. Mom left us these necklaces for our birthday that year."

"Poor Ruff," Astrid mumbled, thinking of the invasion from her own youth that was led by rogue enemies of Berk. She felt grateful that her parents had survived the attack, but she also felt guilty that her mother survived while Tuffnut's mother hadn't. She also thought it was peculiar that Ruffnut had never divulged the information to her, since she had spent more time with Ruffnut growing up than she had with Tuffnut. "Do you still think about her?" Astrid asked, looking worried at how Tuffnut's eyes were clouding. He could be close to crying, or still bleary from their seven-hour lapse in conversation.

"Sometimes." Tuffnut, facing away, went on. "When Dad sent us to dragon-training, he wanted us both to be, like, the best ones there and be, like, the top warriors in the whole clan. He never wanted us to end up like..." Mom, Tuffnut finished mentally. He watched a dragon flap in the air and mused without thought to Astrid, "I was okay at fighting dragons, and I guess Ruff was, too, but it wasn't me. I never felt really good about it. Something about it was just...not me." He asked in caution in case Astrid didn't understand his rambling thoughts, "y'know?"

"Yeah," Astrid said immediately. Tuffnut had subtly changed the topic from speaking of his mother. She allowed it to happen and continued on her shared discontentment with their previous dragon-training when they had been preteens. Astrid shared in a near-whisper, "my parents were the same way. They wanted me to be the best warrior in the family. Everything I learned about fighting, I learned from them. At first I wanted to grow up to be just like them, I guess a little too much," Astrid confessed, thinking back on how driven and heartless she had been to surpass the Twins, Hiccup, Snotlout, and Fishlegs in dragon-fighting at any cost.

Hiccup heard Astrid's tale and felt great empathy for what she had said. He had felt similarly when he had realized he hadn't wanted to be chief of a village that had slaughtered dragons only because they had lived in fear of the creatures for generations without understanding them. Ruffnut, when Hiccup glanced to her, looked more interested in what other secret Tuffnut was going to share with Astrid.

"Oh gods," Ruffnut heard Tuffnut mumble to Astrid. A smile bloomed on his face and he laughed and squeezed shut his eyes like he had heard a great joke.

"What?" Astrid implored into her hands. She thought there was something about the jingle of Tuffnut's laugh that made her want to capture some of its joy and save it in a jar for a rainy day.

"You were so mean back then," Tuffnut whined, sending them both to giggle in agreement.

I didn't know how to be nice, Astrid thought in protest as she blinked forlornly on Tuffnut's chest. Tuffnut's criticism stung because he wasn't the lying type and, like Ruffnut, had no proverbial filter. Astrid believed there were still parts of her personality that needed major improvement. She would try to do better.

Tuffnut remained still and ruminated his own personal thoughts. He raised his helmet where Astrid had left it to shroud his vision and he felt sunlight rest on his nose. They both began to speak incoherent patterns of thought just because someone else was there to hear them.

"I feel like," Astrid began suddenly.

Tuffnut took notice and lifted his helmet higher to peek at her expression. "What?"

What? was a simple demand, but for Astrid, explaining her bottled feelings was like unleashing a flood of emotions. She kept them mostly at bay to save her dignity. "I just think...everyone here is really afraid of me, because of what I used to be," Astrid said. She looked to Tuffnut's shirt beneath her palms and she asked herself, are you scared of me, too?

Tuffnut repositioned his helmet to shade his eyes with pitch-black darkness and fill his nose with the scent of sun-kissed metal. "I'm not scared of you," he said in a lazy yet firm tone.

Astrid thought it was uncanny how well he had read her thoughts. His reply stirred a feeling in her that made her want to challenge Tuffnut and prove he was bluffing. She scared every guy away, even Hiccup. She didn't like how confident Tuffnut had become with her all-of-a-sudden, and she wanted nothing more than to put him in his place so he wouldn't give her anymore butterflies. "What I'm saying is," Astrid clarified to distract herself from the direction her thoughts were turning, "I feel like no one really knows me. I know we're all friends, but, for some reason I feel I'm being taken for granted. I feel...invisible." Astrid watched the slight frown beneath Tuffnut's helmet to see if he would laugh. It remained unmoving.

After a long time, Tuffnut mumbled, "me too." There was a lot that they shared in common that he hadn't realized.

Astrid understood that if they kept talking, she would say something she'd regret, like an admission that she hoped they could spend more time alone to talk. Astrid made a fluid motion to stand on her feet, and she collected the items from their watch-post.

Without a word, Tuffnut motioned to sit forward on his elbows. His stomach felt cold and abandoned. He watched Astrid kick sand over their dead campfire and he wondered if he had said something stupid to make Astrid angry. That was usually the case.

"Get the blankets," Astrid commanded Tuffnut, feeling more in charge of her emotions the further away she walked from him. "And don't forget my axe!"

Tuffnut assumed his role as her compliant helpmate as if nothing had changed from the start of their third shift. His grumblings, however, told his true feelings in Ruffnut's, Hiccup's, and Snoutlout's ears.

"What the hell is her problem?", Hiccup heard Tuffnut mutter. Tuffnut's hand swiped Astrid's axe that lodged in a section of the shrub near Hiccup's head.

Tuffnut's bootsteps turned from mushy sounds to crackles over sea-sprayed forest foliage as he followed Astrid's lead to the Edge.

Ruffnut allowed herself to be helped up by Hiccup and Snotlout. The three of them waited several paces to trail behind Astrid and Tuffnut until they became two distant walking-figures.

Hiccup never knew Astrid felt such a way. He had assumed her to be indifferent to anything than kicking butt. "That was... something," Hiccup said with an awkward chuckle. His friends disagreed.

"That was disappointing," Snotlout grumbled. There was nothing Tuffnut or Astrid had said that he could use against them in an argument.

"That was close," Ruffnut rasped to Hiccup as he helped brush her arms free of sand. And weird, Ruffnut thought to herself.

A crack of thunder sounded above, and the bright morning became dim with fast-approaching rain clouds. Hiccup smacked his teeth in anger. No one would be at the Edge in time to secure the camp for the rainstorm, thanks to his blind idiocy to investigate something that Snotlout called "an emergency".

"It's way too early for this," Hiccup grunted, walking into the sprinkling rain that plopped fat droplets onto the shore of the island. That time, Snotlout had no objection to Hiccup's statement.

"Hey. You alright, Ruff? You look a little down." Hiccup said to Ruffnut as the three of them began to jog to their camp under the morning rain.

Ruffnut was dejected. What did Tuffnut mean by saying he felt 'invisible'? How long had he planned on not telling her his feelings first like he always did? Her naturally-gravelly voice replied, "don't worry about it." She would ask Tuffnut some serious questions later in their bunk.


A/N

: For now I'm going to allow an "open-ending" here so you have some sense of closure. Thank you for reading this far.