Chapter 8
"If you don't tell me where we're going..." Astrid raised a fist, but she found it was loose and limp. Did she completely trust him? Astrid wouldn't go that far. She just didn't want to punch him at the moment.
Hiccup pretended that he thought her threat was genuine. "We're just going to a library! It has books! Scrolls! Maps!" He slowed his pace to let her walk beside him.
Astrid couldn't say she was a particular fan of books. "How many?" she asked, narrowing her eyes and twisting her lips in grudging acceptance.
"All of them," Hiccup said. He swung his arms around and almost slapped her. She did shoot him a light punch and glare for that. "Sorry," he muttered. "Okay, maybe not all of them. But enough to answer a ton of questions."
What did she want to know about? Astrid scrunched her fingers in her skirts. She tried to think. Hiccup had been able to answer a lot of her questions earlier in their adventure, but she got the sense he was only scratching the surface of the world. The foray into the city had filled Astrid's mind with new details and aspects of reality, but she had been able to hold off sensory overloads with quick and careful categorization. What she still wanted to know about - her eyes darted to Hiccup, which she scoffed at immediately, and then forced herself to think "the ocean" - she would much rather experience herself. To her mother's eternal disappointment, Astrid didn't bother much with reading anything that wasn't entirely practical and suited to her particular interests.
Then she grasped a topic. "Dragons."
Hiccup sucked in a breath. He grabbed her wrist to maneuver around a cart selling pastries and then to sidestep into an alley strung with clotheslines. He dropped her wrist to scratch at his neck. Seemingly hesitant, he said nothing for a good while. Finally: "Too dangerous."
Hardening the muscles in her chin as she raised it, Astrid shook her head and replied, "For you, maybe. For me, I'm just a curious person wondering about bloodthirsty creatures."
"They aren't- they aren't bloodthi- Oh. I see what you did there." He huffed in embarrassment. Glancing at her, he said, "That... does make sense, actually."
"Guard captain's son too high profile to ask those questions without suspicion, huh?" Astrid teased, leaning over to nudge his arm with her shoulder.
Hiccup jumped. "Hey! I... well, yeah. Probably." Trying to regain any pretense of smooth confidence, he stretched his arms back and over his head. "I mean, you are walking next to a total treasure trove of dragon knowledge right here, so maybe I'm a little insulted."
In a move stolen from her mother, Astrid raised one eyebrow. "You ever checked this library for dragon knowledge?"
"I... well, no. Not recently, anyway."
"So maybe there's something in there you missed because you're too scared to sneak around and read dragon books."
Shaking his head in disbelief, Hiccup scoffed, "I'll have you know that sneaking around the castle is a very difficult endeavor!"
"Okay. So what are we doing right now?"
"We're..." he sighed, and then he smiled in defeat. "We're sneaking around the castle."
Astrid laughed. Hiccup looked forward, but Astrid watched him make a poor attempt at smothering his grin.
They arrived at the end of the alley. Astrid squinted up into the sun. She'd assumed that the alley would veer off into the shadows, but it was a simple dead end to a grey stone wall not too unlike the caramel-toned stones of her own tower. The only interruption in the rocks was a window shaped at the top like a teardrop.
Hiccup dug his fingers and shoes into the grooves of the stones and pulled himself up to the window a few feet above his own height. With his left hand, he reached up, grunting, and yanked at a clasp on the window. It swung open. "Greased it myself," he murmured to her, and Astrid rolled her eyes at his puffed-up chest. "Do you need a boost?"
"Nope," she replied, and she scampered up the wall, poked the window open just a bit more, and slid through the frame onto the cold, hard floor.
A moment later, Hiccup was standing beside her in the long, plain, dark hallway. He offered her raised eyebrows and a small crooked smile before beginning his long strides down the left. Astrid matched his pace as best she could, still a bit behind him.
The pair continued in silence for a bit, halting whenever they heard voices and pressing themselves against shadowed walls. Astrid hadn't realized how emphatically Hiccup had meant "sneaking" until the first time he had stiffened and jumped to the side, but she followed his lead and caught on to his near-paranoid listening quickly.
Most of the voices were deep, with a strange rumbling accent that Astrid had only heard the faintest traces of in Hiccup's own voice. The one exception was a sharp female voice, higher than the other castle inhabitants, but still deeper than most female voices. Hiccup hissed a curse when he heard this particular woman, body-slammed the wall, and seemed to be holding his breath.
"His Royal Ass-"
"Cassandra-" That voice was older and male.
"Oh, come on, Dad. His Royal Highness has been unseen for days. Three to be precise. We're not looking for him. Is anyone going to bother telling me why not?"
"Prince Henry is probably just buried in the books in the library."
"I checked the library."
Astrid raised her eyebrows at Hiccup. Based on his secrecy, she doubted Hiccup wanted to encounter Henry on this escapade. Hiccup gave the smallest shake of the head and a grimace indicating that he disagreed with the older voice's statement.
"I seem to remember that Prince Henry has been found in the library many times after you claimed to have searched it thoroughly."
"And you don't think that's suspicious?!" The voices faded with their owners' footsteps.
After a good thirty seconds of dead silence, Hiccup wheezed out a breath. "If she hadn't been arguing, Cass would have got us for sure. She's..." he seemed to rethink his first choice in words to describe Cassandra, and instead settled on "a tricky one."
Astrid angled her head toward Hiccup questioningly. "Are you positive that the prince won't be in the library?"
Hiccup grinned. "Oh, her dad's right. He's never in there. There's a secret passage in the classic literary epics section."
"Why didn't we use that?" Astrid asked.
Hiccup placed a dramatic palm over his heart. "And compromise security to some pretty girl I just met in the woods yesterday? As if!"
Now Astrid was the one trying hard to hide a smile. She interrupted Hiccup's wild hand gestures and sputtering apologies. "We need to keep moving."
"Right," Hiccup said, the rigidity in his shoulders collapsing with relief. They turned the corner into another gray hallway. "There is one person in the library we can't avoid, though."
Astrid took a moment to update her mental listing of which turns they had made before remarking, "You don't seem to care, so I'm guessing whoever it is won't be a problem."
"Eh." Hiccup danced around a pedestal with some dark-hued vase balanced precariously on top. "I used to always run into that thing. Fourth vase they've put there."
He smiled back at her, and Astrid let herself return the smile. "I'm guessing age and dragon riding skills gave you some better coordination."
"Just enough to not be as much of a menace," he shot back. "And Fishlegs won't be a big problem. I do have some negotiating tactics, you know."
"'Don't tell anyone, or I'll let my dragon eat you?'" Astrid guessed.
"Ha. No. Somehow I think that's not a secret Fish could keep."
Astrid wanted to interrogate him on the names - Cassandra and Heather seemed like nice, normal human names, at least from Astrid's admittedly limited experience. But Fishlegs? Hiccup? Dagur? Were men normally given such ridiculous monikers? - but Hiccup pushed a hand back to halt Astrid as they reached a thick set of huge wooden doors, rounded at the top with metal bars welded across their frames.
"Here we are," he muttered. "Don't say anything until I bully Fish into silence, please, thanks."
"Why? Do women frighten him?" Astrid said, crossing her arms and smirking.
Hiccup spun to face her and bent so that their eyes met. "Yes," he said, completely fake-serious.
Astrid tilted her head to stare at him through her eyelashes. "Even more than they frighten you?"
More sputtering. More hand motions. He was just too easy.
The doors swung open, silent like the window pane. Astrid was starting to suspect Hiccup was meticulous in escape route maintenance, even if he claimed this particular route to freedom wasn't his. She smiled, but that smile dropped in shock when her eyes processed the room she had just slipped into behind Hiccup. Dark wood stretched from floor to ceiling, and across the walls were volumes upon volumes of books and scrolls. The cases stretched back into a dark room with a high ceiling, where pasty, thin candles flickered atop iron chandeliers. Silence was deafening here, except for muttering from a few feet away, behind a bookcase marked "Maps and Legends" on a copper plate hammered into the wood.
"Fish?" Hiccup called, his voice dropping into a loud whisper.
The muttering erupted into a loud, squeaky yelp. Something, most likely a thick book, dropped to the ground. Astrid listened to a gasp and a mad shuffling of pages and papers before a head popped around the corner of the case. The man - probably Fishlegs - towered over her, pale as parchment with a body comprised of big circles and thick ovals. His thin blond mustache quivered as he stared, frozen, at her and Hiccup. "Uh!" he squeaked.
Hiccup turned to mouth "Hold" at Astrid before striding forward and beginning a poorly muted conversation. Astrid stepped to a stack of books atop a high table and began running her fingers down the spines, feigning distraction.
"Who is she?! Hiccup, you know I can't allow commoners in here!"
"I'm a commoner!"
"Hiccup, you are nothing close to a commoner!"
"I'm practically a commoner."
"No!"
"And neither is she!"
"Who is she, then?"
"She's... she's a visitor!"
"So a commoner!"
Both boys were flailing wildly at each other. Astrid thought back to the town square, where she had been surrounded by more people than she could ever imagine. Was gesturing dramatically while talking a national pastime? She couldn't recall it back in the town streets, or even in the Moldy Cabbage. She softened her breath when she realized the boys were now actually attempting to whisper.
"...any girls in here..."
"...because it's not Heather..."
"Leave Heather out of this!"
"Still got that crush, huh?"
Fishlegs whacked Hiccup in the arm with an atlas. Astrid sucked her lips between her teeth to muffle a laugh.
"...impress some floozy..."
"... not a floozy..."
"... please... any more trouble... your dad-"
"...owe... fried fish."
Fishlegs narrowed his eyes. Hiccup shoved his palms forward and up in an offering motion.
"Fine. But from the good stand, by Hanson's smithy. Not Elias's stuff."
Hiccup guffawed. "What problem do you have with Elias's fish?"
Astrid rolled her eyes. Clearly she'd been given access to this library. She darted from aisle to aisle, squinting at the copper name plates announcing each section. "Sciences" caught her eye, and she darted down the aisle, swinging her eyes up to gaze at just how high the bookcases stretched on either side.
"Stop arguing with me about poor quality fried fish! Go supervise your woman!" Fishlegs squealed, indignant. Astrid looked over her shoulder to glare at the possessive description. Fishlegs turned even more pallid than his normal hues. "Hiccup... why does she have a frying pan?"
Hiccup was already trotting to Astrid, but he threw back, "Careful, Fishlegs, she's already taken down two men with that thing." He winked at Astrid, who stubbornly refused to admit to any possible fluttering in her stomach.
They both heard Fishlegs whisper faintly, "... with a frying pan?" Hiccup crunched his shoulders up and bent over as he laughed, and Astrid tilted her head back to cackle at the ceiling.
Astrid composed herself and peered around Hiccup at Fishlegs. "Where does a woman find books on dragons around here?"
Fishlegs froze for a moment, clearly threatened by her. Finally, eyebrows knitting together, he pointed to a pedestal against the wall at the end of their aisle. "We only have one. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's read it in the past ten years."
"How many times have you read it?" Hiccup widened his eyes knowingly at Astrid, even as he directed his question at Fishlegs.
"Twelve."
"Impressive," Astrid said, even though "neurotic" seemed a bit more accurate to her.
After sputtering, flailing, stuttering, and blushing, Fishlegs managed to choke out, "The generals ask me what's in the book instead of reading it now, which I find frankly pretty annoying." Fishlegs toddled off down another aisle, grumbling to himself, "The greatest text we have on the subject, and they want an easy-breezy summary!"
Hiccup was already at the pedestal, flipping the worn leather cover over. He shook his head fondly. "Typical Fish."
Astrid slid next to him and pinched at the pages. "You didn't know this book existed?" Her eyes skimmed the introduction, written in rough chicken scratch by someone named "Bork". She sighed. Men and their names.
Shrugging, Hiccup ran a finger down the classification system listed on the following page. Leaning closer to Astrid and softening his voice, he admitted, "I did, but I haven't read it in years. Most of what I know now, I learned on my own." His eyes a little glassy, he added, "And you can guess why I wouldn't want to add to this book."
Astrid could guess, but her hesitancy must have shown through. Hiccup flicked the pages to near the end. Astrid's eyes widened. Night Fury. Unlike most of the illustrated pages she had glimpsed, this page was blank. Her mind chilled at the thought. Nobody had ever seen a night fury.
"Nobody ever lived to tell the tale, apparently," Hiccup muttered, seemingly having tracked her train of thought. "Just me." Astrid's fingers ghosted across the letters at the bottom of the page. According to this book, Toothless was an enigma of a demon. She had to admit that what she'd seen between Hiccup and Toothless was... not that. Toothless had been hostile toward her, but only out of protective concern for Hiccup. And she couldn't blame the dragon. Her feelings toward Hiccup hadn't been exactly rosy and soft at the time. Not that they were now, of course. She refocused on the words "unholy offspring of lightning and death". That wasn't Toothless. Had nobody else truly ever seen a night fury?
"Do you think that's true?"
His green eyes drift toward the corner of the book in thought as his eyebrows drop over his eyes. He was sad, Astrid realized. "I don't know," he murmured. "I'd like to believe it's not."
Astrid pushed her gaze back to the book. Flicking the pages back through previous entries, she marveled at the detailed sketches of various dragons. Of course her mother had spun horror stories of monsters in bedtime stories designed to keep Astrid's feet glued to the tower floor, but her descriptions couldn't hold a candle to the diversities and complexities of the drawings.
As she studied a page on Changewings, staring incredulously at the depiction of their ability to spray acid, Hiccup leaned closer and whispered into her ear, "Their wings are reflective."
Her eyes widened. "Seriously?"
"Why do you think they're called Changewings?" Somehow, though she was looking only at the pages, she could hear Hiccup grin as he added, "And they can hypnotize."
She turned to stare at him. He nodded, obviously impressed. Turning back to the book, she flipped to another dragon. Whispering Death. Astrid shivered at the circling rows of teeth etched far back into the dragon's mouth. "What about this one?"
"They're burrowers. Their mouths actually work really well digging tunnels. Hard to fight, though." When she raised an eyebrow at the page, Hiccup explained, "Natural enemies of the Night Fury. I try to avoid all dragon-on-dragon violence, but they really aren't a fan of Toothless."
On another page, Hiccup pointed out Snaptrappers. "Their breath is venomous. And smells like chocolate." He scratched the back of his head and muttered, "Learned that the hard way."
Guffawing, she shook her head. "Don't tell me you just smelled chocolate in the forest and decided it was a free meal."
Hiccup threw his hands in the air and protested quietly, "I was hungry! We'd been traveling for three straight days! Toothless was just as fooled!"
"Now that is embarrassing." She thought about the implications of his words. "So you just... what? Travel around the world, researching dragons?"
He rubbed the back of his neck and nodded slowly before replying, "Yeah. Pretty much. Just the archipelago, though, not the whole world. My absence gets me in trouble but..." He paused, eyebrows knitting together, and Astrid wondered if he had ever stopped to think about why he did all this. Certainly nobody had ever asked him. He'd never had to explain it. His voice soft, he finally continued, "I guess it's just what I love doing. Something different. Something new."
Astrid could understand that.
Hiccup's eyes rose to the ceiling, distant in memories. "It's never the same story twice, that's for sure," he said.
Flipping to another page - Gronkle - Astrid found herself saying, "Tell me some."
He started, tilting his head like one of the perplexed parrots Astrid had seen for sale in the city market. "What?"
"Tell me your stories. Something new, something different, right?"
His jaw dropped slightly. He stared at her for a moment, his face a blend of confusion and some unknown feeling. "Ye-yeah. I, uh, I have some stories." His gaze dropped onto the Gronkle and promptly lit up. "Okay, what do you know about volcanoes?"
"What?"
"Fish! Can you get me a book on volcanoes?"
"Stop yelling in my library!"
Most of the questions Hiccup got asked throughout his life fell largely into the same category: someone questioning him about what he was doing while already very much wanting him to stop doing that exact thing. He'd gotten understandably defensive around the time puberty had hit him like a Rumblehorn. Some of that hypersensitivity had worn off, but it didn't curtail his amazement that Astrid seemed to want him to keep talking. She was curious. She valued his perspectives and observations. The giddiness flowing through his brain told him that Astrid's questions were the drugs he had always avoided.
He was so giddy that he almost didn't feel guilty for having to continually chase Fishlegs away from the whispered discussions with Astrid. Fishlegs was fascinated by dragons in the way children gawked at criminals locked in the stocks. The moment Fishlegs suspected Hiccup's own interest in dragons was admiring rather than fearful, the entire castle would hear about it. Fish could keep low-level secrets - with a significant amount of blackmail on Hiccup's behalf - but potentially treacherous secrets? Not a chance.
Hiccup's glares and turned back didn't stop Fishlegs from repeatedly trying to inch into their conversations, though. Inevitably, Astrid would ask a question, and Hiccup would realize the answer required a level of background knowledge Astrid didn't have. So he'd start rooting through the shelves. Fishlegs usually ended up deducing which topic was under discussion and finding the exact text. Within minutes, Hiccup and Astrid were sitting on the floor, backs against the stone wall, surrounded by neat stacks of books. Fish shot Hiccup his own dirty looks due to the tomes on the floor. Sacrilegious, in Fish's eyes.
They'd moved on from volcanoes long ago. The struggle currently was explaining the existence of Scauldrons, the first water dragon Hiccup had chose to introduce to Astrid in order to begin familiarizing her with the tidal class. It almost floored him, how hungry he was to share this information. For five years, he'd been collecting and observing and testing and researching. His relationships and ability to communicate with various dragon species had obviously improved as a result. Yet Hiccup had never been able to share this knowledge. He'd never been able to weave all the different tendrils and strings of thought and data together to show something beautiful to a person experiencing it all for the first time.
He'd had Toothless. Toothless was in all ways irreplaceable.
But Hiccup remembered the ache in his stomach watching Toothless greet draconian friends at breeding grounds and feeding hives. There was a comfort in resting genuinely with another member of one's species. Having this secret - this world of dragons in his mind - had isolated him.
"Seashockers," Astrid murmured, her fingers ghosting the page of another tidal class dragon.
"Hold on, we need to make sure you understand Scauldrons first."
"I understand them fine," Astrid said, quick but without venom. "Tell me about Seashockers."
Hiccup wouldn't have been able to resist even if he'd tried. "Beautiful. They travel in pods, and they're incredible hunters - use sonar - you remember I explained sonar?" When Astrid nodded, looking somewhat hesitant but largely comprehending, he plunged on: "It's an incredible underwater hunting tactic. I've only seen them a few times up close, but they're pretty graceful when they skim the waves. I'm assuming they're graceful underwater too, but the one time I was underwater to see them... I wasn't really focused on what they looked like as much as how to escape them."
Astrid leaned back in surprise. "They attacked you?"
"I wouldn't say attacked. They did separate me and Toothless and send us falling into extremely cold waters. But they weren't aggressive." Hiccup frowned and sighed at the mysterious memory. "I think... they wanted to take us somewhere."
"But it was too cold."
"Exactly," Hiccup affirmed. "Neither of us would have lasted long in the water. Toothless adapts much better to different temperatures than I do, but even he can only adapt so much."
Astrid surveyed Bork's old scribbles on the pages. "So you never found out where they wanted you to go."
Hiccup shrugged. "Who knows."
"You never tried to figure it out?"
He had tried. Then a swarm of dragons began attacking Berk, a bigger swarm than normal, and Hiccup had his hands tied trying to covertly prevent two different types of genocides. On a long list of things to get done, trying to figure out why a bunch of Seashockers had nearly drowned him and Toothless wasn't top priority. "We can't all be as fearless as you," he joked. It was easier to make himself seem like a coward than to delve into the deeper and darker fact: he was fighting every battle, and he and Toothless were doing it alone.
Ignoring - as usual - the gnawing feeling that something had to give, Hiccup zeroed in on the other nagging feeling. A question. "But... I am wondering something. And since you've been interrogating me this whole time, maybe you can make time for one of my questions?" He saw Astrid tense and then force herself to relax - more of a mask of confidence than a decision to trust him - and he plunged on quickly. "Why haven't you ever left the tower?"
Astrid's gaze was stubbornly affixed on the curling ears of the dragon manual, but her response took only a moment to appear: "My mother forbade it."
"Okay, sure, but..." Hiccup shook his head in disbelief. "You could have left anyway."
At this, Astrid jerked to stare at him. "What?"
He held up his hands in a preemptive shield and sputtered, "You made it down jus-just fine yesterday. She didn't have any barriers or obstacles. I mean... yeah, she told you not to." Hiccup sighed. "But you don't seem like the type to let other people get in the way of what you want."
It was as if she wasn't even blinking. Hiccup stared back at her. He'd never really stopped to consider that he was alone. Suddenly he realized that Astrid had never stopped to consider why she was alone too.
Fishlegs, in the distance, let out a loud yelp that Hiccup recognized enough to know that Fish had just dropped a large tome on his toes. Hiccup looked away, and his peripheral vision told him Astrid had looked away too.
He peeked back to see her face harden. She opened her mouth, probably to snap, so Hiccup leaped into the silence, even as he crouched behind his shielding hands. "You don't have to answer!" She frowned at him, and he repeated emphatically, "You don't have to answer."
Astrid cleared her throat. He watched her shift her legs and wince. "Are you okay?"
She nodded, grimacing, as her eyes settled into the glare that Hiccup almost wondered wasn't a default position. "Yeah, it's just... with my mother, if she asks a question... you answer, you know? No other options."
He could relate to that.
Huffing, Astrid dropped her head back to rest on the bookcase. "And she rarely likes my answers! She can't handle the reality that I'm never going to be the dainty, perfect, flowery daughter she wanted."
"No kidding." When Astrid's eyes snapped to him and her fist raised, Hiccup held up his hands again as a pathetic shield and ducked behind them. "That was a compliment, it was a compliment!" She lowered her fist. Her lips briefly twitched upward. Hiccup swallowed back the memories of his own father looking at him with a similar disappointment to what Astrid was describing. "But you're successful, right? I mean, think about when you get back. You took this trip solo. I'm practically just your compass, you know? She'll have to start seeing you in a different way now."
Her whole body sagged. Hiccup blinked repeatedly, confused, as she smiled tiredly at him. "Why do you think I gave you a deadline? She can never know I did any of this." Her hand swung out, gesturing to the library - to the world around them.
Hiccup swallowed. Astrid would return to her tower, and she would never leave again. He'd only ever see her in a memory that would eventually feel like a hallucination.
Something he didn't want to name stabbed at him, and his eyebrows lowered and knit together. "You can't possibly want that."
Her jaw dropped. "What?"
"How can you possibly want that?" His voice was becoming louder, but he couldn't bring himself to care. "You're out here, Astrid! You're living! And everything you've gone against, you've beaten it. Your mother is wrong about you. You'll hate it - you'll hate going back to how it was before, and you know it."
Astrid leaped to her feet and slammed the dragon manual into his chest. "You don't know anything about me," she snarled in his face. Hiccup wheezed, his lungs searching for the air she'd just shoved out of him, but Astrid was already striding toward the door. Even in her fury, she was graceful enough to not disturb any of their precarious piles of books. Hiccup, not so lucky, took his time tiptoeing and high-stepping around the stacks. He still knocked two over, and he didn't have to look at Fishlegs to know the young man's face was twisted in outraged horror.
"Sorry, Fish," he said, throwing a grimace over his shoulder.
"Are you?" Fishlegs hissed, already descending on the books like a worried mother hen.
Astrid shoved the doors open, and Hiccup's instincts, well-developed from sneaking around this castle and the jarldom at large, pushed him faster in her stead.
"Astrid, please," he hissed, remembering his volume now and cursing himself for not remembering it earlier.
He shouldn't have been surprised that she had memorized the route they'd taken. "Stop," he whisper-shouted, and Astrid spun to face him, her arms and fists stiff as she bared her teeth at him.
"You don't know anything about me, so don't bother giving me orders-"
Guards' voices echoed ahead, and shadows skipped around a corner and across the stone wall. Hiccup reached out, snatched Astrid's wrist, and yanked her into a windowless, flame-less alcove. He pressed them both against a wall and into a particularly dark patch of the dead end. He held his breath. Astrid opened her mouth, and Hiccup used his free hand to - as gently as he could - slap it over the words no doubt about to give them away. Her dagger glare was quickly replaced with wide eyes as she heard the source of his caution.
The guards' jingling armor had masked Hiccup and Astrid's hasty retreat, and they watched in silence as the two brutes strode fiercely down the hall, darting across their vision briefly.
Hiccup removed his hand immediately but otherwise steeled himself into immobility as he listened to the clinks of chain-mail and sheathed weaponry fade into other hallways.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, releasing her wrist but staring at an invisible point on the floor rather than catch her gaze. "I- of course I know it's your choice." He grimaced. "I just wish you were making a different one."
"Why do you care?" Her voice was low, but the edge remains.
Hiccup took a small step backwards and twisted his hand in his hair. His fingertips skated across the tiny braid, and he smiled briefly at its small, silly comfort. Staring off down the hallway, he said, "You deserve better."
Because "I'll miss you" was too honest.
You're being ridiculous. You've known her less than two days. He tried to tell himself that, but he already knew it was far too late. He'd known Heather and Dagur for four years, Fishlegs for three times that. As far as they were concerned, the word "toothless" was just a description of some old drunk in an alley.
Hiccup's neck warmed. He was desperate. That was why this speedrun-friendship had happened. That's why she was so uncomfortable by his sudden intimacy. Astrid had clearly lived in a tower for her entire life, and even she could understand boundaries and the meaning of "too much too fast" better than he did.
Astrid sighed. She slid back out into the hallway. "Come on," she said, cold now rather than fiery. "You were going to show me the ocean, right?"
Hiccup jogged to keep up with her. His longer gait didn't mean much when he was cowed and she was pissed off. Wracking his mind for something to fill the silence, the only oration he could wrangle from the depths of his mind all sounded like something that would be punctuated with more not-teasing punches from Astrid.
The silence itself was beaten back by a roar that Hiccup recognized. His memories of it were rare enough that his blood chilled. He froze in the hallway, his ears and mind straining for the scream's location.
"What was that?" Astrid's fists were already wrapped around the handle of her frying pan.
"That would be Corran."
She frowned at him, no longer glaring - no doubt because Corran's fury was far more threatening than Hiccup's idiotic honesty. "I thought you said he was the quiet, brooding one."
"Find it!" The hallway echoed with Corran's howling curses snarling, raging across the stones. Hiccup's blood chilled, because in all his adventuring and falling for a stranger, his mind had decided the initiating event wasn't worth remembering.
"The crown," he groaned. If the universe hadn't already lined up enough evidence of his idiocy, Hiccup convincing himself that Corran wouldn't notice the missing crown, today of all days, was convicting information enough on its own.
"The crown?" Astrid repeated slowly, completely tense. Her eyes flicked down to the floor, as if remembering something. Hiccup could guess she was clever enough to have searched him back in her tower, and the crown no doubt caught her eye.
Both of Hiccup's hands ran through his hair. Corran had good reason to blame Hiccup for its disappearance, but that blame would only deafen him face-to-face if Corran saw him right now.
Against his will, Hiccup felt a toothy, awkward, guilty smile pull across his face as he turned to Astrid. "I'd love to explain royal regalia to you right now, truly, I would, but we seriously need to get out of here."
Please trust me.
Her gaze's quick scrutiny of his face seemed to confirm something, and she nodded.
"Follow me," Hiccup whispered, and he took off back down the corridor. Astrid followed.
Hiccup would be impressed if she could memorize this route. At age 10, he'd grown so sick of getting lost in these hallways that he had taken three months just to memorize everything. Whomever this king was who'd built the castle, long before the Vikings - Hiccup thought anyone with such atrocious architectural hallucinations deserved deposition, really.
After sprinting down truly countless hallways, crouching in a frankly unnecessary number of alcoves, and even vaulting out of a window and across a small garden and through another window, Hiccup's instincts sent him shoving shoulder-first into a small room. Astrid was just far enough behind for him to kick a smile pile of tunics into a corner and throw himself onto the bed while stretching out the top furs in some neater version of the previous lumps.
He rolled over to watch Astrid carefully slide the door closed. Hands still on the old mottled wood, she scanned the room, frowning even deeper when she saw Hiccup sprawled out on his bed.
Hiccup tucked his hands behind his head and propped an ankle on his bent knee. "Welcome to my room," he said, wincing at how forced his cheer is.
Astrid's head swung around quickly, clearly more intrigued now. "Really?"
"I wasn't born on Toothless's back, you know. I have an actual place where I live." Oh, so his sarcasm decided to return, did it? It certainly would have been lovely to have it fifteen minutes ago rather than the embarrassing honesty that tumbled out of his tiny brain instead.
Astrid stepped away from the door in order to explore every nook and cranny of the room. Hiccup watched her run her fingers along the wooden chest at the foot of his bed, poke her frying pan at his unused sword collection - forced upon him by his father - and thumb through the papers on his workbench. Maybe it was the relief of evading Corran, or maybe laying down in his bed had reminded him how tired he was, but weariness weighed heavy on his head and shoulders. The back-and-forth of Astrid's fury and good will was draining.
He'd run into dragon trappers on a number of occasions. Most of his inquiries as to these pirates' purposes had only received responses of cannonballs and nets, but he had managed to free a good number of dragons nonetheless. Some of the creatures, sustaining a range of injuries, had fled to nearby forests with Hiccup and Toothless in pursuit. Watching the animals tremble and pace, snarling when Hiccup approached, squeezed Hiccup's heart tight. He recognized that suspicion and lack of trust here too, in Astrid keeping her distance from him even now.
Maybe the trick was to just treat Astrid like a newly uncaged dragon.
He struggled with responses to that revelation. He'd never had to talk to his dragons before - pacifying them was more about keeping his voice low and soothing rather than actually communicating ideas to them. Comforting noises and body language had been the main indicators. Weighing unspoken words for a few more moments, he sighed. The release caught Astrid's open attention, though Hiccup was certain she'd been hyperaware of him the whole time.
"Truce?" he asked, keeping his voice low, calm, and soft.
"What?" She turned, eyebrows furrowed, still clutching the frying pan.
His head dropped back onto the pile of furs. "Astrid, I don't want to keep arguing with you. I know you don't trust me, and that's okay... for now. But I want you to trust me." She opened her mouth to protest, and he held up his hands. "I know I can't make you do anything. You have to make that choice." Pushing himself up onto his elbows, he shook his head. "It would be easier for both of us if we could get along before... before you go back to your tower." He did his best to ignore some weird ache in his stomach.
She grimaced. "Easier said than done."
"I know. But you know the most important thing about me. You know about Toothless." He ran a hand through his hair as he sat up. "I'm trusting you right now, not to run out into that hall and put his life in danger by just telling everyone. Please, just- just try to keep that in mind."
He watched her thumbs rub at the frying pan handle. "Don't ask any more questions," Astrid finally said.
"I can do that," he immediately replied. Hiccup could bottle his endless curiosity if she'd just stay by him. At least until she was done needing him.
But she didn't need him. Not anymore.
The realization hit him like... well, a frying pan. He'd gotten her to the town. She could see the lanterns from any point in the city tonight without his help. There wasn't a threat in the area that he couldn't protect her from better than she could protect herself. Astrid could probably find her way back home too, Hiccup had no doubt.
The real question was whether Astrid was unaware of this or whether she was choosing to stay with him for the rest of her adventure.
Maybe it was too much to believe that the latter was true, but Hiccup would hope anyway.
Author's Note:
Look at that, another chapter! And so many deep questions! Would you believe that writing anything even vaguely romantic makes me squirm from utter discomfort? You should, it's the truth.
Thanks to the people who have been faithfully reviewing. You bring me joy. And to those who haven't, no worries, friends.
I'll take a break from updating in a few weeks, just so I can catch up on writing and enjoy the holidays. For now, though, Mondays shall continue to yield new fruits of Hiccstrid fun.
