Chapter 14
Only once in her life had Astrid allowed one of her injuries to remain unhealed.
She was nine years old, and her mother had left for the day to buy supplies. Standing on her toes at the kitchen table, Astrid was squinting with concentration as she chopped the onions with a tiny knife - the only sharp edge in the tower still permitted by her mother's paranoia. Grinning and lifting her chin in triumph, she recklessly increased the speed of her chopping. The knife had slipped, slicing into her finger.
Every other time a wound surfaced on her skin, Astrid would wrap her hair around the injury, sing the healing across her body, and continue on with her day. That day, staring down at the blood surging through the cut, the nine-year-old stood motionless. She marveled at the searing pain the knife had caused. Blood pooled on her skin. A droplet slid off her finger before slapping onto the tiles of the kitchen floor.
It was a brief moment of allowing herself to feel physical pain.
Now, at eighteen, she could feel the cuts on her hands oozing. Her shoulder and head throbbed. This time she couldn't stop any of it. Astrid flexed her muscles, yanked her wrists apart, and rolled her shoulders, but she knew nothing would ease the chain handcuffs fastening her hands together behind her back. Instead, her movements aggravated the slits all over her hands and wrists, and she hissed at the icy blaze of pain.
Shards of broken mirror and droplets of her blood still surrounded her on the floor from when her mother had ambushed her, though Astrid's gaze remained pinned on her mother - and Astrid wished her glare could burn.
Mother scurried around the tower throwing clothes and essentials into a sack. Her pretense of ignoring Astrid would have worked if the woman had ever stopped scolding her.
"This is your fault, dear," her mother snapped. "I kept us safe all these years in this tower, just for you to throw away our one safe space!"
Even if Astrid's throat wasn't already scorched from screaming earlier as she fought against her mother's grip, she still refused to say a word. She hadn't said anything since her mother had held her dagger to Astrid's throat and cuffed her in iron.
The woman didn't seem to need any response to continue her ranting. "Now we can't stay here. It's not safe. And you're clearly too idiotic to stay with me!" She whimpered with frustration as she pushed bars of soap deep into the sack. "We had a good life here! If you weren't such a selfish girl, we could have kept having a good life here!"
A few days ago, those words would have hurt. They still stung like the abrasions on her hands, but Astrid, with a bitter huff of a laugh, recognized that being chained to the column in the room was the bigger betrayal from her mother. Her knees ached. She'd been in this position for several hours now, watching her mother pack, prepare, and pace around while snarling insults.
Her mother whipped around to glare heatedly at her daughter. "Well? Don't you have anything to say?"
Astrid mirrored the look. She merely raised an eyebrow.
The woman sputtered indignantly, face trembling. "You could apologize!"
Breaking her hours-long silence, Astrid said drily, "Sorry for being a normal human being." Listening to her own words spitting like venom, she nearly had an out-of-body experience. Astrid recognized that sarcasm as a new skill, one she'd clearly picked up from Hiccup.
"Astrid!"
"I'm not apologizing for wanting to get out of this cage," Astrid snapped back.
"You're being dramatic!"
"I'm being dramatic? You locked me in a cage for eighteen years! You're the one who's dramatic!"
Her mother strode to Astrid, her ever-polished black shoes protecting her from the shards of mirror. The woman towered over Astrid, eyes wide and dark with fury. She hissed, "I gave you every comfort. I made sure you wanted for nothing. I kept you safe, clothed, fed, clean, and loved. And for what? So you could run away."
Astrid's laugh was cold. "I'm beginning to think you did all that for yourself, not for me," she said, only realizing the truth as it flowed from her mouth. "It's not as if you didn't benefit from this." She jerked her chin at her hair, piling up on the floor behind her. It distracted her for a moment, as it lay unbraided and unflowered. A needle of regret poked at her chest. The now withered and broken petals lay at the bottom of the tower, tangled in grass.
She missed those flowers.
The darkness filling the tower served as a grim distraction from her mother's furious tirade, and Astrid welcomed the way that the woman's snapped words faded into a buzz. When they arrived back at the tower this morning, they had not lit any candles, having the intention of going straight to sleep anyway, but even without the candle's familiar beaming, the ceiling loomed oppressively cold, empty, and dark above her. Outside provided little light either, she realized. Never once in her life had gray clouds filled the sky outside her window. With her eyes, she traced the silver edges of the sooty clouds blanketing the sky.
Her mother took a breath, finally realizing Astrid had tuned her out, and that's when they heard it - a faint, echoing, distinctly male voice, cracking with desperation in its search:
"Astrid!"
Even more quickly than Astrid could open her mouth, her mother's hand slapped onto Astrid's face. She still tried to scream in response, but her voice was pitifully muffled: "Hiccup!"
"Astrid!" she heard him call again, and she strained forward, ignoring how the cuffs cut and scratched her skin. Her mother moved behind her, keeping one hand firmly pressed across Astrid's lips. She sensed the woman's muscles tense in their stretch toward the kitchen table before they loosened again. A moment later, her mother held her blue scarf in front of Astrid's face and swiftly grabbed both ends, yanking the scarf into Astrid's mouth. She tried not to gag as her mother tied the scarf tightly behind the back of Astrid's skull.
Again, she tried to reply to Hiccup, but the scarf served just as effectively as her mother's hands had in stifling her shout. That didn't stop her from lunging forward again, ignoring the clangs of her chains in favor of surveying the window. It was large, but not large enough for Toothless to fit through. Astrid had heard her mother's voice echoing in the hollow enough throughout her life to determine that Hiccup was on the ground, perhaps a few stone's throws away from the foot of her tower. He had mentioned to her that their cove was too compact for Toothless to hover at the window without hitting and possibly injuring his wings. Hiccup had climbed the tower's wall once. He could do it again.
"Astrid! Please listen to me!" She clenched her jaw from the effort of listening to his faint yells.
Her mother, meanwhile, scampered around the room, her eyes wide and wild. Astrid smiled beneath the gag. The woman was no match for Hiccup and Toothless combined. Hiccup would help Astrid escape - again - so she could leave her mother behind, and then...
What then?
Never could Astrid have planned for the past twelve hours, even after she'd planned her eighteenth birthday a hundred times in her head over the years. Now she faced an entirely unexpected future.
I can plan it later. Her mind supplied glowing pictures of her mother in these cuffs, Astrid looming above her, Hiccup leaning into her ear to offer some wisecrack. Back in the current reality, the woman turned, their eyes met, and Astrid grinned as wide as she could so her mother could see it around the gag.
Her mother pressed her lips together, scrutinizing Astrid.
From below, they listen to Hiccup yell, "Astrid! I didn't turn on you, I promise! Let me explain!"
Something like a fierce fondness rumbled through Astrid. Hiccup came to find her, even after all the hits he'd taken to the head for his efforts.
Mother darted forward. Astrid twitched away from the woman's hands, but her mother instead grabbed Astrid's hair and began piling it into her arms.
"I'm coming up, okay?"
Her brows knit together as Astrid watched her mother fling the pile of blond locks out the window and let it tumble down to the earth. She tossed a loop of hair over the hook above the window and pulled it taut before looping it around the metal curve a few more times.
Astrid made her best attempt at asking, "What are you doing?" Of course, it came out sounding more like "Wuumph urr yoo doung?" Astrid didn't expect a reply, and her mother didn't give one. Instead, they paused in the silence.
Hiccup's voice, still far below, filled the silence. "Uh, okay! Thank you!" The fondness curled within Astrid like steam rising off something fresh and warm, but confusion at her mother's actions promptly blew the wisps of steam away. Both women listened again, but they heard nothing. The hair trailing out the tower window tensed before swinging back and forth slightly. Hiccup was climbing up.
Taking her time, her mother moved to the table, her face darkening as her brow drew tight on her face. A moment passed like a month before the woman reached onto the table. Her spindly moon-pale fingers wound around the hilt of her dagger.
Time transformed from molasses to lightning. Everything in Astrid constricted painfully, and she began screaming out wordless sounds as her mother flowed back to the window. Her hands couldn't feel the stripes of blood as she yanked and strained against the cuffs. She had snuffed out the pain too well to let it surface now. Instead, dread built within her, long ago too much to stand but still stacking itself higher and higher.
Pressing her back against the wall, her mother curled her bicep to hold the dagger aloft. Astrid tried to scream louder, but it almost seemed as if nothing was coming out of her mouth at all. The steadily deepening cuts on her arms gave her no tactile feedback, but the cloth gagging her mouth was overpowering.
Astrid could hear just fine. She could hear Hiccup's voice - its volume slowly increasing as he climbed, even with the occasional grunt in his words as he heaved himself up the rope of her hair. "I know what it looks like. Let me explain, I'll explain everything. I got here as fast as I could, I'm sorry."
Please, stop. Please, Hiccup. She couldn't say it, but those words stampeded through her mind in a desperate loop for agonizing minutes that seemed to pass by both sprinting and meandering at the same time. Hiccup, please, stop.
Hiccup, who had what seemed like a hundred secret passages and hidden exits to get him where he needed to go. Who hid his best friend, a dragon, from an entire kingdom for three years. Who sneaked out of a tavern with her, unperturbed by the perilous circumstances. Who always seemed to be running circles around whoever happened to be chasing him at the moment. He wouldn't step off the windowsill without surveying the room. Either he would spot her mother hiding in the shadows, or Astrid would signal him to warn him of her mother's presence. He would be fine. Astrid knew it. Everything would be okay, because Hiccup was smart.
His fingers breached her vision, first grabbing onto the rope of hair before finding purchase on the windowsill.
Astrid was begging him, but her voice was so muffled even she didn't know what she begged for.
Her mother's fists clenched.
Hiccup pulled himself up onto the ledge. His eyes moved from his hands, and they scanned the room, and as he stood up, his eyes found Astrid.
Everything in Hiccup seemed to break. Tension crumbled into relief in his face and his shoulders, and he stumbled forward, off the ledge and onto the floor, toward her.
Astrid screamed and lurched toward him because he needed to see, he needed to look, he needed to notice-
But Hiccup's eyes were bound to Astrid alone. So when her mother shot out of the shadows and plunged a dagger into his back, she could witness uninterrupted the spark that flashed across his eyes before drowning in shadows.
Astrid lunged, running against the lock of her chains, as her mother ripped the dagger back out of Hiccup. His fingers clutched at his chest. A scream - more ragged than anything her voice had ever formed - ripped out of Astrid's throat and slammed into the gag. Their entwined gazes fractured as Hiccup slowly looked down at the blood seeping through his shirt. His brow knit together, perplexed, as if the dampness of the blood on his chest mystified him.
Her knees hit the ground at the same time that his did. She continued striving forward, but he sunk further down, twisting in on himself. In her peripheral vision, Astrid could see her mother creep forward, twirling the dagger between her fingertips. Her lips twitched upward briefly before she coldly intoned, "Now look what you've done, Astrid." Her mother spared Hiccup only a displeased glance as she stepped over Hiccup's form like he was dust she had yet to sweep away.
Astrid howled furious words nobody could make out while her mother slung the sack of supplies over her cloaked shoulders, stepped behind her daughter, and began untying the chains from the column. Astrid pressed her toes into the floor and pushed herself up to a deeply slanted standing position. The stones were too slick to provide enough friction, and her mother pulled her back toward the opening in the floor.
Her mother's voice strained with every yank. "Our secret will die with him!" Astrid ran, but still she was dragged back, away from Hiccup, as her mother continued her victory declaration. "And we will go where no one will ever find you again!"
Roaring, Astrid twisted her shoulders to concentrate all her power into one side of her body. She tried to wrench herself forward and out of her mother's control. Hissing now, her mother pulled back harder on the chain. Astrid felt the slightest droop in the knot at the back of her gag. She tossed her head around wildly, and the gag sank lower with every seizing movement.
Her mother snarled, "Stop fighting me, Astrid!"
And the gag dropped, and Astrid turned around to scream, "Never!" Her voice tore across the dark corners of the tower. Astrid matched her mother's glare with every bit of cold fury. "I'll never stop fighting you! Every moment, for the rest of your life, you will always have to watch your back, because I will fight you at every turn, I will pounce on every weak moment, and I will not stop until I'm free!"
Behind her, Hiccup's voice rose, soft and confused. "Astrid?"
Swallowing hurt. Astrid scrunched her eyelids tight to kill the tears before turning her fury back onto her mother. She couldn't leave him here to... to die. The words hurt, but she didn't regret one syllable of them as she said, "Unless you let me heal him."
The chains slackened ever so marginally as her mother's jaw dropped. "Wh... What?"
Astrid squared her shoulders as she set her terms. "I'll go with you quietly if you let me heal him. You and me. Together forever. Just the way you want."
She matched the healing power of her hair with the venom in her spirit as she glared at her mother and finished, "But only if he lives."
At first, it was a punch.
That's how it felt - like someone had slammed their first into Hiccup's ribs. But then something wet expanded across his chest. His head had moved reluctantly, so it had taken him a long expanse of seconds to peer down at the deep red polluting his shirt.
But now everything around him faded, with only arbitrary details catching his attention. He heard the clang of chains clattering to the floor, he smelled something coppery and instinctively worrying, he saw Astrid crash to the ground in front of him, and he felt her arms as she slid Hiccup backwards to lean against the column behind him. The world beyond her fogged beyond his comprehension, yet he could see every crease in her hair and the way her eyebrows curled upward as she crouched at his side. Her hands hovered over the red on his shirt. Staring down again, it gradually occurred to him that he'd been stabbed. All those tales in longhouses and taverns where Hiccup had nursed a hundred drinks and where seasoned fighters curled up their shirts to boast about gruesome scars and to reminisce about how a blade felt like a fist.
Astrid crushed his tunic in her hands, and he shivered as she peeled it off his skin to stare wide-eyed at the hole underneath. Her fingers trembled.
"You've been stabbed," she said, unable to meet his eyes.
"Really?" he managed, and his lips stumbled into an unsteady smile.
"I have magic hair that heals when I sing."
His breath caught in his throat - whether from the wound or from the honesty, he couldn't tell. "Amazing," he whispered.
Astrid's head lifted, but she still couldn't meet his eyes. She couldn't hide that she was terrified. "I'm going to heal you."
Hiccup coaxed her gaze to his with a growing though still pained smile. "Thank you for summing that up." A breath shot out of her - a weak pang of laughter - and his mind finally pieced together the previous moment's conversation between Astrid and her mother above his head. "And then she'll take you," he murmured, and he wondered if she could see how many times he had broken to pieces over the past few days. Every piece for her, and he couldn't bring himself to call it pathetic anymore. Astrid rolled up his tunic to rest above his wound, but Hiccup couldn't force his gaze down to see the damage. Instead, his arms moved slowly toward her, but her hands met his halfway. He watched their fingers interlock, and he murmured, "Don't leave."
"I have to save you," she whispered back, their hands holding her attention now.
"I'd... rather you save yourself." And it was so selfish to say so, he knew it - to leave his father, to abandon his dragon - but he wanted it anyway.
So when he looked away and surveyed the blurred mess of the tower, and a gleaming shard of mirror captured his eye, he built a plan.
Cut the hair. Get rid of her powers. That woman won't want her. Hiccup dies in peace. Astrid lives in freedom. He wasn't much of a poet, but he could admire a beautiful ending.
Hiccup drew his entire focus to that shard, so when Astrid dove down and kissed him, it shocked him to the core like a dagger never could.
Everything existed so loudly and so simultaneously. Astrid's lips pressed against his, uncertain and soft, and though she'd spent her life in this room, he could smell spring grass and awakening trees on her skin. He unraveled his fingers from hers, and even while his right hand inched toward the mirror shard, his left hand enjoyed this last act fully by grazing her jaw with his fingers.
Who would have thought I'd get to kiss her and not make Toothless's new tail?
Distractions, distractions.
He could die in a moment. Just a few more seconds. He was already being selfish anyway.
Leaning forward more, Astrid tilted her head toward his enough that their bottom lips disconnected, and their lungs fought for the breath between them. Hiccup claimed the breath and her lips again. Astrid pressed closer and twisted one hand in the collar of his tunic. Though his eyes were closed, he felt the way she settled into the kiss and into his hand as it cupped her cheek.
And then Astrid's mother ripped her away, and she took his breath with her.
No matter how desperately his lungs heaved, the air came thinner and thinner, and his mind wasn't helping by sending the room into a wild spin. Whether the stab wound or the kiss was twirling his consciousness around, he couldn't tell. Hiccup leaned in the direction he guessed to be forward, blinking and squinting at Astrid, who thrashed in her mother's grip, and then it wasn't her mother's grip but iron cuffs pinning Astrid's arms behind her back. Everything was getting duskier in his vision, but he could at least see the dark-haired woman staring down at him, and Astrid was screaming about promises broken, and Astrid's name was getting harder and harder to say even in the weak whispers that he was barely managing, yet somehow his fingers gripped that mirror shard, so tight that he could feel something slick sliding off the sharp edges of the silver fragment, and it wasn't supposed be like this, because he was supposed to cut her hair, she was supposed to be clutching at the severed hair and asking him why, and he was supposed to be dying, dying like he was now, but watching her mother howl with fury instead of wrenching Astrid away, but watching Astrid run and escape instead of crumble to the ground, and it wasn't supposed to go this way-
Astrid's screams rang in his ears for seconds of eternities.
He didn't realize his vision had darkened into oblivion until he opened eyes he didn't know were closed. Now the tower was dark. The tower was empty.
"Astrid?" he wheezed, but his voice crumbled into nothingness before he could stumble through every syllable. His brain still functioned, but it could focus only on the way the light streamed over his head, and how much fainter and darker it seemed than just moments ago in the early afternoon - still bright enough, though, to show him he was lying in a puddle of his own blood.
That shocked him enough to spark a plan. Half-baked, poorly contrived, and easily suicidal, but a plan.
Hiccup shoved one hand into his wound and felt warmth gush over his knuckles, but he pitched himself toward the window anyway. His free hand clawed at the floor until he was dragging himself onto his knees. Slowly, so slowly, he inched to the windowsill. Inch by inch, he pulled himself onto the ledge.
He would die here if he didn't get help. He couldn't get help if he couldn't leave. He couldn't leave if someone else was moving him, because he could barely move himself.
Tumbling down to lie down flat on the ledge, Hiccup tried to wheeze out a Night Fury's call to Toothless. He had to hope the dragon was nearby, entertaining himself with some small and simple circular flight maneuvers he could manage alone even with a manually-operated tail. Pain striped darkness across his vision, and everything hurt so much now, but he couldn't stop. He envisioned Toothless's ears twitching and searching Hiccup's voice, and that drove him forward.
Hiccup shoved himself up onto the palms of his hands and lurched forward, and he tipped forward, and he was falling, feeling everything in his body fade into places he couldn't quite reach with his mind, hearing the air roaring past his ears fade into nothingness, letting darkness expand across his vision again, hoping Toothless would catch him in ti
Author's Note:
And... you've reached the end of The Tangling.
No, seriously, that's the end.
Okay, chill, put down your frying pans! The sequel is in the works right now, and I've plotted out most of it (me? planning ahead? whodathunk?). I will be taking a few-week hiatus to get the first few chapters the way I want them. Obviously, fic subscribers don't get updates when a sequel is published, so I'll add the first chapter to this fic when I publish the sequel. That way, y'all will still be updated.
If you've decided one fic was enough, thanks, and that you'll be signing off from this adventure now - I just want to thank you for journeying with me. This is the longest project I've ever done, and I'm so glad you were here with me as I fought through 9 years of setbacks to get it here. Yes, that's right, if you didn't read the first author's note, I started writing this fic in 2013. It doesn't look anything now like it did then! But then again, neither do I.
Leave your comments (especially about that long-awaited kiss, because I've never written one before, so I'm hoping it was good?).
Thanks for the ride.
For the record, you are all very useful reptiles.
UPDATE 3/18/2022: The sequel has been posted (or at least the first chapter, as of now). Check out my author profile to begin reading The Raveling!
