EDIT 2/7/16 Mostly just typos.
I think it's time to answer some of your questions! (Since you're all amazing. XD)
Scenes like this, where characters share back story through dialogue, are extremely difficult. I hope I did alright. (Also, it was a chance to let my love for Stalka shine, even if just a little.) With Jack as the peanut gallery.
Chapter 8: This is Our Story
"At least, if you want to know how dragons come into the story," Valka added, before taking another spoonful of her soup.
"That was one of my questions," Astrid nodded.
Valka nodded, settling in to tell her part of the story. "My family comes from an island called Berk, in an archipelago north of Iceland. It was home to a number of Viking tribes, before the area became civilized. According to our history, the islands were once abundant with dragon life. But they've begun disappearing into the sea. There are some left, obviously. And my family has watched over them for generations. That's where I grew up, surrounded by more dragons than people."
Astrid could picture Valka as a young girl, running across a windswept island filled with dragons. The woman had the build of someone who had spent her childhood tumbling around outdoors, and had never really stopped.
Though, if Astrid's family meals had been chaotic with three brothers, she couldn't imagine what they must have been like with two brothers and a bunch of dragons.
"I came to the U.S. for college when I was eighteen," Valka went on, "and I had every intention of returning home afterwards. It was what I thought I wanted. But my plans changed." She looked at Hiccup, whose cheeks turned pink from the sudden attention. But Astrid thought she caught sight of a small grin as he looked down into his bowl.
Valka smiled as she looked back at Astrid. "My first year of college, I met Stoick Haddock, the man who became my husband."
Astrid was not the most empathetic person in the world, by any means. But even she could tell that Valka's smile meant she had been completely and truly in love with her husband. Maybe even still was. And she looked at her son as the product of what she and Stoick had had.
"Stoick was several years older, working his way up the ranks as a prizefighter. Not his most endearing quality at first, I confess."
"Wait." Astrid held up a hand. "Stoick, as in Stoick the Vast? That Stoick?"
"That Stoick," Hiccup said, taking a drink of his sparkling cider.
Astrid leaned back in her chair. "I grew up watching him fight. He's the whole reason my brother got into prize fighting."
Well, that and the fact that Lars just really liked hitting things, and he'd been just smart enough to figure that he might as well get paid for it.
"He and many others," Valka said wryly. "My husband became a legend in his own right."
Astrid looked at Hiccup, trying to connect the gangly twenty-something in front of her with the burly prize fighter whose pictures had been pinned to her brother's wall.
She couldn't see it.
"This ranch has been in the Haddock family for generations, but as a wedding present Stoick had the house and the stables redone so I could bring my dragon, Cloud Jumper, here from Berk. When a child is born in my family, they're given a dragon to be their lifetime companion. The hardest part about college had been being away from Cloud Jumper. And I had thought that agreeing to marry Stoick meant giving him up for good.
"When Hiccup was born a few years later, I took him to Berk as soon as I could fly again. And when we went into the dragon nursery, the first dragon that came over was a newly hatched Night Fury – one of the last of his kind."
Toothless has been lying obediently in the living room, but he sat up as Valka spoke. There was no doubt that he knew she was talking about him.
Astrid looked from the dragon, back to Hiccup, remembering what he had said the day before.
"So he really was a birthday present."
"In the simplest terms, yeah," Hiccup grinned, looking over at the dragon.
Toothless cocked his head to the side.
"I don't think they've been apart more than a day since then," Valka said. "Well, aside from when Hiccup was in the hospital, after he lost his foot."
Toothless came over, since no one had said he couldn't, and came to sit behind Hiccup.
"It's weird," Rapunzel said. "When they're here, they're almost never apart. So when I see Hiccup at school, I keep expecting Toothless to come bounding up."
"That explains the dragon thing," Astrid said. "But it doesn't explain the superhero thing."
All eyes went to Hiccup.
"This one's yours, Fearless Leader," Jack said, taking a drink of his sparkling cider.
"My mom already kind of touched on it," Hiccup said. "It started when I lost my foot."
Jack shook his head. "Uh-uh. That's where you started when you told me the story, and it took months for me to makes sense of it. You need to go further back."
The two boys seemed to have a silent conversation when Hiccup looked over at Jack, as though he had planned what he was going to say, but now that plan had to change. But after a moment, he looked down into his half empty bowl, face pensive.
"I'm trying to say this in a way that makes sense," Hiccup said. "I've thought about it a lot, but I've never had to put it into words."
There was a moment of silence, and Astrid waited as patiently as she could for him to gather his thoughts.
Finally, he took a deep breath, and looked up at her. "Mom goes back and forth between here and Berk a lot. Growing up, I went with her about half the time. But Dad… we were so different, he didn't always know what to do with me when I stayed here." He grinned dryly. "Mostly because I didn't know what to do with myself. I knew I wanted to do something, but whenever I tried I usually made a mess of everything."
"Personally, I think we're all just crazy," Jack interjected.
"And you're the craziest of all," Hiccup countered, not even glancing over. They both grinned, as though it were an old joke. "When I was fifteen, Drago Blüdvist attacked Berk. He's been trying to take it over for years, but that was the first time I was there when it happened."
"I always wondered where he came from," Astrid said. "It seemed like he had some kind of vendetta against you guys, but there was no explanation why." She did not mentioned that her "always" was actually just since the night before, when she had done some internet research into all the fights she had ignored for the past three years.
Only after he said it did Astrid remember what he had said earlier – that his father had been killed in one of Drago's last attacks on the city. She hadn't seen any of the footage of that fight – but she had seen the after math of it. And it had been impossible to miss the news that Stoick the Vast had died while defending a group of civilians against one of the dragons Drago had brought into the city.
"Yeah, it's a family thing," Hiccup sighed. "Each of us has a personal villain – Drago's mine. That one's pretty much fate.
"But that was my first fight. We didn't exactly do well. I lost my left foot, and Toothless lost his tailfin." He rested a hand on Toothless' side. "But we still won. And as we recovered, I realized I had really liked doing something good. I should probably admit that there was a stack of comic books next to my bed at the hospital. So when I started trying to come up with a way to help Toothless fly again, saddle designs turned into an alter ego. I didn't really think about doing anything with it at first, but the idea stuck. Toothless is a Night Fury, so that's where I got the name.
"It didn't help that I'd had a lot of time to watch the Guardians on TV," he said. "That was about the time they started getting a lot of press coverage.
"Anyway, on one of my test flights, while I learned how to control the prosthetics, I – well, there were a lot of crash landings," he admitted sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. "But one in particular. We crashed in the garden of a house I had been flying over for as long as I can remember, a few miles further up the road."
"Right into my tomato patch," Rapunzel said ruefully. Apparently she had never fully gotten over the loss of said tomatoes. "And the pumpkins."
"We pretty much destroyed everything," Hiccup admitted, laughing lightly. "I like tomatoes, but not being covered in them. We got tangled up in the string fence around the garden, which we'd knocked over. I had my pocket knife, and was trying to cut us out, but Toothless wouldn't stop thrashing around. I had fallen out of the saddle, but was still tethered to it. So when he stood up on his hind legs, it pulled me off my feet. He starts pawing at the strings to try and get them off, but he's just pulling them tighter. Admittedly, calling him a 'useless reptile' did not help the situation."
Toothless snorted.
Hiccup grinned before he went on. "That's when we hear:"
"'Are you okay?'" Rapunzel asked, when Hiccup gestured to her.
"I should mentioned that she was pointing a cast iron pan at me," Hiccup said.
Rapunzel giggled sheepishly. "I had a very sheltered upbringing. I had never been off the property, and for most of my life I was all right with that." Her expression sobered. "Hiccup mentioned that we each have a personal villain, and Gothel is mine. She raised me, claiming to be my mother, and telling me that the outside world was a terrible place."
"She was kinda right," Jack said.
Astrid snickered, because Jack was "kinda right".
"But it's also amazing!" Rapunzel said, childlike excitement filling her voice and expression. "It's vibrant, and exciting, and life is better than I ever could have imagined. And I imagined a lot. When Hiccup crashed into my garden, I had finally reached a point where I wanted to get out, and I was ready to leave. Well, almost ready."
"I offered to fix her fence, since I had cut it to pieces," Hiccup said. "There wasn't much we could have done about the garden that late in the season. We started talking, and the more she told me about Gothel, I knew I couldn't leave her there. I didn't know if they were related or not, but it obviously wasn't healthy."
"I came home from Berk one day," Valka said, "and I wasn't even off Cloud Jumper before Hiccup starts telling me how he wants to bring this girl to live with us. It took a while, but once he explained the situation, Stoick and I agreed."
"I left on my 18th birthday," Rapunzel said.
Merida spoke for the first time, looking up from the food she had seemed focused on. "Did Gothel ever even realize the garden was ruined?"
Rapunzel shook her head. "No. I'm not sure she even realized there was a garden. If it's not her reflection, she doesn't pay much attention to it."
"That's the most unforgiving thing I've ever heard you say," Hiccup said, glancing over at Rapunzel for a moment before he looked back at Astrid. "I'm still not sure how Gothel ended up getting into bank robbery. We haven't exactly asked her for her side of the story."
"I still can't figure that out," Rapunzel admitted. "We waited until my birthday so that Gothel couldn't legally drag me back. Of course, when we did a records search, we found out that I'm not her daughter anyways, so there's nothing she could have done."
"I was already homeschooling Hiccup," Valka said. "Suddenly I had two students. Admittedly, she was the better student. Hiccup was a little too busy flying around to focus on his studies."
"I was distracted," Hiccup admitted. "I was…sixteen by that point. Yeah, 'cause Merida is year older than I am. And I had started flying over the city, looking for ways I could help. That's how I met Merida."
All eyes went to Merida, he had just taken a bite of soup soaked bread crust in her mouth. She swallowed quickly. "My turn?"
Rapunzel and Hiccup both nodded.
"Oh." She took another bite, wiping away the bit that dribbled down her chin with the back of her wrist. "My family had come from Scotland because of my dad's work. I was goin' to a private high school downtown, and I wasn't makin' friends. And if you say 'wonder why' Frostbite, I will smack you."
Jack was taking a drink, and Astrid suspected from his grin that that was exactly what he had been about to say. But he remained silent.
Merida waited a moment to be sure there would be no retort, then went on. "I musta watched one too many superhero movies, 'cause one night I just took my bow and started patrolin' the streets."
"I was at the train yards one night when I overheard a rumor about a vigilante archer," Hiccup said. "So I went looking for her."
"He found me, alright," Merida said. "On the roof of an apartment building in the slums. I had just broken up a drug deal, and was about to head home when there's this rush of wind behind me. I was already scared of bein' caught, then I turn around and there's a dragon five feet behind me. I may have tried to shoot him."
"It's the only time I've ever seen Merida miss," Hiccup said. "Thankfully."
Astrid wasn't sure which part of that had Merida looking so self-satisfied.
"At some point in the conversation Merida asked if I was inviting her to join my team. Initially I said no, but the idea stuck. Especially since I already had Rapunzel here, who was getting really good at throwing her hair around."
"Hiccup and I exchanged numbers, and a few days later I got a text askin' if I wanted to join the team. I came here the next day, and the three of us, plus Toothless, became the Big 4."
"I never liked the name," Rapunzel said. "I always considered Stoick, and Valka, and even Cloud Jumper, as part of the team. Even if they didn't fight with us, we've always been dependent on their help."
"I agreed," Hiccup said. "And we pretty much scrapped the name. But we couldn't think of anything else. When the reporter asked what we called ourselves a few weeks later, it came out. We hoped when Jack joined that the media would come up with something better, but they're still using it. Speaking of." He looked over at Jack. "Your turn."
"I worked for Pitch Black, changed my mind, joined the Big 4."
"I'm gonna hurt ya," Merida muttered.
"It's not something I like talking about," Jack said, looking over at Astrid, who sat beside him. "Let's say I have a tragic back story, and leave it at that."
Astrid couldn't deny that she was curious, but could respect that he didn't want to spell it out. Most of her questions had always been answered anyway. Still, she had to ask.
"Did you work for Pitch Black willingly?"
Jack took a deep breath, and she found herself appreciating that he was obviously thinking about his answer.
"I want to say no," he said. "But I can't. He got me when I was young and angry, and I fell for everything he said about being special, and him being the only person who could understand. Even before he got his powers, he was always good at manipulating people's weaknesses."
"So what made you change your mind?"
Jack looked across the table to Rapunzel, and there was a moment of strange silence. The answer was common knowledge to everyone at the table, except Astrid – but none of them was willing to say it. Still, Jack and Rapunzel held each other's gaze long enough, their silent conversation unbearably loud, that Astrid could get the impression what no one was saying.
She decided to leave it at that. He had said enough for her to get the gist, at least.
"So, you all live here?" she asked, breaking the awkward silence that she had accidentally created.
"My family went back to Scotland a couple years ago," Merida said. "I'm here on a student's Visa."
"I don't have anywhere else to go," Rapunzel said.
Astrid looked at Jack. "I'm guessing you're just a freeloader."
"Yup." But his smirk lasted only a moment. "Nah. Pitch got to me because I believed I was alone. All I wanted was a family, and I finally have that."
"When Stoick and I married, we both wanted a large family," Valka said. "But there were complications in my pregnancy with Hiccup, and I wasn't able to have any more children. So, when he started bringing home strays—" she shot a pointed glance at Jack, who grinned at what was obviously an inside joke "—we didn't really mind taking them in. It wasn't what we had planned, but in a way, it was still what we had wanted."
Astrid looked around the table. It was nothing like her own family – though that certainly wasn't a bad thing. The fact they weren't related clearly didn't seem to bother any of them.
"I told you we're all crazy," Jack said.
Astrid snickered, and looked over at Hiccup, who was grinning at the comment. Their gazes met, and Astrid felt her smile grow, a warmth spreading through her chest as his smile did the same.
She decided that she liked his lopsided, imperfect smile, which was a little self-conscious. Just like almost everything he did. He obviously didn't realize how attractive he was, and it made him that much more appealing.
Actually, Astrid realized: she liked him.
She liked him a lot.