Astrid had fallen asleep. And she had no idea how. She had gone to the gym for her usual boxing practice, and then she lied down on the bench to rest for a while. Next thing she knew, she was snapping awake at the sound of her water bottle hitting the floor and splashing water everywhere. She sat up and picked her bottle, her other hand rubbing the sleep off her eyes.

"Morning, sunshine."

Astrid froze. Ever so slowly, she looked up and found Hiccup looking at her from the bench press equipment, a big grin splattered across his face. The green-purple bruise she had accidentally given him still embellished his nose.

"How long have you been there?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.

Hiccup shrugged. "A while."

"And you decided to watch me in my sleep."

"I just didn't want to wake you up." She just stared at him and waited, and soon enough, he was blurting out, "I'm not a creep!"

"Your words, not mine." Astrid shrugged.

"Well, I was just waiting." He pushed himself off the bench. "Because we have plans today."

She crossed her arms. "Since when?"

He frowned and worded his words slowly, "Last week. When we agreed that I would share my secret working out routine with you if you showed up today."

"You realize me coming here to train has nothing to do with you," she said matter-of-factly.

Hiccup shrugged. "All I know is that you could've come to the gym any day of the week—"

"I come here three times a week," she reminded him.

"At any hour of the day—"

"Mornings are less crowded," she interrupted him again.

"And you could've left before I arrived—"

"I fell asleep!"

He pointed at her. "The fact is that you're here." Pointed at his own chest. "And I'm here." He gestured between them. "And we have plans."

"We don't," she said, grabbing her belongings, shoving them inside her bag and heading to the doors.

"Where are you going?" Hiccup asked.

"To the cafeteria."

"What about me?" he whined.

"You're free to do whatever you want, Haddock," she huffed. "I couldn't care less."

"Oh, come on, Astrid." Hiccup rushed after her. "Don't be like that!"

Astrid continued on her way to the main building, and from the corner of her eyes, she saw him stopping and crossing his arms.

"Fine. Leave," he grumbled. "I'll just go… partake in my secret activities. Without you..."

She clenched her teeth and took a deep breath. "Be my guest."

She watched Hiccup sauntering in the opposite direction, whistling with his hands behind his back, and her fists tightened, nails digging into her palms. Her curiosity had been piqued.

Goddammit, that bastard!

She rushed after him, planning on inconspicuously watching where he was going and figuring out his deep secret, then leaving like she had never been there, and going back to treating him like the fly that he was.

… Her plans were ruined as, as she turned on the corner, she found him waiting for her, his back against the wall and his arms crossed in front of his chest.

"Hello again," Hiccup greeted with a smirk.

She froze, blood rising to her cheeks, anger at being caught making her ears ring and her vision darken.

"I knew you were curious," he said, taking a step towards her.

She crossed her arms, glaring at him. "Show me whatever you want to show me before I change my mind."

Hiccup chuckled and shook his head. "All in its own time, Astrid."

Astrid shoved him out of the way and stormed down the pathway.

"You're going the wrong way!"

Hiccup hummed a cheery melody, occasionally stealing glances from the girl walking a few steps behind him. He was thrilled at having her attention, even if he had to put his manipulating skills into action to accomplish that. He led them to the stable and held the door open for Astrid. Hiccup didn't miss the glare she threw at him as she entered first.

Hiccup made his way straight to the black stallion and opened his arms. "Hey, buddy! How have you been?" He rubbed the animal's neck and received a pleasant warm huff of air to his face in response. "Astrid, meet Toothless."

Astrid had stopped at a reasonable distance from the animals, and she stared at him with narrowed eyes. "What… the hell is this?"

"School takes care of rescue animals," he explained with a shrug. "Toothless is one of them."

"I can see that." Astrid rolled her eyes. "What I don't understand is your connection to them."

"When you're a sulky boy with no friends, you end up wandering around all kinds of places."

"Yet you never stepped foot in the gym before last week."

"The grunts coming out of that place still terrifies me. No way in hell little me would go inside!" Hiccup protested.

She let out a snort. "A talking fishbone like you probably would've been eaten alive."

"Yeah, haha. Very funny." He rolled his eyes.

"So one day, I found this guy." He pointed at the horse. "And… I guess I kept coming back after that. Isn't that right, bud?"

Hiccup glanced at Astrid and frowned. She looked uncomfortable. Her eyes were wary, and she kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other like she was ready to bolt out of there at any second.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine," she hissed.

Hiccup continued to look at her with concern. She didn't look fine. "Well, since we came all the way down to this edge of the world, how about a ride?" He went around the stall to pick the saddle resting on the fence.

She shook her head. "No, thanks."

"What? Why not?"

"That's a thousand pounds of pure muscle that could poke a hole through your chest with its hoof!" Astrid shouted, pointing at the horse.

Hiccup laughed as he fastened the girths around the horse's torso. "Could it be that you're scared?"

"I'm not."

"There's nothing wrong with being scared, you know." As he finished working on Toothless' saddle, he led the horse out the stable and watched as Astrid instinctively took a step back at the sight of the approaching animal.

"I'm not scared!"

Outside, Hiccup mounted the horse and held out a hand for her. "Come with me, then."

She glared at his hand, then her eyes went to his, and he made sure to maintain eye contact. He smirked as he watched her making her choice.

At last, Astrid huffed throwing her hands in the air.

"You better not drop me, stable boy," she mumbled as he pulled her up.

"Wouldn't even dream about it!"

She felt sick. Her head spun whenever she looked down, the horse's movements were far too hard to predict, and there was no space for two on that goddamn saddle. One tiny slip and she would be dealing with a nasty fall, possibly followed by that dark monstrosity stomping her to death. And yet, she refused to rely on him for support.

Oh, Astrid could tell that he was having fun. Teasing her, riling her up, and trapping her on top of that messenger of death itself… Whoever said Hiccup was nothing but a naive, gentle, harmless guy couldn't have been more wrong. Hiccup Haddock was a manipulative jerk of the worst kind—the Jack Frost kind! And she would rather face the horse's wrath than providing any more enjoyment in that whole ordeal.

The horse trotted along the grove path, the uneven ground making Astrid almost lose balance a couple of times. Toothless slipped on a loose pebble, and Astrid was mercilessly thrust forward. Despite her efforts not to, she held onto Hiccup's back, hands clenching his shirt's fabric with all her might. Taking notice of their sudden proximity, she let go of him, pulling her hands back as if the contact had burned her.

"It's okay to hold onto me, you know," Hiccup said, looking at her from over his shoulder.

She gritted her teeth and threw a punch at his shoulder. "Eyes ahead, Hiccup. If you make us fall, I swear to God, I will kill you."

Hiccup flinched. "If you're so worried about us falling, you should know that injuring the rider isn't safe practice, Astrid."

"I'll show you safe practice, smartass," she grumbled, and Astrid had to hold onto him again as the horse roughed its way through the school property.

Astrid hissed, closing her eyes.

"Astrid?" Hiccup called, but she could barely hear him, let alone word a reply. All she heard were the echoes of the horse's clopping.

The horse seemed to slow down, but even the slightest of that beast's movements felt like a seven in the Richter Magnitude Scale, and it did little to ease Astrid's anxiety.

"You okay?" Hiccup asked with concern.

"No…" Astrid's nails dug into his flesh.

"Maybe we should stop—"

"Distract me."

"W-what?"

"I said," she snarled, "distract me."

"Okay. Uh…" Hiccup cleared his throat. "Nice weather we're having today, huh?"

Astrid groaned. "You're gonna have to do better than that, stable boy."

Hiccup laughed shyly and scratched the back of his head. "Sorry."

She took a deep breath and rested her forehead against Hiccup's back. She could feel his heartbeat, and she tried to focus on it. "Don't you… don't you know a story or something?"

"Story?" he asked. "Story! Right. Got it. I can do that..."

Hiccup cleared his throat and straightened up.

"Once upon a time, there was a boy…"

The boy's mother had died when he was a baby, so he lived with his father, just the two of them in a big house with far too many empty rooms. The father was an important man, and his work kept him away from home often. Thus, the boy was frequently left to the care of nannies and housekeepers. They never really had a very close relationship, but the boy still loved his father. And even though the boy doubted it at times, his father also loved the boy dearly.

You see, for a long time, the boy didn't think he was worthy of his father's love, and he dreaded his father's resentment more than anything in the world. Seriously, how could he not? He was such a wimpy child that all the adults feared he would perish under the harshness of the world. And their assumptions were not baseless. The poor boy was small, weak, and so clumsily he could be considered a liability in others' lives. The boy was a laughing stock, and it didn't stop there: the boy's bad luck wasn't limited to his physical attributes. The boy also had a brain far too big for his tiny complexion. Although he used his sharp tongue as a shield, his contemptuous words filled to the brim with sarcasm put him in difficult situations more often than not.

So the boy's unpopularity was no surprise to anyone. With no friends to call his own, the boy played alone most of the time. Locked up in his house with only his mind to keep him company, the boy let his imagination roam free. He created fantastic words with dragons and monsters, his toys came to life and acted out his convoluted narratives, he lost track of time as the voids of loneliness were filled with stories of fantasy, of heroism, and of adventure.

One inconspicuous day, the nanny got sick, and no stand-in could be found at such short notice. His father was supposed to leave work early, and the boy would be left unattended for only a couple of hours. No one imagined the harm those couple of hours could do. No one ever does.

Well, the thing is… something unimaginable happened. While the boy played in his room, enthralled with sword fights and alien spaceships, he fell asleep. But that was not the terrible part. The terrible part was that a fire started downstairs. The firemen said something about a short circuit on the old power board igniting the fire, but that kind of detail hardly mattered. What mattered was that the fire spread, and it consumed the house as the boy slept.

The boy woke in startlement, fumes burning his eyes, and the room's increase in temperature making it hard to breathe. He tried to get out of there, but the doorknob was too hot for his hands, and the windows were too heavy for him to open. That was when he started to panic. He would never forget the pungent odor of smoke or the taste of ashes on his tongue.

He punched and kicked the door, he screamed for help, cried for god to have mercy on his life, prayed for his father to come and save him.

But no one came.

To the boy, it felt like he had been trapped in that room for an eternity. His sight began to blur, he started to lose conscience. As the room darkened with smoke, his hopes of being saved faded, the concept that that would be his end set in, and he stopped trying.

The last thing he saw was the roof collapsing.

By the time the boy had regained conscience, he was in a hospital bed, immobilized with a tube going down his throat, and attached to a heartbeat monitor beeping loudly somewhere in the background. His father was there too, and by the man's disheveled look, he had been there for a while. He sat next to the bed, holding the boy's hand. Trails of tears started in his eyes and disappeared somewhere in the man's thick beard. The man was the first thing the boy saw when he woke up. And the way the father's eyes lit up… was unlike any other moment they had ever shared. It was as if the world had stopped, and the boy's life was the only thing that mattered. And in hindsight, the boy should've been thrilled to connect with his father, happy to be loved, glad to be alive.

But he didn't feel anything. Not when his father gave him a bear hug that could've crushed his bones. Not when the doctors took the catheter off his throat, not even when he realized that the itch on his leg… meant that… his leg was no longer there. He was too high on morphine to feel any distress—physically, that is. In his mind, he felt an emotional void, an apathy, an unattachment to the rest of the world that the doctors would later diagnose as PTSD.

You can imagine what came after. Therapy, antidepressants, rehabilitation, misplaced anger, a lot of self-loathing, and too much time mulling over the 'what if's in his life. What if someone had checked the power box before it blew up? What if his nanny didn't get sick? What if he wasn't left alone at home? What if he was out with friends instead? What if the firemen had arrived sooner? What if… it had all ended in that fire?

"Don't say that."

Hiccup jumped. He had been so lost in his own memories that for a moment he forgot about his companion. He looked down at his chest. Her arms were wrapped around him, and he wondered when that had happened.

"He survived," Astrid said in a weak whisper. "That's what matters."

He wheezed out a shaky laugh. "Yeah."

He furrowed his eyebrows, trying to think of something else to say. Nothing that would lighten the mood came to mind. She didn't say anything either, so they fell into silence. And as the silence grew heavier, he cleared his throat.

"I-I don't think that way anymore, by the way," Hiccup said. "At least not often."

"That's good to know," she mumbled.

"Bet you weren't expecting this kind of story, huh?" he tried to joke, but his voice tone was still too sullen to be funny.

"You could say that again..."

"Sorry." He sighed, messing his hair with a hand. "I tried to go personal, maybe that was too personal."

"It was fine."

"But... I guess me pouring my soul out to you served its purpose."

"Meaning?" she asked, untangling herself from him, and Hiccup immediately missed her warmth.

He gestured with his head ahead. They had made their way back to the stable. He had successfully distracted her during their ride.

Avoiding making eye contact with her, Hiccup helped Astrid down and hurriedly led Toothless back to its stall. He took his time carrying for the horse, trying to cool off, but nothing he did ease the tightness he felt on his chest. He half-expected Astrid to go back without him, but to his surprise, she was still there.

"You didn't have to wait," he mumbled, looking anywhere but at her.

She crossed her arms. "Are you trying to get rid of me, Haddock?"

"N-no! I… I just…" He groaned, his eyes glued to his sneakers. "I don't know how to look at you right now… Things feel… raw…"

Astrid hummed, and he didn't have time to dodge the punch she threw at his chest.

"Ow! What?! Why did you do that?" Hiccup cried, rubbing a soothing hand on the injured spot.

"That was for the manipulation," Astrid snarled.

Then, he felt himself being pulled by the collar of his shirt. He closed his eyes, preparing himself for the blow, but it came in a completely unexpected way.

Something soft touched his cheek, and his eyes widened with startlement. Every single one of his muscles tingled, his heart beat fast inside his ribcage. His palms were sweating. He stopped breathing. His brain melted. His body froze. He couldn't move, and it almost felt like he was having an extracorporeal experience. Seeing what was happening but unable to react. Did she really do what he thought she did? Her lips were on his skin! She—she was kissing him!

Astrid pulled back and tucked her hair behind her ear.

"That's… for everything else."