"The greatest illusion of this world is the illusion of separation. Things you think are separate and different are actually one and the same… We are all one people, but we live as if divided."
In Which Hiccup Finds Out What to do with Vikings
Hiccup had forgotten about the traps.
To say it was spring would be misleading as the season was late and fleeting on Berk but, on the whole, winter had eased off. Storms were still nothing to mess with and everything was still frozen, but the midday sun felt a bit warmer and the cold no longer seemed to freeze the very air solid at night.
Which meant that he hadn't been in the wilds for a year when he found himself cautiously venturing south. Though he wasn't exactly sure why. His return to the village was something of an inevitability, but he hadn't figured out how to approach it. He was not going to give up Toothless or put him in danger, simple as that, but not returning seemed an overreaction. There had to be a middle ground between the two.
Perhaps he could return only briefly, assure everyone was alive and not a failure, convince his father that he still had something to prove and head out again. But that would require Stoick the Vast listening. And how would Hiccup reintroduce himself? He had a feeling that 'Hey, Dad, been gone for a year nicetoseeyou I'm leaving again bye' would not go over well.
So he made the mature decision to put the entire thing off. Until he had half an idea how to go about it, at least.
In the meantime he drifted southward on dragonback. He made sure Toothless never approached even the general area of the village and they kept their daytime flight low, but there was always a risk. One that Hiccup couldn't justify. Their side of the island was safe, and if he wasn't going to the village he had no real reason to be in the south. Still, between their long exploratory flights to the rest of Berk's reaches and small surrounding islands, he would find himself spending an afternoon here and there treading familiar ground in the south. It was pleasant, if oddly surreal to see his best friend, the Nightfury, frolicking and nosing about his childhood haunts.
But.
He had forgotten about the traps.
And the first one they found came close to maiming, if not removing, one of Toothless's forelegs.
The very worst part was that Toothless had seen it, knew it was there but didn't know what it was, and had gone to investigate. Hiccup noticed in time to cry a warning bare moments before a barbed chain noose would have cinched closed around his leg and snapped back with enough force to lift and suspend him in the air. Toothless was confused by his alarm until Hiccup, very solemnly, very deliberately, very carefully, sprung the trap.
The metal noose screeched as it snapped shut, recoiled and ripped across the frozen ground like a thing alive and snapped into the air with a whip like crack. Toothless nearly jumped out of his skin. He remained frozen to the spot, eyes wide as saucers, ear-lobes flat to his neck, weight on bent back legs and wings half spread in alarm. The limp noose chinked metallically and swung empty, fifteen feet off the ground.
Never before had Hiccup seen Toothless truly frightened. Worried, sure, but not scared. Just then he would have described the dragon's expression as horrified.
Because Toothless understood. It wasn't just shock at the sudden movement or fearful sound, it was a dawning realization. That could have been him.
The young Viking's heart ached, but there was a small, sad smile on his lips. Because Toothless grasped the danger, and was a quick learner. He would know snares in the future. He would be safe.
Hiccup was proud of Toothless. He had always felt some awe and occasionally a fond, good natured envy towards the Nightfury's strength, speed, and coordination. He was somehow admirable, even when the little cat sized butterball was still unsteady on his feet. And he had only become more formidable since. Now he couldn't deny that Toothless was brave as well.
Immediately after his first encounter with them, the Fury made it his business to ferret out traps. If they were there, he would find them and call for Hiccup. Not only did he understand the danger to himself, he realized that they would mutilate anything that tripped them. Avoiding them was not enough- they were a threat that needed to be rendered harmless.
The tripping and occasional destruction and removal of the traps brought some guilt- Hiccup had spent long hours in the forge crafting parts for similar contraptions, often bettering the designs while he was at it, and even aided his peers in setting a few. Every step of the process took time and resources and effort, all of which he was sabotaging. But he couldn't bring himself to regret it.
He noticed early on that the people of his village had little idea as to what they were doing. The traps were placed poorly, almost randomly, or with the same logic that one would set a rabbit snare. To say that the traps, even those that were baited, were ineffective was a gross understatement. Hiccup was briefly baffled as to how they managed to catch any dragons at all.
Then it occurred to him that the Berk's archipelago alone was massive and the world beyond it even more vast. That only Terrors seemed to have a home range, and that he rarely saw the same individuals of the larger species and assumed they were nomadic, or at the very least that their ranges were huge. That it was possible some had never been to Berk, or encountered a snare.
That the first time Toothless saw one he'd approached it with curiosity and no inkling of danger.
Hiccup then, for once in his life, did his best to stop thinking and not follow those thoughts to their logical conclusion, but a trembling chill swept down his spine despite his winter furs. And though he spared a thought for his people each time, he felt less than remorseful for destroying the traps. He left valuable metal where it could be recovered, but more than once he went out of his way to leave more gruesome traps beyond any repair. Not even quench hardened metal could stand up to a few of Toothless's plasma blasts.
It quickly became a game whenever they spent a day in the south. Hunt down traps. Take out as many as possible. Dodge what Vikings they came across.
They didn't encounter villagers often, but it always prompted Hiccup to whistle an immediate retreat to Toothless, even if the dragon wasn't close enough to pick him up. He felt foolish hiding from his own people, but the very thought of being 'found' made his shoulders slump and his throat close up.
So he hid.
Every time.
It was how he discovered that the villagers never looked up. Small groups of about half a dozen came out to check, reset, repair, and set new traps. Though they would cast nervous glances at the sky, Hiccup found he could tuck himself high in an evergreen tree to hide while he kept an eye on them. He was never close enough to recognize familiar faces or hear anything other than distant swearing when they discovered a particularly ruined trap.
So it was with trepidation and excitement that he found himself close enough to watch them set up a trap. Trepidation because they were that close, excitement because the unfamiliar trap had a complicated mechanism, and dismantling the thing would be child's play if he saw it set. He pulled down his mask to hide the pale plane of his face and waited, hidden in plain sight, until the chattering Vikings moved off. The moment their voices faded to silence he was out of the tree and crouched next to the mechanism that had been not-so-subtly hidden in a tangle of saplings at the base of a half dead tree. The Vikings never backtracked, he was in the clear and had no reason to think he should have waited longer before he abandoned cover-
-until an axe buried itself in a tree trunk a foot from his head.
Hiccup froze, but didn't jump. He'd learned well that quick movements were more trouble than they were worth, and he returned to working fiddling with the mechanism without so much as a glance at his attacker. The axe was confirmation enough- he'd reground the bevel and edge enough times to know who it belonged to.
"Easy there, Astrid!" He called as he prized up a slat of wood that protected the mechanism's more delicate workings. "I'm not a dragon!"
A rustle to his left went completely silent. A beat, then-
"Hiccup?"
Yup, that was Astrid, though he'd never heard her so… surprised before. She was something of a prodigy, easily the most promising Viking of their generation, and was never caught off guard. He wasn't sure why he would throw her off balance. Perhaps looking at her would give him a few clues, but nerves kept his eyes down and his hands busy.
"Yeah. Not a lot of other people out here…"
"It's really…" She took a few cautious steps into the open, but kept her distance when she bent to peer at him. "Why are you wearing…"
Hiccup paused, confused. His winter clothing wasn't that odd. Sure he'd modified it- extra fur around the edges, Nightfury scales around the collar and Nightmare scales on his forearms and boots for protection. He'd burned Hooligan motifs and a stylized dragon or two into the leather out of sheer cooped-up-in-a-snowstorm boredom- and flying tended to wear…
Oh.
He pulled his mask up and, when he noticed that Astrid still hadn't recovered from her shock, slid it off completely for good measure.
"It- it's good against the wind…" He'd forgotten he was wearing it, and shot her an apologetic smile.
Her eyes only got wider. "Hiccup, your hands…!"
"It's just dye!" He quickly offered up his blackened hands, flexed his fingers and showed where the dye started to fade just past his wrists for good measure. The dark skin was arresting, especially against the white of the snow, but its superficial resemblance to severe frostbite hadn't occurred to him before.
"I was working on some new gear, and when the leather is thick and stiff you really have to work the stain in…"
Hiccup retuned his attention to the mechanism and trailed off, more than a little self-conscious. He took a breath, relaxed, and focused on slipping a series of gears with a metal pick. When Astrid started forward, he shook his head with a sigh.
"Step around the outside." He made a loose gesture toward where she should walk, but didn't look up. "Don't want you snared if I accidently trip this thing."
Astrid heeded his advice and wrenched her axe from the frozen tree as soon as she was close enough. Hiccup didn't react. After a pause she crouched on the opposite side of the mechanism.
"You're the one that's been sabotaging our traps."
It wasn't a question, and the words were hard and sharp as her axe.
"Mostly…" Hiccup admitted. Which was true. Toothless had become adept at neutralizing basic snares. And speaking of Toothless, where had the overgrown lizard gotten off to…?
He passed the pick to his mouth, held the wood grip in his teeth and used a smaller one to shift a gear.
Click.
"Why?"
"Well," he shifted the pick to the corner of his mouth and spoke around it. "This one is more likely to catch a careless human than a dragon…"
"And how?" Astrid all but cut him off, but sounded more baffled than angry.
Hiccup paused, looked from the mechanism to the pick in his teeth, then finally up at Astrid. He raised his eyebrows, then, very deliberately, twisted his wrist and disengaged another gear with an audible click.
"That's not-" Astrid snorted and looked away to disguise a contained a laugh. "No. That's not what I meant. I mean, some of the traps were tripped, and some were cut, but some were melted. We all assumed it was a dragon…"
"Yes. Well." Hiccup's efforts had cleared enough room for him to wedge the last gear out of his housing, and he rendered the grisly trap harmless with a twist of his fingers. "I might have had some help…"
He mentally cringed. If ever there had been a time to lie-
Astrid was not one to let something like that slide. Hiccup could fairly hear her bristle.
"Start talking." She growled and raised her axe, but looked just as surprised at confronting Hiccup as a threat as he was about being considered one.
"Uh…" His step back was halted when Astrid seized the fur ruff of his coat.
"It better not involve this-" She tugged at the rounded blue-grey Gronkle scales that covered the clasp of his hood.
The tone struck something in Hiccup. A fight was the last thing he wanted, but he centered his weight and pushed Astrid's hand from his collar.
For a moment Astrid was too shocked to react.
"We don't have to trap them, Astrid." He completed his step back and met her glare with a level look that bled into earnestness. "They hate these traps as much as we would if our people were routinely maimed by them."
"You've been working for them?" Disbelief was clear in her voice.
"Not the words I would choose…" His mind scrambled desperately for a solution. Running would only make things worse and he would be as ineffective in a fight as a fight would be at finding a solution. He backed off again, and cast about for alternatives. None were forthcoming.
It was Astrid who unknowingly provided one when she stepped up on the metal shell that had shielded the trap's mechanism and hefted her axe.
Hiccup knew that she was just trying to intimidate him. It was how Vikings worked and, while he was alarmed and a bit of pain was not out of the question, he knew Astrid wasn't about to axe him. Still, it was a clear threat. And not only clear to him, apparently.
A snarling growl ripped from the shadowed undergrowth and rolled through the clearing. The sound alone was enough to raise even Hiccup's gooseflesh. Astrid went sheet white, her gaze fixed on a point behind Hiccup. She was still for only a moment before her training kicked in.
"Hiccup move!" She leapt forward to shove him aside, but Hiccup was a step faster.
He ducked her arm and twisted her axe from her just as she pulled back to throw it. Only when it was safely out of her grasp did he finally catch sight of Toothless.
The dragon moved like Hiccup had never seen, smooth and fast and all at once like a black waterfall cascading over the landscape. Cupped at his sides, his wings made him look twice his size. His head was bowed, pupils narrowed to catlike slits in his brindled green eyes.
Hiccup cast aside the axe without another thought and met Toothless before he could approach to Astrid.
"Hey, bud. Easy, easy." He laid the flat of his hand on the dragon's broad head, his touch light. "She's a friend…"
Toothless's response to his reassurance was immediate. The aggression eased from his posture and he made no move toward Astrid, though his gaze remained fixed on the girl as he leaned toward Hiccup. There was curiosity alongside his caution, and Hiccup smiled.
"There. See?" He turned back to the still reeling Astrid. "You just scared him."
"I scared him?" Her voice rose, almost frantic. "Hiccup, it's a-"
Toothless cut her off with another growl, but this time the sound was lighter, almost breathy. Hiccup recognized it for what it was- halfhearted and verging on admonishment, more watch your tone than anything else- but it was enough to make Astrid flinch.
"… Nightfury?" Hiccup supplied.
He ran a hand along Toothless's neck and Astrid tracked the movement like she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Which she probably didn't.
"Astrid, Toothless. Toothless, Astrid."
Toothless made his uncertain gru gru gru sound, but tipped his head and perked up his ear-lobes. His pupils had rounded, and Hiccup patted him in encouragement. Astrid looked back and forth between the two.
"Toothless." She managed.
"Umm-hmm." Hiccup nodded.
"The Nightfury."
"Aye-yup. You want to come say hi?"
She huffed in disbelief.
"Come on, Astrid!" Hiccup wheedled with a growing grin. "A Nightfury! No one's ever even seen one before! You're going to turn this down?"
"You've seen one before!"
"Oh," Hiccup flicked a hand in exaggerated dismissal. "This pushover is the least of what I've seen."
Toothless huffed and slapped Hiccup upside the head with an ear-lobe. The Viking only laughed and donned a placating posture, the dragon blurbled and rolled his weight.
Astrid watch the exchange, baffled and disarmed in more ways than one. The aggression and much of the fear had left her posture, but Hiccup wasn't sure what had risen in its place. She didn't respond.
Hiccup's brows knitted in thought and he absently scratched behind the smaller lobes along Toothless's jaw until the Fury hummed with contentment.
"I'll tell you what. We've caught you off guard, and Toothless and I have to leave soon if we want to get back before nightfall…"
Astrid looked like she wanted to ask get back to where? but was too distracted by the purring Nightfury.
"How about we meet up tomorrow, and you give us a chance to explain before you report back to the tribe?"
"But Hiccup, it's a Nightfury. If the Chief knew-"
"Yeah, I know. Trust me, I know exactly what the Chief would do if he knew." Hiccup had to force himself not to turn away, but he raised a hand to his head and sighed. "Look, Astrid- Toothless isn't dangerous. I can show you, just give us one chance. And after that…"
Astrid finally looked back to him, stared him square in the eye, her face stony.
"One chance." She repeated. "You get to explain yourself. What do I get?"
"I've learned a lot. About dragons." He knew full well what Astrid would probably use that information for, but he had to try. Hiccup hesitated, but ground out his next words. "I can show you, teach you. And then if you still want to turn us in…"
Astrid turned sharply and strode to retrieve her axe.
Toothless tensed and snapped to alertness again, but Hiccup kept a hand pressed to his neck. Hiccup had only a hatchet and had never wielded it as a weapon, but the Nightfury had clearly made the connection that the axe was a danger. That was good, but Hiccup did not want to make a move against Astrid. Not yet, anyway. So he prompted Toothless to be still and watched, wary.
Astrid swung the axe onto her shoulder and half turned back.
"One chance." She glared at him, but didn't so much as glance at Toothless. "Meet me at Raven's point tomorrow. I'll be there at noon."
Hiccup let out a long breath, but watched Astrid stomp away.
She didn't once look back.
The young Viking and the dragon were all too eager to escape to the sky as soon as they were alone again.
Woah! Dialogue! I didn't know how this would work. I love dialogue, it's not a chore for me and can be so much fun!- but in this style? In MSotM the speech is fairly straight-up with little description in conversation. So I didn't really stick to that. At all. (Also avoided all of the gollys and gees. You're welcome.) Let me know what you think of the dialogue, and if it fits with the style!
An Astrid that is not being snarled at by a Nightfury and does not feel that her hard won reputation is being wrongfully usurped by a cheating fishbone is an open minded Astrid! More open minded, at least… And I swear It'll be written on Hiccup's tombstone (were Vikings into that):
HERE LIES HICCUP HORRENDUS HADDOK III
HE HAD TO TRY
Can't hold it against him though, it is one of his greatest strengths (and weaknesses, wee lamb), and a huge part of the reason why he is so awesome. Long live the Chief.
Yes, I am aware of the proper spelling of Night Fury (and its plural). I will continue with Nightfury(s) for this story, though. Think of it as a stylistic change. It fits better, somehow…
MORE THAN 100 FOLLOWERS! You guys are amazing! It warms my heart to know that so many are enjoying this happy little jaunt! Oh, and you reviewers- after my own heart! Well met ye kindred spirits!
Four chapters left, if all goes according to plan. I'm going to try not to split any of them, so we'll see how that goes.
Almost forgot! Today's quote is from Guru Pathik of Avatar: The Last Airbender! You tell 'em, Guru!