Mors Bellator
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"Sorrows cannot all be explained away in a life truly lived, grief and loss accumulate like possessions."
- Stefan Kanfer
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Ruffnut feels the air forcefully rush from her lungs. This must feel like drowning, she thinks, as she suddenly finds it harder to breath, harder to contain her emotions, her anger, with each word that passes his split lips. She remains in denial as she sprints through the village, convinces herself this must be some cruel, cruel joke; he cannot be gone. He promised he would come back – he hadto come back. He said everything would be fine, that they'd gone through worse things; that it was just another raid. He had promised that they would have a life together, and grow old and senile and crazy until Ragnarök. But the look in his best friend's eyes, eyes so much like her own, is painful and withered. She hears screaming in the background as another raider is slaughtered. But she doesn't care; she has to find him, to prove to herself that they are wrong. She hears her best friend crying in the background, cradled by their chief as he watches after her. Footsteps identical to her own race after her, his voice begs her to stop, but she does not listen. Behind them, Fishlegs has smashed in the skull of a dead warrior in anger with his war hammer.
She skids to a halt in the mud as she clears the edge of the forest where they had been fighting. Finding him is not difficult, as she approaches the front door of what would have been their house, now a smoldering pile of ashes and burnt stone. Nobody has touched him, either in sympathy or in fear of invoking her infamous temper.
A heavy broad sword is lodged in his chest. A large gash in his forehead has leaked blood into his pale eyes, and his jaw is slack, hanging open beneath a gruff beard. A small trail of blood runs from his broken nose, and she can see that is teeth are coated in the copper liquid. The leather twined necklace she had given him for his birthday peeks out from under his torn shirt; the ring on his finger sparkles sickeningly with every crack of lightening from above. His once bright eyes, those rambunctious eyes once so full of life and happiness and love, love for her, now force a blank stare to the heavens above. They are devoid of life, of pain, of anything and everything. She feels her knees sink in the muddy ground; her shoulders had already begun to shake with unshed tears. In a rare display of raw emotion, she tenderly reaches out, and brushed his shaggy hair from his broken face. A face that will never smile at her again, or laugh, or entice her with a corny pick-up line, or tell her how beautiful he thinks she is.
She feels that tears coming now, forcing their way down her own dirty, bloody cheeks. She knows he did this for her, fought for their future and their children. Children they will never have in a future that no longer exists. Finally, the pain is too much, the weight of reality too heavy, and sobs finally shake her strong shoulders. She begins to mumble nonsense, things that only he would understand. She can feel her brother's eyes on her, he stands only feet away. She wants to scream, to cry and shout and slaughter. It isn't fair, she thinks, about how Astrid still as Hiccup and how Tuffnut still has his wife. Finally, she collapses against his cold skin, a sensation foreign when compared to his usually flush complexion. Suddenly, the short years growing up that they spent together pale in comparison to what they could have had, to what they never will. Grief and loss tug painfully at her heartstrings; they will consume everything that she shared with him. Her tears soak his shirt, and her heart shatters with the sad, terrible truth: Snotlout was gone, and despite her pleas, her cries and broken prayers, he was never coming back.
