Annnnnd we're back. For the final two chapters of this story. I hope you've been enjoying it thus far. A couple of weeks have gone by since the last chapter, just so you know. It's not explicitly stated. A little NSFW talk at the top of this chapter.

Hiccup was talking.

He had his head in her lap and she put little braids in his hair and thought about the night before, when his head had also been in her lap, sort of. She'd had her fingers in his hair then too, but sloppily, not having the mental steadiness for much else. And there were other differences between then and now—now it was cold and they wore their winter vestments, where last night it had been warm under the furs and the sweat and they wore nothing; then they had been in the snug confines of her bed and her room and here they were out on the ash island, icy archipelago on the horizon, snow clouds overhead threatening a storm. His lips moved as he spoke and she thought of them moving against her, over her breasts and down her stomach and between her legs, the result of a quiet suggestion but it felt as though he'd planned to go there all along, so willingly had he run with the idea. He liked to drive her mad, didn't he, and he was good at it, stupid idiot, smart mouth, genius mouth—

"Ow!"

She snapped out of it—excited, she had pulled some of Hiccup's hair, and he sat up now, looking offended.

She winced. "Sorry!"

Hiccup put a hand to his head, stroking the sore spot. He recovered from the shock enough to ask, "So what do you think?"

Oh. Whoops. "Uh," Astrid managed, turning her gaze to Toothless and Stormfly, who napped in a heap nearby. She tried to keep a level voice. "Well. You know."

Suddenly a schoolmaster, Hiccup disguised his obvious disappointment with a patient tone. "Did you listen to anything I just said?"

They made eye contact, and the truth emerged. Disgruntled, Hiccup adjusted his seat and made an unhappy sound, while she went about patting his arm, attempting consolation.

"I was just distracted by how handsome you are," she offered hopefully. He tossed her a glare.

"You need to stop trying that one. It doesn't work."

"What were you saying?"

"Are you going to listen this time, or do you want to braid my hair?" She glared this time, and he ducked his head, and went on. "I want to build stables in the caverns under the village."

Astrid sat back, open-mouthed, the ground cold even though the thickness of her skirt. "Dragon stables?" The caverns ran all under the island, but they were dark and frightening and inaccessible. Hiccup had only discovered them because of a Whispering Death attack—that pretty much epitomized Astrid's feelings about the dangerous tunnels.

"Yeah, I mean…" He started to gesture along with his words, in that emphatically awkward way he did when fueled by strong feeling. "The village is expanding, more people get their own dragons every year, we're going to run out of space. It makes sense to have a place for the dragons!"

"For all the dragons?"

"That's the idea."

There were dozens on Berk already, and if he wanted to accommodate the growth—she couldn't envision the huge structure necessary for this task. But, looking at the determination of Hiccup's chin and the glint in his eyes, she knew he could. That determination and that glint had gotten Berk far. And she trusted him now more than she ever had before.

But. "I think…" He glanced up at her, excited still, but nervous too. Elbows on his knees, clasped hands dangling in the space between them. "I think you're a little crazy," she admitted.

"I need to convince my dad that—" As soon as these words escaped him Astrid was frowning. Hiccup caught that but barreled through, insistent, "—we can really do it, after everything with Dagur, we need a project. We can prove ourselves to him."

Mediating the expression of impassion that crossed her face would've been impossible, so she didn't try. "We?"

"I can't do it alone—just me and Toothless, it won't work, I need you to help me plan the practical stuff, and keep people from—setting things on fire, I don't know." What a responsibility, she thought glumly.

"It's the middle of winter, Hiccup." With a frustrated grunt, he hauled himself to his feet. "Your father is not going to be impressed if you suggest channeling the village's resources into a pet project—"

"It's not a pet project! Come on, Astrid, think about it." He started to pace, and she stood too, feeling unsettled by stirred emotions. "There's so much we could do for Berk, there's so much more it could be, we just need him to believe that something this is possible, and then—then we can do anything!" As he spoke a grin had crawled across his face and now he stood there, arms wide, like the breadth of his passion. His breath ran ragged, exhales unfurling in the chilly air between them.

She hesitated, then scuffed her boot on the ground. "Promise me you'll tell the council it can wait until spring?"

Hiccup's head bobbed, thrilled by her implicit approval. "It can. It can absolutely wait until spring."

"Then I'll help. I guess."

"Ha!" He spun around once on his prosthetic, then stumbled—Toothless's head popped up, then fell back to his paws once he observed Astrid grab Hiccup's arm, steadying his master. As Hiccup caught his balance, she took a step toward him.

"Why is it you always need to be doing something with your hands?" she demanded.

As if to prove her point, he placed them on her shoulders, shrugging. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, you're restless." She nudged him in the gut.

"And you're not?"

"I'm spirited. That's different from restless."

He laid a palm against her cheek, brow furrowed in not-quite-understanding, which sent a funny wave over her whole body, and for a moment she couldn't remember how to speak. "Bad different?" he asked, in a low voice.

"I guess… I guess it wouldn't be so bad if some of the stuff you did with your hands could be—to me?" Despite her best effort, she smirked a little on this line, and Hiccup's hand fell away. He had not expected a come-on.

"That's every night this week, Astrid!" The strain in his voice read somewhere between scandalized and flattered.

"You're not enjoying it?" There was a real note of doubt in this question, much to her surprise. Despite Phlegma's rigorously contrary rearing, a young girl on Berk couldn't escape the traditional wisdom that a wife's duty was to please her husband and bear him children, above everything else. They were not married, of course, not yes, but if she couldn't do it now—when all was new, and exciting—

"No, that's—definitely not it," he said, with an oddly truthful eye roll. "Like really, really, not—" She blushed, distracting Hiccup, who struggled to get on with his point. "Listen, you know, we have to be careful—"

"I'm drinking the tea Gothi gave me!" she shot back, not mentioning that it tasted distinctly of piss, and gave her crippling bouts of nausea.

He shook his head, "I don't trust the tea."

"Well, we can just…" Astrid brushed a nonexistent bit of dirt from his shoulder, innocent. "Do more of the stuff where that whole… business, isn't a concern." When she glanced up, his cheeks were red, his eyes were searching her person and finding recent memories, recalling vivid knowledge. Embarrassed lust. Cute and satisfying.

"Was it…" he began, but the timid insecurity wouldn't let him get out the words. Convenient, then, that she could read the question in his face. Was it good?

Astrid leaned in and said by his lips, "What do you think I was so distracted by before?" and kissed him before he could splutter in disbelief or indignation. Hiccup's shoulder's dropped three inches, and he sighed against her.

When they'd parted, he started for Toothless. She saw why: the storm clouds were gathering. They would need to head home, lest they get caught in a blizzard. "I'm sleeping in my bed tonight," he called over his shoulder, adjusting his leg for the flight.

"Am I sleeping in your bed tonight?" Astrid sauntered over to Stormfly, who stretched lazily.

Having hauled himself on to Toothless, Hiccup let out a single, short chortle, defiant. "No. Definitely not."

"Why!"

"Astrid!"

She groaned, settling on to Stormfly's back, "You're never going to want to just spend a day in bed with me, are you?"

Toothless bucked under him, ready to fly. A hand on his dragon's neck, Hiccup squinted at her. "A whole day? Like twenty-four hours?"

"That's how long a day is, Hiccup!" With confusion playing out openly across his face, she started to laugh.

"A whole day inside?" he asked again, still astonished, his dragon desperate to go, to do. Funny how sometimes Toothless could read Hiccup's mind, or behaved as though he were an extension of it, even. Each of them was, to the other, an altogether more powerful appendix than the one they'd lost.

So she waved a hand to call him off, shook her head. "Restless. It's a good thing I love that about you." And they set out for home, staying just ahead of the snow.

"Where's your boyfriend, Astrid?"

For a half-second, just a half-second, because any longer and even Snotlout would've caught on, Astrid shut her eyes. Ruff had been referring to Hiccup as her boyfriend in jest consistently for the past few weeks, even after they returned from Berserker Island and she wouldn't speak to him. She sometimes forgot—understandably—that Ruff didn't know how pointed her joke was.

"He's not my boyfriend." She tried to say it like she had said it all those times before, with just the right amount of revulsion and calculated ambivalence. "And I don't know where he is, he should've been here by now."

They, them, the gang—herself and Ruff and Tuff and Fishlegs and Snotlout—mulled aimlessly around the arena in front of a group of young Berkians. They'd had to spend an hour clearing the arena of the previous night's snow using dragon fire, and now the ground was puddled and damp and cold on yet another freezing winter morning. Every Hooligan had on their heaviest furs.

"Hiccup was supposed to help me with the lesson," Fishlegs said nervously, eyeing the kids. They were between five and eleven years, about ten little ones in all, and they stared at the older youths with saucer-like eyes. The day's lesson paired them with infant dragons, and focused on basic care, grooming and waste etiquette and whatnot. These were the youngest kids they'd taught, so far.

"What's a boyfriend?" a girl of about six asked Astrid, sounding annoyed. Some of the other children giggled.

Out the corner of her eye, Astrid saw Ruff shake her fist excitedly, as if she'd been waiting for this moment. Which maybe she had—Astrid wouldn't have put it past her to bribe a small child into asking invasive questions. And she could sense that Tuff and Fish and Snot were poised for her response, too, albeit with a degree of fear rather than glee: Fish might've been waiting for a bomb to go off, from his expression. What, did they think she was going to chew out a tiny person? Honestly, if there was anything about this to make her angry, it was that they expected her to be angry.

Tossing her friends a glare, she turned back to the girl, and rearranged her face more pleasantly. "A boyfriend is what comes before a husband. You're Brenna, right?"

She nodded. She was smaller than the other girls her age, with reddish brown hair and freckles. Maybe a cousin of House Haddock, Astrid couldn't remember. Brenna said, small face scrunched, "You're Astrid?"

"Yes, I'm Astrid." The way Brenna said her name was like—there was awe in it. No one used to know her name.

"My mother told me we're all going to have to listen to you, one day."

Some of Astrid's diplomatic confidence slipped away. Ruff was no longer smiling—nor did the boys look so much frightened as sobered. Astrid could feel fourteen pairs of eyes on her, waiting. "Why does she say that?" she replied stiffly, not sure how to respond beyond pretending to misunderstand the statement.

"Because she sees Hiccup-the-chief's-son coming from your house in the morning." The young ones didn't understand, but behind her, Fishlegs gasped gently and Tuffnut let out a low whistle. Brenna stared up at Astrid, who could hear her own heartbeat thudding in her ears. "If boyfriend comes before husband, then why—"

"Brenna," said Astrid, smiling, speaking through her teeth. "I want you to tell your mother that you told me these things, okay?" The girl, a little sheepish, nodded. Astrid had better get a basket of salted cod or a new saddle from this woman; Brenna's mother ought have known better than to say such things about someone they would all have to listen to, one day. "Fishlegs," she swung around, "Go on and start the class. I'm going to track down our wayward future leader."

As she started out, Ruffnut chased her a few paces, whispering, "I promise I only paid her to say the first one, the rest was all Brenna." Astrid ignored this revelation.

"That girl is smart. Give her private lessons in everything." And she swept out of the arena, leaving education to her peers for the day.

She checked the forge, the Great Hall, the Haddock house, the armory, and even called down into the caverns before she finally found him high above the village, near Gothi's, leaning against a sunning Toothless, who'd cleared a patch in the snow for them. He had his notebook on his lap and was sketching furiously, hands stained black with charcoal. More likely than not, he hadn't even realized what time it was, nor did he look up when she approached.

"You know there's a class now that started twenty minutes late because of you, right?"

Hiccup's gaze stayed glued to the paper. "I've told Fishlegs a hundred times he doesn't need me there anymore."

Astrid stood over him, letting her shadow swallow up his work, so he was forced to stop. Finally, he squinted up at her, shielding his eyes from the sun's glare, and from Astrid's. "It's your academy, Hiccup," she told him sternly.

"I'm done with the academy."

His nonchalance caught her off guard. "What do you mean, you're done with the academy?"

"I mean, I'm leaving it to Fishlegs and you guys, I've decided." He was back at his sketchbook, and, overcome with frustration, she bent down to rip it from his hands—except that he hollered and held on, and their tug-of-war over the volume dragged him to his feet.

"Stop what you're doing for two seconds—"

"Astrid, stop it!"

She let go of the book and sent him stumbling backwards, and he fell into Toothless briefly before recovering his footing. Between Brenna and this sudden announcement, Astrid was feeling a little shaken. "You can't just say you're done with the academy."

"But I am, I figured out something else I want to do!" Eagerness crept back into his voice, as he checked the pages of his precious notebook, and recovered his pen from the ground. Moved by his being—sweet, oh, whatever, she had earned the right to think of him as sweet and not feel embarrassed by her sentimentality when so much cloying sentiment had already passed between them—she lost a little of her anger, and rocked back on her heels in thought.

"Is this about the stables?"

"It's not about the stables, it's about what the stables are about." She struggled to understand this sentence, but he had taken her hand and was pulling her down to sit with him next to Toothless, beaming. "I figured it out, Az," he exclaimed, "I figured out what we're going to do."

Astrid thought she might have missed a plot point, here. "What we're going to do?"

"Something important for Berk," he said, and she flushed to hear her own words of so long ago repeated back to her, like being reunited with a beloved childhood toy. Who had that person been, who loved the idea she would be remembered? It seemed silly now that she had ever doubted. Of course she would be remembered, she wasn't going to let anyone forget. "Look." Hiccup set the book between them.

She saw lines and more lines, and Hiccup's scratchy writing. Supports. Structure. "What is this?"

"It's a plan. Here are the stables, with a—you know you can access them through a gap in the cliff wall? We'll build a runway there," He gestured down to the cliff in question, as though pointing out the landmarks on a map, and turned a page. "Then you've got an upgraded fire prevention system, an entire network of above-ground pipes running all over the village, from a rainwater reservoir." He pointed to another location in the village; turned another page. "And stands for dragon racing," The harbor; another. "And a granary, with a windmill." A sheep pasture.

"Hiccup, this is…"

The Berk of these designs was not the Berk that lay before them, small and quaint and colorful. This Berk was architectural; streamlined; ahead of its time. It was Hiccup's Berk.

He took her hand and watched her, smiling, biting his lip at the same time. It struck her as a strange, beautiful gesture, drummed up on anticipation and excitement and affection. He wanted it to be her Berk, too, she realized. The thing about New Orders—they're new. Unfinished, fresh paint. Even a Viking of the Old Order can find her place in the New Order, particularly when that's what the New Order is all about.

"It's a lot."

His face fell. "Well, yeah—"

"And it's amazing." They shared a grin, wide, wider. "We should do all of this."

Hiccup exhaled sharply—he had been holding his breath. "You really think so?"

"Yeah," she said, and pecked him on the cheek. "I really do."