Obligatory celebration: halfway through my exams! Thermodynamics and quantum physics were actually not that awful. For once, I had the afternoon off exams, so I finished this chapter. 400 first views, 10 first follows, round-number happiness. Thanks for everything… Right, onto the story. For once, we start off right where we left everything. Even though it's been cut into two, this chapter is still enormous. Human!North; Human!Sandy.

faisyah865: Thanks so much for your continuous support, glad you're enjoying it!

theawsomest5: You are as awesome as your name suggests, thank you and hugs! And, no comment ^^

Noon30ish: Many many many thanks, as usual. I love HiccupxJack too… the gray-area comment was a justification mostly for the end of Rapunzel's chapter and most of Anna's, as well as a huge warning for this one. So everyone, DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU ;)

[I answer comments in the antechronological order, as long as the number is manageable]

Chapter 6, where Hiccup has a baby lightsaber, Toothless gets a mention and the readers are going to hate the author. If you do, please do it constructively in the comments.

CW: very mild sexual content, cultural appropriation, implicit homophobia, ['Race-bending' of canon characters, sepia-and-sepia morality, things fans are going to hate me for]

"Jump off. We're landing on the ground."

Precipitately, Hiccup pretended he wasn't at all awkwardly drooling over the silver-haired man's laughter. Starting to get used to it, he spread out his coalstring membranes and softly landed on the stony floor, just after Jack.

"You're getting pretty good. A few more days and you'd look like one of us."

"Thanks, I'm honoured."

Compliments were something he knew how to take, but that sounded strangely satisfying for his ego when it came from the Guardian's pale lips.

Before them, a tall, imposing man in dark scarlet slashed swiftly and powerfully at a wooden log with a pair of identical sabres. Before Hiccup had time to wonder whether he was showing off or sharpening his blades, the old man had cast them aside to reveal the carved figurine of a bear, as tall as Hiccup's hand. A bewildered toddler ran towards the man and eagerly snatched the new toy from his hands with lightning-speed thanks.

As he turned around to greet them, the inventor had a better opportunity to appreciate the man's appearance. He was as tall as he was broad. His skin was weathered like dark red earth with shallow wrinkles and scars. His cloudy gray eyes scanned through the youngsters, both impressive and expressive. Even though his eyebrows were still dark gray, his long hair and flowing beard were a lighter tone of silver. He wore a simple worker's outfit in the fashion of Northern Extremesia, mended so many times it resembled a patchwork of colours and textures of red. His sleeves and hood were lined in white wolf fur. Around his neck was a silver chain with a moon crescent pendant.

"North, Hiccup. Hiccup, North." Jack simply introduced.

"Delighted to – "

"Where's that guy from?" was the sabre-wielder's sole reaction.

"The Plant Alpha constellite raid at this morning's collect. He took down a DunBroch ship, outflew a bunch of their gliders, then he fell from the sky and fainted on me. Would have been rude for me to leave him."

Well, that was a direct way to put it. After all he had seen and heard, Hiccup could not be sure what 'rude' meant in context, but he was convinced Jack must have a somewhat different code of honour and conduct. North gestured inquisitively towards Hiccup's coalstring wings and his flying gear.

"I'm an aviator, a civilian solo flyer, so those things become handy when I need to jump off my glider."

"Did you make them?"

"I designed them. My father's factory has dedicated equipment to - "

"Come with me."

Jack and Hiccup followed obligingly as the massive man drew them to his own ground-level hut.

Hiccup could not help gasping at the wonders inside. Everywhere, from the ceiling to the roof, were parts of clockwork engines. Scavenged or recuperated through the years, the piecewise automatons were of all sizes, all shapes, and all purposes dimly glimmering with copper, steel or golden light. Pieces of weapons, toys, ironhorses, zeppelin engines, clocks, and many other objects even Hiccup had never seen before. The fracture surfaces of their metal carcasses revealed their complex machinery, all in pistons, levers, gears and cables. The largest cog Hiccup could see was half as tall as he was, while the smallest must have been no larger than a human tooth. Throughout the unkempt mechanical bazaar were diverse functional devices, simple but well-made: a water-cooling pipe with diverse wheels and tubes around it, for metal quenching purposes, a burning hot brazier under a thin, high chimney that dug its curvy way through the cramped space into the roof, a model train rambling through the workshop carrying the essential engineering tools…

"That's all the automaton pieces we've collected over time. We try to somehow fix them or repurpose them. North is the one who does the entire technical job, of course. He used to make toys up in New Burgos in Northern Extremesia, before his factory was bought by - "

"Jack, I didn't get him here to listen to your banter. Boy, have a look at this."

On a working surface was the central portion of a bourgeois pet that had been a furious fashion a few years ago: an oversized robot insect. They were difficult to make: light but strong, enough to carry their own weight and sometimes their owner's luggage or children… Hiccup could see that only the wing portion had been extracted intact from the clockwork bug. A typical constellite powder battery in the centre was connected by the small motors on either side. North must have cleared out the cables and fixed the wings onto a system of leather straps and copper buckles, simple but efficient and appropriate to fasten onto someone the size of a child.

The wings themselves were twice as long as Hiccup's arm, shaped like a scarab's, masterfully crafted into a matrix of coalstring and glasstring. Thin as paper, light as a feather, sharp as a blade, supple enough to support the vibrations of flight and strong enough to flap at fullest efficiency. Under the iridescent surface, the copper cogs and gears that transmitted the motion were visible. Even the fine branching grooves on insect wings were subtly reproduced. It was a work of technique and art of the greatest craftsmanship, of a level that remained greatly unequalled.

A thin crack slithered its way through the fine composite, from the tip halfway onto the centre. Only a very high and localised heat source could fix that, Hiccup realised, and North probably did not possess that.

"I see," the inventor mumbled to himself. "If you clamp both sides of the crack securely, exerting a very small amount of tension onto them to draw them together, sorry I know that's not very precise…"

But he saw that North and Jack had skillfully completed the task, creating hair-thin overlap between the sides on the table.

"Perfect," said Hiccup. Leaning onto his prosthetic leg, he opened a compartment containing a metallic cylinder that fit his hand perfectly. He adjusted his aviator's goggles onto his eyes, while the others put on soldering masks. Then he rotated a small switch at the base of the cylinder, releasing a plasma jet about as long as his palm, shining in a faint tone of constellite indigo. The plasma jets were copiously used at Berk Steel in industrial-scale machines, but Hiccup had designed an ingenious thermal lensing system to tune its length and miniaturised the system, at the expense of some beam coherence, to make it fit into his prosthetic. That could always become handy when it came to in-flight fixes.

"Whoa," commented Jack. "This. Is so. Hot."

North smiled behind his soldering mask.

Holding the device with both hands to stabilise himself, he carefully dragged the tip along the crack line, causing immediate fusion and self-welding of the tissue. When he was done, the scar was rough and ugly, but the wings had regained their function. Jack checked that they could flutter elastically and smoothly.

"Tooth is going to like that," the silver-haired teen said happily.

North nodded in agreement.

"The only Guardian who can use these," Jack explained to Hiccup. "As small and light as a child, as fast and agile as a hummingbird. It took her years to master the art of flying with them. They were designed and reworked to hover on the spot, so she has to propel and stabilise herself while flying. She got shot down by a rifle during a mid-herb-gathering encounter with a patrol, hence the damage."

A few minutes later, Jack and Hiccup had left the workshop hut and walked around the camp. The earthy space was surrounded by a fairly high calcite wall, vestige of the former stone quarry, covered in roots and creepers. Tall trees grew within and without, Guardian huts around and in them. About one and half hundred Guardians lived there, many of whom were children and teenagers. A third was white of skin, while the remainder was native or mixed-race. According to Jack's explanations, they lived on local resources, hunting, fishing and gathering and lumber. They raided the colonist settlements for constellite, helium, metal, weaponry and occasionally medicine. They possessed their own hot air balloons and a few gliders obtained in their attacks, even though they had little to do with these without zeppelins. All parts of what they hunted or stole were used as such or repurposed, such that scraps of ironhorses and engines ended up as bowls, plant pots or jewelry…

"Hey, Sandy!" Jack waved cheerfully at a small figure.

As a response, a series of silhouettes of golden light danced all around them, on the barks of trees, metal of huts and even the puffs of steam from the nearby water boiler. The man who operated the rotating mirror chamber was short of stature, draped in baggy yellow linen with mismatched buttons sewn onto triangular embroidered patterns and connected by small chains. His hair spiked out rebelliously from his head, black at the roots and dyed golden at the tips. His eyes were small and slanted like a cat's, surrounded by jet-black curved eyelashes. Around the Guardian were a flock of children, excitedly contemplating the tales of light that escaped and spun around them from the machine of mirrors and cut-out shapes when he lit the candle at the centre and cranked the squeaking rusty handle. Sandy simply nodded at Hiccup and Jack with a smile as they passed.

"Ah, the Dream Projector!" Jack exclaimed. "Sandy was brought by the colonists from his native Western Extremesia, to work on the ironhorse railroad from Bartolomé to Fairylight. He managed to escape and found us. He's a guy of all trades really, from repair to medicine and cooking, but he's always had a thing for mirrors, so he made that machine of his own. Children and grownups always get carried away by the images. A bit of light in dark times."

In addition to the struggles with mercury poisoning and erosion, as well as the altercations with the likes of Corona & Sons, the Guardians maintained sometimes hostile relations with other Drifter camps. Even though the contacts were minimal, the rivalry usually meant occasional ambushes, scavenging and sabotage.

"Guardians live for their freedom," the silver-haired youth commented, "we'd rather raid them and run away laughing than sit down, negotiate and trade with them. We're not selling our independence against a Company-like system for an illusion of comfort and peace, waiting for them to deceive us and stab us in the back while we sleep soundly in our beds. We live for the fun in life, all of it and right now. Life's too short, blink and you'll miss it. It's like those fleeting images from Sandy's dream machine. As some Guardian said once, dreams turn into wonder, wonder into hope, hope into opportunities, opportunities into memories. The most important is that these opportunities are fun."

Jack's eyes glistened with mirth in the afternoon light, and his whole body radiated with a vitality that Hiccup could feel vibrating through the air around him. He was truly alive, there and then, with every muscle of his body and until the tip of his thin hair, beautifully iridescent like snow in bright sunlight. Hiccup simply stood admiring, his amazed eyes wide open. Until Jack suddenly jumped and placed his fresh hands over them.

"That reminds me," he spoke mischievously, "I've got a surprise for you."

Hiccup could hear the grin sculpted onto his statuesque face. The Guardian guided him through the camp, nudging him gently as they walked over some roots. Hiccup was too distracted by his touch and the fierce excitement it diffused in him to think about what the surprise could possibly be. Such that even though it was fairly obvious, when the silver-haired man eventually removed his hands, the aviator's jaw dropped.

"Toothless, you're all right!"

He ran to his plane's side and hugged the fixed aircraft as if it were an oversized pet.

"… Toothless?" asked Jack without even concealing his amusement.

"Er… people aren't supposed to hear that." Hiccup was flummoxed. "I talk to my glider when we fly alone. The… nickname is to mock the Berk Entreprise Dragonfangs."

"Ah, I like that!"

In his excitement, Hiccup had momentarily forgotten about his damaged glider. He eagerly checked the turbines, the wheels and the tail. The glass ceiling, expectedly, was missing, but everything else was in place and ready for usage. Hiccup quickly picked up some glass fragments and debris that would help him identifying the type of the mercenary's arrow and bow. A new sample of constellite was even in position to power the engine.

"How did you even…"

"I've got good people," Jack joked. "Basically, the aircraft is so well-designed that it essentially broke into two between the cockpit and the tail with the explosion, creating no major other damage."

Oh dear, that was embarrassing. Hiccup knew that the junction between the front and rear of his plane wasn't ideal, since the custom cockpit had been enlarged for the convenience of long flights, while the tail section had been scavenged from one of his father's gliders. At least that had served as a lesson.

"Before you ask, for the new rotor, we replaced the one that was blow up with a brand new one. Let's say we've got a few lying around with nothing to do with. North is an ace at that kind of stuff."

"North wasn't alone!" protested a juvenile voice from beneath the wing, echoed in a chorus of giggles.

Hiccup and Jack saw the children, aged between nine and twelve, busily and merrily polishing the ends of the new screws. They were all natives, garbed in flowing linen with bright feathers and leaves in their hair.

"You helped?" said Hiccup, curious but slightly disturbed, kneeling by a dark-skinned boy.

"Sophie and I soldered all of these ourselves!" the kid said proudly, showing some cables beneath the carcass. The work wasn't the cleanest the inventor had seen, but he doubted he would have been able to fare much better without all his equipment and in the emergency. He could get that improved later when he got back.

"That's great, Cupcake," cheered Jack. "Someday you'll be able to build machines like this on your own like Hiccup did. Right now I think North wants his tools back at the workshop."

The children immediately ran away, with a satisfied chortle. One stopped before Jack and gently tugged his trousers.

"Jack, do you think I'll be able to be like you someday? To fly and raid the settlers and drift away like the wind? To lead the Guardians with energy and enthusiasm the way you do?"

The silver-haired Drifter looked at him, sky blue eyes straight into earth brown eyes, and considered the question.

"I can't read the future, you know, Jamie. But I'm sure that when your time comes you'll make a far better guide for the camp. Just remember to love all, the small and the big, the straight and the crooked. Now go away and have fun while you still can."

The child simply nodded and dashed away after his companions. Hiccup was thoughtfully leaning onto the new helix, so Jack lightly jumped onto the wing to sit next to him. As his thigh brushed past his elbow, the aviator felt a fresh wave rush through him, as if his blood had frosted into tiny snowflakes.

"Wait… you're… the leader of the Guardians? You haven't told me!"

"I haven't said that much about myself," the teenager admitted. "I was born in the Sunkenlands on the Old Continent. A barefoot street child, with not much else but a smile and swift hands to catch what I didn't have. I was sent to an orphanage, of course, and some old aristocrat became my benefactor. Probably intrigued by my mysterious traits and my hair, one of those crazy fashions they had at the time.

"They put me in a foster family in Canis Minor, not the gentlest one to say the least. I escaped the beating and humiliation, and I was once again in the streets, alone with my liberty. I encountered some other kids like me, and quickly became the leader of my gang. They couldn't take us the only thing we had, our fun, those policemen and their mustaches. We raided bakeries, scavenged covered markets at night, lived on roofs between steaming chimneys and blackbirds, staring up at the starry skies and the belly of colourful zeppelins at night.

"Eventually they caught us, the militia of Canis Minor. They think that there were far too many people on the Old Continent, and not enough on the new, so I was sent aboard on a steamboat with the convicts and the rest of the riffraff towards Southern Extremesia. They got me to work in a cotton plantation, but after the first whippings my feet carried me away, as they always do. I found this camp, which was hardly half its current size at the time. The natives and a few migrants here were misfits who had escaped from the colonists and lived in darkness and fear. They immediately believed in me, thinking I was their Feathered Snake come back, their white-haired benevolent god who had taught them how to live and love. I liked my new gang, so I played the part, structured the camp, led the first raids and brought back the first sacks of constellite, and after three years that's where I am now. Still smiling and barefoot and free with my band of outcasts behind me."

Hiccup dropped his arm from Jack's leg, struck by the revelation. His green eyes scanned the teenager's frail, bemused and content stature. What he felt when he looked at him was wrong, the Berk clan and company would say so, his father would agree. Furthermore, as he was just reminded of, Jack was nothing but a thief, an outlaw, and Hiccup was a gentleman and heir.

Suddenly, he had realised the harm Jack had done to these Drifters, these free people who now called themselves Guardians. They had been peaceful and hopeful, and Jack had made usage of the same charm he had on Hiccup himself to conquer them. He had taken advantage of their fear and belief, just like he had bewitched the aviator in his loneliness and fascination, to impose upon them his own way of life. Hiccup now knew how to put a name on the sensation he felt when Jack addressed him. He decided to call it scorn. It somewhat calmed the confused tempest deep in his intestines.

"Hiccup, are you all right?"

Even in his concern Jack sounded entertained and carefree, nothing like a responsible leader the way a man like Stoick was. The aviator, unable to contain his anger, blurted out:

"These Guardians of yours, you've made them into pale copies of yourself, into scum, into robbers, into enfants terribles that live as if there's no tomorrow, the way you had lived in the Old World. You exported a lifestyle from Centralesia, that of the street gangs that fly above roofs and chimneys, dark alleyways and robotic cars, to people that might have been savages, but had a past, a religion, an honour and a humanity. They believed in you and you deceived them. Even their dark-skinned children are named Jamies and Sophies, in the Centralesian fashion! On top of that you exploited them into forced labour! You swamped their culture like a veil of frost covers fertile soil: making it whiter, colder and lifeless. Who even gave you that name, Jack Frost? Did you style yourself a god?"

And a god he was, in all his beauty so perfect it was disgusting. A god of careless domination and joyful destruction, in many ways worse than the Companies the natives had attempted to escape. Jack took some time to choose his words.

"How do I know that? The Moon told me so. But that was all he ever told me. And that was a long, long time ago."

That was the last straw. Hiccup had had enough of this irrational folly, these endless jibes and jokes the silver-haired man gave in place for answers. Slowly within him, a crust was forming, thick and uneven, shielding his overwhelming emotions from his logical mind. It gave him an uneasy semblance of comfort.

"Sorry, I need to get back. Thanks for everything."

The aviator pushed the Guardian off Toothless's wing. Of course, the teen landed with exasperatingly perfect grace. He climbed onto the cockpit and started the constellite engine. The aircraft picked up some speed on its wheels, before taking off the eroded soil. Instants later, all that was left of it was a line of fluffy steam, parting the amber and scarlet of the sunset sky.

Jack had not even noticed the apology. He remained motionless, staring. At once curious and afraid of what was happening inside him. He vaguely wondered whether the pain had been worth the fun. Oh, how quickly things had turned from sweet to sour. Maybe it was a good thing Hiccup had left before the situation could further worsen. However, he also wanted the young aviator to come to him and say sorry.

After the Exposition ball on the Berk Entreprise ship

"That was an admirable job, son."

Stoick the Vast's thundering voice made the inventor jump. Clearly he would not have the night to himself.

"Thanks, I simply cast the doped crystal into – "

"I saw the records of your flight seismograph. Crossing that with your radiocommunicator's location when you messaged and your constellite consumption, we should be able to locate that Drifter camp you got your fixes in. Gobber's already working on it. Finally we caught that scum, and we, the powerful Berk Steel, will bring them down. I'm flying over to Plant Alpha with the Nadder 45 tomorrow, we'll recruit some DunBroch mercenaries to support our mission."

"Er… great! That was a long day, I'm going to bed. See you tomorrow."

The makeshift crust that hid away his emotions suddenly burst. As he walked across the deck, he was too overwhelmed to think. And for once, his feelings decided for him. Before he could make sense out of them, his intuitions took over. He softly knocked at the door to Astrid's cabin, neighbour to his.

The female warrior, her sleepy hair in a straw-like mess, held up her pillow like a shield. She saw the light in Hiccup's emerald eyes, and it was uncommon enough to be disturbing.

"Astrid, I know this sounds crazy," he said simply, a strange intensity in his voice. "But you have to listen to me. You have to believe in me."

Meanwhile, in the Guardian camp

In the near-absence of artificial illumination, the galaxy lit the night sky in all its glorious splendour. Its blue light enveloped Jack Frost like a cloak of loneliness. The moon reflected off the porcelain mug he was holding. Crouching at the end of a tree branch, in perfect equilibrium, he contemplated the object with a dark smile. A robber at heart, he could not have stopped himself from picking up the small, simple thing in the glider's cockpit.

The mug was marked with a dragon, the emblem of Hiccup's Miseralian clan. So that was what he was, a being of fire. Jack had always known he was different.

Different, that was what the inventor and the Drifter would always be. Despite everything. A barefoot prince and a gentleman. The manners and the liberty. The mischievous and the logical. The iceberg and the flame.

The engines of society and Nature, in their implacable machinery, would do nothing but keep them apart.

They would have to bend the mechanisms, to stop the spinning gears and the running chains, to believe in each other once more. The power was strong enough to destroy both of them, but both were used to a life of drifting above danger and death. Plus, certainly that would be worth the fun.

If you hated this chapter's end, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. No-one is good or bad, not even Jack and Hiccup, people can make decisions they regret, I have said.

Fun fact: In case you're wondering, Jamie & Co are ethnically closest to Aztec, Sandy is the in-universe equivalent of Asian (who actually were brought to the New Continent to build railroads) and North is similar to Native American, although with some African heritage, which explains the beard and the sabres (the bear is an evocation of a totem). In a fantasy-universe inversion, Northern America is mostly a Spaniard-type colony, for some historical reasons, hence New Burgos – equivalent of New York while somewhat reminiscent of Burgess. Follows stronger population assimilation , culturally (North's clothing style) as well as religiously (the silver moon necklace instead of the cross, because I'd like Spain to be still kind of Moorish at that time - but then you can interpret the pendant as a mark of his allegiance to the man in the moon, if you like). When I watched RotG, I found the fact that the whole cast was white and middle-class rather striking. The children the Guardians protect are all over the world, but only those are ever seen on-screen. Jack, North and Pitch are white too. I wanted to give it an in-universe spin, haters gonna hate. Note that I don't particularly like or dislike racial/ethnic dialogue, this fic has a lot of American readers so I thought the vocabulary might be more familiar to you.

Author's mistake of the day: The mini-lightsaber. For my defence, it's never mentioned as such in the description and (so far) used for entirely different purposes. It is after I designed the device in my head that I realised some outreach scientific author (Roland Lehoucq) has mentioned a similar device as a realistic possibility to make a lightsaber. If you're wondering, this object is more physically realistic. I am not responsible for any accidents due to you trying to make it in your garage workshop :P

Announcement: Not really an announcement, but as you noticed this has mentions of Aztec mythology, which may become increasingly important. If you want to read more about it (not required to understand the fic, hopefully, but might help pick up some of the references) you can look into Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca or the Five Aztec Suns (hope I haven't spoiled too much). I may try and give a quick appendix summary soonish if I have time. Meanwhile, R&R, F&R and stay awesome. Cheerio!