Thanks everyone for everything. Here's a short, rather graphic chapter. Let me know what you think in the comments.
theawsomest5: Thank you! Yes, Jack is great. I wonder where he is :P Well, there's some answer to it in this chapter. He's just literally had his PoV and flashback in the chapter before last, so I need to catch up on the others too! I've got the next five-ish chapters completely plotted out in my head, and Jack is narrating a big chapter ahead, as in a big one. I'll say no more!
Chapter 11, where content warnings are escalating quickly, even though the plot has kind of been building up to this.
Disclaimer:*insert*
CW: mentions of violence, blood, death, racism, genocide attempt
"Nay! Not that way!" fulminated Merida as Astrid collected her arrows that had barely met the target.
The DunBroch heiress had landed on the Berk Entreprise Rumblehorn a couple of hours earlier with Stoick's delegation, and after some quick unpacking, the two young women had started training on the gigantic steamboat's deck. As the afternoon slowly drifted into sunset, Astrid had shown the redhead some axe-wielding routines, before insisting that she should advise her on archery.
The blonde warrior inserted her arrows into her belt quiver, against a brown leather corset tightly adjusted over her dark scarlet dress, barely floor-length at the back and mid-thigh length at the front, revealing mismatched stockings, one red and one black, and combat boots, covered in an intricate steel machinery of cogs and pistons designed to activate a combination of springs, blades and projectiles. Tied with a complex entanglement of straps on her arms and back were similar latest-technology devices, all in small sophisticated metallic parts, designed to cut, slash, shoot or store more weapons, covering the pale, bare arm skin and the round lace-frilled neck of the fashionable Centralesian gown.
Next to such a display of cutting-edge – figuratively and literally – armament, Merida's training outfit looked almost simple. She wore a gown of a light but solid fabric in her favourite shade of dark blue. A narrow, plunging neckline revealed a sharp and thin section of her freckled ivory skin through the whale-boned corset. Below a thin belt from which a variety of blades hung, the crinoline extended like the corolla of a night blue flower, falling to the height of her stripy-stocking-covered knees. Each of her embroidered ankle boots concealed a small constellite gun. Her glaive was in its sheath strapped behind her back, that mouse nest of an orange shock of hair tumbling onto it. Her custom gyroscope bow, of course, was in her hand, along with some arrows that dimly shone in indigo in the bright sunlight.
"Nay," she repeated impatiently. "You can't just look at the target through the sight and shoot. You have to remember you're on a boat. While the deck and the target are rocking beneath you, the arrow is hardly aware of any of that happening. You have to be aware of the tide's rhythm, choose the time where the ship moves slowest to shoot. And the winds, if you shoot outside you have to take it into account. Open your ears and listen. Which way is the wind blowing, how strong, how fast does the direction change? Hear the wind, hear the tide, the ship, the silence and the forces of Nature, the…"
"Radiomessage?"
The archer cocked a ginger brow, surprised.
"That's from the changing rooms. That must be Hiccup radiomessaging me. I need to go."
"I'm coming with you."
The warriors dashed down a flight of spiral steel steps into the vessel's colossal armoury. Between broadswords, bastards, sabres, rapiers, glaives and daggers cleanly disposed into ellipsoidal patterns over the walls, guns and rifles cleanly aligned carefully arranged by size and oak and glass cupboard full of the newest inventions as well as numerous prototypes of imbricated-part constellite-powered lever-mediated spring-loaded deadly things that could be used to dispatch knives, bullets or other boomerangs from all possible parts of one's combat gear, some of which Merida hardly wanted to think about. Astrid had to ask her to hurry up as the heiress excitedly stopped to stare at the beautifully intricate arms.
After they crossed the immense wooden-floored room, a low-ceiling gray corridor opened before them, toughened glass doors on either side opening onto small training rooms. The Shield Maiden hastily waved at Snotlout Jorgenson, Hiccup's broad-chested cousin, who gestured back between two paint-cartridge rifle shots with cheerful smugness. By contrast, the twins, Ruffnut and Tuffnut Thorston, hardly responded to her mid-grappling training session in the next-door room. Fishlegs Ingerman distractedly grinned back while replacing some gear on his constantly upgraded gauntlets.
Eventually, Merida and Astrid reached their own changing room. As soon as the door was opened, a puff of warm steam escaped from the women's common showers. Along the cramped cabin's walls were a number of unkempt dresses, randomly thrown onto rows of circular shields, piles of battleaxes and alignments of full quivers. Their footsteps echoed on the humid tiled floor.
"Is Hiccup your fiancé?" asked Merida, somewhat abruptly.
"Of course not, we're adoptive siblings. Father intends to give my hand to the Rumblehorn's captain and leader of our fleet, Eret son of Eret."
"Oh, I see, sorry."
The slightest hint of disappointment and resignation tainted the archer's voice.
"If I didn't know you better, I'd have thought you liked Hiccup."
"Huh? How do you even know me?"
"You stay here," commanded Astrid as she composed unlocking combination of her metallic locker, setting into action a series of small pivoting pieces before the door swiveled open.
Fumbling into the draped skirts, rifle munitions, metallic crinolines and spare silver buckles, she managed to find the sizzling radiomessenger that repeatedly played Hiccup's message. Even though the background noise made it loud enough for it to be heard from a distance, Merida could hardly make out the words from across the room. She let herself fall onto the nearest bench.
When Astrid finally turned off the communication device and looked towards her, her traits were livid.
"We're flying to Falconlake by balloon, as soon as possible. No time to get to the quarry anymore. Take your weapons and munitions with you, nothing else. We'll be expecting four other people on board… at most. I'll get some constellite for them, Hiccup didn't plan enough of it to fly such a large detour and with so many passengers."
"But.. And the plan you were –"
Before she even had her answer, she saw in the Shield Maiden's pale blue eyes that somehow it was too late.
An hour earlier, above the Southeastern Extremesian rainforest, minutes away from the Guardian camp
Hiccup nervously fidgeted with his pencil, mourning the loss of his favourite mug. Well, considering that his glider had recently exploded, only losing a porcelain cup had been incredibly fortunate. Even though drinking his hot coffee out of a crystal wine glass was strikingly inconvenient. He flew high over the jungle's canopy, borne by the winds along the most direct route to the Guardians' camp. According to his estimates, he would reach his destination in a few dozen minutes. Seeing that Stoick and Gobber had already located the quarry using his own flight data, he was hardly giving away anything by taking the fastest route.
The pilot was in the process of convincing himself that he had to help the Guardians. Stoick was busy rallying the forces of DunBroch over Plant Alpha, and they had a day at least until he seal a contract with the mercenaries and fly his heavy forces towards his target. Once they reached it, the Guardians stood no chance. They excelled at guerilla, sabotage and raids, but facing trained military troops in open combat, amongst their crones and their toddlers, would result in an inevitable carnage. No human beings possibly deserved that, thought Hiccup. He would convince the Drifters to move out and hide until the storm faded away. This was nothing to do with Jack. This was his duty towards a people, as a sign of his Miseralian honour.
His absence at the Berk Steel presentation at the Exposition would have caused even more disruption amongst the attendees. Thus, the inventor had needed to wait one day before flying south towards the quarry. He had agreed with Astrid that she would join him as quickly as possible to help defend the camp, once she convinced Merida DunBroch to join. Even though the redhead archer's stubborn insubordination slightly worried him, he had to recognise that she and Astrid would make a formidable warrior pair. Besides, they would never have managed to rally her to their cause without her rebellious attitude towards her own clan.
From above, the rainforest was more than an emerald sea. Flowers and fruits on the highest branches yearned for photons, revealing their pale colours to the skies. Each petal, each pistil, each seed and each stem defied gravity to display its unique shape and shade of pastel in the impressionistic sunlight. Parrots sporadically fluttered from dominant tree to dominant tree, earning the waves of primates hanging off their branches and creepers. These rare episodes barely disturbed the silent blooming of the secret garden. To the aviator, the canopy was the largest secret hanging garden that he had the privilege to tread in. A garden whose circular frontier was the horizon, to which even he could never uncover all the hidden mysteries. Such that without prior knowledge of the quarry's location, which Astrid had actually obtained from Gobber and radiomessaged to him, he would have seen nothing there but another patch of light paint strokes on an emerald backdrop.
Spinning a brass pulley that was connected to a series of wheels and chains, he shifted the orientation of both of Toothless's wings, ready for the landing. The vessel dove towards the trees, leaving a trail of steam on its wake. A subconscious smile appeared on Hiccup's lips as he avoided the first large branch on his way. He ducked under entangled vines, glided around a large trunk, feeling the leaves rustling against his plane's carcass and the branches elastically parting on his way. For a second, he was weightless. For a second, he just existed in the world around him. For a second, he hardly thought about Jack. And then the plane slowed to a stop.
Hiccup flicked a steel pedal with his prosthetic leg, immediately deploying the helium balloons above his ship. The fixed and upgraded system had worked without a hitch. Expecting the idea the Guardians now had of him, he had thought it more prudent not to land in the camp and let them approach Toothless. A complex system of imbricated gears of all sizes and shapes than ran along the inside of the plane's side activated the spring-loaded harpoon other the wing, securely anchoring the floating engine to a nearby branch. Spreading his coalstring wings, Hiccup opened the door and jumped into the air.
As he ably landed onto the dark red floor, it took him some time to realise that something was off. Gradually, the first thing he was aware of was the silence. No chattering voices, no children's laughter, no footsteps, no clanking metal or creaking pulleys. And then he noticed the smell. It was subtle enough, almost covered by the forest's humid and earthy scent, but it made his stomach ever so slightly churn. Cautiously taking a few steps around, he hesitated to call out for a name. Who could he possibly call for? North, who had hardly bothered to welcome him? Sandy, who had not spoken a word in his presence? Jack, whom he had outright insulted before they parted? But his thoughts were interrupted as he realised what was leaning against the wall around the corner of the nearest shed.
The old man stared at him with his usual impressive eyes, wide with determination. His beard fell onto his broad chest, streaks of silver and onyx splayed out onto the red patches of leather. His callous hands clung to his identical sabres. The inventor would have expected North to spring at him, were it not for the half dozen wooden arrows and darts buried in his rotund stomach. The large gashes on his shoulders, chest and legs were hardly visible against the crimson fabric of his garb. A single scarlet stream poured against his temple into the furrows of his wrinkled dark red skin.
Hiccup wanted to look away from the cadaver. He could not. He wanted to feel repulsed, and he did. But fascination had him nailed there. How the watercoulour eyes had lost nothing of their expressiveness. How someone dead could look so alive. How the difference was so subtle yet so obvious. How North, mentor to Jack and father to the Guardians, was dead. How Hiccup should have been overwhelmed.
Instead, suddenly, he felt nothing.
His utterly dry green eyes warily detached from the corpse, onto the remainder of the carnage ahead. He had half-expected a pile of bodies higher than his head, bloodstained faces distorted in anonymous horror, oozing with a river of red liquid pooling down under his feet. However, all he saw was human shapes here and there, in the mismatched beauty of their Drifter outfits, some with something slightly stranger than others. Fallen feathers. Torn-off buttons. Bloodstained wings. Unnaturally angled limbs. Shattered staffs. Fragments of metal and wood poking through skulls, throats, shoulders, legs. All their lives had abruptly been blown away like the wind clears the fog, lively expressions still pulling their traits, eyes still wide open. Absorbed onto the sandy floor, the blood puddles were not even that obvious. The heavy canopy overhead was the lid of a coffin of oblivion, concealing the secret carnage as one of its many mysteries. This had nothing to do with the heroic gore of epic battlefields the people of Miseralia sang about at dusk. Everything was so unglorious, so unpoetic, so real. The pilot hardly registered that most of the bodies were white of skin. And flies, flies swarming everywhere, more flies than Hiccup had ever seen in his life.
He was empty, numb, detached. He awaited to a wave of terror, disgust, sadness, but none of these came. At the surface of his brain, his survival instinct had him load the small steel crossbow on the right forearm of his flying gear. Whoever had slaughtered the Guardians may still lurk around searching for survivors. Quietly, he advanced amidst the debacle, preparing to shoot.
A waft of steam blew into his face as he walked by the constellite-powered stove. As a reflex he let go of his bolt. Suddenly, he heard a spinning projectile whistle past his ear. Another rebounded against his aviator's helmet. Under the impact, Hiccup fell to his knees. He realised the weapon was a small, slender golden blade, similar to a scalpel, covered in a thin liquid layer. Cautiously, he brought it towards his nose. The vaguely flowery smell was characteristic of morphium. Hiccup immediately identified the anaesthetic's scent from the infirmary rooms on board of the Berk Entreprise steamship. His attacker had not meant to kill.
"I mean no harm. I came as a friend," he said evenly, letting go of the blade and of his crossbow. A friend of whom? North? At least the dead man could hardly deny it, he thought bitterly.
A metallic flutter answered him, followed by a flying silhouette that landed straight before him. Her white linen dress was torn and covered in bloodstains, her dark hair, dyed into rainbow-like shades, messily gathered into a nurse's bun. Two identical scalpels to the one that hit him fiercely gleamed in her hands. Strapped against her back were the clockwork wings he had fixed. As soon as she saw him, a certain expression of relief fell over her traits.
"I'm Hiccup – " he started, realising he had not revealed his last name to Jack.
"I know. My name's Tooth. This is Sandy."
Hiccup's heart ever so slightly settled down at the sight of the familiar short man, spiky yellow hair cluttered with sand and blood.
"I brought none of this upon you," Hiccup said quickly, "I came to warn you about an attack that was supposed to –"
Sandy interrupted with a simple nod, wary eyes full of understanding. Tooth sheathed her blades onto her leather belt and came to kneel facing the young inventor.
"After you left, Jack thought it best to get rid of his status as a white saviour by negotiated an equal-to-equal reconciliation with a native clan and long-term rival, the Huacan Drifters. I did back him up, it sounded like such a bright notion from his part. Yesterday, their leader received him for the accords, but after years of minimal contact and divergent cultures, the proposal was accepted, but in a peculiar way. People do not change from a day to the other, you see. And the Huacans, even though we hardly thought about it, are adepts of ritual human sacrifice. Drago, their chief, believed that Jack was willing to sacrifice his own blood and that of the non-native ones of our tribe to appease the Suns for his crimes and persuade them to chase away the white invader from Eastern Extremesia. Of course, when he understood this, Jack refused, so Drago caght him as a prisoner and attacked, taking us by surprise and leaderless. They took all our constellite and some of our engine and automaton parts. All the natives were captured and forced into becoming Huacans. The others… North was killed in combat, bravely taking many enemy lives. So were many others. Claude, Pippa, Monty… but these are names you probably never heard of. Jack alone was spared, to be sacrificed at close of day atop the Pyramid of the Moon at the Huacans' ceremonial capital, half an hour north from here by hot air balloon."
A crystal transparent tear rolled down her magenta eye, and Sandy reached out to wipe it with surprising gentleness.
"Jack… he was… he is our closest friend as well as our loving leader. He told us to stay alive and keep the camp, whatever occurred to him or the others. And I accepted, I even encouraged him to… Oh, Jack…"
A sob shattered her delicate voice.
"Tooth, it's not your fault."
How could he be so cold, so unaffected? Hiccup's heart was shielded under frosted armour. He wanted to feel, he wanted to weep, to be human. But his emotions were deep below, under the numb skin and the blank cortex. He knew they existed, silently incandescent like a dormant volcano, but his consciousness deliberately glided over the surface in fusion. He was desperately calm and collected, unable to express or comprehend what he went through. Where he should have collapsed in tears, he was standing there in the rising twilight, ruthlessly planning and scheming when it mattered. There was not much left of him but an intricately designed, perfectly oiled robot in shining steel armour, precisely calibrated to accomplish the task the last Hiccup's scrap of feelings had vaguely set onto.
He had read that native Drifters would never kill off their enemies in open warfare, but rather take them as prisoners for sacrificial purposes. Clearly, Drago had made an exception for his white enemies, these less-than-humans. The asserted pillars of his education had collapsed, and little was left of what he thought he knew. This was the ideal time to start rebuilding things anew. Progressively, his analytical mind drafted a mental list of the remnants of his certainties.
One. He had come to rescue the Guardians, and many of them had been killed, the remainder captured.
Two. Jack was alive, and the Huacans had no plans of sacrificing the native Guardians, such that the silver-haired chief was the only one who needed urgent saving.
Three. Hiccup had not come to save Jack, he felt nothing for Jack any more, if ever.
Four. He had to at least help Sandy and Tooth free him, after everything he had caused to their tribe.
Five. He was just trying to lie to himself and failing miserably. Of course there was something between him and Jack Frost.
Slowly, dully, he started to fidget with the scalpel at his feet in a helicopter-like way. He only realised when he dropped it and tried to pick it up. Were it not for his aviator gloves, he would have cut and anaesthetised himself.
"Sandy, do you still have much morphium left?" he asked, looking at the blade.
"Don't do something stupid," warned Tooth's protective voice, concerned he might want to drug himself into oblivion.
"I've already done that. I was just wondering, because I've planned something, you know, crazy."
Fun fact: As shown by the position of his crossbow, Hiccup is left-handed, just as his book counterpart is (he is consistently depicted as right-handed in the films, I seem to think). It is a minor plot point. While book references are minimal due to the huge difference between the films and the books, there may be some, here and there. Also, phew, some of that chapter was tough. North is dead. I'm sorry, it's what war is like. I tried to give a more realistic approach to the carnage rather than an epic amplification or a glorious gorification, or even a pink fluffication. It's somewhat unusual, especially in fanfic, please give your opinion in the reviews! Finally, Hiccup's reaction has become fairly typical of him. In canon, he's been able to cast aside his emotions to focus on the action at multiple times, only to collapse afterwards (when first facing Toothless, when first seeing the Red Death, when his father died, …). It's become a quite large character trait in this story. Actually, the eponymous Aviator and inventor (H. Hughes) in his pretty amazing film has been depicted with a similar genius-when-it-matters/heroic BSOD personality – he is one of my inspirations for Hiccup in this story. Also, phew, that was a long author's note.
Announcement: I have something quite big that I'm organising upcoming on Wednesday, so I'm not sure how regularly I'll be able to update. After that, I'm getting cracking on the next 4-5 chapters I've had plotted out for a while. Until then, R&R, F&F, leave constructive comments, have an automaton hug xxx