Hiccup
It was pointless. It was all pointless.
Astrid was reclusive now, refusing to come out of her room. She'd lost hope, just like Hiccup was losing hope as well. At this point, Hiccup knew it was better that they gave up and wait for Siren to come home on her own. Maybe she'd already returned to Berk and was waiting for him, or maybe she was dead. Maybe she was out, somewhere far away, so far away that it would take her weeks, maybe years to come back.
Or maybe she would never come back at all.
Whatever it was, Hiccup knew it was time to go back home. He knew he couldn't go out on hopeless searches anymore.
There was simply no point.
Siren
It was a snowy and windy January night, and I was sitting in room at Dragon's Edge, Rupac and Toothless sleeping on one side of the bed, and my Terrible Terrors on the other. My hair fell over my shoulders and onto my knees. In my hand, there was a sword. It was the one I wore to Berk.
I'd been meaning to cut my hair for a long time. I just never got around to it. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I couldn't imagine myself with shorter hair, maybe it was because I couldn't decide what length it was going to be. Maybe it was because my hair was like that for a long time, cutting it felt hard.
But I knew I had to do it. It had grown too long for me to care for. The last time I'd combed it was six or seven months ago, and it had taken me two hours to get all the tangles out.
Back then, it had been only an inch above my knees. Now, it was three inches below them. It was too long for me to be able to care for it.
I took up the sword and held out a lock of my hair. I knew what length I wanted my hair to be now. It was to be three inches below my shoulders, long enough for me to tie into braids or in a bun or anything if I wanted to.
Carefully, I cut the lock and let it drop. I took another lock and cut it, this time a lot quicker than before. Then, I started taking three or four locks at a time, then I cut them. I watched ribbons of blonde fall to the ground, each new set of ribbons quicker than before. Finally, the last set of ribbons fell to the floor.
I dropped the sword and ran my fingers through my hair. I had never felt messier hair in my entire life. I couldn't even get my fingers through the first set of tangles without getting them caught.
I felt a strange sense of relief run through me as I realized my neck didn't hurt as much as it used to. It was an elating feeling to be out of pain and not have two or three pounds of hair weighing on top of me. As sad as I felt to not have long hair, I was equally happy that taking care of my hair would be easier now.
I picked up my sword and put it back in its scabbard. Then, I took a broom and started cleaning up my hair, piling it up. I found a brown sack in the storage room and threw all my chopped off hair in it. I tied the sack and left it at the foot of my bed. At this point, dawn was coming, and my legs felt too tired to mount Toothless, and I lacked the energy to be up in the air right now. I'd already slept some, but now I felt that I had too much energy to go back.
I already knew what projects I had in mind next for three of the pre-lunch classes: Building a stuffed dragon for dragon classifying, a translation guide for Nordic-Celtic, and a book of religions in Japan and the Viking world. For Viking history, it really wasn't necessary because they all knew it by heart through their assignments.
Lately, Rupac had been acting mopey, so I decided that when the kids' next break came in March, Toothless, him, and I would go get some more Quetzalcoatls since he seemed to be lonely. It was also good for me because I could use some more to help the kids when they needed help, especially since more than one needed help at a time. Even though the Quetzalcoatls were slow writers, they could help me calculate percentages on tests, assignments, and projects, though I'd be the one writing comments since, like I said earlier, they were slow writers.
The more Quetzalcoatls I had, the sooner we'd be done marking tests, and the more time I could spend tending to my crops, the more time I could spend writing letters to Ichigo and Rukia, the more time I could spend studying Korean, and most importantly, the more time I could spend riding Toothless around the known archipelago, or riding outside it to map more areas, like I did when I sold rice. I'll be honest here: I did bite off a bit more than I could chew with all that rice.
Especially since the crops were left unattended when I was kidnapped by the Celts.