Hiccup's character, though I do try to keep him fairly close to his movie canon counterpart, may seem very OOC in this and coming chapters. That will be due to certain events in his life.
What Friendship Can Do: Chapter 1 - The Blacksmith's Apprentice
Sluggishly waking up early one cold morning, Hiccup Haddock found himself slumped forward on a chair behind his desk. Arms crossed upon a heap of papers scattered about the smooth wooden surface and his head resting on top, his forest green gaze had settled itself on an extinguished candle once his eyes had finally opened. The wick had run all out of wax to melt long ago and so its flame had slowly died overnight.
The soft morning light came creeping into the room as did the harsh temperatures, chilling him to the bone. Yet, he didn't feel like moving and so simply stared ahead of him instead.
It was freezing cold in this small room and still he could not bring himself to move an inch, not even to get up and grab a fur vest for warmth. His body, mainly his joints, felt stiff and frozen in place. His neck and back threatened to ache for a good long while from the position he had fallen asleep in, if not for the rest of the day.
It was punishment after he once again tried to work in his little private workroom in the forge all night, which had become his permanent place of work by now. He had wanted to focus on something a little different than axes, maces, swords, and other weapons with which he worked all day long.
However, instead he had been spending all his time staring at an empty paper and playing with pencils and whatever else suddenly found themselves in his grasp. The time he could've spend on something useful or on sleep had been carelessly wasted instead.
His usually ingenious mind has been coming up empty for longer then a few months now. For almost three years in fact. Even the artist within him could not bring himself to draw. Not anymore. It felt like both the inventor inside and his creative side had shriveled up and withered away, like a flower without water or a fire without fuel.
He stared and stared with a frown etched quite permanently onto his lips. Not a fiber of him wanted to budge. He didn't even have the energy to do so. The freeze could grow worse and he'd still find a lack of motivation to get up and start a new day as a blacksmith, no longer considered to be a mere apprentice and now an essential part of this forge.
However, with a deep and tired sigh, Hiccup realized that he had no other choice but to stand up from his seat, weither he was too tired to do so or not. The Vikings in the village of Berk would wake up soon and that would mean they expected the forge to be up and running, smoke escaping the chimney up above like every other morning.
Bracing himself, the now eighteen year old teen pushed himself up from his chair and felt his body complain just like he had expected it to. Stretching every little bit of himself and running a hand through his tousled brown hair for a brief scratch, his spine ached and his muscles cramped. His joints hurt and both his fingers and toes were freezing and numb. He could barely even move his digits they were so cold.
Sleeping in the forge did truly turn out to be a terrible idea. Hiccup scolded himself silently, but fervently, for this foolish decision.
Briefly rubbing his upper arms and hands for warmth, Hiccup left his workshop to light up the forge for the day. As the fire gradually build up with his help, Hiccup briefly left to clean up his room in the back before planning to return and take a look at the long list of commissions for today.
Grabbing papers and stacking them neatly onto eachother to create room on his desk, Hiccup's gaze fell on a peculiar set of drawings he'd made three years ago, shortly before he began losing interest in both inventing and drawing.
They depicted a large reptile as black as the night itself with wide and strong wings on top of its back. On the front of its flat head were two big and round eyes with slitted pupils. A long tail held what almost looked like a second, less mobile, and smaller pair of wings and two tailfins on the very tip of it.
The amount of detail in these pictures and their colouring suggested Hiccup had spend a considerate amount of time memorizing every little detail he could find on this animal. His younger self had been quite a curious one.
Quite gullible too.
Now that he had the displeasure of viewing them once more, the older teen felt a twinge of resentment well up in his chest upon the very sight of the creature and grimaced at the dreadful memories replaying on his mind's eye all over again.
He didn't even know he still had these, believed to have thrown them away years ago. He had enough physical evidence to prove its existence. These drawings really weren't necessary to remind him even more.
So in a fit of anger did he take every single sheet of parchment related to this creature that he could find and took them to the front, stomping over to the fire burning slowly with every intention to burn them right then and there. Drawings, blueprints, everything concerning this Thor-damned reptile needed to disappear. Right here, right now.
Yet, with the papers clutched tightly in his hand and hovering over the flames eager to burn and scorch everything until nothing but ash was left, Hiccup found himself hesitating.
Why, oh, why was it so difficult to let go? That monster did nothing but trick and betray him! It was merciless and callous like any other dragon in the Archipelago, just like he had been taught ever since he was but a young child.
Still, he found himself hesitating.
His anger growing, Hiccup instead crumpled the papers up into a ball and proceeded to throw them back into the room they came from in a fit, adding to the mess he had been trying to clean just minutes earlier.
With a defeated huff did he rub in his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose while the other came to rest on his hip. His anger abated slowly and reluctantly.
There simply was no use in becoming agitated over it now. 'Let bygones be bygones' is what people say, right?
"This is why, Hiccup. This is exactly why you're a failure in your father's eyes." The young man muttered to himself, scolding his inability to put the past behind him.
It was still so early in the morning, he hadn't expected anyone to hear.
"Ah, 'iccup, don't be so tough on yerself. Yer father doesn't think so badly of ye." A voice quite familiar spoke up and broke this lonely silence the boy had been in and Hiccup turned to see his mentor limp in, who was a Viking with only one arm, one leg, and incredibly bad breath by the name of Gobber.
The man owned the forge where he worked and had been in this profession for a long time even before he was born. Not only had he taught Hiccup all he needed to know about blacksmithing, but he was also a bit of an uncle to him. More of an uncle than his actual uncle Spitelout, that is.
"Oh, hey Gobber." Hiccup greeted him with a frown, though he hoped his exhaustion wasn't too obvious.
If he did notice, Gobber wasn't showing it or commenting about it.
"Ye give yerself too lil' credit, 'iccup. Just 'cause yer father made ye a full-time blacksmith doesn't mean yer a failure in his eyes. In fact, 'e's going out of his way to keep ye safe." The man said as Hiccup moved to take his apron and pulled it on, meanwhile he took a list at the work that needed to be done today himself.
It wasn't anything special. Just bend swords, chipped axes, hammers, the usual stuff in a war-torn Viking village such as this. If the damage wasn't done by dragons, it was done in a fight with the Outcasts. Although, he did spot one of Mildew's farming equipments on the list and felt another sigh escape at the thought of the old man.
Hiccup honestly didn't know which was worse.
The dragons that came raiding his home for cattle every other week and forcing them to sometimes survive on leftovers of leftovers for days. The Outcasts with a chief who sought vengeance on Berk's, who happened to be Hiccup's father, Stoick the Vast, and had yet to give him a reason why this fued was happening. Or Mildew, who's current only joy in life, besides his strange affections for a sheep named Fungus, was to make Hiccup's miserable.
Briefly did the teen wonder if he could somehow make the tool, a shovel, only seem fixed as he grabbed it from the pile, but then figured he'd be giving the man even more reason to visit and complain this way.
Instead he shoved the shovel at the bottom of the pile and figuring the old man could wait until the long list before him was dealth with. Hiccup decided to focus on the topic of discussion.
"Yeah, I'm sure that's what my dad meant when he announced that I would be a great candidate to take over the forge someday and mysteriously stopped all of my training as heir. Ten whole years gone to waste." Hiccup replied sarcastically and briefly faced his mentor before taking a sword in need of sharpening.
At least that was something he was good at. Sarcasm.
"'e said blacksmithin' was an 'onourable job." Gobber stated curtly with his brows furrowed. Any other man would've found some offense in Hiccup's insinuation that theirs was but a lowly profession.
"Yes, to lure me into a false sense of security and hope I wouldn't notice his utter disappointment." Hiccup was quick to answer as he brought the sword over to a grindingstone and grabbed the handle to make it turn and spin.
This time it was Gobber's turn to sigh, unable to come up with a suitable response as he knew that to be the truth. Stoick had been disappointed and he had been trying to convince himself, his son, and the rest of the Hooligans that there was nothing wrong with their heir becoming a smithy instead of a chief.
That decision had hurt. Years of training and preparing had been in vain, all that effort Hiccup had put into proving himself had become meaningless. It was honestly just another reason for his deep-rooted hatred for that dark dragon to grow.
That dragon, that Night Fury, it was the sole reason why he was now such a disgrace in the eyes of his village, a disappointment with no chance of redeeming himself. It was why now even his own father had finally given up on him.
Hiccup Haddock the Third. The first Viking in their three hundred years of Berkian history who could not kill a dragon. The first heir to lose his right, his privileges, his future as chief of Berk. Even his fifteen year old useless self before he caught the thing would've been held in higher regard than him now.
Gobber decided to speak up again when they each had a weapon to fix. The man grabbed a hammer to replace while the teen worked on sharpening the dull blade.
"Ah, 'e just wants to protect ye." Upon hearing this, Hiccup let his eyes roll.
As if the elder blacksmith could see his reaction did he continue, though his back was turned to the boy. He spoke with a strange tone to his voice.
"You kno', there's no shame in fearin' dragons, 'iccup. Not after what they did to ye. First your mother and then..." The sound of the grinding and grating of the grindstone stopping and metal clanging to the ground is what drew Gobber to turn and look up to the boy. His eyes gazing back at Hiccup's glaring ones.
One bright green, the other a lifeless and cloudy grey.
The cause lied with the thin, ugly, and jagged scar that ran through his right eye from his cheek to his forehead in an arch, hidden partially by his bangs. It cut straight through his eyebrow too and it wasn't the only one present on his person.
This one painted the right side of his face with the reminder of a story everyone on Berk was aware off, a story small children would be told to warn them of the dangerous monsters that lurked within the fog of Helheim's Gate, the Unholy Offspring of Lightning and Death Itself.
It was the tale of how a young boy foolishly trusted a dragon and paid a heavy price.
They were put there deliberately by the beast. Though only fleshwounds, it had been enough to blind him in that eye and there had been nothing their village healer, Gothi, could've done to restore his sight. There were also many more that littered his body beneath the red tunic and the green leggings that he wore, constant remembrances of what had happened three years ago, when his life had begun its slippery slope downwards.
This whole mess had started with a boy and a dragon.
"I finished dragon training, Gobber." Hiccup spoke as he turned to fully face the other Viking, no longer just glaring from over his shoulder. The sword was still in his hand, the tip of the blade dug into the ground.
"I won the honour to kill the Nightmare fair and square. I was so close to becoming a real Viking! If that Night Fury hadn't... hadn't done... that... the night before the kill, everything would've been just fine." He added in an attempt to convince his mentor that he did not fear dragons, that everything would have turned out the way it was supposed to if it weren't for that one particular reptile.
"'iccup." Gobber said his name with the shake of his head, but the boy didn't let him continue.
"It's the truth! If I was just given another chance to prove myself after I recovered-" His mentor didn't allow him to finish that sentence either and cut him off.
"'iccup! Almost every raid after the attack you cowered in yer room in fear of hearin' the Night Fury's howl again, scared it might come back someday to finish the job." The man reminded him. He still vividly remembered the already small and bandaged form of his frightened young apprentice turned even smaller as he huddled in a corner while the battle raged on outside of the safe confines of his house.
At the time, Stoick, unable to forgive himself for letting that creature hurt his one and only son and leave him for dead, had allowed him to cower in fear and lock himself in his room during every raid. Hiccup had been perfectly fine with this. At first.
But as the time passed, it had quickly become clear what nearly losing his son in such a brutal manner had done to the man.
Growing overprotective of the boy, he had fed into Hiccup's want to stay away from dragons to the point of going out of his way to make sure the teen didn't need to be put in such dangerous situations anymore.
It wasn't at all the Viking way, but Stoick had already lost Hiccup's mother, Valka, when the boy was only a few months old. Now that he had been so close to losing another loved one, 'the Viking Way' was the last thing he worried about. He refused to let the dragons take someone else from him.
Unfortunately, it was a problem to everyone else in the village, Hiccup included. The old blacksmith wasn't a part of that.
"Stoick and I don't always see eye to eye when it comes to ye, but he was right in his decision. Don't question the chief, 'iccup." Gobber ended the conversation with that and resumed his work on the hammer. He didn't expect this topic to be opened again.
"Gobber."
"I don't 'ear that grindstone going, 'iccup." Was his single reply and the apprentice begrudgingly decided to continue with his own work. There was no room for argument.
With a deep frown plastered on his face, his eyes narrowed, and eyebrows furrowed in anger did he go back to work on sharpening the blade of the sword he still held. Hiccup had only one dark thought running through his head.
'That Night Fury will come back someday. When it does, I will shoot it down again and this time I won't hesitate.'