Author's Note: You guys. Um. Wow. Nice to meet ya'll. (That's my one yearly self-permitted usage of the locally invented and accepted "ya'll". You made me smile a lot, so I decided to use it on you.) As a thank you for your support, you get this chapter a day earlier than I planned to release it to you. That being said, I'm now out of pre-written material, so the next chapter will probably take a bit longer.
ON WITH THE SHOW!
Nightfall, Part Two:
He wakes, and regrets it. He hurts from the fall and the scared and the Toothless-soul-love hurting. He had his wings, he could have landed on his own, but that would mean leaving Toothless scared and no no no.
They fly together. They fell together. Yes yes.
Still, he whimpers quietly when he moves.
The dragon-wing wrapped over him where he lays shifts slightly, just enough for Toothless-heart-of-mine to see him, green eyes saying love love love and worry. Hiccup shifts on the sand to push his spine closer to the bigger dragon's dark warm scales, and chirps good happy love good. Toothless purrs good love good back at him.
He rolls to all his paws and leans against his dragon-love's side, rubbing scale-skin against soft-skin and scale-leather skin and fin and wings so that they smell like each other and the itches of sleeping on sand are soothed. They croon laughter and comfort at each other and Hiccup crawls out from under the extended wing and into the space between chest and throat and jaw, nudging his skull into the soft space under Toothless' jaw, humming happily.
Hiccup was so so so so scared last night scared small scared and here and now with his heart-beloved warm and alive with him they are joy love safe relief you we calm we relief regret love, he vocalizes softly, hiding his face in the warm dragon-scent of Toothless' throat.
The black dragon lets him do it, rumbling love through them both. It feels good on his bruises and Hiccup leans into it for a while, chirping little questions and happy sounds occasionally. It makes his body feel better but his heart hurts, remembering, and he pulls away, rubbing his cheek against Toothless' and moving to the injured wing on their other side.
The sight – even this afternoon as they wake – makes him angry, and he quietly clicks mad scared hunt hurt sorry protect protect in a continuous furious tirade as he examines his work from early this morning.
Hiccup has the most delicate and clever paws of all of his nest-mates, and he loves to amuse himself or the others with the impossible things they can do. He does not remember learning how to sew or tie knots, but these are not the first stitches he has set, nor the first limb he has splinted. His kin sometimes raid Viking ships or settlements for the fun of it, or to get things they cannot find in their island nest, and Hiccup-Toothless sometimes go with them, if they are bored or if Hiccup wants something he cannot make himself, and sometimes the pfikingr manage to hurt his kin. He does not like pfikingr, Vikings – they hurt dragons and they are stupid and cannot talk and cannot fly – but they can make things.
Toothless thrums at him calm easy peace breathing love, and Hiccup realizes that he has been chittering angrily as he checks the stitches.
Sorry sorry, he croons.
The breaks from the rock fly?! rock fly?! are not as bad as they could be, but they are bad. Still, he has seen worse, set worse, seen his kin survive worse. They will fly again. He checks each laceration scrape by scrape, using all of his senses. He presses his lips to each closed wound to take the temperature of the skin and the blood and flesh below; sniffs for the uneasy stink of infection; licks them just to be sure and to reassure Toothless-love. Several repetitions of this in, he hits a deeper and painful wound and Toothless yelps, and shifts away.
Hiccup whimpers sympathy sorry mistake forgive? and the other dragon licks him back, humming. He turns his face up to the gesture and Toothless obliges, which is reassuring and familiar and, entirely as a side effect, plasters his fur out of his eyes again.
He is more careful after that. The wounds will heal. He tells Toothless yes good yes relief hope promise fly good us yes, chirping and cooing and returning to the black dragon's front paws, the better to wrap around his head and say it all again with touch.
Together they know that they are hungry. They would have hunted last night but they followed the other flock because they were hunting already and last night became bad scary bad confusion no no falling falling falling falling and they did not eat. And they have fought and hurt and fled since then. The wind blowing into the sea-cave they have found and claimed smells like sea and flight and open air, with spray from the ocean below and the stubborn snowmelt running down the cliff wall to join it.
C'mon c'mon? Hiccup's tone asks, glancing towards the mouth of the cave and the sunlight there and back at Toothless.
Yes careful yes, he answers. The black dragon gathers himself, pauses, laughs a dragon-laugh and lifts one paw up into the air so that Hiccup, perched on those paws, tumbles to the side and onto his back in the sand. Hiccup stays where he's been put, laughing yowp-yowp-yowp back at him. He stops laughing almost immediately, watching anxiously as Toothless-love moves the splinted wing. Toothless moves it gently, not furling it in close to his side the way he should, but keeping it stretched out as if he were going to take off at any moment.
Hurting? Hiccup chirrs, worried.
Toothless purrs no no good and noses at his partner-love to get him up off the sand, scooping him up with his flat nose and all but tossing him towards the sunlight.
Strange careful slow, Toothless reminds him.
Yes yes yes, and his voice says that he knew that, but his body says laughter, because he is reckless and Toothless has had to rescue him too many times always will.
Hiccup slinks towards the cave mouth, stomach nearly brushing the ground as he moves, step by step, keeping all his paws on the ground and ready to leap and fight or run if danger is outside waiting. He listens, raises his head to look out just a bit, and breathes in the wind.
He senses nothing of danger, and then all his senses are blocked out by Toothless-beloved looming over him protectively.
Safe maybe careful still, he tells the bigger dragon.
Toothless hums thoughtfully, but agrees.
Still, they spy on the area for some time, hunters waiting patiently to avoid being hunted, before conceding that they are alone.
Lifelong habit and near-constant company means Hiccup habitually vocalizes his thoughts. He talks to himself because Toothless is himself. He can no more truly imagine Hiccup without Toothless than he could imagine himself dead. It would be the same thing.
Sun good nice warm str-e-e-e-tch happy you sun you awake sand itch itch hungry flying? Automatically, Hiccup looks over the edge of the cliff down to the seawater below, calculating the distance between their perch and the water and the depth of the water from the color it is, and judging the safety of a leap-glide flight into it from that and the wind and the color of the rocks and a thousand other things.
He has no name for this process, nor could he explain it. Hiccup can think abstractly, but he does not have the vocabulary to discuss it. He speaks fluently a language rich in emotion and sensation but devoid of measurements and hypotheticals. Similarly, there exists a disconnect between his thoughts and his pronunciation of the scraps of Norse he remembers or has picked up. He thinks of himself as Hiccup and his dragon-love as Toothless. He can no longer properly pronounce the names the way they were intended, and since it has been fifteen years since he heard his name addressed to him in a human voice, he cannot recognize the original sounds when they are spoken to him. His concepts of names are abstract, but often impossible to render into a human language. He is missing through lack of use several sounds that the Norse language takes for granted, so the handful that come from Norse roots are badly garbled and mispronounced. Some cannot be pronounced by a human. Others are simply ideas associated with an individual. Several of his nest-mates he thinks of as variations on The She Who Smells Like This.
He has a dozen or more variations on how he addresses Toothless.
Hiccup is intelligent, creative, innovative, inventive. He does not have the vocabulary to talk about it. He is loving, faithful, brave, true. These he says every time he speaks.
Already planning his descent, the dragon-boy remembers his beloved's injury. Toothless cannot fly, which is deeply wrong. They always fly together – they are a single self – and Hiccup does not want to fly if Toothless cannot. He yowls-whimpers this realization and unhappiness, turning back to the black dragon and attaching himself to warm scale-skin and the leather of the flying-with that Toothless wears except when Hiccup is making it better, which is, when they are back at the nest, often.
Toothless huffs stupid silly hatchling at this behavior, and nudges him away towards the edge. When Hiccup looks at him incredulously, he quorks their familiar ready you jump signal they use when they are about to glide together in the air, pushes him again, and then looks pointedly at the treacherous jumble of cliff-face and fallen rocks that they scramble-jumped up in the morning-light and the fear and the hurting to get to this refuge.
The dragon-boy loves to fly. He got tired of waiting for his wings to be and made his own so he could be a proper dragon and flirt-soar-glide with Toothless. Every opportunity is good happy good love joy.
Hiccup trills a happy, happy sound. It turns into a brief and adoring dragon-dance between the two of them. You me we us, Hiccup and Toothless sing to each other, dragon twining around dragon-boy clambering over dragon, petting climbing nuzzling touching loving each other, you me we us.
The apparently monotonous lyrics would not translate to a human listener, but it is both the simplest and most complex us-song they know. It is who they are and it is everything they are.
It ends when Hiccup's stomach makes an audibly hungry noise. Toothless stops still and lets his partner-love stumble into him. Hiccup collapses against him and they purr at each other.
Go go go, Toothless pushes him.
He needs no further encouragement to unfold his wings and jump, brief instant of sheer falling becoming a glide as his wings catch the wind, descending lazily with nothing but the water and the wind beneath him.
Hiccup has spent his entire life in the company of beings who can fly and who love him and care for him. He has never been afraid of falling because flight is as much a part of his life as air. He knows exactly what he's doing.
And even if he didn't, he'd probably do it anyway. It's glorious. It's living.
He veers and tilts and spins a bit, just for the fun of it and because he can. He is a dragon, he belongs in the air.
Just before he hits the ocean – faster than he'd like to – he flares his wings backwards and brings his back paws down to trail in the water, slowing him and balancing him as a tail should do. He would like a tail. Tails are good. He does not have one yet and he does not know why. Making the wings he missed so was good. Maybe a tail will be the same way.
A heartbeat later he's safely in the cold moving water, flailing to keep his head above the waves as the current tries to catch at his wings the way the wind does, pushing him around and down. But he knows its tricks and furls them away from the water's sneaky claws.
Rolling onto his back, Hiccup watches as Toothless descends to the inlet's beach a little slower, leaping from rock to rock and clinging to the nearly-sheer face briefly before taking aim at making a giant leap to the shore.
Not liking the plan he can see his heart's-love intending, Hiccup shrieks a scolding warning no careful hurting bad no at him.
Toothless swings his head around momentarily to glare at him, screeches back careful you? you? lookatme you! but makes a slightly safer next couple of moves.
Hiccup purrs at the good joke. He has given advice he would not follow and he knows it. They both know it. It's a good joke.
Once Toothless is securely on solid ground, Hiccup feels able to look away and be aware of his immediate surroundings. He is pleased to see that between his unusual arrival and Toothless' descent, the local fish have recovered from their shock and returned to investigate him.
He twists in the water, reflexes drawing the one-claw from its sheath on his front leg and cutting into an unlucky fish in a single motion.
The rest scatter, but breakfast is off to a good start. They prefer to fish from the air, but they can hunt from shore too.
It takes him only a few minutes to rejoin Toothless on the beach, briefly and futilely trying to prevent gritty sand from replacing the grains he'd just washed away in the edges of his dragon-scale and leather skins. He will wash again later, as fishing will probably turn into playing once stomachs are quiet again.
Hiccup chirps a fish sound, holding it out to Toothless.
Fish good fish good, the black dragon croons back, but makes no attempt to take it. Fish fish?
Fish fish fish, his partner agrees.
They hunt fish for a while, baiting them in to the shallows with the entrails of the first one and striking when they are just below the surface. It's a wet and messy process, full of splashes and yelps and laughter, working together one minute and then stealing each other's catches the next. Hiccup scares up a crab and stalks crabs instead. He likes them better than Toothless does, having more patience to get rid of the hard nasty shell. And fish are usually bigger, so they need fewer fish to feed a larger dragon. Hiccup is small enough to not need as many.
The dragon-boy eats a dragon's diet. His body is used to raw seafood; he has eaten cooked fish, although he would not think to cook them on purpose. Sometimes quarrels break out in the nest and fire is blown, and if the quarrel is over food then sometimes food gets burned. Then it's eaten anyway, because it's food. While he has had similar experiences with dragon-charred red meat, he has learned that raw red meat does not agree with him, and has avoided it since the last attempt to share a red meat meal with Toothless or others of his kin.
Very rarely, he has tasted Viking foods, stolen from raids out of curiosity more than anything. A food he does not know as bread he thinks is boring. He has mentally catalogued a variety of cheeses, without too much success or necessarily knowing that they are all types of cheese. They all taste different – and universally off to his taste – so he does not associate them except as Viking food.
When he feels like it, he will eat nuts, when he can find them, and a few plants, including berries and fruits when he can find those. He does not know that his body is driving him to seek out certain nutrients missing from his regular seafood fare, and he cannot explain it to his kin. Experience has taught him a rough-and-ready experimental method of testing new possibly-edibles, and, like the other dragons, he can deliberately throw up something he's eaten that he shouldn't.
Most of his meals, one way or another, come from under the water, but like all hunters and foragers, he eats what he can find and kill that won't come back to find him and kill him in its turn.
After they hunt their meal – not enough, but enough for now – Hiccup wades further into the water and beckons his Toothless-half to him. Hurting water you water good hurting, he commands, punctuating the demand with a whistled now!
The salt water will clean out the wounds that were hurting the black dragon before in the cave, and the wing is far enough away from the dragon's heart-fire to go briefly numb in the cold water. It's a straightforward if temporary treatment and not unusual for the two of them or dragons in general. Toothless grumbles anyway as he obeys the benign command.
Good good good better love, the dragon-boy coos to him, swimming to meet him and catching on to a strap of the flying-with before the waves can wash him away from his dragon-love. He floats there, letting the cold water, which he barely notices after a lifetime of exposure and his current proximity to Toothless' fires, rock him back and forth. Pleased, he rubs his cheek against the side of the other dragon's neck, humming deep in his throat.
He can almost forget that they are grounded on an island full of pfikingr who have already hurt them once, quite badly, and are uncomfortably prepared to fight dragons.
And the St-t-t-t-t-t-kk had made Viking noises at him, the memory of which unsettles Hiccup when it occurs to him. He hadn't understood any of it, except some of the name – too scared, too threatened, wanting to be anywhere else, fear pain fear pain distress from and for Toothless-beloved – but some of it had sounded vaguely familiar.
Toothless apparently interprets Hiccup's restless half-vocalized thoughts as a request to stop swimming, because he begins to tow his companion back to the shore. Although it is equally possible that Toothless has decided it was time to get out of the water anyway, and if Hiccup disagreed with him he could just let go.
As if that would ever happen.
Worried, Hiccup tells him, finding his feet beneath him as the black dragon trudges out of the water. Want go, he growls, indicating here by kicking at the sand, not like.
The sad descending sound Toothless replies with means can't.
Hiccup's sigh requires no translation. A moment later he sets his feet in the ground he has just rejected and declares you me love love love. The rest of his thought is all body language, shoulders back and head up, chin tucked down. Challenging, resolute. It's an attempt at a stance he's seen other dragons take, but it doesn't quite work for him. Toothless understands, though.
Brave brave fierce us, the dragon-boy roars at the distant cliffs.
His partner-love deliberately pushes his nose into Hiccup's stomach, knocking the tail end of the roar into something between a huff and a squeak.
Thoroughly told off, Hiccup yelps, growls half-heartedly at Toothless, and gets knocked over completely for his pains. They wrestle on the ground, careful of the broken and bound-up wing, until the dragon-boy, still dripping from their swim, is coated in sand again and pinned in it for good measure.
Itch itch itch, Hiccup complains in a series of whines and squirms. You win lemme up!
Toothless laughs at him and, eventually, lets him up.
Released, he turns his back on the black dragon – fully expecting to get pounced on all over again – and strides off into the water again, making hough hough hough sounds repeatedly. It's an arrogant coughing noise someone they know makes all the time.
His dragon-beloved lets him get a step or two into the surf before scything his tail around and knocking him down with a splash. By the time Hiccup manages to come up for air with which to protest, Toothless is curled up a safe distance away higher up the small beach, broken wing stretched out to rest and one green eye peeking out from behind a tailfin to catch his reaction.
Prudently, Hiccup decides to admit defeat.
When he's clean but wet and cold, he joins Toothless-heart's-love and climbs onto the bigger dragon's back to take advantage of his heart-fire heat and the sunlight both, drying his skins and warming him inside.
In enemy territory, grounded and worried and threatened, it's foolish for them both to sleep somewhere that the pfikingr could find them. They take turns dozing in and out, bodies resting but minds kept partly on alert, renewed by being together.
Hiccup is asleep and Toothless partly awake when the wind changes unexpectedly and the black dragon catches a new scent. His ear-flaps perk up, extending and triangulating, and he raises his head slightly, careful not to disturb the sleeper on his back, trying to identify where it's coming from.
A moment later, he sees a movement at the scrubby forest edge that lets out to the shore. It's just a little bit wrong. Toothless decides that Hiccup-beloved can always go back to sleep, and summons a blast of fire/power/energy as quickly as he can, snapping his head around with the unique and threatening sound doing this makes.
His dragon-boy wakes up almost instantly, rolling to a crouch with a snarl in his throat and his claws already on – Toothless can feel them on the back of his neck as Hiccup puts a paw down lightly for balance and to tell Toothless where he is.
The clump of tree and undergrowth and rock he'd aimed at is a smoking absence. Toothless can't smell anything living burnt.
He only wonders for a moment before seeing the surviving culprit – a smaller Viking she, running now and making good time away from them despite the forest. He is angry and defensive and hurt and she was smart to run.
Hiccup is, for once, silent, waiting. It makes no difference – Toothless can hear him thinking by now.
Threat gone, Toothless chirrs.
Worry threat worry bad bad bad, his companion's growl says. A whistle: Go?
The bigger dragon looks around the area they have claimed as their own. They have access to food from the ocean and drinking water from the snowmelt cataract. They have a cave-nest they can get to but the pfikingr probably cannot. They can see any of the dragon-killers coming. And they know it exists. This is an island they do not know. There might not be anywhere better.
This would be difficult to explain, but Toothless knows that his dragon-boy is clever and will understand for himself. He sighs and digs his front paws into the sand. Stay. He raises his head in the same pose Hiccup had tried to assume earlier. Guard, protect, hold, it means.
Neither of them go back to sleep.
To be continued.
Extensive Author's Note: …because someone will ask, and I was just recently talking to Raberba girl about this: when Hiccup and Toothless use the emotion/word love to and about each other, it's not sexual or necessarily romantic, although the depth and emotional/spiritual passion of the very best and most intense romantic relationships are certainly very present. They are a touchy pair. But the physical contact here is much closer to a cat that wants to sit on you and be petted and cuddle. Or a dog, if you prefer. (Much of Toothless' body language in the movies is feline anyway, and I love cats. If you want to talk to me about the language choices I'm making for this story, expect occasional cat metaphors.)
Having said that, if reading this as non-platonic makes you happy, I am not policing your brain. It's your brain. Fair enough: Hiccup at least is a just-out-of-teenage-years human (even if he doesn't know it) male and these two don't have any secrets or shame when it comes to each other. I am OK with you reading it that way, and if you want to tell me that you're reading it that way and I'm successfully hitting buttons I will be OK with that too. I'm told buttons are nice. Embrace your buttons. But this story has a K-plus/PG rating and it will stay there.