ON WITH THE SHOW!
Nightfall, Part Seven
"Don't ye do it," says Gobber.
Stoick puts the tankard in his hand down on the table with a thunk and glares at his friend, who takes the bench across from him entirely unaffected by the look. He is immune through long experience and what Gobber himself calls general cussedness. "Do what?" the chief asks.
"Follow the lass like ye told everyone else no' to."
It's very early in the morning and there is almost no one else in the Great Hall other than people who like to cook or are particularly good at it, getting food prepared for anyone who wants to eat with others rather than in their own home or who is not a particularly good cook. They have enough dragons trying to burn down the village without certain people – naming no names – helping. And efforts to impose cooking duty as a punishment had proven the flaw in that idea very quickly – some people should not be turned loose around food that other people plan to eat whether they are disgruntled or not. Most of the light in the Hall comes from torches, the occasional guttering candle, and fire pits rather than in through the open door.
Stoick wonders if he can end this annoyingly perceptive line of questioning by ordering Gobber to fix the hinges and latch on the giant Hall doors. They never close properly and are frankly unsatisfying to slam.
Not that Stoick would know anything about that. It's much more important that the doors close properly to keep the heat in during devastating winter when it is sometimes necessary to bring everyone in the village and the animals too into the Great Hall lest they find ice statues of sheep frozen where they stand.
"I'm not following Astrid," he says. "I'm sitting here."
"Aye…before the crack o' dawn."
"It's morning. I'm awake."
"Special occasion, is it?"
Stoick briefly wishes he was a child again and could throw his plate at Gobber without any consequences more dire than missing the next meal for wasting food. It had been worth it several times all those years ago.
"'Cause wha' I know is, ye came through my forge yesterday mornin' lookin' for her and stormed out again cursin' when ye found she'd left already carrying a basket's worth o' food." Gobber scans the empty hall. "If I meant t' go with her next time she left, I'd stake out the Hall too."
Abandoning the pretense – he is waiting for Astrid to show up – Stoick growls, "That's my son out there, Gobber, and a week now she's told me to stay away. I want to see him, or I'll know why."
A week now since Astrid had volunteered to try to teach the feral boy to talk, a week of knowing the son he'd lost as a baby was alive but as far away from being his son as it was possible to be, a week of not knowing what has happened to his beloved Valka – Stoick is running out of patience. Waiting for someone else to do something that is important to him is unfamiliar and grates on him. He longs to get involved, judge the situation for himself, and get his boy far away from any dragons. He doesn't even want to think about what the creatures must have done to the child to drive him so mad.
He's already caught Snotlout in the act of recruiting a small army of youths and teenagers who were trying to head out to the western shore with an arsenal worthy of an inter-clan war, and the twins can't even look west without someone cutting them off and sending them somewhere else, with various rates of success.
Typically, Gobber changes tactics the instant he's won. "What's tha', then?"
The chief glares at the paper instead of his friend. It has about as much effect. "That's the monster that took my family from me."
Gobber picks it up in his good hand – he's wearing a hammer as the other one – and eyes it. "Funny-looking creature. Big fella?"
"Bigger than anything else I've seen here. Nearabouts the size of the house it burnt its way into after a baby in a cradle." He doesn't want to talk about it, and his repeated attempts to draw the beast have not improved his desire to. This last is the most successful. Stoick is not a particularly talented artist, but he's a decent draftsman and can map an unfamiliar coast from a longboat going up and down in high waves repeatedly. And the image of the strange dragon, of a kind which he had never seen before or since, is burned into his mind the same way as is his wife's face and her laugh when they'd danced and even her arguing with him, and now the wild frightened eyes of a boy gone feral and mad in firelight and a dragon's long shadow.
Part of him does not want to know what happened to his son to bring him back in such a state. (He has already decided that the feral boy is Hiccup. He has no evidence, no proof, but his heart knows. He thinks he might have known as soon as his instincts told him to try to talk to the feral boy rather than ordering anyone with a crossbow to shoot down the threat.)
Much of him is desperately hoping that Valka is still alive, even if she is in the same wild condition. Surely there is no way a baby or a child could have survived on its own in the harsh islands of the north. She must be out there somewhere.
Stoick wants to bring his wife home. He wants to reclaim his son from the monster's shadow. For twenty years he has accepted that his family was lost to him. Rather than marry again and have a child to replace those he had lost, he chose an heir from his people to be the best of future leaders, trained to it and not just born.
Now he knows his son is alive, and on this very island, and that same heir has told him not to go to the boy.
"I don't care if he can talk to me or not," Stoick rumbles. It's only partly true. "I just want to see him."
"And if ye frighten him? If he runs from ye?"
"I'm not going to hurt him."
"He doesnae know tha', whoever he may be."
They have been friends for a very long time, so Stoick looks past this statement and confides in his friend. "It's him, Gobber. I'm sure of it."
The blacksmith sighs, in a way Stoick would almost describe as sympathetically if this weren't Gobber. "And ye do not know tha'."
"Yes. I do."
Gobber shakes his head sadly, placing his hand flat on the table between them. "Twenty years, Stoick. If Valka had lived, surely she would ha' come back to you, and she knew how important your son was to you. She would ha' protected the little one with her life and used all her strength to bring them both home. Let the poor ghosts rest."
Angrily, Stoick tries to deflect. "Gobber, we need that boy. He can talk to dragons. He can win us the war."
"Aye," his friend says patiently, "I'm no' disputing tha', it's good sense. But tha's got nothin' to do wi' you sitting here waitin' for the lass."
"Whatever you've got to say, say it," Stoick snaps, wishing he was holding the tankard so he could bang it down again for emphasis. But it isn't in his hand and picking it up again just to bang it down would look sillier than the Viking chieftain likes to look.
"I already did. Don't let yon wild boy hurt you because he's sommat other than you want 'im to be, and don't ye frighten th' livin' 'cause ye're too busy chasin' the dead and th' gone."
It's good advice that Stoick has no intention of following.
Astrid comes in later in the morning, when the benches are half full with yawning Vikings and the sunlight streaming in through the doors – he forgot to ask Gobber to fix them again – has lit up the cavernous room brightly. She greets the people who greet her pleasantly enough, remembering names and problems and accomplishments accurately.
She collects a basket that seems to have been prearranged for her or just stored in here and heads back outside.
Stoick stands in her way unavoidably. He's between her and the door so there's no way she can pretend she hasn't seen him.
She doesn't try, following him obediently when he crooks a beckoning finger at her and points her to an unoccupied table some distance away from the rest of the people in the hall.
"Tell me about him," says Stoick the instant she sits down.
Some of it she's told him before, but she must hear the intensity in his voice because she says it all again. "He's clever. I think he assumes everything associated with me is a trap, so he won't go near anything I put down unless he sees me do it. He won't get close enough for me to touch him – I think he's worried about me hurting him. As long as I'm safely out of arm's reach, he's getting used to me being there."
She summarizes efficiently, a useful skill. "I don't think he eats enough, at least not stuck where he is. He's a good scavenger, though, partly because he's willing to eat a lot more things raw than I would be. He could hunt or forage better if he left the shore, but he won't go far from the dragon. He started to be a lot more comfortable with my presence once I started feeding him. But he won't take the food from me even if he's obviously hungry because he's been feeding the dragon rather than himself. He does that. He loves that Night Fury, and, chief – it loves him.
"He waits for me to put the food down and move away, and then watches me the whole time while he moves towards it. I think he must have stumbled into a trap or a snare at some point – he's too afraid of them. Sometimes he tests food before he eats it – tries a little bit but no more – possibly because it's unfamiliar. I brought four different kinds of cheese a few days ago, just to see what he'd do, and he had to check all of them. If he usually hunts and eats things raw, then he's probably gotten sick from it in the past. So he's smart enough to try to avoid that happening again."
Astrid sighs with pure frustration. "He must know he's human! The way he uses his hands – the harness the dragon – Toothless – was wearing? He was sewing bits of it yesterday with some thread I brought him to play with! He took apart the canvas for thread, so I wondered what he'd do with raw string," she explains, seeing the chief's eyebrow go up at this unlikely plaything. "He draws in the sand and puts chalk designs all over the rocks. When they wash away in the tide he puts new ones back. He took apart a wooden toy wagon I brought him and looked at all the pieces, then put it back together again – and it worked! The wheels still rolled! I couldn't believe it – I can name you half a dozen people just from the ones in this room who couldn't do that with written instructions and a lesson. But I won't," she adds hurriedly. They might hear her.
"The thing is…I don't think he does know. It's exactly like I'm talking at a dragon. A smart one, one that can't breathe fire and can't fly, but the way he looks at me – when I meet someone's eyes around here, I connect with them. We acknowledge each other as people. He looks at me but he doesn't look at my eyes, and when I do manage to catch his eyes I can't get through to whoever's in there. He sees me, but he doesn't look at me, if that makes any sense. He's so different."
Stoick rumbles disapprovingly. "I need to talk to him, Astrid. Can he talk?"
She shakes her head. One hand anxiously creeps up towards her braid, and she drops it back to the table and puts her other hand on it when she notices. "Not really… Chief, no. Not yet."
He unrolls his drawing of the dragon and places it on the table before her. "I need to know," he says, emphasizing every word like hammer blows.
Astrid bites her lip. "One more day," she insists. "Please. Let me at least warn him that you're coming. If you show up unexpectedly he'll run, just like a wild animal."
Damn Gobber. Stoick hates it when his old friend is right, if only because he tends to gloat, and occasionally sing, which is truly horrific. "Fine. You've got today. Tomorrow I come with you, though. No excuses."
"Yes sir," Astrid agrees, getting to her feet. "I'll tell him – at least, I'll try."
Astrid has spent enough time walking up and down this path in the past week to know that something is different about it today. It's as if either something large has blundered through tearing off tree branches by accident or something has come through tearing off tree branches on purpose. Either way, she knows that particular fir didn't look like that yesterday.
She has been unable to bring herself to wander around in the woods completely unarmed. In the interest of not spooking the feral dragon-boy and the still-terrifying Night Fury, she has left her favorite axe at home in favor of a weapon she can leave in the woods before coming out into their space, a small belt knife. Well, comparatively small. Smaller than the axe, anyway.
Now she draws it and holds it cautiously, ready to stab or slash or use the blade defensively to keep an attacker away from her. She eyes the forest around her, looking for any sign of who or what else has been here.
It briefly occurs to her that she is doing the same thing the boy who is slowly learning to answer to "Hiccup" does quite often, stalking prey that might be stalking her.
There are fresh boot tracks in the earth, and Astrid swears, wondering who has snuck out this way. Bad answers occur to her and she casts aside swearing in favor of following the tracks as quickly as possible. The last thing she needs is someone with a crossbow and a good aim trying to be a hero.
Or worse – someone with a crossbow and a bad aim. She doesn't know what Hiccup would do if his dragon-companion was killed – having seen boy and dragon interact like two people with a single mind, inextricable, she suspects he would not recover, that he would simply lie down and die from loss and loneliness – but if Toothless was attacked by a Viking again and survived she is absolutely certain that their ongoing war with the local dragons would suddenly become much less important than a whole new war with a raging Night Fury.
The tracks take her upwards, out of the forest and up onto the edges of the sea cliffs that the dragons' beach is part of. Dropped needles replace boot prints, and Astrid follows them faithfully, more and more worried. From these cliffs it would be easy to see the shore, if from a distance, and if she remembers correctly there is even a point up here where it is possible to see part of the mouth of the inaccessible sea cave.
This is very bad.
Her pursuit leads her to an edge of the cliff with a good if distant view of the cove, where she discovers…a pile of tree branches. Astrid is very briefly baffled until she sees the boots sticking out of one end and the battered home-made book barely visible between the needles at the other.
Oh, thank the gods. She puts the knife away.
Approaching as silently as possible, she leans down and taps the ankle attached to the boot sharply.
The pile of tree branches yelps, shakes, and yields a somewhat sap-covered Fishlegs.
"Oh – Astrid!" he says. "Um…fancy meeting you here?"
"Do I even need to ask what you're doing here?" she asks rhetorically. "And do I even want to?"
He brandishes the tattered bundle of pages, somewhat haphazardly sewn together. "The Book of Dragons doesn't even really have an entry for the Night Fury, just an empty page!" he says excitedly, flipping through the facsimile he made so he could update it – trainee dragon fighters are not supposed to draw on the only original version, and adults of the tribe even less so – to the relevant page. Or lack of page – she does remember it as mostly blank, and always just suspected that the original writers had simply run out of dragons right before they ran out of pages and invented one because they didn't want to admit that they'd miscounted. After all, no one had ever seen a Night Fury.
Sure enough, the original title and page contents, which Fishlegs had copied down in ink, are now accompanied by a host of scribbled notes in charcoal.
Astrid sits down on the ground away from bits of sticky sap and borrows the booklet, reading what he's added. Highly intelligent, it reads. Shoots a blast of fire rather than a normal flame, black scales and green eyes, makes a screaming whistling sound before it shoots, no known shot limit, has been observed with human rider. There are also some size estimates, mostly along the lines of 'smaller than this kind of dragon, larger than that kind of dragon' rather than numbers.
"There's so much we don't know about it," Fishlegs says when she hands the copy back. "Now that we know it exists, there might be more of them, and we've got to be ready!"
She thinks he might have a point, but she's not going to admit it straight off. Besides, learning about the Night Fury and its boy is her job, even though she doesn't necessarily want to come out here and study it like Fishlegs does. "How did you get out here? I thought just about everyone in the village was making sure no one wandered out this way."
"Well…everyone's kind of mostly watching the twins and Snotlout," Fishlegs points out, "especially after that stunt he pulled the other day."
Ah. That explains a lot.
"And you're hiding in a pile of fir branches because…"
"Some dragons have a phenomenally good sense of smell," he answers promptly, "like the –"
Astrid holds up a hand preemptively to cut him off before he can get going and list every dragon he knows of by relative sensitivity of smell on the numbered scale that is one of the things he's added to his personal copy of the Book of Dragons and only he uses. "I read the book too, Fishlegs."
"Oh. Right. Um…what's it like?"
She must have blinked at the wrong moment because he's suddenly ready to take notes, staring at her avidly.
Astrid does not particularly want to be interrogated about dragons by Fishlegs right now. She casts around for a suitable and sufficient distraction or bribe.
And finds one. "I'll tell you what, Fishlegs. You know the dragon rider?"
He nods – of course he knows about the dragon rider.
Everyone on Berk knows about the dragon rider, including the little children. Two days ago she'd made the mistake of walking through the middle of town right as a flock of sheep stampeded wildly through the same area – yes, sheep can stampede if they're spurred on by some of the children big enough to walk and get into trouble but not big enough to be put to work, who are riding on the backs of some unfortunate sheep right in the middle of it all yelling that they are riding dragons. One of them had been waving a lit torch and trying to roar like a dragon, which had been doing a lot to encourage the stampede.
That had been a weird day.
"You know he likes to draw?"
He did not know that. His eyes go big and amazed. "Really?"
"He likes drawing the Night Fury. If you don't hang around up here and try to put an illustration of it in your book, I'll see if I can get him to draw it himself, and I'll give you the result."
Fishlegs says "OkaybyeAstrid," so fast it's practically one word and clambers to his feet. He's halfway down the slope headed back towards the forest path – and Astrid is mentally patting herself on the back for a successful negotiation – when he stops and turns around, reversing his steps so he doesn't have to shout.
"Hey, Astrid? Is that really Chief Stoick's son?"
Isn't that the question? Astrid thinks. What she says is, "I'm not sure. I don't think even he knows, and he can't really talk so he couldn't tell us even if he did. But…I think…probably."
"Wow…" says Fishlegs, awed. She expects him to be amazed by the dragon and the fact of the dragon-boy riding it, so she's not expecting his next question. "Is it weird?"
"Is what weird?" she's forced to ask. Many things are weird.
"If dragons hadn't taken him…he'd be the heir to Berk instead of you."
It wasn't before, but it's suddenly very weird. Astrid tries to imagine the feral boy as fully human and can't do it. She's wondered what he might look like if he stood up properly and cut his hair out of his face, if he didn't stare at her like he was waiting for an axe to appear in her hand and for her to run at him screaming, if he wasn't constantly petting a lethal dragon and being petted by it in return, if he smiled like a human instead of snarling like an animal, if he spoke in words instead of shrieks and croons and roars – but only as a way of passing the time and relieving the frustration of trying to interact with him. And no matter what, there was a constant overlay of dragon to him she couldn't remove even in her imagination.
She's never really thought of him as being a real human under the dragon's skin, never imagined the 'what if' Fishlegs tossed out there so casually. She would have grown up with him, she realizes, would have seen the human boy every day and thought nothing of it. He would have been someone, rather than just on the edge of something.
"I haven't thought about it."
As of right now, it's a blatant lie. From now on she suspects she will not be able to stop thinking about it.
She did grow up with Fishlegs, though, and he has learned over time the note in her voice that says this conversation is over, go away.
He does, although he reminds her as he goes that he'd really, really like that drawing. She does mean to follow through on that promise even though he's given her a nasty and unexpected shock that will be bothering her all day and beyond.
"Hiccup?" she calls when she arrives at the shoreline. "Hiccup, it's Astrid. Where are you?" She doesn't have much hope that he will learn to respond to this question and come to meet her on cue, considering he won't come near her on his own, but she knows he responds better to tone of voice than actual words, and he's sort of accepted the way she pronounces his name. She suspects she could say meaningless things, or recite rhymes, and he would hear only the way she was saying it, with the occasional broken bit of Norse he seems to remember or has picked up thrown in.
At least he's not hiding today. Two days ago something – she doesn't even know if it was something she did or if it had been something unique to whatever is going on in the dragon-boy's head and therefore completely inexplicable to sane people – had spooked him and he'd retreated from her steadily despite the food on offer, leading to a rather absurd dance across the beach as he backed away and she crept forward. It had ended in metaphorical tears as he'd lost patience and outright roared at her until she'd retreated back to the flat rock which seems to be her space the same way the cave is his and the dragon's. Then he'd hidden for the rest of the day. She hadn't realized he could stay out of sight on the beach even without retreating to the inaccessible sea cave, although she'd been able to guess roughly where he was by the dragon's movements. Toothless, at least, always knew where he was.
He's hunched over in the sand, playing with the chunk of blue glass she'd brought as part of her basket of offerings a week ago and has brought back recently. She's amused by the way he investigates things, which is somewhat childlike and very thorough. Personally, she wouldn't have wondered what glass tastes like, but he does, lapping at the side of it gently and then grimacing at the curious texture, which he rubs against one cheek to feel more closely.
This would have confused her earlier, but since then she's gotten a look at his bare hands, if from a distance. They're calloused and rough and scarred. The last two fingers on his right hand are slightly off, as if he'd broken them at some point, but they don't seem to bother him or make him any less dexterous. Which he is – she hadn't been exaggerating to Stoick earlier about him sewing, and she suspects the dragon-scale and leather clothes are all his work.
Although he's not wearing the clawed gauntlets at the moment – they're strapped to the rough belt around his waist where he can get to them remarkably quickly – she thinks it's no wonder he wears them so often. They're probably as much to protect his human hands as they are to use as dragon-claw weapons or for traction as he climbs.
Hiccup's head comes up, with draconic alertness, at her approach and her voice, although he looks away, back at the glass, as soon as he's assured she's again not armed and not approaching him. She's become part of his landscape and as long as she stays there, Astrid thinks he's not worried about her.
Not that she doesn't do something similar with regard to Toothless, who still terrifies her even if she won't admit it. Where the boy won't make eye contact, the dragon eyes her directly from his perch on a spur of rock, as if constantly assessing her as a possible threat. Its gaze freezes her blood and makes her stomach sick in ways she hasn't experienced since childhood.
Astrid knows dragons as enemies, though, and thinks to her disgust that this might be her rejected – but resistant – fear talking. If Toothless meant to hurt her, she reasons with herself, he'd have done it by now. She's been around him quite often and, unlike Hiccup, the Night Fury doesn't have to get close to her to attack. He could blast her from the stone quite easily, but hasn't. Anyway, after a few moments, the dragon turns away from her and goes back to intensely looking out to sea, peculiar black ears flattened towards his head. Involuntarily, she follows his gaze but whatever he's looking at, she can't see it.
She wonders if Toothless knows that she's trying to take Hiccup away from their wild coexistence, and suspects that he might. Astrid realizes that Stoick would snatch up the boy and kill the dragon and expect that to work.
Astrid really needs to remind her chief and mentor quite strongly why this would not be a good plan.
As she sets out the food collected from the Great Hall earlier – the people who like to cook are surprisingly happy to feed a dragon-boy as well, as long as they think of him as a hungry human child – she spends a few minutes watching Hiccup play with the blue glass, looking through it, starting in surprise, and then running primitive experiments with putting other things under the glass and looking at them through it or pointing it at things too big or distant to move, including Toothless, moving it from sunlight to shadow and watching the refracted light travel across the beach, and rotating it in his hands to watch the light change. She wonders what he's saying as he does so, although she can hear noises that sound curious and interested and amazed. The supervising dragon purrs back at him occasionally.
After a while, she tries to get his attention away from it and towards her and her message for today. Stoick has entrusted her with the responsibility of caring for this boy who he truly believes to be his lost son and she doesn't want to disappoint him.
Knowing that he will come here tomorrow anyway, regardless of whether Hiccup is ready to see him, much less talk to him, is an additional incentive. Once Stoick has decided that he's going to do something, he's going to do it no matter who tries to stand in his way either physically or by trying to argue with him – and anyone who does will regret it. She's surprised she got even a week, although it is clearly not even close to enough time.
She thinks a year might not be enough.
Maybe she should start small today. "Hiccup," she calls. She pulls a piece of paper from her basket of care-and-feeding-of-dragon-boy supplies; there's a permanent stack of it in there now and between father and (probably) son the village is going to be out of paper really soon until the next trading season. Or they could put Snotlout and his cronies, who are clearly frothing at the mouth to go attack something, in a longboat and send them out raiding any other humans that cross their path or any islands they happen to run into by accident, both of which they're completely capable of doing.
Astrid makes a mental note to mention that idea to Stoick. It would solve so many of their problems at one stroke.
"Draw Toothless?" These are both concepts he is interested in and thus words he sort of knows. Recognizes, at least.
The paper gets into his hands somewhat indirectly and he quite contentedly replaces glass with paper as the object of his attentions. Ignoring the charred stick she'd supplied, he scavenges up a different one from the edges of the shore – staying well away from Astrid the entire time – and takes it over to Toothless to burn, which the dragon does obligingly with a soft huff quite unlike its lethal blast of battle fire. Apparently this stick is better for some reason – she can't tell the difference – because he lies down in the dragon's shadow, propping the sheet of paper on the stone, and draws for a while.
Astrid hopes that the activity will improve his mood, just like promising the drawing to Fishlegs had served as incentive to listen to her telling him to do something he didn't want to.
She fills the time by trying to imagine, as Fishlegs had suggested, a Berk with a human version who had grown up there. It's simply not in her frame of reference and she can't get anywhere with it. Every time she tries, she trips over the idea of the boy fighting dragons. Since he's currently warbling at a Night Fury from right under its nose and drawing a complex charcoal line on its – his – scales from between its eyes to the tip of its snout, which Toothless tolerates until he's done elaborating on it and then promptly rubs the ashes off onto the boy's scaled armor, it's a difficult proposition.
She's reduced to baby talk, and Astrid doesn't even particularly like babies, who tend to smell weird and scream unexpectedly. Still, she asks, "Give?" when he seems to be done with it.
This is a word they've been working on somewhat haphazardly, and she extends an open hand in case he's forgotten it since the last attempt, beckoning.
The request gets his attention and he edges towards her, stopping outside whatever distance he thinks is safe and putting the piece of paper down. While she's distracted by it, he detours around her towards the food, leaving her wondering which of them is manipulating the other.
Moving back into his field of view, Astrid tries, "Hiccup, Stoick come here."
The dragon-boy puts the piece of bread in his hand down and backs away, looking up and around and clicking anxiously. The hissing, ticking way he says the name is in there, mixed in with whines and faint growls and increasingly desperate attempts to find the enormous Viking warrior in the undergrowth or on the shore. Futile ones, of course – he's not there.
It is such a good thing she persuaded the chief to give her a day to work on this.
"Hiccup, it's all right," she tries to soothe him. "Stoick good," she pieces together.
He eyeballs her suspiciously in between staring around and hisses. It's clearly a contradiction.
She repeats everything she's just said several times before he calms down and goes to play with the glass again. Maybe she got the idea through, or maybe he'd just gotten bored of listening to her. That seems to happen quite often.
A shriek from above announces the end of any more language lessons for a while, and Astrid flinches as a whole wave of Terrible Terrors swarm down the cliffs and run, fly, jump, or a mixture of all three towards the dragon-boy, who calls back to them in a way that sounds almost exactly like the noises the real dragons are making. He's a very good mimic, and she wonders if he's just copying them or if they're actually talking to each other. They seem to like him, although they're less certain about Toothless, who is so much bigger than them and seems less amused by their antics. The black dragon glares at the one buzzing around his head until others join it and there are too many moving too fast to stare at all at once, at which point the bigger dragon barks at the little ones and they scatter into the ocean.
They come up arguing and breathing little tongues of flame at each other, the targets of which promptly dive back under the water and, if she's seeing things right, try to pull the fire-breathing ones under. It's not that there are any declared sides; it's just that the ones that have their heads above water breathe fire and the ones who don't try to dunk them and the result closely resembles what happens whenever the twins happen to be set loose on a beach.
Seeing the little menaces swirl around Hiccup, perching on his shoulders and back and clamoring to be petted – and watching him pet them – is unnerving. Not quite on the level with stared-at-by-Night-Fury unnerving, but it is definitely very odd. She shudders, careful to hide that reaction from the sometimes frighteningly observant boy and glad she's not in his place right now. Being mobbed by a swarm of Terrible Terrors is really not fun. Give her one big dragon any day. They're little, but there are lots of them, and when they get really angry, which they do easily, they're too stupid and silly to back down even when they're outmatched.
Astrid had never thought she'd be grateful for Gobber's insistence that she and her cohorts learn to fight dragons armed with nothing more than cooking implements, although she is holding off on telling him that until she really needs to.
She regrets not realizing that Hiccup would get the general idea of "bad dragons" when she happened to say those words earlier in the week. She hadn't actually meant all dragons, although she not-so-privately thought so, she'd just wanted him to stop laughing at her being attacked by what felt like dozens of little monsters. She'd meant that the Terrors were behaving badly, but of course he'd been offended.
They're sort of fun to watch from a distance, though. She tests herself by edging in closer and closer, getting all the way down to the beach. The little dragons ignore her. Clearly being hit with a cauldron is really not fun for small and silly dragons either and they've learned better than to mob her.
The Terrors wear themselves out within a few minutes and take up perches on rocks and cliff sides and the occasional tree branch to rest, squawking at each other periodically as they jostle for room.
As Astrid watches, Toothless rises from his spur of rock and steps his way quite carefully between the little dragons sleeping like the dead on the rock fall, working his way to Hiccup's side. He lowers his head to the boy's and makes a sound that includes a whuff of breath that ruffles his hair and a rumbling purr.
Hiccup turns his face up to the dragon and laughs a dragon-laugh, rising partway to his feet – it ends up as a half-crouch – and crooning something amused. He pretends to stalk the bigger dragon, whistling like a Terrible Terror and making imitative small leaps as the Night Fury backs away teasingly.
Toothless flips his tail around in a gesture she's beginning to realize is something like laughter, not coincidentally smacking Hiccup over flat. He purrs and chirps as if he'd never heard or spoken a word of Norse in his life and wraps himself around tail and tailfins, wrestling with it until the dragon snatches it back and pounces on him directly, but entirely in play.
It takes Astrid's breath away to watch. Her instincts still say that the dragon's leap is going to end in human blood and screaming and the stink of dragon-fire. Having the result be whistles and impossibly liquid croons and shrieks of dragonish laughter is unnerving.
The dragon wins the scuffle, unsurprisingly, dropping his chin onto the boy where he lies in an eddy of kicked-up sand. He refuses to let Hiccup go immediately, croaking mockingly until the dragon-boy pets his nose and chin and scratches under his jaw, yelping back in his turn.
Staying quiet and out of the way, Astrid stares covertly as Hiccup ends up on the Night Fury's back, stroking the top of his head and the back of his neck gently and lovingly. Toothless purrs and relaxes, flopping down on the ground in an absent-minded sprawl.
They're so used to her presence by now and have accepted her as part of their landscape that his broad-finned tail ends up almost within arm's reach of Astrid where she sits unthreateningly on the damp edge-of-the-water rocky sand.
Astrid stops breathing all over again, staring at the black skin and scales so close to her. She wonders if it's warm. It must be, surely. No creature that breathes fire could ever be cold…
Carefully, the Viking woman reaches out, summoning up all her considerable courage and stabbing it through the ice-cold heart of her fear of the Night Fury. Her fingers almost make contact.
Hiccup leaps at her so immediately and silently that the first she knows of it, her face is hitting the ground with the dragon-boy on top of her like a predator. He doesn't even snarl, not until she's already pinned to the ground with his bared teeth and that furious growl a hand's-breadth from the side of her face not buried in sand and grit.
There's a rock digging into her ribs and sand in her hair and eyes and mouth and brackish seawater lapping at her feet from the flying tumble he's shoved her into and she struggles, suddenly frightened beyond thought, beyond sound, but he counters her every defense before they even get started. The best she can do is get onto her back rather than having her face down in the sand, where now at least she can see the animal that's going to kill her. His eyes are as green as the black dragon's and just as inhuman; he smells of seawater, she realizes irrelevantly, of fish and stone and dragon-musk and fire. He smells wild.
He looks nothing like the playful dragon-boy who had just been teasing a dragon that Vikings had nightmares about and trusting it unconditionally to never hurt him.
When she tries to throw him off, using her elbows and knees, the dragon-boy delivers a ruthless and crippling backhanded blow to her gut with those clawed gauntlets that has her trying to curl up just to breathe. He's small only compared to the oversized Vikings of Berk, but he's still bigger than her – and faster, and fiercer, and unexpectedly strong. He just doesn't look like it, since he's usually crouched on all fours or half-hunched cautiously, and almost invariably next to the dragon, which makes him look smaller just by comparison.
She's been thinking of him as a dragon-boy, but she is abruptly reminded that he is actually a physically full-grown man, as old as she is, and one who has probably grown up fighting with dragons with his bare hands, either in play or in self-defense.
The claws that wrap around her neck, pressing just hard enough to threaten to cut off her air or rip open her throat without actually doing so yet, are almost a secondary concern to the ones she can feel against the vulnerable point just below the apex of her breastbone, curving inward and up as if to dig under the protective barrier of her ribs and root through the vital tissue within. They cut through to her skin and go through, drawing blood freely, and could easily go further.
Viking woman and dragon-man freeze, one too frightened to move and unable to anyway because of the weight on her and the claws digging into her flesh and the snarl that she is utterly sure will literally go for her throat if she so much as tries, and the other furious and threatening, growling a wordless and animalistic sound that promises immediate and terrible consequences.
He couldn't have been any clearer if he'd spoken pure Norse.
Touch him, and I rip your heart out.
She believes it, unconditionally. He will do it. He will kill her without hesitation.
"I'm sorry!" she says, wondering if he understands the words. She puts as much of her intention as she can into her voice. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Hiccup, I won't touch him, I promise." Astrid bites down on her lower lip, hard, before she can start babbling, and tries to figure out how to do something she has never before contemplated doing – surrender.
Slowly, she opens her palms and lets them fall to the sand where he can clearly see them if that overlong auburn tangle of hair doesn't block his peripheral vision and if he ever takes his eyes off her face; they are burning into her like a brand held close enough to scorch and scar at the slightest touch.
"Hiccup?" she says, quietly, trying to imitate the tone Stoick uses to calm people down. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt tt th ss, ikk-phuh."
The growl deep in his throat dies away at the sound of his name and the dragon's in his own pronunciation – Astrid wants to gasp in relief that she'd gotten them acceptably right – but the claws threatening her stay where they are for a few seconds longer. Then, in a single movement, he rocks back onto his heels and makes a flying leap for a rock uncovered by the tide.
Dragon-claws bite into the slippery surface, grounding him, and he instantly takes off again in a brief series of rapid scrambles and leaps, fleeing.
She's not at all surprised to see him end up curled against the Night Fury's side, a fair distance away – she didn't even notice Toothless move! The Terrors are long since gone. They're silly, but they're not that stupid.
Hiccup's green eyes glare at her over the top of the gauntlets folded in front of his face, and she's willing to bet he's growling behind them.
Astrid decides to call it a day before she provokes him any further and undoes all of her work so far.
It's only when she gets back to the village that she realizes she has once again run away from a dragon.
To be continued.