Author's Note: Probably T-rated levels of violence in this chapter. For the moment, general story rating stays where it is.
ON WITH THE SHOW!
Nightfall, Part Twelve
Astrid never wants dragons to attack her village – she wants them all to fly off the edge of the world and never come back – but if they have to do so, they couldn't have chosen a better night.
Better for her. Worse for them. After that afternoon, Astrid is spitting with rage and eager for something to take it out on.
How dare he? She had asked him for help – Astrid never asks for help – and he'd looked through her indifferently with those cold green not-quite-human eyes barely any different from those so disconcertingly on the real dragon. She'd lowered herself to beg from a creature more dragon than human, all for the people she meant to devote her life to, and he'd looked away from her uncaring, dismissing the struggles and the suffering of her people as something he accepted, because he cared more about the dragons that were trying to starve them out if they didn't kill them or burn them to ashes first!
She slams her axe into the face of a Nightmare, but the eyes she aims for aren't bulbous and golden and glowing in the dark. In the place of every pair of dragon eyes she sees flint-hard green ones that should have been human but aren't. Those eyes surround her; they have followed her all the way here and they are haunting her. They had been the eyes of a dragon in a human face, and she'd seen not a person but something with a dragon's heart, and surely that was the same as saying no heart at all? Wasn't it? Except –
She is beginning to wonder if there is anyone even in there, anything human left in him at all. Every time she sees flashes – when he understood the idea of love even when he couldn't pronounce it, when he drew because he was happy, when he cared for Toothless as much as Toothless, however impossibly, cared for him, when he actually looked straight at her because he was trying to communicate – she thinks there might be.
And then every time he does something so completely inhuman – usually he has only to open his mouth, how can he make those noises and still leave her stumbling to translate when he tries to speak Norse one broken word at a time? – she remembers or she realizes all over again that he hates and fears her because she's human and he doesn't know he is.
The irony is driving her mad. If she could just get through to him! If she could draw him the way he can draw her and show him to himself!
Or maybe he does know and just won't admit it. Or possibly he just doesn't care, which would make him, in her eyes, a monster all over again. She doesn't know which one to believe or which one would be worse.
Astrid hates that she'd been starting to see a person in there. She loathes that she has been getting attached to him. She vows to never do it again. He's no child. And he's certainly no tame pet.
Cold-blooded heartless stupid pitiless creature! Astrid curses as she fights; she defends herself, defends her people, and holds them off for just one more strike. And she honestly can't say whether she's talking about the fire-breathers trying to eat her people off their own island or the dragon-boy on the shore, who is probably fast asleep cuddled up in perfect contentment with that nightmarishly clever Night Fury while she's out here in the cold and the dark, except for all the fire, which is worse, fighting his friends while they try to kill her either quickly and directly in battle or slowly through starvation.
Every blow she strikes is one more moment she doesn't need him. Every scream of pain from the fire-breathing monsters breaking into their stores and going after everything the ragtag fishing fleet has brought back over the last couple of weeks and the remnants of their much-harried herds is a victory. Somewhere down in the village, she can hear cursing and shouting and then a sound like a twang and a thunk as Gobber's catapult, which she suspects is less fixed than he'd like to think, hurls spike-infested rocks into the sky in an entirely uncontrolled manner. It's causing quite a lot of havoc up in the air, though, so she smiles grimly, barely more than a snarl though gritted teeth –
Which reminds her all over again of Hiccup, who hisses and threatens to bite her if she gets too close as if she's going to sprout claws and tear into his throat – although he is certainly capable of doing that, she knows too well: those scratches beneath her breastbone might actually scar where he'd threatened to rip her heart out. Surely by now even he must know that she's not trying to hurt him. He isn't stupid, he figures everything else out faster than anyone in the village she can think of. Except humans. Except, as she knows but he doesn't seem to, himself.
She wants to grab him and shake him, which even she admits, if only to herself, would probably not help. But if she could she'd drag him away from that Night Fury, another incredibly bad idea, and bring him here by the scruff of his neck to show him the people fighting for their lives and their homes and their families, rustled out of bed very late at night with hard work to do tomorrow after work just as hard yesterday just to survive.
And he'd probably turn on them to protect the attacking dragons, which are coming more often, she realizes. She should have had more time to get through to him and get him on their side but it hasn't even been a month since the last direct raid – oh, people have seen dragons in the woods and up in the mountains, but only a few at a time and if they'd just stay away from the village they could all do whatever they wanted – except come after her people!
Astrid rolls and spins in an absolutely perfect somersault roll and comes up again under a Nadder's nose, chopping up at it and feeling the blade hit home in flesh and bone. It screams and tries to get away from the Viking shieldmaiden, slashing at her with the claws on its feet, but she twists away and the combination of movements only makes the injury worse. Astrid will be washing blood out of her braid for hours but she doesn't care right now. She wants to hurt something, and the damn creatures aren't screaming enough to satisfy her right now.
Every scream she hears from her own people only makes it worse, because in between the battle-mad shouting and the people who are fresh to the fight and still having fun in the excitement of combat she can hear sounds that are people in pain and people who are afraid.
And she has failed them.
She has held her tongue and kept her patience and tried so hard. She has faced her own fears and stared them down every time Toothless has looked over at her, which he does often as she tries to interact with his semi-human companion, stomping hard on her instinctive need to run as far away from him as fast as she can, to which she refuses to surrender. She has managed not to drive away the little monsters that swarm around him. She has tried to feed him and tried to teach him to talk and she'd almost sort of gotten fond of him and she realizes all over again that it may as well have been for nothing.
The absolute indifference in his eyes! She had seen her failure as clearly as the sun.
So for now she burns away her shame and her anger in the heat of battle and defends her people and herself and her honor with the axe in her hand and the courage in her heart.
The fight, she knows. This, she can do. She is clearly no dragon tamer, and she rarely dances at feasts, but this, this is her dance.
The ground beneath her feet is hers; she has bled on it and shed blood onto it. She knows every step of the place, every wall she can push off of and every ramp she doesn't dare leap on to because it will give beneath her feet but the two-headed monster chasing her doesn't know that and will plunge through bringing it down to a level she can reach it on. She knows the difference between a flicker of reflected firelight from armor on a man with a sword in one hand and a mace in the other, swinging both in a deadly whirlpool of iron and shouting as he charges, and the flare of a new fire that starts as a Gronkle vomits burning liquid rock to cut off the woman storming it as it smashes through a sealed crate after the salted fish newly packed in there.
Her ears take in and sort through the voices of her people as they fight. She picks out people who need help before they can admit they need it, because they never will, and people who have won their battles and can be sent to support the others. In the midst of the fight no one questions her when she grabs arms as thick around as her waist and shoves the owners to where they'll be more use, because they trust her. They rely on her to protect them.
Astrid organizes fire crews, breaks up a quarrel over a rapidly diminishing stock of crossbow bolts by sending half of the arguing cluster to help Gobber load his bloody catapult and sharing the remaining bolts out equally among the rest, and checks on the cave dug into the rock and barricaded with their strongest and most reinforced doors that the very small children have been moved into. She corrals some of the older ones who are trying to get out and get into the fight despite the fact that they are small enough to be stepped on by accident, considers confiscating a knife almost as big as the child holding it, and then thinks better of it and appoints the knife's holder the guard on the gate in charge of all the other would-be fighters. The little girl puffs herself up importantly and holds her new post with excitement and enthusiasm – Astrid will have to keep an eye on her once she gets big enough to put to use for real.
She notes with some concern the spectacle of Stoick wielding that warhammer to devastating effect. His eyes in the firelight are cold and hard, his jaw set and that great voice silent; he is taking no joy in the fight.
He is not defending his people. He is killing dragons. There is a line, and he is venturing across it. The chief fights not to drive the fire-breathing creatures away but to get them down where they can be killed, pursuing and persisting even when his opponent is clearly beaten. There's a long gash scored into the crook of his left arm where something trying to get away from him has gotten lucky; he does not seem to have noticed and his wrist guards are a mass of caking blood worse than Astrid's hair right now. How much of it is his and how much is from the marauding dragons she cannot say.
It must last for hours before the dragons give up and go back to whatever forsaken place is their home, after it turns into a siege of sorts with dragons pacing around a makeshift barricade around Gobber's catapult, once they've learned better than to fly over it. Astrid wouldn't fly over that thing if she could fly, either, and she's not particularly comfortable sheltering near it because there's always the possibility that one of Gobber's contraptions will collapse under its own weight or explode outward having been pulled apart by a cord with too much tension on it, especially after dragons have been trying to blow it up. Still, as the night wears on, she and the other besieged Vikings manage to catch some naps in shifts. Hers are riddled with half-conscious nightmares all but indistinguishable from reality, and when she wakes up from the light doze she's slipped into in her turn she's momentarily not sure if she's done so or not.
Ultimately, the raiding dragons leave behind a lot of damage that will take weeks if not months to replace, severely raided caches of food that would have alleviated a lot of worries later in the year, plenty of bloodshed, a handful of trapped dragons either ensnared or too wounded to fly, more dead dragons, and three human corpses.
Astrid goes cold at the sight of the dead. None of the children that she had discouraged from getting out of the cave are among them, but she knows everyone in the village and every death, even of a warrior in combat who has lived a life knowing that he or she will most likely die in battle and accepted that, is a blow to her heart.
This, this is her fault, because she cannot make a single boy see the obvious.
She wants to take off running and grab him and shake him and bring him back to see the dead she'll place at his feet and the blood that she'll put on his hands, because he can talk to dragons, he could have stopped this, and he had looked straight through her when she begged for help.
But she can't. She has too many responsibilities to her own people to abandon them to put him and her anger before them when they need her.
Instead she helps to put out fires and straps rough bandages around wounds and counts heads. She dispatches her Vikings down to the cove to check on the ships – one day soon, if the attacks keep getting worse as they are doing, the dragons are going to get it into their heads to burn the ships. She is glad dragons are not that intelligent – if they couldn't send ships out to fish, trawling the deeper waters, Berk would starve permanently, and none of them would make it through the winter, and the dragons would have the whole island to themselves.
Toothless would think of that , something nasty in the corner of her mind whispers.
There is no point in her helping to prop up walls and deliberately collapse already-collapsing buildings when the island is full of people so much bigger than she is, so instead she goes to help the warriors who are wrangling dragons out of nooses and bola and into the fighting pit. She's spent plenty of time in that pit herself and owes her life a few times over to the things she'd learned there.
Still, when a Nightmare hit by one of Gobber's catapult payloads tries to prop itself up on shattered wings and fight back when they come for it, she flinches. Not because she's afraid of the thing, but because, to her irritation, she feels sorry for it. She's seen too many broken wings on dragons recently.
And it just won't stop fighting back even though it's clearly terrified of them and hurting even more every time it moves – when had she gotten so good at figuring out what dragons were feeling from those incomprehensible noises? And they can't do anything with it, they can't get a rope around it because Nightmares just set themselves on fire and burn through ropes, and they can't herd it into the pit because it can't move.
Finally Astrid has to leap in despite the fire and put her axe through its serpentine neck just to make it stop making that horrible whimpering sound that it's making. She can't stand it anymore.
Blood splatters her and the flames die out as it hits the ground and she rolls away. She comes up shaking, the sound it had been making still ringing in her ears. Astrid does not want to sympathize with dragons.
Not when her village has been smashed again and people – real human people – are dead.
Finally there comes a point where no one is watching her or wants anything from her, and there is nothing more she can do. Astrid has had a horrible night and a worse morning and she is out of patience.
As she slips away to take it out on someone who she considers wholeheartedly deserves it she furiously throws her favorite axe into a tree trunk, where it sticks – of course it does, that's what she'd meant it to do, Astrid can throw an axe. When she tries to pull it out she is horrified to find that the haft is coming loose and the blade has begun to wobble. She has been so caught up in trying to tame a wild boy that she hasn't even been looking after her favorite weapon, the one she relies on in battle to protect Berk. It is clearly time for her to get her priorities – and her methods – straight.
Angry, Astrid marches away towards the shore.
Always before she has been careful when she approaches him. She has stepped lightly and shed her weapons if not her armor – he's sort of fascinated by the fact that she's wearing metal even though he won't get close enough to look at it properly, but she's seen him watching the light reflect off her pauldrons and buckles – and made sure that he knows she's there before she intrudes too far into his and Toothless' space. She has spoken softly and been patient and brought bribes of complex toys for him to take apart and reassemble and fed food they can't spare to him and his beloved Toothless both. She's spoken baby talk and waved her hands around until she has felt very stupid, all in hopes of communicating with him.
And apart from a few misunderstandings they have more or less gotten along. Whenever she has said or done something he doesn't like he is more likely to move away from her and retreat to some other area, glaring at her balefully the whole time, than try to argue with her. She wonders what her visits have been to him. Certainly they matter less to him than they do to her. He always gets tired of her presence long before she is through with him, and he is perfectly capable of just going away, and she's always let him, reasoning that chasing him would only make things worse.
Well, no more of that. Fuming and wound-up and overtired and grieving and ashamed at her own perceived failure, Astrid is going to damn well get in his face and make him understand just how bad the situation is here if she has to knock him over and sit on him to make him listen.
She'll figure out the claws and the actually bigger than she is and the killer dragon shadowing him when she gets to them. Although she does leave the axe out of sight.
"Hiccup!" she yells as she storms onto the shoreline. There are more clouds in the distance following the other night's storm and the sea is dark and threatening. Yelling at him feels strangely but absolutely right, so she does it again. "Hiccup!" Clearly she should have done this weeks ago.
He is not hiding today, or sunning himself like a dragon, or fishing or scavenging, or drawing, or playing with Toothless or the Terrors, or any of the dozen other things she has watched him do over the past few weeks.
Today he is climbing around on the rocks that tumble down to the water's edge, but not for fun. It is almost as if he is pacing, dragon-claw gauntlets digging into the rock and shearing off small bits eroded away by the salt water, clambering from stone to stone with his head down and shoulders hunched up around his ears in that way that always makes it look like he's actually got invisible wings that he is protecting his head with. Usually, this means she is annoying him and is a precursor to him ignoring her. His movements are anxious, and his eyes when he whips his head around to look at her are bloodshot, tired, and angry.
She can hear him growling and muttering to himself, the way dragons would do it if they grouched like grandfathers, even as she shouts.
Clearly he didn't get the good night's sleep she had imagined him indulging in while she fought for her life. Good. He's also clearly in a very bad mood – she doesn't have to be an expert in his dragonish movements to see that. Whether he knows it or not, anger and sullenness and maybe even a little bit of what she thinks might be fear – the way he moves looks like he expects to be ambushed, with lots of looking at his surroundings and especially up at the sky – come through quite clearly on his human face.
Astrid doesn't see Toothless, but with how fast that dragon can move that almost doesn't matter – he could kill her for this whether she can see him or not.
"You!" she challenges, marching over to his current rock. He's perched a little higher than her head, and he crouches back on his heels as she approaches, bracing himself as if to leap either at her or away and baring his teeth in that open-mouthed silent snarl she's become so familiar with, that wrinkles a snub nose even further and looks like it should have fangs but doesn't.
"You listen to me. This is important."
Sure enough, he whips away and vanishes over the top of the rock. Astrid is just winding up for a really good shout when he reappears on top of it with his hands bare of those gauntlets and, for some reason, dripping with salt water.
She's less worried about water than those claws, so now that they're back on his belt she starts to lay into him properly.
"Your dragon friends are trying to kill us. You get that? Dragons make Vikings dead. And that's bad. Bad, bad, bad, and I need you to –"
That's as far as she gets before he pounces at her, knocking her flat to the grit and the rocks and the dirt and crushing out of her all the breath she had saved up for shouting at him. Because she's never seen him stand up properly, she keeps forgetting how tall he actually is – not a patch on his father, the real one, not the dragon he seems to think is his father, or half the men in the village come to think of it, but strong.
But Astrid has been fighting for her life all morning and most of the night before that, and she remembers how he fights – she never forgets the way an enemy moves, ever. So rather than wasting time being surprised like last time she yells directly at him the moment she gets her breath back. He jerks his head back away from the sound like any animal and she uses the opportunity to get in one good punch to his jaw that drives him backwards just a little further. It's almost enough to put her knee into his gut to knock his breath out of him in perfectly fair turnabout but he blocks the attempt. Astrid had half expected him to do that, though, and she braces herself against the ground and manages to flip them so that she's briefly the one pinning him.
It doesn't last; he gets a hand onto the collar of her tunic and another wrapped around her belt and throws her off, practically over his head. It's not at all like fighting a human man, who probably would have had a lot more hands on her and would react to her as a female fighter in a different way. Hiccup doesn't notice; it has occurred to her in the past that he might not even know that she's female, or particularly care. It's exactly like fighting a dragon.
In any case, he's already up and after her even as she's trying to twist in midair so the landing hurts a little less, and the spray of muddy, sticky sand she kicks up when she lands doesn't help even though there are far worse places she could have landed on this shore – it's full of very hard rocks.
Both his hands slam into her stomach as he pounces – he really does leap like a dragon and as long as she's on the ground she is in trouble but she is also lucky he does not have those claws on, and when she gets a chance she will wonder about why he doesn't when he's so obviously trying to hurt her – but she aims another punch at his face anyway. Hiccup snaps his head back too quickly for her to make contact this time: he's learning from her. Now she's worried.
But his next move is to get a hand into her braid and pull on it hard, digging his fingers into and through it, twisting her head to the side and baring her throat even as she's pulled towards those snarling teeth. There's suddenly a very real possibility that he really does intend to tear her throat out, without the claws.
She shrieks with rage almost like a dragon herself – no one does that to her, the last person who had pulled her hair had promptly gotten two of their teeth knocked out and they had both been seven years old at the time. He's unimpressed by her scream and roars directly into her face, but he also lets go of her braid and vaults away from her before she can retaliate.
Hiccup doesn't go far. He stays within a single leap of her as she sits up, holding back a desire to flinch even just a little at the impending bruise developing on her stomach, which she can already tell will be colorful and ugly, and glares at the dragon-boy glaring back at her from his hostile crouch.
"What in the – "
name of all the gods was that about? she doesn't get to say.
He slaps her.
It's a single sharp open-palmed blow across her cheek and jaw and mouth from what she has noticed is his dominant left hand and it stings more than the bruise for the sheer humanity and the shock of it.
Astrid is, temporarily, at a loss for words as he gets up and retreats – no. That would imply that he had lost. There's nothing of defeat about the way he returns to his pacing across the sea rocks, moving up and down as easily as back and forth and scowling, shaking his head erratically as if trying to get water out of his ears or physically shake a thought out of his head. The way he's climbing around makes it almost look natural – Astrid herself would have to use her hands as much as her feet to move across those rocks. The only reason he's not physically bristling is that his borrowed scales don't do that. If he had a tail it would be lashing back and forth like a whip. She can almost see it.
Swearing under her breath at him, Astrid licks at her lip to see if it has broken open under the blow and tastes blood.
But it tastes wrong, and she spits it out in disgust.
Suddenly she notices the dampness on top of the burning sting of the slap and she touches her fingers to the aggrieved cheek, wondering.
They come away stained with dragon blood. It must be plastered across her face like a stripe. That was why he'd gotten his hands wet and not worn his gloves – he'd gotten the dried blood out of her hair that she'd totally forgotten was even there and painted it across her face like a banner.
Look what you've done, she imagines that Hiccup is saying. Look at the blood of my friends on you. This is why we are enemies.
She is furious that this is exactly what she wants to say to him, and that he has found such an infuriating way to say it first.
Her shoulders hurt not from the brief fight but more from the tension between them, a promised phantom pain, of knowing that any moment now Toothless is going to show up and weigh in on behalf of his dragon-boy, and she will be very, very dead. She can't imagine why he hasn't rushed to Hiccup's defense already…except that he hasn't needed much defending that he can't do himself up until now.
And he is really not going far from those rocks, despite his clear agitation. Maybe Toothless is behind or beneath them somewhere. She's been so cautious and tentative ever since they took up residence here that she's stayed mostly in a small range and so has never been over in that area of the shoreline. Anything could be back there.
Despite this, she stands up and unsuccessfully tries to wipe the blood from her face and tries again, approaching the fall of rocks where he paces. He shoots anxious and annoyed looks at her as she does so, but does not attack or bolt, although he looks as if he'd like to do both, maybe at the same time if he could manage it.
"I don't want to kill dragons," she says through gritted teeth, and then remembers that he hears her voice even if he doesn't always understand her words and tries saying it again more gently. It only sort of works, but she cannot get more of a handle on her temper than she has already done by not picking up the biggest rock she can manage from the flotsam on the beach and just throwing it at him. "I don't want to kill dragons. Killing dragons is bad."
"Isss," he agrees sullenly, glaring. She has worked out that this is his way of pronouncing 'yes'.
Well, it's a response. Maybe if she can just make him see…but she's running out of patience fast and she can't help but feel that she's burning down a very short candle that's about to be obliterated in dragon-flame. Quite literally – her shoulders itch with the need to turn around and watch for the Night Fury.
Baby talk, she reminds herself, and unclench your teeth again, Astrid!
"Dragons," she says, "kill Vikings. Bad. Vikings kill dragons. Bad. Dragons eat Viking food. Bad."
He shrugs, jerking away from her and fidgeting across the rocks, prowling across them as if searching for something.
"Hiccup, listen!"
Hiccup snarls at her, a rapid snap of glaring and teeth and hissing. He knows she's there, he's just thinking quite hard about something else. She wonders what. What does he have to care about, stranded here?
She struggles to get her message down to the very basics, and comes up with "Hiccup say dragons go."
He ignores her for a bit to peer over some of the rocks and say something complicated in his dragon's voice. It sounds upset and stressed and harassed, and he keeps looking back at her as if the conversation is about her.
It makes Astrid only a little less nervous to know that Toothless is not sneaking up behind her, assuming that Hiccup isn't smart enough – and he might be – to play decoy and pretend to be talking to his dragon companion while the Night Fury ambushes her.
She really wishes she hadn't thought that. Against her will, she can't help but sneak a glance over her shoulder. No intelligent, lethal black dragon.
Finally Hiccup looks back at her and makes a complicated noise that it had taken her days to figure out meant both him and Toothless at once, and follows it up with "isss kkko, bad herrr bad isss kkko."
Astrid translates that as meaning that he and Toothless are going to leave, to go, because this place – he could mean the shoreline or the entire island – is bad. But it's not what she meant, and he can't leave now, she won't let him. She needs him to be here, at least until the other dragons are not.
Horrible thoughts swirl in her head, ways to keep him on Berk, thoughts she almost hopes she wouldn't be having if she wasn't so worn-down and desperate, drowning and catching at anything she can, however small and unlikely. Most of them revolve around Toothless. Could they capture the Night Fury, if they had to? What would they need to do that? How many warriors would she lose in that attempt? Could she make Hiccup understand the concept of a trade – him sending the dragons away for Toothless' life?
Would any of them survive that?
Visions of Berk in flames before a black dragon advancing at a steady walk like death itself, Toothless and Stoick locked in mortal combat for the soul of the dragon-boy, warriors she's responsible for dying under Hiccup's claws and Toothless' very real teeth, something going wrong and Toothless being killed in self-defense and Hiccup dying of grief with Viking blood on his hands – this is a bad plan, and even angry and exhausted and frustrated as she is Astrid abandons it.
"No," she says instead, "not you and Toothless. Those dragons." She points out to sea and then, seeing angry puzzlement on his face, puts her fingers up to her still-bloody cheek and holds the result out to him. "Hiccup say these dragons go."
The dragon-boy growls sullenly at her, twisting his head away in what might be a refusal and might be incomprehension and might just be frustration. He's not allowed to be frustrated, she thinks angrily. She has all the frustration there is and there's none left over for him.
"Say dragons go!" she insists, voice rising even though she knows that shouting at him will not help.
Finally he shrugs and says, "Nuh."
Astrid sees absolute red for a brief moment before realizing that he had said something more after that and she'd been so angry she hadn't heard it through the roar of her racing pulse in her ears. "What?" This is too general, she knows, so she waves her hand in the way that they've established to mean say it/do it again.
Hiccup actually rolls his eyes – she's seen Toothless do something similar, lowering his eyelids and turning his eyes up as if not wanting to look at whatever stupid thing is annoying him anymore, usually a Terror. Then he makes the same complicated Hiccup-and-Toothless-together noise and adds "nuh drakkkn chfff –" but if there was anything more after that he doesn't repeat it, because he stops short and goes blank and still, staring into the distance and through her completely, ignoring her.
Astrid has had a very long day and it's not even noon yet. She is tired, battered, frustrated, grieving, and out of patience. She is not up to comprehending anything more complicated than the fact that he's just refused to help her again and is now ignoring her completely in favor of leaping to another, slightly lower, rock and peering around it to talk intently to Toothless. He hadn't cared about what she had said but he's intensely interested in whatever meaningless dragon thing has caught his attention now – his shoulders are tight and his posture riveted, and while she can't understand a word that he's saying, if they're even words, she can hear the excitement and interest and maybe more than a little bit of fear in them.
How dare he? How dare he not only turn down another request for help but turn his back on her?
It's too much. She has had enough. She has lives to save and no more time to humor an animal who shouldn't be one; she needs him to rejoin the rest of the world.
Which is when she notices that he's done something he's never done before.
He has turned his back on her.
Hiccup is always watching her, directly or sideways-on or out of the corner of his eye. If he doesn't know where she is then Toothless is watching her for him. But whatever it is he finds so much more interesting than her asking him for help has gotten his attention so strongly that he is not watching her at all.
She is tempted to act on impulse and leap at him, shaking him like she wants so badly to do. She'd fist her hands in the worn leather stretched across his shoulders and drag him off the rock and onto the ground so she can shout at him. Astrid tries to imagine what would happen next, and briefly enjoys the image of him twisting in her hands, startled and squawking with rage and surprise. She'd jam her knee into his lower back and stay out of his reach, pull his overlong hair for him and see how he liked it, her hands would hit borrowed dragon scales one second and human flesh the next and she'd pummel both equally. But then they'd just be fighting on the ground again like they'd never started talking instead, and although it's tempting she bites her lip and doesn't do that.
She compromises. She sneaks up behind him, gets hold of an ankle, and drags him down from the rock as hard as she can, but lets him go as soon as he hits the ground. As she'd expected, he rolls up to a crouch roaring in surprise, furious, so she does something probably even stupider.
She gets in close, shoving him against the rock and jamming her forearm up against his throat, hooking one foot behind his legs to keep him off balance. He fights like a dragon – he pounces, he slinks, he gets his claws into his enemy and shakes it, but except when he jumps he does it on four feet and keeps his balance low. He doesn't balance on his own two feet very well, and he knows it, struggling to get away and not able to gain enough traction to do so. Her arms are positioned to keep him away from the gloves still at his belt as much as possible – he's trying very hard to get to them and he will get past her guard through sheer strength if she doesn't take advantage of this very fast – and he can't lower his head to bite with her arm in the way. She's not trying to choke him, though; he can breathe.
"Listen to me!" Astrid yells into his face, fed up. "People are dying! Real people! People like you – like Aka!" she says, suddenly absolutely sure that he will understand that and that it will hurt and serve him right for not caring about anyone else but himself and that bloody dragon he dotes on!
And that bloody dragon has just announced his arrival with an eerie, enraged whistling shriek like lightning if lightning warned its victims ahead of time, materializing as a blur of black-glossed scales that emerges from the tumble of rocks. She knows that Toothless has reacted to the attack on his companion and she has only moments to live. It almost doesn't matter to her, outside this one moment. Instead of doing the sensible thing, the cowardly thing, she turns her attention away from Hiccup for a brief second and shouts "No!" at the Night Fury.
Toothless rears up, wings flaring out, and screams, but he cannot blast her. She is too close to Hiccup, and the dragon will never endanger his dragon-boy, who has interpreted his way through her last comment and is roaring wordlessly at her rather than trying to get away for a moment.
At the sound of his mother's name, give or take a few sounds, Hiccup howls in fury and gets one hand past her guard, slashing back at her as quick as thought. He hasn't managed to get to his claws yet, and Astrid is hanging on as hard as she can to his left wrist, so only worn-down human fingernails scrape across her hairline and down across her forehead, and she shakes off the lesser pain.
"You don't care!" she chants over his snarls. "Damn you! You don't care! All you care about is dragons!" Oh, she wants to hurt him. It won't bring back the people who died this morning because she's failed to get through to him, but she wants to anyway. "While Vikings die!"
He understands at least part of that, because he growls back at her, "Pfikingr bad!"
"No we're not! Damn it, Hiccup! Stop and listen to me!"
Stop is a word he knows, and sort of listen, and for one brief miraculous moment he does. He's glaring furiously but he's not trying to hit her right at this moment.
"Okay?" Astrid asks, seizing her chance. "It's okay, Hiccup." She forces her voice to calm down, hoping he'll do the same.
They stare at each other for a frozen moment with Toothless' shadow across them. She's still got him pinned against the rock and off balance and he doesn't like it.
Damn, but he's taller than she is. She hates that. For a moment from this angle she can see the human he should have been, and for that brief moment it's a man and not a dragon under her hands, if only in her mind. She hates that too.
The dragon looming behind him croons and squawks something angry and protective, and the dragon-boy croaks back at him, sounding annoyed but not particularly hurt. He waves a hand in a way she thinks might be a signal to stand down, that he'll handle this himself. She is annoyed that she has learned to read him but she can't get the simplest concept through to him.
Finally he jerks his head away as if ignoring her, relaxing a little under her hands. It could be a feint, and if it is she'll regret it, but one of them is going to kill her if she keeps this up.
"Okay," she says softly. "We're good. Hiccup, are we good?"
"Isss," he mutters.
She shifts her grip from imprisoning to just holding him there. It's the longest she's been in physical contact with him, ever. And he really hates it. He's trying to push himself back into the rock and her away at the same time, hands fluttering, reluctant to touch her and break the agreed-on truce – she hopes they have agreed on a truce – but not wanting her Viking human hands on him.
Astrid steps back just a little. She doesn't go far, and she keeps her hands out to intercept him if he leaps for her or to stop him from bolting, and she doesn't move away far enough that Toothless, who is still crouched to pounce with his tail swishing wildly and teeth imprisoning an angry growl, has a clear shot. She's still keeping him where he is, but she's backed off.
Hiccup glares at her, his whole body shuddering convulsively as if her touch had been poison and hunching slightly. He's mostly leaning against the rock rather than crouched on all fours but he still keeps his hands low.
Bare hands.
Astrid can't draw very well but he's not stupid…
"Vikings aren't bad," she says, watching the space between them and waiting for an opportunity, trying to get the idea into his head. "Your mother – mama – 'Aka' – was a Viking, did you know that?"
She thinks he recognizes all the important words in that sentence, more or less, because she can see the rejection spread across his expressive face. "Nuh. Pfikingr mama drakkkn dead!"
"Your mother was Valka of Berk, Hiccup. Stoick is your father. 'Aka' was a Viking. And so are you."
He looks at her like she's crazy, like she's foaming at the mouth and biting at people. He says his name in that guttural way she can't really pronounce and asserts, "drakkkn!"
Astrid leaps at him again, taking her life in her hands and grabbing one of his. She sets her feet instinctively against his panicked attempt to pull away, using him as a human shield to protect her from the fire-breathing, now very angry dragon. "Look!" she shouts at him, frustrated by his denial of what is, to her, obvious.
Using her other hand to keep his wrist in place, she manages to press their palms together. Their hands are different sizes but clearly the same shape. "We're the same, Hiccup. You're not a dragon. You're human – a Viking, like me – and we need you to help us."
The dragon-boy stops trying to struggle away from her, staring in absolute horror at the convergence of their hands as if he's never noticed the similarity before, and maybe he hasn't. For a moment she relaxes, thinking that she's gotten through to him, that the intelligent mind buried under dragon scales has gotten the idea.
He stares. He trembles – she can feel his pulse racing where she holds his wrist. She's tempted to try to calm him, gentle him. Her hand itches to pet him like a frightened child, which is, for a moment, what he looks like. Involuntarily, her thumb rubs across that galloping beat under his skin.
"See?" she says softly. Astrid turns her hand just slightly and folds her fingers between his, showing him how they match up, trying to pull him back to humanity through the simplest possible method of a hand to hold. "Look at yourself, Hiccup. You're human."
He's completely silent, utterly still except for the shaking. And she sees terror bloom in his eyes.
Fortunately for Astrid, she has trained to anticipate movements around her. She drops his hand and pulls back just in time to avoid the handful of dragon-claws on his free right hand that he has just tried to tear her face off with. Still, one scores a long and bloody gash across her cheekbone, missing the eye.
But however much that wound hurts, it is clearly nothing to what she has done to him. He shrieks, a terrified, horrified, furious, completely inhuman sound that puts a block of ice in the center of her chest, looking at the bare hand she'd held as if it were stabbing him in his own heart.
Something that might be his name and "drakkkn!" he howls at her, shaking his head furiously, trying to shake that idea out of his head, and Astrid realizes she has made a huge mistake, because his grasp of Norse is slipping away from him and the dragonish noises returning.
A single scrambling leap takes him to Toothless, and onto the dragon's back in the next. From this safe place he crouches between the dragon's shoulders and roars at her.
About the only thing she can understand of the things he screams at her is that he is a dragon, that he flies, that he comes from an egg, and then she has no idea what the next statement is meant to be, but it must be some dragonish thing that she has no frame of reference for and he takes for granted, because she can hear the way he pronounces his name in there along with what almost looks like a submissive crouch much belied by the anger he throws at her.
The next thing she can pick out from the rage is the name of the dragon that Stoick hates so badly, the one that had taken him as a baby, and that she still can't pronounce or figure out what it is supposed to be. And sure enough she hears Hiccup's name as well and "uh-thrrr mama hrrt!"
His anger is further enraging Toothless as well, who lowers his head and flares his wings back and stalks towards her, threatening. Her human shield is gone and he suddenly looks nothing at all like the clever, affectionate companion who played with Hiccup on the beach and took fish from his hands and rolled his eyes when he was amused. Now he truly does look like death's child.
Astrid is going to die under the wrath of a Night Fury after all. She has cheated her fate for a few weeks but it has come back to get her again. Running from it had only postponed it and she will not further shame herself by trying again. She is a warrior. She accepts her death.
She looks it in the eye, and holds her ground, regretting that she has failed to save her people but hoping the gods will know that she tried.
And if she must die, at least she dies honorably, facing a creature that has given her and her people nightmares, beautiful in its deadliness and a worthy foe. She can see in his eyes his anger at her because she has hurt the one he loves, see his protectiveness of the dragon-boy now riding properly on his back. The two are almost like one being as they move, perfectly in unison, perfectly focused, rider communicating to dragon and dragon communicating back to rider as if there is no line between them. She has seen Hiccup ride on Toothless' back before, but never like this. Never for real.
If she had seen this, she never would have thought of him as human.
Astrid stands her ground and does not close her eyes as Toothless leaps for her, roaring.
For the second time inside an hour she flies across the shoreline under attack by a dragon.
When she can think again there's mud in her hair to match the dragon blood, and seawater in her eyes, and something unspeakable in her mouth, but she must be alive. No afterlife would include sand down her back, and if it does Astrid is going to have serious words with someone. She hurts but she can't smell human blood. Head reeling, she tries to sit up.
The Viking woman doesn't get that far. She only manages to prop herself up on one elbow before something with claws hits her, flipping her over onto her back and holding her there.
Astrid looks up past the dragon paw pinning her to the ground and Toothless' all-too-fanged, burning snarl into the frozen-pine eyes of the creature who should have been Hiccup of Berk.
"Uh strrrtt," he says, and it's barely human, "kkko."
And Toothless lets her up; he moves his paw only as far as it takes to stomp down right next to her instead of on her chest.
Gods help her. The one human quality he possesses, and it's mercy.
She has been given her life.
She goes.
The failure and the shame and the shock hurt worse than the beatings both dragons have given her today.
She takes absolutely no pleasure in hearing behind her, as she walks away from a chance to save her people that she has probably lost for them, an inhuman wail of absolute confusion and fear.
To be continued.