HICCANNA MONTH
WEEK 2, DAY 7 - WAYS TO SAY "I LOVE YOU": IN AWE, THE FIRST TIME YOU REALIZE IT
CAMPING (IMPLIED COLLEGE) AU

Hey uuuuuuhhhhhh. Not me writing this a full-ass year ago and barely getting it submitted on here in time for this year's Hiccanna month (which, in a very in-character move, I procrastinated having until July). Whoops.

Anyways, this cheesy little one-shot is very near and dear to my heart because I based it on a couple of my irl experiences! But I gave my beloved blorbo Anna the happy ending I could never have ;_;

BUT she also gets stuck with insomnia because I've had to deal with it my whole life and now so must she XD I mean it WOULD explain why she seems to have trouble getting up in the morning tho...poor sleep-deprived babe D: Anyways this fic somehow turned out to be even MORE self-indulgent than the last, so enjoy me aggressively projecting my life into fictional blorbos XD

Shout-out to the girlies on the discord gigilberry and haru for contributing some of the headcanons in this!

They remembered everything for the camping trip except Anna's melatonin.

Hiccup got the tent, the bug spray, and the sunscreen. Rapunzel checked at least 30 times that everyone remembered their sleeping bag, and provided the first-aid kit they would inevitably need (if Merida and Jack's recklessness were anything to go by). Merida brought the frankfurters and buns for grilled hot dogs, as well as a trunkful of firewood ("No, we can't just use some random wood we find in the forest! Do yeh have any idea how smoky and shite fire is when yeh make it out of fallen branches and twigs and…miscellaneous pieces of bark and what have yeh?! Nae, Ah'm bringing us the good stuff ef et's the last thing Ah do!").

Anna was in charge of s'more materials. She took her duty very seriously, getting only the very best quality (but reasonably-priced) goods the supermarket had to offer.

Apparently she'd been so preoccupied scouting for chocolate, graham crackers, and marshmallows that she forgot to pack the only thing that had let her sleep for the last 13 years.

All of her friends had dozed off long ago, dissolving into a number of different snores (although none too annoying, thank god). Meanwhile, she'd been up for…how long had it been? She checked her phone.

4:45 a.m. 3 hours.

It hadn't been so bad. It was midsummer, and crickets and cicadas and owls and other chattering night creatures were singing a lively chorus. The sky was clearer than she'd ever seen it, dusted with so many silver-white stars that she felt like she could scoop them right out of the air and eat them like sour gummy sugar. The trees formed tall, inky outlines—ominous to some, maybe, but Anna found them oddly peaceful.

Outside the cloth flaps of the tent, the night was warm. Anna was more than happy to stare up into the cosmos and think about deep subject matter—the universe, other universes, life, death, love, the beginning and the end of all that was, the potential existence of extraterrestrial life, how long before an expanding spacetime continuum began to collapse, what the meaning of it all was. Whether her existence was but a tiny, insignificant blip in the grand scheme of things.

Not that she arrived at satisfactory answers for any of that.

For the first couple hours or so, she'd looked for constellations…and hadn't found a damn thing aside from the big dipper. No surprises there—stargazing and star-charting were always Rapunzel's thing.

Besides, the view was better inside.

She was back in her sleeping bag by 3:30, lying on her side. Over and over her eyes trailed across Hiccup Haddock's sleeping form, wrapped up in dark green bedding a couple feet away.

He snored, but not loudly—more like a puff of breath here and there. Sometimes he clicked his tongue and smacked his lips like a chipmunk, and Anna always wondered what he was dreaming about. His arms were splayed at odd angles, like he was frozen in the middle of some ridiculous dance routine. His hair, constantly ruffled and wind-blown, was splattered across his pillow like paint, dark gray on light gray in the monochrome of the dim tent. His mouth hung open slightly, expression tranquil.

It was a far cry from his daylight face, constantly tensed up and scrunched in anxiety.

His chin and cheeks were splotched with their own constellations—freckles and pock marks and acne scars forming little dappled trails reaching across his nose and up his forehead. They were much prettier than any of the ones in the sky, Anna decided.

Hiccup had been on her mind a lot lately.

Not that that was anything new. But it had only gotten worse. She nearly failed an exam because she was texting him the entire time she was supposed to be studying.

If College Junior Anna were to tell College Freshman Anna that she would meet one of her best friends via joining a nerdy Dungeons and Dragons campus club in an attempt to pick up a lanky gamer boyfriend (it hadn't worked), the older of the two Annas would be laughed out of the room. Anna Runeardsen wasn't known for her social successes, after all—accidental or intentional, platonic or romantic. How she had even gotten into a decent college—let alone made this many friends upon arrival—was beyond her.

Her and Hiccup's rapid closeness was a wholly unexpected surprise, but a pleasant one. It was also, however, something Anna always had a feeling would land her in deep shit.

And for whatever reason, her intuition was tingling like a spidey sense and she smelled the deep shit just around the corner. This quiet, peaceful night felt like the calm before some kind of storm.

Really, she suspected the problem was that she was in too deep in general.

Despite what one might think from some ill-fated dating attempts freshman year, Anna knew she didn't need a boyfriend. She could take care of herself, thank you very much, and she got pissed when people underestimated her. No, you don't need to help her carry that heavy box. No, you don't need to walk her back to her dorm after a movie night with friends—she has plenty of pepper spray if the need arises. No, you don't need to shield her petite, "delicate" body from those rowdy frat boys leering at her—let her flip the assholes off. And if you insisted on paying on the first date (not that she went on many), it would also be the last.

It was different with Hiccup, though.

He wasn't overbearing with his chivalry—well, if you could even call it that. Anna didn't know how, but he managed to strike the strange balance between looking after her while taking her and her overall competence deadly seriously.

More seriously than most people did, anyhow. Just because she enjoyed the occasional miniskirt didn't mean she couldn't throw a punch or pass a class.

But Hiccup let her lean on him. Hold him to steady herself when she was drunk, even though he usually hated being touched. He listened attentively to every bit of stupid, rambling drivel that came out of her mouth when just about anyone else would talk over her or ignore her or look at her like she was insane. One time, he helped her back to her room after a shot too many, looping an arm around her back while he tucked her into bed. She woke up to a glass of water and a bag of mini Milky Ways on her bedside table the next morning.

He was also the first to jump in when she needed a favor—an electronic fixed, a ride off-campus, a late-night snack when she missed dining hall hours doing homework and had nothing to eat (Hiccup always kept candy and chips in his dorm). He was one of the only people on earth who didn't roll his eyes and repeatedly groan in exasperation as he slowly guided her through physics and chemistry homework. He never once raised his voice at her during DnD, no matter how many times she forgot her attack and damage rolls and how constantly perplexed she was by the game's combat mechanics.

For fuck's sake, there was one time he ran into her at the mall a little ways off-campus and caught her having a conversation with a Pikachu plushie, and he didn't even flee out of secondhand embarrassment. Sure, he laughed a little, maybe teased her a bit afterwards, but he never mentioned the incident to anyone. He protected her dignity (barely intact though it was) and didn't even seem to think less of her for the whole ordeal.

Despite all that, he was never pushy. He had a sixth sense about when she wanted (or, admittedly, sometimes needed) help, and when she'd rather do things on her own. Perhaps it was simply that after a lifetime of dealing with Elsa's emotional repression, Anna made a point of not being difficult to read. In any case, when Anna didn't want to be coddled, Hiccup knew.

And he knew she could be kickass, too.

He was the first to cheer when she got a test back and scored above 79%. He talked her and her ideas up to their friends, no matter how inane most found the musings of Anna's mind. He didn't interrupt her or shut her down, and sometimes in crowds, she got the impression he preferred for her to do the talking. A symbiotic relationship of sorts—if she was the loud, chaotic, and untamable trumpetvine, then he was the grounding support pole that she rooted onto and curled herself around.

Maybe that wasn't the most egalitarian way to phrase it. She could support herself if she wanted, but…

He didn't take care of her out of a condescending pity, or some insulting obligation that because he was the strong man and she was the dainty and helpless woman, he should. He took care of her because he cared about her. Simple as that.

And to Anna, that made a world of difference.

Hiccup mumbled in his sleep, turning onto his side and pulling his arms into his chest. Anna smiled.

He tended to hunch up like that. He was small, and he got cold easily.

She squirmed partway out of her sleeping bag and inched toward him, frowning as he stiffened. The summer night had grown progressively chillier as she soldiered into the wee hours of the morning, the last of the day's lingering warmth slipping quietly away.

Anna picked up a spare blanket and carefully pulled it over Hiccup's sleeping form, tucking it around him gently enough not to wake him. He seemed to relax, melting into his bedding and letting out mellower breaths.

Anna sat and watched him for a long time. Inhale, exhale. Tufts of bangs fluttering up with every puff of air. Shifts and shuffles what felt like every five minutes, because even in his sleep Hiccup couldn't stay still.

Eventually, most of his hair stopped being in blowing range and settled into a silly-looking cloud over his eyes. Anna fought the urge to brush it away.

She was whipped, and it was becoming a concern.

The fact that Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was without a doubt the most fascinating person she'd ever met wholly and truly did not help matters.

He knew enough reptile fun facts to fill a small encyclopedia. He'd gone on multiple Wikipedia deep dives to figure out the mechanics of cars and trains and household appliances alike, and would talk about them at length to anyone who'd listen. He knew an alarming amount of Lord of the Rings trivia and insisted on being Smaug for Halloween when he was 7. One of the times she crashed at his dorm, she woke up to him muttering numbers to himself while he built a DnD monster. Another time, she barged into his room to find him singing along to some Linkin Park song, hands doing the most awkward, jerky dance moves she'd ever seen. He spent nearly all of finals week holed up in his room, chugging monster energy drinks and somehow consistently clawing his way into the 90th percentile on every obscenely difficult physics or calculus exam he took.

Even if Hiccup sometimes made about as much sense as eating bananas with ketchup, he was easily the smartest person Anna knew. Most of the time, anyhow.

That past April she spotted him by the mid-campus pond, being chased by a flock of angry geese. She could tell from one glance that however this started, Hiccup must've had a serious lapse in judgment.

Anna rescued him before the situation got too out of hand. A good dose of shrieking, scolding, and waving one's hands all over the place could fend the beasts off, but that didn't stop her poor naïve friend from being thoroughly shaken by the incident.

It turned out Hiccup came to the pond with hopes of feeding the waterfowl, only to a) try to feed them stale Wonderbread, of all things (and only the most novice and uninformed of waterfowl feeders didn't know that white bread was actually terrible for duck and goose digestion), and b) let the creatures get altogether too close, igniting several cases of goose claustrophobia and meal wars that were ultimately taken out on Hiccup.

Anna chuckled at the memory, shaking her head. She'd ended up staying a while, calming the mob of geese and showing Hiccup the proper way to feed them. After all, she always kept some bags of oats, dried corn, and sunflower seeds in her backpack for exactly this purpose. You never knew when you'd have time to stop by the pond in between classes, and the campus waterfowl weren't going to feed themselves.

(None of the campus wildlife were actually capable of feeding themselves, Anna was pretty sure. They had to subsist entirely off garbage and student handouts.)

They sat by the pond for a long time, and she demonstrated how to toss snacks and indulge bottomless avian appetites without leaving yourself at the mercy of dozens of biting, hissing beaks. He lost his shit laughing when she pulled out a box of freeze-dried crickets, cracking it open and adding the insects to the buffet scattered across the grass.

She could only roll her eyes at him. "What are you laughing at, Goose Chow? I read on the internet they like bugs! And I can buy these at the pet store 2 blocks down for only $2.99!" A particularly fat white goose she'd named "Marvin" honked approvingly and vacuumed up a beakful of crickets, unequivocally proving her point.

She gave Hiccup a smug look, deciding to assert her dominance by dumping the rest of the crickets on top of his head. He caught one as it fell, inspecting it.

Before she could process what was happening, he popped it in his distinctly non-goose mouth and crunched down on it.

(According to him, it did not taste good. It did, however, cause her to screech-laugh so loud that every passing student shot her glares that could wilt entire flower gardens.)

She missed the rest of her classes that day, but it was worth it.

Back in the tent, Hiccup snorted in his sleep, jerking sharply and knocking the blanket she'd put on him out of place. Anna leaned in, brow furrowing in concern.

His head shot up, eyes wide open and bloodshot. "The dragons!" he gasped out, looking wildly around the tent. "The dragons are in trouble!"

His already-disheveled hair flew every which way as he propped himself up on his arms. "The dragons, they're…trying to…arrest them…"

Anna smiled tightly, pursing her lips and trying desperately to keep from laughing. The cops were after the dragons, and it was very serious business.

"Hey. Goose Chow." She leaned forward and gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. "The dragons are fine. I promise no one has warrants to arrest them. Besides, they probably set all the police helicopters on fire."

He chuckled, eyes seeming to fully take her in for the first time. "Oh, Anna, hey," he said blearily. "What're you still doing up?"

"Lifelong insomnia, my old foe, we meet again!" She gave him a strained grin and two thumbs up.

His smile faded. "Shit, your meds…"

She shrugged. "Eh. I'll sleep on the car ride back tomorrow. Or maybe I can talk Rapunzel into driving us to that Starbucks in town before we go hiking."

He hummed thoughtfully, lifting a lethargic hand to rub at his eyes. "I w's having this…this fucking weird dream…"

"Indulge me." Anna smiled. "I've got nothing better to do."

"I was like…in the mob, I think? We had some sort 'f agreement with the cops that they wouldn't go after this one clan of dragons, even though they were doing all this like…" He waved a hand around vaguely. "Tax evasion. But then these weird vampires with Australian accents moved t' town, and started murdering all these students at the wizard college and framing the dragons for it? And the cops were like 'we have t' break our agreement' and I was like 'no…the dragons're just doing tax fraud, you said that was fine, you have t' let them go…'" He yawned.

Anna smiled, shaking her head. "I mean, the easy solution here is just to explain that the dragons have an alibi. They couldn't be there at the time of the murders if they were busy filling out fraudulent documents to get out of paying their taxes."

"Mmmmm. Wish you could've been there t' tell me that."

He pouted. As his eyelids drooped, he leaned slightly into the hand still resting on his arm. Anna tried not to think about how much of a racket her heart was making.

"Did remind me, though…" He sat up a little straighter, tired eyes suddenly filling with interest. "'ve been thinking about Alya's backstory. I wanna work more of it in."

"Alya?"

Anna leaned in eagerly. Alya was her character in their latest DnD campaign, DMed by none other than the great Hiccup Haddock himself.

The green she-kobold was a washed-up wizard school dropout, left with no choice but to earn a living doing magic tricks at ritzy elf children's birthday parties. Alya had already encountered Telynthia Edheldris, her traitorous ex-roommate turned bitter academic rival. Telynthia, it turned out, was the mother of one of the all-time brattiest party guests Alya had the displeasure of meeting (and had all the snobbery to match such a position). Thankfully, Alya got some long-awaited revenge by distracting Telynthia with prestidigitation spells long enough to shove her in the punch bowl.

Alya had a decent amount of spotlight in the campaign already, but if Hiccup wanted to give her more…

"Maybe Professor Everbleed can show up." He watched her hopefully, as if waiting for her approval. "You said he was like. Really intent on running those unethical magic tests on you. For…reasons." He waved his hand vaguely. "I know you had something, but…'t's too fucking late. Can't think of it." He adjusted himself again, trying (and failing) to look more alert.

"And f'r nothing but a couple points 'f class credit, too," he went on. "'N I remember you were so worried about it you ran away from school. So…"

He propped up a sagging chin on his hand, eyes eager.

"You're 'parently quite a catch. You know. To experiment on." He grinned teasingly, although exhaustion made it slump. "Maybe he could hunt you down n' try to make you come back t' school. 'D be a spicy plot. Although I guess he needs leverage, since you wouldn't be dumb enough t' just go with him…"

Hiccup paused, brow furrowing as he thought. "Mmmmm…maybe…he could kidnap Rizzol and Viria? And Onyx? T's all of them, right?"

Anna stared at him.

She'd peppered no less than 5 relevant characters into Alya's backstory: Telynthia, her evil ex-professor Ulric Everbleed, and a college, teenhood, and childhood friend. She was happy enough that one made a cameo—wishing for anything more seemed like asking too much.

She never dreamed Hiccup would make a concerted effort to work all of them in. Weave together an intricate plot thread just for her, treat every part of the background she'd given him with love and time and care. Bend and tweak campaign plans he probably had in place for months, just so he could carve in characters she made and loved. All for the sole purpose, it appeared, of making her happy.

He didn't have to worry. Given how he ran his games, she knew she was going to enjoy every minute of whatever he did. With her own arc, and with everything else.

And that was about when the realization hit her like a fucking freight train.

"Holy shit." She gawked at him. "I love you."

Pure silence. He blinked several times, the only sounds in the tent the soft hum of nocturnal creatures outside and Hiccup's small, open-mouthed breaths.

It took Anna a few moments to process what she said. When she did, she couldn't breathe.

So this is the storm.

Then his arm curled around and his hand found hers, still resting on the skin near his shoulder. He intertwined their fingers and squeezed—a brief apology, she imagined. The warning lightning flash before the roaring bang of thunder that was inevitable rejection.

Anna could no more have guessed his next move than solved a differential equation.

He broke into a huge, stupid grin, which somehow managed to shine through the torrential downpour in her mind.

"I love you too, Anna."

With that, he passed out.

His eyes drifted shut and he plummeted, head bouncing off the pillow slightly as he hit it. Within less than a minute, his mouth slid open and emitted a long, guttural snore.

Whether his half-asleep mind would remember this conversation in the morning was anyone's guess. Perhaps if he did, he'd write it off as just another part of the corrupt mobster dream. Brains could be good at that—tricking you into thinking you'd woken up when you hadn't.

But he was probably too tired and delirious to lie. He was no master of deception at his most aware, let alone when his brain was fogged up with clouds of lingering sleep.

Slowly, Anna slid her hand out from under Hiccup's. His fingers had slipped from hers, but his warmth still lingered on her skin.

She inched her way back into her own sleeping bag and sank into the fluffed and still-relatively-unused pillow. Her eyes were still locked on the boy beside her, and as she tucked herself in, a giddy smile of her own began to form.

For the first time in months, every muscle in her body untensed. Relief weaved through her, more soothing than her melatonin and her antidepressants combined. She knew with a serene sort of certainty that morning would be there soon.

She'd been right. This long summer night, with its stillness and its tranquility and its endless thoughts and its half-lucid conversations, was the calm before the storm.

But let the storm come. It turned out the grass really needed the rain.

YES, I will die on the hill that Anna hates traditional chivalry, I mean look how fucken pissed she was when Kristoff was about to not let her help fight the wolves! And like yeah Hans is gentlemanly and courteous to her at first but he always treats her like an absolute equal and never actually acts like she can't take care of herself. Yes you can be a romantic at heart and want to find true love's kiss and swoon over cute boys and STILL not enjoy some aspects of "traditional" mxf romance lmao

Anyways I too tend to fall hard for men who look after me in a non-condescending and non-gendered way and thus, as per usual, I must also subject Anna to this XD

Yes I did indeed have Hiccup wake up, ramble incoherently about DnD, confess his love for Anna, and then immediately go back to sleep. I simply cannot regret this. It was also unironically very fun to come up with Anna's (second!) DnD character. I have some headcanons on my tumblr about the RotBTFD kids playing a DnD campaign, and I had Anna playing a wholesome-but slightly-annoying-human bard. And like...that's so perfect for her, where can she possibly go from there? A wizard kobold who performs at children's birthday parties and is a college dropout, apparently XD

Also as a longtime DnD player I can 100% confirm that a DM using all the characters in your backstory in the campaign proper is absolutely basis for a love confession. Like. The norm is to use one, maybe two, of your backstory characters in the plot, but every single one? That shit's marriage material. You hold onto this person who cherishes every single last fictional RPG character you make and you NEVER LET THEM GO DO YOU HEAR ME