He was still staring at Jack when the teen had cut down enough branches from the first tree, and started to walk away. He seemed to finally feel Hiccup watching him, because he turned back. His dark brow folded over with confusion at Hiccup's open-mouthed glare.
"Do I have something on my face? What?"
Hiccup shook himself into a scowl, crouching and taking the branches. Dragging them away, he called back at the last second.
"Yeah, ugliness."
"Good one. Almost sounded clever." Jack called back, unaffected, hacking again at a different tree. "Hurry up with the fire. We'll die far faster than I should like without it."
"You'd die far faster than me, scrawny."
"I could still lift you on one arm."
Hiccup didn't doubt it, but he couldn't think of a rebuttal, and he found himself content to try to clear a space for a fire. "No, no, not there. Too close to the river, try over there." Jack pointed out a patch of land where most of the snow had failed to fall. Hiccup scowled, but Jack was already turning away, running his hands through his hair and stacking branches he'd cut down.
Hiccup had seen people make fires before, but they always had some sort of papery tinder, or even gasoline. He cleared away a sizable circle of snow and plopped into the middle of it, pulling his legs up to his chest in the cold. His hands didn't want to work; his fingers could barely close. The sounds of wood cracking and splitting as Jack used his surprisingly powerful swings to bring the material crashing down became the only sounds Hiccup could hear over his freezing breath and the constant, almost calming, wail of the river.
"They've got to have noticed that we're gone by now." Hiccup attempted to break the not-so-silence.
"Of course they have, but they won't know where we've gone. It looks like we traveled a long way downstream." Jack had to raise his voice slightly to be heard as he moved further away. He did not like that he was so loud. Though he still had seen no sign of other life, he was observant.
"Why did this have to happen? I could've been anywhere else by now." Hiccup moaned, a little teepee of sticks threatening to fall again as he stripped it of needles.
"You tell me; you're the one who decided to check the alarm." Jack didn't blame him outright, but he didn't have to. Hiccup knew it was his fault.
"You should have stopped me."
"That only would've made you want to leave more."
Jack was absolutely right, and Hiccup knew it. Instead of snap back an answer, he leaned over his little twig teepee again. His lighter was the old-fashioned kind, where flint was sparked with a tiny cut of steel, so he only needed to click it in order to get sparks to fly. Unfortunately, very few-if any-fell where he wanted them to.
"Argh-just-c'mon, you-ugh!" His fingers, too stiff to hold the lighter open for more than a few seconds anyway, slipped right off the steel. He bit his lip to try hiding his frustration, not wanting to admit that he couldn't do something.
Jack didn't notice; he had already wandered further into the forest, out of earshot but not eyesight, mind number than his skin. What was he doing? How had this happened? He refused himself to dwell on the freezing water, tried to block out any memory of cold. He'd managed to hide his panic from Hiccup for this long, and he was determined to not let it be known. He brought down another good, long branch, and leaned against it in lieu of his staff. He stared at his feet in the snow.
How could he have let this happen? Had he not been kind enough to Hiccup, had he not been distant enough? If he'd succeeded, neither of them would have been out in the cold.
No, he couldn't blame himself. It wasn't his fault. But he refused to blame Hiccup, either, even though he desperately wanted to.
It would've been so easy to hate Hiccup; sometimes, he let himself slip, and he thought that he did. It was directly against his moral standing, but sometimes the man would get in his face until they were almost touching, that stupidly smirking sneer that so often contained a cigarette twitching at his lips, eyes filled with malice and some strange form of delight. It made Jack feel sick to think that he could have possibly done something to make someone hate him so much. He guarded himself against Hiccup as best he could; he knew what would happen if he let the seething Viking too close. It had happened before. It wouldn't happen again.
Jack didn't realize how tightly he had been gripping the branch in his fists until it cracked, and he released it with a hollow grunt of shock. He shook his head a bit, and then much harder, even smacking himself over the cut on the back of his head as he moved away, lifted the blade, and hacked into pine once more.
By the time he dragged back his mountain of sticks, Hiccup had built up a small fire, rapidly feeding it more and more. Jack was so cold that he could no longer feel the cold, and though he knew how dangerous that was, didn't want to go near Hiccup immediately. He sat at the other side of the fire, trying to pretend he wasn't frozen, and began to strip smaller branches holding needles from the larger ones he'd separated from the trees. He felt Hiccup look up, felt his eyes boring into Jack's...chest? He definitely wasn't trying to look at his face.