Chapter Text
It was hard to process— Hiccup being banished. Astrid still remembers the look on his face as he turned and left that day in the ring. The way he didn’t look back.
Betrayal, like a shock wave, swept through their village, that damn ring the epicenter. She remembers all the ways Stoick had screamed. Cursed his own son’s name, damning him and the house they shared.
Five years later and Astrid is still trying to process it all.
Five years later and everything is about to change again.
“I heard he killed six people when Stoick exiled him!”
“You know Stoick was his dad right?”
“Well, I heard it was thirty!”
“Everyone knows that, muttonhead—”
“He’s gonna be our chief now because—”
Children talk. Of course they do. All they know is second and third hand stories— they weren’t there. They ask Astrid questions, though, questions she sometimes doesn’t know how to answer. But she should, they think. She was there, after all, she knows. She remembers.
The children don’t understand or consider what knowing and remembering does to a person.
She forgives them. Answers them the best she can and holds the pain and knowledge and remembrance in her heart, keeping it tucked away in a special place that’s just for her and no one else on this wet rock.
Stoick is dead now. Died how he lived— stubborn, unflinching, killing dragons.
It had been pointless, anyway. Dragons haven’t been to Berk for almost as long as Hiccup. Like somehow he took them all away one day, with the wind.
Every part of Astrid shakes with pain at the funeral as she lights the first arrow and prays to all the gods in the heavens for forgiveness. This first arrow is for Hiccup, not her.
She fires it with her eyes closed.
She doesn’t see that it’s found its mark and she doesn’t see the rest of the arrows fly over her head and find their marks too. She doesn’t watch the boat go up in flaming glory, smoke carrying their chief to Valhalla to join at the table of his ancestors.
Astrid is acting chief now.
There’s a strange comfort in knowing that, up until the end of his days, she had Stoick’s trust, unearned though it was.
There are a hundred and ten things she never told him— she said nothing about Hiccup or Toothless or the Nest or anything.
There’s a predictable hurt in that too, though. But it’s hard to decide what to feel guilty about anymore and Astrid doesn’t know how much longer she can live a life consumed by a hundred and ten regrets. Stoick is dead. She can’t lie to him anymore.
Even in the face of all the things he didn’t know, Stoick forgave Hiccup in the end. It was only Astrid, Gobber, and Fishlegs that heard the last whisper as Stoick succumbed to his wounds. They’d done everything they could, but it wasn’t enough.
Nothing ever was.
“He’ll be here soon,” Snotlout says. “We need a plan.”
The four of them— Snotlout, Fishlegs, and the twins— have come together in the Great Hall to create Astrid’s informal counsel in this short interim. She didn’t ask, but they always seem to know when she needs them anyway.
“Plan?” Asks Fishlegs. “What plan?”
“The plan where Astrid challenges him for the chiefdom? That plan?”
Ruffnut frowns. “I didn’t know that was the plan.”
“Of course it’s the fucking—” Snotlout throws his hands in the air and sighs emphatically at them. “What the fuck other plan do we have here?”
“Just… Let him be the chief?” Fishlegs suggests nervously.
“Fully honest— that’s what I thought we were gonna do,” says Tuffnut.
“Why would we— we’re not gonna— Astrid, talk some sense into these people!”
Astrid tries to think about it. She really does. But— “I don’t see why I would do that, Snotlout.”
“Because we can’t let him become the chief!” He looks at them now like they’re all properly crazy. Like whatever he’s suggesting right now is the only logical thing to do. Maybe it is. Astrid doesn’t know.
“Why not?” She asks him, folding her arms across her chest. “It’s his birthright, we already sent word for him, he’s already on his way.”
“And when he gets here, you challenge him for the chiefdom! What’s not clicking here?”
“Doesn’t challenging him mean Astrid is going to have to… y’know… kill him…?” Fishlegs asks.
“Well if that’s the case, I’m all for it,” says Ruffnut.
“Oh, I do love a good old fashioned fight to the death,” her brother agrees.
“I’m not going to kill Hiccup,” Astrid says decidedly.
The group falls deathly quiet in a way that makes her irrationally angry. They all refer to him obliquely just like the rest of the village. Epithets take the place of a name— The Boy Who Grew Wings, Sky Holder, The Night Fury’s Companion, The Dragon Rider— and have built him into a myth.
A myth to fear.
Astrid remembers Hiccup, though. Even before they were teenagers together, trapped in a ring learning all the ways to kill dragons, Astrid remembers Hiccup being a sweet sort of person. Soft spoken and kind in a way that many of their tribe were not. Defiant in a way that surprised her in some ways, and didn’t in others.
Her last memory of him is of his reckless bravery and compassion in the face of exile. His silhouette growing distant on the horizon, an impossible choice made.
“It’s just Hiccup,” she says after a while. “You remember what he was like, don’t you?”
Snotlout has convinced himself of the myth. He’s built it out of a place of betrayal, Astrid is sure, using it as a way to protect himself from whatever complicated feelings he has about everything that happened in the ring that day. “He’s been gone for five years, we’re all different now, aren’t we? Exile breeds resentment. Who’s to say he doesn’t come back here and raize the village to the ground?”
Astrid scoffs.
“What did he say when we sent word to him?” Tuff asks. “Anything about a rain of dragonfire descending on Berk?”
“No, nothing like that,” Fishlegs tells them, reaching into his pouch and pulling out a single sheet of paper. “Succinct and nonthreatening,” he says, laying it out on the table for the rest of them to read.
Berk,
I return to you with a heavy heart. You may expect my arrival soon.
—H
Astrid has read this already. She’s studied the shape of the letters; she’s noticed the small stain of a tear at the top of page, hastily wiped away in an attempt to hide it; she’s traced with her fingers the symbol drawn beneath the signature— a dragon curling in on itself, all black but for one tail fin colored red.
She traces it again now as it sits in front of her, transfixed in plain view of everyone. She can’t bring herself to mind right now. Who cares if she exposes the soft and tender place in her heart where the memory of Hiccup lives?
Astrid snatches her hand away from the paper, coming back to herself and feeling the hot rush of shame wash over her. The others, Odin bless them, say nothing, pretending not to see what she knows they all saw.
“I’m not going to kill him,” she says again, her words carried by a quiet sadness. “I don’t know if I could, even if I tried.”
Snotlout looks at her for a very long moment and she can see his fears written across his face. She knows hers show too, and she doesn’t try to hide them. “Fine,” he says eventually. “But the moment he steps out of line, I’m killing him myself.”
She nods slowly and looks around to the rest of them. “We’re all in agreement, then?” Astrid asks. “We’re going to give him a chance.”
Fishlegs nods eagerly, visibly relieved.
Ruff and Tuff share something of a disappointed look between themselves. “Just as long as we can kill somebody else some other time,” Ruff says with a wicked smile and suddenly, Astrid feels much better.
It’s hard to say if Hiccup will hold the past against them, certainly. It’s impossible to know for sure. But Astrid is inclined to think the best. Maybe it’s naive of her to think that the banished son would return, not to seek vengeance, but to lead.
In her head, she knows Hiccup has every right to tear them all down, but her heart cannot be convinced that he ever would.
The five of them finish their dinner in sad, companionable silence, all content to leave the others to their own repetitive thoughts of what ifs and old friends. The Great Hall is quiet in much the same way as they are— speculative conversation has melted away at the tongues of even the children, and Hiccup is, for now, a ghost to haunt the mind and not the mouth.
“Astrid, do you think we should tell them all?” Fishlegs asks lowly as the two of them walk out of the Hall together. “Don’t they have a right to know what Stoick said about— about, well, the Dragon Rider?”
Astrid still doesn’t have any of the answers people are expecting her to have. She doesn’t know. She just doesn’t. “What good would it do? Even if it’s just the other three, Fishlegs… I can’t see how that’ll make them feel any better.”
“Did it make you feel any better?”
“I don’t know how I feel.” They stop at the bottom of the stairs and she turns to him. “What about you?”
Fishlegs studies her face for a moment, then sighs and looks away to the horizon. “We were close before. The Dragon— Hiccup and I.” His face changes, brightening slightly with fond memory. “Even before dragon training… There was a day— we had to have been six or seven then— that we were exploring in the woods alone. We must’ve wasted the whole day away giant hunting or doing something else ridiculous.”
“Simpler days,” Astrid comments softly, recalling herself at that young age. Hopeful eyes and an unburdened heart.
“Much. It was getting late and I begged for him to let us go home, but he heard something, off deeper in the forest— the tiniest little bird call. I can’t say how he figured from such a far distance, but he convinced me it was hurt and calling for help. Sure enough, when we followed after the sound, we found a little bird on the forest floor with a broken wing. We got lost on the way home, but we brought it with us and he carried it the whole way back…” Fishlegs falls quiet for just a moment. “He forced Gobber to help him make it a splint the next day and three weeks later, we released it back out into the wild.” He looks back at her. “I knew that little boy, Astrid. I saw him in the ring that day, all those years ago, with a little bird held so gently in his hands.”
“People can change,” she suggests. “Like Snotlout said, banishment breeds resentment.” There’s a part of her that wanted Fishlegs to challenge her naivety. Needed for him to poke holes in her biased memories.
He shakes his head at her, something in his eyes understanding her need. He refuses her. “It’s just Hiccup,” he says kindly, throwing her own words back in her face.
“I just… can’t help but wonder if we’ve done the right thing. I want to believe he won’t want to hurt us, but there’s doubt here! I need to know what I’m supposed to do, but there’s no way to find out!”
“Look, Astrid… We can’t know how this will be other than the fact that it will be. Even without what Stoick said, he never actually denounced Hiccup as his heir. Under Viking Law, we had to ask him here.”
She looks at him helplessly. “There really is no right answer here, is there?”
“I think all we can do now is wait.”
It’s a lot to process— coming home. It’s only been a week though, so Hiccup thinks he’s allowed just a little more time to understand it all.
His father, for starters, is dead.
Hiccup feels guilty for resenting the grief he now carries in his heart. But, gods, does he resent it. Resents the little bit inside him that was convinced, for five long years, that there was a chance that he and his father might make amends.
An ember of hope that burned for far longer than he should’ve let it, finally smothered by a single letter. Trader Johann had arrived at Hiccup's little island outpost and delivered, with shaking hands, the last blow.
Lost Son of Berk,
May this message receive you well. Stoick the Vast, your father, has joined the Valkyries in Valhalla. His death heralds the end of your exile; return to Berk and claim your birthright. Lead your people as you were born to do.
Please send word back at your earliest convenience. In the interim, Astrid Hofferson will carry the responsibility of chiefdom.
—The Hooligan Tribe of the Island of Berk
He read the letter six times with tear blurred eyes before the magnitude of it all finally started to set in.
Five years and he’s finally going back to Berk.
His father is dead and Hiccup is being welcomed home.
He and Toothless take now to the sky, a week of packing and planning and preparing behind them. He talks as they fly, explains in plain language why they must both return to such a hostile place. He’s been explaining this for the past week. Toothless, even with his kind eyes alive with intelligence and understanding, has probably grown weary of Hiccup’s telling him the same things every day.
Hiccup keeps talking, though, because, well, to be honest, he expects a fight. He expects a trap, danger, hatred. He cannot see a future where the people of Berk respect him enough to call him leader.
He says anything but that out loud.
He has a plan, of course. He won’t fight back. At the inevitable challenge for chiefdom, he will throw down his sword without raising it, plead mercy, and leave again. Maybe they will be kind enough to ask him ‘stay’ and maybe he will be weak enough to accept. But he will not fight.
Death has marked his step for five years. He will not allow it to follow him back to his people.
Toothless groans and flicks his ears side to side in front of Hiccup’s face.
“Set down soon, bud?” He asks the dragon, running his hand down the center of his scaly head. “I know it’s a long flight.”
Toothless growls contentedly, eager for the rest. It’s not actually a terribly long flight, but for as light as Hiccup had tried to pack, there were too many things he had to bring with him.
Even if the Hooligans plan to run him back off the island as soon as he arrives and let Astrid get on with it how she will, Hiccup must still offer gifts of goodwill— the spoils of travel, knowledge, and gold— to his people. Five years gone, a world of hurt between them, and he still loves them.
He wants to be able to love them.
The wind, seeping through the narrow slits in his mask, keeps his eyes dry and for that Hiccup is grateful. He has a heartful of tears to shed, sure, but something in him refuses to let them even leak. There will be time for tears when he is dead in the ocean.
He and Toothless land on a small island familiar to them both, home to the small fishing village of Old Ait. The people here tolerate the two of them, but they’re always more willing to be near either of them after Hiccup has jangled a coin purse at them. He understands. Knows that the mysterious stranger who never shows his face and rides on the back of a Night Fury isn’t someone he would easily trust either.
He helped them deal with a dragon problem two years back, though, so now there’s respect in the way the villagers fear him. Not much, but it’s enough to get them to allow Toothless up on to the docks.
They land on the beach, just close enough to the village and docks for anyone looking up to see them, but not near enough for it to look like an attack.
Hiccup’s life has become one of very thin lines and very delicate peace.
Toothless walks just a step behind Hiccup as they come up the beach. It’s not anything either of them like, but it’s expected here and everywhere else that they prove that Toothless has been ‘tamed.’
Hiccup, too, must prove he’s been tamed, so once he’s sure that several of the fishermen on the docks have seen him, he makes a big show of throwing his weapons down in the sand and raising his hands, his palms turned to the sky.
“I’ll— I’ll go get the chief,” one of them shouts from the dock before tearing off towards the village.
Hiccup sighs and drops his hands. “Just stay here this time, bud,” he tells Toothless. “I won’t be long anyway.”
He growls once and rolls his eyes before tramping around on the weapons and laying down in the sand.
By the time Hiccup’s made it to the docks, so has the chief of Old Ait, Frode the Waterborn, his eleven year old daughter, Bodli, at his side. Hiccup leans his head to the side— the closest he can get to a friendly smile without taking off his helmet— and waves to them. “Chief Frode, Bodli,” he says. “Nice to see you again.”
“Dragon Rider,” says Frode, bowing his head to Hiccup just so. “To what do we owe the honor? Do you require food or rest for you and your dragon?” He, out of all of them, is certainly the least frightened of Hiccup and Toothless, but in his voice, there is still a noticeable anxiety, betrayed by both the nervous set of his massive shoulders and his overeager need to please.
“Oh, nothing like that, no. I was actually hoping to buy a boat from you.”
“A boat?”
“Why do you need a boat for, Rider?” Bodli asks. And, to be perfectly honest, out of all of them, she is probably the least frightened of the dragon and his rider. Hiccup has always found himself quite fond of her.
“I need to sail somewhere, Bodli.”
“Yeah, what about the dragon? Innit how you get places?”
Hiccup laughs. “Yes, normally he is, but this is a different kind of trip than usual.”
“Where are you going then?”
Chief Frode claps his hand down on his daughter’s shoulder and pulls her close to him. “I’m sorry about her, Dragon Rider,” he says quickly. “She asks too many questions at all the wrong times.”
“Not at all, Frode. Curiosity is not a flaw. And we were all eleven once.” Hiccup lists his head to the side again. “To answer your question, Bodli, I’m sailing home.”
Bodli, emboldened, steps again away from her father. “Where’s home, Rider? Is it a long way?”
Hiccup shrugs. “Not as far as it could be, but I return with gifts for my people. Too many to carry on Toothless’ back all the way.”
Her face lights up. “Things from your travels?” She asks with shining eyes. “Rider, please, can I see some of the things you’re to gift to your people?”
He can’t think of a good reason why not. Bodli reminds him of himself in a small way— an insatiable desire to know and see and understand flows through her veins, and he can see it. Hiccup smiles, a smile that is real and just for him, and turns to the beach. “Toothless!” He calls, beckoning the dragon with his hand. “Bodli, have you met Toothless already?”
“No, I—” she shrinks back towards her father as the dragon comes up the beach. “I— I haven’t met—”
“It’s okay,” Hiccup says softly when Toothless stops behind him on the dock. He hasn’t really understood what’s so frightening about Toothless in many, many years now, but he knows that no one can quite read him the way he can. To many, he’s still a wild animal. “Would you like to?”
“Dragon Rider,” Frode says sharply, putting himself between Toothless and his daughter. “I’m not sure if that’s a very good idea.”
Hiccup ignores him and looks at Bodli, who’s leaned around her father to look at Toothless. She catches Hiccup watching her and, somehow, the two of them manage to make eye contact. The curiosity that burns so brightly in her eyes is mystifying.
“I want to,” she declares, moving away from her father and cautiously closer to Hiccup and Toothless. “Can I meet him, Rider?”
“Of course. Hold out your palm to him and let him come to you, alright?”
Bodli nods and holds out her hand hopefully to Toothless. He considers her for a moment, cocking his head and flicking his ears. Bodli watches him back, unflinching. His eyes get big and he bumps his head against her hand. She yelps, but doesn’t move, a grin the size of the archipelago growing across her face. “Oh my Thor,” she whispers and Hiccup laughs again.
He takes one of his smaller saddle bags off of Toothless and opens it for Bodli. “Here, look,” he says, holding out a bronze disk to her. “This is an astrolabe I was given in Greece.” He releases it and the saddle bag into her insatiable hands and Frode clears his throat.
“You’ve long been a fascination of my daughter’s, Dragon Rider,” he says awkwardly, a watchful eye attached to Bodli.
Hiccup cocks his head— less of a smile, more of a confused motion, he thinks— and folds his hands behind his back. “I should probably apologize for that, shouldn’t I, Frode?”
He clicks his tongue. “No, no. Not yet anyway.” He smiles, a shy camaraderie in his eyes. “I’ll come knocking once she sets off on a boat in search of adventure beyond the archipelago, though.”
He chuckles politely and the two of them watch Bodli trace the stars engraved on the astrolabe with her fingertips quietly, her back pressed up against Toothless’ side. Hiccup wants to tell Frode that it’s not so bad out there in the great big world. There are beautiful places and clever people and fascinating dragons.
There is a part of the human soul that longs to be free, Hiccup has realized, and that freedom can be found in the open sea and sky, and in the company of perfect strangers.
But a great pain in his heart can’t bear to tell Bodli to ever leave her father’s side. She is loved here, that much is clear, and Hiccup couldn’t let himself convince her to give that up for something so small as an adventure.
Freedom, he sometimes thinks in quiet moments, might not be worth the price you have to pay for it.
“So, where do your people hail from, Dragon Rider?” Frode asks after a while. “Is there a whole village of strange creatures like you?”
“Afraid not,” Hiccup tells him good naturedly, by now used to being seen as something only tangentially human. “I’m just as much an oddity there as anywhere else.”
“Will they welcome you back, then?”
“Hard to say… It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
Frode studies him. Looks at him like he’s trying to see right through the helmet to his unguarded face. “Why go back, Dragon Rider?”
Hiccup shrugs, somehow unable to lie with Frode’s eyes burning holes into the sides of his mask. He trusts the old fisher, though, in a way that surprises him. “My father died,” he says. “Our tribe must mourn and, oddities or not, I suppose I’m still a part of it.” It’s a lot of information to give up— villages mourn for all deaths, sure, but there is a gravity to the confession that wasn’t quite intentional— but Hiccup feels less alone for having divulged it.
Frode’s face flickers through several different emotions in rapid succession, before it settles on a very diplomatic frown. “My condolences, Dragon Rider— I am truly, truly sorry that you must face such loss.”
“Ah,” Hiccup says stiffly. “Thank you.”
He nods and reaches into his pocket, producing a ring too small for any of his fingers. He takes Hiccup’s hand and presses it into his palm. “A gift,” he says. “For your chieftain. Wherever you call home, Dragon Rider, let me call myself your ally. In times of war and times of peace, the Deep End tribe of Old Ait is a friend of yours.”
On its face is the crest of the Deep Enders— a fish run through by a spear displayed across a tall evergreen tree. Hiccup stares at it in his palm, his breath stolen from his breast, letting the weight of it wash over him. Tokens of friendship do not come often to the Dragon Rider. They are always hard earned and easily lost. Never have they been so unconditional.
“You have always been kind to us,” Frode continues. “This village would have starved three times over if not for you and that dragon of yours, you know that. If ever a time arose that you needed anything, I hope you would call on me.”
“I… I would, Frode,” Hiccup says, tucking the ring away into a secure pocket. “Thank you. You know, always, I will be a friend to you as well.”
The chief nods and settles his great paw of a hand on Hiccup’s shoulder and tries to look him in the eye. “I may not know your name, lad, but I see what you’re made of,” he says very quietly. “You’re an odd man, Dragon Rider, but you are surely a worthy chief.”
A lightheadedness comes over Hiccup and something in him wants to rip off his helmet and let Frode see him for what he is. He wants to be known. Understood in some small way. It burns at him, tears up his insides with claws of iron.
“Woah,” Bodli interrupts breathlessly before he can do something recklessly stupid. “Rider, what’s this?”
He looks quickly away from Frode, blinking tears out of his eyes, and finds her holding up a sword with a wicked curved blade that she’s found strapped to Toothless’ saddle. The dragon nudges her in the belly as she swings the thing in a slow arc, pushing her ever so gently away from anywhere she could accidentally hit somebody.
“That,” says Hiccup, “is called a khopesh.”
“Khopesh…” Bodli echoes, keeping her eyes on the blade, entranced by the way it shines in the afternoon sunlight. “It’s beautiful.”
“The great pharaohs of the kingdom of Egypt carry them into battle. They’re said to be a gift from their gods.” The weapon looks good in her hand as she wields it, she’s unpracticed with a sword like this, but Hiccup can see absolute mastery over it in her future. “You know, Bodli, I think you oughta keep it.”
Her attention snaps to him, bewildered. “You… want to give it to me?” She asks with cautious excitement.
He nods, leaning his head.
Bodli’s eyes grow wide and she drops the khopesh, and she runs to him, throwing her arms around him and hugging him tightly. “Oh my Thor, thank you, Rider! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
He hesitates, just for a moment, then hugs her back. He’s confused and delighted and taken aback, and Bodli’s joy is contagious.
The smile that pulls at him is so big it hurts.
“Let’s see about that boat, Dragon Rider,” says Frode when Bodli breaks away from Hiccup, resuming her interest in Toothless and the khopesh.
“Yes,” he says, all sorts of knots tangling and untangling in his stomach. “Yes, thank you.”