Chapter Text
The horn sounding, deep and resonant enough to vibrate the bones of anyone within a square mile, wakes Newt from dreams of dragons sailing graceful and beautiful through the night sky. He sits up with a gasp, and peers out the window. It’s dark out, probably around midnight, and sure enough, he can already see the tell tale spurts of fire over the town square where the livestock is kept. Dragon attack.
Newt is ready. He’s been waiting for this. He rolls off his bed and dresses quickly, then drops to his knees to pull his supplies out from under his bed. A precious handmade notebook and pencil, both small enough to shove into his pockets. He waits a moment longer to make sure he is the only one in the hut. Even people like his parents and uncle, who aren’t particularly aggressive or muscular, join in defending the village. There’s hardly anyone in the town that doesn’t join the fight. Even most of the teenagers contribute by doing things like putting out fires. Newt is one of the few not expected to hlep, which is, as he’s often reminded, due to him being a “tiny freak.” Whatever. At least it makes it easy for him to sneak out of the house and into the night, already alive with dragon fire and shouts.
Newt ignores the fray in the center of the village, instead making for the hill. It’s on the edge of the village that faces into the depths of the island, far from any livestock. It’s probably not the safest place to be in a dragon attack, as a decent amount of the dragons approach the village from over the island and thus have to fly over the hill, but there’s nothing of interest there, so he’s confident none of them will actually be paying attention to it. It also provides an excellent view of the village and is rocky enough for there to be good cover and hiding places. Plus, everyone is too busy running into the village to join the fight to notice one small, weird teenager (who's shit at fighting) running in the opposite direction. He has to swerve once to avoid Herc Hansen, who might give more of a shit about him being where he shouldn’t than other villagers, but other than that he makes it to the edge of the town easily and quickly finds a good place to watch the fight unfolding beneath him, lit by the fires of the attacking beasts.
There’s some lovely variety tonight. A truly beautiful Monstrous Nightmare coated in flames. A Deadly Nadder. He only takes his eyes off the beasts before him long enough to sketch out hasty images of them in his notebook, squinting through the dark to see the pages. Then-
Then he hears a scuffling sound to his left.
He goes still immediately, breath catching in his throat, heart stopping and then slamming into triple duty. Oh shit. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe a dragon would stop at the hill. There’s the scuffling sound again, and something scraping - a claw on a rock, perhaps - And-
A familiar voice hissing, “Oh, fuck!”
That’s not a dragon.
Newt looks to his left, then jumps to his feet and takes a few strides in that direction. He has to go around a large rock that was blocking his view, and beyond that is a clear, flat area currently occupied by a skinny, somewhat disheveled boy, kneeling awkwardly on the ground and setting up some sort of strange mechanism.
“Hermann?” Newt says disbelievingly.
The other boy jumps and looks at Newt, wide-eyed. He relaxes when he sees who it is, then bristles defensively. “Newton? What the hell are you doing out here- No, I don’t need to ask, you’re observing your precious dragons again. Really, I’d thought you’d have learned your lesson after last time. I see your eyebrows have finally grown back.”
“That’s rich from you!” Newt says, only barely remembering not to shout. “What the hell are you doing here? Is that- Please don’t tell me that’s one of your stupid inventions!”
“It’s not stupid!” he snaps, and goes back to fiddling with it. It appears to be somewhat like a crossbow, but able to fold up into small pieces, and set up on a tripod that stabilizes it against the ground. The projectile he is loading looks nothing like an arrow. Instead of having it face toward the village, it’s pointed at the direction the dragons are coming from; toward the depths of the island, which are forested and inhabited only by dragons and other wild animals.
“You’re not supposed to be out here!” Newt says, taking a step toward him.
“Neither are you!”
“Yeah, but I don’t give a fuck about rules, and you do! What if someone catches you here! Or worse, what if a dragon tries to attack, what will you do? It’s not like you can outrun a dragon!”
He sends Newt a truly furious glare at that. Newt feels the tiniest bit guilty.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, sitting down on the dirt on the other side of his weird machine. Newt doesn't think he's seen this particular creation before, but he has often caught glimpses of Hermann drawing sketches of various inventions over the past few years, and this looks as peculiar as all of them. “But is playing with some stupid invention of yours really worth taking the chance? I know how much you hate risks.” The last part is accompanied with a bit of a sneer.
“I’m not taking a chance,” Hermann says fiercely. “This is going to work, I’m certain of it. I’ve done all my calculations at least twice, and I’ve tested it, and it’s going to work, and I’m going to kill a dragon, and then no one will think I’m useless anymore!”
Newt leaps back to his feet. “You’re going to kill a dragon?!” he shrieks.
“Shut up!” Hermann hisses.
“Have you listened to anything I’ve ever told you-”
“No-”
“They’re not bad, they’re just wild, we don’t need to kill them-”
“Just because you love them-”
“Shut up, I don’t love them!”
“You do so-” he starts to retort, then audibly sucks in a breath and says, “Oh gods. There’s one.”
Newt, heart suddenly thumping, looks in the direction Hermann is facing toward. And there, flying toward them, low over the woody, rolling hills of the island, is a medium sized dragon - no doubt still fierce despite its size - with long, brightly colored wings. It’s not far off now, not far at all, and its current path will cause it to fly directly over the two of them. Newt’s brain, confronted with the reality of a dragon heading directly at him, fills up with buzzing, incomprehensible fear, so that he freezes in place, unable to decide if he should run or hide or try to fight. Unable to think at all.
Hermann, sounding perfectly calm other than the way his voice slightly shakes, says, “That one will be perfect.”
“Don’t!” Newt squeaks, shrill with fear.
“It’ll work, I swear- Just one more second, I need it to be closer in order to kill it-”
“Hermann-” he says desperately, and dives at him, trying to knock his hand off the trigger, or maybe trying to collapse the machine entirely. Instead, he jars Hermann hard enough that his hand reflexively squeezes.
There’s a twanging sound. Hermann swears. Something rushes past Newt’s face. The dragon shrieks. They both look at it-
Something has hit it, but not directly; it's a tangential strike that tangles in its wings. It seems to jerk in the air, and is flung backward, unexpectedly colliding with what Newt at first thinks is a slightly lighter patch of sky. Then, with a shocked jolt, he realizes it is another dragon, right behind the first one, so dark as to be almost invisible against the night sky, only noticeable when the first dragon collides with it. They both make an unholy sound, shrieking at each other and beating their wings, now tangled together by whatever Hermann’s projectile was - some sort of net, Newt thinks - and go careening off into the night, trying to fly but losing altitude all the while, until eventually they fall out of the sky, down somewhere into the middle of the island.
“F-fuck-” Newt stutters. “What the fuck did you do?”
“It’s your fault!” Hermann shouts, voice high and shaking. “You made me shoot too soon- It hit inaccurately- Oh, Hel, this is all your fault, damn you!”
“I have no doubt the fault belongs to both of you,” an icy, accented voice says from behind Newt. He stiffens. Hermann goes dead white.
“D-dad. I-”
“I have no interest in your excuses or your explanations, Hermann,” Lars says, striding past Newt to stand before his son. “I understand perfectly. You were meant to stay inside, where you would not be in anyone’s way, and instead you snuck out to play with one of your stupid toys-” At this he aims a kick at Hermann’s contraption, hard enough that it shudders and falls apart, Hermann flinching away at the gesture, “-and have nearly gotten yourself and your idiotic friend killed, and done gods’ knows what to some dragon. Let’s just hope you haven’t provoked the damn things.”
Newt has an irrational urge to protest that they are not friends - not anymore - but for once manages to keep his mouth shut.
“Now get up. We’re going home. You too, Newton,” he spits.
They may not be friends, but Newt still feels a painful burst of empathy when Hermann tries to stand up and loses his balance as soon as he puts any weight on his bad leg. Newt swallows nervously, casts a glance at Lars, then steps toward Hermann and silently holds out a hand. Hermann flushes dully, but takes Newt's hand and hauls himself up into a standing position. Lars watches all this with zero expression on his cold face. When they are both standing, he pivots and strides back to the village, a hand resting on the hilt of his sword, presumably in case a dragon tries to attack them on the way back, although Newt doubts even a dragon would dare confront Lars when he's this obviously pissed. Lars doesn’t look back to see if the two boys follow.
Hermann casts one longing look at his shattered machine, then walks after his father. Newt follows behind. They don’t speak, not even saying good-bye when Lars deposits each of them in the appropriate doorway - only a few meters apart from each other, and Newt is often convinced his biggest misfortune in life is being neighbors to Hermann Gottlieb - but the mutual air of resentment and recrimination directed both at each other and at Hermann’s father doesn’t need to be spoken to be perfectly clear. Hermann might as well be shouting, “this is your fault!” in his ears. Newt is shouting it right back.
~~*~~
Hermann’s punishment for being out of the house during a dragon raid is fairly typical. Not that he’s prone to being out of the house when dragons are flying overhead trying to kill everyone- well, that depends on your definition of prone. It’s happened once before. Hermann doesn’t think that makes it a repeat performance. Newt has been caught out of doors during dragon raids at least five times, and Hermann knows for a fact there are two other times beyond that, and suspects there are several other instances. Twice is hardly often, not in comparison to that.
But, anyway, although this has only happened once before and thus there is not an established punishment for it, there is, in general, established punishments for everyday bad behavior, and the punishment for this follows the pattern of that.
A lecture, first of all, starting early the morning after and going on for a long while. Hermann stands silently before his father and takes it all. He’s thinking, for some reason, how if Newton were in his position right now he would make loads of snarky comments - “The villagers could use a little less feeding, don’t you think?” when Lars says ensuring there's food for the winter is more important than this, that sort of stupid commentary - and not at all take it seriously. But Hermann does, and Lars doesn’t like excuses or talking back, so Hermann stares wordlessly at the floor until Lars barks, “Look at me when I’m talking to you, Hermann!” and then Hermann forces himself to look up into his father’s familiar disappointed face as he tells Hermann that he can’t just do things like this, he is forbidden from leaving the house during attacks because every time he does, something goes wrong, and Lars has more important things to worry about than his errant son who just can’t seem to be like everyone else…
It always the same. He may scold Hermann for different things each time, but the basis of it is always the same. Why can't you just be like everyone else? Why are you such a disappointment?
After that are chores. There’s cleaning, which Hermann doesn’t mind so much other than scrubbing the floors, which hurts his knee. Not that he would ever dream of complaining. There’s also polishing all of his father’s armor, which is less pleasant. The fumes make him go lightheaded. He also has to do the cooking for the next two weeks, which is really a punishment for everyone, because he isn’t good at it. Baking, he can handle, but his cooking is always bland and burnt. And there are various other household chores too. Nothing he enjoys, but nothing that is overly unpleasant or unusual.
Then there’s the silent treatment. This, Lars informs him, is not for the actual sneaking out, but for the time that Lars was forced to take away from fighting to look for him after being informed by Dietrich - the bloody sneak - that Hermann was out of the house. That, Lars lectures in a superior tone, is the worst offense, because it doesn’t just endanger him, but everyone. So, the old silent treatment, enacted whenever one of his children does something he considers particularly heinous, wherein he instructs all of the unpunished children to not speak to the child in trouble for a set amount of time. For this particular infraction, it’s four days of silence.
Hermann always pretends that he doesn’t mind the silent treatment, but he does. It’s all right at first, almost peaceful, to be spared anyone speaking to him. His siblings are all annoying anyway, and most of the time when the three communicate with each other, it’s all bickering. It ought to be nice to be freed of that. But somehow, as time passes, it always wears on him, to be so utterly ignored. Once, when Lars was particularly furious with Hermann, the silent treatment lasted for seven days, and by the end of it he felt as if he was starting to cease to exist.
Four days is bad, but he’s very angry too, and that always helps him last out the silent treatment, as it makes him not want to speak to anyone either.
The worst part, actually, is probably that Lars forbids him to leave the house for a whole day. No doubt he would forbid it for longer if he could, but Hermann is old enough to have chores around the village that he has to perform, so instead Lars restricts him to the house for one day and gives him a curfew for the foreseeable future, to always be home by the time it began to be dark.
He steams for the day that he is trapped inside, thinking angry thoughts about his father and his ruined invention and his wasted efforts and blasted Newton, but most of all about those dragons. He fumes his way through all the chores he has to do that day - which is a considerable amount and keeps him busy the whole day - and sulks through dinner and wonders where those dragons went down and if they are still there and this is all Newton’s fault. Trapped as he is in a bubble of silence, he is left alone to consider these thoughts. After dinner, he escapes to the room he shares with his sister, which is fortuitously abandoned. She must be spending the evening with that obnoxious boy that she’s interested in.
Since he’s alone, it’s safe to pull out his precious notebook, and the tattered map that he...found. Not found, exactly. It’s ripped, so his father was going to throw it away, and instead of burning it as kindling as Hermann was supposed to, he pocketed it. It’s even more worn out now, lightly scribbled on by Hermann. He sketched a bad version of it in his notebook a few months ago to write on instead of the actual map, in the hopes of preserving the original longer, but the map will still probably be ruined beyond all use in another half a year or so.
If his father knew that Hermann had either of these things, he’d be angry, especially if he were to figure out what Hermann was doing with them. It’s unfair, really, because he’s trying to be helpful. Everything in his notebook is ideas on how to better fight the dragons, and every mark on the map is an attempt to track the dragons’ patterns to see if he can figure out where they've been coming from. But Lars is so convinced that Hermann is absolutely useless that he would never listen to any of that. Is so sure that just because Hermann can’t fight - can’t run, can’t properly wield a sword or spear or ax, can’t lift anything heavy - he must be worthless in every aspect of his being, including his brain, and therefore must be a complete idiot.
It’s not fair. He isn’t useless. He isn’t worthless. He isn’t stupid. He just has to fight differently from everyone else, that’s all, why won’t Lars just listen- If he could just kill a dragon, then Lars would see that he could be useful, he could be a good son. Lars would listen.
So, Hermann grits his teeth and carefully examines his map of the island and it’s surrounding land masses. He thinks the dragons come from the west, but that isn’t significant today. The two dragons from yesterday, the ones that he hit - and if Newt just hadn’t jolted him, he would have shot more accurately, when the dragon was closer, and he’s sure that if he had hit it close range it would have been a shot with enough force to immediately ground the dragon and hopefully kill it - landed somewhere on the island. Hermann tried to mentally note the location as carefully as he could last night. It was to the right of a rocky outcropping...which, looking at his map, seems as if it could match this location...Yes, that could definitely be it. About a mile away, maybe a little more. He pinches his lips, considering if he can walk that. Depends on how even the ground is. He tires much more quickly than someone without his particular disability, but he still has fairly good endurance. It’s going through the wild and uneven landscape that is more of a problem. He can climb simple structures - ladders are downright easy, for example - but a sloping hill is much harder, especially if it’s covered in undergrowth.
Well, he won’t know unless he tries, he decides. And he’s in trouble enough already, so he might as well try. So the day after that, when he is at last left alone, free of chores and ignored by all in his family, he gathers up the things he thinks he might need. His sketchy map, a water skin, the cane he uses when he has to walk long distances (or on the days where his leg, for no apparent reason, is so weak or painful that he needs the help), and one other thing.
This is the real reason he needed to be alone in the house. If he only wanted to sneak off, he wouldn’t mind if his siblings were around. They’re ignoring him anyway, and have no reason to suspect he’s going somewhere he shouldn’t. But they would notice him going through his father’s private supply of weapons and armor. They would question him taking the long, sharp hunting knife, the one that he knows his father has killed more than one dragon with, the one that he has had since before he came to Shatter. Hermann might be more subtle with a different knife, and if his father notices him taking this one, he’ll certainly get into trouble. But it has to be this one. It has to. So he carefully ties the sheath to his belt, and then sets out, glancing around to make sure no one is looking before he crosses the boundary of the village and heads in what is, according to his map, the correct direction towards the rocky outcropping he saw last night.
He still might be able to kill a dragon and prove himself. Two would be even better.