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The thing about Hiccup is that he’s a hard man to catch sleeping, literally as well as figuratively.
Astrid thinks this might be the day she does it, though.
No-one has seen him step foot outside today, though the Twins swear they spotted him in the Clubhouse at the crack of dawn, getting food. This has been dismissed mainly because it would require the Twins to have been up at the crack of dawn.
There was some noise in his hut this morning, which is normal for him, but as Astrid walked up to it in the middle of the afternoon, it is still and silent, and has been for several hours.
Which is very much not normal.
Astrid knocks on the door. There is no response.
She knocks again. “Hiccup?”
Nothing.
Normally she wouldn’t go into his hut without an express invitation, especially not on Berk, where there would be a chance to run into Stoick as well. But this is Dragon’s Edge, and things are different here.
Besides, she’s starting to get worried.
She eases the door open and takes a few steps inside. “Hiccup?” she calls again.
“Shh!” comes the response from the loft. “Astrid? What’s going on?” He’s speaking in a carrying whisper.
“Hiccup?” Astrid asks. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just—ow!”
Astrid scrambles up the steps to his loft. As she reaches the top, she finally sees him. He’s sitting up in bed with his legs bent and his blanket spread over his knees, and as he meets her eyes over the blanket, he pulls his hand out from underneath it.
“Oh—gods,” Astrid says. “Sorry. I didn’t realize.” Face reddening, she starts heading back downstairs.
“No, that’s not—you know the baby Terrible Terrors we brought back the other day?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, it turns out one of them is just incredibly feral,” Hiccup says. “I’ve been trying to socialize him, but he can only really deal with being around one person at a time, so we’re spending the day in here.”
“Where is he?” Astrid asks, looking around.
Hiccup points at the blanket, and Astrid shoots him a quizzical look. He sighs.
“He’s under my legs,” he says. “Dragons like caves, apparently. Even tiny ones made of blankets.”
She glances down again and then back at his face, feeling a smile tug at the corners of her mouth as she climbs the rest of the way onto the floor of the loft. “How’d he end up there?”
Hiccup smiles ruefully. “He was getting frustrated, so I decided to read and give him some space. Twenty minutes later, he was digging at my legs.”
Astrid chuckles, and Hiccup’s arm disappears back under the blanket. “Sorry, am I riling him up?” she asks.
“No, he’s, uh—he’s actually settling down.” They’re quiet for a few seconds and Hiccup’s face gives a twitch of what might be pain, before a small, contented reptilian sigh issues out from beneath the blanket.
Hiccup’s eyes meet hers, round as saucers, when a few moments after that, the sigh grows into an honest-to-gods snore.
“I think he’s asleep,” Hiccup whispers, somewhat unnecessarily.
Astrid only nods, smiling at the grin of utter delight that is spreading across his face.
Then the door to his hut crashes open.
“Hiccup!” Snotlout says loudly upon not seeing Hiccup downstairs. He climbs the ladder, standing on one of the rungs to ask, “What are you still doing in bed?”
“More to the point, why aren’t you in bed with him?” Ruffnut asks Astrid, appearing at Snotlout’s elbow.
“Ruffnut!” Astrid snaps because of how incredibly off-base that is; it’s been years since the last time she’s even kissed him, and they certainly aren’t—
Hiccup gives a muffled noise in the back of his throat that is definitely pain. “I’m working with a—” he starts to say, before Fishlegs bursts in.
“Hiccup, I’m sorry,” he says. “I tried to tell them—” But he falls silent at the squeak that comes out of Hiccup.
“Could you all please leave?” Hiccup asks, his voice a solid octave higher than usual. Unusually for them, they listen, sidling out as surreptitiously as they can. “Not you,” he says as Astrid turns to follow. “You can stay. Unless you don’t want to.”
She waits until the other Riders have left, and Hiccup’s face has relaxed a little, to ask, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, forcing a smile. “Just claws.”
“Hiccup,” she says, taking a step toward him and going to pull back the blanket.
He holds her off with a raised hand. “Tiny baby claws that weren’t actually trying to do any damage,” he clarifies. “He just got startled.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
He nods. “Thanks, Astrid.”
“I should let you get on with it then,” she says. “You know me—the only thing I do that involves sitting still is sharpening my axe, and I don’t think that would help.”
“Maybe not,” he admits. “I do have an old book on Berkian naval strategy, though. If you’re interested.”
She smiles. “I’m pretty sure I’ve read it,” she says.
He smiles back at her. “All right, then. Let me know if you change your mind.”
She nods. “I’ll see you later.”
“Okay. I’ll come up to the Clubhouse for dinner. It’s your night to cook, right?”
“Yeah. I’ll see you then.” She heads back down the ladder and out into the afternoon sun. As the door settles behind her, part of her registers abstractly that it would seem Hiccup’s good with kids.
It’s ten years later, almost to the day, and Astrid hasn’t seen her husband and kids all afternoon. Normally Hiccup tells her before he takes the kids out for some kind of adventure on the island, and he always has them back by dinner. Of course, she does the same when she’s the one with enough time for adventures.
Now, though, the mutton and vegetables she’s been working on are dangerously close to finished, with no sign of their return.
Astrid leaves the mutton to simmer, wipes her hands on her apron, and goes out the back door, quickly crossing the small yard to Hiccup’s workshop. “Hiccup?” she calls, knocking on the door. “You in there?” She’d expect it to be rather louder if they were all inside.
“Come on in,” he says, and she opens the door. He’s seated on one of the stools at his work table, an elbow propped on the tabletop and his legs propped up on another stool, prosthetic over foot. The blanket from the little cot he has in here for nights when he stays up working too late to feel like he can join her in bed has been pulled off and is now draped over his legs, falling to the floor below.
“Hey, babe,” Astrid says, walking in. “Have you been here all day?”
Hiccup sighs. “Yeah, just trying to get some work done. I knew you were doing the same, or I would have sent the kids to you.”
“Where are the kids?”
He points at the blanket.
Astrid giggles. “Not Terrible Terrors this time?”
He looks confused for a second, then remembers and grins at her. “Oh, they’re terrors,” he says. “Just not Terrible ones.”
Astrid walks over to him and leans down for a kiss. “Ready for dinner?” she asks.
“Last I checked, they were asleep,” he says, and a chorus of muffled giggles betrays the fact that they’re not asleep now.
Astrid crouches down, chuckling. “Come on, you two,” she says, lifting the edge of the blanket to peer in at them. The wide green and blue eyes of her son and daughter meet hers. Her children are curled up in a pile together, looking rather like baby dragons themselves. “Come help Daddy set the table.”
Zephyr is the first to disentangle herself and tumble out of the blanket cave. “Come on, Nuffink,” she says, and together she and her brother patter out of the workshop and back to the house.
Hiccup stands and dumps the blanket back onto the cot, then turns to Astrid and wraps his arms around her shoulders.
“Seems like baby humans like blanket caves as much as baby dragons do,” she remarks.
He grins. “At least these ones don’t have claws.” He kisses her lightly, but as he leans into her, her hands travel in ways that make his lips part beneath hers and his breath quicken.
A shout from the kitchen—Zephyr, definitely Zephyr—makes him pull away, and he looks at Astrid regretfully. “Can we pick this up later?” he asks.
“Sure,” Astrid says, smiling. “After you and the kids are done with the dishes.”
“And after Nuffink’s stories. You know he’s going to want at least three.”
“Then make them good ones so he lets you go sooner,” Astrid says, smiling at him in a way that she knows makes his heart beat faster.
As they’re walking back to the house, she says, “You know, that day with the Terror was one of the first times I thought you might make a good dad.”
“Really?” Hiccup asks, smiling. “That early?”
Astrid smiles back at him. “And it turns out I was right.”
“You usually are.”