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Once, when Hiccup was nine and couldn’t sleep, his father had taken him into his lap and shown him the medallion.
“I gave this to your mother before we were married,” he had explained, letting Hiccup cradle it gingerly in his palms. “It meant we would be together forever.”
“Cool.” Hiccup rubbed his thumb over the delicate decorations, marveling at its intricacy, its detail. He tilted it back and forth, so that the firelight played across its surface like it was dancing. It was useless, this flat thing, and beautiful. Beauty was something which Berk did not have a lot of. And here was Hiccup, holding it in his hands. “Can I keep it?”
His father’s face had darkened, as if Hiccup had tossed water into their burning hearth. “No,” he had said gruffly, and brought Hiccup back up to bed with fewer words. Hiccup hadn’t touched the medallion again, only peeked at it through the crack in his father’s bedroom door. He hadn’t understood, when he was nine. He thought he understood a little better now.
Viggo was dead, and the Dragon Eye was gone, and Astrid looked shaken and still on Stormfly’s back as they flew home to Berk. This was guilt like Hiccup had never felt it before. It surged again every time he caught a glance at her, pressing across his shoulders and curling hot down his spine. His fault. He tightened his grip on her hand and tried not to think of it, of the cold rush of terror that had swept down his spine as he watched Viggo dig the blunt of her axe into her throat. Don’t even think about it, she’d said. And Hiccup hadn’t, but not in the way she had meant for him to.
The cold flight. The heavy, heavy guilt. His fault.
He walked Astrid home when they landed back on Berk. She said that she didn’t need a chaperone; he thought that he couldn’t bear to leave her. She let him hold onto her hand, all the way past the front door of the quiet Hofferson house and up its staircase and into her bedroom, didn’t let go of her until they collapsed across her sleeping furs. Well, Hiccup collapsed– the sight of a bed had him suddenly feeling filled with sand, the exhaustion seeping into his every muscle. Astrid stayed upright long enough to light the lantern on her nightstand.
“So,” she said finally. “Everybody knows, huh?”
Hiccup hummed, eyes closed. “Not quite how we planned to tell them.”
She kicked off her boots and sat down beside him, folding one leg beneath herself and tangling the other with his. Hiccup was content to watch her glow in the lamplight. He still wasn’t used it, being allowed to just look, still felt like it was something precious and rare that he could only have if he snuck it when no one was watching. They’d stolen his father’s mead once, when they were sixteen– it felt like that. Hiccup drank in the sight of her now.
He had thought that she’d made it through the battle and the hostage situation mostly unscathed, but as he watched her now he noticed a thin red line across her throat where the blade of the axe must have bit into the skin. “You’re hurt,” he said.
“Just a scratch.”
Hiccup touched his thumb to it, flinching back when she hissed. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she murmured, “just stings a little.”
“No, I mean–” Hiccup drew in a shuddering breath and moved his hand to the side of her neck, the weight of her unraveling braid. “I’m sorry that he hurt you. He… It’s my fault.”
“Hiccup, come on.”
“No, it is.” He tugged loose the leather cord at the end of her hair and began to unwind it from its plait. “He asked me about you, right before you found us with the Submaripper, and I snapped. He was looking for a weakness and I handed it to him.”
“Hiccup.” She turned to look him in the eyes, his fingers stilling in her hair. “It isn’t your fault. Any of us would have done the same.”
He nodded.
(It didn’t help. There was a shadow that crept into the edges of his conscious at times, and it was called Hiccup the Useless, a shivering vestige of the way he’d felt before Berk began looking at him differently. It was here now, he realized, here in the guilt in his chest. Useless. A leader who had failed to protect the Dragon Eye, a peacekeeper who had sent his enemy plunging to his death, a boy who couldn’t keep his girlfriend safe. What good was Hiccup? All he could do was unbraid her hair.)
Astrid lifted her kransen from her head. Suddenly Hiccup saw that she had bruises bursting up her arm, crimson and violet across her skin like a summer garden. A line of fingerprints– he could make them out if he looked closely. He didn’t want to look. “Gods, Astrid.”
“Yeah.” She closed her palm over the bruises. “That bit was very not fun.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If you say you’re sorry one more time–”
Hiccup threw up his hands in surrender, hoping to keep his own arm unbruised. Astrid looked away, swallowing thickly; he caught the jump of her throat and the set of her jaw even in the low light.
“I don’t even know how it happened,” she told him quietly. “He was just– there. I didn’t even have a chance to fight him off. He yanked my axe from my back and then he just grabbed me, I–”
She tore off with a shuddering breath, her lip white between her teeth, and reached out to wrap her arms around him. Hiccup let her, running a hand over her hair as she pressed her face to the worn linen of his tunic. His fault, she was here shaking in his arms because of him, because he couldn’t keep his heart from scampering out on his sleeve for one minute in front of their greatest adversary–
He shook the thought from his head. He whispered again that he was sorry, so sorry. Astrid pinched his arm.
They sat like that a while, curled into each other on Astrid’s bed. It was strange, thought Hiccup, to be back on Berk after so many quiet nights on the Edge– this busy place, peopled in a way he'd never noticed before, distantly-slamming doors and drunken conversations echoing up from the streets. He pressed an absentminded kiss to the crown of Astrid’s head. There was this, too. They’d barely managed to keep it quiet for a month, and that was only hiding it from four other people– a month of stolen kisses and hands clasped under the table and conveniently losing their way during afternoon flights. They wouldn’t get away with any of that here, not with so many people around, not as Berk’s prodigal warrior and the Chief’s heir. On the Edge it was just them. Hiccup and Astrid, their relationship, it had always been just their thing. On Berk it would be everyone’s.
He hugged her closer, felt more than heard her hum into his shoulder. They could be just Hiccup and Astrid a little while longer.
“Hey,” Astrid finally murmured. Her voice was steadier, the rise and fall of her shoulders easy. “You know that when my parents find out about us, they’re definitely not going to let you stay up here so long anymore.”
“Give them some credit, Astrid, they’re used to me coming and going.”
“I mean, they’re used to one of those things.”
“Astrid,” he mumbled, and she laughed, tightening her grasp around his waist. Hiccup liked how she fit against him. He never would have figured Astrid for the type to want to hold someone, but it worked out nicely. He wanted to be held.
She settled her head back against his shoulder. “Just makes you think, y’know.”
“About what?”
She shrugged. “How we’re all growing up. The future. What else is going to change.”
The future. All the wonderful years you have ahead of you. The thought of it hit him like a dream.
“Astrid, I was thinking,” he began. “About something Viggo said.”
“Mm.”
“Y’know, about… When he asked me if I was really going to sacrifice you, and– and our future, for the Dragon Eye.” He dragged his fingers through her loose hair, catching in its tangles and pulling them apart. “When he put it like that, Astrid. It was so clear to me. You wouldn’t believe how easy it was to throw that thing.”
“You shouldn’t have done it.”
“What, saved you?”
“Wrecked the Dragon Eye. And Viggo.”
“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he said, a little numbly.
“I know,” said Astrid quickly. “I know. It’s just– I know how important it was.”
“Not more important than you.” It came out soft. Hiccup needed her to look at him, needed to her to hear it.
She bit her lip, looked down at her lap. “Well, thanks,” was what she said.
A different Hiccup who hadn’t had the day he’d just had might’ve been a little crestfallen that Astrid had retreated so quickly back into her shell, that it had taken so little for her armor to strap across her chest again. But the relief at having her here and having her safe had crept into every corner of his body, and he couldn’t find it in himself to be annoyed. Talks like this were difficult to handle for Astrid; feelings like this were difficult to parse. Part of it was that being with Astrid was so easy, so natural, that he sometimes forgot to think about the things that made it that way– the things that made his chest feel flayed open, the things that were hard to get off his tongue. He loved the easy days. But he wanted to be there for days like these, too, for the things that were difficult to handle.
It occurred to him a little suddenly that he loved Astrid. He’d been poised on the cusp of it for a while, and now he had lost his balance.
He was a moment or two late in realizing that Astrid was talking again. “Guess I owe you the favor,” she mumbled.
“Sure, yeah. You can pay me back. Y’know, next time it’s my turn to be held hostage over an irreplaceable artifact of dragon knowledge–”
“Well, you never know what could happen in this long and wonderful future Viggo apparently thinks you’re going to have–”
“–you can return the favor. Deal?”
“Fine. Only because of today.” She was smiling, round-cheeked and rosy, as she flicked her finger through his bangs. “Honestly, though, Hiccup, I guess I would’ve done the same for you.”
“You guess?”
She tugged at one of his braids. “You know what I mean.”
Hiccup did know. “Astrid, I…”
She shuffled in his arms to meet his eyes. A thousand things to say arced through his head like lightning, and all of a sudden Hiccup felt shaky, sure that if he held his hand out above her head he would see it tremble. “You’re my future,” he blurted.
Astrid blinked at him, slow and blank and blue, and he steeled himself and tried again. “I mean– I want you. To be part of my future.”
She said, “Oh.”
“Look, I–” His voice, too, trembled in his throat, and he willed it settle. “I know that this thing, um, us together, I know it hasn’t been long. But Astrid, it’s been, you’ve been, being with you is brilliant and I… I mean, I know the future’s never going to be certain. But I just think– if there’s one thing I’ve always been sure about, ever since that first flight we took with Toothless, it’s you. I’m sure about you.”
It was a few seconds before it became enormous, the thing Hiccup had said, a pocket of Zippleback gas that bloomed in the space between them until Astrid’s voice sparked in its center. “Hiccup.”
There was something in her tone that Hiccup couldn’t parse, and his stomach lurched, certain for a second that he had made an irreparable mistake. He didn’t know how quickly to backpedal, so fast he might have tripped. “If you don’t feel the same that’s fine, that’s so okay, just pretend I didn’t– look, let’s just forget this conversation ever happened–”
“Hiccup.”
He looked down at her then. A soft smile lit Astrid’s face, glowing in the dark, that little quirk to her mouth she often got when he was rambling and she was trying not to make fun of him for it. He was rambling, wasn’t thinking, should have planned this better, or at all. Astrid would see through it. Astrid always saw through it. She always saw through him, and Hiccup knew that now she was seeing through his stammering and his heart thumping and his hands twisting nervously in his lap, and he knew she saw how he felt. The difference was that he saw her now, too.
“You’re laughing at me,” he complained.
She bit back the grin. “No.”
“Astrid.” He grasped her hands in his. “Look, would you just listen, I’m trying to say– someday, when we’re older, if you still want to be with me and we’re ready, then someday, I’d want…”
“I know.” There was something brazen in Astrid’s gaze, bold and bright. “So would I.”
“Okay. So–” He brushed her bangs from her eyes, tucked the loose ends behind her ear. Her hair was soft and pale in his hands, flickering silver in the lamplight, and he let it fall from his fingers, spilling over her shoulder. Precious like spun gold. She wanted someday, too. The thought sparked like a firework in his chest and shuddered out to his fingertips. “Someday. Deal?”
Astrid grinned, blinding, like sunlight. “Deal.”
She gave the hand he’d extended a firm shake, businesslike, until her other caught him by the shoulder and tugged him close into something decidedly not. Hiccup pushed down the urge to sigh as she kissed him. The Dragon Eye, Viggo, the Edge– all of it melted in the warmth of Astrid’s fingers curling against the back of his neck, and it sank slow and heavy into Hiccup’s bones. This was a promise. This was permanent. The reality of it had always seemed so far away to Hiccup– of marriage, of having a wife, of being a husband– but in a blink it had drawn close enough to touch. He let his hands fall to Astrid’s waist.
A throat cleared sharply from the doorway. “Hi, kids,” said Astrid’s father.
Astrid sprang back from Hiccup like she’d been burned. He could see the tops of her ears burning, too, strawberry-red beneath her hair, and he knew his face probably warranted its own call to the fire brigade. This was not how any of this was meant to go. So far from it.
“Dad,” squeaked Astrid. Hiccup had not ever heard Astrid squeak before.
“Hi, Mr. Hofferson,” he said lamely. He wished he was just a bit skinnier after all, so that he might have been able to slip through the floorboards. Was this it, then? Were they supposed to tell now? Was he supposed to shake Mr. Hofferson’s hand and ask for handsal? “We were just, I was just, we didn’t mean for–”
Astrid’s father held up a hand. “I only came to tell you supper’s ready. Hiccup, lad, you’re welcome to stay.”
He caught the look on Astrid’s face out of the corner of his eye. “Thank you, sir,” he replied, “but I should probably be getting back to my dad.”
“Aye.” He gave Hiccup a wink over his shoulder as he turned back down the stairs. “Although I reckon it’s high time you stopped calling me sir, eh?”
The gods had to make it even, so it was Hiccup’s father who caught them next, stealing a kiss against the kitchen counter as the parsnips Hiccup had been chopping lay forgotten by the fire. “Afternoon,” was all Stoick had said to them as they leapt apart, “don’t let the stew burn,” and Hiccup figured he hadn’t thought much of it.
So it came as something of a surprise when, the morning they were set to leave, his father caught him by the shoulder and pressed it into his palm. He hadn’t thought about it in years, but the cool weight of it tugged at the memory. The medallion. His mother’s. “For your Astrid,” Stoick muttered, and hastily turned his back before Hiccup could open his mouth.
Hiccup turned it over in his fingers, the flat thing, traced its loops and lattices of copper patterning. It was smaller in his hand now, heavier in his heart. “Dad,” he said meekly. “You can’t give this to me.”
“I want you to have it.”
“No, you can’t— I can’t take this from you. It’s yours, Dad, don’t be—”
He held it out, tried to wrestle it back into his father’s grasp, but Stoick caught Hiccup’s hands between his own. Gently he folded Hiccup’s fingers back around the medallion, pushing his curled fist back towards his chest. He stepped back, dropped his chin.
“The way you are, with her,” he said, soft. “Reminds me of Val.”
There were endless things Hiccup could say. “You think I should—”
His father lifted a shoulder. The movement was so rare from him, and it jostled his armor and his beard, as if they too had not expected it. “If that’s what you want.”
Hiccup opened his hand around the medallion. He could make out some of the lettering between its decorations— the word forever. He did want it. To think of it felt like flying.