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Hiccup slides the AP chemistry textbook from his locker’s top shelf, grunting slightly under the weight. Together with three other textbooks and a wizened copy of Moby Dick (thank the gods his lit class is reading this, as he is now an expert on the several-decades-extinct trade of whaling), he one-handedly unzips his backback and begins the process of cramming everything in.
He can already feel how heavy that thing is going to feel on the way home. Great, another aching body part to add to the list.
He reaches up to touch his shoulder and makes a face. It still stings when he presses it. He pokes just under his eye and winces.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III looks truly pitiful right now. Like an utter failure. Maybe if he keeps his head hunched and speed-walks to the bus stop, no one will notice.
He starts planning the rest of his day in his head. His dad doesn’t get home until six, so that’s plenty of time to put some antiseptic and unassuming band-aids on. Also plenty of time to figure out and rehearse a non-embarrassing explanation for his condition. He’ll have to wear long sleeves tomorrow, but eh. It’s autumn, it won’t be that uncomfortable.
There are a number of Anna Runeardsen’s hoodies in his dresser. She’s terrible about remembering to grab them when she leaves, and she’s been coming over so long that he’s stockpiled quite the collection. Hiccup wonders idly if any would fit him.
Probably. He and Anna have nearly identical body types. If anything, her clothes might look a bit big on him, but no matter. He can manage.
He also wonders if she’d notice if he wore one tomorrow. One of the baggier ones would do an effective job of covering the worst of his banged-up body. With the hood pulled up, it’d even hide the icky-looking, discolored spots on his neck. He doubts she would mind, but it might be a bit awkward if she—
“Hey!”
Hiccup slumps against the row of lockers, suppressing a hiss of pain as his bruised shoulder bangs into the metal. Gods, no. Anything but this.
Hiccup has hoped for many years that the most mortifying moment of his life will always be the end-of-5th-grade barbecue, when he requested condiments on his hot dog and zoned out in the middle of the question (it wasn’t his fault—he saw an interesting lizard nearby and had to mentally determine the species). Being the guy who wanted “a sausage with condim” isn’t something middle schoolers forget in a hurry.
As it turns out, this might take the cake instead.
“Heeeey, Anna!” He swings his backpack onto him and shuts his locker, turning to grin at her. He knows hiding behind his locker door would only arouse suspicion—or worse yet, get him a tight hug from behind that makes the battered state of his tiny twig form all the more apparent.
She’s leaning on the wall a few lockers down, understatedly charming as usual. Floral print t-shirt, jean shorts, magenta jacket, back braids wrapped into a bun, radiant grin. It’s a comforting image—and for a moment, the myriad of injuries hurt a little less.
A lot had changed about Anna over the years, but her smile always stayed the same. Hiccup doesn’t have a lot of constants in his life, but the charismatic sunshine ginger who no one ever expects a loser like him to be best friends with is one of them.
“My god.” Her latest rant begins as soon as the greetings are finished, as is customary. “Did you know Picasso tried to steal a statue? Like, a whole freaking statue?” She slaps a locker for emphasis. “Everyone thinks he tried to steal the Mona Lisa, but that was some other dude who tried to frame him. But when the cops got him, he was flipping out because he knew he had all these statues he wasn’t supposed to. I have no idea how my art teacher knows any of this, but she said—hey, what happened to you?”
She frowns, striding toward him. Oh no.
It’s not that he doesn’t want Anna’s sympathy. He doesn’t mind her fussing over him—at least someone does. It’s just that it has to be humiliating for her, continuing to associate with a guy who can’t take a punch very well.
She reaches for him, trying to brush her fingers against the bruise circling his eye. He shrinks away.
It’s an instinctual withdrawal. Rationally speaking, he would love to lean into her hand and feel any variety of gentle touches. It’s a fucking stupid thing to let happen, though—like shooting a line of coke right before the entire coke house immediately packs up and moves themselves and their drugs to the next city over, never to be seen again.
Because the truth is that guys like him don’t get to be touched by girls like her. Bubbly, vibrant, half a foot taller. Anna probably sees him like an annoying twin brother—an unflattering mirror. All of her worst traits, reflected right back at her.
“I…fell!” He says brightly, putting on his most convincing grin. “They were…mopping the stairs right when I needed to go down, and uh, oh boy did I pay dearly for it. This, um, this school really needs better safety precautions, eh? Like how hard is it to find a ‘Slippery When Wet’ sign—”
“Hiccup, people don’t get black eyes from falling.” She cuts him off with a glare.
“Yes they do!” he retorts, although admittedly with little conviction. “I hit my head on the railing. It was very painful.” He rubs his temple to emphasize.
“Is, uh…is that why you have bruises all over your arms? And your nose is bleeding? And your face is all scabby? And your hair’s messed up?”
“It was a bad fall.”
He does his best to sound casual, but he doubts it’s successful. He laughs nervously, and Anna crosses her arms.
“So I’m supposed to buy that whatever actually happened is somehow more embarrassing than looking like you got run over by a train after…falling?”
His cheeks heat up. On second thought, this is much worse than the 5th grade barbecue. “Oh, gods. Is it really that bad?”
Anna bites her lip. “I mean, it’s not awful. Sure, you look like you were in one of those mob movies, and a bunch of gangster guys cornered you in the alley and went to town on you because you owed some guy in a suit 4000 dollars, and your eye looks like someone really messed up the eyeshadow and called it a day, and your hair looks like you’ve been living in the Jumanji game for 5 years—”
“Anna.”
“Right!” She smacks the locker again, as if to physically cut herself off. “Not helping. Anyways, you want to tell me what actually happened, or do I have to spend the next, like, week worrying about your…” She gestures abstractly. “Hand-eye coordination?”
He lets out a deep, defeated sigh. The last thing he needs is to worry Anna even more than he already does.
“I didn’t get Josh Fuller’s homework done in time. He told me he’d pay me 20 bucks for it—and I mean I agreed, because why throw away good money? But I had so much other crap to do, and he cornered me in the courtyard with his football buddies, and…” He rubbed his cheek, still stinging from where it ground into the pavement. “His right hook isn’t half bad.”
“Asshole.” Anna’s lips tighten, hand drawing into a fist. “Where the hell is he?! I swear I’ll—”
“At practice. What, you’re going to walk out in the football field and punch the linebacker?”
“Don’t tempt me!”
“Pretty sure he’d just snap me in half with one hand and snap you in half with the other.”
“Don’t give him so much credit! Punzie tells me the cheer team sees him benched half the time. I could totally take him.”
Hiccup sighs. This girl really is going to end up in the hospital one of these days. He only hopes he’ll be around to hold her back if she gets an especially ill-advised idea.
“Oh, speaking of Punzie, though!” She saunters over and grabs his arm—between the bruises, thank the gods. “We should go find her! She’s always carrying around those wet wipes and hand sanitizers and stuff. She can probably get you cleaned up, at least.”
She starts to drag him away, but Hiccup grinds his feet into the tile floor. “Anna, you don’t—you don’t disinfect cuts with hand sanitizer. You know that, right?”
Anna stops, blinking. “Oh. Right. Yeah, that’d be stupid.” She slaps a hand to her head. “Ugh. I’m sorry. It’s been a long day, my brain’s at like 50% charge.”
“Completely understandable. That’s high school for you.”
To his dismay, Anna attempts to resume the dragging. “Well, I’m sure she’ll have something. She’s always got ibuprofen and nausea meds and whatnot—she’s gotta have other first aid stuff.”
“Anna. Seriously.” He gives her a pleading look. “Don’t bother Rapunzel. She’s probably in the middle of…I don’t know. Giving some important speech to the Student Council.” Anna opens her mouth to protest, but Hiccup shakes his head. “I’ll be fine. I promise. It doesn’t even hurt that bad, it’s just…” He heaves a deep sigh. “More embarrassing that anything. Like a big flashing red light that says ‘Look at me! I’m a wimp!’”
Although he gets a snicker out of her, her smile quickly fades. She lets out a defeated huff, slumping onto a row of lockers and taking him with her.
Her hand is still on his arm. He really should not be enjoying that as much as he is.
He studies the ceiling—made of those holey, Styrofoam-looking tiles and shining bleakly in harsh, florescent white light—and for a moment, he and Anna aren’t surrounded by teenagers anymore. They’re back in an elementary school hallway, hiding in some alcove and hoping they can stay out of everyone’s way.
Their grade school peers had not thought particularly highly of them. They had their fair share of recess hair-pulling, tripping, tag-team taunting. Anna was the fidgety, loud one—the one who couldn’t keep her mouth shut at the best of times, and often as not got the whole class in trouble for it. It didn’t help that the things that came out of her mouth were so bizarre and off-the-cuff that it only took half a day of kindergarten (maybe less) for her to get written off as the “weird kid.”
Hiccup hadn’t fared any better. He was the nerd, the dweeb, the geeky loser, et cetera et cetera et cetera. Teachers sometimes made an example out of his assignments, gushing about what a good, hard worker he was, but all that ever did was get him sneered at for being a brown-nosing teacher’s pet. When he wasn’t all that, he was “the kid with the weird leg.”
Anna always liked the prosthetic. She said it looked like a cool robot leg, and speculated about gritty cyperpunk futures where he could yank part of it off and have it double as a machine gun.
Despite everything, they’ve always had each other. Hiccup can’t even begin to explain how grateful he is for that.
Things got better in high school. They met Rapunzel and Jack and Fishlegs and Merida and the twins and all the others. Their friend group got bigger, and they found that not everyone their age was put off by their strangeness. Outright dicks like Josh Fuller were few and far between—at least compared to middle school.
For a while, they watch kids walk by, shouting and laughing and yanking on their friends’ backpacks. A couple of freshmen jump up and try to touch the ceiling, only to trip and nearly fall flat on their faces.
That cheers Hiccup up. Only a little, he swears.
“You know…” Anna speaks up after a while. “Erin Morris called me a bimbo in class today.”
Hiccup turns to frown at her. “She did?”
“Yeah.” She smiles weakly. “The teacher called on me and asked me to do the next part of the trig problem, and my mind had kinda been wandering a bit, so like…I said I didn’t know. And Erin told me I was such a bimbo. I think she was joking, but I also…don’t think she was?”
Hiccup opens his mouth and shuts it again, unsure what to say.
She continues before he has the chance. “I got my test back in AP history. C-. Travis Palmer still sits behind me, and I guess he saw, because I heard him whispering to someone about how he has no idea how I’m still in that class.”
“I—”
“I was really restless in lit class.” Anna goes on, ruthless. “I kept squirming around because I couldn’t get comfortable, not matter what I tried—oh, and I think I was doing the leg-shakey thing, too. Anyways, Mrs. Acosta got all pissed and yelled at me in front of the entire class because I was being a ‘huge distraction’ or whatever.”
“Anna, that’s—”
“Punzel was raving to me at lunch about some genius girl in her chemistry class.” Hiccup should know by now that he’s not going to get a word in edgewise. “Zoey Juarez or something? She’s kept an A all year. Punz says she’s on her way to becoming a biochemical engineer and ‘totally fixing the environment’ or something. And sometimes I wonder why she keeps me around when she could hang out with people like that.”
Hiccup narrows his eyes, baffled what her endgame is. “Is—is any of this supposed to make me feel better? Because all I’m gathering is that we’re both pathetic.”
“So…” She leans in, gripping his arm harder as a devilish smirk dances across her face. “Let’s be pathetic together.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Will that help?”
“Uh, yeah.” Anna snorts. “Misery loves company? Duh.”
“You don’t have to drag yourself through the dirt to make me feel better about myself, you know.”
“Oh, I don’t have to!” She smiles brightly. “The rest of the school is already doing it for me!”
As he frowns, she lets out a sigh.
“Look, you…you don’t have to be this tragic action hero who bears your pain alone and goes to like…brood on a mountainside and stare at the horizon. It’s not this like, I don’t know, terrible burden you have to deal with on your own. You’ve still got me.”
He looks over her—bright, lively, stubborn as shit. The one who always was happy to do the talking when he didn’t want to. He probably doesn’t deserve a friend like her. Who does?
“Frankly, I’m a little surprised you still want to be associated with all…” He waves his hands up and down abstractly. “…this.”
“You…just gestured to all of you.”
“I’m aware.”
“Well, anyways, I could say the same for you wanting to associate with me.” She shrugs. “Point is, you’re not getting rid of me that easily. I’m the garbage to your dumpster. The sewage to your rusty drainpipe. The moldy bread to your stale Cheetos.”
“Anna—”
“The great pacific garbage patch to your hole in the ozone layer. The nuclear waste to your abandoned and collapsing military outpost.”
“Anna, I don’t think this is helping—”
A few students send strange looks their way. Anna raises her voice, unable to be deterred. “The soggy cardboard box to your dingy alleyway! The plastic solo cup to your dysfunctional frat house!”
Hiccup is spluttering, at a loss for how to form coherent sentences. Let it never be said that Anna Runeardsen does not commit to the bit.
“Look, all that to say…” She gives his arm a couple squeezes, and he hopes she can’t see the heat rising to his cheeks. “We’re a team. Maybe one that people don’t usually like very much, but we still have each other’s backs. If you go down, I go down. Simple as that.”
He looks over her, clutching onto him like she never wants to let go, and feels a rush of gratitude. For all her moments of chaos and weirdness and rash decisions, she’s his rock. She always has been.
“You’re the rock and I’m the lichen.”
As soon as he says it he realizes how stupid it sounds. Anna snorts, rolling her eyes.
“Oh, come on! I mean sure, I’m the secretly super tough one who everyone overlooks because I seem all ordinary and boring, but you’re too pretty to be lichen.”
“I’m many things, Anna, but I assure you I’m not pretty.”
“You’re more like moss,” she declares, ignoring the assessment.
Hiccup gives her a baffled look. “Moss?”
“Y’know. Adaptable, resilient, also super tough. But also really pretty. You see it and you’re like…calmed. It’s like ‘oh, okay, there’s moss here, everything’s going to be fine.’ Like if you go somewhere and there’s a bunch of moss it feels like it can’t be so bad. I guess in some weird, primordial, ancient way, you kind of feel like you’re…home?”
It’s an odd thing to say, but Hiccup gets the distinct impression it’s supposed to be a compliment. Anna isn’t the most delicate with her words, even when she’s trying to be kind.
It’s not as though she’s entirely wrong. Sometimes when Anna’s at her most anxious, his even-tempered rationality is her lifeline.
(At least, what he likes to think is his even-tempered rationality. His view of himself tends to be unfairly aggrandizing or absolutely abysmal, depending on the day.)
He chuckles. “Well, in that case, I’d love to be your moss.”
She grins triumphantly, jerking him a little as she bounces on her feet. At the moment, Anna Runeardsen is shining at least four thousand times brighter than anything else in that lifeless, gray-and-white hallway.
He really wishes he could grow the balls to properly ask her out. Maybe by the time senior prom rolls around.
“Hey, so…” She rubs the back of her head with the hand not currently gripping his arm. “I heard some new episodes came out from that one show you’re really into. You know, the one with the dinosaurs that can shoot beams out of their eyes and the time-traveling wizard? Forget the name.”
“Oh! Velocilasers!” He nods eagerly. “Yeah, half of Season 5 just dropped this morning.”
“You want to come to my place and binge them?” She hooks her arm in his and leads him toward the front lobby. “I don’t know when my parents will be home, but I can fry up those frozen crab cakes you like.”
She looks worried, as she often is when it comes to cooking. Nonetheless, her blue eyes are as genuine as he’s ever seen them. However the food turns out, it’s clear she’s planning on throwing her entire heart and soul into it—and that’s more than enough for him.
The tension, stress, and crippling mortification drains out of him with each step, her hand on his skin seeming to brush it all away. He smiles, realizing that the scrapes and bruises aren’t bothering him anymore.
“I’d love that.”