Chapter Text
April 2019
The corridor swirls nauseatingly as Hiccup walks down it, dragging one numb leg after the other. The lights are too bright, too loud, to think. He tries to clear a bit of fog in his mind, and concludes this trance-like place might be the backrooms. How ironic that he is transported right into the video game he used to be obsessed with for a solid two years.
Obsession. What a weird concept. Feeling so strongly for something that it consumes you. He can only dream of such passion in his borderline-catatonic state of mind. For all that’s in his brain right now, he might as well be dead.
However, a strange, numb part of him feels indestructible. He could walk forever without any pain. Or maybe he’ll try and faint, or even drop dead on the spot.
He doesn’t know. It’s all so fuzzy . His head is full of brown noise, his limbs feel full of sand, and he might have three pieces of homework due in today. He can’t remember, can’t think clearly enough to summon the sharpness of mind he once took such pride in.
What’s happened to me? He thinks, and he might be sad if he could feel things. Earlier today, his friend was telling everyone how her hair was finally past her transition goal length, and he felt nothing . His other friend was telling everyone about his kid sister, and he once again felt nothing. In break, he read an article on another shitty government policy targeting homeless people, and he felt nothing. He could be shot in the chest, and he probably wouldn’t react.
It's horrifying not to feel at all. He's used to at least something , even if it burns inside him. Now, it’s empty. He knows he’s not a bad person, but he might as well be if this is how he sees the world.
He feels like his insides are made of marble, like an ancient temple abandoned in the far mountains. It begins to take form, becoming tangible to his mind’s eye: it’s dusty, unremarkable despite its size. It’s light in a dark way, where the sunlight is but a ghost of a presence. Tendrils of darkness tickle at his jaw, his face the only thing he can keep halfway in the sun.
Suddenly, he spots light. A literal light at the end of the tunnel. He braces, advancing further, and realises it is much closer than he thinks.
He shuts his eyes, visualising himself stepping out of the temple door, and instead falls down half a flight of stairs.
Once again, the pain doesn’t hurt him. A teacher looks at him funny when blood drips from his nose, but he ignores it. Nothing matters anymore.
Out of the temple and into the light, he feels like he could be floating. Unburdened by his stump pain, his joint pain, what he and his friends like to call the dull ache of existence.
He ignores it and floats along to his class, sits there for an hour, and leaves feeling like it took five minutes or a millennia. He joins the flock of people that don’t feel like real humans, and walks outside, wondering if his whole life is a stimulation and that someone would be kind enough to turn it off.
The flock of not-people disappears like robots called back to a base (although robots would be a good word to describe the monotony of these not-people he sits in a building with), and Hiccup does not join them. He might get in trouble for skipping, but really? Consequences seem like such a faraway thing, like a silly plot device in the dystopian books he enjoyed in the first half of the 2010’s.
The longer he sits outside, the more his hands are too hot, his face too cold, (he really should go inside) that goddamn Katy Perry song, and all the sudden nostalgia lurking in pockets of his inner monologue makes his heart ache.
He thinks back to his childhood friend and her bright smile, the warmly sunny days they'd spent in the woods with his other childhood friend looking for dragons before she moved away and he and his other friend outgrew it.
Just as he is walking inside, a ridiculous thought seizes him. Why not look now? After all, he can get out of this place full of not-people he doesn't want to be around easily. In a swooping sense of euphoria, he feels slightly like a bird. Or, even better, a dragon. They are not meant to be chained to the mortal restraints of gravity. They deserve to fly.
And so does he.
Outside, he thinks with alarming clarity. The need for outside outside outside grows like cancer cells until it beats, visceral, inside him. He sluggishly removes himself from the person’s grip, and runs - stumbles, more like - until he crashes through the automatic doors, and he is outside his school, on the courtyard, up the slope of the field until- until
He is high, watching over the whole school, and the greenery are no better than the not-people.
He whips his body around, trying to run away, but every plant, every tree, every damn thing that sways in the wind - loud loud loud in his head, but not bad loud - grows tendrils, long green snakes that reach towards him like dying hands. He knows, on an instinctual level, that they are going to choke him.
His knees cave, his prosthetic catching on the mud as he crumples, and he thinks outside is not good before his head follows in the path of his knees and he lets himself be smothered by the green hands.