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the definition of you and me
Change happens all around us, and we don't even notice it. Until suddenly everything falls into place.
He doesn’t know when it changes. He doesn’t know when Astrid becomes something different from his idea of Berk.
He doesn’t know when eventually Astrid becomes something more to him than everything he ran away from.
And for one thing, he thinks he is afraid that he has defined the thing that he’s been running away from all this time.
“Hiccup?” He doesn’t like the way her voice sounds soft in the morning, or the thousand little things he notices. He doesn’t like it.
He doesn’t like in the surviving, in the constant monotony of fire and dragons—because of course dragons are his life.
He’s gotten to grow fond of Astrid, again. Different in everything that he ever thought he would. Something he wishes he didn’t, but wishes he could do all over again.
“Hiccup, I can hear you thinking from all the way over here,” she says in the maddeningly infuriating way that he’s gotten used to.
He thinks he might want to run, and to do the thing he’s trained himself to do after everything. Like he ran from Berk, like he ran from everything that reminded him of it.
“It’s nothing, Astrid.” He doesn’t know if this speaks for how lonely he’s been or something else.
“It’s clearly not nothing if you keep thinking about it, Hiccup,” she rolls her eyes at that.
And perhaps, there’s this urge to just call her m’lady, and see if he could get away with it with all his arms intact.
Hopefully, maybe.