Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Theme: “Professor!”

“Ew Porridge? Really?

“Aye, it’s dead delicious. Besides I’m surprised you aren’t eating cereal, since there’s even a Muggle brand named after you!”

“That’s Frosties not Frost you incurable idiot.”

“Call me that again?!”

“Idiot.”

“Want something else for breakfast? Chew on this!”

Sighing, Rapunzel met Hiccup’s weary look over her copy of Advanced Runes. His eyes flicked meaningfully over to where Merida was dangling a slightly punch dazed Jack by his collar as he kicked her shins violently in an attempt to escape, both exasperation and affection for their feuding friends conveyed in the  sharp viridian gaze. What do we do?

Mischief bubbled in her gut.

“DunBroch, Frost! My office. Now.” She hissed, dropping her tone to a deep, masculine timbre.

Merida shrieked and dropped Jack in shock. Both sprang backwards about fifteen feet, crashing headlong into the bookcases behind. Rapunzel’s impression was so unexpectedly accurate that even Hiccup had to supress a shiver and check that Professor Pitch hadn’t actually materialised behind them unseen.

As the dishevelled pair scrambled to their feet, looking around the libary wildly for the Defence of the Darks Arts Teacher Hiccup fixed his face into an expression of innocent confusion. The fourth member of their study group didn’t bother. She simply buried her face into her book, her shoulders shaking in uncontrollable laughter. 

“Raaapunnnnzel!” they both moaned in perfect unison.

A moment of silence followed. Then-

“Hey don’t copy me!”

“I said it first.”

Theme: Snitch

Jack feels a surge of pride and unexpected awe towards his best friend as she shoots ahead of him, laughing manically for no reason whatsoever.

It occurs to him that where some people are arresting in stillness, Merida’s spirit blazes best in motion. In duels with the sparks flying around her, at the center of everything, fire incarnate. In Quidditch, like now, when her eyes narrow on the snitch, every line straining towards that goal.

It’s odd. Rapunzel melted the ice walls he had built around himself with sunshine, Hiccup snuck through quietly but Merida had just arrived; like a thunderclap, or a cacophony of those awful bagpipes she loved so much, and proceeded to steamroller her way into his heart like some crazy crimson tornado.

Fisticuffs and fierce loyalty, his friend, an incorrigible force of nature -

-a lionhearted  girl.

Her fingers close around the golden ball and the Quidditch pitch roars and even though his robes are emerald and hers are scarlet and it means he’s lost, he smiles.

Theme: Dragon

‘Population Control’ the ministry, his father, other wizards call it.

He calls it vengeance. He calls it carcasses that litter the room of his conscience. Their blood, which annually darkens the dust, has seeped inside him. It mixes with his dreams.

There are quotas, apparently. His father at least, keeps to them but the less scrupulous traders tend to ‘forget.’ Hiccup watches the goldlust grow and the numbers dwindle.

He knows how to kill as well. Once, he even wanted to help but was deemed ‘too small’.  Now he’s older he thinks he’s lucky he still is. He’ll starve himself if it will make him avoid it. First you down one, tail-fins or wings with a slashing spell. Then when it can’t fly away, then you go for the kill. Spell, arrow or harpoon to the jugular it doesn’t matter, just don’t get too close - that would be fair wouldn’t it? Getting near enough for the poor and probably still thrashing creature to fight back would be far too fair.

Until he can change things, he’s going to focus on the happy moments. This will be the first time he’s had anything to look forward to remotely close to Christmas. He’s staying at Hogwarts! He’ll make up an excuse, (not that Stoick can really be any more disappointed in him anyway) and then he can spend the time with his friends. Wizards chess, presents, exploding snap, he’s sure Jacks got some pranks already planned.....

Hiccup will still see the kids often. They ones who display their wands proudly to their friends and he'll wonder if they’ll ever know how the wandmakers get dragon heartstrings in the first place.  

Maybe thats why the hat put him in Hufflepuff. Maybe that’s why after six and a half minutes of its insidious whispers wavering between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, despite the fact would have done well, that he had an intellect to match his friend Rapunzel’s he’d stumbled over to the yellow bannered table not the blue .

There’s some part of him knows that ignorance is bliss. 

If people like these, I'll write some more. Some will be happy, some sad. Feel free to leave your own prompts too!

Chapter Text

Theme: Crying

The crumpled, shaking slip of a girl with her head buried in her knees, face hidden behind her fiery clouds of curls was so much the antithesis of the brave, headstrong, impulsive Merida that Rapunzel knew, that before she dropped to her knees to put her arms around her friend she was frozen for a full minute trying to reconcile the two images to another.

“Merida what’s the matter?”

Her friend didn’t look up, just carried on a strange mix of humming snatches of song and sniffing, rocking backwards and forwards slightly. Her left hand clutched the letter that had arrived in the post this morning. 

“What are you humming?

“Huh?”

“You were humming a tune.”

Merida lifted her head. The tired grief in her face was like a stab in the gut to Rapunzel. “Aye” she conceded wetly. And then, very unexpectedly, she opened her mouth and out of it came rolling a lilting tune in a language  that seemed at once haunting and unearthly

“A naoidhean bhig, cluinn mo ghuth. Mise ri d' thaobh, O mhaighdean bhan....”

 Merida trailed off abruptly, evidently embarrassed. “Mum used to sing it to me when I was a wee bairn.” she muttered in gruff explanation, wringing her hands akwardly .

Rapunzel wants to ask if her mother also sang the tune like that; not as either a lullaby or a lament but as something with a shade of both. Or is it just Merida that knows enough of the world to sing it so achingly bittersweet?

 Instead she asks “What does it mean?”

“O Noble Maiden fair. It’s in Gaelic..”

Merida spoke Gaelic. She had never known that about her friend. Then again, finding her crying in a corridor in the dark made her realise, in the most heart breaking way possible, that there was a lot she didn’t know.

She tried to think of something to say.  The answer that came after a few minutes had elapsed surprised her.   

“Flower, gleam and glow

Let your power shine

Make the clock reverse

Bring back what once was mine”

“Heal what has been hurt

Change the Fates' design

Save what has been lost

Bring back what once was mine.

What once was mine”

Merida looked up, her eyes glittering in the half light and nodded, once.

“Little baby, hear my voice

I'm beside you, O maiden fair

Our young Lady, grow and see

Your land, your own faithful land

Sun and moon, guide us

To the hour of our glory and honour

Little baby, our young Lady

Noble maiden fair”

Whether by tears or songs or other means, all silences are made to be broken.

-So are people, she has learned.

Theme: Leaving

They are surrounded. There is no escape: wands point at them from all sides. At every point of the compass is Death. Yet surprisingly the clearing is silent.

A bloody smile escapes Merida as she grips the sword of Gryffindor. It had sung in her hands as she span, weaving the sea and stars together in the reflections off its blade. 

“Don’t leave me.” she says.

Rapunzel smiles softly at that “Things that love has touched never leave. They just get harder to see.”

“ Never.” Hiccup echoes. 

Together, the four raise their wands.  

Prompt: Birthday

Sitting in a loose horseshoe in the library, they discover Rapunzel is as paradoxical as she is in everything else when it comes to presents. She lights up with simple childlike joy when she receives them, bouncing around with barely contained excitement. Yet her eyes are wise when she opens them; gifts convey messages but they also betray hidden emotions and Rapunzel has always read effortlessly the instinctive language of the heart.

Hiccup presents her first with a neat package and it turns out to be a soft blue scarf, perfect for the winter weather. She squeals in delight and immediately winds it around her neck despite the fact that it’s a cloudless day outside. Pascal, her chameleon, emerges from her collar to poke at the scarf gingerly before he lights up pink in approval, prompting a round of laughter from the others. Hiccup himself shrugs but is obviously pleased with her reaction.

Merida’s is a contrastingly messy affair of tape and paper. But the clumsiness with which it is wrapped cannot belie the tenderness of the gift, for the title of the book is also an unspoken description, the name of the old memory which currently dances under Merida’s smile.

Jack gives her a book too, but rather than ‘Gaelic Folksongs’ picked out in gold letters on a vine green cover the front is blank leather and it reads ‘Photo album’ in black typeface instead.  Hogwarts leaps out strikingly at the Ravenclaw in different angles and seasons from each page but her fingers linger longest on the one where four figures laugh in front of it.

She hugs each of them in turn for real and then moves on to the packages from her parents, which are numerous.

The last present resting has no label.

“Oooh got a secret admirer Punzie?” teases Jack. 

Rapunzel doesn’t answer but colours slightly as she fumbles awkwardly to tear the paper off. The layers finally fall apart in her hands.  Resting inside them is a delicate silver bracelet.

When she sees a charm hanging off it is a tiny frying pan she laughs and the joy of the sound is so undeniable that the shadows all around seem to flinch and retreat for a moment, their equilibrium disturbed.

 “Rapunzel! Where are you going?” Jack shouts as she sprints from the room

“To thank someone.” She yells back, grinning.

“To thank someone? And why the frying pan....Hey.... didn’t she repel a rogue bludger with a frying pan once and it hit Clyde Stabbington smack bang in the face?

Yeuch! You’re saying Clyde gave her that?

“As if. You two are idiots.”  Merida muttered exasperated.

“Wait you know who gave her that?”

“It’s obvious. If you can’t see it then I’m not telling you”

Jack looked suddenly sly “Hey Merida I never knew you had a enough girly side to notice that sort of thing.”

The Gryfindor’s eyebrow twitched. Jack grinned wider.

“Tch Hopelessly romantic.”

“Jaaaccck.” interjected Hiccup warningly

“I bet your room’s decorated with unicorns” He added.

An hour later they all ended up eating Rapunzel’s birthday cake in the hospital wing, while Madame Maudie tried to fix Jack’s nose. 

Prompt: Merida shows a curious Hiccup some Archery.

It’s a day in early autumn that Merida shows Hiccup some archery.  

Here, autumn is the impetuous season. The wind is stirred into frantic rancour. Each tree’s carefully collected treasury of leaves is emptied, the crisp green currency of the forest exchanged for decadent swirls of gold and scarlet. It’ll be a few months before their short-lived glory fades and it’s a welcomed reprieve from what follows; the white gauntlet of winter’s grip.

Autumn suits DunBroch castle, and the residents within. Hiccup, staying there for the half term learns the bright-eyed riddle that is his best friend all over again; she laughs more, teases her brothers, leaves the window open because she loves the sharp tang of ozone before it rains, takes her broom out at dawn and neglects all her schoolwork in order to spend more time trying to entice Hiccup to climb trees in order to snatch the ripening apples.

She practices archery every day to her mother’s apparent despair and her father’s obvious pride.  Naturally Hiccup becomes curious.  He asks her to show him, not quite expecting the brilliant grin he receives in response.

They get up at daybreak, on a breezy Tuesday before the early frost begins to relent. The Scotland that greets Hiccup that morning is wild and old and half-familiar; the landscape an ancient melody, building all the way into the stunning white tipped crescendos of the Highlands’ mountain ranges. He is awestruck as he walks, but makes a note to show Merida Berk one day, but after: when he has the courage to look his father in the eye.  

With the quivers and bows slung over their backs (High quality, well maintained ones; the first rule of archery is good equipment apparently) they head out to the fringe of the forest because as Merida points out ‘you can’t be too careful Hiccup’

“Second rule of archery: good stance and position or its all for naught.” His friend begins “Archery doesn’t use just arm strength...” Tapping his back “...it also uses the muscles of the back; you have to try to draw your shoulder blades together as you pull. Keep your elbow up but not too high. Don’t hold on to the string too tightly early, wait till you draw back....”

A stream of instructions and missed targets later and Hiccup is ready to give up. No matter what he tries the bow feels leaden in his grip, the arrow is a struggle to load and every shot falls short or flies over the target.

 “I can’t do it.” he states “I’m useless at everything.”

To Merida, at that moment Hiccup has never been farther from the child his appearance suggests him to be. He looks world weary, a prisoner under his pale skin and constellation of freckles.

At fourteen, Merida knows you are more than a sum of the shadows you grew up under. Hiccup, doesn’t. She realises he is still stuck in the shade of his self-perception. He hasn’t had the chance to see what a brilliant person he can be.  

Maybe that’s what prompts her, when he throws the arrow down in despair to grab his hand and tugs him around again, to look her in the eyes.

“Hiccup, if you shoot don’t do it because someone told you to. Shoot for yourself.” And he feels strong wood pressed in his hand again, smooth and cool and a shock after Merida’s warm fingers. His grip tightens around the slender half-moon of the bow.

For himself.

The idea is new and strangely bright.

Whether by skill or some lingering magic in his fingers left by Merida’s gentle touch it feels easier than before to load the arrow and pull the string back to his cheek. Before he can think too long he looks straight down the shaft, aims, and lets his fingers loosen around the string.

This time he feels, rather than sees the arrows path.

It’s not a bull’s-eye by any means, but it hits the target solidly. Besides, Merida’s smile is a beginning and that means more to him than any perfect score in the world.

“Not half bad for a toothpick.” She laughs “You can keep the bow. The first rule is good equipment, the second is good stance but the third is constant practice and there’s no substitute for that.”

Chapter Text

Theme: Fiendfyre (Part 1)

She registers light, unnatural light on the horizon.

Fire. The entire landscape is ablaze.  Mor’du will burn down this whole forest to find her and finish what he started.

“Augumenti! Augumenti!” it’s no use, the water evaporates before its even properly formed. These aren’t natural flames and a wand won’t help her. 

Before she can try again the smoke is reaching her, black maw open and its swallowing her. She’s running. Faster than she’s ever run before. It’s still not enough. There’s fire, so much of it, everything is fire and burning and burning and the anguish of the heat on her skin. She’s stumbling, half running, the searing smoke blinding her and she’s got to keep moving, through the choking smoke. A blazing branch suddenly falls, the heat branding it to her back. Every part of her skull screams senselessly the pain of it.

She hears shouting, yells and some tiny part of her that hasn’t retreated inwards from the torment of the sensation is telling her to run in that direction. She tears the burning stick off, blisters erupting on her hands and jerks blindly forwards, lungs heaving as if she is about to regurgitate them, her pulse pounding in her ears.  

Fire and ash and smoke, all convene, bent on consuming her.

Finally after what seems like miles she’s aware that a pair of hands, gloriously cool hands reach out to her, and the relief makes her stumble. She falls and the last thing she feels before she succumbs to blackness is a sharp impact at the back of the head that should be agony but terrifyingly feels like nothing at all.  

“Merida!” Someone is screaming and she’s not even sure the voice isn’t inside her head.

Theme: Sunshine 

 “Jack, you’re making it snow.”

“Sorry.”

“Just try not to think about the weather while you have your wand out.” Rapunzel suggests placatingly. 

It was one of those baking July afternoons that everybody wished for right up until the moment it arrived. Subsequently sprawled out in whatever paltry shelter the shade from trees in the grounds provided Jack, and the majority of the student population now wished for nothing more than a really, really cold glass of water and a short sabbatical to the Arctic.

“It's too hot to study.” He groaned as he flopped in the grass.

“Hmm, I seem to recall that several months ago it was ‘too windy’ to study.  And  before that it was ‘too cold’. I pity you Jack it must be dreadful to be so susceptible to academic breakdown because of minor changes in the climate.”

“No need for such sarcasm Hiccup” The snowy-haired boy retorted “It is very hot. Hey Meri don’t you think its too hot right now?”

“Go ‘way.” Merida’s simple reply was muffled by the Transfiguration textbook she was slumped into.

Jack looked at her in disbelief. 

"Right. Enough lazing I think its high time we spiced things up around here. I’ve had a huge prank in my head for days anyway. I promise you’ll never have seen anything quite like this. What do you say?” 

Theme:  Toothiana/Running away

There’s rain pouring down. The light from the fluorescent lamps dissolves in every pool that forms in the gravel, until the floor is little more than an anagram of guttering neon reflections. Jack presses his forehead against the cool glass of the window and wonders how he ended up here, in this place where everything is mirrored and nothing is clear.

He doesn’t order another coffee. He can still taste the last one he drank even though it was days ago because bitterness, of all the flavours life has to offer, lingers the longest. 

This is not the first time he’s run away from the orphanage: pretending he’s just a muggle like this is easier sometimes.  But this is the first summer since he’s been friends with Merida, Hiccup and Rapunzel that he’s resorted to it. Pitch has changed everything.

He’d forgotten it was open mic in this dim little coffee shop today until one girl grabs his attention suddenly by clambering onto the tiny stage. False feathers stick haphazardly from the headband that holds back her hair: choppy strands clumsily dyed a bright blue shade. More feathers are woven into her braid. Her scarecrow-ragged jeans are held up by a loop of parcel string at the waist and rolled up at the knees and he guesses that like him she dislikes shoes: the feet that rest on the edges of the wooden stool are bare. 

She’s looks small in the spotlight; ethereal even, but she’s so quick and sure as she turns the machine heads to tune her guitar that before he realises it his pulse is moving almost as hummingbird fast as her hands, racing in anticipation.

 She clears her throat nervously and a flawless smile that every dentist would covet appears briefly on her face: its impossibly white and perfectly even.

 “The name’s Ana. This song is ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ and it’s dedicated to anyone who’s ever run away to find answers only to realise they never knew the question.”

Turn down the lights, turn down the bed 
Turn down these voices inside my head ....

It’s not sweetly sung, instead it’s rough and raw and heartfelt. It projects a tired yearning that he is familiar with.

He forgets the rain. He forgets his parents and Pitch and magic, all his other problems. This music and this moment are all that matters.

Theme: Home

Steam from the train engine danced idly at Kings Cross. The babble of mingled greetings, conversations and farwells from the various students and parents, along with the hulabloo of animal noises from the pets that belonged to them rose above the pearly vapour that obscured most of the platform. 

The Hogwarts Express once again became, for several hours the kingdom of good-natured chaos.

 “Fenton!” yelled the owner of one escapee owl,  a frantic first year who nearly collided with Hiccup as he barrelled down the length of the train corridor after his pet. 

Hiccup smiled gently, tugging on the comforting buttercup fabric of his scarf. He had come to love the colour of his house: a warm, welcoming yellow that heralded the happiness of home. He was suprised at how different it felt different boarding the train this year now that he was no longer a newcomer.

He walked down the carriages looking for a face he recognised and felt a brilliant grin spread across his freckled visage when he heard a very familiar shouting.

“OY! That’s my luggage ye cross-eyed crater-faced piece o’ clart!”

Of course he heard her before he saw her Hiccup thought wryly; Jack had once said of Merida that her reputation always preceded her but her voice preceded even that, and he was right.

“Crater faced?” cried a sneering voice indignantly and Hiccup stepped into the carriage in just enough time to see Merida take a violent swing with her suitcase, but not at Jack as he had expected but Snotlout, a boy who asides being a member of the same house as the white haired boy had almost nothing in common with him. Snotlout had a full time job being one of the most stubborn and obnoxious beings to ever exist.

Hiccup and Rapunzel- who was already seated inside the carriage- both rushed forward to sent a neat jinx each at the stout boy as he stuffed his hand in his pocket, knocking him backward before he could pull out his wand.

“Forgot.. I...could use spells again.” Merida huffed, dragging his unconscious form out of the carriage and depositing him on a nearby luggage rack before she hefted her suitcase back onto it. Hiccup tried to ignore the crunch this created.   

“Thanks you two.” She  punched him in the shoulder lightly before she swept him up in a brief crushing bear hug. 

“No problem. Nice alliteration with the insult there by the way. Rapunzel being tutoring you?”

“She wishes.” Called the younger girl, who also wrapped her arms around Hiccup in a warm embrace. “It’s good to see you Hiccup.” She pulled back to look him up and down with almost motherly appraisal “You’ve grown taller haven’t you?”

Hiccup realised this was true, he was on now on eye level with the friends who had confidently dwarfed him a year ago.

“Well midget’s been drinking his milk and he’s gained an inch. Hurrah for puberty!”

“Hello to you too Jack.” muttered Hiccup, not having to turn around to recognise who this new arrival was.

“Yo. Looking well Toothpick, Princess and Absurd-Hair-Girl.” Jack grinned and waved, cheerfully ignoring the collective outrage caused by his nicknames. “I brought food for all of you.”

“Um? Jack, why are you wearing every colour of house tie except the one for your own?”

“I borrowed them. I never liked green anyway so I felt like a change.” His usual cocksure smirk was in place but it softened momentarily into something gentler as he looked at his friends. 

“You mean stole them.”

“Nuance. Hey Merida how are Legolas and Elmo?”

“What?”

“Well aren’t you secretly their lovechild? I mean the whole red hair and the archery gives it away-”

"I cannae believe I missed ye!!!.” Her accent got stronger as she said this: in Merida-meteorology this was always a clear warning sign of an impending storm of bad temper.  Jack looked unaffected, the Slytherin had actually always found it amusing that she got more Scottish when she was irritated and this had led to several memorable major incidents last year designed to provoke her: including one that was already showing signs of passing into school legend as ‘The Three Hundred Herrings Incident.’ Merida seethed for a second before affection won and she surrendered a grudging smile of amusement. She smacked Jack affectionately on the shoulder.

ah... ah....anyone want one of these beans?” interrupted Rapunzel: immediately capitalising on the rare moment of silence. 

“Aye! I will. Bet Jack will cry if he gets a Tripe jelly bean though. His wee stomach can't take it”

"Is that a challenge ?"

Watching the friends he had come to love bickering, joking, eating sweets and eagerly catching up from over the holidays made an odd feeling settle in his chest, the most treasured kind of happy ache. 

Hogwarts was ahead and he was already home.

Chapter Text

Theme: Mischief Managed

“Um guys what are you doing? I thought we finished our prank war”

“Sshhhh we did. We’re pranking Eugene now.”

“Eug- why?”

Jack looks crossly at Hiccup as if it should be obvious “Because he’s the one who keeps sending Rapunzel gifts: thinks he’s slick, the narcissistic twit.”

“I fail to see how that’s a reason for this.” Hiccup gestures to what must be more than a hundred chamber pots stacked oh so carefully against the doorway. And all of them are filled with some kind of potion. “Wait. You were the ones who put Babbling Beverage in his pumpkin juice weren’t you? He was lurching around the corridor talking utter nonsense for hours.”

Their expressions are gleefully unrepentant.

 “You two are acting like a pair of overprotective parents. Don’t you think Rapunzel should be allowed to have a say in this? Anyway after the Hundred Herrings incident and the more recent but equally intellegent idea to drill holes in all the bottom of boats on the Black Lake while there were couples in them trying to go on romantic boat rides you guys are in enough trouble as it is”

“Oh we know. But now we have an excuse for something we’ve wanted to do all year.” Merida whispers from the corner she is crouched behind, an unholy grin on her face.

Abruptly, they all go quiet as footsteps approach.

“ Its Eugene! Oh baby this is going to be the motherload of pranks. Get ready.” Cackles Jack

“STOP!” Hisses Hiccup “Rapunzel’s with him!”

They dive into a nearby cuboard  as the two come into earshot, chatting amicably.

“Hey Goldie. Thanks for helping, I would have failed Transfiguration without your help.” They hear Eugene say.

Goldie? Mouths Jack to Hiccup, miming being sick. He shrugs. “But Rapunzel’s being helping Eugene with his studies? And did he just say thank you?” he hisses in disbelief at his fellow Slytherin.  Merida hushed them  both hurriedly and they look back at the pair.

“Oh. It’s no prob-eeeeeeeeeeee!” Rapunzel squeals suddenly as Eugene drops the books, in one quick motion he throws her over his shoulder and begins running in circles up and down the corridor. Rapunzel pounds on his back  “EUGEENNEE PUT ME DOWNN!” She manages to gasp out between her shrieks of laughter. “I’m dizzy!”

After several minutes a chuckling he obeys and sets her on her feet, but his hands don’t leave her arms. She’s flushed and far too close. Strands of blond hair escape her braid in little wisps and Eugene leans over to tuck one behind her ear, finding himself counting the flecks in her eyes as if all the answers to the universe lie within that number.  

“Eugene?” She repeats, this time uncertainly. He leans in slowly.

Which is of course the moment Jack decides to elbow Merida so that she knocks Hiccup and all three of them come flying out of the broom cupboard. The pair jump apart like they’ve been burned, looking everywhere except each other. Merida tries to scramble to her feet.

But in the process she dislodges a chamber pot.

And a flash of blue is all Hiccup sees before a hundred chamber pots explode simultaneously. They are knocked backwards as potion flies outwards with the destructive force of a small bomb. But rather than falling to the floor the enchanted liquid reforms.

He's not sure who splutters “RUN!!!”

But too late, a terrifyingly gigantic water dragon rears up and chases them down the corridor to come crashing down on them again. Hiccup is thrown around in the torrent of water for several minutes as it rebounds from wall to wall.

 “Guys?”

Rapunzel is the first to recover once the level settles and she drags herself upright on the slippery floor using the wall as support. She’s drenched to the skin and her eyes already promise a thousand redemptions as she focuses on her friends. Eugene lies sprawled out, stunned.

“Forget pranks. I think we just performed the cockblock of the century.”  A dripping Jack wheezes from the floor.

Theme: Fiendfyre (Part 2)

 Its been five days since bewilderment and a false bravado, because Merida was not on the scarlet engine like normal and he is aware what this means, the correlation between the passing days and the increasing desperation on their faces. But looking at the horror and confusion painting them now he’s not sure that showing them him wasn’t the biggest mistake he’s ever made.

“Hiccup I’m going to cover my eyes and count to ten and when I open them again there better not be a dragon standing there. One, two, three, fooooo-” something cool and rough bumps against Jacks forehead, and his squeal echoes in the dim blue expanse of the forest night.

“Toothless back off.”

“TOOTHLESS?” Jack stammers in near hysteria “You caught the deadliest dragon in the world and then you named it? What the hell-”

“He’s my friend. He can take us to DunBroch”  Hiccup replies shortly and Rapunzel nods suddenly behind him, approaching Toothless with renewed courage in her eyes “Jack hush.” She whispers “I befriended a chameleon after all, Toothless here is just a bigger reptile aren’t you?” she smiles at the dragon and Hiccup has to contain his sigh of relief at her understanding. “He’s beautiful.” She breathes reverently after a moment.

“Here.” He slowly guides her palm to Toothless’s snout.

She gasps softly at the contact and the look of exhilarated amazement on her face reminds him of his own the time he first touched a dragon.

“Wow.”

“Listen.” Interrupts Jack warily “I really have no idea what is going through your crazy head but if this... Toothless here can help find out what’s happened to Merida, I’ll go along with it.”

“Well then.“ Hiccup says, sounding much more confident than he feels “Try to hang on.”

“Go!” he calls to Toothless once they are on his back. 

“WHAT WAS THAT HISSING? YOU SPEAK PARSELTOUNGE?” yells Jack.

“Um yeah, I found out I can more or less understand him and speak to him.”

Luckily for Hiccup the vile stream of Jack’s curse words that follow are lost over the roar of the wind. 

Theme: Summer Break

The knife is in his hand, tempered metal that whispers insidiously to cut and slice and wound.

“We are descended from the Vikings themselves. We’ve done this job every year for generations” his father would boast and by then he was already no longer a child and he understood what it was to have your ears ring with silence; a noise which occurs at the wet crimson intersection of flesh and hammered iron and precedes the sound of bones clattering into mass graves.

The dragon lies before him. Twisted in ropes like so many others he’s seen but the guilt in his stomach will not let him forget that time it was him who shouted the Incarcerous spell. And why? So his father would be proud of him? It was a lucky shot in a chaotic sky where for a moment, consequences didn’t exist.  Only a fool would be proud of that. Didn’t he swear he would never be part of this, that he'd do anything to avoid it?

Its green eyes are so alien and yet the fear in them is so familiar it’s like a psychical wound.

This dragon, he is just as scared as I am.

As scared as I am

He’s still scared. After all this time. And so, so tired of it.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to make the vengeful bloodlust of his ancestors come to turn his marrow to maroon and his skeleton to steel. But instead other things dance on the backs of his eyelids, Merida showing him how to draw a bow, the afternoon he fell asleep in the library and woke up at dusk to find all his notes finished in Rapunzel’s neat script, the gleam of Jack’s smile before he tipped a bucket of water over his head, Professor Gobber’s eccentric brand of kindness- all the good things in the universe that make him more than just the weary footnote of a lineage of steel.

He was the hiccup, the blip, the error that wouldn’t fit in and yet it has taken him all this time to live up to his name and break free from this murderous wheel entirely, to carve his own path.

The ropes fall away under the keen resolve of the blade and he tosses the knife away. The reptile springs free snarling but he can’t even summon up the urge to run, transfixed by the sinuous beauty of the creature now it is no longer trapped. He had always imagined that Night Furies, the fiercest of all dragons, would be horrendous, violent, evil looking monsters but he cannot reconcile that image with this pitch black coil of wild, fierce grace before him, with the primeval wisdom held in its emerald eyes. So he does something he will never understand afterwards. He looks into the face of the dragon and laughs.

It’s a sound this summer has made him forget he was capable of anymore; a carefree laugh of absolute joy and exhilaration because he’s so happy, so ridiculously and illogically happy that after everything he’s been through he can die with the intense happiness of having been face to face momentarily, with a dragon on its own terms.

He is less than his father wants him to be and nothing more than himself.  He is free.