Chapter Text
“Hiccup.”
“…Astrid.”
“Where are you going?”
This was everything he wanted to avoid, actually. That’s why he’s on his way out of his house, out of the village, to meet up with Toothless at the edge of the northern cliff. And why he decidedly did not tell anyone where he was going beyond a simple note left on his desk for his dad to find the next morning. Nothing unusual here, no sir! Just a usual scouting of the islands around, totally not a ploy to avoid hearing his dad talk about chiefly duties and settling down— all the stuff that feels more like a chain around his neck than something he should be excited about.
He needs to go out, away; figure out where the itch is and get rid of it before he’s inevitably tied down somewhere. Clearly his face must’ve betrayed his thoughts more than once, given the long looks from his dad and the concern pouring out of his friends (albeit some in more subtle ways than the others). The looming hand of duty is nothing compared to whatever else has been driving him halfway mad, however. He knows where to start looking, but doesn’t know what he’ll find— if he even finds anything at all.
Despite living at the Edge most days, after Viggo’s… loss, they’d all collectively decided to go home for a while. Without a leader to drive them like Viggo once did, Hiccup thought the Hunters would face some kind of power vacuum, and without a goal to pit the Riders against the Hunters, he guessed neither side needed to meet again any time soon. The loss of the Dragon Eye was heavy on him, but not as heavy as the thought of Viggo jumping down into the lava. They were enemies, sure, but he hadn’t wanted this to happen either.
“Can we not do this again,” he sighs, reminded of that time Astrid herself had found him and Toothless out. While there was much less at stake now, he still can’t help making the comparison.
He certainly feels like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar when she looks at him, deadpan, and crosses her arm over her chest. “Do what again? You’re the one who’s leaving mysteriously in the middle of the night.”
Hiccup keeps on walking anyway, and his naive heart hopes Astrid will give up; but only the gods know which of them is actually Stoick’s kid, with how bullheaded Astrid can be. “I’m just going on a ride! I’ll be back in a day or two—”
She tuts, using her axe to pick Hiccup off by his collar. “You’re not going unless you tell me,” she says when he turns around. “You promised, Hiccup.”
It takes him a minute to gather his words; there’s no easy way to tell her this kind of thing, much like there wasn’t when she met Toothless. It’s something he feels rather than knows, and it has been bothering him for so, so long— and now that he finally has enough time on his hands to check it out, now that they’re not on high alert every damned day—
“It’s a long story,” he decides. “You might think I’m crazy by the end of it.”
Astrid, who has always known him better than he knows himself, whistles for Stormfly. “It’s not like I don’t already know that.” On the side of her wings are bags packed with supplies; food, blankets, some tools, the usual. Hiccup can see the glint of a fourth spare leg peeking out of the cover. As always, she came fully prepared. “Tell me on the way, then.”
The rest of the walk to Toothless is silent, a storm brewing in Hiccup’s mind as he tries to make sense of his own thoughts. Everything usually flows well with him, the words unstoppable once you really get him to talk about one thing or other—worse if it’s something related to dragons or new technology—but this time he can’t get a full sentence formed in his mind without that feeling coming back to haunt him.
The wind flings his hair back into his face, forcing him to march on. He can feel the eyes digging into the back of his head, and they’re not Astrid’s.
The first time he ever felt off, as he came to call it, was on Glacier Island over a year ago. He had always been curious about the reason why Gothi wasn’t killed that day, too, and he came to learn that the Wraiths used temperature—the heat of their bodies—to locate them in the blizzard. And yet when they clearly had to chance to take everyone out, they didn’t. Even worse: the cold wind was certainly not a surprise when landing on a place with that kind of name, obviously, but its bite was softer than he had expected. It warmed Hiccup’s cheek briefly before being chased away by the snow.
Clearly no one would’ve agreed with that sentiment, however. But something was weird; there was only one Wraith that day, but he’d felt more than one pair of eyes on him during the snowstorm. When it attacked, it began with the camp, not the team— and then when it did attack them, it didn’t go for the kill.
While Hiccup was undoubtedly good with dragons (a single point of pride he will never let go of), having them avoid attacking him—or anyone in his group—directly, while still fully wild and untamed, was strange. The snowbank protecting him after the avalanche was even stranger.
When he’d figured out how the dragon’s sight worked, there was something even worse, something he’s only telling Astrid now, long after the event itself, because no one would believe him otherwise:
Someone else was in that blizzard. At least, he’s sure it was a someone, not a something, though it was such a fleeting glimpse of bright and blue against the snow that he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it. Light can do all sorts of crazy things, and so can sound, but the laugh Hiccup had heard when the cave fell down onto the others was unmistakably human.
It just made no sense. It still hardly does: who in the world could survive living with the Wraiths? Worse, who could survive in those kinds of temperatures year-round, when the ground itself is made out of ice? Who had managed to train the dragons there so they wouldn’t be attacked?
So Hiccup kept himself silent, telling himself he might have hallucinated it, or saw something that wasn’t there. He repeated that mantra almost every night for months, trying to shrug away the paranoia and, as everything mysterious always ends up being to him, the puzzle he desperately wants to solve.
At least, that was until Ryker and the Hunters went into the Wraith caves to get another tooth.
Despite the strength of the snowstorm, the camp Snotloud had set up stood its ground, and the air around it was ever so slightly warmer than the rest of the island. Not to mention how the blizzard hid Astrid well enough she could fly away from Hiccup while they were scouting. When things had calmed down, and Hiccup could finally talk to Heather without pretenses, he’d asked her how she managed to steal arrows from Ryker’s quiver, when he was shooting at Toothless—and he can’t say he wasn’t confused when she said she didn’t. They both knew Ryker had more than three arrows in that bundle, but by the time he’d shot the third the rest had been missing.
Remembering it now, he still feels that anger from being kept away from the truth for that long. He still feels frustrated now, but it’s become less intense than when he’d first found out. After that discussion in the main hut, he’d quite literally stormed off, even Toothless noticing his rage and giving him the space he needed to get over himself and understand why both Heather and Astrid kept him in the dark.
He’d managed to angry-walk all the way to the (ha) edge of the Edge, feet dangling off a snow-less cliffside and the wind mostly absent beyond a grass-height breeze. The moon shone just above the water, painting the ocean the lightest blue he’d ever seen. After staring at it long enough to hurt his eyes, he let himself fall on his back, the grass left to cool off the redness of his cheeks with the leftover frost from the previous snow.
Even though it had still been summer.
“I just—” he began, talking to no one but the wind and the nature around him, “why couldn’t they tell me?” He’d always been the loner as a child, someone the rest of the group ignored or kept their distance from. No one ever told him anything important that had been going on around the village except his dad—and even then the details were fuzzy, more so an explanation of Stoick’s absence than getting Hiccup involved in Berk’s affairs. Being left in the dark, especially by two people he trusts with his life, only brought back those childish frustrations he thought he’d gotten rid of.
But the wind never replied, so he kept going. “Is it because they don’t trust me? That I’m too bad of an actor to make it seem real?”
The moon dipped lower into the waters, halfway gone now. The breeze had gone quiet; if Hiccup had been less angry, he might’ve said it was quieting down to listen to him. Instead he wiggled away from the ledge, letting his fully body be embraced by the cold grass under him, the waves crashing against the cliff soothing him ever so slightly.
A single tear dropped from his cheek onto a wildflower, the poor thing frosting over—though Hiccup never saw it. “If people don’t feel like they can trust me… do they even believe in me, that I can take my father’s place?”
Like that was the dumbest thing it had ever heard, the wind crashed against him, slipping through the needlework of his shirt and tickling his sides with freezing air. He sputtered, drawing his tunic closer to his skin; the redness of his eyes had gone along with the confused smile now plastered on his face. The breeze suddenly calmed and turned more soothing, shaking some dirt off his braids and cooling the wood that rubbed painfully against his stump. He fell asleep there, under the moonlight, and didn’t understand how snow could’ve gotten into his hair by the time he woke up, sunshine-warm, the next morning.
The air is completely still, unnaturally so, when they land on Glacier Island.
“Let’s stay alert,” Hiccup tells Astrid, “last we came here we weren’t very nice to the Wraiths or their nest.”
She hops off Stormfly’s saddle and grabs her battle axe, though she holds it loosely in her hand. Hiccup guesses she doesn’t know what to expect—friend or foe. If there’s even anything on this gods-forsaken island. This time of year, the dragons should be sleeping off the leftover tiredness of summer and waking up again; it’s not the best time to be disturbances.
The island’s main plain and mountains are small compared to Berk, and they make quick work of looking around the accessible outdoor areas. Not much has changed since they last visited, beyond a few more mounds of snow and what looks like ice debris from a recent avalanche. The tunnels leading up to the surface have been filled in almost perfectly, as though they’d never been there; the same could be said of the cavern the hunters collapsed over them when they last visited. Not even anything left behind by the hunters themselves could be found.
“Nothing here either,” Hiccup calls out. “Maybe I am going crazy,” he adds, only for himself and Toothless to hear. And that’s when a snowstorm begins to shroud the island in pure whites and grays.
His dragon warbles with a roll of his eyes.
“Thank you, that’s very nice of you Toothless, way to reassure me,” he deadpans. He turns to where Astrid was supposed to have gone, and seeing nothing but snow—the wind’s temperature nearly gluing his eyes shut anyway—he yells, “ASTRID!”
Faintly, her voice is carried by a much warmer, softer wind. “Come here! There’s a small alcove. You might wanna see this!”
He exchanges a look with Toothless and runs toward the source of her voice. Somehow her words had crossed most of the main plain and managed to slip through the single-dragon-sized opening in the cliff face. It was the only part of the island he’d seen where something was growing out of the cracks in the rock. Crocuses.
Once he walks into the shelter, though, his soul nearly leaves his body.
“What in the…”
Despite how small the entrance is, the wind is so intense that he has to block it from his face, lest it turn his eyes into ice cubes. However, with his hand shielding his vision, he can make out a few things.
There’s a relatively large water hole in the middle of the cave. Ice covers all of it, but there are cracks, and they’re formed as though—
“Astrid,” Hiccup calls out once she notices too, once she’s on her knees looking down into the water. “Astrid, the cracks—”
“Someone fell in there, Hiccup—”
“No,” he shakes his head, using his free hand to trace around the edges. “Look, see how the water touches cracks that are smaller? On our side they’re bigger.”
She hardly shivers as she straightens out her back, turning to him. “I’m listening.”
“That’s the kind of angle that’s made when something gets out of the ice, not when something falls in.” And even if he were wrong, there was simply no way of getting their body out of that ice without ending up dead, too.
Astrid looks back down at the frozen pond, then twists herself away from it. The action looks almost painful. “Whatever came out of there…”
Or whoever, his mind oh so helpfully supplies once her voice trails off.
Hiccup turns back to look at the walls—shelves!—around them. Astrid looks pensive, as though trying to find a word to characterize what they’re seeing.
“They seem lonely,” she finally says.
“What in the name of…”
He shuts up before finishing his sentence, because she’s absolutely right. They do.
The walls are lined with natural shelves from the erosion of the rock, but they are full of little snowmen and figurines. None of them are particularly detailed, and there are no other signs of close friends, family, or pets among the little souvenirs. Most of the figurines are vague shapes of random things, like leaves or flowers or the moon. There’s only one detailed sculpture, and it’s of one of the Snow Wraiths.
“Believe me now?” Hiccup asks her, hoping for a teasing tone, but neither of them feel like laughing at the moment. Whoever lived here was clearly isolated, and it’s unclear how long they’ve been here—or how long it’s been since they left. If they even survived the winter at all.
“Hiccup,” Astrid whispers, pointing at another figurine, hidden behind a small snowbank off to the side “doesn’t that—”
Before she even had the chance to finish, the wind blew harder, hard enough to push them away from the wall and back toward where they came.
“We should leave!” Astrid yells over the sound.
Hiccup nods, hoping she can see him through the whiteness of the snow now encircling them. “Agreed! The Edge?”
When they both turn around, their dragons are gone; maybe they left a while ago, thrown off by the ice and clear presence that was around in that cave. No wonder they couldn’t find it back then, they’d come on a mission and their dragons were their only defenses! Now that they were exploring, the threat of being without their dragon didn’t stop their human curiosity.
(Or maybe Toothless and Stormfly didn’t feel there was enough space to tussle. Hiccup’s paranoid brain has obviously chosen the former explanation, but he can’t exactly dismiss the obvious, less crazy option either.)
“I don’t care where we go, let’s just get out of here!”
Without a word, they did.
That didn’t stop Hiccup from trying to glance back at that figurine. It looked a lot like a night fury.
“Hey, Hiccup?”
“Mnhnfnn?” Restless as he is, he’s somewhat surprised he managed to get a few minutes of precious sleep on Toothless’ back. It’s been a long day, okay? They shouldn’t be too far from the Edge now, with the sun slowly falling down toward the ocean.
Astrid is looking at him weirdly. Not at Hiccup, I mean— she’s looking at Toothless’ wings and face, then back to Stormfly’s own, over and over again. His fatigue is soon forgotten for worry. If she’s wearing that face, when there’s nothing but ocean around them…
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Haven’t you noticed?”
“Noticed what, Astrid? You’re killing me!”
“Their wings!” She points out, gesturing around her. “They haven’t flapped their wings since we passed that sea stack earlier!”
They’ve been gliding for the better part of an hour? Upon closer inspection, she’s right: the only movement Toothless makes are a few mindless adjustments and stretching his wings further once in a while.
“We must be flying over a good enough wind current, then,” Hiccup posits. “That’s good, gives them some respite until we get to the Edge.”
“I don’t know,” Astrid ends up telling him, her arms wrapped around her, rubbing her hands over her skin. “The wind is southbound but it’s so much colder than when we left. I’m freezing.”
She never gets cold. Even on Glacier Island, all she did was warm up her fingers (except when the wind freaked them out, but he’s choosing to categorize that instance as a statistical aberration). Hiccup’s eyes immediately widen and he nudges Toothless with his knee.
“Alright, bud, stay ale—”
He can’t even finish his sentence before the wind both slows down and warms up all at once. Toothless stumbles a little, his claws dipping onto the water ever so slightly before he corrects course again. When he turns to the side, he sees Stormfly doing much of the same.
“That was weird, right?” Astrid asks, unsure.
Hiccup nods. “Definitely.”