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Hiccup had been born for the skies, but now he would die at the bottom of the ocean. His last breaths would be stagnant instead of fresh. Trapped in a diving bell, as far from the open skies as he could get.
With Toothless right beside him, yet just out of reach, twin souls separated by a thick amber window and curved walls of metal. Soon to be separated for good, until they met again in the halls of Valhalla. (If Valhalla was what awaited Hiccup. Was this an honorable death? Did this count as dying in battle?)
Hiccup tried to get Toothless to leave, to propel himself back to the surface, to mourn with their friends up above. Hiccup didn't want to die alone in a sphere slowly filling with water. But the thought of Toothless watching him die, helpless to save him, was far worse.
Toothless wouldn't go, though. Of course he wouldn't. He didn't care about the scars that witnessing his best friend's death would leave on his soul. He refused to let Hiccup die alone. And though it tore something inside of him to know that his dragon would suffer, Hiccup understood. He was grateful. He would have done the same.
The moments before the flood could be measured in shallow breaths and heartbeats stolen from the jaws of time. Hairline cracks had already sprouted in the window; they spread slowly at first, branching like lightning. The sound of splintering amber crackled like thunder, deafening in the tomb-like silence of the diving bell. Next would come the deluge, then the cataclysm, and then…
In those final moments, Hiccup felt no fear. He didn't search frantically for a miraculous escape that he knew did not exist. He didn't beat at the sloped walls of his prison. He didn't pray to the gods for an impossible rescue or a quick death. He didn't even cry.
He just placed his hand on the window, gazed past the growing cracks and into his brother's eyes, warped and yellowed by the amber.
"I love you, bud," Hiccup said. And then the dam broke.
The water hit Hiccup in a shock of cold. He'd just been out in it, completely immersed, and it hadn't seemed this frigid then. Maybe it wasn't the temperature of the water scattering chills across his flesh and wracking his body with violent shivers. The water wasn't cold; no, that was the hand of death groping at his ankle, sliding down his spine.
He was going to die.
The water gushed now instead of poured, the cracks in the amber now a canyon. Hiccup could barely see Toothless past the spray. Salt burned his eyes.
Higher now, past his chest, no longer creeping but sprinting, reaching for his chin—
Fully under. Floating in his own tiny bubble, water inside and water outside. He had become water, swirling, sinking, swaying, splashing.
He held his breath, pressed his lips together, even though it wouldn't change anything. A final act of defiance, one tiny human staring into the face of certain death and still saying, "No." Humanity's greatest strength and its greatest weakness: Railing against the inevitable, convinced they can wrestle the loom away from Skuld and weave themselves a new fate.
But all that was forgotten when the Submaripper appeared out of nowhere, hurtling full-tilt toward the diving bell — and Toothless.
"Toothless!"
The air rushed from his lungs in a torrent of bubbles. The water muffled his voice, distorted it, but it was enough. Toothless turned just in time to avoid being caught up in the mammoth dragon's maw. Hiccup clamped his lips back together, but the damage had been done — his empty lungs now screamed to be filled again, and it took a titanic battle against his own traitorous body not to breathe in.
At least his last breaths had been spent fulfilling his most sacred duty, one last time: Protecting Toothless. Toothless already had the final beats of Hiccup's heart, and now Hiccup had given him his breath.
Flashes of purple painted the water, desperate draconic paint strokes that stirred up silt and sand on the ocean floor and buffeted the water into mini eddies and currents. Toothless's strongest plasma blasts did nothing to deter the Submaripper. Hiccup wasn't even sure the dragon noticed them.
Don't waste your breath and energy on a dead man, Hiccup pleaded silently even as the edges of his vision tapered. His chest spasmed, lungs on the verge of collapse, he needed to breathe, it didn't matter what—
He opened his mouth right as the Submaripper took the diving bell into its enormous mouth and pelted for the surface.
Too late. Moments too late.
Hiccup's last moments of consciousness, of life, blended lung-searing agony and rushing water into a cacophony of suffering so acute his body seized, his limbs twitched, and his mind and vision whited out —
It should have stopped.
The pain, the unbearable pressure, the burn of water pouring into his nose, his mouth, flooding his throat and his sinuses, filling the hollow that was once his lungs.
But it didn't.
He stayed there, suspended in a watery hell, unable to draw air into his starving lungs. Water surrounding him, limbs flailing against it.
Trapped. Twisted. Tied eternally to the moment of his death, his should-have-been-death, but it didn't stop, it didn't end, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't scream, he couldn't swim, he couldn't move—
Someone was crying.
It wasn't him; he had no air to cry with.
Long, low whines, ending in a faintly upwards trill.
He—
He knew those whines.
Toothless.
No no no no no
Toothless didn't need to see this; he needed to swim, to flee, to save himself—
Through the torrent, he vaguely felt something warm ghost over his face.
Hot. Gentle. Familiar.
Beloved.
Steam from a dragon's nostrils, his dragon's nostrils, but Toothless couldn't breathe underwater, which meant—
Which meant—
Hiccup's watery world tilted precariously and he teetered between death and life for several heartbeats.
Heartbeats.
Water congealed into something solid, something real — a thin mattress beneath his back, a blanket twisted around his body like a Hunter's net. His eyes snapped open, and Toothless cooed anxiously down at him. The ceiling of Hiccup's loft back home on Berk materialized behind his Night Fury.
Home. Safe. Alive.
Fractions of memories flashed through his mind in quick succession: Waking up on the deck of their ship, retching and gasping, water spilling from his mouth, pain wracking his body, his lungs burning like he'd inhaled fire instead of air, Astrid's hands in his hair, on his face, Fishlegs holding him upright, trying to climb into Toothless's saddle, his body too weak, too abused, to even struggle when Fishlegs pulled him back… the others taking to the skies in a rush of fury, to pour their wrath onto Viggo's flagship.
He hadn't died. The Submaripper had saved him. They had taken back the Straits.
Not drowning. Warm and dry in his own bed in his own home with Toothless by his side. Alive.
So why couldn't he breathe?
He worked one arm free from the confining blanket and clawed at his chest, as if he could reach inside and make his lungs work again. The sounds that came out of his mouth were breathless, steeped in animal terror.
The death rattles of a living man.
A strangled keen forced its way out of his gaping mouth, propelled on the smallest sliver of breath. He felt his heartbeat in his temples, heard it pounding in his ears, loud and fastfastfast—
And he realized. He'd walked this path before.
Panic could drown a man as easily as water. Terror could empty the lungs and fill them with brine. Fear could turn safety into danger, assault the mind and twist the senses and throw a man back into his lowest point, his greatest horrors, again and again and again and again and—
Something heavy settled on his stomach — Toothless's head — and Hiccup latched on to the sensation, allowed it to anchor him, steady him, ground him. Toothless was here, he was real, Hiccup was here, Hiccup was real, Hiccup was alive.
Toothless emitted a low, sonorous sound that Hiccup could only describe as a purr. It rose and fell with each of his dragon's slow, even breaths, and Hiccup followed the cadence of it, the rhythm, the lullaby of Toothless's presence coaxing him to shore.
And little by little, Hiccup learned how to breathe again.
In-out. Small. Shallow. Stilted.
In-out. Halted. Hungry. Hitched.
In. Out. A bit deeper. Still desperate.
In. Out.
Evening, lengthening, regulating.
In. Out.
In. Out.
In. Out.
When his heart had reclaimed a normal rhythm and his shuddering breaths had leveled out, and his chest rose and fell to Toothless's rhythm, slow and deep, Hiccup reached a trembling hand up and scrubbed it over his face, wet with tears instead of seawater. Then he pushed himself up on his elbows, then shifted to sit, Toothless's head moving with him.
Then he lunged forward and threw his arms around his dragon's neck, buried his face in his best friend's sleek scales. "I thought — I thought I was back there. In the cauldron. Drowning," he gasped.
Toothless warbled worriedly, the sound reverberating through Hiccup's body, making him whole again.
"I'm okay, bud," Hiccup said. He paused. "Or I will be. Eventually." He sat back, scratched Toothless's nose. A tiny smile tugged at his lips as the dragon melted.
"Thank you, Toothless. For staying, then and — and now, too. That can't have been easy."
Toothless chuffed.
Hiccup laughed, hoarse and grating. Genuine.
"I know, bud," he smiled. "I wouldn't leave you either."