20A/N: Hey guys! Again, not dead. Sorry for the delay, if you've read my things before and payed attention to the author's notes, you'll know about the unreliability of my muse. But, on to the story! This one-shot (I think it still counts as that) is both longer, and a little heavier than most of the other stuff I've done, but I think it has value. Hiccup generally gets all the whump attention, but Drago's attack wiped out half of Berk, so Astrid most likely lost people too! And especially since we never really see her emotional side, (and believe me, all girls have one) I felt like this needed to be explored. I hope you enjoy this! (Really though, please review, you have no idea how it brightens my day.)
Astrid Hofferson did not cry. Crying showed weakness and helplessness, two things that no person in his right mind would ever have called Astrid Hofferson. But as she watched the moonlight dance across the water, she certainly felt like it.
She hadn't felt that way recently, maybe because she hadn't had time to feel anything recently. The Island of Berk had been left in shambles since Drago's attack a month before, and the days had been filled with clearing rubble, rebuilding homes, and simply getting things back in order; the monotony of it only broken once or twice by dragon races to keep up morale. But now, as the island looked more and more put together, and more and more of the ice was removed or melted away, there was time to think. There was time to notice the splintered houses that had not been fixed, and probably never would be since no one was coming home to them. There was time to notice how few children there were laughing and playing in the streets, and how many shops and booths were closed up, looking forlorn in their vacancy.
From the first day, Hiccup had taken control. He had turned the Great Hall, which was (miraculously) still intact, into a temporary shelter for villagers whose homes had been destroyed, and he had set the very old and very young to work making food for the steady flow of workers who came in and out in shifts. Another thing he had done was organize all the able-bodied villagers into working groups. They rotated in shifts between working and eating and sleeping. It was as he began to divide the people into groups that they realized just how many were missing. Name after name was called with no answer, and as the process went on, a grim silence settled over the village. By the time things were organized, everyone was ready to throw themselves into work so they could try and forget the deafening silence.
The one silence Astrid couldn't forget, and the one she was sure she would never forget, was the silence that fell when her parents' names were called. She had been busy with organizing the villagers into lines, trying to shut out the sound of Hiccup's voice calling out names from the village registry. True, there would be strings of five or six names where each was answered with a somber "Here," but all too often the calls were met with nothing but eerie stillness.
"Hofferson, Erick." Suddenly Astrid's ears were alert, and she stiffened. She turned around, searching the crowd for any sign of answer. No one even moved. Hiccup paused a half-beat longer than he had with the other names, but pressed on.
"Hofferson, Ingrid." Astrid closed her eyes for a moment as the silence engulfed her, but then went back to what she was doing and waited for the silence to sink in. She knew Hiccup's eyes were on her as she continued her task, but she couldn't bear to look at him. She expected to feel pain like a knife, but, instead, it was as if a chasm had opened quietly in her heart and swallowed everything inside. She felt empty. Astrid went on with her work, everybody did, and soon she found that if she worked long enough, and if she could get tired enough, she could stop thinking about the void in her heart. That helped it not hurt so much, or she supposed it would have if she had felt anything.
Always at the front of the working force was Hiccup. Whether he was training dragons or clearing rubble, every day he worked two shifts straight before getting a meal and then stumbling towards a cot to sleep for a few short hours. If others hadn't insisted that he rest periodically, he probably would have worked himself to death, and Astrid knew that sometimes he wished he could. But every day she was right there with him, and he was with her. They were each other's silent support. They worked side by side and looked out for each other; he made sure she ate, she made sure he didn't get stuck in his own dark thoughts, and at the end of the day they fell exhausted onto cots right next to each other and enjoyed deep, dreamless slumber. All through the days there was one thing after another to keep Astrid from thinking about the emptiness inside her, and she always found solace in the blind unconsciousness that gave her escape, but her sleep hadn't been dreamless lately.
As work was winding down, and things began to be more put together, Astrid found it more difficult to fall to sleep. Every night when she came in she would eat and go straight to her bed, expecting to be asleep in minutes, but as she was less and less exhausted, she discovered that it was harder and harder to go to sleep. And when she finally did get to sleep, her dreams were dark.
-0o0-
"Hello?" she called out, only half expecting a reply. The night was cloudless, but she couldn't see the moon or stars. Everything was pitch black. She took a tentative step forward, unable to see where her foot would land. She stumbled along like this for what seemed like hours, with each step getting more desperate and less worried about where her feet would go. She started running. She didn't know where she was going, she just had to find something, anything. As she went on her lungs began to burn and soon she was forced to stop, crumpling to the ground in a heap, gasping for air. She felt suffocated. There was no light, and no noise except for her own labored breathing echoing in her ears. She had to keep moving. Her only hope of finding something was if she kept going. She began crawling forward on her hands and knees, still weak from her previous efforts. After an eternity, she saw something. Light! She managed to get to her feet and run unsteadily towards the orange glow that flickered in the distance. It grew stronger, and soon she had to shield her eyes, so long accustomed to dark, with her hand. She came to the edge of a cliff and forced herself to uncover her eyes. She blinked against the light, noticing as she did that everything was still silent. As her eyes adjusted painfully to brightness around her, she made out shapes in the valley below her. Human shapes. Dragon shapes. All motionless. The light was coming from a hundred fires that were set around them, each of them blazing with all their fury, but every one silent as the forms they guarded. She fell to her knees, and the silence penetrated to her very core.
She was roused from her stupor by a cold blade being placed to her cheek. She turned around slowly, distancing herself from the metal as she did. Who was there to threaten her? Everyone was dead.
Drago.
He had done all this! He stood there over her, sneering at her horrified expression. The sneer turned into a smirk, and she saw the victory in his eyes. He didn't say anything, but with his sword he pointed at her chest, and then significantly at the silent forms in the valley below. At first she thought he was going to kill her, but her horror increased as she understood his meaning.
"No!" she shouted, and what she had meant to echo out in defiance was turned into a muffled plea. "It wasn't me! It was you!"
His smirk turned into something more sinister, and he nodded his head, confirming a fear she didn't know she had. She started to protest again, but he reached down and grabbed her face, forcing her to look at the devastation below. She looked down at the silent figures and faces of the people she loved, Hiccup and Toothless, Stoick, Valka too, and, in the very heart of the destruction, lay her mother and father.
They were all dead because of her. The silence in her heart was filled with something now, something more horrible than the emptiness: guilt. Guilt and despair. Guilt so loud that it hurt her ears, pounding on the inside of her skull, and despair so heavy that it pushed her to the ground, or would have had Drago not been grasping her face in his death-grip. His hand shifted from her face to her neck, and she realized vaguely that he was choking her. It was not until the black started to cloud the edges of her vision that she began to struggle. The light! She needed the light! It was her one last hope. She tried to pry his fingers off her neck, but her fight was useless. He was too strong. The blackness obscured the light, and right as she faded out of consciousness she finally heard someone speak. She thought it was Drago, but it sounded more impersonal, and, if it were possible, even more evil than he was. It sounded like Guilt.
"You belong to me now."
-0o0-
Astrid launched into a sitting position, gasping for breath. She had had nightmares recently, but none of them had been quite as bad as this one. She tried to steady her breathing as she looked around, fixing her eyes on the light of the fire in the center of the hall, and listening intently to the sounds of steady breathing coming from various parts of the room. Light and sound were all around her. She was alive and they were alive. Astrid's breathing hitched. Not all of them were alive. A strange lump formed in her throat, and she decided she needed some fresh air.
As she turned to her right to get her boots, Astrid saw Hiccup had woken up and was propped up on his elbow.
"Bad dream?" he asked in a whisper. Part of Astrid was tempted to nod and curl up in his arms like a frightened child, but her independent streak won out.
"It's ok," she said in lieu of an answer. "Go back to sleep." He looked unconvinced, but didn't get up to follow her when she opened the tall door of the Great Hall and went out.
So here she was, sitting in the wet grass in the middle of the night, watching the moonlight play on the rippling waves down below. The wind was cold and dry, making her eyes water and her nose run. She scrubbed a hand across her face, unable to account for the lump in her throat as the wind continued to play with her eyes and nose. She wasn't crying, that much was certain. Astrid Hofferson did NOT cry. Crying showed weakness and helplessness, and if… Her thoughts left off of her mantra and moved on in a different strain. …and if there were two things she felt right now, they would be weakness and helplessness.
Astrid heard someone coming towards her and rubbed her hands across her eyes quickly before putting a hand near the knife in her boot. She was about to spring up when someone dropped a blanket lightly around her shoulders. She relaxed: Hiccup. He sat down next to her, but Astrid didn't look at him.
"I have nightmares too," he stated simply. When she didn't make any answer he went on. "Mostly they're about when my dad died. Sometimes I have to sit there and watch, or sometimes I almost save him, but no matter what, there's nothing I can do. That's the worst part. Not the look in his eyes as he pushes me out of the way, or Drago's satisfaction, it's always just that sick feeling of helplessness in my stomach."
Out of the corner of her eye Astrid saw him look at her, expecting her to say something or do something, anything to show that she had heard him.
"Astrid…" he said softly, consolingly, and reached over to brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "They were your parents." And image flashed across Astrid's mind: silent flames engulfing the motionless bodies of her mother and father.
They were my parents and it's my fault they're dead. A tear escaped her eye. Weakness, that was what she felt. Two more tears slid down her cheeks. And helpless was what she was. That brought more tears to her eyes, and before she knew it, she was sobbing. Hiccup pulled her towards him until her head and shoulders rested in his lap. He wrapped his arms around her protectively and leaned over her as if he were shielding her. She could picture the concern on his face. He had never seen her cry. Astrid Hofferson did not cry.
As Hiccup held her Astrid started sobbing more violently, trying to muffle the sound by burying her face in the blanket he had put around her. He smoothed the hair from her face and didn't say anything, simply being something solid as the life that Astrid had known disintegrated. She didn't know exactly when it happened, but at some point, the chasm that the silence had carved in her heart tore open further, and, like out of Pandora's Box, all the pain that she hadn't felt flew out, demanding that she feel it.
Her parents were gone. She finally felt the loneliness and sadness of it. She finally felt the sorrow of having no home to go to, no mother to kiss or hug or talk to, no father to support and protect and teach her. She recalled each and every name that had been answered with silence a month before, and she grieved for them. She grieved for the lives that hadn't been finished, and the people who were left behind. She grieved for the mothers and fathers and husbands and wives that were left with their hearts torn in two, and for the children. The children who wouldn't have parents to teach them how to grow up just as they needed it most, and the children who wouldn't have parents to hold them when a nightmare woke them up, or comfort them when their hearts were sad, but most of all, she wept for the children who were too young to understand why their parents wouldn't be coming home, and who would grow up never to know a mother's embrace or a father's loving discipline.
All the time that Astrid wept, Hiccup held her, comforting her as best he knew how. Her life would never be the same, and though he had tasted a part of this pain that she was going through, he didn't think his father's death had become real to him yet, and he knew that a day would come for him where everything he hadn't felt would search him out and find him. Still, it hadn't found him yet, but it had found Astrid. As he held Astrid, sobs still wracking her frame, he thought about every way that she had helped him from the very beginning. She had been the first one to believe him, the first one to put any sort of faith in him, even if it had been unwilling at first. All through the years she had been right there with him. Every trial and every joy that he had experienced, she had as well. She had trained beside him, worked beside him, laughed beside him, and stood beside him, and now she was letting him see a part of herself that he was very sure no one had seen since she was a very small child. It wasn't just the things that she did for him that mattered either, it was the things that, even with her fiercely independent ways, she let him do for her. He loved her, and he wanted to spend every day of the rest of his life standing right beside her.
Time passed, and Astrid's sobs gradually slowed to a stop. She realized that, while she still felt the weight of the loss, her tears had washed over it and robbed it of most of its bitterness. It still hurt, but it no longer felt poisonous. Contrary to what her usual behavior would have been, Astrid stayed in Hiccup's embrace and had no inclination to move. He was comforting and safe, and he loved her. Why would she want to be anywhere else? A warm, understanding silence lay over them, broken only by the sound of the waves below. Something dawned on Hiccup, and he wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. Under normal circumstances he would never have dreamed of saying anything of this sort, but there was such a peace at the moment, that he couldn't help but say it. He leaned down and smoothed the hair out of her eyes, whispering in her ear as he did.
"Marry me?"
Astrid felt that she should be surprised, but she wasn't. The answer was obvious, so she simply nodded her head and gave her reply in a croaky, tear-tinted voice.
"Sure."
Hiccup smiled and kissed her cheek, then scooped her up, blanket and all.
"Good," he said cheerfully, making his way back toward the Great Hall with Astrid in his arms. "I don't know what I would have done if you said no." Astrid giggled, the sorrow and heavy emotions from just a few minutes ago already a distant memory. They entered the Hall and Hiccup set Astrid down on her cot. He pulled off her boots, tucking the blankets around her like she was a small child, and kissed her forehead. He started to move towards his own cot, but Astrid freed her arm from the blanket and caught his wrist. He turned back towards her, searching her face in the dim glow of the fire.
Astrid had never been very good with words, and while she felt that she could have said something a few minutes ago, that spell had been broken, and she was just plain Astrid again, so she did something that was very like herself. She pulled him towards her and kissed him, smiled a very eloquent smile, and then turned over to go to sleep. A few seconds later she heard the sound of a cot being scooted across the floor and felt Hiccup lay down with his back to hers. She smiled, welcoming the warm, sure feeling of having him at her back, and after a few minutes of silence drifted off into quiet sleep.