After
I...know this isn’t the ideal time to post this. But...it made me cry today, so, here we are. I’ll reblog as I deem necessary. This is not the end, actually, this is the straight up rock bottom, and it’ll get better from here, but it’s still so hard.
Tumblr | AO3
Fuse
The North wall of the volcano splits vertically. Perfectly. Exactly how it’s supposed to.
Sheets of granite fall into the sea, which seems deeper than it was a minute ago, boiling with the force of lava pouring upwards from underneath. A wave surges outwards, barely dampened by the teeming sea dragons all fighting to get closer to the island.
Fuse’s ears ring. She wasn’t close enough to the blast for that, but they ring anyway.
The volcano is all lava and crumbled rock and she doesn’t see Eret anywhere. The spot where he landed doesn’t exist anymore, it bubbled away and he probably went with it.
Into the lava that went into the ocean that’s boiling with the newly opened thermal vent.
“Where is he?” Arvid shouts, panicked like he already knows the answer, his dragon crying out and tugging to fly lower. The island is so packed with dragons that they can’t see the ground, but Eret isn’t on the ground. Eret isn’t anywhere. “Do you see him anywhere?”
“No,” she shakes her head. She stares at the thermal vent but feels cold anyway, the wind from a few thousand sets of flurrying wings licking across her. Some of the dragons are flying away from the island. The ones still crawling all over it are mostly white, the sickest of them all.
The volcano is gone and so is Eret.
“Help me look for him!” Arvid yells, diving down through the swarm. A bright green gronckle runs into him and he ignores it, dodging and weaving around a couple of Hobblegrunts that look downright young.
They aren’t going to find him. There’s nothing to find.
She follows anyway, slower, circling the island below the thinning swarm, staring at the ragged edges of the island. The blast was perfect. A whispering death that’s entirely covered in chalky scales slithers into the sea.
Seventeen silent laps of the island later, it’s almost empty, a few fireworms skittering over the volcanic rock. It’d be the right kind of rock for stink bomb substrate. Thinking of bombs makes Fuse nauseous and Hotgut lands with a heavy thump on the edge of the rock. Fuse climbs off of her and pats her head, her hand still clammy even against warm dragon scales.
“Eret!” Arvid lands, leaping off of Wingspark and cupping his hands to his mouth. “Eret!” He turns to her, “do you see Bang?”
“No.” She crosses her arms, chest feeling oddly hollow. It’s like she’s a drum and her heart is rattling around inside her, bruising her lungs but making noise that she feels but can’t make come out of her mouth. Her nose is numb like the weather’s colder than it is and this would have been worse in winter. It would have worked differently in the winter. The blast couldn’t have gone if all that lava had solidified.
That was the only way this could have gone. Eret didn’t have to be the one to jump.
“Little brother!” Arvid sobs like he’s the one boiling in a thermal vent. “This is when you choose to shut your giant mouth?” He picks up a boulder and chucks it with a frustrated grunt and it tumbles off what’s left of the cliff and into the sea. “Eret!” He calls again.
He’s crying. Fuse blinks, eyes dry and prickly.
“He’s gone,” she croaks, her voice coming out almost dusty. Like she already forgot how to use it because Eret isn’t going to hear it anymore.
“He’s probably just hurt somewhere,” Arvid shakes his head, “we’ve just got to find him—”
“Where he was standing—it’s gone. He’s gone. He was too close to the edge.” She doesn’t recognize her own tone above her still ringing ears. Her nose is numb and her teeth start to chatter. It’s not cold and nothing makes sense. Nothing except for the fact that Eret’s gone and she handed him a knife. That she can still feel the imprint of his touch on her shaking hand.
She swallows even though her mouth is dry and her eyes are dry and she feels preserved. Like someone is freezing her so that she doesn’t go bad before she’s needed again. Fuse jerky ready for a long period of hibernation.
“He jumped where you told him to,” Arvid points at her, furious. Still crying. Shaking with a huge feeling she doesn’t have room for next to all this empty, cold numb. She can’t bring herself to care.
“I didn’t want him to.”
“He still did it with your bomb—”
“Yeah.” She gestures at the ruins of the volcano, “and it worked. And the dragons flew away.” She starts hiccupping. Or maybe it’s shaking. She’s not entirely sure and her eyes are so dry that the sun looks too bright. Her knees wobble and Hotgut steps up next to her, offering her head to lean on. “And he’s gone.”
“Shit,” Arvid deflates, “you don’t look so good.”
“He’s gone,” she repeats in that tired voice that doesn’t sound like her. The island spins, the ragged shore blurring against blue water. No more dragons are thrashing, the sea is almost calm. The island is calm now. It’s not a bad place, it’s not its fault.
“Hey, Thorston,” Arvid walks up to her, shaking her shoulders with hands that might as well weigh as much as the baffle. The baffle that’s gone too. Not that it matters, it did its job. “Look at me.”
“He’s just…gone.” She stumbles even though she’s standing still and Arvid catches her. He hugs her and it’s more of a bandage than anything as he starts crying, chest shaking and making the rattle in hers louder and worse. She should comfort him. She doesn’t know how.
“Stubborn Asshole,” he lets her go, wiping his forehead, “always had to be the fucking hero.”
Had. Like in the past. Fuse’s stomach lurches again.
“The chief’s going to be here soon.” She doesn’t look at the water because it’s still spinning. Only her feet seem still. “We’re going to have to tell him. We’re going to have to tell everyone.” She doesn’t say that they’re going to have to live with it because she’s not really sure how she’s going to.
Aurelia
The dragons come all at once. It looks like a cloud, for a moment, when the wave of them first comes over the horizon. Aurelia doesn’t remember being this happy to see dragons, ever, but something feels right about Nadders crowding the feeding stations, grayish scales flaking off to reveal new, shiny ones underneath.
“Get inside,” her mom calls from behind her.
“Aren’t you seeing this?” Aurelia gestures at a trio of young monstrous nightmares soaring up above the house. One lands on the roof and Stormfly squawks, scaring it off. “The dragons are back.”
“Hiccup did it?” her mom appears in the doorway, pushing her hair behind her ear and staring at the dragons like she’s looking for a Night Fury.
“Or Eret was right.”
“You can’t know that,” she shakes her head, “your dad has an alpha dragon, that’s more likely to work than—”
“Whatever.” Aurelia scoffs and walks back inside, avoiding a swarm of terrors eagerly drinking from the watering station. They’re shedding too, and small. Most of the dragons look young, or at least they do in her narrow understanding of dragon biology. There aren’t many big ones, but it’s still not exactly her crowd.
“Hey,” her mom steps back inside, “we’ll talk when everyone gets back, alright? But I have to ask now, did you…coach Eret or anything in speaking against your dad that way?”
“What?” Aurelia scoffs, “no—this isn’t about being chief, it’s about helping the dragons. And it looks like it worked so…”
“We’ll talk when everyone gets back, you don’t know what worked.” She shakes her head and looks tired, “and I do know you tried to stall your chief’s plan—”
“My dad’s plan.”
“It’s both, you don’t get to pick.”
Aurelia knows what that means. It means that a bunch of kids spoke out of turn and the real adults are going to have to remind them that they’re kids. It means rewriting the past few months. It means she can get married, apparently, but nothing about that says anyone is going to listen to her yet. She’s shocked it extends to Eret too, honestly, after he did such a decent job basically leading the whole village, but the lack of favoritism in the negativity is refreshing.
The dragons are louder than she remembers, their wingbeats and squawks and the way they scramble across the roof. Aurelia doesn’t know how she picks out Wingspark’s cry in all the noise, but she does, and she knows that it’s not a happy cry.
Eret offered for Arvid to stay back. It could be dangerous out there, after what happened to Ingrid, and after the last year, Arvid wouldn’t let Eret do the dangerous thing. It can’t happen like this, not now, not when they’re so close to everything they’ve talked about.
“Oh no,” she runs back outside, expecting Arvid to be hurt, or even worse Wingspark to be alone, but Arvid looks fine, if pale. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“How’d you know something’s wrong?” He jumps down off of Wing’s back and pulls her into an almost bruisingly tight hug. He smells like smoke and anxiety and she pushes on his chest until she can see his face.
“Wing sounded sad, what happened? Where is everyone else?” She looks around, “did my dad catch up to Eret or something?”
Arvid sighs and takes a second to make eye contact and when he does he’s guilty. Guilty like he was when they went too far and realized they’d stuffed all their blame in exactly the wrong direction. He cups her cheek in his clammy hand and shakes his head.
“What’s that mean?” Her eyes prickle because her brain is going faster than it will let her accept. “Where’s Fuse? Where’s Eret?”
“Fuse is riding back on the boat with her dad and the chief,” he sighs, “Eret is…he’s…”
“You’re back? Where’s Eret?” Her mom runs outside and freezes.
“Mom, I…” He stumbles over the title and she’s clearly his mom right now, not Aurelia’s, because he’s biting back tears. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see what he was doing, I tried to find him but—”
“Arvid, where is he?” She whistles and Stormfly glides down from the roof, landing neatly beside her. “I’ll go get him, just tell me where he is—”
“Oh no,” Aurelia’s heart drops and her knees tremble as she shakes her head. “No, that’s not possible.”
“He didn’t make it out,” Arvid shakes his head and swallows hard.
The dam breaks and Aurelia doesn’t recognize the sound coming out of her throat or the fact that it makes her more upset, more heavy. More confused.
He was just here. He was just flying too fast and making a fool of himself in front of everyone. He was just making her so proud and embarrassed and tired, because she thought she talked fast. She presses her face into Arvid’s chest and he cradles the back of her head, sobbing quietly himself. Arvid doesn’t cry. If Arvid’s crying, it’s real.
Her mom left her, but her mom wanted to. Eret didn’t want this. He wanted things to be better. That’s all they wanted.
“What are you talking about?” Eret’s Mom asks, her voice trembling, “he didn’t make it out of where? Where is he, Arvid?”
“He’s gone, Mom,” Arvid sobs. He’s shaking. Aurelia’s shaking. The world is shaking.
“That…no, it—Hiccup will bring him back. Hiccup will find him, it’ll be ok.” She’s crying too though, shallow little sniffs that Aurelia can barely hear.
Arvid shakes his head and holds Aurelia closer, stooping down to cry into her hair. She doesn’t know what to say. Hel, she doesn’t know what not to say. Her mind is as silent as the forests were yesterday.
Hiccup
“Why isn’t anyone helping me?” Hiccup jumps off of Toothless as soon as he lands on the lead ship, pointing up at empty skies. The dragons left, thousands of them passing overhead when they were about three quarters of the way to the island. “We need eyes in the sky, now!” He uses what’s left of his biggest voice and Snotlout shakes his head.
“We need to think about getting back.”
“What in Thor’s name are you talking about?” Hiccup clears his throat so that other boats hear him, “we need to start sweeping the island, I’ll start in the northern caves but let’s break it up into sections—”
“That won’t help.” Fuse cuts him off from where she’s sitting with her gronckle, paler than he’s ever seen anyone and wrapped in her dad’s outer fur. “He’s gone.” She stares at her lap, back stiff and straight.
“I’m going to get him back,” Hiccup tells her, voice starting to shake even though he believes it. He has to. This isn’t how this ends. There has to be another way for this to end.
“He’s gone,” she shakes her head.
“If everyone would just help me, we’ll find him and get him back!” Hiccup isn’t sure when he decides to yell it, but the last word tears out of his throat like it’s reopening an old wound he’d forgotten about.
“No, there’s nothing to find, he’s gone.” Fuse’s voice is smaller but no less flat and the fur around her shoulders starts to fall off until Tuffnut sits down beside her, readjusting it and putting his arm over her shoulders.
“Snotlout might be right, Hiccup,” Fishlegs steps forward, wringing his hands together and looking at Ruffnut for what looks like encouragement. “Those dragons that passed over us looked like they were headed towards Berk—”
“I know that!” Hiccup snaps, because Eret was right, at least some of it was right. And he didn’t listen. And now he has to bring him back, that’s how these things go. He has to get his son back. “It’s Berk, it’ll be happy to have its dragons back, we need to be here, now—”
“Hiccup,” Fishlegs tries again and Ruffnut puts her hand on his shoulder, “they could still be sick. They could need us.”
“I don’t care about the dragons right now,” Hiccup stares daggers into everyone who’s just…standing. They’re all just standing. Shoulders slumped and dragons sad, their heads hung low. And it’s quiet except for the waves lapping at the sides of the boat. Hiccup’s words echo in his head and off the sails and Toothless nudges his hand as if accepting a wordless apology. “I need…I need to find my son.”
“He’s gone,” Fuse whispers, her gronckle trying to lick her face as she bats it away with a limp arm, knocking the fur off her shoulders again.
“Hiccup,” Tuffnut puts his fur back around his daughter’s shoulders, “at least some of us need to get back.”
“Fine, take half the ships.” Hiccup looks over his shoulder at the island, Bang splashing through the surf in a frantic lap. At first he thought Bang could help him, but he’s distraught, crying out and flailing briefly through the air before diving back into the sea. “I’m staying.”
“We’ve been here for hours, Hiccup,” Snotlout’s belligerent tone fades enough to make Hiccup nauseous at whatever he’s about to say, “don’t you think we would have found something by now?”
“There isn’t anything,” Fuse shakes her head, “the vent opened up just like we said it would. It’s all gone.”
“We did find something,” Tuffnut stands up, “my daughter who needs to get home. Ruff, come on.”
A couple of other people move towards their dragons and a ship at the back of the fleet starts turning around. Eret knows these people, he’s been chief to these people. And they’re all so quick to leave. It’s only been a couple of hours, he’s on that island, somewhere. It doesn’t end like this, it can’t.
“I need a ship to get him home if he’s hurt,” Hiccup clears his throat and tries to give an order, but they’re all starting to sound like pleas. “And I need enough people to get it back fast—”
“Hiccup,” Gobber takes a slow step forward between Snotlout and Fishlegs, his limp more obvious than Hiccup has ever seen it. “Don’t make me say it.”
“How can you leave? You know him even better than I do.” Hiccup doesn’t know where to aim the flare of desperate anger at seeing dragons take off of ships as more and more peel away from the back of the fleet and head towards home.
“I know him enough to know…he’s not you.” Gobber sighs and he looks old and sad and Hiccup shakes his head.
“No, he’s—I’ve got to find him. I’ve got to fix this—”
“The village needs you,” Gobber swallows, “Astrid’s going to need you.”
“Astrid needs me to bring our son back!” Hiccup shouts, voice cracking, a tear leaking from the corner of his eye. Snotlout looks away. Fuse is muttering something under her breath while her dad kneels in front of her, holding her hands.
“She’s going to need you more than ever, chief.”
The title is a slap and terse reminder that he can’t be Hiccup right now, he can’t be a father. He can’t think about Eret, the boy, his son, it has to be Eret, future chief. He doesn’t grieve for the latter at all, but looking at Bang frantically splashing by the shore, the grief for the former hits like a Warhammer to the chest.
He’d prefer a Night Fury blast, honestly, and he’s jealous of his dad’s choices all over again.
“Toothless,” his voice shakes and he wipes another tear before it falls. He can cry later. “Get Bang to come over here.”
Toothless croons and the spines along his head glow weak blue for a moment and Bang pauses, turning towards the ship and swimming forward with a couple splashing wingbeats. He croons louder, like a scream, like the sound Hiccup’s heart is making when he thinks about going home empty handed. He doesn’t want to imagine Astrid’s face when he tells her, but he can’t think of anything else.
Bang stops splashing and lets out a weak blast, rocking the boat slightly and blowing it back towards Berk with a burst of wind to the sails. Toothless’s head stops glowing, immediately, and he looks up at Hiccup with big green eyes. Hiccup wishes, for the first time, that he couldn’t read Toothless quite so well.
“He wants to stay,” Hiccup wipes his eye with the back of his hand. He’s going to fly back, maybe it’ll dry him out enough to talk to Astrid. “Bang wants to stay.”
“Toothless can’t make him come?” Snotlout asks and Hiccup barely bites back a sob.
“Won’t.”
And it’s quiet. And no one is going to argue with him, now no one is going to be better and be so brave and stubborn and stupid that an island bends to his will and tens of thousands of dragons follow the course he laid out for them.
“I’ll fly back, ships can follow.” He avoids looking at anyone else before taking off, tears biting into his cheeks as he urges Toothless too fast, hoping the rushing wind can make him think of anything else.
Astrid
“They should be back by now,” Ingrid paces back and forth in front of the Haddock fireplace, arms crossed and twitching.
“They’ll be back soon,” Astrid rubs her temple, trying to focus on fixing the shirt in front of her. She doesn’t know why Eret can’t go a day without destroying some item of clothing, Stoick does better than he does.
Aurelia sobs upstairs and Astrid pricks her finger, swearing and setting down the needle entirely.
“The island isn’t that far away, Mom.” Ingrid tosses another log on the fire, just looking for something to do, and Eret sighs a pointed sigh at her.
It’s absurd to be in the same room with him like this. At the Haddock table, in Hiccup’s house, Hiccup’s ring around her finger. She wouldn’t say that they’re getting along, it’s more like they’re ignoring all communication aside from the necessary and after Ingrid got hurt, they agreed that the necessary must include their children.
Eret included.
Hiccup will bring him back. If he’s hurt, they’ll figure it out. Arvid shouldn’t have scared Aurelia, but he seemed sure enough that Astrid thought he could use his father. She was shocked, initially, that he wasn’t on the ships with everyone else, but it makes sense, he’s more ostracized than ever without his attachment to her.
“The pacing isn’t helping anything.” Eret tells Ingrid gently and she scowls at him.
“It’s not hurting anyone either.” She looks at the staircase when Aurelia sobs again and her face goes pale, “what all did Arvid say again?”
She looks worried and it makes Astrid’s stomach churn with the horrible shadowy feeling that something about Arvid’s account might be true. But even if it is, Hiccup will find Eret. Hiccup has pulled people out of worse situations than this and more than that, Hiccup has been pulled out of worse situations than this. This wasn’t a bewilderbeast or a red death, this was just an island and Eret’s strong. Too strong. Strong enough to take the whole world on his shoulders and fight when someone tries to take it back.
“Hiccup will bring your brother back, alright?” Astrid doesn’t know how many more times she can say that today.
Eret catches onto her stress, the infuriating way that he always has, and she sees his hand twitch towards hers on the table top, twenty five years of habits dying a slow, brutal death. She hardens her expression and hopes he can’t see through this one and his hand on the table curls into a loose fist.
“The chief always has a miracle up his sleeve.”
“It’s not a miracle,” Astrid fights to keep her voice level as the crying upstairs slows, a raw pained sound pulsing with her measured heartbeat, “Arvid doesn’t know what he saw.”
“What did he say he saw?” Ingrid asks.
“Don’t worry about it.” Astrid can’t say it without thinking about Arvid’s face, how sure he was, how impossible it all is, “we’ll get the whole story when—”
“Hiccup gets back, we get it.” Ingrid kicks one of Stoick’s blocks with enough force that it flies across the room and plinks off of the window.
“Hey—”
The door swings open, creaking and letting in two streams of early evening sunlight on either side of Hiccup. Astrid can’t see his face, but she can hear his steps, heavy, defeated footfalls that don’t make any sense. She stands up as he shuts the door behind him and his red-rimmed eyes meet hers.
“Where is he?” Ingrid runs up to Hiccup first and he shakes his head at her. “What’s that mean? Where’s my brother?”
“Astrid,” he gently pushes Ingrid out of the way so that he can see Astrid clearly and his eyes aren’t red from flying. They’re red from crying. “I…”
“Is he at the healers?” Astrid’s mouth goes dry as she says it, “do I need to go be with him? Is it—”
“Answer her,” Ingrid shoves on Hiccup’s shoulder, not hard enough to make him stumble, and she starts crying, the sound weaving with the crying upstairs and echoing off of the wall. “Why aren’t you answering her?”
“Ingrid,” Eret stands up and hugs her and she shoves at his arm.
“Why aren’t you answering us? Where’s my brother?”
“We…” Hiccup swallows and sniffs and his voice catches on a knot in his throat, “I couldn’t find him.”
“You couldn’t find him?” Astrid repeats the answer. The idea that this is where Hiccup failed, that this was the unanswerable question, doesn’t have a place in reality. “Did he run away? Or…”
“No,” Hiccup looks at the floor between them and Ingrid’s crying dries up to defiant little sniffs, “Bang was there. He was—he wouldn’t come back with us. I—he…”
“He’s dead?” Eret asks, a careful tenderness in his voice that she couldn’t ever match. Not that she needed to, he always had it covered, and it does to Hiccup what it used to do to their children. It brings him back to the moment and he wipes his face, jaw set forward.
“We couldn’t find him today, but I’m going back tomorrow, Astrid. Hel, I’ll leave now, I’ll get Toothless some food and—”
“He is dead, isn’t he?” Astrid cuts across his frantic hope, because he’s cushioning himself, she can see it in wide, teary green eyes that won’t quite focus on her face.
“No one has seen him since the blast and—” Hiccup’s arms flop to his sides and he looks smaller than usual, like he lost another part of himself, and Astrid’s knees start to shake. She forces them steady. “And the volcano was erupting into the sea and—”
“Eret’s dead,” she whispers, voice shaking out of her control. She tries to swallow it and tears well up in her eyes, hot enough to burn as she struggles to keep them open. Through the teary film, Hiccup looks too similar, like he’s from a reality where Eret got to grow old or Hel, even just grow up, and she cries out because there’s not enough room inside of her for all of this.
“I’m sorry, Astrid.” Hiccup’s arms wrap around her, too tight, like he’s trying to hold her together and she doesn’t think that’s possible. “I’m so sorry. It’s—it’s because of me, I should have listened to him. It’s my fault.”
That drags another harsh sob out of her throat and she buries her face in his neck, inhaling sea spray and leather and trying to breathe. It feels like she’s suffocating, like the air in the room is fleeing from her and Eret was dead hours ago, wasn’t he? Midgard has been without him for hours and she didn’t know. She didn’t listen.
“It is your fault,” Ingrid shouts, “you said no one else would get hurt. You said you’d protect us—”
“Ingrid,” Eret—the only Eret, now—herds her towards the door, “come on—”
“You said you’d make sure no one else got hurt. That’s why I told you everything,” she barks out a single, violent cry, “and now Eret’s dead. It’s my fault. Fuck, it’s my fault—”
“It’s all our faults,” Aurelia’s voice appears at the bottom of the stairs and Astrid manages to look up at her. Her face is puffy and Arvid’s standing behind her, hand on her shoulder. “More than that, it’s his. It’s his own damn fault. Dumb, stubborn—” She inhales a sob and her shoulders shake, “I—he made his choice and our dragons are back and I still don’t think I can ever forgive him for it. I…”
She doesn’t know what to say. There’s a space that Eret would have—should have—filled and it hangs heavy in the miserable air.