Okay Okay Sorusing you've got me intrigued: What is FLY?!!!!
thanks for asking @sanfangirl !!!
It’s my favorite things ever: superheroes, secret identities, and Hiccstrid. and modern AU, of course.
(So, FLY was the title I picked after seeing one of those motivational posts of it being an acronym for “first love yourself”. In the original iteration of this AU, it used to be more important, but the actually flying is also important lol. It’s not really that good of a title anymore but eh.)
This is my superhero AU (“really, not much to know” is actually the AU of this AU) in which Astrid is training to be a superhero sidekick at school. Her family name is disgraced, so she cannot become a “solo” hero without lots of extra work in college. She has extremely good control over her water powers.
in this universe, everyone born in “The Above” (artificial flying islands above th earhipelago after a war) is born with something called a “karyon”: a mark/bead on the neck that grants them powers by using a particle called dust.
I have an entire 10 minute explanation on dust that is plot-relevant but I’m skipping it right now for brevity’s sake
one day, she is confronted with an odd situation: a vigilante who’s powers don’t work how powers SHOULD work, fighting a new kind of villain that recently popped up. He doesn’t have a karyon, and neither do these new villains who seem to permanently be beserk and incapable of human speech or thought.
after this odd meeting, she wakes up in the middle of the night, outside her house, after having an odd dream, and her powers are…off. Instead of water manipulation, she can now fire off odd spikes…and why can she smell so well?!
She eventually discovers more about the situation: these new villains are people controlled by a villain that the vigilante - whom she’s dubbed “black” - calls “The Queen”, and are being hypnotised to do her bidding.
she eventually agrees to help him out, and joins him in his fight against her, since the heroes aren’t doing anything about the situation and she knows they won’t budge any time soon.
The vigilante calls himself “Night Fury” which as her laughing at first: him? Name himself after the unholy offspring of lightning and death that all of the Seven Families boasted to have survived encounters with?
But then she realised that his powers fit the creature to a T: the lightning. The super speed. She invisibility.
and then, more puzzle pieces click. She’s somehow gotten the powers of a Nadder. All of these new villains are dragon themed…so the Queen must have some obsession with the ancestral dragons.
things spiral from there.
on hiccup’s side of things, life isn’t looking great at all: the only person in the above who doesn’t have a karyon.
he has three and they all don’t work properly at all. They even cause him so much harm that he had to undergo surgery to get one removed.
His father is the shining beacon of his family, the leader of the Seven, superheroes of epic proportions who are gods among men, essentially.
his mother is Skullcrusher’s second in command who has control over the Alpha Matrix, a device that monitors all superpower usage. (And a certain kind of superhuman but shhh he doesn’t know that)
and then, there’s him, Hiccup. he’s just a screw-up. He is not worth of either family name and knows the other relatives in the council are dying to kick him out and leave him nameless. To make him a nobody.
So it doesn’t surprise him in the slightest when his father sends him to live with his aunt to avoid the media.
hiccup knows it’s to hide the fact that his son is weak, or that he even HAS a son, but alas.
when hiccup was young, a supervillain did something to his karyons. Hiccup knows better than to ask which villain.
For whenever he asks; his father or mother just shake their head or freeze, clearly not wanting to talk about it.
he knows his karyon was messed up by a villain, and someday? Someday he WILL find out which villain and give him a piece of his mind.
—
things don’t exactly begin to look up once the dreams start.
dreams in which is body doesn’t ache whenever he gets into contract with high concentrations of dust.
Dreams in which he can freely leap across rooftops, dreams in which he is fighting villains effortlessly from afar with his lightning powers - well not completely effortlessly, but still!! - and shows great mastery over his lightning and super speed-
powers which he doesn’t have. At all.
things derail further once a certain blonde girl in blue begins to pop up in his dreams, stubborn, fierce, and…wait isn’t that his classmate?!
also another fun fact: Gothi is a tattooist in this AU.
eventually, the other dragon riders would show up…but I’m not that far yet.
this is my oldest au and the one that has been reworked the most.
anyways I think I should stop here before I type an entire essay. Thanks for asking :D
