(for when you're done with your current deviations :3) Hiccup doesn't find Toothless/fails to shoot him down and grows up to be as bitter and old as Mildew only to have another scrawny, 'hiccup' kid do what he couldn't
Deviation meme:
The boy’s name is Chewless but everyone called him Clueless until just recently.
Hiccup sits on his porch and cups his hands around the head of his cane— hands gnarled and stiff from a life of using them. That boy apprenticed in the smithy for a few months. He was put on the docks for several weeks. In the tannery for a total of three days. He was pawned off, from shop to shop, trying to find a place to fit in.
Clueless was a disaster. Meeker than the others, a little heavy, and, worse yet, as clumsy as they come. He wasn’t Viking, and Hiccup would gaze upon the boy and feel a sour sort of empathy. It was with this quiet amity that Hiccup predicted the boy’s life. How it would play out; how his enthusiastic attempts to fit in would flitter off, and how reality would weight Clueless down until he was a very old man, tired and annoyed with the world.
Those predictions were shattered when the child arrived on a dragon.
No one knew at first. Clueless was always a bit skiddish, so seeing him scarce around the village was nothing to complain about. The first sign that something was different was when he signed up for dragon training out of the blue. And he excelled.
The similarities between he and Hiccup stopped. Where Hiccup fumbled his attempt at training brilliantly, Clueless did not. He took down dragon after dragon in the most peculiar manner. Clueless grew confident, social, prideful, and when the truth was revealed—when a companionship with a dragon was shown to be the source of his aptitude—Clueless flew the beast against other dragons.
It was a slow rolling ball from there, but eventually the nest was found, more truths were uncovered, and the beast behind it all was killed. Clueless was a hero.
The changes didn’t end there.
The shadow of a Viking-laden dragon flies overhead and Hiccup bitterly recalls another ghost of his past. The carcass of an unidentified dragon, discovered in the forests just off Raven’s Point by hunters. Just barely fifteen, Hiccup had swore up and down that he was responsible for it. That the remains of the rope were from his bola canon, which he had shot months before. But no one believed him. Claiming it was the remains of a Night Fury likely threw all credence out the window. Night Furies were bigger, sharper, more ferocious, they told him. The skull was too sleek and round, eye sockets too big, frame too small.
Hiccup was laughed into silence and he swore, right then, it would be the last time he would ever be laughed into silence. He grew more cautious, more sensible, more repressed. He quietly accepted his place in the village and focused on inventing practical appliances.
Now, decades later, Hiccup sits on the steps of his home, alone, and watches as Clueless laughs, surrounded by friends, their dragon companions lazing at their sides. Hiccup watches what could have been him, green eyes alight with envy, if he had only searched a little longer, fought a little harder.
He watches a dream he gave up on come alive without him.
((Remember these? There were a couple left in my drafts. Here are more X)
