[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]
Jack is going to catch his secret admirer this time.
He ate dinner long after sunset to keep his energy up. He made a pot of coffee and downed half of it with a grimace, despite his mother's complaints. Hell, he was even out in the field in the dead of night barefoot, his toes turning numb with the cold press of dirt.
He’s starting to regret that last one. He glances down at his toes, wiggling them to check that they still listen to him. Indeed, they wiggle.
Jack isn’t sure how long he’ll have to wait or if his admirer will come tonight at all. But seeing Hiccup the other day, holding the flower meant for him, had filled him with some feverish desire to finally catch the person in the act. Hiccup was proof that this person did exist. For whatever reason, there’s someone who holds affection for Jack.
The thought warms his face (though, regretfully, it does nothing for his poor feet). Someone holding affection for him. He, Jack, the shepherd boy, who’s made the mistake of biting Hiccup once when they’d gotten too into their wrestling match.
Someone holds affection for him.
The moon is just a skinny slip of light, itty bitty in the inkblot sky. Jack tilts his chin up to it regardless, leaning a little heavier on his staff as he watches shadows of midnight black cross the sky. Likely clouds, but maybe a flock of birds or a late-night dragon hunt. Jack scans the shadow for any indication it’s a group of dragons, even as his thoughts tumble away from the present.
He’s been thinking about his admirer, sure, but ever since he’d caught Hiccup with the flower, he’s also been struck by the realization that he’ll have a chance to spend more time with Hiccup. A trip to the mountains, or even to the dragon village, would surely be easier if he asked his admirer to take him there.
Not that he hasn’t asked Hiccup before. He has, on several occasions. But Hiccup tends to get stuttery anytime Jack hints at finally meeting the dragon riders Hiccup talks so fondly of, so Jack doesn’t push.
Well. He pushes a little. But not too much, or too often. Just a bit of pushing here and there, especially when he isn’t being trailed by Emily.
The thought of Emily makes him frown.
Emily is—well. She’s Emily, which means she’s always saying things, and not all of them are truthful. So when she’d told Jack it was Hiccup leaving him all those gifts, he’d immediately assumed she was messing with him. Hiccup is a friend! A friend who has important things to do for his tribe, important responsibilities. (Besides that, Jack has seen how Hiccup talks about his “friend” Astrid. He’s pretty sure she’s more than a friend, but he doesn’t have any theories as to why Hiccup would be shy on that one.)
The moon whispers out from behind the moving shadow, and Jack’s spirits sink a little at the wispy shapes that pass over its crescent form. Just a cloud.
Blowing his bangs from his forehead with a huff, Jack leans further against his staff, his spine giving a small pop between his shoulder blades as he adjusts his weight. “You think they’ll come tonight?” He asks the sheep. The sheep don’t respond. Jack is sure one day he’ll get them to crack. Hiccup doesn’t seem to think so, but Jack is on a mission to prove him wrong.
Jack lowers his eyes from the moon, gaze pulled like a leaf on the wind to the crook of his staff. He’d taken the flower Hiccup had half crushed and woven the stem of it around the wooden crook, mostly as a way to preserve the flower since it was too damaged to last more than a day. Staring at the stem, Jack lets his thoughts turn idly.
There’s something weird about the whole thing.
Why would Emily lie to him? She’s never tried messing with his feelings before. Getting out of chores and passing blame is her usual MO. They rib one another, but at the end of the day, they’re siblings; Jack sneaks her extra cookies from the cookie jar after dinner, and Emily double checks his bed decoy is still in place on nights Jack sneaks out to the pasture to lie under the moon. She’d never lie to him about something like this.
And now that Jack is thinking about it, why had Hiccup been holding the flower? Had he seen it next to Jack and picked it up? That had been Jack’s assumption when he’d (been very rudely) woken up, but now . . .
“I’m sure he will,” Jack says to the sheep. He can’t remember what he’d been telling the sheep, but talking out loud always helps, especially when his thoughts are as scrambled as they are now. Groaning in frustration, he straightens up from his lean against his staff—
—only to stiffen at the abrupt shuffling of sheep, somewhere to his left.
Jack snatches his staff from the ground and spins on his heel, eyes straining in the darkness.
There! A figure, too shrouded in the night for him to make out any details, but most definitely humanoid (and not a wolf, thank the gods). The moon isn’t doing Jack any favors, but it looks like they’re frozen midstep, their head hunched over their shoulders.
Jack lowers his staff, his heart racing. About time! “Hey!” Jack calls out, putting on his best grin. If they’re a dragon, they can probably see him even in the dark, and he wants to make a decent impression on them.
(The realization that this stranger probably knows Jack far better than Jack knows them is . . . unsettling, but Jack shoves it down. They’ve been leaving him flowers and bread. How much danger could he be in?)
The figure doesn’t unfold from their hunched position, so Jack steps forward, trying to get a better glimpse of them. What little light the moon has been offering flickers away—probably behind a cloud.
Jack spits a curse and takes off after them.
Whoever they are, they’re fast. But Jack is fast too, light as the wind even on frozen feet. Jack can barely make out who he’s chasing, trusting the vague silhouette of panicked sheep parting around them to trace his path over the pasture. The moon begins to emerge from behind its cloud, and big, black leathery things snap open from the figure's back.
For a moment, Jack thinks they’re Hiccup’s wings.
The figure crouches, like they’re about to burst into the air. In a panic, Jack lurches forward with his staff. The crook of it catches the dragon around the waist, just over what looks to be a belt—
—and then Jack is in the air, a mad gust of wind erupting over his face from the figure’s wings. It’d be enough to shock him out of his grip on his staff, had he not been so accustomed to grabbing onto Hiccup for delighted life every time he’d been snatched from the earth. Even so, he yelps in surprise as his body is flung forward.
Their combined weight is enough to throw the figure off their flight. The two of them jolt in midair, and Jack thuds into the figure's legs as momentum catches him. Something metal hits him in the gut, knocking the wind from him. There’s a tug on his staff, and between the chaotic tumbling of it all, Jack’s white-knuckled grip on the wood slips.
He falls, eyes screwed shut as thoughts whirl around his skull too quickly for him to grab at anything other than bracing for pain.
A second later, a body thuds into his, and he’s being flipped suddenly, everything spinning for a wild moment as the figure crushes him to their chest. It’s a rough grab, and Jack’s hands make a blind grab on instinct, frozen fingers gripping at armour—armour Jack knows by heart by now.
Hiccup’s face is screwed together, the worried knit of his eyebrows achingly familiar in the light of the moon. It only takes a moment for Hiccup to right them in the air, his arms firm around Jack’s waist as his wings beat steady, a near-perfect partner to the night sky.
“Gods, Jack,” Hiccup says. There’s probably irritation in his voice, but Jack’s a bit too busy having his whole world suddenly rearranged to really process the fact that Hiccup’s upset with him. “How did your staff not break? I get you’re not very heavy, but I took off at full speed, and it carried you. What is it made of—Jack? Jack?!”
Jack snaps his eyes away from Hiccup’s mouth. He’s not irritated, Jack realizes abruptly. He’s worried.
The arms around his waist adjust, and then there’s a hand on his face, strikingly warm against his chilled cheeks. Stupid dragons and all their stupidly natural furnace heat, Jack thinks suddenly and viciously as he lets go of Hiccup’s stupid armour to grab his stupid face. The thought of Hiccup dropping him never even crosses his mind.
“You’re my admirer?” He asks, his voice erupting from him far louder than he’d intended. “You’re the person who’s been leaving me bread and—and flowers and—and—!”
Hiccup’s eyes widen, pupils enormous. His ears flatten against his head, and beneath Jack’s hands, he feels the heat that rises to Hiccup’s cheek. It’s an absurdly nice feeling.
“Uhm,” Hiccup says, when Jack fails to splutter any further. “Surprise?”
Surprise, he says. Surprise.
Jack can’t help but laugh.
It burbles out of him, gently at first, but then he starts to shake with it, something delightful like sizzling bacon or the crash of a hot spring erupting inside of him. He lets go of Hiccup’s face so he can tuck his own into Hiccup’s neck, utterly consumed by the laughter that’s sending him into shambles.
As he slowly regains control of his laughter, Hiccup lowers them to the ground. By the time his feet touch solid earth, he’s dizzy with how happy he feels, and it’s only Hiccup’s arms around him that keep him upright.
“Jack?” he asks. He sounds nervous, or—well. Nervous isn’t quite a strong enough word, or maybe it’s an understatement. He sounds like he’s making that face he gets when Mary catches him off guard by offering him food, or the first time one of the sheep randomly appeared at his side, its bored expression insanely comically next to the utter panic that had made Hiccup’s shoulder rigid as rocks.
The memory is enough to finally make Jack’s laughter subside. He pulls his face from Hiccup’s neck, and sure enough, Hiccup looks halfway between miserable and delighted. It’s a look only he could pull off. Not for the first time, Jack wants to kiss him stupid.
‘Oh, I’m stupid,’ Jack thinks.
“Sorry! Sorry,” he says as he catches his breath, his face sore with the grin that’s completely overthrown his face. “I’m not laughing at you, I swear.”
Hiccup nods like he doesn’t believe Jack, which is fair. “Uh-huh,” he says slowly.
Jack brings his hands back up to Hiccup’s face. Before he can lose his courage, he leans forward, and is greeted by a mouth as warm as the cheeks under his hands as he kisses Hiccup quickly.
When he pulls back, Hiccup looks utterly dazed. And then he grins, pupils enormous and ears straight as sugar cane as he leans forward and thumps his forehead against Jack’s. Jack leans into it, into the soft brush of Hiccup’s fringe and the bump of their noses. “You could have told me,” Jack says, and delights in the feeling of Hiccup’s brow screwing together, even as smile lines appear at his eyes.
“Yeah, that’s. Well. I tried telling you the other day? With the—”
“—The green gambler! Oh Gods, I’m so dumb.”
Hiccup barks out a laugh. “Maybe a little,” he says. Jack jabs him fruitlessly in the ribs, which hurts his finger way more than it hurts Hiccup. But it makes Hiccup laugh against him, his tail making a swish noise in the grass as it sways behind him, so it’s entirely worth it.
Hiccup pulls away from him, arms loosening from Jack’s waist. Before Jack can begin to complain, he sees why—his staff, and a handful of green gamblers clenched tightly in Hiccup’s fist, the stalks crushed in Hiccup’s grasp. “I brought you more,” he starts, his ears doing an odd flutter against his head. “I was trying to make up for the last one I crushed. Which went swimmingly, as you can see so clearly by the evidence.”
Jack wonders how he hadn’t pieced it together before, the little fact that he’s so stupidly smitten by Hiccup, when all he wants to do is kiss the downturned corners of Hiccup’s mouth to see them turn back right side up.
He takes the flowers, and his staff, and then gladly slides back into Hiccup’s personal space like it’s his own. Hiccup’s tail curls around the backs of his heels. “You could always take me to see the village,” he suggests. He’d had a blank image of a figure flying him to dragon village earlier. His mind fills in the shadow with Hiccup’s silhouette, and Jack feels a little breathless. “Show me the mountaintop you’ve been getting them from.”
Hiccup’s smile is achingly sweet, made all the sweeter by the way he hesitates for just a moment before bringing his hand back up to Jack’s face. As if Jack wouldn’t immediately lean into the touch, which he does. “Is that what it takes to make it up to you?” he asks.
“Oh, that’s a hard one. I was pretty bummed about the flower bit. That, and getting rudely woken up, and now that I think about it, you sort of kicked me with your prosthetic, but I guess I did sort of attack you with my staff? Sorry about that, by the way, but you were running and I drank coffee earlier, which is gross, just so I could catch you, so, really, that’s also on you.”
Jack recognizes the look on Hiccup’s face now, the one that’s escaped him forever—its fondness, and it’s almost enough to warm Jack against the cold of night.
@aura2023 I DID IT. PART THREE, LIKE I PROMISED. Holy shit, I did NOT think this semester was going to be as demanding as it was, so I apologize for the wait! But I loved the ending you'd put in the tags about Jack recognizing Hiccup in the night by his hugs, and I was determined to bring it to life. I really hope you like this!!
(And now to actually look at my thousand other wip's, siiigghh)
