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A parent should never have to give up a search, but the Norns are not kind.
When the shores failed to wash up any remainders, the skies to drop any mementos, and the woods seed any paths hopeful, they concluded he was gone forever.
It was another two years before they heard tell of a pile of clothes and blastings lying still on a tiny island not far away, abandoned pieces of him moss-interred there almost since the day they lost him.
Stoick put his head in his hands. All he could do now was pray his boy's death had been gentle.
Six years after Hiccup's lonely death, they heard rumblings. The Allthing was a bitter occasion, draped in rumours of destruction. A master of dragons, they said. Memories haunted the Chief of Berk as he listened. His hand gripped death upon his hammer.
Astrid had kept her silence six winters, but she could bear it no longer. She confided. Hiccup left on a dragon. The scorches reported on his unintended grave were mystery no longer. The pale of death and warmth of memory forgave his heinous deed; poor boy, poor boy, to have been taken so fool-willing. One cannot retain anger at the sweet departed. The boy was ever innocent, betrayal of him a worse sin than against any other.
Soon the talk turned to a broken-down Night Fury, and Astrid nodded thinly. Only one man could rule dragons. "Hiccup" became a bittersweet name, tinged with sorrow and futility of befriending enemies.
War had become blood-feud. Stoick would wring the Dragon-master's neck personally.
The sky boiled in a flutter of dragons. All around, valiants cried out and swung, and the snow shone crimson. Ragnarök had arrived, finally.
Stoick leveled his hammer, ready to vanquish the serpent.
The beast turned, snorted down at him, and a squadron of fiery snarling soldiers flanked them. Smoke and embers churned behind as the world ended. The wraith on dragon-back turned to look at him, mask empty-eyed. He dismounted.
Stoick saw a pale metal band he knew, gleam lost the day it was pried from Hiccup's corpse no doubt, on his foe's arm, and, for the thousandth time, he was parched for revenge.
The sun was devoured.
As fleets of deferent dragons snapped at his men, as the dragon-den-mother brought out her brood and lost them, as the first Master of Dragons lay dead beneath his Jötunn, Stoick only wanted one man's head. With a great war-cry of spittle and sorrow and son-memories and streaming bleeding love never scabbed over, he swung.
The dragons would not have it, and came to defend their master. But he would kill them.
He did not know what he had to prove. The dragons obeyed the wraith without question, even where the other masters failed. Perhaps Stoick simply hoped his Hiccup was watching. Perhaps, in death, he could understand how his father had loved him.
The unworthy Einherjar would not fight him, and danced away. Stoick roared again, and forced upon him. The snap of black jaws came and stole his hammer, bore down upon him building fire, but the Master calmed it and it stepped half-back, still raring.
Stoick would have blood or nothing. "Do not toy with me, foul man! Cursed Jötunn, Loki-spawn! I will have your head!" He seized a lying axe, already bated red. He wondered what colour would burst from the man-monster's breast. "You owe me a blood debt, and you will pay it! I am Stoick the Vast! Father of Hiccup of Berk, now six years dead, may his soul be in Valhalla!" He swung at the Night Fury, and it snapped flaming jaws at him, but the Master did not alter his command. "Your monster you stole from my son, murdered him cold for it, and I will have revenge! Both of your hides and heads, to ease his rest!"
The Master said nothing. He never had.
Stoick charged again. He erupted rage as the Master refused still to fight him, almost seeming hesitant, but the dragon knocked Stoick away, protective, and his weapon sought its throat. The Master lunged. Stoick's axe sounded against a wide blade, a blackened shortsword, held perversely in the Master's left hand.
Lava spilt. It could have been from the mountain, or the dragons, or Surtr's arrival. Or even Stoick's ire. He grinned.
The Master was quick, smoke-stepping and fire-flitting, but he would not escape. His strange steel would not yield, but the press of stony snow and violence and many dragons searching now for their master weighed heavily on him. He continued to quiet them as they came, teeth dripping for Stoick and disappointed to leave him living, and was sufficiently distracted. A wall of protective defensive servants came between a father and his kill, and he swung to vanquish them, and only then would the Master fight him.
Screams of men and monsters erupted elsewhere. Soot hung in the sky. Bifrost had crumbled.
And then, it was over.
With an almighty bellow, Stoick rewrote the foreseen. Odin's forces won the battle. The axe pinned Hiccup's murderer to the snow, buried deep in his upper arm, and Stoick hefted it again and hacked one more time, for pleasure. The arm was divorced, and the Master bled red. Stoick could not relish the moment, though, for his foe had a voice at last.
A scream had finally ripped free, pain wracking the thin man as the dragons howled and nosed him, powerless against his agony. Ragnarök around them ended, the dragons leaving their positions to tend their ruler. They forced Stoick away, but he would not leave. He thrust the beasts aside as he dove for the dying youth.
That voice was from the underworld. Nothing living should have sounded so. It was too sweet, too warm, too well-known. The discarded arm bled over the gold band that had been his son's.
Stoick tore the mask off.
His core trembled.
Hiccup was dead. His body had turned to dew and dust long ago. Nothing stirred him, either frozen in Helheim or lying cold in the mead-halls above them. This Stoick knew. But, instead.
The Dragon-Master was but a man of twenty-one, face paling as he howled anguish blindly and lost his human blood to the frozen earth. Nothing burned anymore. It was the dead of winter. Stoick knelt, sudden sweetness as he extended blood-stained hands and cupped them around the rough, aged face of a world-weary, half-tanned, scar-ridden, dark-eyed facsimile of his little son.
"Hiccup?" he asked, fearing something evil had inhabited the corpse.
But, no, it was not so. The youth blinked between his thrashes and gasped pain, recognition in his eye as he screamed again, saying nothing. Stoick saw in his anguished mouth why: his poor boy, bleeding out now by his father's loving hand, had no tongue.
Stoick's large hand clamped upon the wound, desperate stemming of the flow; he realised in grief his grip was not so much larger than his boy's shoulders, anymore. White was not a colour the snow would ever see again. His son's remaining fingers, six years alien now, curled into his father's cloak, and shook.
The grieving chief called for help and healers, yelling for anyone, invoking any listening god to hear him and undo his atrocity.
The snow nestled Hiccup's stilling body, the cold taking him slowly. He could not scream anymore. His black dragon nuzzled his face as he slipped away in increments.
The hardness of years fell away from Stoick, and in his heart he held a baby in his cradling arms. "Hiccup -- Thor strike me down, Hiccup, I'm so sorry -- son, stay with me, please -- you can't, please, I'm sorry, Hiccup --"
He would have done anything.
"Hiccup, I prayed so long, please -- please don't go again! Son! You'll never know..."
His living and his dying son's head fell back to the snow, eternity-bound, again.