Chapter Text
“The raids are getting worse,” They said.
“Chief, we cannae survive another raid,” They said.
“Stoick,” They said, pleading.
And they were getting worse, and had, and probably always will. The dragons were vicious in their hunger, the monstrous nightmares with burning scales, and gronckles with their stone-thick skins, and nadders with their spikes, and zipplebacks with their twin heads and twice the margin for error. It was the one thing they had always known about them, long before vikings had ever settled in the archipelago; stories from ancient times and times yet to come, the dwarf dragon Fafnir who poisoned the land to protect his treasure, Jormungandr who would kill Thor come Ragnarok, Nidhogg who chewed the roots of the World Tree.
The village had stood for seven generations, rebuilt from the ground up once a month; once upon a time Stoick would have been able to say that Berk would stand for seven generations more.
Stoick stared out across the sea, from the top of a cliff far from the village. The wind bit at his bare skin, at his rough cheeks and rougher hands. The grey sky stretched for miles, flat and pale; smoke a spreading stain from the village far behind him. From homes and his people both - the ruins of one knocked down and the old, charred wood piled into pyres for all the other, and not all were the warriors under Stoick’s command.
They’d lost few in the night’s raid. Hardly a thing to celebrate, but it was a small victory when the blood of many more dragons stained Berk’s soil than the blood of its defenders and Berk had learned to take what victories they could get. Most of the village still stood, charred black and stained with soot, heavy zippleback gas blowing away with the wind weaving through the streets. Their sheep and yaks were safe and the fish stores had not been broken into; the dragons were gone long before dawn, which was a small victory greater than all the others, though not half so sweet as the death of the final dragon in Midgard would be.
One of the dragon training recruits had died for their victory. All of fourteen years old and just good enough in training he’d gotten cocky. They’d found most of Fishjaws, a bloody streak from end to end of the village square.
Stoick should have been back there helping, but the autumn had him in its grip and, besides, he had Astrid in his stead. Spitelout might once have been put out by an heir chosen from outside the family, but he hadn’t been able to deny that Astrid had the skill for it. Or perhaps he had quailed beneath the look in Stoick’s face, the one that had been there for years and hadn’t gone away, the one that reminded everyone that Stoick’s son was missing, probably dead, and he would not tolerate arguments.
His chest ached, twin hollows in his heart behind his ribs carved out by the loss of his Valka and his son. Stoick closed his eyes against the thoughts of Hiccup, of that weedy little runt of a boy Stoick had loved so fiercely he scolded him for the danger he put himself in. Harshly, too harshly, perhaps, but Stoick had not known what else to do when in the ways of all children who thought they knew better Hiccup would not listen to him!
Seven years, Stoick thought, dully. Over seven years Hiccup had been gone. Over twenty since Valka had disappeared, too. It was cruel to think that at least Fishjaws’ family had the closure of knowing their son was dead, but war against dragons had taken kindness from them long ago. They had all earned a little cruelty, at least in the privacy of thoughts.
Stoick sighed, and the wind sighed with him, hissing through the grass and across the top of the stone cliffs.
The ice would set in soon enough; there was the bite of winter in the air, a tinge of snow to the clouds. A brief reprieve from dragon raids until the spring thaw, though winter was its own kind of hel. A trade of one set of troubles for the other, but at least in winter the fires in their homes were their own, tamed and small.
Stoick stared out across the dark, churning sea. On a clear day Helheim’s gate was there on the horizon, a wall of dark mists and fog, sheltering the dragon nest; he could organise a raid, take all of Berk and bring the fight to them.
Let them feel fear for once! Let them know the terror of a viking raid! Let them watch the seas in fear for the sight of their longships, armed warriors wild and powerful storming their nest, tearing the dragons from the sky and splashing their blood across the ground like Thor battling the World Serpent!
And if they were to die there then so be it, they would walk the halls of Valhalla with its walls of shining spears and tables of endless food and mead and its fields of endless battle, training for the final war at the end of the world! At least then they would show the dragons that vikings were not afraid of their shadows against the stars! Not to be stolen from to feed their endless hunger, nor rats in the food stores to be killed!
At least then there would be no more Fishjaws strewn across the village square, no Hiccup or Valka snatched away in the night and missing ever since.
Stoick shook away the thought - a raid on the nest only ever ended in more of his people dead. But a part of him wanted to try anyway, if only to silence the nagging doubts that had taken root in his head where once there had been steel.
He’d split a rock on his head as a child. He’d ripped a nadder’s head from its shoulders as a baby. He’d been made chief when his father died to dragons, and as chief he’d watched his Valka miscarry for years only to be snatched away by dragons from their only surviving child; and, nearing what should have been the end of his time as chief, his heir and son had gone missing, probably because of dragons too. And he’d survived that. The people of Berk were tough, worn and weathered and rooted down into the earth like the mountain against whose base they had settled.
But Stoick wasn’t so certain anymore that they could survive much longer. Hiccup was gone, but the village still skirted disaster; Astrid was his heir, but the Berk she was inheriting was char and charcoal. The people of Berk carried the blood of Sigurd, who killed the transformed dwarf Fafnir for the dragon’s gold; but the curse on that gold had killed Sigurd, eventually.
Hiccup was gone. Stoick hadn’t understood him, that weedy little boy who caused endless trouble when Berk could not afford more trouble - Astrid was a better heir in every way, capable warrior and diplomat both - but, still. Still the loss stung, and Stoick closed his eyes against the wind and wondered what Vallka would make of him for losing their son.
The wind changed, smoke from the ash and embers in the village and the houses charred black blowing against his back, and stinging in Stoick’s nose and throat, acrid on his tongue. A village so small against the base of the mountain, bared to the sea wind and harsher sea storms. So little and so much of it that Stoick had to care for, duties he was passing down to the perfect heir he had chosen that he never should have had to choose.
“Whatever it is,” Stoick said to the soft rustling of grass behind his back, crumbling rock crunching beneath footfalls, “I have no need of the council of the gods.”
Gothi, huffing at him, settled by his side leaning heavily on her staff. Half Stoick’s height and hunched smaller still, wizened and shrunken and eyes pearly with cataracts, Gothi’s frown still had Stoick pressing shut his lips to keep an apology behind his teeth; he was not still the young boy who could so easily be chastised by a look from her. She stomped the end of her staff in the ground, too, with an insistent humph.
Stoick watched the sea, and ignored Gothi jabbing him with the end of her staff, and her scratching of the dirt at their feet with it. Speak for the gods as she may, Stoick had been around Gothi enough when Hiccup was a small, sickly babe that he carried little fear of her now. Thoughts of dragons weighed heavier on his mind, besides, than the ire of an old woman.
Until she hit him with her staff, anyway.
“What in Thor’s name-?” He demanded, and refused to wither beneath her thin-lipped glare. “What d’yeh want of me, you old hag?”
She jabbed a skeletal finger towards the ground, her eyes boring into Stoick’s. Or through them, perhaps, past all his armour protecting his body and soul to all the things he would never dare think. Stoick swallowed his revulsion, instinctive, at blind eyes that saw too much of him.
Gothi had drawn into the earth, simple but distinctive - not writing, neither futhark nor even the elder futhark and the power that hummed in their lines, but a picture that rippled down Stoick’s spine like the licking heat of dragonfire. A man, legs together and arms spread, inside a dragon whose wings spread out either side of him as if they were his own.
Stoick closed his eyes against the sight of it, and for a moment it was two decades gone and Hiccup had just been born, too early and too small but such screams! Lively and hale, Valka bedridden but still alive. And with a grim set to her thin, wrinkled mouth Gothi looked down at Hiccup in Stoick’s hands and thrust that drawing of man and dragon at him.
But the drawing made as little sense then as it did now; less, perhaps, when on that paper Gothi could have but chose not to add more detail it would have been helpful to see - when there was space for writings she did not scratch out. Yet she jabbed at it all the more insistently with the point of her staff, thin brows low over her eyes and mouth wrinkled into a snarl of frustration.
The fear curled again, a slower heat than the flash of dragonfire that haunted the dreams of all on Berk. There was meaning there, as there was in all things Gothi chose to share; if it were from the gods or from her own journeys as a young woman, times so long ago none except she were alive to remember, Stoick did not know, but Gothi was not one to make things known without reason.
Yet it was not Stoick’s job to divine meaning from strange drawings, and he did not know much more now than when he had first seen it twenty years ago. And the frustration of Gothi’s expectation that he understand that damned drawing was a heat like dragonfire too; all Stoick knew - all he had ever needed to know - was that he loved his Valka, and needed to protect their only son, and that like greedy Fafnir whose breath poisoned the land all dragons needed to be killed for the good of the world. That he loved Valka and always would, and though he had failed Hiccup Stoick refused to fail at killing dragons.
That the raids had gotten worse and eventually, sooner than any viking had ever thought, Berk would not survive another. The dragons were vicious in their hunger and Hiccup was missing, probably dead, and had been for years. There was nothing else Stoick needed to know, and if it was truly important Gothi would tell him, without all the nonsense of that cursed picture.
So he turned his back on her, and trudged back down to his village. “I havn’ae got time for this,” He said, shaking his head. “I’ve rebuilding to see to.”
But the nagging doubt in the back of his head would not leave him, needling him in the heat lingering in the raw, blistering skin on the back of his neck.