Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's cold, by the sea. The waves lap onto the shore, covered by a thin membrane of ice that thickens to a waxy, opaque white and clings to the sand, paralyzing the foam. The water's murky, and the soil's muddy, where the seas at Berk were a clear, soft blue. The point is, it's the same, until the plane tickets are bought—until the dusty, mold-covered baggage and old suitcases, the ones that Hiccup hadn’t known existed within some mystery realm of the house are pulled out. 

It’s the same, until it isn’t.

And of course, unlike Berk, where Hiccup simply had to walk a few yards and peer over the cliffs, Burgess was four hours and twelve minutes away from the sea. That’s one tank refill, a dingy gas station Snickers Bar (he could buy those now, and not the cheap, stale version with a tragic radius of ten raisins per peanut), whichever energy drink seemed the unhealthiest, brightest blue, and ultimately a mournful day to his already underloaded bank account. The price of freedom was fifty dollars and twenty cents, gas included.

The air in Burgess didn't taste like salt—not like the salt here by these shores, not like the salt of Berk—but rather the cold crisp taste of the fathomless lake. The scent of the clear waters, the loamy silt, encompasses the entire town like a shadow. He’d taken quick notice of it, the presence of an earthy undertone that had been lacking ever since the lands of Norway were left as a distant speck in the distance behind his plane window. That for some reason, the closer Hiccup edges the woods that leads to this lake, the heavier the air becomes until it's an oppressive, humid wall. 

But Google Maps, as much as it did its job now that for once in his life his phone had all three full bars—hadn’t helped his cause of extracting the mystery lake. There are no photos. No destination that can be reached with online directions. He’s asked around for it, and people know about it. They always know about it, but most look confused when he asks for directions, their brows furrow and lips pull into thin lines. As if the information slipped their minds. There, then gone in a flash.

However, there’s a woman at the Burgess supermarket, her directions the most lucid and the information she gives is the most tangible. She once did a paper on it in high school, years ago. Once, she was equally ensnared with the lake no one knew about, but everyone knew of. She knew little but gave what she could.

Jack’s pond, you mean? She said six days ago, and that’s as close to a name for this lake he’s gotten.

Not a pond, he wanted to correct. Too deep to be a pond. Walk in, and you'll see. You won't see the bottom, no matter how hard you try, but he hadn't the right. Never saw the lake, although he knows it’s there. Wisely, he kept his mouth shut and listened.

Despite this, he still hasn't made the time to look for the lake for himself. That’s what he tells himself, busy as he is with his grand total of five interactions for each week spent unpacking boxes, all revolving around the nice lady, (Kate? Perhaps it was Katelyn,) from the supermarket with the crooked nametag with several letters amiss. He supposes he’ll figure out her name eventually. They live in the same town now, after all.

The tide, here and now by the sea, climbs further up the shore. The sky is an inky black, with no stars and no moon. The sky and sea seamlessly bleed into each other. With no clear divide, they look one and the same. Like one big black space. That's how it sometimes looks here. Sometimes there are boats, and you will think they might be stars for a second, with the white billowing sails and lights. But then it dips over the curve of the horizon, and it’s gone.

Hiccup hugs himself tighter, feeling the strain until it’s stiff enough to feel grounded. His fingers dig into the fabric, crinkling at the fold where the forearm meets the bicep and the skin beneath it, warping flesh into ripples. 

The thing is, he dreams about the lake, sometimes. About hanging just below the solid ice. He doesn't panic, never struggles. He simply drifts, his vision black around the edges and his limbs, long and pale, loosely sway with the current. Despite this seeming tranquility, Hiccup wakes up in cold sweat, gasping for air every time.

Once, a terrifying once, he ran over to the bathroom sink, violently shuttering and hacking as his body tried to expel the water from his lungs before his mind could process where he was and what was real. That he's not trapped under that lake. He's never been to that lake. That he's never been trapped under the ice like that. That, for him, the closest he's come to dying was when a fire ate away at his foot, but even then, miraculously, he didn't choke from the smoke.

It’s getting hard to sleep. The dreams have been lasting longer and becoming more tangible, he’s sinking deeper, and by this point, he's too tired to even pretend to try.

I miss home, is what he eventually comes up with. For the dreams. For the impending and oppressive waters. But then again, Berk could’ve hardly been called a home—not in the ways that pastel colored books with fancy lettering that Berk’s local library would never be able to locate on any shelf whatsoever, had to say on the matter. 

He wasn't even well liked. He didn't like the smallness of it, the way everyone’s ears tied to the end of one another with iron string. It was a dying, backwards town on the edge of nowhere, that his autistic and queer ass had no business pretending he could ever be a part of. Or as his dad said while they were still packing boxes, in complete denial: you're just. Unique. That's all.  

Oh, he was unique alright. In every way that was unacceptable to the eyes of Berk.

He groans, pressing hands against his face, dragging the calloused fingertips from the bridge of his nose to his forehead. He hadn’t come for this—to mope, to think about it. He’d come to—relax, maybe. But that didn’t seem right. 

He’d needed to not be there, this…new and shiny space. There, whatever light the ice didn’t swallow into the depths reflected it like a cold sheet of metal, all light and none of the warmth. This lake that he’s never seen, but already knows.

Costly, his dad had said, a large hand on the staircase rail, but comfortable for a change, eh?

It was comfortable. It was nice, even. His toes, all five of them, didn’t find themselves frozen when the sun crept up in the morning, and the heater did what it was supposed to, opposed to gaining dust as its primary role. 

It was good and normal, and he’d wanted nothing to do with it. Helter skelter, he wanted away. He had to. From his dad, who was trying hard at this new sense of normalcy. From the all-too white house that wasn’t made of dark, creaking pine wood that made the kitchen door impossible to open during summer, when the heat made it pliable enough to expand the fibers. From the faucet that wasn’t dripping until it drove him mad, because here the pipe system didn’t have to be fiddled and fixed at least twice a year. The woods here were thinner, less wild, and the stars here in Pennsylvania lost their sharpness. 

It was nice. It always was until it wasn't. But it was, it is, and Hiccup isn’t going to wait for the other shoe to drop. It always does, and when it doesn’t, it turns to ash and torched bone, transfiguring into metal instead. Yet still, here he is. Bitter as the cud, and stubborn to no end, he won’t swallow the ever-lingering smoke, even when fires eat at him.

So, foot to the gas pedal, Hiccup had blindly chased the horizon until he couldn't smell that freshwater stilt, couldn't see the line of neat white houses, and could finally taste the salt on his lips. Gone for a little while, at least. And then, he’d go back with dragging feet and sharp mouth, like he always does, until the leash grew too tight, and it was Hiccup on the loose all over again.

But Dad’s trying, remember? We’re better now. Somewhat.

…Right. Hiccup wrings his hands, sitting on a wooden bench with rusty screws. Not thinking about it.

It’s quiet here, in the dark. 

He breathes in, making the effort to go slow. His legs are tucked in against his chest, however, and his lungs can only go so far before they can reach their full potential. Instead, he closes his eyes, imagining for a moment something easier—familiar. Familiar didn’t always mean happy or safe, but this time he’s back at Berk; at a beach near the alcove, and that’s as close as it gets. Of course, Berk is unfathomably cold—the wetness walking the tight line between the rim of his eyes and the steep slope of his cheek would have frozen crystal by now. Instead, he has to bring himself to swipe away the burning feeling, committing Hiccup to a bitter self-awareness he could have simply dismissed as something crawling up his eye were he back…there.

But he can feel the wetness, a thin streak down his cheek, and the humid texture on his fingers. He brushes them away on his pants. Now the dark spot is there as well, looking at him with a wide expression.

Eyes hot, the tears gather in his lashes and the water pours down his face. No matter how quickly he rubs them away with the heel of his hand, they stream down, heavy and cold as his lungs felt as though they were weighed down with lead. Hiccup snarls, clenching his hands to fists and clinging them to his sides, as if he can stop the sobs with sheer will-power alone.

“Ugh,” he croaks, sounding waterlogged and wet, and looks up from his knees with no target in mind, “how do people deal with this. How is anyone supposed to—how am I supposed to—”

His forehead lands on his knees once again.

“This is stupid,” he says, voice warbling. Almost lost to the whistling winds.

“Kinda is, yeah.”

Hiccup freezes, opposed to a hard flinch. He tilts his head to the shadow on his left. A single spot of ice hardens, the waves growing to a stop below the stranger’s pale white, bare feet and frayed, ratty pants. The stranger lets out a low whistle, “I mean, 3am. Alone? Dense.” He tisks, “not very bright.” 

Hiccup’s shoulders droop as he presses the heel of his hands hard against his eyes. Maybe if he ignores the stranger, he’ll go away. Or maybe he’ll get murdered with little to his name. Not like Hiccup has much for the other guy to steal. He lowers his legs, lowers his hands to his lap and waits with a rigid patience. Still, the tears fall, sluggish in their pace.

The shadow stills, before shifting towards the bench, and says, “but let's not ponder on that. Here. I’ve been thinking about, like, one of the best presentations I ever broke into. Town Hall, two years ago, Dumb and Dumber brought in a PowerPoint about flat earth. Best thing I ever saw. Flawless public speaking, truly.”

Hiccup doesn’t turn his head to the stranger, slowly and addle-brained, like the expression climbing up on his face on its own accord. What? But it’s a close thing. 

“Apparently, the government has been lying for years, they said. Earth’s flat bros, trust me on this, they said. The Planet is kept afloat with a fidget spinner, they said, with full and unearned confidence. So, someone in the audience wisely asked about the other planets, right? What about them? They’re flat, they said, or not real at all. Except for the moon, apparently. That stays round and real, for some reason. 3D printed by God. Any other question was answered by saying how it was a huge cover-up. They kept going until one of the boys’ mom stormed up and dragged him off stage. Guy was a senior, I think. At least seventeen, him and his friend built like shithouses. Guy two kept going faster and faster, preaching his gospel like it was a one-sided rap battle until his mom came up and dragged him off too.” He laughs, “I swear on all my days, this was real.”

What? Hiccup swallows a hysteric snicker himself, because maybe it's best to not encourage the homeless and insane. Not that he can judge. What the fuck are you talking about? 

“I mean, maybe the moms were their aunts or—or personally vindicated teachers, I don’t know. All I know is that it looked like a mom's behavior.” The shadow stops, perhaps to breathe, though Hiccup doesn't hear the inhale. “But they turned out all right, you know? Became legends in their High School. It’s a new tradition now that seniors make the most ridiculous PowerPoints for their final projects that they can get away with. Dumb and Dumber got into their picked colleges. Long story short, whatever is making you sad and miserable, could not, and I emphasize on this, could not be any worse than that day.” Somehow, Hiccup could hear the smile and knew it was there without turning to look. “Remember, bigger idiots have done it and turned out ok.”

Hiccup says nothing, but he can see when a decent point is being made. A broken clock is right twice a day, and all of that. His eyes are dry now, at least. Though probably still rimmed with red. He sighs.

He can't help himself. He says, “alright, it could be worse.”

The shadow beside him jumps, shifting on the edge of Hiccup’s peripheral. “Yeah! Yeah, exactly, that’s what I’ve been—it could be worse, way worse. You could be dead! I mean," he laughs, his long limbs breaching the edges of his vision that his eyes can't reach. “I mean, look at me.”

Hiccup nods, completely still otherwise although his metal foot might have started to swirl. The guy doesn’t seem to mind, complacent to carry on with this one-man conversation. What had started at a valiant attempt at a cheer-up, was slowly deescalating to something Hiccup might have pitied, weren’t he aware how close he’d come to a complete break-down.

“Hey, as one of the bigger idiots, I can confirm,” the guy shifts, the shadow on the edge of Hiccup’s peripheral. “You would not believe the amount of embarrassing positions one can get in while still being invisible. Tried to hang sideways for several days straight, moved like a sizzling fish, just to see how long I could do it; did not go well. Don’t recommend it. Pros are that no one saw, obviously. No witnesses. Yay. Cons: I did it because I knew no one could judge. Wouldn’t have done that otherwise. Would've saved myself the trouble.”

Right, Hiccup stands up at that, stiffly walking up the dunes, that’s my cue to go. 

“Yikes. Tough crowd tonight,” he hears the guy say from the spot by the bench. “And here I thought—”

The wind obscures the rest, and Hiccup’s shoes press down on the cold sand, his prosthetic dipping further in and out of the sand than the one that was still made of bone, skin, and sinew. 

The voice ebbs closer regardless, “but hey, seriously, what are you doing all the way out here by yourself? Does anyone even know you’re here?” 

Hiccup shouldn’t have expected any less.

Are you alone and vulnerable? Could I get away with a free discount on misremembering your limbs? Ah, yes, but of course. Hiccup urges himself not to roll his eyes. The ones you have left, anyway.

Under a flickering streetlight, he looks both ways at the street, despite how the traffic was completely dead. The static roared in his ears as he heard the footsteps approaching behind him, and Hiccup walked across, keeping his eyes on the ground. He lingers, briefly, at the parking lot where his car was parked, before instead swerving into the convenience store.

The doors slide open, accompanied with a short, lively tune that mismatches the situation like each pair of socks he must buy, and Hiccup can already see the employee at the back of the store sighing from here. “Hey man,” the man says, his tone clearly stating how he was not ready for whatever utter bullshit Hiccup has brought with him this time, “we’re about to close, so—”

“Five minutes?” Hiccup says, cutting him short, “there’s an, uh. Guy, out there. Followed me for a bit, and I’m kind of trying to see if he leaves.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah—yeah, sure.” The guy says, blinking slowly and afro wiggling at the nod of his head, dark and vibrant, well taken care of tightly packed coils. He stills. “Been there before, take your time.” He coughs, “Uh, we don’t have to call the police, do we?”

Oh yes, that would help, but then, Hiccup remembered that the police, especially in America, were a bit slow and unparalleled in their needless violence. They would probably arrest the stranger, despite how his only crimes were daring to be homeless and having the audacity to be made unwell. The idea, then, loses all appeal.

“Ah, no. He’s just—a little off the handle, I think. He’ll probably go along his way soon enough.”

The guy circles around the sidebar where the gums and protein bars are at, stepping closer to the glass, peering out into the darkness that envelopes the view outside. “Where’s this guy you’re talking about? Maybe I know him.”

So much for being inconspicuous. Hiccup turns, squinting his eyes at the searing divergence between the bright white artificial lights and the moonless gloom. Hiccup zones in on the stock of white hair that reflects under one of the streetlights bordering the empty parking lot, minus the two cars, each on opposite sides of the parking lot—he’s got a stick now, apparently, which he writhes around with a casual air to it. No shoes, same pale pearlescent skin, same ragged pants. Same person as before.

It's quite odd. If the stranger wasn’t ticking off every box in the book for being weird as can be, Hiccup would almost think he’s a normal, everyday person that goes to college and wouldn't stalk their classmates to the bathroom stalls—someone who you could have a decent, if bizarre, conversation with. That this person might be acting like a total, clearly screw-loose creep, but strangely enough, it doesn’t feel like he is, or that Hiccup himself thinks the guy is being. It makes sense, almost, and then Hiccup locks eyes with him. 

Oh-uh. With any luck, the mad man with a stick got bad, awful, no-good eyesight. 

Rather than turn away, Hiccup is pursing his lips without breaking the stare, a gaze he hopes resembles something similar to his father’s, a thing that could wither steel. Instead of flinching, as Hiccup hoped he would, or look away first: the stranger waves, because of course he does.

Hiccup groans, tearing his gaze away. “He’s, uh. There, under the streetlight, the one that’s—yeah, that one.”

The cashier hums, eyes narrowing. “Huh. Can’t see ‘em.”

This is what Hiccup gets for praying to gods he doesn't believe in—pray to the wrong god, and they’ll give the wrong guy bad eyesight. 

“Oh, he’s just. Twirling a branch or something—” Hiccup frowns. “—Annnd he’s waving again, great. Great.”

“All kinds of people in this world, ya’ know?” The guy shrugs, straightening his back mid-stretch. “Anyway, tell me when he’s gone. Gotta clean up the store anyways, might as well stick around for that ‘till you’re comfortable.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Anytime.”

Hiccup wanders around the shelves, careful to keep out of the cashier's way as he cleans, pretending to look at the candy before occasionally sparing quick, fleeting glances over his shoulder. Then he would quickly look back down when he sees that gleam of white, a flash of movement, a shadow flickering. He circles the aisles like this, in loose, non-definitive patterns. The fluorescent lights give everything a flat, yellowish hue: like a sickly, artificial sun. A fly buzzes somewhere out of his peripheral, and Hiccup feels the stranger's gaze on him linger like a brand.

Hiccups staring at a row of assorted gummies before the cashier says from across the room, "alright, I got a couple of things to do in the back, then I'm going to go to the bathroom before walking you to your car. Sounds good?"

Hiccup turns outside and…and the figure is gone. He scans the parking lot and finds no one. 

"...you know? I think he's gone." Hiccup turns back to the cashier. "I'm good, actually, thanks though. What about you?"

"Me?"

“Yeah, it’s kinda late. Want me to wait for you instead?” Hiccup points behind him, “take you to your car?”

“Oh! That’s nice of you, but nah.” The cashier begins turning off lights, “I wouldn't take this schedule unless it suited me just fine. Besides, I got a shotgun underneath the register, just in case.”

Hiccup stared at him blankly. “For real? That’s like, a thing? I thought that just happened in American movies. Or the south.”

The guy just shrugs. “Not usually on the northeastern coast, no. But I’m licensed and my manager is…eccentric.”

“Oh,” Yeah. Hiccup could see that. His English teacher had a metal tooth, a peg leg, and hook for an arm that was only functional half the time—the other half of the time, he kept getting his sleeves tangled. An excellent teacher but thought it fundamental to teach him blacksmithing and English simultaneously since day one of lessons. “Ok. Yeah, I know the eccentric types.”

The guy hums, tips his head, a farewell gesture, before slipping behind heavy double doors. “Scream if you need anything.”

“Please,” Hiccup pressed a palm against his forehead, “please don’t jinx me like that, man.” But he straightens his posture, rolls his shoulders, and walks out the automatic doors.

Chapter Text

The cold is blistering; he can't decide whether it cuts deeper because he’s paying attention to it, the store having thawed him, or if it’s getting colder. There are still no cars driving down the street, no nightlife tethered to 24 hour drugstores and midnight establishments meant for the partygoers—only the small store on the edge of the sea, whose name Hiccup hadn’t stopped to read. All he’d needed was to know the closest way to the ocean and a decent route before tapping the GPS and dashing off. 

Nothing talks, nothing chatters. When Hiccup checks his phone, battery charged and permanently on silent mode, all three bars are set, but his notification inbox remains empty. No menagerie of calls or onslaught of distraught parental messages fill up the screen. It’s 3:15 am. Forget the teeth, the mouth—Hiccup isn’t going to look anywhere within that gift horse’s vicinity. He clicks the screen black and slips the phone into his hoodie pocket. The weight is awkward, but convenient, just in case, and nothing else.

The beeline to his car isn’t drenched in complete darkness, the bouncing lights hitting his side like a mantle—Berk had long since gotten him used to walking through dim and sinister roads, untasted by electricity, meant to be walked with honest to god, oil lamps—but he felt the muscles give in just a little.

He pulls the car keys out, puts them in the frame lock below the handle, he twists. Except, no, it doesn’t. The key’s teeth make an awful clicking sound, metal against metal, and the key doesn't turn, barely jiggles.

He thumps his head against the window. “You’ve got to be joking.”

He pulls the keys out, tries again. Same result. It’s nothing new, really. It’s an old car (see: old, ancient dinosaur best left for the ages) and sometimes it takes a few tries. Hiccup blows on the key, a feeble attempt, and when that manages to work as well as the last one, he shakes it instead.

“You think it’ll work if you wait it out?”

Hiccup jerks, the keys in his hand clatter and spiral onto the asphalt. “Fy faen.” You know what? Breathing hard, mouth curling in a sneer, his hands curl into fists. Fuck this guy.

Hiccup whirls around and points a finger directly at his chest, “what the fuck is your problem?”

The stranger freezes completely, slowly looking behind him before he turns back to Hiccup, eyes wide.

The shape of Hiccup’s mouth gets stuck between a ugly laugh and a mean frown.

“Yes, you, who the hell else?"

The eyes open impossibly wider, and they are so incredibly blue. 

“What do you want? What the hell do you even want? I'm broke, bitch! If you plan to rob me, there's nothing you can steal.” He makes a wild sweep at his car, “look at this! The keys don't even work! You think a rich man would have a car that doesn't open?!” He jabs at the other guy's chest, “and if you think we’re friends, newsflash; we’re not! I don’t know why you’re following me. I don't know why you were waiting, but there’s a guy in there with a shotgun and I won’t hesitate to scream and bring him out.” He raises his eyebrows, a silent: what’s your answer?

The stranger stares at Hiccup’s hand, zeroing in on where Hiccup points to his chest. The other’s hand twitches before gently reaching to Hiccup's hand. There’s a second of friction as the fingertips drag across a knuckle. The stranger’s eyes flutter wide, as if shocked by an underlying current, while Hiccup jerks his hand back, locking it firmly to his side. There, in the dark, each watches the other.

The stranger’s hands tighten around the staff, the wood being pulled tight to his chest, when Hiccup notices that the man is holding his breath. It’s a small thing to notice in the big picture, his own heaving breaths taking at least half the canvas space, but under this light, well. The man almost looks dead—or a step away from it. It makes Hiccup stop.

Hiccup pulls back and looks at the stranger. Really looks at him. His feet and hands are blue, the ratty pants don't even cover his ankles. He’s looking at Hiccup with wide eyes, empty hand touching the invisible spot where Hiccup’s hand had driven into, and he’s not speaking. Clinging onto his staff like it’s the only thing he has that's not attached to him. Then suddenly, his own layered clothes and his boots feel heavy against the cold, and it is. It is cold, and the only thing stopping Hiccup from shivering is the adrenaline pumping his veins, his pulse thrumming in his ears.

He’s homeless. He’s not well, and alone. Hiccup drags a hand across his face, the adrenaline leaking out of him and leaving a profound exhaustion, a building pressure behind the eyes. What had the stranger done, exactly? What did he do that was so terribly offensive? The pep talk? The invisibility gag? God. What am I doing? 

Hiccup sucks in a sharp inhale, the cold cutting into his throat. He pinches the bridge of his nose, before sighing and picking up his keys from the ground, the metal ice against the skin. From the corner of his eye, he sees how the stranger watches him. When Hiccup places the key back into the lock, it fits in like a glove and turns with ease.

“Can I take you anywhere?” Hiccup asks.

Hiccup turns to the stranger and finds him staring. 

“I—sorry?”

“Anywhere that’s not—uh.” Somewhere that isn't cold. Someplace warm and safe, if only for a night. Home, a family member. A motel, at least. “Just. Is there somewhere around you’d rather be than in the middle of the cold that was about to freeze my ass, and I don’t even want to know what’s done to yours?” He makes a wide gesture to where they're standing. “Unless you’d rather walk?”

The stranger shoots him a look, as if he’s said something funny, like there’s an inside joke to it, somehow. “I…I don’t really walk, no.”

Hiccup doesn’t know if the lack of shoes indulges or rebuts his offhanded explanation. He looks around, but no third car or Uber has popped into existence since he turned away.

“I hitched a ride.” He tells Hiccup, his speech jilted, “to come here.”

“...Right. Well,” Hiccup shrugs, a loose roll of the shoulders as he turns away, opening the driver’s side door, feeling the cool, stagnant air inside the car flood out, “come on, then.”

When Hiccup slides in and closes the door, it’s like the makings of a black-and-white motion picture. Each step of something that should be as easy as an open-and-close turns into a step-by-step process, the slow motion of the passenger door assisting the equally drawn-out creaking sound of it being pulled open, and the cold briefly floods in before he hears the passenger-side door close with a click. He turns on the ignition as the engine roars to life and waits for enough time to pass for the heating to work. Hiccup reaches into the back, groping at the dark, before finding a worn, blue quilt on the ground and passing it to the stranger, who laughs like Hiccup did something funny, some clever joke, before wordlessly taking it. 

Hiccup stares at the man, who tells Hiccup, "it wouldn't be funny without the context," and leaves it at that. Hiccup turns back to the asphalt.

“It takes a minute for the engine to warm up,” Hiccup tilts his head towards the stranger, but keeps his eyes on the empty parking lot, “the heating doesn't work until then, it’ll just blow cold air.”

The stranger nods, a gesture that’s a few degrees to the right off-kilter; “the cold doesn’t bother me anyway.”

Hiccup blinks. He looks at the guy; his blue eyes, white hair, the staff, which apparently is going with them into the car, his overall theme, and thinks maybe he’s not totally nuts after all, but something distinctively worse, a Disney fanatic. Hiccup sees the tiny dent on the stranger’s cheek, curling upward.

“Oh,” Hiccup says wryly, “so you think you’re funny.”

“I’m hilarious, actually.” He says it like he means it, and the words have too many teeth.

“But not original. Disney, really?”

The guy shrugs, not terribly offended by this. “Disney isn't so bad.”

“No no,” Hiccup taps his temple, “think of the remakes.”

The stranger reaches behind him and places his staff gently across the back seats, where the quilt had been. “Clearly I was talking about the originals.”

With a turn of the dial, the heating flares to life, and Hiccup shifts into drive, reflectively looking out for cars despite knowing that he wasn't going to find any. “Eh, I prefer DreamWorks.”

“Nah, me too.”

Hiccup turns out of the parking lot and flicks his headlights on before easing onto the highway. “Surprising, since there aren’t any frozen guy characters in DreamWorks, which you seem to be really pushing the—motif onto.”

“There aren’t? Well, there should. I’d have an interesting story to tell them that would really hit the box office.” A beat. “Or clonk it. Hard to say.”

They look at each other, lips tight, the corners twisting upwards, beginning to wobble. Hiccup turns back to the road, snickering. “I’m sure you do.”

“Oh,” the guy says, “you have no idea.”

Hiccup snorts, rolls his eyes. “So, seriously. Where to?”

“Burgess,” The stranger says, “home.”

Hiccup blinks, then blinks again when Jack's words settle in. “...huh. Lucky you,” Hiccup shifts to the middle lane, “that’s where I’m heading too. Anywhere specific?”

“The lake is fine, or close as you can, if you can manage it.” 

“Lake?” Hiccup says slowly, making sure he’d heard right. “I thought it was a pond.”

“Ha! No,” from the corner of Hiccup’s eyes, he sees the stranger shake his head, “too deep to be a pond.”

“Are we talking about the same—lake?

The guy shrugs, “only body of water in town that’s not the ice rink or the communal pool.”

“...Right.” The lamp poles pass them like a single smear of light. “I’m Hikke, by the way. Figured you should at least know the name of the guy who’s gonna be driving you for four hours.”

The stranger frowns. “Wait…like, hiccup? Did your parents name you the Norwegian word for hiccup?” 

Hiccup stares. “Shut up.”

“What?”

“You know Norwegian? Seriously?” Hiccup groans, “best part of being dragged to America was that nobody was going to know Norwegian. It’s Norwegian. Which American randomly knows Norwegian?”

“I never said I was American.”

“Oh. Well, I guess your…complexion makes sense, then.”

“But I am,” he laughs, the sound sharp and crisp, the crack of ice. "American." Hiccup squints, because why play these games with me. Come on. It’s like 3:30am. The stranger continues, “and I don’t just know Norwegian. You’re not special, you know.” 

“No, I'm just permanently hexed with rotten luck. Some people call it unique.”

“Could be worse.”

“How can it be worse?”

“You could have my last name.”

Hiccup frowns. The heater’s on full blast, and it’s still cold inside the car. “Which is?”

“Frost,” he smirks.

“That’s not so bad—”

“My name’s Jack.”

Hiccup turns to him, brow raised, “like the pond?”

“Which pond?”

“Sorry, lake. The one I’m taking you to, the one that’s too deep to be a pond.”

“They named the lake after me?" He grins, delighted, "when?”

“We’re getting off track,” Hiccup places a flat palm on the dashboard, “so your name is Jack.”

“Yes.”

“Like the lake.”

“Yep.”

“And your second name is Frost.”

“Indeed, it is.”

“So, it’s…literally Jack Frost?”

“Do you need a notebook for these things?” Jack then opens the window.

“For the love of god, please close that,” Jack complies, and Hiccup says, “no, just sounds fake as fuck.”

He looks out the passenger side window, seemingly fascinated by the view, despite it being little more than lamp poles, trees, and shrubbery. “Oh, because Hiccup is an equally real, legitimate name.”

“I have my reasons.”

“Your parents didn’t have a reason." Jack fiddles with the glove box next, opening and closing it like it's something new to him, with all that child-like wonder. "Your parents had grudges, is what they had.”

Hiccup sighs. “It’s a tradition.”

Finally, Jack clicks the glove box closed, leaving it be for a time. “Is that what they told you?”

“Honestly? I would’ve asked myself the same, if it weren’t for the fact that everyone on the island has equally terrible names. There are worse.”

“Worse than Hiccup?”

“Snotlout.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

He smirks. “Small mercies.” He drums his fingers against the wheel. "Did your parents actually name you Jack Frost?"

"I certainly didn't name myself."

"You certainly look the part. All with the..." Hiccup side eyes him. "I'm just saying. It could be a stage name."

"I'm guilty of not passing up a good punchline and nothing else."

Hiccup huffs and smiles. "Sure."

The dark flows all around them, a river of ink, so dark it was tangible, the texture fibrous. There's a long stretch with no lights other than the car’s head beams. This is the stretch of road without lamp poles, and nothing to observe. It was unsettling when Hiccup was driving aimless to the cold shore, but somehow the darkness gentled on the way back. Without hunger, and without bite. 

The silence should be awkward; there’s a homeless man in his car, one he only met tonight. It should be stilted and strained, with how Jack fiddles and plays with the radio, the heating, the glove compartment. He can’t be set still, and it’s as though he brought a wild bird in his car rather than a man, with all of his constant, unyielding fluttering movements. But every time Hiccup’s eyes slid to where Jack sat, no matter what he’s playing with, there’s a warm gleam to Jack’s eyes, a softness to the curve of his mouth, and Hiccup can’t bring himself to be annoyed, to be unsettled. You don’t scold the nightingale for singing.

“Ok,” Jack says after the long silence, “I'll bite. But, why? What’s the deal with giving terrible names?”

“Something about trolls stealing your left socks. I think. Or the right ones?”

“...What?”

Yeah, that’s an acceptable, reasonable response. Hiccup breathes in through his nose, eyes not all that present, pushing the knot twiddling from rib to rib and playing catch around his lungs away. 

“My town—the old one.” The one becoming further, further away, until it sits hard on his shoulders, instead. “The people there, they’re big on superstition, ah—” Hiccup waves his hand, “Fae on the side of the road. Think myths, think fables. Things like that. The idea was having a name the Fae wouldn't want to take and would terrify trolls. Either-or. Both. Nobody really believes in that stuff anymore, but it’s considered good luck. Everything else, though? Oh, it’s on the table. Especially the older neighbors, they probably give each other the evil eye several times a week. Which is weird. Defeats the whole point of the story about the first people to immigrate there.”

Jack stares, something unreadable flickering on his expression, but it’s gone before Hiccup could decipher it. “What's the story?”

Hiccup shrugs, “something about how the first people packed away on the ships, that they weren't magic, per-say, but attracted the wild things. Gifts too heavy to bear, curses. I'm talking four, five thousand years back. Got pulled into epic after epic and became tired of it. Wanted something gentler for themselves, for the kids.”

“Maybe they should have started with the naming situation?" When Hiccup shakes his head, Jack says, "no? Okay then.”

Hiccup huffs, a smile caught in between. “So, these strangers—these, I don't know, heroes of yore—in one last odyssey, they pulled together into this newly-formed village and sailed away to a hidden place, somewhere without magic. Or somewhere they could weed it out more easily, pushing it deep beneath the soil. I don’t know, there’s lots of interpretations. No matter how you angle it, it’s Berk.” Hiccup tells the story like it’s been repeated to him many times, in flat, bored intonations.

“Huh. Berk.” Jack says, eventually, “so, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Attract wild things?” He smiles, “or am I just a special case?”

“Quoth the idol: let it go.”

He laughs, then. Jack is someone who laughs easily.

“So.” Hiccup diverts his eyes to the road, “do you need to call someone?”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Someone you can leave a message to, then. A voicemail, perhaps.”

Jack works his jaw, the eyes distant, until he says, “you know, I think I do. Is it fine if…?” He gestures to Hiccup’s phone sitting between the front seats, plugged into the charger nestled where quarters and spare sheets of paper sat.

“Yeah, sure. Uh—give me a second, long password.” Hiccup places a knee to the steering wheel, eyes flickering back and forth from the phone in his hands to the road. “Just, can you watch the road and tell me whether I’m about to run someone over?”

Jack smiles, crooked. “Are your decisions always this bright?”

“Eh. From 8am to 3pm they’re at their peak. From then, it’s a long downhill slope.” He hands his phone over, “here you go.”

Jack presses the phone against his ear, the motion awkward, as if unused to the weight, unused to how his fingers curl around the shape of Hiccup’s phone. Still, his eyes gleam. “I’m beginning to think getting in this car with you was a bad idea.” 

The phone rings, and rings, and just when Hiccup thinks it's going to go straight into voicemail, the line clicks on.

“Oh, shoot. You weren’t supposed to answer,” Jack says, hushed but not quiet.

Hiccup raises an eyebrow. If Jack notices, he doesn't say as he looks straight down the road, away from Hiccup.

“Yeah, it’s me. Sorry, I woke you up, didn’t I?”

Whatever the response was, Hiccup doesn't hear it. He lowers his leg that was pinning the steering wheel in place and keeps his eyes dead ahead, trying to give some illusion of privacy.

“I’m fine, it’s all good. This was supposed to go into your voicemail, really. It’s, uh. I was doing my rounds, you know how it is, but it got a little too late. Don’t sleep, you know. And this Hiccup guy—

“Hikke.” Hiccup strains.

“Hiccup, yeah, he…you know. Was so kind as to lend me his phone. To call you.” After a long pause, Jack nods and adds, sounding a little airy, “in Hiccup’s car, yes.”

“It’s not—” Hiccup sighed. “—You know what, never mind. Hiccup is fine. Same old, same old. Why did I think I could escape it, no matter where I went?”

“Hold on, Mrs. Bennett, I’m putting you on speaker.” Jack pressed on the screen and set the phone on the dashboard.

The line goes quiet again, this time two or three seconds longer than the last. 

“I’m sorry, hello?” The voice says, eventually, the phone thick with static, the service patchy. “Is someone there?”

Hiccup looks at Jack, who shrugs at him, pointing at the phone with his jaw.

“Ah, yeah, um. I’m Hiccup. Sir? Ma’am? You’re on speaker now. Jack’s hitching a ride with me. I’m—well. We met earlier and we were both headed to the same place, and like he said, it was already late, so. Yeah.”

Very eloquent, the thought comes, dry and sardonic. That had been scraping the bare bones of tonight’s events, but it would do. Jack hasn’t commented on it, and neither would Hiccup; to save the guy some face.

“Right…thank you, Hiccup. I’m Joyace, Jack’s…guardian. Ma’am suits me fine, thank you. And thank you for—driving Jack back from wherever he’s gotten around this time.” There’s a pause after that, “Jack?”

“Still here.”

“So you’re in someone else’s car,” there’s more shuffling, and now her voice sounds closer to the microphone, like she’s pressing her phone against her ear, likely with her shoulder, “at 3, nearly 4 am.”

It’s strange how she doesn’t sound worried, or angry. There’s befuddlement, a strained fondness, a bone-deep exhaustion, highlighted by the occasional slurring of words, and, strangest of all, wonder.

Not homeless then. Misplaced, maybe.

“Yeah.”

“So how…?”

“No clue.”

“And he can…?”

“Apparently.” Jack says, at the same time Hiccup breaks in, interrupting with a wince.

“I can take him home, don’t worry. Um,” he sighs, “Look, Miss Joy—Joyace? I’m aware this is sort of a stranger danger situation, so if you—” he looks at Jack, “—if there’s anything I can do to—?”

“Be less of a creep?” Jack says, smug.

“You were being no less a creep than I am, you know that, right?”

“You yelled at me, called me a thief, said we weren’t friends, threatened me with a shot gun, and then gave me a ride. I mean, this car is basically a van, and you know what they say about—”

The lady makes a mildly distressed sound, pinning both their eyes on the phone’s screen and breaking the reverie. “You can go ahead and send me your coordinates. That'd be great.”

Hiccup nods twice in rapid succession, despite knowing that she wouldn't see it. “Yeah, sure. Jack, you can…he can do it.” Wait. Hiccup raises a brow, “do you know how to do it?”

Jack waves him off, already twiddling his thumbs around the phone, “North would kill me if I didn’t. Spent a six hour lecture on how to use these things.”

The static of the phone swells, “Jack.”

North and Jack Frost. Right. What was it with the winter theme?

Hiccup didn’t ask, but Jack looks at him and explains anyway, shrugging it off. “Just an old guy with a penchant for building weird contraptions.”

The lady on the line makes a soft exhale. “Alright, we’ll talk tomorrow, then. James and Soph will be ecstatic for you, I'm sure.”

Hiccup sees Jack laugh, an airy thing as he nods. “You think?”

“Anyways, it was nice to meet you, Hiccup—sorry if Jack caused you trouble.”

“Er, not that much…past the misunderstandings.” Hiccup says. Jack shoots him a look.

Hiccup sees Jack’s lips quirk up at the phone, a sharp thing, but it's the eyes that give the raw fondness away. “I’ll see you guys, then.”

They say their goodbyes, the hang-up button slides up, ending the call, and the silent mantle settles once again as Jack softly places the phone back with the ripped paper and quarters. Needled amidst the quiet, deep and soft thrum underneath the seats, jittery against the pavement that runs below. This silence between them is nice too, although different from the one before. This one’s patient. Neither of them speak, and Jack has a stillness to him. It doesn’t prompt Hiccup to switch on the tunes right away, excusing him from the usual needless and frankly exhausting chatter he’s expected to bypass, were Jack anyone else. 

However, Hiccup has never read people well. So, he asks Jack a few minutes into the lull, “would you rather I rather play something instead?”

Jack shakes his head, “I’m alright. But later…yeah. Some music would be nice.”

“Well, feel free to pick the song.” Hiccup nods at him, then thinks better of it, “unless it’s a genuinely bad one—I'm taking the reins, in that case. My car, my rules, and all that.”

Jack doesn’t say anything, and after a few seconds, Hiccup cranes his neck to the side. Jack sits, eyes looking down, a clouded expression crowding up his features. He doesn't fidget, doesn't play with his surroundings, with these things between them. He sits as though sculpted from cold marble; life pulled from the pulse of him. You’re not good at reading others, Hiccup wets his lips, unsure. Slowly tearing his gaze away from Jack to the long, endless road that stretched far beyond the horizon. Don’t play pretend, you’re not good with people.

No, he tightens his grip on the wheel, but I want to try.

“Did you know,” he says, “I had an English teacher with a hook for an arm?” 

Jack’s eyes, a glassy sort, blink out of the far-off place he’d found himself in. His head tilts, eyes lingering on the ground.

“He doesn’t actually need the hook. I mean, who does—but he thinks it’s cool, so the hook stays. And, and it’s not just the hook, you know. He’s got the whole set. Think toolbox, except he gets to screw them into his arm by convenience. Screwdrivers, hammers, dremel machines, flashlights—the kinds that burn your corneas and then some? And the thing is, I don’t think he’s ever made a hand. Just a hand. At least a wooden one for, I dunno—” Hiccup taps his fingers against the wheel, the grip easing. “To be clear, his definition of ‘formal event attire’ includes a tankard-shaped prosthetic and a peg leg that sounds like a maraca with each step you take. People thought of him as a hazard for this, they’re not entirely wrong.”

Jack laughs, eyes crinkled at the edges, a soft curve to his lips, the sound crystal and clear. A thing of clean light. With it Hiccup thinks, with a strange awe, oh, let’s try that again. His voice picks up some pace.

“And maybe, if you were from these parts, and had a bad haircut with even worse bangs, maybe you’d be thinking, but what about the safety precautions! What about the poor children! Because look, lady, first of all, it’s the small children you ought to look out for the most, and not from a place of worry and poorly hidden entitlement. Kids can and will obliterate any ego you still have and then spit on your shoes. Forget about the kids, they’re fine. They’re bored. There’s so much you can do in a small town at the edge of nowhere without getting a little creative. If you don't get creative, they’ll get creative themselves! And you do not want that." He nods, as solemn as he can with the smile edging his mouth, "trust me.”

Jack’s eyes flicker up to him, peering through the silver lashes, a statue breathed back to life, the eyes gleaming and the grin crooked. “Speaking from experience?” 

“Only some.” He makes a disjointed swing of the hand. Something most would define as emotive. Easy to disguise, to laugh off. Stimming to those that know better. “That’s Berk for you. You go to a class with seven, maybe ten kids per year, same as the year before and the year all parents decided to go have their kids at the same time—you'd think they had a reunion or something to agree to these things."

Jack's shoulder shakes, and Hiccup takes it as his cue to continue.

"One of the teachers has a hook and wooden peg leg he sometimes trips you with because he thinks he’s hilarious. The other teacher has a bucket over his head and can tell when the weather's going to turn array or when milk sours. The last one has been in a vow of silence for the last forty years. The last one, for the record,” he shakes his wrist, a quick, flickering motions. “Teaches history.”

Hiccup peels his gaze from the road to Jack, and while there’s a curve to his mouth, the edges strain, the lips pulled in tight. His hands flutter again, but there’s a nervous flicker to them. Jack looks to the back of the car, where his staff lays innocently, jostled by the occasional ill-made seam in the road. 

“I see what you’re doing there, by the way,” Jack says. “Thanks.”

Hiccup shrugs, tight in the way it goes up, “just returning the favor.” One shoulder rises higher than the other, both pulling back for a moment in a resemblance of a stretch, an awkward thing. 

“It helped, earlier. Your story, I mean.” Hiccup tries, giving Jack a clumsy smile, feeling the way it sits sideways on his face. “Even if you did technically call me an idiot by omission.”

Hiccup frowns when the silence stretches, Jack’s elegant hands fiddling with the blanket in his lap, stretching the corners.

There’s a long stretch of trees here, thin and uniformed. The lower branches peeling off, this stretch of wood a sickly thing. More of an imitation of a living, thriving forest. Something, Hiccup finds, the Americans of the suburban east coast are profoundly unfamiliar with.

Chapter Text

“You see me.”

See you, how? Hiccup’s brows furrow. Some satellite, or a plane that hangs above the road, methodically blinks as it follows the curve of the horizon before it’s gone. Is Jack talking about the conversation, this strange ease between them? Or is he talking about the streets, how the bustling bodies in cities pass the weary and ill with their cardboard signs and disjointed, unclean clothes? Either way, Hiccup shifts his hands on the wheel, feeling heavy, the answer’s the same.

“I see you.”

But Jack isn’t looking at him, he’s looking at the backseat, a shadow crossing his features. Then, there’s a pull to his mouth, a clicking to the jaw. A hard, determined gleam to his eyes, a thing so cold it burns.

“Pull over.”

Hiccup squints. “What? No, we’ve still got another three hours, I’m not pulling over.”

“I’m telling you,” he says, not like a command, but a missing piece. Someone else’s leverage he’s bound to give away and set free, something Hiccup wouldn’t want to miss. Jack reaches to the back, pulling the staff close, “you’re going to want to pull over.”

The image comes unbidden, Jack tumbling out of the passenger seat and into the thin trees, the dark swallowing him. He thinks of years ago, an old woman with late-stage dementia wandering out in the night while her family slept, and how in the search it was Hiccup who found the ice crusting over her at sunrise. The horizon pastel in its hues, a pink gleam in the snow. The ice a diamond sheath to her paper pale body, the skin so translucent that he could see the veins that made the hand, a thing that reached at nothing. He doesn't remember what her face looked like, or the eyes. Only the lilac nightdress, and the shape of the mound she made, there in the snow. He can already see, should Jack leave, that he’d remember how Jack turned away better than he’d remember what Jack looked like, than what he sounded like.

“Hiccup—”

“No. No. Unless it’s a bathroom break or—whatever, I’m not going to pull over from the road in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere—” 

“Hiccup.” There’s a staff in Jack’s hand. “Hikke.”

“What? What can possibly be so important—”

“Look at me.”

Hiccup looks, face twisting in mid-shout, until sees the frost spew from Jack’s staff, winding from the fibrous twist of wood, a slow bloom. Hiccup’s face slackens. He sees the spider-thin threads that curl upward, something wanting, silver in the sparse light. Hiccup’s eyes go wide, and the car drifts sideways. Jack puts a hand against the wheel, to steady it, and the frost spreads to Hiccup’s hand, a spooling thing that curls like vines. The cold sharp, a thing that cuts, and Hiccup yanks his hand as the ice bites into the skin of him.

The car swerves violently. Hiccup lunges forward and jerks at the wheel until they slam into a stop in the emergency lane, breathing heavily. In jerky motions, pure reflex, he shifts to park before clinging back to the wheel like a lifeline.

Jack doesn't breathe at all. Hiccup can only feel Jack’s stare, those eyes blue as the dead woman's veins, the specks darker than the sea. Hiccup stares at the wheel, his hands trembling as he still clings to it, eyes blown wide as his chest heaves. When he opens his mouth, no sound comes out other than a thin wheeze. He swallows, working the jaw, before he says, “you’re Jack.” Hiccup’s eyes narrow, the gaze calculating, “your name is Jack.”

“Yes.”

Hiccup raises his chin, sees Jack's fingers interlock with one another, the rest of him still and hardened.

Perhaps the situation should feel unreal. Artificial. It doesn't. It feels acutely real. More than that, it makes sense. Twisted, hopeful, freakish sense. Hiccup isn't sure he can blame adrenaline on his reasoning.

“The pond,” Hiccup sneers, his knuckles white in long-built uncertainty, now breaking into something sharp and grounding, “is too deep to be anything other than a lake.”

“...What?”

“The dreams.” He hissed, his expression twisted as he whirls towards Jack, eyes pulsing. “The dreams. The dreams.”

Looking at Jack now, it’s impossible to mistake him for human. The pearlescent, pale skin. How his hair shines like moonlight. How he flutters, how he moves with this jubilant grace, like leaves in the wind. How the cold pools from him, even with the heat on full blast, even with a quilt loosely hanging off his lap, the frost curling over the edges and burrowing at the stitches. Frost blooms on the blue hoodie like unspooling fern leaves. Jack doesn't breathe. Oh god, he doesn't even breathe. Jack’s like ice shaped into a man, a moving sculpture. Something more than human, or something less.

“You’re giving me dreams,” Hiccup rubs at his hand, the rime coming off in flakes, the skin red. “I keep drowning, and they’re becoming more real. Nobody knows how deep the lake goes, nobody knows that it’s a lake. Nobody but you.”

And me.

Jack stares, hands poised in surrender. The staff balances on top of the quilt, both possessing a sandy glitter to them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t make dreams.”

“It’s your lake. Who the fuck else, if not you?”

Jack leans back, eyes wide. “I don’t know.” His hands swing, his voice has a hysteric edge, “that’s not my jurisdiction.”

“Juris—” Hiccup stares at him, at Jack’s tense stance, the furrowed brows and pinched eyes, how his lips are pulled into a thin line. How Jack leans away from him. Hiccup slumps, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You don’t know.” He buries his face into his hands, “you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

Hiccup drops his hands in time to see Jack deflate, the relief shown from the slope of his mouth, how the eyelids droop. “No,” Jack says, “I don’t. I really, really don’t.” Then he frowns, flickering his gaze back to Hiccup. “Drowning? That’s what you dream about?”

“It’s not—it’s not really drowning. I’m just—there. There somewhere.” He sinks, deeper and deeper still, the light receding. There, at a lake he's never seen. Even though this lake is clearly an unspoken pillar that's entwined deep into the very foundations of this town. A lake everyone knows of, but no one goes to for some reason that nobody talks about.

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Well, why not, you’re Jack fucking Frost!” His hands twist into fists, forearms and wrists flexing, feeling the way the muscles tingle, ready to burst. He shakes them instead, unseeing. “I didn’t even know there was a lake, to know there was a lake! I keep wanting to correct people, but I look like I’m fucking mansplaining if I say that’s it’s too deep to be a pond when I’ve never even seen a picture. I think I’m going crazy, making shit up, but that wasn't it.”

“Uh,” Jack’s expression scrunches, along with Hiccup’s decorum. “What’s mansplaining?”

“Is that everything you’re getting from this?” Hiccup groans. He feels himself cringe, something to bring hands over face and, barely, resists the urge. He runs is hand through his hair instead in one frantic sweep, “what is happening?”

Jack blinks, like he’s the one unsure of what’s going on. “You know, I sort of expected you to go into denial, not to go through all five stages of grief, straight to acceptance—and beyond.” 

Hiccup lowers his head to the wheel, feeling the cool press against his brow, one side colder than the other freezing. He sighs, throwing decorum to the side.

“I have good reasons for that, too.”

“What’s that?” Hiccup hears the smile on Jack’s lips. “No grudges nor traditions this time?"

Hiccup shifts, neck still bent awkwardly, meeting Jack’s eyes, already locked on him.

“Two words: Ruffnut and Tuffnut. Havoc extraordinaries.” 

Jack blinks, again. His expression turns an odd mix between tired and demanding, something Hiccup had probably been wearing a minute ago. “Why is it that I’m the magic guy, yet you’re the one handing out life-shattering ricochets? I don’t know what that even means.”

History in the making has been asking Hiccup that same question—or, at least the essence of it—since he was six and tracking wild horses. If Hiccup can’t give his dad, resident: don’t be weird, go with the crowd, an explanation, then Hiccup can’t give Jack Frost one either. “They’re a couple of twins where I’m from. They’re prank-masters. Devils in disguise. Two for the price of none. The things they’ve come up with could rival with all of this…any day, really.”

Jack gasps: loud, hitched, and betrayed. Hiccup snorts. “In fact,” Hiccup says, pointing down at his feet, “you’re looking at one of their wonders right now.”

Jack squints, leaning in, and looking utterly lost. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. You’re handsome, sure, but I'd credit that to your parents first—and whatever it is you’re trying to show me down there.”

Hiccup falters, jerking straight up as his knee hits the wheel, pain bursting and that does not matter right now. “What? No, I—” What? “My foot. I meant my foot.”

It’s Jack's turn to stare at him like he’s insane. The way tonight is going, he might as well be. Hiccup rolls his eyes, angling his prosthetic leg with his hands to wiggle it out from under the pedals, bumping the sides of the space, over the stick shift, until the metal heel inside his boot that’s attached to his calf emerges. “Actually,” Hiccup wiggles it off, and takes the long, and at this point, slimy with sweat prosthetic sock off and slings both to the back. I’m going to have to wash that when I get home. “I should’ve taken that off once I was in the car. Prosthetics blisters like you wouldn't believe.”

Jack stares, enough that Hiccup has begun to lower his stump back down, suddenly feeling self-conscious.

And then: “they cut off your leg?!”

“What? No!” Hiccup laughs, incredulous, “it was a prank.”

“They cut your leg, as a prank?!” Jack gapes. “Even I don't go that far. It’s a leg, what’re you going to do with that?" He pauses, nodding slowly, “you can do a lot of pranks with a missing leg, actually. Okay, I see it. In a frankly disturbing, twisted way.”

Hiccup shakes his head, still smiling, “prank gone wrong, is all.” He can’t help but wonder how he wouldn’t have been smiling about this, and with such ease, an hour ago. “So, Jack Frost,” he coughs, tries to work gravity’s pull in his favor, bringing back the rising curls edging his eyes and lips down. He tries not to give himself away. “How…how old are you?”

Jack doesn’t raise an eyebrow, but it’s a close thing. “Nineteen. Why?”

“How…long have you been nineteen?” Hiccup makes sure to word it right and slow, without breaking eye contact.

“...no fucking way.”

“How long—”

“Shut up.

“How long have you been—”

“Are you serious right now? Are you quoting me Twilight right now?” 

Hiccup wheezes hard at last, laughing a giggly sort that makes him go HeeHeeHee(eee) instead of your usual hahahah or even HuagHuagHuagh, for the more adventurous and willing to risk choking on their own spit. It comes out of his throat instead of his stomach, something his father might have tried teaching him out of, were his laugh something that saw the light of day more than twice or thrice per year.

He’s out of air now, and a little delirious, which he thinks is fair. He can see it condense and turn into steam before his eyes, dense and swirling against the freezing wall of ice with the face of a person and an apparent interest in the film industry. It only makes him laugh harder.

Jack’s grin, meanwhile, grows manic. “Do you think I sparkle in the sun? Come on. Come on. Make my day.”

Hiccup guffaws, head hitting the back seat. “Shut the fuck up, I take it back.” 

Hiccup’s laughing, but when he looks at how Jack laughs and keeps laughing, also looking a little out of it, he can’t help but think: yeah, that’s the right one.

The laughter slows down, receding slowly into its cadence, a certain lightness to its movements. Unhurried. Hiccup moves to turn off the heater—at this point, what was the use—when Jack stops him, the tips of his white pale fingers grazing Hiccup’s before he’s pulling away just as fast. “Keep it on,” he says. “It’s probably the only thing stopping this thing from freezing all the way over." He frowns, "actually, you should probably get on the move before any gears—motors, whatever, freeze shut.” The wood twirls in his hands, his limbs shifting, butterfly’s wings in a jar, “let it be said, that normally I have a better grip at it. Today kind of threw a curve on me.”

Hiccup looks at him, chest not quite settled to its natural rhythm, “grip on what?”

Jack points around, the top of his staff circling in rotations. Hiccup notices how the frost, almost ice but not quite, has spread. It reaches the roof, the glovebox. It spans across the passenger window, making it hard to see the outside, slow in its uptake, but without showing signs of stopping.

“Oh.” There it was, honest-to-God magic, in case he had any doubts.

Hiccup shifts to drive and looks over his shoulder, then in the rear-view mirror. He checks the empty lane once again, and heads forward.

“Don’t worry,” Jack reassures, “you can brush it off once I’m out of here. Either that or wait a while, whatever suits you. There shouldn’t be any permanent damage to your car…I think.” 

Hiccup sighs. “The car’s shit, anyways, and I’m pretty good at fixing it. As long as it runs, I don’t care at this point.”

Jack hums, brow raised. “Is that a glass half full or half empty kind of mindset you’ve got there going on?”

“It’s realism.”

“Right.” Jack lounges on his seat, sprawling across as much as possible, “so how’s that going on for you nowadays?” He then blows a snowflake out of thin air, letting it dangle between them.

“I’m rarely caught by surprise.” He eyes the snowflake suspiciously, “that’s a plus.”

“Oh really?” The fractals of the snowflake shift like a breathing kaleidoscope before dispersing into powder. There’s a sly, shit-eating grin to his expression. “Also, to answer the question, I’ve been nineteen for like three hundred years.” 

Hiccup froze. “What.”

“Anyways—”

“No. No, no. Do not fucking—anyways—me. You’re—” three hundred years. What has happened in the last three hundred years? “—Older than two world wars. You’re older than the civil war.”

“This is true.” He nods, “history books always get some things twisted.” 

Hiccup stared blankly at the front window, trying to grasp the vast scope of time. “Nintendo started in 1889. You are older than Nintendo.”

“This is also true.”

“What the fuck.”

“It gets worse.”

Hiccup slowly turns away from the window, staring straight at Jack with an unreadable expression. “How does it get worse? Why is everything tonight about getting worse?”

“Santa’s real, actually.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe, maybe it isn't. How could you tell? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it St. Nicholas?” He snickers. “Greatest trick in the book he pulled, by the way. Making people believe an ex-convict's a saint. Cleaver way of getting pardoned.”

Hiccup stared, horrified. “Why are you doing this to me right now?”

“Because you’re a realist.”

“And?”

“And I’m being real with you.”

Hiccup snaps his eyes at him, lightning fast, “no, look. You are real. I can see you’re real. Which I’m still processing.” He focuses on the road but keeps shooting Jack incredulous glances. “But Santa. Come on.”

Jack shrugs. “Why not?”

“It’s Santa.”

“You’re giving Jack Frost a ride in your car.”

Hiccup blinks. Well, when he puts it like that. “I am, aren’t I? I really am.” Hiccup drags a cold hand over his face, intercepting the mist slipping out of his lips. It slips through his fingers instead, like water slithering through concrete cracks. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what else?”

“What else?”

“What else is real. Just—” the car shakes, wheels billowing over a bump in the road, “you said dreams weren’t in your jurisdiction. That implies that it’s in someone else's. It implies you people use words like jurisdiction for magic matters. So, you know, give it to me straight. Rip off the band aid, so to speak.”

There’s a long stretch of silence, the wind whistling past, muffled by the windows, as the heater blows at full blast. When Jack doesn't immediately answer, Hiccup turns to him and sees Jack staring out the front window, looking thoughtful, resting his head on his hand. Finally, Jack says, “there’s Sandy, though the stories know him as the Sandman. He makes dreams. An artist, if I ever saw one, has a lot to say, even when he’s mute. Not everyone knows about him, but the children do.”

“So, it’s him? The one giving me the dreams?” He thinks of the strange peace, the quiet. The calm currents, and nightmares don’t sound quite right.

Jack shakes his head, “not quite. He gives children dreams. He wouldn't be able to give you any, even if he wanted to.” He taps against his staff, staring out the window with his brows furrowed, concentrated in thought. “It would sound more like Pitch, except he operates under the same rules for his nightmares: only children, only believers.”

Rules?

Hiccup files that away for later. “Pitch?”

“Boogie Man, King of Nightmares. Sworn enemy. Him and Sandy have practically known each other since the dawn of time.” Jack makes a flicking motion with his hand, “Pitch is a bit of a bitch, honestly.”

“Oh,” Hiccup says, pretending to get it, but not understanding it at all. “Sounds kinda homoerotic for your friend Sandy there.”

Jack sputters, bursts out in a loud cackle that swings his body forward as if he got a punch in the gut. “You know what? That would…that would make a lot of sense, actually,” he wheezes. “There was rope and a whole lot of whooping during their last fight together.”

“No fucking way. Publicly?” Never, in all of Hiccup’s life, did he expect to get gossip of actual mythical proportion. What else had he been missing?

“I was there. It was incredible at the time, but now with this frame of mind I feel like I should've looked away.”

Hiccup coughs into his hand, “Pitch Black? More like Fifty Shades of Gray.”

“Stop, don’t give me spoilers.” He slaps his hand on his knee, Hiccup doing much of the same, both sounding like different brands of teapot. “Seriously though, god, don’t say that. I need to be able to look at him in the face if I ever end up fighting the guy again. What is it with you and Twilight?”

Hiccup shrugs, the movement somehow feeling cocky. “Shit’s funny. They made us watch it in class for literature.”

“No. That can't be right.”

“In a town as small as mine, with zero bars to speak of and flimsy electricity half of the week? There’s only so much good content to come our way, so you watch whatever you get, quality be damned. Plus, Berk almost fits the vibe of the movie. Key word, almost. Maybe the teacher wanted to live the dream.” Hiccup grins, staring out the window. “Alright, back on topic. So, who else?”

“Hmm?”

“The dreams, my hit list. Who else could cause them?”

The seat crinkles as Jack lifts his too-long legs. From the edge of Hiccup’s peripheral vision, he can see how Jack’s feet are poised as his knees knock against each other, grazing Jack’s chin. Seeing him curl up in the chair, crouched like a gargoyle, is like watching something far too large trying to squeeze into something unfair for their size—you can’t trap a hailstorm in a box the same way Jack can’t make his existence conform to metal doors and crystal glass and a seat that should have been vacuumed weeks ago, crumbs astray. But right now, there’s no hailstorm and there are no clouds. Just a boy that’s larger than himself.

Jack taps his fingers, the slender digits a stark white while the tips where a dark blue; a sea-foam green if the light hits right. “There used to be more of us. I would have been able to give you more names, then. But as it stands, I’m the youngest, and most have been gone for a long time, long before me.” Jack shrugs, empty and dull on the outside, but Hiccup can see the spaces between the cracks, “I don’t have any more names to give. At least not that could cause this, I don’t think.”

“So they’re just—gone? Gone where?”

Jack gives an empty chuckle. “Depends on what gods they believed in, and if believing was enough.” 

Hiccup parts his lips, “oh.” He frowns, “but then—the lady from earlier?”

“That’s—different.”

Hiccup thinks about the phone call, a thing of static, “so she’s…uh…” don’t be spirit racist, don’t be spirit racist—

“Human? Yeah. It was a whole—” Jack’s arms flowing with the conversation, emphatic and full of grand sweeps, “step-by-step process. A miracle of its own, even though it has its loose ends, too. Not like…not like this.”

“How else was it supposed to be?”

“Not this easy, let me tell you. Certainly never by accident,” he says, then softer: “never when I want it to be and always when someone else thinks it convenient.” He sighs, “the moon isn’t even out today, so, who knows.”

“...Do I even want to know—”

Jack’s tone spikes, something light. A faux casualness to it, strained around the edges. “Man in the moon. Guy in the chair. I.T. guy of Earth protection magical services.” He nods up ahead, “did you know that the moon’s a giant spaceship? It has a sail and everything.”

“That—” Hiccup pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut as if that would block out this current unreality. “That sounds like complete horse-shit. That doesn't even sound remotely real. A conspiracy.” He lowers his hand, squinting at the road. “Is this a normal thing for you? Sporadically giving people life changing revelations? At the crack of—what time is it?”

Jack reaches for the phone, slipping it into his palm, touching only the phone cover. The screen lights up. “Close to 5:00,” he says, lowering the phone, “...and no, not really. Like I said: not easy. Not normal, not remotely.”

Hiccup’s back loses some of the tension built throughout the layers of muscle, “well. Good news is we still have time, then,” his head falls back on the seat’s headrest, “at least to make it look like I went on—on an early run, or something.”

Hiccup sees Jack’s shadow turn over to the driver’s seat in a sharp twist, blue eyes burning onto the side of his head. The shadow, still and watchful, throws his head back in one single hard laugh. “You sneaked out.”

Hiccup grumbles, “more like a tactical retreat.”

“You sneaked out with the car. In the middle of the night.”

“Correction: it's my car, I can do whatever I want to do with it.” 

“Not if it’s against the house-rules,” Jack sings.

Hiccup groans, shooting him an annoyed look. “Do you really care about that? You don’t seem the type.”

Jack smiles, wry, “what gave it away?”

Hiccup turns to him, long and hard, not taking the bait. “I wasn’t supposed to be able to see you at all, was I? None of this was supposed to happen.”

Jack’s smile fades, the lips tightened as looks to the side, looking away from Hiccup.

“And the dreams,” he looks forward, the road a long stretch of gray static, “maybe you didn’t cause them, but you’re a part of it, somehow. It’s your lake. Jack's lake. It’s yours because it’s too deep to be a pond, and you know that. I knew that. No one else knows. Nobody goes near it. To be honest, I’m starting to think that maybe they can’t.” 

“Maybe,” Jack says gently, “some dreams are just dreams.”

“No, no.” Hiccup shakes his head. “You don’t know what they’re like.”

“They’re dreams, Hiccup.”

“And you are in my car!”

“Why is it so important?”

Hiccup lets go of the wheel, both of his hands free, hands spread and incredulous. “Because something happened there! Because I thought I was going off the hook ever since I left Berk! And every time I asked no one could give me an answer because they’d get weird and—and their face’s would zone out, and I didn’t know whether it was my imagination, or, or—” 

Hiccup clinches the wheel. He can feel Jack’s stare on him, a thing so intense that the cold gaze burns.

Hiccup exhales slowly. “Everything feels so dead since I went away, Jack, everything is dull, and lifeless. Everywhere except for Burgess, and your lake, and whatever is in the lake, and now my car apparently, because you're in it as well!”

"Wait." Something in Hiccup’s head goes fast, too fast to follow; a disjointed process, connected by frail, frayed seams. He zeroes on Jack. “Because…you’re in it.”

Jack frowns, “I don’t follow.”

Hiccup stares at Jack's slender hands, at the cold, smooth digits. In Hiccup’s dreams, his hands looked like that, yet his hands are spotted with freckles and have a red tint from hours in the sun, wandering in the woods. The body he drifts in, when he’s there in the deep and sinking, the dark slowly swallowing him, is not his own. 

“It’s you.” Hiccup’s ears ring, his heart throbbing in his chest. “You drowned in that lake. There’s something in it, isn’t there? It was always you.”

Jack’s eyes widened, the edges sharpening to something fragile and dangerous; stalactites growing during the passage of night. Hiccup’s jaw shuts close with a click, taking him a few tries to get it moving again, “crap, sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t know why I said that.”

If Jack’s hands were white before, now they are borderline translucent. They wrap around the wood, the ice nesting in the gaps, hard as stone. The frost creeps over the surface of the car, inside and out, pulsing, and Hiccup’s body starts shivering in response. He parts his lips once more, to say something, but thinks better of it, shutting his mouth and looking dead ahead.

It always ends the same way, speaking without thinking. One might've thought he would have learned by now.

The silence that follows is a thing that murmurs, with eyes and ears everywhere. Hiccup thinks of town hall parties with loud, boisterous group-chat with easy conversations: the ones he’s bound to get singled out from, while he watches from a corner. He’s there again, for being too blunt—for the misplaced silences and awkwardly placed jokes. He feels the silence stretch, wondering if it’ll continue to do so until it breaks with a snap.

That pale ghost of a hand reaches forward and presses a button. The radio clicks on, making Hiccup blinks away the memories, dispersing like blown-away dust. The static warbles at first, filling the car, but Jack eventually lands on a song strung by guitar and without lyrics. 

Hiccup startles when a weight is placed on his shoulders, cold like a thin sheet of ice, and it’s the blue quilt. Hiccup turns to Jack, who withdraws, eyes unblinking. He looks wild, like this, with those eyes focused on him, animal in their intensity. Moving as though trying not to startle Hiccup.

“So,” Jack says slowly, “they're not just dreams.”

“No,” Hiccup pulls on the quilt, trying to center it into something functional, to where he could drive comfortably, but to where the blanket can reasonably hold the heat, the fabric cool against his skin. “They’re not.”

“So…” Jack drolls, right leg untucking from under his chin, stretching under the hollow groove beneath the glove box compartment, “you dream of me often?”

Then just like that, the tension leaves and nothing snaps. The murmurs go quiet, and Hiccup steps out of the corner. Hiccup laughs, a jaded, uneven thing, but then the sound dies, and Hiccup’s jaw tenses.

"You sink deeper every night," he tells Jack, the edges strained, "or we both do. I don't know." Hiccup exhales. “It’s peaceful until it isn't. You can’t move, or I can’t move you. I am you. Then I wake up, convinced that I have water in my lungs until reality kicks it.” He waves his hand side to side in small circular motions, “it was sporadic at first, a dream here or there, but now it's nightly. I keep thinking that I’m going to hit the bottom, but I can’t. It's deep. Deep, even, for a lake.” It’s a dark, gasping abyss. A black hole. It’s as if there is no bottom, and the lake somehow stretches into infinity. Complete and total darkness, doomed to be carried further into it by the current. 

Hiccup can’t imagine dying like that. The dreams are terrible, but he wakes up.

He wakes up.

“What’s the point of them?”

Hiccup keeps his eyes on the road, but he tilts his head towards Jack, “hmm?” 

“The dreams, what's the point of them? I sank a long time ago, centuries into the past,” he says this simply, factually, with clean edges. “I don’t even remember most of it, to be honest. Just how I was pulled out, and why I sank. There’s nothing to change.”

“You’re asking me? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t know why, or how, or for what reason.” Hiccup sighs. “I don’t know how to stop having them.” Hiccup turns to Jack. “How were you pulled out?”

“The moon,” Jack tells him, eyes distant. “The moon took me out, and I couldn't be seen anymore. I forgot what I was, and I was something new.”

But what killed you? Hiccup wanted to ask, looking back at the road, the darkness slowly starting to lift, but what led you to the deep? But Jack’s withdrawing, staring out of the passenger window, the frost on his clothes and skin slowly thickening to ice.

“Something new?”

“A spirit.” He waves a hand, “Jack Frost.”

“...Right.” Hiccup flicks the blinker on, changing lanes and taking an exit off the highway and onto the service road. “So…not a vampire, then.”

From the corner of his eye, Hiccup sees Jack’s lips twitch, the slightest curve to the corners. “No, sadly. I’m no Edward.”

“Ok, but, serious question. I have to ask.” Hiccup placed a flat hand on the dashboard, “are vampires real?” 

Jack smirks. “Used to be.”

“Used to be? So, not anymore?” Hiccup squints, “are you sure?”

“I have no way of being 100% sure, but chances are that they're gone. If not gone, then remarkably rare.”

“Oh. Hm.” Hiccup thinks of all the folklore of violent, parasitic vampires v.s. all the folklore that has benevolent vampires, modern romances not included, and those odds don’t look too good either. He makes a face. “Don’t like that.”

“Why?" Jack tilts his head, “I thought you’d be ecstatic.”

“Ha ha.”   

They talk. Chatter fills the empty corners of the vehicle, loud when the conversation drives snickers into full blown laughs. They trade stories, they trade jokes. Hiccup watches as Jack’s hands flutter throughout the car ride, a casual freedom to his movements that a deep-rooted side of Hiccup can’t help but envy and cherish. How Jack drinks in the sight of his shit lemon car as if observing the phenomenon of phenomenons, and something Hiccup softens at the sight.

The frost is beautiful. Hiccup’s eyes can only flicker to the fractals as he keeps an eye on the road. At stop signs, at red lights, but even in these stolen glances, he can see how intricate the lines, like the vines in leaves. An art of unfathomable depth perception. A thing that blooms.

Then there’s the silence. Comfortable and plain, something that requires little thought, even though Hiccup has been wired to look out for it, but every time Hiccup looks at Jack for any put-off signs, he finds Jack’s expression smooth, his posture easy. 

Then, before Hiccup knows it, it’s over. He turns into one of the street roads, slowing down and coasting down until Hiccup reaches a dead end. The car sputters as he sets it to park. “Sorry,” he tells Jack, “this is as close as I can get you with a car.” There are no roads to the lake. No trails. Only the dense woods, the trees bare and looming over them. The humid air crisp and cold, that scent of loamy silt.

Jack shrugs, squinting past the windshield and into the darkness. He makes a lop-sided grin before rolling the window down, twisting the crank, the wind whistling through and the air rolling in. “Looks like home to me.” 

“You sure you don’t want me getting you closer to—” where was Hiccup taking him, exactly? He remembers the phone call with Mrs. Bennett on the line, does he go to where she is, if she even is in Burgess? But then, Hiccup thinks about how ill-fit Jack was in the car, how easily the frost spread, and he can’t imagine confining him, a living storm, to a house. Or does Jack stay in the woods, like some wild thing? Or to the lake, possessing some under-water palace like figures in folklore do? Does Jack have any need for roofs and tiles? Does he sleep there, in the deep? Does a thing like Jack sleep at all? “—I don’t know.”

“It’s close enough,” Jack says simply, like Hiccup’s curiosity isn’t burning a hole through him. 

Hiccup holds onto the steering wheel, eyeing past Jack and to the tall, black trees beyond the passenger window. “...Right.”

Jack only stares outside as well, peering out from those long silver lashes, head tilted low, looking up. Not making a move to reach the handle yet. Hiccup makes no move to prompt him to, either. Wanting to preserve this, this easiness between them, in amber. Somehow compress this moment of time into pearls and hold the vision, tucking them away in jars like buttons, honey, and spare change for a rainy day, but he knows he can’t put time in a pocket. Couldn’t, with a wild thing like Jack.

“It’s been fun,” Jack tells him, and he still doesn't turn, doesn't even reach for the door handle. Hiccup might not be good at reading people, but he can taste the goodbye, like he can taste the humid air, dense and coiling, cool and crisp. A heaviness in the air, a weight. He shifts, the wooden staff knocking against the window, sliding some of the frost in a disgruntled line, “it's not every day I get to carpool.”

“...How do you even get around?”

Jack’s eyes crinkle at the edges, a secretive tilt to his smile. “You have your ride, I have mine.” 

“I bet it doesn’t even have cup holders,” Hiccup says. Through the wide open window, a sharp draft runs in, hitting his side, fluttering his hair and slamming hard against the car, the cold cutting like a knife. Hiccup blinks, “...why do I feel like I just offended someone just now?”

Jack laughs, a crackling sound, like ice freezing bubbles in mid-pop, the sound light like the winter air drifting past icicles. “I’d speak your next words carefully.”

“Uh.” With how Jack’s eyes shine, it’s hard to tell if he’s fucking with him or not, but Hiccup decides to not take his chances. Because magic is real. God, that’s going to take some time to get used to. “My bad, everyone.”

The wind blows easier. 

Jack slips out of the window like water; the motion should be awkward, but somehow it’s not. He moves like a cat, like petals or leaves drifting in the wind, with his strange, playful grace. He doesn't stumble or jerk when he lands on the ground outside: it's completely silent, like he’s drifting in air. Jack’s still looking away. 

Finally, Hiccup watches him wave, the balls of his feet sinking into the snow like a spring ready to jump.

Hiccup fumbles before clipping off his seatbelt, tossing over his shoulder before scrambling closer to the passenger’s seat. The blanket slides off of him, pooling to the passenger-side floor, but this doesn't register. It’s not important. Leaning in, eyes wide and holding himself still as the sunrise hits Jack, drinking in the brilliance of him as flowers lean into the rain. 

“Hey, Jack?” Hiccup says, feeling out of air, with something stuck in his throat, “where are you going?”

Are you coming back?

“To the lake,” still, Jack doesn't turn back to him, “that's home. Always circle back to it, no matter how far I drift.” He shifts, then. 

“Jack!” Hiccup says, barely resisting the urge to lunge, to grab hold of him and stop him from walking into the dark. To say something less desperate than asking Jack to turn around. Let me remember something better than how you turned and walked away. “Tell Sandy, he’s better off without him!”

Jack laughs, a startled wisp, body dangling like a broken swing, “I won’t!”

The wind picks up again, sliding against Hiccup’s cheek, whistling against the borders of the window still with more cadence than usual. The last thing Hiccup sees of Jack Frost is a shadow scurrying through the trees, a few streaks of light inviting themselves through the trees, cracks breaching the forest, tucking between the gaps of bark and the borders of flaunting vegetation. Hiccup looks up at the sky, craning his neck past the roof of the car, noticing the light blue undertones scraping the morning sky.

He slips back onto his seat with a grunt, using his right arm to reach back, making up for the unbalanced weight of his body. Thinking better of it, he reaches out for his prosthetic laying on the backseat, blindly touching the carpeting until retrieving the sock, still inside out and still damp with sweat. They are cold to the touch, the metal and plastic surfaces of the artificial leg burning the tips of his fingers like a block of pure ice. 

The protective cloth and the leg goes in place with a shiver, and it’s then that Hiccup realizes that the music is still on, the radio wheeled to a different channel than usual. So is the frost, glistering in the smallest of rainbows, showing off the right side of his car to the sunlight.

Wait. Hiccup snatches his phone, lighting the screen with a touch. 4 missed calls. 10 messages. Fuck. Shit. Damn it. The back of his head hits his seat. Not fast enough to get home without dad noticing. He sighs, before rolling his head forward and setting it back to drive. If anything, going back to that house and facing dad would serve as a great distraction to…everything that just happened.

Hiccup had to go home, eventually.

Chapter Text

Hiccup sees that his father is already waiting for him, looking out the window as Hiccup glides onto the driveway next to a red pick-up truck. 

He makes a sharp inhale through his clenched teeth, wincing, before sighing. He shifts to park, pocketing his phone before slowly stepping out of the driver's seat. In situations such as these, Hiccup didn’t know if his father would prefer it if Hiccup kept his eyes dead set on him as he walked to the front door, or if it would be better to keep his eyes low. It's hard to judge how much eye-contact people wanted or found ‘appropriate’. His father Stoick, true to his namesake, is especially hard to read. Hiccup, to test the waters, gives a small wave as he walked to the door. Stoick, in a manner eerily similar to Hiccup, pinches the bridge of his nose before shaking his head; the white curtains flickering as he steps out of view.

On any other day, Hiccup’s teeth might have stayed clenched, the pressure against his gums keeping his jaw tight. The line going from underneath his ear to his sternum might have remained visible and unyielding, his stomach stiff, oppressing his lungs for the duration of the day. But today, Santa was real, Jack Frost quotes Frozen, and maybe he hadn’t imagined all those things far at the horizon's curve at sea; staring at him from above the waves back when he was six. 

The door opens before Hiccup can fumble his keys out, the keychain light as it hoops two of the metal pieces together. Unlike the loud bundle he used to carry, different sized keys that threatened to unweave his pockets with each step, these still shine, iron polished with a sentiment barely lived in. Stoick, for a man that had to bend down and suck in air to avoid bumping against most average sized doors—this front door was tailored—he had an impressive swiftness to his steps. 

“Where have you been?”

Well, at least there was no beating around the bush. 

“You know, I’m not sure.” It’s cold, the outer bound fabric of his jacket frigid and slightly stiff with microscopic ice crystals, so he walks past him and steps inside. Besides, nothing beats a spectacle at first morning light—people will be people everywhere, and he’s in no mood for an audience. He’s willing to bet that his father isn't either. “The sea, but I can’t say exactly where.” 

“Not exactly—Hiccup.” Stoick closes the door behind him, twisting and pushing the handle down so that it closes with a whisper and a click instead of thunder and a plea for a full-fledged fight. His voice towers, however, his eyes narrowed and the bushy, wild brows furrowed, “we’re not anywhere close to the sea.”

“I took the fastest route.”

“That’s not the issue,” again, Stoick pinched the bridge of his nose before pointing a flat hand at Hiccup. “The issue is that I had no idea where you were, or when you’d be back.”

“You haven’t even been awake for that long.” There’s a reason why Hiccup wanted to come early, after all. The sun will be lucky if she catches his dad already up and getting dressed, and not any later.

Stoick shoots him a look, “when did you leave?”

Hiccup frowns, looking away.

Stoick spreads his hands. “Well?”

“Around—I don’t know. I didn’t really look at the clock. It was at night.” Hiccup’s eyes flicker further to the left as he does the math, fingers twitching as he counts. “Nine or ten. Eleven, maybe.”

“Hiccup, by god’s teeth,” he says, breathing hard through his nose, a hand rising to his forehead before flying down again. He opens his mouth, shuts it again when the only thing it does is catch air. His eyes briefly flicker upwards like he’s praying for patience. 

It doesn’t last. “What were you thinking? We don’t know this place, not yet—” Stoick turns away, takes one step, and reels back where he was, “anything could have happened. You can’t keep doing these—these little escapades of yours. This isn’t like back home!”

“I know,” Hiccup says, dragging the sound. 

“It very well doesn’t look like it.”

“I’m fine, dad. I was in the car most of the time, anyway.”

“That’s still not the—” Stoick brings a hand to his face, covering his eyes. Usually at this point, Hiccup would consider the conversation over. Stranded, unsure where else it could go. When his father drags his hand off his face and his eyes flicker back to Hiccup, there's a brief gleam of surprise to them, like he expected Hiccup to be gone as well. 

“I’m sorry.” Hiccup says, tilting his head and staring at the brick-red carpet, still unsure about the amount of eye-contact appropriate in this context. “I didn’t want to worry you, and I didn’t think I’d be out for so long. I should’ve at least told you I was going out.” The apology hangs awkwardly between them, the words jilted. It’s hard to tell when people think an apology is sincere enough or not. Hiccup always means what he says, but sometimes the tone isn't right, or his body language was read incorrectly. Sometimes his father knows that he means it, sometimes he doesn't. It’s always a gamble between the two of them.

“And you’re sure you’re fine.”

Hiccup meets his father’s eyes then, sees the shadowed twist in his laugh lines and the worried crease weighing down his brow. Sad, bad, anxious, his mind supplies. Hiccup had a way of making honesty sound like a bad joke, specifically in the way his sentences are crafted—close enough to reach, but not too close to be pulled over. 

“Yeah,” Hiccup says, “I’m okay.”

Look, Hiccup, his father had told him one night in front of the fireplace, when dark pine wood was still hanging above their heads and dicey pipes shuddering from below, I am trying. It’s not easy, but I’m trying. 

Hiccup thinks of the book he found tucked to the back of his dad’s old leather seat, in between the cushions, designedly out of sight. The pastel-colored book with the fancy lettering that Berk’s local library would never be able to locate in any shelf—he’d known, he’d basically lived there, between the moldy tomes and the dozen empty corners, sans the occasional Fishlegs. A tome with a cover that still shined and felt rubbery to the touch and had words like ‘accolade’ and ‘bonhomie’, and could have only been shipped in by one of the nearest islands from the mainland. Which happened to be hours away through rocky, twisted roads and treacherous cold seas. He never saw it again, it burned with the house—but he knew about the book, some self-help about learning to communicate. But Hiccup knew about it. Even if his father will never breathe a word of it.  

“It—” Hiccup licks his lips, cold and chapped. “I had fun, actually.”

His father blinks, and if Stoick had had something ready to say, Hiccup hears none of it. Hiccup has already darted his stare to the side again, close to his ear, but he hears the drawn-out sigh—a deep sound that’s been drained, strained and left to dry, rather than tossed with vehemence as the last option standing.

Hiccup tips his weight from his full-formed leg to the other, balancing most of it on the pylon material-based tip of the prosthetic foot—that nestled into his shoe he bought before everything below the mid-calf was scorched off—with practiced ease.

Stoick nods, slow and tired yet sincere, “I’m glad that you did.” Hiccup sees the way his shoulders give in, the usual sign to suggest that an argument is over and done with, but then Stoick speaks again. Authoritative, but not loud. Hiccup could work with that.

“Next time, you’ll tell me where you’re going,” he says, willing Hiccup to look back at him eye to eye, “and no more being out all night. 1am, at most.”

Next time. Hiccup blinks. Huh. That’s a new one. “Right.”

Stoick raises an eyebrow, in a way that must have been trained. Hiccup rolls his eyes following the sideways nod of his own head, “tell you where I’m going, 1am at most, don’t die and get thrown into a well. Got it.”

An eyebrow twitches. “Good.” Stoick turns away, heading to the kitchen. At first, Hiccup doesn’t follow, heading off to the wooden arch of the hallway that leads deeper into the house, but then his foot stops at the threshold. He turns back to his dad, who already turned the corner. 

Weighing his options, ultimately, he decides to take advantage of the good mood, and he falls back. Walking to the kitchen. His stump is already starting to ache from so much time on his prosthetic, but already he’s lasting longer than he expected to. Probably because he was mostly sitting, and remembered to take it off during both times he was driving. 

Stoick raises his eyebrow once more when Hiccup re-enters through the doorway. Hiccup only shrugs noncommittally.

"I'm surprised that you didn't ground me," Hiccup says cautiously.

"Not like that's ever stopped you," Stoick, turns back to the fridge, grumbling. "Besides, you're an adult. It would be embarrassing for the both of us if I went around grounding my twenty-year-old son."

Setting up breakfast is a silent affair, practiced steps that need no reminding, born from all the years they lived as just the two of them. Even with the new furniture and the bodies, one too small, one too large, Hiccup is adept at deflecting wayward cupboards and thrown-open fridge doors. His father goes high, in charge of the cereal boxes, the bread, the milk—and Hiccup goes low, switching on the coffee maker, the microwave, and pulling out the spoons, placing them on the table alongside the sugar.      

This kitchen is bigger than the one at Berk. Broader. The light comes right in from large windows, dismissing the lamps, and the marble counter doubles as a bar that can easily fit several people. It’s nothing like the slim kitchen Hiccup had grown up oiling the cabinet hinges of. An almost corridor of one undersized windowpane, where only one adult sized Berkian could fit through at the time. However, Hiccup had always been a small, thin thing, and had learned to dodge elbows at the face of busy mornings.

“So,” his father says, halfway through some toast with something red on it—mashed tomatoes. “Fun, you said.”

Hiccup doesn’t look up from his cereal, full spoon wavering midair and milk sloshing back to the bowl from it. He chews, the crackling sound loud in his ears, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yeah.”

“How so?”

“It was relaxing, I suppose.” He says, jabbing floating pieces of cereal under the milk, stirring the pot, “the waves, the wind. Something different.”

His father makes a sound. Not a laugh, not even close, but an attempt. “I’d say we’re full of different, nowadays.”

“Familiar, then,” he takes another spoonful to his lips. “To what I was used to, I guess.”

Stoick swallows his toast full by the third bite and begins to spread the butter on the next one coming. Then he twists the cap off the orange juice’s cartoon box, popping it open, pouring it into his glass. He refrains from pouring into the one beside it until Hiccup nods. Stoick tips the drink into his plastic cup as well.

“Made any friends yet?” 

Hiccup tilts his head up. Stoick isn’t looking at him; rather, perfecting the right amount of mush over the bread over the edges. Turning it around in his palm as if he’d suddenly grown a passion for perfectionism and the fine arts.

Hiccup’s lips thin as his shoulders tenses. Whenever the question came, it was usually unprovoked and was always concluded with the same answer. Hiccup didn’t see the point of it, the question felt more like an accusation. Yet his father continued to ask with faux disinterest, a curious gleam in his eyes. You’ve been asking for years, Hiccup doesn't say. Just trust that I’ll tell you when it happens.

But then, Hiccup pauses, the spoon freezing mid path. He lowers his spoon, thinking that the ice clinging to his car that hadn’t yet melted; the sun was still basking on the crystallites, bouncing from one to the next. The jokes and the stories lingered on Hiccup’s tongue, past the teeth, the jaw, the stomach, bringing forth memories of white and blue silver skin and a crooked smile that laughed with all teeth. And, holy shit, had he made a friend? 

“...Yeah, actually,” he says first, then thinks: wait, really? Hiccup leaves the spoon on the bowl, pushes it back, which is a mistake because now he must search for some other thing to look wildly interested in. Jack didn’t say it and I didn’t say it. Hiccup resists the urge to move his hands, trying to push down the giddy feeling, trying to keep his cool. But then, most people don’t ask if they’re friends, it just is. True until proven otherwise.

A cough bursts out from the opposite side of the table, tearing Hiccup away from his runaway thoughts—there, about to jump off the edge of the table and into his car's passenger seat. Stoick, undoubtedly subtle and all grace as bits fly over the table, and into the bowl. Hiccup pulls a face. Stoick grunts, bringing a fist full of serviettes to his mouth, pressing it over the mustache and beard. “Sorry, went the wrong way.” He coughs again, smaller and with less mouth, “you were saying?”

“I met someone, that's all.”

“You did?” Stoick says, eyes bright. “When?”

“Uh, yesterday,” he says, then stumbles in trying to come up with a white lie to cover his ass, before confessing that he thought he was giving an insane homeless guy a ride. At 3am. Or in Hiccup’s case, leaving himself unable to explain the whole story of magical proportions without looking like he spent too much time alone in the wild—along with the mushrooms and the herbs that’ll leave you drooling and naked, left with the vague impression that you talked with god. “Before—before I left. Well, not before I left, but. Yesterday during the day, after the…" the father-son throw down, “after our talk.”

“Oh.” Stoick slowly puts his toast down, as if any sudden movements would shatter the dream. He scoots his chair closer. “What’s this friend like?”

Hiccup blinks.

What was he honestly supposed to say? Well, you see, Jack Frost—yes, the guy with the ice, that’s him. Not the Jack Frost from the 1976 Rudolph's Shiny New Year shitty stop motion movie with an icicle shooting out his nostril, this one’s hotter. He was trying to do something nice in trying to cheer me up, right? But the guy’s mostly invisible, so of course, I didn’t know that. And he didn’t know that I knew that he was there—so he was just talking to himself, and I thought he was stalking me for about twenty minutes, which again, not his fault—but—

His father doesn’t say anything, but the silence, edging on desperate and free-falling on wonder, prompts him to continue as the mirage gives the dream of water, deep in the desert. Hiccup blurts, knotted by specific thoughts. The rest unravels in utter bullshit, “we, uh. Exchanged…numbers, at a gas station,” he shakes his head. “The guy doesn’t sleep much, apparently, so…so we talked on the phone. While I was in the car. Hands-free.”

“What did you talk about?”

“...Twilight.”

“The movie you used to complain about?” Stoick squints. “The one with the—”

“Yes, we both hated it with a fiery passion.” Although for different reasons. “We also made fun of other movies. It was nice.”

“Oh,” Stoick says. “That’s…nice, indeed. What’s your friend’s name?”

“...Jack.” Please, Hiccup prayed, for the love of god, do not ask me what his last name is.

“Just Jack?”

Hiccup gives him a tight smile. “Just Jack.” Same guy I threatened with a shotgun. That one.

Stoick hums, “and does he live around here?”

“Yeah,” sure he does. By the lake: and by that, I mean on a tree or something. Spirits are real, by the way. This one lives in nature, I guess? “I didn’t ask where exactly, though. Just…around.”

“...I can help you find out more about him if—”

“O-kay, dad, fun interrogation, but it’s fine. Maybe the guy deserves some, I don’t know, privacy, until I get to know him for more than—less than a day?”

“Hiccup, everyone looks each other up online nowadays. It’s normal—”

“Dad, I cannot stress enough on how it hasn’t even been 24 hours yet.”

“At least—at least give me a chance to get to know who his parents are.”

Given how Jack is over 300 years old, Hiccup highly doubts that it was a possibility. “Can’t,” he says. “His parents are definitely dead.” Hiccup stared at Stoick dead in the eyes as his father froze. Fuck. “He’s, uh. Mentioned a guardian. I talked with her, actually. On the phone. She was…around, at the time. Heard from her on the way back.”

Stoick does a motion with his shoulders, stuck between an exhale and a slump. “...Well, please let me meet him myself first.”

“I…” Hiccup tries to think: if Jack were any other person, just some guy—what would he say? What’s the normal thing to say in this situation? “I just don’t want to spook them off right off the bat, dad. You’re almost two meters tall, almost as much as wide, no offense—we know it’s all muscle anyway. And it’s just that sometimes you get this put-out face, without noticing—”

“Hiccup—”

“It’s like you said, we’re not around home anymore, and I hear that Berkians are a rare breed around these parts, so—”

“Alright, alright.” Stoick points at Hiccup. “But eventually.”

“Sure.” Provided if Stoick can see him at all. “I can do that.” Or in the worst-case scenario, say he made him up for convenience’s sake. 

All this hinges upon the possibility of Hiccup seeing Jack again, ever. After all, waiting a decade before visiting would be nothing to Jack. What’s an hour, or a day to him? What’s a year, to a thing like Jack? What are the changing seasons, these spare glimpses of time, in the face of 300 years? 

Hiccup takes hold of his cup, downing the contents. He grimaces right after, lowering the cup. He brushes his tongue against the walls of his mouth to scrub the sensory discomfort away, something that clings for minutes after, even when there’s nothing there anymore, orange flakes washed away. “It has bits.” Hiccup says when Stoick squints his eyes in confusion. Stoick shakes his head; Hiccup shoots him a look.

The silence that follows between the conversations is already short and stilted. Often with Hiccup having no idea how he’s supposed to continue the conversation. Already, Hiccup’s expected to fill the silence, otherwise it becomes ungainly, cluttered with all the things left unsaid. 

Hiccup’s already missing that part of Jack’s company, the unbridled silence, unbothered by the awkwardness that had no realm in their conversation. Still, conversations with his father didn’t tend to last this long. Just this morning they’d already breached three times the number of topics that could get them having a fledged conversation.

“It won’t be long, now,” Stoick says, a softness settling down over his words, and Hiccup perks up, knowing who came attached to them. “Your mother says it should be three months, three and a half at most, before she arrives.” 

Hiccup hums. “Wasn’t it just two months, last time you spoke with her?”

“Ah, well.” He grunts like he’s got something stuck between his air canals. “Turns out, the amount of paperwork takes some time to deal with.”

Hiccup nods. That was probably right: he’d never been head of United States Geological Surveys, so what does he know?

Stoick fiddles with the edges of the napkin, pinching it between his fingers. “Are you upset?”

Hiccup thinks about this, staring at the floor, and finds that he isn't. He probably should: maybe once, long ago, he would have cared enough for it to hurt. Hiccup gives a loose, aborted shrug, “not really.” As it stands, the bridges had yet to be built, stared at from across each side, and uncrossed. “I mean, it’s, you know. It’s the same as it ever was? Nothing’s changed.”

“Well. That’s…good, then.” Hiccup looks up to see Stoick’s slight plunge of his brow, the arch digging into the corner of his lips; barely a movement at all. If anything, his father has stopped moving at all, his hands going completely still, but Hiccup’s eye zones-in on the shadow that crosses his features, nevertheless. A sad, heavy thing. Hiccup’s shoulders tenses as he blindly tries to think of a different subject. Something to ease the dark, a lighter, happier thing.

“You…mentioned you guys used to go skiing. How was it?” Hiccup blurts, “were you any good, or did she kick your ass?”

Stoick’s mouth makes a slight curve, a tell-tale twitch of his mustache, and chuckles; a deep, quiet rumbling that comes from the chest. Hiccup counts it as a win. Yet as Hiccup waits, Stoick doesn’t respond. Doesn’t tell Hiccup stories about him and his mother when they were younger. He only sits there, in silence. The feeling of victory dims as Hiccup’s lips pulls thin. Then suddenly, all at once, Hiccup isn't hungry anymore, the eyes heavy, his body heavier than lead.

“I’m, uh.” Hiccup stands up abruptly, dishes in hand. He swallows before saying, “I’m going to take a nap, sleep for a bit.” The silence grows heavier as Stoick still doesn't say anything, the only sound in the room being the water hitting the dish, and the clash as Hiccup places them on the drying rack. 

Even when he’s out of the kitchen, past the walkway, and down the hallway, the silence seems to still follow, a dark shadow that drapes across the house. He closes his door with a click that echoes in his bedroom. For a moment, Hiccup only stands there, a nervous hand running through his hair, the other hand fidgeting the seam of his hoodie. His expression tense, before exhaling hard out the nose and walking to the edge of his bed. When he hits a cardboard box, he doesn’t feel the jut, paper against metal, but the vibrations echo and reach the stump. He sees the box drag across the gray carpet.

He takes off the prosthetic, the ache immediately ceasing. His stump sore, puckered, and red. He takes off his shoes, slips off his jacket, the phone slips onto the bed sheet. He throws the jacket to a nearby chair where it dangles from a sleeve and a half. It’ll probably fall, but Hiccup is already pushing his hand’s heel to the back of his right shoe, sliding it off without taking the laces first; something he doesn’t have the freedom to forgo with the left, prosthetics being less lenient to flexibility than muscle and tissue. The point would be moot, anyway.

The boots hit the ground, the second shoe knocking against the first one with a dull and heavy plastic sound. Hiccup shoves the pair of them to the side with his foot along with the castoff socks, and lets his back hit the bed, soundless despite the springs burrowed in the mattress.

Hiccup can feel the way his throat clumps; used to voicing his part into a disagreement, but not to the duress of everyday conversations. And yet, it hadn’t been until the very last five minutes that Hiccup felt his body come down from the high place where it had found itself, feeling the strain building up his forehead and sapping the surge of energy running since he grabbed the car keys and took off in the middle of the night.

Even so, his body fidgets, some leftover energy that never does quite settle on its own accord. He rubs his forehead, pushing his fingers into the skin around his eyes and the bridge of his nose connecting them. A cool pillow covers his eyes from the outside light—the blinds haven’t been set yet. The rays try to peak in the gaps of thin cloth, but Hiccup presses the pillow further. 

He urges his limbs to still. Soon, the mind, swayed by lethargy—the thoughts, the feelings, follow.

Sleep comes instantly after that, a thing that drifts.

The water is a metallic thing, fine and silvery as mercury, bright and lifeless in its moonshine. There’s no life. There’s no kelp, no algae, no fish. Only the water. A thing that consumes, he knows. He knows. He can feel the cold bite down on him like teeth, hungry in its wanting. Pulling him down as a child tucks away favorite toys from the other children, as clams hold pearls in its clasp. An innate and near animal instinct to keep. 

The currents ripple, he sways with it as reeds bend to the wind, the light shimmering far above him.

He’s paralyzed, but this doesn’t bother him. It’s calm. Quiet. 

You should get up. The thought is a weak, flickering thing. Eyes half-lidded, he sinks. Even here in the deep, he keeps his eyes to the skyline. A syrupy bitterness creeps, as he identifies the flicker. The phantom gleam of a snarl. The nervous titter of urgency. 

Wake up.

Hiccup’s eyes fling open. The sudden sensation of rising from his slow and dazed sinking leaves him light-headed and dizzy. As if he’s been flung from his dreams, rather than merely awoken.

There’s still a haze to him, as he climbs the ladder from slumber into lucidity. Yet he can’t help but be a little smug about it. Gotcha! He’d say—or that’s the sentiment laughing inside his chest as he goes up, surfacing the top. I didn’t sleep all the way. I did not fall. Not this time.

Chapter Text

He wakes half expecting to find his clothes dripping that murky lake water, soaking the bed’s cover, to find his skin clammy and hair wet. It’s a phantom sensation, this bone-deep cold. When he runs a hand through his hair, as always, it's bone dry. Though the sensation is distant, unattached. It’s, briefly, like running his hands through a dead animal's pelt. But as soon as the disjointed, dizzying sensation comes, it's already gone before Hiccup can pick it apart and analyze it with a cool, curious eye. He pats his clothes instinctively, feeling a little silly when his hands come up dry, haze of slumber gliding away. 

The pillow that covered his forehead had shifted, emigrated to the corner next to the wall. No longer screening the sun rays, the wayward hand fumbling the sheets lands over his nose, over his eyes, giving shade and shielding Hiccup from the bright dancing spots that had begun to appear behind his eyelids.

The cold always lingers the longest. As well as that clammy, papery feel of his skin, as if he’s been submerged for hours, this lingers too. Hiccup can only breathe through it as the warmth ebbs back into him. He squints his eyes open through his fingers before pulling himself into a sitting position (he manages after the third attempt) and crosses his legs. Or, what’s left of them. Hiccup doesn’t think much time has passed since he’d fallen asleep, but he’s awake now. He hardly ever finds it in himself to sleep right back after the dreams. It would be too easy—he’d fall right back into the fathoms, wet and cold to the last nerve, only to wake up again. He must have rested somewhat, though: the headache from earlier is gone, the jacket on the chair has fallen to the floor. 

Hiccup scowls, his eyes still heavy, no-doubt red-rimmed. However long it was, it would have to do. He’s not even shivering this time, unlike earlier, with a car full of—of frost, and a guy named Jack who went hand in hand with the chill. Because that had been a thing. A thing that had happened. In his car.

There’s an expansive feeling pinwheeling inside Hiccup’s head, his chest—it grapples his limbs, willing them to rattle; a rhythm that matches festive drums and crowds of cheering alongside it. “...what the fuck,” he laughs.

It had been going on since he exited his car, although subsided, and now it’s bleeding all over. It’s a pulsing thrill; wonderment and trepidation, something out of a children’s book. He’s eight years old again and waking up to hand-crafted presents under a decorated pine tree stuck to the bottom of a barrel. He snorts. It’s too surreal, really.

Hiccup glances around his room. An everyday picture: from the desk to the mirror attached to the closet door, it screams Hiccup H. Haddock all over. Fittingly unremarkable. The sun shines. The rug still needs an in-depth clean, but it won’t mystically get up and do it itself. And the breeze that’s coming from the open window, feels just like that—the breeze, not like someone he might have offended by putting his foot in his mouth. Hiccup is twenty years old, inside his bedroom, under the covers—he stops.

They’re not just dreams, he’d told Jack, as he blinked snowflakes out of his eyelashes. 

He blinks his eyes now, no white blurs smearing his field of sight. With a drop, his earlier sense of wonder shrinks, and wanders across dread instead. His left-over smile crumbles: did it happen, really? 

He shakes his head, brow twisted, the weight denting the mattress. Yes, yes it did. He wasn’t that far gone. It had made sense, there and then. Back inside the car, with the pearlescent flakes floating around as if they belonged there, the sound of the heater whirring at max capacity—the jokes had been too informal and dumb to be anything other than what they were. Suddenly, an answer. A solution: maybe we’ll see, even. And yet, at the light of day, everything feels mundane, the strange night buzz merges with the morning doubt.

He shakes his head again. The bridge of his nose crinkles and he gives a sharp exhale. Apparently, he thinks, wry and slightly wild with surrealistic implications—the words are deep rooted nevertheless, clinging until the ax cuts them down for certain—meeting the cause does not cure the symptom. Figures.

He blinks at the ceiling. His foot starts to jitter, sheets rustling. His hand taps the bed linen. He stares out the window and between the blinds, there past the neat row of houses, deep in the wood, lies a strange lake. He takes a deep breath. Right then. 

He gets down off the bed straight to the floor, bear-crawling to the door instead of hopping—Gobber caught him hopping around his place once when he was still recovering and has since been advised against it—opening with an arm stretched on the handle and peering out. He angles his ear outside, listening for steps or movement—the TV, maybe, although unlikely. Stoick had bought two of them, fancy and sleek screens; one sits in the living room, and one hangs on a wall inside the master bedroom. Although for what reason, Hiccup doesn’t know. No one in their home watches much TV except movie nights, a new tradition: in which staying in silence is not only a choice, but the often preferred one. Hurrah. 

Perhaps his mom will make better use of them when she comes.

The house is spacious with two floors to its name, but the walls aren’t all that thick. The low murmur of his dad’s floats, muted by the plaster delimiting the kitchen and the hallway beside it that connects it to Hiccup’s room. Silence follows his father’s half-eaten sentences in shared intervals. Hiccup closes the door, leaving Stoick to his phone call.

He gets dressed before he can think about where he’ll be spending the day wondering about; if he’s smart, he won’t grab the car for the next few days—if for nothing else than for the sake of his wallet. He dismisses taking a shower in favor of staying warm; I already took a shower before leaving anyway. Shirt, jacket—not that one, it's crumpled now—his phone, the keys. He grabs another, clean, prosthetic sock and slides that on before putting on the prosthetic itself. Can’t forget the leg, either. 

Hiccup stops at the fringe of the door frame, fingers grazing the wood, footsteps planted in place. He sways for a moment. Finally, he pulls himself back inside, flumbing an arm behind the door, a ragged leather satchel with several strings and buckles grasped between his fingers. He walks to the desk in front of his bed, pulling drawers open, stuffing the contents and supplies inside the satchel. He passes his room’s threshold once more and swerves to the right, opening the bathroom door. Teeth are washed and rinsed, hair gets brushed and—sort of—neatened over. Giving himself a quick look in the mirror, straightening the shirt and the collar of the mustard yellow jacket, he fidgets with the strap of the satchel across his chest, wrapping around the second belt to one of his legs until the weight sits on the side of his hip. It’s purely for aesthetics, and no one is going to be able to see the design beneath Hiccup’s jacket, but damn it, he feels cool. 

The wooden floorboards change to tiles when Hiccup steps into the kitchen. The dishes have been washed. Now tracks of water droplets remain, basking on the ceramic cereal bowls and the white plates that bend at the edges, content to remain there before joining the humidity. As the kitchenware lay drying beside the sink, plates on top of plates and cups on top of glasses, everything else has been put away—crumbs still spread across the counter. Hiccup has half the mind to grab a wet cloth, but his attention props his chin up in a distant manner, words prickling his eardrums until he heeds their attention.

But it’s not the words that make his eyes zone in, fixed on the table, on the crumbs, or the ants that are roaming around, taking stock with gusto. Stoick picks a dozen phone calls a day, getting life-plans straight and policy’s agendas on a tight, several pound leash. It’s always direct. To the point. Or, if he’s chatting from someone back at Berk, he would have pulled out a drink, as if sharing for two.

“Well, what then?” Stoick says. Emotion webs into the question, pricking as the vulnerable do. The tone sounds tired—in return, exasperated. But he sounds soft, a tone reserved only for his mother, and for no one else. Hiccup steps closer to the doorway, rounding the counter and throwing shade over it. The ants panic, but the danger is already over before it begins, cloth forgotten in favor of eavesdropping.

“No. No, he wasn't upset when I told him, that’s the problem. He wasn't even surprised.”

A gap of silence.

“He doesn't—” Stoick pinches the bridge of his brow, “—he hardly knows you. Christ, Valka, I don’t know him. He’s twenty-years-old, down a leg, and we barely know him at all.” His hand drags off his face, and instead grips at the kitchen counter. “He’s taking a gap year, trying to figure out what he wants from life until he takes the next step, recovering and getting used to his prosthetic, but after that, that’s it. He’s gone. What are we going to do when he’s gone?”

Stoick says nothing, ear tilted to the phone. Hiccup doesn't dare move, holds his breath to preserve the stillness.

“I know,” Stoick says, “I know that you’re trying to come home as soon as possible. But he doesn't know. He doesn't know us either and I don’t know how—I don’t know.”

Hiccup doesn't want to hear this anymore. He steps out of the shadow and waves at his dad, showing him the keys in his palm to show that he plans on going out without interrupting his phone call.

There is a rare, guilty expression on Stoick’s face, lowering the phone as he looks at Hiccup. But whatever he was going to say, if anything at all, Hiccup doesn't stick around long enough to hear it, already rushing out of the room, out of this house.

Hiccup keeps his breathing even, his exhale slow and measured. He starts walking, pushing all thoughts into a corner, away with the ice and the crinkles on his father’s brow. He thinks of the cool, smooth surface he’s seen in dreams, the sharp, rich scent of silt.

Fuck this. Fuck this house and fuck those dreams. He’ll cull them to the root, and finally get some sleep, deep and true.

The door shutters behind him.

He takes the car, in the end. Probably not the cheapest decision, but it's the one he sticks by.

“Ah, great,” he says, reviewing his now ascertained sanity—yay. For one, everything is damp as he locks the door open—at the first try; the floor is wet, the walls moist, and he has to swipe the water that had dripped off the ceiling and is now pooling on the driver’s seat. He sits, trousers uncomfortably cold, but his shoulders sag in relief. He eyes the pools on the mattress underfoot and the remaining frost clinging to the edge of the windshield and the rear-view mirrors.

He pushes the key in the ignition, testing the ground, and turns it. The car sputters once, twice, then settles. 

He wasn’t going to drive originally, not really—just check for the proof that he didn’t have a vivid, worrying hallucinatory experience—worrying mostly due to the wacky content and less by the hallucination in itself—find out whether his car lived or nay, and come right out before he lost the nerve buzzing his veins. Everything was surprisingly in order. The car, the cold and the ice. The motor rattled, and with the taste of silt in the air, the humidity heavy—maybe that was why he drove, saving himself thirty minutes by foot of riddled overthinking he would’ve had if he walked straight through the mouth of that trail. 

The drive is quick, smooth. Uneventful. He parks in the same spot he had earlier, where he dropped Jack off as the sun swelled from the trees. His wheels caking the mud and pressing over the pathway his car’s tires had carved earlier at sunrise. He steps out and sees no footprints. It confirms his suspicion, (he did fly off, huh.) He stares hard into the horizon, the sky a pale blue.

From the driver’s seat, Hiccup watches the tree’s canopy’s nod over the barrier of houses between him and the forest, evergreens swaying to the mellow blow. It’s different in the bright daylight, he thinks. In a way it feels less real, like a photograph being taken with flash, filter heavy and sterile. There are no elves jumping out of car windows and looking all sad about it—he checks, pointing an ear towards the trees for bells or sounds of laughing now that he can actually see more than two feet ahead of himself in the daylight.

Hiccup breathes. The soft, fresh layers of land and life—the sort where people would spend a year to heal their lungs at. It combs the muscles that string up his neck down to his shoulder blades, defusing both body and mind: nature’s giveaway. The breeze hauls the scent of the pine trees first. His steps pause. The earthy undertones come next, brisk soil and dirt wrapping the nimbus of the forest in a neat bow, and it feels like longing. 

Easy, too easy. 

In sight of the big picture and the jittery limbs, the tension keeping his spine straight like a metal rod; it’s surprisingly simple how Hiccup leaves his car, hands in his jacket pocket, and aimlessly wanders into the thicket, quick before he can think about it. All strangely familiar in its dream-like haze. It reminds me of home, is what he comes up with. This time he knows better. 

The woods began as tame. The trees are thin as sickles, grossly organized in neat lines that took the fun of woodscapes away. The soil reeks of gasoline, the puddles iridescent from the oil. However, the further he wanders in, aimless yet sure, the wilder it becomes. The trees dense, sporadic instead of in clusters, the signs of human interference becoming sparse. The air rich and humid. The forest stretches further than Hiccup previously assumed, and then, it's unfathomably quiet. Nothing buzzes, nothing sings. Nothing scuttles, runs, or flickers. It’s as though Hiccup caught the world sleeping, even as the sun hangs high in the sky, the light dappling the ground in its rich, warm hues. He supposes this warning sign, this indicator, is a better sign than opposed to a jump scare.

He’s finally going to do it. He’s going to find this stupid, insanely mysterious lake that everyone knows about, but nobody speaks of. Rip off the bandage, so to speak.

He stops as the man-made trail ends, staring beyond the sere branches and evergreen leaves. Only whatever’s left could withstand the cold. Something beneath his skin, a hum that sits between the epidermis and the wry muscle of his frame, he knows that the lake is close. Sees it in his mind’s eye, the wine-dark pool, still as glass. That mouthless hunger. The pang strings through him, recognition to a cellular level. The air spearmint and frigid, the cold stings his throat as mist plumes from his mouth, thick as cotton.

Come on, Hiccup. Like a cheap, bloody bandage. A quick rip-off. 

The thing about 0.99% of bandages, is that either they don’t stick at all, or stick all the painful way through. And then, instead of stripping the whole thing in one go, you’re left pinching at the ends, pitifully slow, adhesive sticking to fingers in clumps—wincing and biting lips to keep the silly noises in. This is how he makes his way through the forest. Shoulders ridged, back straight, he steps off the trail. The hum electric, like standing next to a live wire.

The crunch beneath his feet, his pulse throbbing in his ears—there, seated in the dome of his skull—and his breathing are the only sounds he can hear. Until the wind flips his hair, like a flick of fingers. Something with a tangible presence, large and coiling. As if a colossal eye turned its focus to his entire being. A bead of sweat trickles down from his temple. Oops. There goes the Band-Aid.

The wind, alive. Ridiculous. Lunacy. But then again, until yesterday, common sense had a different shape—something austere and benumbed—before childhood wonders such as immortal red bandits and walking rabbits became fact. 

“Uh.” A particularly strong blow finds his back, and Hiccup shivers, off balance. The wind crackles, a sharp laugh; something that edges onto cruel and settles to a keen skepticism. And he knows it’s a laugh, because if his heart wasn’t rattling around in his ribcage and he wasn’t the target of omnipotent mockery—but rather an observer peering at his shaky, bumbling frame from the outside—he would be laughing too. He’s got enough self-respect to see what he must look like. “If this is payback from earlier, you probably have a right to,” he says, and breathes in a shaky, involuntary hitch. 

Hiccup doesn’t consider himself a coward, but he believes in common sense. Right now, common sense tells him: Haddock, don't be a suck up, don’t be a suck up. No one likes a suck up. 

“I can’t even remember what I said, if I’m being honest, but I don’t like being called names, either.” He fiddles with the seam of his jacket, a nervous gesture. “So. Yeah.”

Hiccup holds his breath. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Does anything he’s saying make sense? Is he even speaking to something? What, exactly, is listening? But then, a whistle goes up and then down by his ear, something that changed cadence; it sounded like a tune someone with teeth would have made, and not the empty gust of air that’s ruffling his hair. Oh. That didn’t seem too bad. 

The eye blinks, and the tension defuses like a popped soap bubble.

Hiccup coughs, lets the stirring locks of hair cover his eyes and tickle his nose. “Are we good, then?” The wind sighs, shifting his hair, pulling it back, out of his eyes. Hiccup thinks that’s a good sign, but just in case, he simply nods, “great, I’m just going to—right.”

The wind pulls and tugs with a rough, unrefined edge. And it’s as though the bandage crumples in an invisible hand, like parents do when faced with a distressed child: they’ll say that they’re going to count down to three, then pull at two, and start spouting nonsense right in between before you can feel the yank. A playful, harsh thing. This wind.

Hiccup starts walking, heart rate back to average. The pater in his chest soothing to an even rhythm, his clumsy chatter filling his ears instead of his own jackrabbit pulse feeding his anxiety.

“Stupid question, but you’re not going to shove me into a ditch, right?” The wind gently blows against him with a jarred shove, the sound crackling through the dead leaves. He’ll take that as a no, then. Hiccup shrugs, “just asking.”

By the time the trees have grown thick enough that Hiccup must trudge, legs stepping in odd angles to avoid the bushes and rocks and mud, he’s, curiously, started to rant.

“—So, the North winds, South winds…they’re all you, then? No partners that share the burden of the whole world? Uh—divisions maybe, or something to speak of?” A light tune answers, instead of a lower note, and Hiccup nods, thinking. “That’s…amazing, actually. Multitasking at its finest. Well, what about consciousness? Are you always aware, or is it a…whenever it fits the mood sort of deal that you’ve got going on?”

The wind cares little for intrusive questions, Hiccup’s found it best that he made sure to ask. It started with silence, at first, fidgety hands. Then it turned to thin, useless comments like the weather’s nice, slipping to, shit, you’re the weather. He got another cackle in response, promptly hitting Hiccup with a recent mental picture. Jack with his opal white teeth, the way he looks up at Hiccup through iridescent lashes as his chuckle breaks the air like shattered glass, the eyes crinkled. Maybe this is why Jack laughs easily. 

The temperature plunges without warning, the frigid air hitting him like a wall, stinging his eyes and burning his throat. The mist, the plumes from his mouth dense as smoke. It chills him from the inside-out, like his lungs are beginning to freeze before the rest of him.  

Or maybe it's something else instead, something less on the nose. Maybe it’s that he sees it. Naturally. That's why it's surprising, because he just sees the lake. There, in the clearing. The surface, still as glass, all wine-dark like he imagined, like he dreamed. It glitters like onyx in the sun. Perfectly circular, quaint. Unassuming. If not for the depth, if not for Jack’s body hanging somewhere in the deep, he’d assume it was a pond. Just a pond. The wind goes ahead, taking a few leaves and motes of dust that become visible under the rays with it. They circle around the trees, above the muddy shore, atop the water and swifts back beside him. Like children do, dancing in dizzying circles. The wide, mammoth swings care-free.

Hiccup wonders if that’s the wind’s way of saying: it’s fine, see? I do this ten times a week at the very least.

“Too late to turn back now, huh?” he says, in the way one wagers the options given. The wind doesn’t do anything; doesn’t push him in any direction—only swirls around him, curling behind ears and flapping the hems of his jacket. And it's precisely that—freedom of choice, that gives him the confidence to forgo picking between the urge to fight, flight or freeze. Instead, he chooses something more recreational: he saunters. 

Hiccup moves forward and tries not to trip. He still kind of does, the tips of his shoes hitting against the jutted pebbles and stones, but the wind catches him before the fall. “Thanks,” he grunts before cautiously edging his way closer.

He looks at the ground, pine needles covering the ground. Slippery bastards. He steps over a large stone that rises over them, tall grass flicking the shin of the leg and bouncing back when he takes the boot away. There’s a small steep, full of green, and Hiccup presses one leg to see as far as it goes, holding one arm to the tree beside him. He jumps and sticks the landing with a wobble.

“You know, I thought—” he looks around for a clearing to put his other foot down, instead of pressing over the green lush, “I thought this would be different. Not the place, the place’s fine. But the feeling of it, you know?” He skids over a bunch of flowers and lands on empty soil. “I mean, it’s decent, as far as magical places go. Not too gloomy or—I don’t know. I mean, if this place truly were a death trap, it’d actually be on point. Gloomy tends to spook off people—which is why most horror movies are stupid about their plots.” Hiccup hums, “this? This is nice. Less points in my favor, of course, but definitely a five stars hike review.”

There used to be a lake, back in Hiccup’s alcove—it’s still there, along with the fish that know of nothing else outside its confines. It wasn’t his, of course, but he’d never seen anyone else beside him in it—although, he’d once spotted some day-old bear tracks.

There’s no fish here, not that he can see. That’s the point, he can’t see anything. The water isn't a murky, ambiguous mess—it’s deep. It swallows the light almost instantly. The few rays that dance from the canopies to the ground and the water’s surface bounces right off. It’s not scary as much as it’s eerie. It’s not unsettling because it inspires fear—it’s not the fear that wakes him in cold sweat, but the promise. Nothing from the fathoms lunges at him. He doesn't become hypnotized by some siren or pulled into the waters. No epiphanies, no sudden realizations, no visions. Anticlimactic. No spectacle. It’s almost a downer, like perhaps he could have saved himself the trouble. Instead, he takes his eyes off the water and looks around. Living wind, check. Ominous body of water, check. 

He frowns at the shadows by the trees, seeing a flash of movement. But nothing there. It’s only the sun changing positions, the angle of the shadows shifting in a singular, clockwork motion. No Jack, then. 

Weird guy in a hoodie with pants that have seen better days? Wait and see. He can do that. It’s all he ever does. He’s always been good at waiting for people. So good, in fact, that if anyone asks, he’ll say he’s drawing, practicing the craft. He’ll convince himself, too. 

Waiting can take shape in many forms. Some people wait for minutes and others for their entire life. Only some learn to disguise it better. Well, enough to hide it even from themselves. 

He kneels at the base of a trunk, near the shore. He pats the ground—not too moist—and sits, stretching legs until they’re folded. He must help bend the metal one with his hand, grabbing the boot by the front and pulling it in. He thinks about taking the prosthetic off, then discards the idea. The hum still itches beneath his skin, keeping him on edge. For what, he has no idea. Maybe it's the nervousness that comes from knowing. Whatever it is, a zealous instinct tells him that he should be prepared to bolt at a moment's notice. To never relinquish the ability if he stays near these waters. 

With a faux casualness, he unbuckles the bag. Shifts it so it lays closer to the front instead of the side, and pulls out a leather journal: deftly handmade, stitched from top to bottom by yours truly.

He unfolds a strap of leather with several charcoal sticks and graphite pencils, wrapping a piece of cloth around to avoid unexpected smears, and gets to work. Hiccup can draw from memory, some things better than others, but there’s something satisfying about reproducing something you can see; a commingle between learning and witnessing. Something to fall back to when creativity has shut off for the remaining day, and the drive hasn’t.

Don’t be scared to really rub those dark spots in, is what one of the neighbors in Berk, a fellow—and only—artist in town, had bestowed upon him. Little tricks and details that made paper come alive. The old man that had passed away years ago, and the art materials the man had given him burned with the fire, but Hiccup clung to the advice with a ruthless clasp. 

When he pencils in what’s going to be the watery texture of the lake, he grabs the darkest shade, tips the pencil sideways until the nib rests horizontally, and digs his thumb in. Not harsh, but heavy and consistent.

Were there a spectator, Hiccup could suppose that he’d look a bit silly, occasionally pausing to show the wind his process—or wherever it is, this thing that followed him into the woods. But the way it croons, impatient and grabbing at the pages, thumping at the ground and gargling across the water, Hiccup finds it more enjoyable to have a nonjudgmental audience. The alternative feels rude, anyways. To just ignore it. Rude as well as unwise: you don’t turn your back on tigers. Particularly when the tiger has claws spanning the girth of the Equator, tornadoes and typhoons sprawling to life when sharpened.

The cloud that must have been covering the sky hurries away, or perhaps the branches overhead have organized themselves, decluttering and giving way to a brighter scene. Hiccup bats his eyelids at the cracks of blue between the green and twigs, and the sun is landing a bit more harshly than it was before. Hiccup moves his things and himself to the other side of the trunk where there’s more shade and stops the squinting that’s harrowing into what would have been a lasting headache. He tugs the corners of his jacket away to his face, zipping down through the middle, feeling warmer all at once. Humidity’s a bitch.

Pencil strokes have covered the sheet almost completely, streaking shade and simulating highlights when Hiccup raises the paper again. It doesn’t shift or tremble. Hiccup doesn’t feel his hair wave. No shifting leaves or dancing trees gives the wind’s position away. He lowers the bundle of pages and cranes his neck around, feeling a tug of disappointment when he doesn't see any signs of the wind being around anymore. 

Hiccup half-shrugs. He's optimistic that it won’t be the last time they’ll talk and goes back to the page erasing thin threads to showcase wee spotlights; unimportant on their own, but of essence to the big picture. 

It’s at some point, eyes shifting from the paper to the real thing, that Hiccup frowns. The shades are all wrong. Shit wrong. The drawing’s alright, that’s not the problem. The lighting is completely inaccurate. Indecisive, sloppy. Looking back and forth, it looks plain inconsistent. Like that one painting Hitler had made—light sources originating from anywhere and everywhere, no fuck’s given about luminism or sense of mind—clearly, there had been none to speak of. Embarrassing, really. Hiccup frowns again. 

The day, while everlasting at times, shifts, and turns with every hour that goes by; an artist has to be fast to jolt the right sort of sketch before the lights and colors break loose, taking flight and messing up the end result of a drawing. He knows he can get…focused, too focused, at times, but not even a cloud can make the sun take such drastic leaps. It hasn’t been that long, has it? Hiccup sets the sketchbook down and grabs his phone, fumbling with the keyboard until the passphrase kicks in. The front screen flashes, minimalistic icons adorning close to the digital clock dead center. He does a double take. 

1:14pm, the clock tells him. It’s not much to tell. It makes him pause anyway and ask for details. Even when the screen flickers off, he stares with a continuously raising eyebrow. 

Hiccup blinks. Was his phone wrong? He turned the screen off and on again. Perhaps the witching hour had come early. Or experienced a time change; Saturdays and Sundays being off the book. Who knows? Not him. 

Hiccup thinks back—he arrived at eight—eight something, he remembers, and it certainly has not been that long since. He remembers because the car was playing an awful tune the moment he parked. The lyrics rhymed too much, as if the author had picked the words at random if the last syllable matched. The rhythm had relied on the same banal chords for all four minutes of the song, and the only reason Hiccup had kept it on was due to morbid curiosity. After some bad waste of time spent, he’d turned it off, checked the time on his phone, and thought that the radio person in charge of the morning playlist might’ve needed a couple more hours of sleep. Or a raise. Case in point: it has not been five hours.

He twists his neck and glowers at the lake with a deadpan expression, “bet you don’t know anything about this?” The lake stays as it was, quiet and motionless. Not a care in the world. Hiccup wonders if, like the wind, this lake can pull off a joke at his expense. 

He hums, noncommittal. Grabbing a small, thin fallen branch, he swirls it around the quiet surface. Once the tips are below the surface, it disappears instantly.

The ripples start at the edges of the lake, the pulse creeping towards the stick like a video played backwards, like the rippling muscles of an esophagus. Wave–particle duality turned inside out. Absorption rather than fluctuation. Hiccup stares at the motions, the surface making slight creases like crinkled sheet fabric, a cold chill crawling up his spine. 

However, a small part of Hiccup is groaning at himself, saying words like: hey, idiot. How would you feel if someone prodded you with a stick? The larger part of Hiccup, the one that’s about 60% water and whatever’s left in charge of his decision tasking skills, keeps swirling the stick, intrigued—there’s probably a leak in the brain, somewhere. 

Hiccup knows he can glance at the nigrescent surface, the obsidian gleam when the ripples hit the sun, but never touch. Technically, he isn’t. Here as he honest-to-God pokes at it with a stick, but there’s nothing to be said about partaking. 

The incoming ripples are rhythmical in their beating, the minute swells hypnotic in their reversed tide, throbbing like a hyaline heart. Cold to the eye, ice to the vein, the circular spokes which ring the edges like collagen fibers to the eye: when Hiccup looks, something looks back. Distantly, he realizes that he's swaying, his pace matching the mute rhythm, brought to a lull and eyes heavy lidded. 

His pupils flicker, withdrawing from the ripples, and he realizes only then that he has no reflection. The lake reflects absolutely nothing, not the sun, not the trees, not the clouds. Nothing. Greedy thing won't even reflect the light, the dark eddies that settle deep in the woods like a pool of oil, a translucent film. He feels that hunger in it, that ever-present hum which sits between the epidermis and the wry muscle of his frame buzzes through him like fine wine, the nerve fibers fizzing. The ringing in his ears intensifies as he leans it, caught in its terrible maw.

The pulsing quickens.

Something behind him bellows, the howl earth-shattering, the sound dragged out to a babbling hiss behind him, bursting the drift. 

Drift. Drifting where?

Hiccup blinks before a bolt of awareness hits him, the nerves molten from the lightning strike. Like a bullet to the brain.

Hiccup nearly trips and falls right into the lake then, before his good leg shifts and counters the weight. He almost breathed into it, a lake which continues to do nothing but wait, as if nothing happened. Eyes wide, his heart throbs in his chest, the sound thudding in his ears. “Shit, crap—” so maybe, the lake doesn’t share the wind's sense of humor—but his life has a dark sense of humor. 

His already precarious position, a fickle thing, balance takes a dive for him in the wrong direction. And for a moment, he thinks he might fall in—bad, bad idea. Terrible, awful, no-good idea—before the wind steadies him with a well-practiced jolt. The sort that speaks to those familiar with a leading role on the dancing floor, spinning partners and leading them to a dip. Hiccup’s shoulders fling back with a cry as the wind shoves him inland, the outline of his body smearing the rubble with a sharp exhale. 

“You’re back,” he gasps, a little short winded, propping himself up on his elbow. “Hi. Thanks—” that’s as far as he gets, before the wind suddenly whips around him, yanking him up from the ground and on his feet with a terrifying ease. Pushing him toward one direction, away from the water and into the lush woods. “What—wait.” He stumbles, bumbling words, but the wind prods, pulling and yanks the hem of his shirt. “Just, hold on a second.”

It's still difficult to pinpoint where he should be directing himself when introducing conversation, particles and seeds and excess foliage lashing from side to side instead of limbs and features to speak of. It’s freeing. Tricky, yet freeing. There’s nothing to look at, but it’s easy to see. He remembers his preschool teacher’s stern and boiling gaze, the eyes glassy and gray, the corners creased in indignation. His father’s tense jaw and tight lip, the frustrated sigh. The sickeningly sweet smile of the high school counselor. Look me in the eye when I’m talking to you. They demand as they look through him. 

He can’t see it, the wind. But he feels the enormity of it. The sheer vastness. Hiccup exhales sharply, his nose wrinkles and lungs go lead-heavy. His eyes follow the trail of leaves, the wind tearing them up to shreds with no effort.

What to do, then, with no eyes to look at? 

Now, he thinks he understands what his father—his teachers, his pears, meant—all those times he’d looked away. The uneasiness of an outsider’s approach. He’s outside, he’s not being let in. They can’t see the glass wall, and he can’t reach. 

Look at me. They would tell him. You owe it to me. Look at me.

He remembers diverting eyes, shunning the encounter and away from it. Being watched but not seen. Hiccup doesn’t see people either, at some point realizing it was better not to look. If the eyes are the window to the soul, Hiccup keeps the blinds drawn. The wind has so much soul, everywhere, all at once. An open, fiery, heartfelt spirit. The wind lashes, not listening. And in that moment, Hiccup felt the echo as the reflection ripple in infinity, there at the house of mirrors.

So maybe it didn’t have to do with the eye contact, after all. Just contact.

The wind is pulling at his legs. His knees. At the foreground of his mind, his stump stings. Hiccup grunts, and brings his feet down, “Seriously, stop.” He isn't sure what he was expecting, but it's surprising when the wind immediately stills. He stares blankly at nothing before snapping out of it, “I get it. That got weird quick, but I need a second. You can’t just—ragdoll me around. Maybe,” he gives a sharp exhale, “maybe give me a minute to breathe and process…whatever just happened by the lake.” He barks a harsh laugh, edging onto hysterical, eyes wide. “This place that may or may not have a corpse in it." 

Hiccup looks over his shoulder, the stance ridged and his mouth tightening to a thin line, a focused gleam to the eye. “My things are still back there,” he tells it, “I’ll grab them, and I’ll leave.” 

He feels the wind titter, a to and fro motion he only gets to experience when he’s driving—the window rolled down all the way, sticking a skinny hand outside it and letting it ride the invisible, powerful waves. 

The journal is where he left it and so are the tools. The items begin to wiggle as he gets close, air currents thinning around his fingers. He shoves them all into the satchel. There's probably some dirt in it, now. With one last look at the lake, Hiccup steps away. “Okay. Cool. Lead the way. Just—I can walk on my own, alright?”  

The wind eases as Hiccup walks through the foliage and evergreens. Even with his back turned, he knows that the lake still pulses, zeroing in on him as the center remains still like a pupil. He knows this from how the wind drapes over his shoulders, the gesture protective and possessive in equal measure.

Watched and seen.

Chapter Text

Allowing one last look at the waters, Hiccup climbed back up the slump he’d come from. Sparing the green bits in favor of the brown, drier spots, he discerned the flat slab he’d used earlier as a stepping stone. Making sure the prosthetic wouldn’t angle out, he pushed himself up the mound. Naturally, the momentum conked out. Off he went. His pencils jiggled from inside the satchel. He tried again with more might, feet poised for take-off. An encouraging pressure nudged and steadied his weight forwards, and he nodded at the wind. “I’ve got it.”

This was how the woods swallowed him. 

Hiccup may have a preternatural ability to find highly suspect lakes. However, given that he’s been wandering aimlessly, the fact now stands that he does not share a similar awareness to his car. Once up and steady, he looks at the vegetation, squinting his eyes. 

Well, fuck.

He finds absolutely nothing triggering even a vague sense of familiarity. The rough mapping he’d worked on the way here vanishes from his mind and gains a new shape. Maybe it’s because forests in Berk were much wilder, and that’s all he’s used to. Or maybe the lake is a jokester, after all. A thing that can confuse the senses. Shuffle the cards.

Shrugging off the ominous, he arbitrarily begins walking in an appropriate direction—only for the wind to drag him by the lapels, veering him sporadically through some imaginary path. No tracks, human or otherwise, pave the grounds. Deadpanned, Hiccup guesses now is as good a time for a tour ride as any.

Eventually, the wind whistles, a low sound as it pulls at his jacket. Even though it has no face, Hiccup raises a brow at the wind. Tries to, anyway. He’s still not sure what piece of it he’s supposed to look at. “You’re going to lead me to my car, right?”

The wind warbles.

“You lead me to a really cool mushroom, yes, but that wasn't my car.”

The wind chortles; a thick, gluttonous sound.

Hiccup lets himself smile, releasing pressure from the mockingly serious expression tugging his lips into a flatline. It had been a wobbly attempt at best, keeping the elated glee under wraps. “That doesn’t sound like a yes.” He scans around. There's no trail or anything man-made. Not a good sign. “Doesn't inspire much confidence, if I’m being honest with you.”

It tugs at his jacket again, the wind blowing left. Right? No, left. Hiccup side steps, muttering at the ground.

Hiccup looks at the floor grounds, searching for presence, but the forest cramps around him wildly, barely letting through. Had he been alone and wandering, the chance of him getting lost is sizable. With his phone acting up, he isn’t sure how much Google Maps would have helped in this situation, given that it has no idea that the lake even exists. Luckily, he has the wind. The wind, however, is not keen on explanations. He digs his heels down.

“Alright, ok, fine. You’re not—you're obviously not taking me anywhere close to my car.” 

The wind surrounds Hiccup but doesn’t make a move to drag him. His shoulders sag on their own accord. The wind stills, falling silent. The leg with the prosthetic wobbles and Hiccup nearly trips before righting himself. He steadies himself and nods sideways, a half-hearted movement that relinquishes all self-defense without looking at it too closely in the eye.

Hiccup presses his mouth in a thin line, the wind swaying him where he stands. He looks somewhere over his shoulder and bites his cheek.

“Look,” he says, “I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve no idea if the car is parked somewhere that’s liable for tickets or not.”

The wind makes a long sound, like a gust traveling through a pipe. The air around him loosens, the wind moving somewhere else. The absence makes Hiccup miss a step. 

“Yes, that one’s on me. A dumb move to pull, got it. Point is, I could get a frankly ridiculous bill worth hundreds of dumb paper money that I don’t want to come home waving around with. Especially after this morning. If my phone is right,” he pulls the device from his pocket, lightening the front screen, time zone numbers blearing against his eyes. He cringes at the time before shoving it back into his pocket. “If this is right and not just a freak accident, it means I’ve been around for way longer than I intended and that’s…not great. You feel me?”

The wind doesn't react. He looks around and sees no response. 

Perhaps not.

“You’ve nothing to say to that?” He tunes his senses, but the wind doesn’t make itself seen or heard. He flippantly moves his hands, making his voice purposely more nasal and high-pitched, like the little shit he knows he was born to be. “Yes, Hiccup. Whatever you say, Hiccup.” He throws his hands open, shoulders plumbing. “I will now walk you to this random location and all will be well—” 

Something is shoved to his chest, the wind in tow. It's light and makes a dull thud when it hits him. By reflex, Hiccup makes a grab at the object and stares at the blob of bright blue he’s wrapped under his fingers, a bottle. Half full. A few seconds tick as Hiccup recognizes the overly expensive energy drink he’d bought from the gas station. It was still cool to the touch.

A second thing plinks against his prosthetic before falling to the ground. Hiccup plucks the car keys from the earthy dent it made in the soil, brushing dirt and letting the metal shine through. Hiccup stares at the keys and the bottle in his hand. He slips his hands inside his pockets for good measure. Yes, the keys resting on his palm are missing from their original safe spot. Not so safe anymore, if a pickpocketing wind is to be considered. He looks up, then back at his keys, then up again, and decides it doesn't matter. With a trapped, squealing whine draining from the back of his throat, he places them back into his pocket, slipping the bottle into the satchel. Uhuh. Okay. It just—doesn't matter. Fine.

“Is it…is it out of the parking area?”

The wind coos at him. 

Hiccup stares.

No ticket. That’s the only thing that matters.

“I’m…not going to ask how. But thanks.” He gives the wind a lop-sided smile. Hiccup shifts in his boots and raises his hands in mock surrender. Fuck it. It's not like he needs to be anywhere. Besides, the thought of going home now leaves a hard stone lodged somewhere underneath his ribcage. “Look, if it’s not my car, then at least—at least show me something cool.” Hiccup lifts his chin from where it had been digging into his clavicle.  “If that's the plan, I mean.”

The wind leads him with the scuttle of leaves and the occasional tug of his jacket. He doesn’t know how long he follows the wind and doesn't bother to check the time. He’s six again, getting lost for the first time and balancing on fallen logs. He’s eight again, when he first followed the elk tracks in the snow, or ten-years-old, playing survivor as he builds a tent with sticks and leaves. It’s like he’s new all over again, about to see something for the first time.

Eyes squinting, Hiccup watches from the now thin and spread-out trees, the forest brighter now for having more light shining through the branches. Then, finally, the wind leads him to a dirt road with a fresh set of tire tracks. It leads him alongside it until he sees a house with a car that’s rolling onto the driveway.

Hiccup side eyes the wind, the corners of his smile having a sardonic twist to them, and dryly says, “no candy house?” 

The wind whips at his locks.

It’s weird how the house sits. It’s weird that it’s here in the middle of the woods for reasons Hiccup can’t quite parse out. Maybe because he didn’t think anyone could stand being in the woods at all, given how wide a berth most people subconsciously seem to give the lake. The idea of swarms of people being unable to go near it, yet a house was built here—that someone is currently living in—is jarring.

Whether it's his eyes or the lake-soaked roots of this forest, he’s being played anyways. A woman comes out of the driver’s seat and opens the trunk. He listens to the unmistakable sound of full plastic bags being hoisted and the footsteps that come with them. However, the mystery woman doesn't notice him, because she’s busy with her goddamn groceries. They stand out like a sore thumb, bizarrely mundane and ordinary as the white plastic bags contrast against the black trunk lining. 

Contents clatter beside the lady’s knees, the mid-calf winter boots cushioning the sharp corners bending the plastic bag. Strands of hair leak in disarray from an upholding topknot trying to keep the hairpiece together. There are dark patches beneath her lilac glasses, under her eyes, but her eyes look kind—soft around the edges.

Hiccup isn’t in her direct line of sight but isn’t concealed either. He could let her know that he’s here, but, hey. Magic is real, apparently? Magic ladies and forests doesn't seem to be much of a leap, and he’s read enough of Grimm’s Fairy Tales to know how that shit can go south fast. So, he sticks to the shadows and says nothing. 

And yet, the bags don’t clutter against each other as they land on the ground, and neither do the contents inside them. Hiccup blinks, eyes wide as the wind lifts the bags from the bottom. Lifting them from the ground up and carrying them instead to the front porch. Like the invisible man has come around to help people with groceries. In the woods. The wind isn't doing this secretly either, like a prank, it’s happening right in front of the woman's face—

The woman’s sigh breaks Hiccup out from his thoughts. “Thank you, I really needed that weight off my back.” 

Hiccup stares. 

Oh. Okay.

Hiccup squeezed his eyes closed and pinched the bridge of his nose. 

Alright. Hiccup drops his hand back to his side. Eyes slowly opening again. She knows the wind is sentient, apparently. Cool. Ok. This is normal, I guess.

“I might’ve pulled a muscle,” she says to the wind. “We won’t know until I’ve settled down, but I’m betting on my hip.” 

The wind makes a jab, tilting the woman lightly, who laughs. Her bun hangs loose and messy, looking close to unraveling altogether.

“It's fine, I just rushed on my way back. The cashier is new—you know her—still at the stage where she needs to triple check the produce numbers. She hasn’t learned to be quick with it yet.”

The wind seizes some leafage and swirls above ground in a slow oval. 

The woman rolls her eyes. The motion is eerily symmetrical to the wind. “She can’t be more than—what, sixteen? Eighteen, tops. She’s nice. She’ll catch on.” She waved her hand. “Anyway, the store had a few sales going on today—there was a discount on Sophie’s cakes, so I grabbed a couple of extra ones. They might last the week. If I hide them well enough. Jamie’s radioactive green muffins were as expensive as ever.”

Hiccup shifts, uncomfortable at the notion of eavesdropping, now that it doesn't look like he’s going to get eaten or some other equally wild end. Now he just feels like a stalker. And stupid.

“You usually don’t act that way unless someone’s in the woods,” the woman says. “I thought it was Jamie or Sophie, but I'm assuming it must be someone else. Is that why you called?”

Not uncomfortable anymore. Hiccup angles his ear.

The wind whistles a high note that wiggles at the end. 

“Not a cyclist this time?” 

The wind blows. The last set of bags get lifted from the trunk to the ground. The hinge closes with a snap.

“It’s okay, I’ll handle these—a hiker, then?”

The leaves and the dirt ruffles. Hiccup listens as the steps come to a halt, scratching the dry soil.

“I thought—I had thought.” The woman’s lips go thin, a shadow flickering across her features. “You sounded pretty shaken, you know. I called school. Just to make sure no one was missing or—or,” the woman’s voice retracts. “The guy at the office was understanding. Some parents check in on their kids from time to time, apparently. Worrywart behavior.” 

The wind howls, low and shaky. The sound makes Hiccup wince.   

“You would’ve told me otherwise, yes. But I had to check for my own comfort. It’s justified. You know it’s justified.”

Hiccup frowns. This weirdly feels like listening in to an argument or discussion his parents would have. 

The wind blows more softly this time. 

The woman sighs. She cracks a smile. “Yeah. They’re in class. Making trouble, no doubt.” 

The wind laughs, fond and gentle. The woman's loose hair moves slowly, as if underwater. She holds her hand as if feeling the glide between her fingers. Hiccup watches with a strange urge to look away.

“It was someone else, then. By the lake.” Her hair stills, her hand lowers. The woman hums. “Did you lead them all the way out? We don’t want another allegedly missing person happening again.”

Well, that was reassuring. Hiccup hopes that wasn't an underlying threat. The wind chuckles, tickling his ear, and Hiccup glares from his half-hidden spot behind the pine tree. 

Hiccup sighs. This is getting awkward.

He steps out of the tree’s shadow and stands his ground, still going unnoticed by the woman, who continues talking. 

He coughs, and the wind tugs the woman’s sweatshirt until her gaze has landed on him. When she does, her body goes still. The record scratches. They lock eyes and she stands taller, dislodging herself from the side of the car she’d at some point reclined at, arms folded. There’s intention in the gesture, the informal sort. Laidback. The wind swaggers between them both, mellow; the music plays again. Hiccup softens his grip, and the tension that had been crawling over his shoulders slips away.

Hiccup stares. The woman stares back. She waves. 

He feels the wind push, a digit-less hand on his back. The dirt crunches underfoot when he takes the reluctant step forward. Head tilted; he waves back. 

“Hello. Are you lost?” She asks, nonchalantly, to the invisible mantle blowing at both their fringes. 

Yes, he doesn't say, I'm lost, but you already knew that. You were talking about how lost I am with some invisible creature of the forest and now you’re talking to me like that’s a thing. Instead, he swallows the sarcasm. 

“Yes. Well, no. It depends.” Hiccup pats his hands twice where they fall down his thighs, feeling the trenchant awkwardness and side-eyes a flurry of leaves, wanting to ask, is this what you want? Is this it? He parts his lips where they’d pressed into a standard ambiguous line, then resets the gesture, eyebrows up and eyes looking around like they’ve lost something—an excuse, maybe, to run and avoid unprecedented conversations without looking back. It’s probably the same expression he feels his muscles play out whenever something goes wrong, and he must face his father in the aftermath. The one that goes what can you do. 

The woman looks at him, puzzled. He knows he’s stalling. 

“Your friend brought me here.” He explains, not looking her in the eye, the embarrassing churning feeling igniting. Words try their best to douse the shame. He clears his throat, “I was going back to my car, but they insisted on coming here instead. Which sort of makes sense now that you’re here. I mean, what are the odds? I don’t know, I don’t know what the odds are.”

“Sorry?” The woman doesn’t catch his meaning, she just looks at him like he might need a hospital. Mental or otherwise. Under her breath, she says, “I think I’ll need to call someone—again.”

It gives him a pause, thinking back on Jack’s and his misunderstanding. He continues, duly aware he’s making no sense, quickening his speech to get it over with. “They were here a minute ago. You know,” Hiccup waves his hand in fluid motions and whistles. He stops, feeling silly. “The wind brought me here. The very alive, very sentient wind, is what I mean.” He looks at her, waiting for recognition to set in. It doesn’t, or at least he doesn’t see her reaction as he breaks his gaze away, a flash of light getting caught in the reflection of her glasses.

The wind isn't very helpful, either—it stays still and waiting.

“I saw you two talking. Sorry for—listening in.” He shrugs, taps his right foot, tousling the ground. The silence stretches, still. Hiccup opens his mouth, closes it, repeats the gesture, then speaks anyway because he’s not very good at staying quiet when he ought to. Namely ‘cause it’s a shitty thing to do, assuming things about people. “You’re not a witch, are you?”

The wind cackles like it’s blowing through narrow streets near the cliffside, above the harbor: thin, elongated sounds that twist in loops. But at least it's laughing. Hiccup can almost hear a near-human vocal in there. Even then, the cadence speaks less of Autumn midnight madness and cauldrons, but of a mocking wheeze instead.

“Do I look like I know anything?” Hiccup turns to the wind with a deadpan expression, “it’s a fair question.”

The woman makes an airy noise that turns into a chuckle. “Ha! No, that’s not me. I'm no witch.” She says, having broken off her shock. Notably, the woman is not wearing a pointy hat. There are no big warts on her face. Plus, she seems to be well adjusted. Hiccup’s response would’ve been to agree and nod, but then she blinks, considering. “Least, not yet. But you know, maybe I could at this rate.” 

No. No, he doesn't know. Hiccup blanks back to a half-eaten sentence he’s not been present enough to recall. He’s about to ask her to repeat herself, but the lady isn’t looking at him. She’s looking to her side, following a swift trail with her eyes that Hiccup can’t see, but he can feel the tell-tale of the wind. 

She averts her eyes to Hiccup, then back to the wind, then back to Hiccup. Confirmation, he thinks, is what she’s asking from him. Hiccup nods, stiff to his shoulders, who carry the movement, a half shrug half nod hybrid. She turns back to the curling of dust and leaves. “Actually, could you go ahead?” She tells the wind, “I think I didn’t, ninety-nine percent sure of it, but I might have left the oven on. Or the boiler. Something on.” The wind leaves slowly. Cold brushing hiccup’s cheeks as it slips away. Joyace looks back at Hiccup, apologetically, speaking in a rush, as the wind spills in through the windows, windowsills snapping against the frame. “It’s not usually this bad, I promise. I left in a hurry, with all the—” she gestures around. 

“Yeah,” he says, not getting it at all. God only knows what Be or Not to Be witches do during their Wednesday mornings. 

The woman seems to ponder something, eyeing him, “You’re Hiccup, right?” She asks. The record stops once again.

Hiccup eyes her warily. Automatically knowing people's names is very suspicious witch-like behavior. Especially when the naming choice situation doesn’t seem to faze the woman in the slightest. Norwegian outsiders—insiders, too—usually look a little put off, even before Jack gave his name an English translation. It's customary. 

“It’s Joyace,” she clarifies, “Joy for short. Nice to—well, formally meet you. Didn’t think it’d be this soon. Or ever, if I’m being honest.” She pauses. “Unless you’re someone else? I assumed—the timing would be strange otherwise, is all.”

Joyace. Joy for short. The bells aren’t ringing—the church is on the other side of town. He doesn’t remember her face—her name shakes inside the walls of his skull and rattles nonsensically. He shrugs in his mind's eye and steps closer, filling the gap.

“To be fair, I only mentioned my name once, and it was all very quick,” the lady—Joyace, says. Hiccup’s gaze remains on the ground, frowning vigilantly. “I asked for your coordinates during the phone call last night.”

Hiccup is still thinking as she tells him this. It only takes a short moment to stop, a bundle of keys chattering in her hand that aids in bringing him back, but it feels longer. Then, the last half of her sentence settles; the flavors grounding and giving shape to the voice he’d heard through the phone.

Hiccup's eyes widened. 

Oh, shit. 

The Joyace? No way. Or yes way? Hiccup stares at the woman.

“I—Yes.” He says, finally, “I’m Hiccup. That guy.” The name sounds odd in a language other than his own.

The woman nods at him and says, “give me a moment, I’ll put these inside.” She takes two—three of the bags, squeezing four plastic handles in one hand—and pulls the bags full of shopping bags up, carrying them to the small porch of the house with a subtle limp. Her bundle of keys jingle as she finds the right one, swinging the door open with her elbow.

Hiccup recalls an earlier comment about a busted hip and moves to take the other three bags left beside the car. They're heavy, damn. He follows her, awkwardly balanced, stepping up the wooden stairs, outside the front door. The stairs creak when he steps on them, the wood old and dry, the sun having eaten away any color it once had. His hands shake a little, carrying them. He doesn’t think it has to do with the heavy bags, but he’ll take the excuse with gusto.

The door is open ajar, noise coming from within. He peers inside discreetly. “Um.”

The kitchen is close to the entrance, straight to the left, whereas the breadth of the living room takes on the right. Joyace’s head pops behind the kitchen’s threshold, beyond a small, shaded corridor in between. “Oh, thank you,” she says, noticing the bags in Hiccup’s hands. “You can leave them here. One, two, three…these were all, right?”

Hiccup opens his mouth, thinks about it. “I—I think so?”

She nods. Still, she goes back, double checking everything was in order, and nothing had been left behind. Hiccup steps through the doorstep and into the house like avoiding snails after a rainy day. The bags wrap and bite down around his fingers. He holds them tighter, not dropping them to the floor.

He stays there, beside the door. He panics a little, he can admit that. Something's lodged inside Hiccup's throat. Questions, doubts. Hey, wait. What about the lake? What do you know of dreams? Where is he, will I see him again? He has no idea what's the next step is following this interaction. Not that he knows, most of the time, but still. This is uncharted territory. 

“Do you like Mac n’ Cheese?” She says, popping speech bubbles crowding around Hiccup's head. “I was in the middle of making lunch before I left.”

“Uh.” He doesn't know. He hasn't tried it, yet. A true American crime to his name.

“At least let me point you the way back—things get confusing fast around here. North and West like to switch sides sometimes. They make a game off it.” She laughs. Hiccup cannot, for the life of him, tell whether she's joking or not. 

Leaving the front door open, the screen door shuttering behind them, Joyace brings a knuckle to the bridge of her nose, pushing her glasses back in place where they’d been slipping. She returns through the kitchen’s threshold with a spring in her step. Hiccup gives one last look outside before giving a hazy chase.

Chapter Text

A heavy pressure sits on Hiccup’s shoulders, kicking its feet and hitting at his sternum. He follows through a short passage without natural light, unsure how to push this…thing forward. How to tread the waters, ask what he needs to know. And he needs to. 

Hiccup was stumbling into the woods, his heart hammering and cold, yet he knew where the lake was. Like a hook to the manubrium, a fishing line tied to the make-shift edifice of his ribs. All he had to do was take the bait and follow the pull, and there was the lake in all its abysmal awe. She doesn't understand the dreams—that freshwater cradle, that bloodless womb, and that mouthless hunger. His synapses are being transmuted. Some invisible worm has burrowed itself in the shell-pink swaddle that makes his brain. He’s being consumed in his sleep. Diminishing. He’s drowning in air.

The coincidences are building up, the dreams getting more tenacious, teeth sinking more than ever at the newfound awareness of what they ought to mean and how little he knows. Jack turned away and carved an empty room at the seat of his skull. Spiders crawl within and contemplate building a nest without knowing whether the space will remain empty for long.

Hiccup cranks the door of the empty room open, a thing of the mind, and shines a light. 

The kitchen spreads ahead of him, nothing obscuring it from the entryway. All the windows are open, yet despite the chill, the room holds a strange warmth to it. What with the sunlight beaming through, the worn furniture and floorboards, the table chipped and covered with sharpie stains and doodles. There are drawings and school calendars stuck to the fridge with Bluey and Bigfoot magnets. One of the drawings seems to be a family portrait, and despite them being barely more than stick figures, shows an individual with a staff, blue eyes, and white hair as one of the four members.

“You’re Jack’s guardian,” Hiccup blurts, like he’s putting his other foot down. He reels in the same way his mind is churning, a fizzing blue screen occupying space and throwing away battery time. He puts the heavy bags down on the floor by the fridge and shakes his hands.

“I am.” To Joyace’s credit, she takes him in stride. She begins taking the groceries from the bags and onto the kitchen countertop, leaving Hiccup to wriggle his hands inside his pockets. “Though not legally. Hard thing to explain to CPS. Jack.” 

Jack. His name spoken out loud into existence. Real. Real. 

A looming shadow approaches overhead. A few spiders scatter away inside the empty room made of ice.

“I—” what to say, what to say. This is probably his father’s fault, somehow. He just had to mention meeting Jack’s guardian. Doomed him by opening his mouth. “He arrived alright?” Hiccup asks, practically wheezing. “Jack. I dropped him off, uh. At the edge of the woods, around…” he frowns, staring holes into the wooden floors. It's then that he becomes aware of how saying, oh, hey, I dropped your ward off in the dark, in the middle of shit-nowhere, makes him sound like a complete ass. “Um. He seemed to know where he was going.”

“Oh, he got home, don’t worry.” She pulls a box from the cupboard and ducks down to the cabinet beneath the stove, pulling out a pan. “Jack has his own ways of getting to places.” She fills the pan with water before turning on the stove to high. “You can just grab a chair over there. Do you want a glass of water? I just bought some juice, but it isn’t cold yet.”

Something tells him the radioactive blue bottle inside his satchel is likely still cool. “Um, yeah ok. Sure.” There’s a ringing coming from somewhere, pining his eardrums. “Water would be nice.”

Hiccup is about to ask her one of the several questions going through his head, but she beats him to it. “So, you've seen him,” she says as she searches for a glass. “Jack.”

“Oh,” he says, pulse beating. “You mean the…” he wiggles his fingers. “Yeah, I know about that.”

“No—well, come to think of it, you didn't know about the—about the everything, at the time. Did you?”

Hiccup laughs, dry. “Absolutely not, no—oh, thanks.” 

Joyace dips the jug of water, filling Hiccup’s cup, nodding at him. She crooks in a smile, eyes far away. 

“You surprised me. Back there,” she tells him, moving away to continue her task of putting things away, “At first I thought you had a case of severe dehydration or something—” Hiccup closes his eyes for a moment, the embarrassing tingle razing beneath his cheeks, folding his skin to accommodate the emotion into his face. He’s never been great at first impressions. “But then, you were talking about her. To her.” Joyace’s tone turns light, a slight awe touching ground. “I’m not surprised the wind brought you here. It’s just like her to meddle.”

Hiccup errs. He had been wondering.  “The wind, uh. She’s a…‘her’?

Joyace snaps his chin up, blinks, then shrugs. “She doesn’t really care what we use, but she likes to keep with the times.” 

Hiccup squints his eyes. He looks at his feet, squinting at them also. He scratches his forehead, feeling the gesture rather than rubbing an itch. “...The wind has pronouns?”

Joyace’s voice loops in a so-and-so tone. “With all the people in the house being able to notice her, she must have thought, ‘why not’?”

So having magic and gender studies coexist in the same world leads to this. Hiccup blinks. “Huh.” 

Hiccup searches with his eyes around the kitchen, past the threshold. He hadn’t seen or felt the wind since she slipped through the windows and into the house, he realizes. “I’ll have it in mind for next time. Where…is she, anyway? She’s the wind, she can go anywhere, but I thought she was,” he flags his hand like a booklet during summer with no AC, and a little lamely, he says, “somewhere around here.” 

Joyace hums and frees the last bag off its contents, placing the last of the cans on the shelf. Turning away from the pantry and now closed cabinets, she turns and shoots him a grin that Hiccup doesn’t understand but sees the humor in.

“To be honest, I never know myself. I know she’s never too far.” Joyace walks over to the left side of the kitchen, near the window. She takes what Hiccup notices to be a radio that was sitting beside misplaced knick knacks, switching it on. She fiddles with the buttons, broadcasting stations until landing on some song that Hiccup vaguely recognizes from having heard it coming from the supermarket speakers. She raises the volume considerably. “We’ll see. I give her less than a minute.”

He wrinkles the skin above his nose in half confusion and leans back on his seat, glimpsing into the passageway and into the living room. Like Joyace said, it doesn’t take long for the wind to barrel in. Throwing locks of hair and dust in a frenzy, Hiccup feels his hood jacket flap, the wind’s pressure lifting it up, sticking it to the back of his head and neck. The plastic bags rise into the air in rapid circles, one of them nearly slipping outside the window. He blinks against the current hitting his nape, wide eyed. The wind eases soon after, but the impression of having a small-scale cyclone appear inside a building leaves him reeling. 

Joyace looks as fresh as ever.

The volume of the music lowers, enough to speak without raising your voice. Light objects like empty match boxes and the edge of the table's mantle swings mildly to the rhythm of the song. Dancing, Hiccup supposes, or an unearthly version of tapping your foot. Joyace meets Hiccup’s eyes and raises his eyebrows, her crow’s feet showing. Hiccup nods at her faintly.

“So, like. The bat-signal,” he says.

“Oh yeah.”

What follows is a strange domestic affair. Hiccup sits, leaving his anxious, wandering thoughts to roam as the woman and the invisible figure coordinate themselves in a strange dance of pots and dehydrated macaroni. He watches, not really knowing what he’s sitting here for, but clinging to his remaining glass of water as a lifeline. The glass of water was barely touched except for the occasional sip, the condensation nestled between the crooks and folds of his fingertips. 

He snorts at the odd interactions before him with more air than sound. It’s not a mocking noise—mostly unbelieving. The whole thing is weird. Not bad, not at all, but weird. That train had already taken off hours ago—weeks, even, but Hiccup was still surprised by the sheer speed of it all. One moment he’s having freak dreams and breakdowns at shit o’clock, next he’s found that Mr. Frost is giving him a pat on the back with substantial success in recovery. 

And now he’s somehow let himself into Joyace’s house to watch her and the wind cook a meal.

It’s familiar. Preternatural. Absurd. But he’d be lying if he denied the homely ritual happening in front of him wasn’t grounding, scattering his flared worries with an ounce of sense. Like plopping all kinds of ingredients into the same pot, stirring at slow heat was bound to break it into the same sloppy mass. 

A woosh of air slides across the table, exiting the open window over the counter. Joyace leans into the indiscernible, unseen curve. The invisible pressure presses back.

He blinks. Fidgets. Swallows, before saying, “Thanks, for taking the time to explain this to me. I…” I thought I was going downright mad. Caught some sickness in the brain. Thought I was chasing fiction. Dissevering from reason. “I thought I might’ve dreamt the whole thing—before. I think I needed to hear it. That it’s happening to someone else. That it’s not just me.” 

“Of course, anytime.”

Hiccup pulls his lips thin, slow and unsure of what else to say, before he asks, “when were you able to notice that Jack was around?”

Joyace turns back to her pot. “I started noticing things. Small things. Like how the backyard’s cleaner than usual. I thank my kids, and they'd give me an odd look. Or hoarfrost on the counter, embedded in my floors.”

The frost in his car. Iridescent fractals. The shore thickening to white, waxy ice. Those eyes. “A strangeness taken root.” The words drip through from his brain and pour from his throat. Slow, as if half asleep, his eyes half lidded. He didn't realize he said the words out loud until Hiccup saw how she looked at him, puzzled. He stares back at her with wide eyes.

Joyace hums. “Is that a quote?”

Hiccup blinks. “No.” His fingers fidget, pressing against each other. “Just nonsense.” 

Joy chuckles, Hiccup’s shoulders tensing under hardship and compulsion, but Joyace’s voice is covered in thick saccharine affection. “It reminds me of my kid, the oldest. Or the second oldest, now. He thinks he’s funny.” Even exasperated, her eyes held a warmth to them. “And he is, but it gets him into more trouble than it’s worth.”

Hiccup nods, his shoulders relaxing again. His mouth dry. 

The electric feeling that dizzies him from inside his brain recedes a little, the spiders on their way to affirm the room as vacant but not safe to remain on the account of something else claiming space. Durable, it’s what this feels like, less capable of sliding through his fingers and walking into the forest at the early sight of the sun rays. Or freezing solid in the middle of a glacial night. Right now, there’s a glass between his cupped hands, a woman with a wrinkled, low quality plastic apron around her waist, and the kitchen is heavy with the scent of flavored condensation.

Joyace puts a lid on the pot, securing the heat. 

“And that’s that,” she says, wiping the moisture out of her hands down the flap of the apron, then over the sides of her pants when she remembers the plastic material of the kitchen garment isn’t going to do much. She steps next to Hiccup, and he isn't bothered by the move. She looks like she’s about to ask something, then her face does something funny. “Are you okay?” She asks, a frown sculpted into her vocal folds.

Hiccup blinks. He doesn’t bother to lie, but it comes close, the Pavlovian response of years of shrugging off his moods rearing its ugly head. “More or less,” he croaks. “This is a lot.”

Joyace breathes like she’s missed a step. “Yes, I imagine it is.” She takes one of the seats next to Hiccup, sliding from underneath the table, and barely sits on it before jolting. She stands up again, takes her phone out of her back pocket, placing it on the table, and settles properly. She faces him, body forward. “I’d forgotten how it used to feel. When everything was new to me.” She frowns. “Sorry, I don’t think I’ve been very accommodating to you, considering the…situation.”

Hiccup shakes his head, a knot in his throat. “‘S’fine. Exceptional circumstances and all.”

“Yes, well. Still. I won’t mind if you’d like to continue asking me things.” She tells him, slowly. “Not all is mine to give, mind you, but I can give you the ropes. Although, to be honest, you could live your life as you’ve been. I’m more involved because I chose to, but—it’s your choice.”

Joyace looks pained when she says this. Or maybe that’s just Hiccup, shrinking at the way her words rebound in the space where his ribs and stomach meet, deep under the first layers of the epidermis. She then looks like she’s about to say something else.

“I came looking for Jack,” he blurts, airy and rugged. “And find answers. I thought, maybe, at the lake…I thought there I’d find—I don’t know.” He shakes his head in small, rapid movements. He shrugs. “I thought—maybe, it was all in my head. Then the wind said hi and parked my car—”

“The lake?” Joyace cuts him off with a sharp edge, then the knife turns into a rubber spoon. “Wait—she parked your car?” 

“God. I hope so.”

She shakes her head. “You were saying?”

His head swarms. He thinks of the wine-dark deep, the comely waters of his dreams. He could feel it, in his dreams, the painful yammering of his heart, and of the cold. Always of the cold. How the water gibbers and sheathes him, there, in the deep. In a lake that’s not a lake, of a dream that's not a dream. He looks at her, unsure how to express this. Unsure how to tell her without sounding like he’s possessed, sickened by some fit of fever.

She knows something, he thinks, his heart constricting in his chest, his hands cold and clammy. She must know something.

“Does the lake cause weird dreams?” Hiccup stares at her in cold sweat. “Does the lake…affect people?”

“Dreams?” She asks, polite, civil, mild. “No, I’ve never had any dreams. The lake doesn't give people dreams.”

“But there’s something wrong with it. With the lake. It’s not natural. Does it draw people in? Do people go missing?”

“Yes,” she says slowly, “it’s not natural. But it’s never drawn people in, no. Usually, it’s the opposite. People can’t get too close to it, they forget about it, or they don’t talk about it for reasons they don't understand. It doesn't give people dreams, never had. Why do you ask?”

He swallows, trying to be patient, trying to keep his cool. Vying for at least some facade of rationality. He breathes in slowly. “Do you know where Jack is? Where I might find him.”

That’s…not what he’d meant to say. Jack doesn't have any more answers, and their meeting last time only drudged up more questions.

A confused look smears over her expression. Then, it clears. “Oh, he went to pick up the kids from school. They’ll be here in a few.” 

Just like that, a spider or twenty gets violently squashed underfoot. Hiccup’s eyes widen, head dizzy.

“Jack lives here?”

Joyace’s eyes cloud, her brow furrows, the frounce of her forehead reaching her eyes. “Didn’t he tell you? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“No. The wind brought me here. As in, dragged me before I told her I could walk. I mean, I would have come anyways if I’d known, but—” 

Hiccup and Joyace stare at each other.

“Oh,” Joyace says, “I thought you asked her to bring you over.”

Hiccup parts his lips, swinging some air in through his mouth, vacillating in his seat. He clears his throat. “Like I said—I probably would have come anyway.”

“To see Jack.” She says it slowly, with an odd tone that Hiccup can’t decipher.

Hiccup looks at his feet. His left shoe looks stiffer, tighter around the seams. “I wasn’t sure…if I would be able to see him again. He didn’t look very convinced yesterday, either. When we said goodbye.”

Joy’s looking at him with an inquisitive, knowing eye that reminds him of Gobber. The man could goad anything out of him with a levity matched by few. However, Joyace once more proves herself to be the exception, for the only differentiation was how only now the watchful gaze wears glasses and consideration—and, perhaps, a cauldron—rather than sarcasm. It feeds into the automatic reaction to abort and deflect. Though, what exactly Hiccup is trying to distract her from, he’s got no idea. 

“He said that the moon was a spaceship,” Hiccup says mournfully. “Casually. Like a fun fact.”

Many emotions—disbelief, outrage, confusion, and dubious acceptance—filter through Joyace’s face before she finally says, “...I am choosing not to acknowledge that.” She takes off her glasses to place her palms at her eyes. Still, she snorts. “First time hearing that one.”

He exhales sharply, a laugh that didn’t make it to see the light of day but still haunts the premises. He then rakes a hand through his hair, nose wrinkling. “I mean. Just, everything in general. Magic? I mean, c'mon.” He makes a wild gesture to the air around them, the pitch of his voice borderline hysterical. “Magic?”

Joyace blinks at him with a sparkle in her eye. 

“God, yes, thank you. Finally. Someone says it.” She leans her head back, muttering under her breath, then reels back to face him. “It’s hard keeping a straight face, sometimes.” She closes her eyes, spreads her hands, like she’s trying to fit an explanation in the space between them. “Magic. Quite.” 

“This is crazy.” He breathes, lightheaded. “This is crazy, right?”

Joyace snorts.

Hiccup runs a hand through his hair, eyes wide and his expression pinched. “Is Santa actually real? I heard that he’s an outlaw. Jack said he was an outlaw. What do I do with this information?”

“Oh. That. Yeah, I just don’t think about it too much unless it’s relevant.”

“How is it ever supposed to be relevant?”

“Jamie made an essay about the class disparity of Christmas gifts and had a list of questions with demands. He uses Jack as a messenger, poor thing. He seemed thrilled with the task, at least.”

“And he answered?”

“Oh, yes. They’ve got a long-standing correspondence going on now. So, it's relevant sometimes, yes.”

Hiccup takes that in. “What…what was the answer?”

“Apparently it's based on whatever the kids believed they could get, and something with plausible deniability.”

Hiccup thinks back on his Christmas presents, his hand-crafted items and carved wooden trinkets. He remembers accidentally finding half-finished projects hidden around the family’s workshop, paint still fresh with metallic smell, then fully finished when the time came to pull the ribbons and cheap wrapping paper apart. Or of his father doing a horrendous job of sneaking them into the house. So, maybe this North guy doesn't visit everyone. Or maybe they got on the…the naughty list? Shit. Is that also real?

“...Huh.”

“Yeah.”

Hiccup works his jaw, mouth tightening to a thin line. Again, he racks a hand through his hair. He breathes in deeply. 

“So,” Hiccup says slowly, inquiringly, “it seems like you must know a lot about this magic stuff and how it works.”

Joyace barks out a laugh, something scratchy and dry, before shaking her head. “Know? I hardly know anything. My kids saw Jack first and they just—they don't question it, the implications. How much it changes everything.” She swats her hands above her knees. “Magic to them is just. Gravity or inertia. They don’t know any better, and so I, as the adult, must keep my cool as my entire perspective of reality walks into the ocean.” She sighs. “Honestly, I was hoping you’d have some answers yourself, but it seems that you know even less than I do.”

Something inside Hiccup staggers. Trips and falls three stories downhill.

It would have been too easy, he supposes. 

His back straightens, eyes sharp, emotion swirling and carrying his voice as a high-speed rail. “What do you know? Why—why can we interact with Jack—and, and the wind? But apparently virtually no one else can? Why is it weird that we can?” His face strains, the skin pulling into the space around his eyes, “I don't understand.”

Joyace settles into her seat.

“Right. That’s the thing. For the record, I barely know anything about how his magic works. But what I do know is that Jack, or creatures like Jack, can engage with the world like we do. They can hold things, carry stuff. But we—” She makes a rounded gesture with her hand between her and Hiccup. “—Stay tangible. We're not governed by things like belief. Physics, yes. Odds, likelihoods, science. But not that dream stuff. If a nonbeliever enters the room, that's it. They slip away from us. Go through things, even light, apparently—leave virtually no traces of existence. Good as gone. Anything more than that gets murky for me.”

“Wait. Wait.” Hiccup holds up a hand. “Hold on. You have to know what the deal is with Jack. You're his guardian.”

“Jack,” she says, her voice high pitched and just as borderline hysterical as Hiccup was, “has no point of reference for normal. Getting him to talk clearly about anything is like pulling teeth.” Joyace crosses her arms and stares at the kitchen tiles on the wall, then out the window. She sighs then says, “so far, we think it’s something about how it's so close to the lake, and how maybe it combats—whatever it was that kept me from being able to interact with Jack before. But it's a question of correlation vs. causation. For me, it happened slowly. I don't know. Nobody knows. And that was our working theory before you came into the picture. Now I'm not sure if that theory is even relevant anymore.”

“So—” Hiccup can feel a headache coming. For now, he ignores the comment about the lake, pinches the bridge of his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. “—Jack implied that there were rules. If there are rules for magic, then there’s gotta be some kind of consistency. Some—” He makes a disoriented, circular gesture with his hand before opening heavy-lidded eyes. “—Structure to it. Magic can’t all be dream logic, can it? We can’t be breaking fu—uh. Freaking, magic conventions, unless there was some agreed norm. Right? So.” Hiccup gesture between the two of them. “What exactly makes us outliers? Is nobody supposed to see Jack at all? Or…?”

Finally, Joyace tears her gaze away from the window. “Apparently it’s just supposed to be kids.”

“Like, any kid? You said something earlier about nonbelievers—Jack had mentioned something about that. Children-based believers. Believers in what? Also, how would Jack go through things? What was that—let's go back to that.”

“Oh my God. No, yeah, only children that believe in Jack and people like Jack can see him. Them. It must be specific, is what I mean. You can’t just believe that magic exists, you’ve also got to believe in the thing itself. Otherwise, it doesn't count.”

“Seriously? It has to be that specific?”

Joyace shrugs, eyes on the floor and her expression clouded. “Apparently.”

“So,” Hiccup says, “how much is it supposed to be real? The myths, the stories—that stuff of folk and fancy—how much of that was real? Can you—can you bring something into existence by believing in it? What’s the limit, what's even—”

“I don’t know,” she says, tired, “I don’t know how far the rabbit hole goes. I don’t know what the limits are. I don’t know where the line is. I don’t know why we can interact with the wind, but others can’t. I don't even know how Jack can go through things sometimes, just that it happens. I just don’t know.”

Hiccup runs a hand through his hair. He sighs a long thing, something with a lot of air and very little decorum. 

“Thank you, anyways. I know I said it before, but this is—” He shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders to his neck and leaves them there for a second or two, then lets them fall.

She keeps her eyes on the floor, her expression still clouded, but she tilts towards him. She sends him a reassuring look, looking tired herself. Still, she’s smiling. “It takes some getting used to, yes. Although, to be fair, while I’ve essentially adopted an invisible child that shoots ice out of a stick—the two younger ones act like he’s always been their older brother. That, at least, smooths things out for me.” 

Hiccup smiles back at her with tight lips. His chest feels dense, but there’s a sense of liberation. Like the hand that has his overripe heart in its vice had loosened its grip, but still holds firm. When he speaks, he feels drained. Subdued. “It’s not even The Grimm Brother’s style, you know—or maybe it is, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s all supposed to be fictitious. A dream, maybe. Especially—especially when he looks like that.” Hiccup rests a hand on his cheek as he stares out the window with a furrowed brow, squinting like it's personally offended him. “Made me wonder how many people he lured into the ice or something.”

Joyace’s smile drops.  “What do you mean, luring?”

“Lured—not lured. Uhh. Allured. Seduced. Captivated by?

“What.”

Hiccup turns back to Joyace and stares, confused. “What?”

She looks at him, and the smile is back, but it’s an odd grin. “Seduced,” she says, the eyebrows quirked.

“I mean,” he says, feeling weirdly defensive, “he looks dead, sure, but in like. A marble way. With pigeons on top? Not the most conventional, but he can take people to their watery doom, for sure. I mean it as a compliment, really. He’s easy to talk to. I guess you know that.” Joyace stares at him for a moment too long when he begins to think he’s misread something along the way. He clears his throat. “Anyway, I wasn’t—I didn’t know he’d be here. I should probably go and—come back some other time. Wouldn’t want to—uh, impose. Intrude.”

For a moment, Joyace looks ready to contradict and refute, but in the end, she stares down at her lap with a sad smile.

“He doesn't get visitors often,” she says softly, shaking her head. The corner of her mouth was too tense to be described as simply a smile anymore. Hiccup thinks it looks harrowing. Something bitter, untamed and autonomous. The shadow flickers, then she shakes it off, a more comfortable posture returning to her shoulders. “He might like the surprise. You, coming to say hi.”  

A sound chimes in from the table. Joyace picks up her phone and unlocks it into the main screen. After some fiddling, she snorts down at her phone in good humor. “My kids,” she explains, picking up on Hiccup’s curious glance. She shows him a blurred picture of a couple of kids parrying each other with sticks through wooden land, frightening realistic red paint on their faces. “Jamie left with a bottle of fake blood this morning. I told him he’d have to ask them for permission to use it in his project. Jack is saying the school didn’t let Jamie do a proper demonstration during his presentation today, I think Jack let them wing it out on the way home”

Of course Jack plays with his siblings after school. Of course he’s the type to follow along with their games. Of course he would.

“Uh. Okay.” He turns away from the photo. “I’ll say hi.”

Behind him, a dull sound rattles, two heads tilting towards the noise. The broom hits the ground and clatters for a few beats before pushing itself up again. Hiccup’s eyes widen, trying to make sense of the picture: it dangles in the air, doing jerky sweeping motions without touching the ground, never mind dusting anything away. At most, the coil caused by all the swishing about will blow one spot clean and leave the rest full of dirt clumps.

“Are you sure you don’t want to use the vacuum?” Joyace sighs at the wind, with the tone of someone who’s asked several times before and already knows the answer. The broom stops moving, poised upright like a perch. It stays that way, Joyace staring at it with a flat expression for a moment that stretches, reminding Hiccup of history class and a teacher with beady eyes that stared into your soul and back. Hiccup’s gaze darts between Joyace and the inanimate object. “Fine. If that’s how you want to be, please. Be my guest. You know I always appreciate a helping hand.”

Hiccup turns and settles back to Joyace.

“She doesn’t really like the vacuum, even though it makes work easier. Something to do with messed up airwaves. I think she’s jealous.”

The broom turns on its axis. En guarde, like a sword ready to strike. Joyace stares with her eyebrows raised for five glacier seconds. 

The broom lowers, sinking into an upright position before going back to doing a piss poor job at sweeping. Joyace sticks her chin up, having won the battle of wills.

She gestures to the broom. “She could just sweep the whole place in one go, but she’s prideful like that.” Her voice is flat and wry, but as she stares at the swirling leaves and roving dust, her eyes are soft, her mouth quirked at the edges. 

Hiccup looks away once again, feeling odd. 

Bit by bit, chatter begins to filter through the windows. High pitched jabber and laughter coming from outside the house reaches Hiccup’s ears, and he forces himself not to jolt, pressing his teeth together, hands full of sweat.

Joyace seems to have also noticed the activity going on outside. “I’ll give them a heads up.” She motions at the entrance, nodding at him, then vacillates with parted lips. “If you want something to do, you can put the bowls on the table.”

Hiccup gets up, too fast before he corrects himself, glad to have an excuse to flail his limbs around. “Isn't it a bit early for dinner? But, yeah, of course. Er, where—and how many—”

“I'd hardly call just mac and cheese a dinner. No, I usually try to make them a snack when they come home whenever I can. Five bowls. You can grab the ones on the drying rack. Cutlery’s here. Just spoons are fine. Oh, and Sophie likes adding mayonnaise to everything.”

Joyace pushes her chair back, and grabs her phone, typing something in while Hiccup handles the bowls.

“Wait, what was the presentation about?”

“The French revolution,” she says.

“Ah.”

Her phone beeps. “Well, they’re here.” She tells him, with an air of finality, looking once again at her phone and tucking it away. She smiles at him. “I’ll go ahead and take care of the reception.” 

Yes. Right. He watches her walk over to the door, then step out, the screen door slowly falling back as the wooden one stays open, letting the sun fall over the floorboards through the crack.

Hiccup hesitates, then reaches the fridge, pulling twice when the first tug didn’t do the trick. Bottles and jars rattle spring back, hitting the wall of the fridge door when it opens, recoiling back to place. He winces, but the house is silent. There's an ungodly amount of applesauce and cold cuts for sandwiches, neither of which are things that would frequent his own fridge. He spots the mayonnaise jar sitting on one of the lower trays, easily accessible. After a moment's consideration, he grabs the now cool juice box from the place it had been left at the back, probably so it would cool faster.

The front door opens. There’s nothing to see from where he stands, but he hears the telltale signs and the whine of the doors being pried open, followed by footsteps and the sounds of someone arriving home and dumping everything as it is. Whatever time Joyace had tried to gain Hiccup by playing messenger for Jack, does not carry the same effect on her kids; Hiccup is still holding on to the cool jar and humid juice box when a small figure dashes in straight for the fridge. Hiccup takes a step back. So does, who Hiccup can only assume by default, Jamie. Fortunately, nothing falls, crashes and leaves a permanent stain on the flooring of Hiccup’s ego.

The boy, presumably the oldest of the two kids, gapes at the stranger in his house. “Who are you?!”

Before the boy gets any ideas of screaming his lungs out, Hiccup hurries to throw himself an introduction.

“Uh, hi. Your mom told me to wait here for a minute. I’m Hikke.” 

The boy squints at him with what Hiccup thinks is an excessive amount of suspicion, although perhaps appropriate. “I’m Jamie. But only my friends can call me that.” he says, sounding out every bit of the ten-something years he’s got on himself. “And my mom. You can call me James.”

“James. Right.”

“I haven’t seen you before. Are you from mom’s work? She works at the office.” Jamie continues, “her boss is bald.”

Just how old did this kid think Hiccup was? He steps to the table, placing the objects at the center of the table, amidst the bowls, like he does at home.

“I don’t work in an office.” Hiccup puts his weight from one foot to the other. Whatever is left of it. “I moved over here about a month ago. From an island off Norway. Small town at the end of nowhere.”

The kid continues watching him. It's a bit eerie, if he’s being honest, but Hiccup admits that being cautious about strange people in your kitchen isn’t a bad trait to possess. A soft chime reaches Hiccup’s ears, and the faint murmur flickers his hair. The window squeaks when the wind filters through the small open gap, reaching his cheek and the lapels of his jacket.

Hiccup turns to her, who’s carried a trail of flying dirt and forest bits inside. “Hi again. Is…everything good, out there?”

The wind whistles, but Hiccup can’t really tell what she means. His face twists a little, but tries to keep it in check, veering away from the apprehension that leans into an ache he feels in the body and not just in the obfuscation of the brain. It threatens to dig into his ribs, a pressure that pins the expanding cold sensation into the apex of the heart. Hiccup breathes and the cold lessens. The pressure lifts off, sticking the prodding needles into the shaking muscles of his limbs rather than the beating of his heart, and Hiccup makes an effort to make it stay there, away from his hard-beating nexus. He presses shaking hands into fists, smoothing his knuckles under thumbs. 

“Wait.” Jamie whispers. “Waitwaitwait. You—oh man, Sophie’s gonna flip.”

He turns again towards the boy, whose eyes are wide open. Oh. Right. He didn’t know that Hiccup knew. 

“Sorry?”

“You’re the guy, aren’t you! The one with the weird name, who called last night!” Jamie pauses and turns an easy shade of pink, grimacing as he tries retracing his steps. “I mean—sorry. It’s not that weird.”

“No, you’re right.” He says and tries to pick a tone of voice that could equally annoy his father yet cause an acquaintance to choke a surprised laugh. “I have been going by Hikke since I came over here, but where I’m from—in my home language that is, I actually, honest-to-God, legally, go by Hiccup. You might as well call me that, too. Easier to remember, I think.”

Jamie blinks. He’s resisting the urge to say something indiscreet; Hiccup knows. He can respect the attempt. Instead, Jamie goes quiet, eyes fluttering throughout the room. 

“So, you know about—” the boy cuts himself off. His entire posture is a collision of interests; his frame is frozen, but his limbs flutter and flicker. Hiccup blinks at him with a sense of deja-vu. Perhaps this is how Hiccup must have looked in the eyes of Gobber or his father when he was younger and hadn’t grown the limiting but preventive veil of emotive camouflage.

“Yeah,” he says, throwing Jamie a bone. “I know about Jack.” 

Jamie’s eyes widen, something vulnerable and excited lurking underneath. “Wow. I mean, wow. And you—you remember him.” Hiccup frowns at that, but Jamie is a flash of excitement and appendages. A bright thing. It overtakes everything else, and Hiccup can’t help the smile that climbs his lips. “Oh, man, that’s so cool. Seriously, Sophie’s going to flip, she’s been pestering Jack, like, the entire time. And you’re here. In our house. No one ever comes to our house! Where’s Sophie?” Jamie pauses. “Hold on, where’s Jack?”

It’s a good question Hiccup has been actively trying not to get an answer to, but a kid is here now, his car is too far away, and Hiccup can only run for so long. “Uhhhh. Outside? Your mom is telling him I’m here. I think.”

Jamie all but climbs on the kitchen counter, sitting on the surface but peering over the window. “He doesn’t know you’re here?” The kid wears a colossal grin. His eyebrows rise, joined by a snort and a snicker. “Oh, this is great. He just tripped over his staff.”

Hiccup cringes for both Jack and himself. “He did?”

Jamie hums. “I call that justice.”

Justice for what?

But before Hiccup could ask, Jamie pushes the window open, only by a fracture, angling his ear to the open crack. Hiccup…Hiccup sits on the chair again. There’s a very strong urge to join Jamie by the window, but he remains in his seat. He’s no longer twelve. At least the boy in front of him has that excuse going on for him. However, this doesn’t stop Jack’s high-pitched shout from leaking in from the window and his gibberish flooding into the kitchen. 

“Is—is he okay, you think?”

“I…guess.” Jamie nods, then snorts at whatever he’s seeing. “He’ll be fine.” 

With that, the boy turns on his heel and rushes out of the kitchen. He reaches the edge of the kitchen’s entrance, a hand gripping the purely decorative door arch, and lets his weight swing into the dark and short pathway.

“Sophie, the walls are thin, I know you’ve heard everything. Get up!”

With some reluctance, irrepressible curiosity takes the lead as Hiccup steps in, following the boy’s line of sight. ‘Sophie’ lies face down, surrounded by what Hiccup presumes are her belongings, flat on the floor. Spots of bright thick red dye her blonde hair, locks sprawling over the sides of her face, over the ground. She wiggles her hands, arms lying limp by her sides before flopping them still again. 

Yikes. He felt that.

“Ugh, fine. Be like that.” Jamie says, then turns back to the counter, plopping onto it and towards the window once more. He watches for a short moment before he’s whispering and jumps back down. “Oh, shoot. Okay, they’re coming. Hiccup, you stay there—wait, no. Stand up.” He does. He doesn’t even question it. God. “Okay, so like—not like that. No, offense but you’re standing like you’re about to fall over. Not a good impression. Jack’s cool. You’re pretty cool too, right?”

Hiccup had never been called that in his life, ever. “I’m—”

“Awesome,” Jamie barks, smiling like the tail end of a shooting star that grew teeth. “Stay there. Without the shoulder thing. Be right back.”

And then he leaves. Hiccup wants to cry, maybe. He’s not made for this, he thinks. Social interaction. He really isn’t. It should be easier—kids have no filter. He has no filter—why isn't it easier? If he could just—

The door creaks open.

The temperature plunges, and all he smells is that freshwater silt. He turns to the door, his breath caught in his throat and eyes wide as translucent white fingers curve over the wooden edge, hoarfrost violently blooming across the doorknob. The house shutters, Hiccup’s breath clouds, and there is the boy all in blue. Bare-foot, stepping in like he’s down-feather light, Frost spreads from his footsteps and onto the wooden floor like lacework, like spider-web spasms. Like he’s without weight, Hiccup’s merry ghost of the lake. 

But when Hiccup looks Jack in the eye, all that mythos, all that folk-fancy and dream-vision rots and falls apart. Instead of a mirage, or some story-book illustration, Hiccup sees a furrowed brow. A nervous anticipation. Those bright, sad eyes alight in some fragile wonder.

They stand there for a moment in silence, both still. Each looking at the other.

They step closer to each other, like they’re friends who haven’t seen each other in a lifetime. It shouldn’t feel this overwhelming, like standing on a live wire, like walking into some candy-glass dream. They saw each other this morning, yes. They’re new to each other, yes. Strangers, yes. But they didn’t know that the other was real—could be real. They didn’t know. It’s like they’re walking around an invisible wall, not reaching out but with every intention to. Maybe Jack doesn’t know what to do in this situation either.

Jack breaks the silence first, and says, “still hallucinating, you think?” 

It’s supposed to be wry, Hiccup thinks. Something paired with a quirked brow and a sharp grin. But Jack’s too sincere, too insecure. Too curious.

“I’m not that crazy yet, no,”

Jack laughs, delicate, at risk of breakage. Sleets of ice off the glacier top.

Hiccup extends an arm, awkward and lame. Jack stares, hesitates, then grabs it back. And then Hiccup is being pulled in and they’re sharing a hug.

“Ha!” The sound rings into the entryway, and Jack spins. Bright, bright. Hiccup’s feet stop touching the ground like he’s the weightless one. Oh, man. 

Frost touches Hiccup’s cheek, cold but soft in texture. He barely feels it, lightweight as it is. It spreads in a thin layer, blooming where Jack’s hold fastens. Goosebumps cover Hiccup’s forearms. He laughs, too.

Jack puts him down and they break apart.

“Hiccup, what. What are you even doing here?” Jack laughs, looking at him like he can’t believe what’s in front of him. His hands on Hiccup’s shoulders are cold, slowly leaching the warmth from his core. Hiccup can’t bring himself to care. 

He coughs, makes a burrowing sound. “In my defense, this was…not part of the plan.” 

Jack smiles, wry, finally. All that vulnerability melted away. “What plan are we talking about?”

Hiccup huffs. Looks at him with some incredulity. “...Not the one where I come into your house unannounced? I mean. It’s your house.” Hiccup looks away from Jack and down at his clothes, now coated in white fluff. “In my defense, though, I thought you lived in—in a tree, or whatnot. No offense.”

“None taken.” Jack takes a step back, looking at Hiccup’s clothes too. He apologizes, laughs an airy thing, brushing the frost away with the back of his fingers. Jack, however, only makes it worse, the ice growing in jubilant fuzz, muttering under his breath, “okay, bad idea.” Hiccup rolls his eyes, the corners of his mouth quirk upwards, as he gently grasps Jack’s hand and pushes it away before flicking off the frost himself. “Anyway, you’re not wrong,” Jack says, staring at him as the frost peels off and falls to the ground, “I used to, before. Living in the trees, in some abandoned fox burrow. And I guess I still do, on occasion.”

Hiccup stares at him, then snorts.

Jack looks at him. “What?”

Hiccup brings a hand to his face. “Seriously?” Hiccup lets his hand slip down. “Trees. House in the woods. For your sake, I really hope you don’t sparkle under the sun.”

Jack groans. “Please. Don’t make me the Edward in this.”

“Who’s Edward?” Jack and Hiccup startled, staring at Jamie. Sophie follows closely behind him, and when she taps his shoulder, he turns and sees her making fangs with her pointer fingers. This somehow seems to be enough of a clarification for Jamie as he turns back to Jack and Hiccup then says, “wait. Isn't Twilight that old movie with the vampires?

Hiccup gapes. “Old? I was your age when it came out!”

“Yeah. Old.”

“I mean,” Jack says, throwing Hiccup a sly smile, “I wouldn’t call it old.”

“Jack,” Jamie says, “you are three-centuries-years old. You are the pinnacle of old. I can’t hear you over your dusty senior citizen membership card. Shut up and go back to the 1700’s where you belong.”

Holy fucking shit. Hiccup stares as Jamie, brows raised to his hairline. That was ruthless. Jack, similarly bewildered, looks speechless yet delighted.

“Oh boy,” says Joyace, coming out of fuck-all nowhere. Or, possibly, came in right after Jack, and Hiccup for some reason just—didn’t notice. “Hiccup, meet my two Tasmanian devils.”

“Oh, we already met.” Jamie says, then whispers in a tone he probably thinks no one can hear him, “You’re still doing the shoulder thing, by the way. You should fix that.”

Sophie nods. 

Fucking. Ruthless. 

“Okay,” Joyace says, an angel coming up from the battlefield to the wounded. Because that’s how he feels. Fucking wounded. Twelve-year-olds, man. “Who wants Mac?”

Chapter Text

Hiccup grips onto his spoon like a fucking lifeline.

Everyone is staring at him, which sucks. Joyace? She sits at the head of the table to the furthest left of him, looking at him. Sophie and Jamie? They both sit across from him, Sophie to the left and Jamie to the right. They’re also looking at him. 

Sophie looks disinterested—keyword, looks. Her eyes rotating around the room lazily like a fly that’ll occasionally come to buzz at his nose, buzz off, and repeat. Jamie, however, is slouching over the table. Balancing precariously in his chair, his body weight is poised on his elbows, crinkling the plastic tablecloth with a crazed look in his eye like some tasteless iteration of good cop/bad cop in one of those piss poor action movies. And his mother does not look interested in noticing the hazard that is her son—namely because she’s too busy looking at Hiccup like he’s going to do a magic trick. 

To be fair, Hiccup had been waiting for her to do the same thing. 

Jack is also staring from the foot of the table, in that smug way of his like he’s expecting to be entertained or amused by something. Hiccup could tell, given that it's almost the exact same look Jack had before he stepped into Hiccup’s car. It’s the same look Jack had when Hiccup had handed him a blanket, like Hiccup’s somehow done something either clever or insanely funny and doesn't know it yet. 

The wind is, perhaps, the only one who’s giving him a berth of space. Huzzah. Even then, he can hear her lingering near the window, making a silver noise that reflects on the plates sitting on the drying rack. The sound is familiar, reminding him of the west flank of his old house and how it faced the receiving end of Berk’s known long winded cliffs. If not as strong, then as persistent. The window pane flutters and it sounds like a sharp crackle before fading into nothingness.

He slowly chews on the mac and cheese. It's…well, it’s macaroni. And cheese. It’s alright, he supposes. Kind of bland, if he's honest. The texture is a little off, too, but he’s not going to slander the only thing keeping his attention from slipping off and make the mistake of meeting them directly in the eye. One does not disrespect the sanctum of a lifeline.

The boy in front of him doesn’t lean forward, but his elbows spread on the table, rippling the plastic further. “So. Hiccup,” Jamie says. 

Joyace sighs, muttering, “here we go.”

His spoon freezes in the space between his chin and the bowl. His eyes briefly squeeze closed. Swallows. Like a man on death row chewing on his last meal. It seems vitally important to him not to raise his head more than 35 degrees away from his plate; the weight is like a cinder block sitting behind his front lobe and makes it easy to keep his head down. But something has to give in. 

He did not get enough sleep for this.

Hiccup cranes his neck rather than leaning back, unnaturally stiff in the way one does when awkwardness takes its brassbound grip—not what appears when smoke and fire are invoked in his mind's eye, a thing of flesh turned to metal, but a thing that bumbles instead. Awkward. He feels awkward. He meets Jamie’s burlesque seriousness with what he hopes is a blank expression, but probably gives something away regardless. 

“Yes…?”

“What’s your deal?” 

Hiccup is hyper aware of where his shoulders are and what they’re doing now. Kids, man. 

“My deal.” 

“Your thing.”

“My thing?”

“Yes. Your thing.”

“What thing?”

“Jack.” Jamie finally looks away from Hiccup and turns to Jack, who’s laying back on his seat, plate untouched, with the attitude of a teacher letting the novice play the field. Hiccup’s eyes flicker to Jack’s and sees the crinkle in his eyes, his sharp mouth tugging at the corner. Prick. He still feels the damp fabric against his skin, the melting frost lingering on his jacket when Jamie says, “Jack, tell him about the thing."

Jack looks back at Jamie. He raises an eyebrow. 

“I think that’s Guardian analogy territory.”

“Noooooo,” Jamie says in despair. “That’s not it!”

Hiccup looks between the two of them, feeling somewhat bewildered. 

“Uhh.”

Jack shakes his head. Hiccup’s unsure if it’s at him or at Jamie. Jack then snorts, and says, “you’re being a bit cryptic here. If you’re going to interrogate our guest, you might want to start with straightforward questions.”

Hiccup nods to himself. Jamie sighs a long, suffering sound, tapping his hand against the table as the other hand picks up the spoon and stiffly devours his meal. 

Hiccup then stills, blinking. A gear gets jammed, a misalignment inside the brain. 

“Guardian analogy?” Hiccup turns to Jamie, prying the darn coil, finding the key issue. “What Guardian analogy? What’s he talking about?” He turns back to Jack. “What are you talking about?” Hiccup looks at Joyace briefly, but she simply shrugs, looking as lost as Hiccup feels. Or, she’s letting the kids have their turn at the cost of Hiccup’s health. Hard to say.

Sophie, who’s sitting on the cushioned bench against the wall to the left of Hiccup, takes her empty glass with one hand, which she rises above her head, and a napkin with another. The glass sits on her hair like a pointed hat and the napkin like a beard. She says, “ho, ho, ho.” 

Hiccup does a double take, desperately scrambling for context. She can talk, she just chooses…not to? However, he turns that dial down pretty quick and Hiccup lets it sit with the rest of the questions sitting on his mental tray, reluctantly moving on.

“Uh…is that—was that a clue?”

Sophie stares at him, unblinking. 

Alright.

Hiccup squints his eyes at the glass and napkin, then at Joyace, who decides then to focus on her mac and cheese, before finally settling his gaze back at Jamie. 

“Correspondence.”

Jamie lowers his spoon and looks at him like he’s either lost a marble or gained one. 

“Huh?” 

Hiccup coughs, twisting his boots against the floor tiles like he took a leap down the ravine  and now his knees are suffering as a consequence. He retraces his mental steps and reboots the linear sequence of thought association, feeling wrong footed. “Santa. Nicholas. However he’s called—you talk with him? Because he's real. He’s real, right?” Hiccup turns to Jack again. “And you’re the delivery guy. Because you know him. Enough to hand deliver mail, apparently. Because he’s real.”

Jack blinks with his eyes wide, giving Joyace a look. She shrugs again, this time with some mirth blended into it.

“Oh, you mean North?” Jack says, playing off whatever that was, “the russian convict? Yeah, he’s real.”

“Interesting how you know him for that and not for the other thing. Also—does not answer my question. But, yes. Him. That guy. Correspondence.”

“Do you have a point to this?” Jack says, the little shit, like he’d done back in the car when he’s purposely being obtuse to mess with him. Hiccup huffs, eyebrows pulled down but with a gleeful yet exasperated grin tugging at the rest of the expression. His eyes are starting to burn from the lack of sleep, but he puts aside the sensation—too wired from the conversation.

“Getting there. You said—in the car something about an ‘I.T.’ guy—what was he called again…‘earth's magical protection services,’ you said. Moon-is-a-spaceship guy. What were you going on about?”

Sophie drops her spoon, slack-jawed. She slams her hands down the table, rattling bowls, spoons, and the juice box, sounds ending on a high metallic note. The wind picks the spoon and tosses it, Joyace grabs it and puts it back into her plate in a smooth motion. Sophie gestures something that Hiccup doesn’t catch. Jamie pulls a face and spreads his hands, looking at Sophie with mirrored looks of horror and disgust.

Oh, so it’s news to everyone. Fun.

“I wouldn't worry about it, kids,” Joyace says, followed by a whistle that’s moved from the window to the counter, raking Joyace’s locks, swaying slowly as her already loose bun unspools. Hiccup watches, feeling oddly puzzled as the wind tucks hair bundles back in place and Joyace silently thanking her for it.

“No,” Jamie says, as Sophie stares at the table with a thousand yard stare, “I think I will.”

“I’m mildly impressed you remember that,” Jack tells Hiccup, nonplussed and brows raised like he was born to supervise and overlook existential crisis. Handing them out like cheap pamphlets.

Hiccup frowns, unsure if he should be insulted or not. Ultimately, he decides it’s not with the effort. “It was less than a day ago.” He sighs, tired. So tired. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Guardian analogy,” Hiccup recites, dragging his hand down off his face, trying to keep them on track. They might as well be back on that 4 hour drive. “North. Guy in the chair. You. Sand guy might be involved? ‘Sandman’? Pitch. There’s a connection, that’s my point.”

“There’s two others, one of which being an alien from outer space, but sure.”

Hiccup rolls his eyes at Jack and points at him.

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

Hiccup lays back on his chair, breathes and looks at Jack with wide eyes, raised eyebrows and pursed lips. He’s so close. So close to losing it. He can feel it. It’s probably in his blood, too. Like leukemia. “You—you’re not being straight with me.” 

Jack points back at him with his own spoon, bowl still untouched. “I left that thing back over a century ago, I think.” He starts to twirl the spoon between his fingers, nonplussed. 

Joyace coughs. Sophie offers her the Santa beard napkin as she nonchalantly picks at her food.

“What,” Hiccup asks, expression pinched, “clarity?” 

Jack stares at him for a moment. 

“Sure.”

“…Right.” Hiccup squints. “Anyways…all of that, being connected. What is it? You, North, Sandman, two others, and…moon guy, I guess. Who’s also a factor in this. Because that’s real, also. Sure. Why not.” 

“He keeps on track and he’s quick.” Jamie makes a soft noise, like a gasp of awe, already snapped out of his reverie. “Let's keep him.”

Hiccup shuffles in his chair, bashful and unsure on how to respond. 

“We can’t keep random adults, son. There are laws about that.” 

“I mean, we got Jack.”

“He’s a special case,” Joyace reasoned, “therefore unrelated.”

Sophie looks at Hiccup with an unsettling hard gleam in her eyes as if she alone can bypass the US of A’s federal stance on kidnapping.

Hiccup eyes her back nervously and elects on instead taking another bite into his bowl, food mostly gone by this point and clinging to the sides of the ceramic. He grimaces at the now cold cheese, the pasty texture and accentuated sourness, chewing with his tongue pressing as close to the roof of his mouth as he can, and not the mush between his teeth without looking like an unthankful miscreant. Cheese rule number one: eat while warm, or not at all. Not too hot, either, otherwise it’s just liquid slop. 

He puts the spoon down but doesn’t let go, considering what kind of faux pas he’d be committing if he were to put the dish aside, and how to best avoid anyone noticing.

Jamie suddenly gasps, raises his hand up in the air. He waves it around.

Bringing a hand over his mouth and gesturing at Jamie with the other, Hiccup sighs and says, “please, for the love of God. Just tell me. Elaborate, on anything. I promise I won't stop you.” He swallows, resisting the urge to grimace at the texture.

“HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE AVENGERS.”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“I’m joking,” Hiccup says. He’s not. The movies look like they suck ass. But he’s heard enough people talk about it, and read enough rants on the low quality one bar internet—two on a good day—to know what the movies are about and what happened. “I love Spider-Man. I know who Spider-Man is.” 

Jamie looks like he doesn’t care, outside the containment bubble of energy he’s trying very hard not to burst in Hiccup’s face. He bolts upwards, the chair tittering before balancing back on all fours, tripping over words and shooting past them. “Yeah, okay. So. This guy here—” He stretches his arms at Jack over the table to the right, swaying forward with a wobble. “Is kiiiind of Marvel Universe Loki—you know who Loki is, you’re Norwegian—if Loki had been a good guy. Annnd didn’t have a cool brother that directs lightning, I guess. Actually, Jack can kinda do that? Not the point.” What. “Point is, they’re both blue characters with ice powers and a sad backstory. I mean, just look at him—” He points at Jack.

“Hey.”

“I said if Loki was a good guy from the beginning,” Jamie says, “a very important distinction. You’re just misunderstood, because you look weird, but that's ok.”

Jamie says this with a guiltless expression and a bright tone, but there’s a grate around his eyes that gives the mischief away.

“Weird?” Jack squints. “I don’t look weird.”

“You do. You look homeless, also,” Jamie adds helpfully.

Jack squints at Jamie even harder.

“I don’t see how that makes me like Loki. Loki doesn't look homeless. Also, notably, I do not want to take over the world. I know, because I’ve been offered. He’s not even blue all the time, just in like two scenes. That's our only real connection. He shapeshifts, he doesn't even have ice powers.”

“He does in the comics,” Jamie pipes in.

“Ok, well. The comics also had Ms. Marvel give birth to her boyfriend. So.”

Everyone makes a face at that. Hiccup decides then, for the sake of his sanity, that he wasn't going to ask for an elaboration.

“No straw man fallacies at the table, Jack.” Joyace then adds, “also, Loki is a frost giant. Him having ice powers makes more sense than him not having ice powers.”

“I thought you didn’t read the comics?”

“I don’t, but between all of your discussions I can piece things together.” Joyace waves her phone and the screen shows pictures of Loki comics. “Also, google.”

“...Granted. But that’s just him being able to do magic in general, not his speciality. Maybe a small poetic thing written here or there? ‘I am winter, winter is coming, blah blah’. But what does he do? Not winter magic. See? Similarities null and void, we’re nothing alike.”

“...Right,” Hiccup says, understanding nothing, sending the rest of the family a questioning look while Jack is not looking. Sophie sends him the universal sign for, ‘ignore him’, Jamie grins, and Joyace only shakes her head. Hiccup looks back at Jack. “Ice powers, innit?”

Jack shrugs. “Let it go.”

“That’s just Jack.” Jamie tells Hiccup. “The other Guardians have their own thing. So, like. Think avengers, but with, uh, magic. Less avatar-the-last-airbender-ish. Not magic like Dr. Strange, that’s different magic—time-space wizardly. Our magic.” Sophie makes a whooshing sound.

Hell you mean, ‘our magic’?

“They just don’t do them like they used to,” Jack sighs.

Jamie turns to him. “Aren’t the Guardians older than you?”

Hiccup tilts his face to the side, stretching his neck. “So—what, they also have, uh—” don’t say it, don’t say it—“magical powers?” Hiccup phrases the question like he can’t believe he’s saying it, mainly because he doesn’t. Coincidentally, there’s a child-sized Hiccup running inside his withdrawn, unsociable and sardonic heart, spinning in circles and glowing like an IMALENT SR32. 

“Yeah,” Jamie says, “they kind of live really, really, really long. Like dawn-of-time long. Not all of them, but as long as kids believe in them, they’re practically immortal. Kinda. Not exactly. It’s complicated.”

Hiccup nods. It’s not all too different from how Joyace had explained it, although Jamie seems to be the one filling in the gaps. Hiccup looks at the table, morbidly curious, and maybe a touch perturbed.

“So yeah, there’s North—that’s Santa, of course. You know what he does.” Jamie continues, “he lived for a long time, is basically a genius, and technically his magical powers are swords. They’re very cool by the way.”

“His tattoos are magic, also,” Sophie says.

“Swords?” Not exactly the mental picture one comes across first. Then again, marketing is a lie and apparently Santa was a felon first. Hiccup eyes Joyace, trying to gauge on whether she knew this or not. She looks lost, a tightness around the eyes that reads to him as uncertainty. Oddly enough, she looks young in that brief moment, but then the expression flickers and dissolves, and he doesn’t have the time to deconstruct it. “Wait, tats?” Hiccup says, incredulous, “Santa has magical tattoos.”

“Cavalry sabre,” Jack corrects. “Whatever you know about ‘old saint Nick’, forget about it. Except the cookie thing.”

“Uhuh.”

“‘Ana can fly—she’s the tooth fairy.” Jamie says, then points at him, Sophie getting up on her seat and turning around herself, rotating by knocking knees together. Hiccup suspects she’s attempting visual aid. “Not float. Like, she actually flies. She’s got these—huge hummingbird wings? She’s a polyglot, too. She came around to give us sign language classes once.”

“Showed teeth collection,” Sophie adds.

In the corner of Hiccup’s eye, he sees Joyace puts her head in her hands when no one else is looking. 

“...Uhuh.”

Jamie starts counting with his fingers. “Sandman, Bunny…”

“That’s the alien by the way.” Jack says. 

“I—which one?”

“Actually, both are. Aliens, I mean. I meant the rabbit, though.”

“The rabbit.”

“Easter bunny. Spirit of Spring. Pain in the—neck,” Jack drawls. “Something crawled in and never came out. A real stick in the mud.”

“Seven feet tall,” Sophie says, eyes crinkling and smiling a little wider than she was before.

“Seven feet tall rabbit. Right.”

Jack hums. “Australian, too. Or, at least he’s got the accent. I’ve never asked him about that, now I think about it...”

“Australian,” Hiccup and Joyace trade a look as he says it. “Of course.”

Sophie clicks her fingers at him. He reels in. Right. Hiccup focuses on his temple and disperses the tension stitching wrinkles there, ebbing the small headache that had begun to form. He shakes his head, blinks a few times. He raises a hand, palm facing the others. “So, they—what do they even do?”

Jack looks at him, a faux smile that would read as patient if not for the sadistic gleam in his eyes. “Come on,” he says, like one would to a particularly slow child. “You know.”

Maybe it’s the way Jack’s tilted in his seat, or the strange air of confidence around him, or the way Jack is keeping his eyes on him. Whatever it is, it makes something condense into Hiccup’s face, cramped and sizzling beneath his skin, a whirring that compromises the structural integrity of his skull.

“Little shit,” he whispers under his breath before he can think about it, hand drawn to his face.

And, look. Hiccup is not an idiot—mostly, he’s disgruntled. Annoyed, really. It’s simply mind-boggling that Jack’s got game at all, and he’s frustrated that he gets it. If Hiccup tried that, he’d get the crap kicked out of him. He certainly couldn’t have gotten away with it and looked hot while doing it. Ugh. Couldn’t the universe have spared some charisma for Hiccup instead?

Hiccup throws his hands up. “Fine, ok. They, what, throw gifts at kids as—compensation? That’s—that sounds a lot like graft. Or bribery.” Commensalism fits the bill best. Maybe parasitism if you look at it from an odd angle, but he’s not about to say that with the kids looking at him all wide eyed as they talk about the Guardians like heroes of yore.

“That’s what I said!” Jack cackles, sudden and garish. He throws himself over the table, laughing a mean, self righteous sound. “I told them, but noooo, Jack. It’s different, Jack. It doesn't work like that, Jack. Ha! As if.”

Hiccup sees Sophie roll her eyes. She gestures at Jack with a half hearted version of a shrug, aided by a disparaging expression that makes her face look younger than it is, as if saying: this is what I’ve got to live with, see? 

Hiccup breathes a small laugh that loosens the pressure in his jaw.

Jack tilts back beside him, laughing residual snickers, taking a long breath of air he doesn’t actually need. Then his face softens, though there's still that lingering mischievous gleam to him. “Too much?”

Hiccup groans, the sound carrying into a sigh. He gives Jack a half exasperated smile, which feels different from his usual satirical overall attitude. More true, less heavy. It’s nice. “You’re saying that the—the four commercialized myth-horsemen of the apocalypse exist. And have a band. After the moon thing I’m not sure there’s a lot more to surprise me with, but—that’s—this is not my life I’m living right now.” He brings a hand to his forehead and rakes his hair, feeling the pull. “Marvel is one thing. Disney is another.”

Jack laughs and it’s like the sound of porcelain hitting the floor. A thing that scatters.

“It’s still kinda like marvel though.” Jamie looks between them. “Like they team up! Annnd fight bad guys.”

“The Pitch guy.”

“Yeah! But it was rough at the beginning. They didn’t trust Jack, and thought he did things he didn’t.”

“Lame.” Sophie says, solemn. “Very lame.”

Ah, well. It seems coworkers will be coworkers no matter the category of personhood.

Hiccup looks at Jack. “And you’re…part of this group now. These Guardians.”

“Yup.”

“Like—like a job?”

“It’s more like volunteer work, technically it’s my side job, but sure.”

“Okay.” Hiccup processes this. “And they didn’t—I mean.” 

Jack looks at him questionably, then nods at him to continue. Hiccup’s eyes scatter, trying to find the words, but Jack doesn’t press. His tongue unravels pretty quick.

“You’re not a hard person to trust.” Hiccup says slowly, tasting the truth in his statement. He thinks of the corpse pale boy in the convenience store parking lot. How Jack carried himself in delirium violet hues, this barefoot boy and his oxygen deprived eyes, that dead vein blue. 

No, trust is not the truth entire. He thought of Jack as amicable in the beginning, yes. Jack, to him, was a lost thing. A songbird with the maimed wing. The half feral, sick dog in the fever-yellow streetlight. Some joyous thing that got broken and carelessly tossed. But he trusted him enough for the passenger seat in that twilight hour, so it’s true enough.

He isn’t looking at Jack now, and the silence stretches for a moment. 

“Well,” Jack asks, “did you?”

“We cleared up the misunderstandings pretty fast.”

“See?” Jamie says, out of the blue, “it’s not that hard.”

Hiccup looks at him, startled. 

“What is?”

Jamie pauses, debating, but the indecisiveness leaves as a wave of resolve takes over. “It’s just—the guardians, they’re great—” He waves his hands about. “But they’re also kind of dumb.

Jack makes an eh sound. “Unsociable, more like. Workaholics, all of them.”

Joyace nods her head, sensitively, and Hiccup senses—or hopes there’s a story there somewhere. If the tooth fairy can drop by for a visit and Santa repeatedly sends in mail, who knows what this house has seen or been through. Hiccup sees Sophie sprawl on the table and hold an arm out, loosely inspecting the back of her hand, but he has the feeling she’s still paying attention.

“That too, but that’s not what I mean.” Jamie says.

Jack raises a doubtful eyebrow when Jamie doesn’t prompt anything else. Honestly, Hiccup is half envious of how well Jack does it. Jamie twiddles with his fingers, picking his nails. Either because he’s distracted or he’s doing it as a distraction, Hiccup isn’t sure. If he’s anything like Hiccup, then perhaps it’s both. 

The wind shifts around, then, as if prying. Hiccup then gets the distinct, irrevocable feeling that they’ve encountered a bounding mine. A ragged and overgrown terrain from wars past that threaten to detonate. He doesn't know what to say, so he keeps quiet. Eyeing the obstructed, bogged ground instead, balancing his public awareness and hoping that the tension in his neck would be overlooked. 

Jack must’ve connected the dots along the way, however, his confusion smoothing out into a gentle expression and Hiccup breathes easy.

“There were important things going on.” Jack tells Hiccup, looking at him briefly, almost apologetically. For what reason, he’s got no idea. Jack then patiently tells Jamie, “they didnt know me yet and had to trust me with something that was important. We didn’t have a lot of time, remember?”

Jamie frowns at the table for a moment. “I know that, but they were wrong, and you didn’t do it,” Jamie says, immediately losing Hiccup as the fragile data scatters like sand to the sea. “Did they even say sorry?”

“Jamie—”

Jamie and Sophie share a look, Sophie with her cheek pressed on the table and Jamie sitting straight in his seat. Communicating soundlessly or maybe seeking support, Hiccup isn't sure. It reminds him of the Thorston twins.

Jamie leans towards Jack, and he has that intense look in his eyes again. “You talked about what they thought you did, kinda. And you talked about how you guys fought together again like it never happened. But I never heard you talk about how they said sorry.

Something in Jack unravels, merging tension like talons on his joints. Jack’s shoulders stir before stilling completely. He says, after a moment, “they didn’t have to. Some things work out on their own.”

“This is different,” Jamie insists.

“I didn’t say sorry, either.”

Jamie sighs, harsh and sudden. A sharp exhale. “Why would you need to say sorry? When you're showing me something new, you take the time to explain it, and you don't make me say sorry for messing up when I’m still learning. Why do you have to say sorry when nobody took the time to teach you?”

Hiccup is sure Jamie has forgotten that he’s still there. This must’ve been what guests felt like when he and his dad had full-blown arguments during holidays. God, karma’s a bitch. He makes a good, conscious effort of looking like he’s evolved past the need to breathe.

Jack cuts in, shifting in his chair, changing positions. Uncomfortable. “Like I said, it was important. A lot of things were happening really quickly, and they had to put a lot of trust in me without knowing me. I didn’t know them and didn’t trust them much either.”

“Ok, but what about after? Did they say sorry after? When everything was fixed?”

Hiccup is getting many mixed signals from this conversation, the first one being that Jamie is not going to back down from whatever power horse he’s mounted. The horse is galloping, winning the race of social awkwardness only children and Hiccup can create with unearned confidence. The horse is out of control. It’s out of his hands and riding into the sunset. 

Hiccup looks at Joyace, and she has a look to her that's akin to pride. Her eyes flick to Jamie and Jack with a trace of curiosity as the lines in her face deepen with worry, then she looks at Hiccup with the same apologetic look Jack had. Hiccup still doesn't understand what they’re trying to apologize for. You can’t control children, they’re reckless things. His childhood proves that.

“Jamie,” Joyace says, “where’s this coming from?”

Jack’s brow digs into the crevice above his nose bridge, eyes narrowed. 

“Jack doesn’t talk about this ever, but he’s talking about it now,” Sophie says.

“Ok,” Joyace says, “but we have a guest.”

“It’s drama. People like drama, it’s ok.”

Hiccup makes a sound.

“To be honest, I’m mostly confused.”

Jack drags a hand across his face, and Hiccup suddenly notices the emptiness that inks him into a backwater, background stain. He realizes that he doesn’t know where Jack has left his staff, seeing how integral it seemed to the totality of him. 

Jack doesn’t look any of them in the eye. A shadow flickers over him, the lines in his face darkening to an expression that Hiccup can’t neatly translate. The lines around his mouth tighten, the jaw clenches, eyes focusing on the table. 

“Okay. Long story short, I screwed up. Basically handed myself to the evil guy at some very important, pretty critical moment. Got a job collaboration offer from him, even.”

Hiccup thinks on that, finding it odd. 

“What reason did he have to think that you’d suddenly change sides?”

Jack stares at Hiccup for a second, before bowing his head. “It’s not about—what he did, or didn’t. It’s about—look.” He sighs, the tension shuddering off of him like an old skin, and says, “I was new to the group. None of that centuries old loyalty, for one. He thought I had my own agenda and he wasn’t wrong, I did. I only agreed to a short term arrangement with them and they were supposed to pay me for my help afterwards.”

Jamie watches him, attentive and a little surprised. 

“They also stuffed you in a bag so you’d meet with them.” Joyace hums. Hiccup looks at her, and so does Jack with a surprised rise of his brow. “And expected you to sign a contract with them almost immediately with no elaboration on the terms and conditions.”

“You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“No, it sounded worse the way you said it the first time.” 

He shakes his head, frustrated, his hands fiddle with the table’s edge, restlessly pressing his thumbs against the seams before his left hand taps the surface. “I’m not guiltless, is what I’m saying. Pitch wanted to meet with me and listen, and I came to hear him out. Then it turned out that it was just as much of a distraction as it was a recruitment angle. He set it up so it would look like I'd agreed to his conditions even if I didn’t. Go figure.” A fuzz of frost spools out of his bowl like white mold. “There wasn't time for cross examination. Tensions were high with lives on the line, so when everyone assumed the worst, it wasn't unwarranted.”

Hiccup takes a moment to let all of the words set in and wash over. He searches the kitchen, the staff out of sight, not poised anywhere. After a moment, Hiccup says, “so.” 

Jack looks at him. 

“So?”

“Kinda like Loki,” Hiccup says, flickering his fingers, the corners of his mouth tilting upwards. “With all the miscommunication.”

Jack scoffs, jest coloring the edges.

“That implies that I was a bad guy at first. I wasn’t a bad guy. Mischievous at worst. Roguish—” He grins. “—At my always best.”

Sophie groans, knocking her head down beside her plate. Joyace massages her brow. Jamie snickers into his hand.

“So, a hazard,” Hiccup tells him, mildly.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“I think I have a hard time believing that,” Hiccup says.

“Why’s that?”

“Just a hunch.”

When Jack smiles, the shape of his mouth like a knife-sharp slit and his eyes narrow. “You don’t know me,” Jack says.

Hiccup looks at Jack, skeptical, lips turning upwards. Jack stares back, holding Hiccup at eye-lock that Hiccup doesn’t break from. 

“I do!” Jamie pipes in, breaking the stare off.

The knife’s edge smirk dulls to a fond, if exasperated, thing.

“I know, Jamie.”

“Me too,” says Sophie. 

“I know, Sophie.”

“You’re weird,” says Jamie.

“Very,” says Sophie. “You look like you’d play mean tricks.”

“Again with this? Joyace, help me out here.”

“You’re a bit weird.” Joyace concedes.

Hiccup snorts. Jack stares at her in poor rendered betrayal.

“Is that so?”

“You're certainly…something else.” Hiccup tells him. 

Jack tilts his head in a bird-like motion, staring holes into the wall with an animal intensity, eyes taking flight and perching on the wall.

“You look dead,” Sophie tells him, bluntly. She shakes her head. “Wrong.”

Hiccup blinks, mouth parted. She doesn’t sound unkind. Impish, maybe, but not maleficious or anything. Still, those are fighting words.

“What?” Jack says, with an odd grin. He moves his eyes away from the wall, flickering between the three of them. He’s looking at Hiccup when his eyes flutter, dipping down, gone for a second. “What do you mean, wrong?”

“Like you’re sick,” Sophie says, matter of fact. “You look like Abby when she’s hungry. Like you’re gonna lash out.” 

Jack’s shoulder’s roll smoothly, pressing his back onto his seat’s recline, carrying the movement. Hiccup frowns, something about the gesture making him pause, though he doesn't understand why. Maybe it's Hiccup’s mind reaching, when a shadow flickers over his expression before Jack’s veneer buries it, replaced with a smile feigning offense.

“Lash out?” Jack says the words slowly, like it’s an odd shape that won't set right in his mouth.

“Ok yeah,” Jamie says, looking at Sophie. “I can kinda see it. It’s not, like, angry. But, tense. Prepared. Like a snake.”

The tips of Hiccup’s hands grow cold, like that of an artificial chill coming out the cooler, reaching out. Jack sticks his hands inside his hoodie, crumpling the cloth. A thin layer of frost spreads from there, dilating like spindly roots giving into vines through a frozen body of water, the conversation turned to background noise. Jack blinks, his eyes then refocusing from the spot they’d started to dig in. 

Oh. 

Jack looks at Hiccup, like he wants to say something, ask something, but doesn’t. Hiccup can’t even decipher what kind of look that is. Jamie and Sophie, however, seem to parse out its meaning better than Hiccup could. They drop their antics and trade a look that’s tight around the eyes, keeping quiet. 

Hiccup looks at Jack, uncertain, and at Joyace, whose mouth has thinned. Her hair has gone flat, the wind pauses. 

“I believe,” Joyace starts, her voice breaking his focus on Jack and prompts him to look at her. She looks at Hiccup dead in the eye. “I was told something about seducing people to their doom.”

Hiccup’s eyes flicker to Jack before looking back to Joyace and tilts his head, unsure where she was going with this. 

“To their doom?” Jack says, his grin all teeth. There was supposed to be a laugh in there, but it dies at the door, ill formed and unfinished.

“Seduced,” Joyace says slowly, “yes.”

Whatever Joyace was trying to pry Jack away from, didn’t seem to do it’s bidding. 

“Oh.” Jack says slowly, as if from a great distance. He measures the words like he's just made sense of something. “I look like the villain of a story.” 

A small, strange, and off kilter smile has been sewn into his mouth. That same sharp grin. A soft, if playful, museing. It would sound almost indifferent if not for the eyes. They’ve lost that light. A window with the blinds closed. “That’s,” he laughs, corroded needles pinning Hiccup to his chair, “that’s good to know. I hadn’t known. That’s silly, isn't it? Not knowing.” The chair rasps, quiet when it tilts backwards on its hind legs that glint with a light coat of ice. “But it explains much, now that I think about it.”

Joyace pauses, looking at her two youngest. Sophie and Jamie look at each other.

Jamie’s hands flutter. “Well—I mean.”

Sophie makes a sound from the back of her throat, hands faltering, not so much a nervous gesture but for the shortage of words. A turmoil in the brain.

“It’s not…bad weird,” Jamie says, “just…well. You’re blue. People aren’t blue, not unless they’re—” 

“Dead?” Jack says, his smile all edge and pulls back at the skin, piercing daggers into his cheekbone and stretching the lips, invisible fingers digging and pulling into meat lines. But something must’ve shown in Jamie and Sophie’s face, because then the skin eases, stutters, and Jack gentles. The withdrawal of the sharp corners reveal a tired expression, the smile withdraws into a smaller, more sincere thing. “It’s alright, I know—”

Hiccup remembers to breathe and quivers at the intake. 

“It’s a compliment, actually. The doom thing.” Hiccup says awkwardly, the words pried out of him without his permission. His speech comes out crooked, voice strung up like a defective guitar, turning pegs giving in under pressure. Jack sharply turns to Hiccup. Jamie and Sophie turn to him as well, their expressions a mix of relief and confusion. “Reminded me of sirens, sort of. You. Not the ones on the Discovery Channel, with the—the weird documentary that got debunked ages ago but still appears on the channel like once a month.” He inhales, a little out of breath. “Not the little mermaid, either.”

“What,” Jack says.

“You know, the ones from legends,” Hiccup says, because he never knows when to shut the fuck up. “Old, classic myth ones. They’re cool, aren’t they? Well, at least to whoever’s watching, I guess. Or listening. Before they get dragged into the waters or something.”

He knows he’s talking too much, watches himself from a confined corner of his brain, unable to stop it, and hopes it sounds right enough. Jack goes through a series of complicated up and down expressions that leave Hiccup floundering. Eventually, there’s that juberent spark again, that mischievous gleam to him, if still bewildered. “It still ends with doom, you know,” Jack says.

Hiccup raises both eyebrows at the fault of his inability to raise the single one. 

“Or a change of scenery.”

“You would’ve drowned, you wouldn’t know if there’s a change of scenery.”

“You don’t know that. What if I’m taken to an underwater palace or something, hm? Did you think of that? Maybe the sirens want me.”

“Sirens want to eat people.” Jack shrugs. “Cannibalism.”

“Not so, humans and sirens are different species.”

“Okay, but you’d still get eaten? I don’t think clarification matters at that point. No matter what technicality you’re banking on, you’d be dead. You wouldn’t know what happens when you die.”

 “I would, actually.” Hiccup shoots him a meaningful look. “On a technicality, sure. But still.”

Jack blinks. 

“Huh.” 

“…How long have you two known each other, again—” Jamie asks. 

Jack tilts his head, as if thinking it over, and says, “just about yesterday night and…now, I guess.”

Sophie has her eyes as wide as saucers, her head rearing back so far it’s borderline comedic, especially since it bunches up her neck. Jamie squints his eyes and says, “it doesn’t sound like it.”

“Man,” Hiccup says, "I don’t know what to tell you.”

From the corner of his eye, he sees that the wind still isn't moving, ominously still. Joyace is no better, she has that odd grin and quirked eyebrows from earlier.

There’s frost crawling up Jack’s hoodie, and weakly pulses at the shelf of his jaw, the creeping layers miniaturistic, a flaky film of pearlescence like muscovite. Jack laughs, and it reminds him, somehow, of the rain falling down—not a storm, garbed in heavy rains, but a dewy mist. The gentle snowfall instead of the hale storm. He doesn’t know what any of it means, but the laugh has lost its edge, and Jack’s back to the sharp, bright thing he was. His hands are back from the dark place inside his pocket. 

Hiccup focused too long on the column of Jack’s neck, trying to read foreign signals and crystalline fractures. As soon as Hiccup realizes this, he sharply looks away.

Chapter Text

“Alright,” Jamie says, crossing his arms with a huff and glaring at Hiccup, “but you never answered my questions. What’s your thing?”

Hiccup blinks and comes up short.

His life isn’t interesting—the last month notwithstanding. And honestly? He was hoping for at least a few months before getting broadly introspective. Hiccup looks at Joyace for guidance or direction, a little desperation slipping through. She bobs her head inconspicuously, hinting at him to play along. It’s only slightly helpful.

Alright, fine. His thing. A thing about himself. Fun fact trivia, he can do that.

“...I have one foot?” Hiccup says, in the end. “The right one is all mine, but the left is a chunk of metal and plastic.”

“Huh?” Jamie’s look of concentration blunders at once, startled. Hiccup senses some movement beside him, so it’s likely that Joyace hadn’t noticed either. “You do? But—”

“Ah.” Hiccup nods, understanding, gesturing down. “It doesn’t look like it with the boots and trousers on, but it’s all prosthetic from the mid-calf on my left leg.”

Sophie nods, Jamie is staring at the table like he can look past it, gaze inquisitively absent-minded, but he reels himself in. “I—that’s cool, I guess,” he says, with a glint in his eyes and collected—as far as kids go. Hiccup agrees, it is kind of cool, though it hurts like hell sometimes. It took him a year, re-learning how to walk, and he’s still getting used to it. In any case, he’ll ask Jamie if he wants to look at the artificial limb later. Maybe Sophie, too. They seem to be the kind of kids that would be more interested than disturbed.

“He took it off in the car,” Jack says, nodding sideways from the foot of the table. “Out it went, just like that.” He tisks. “No warning.”

“This isn’t that weird.” Hiccup rolls his eyes.

Jack looks at him with an inscrutable expression. “It wasn’t, no. I’ve seen my share of missing limbs.”

“Okay, that’s…a little morbid,” Hiccup says, to which Jack shrugs. “Also, you have literally no room to say anything about warning people. I was driving when you decided to pull the rug on me, remember that?”

The wind makes a gleeful hiss, Joyace makes a choked noise beside them.

Jack gives Hiccup a lopsided smile, swatting his hand about. “There was no one on the road. It was fine.”

“I was driving.”

“And then you parked.”

“You don’t shatter people’s realities while they’re behind the wheel!”

In front of him, Sophie snorts, the wind joins in, squeaking through the window, running through old pipes. He bites into his teeth, coming back to himself, and pointedly turns back towards the kids. “Uh, yeah. There’s not much to say, honestly. I used to live on an island just off of Norway, like I told Jami—uh, James.”

Jamie considers him.

“Jamie’s fine.”

Oh, thank God.

They both ignore the looks Jack, Sophie, and Joyace are giving him and Jamie. “Uh. Yeah. So, I came here—The only-foot-thing is probably my one interesting quality. Apart from, uh. Recent developments, I guess.”

Jamie stares at him for a long moment before nodding once, unconvinced. The wind, however, starts screaming. Straight-up banshee-ing. Her sharp whistle thunders into his ear drums to the rhythm of his beating heart—the stringed instruments come join in as well, the whistle turning to threaded noise. The kids cover their ears, Jack’s squinting his eyes and grimacing like he wants to do the same. Joyace looks impassive, and Hiccup admires her through the ear-splitting haze. He really does.

“Words, if you can,” Joyace says, over the sharp noise.

The tempestuous screeching stops, bypassing over the table in a whir, nearly tipping the juice cardboard. She thrashes over to Hiccup and dips down, whipping around the base of his chair, and Hiccup braces for takeoff, unclear whether his insurance covers the wind breaking his bones or not.

“Can we please not bully the new people?” Jack says to the wind, fidgeting in his seat, exacerbated as sheets of frost climb up from the shelf of his jaw, the hoarfrost hooking beneath his lower eyelid. Jack attempts to casually scratch the waxy layers of that sickle shape off him as white fluff specks the bridge of his nose and starts to slide onto his cheeks. “We want people to come back, occasionally.”

Jamie snickers in his seat, looking at Jack, and Sophie twirls her hands in the air as if feeling the wind current that’s woken up inside the house. 

“What—” Hiccup asks, and the wind knocks his satchel. He’d switched it from his shoulders to the chair’s top rail before they started eating, and it now falls to the floor. It drops with a dull sound, and the wind slows her spinning, pushing the bag next to Hiccup’s foot—the prosthetic. He feels the faint vibration in his calf, and he picks it up, confused, looking at the space where the wind is curling about, then at Joyace. “Can you…translate that, by any chance?”

Joyace stares at an empty spot like she's expecting the wind to answer. Joyace gives her a flat look and makes a clicking noise when there's no response. Joyace sighs. “I think she might want to show you something.” She nods at the bag, and, okay, that should have been obvious.

The wind whistles a high note, then ruffles his hair with invisible fingers. Hiccup frowns, unfastening the belt that kept the lid of his bag closed, wondering what the wind was going on about, and opens his bag. His art supplies are all over the place from when he’d rushed away from the lake, and the bottom of the bag is smudged with some piece of coal that made its way out of the pencil container. He’ll have to wash it when he gets home or he’ll forget about it completely.

He looks at his bag, then at the floor where the breeze lazily swirls sandy dust. He lifts his open bag and asks the wind, “you mean this?”

The wind sings a warm sound, a far cry from earlier. And, just like that, she bolts away, joining Joyace like she'd never left her side.

Hiccup’s face twists in confusion.

“Okay, if everyone is done with their mac and cheese—” Joyace gets up from her chair, scooting backwards, and says, “you can hand them over.”

Everyone has a little leftover food left in their bowls, which makes Hiccup feel less guilty about his leftovers. He hands her his bowl, and so does Jack, stretching an arm behind him to hold the dish over to Joyace. His bowl is still full, content unmoved, and Joyace moves to put it in the fridge. The jars and plastic containers rattle when the door closes. Sophie stacks her and Jamie’s bowls and steps down her stool and pushes them onto the counter. Jamie gathers the silverware and follows her there.

The wind follows Joyace to the sink. Somehow, the wind turns on the radio, a soft tune beginning to play in the background.

Jamie and Sophie are back at the table, and Sophie stretches her hand over to tap Hiccup. She points at the bag, lifting her eyebrows. He pulls out the leather notebook in two pulls, things moving clumsily inside as they drop to the bottom of the bag.

Jack creeps closer, and Hiccup makes room, showing the cover.

“It’s my sketchbook,” he says. It had been a quiet comfort, back in the forest, the wind swirling about as he drew one thing or another under the shade. An odd, but comfortable experience, before the lake with its mouthless hunger. He skims over the pages. “It's relatively new. There's not much going on inside, yet.”

“You’re an artist?” Jack says, sounding delighted. Like the other shoe dropped and started tap dancing across the hall. Jamie and Sophie close in.

Hiccup scrunches his brow. He’s never been called that before. He sketches when bored or in need of a distraction, which admittedly, is often. He doesn’t know if that counts as anything other than creative elusion.

“I…draw.”

“You draw, so you’re an artist.”

“They’re mostly sketches. Notes.” Jack doesn’t pry the leather cover open, but his hands flicker at the edges, almost transparent. Hiccup makes a quick mental assessment, not finding anything weird or incriminatory he might’ve drawn in his mind bank. It’s mostly sloppy charcoal background sketches, or people-watching studies. There’s also a drawing of Jack and the lake thrown in there, some fantasy concepts, but that’s all. He shrugs and says, “you can look inside, if you want. Just, uh. Mind the charcoal.” He hasn’t applied the fixative spray to some of these drawings yet, and charcoal is irritatingly easy to brush away. 

Jack gives him a sharp, eager smile and flips through the book. Thin, delicate hands slowly turn the pages. Frost lines refuse to adorn the material—they, like a thousand spindly roots, seemed to reach for the paper; only to withdraw like insects and instead settle over Jack’s knuckles to form circular feathery patterns. When Jamie and Sophie start to get grabby, he hands the book to them and starts to walk where Joyace is, probably to help her with the dishes or to talk to her.

Feeling restless, Hiccup flexes his fingers while each of them does their thing.

Jamie is looking at one of the thick pages, wide eyed, with Sophie standing beside him heralding a similar expression. His hands are on the table, and hers are on his shoulders. Jamie reaches the page, resting his hand there.

Hiccup reflexively cringes. There goes the drawing.

“Mom,” Jamie whispers, clearing his throat. “Mom.”

Joyace turns the faucet off, turning back with a small towel in her hands. She makes a questioning noise. Jack stops before he looks at the kids, at Joyace, then at Hiccup.

Hiccup looks back at him, equally confused.

Joyace looks at her kids with a fixed brow, then curiously at Hiccup, and pauses by the table, Jack behind her. She gestures to the journal, the page her kids seem fixated in, both smiling wide. Hiccup gives her the go ahead.

Please, please don't let it be a nude drawing. Americans are such prudes about that. Again, there’s nothing criminative in there. Supposedly. He’s starting to have his doubts, the kids looking like the cat who caught the canary.

Joyace steps behind Sophie, leaning down. Brows furrowed, eyes focusing, adjusting for a moment.

“It's him,” Jamie says, nodding to the side. Joyace blinks, then looks over Hiccup’s shoulder. Hiccup doesn’t look behind him, but he can feel the cool emanating on the nape of his neck, and whatever part of his ears that aren't covered by his tangle of hair.

She squints. “Him—”

“Yeah.”

Her expression goes wide, and her eyes take on a wild, dewy sheen as her mouth softens. Her breathing stutters, and her children part as she steps closer to the sketchbook. Before Hiccup could sit up and look at whatever drawing they’ve found, Jack beats him to the punch, paralyzing him in his seat. Jack steps don't make a sound against the kitchen floor when they round the other side of the table, behind Jamie. His eyes go wide too and snaps his head back at Hiccup. 

Jack, Jamie, Sophie and Joyace stare at him.

Oh, he thinks. I’m the damn bird. 

Fuck. 

Hiccup sinks in his chair miserably. He thinks this is, arguably, worse than before. 

Hiccup sighs, racking a hand through the side of his hair. He gets up from his chair awkwardly, muttering nothings, and places his hands on the table. Ready to face his sentence. He cranes his neck at the wooden board, tilting himself until the drawings make sense.

Hiccup pauses and stares.

It's only a drawing of Jack. A scattering of rough sketches and skeletal frames next to a portrait. Thumbnails before the first draft. There’s a smudge, now, where Jamie touched it. No background, black and white, unfinished. Nothing taboo or extraordinary. It’s no more detailed than his other studies, than the people he’s drawn in the park, at the supermarket, the jogger that takes his morning walks by his house. He swallows, disturbed, his face heating up and going red under the overwhelming bright light of the kitchen.

“They’re good,” Sophie says, grinning.

“They’re good,” Jamie repeats.

“I…don't remember drawing those,” Hiccup lies, trying to save face, which he immediately regrets and has historically been a bad idea, because he can’t lie for shit. He knows this. It probably came out fake and obvious, too. Somehow, people always seem to know, and Hiccup still doesn’t know what gives him away. Gobber refuses to tell him.

Jack continues staring at him. Panic clouds Jack’s expression before he smoothes it over with a tense grin, the whole thing throwing Hiccup off.

“It’s your notebook.”

“Yes,” Hiccup says, because it’s too late to take it back. “I know it’s my notebook.”

“That…could be normal.” Jack goes back to studying the drawing, mouth taunt. “Forgetting.”

For half a second, Hiccup thinks Jack is messing with him. 

“Yeah,” Jamie says, high pitched.  He’s smiling, but his brows are furrowed, and a shadow flickers across his expression, and it gives Hiccup the impression that he’s being told a comfortable, white lie. “And you’re new, so—”

“Brain goes—” Sophie makes a buzzer sound.

Hiccup’s eyes flicker between Jamie, Sophie, and Jack.

Okay. He’s missing something.

“Uh, I mean. I’ve slept like—three hours,” he says, picking at the dry, peeling paint that context provides, finding nothing underneath, and tries to bypass a sad lie with a sorry truth. “My mind isn’t at its highest spot right now.”

Sophie clicks her fingers with her eyebrows raised and points at Hiccup like he’s made a good point or brought an improved concept idea to the content table. Jack doesn’t look convinced, and Joyace has gone back to looking at the picture, if she ever looked away. There’s a soft upturn to the corners of her lips, her eyes bright. The disconcerting feeling in Hiccup’s gut pulls at the corners of his mouth, the muscles of his cheeks hissing for some sort of release. He hates, hates not knowing.

“You, uh—” Hiccup flounders, his gaze flickers to Joyace. “—You act like you've never seen him before.” The drawing isn’t that good. This isn't Hiccup being overly critical of his work, not a mark of insecurity, but a simple fact. It’s a good first draft, and it shows a decent execution of technical skills, but that’s all.

“I haven't,” Joyace breathes.

It’s so soft when she says it, he almost misses it. Hiccup sharply turns to her, his face pinches and his shoulders stiffen.

“What?”

“I haven't seen him before. Apart from my kids' drawings, I suppose.” She startles out a laugh. “Oh God, this is him?” She beams at the drawing. “Oh, Jack, look at you.”

A sharp, piercing confusion hits hard and strikes his face numb, leaving him reeling with a gash. It’s a disparity, and Hiccup braves the next seconds pulling at each other’s ends making sense of it, searching Joyace’s face and Jack’s and the kids.

Jack pauses, parting lips with a considering look, then mouths something at him, like he’s about to tell a good joke. Watch, Hiccup thinks. Jack prods a hand in front of Joyace’s face that clearly goes unseen. Her eyes don’t flicker, her expression doesn’t change, she’s still smiling at the drawing. Jack must be reigning the cold in, because Hiccup can tell when he’s close without having to look. He looks playful, soft, before Jack gives him a reassuring gleam—that easy grin. Hiccup tries to smile back, but the joke doesn't land.

Then Joyace raises a brow and tilts her head at her kids, who’re chuckling and staring at what must be simply open air to her, giving away the game. Jack doesn’t react in time, doesn't notice her turning until it’s too late, and his hand phases straight through her face.

Joyace turns back to the drawing. Hiccup, Jamie, and Sophie cringe. Jack winces and recoils, holding his hands together instinctively, as though he’s brushing the feeling of it away.

Jack chuckles, a grisly thing, an attempt to mitigate Hiccup’s mood. That’s what Jack’s doing, Hiccup realizes.

Hiccup grinds his teeth. 

Never by accident, Jack had said. Something about convenience. There, in the delicate dark, when Jack perched himself in the passenger seat like a wild bird. On that long, crooked asphalt road. When someone else thinks it convenient.

From the dining room, Hiccup eyes the fridge in the kitchen, the scraps of paper with scraggly blue and white stick figures. Stares. He inhales sharply. He tries to recall when Joyace looked directly at Jack but comes up blank. She must’ve been following the sound of his voice—the trail of frost. Someone else's line of sight.

There’s a gnawing in the pit of his stomach, the body electric, molten metal to the veins. It brews in the firmament of his ribs and makes of him a furnace. It hits him all at once like a mallet to a nail. Too abrupt, too crude. And it leaves him dizzy and aimless, this alien sensation.

Convenience. How extraordinarily banal, the casual cruelness of it. 

He slowly turns back to Jack and the Bennetts. He purses his lips, shaking his head like he doesn't know what to do with it.

“There's centuries of art about Jack Frost,” he says. “There’s—Jack Frost isn't a new concept.”

Jack’s eyes flicker away from his hands and back to him. Hiccup continues, confused and desperate to get his thoughts in order.

“He isn't some local, urban mythos that only appears in Pennsylvania. Jokul Frosti,” he says the name in his mother language, with the dry vowels, unable to butcher the pronunciation, “was something that dates back to thousands of years ago in Nordic folklore. This can’t—” The portrait is such a small thing, no bigger than his palm. Hiccup stares at his own simple, unextraordinary drawing and gestures at it with a flat hand, a twisted realization dawning on him. “—This can't be all there is.”

Hiccup notices Jamie looking at him like he’s trying to see the back of his head and Hiccup realizes he’s raised his voice. Jamie raises his chin, glancing at Jack or at Joyace. Hiccup looks down and starts stitching invisible needles into the tablecloth, quieting the kindle and reducing the flame.

“It is,” Jack says quietly. Hiccup tilts his head but doesn’t look up from the tabletop. “And…it isn't. There’s Tooth’s Columbarium, the Ivory Palace. She has pieces of me.”

Hiccup’s hands still.

“What do you mean, pieces of you?”

“My milk teeth, some memories. North has a magical equivalent of a paper trail. Some tricks I played when I was alive. Bunny has an archive, and he has a record of me and all the remaining spirits. Sandy has scraps of my dreams. Echoes. There’re pieces of me around, if you know where to look, if you’re a spirit. But humans? Forget it. Teeth can’t be memories to them, just teeth. They touch the sand, and they’ll sleep. North’s records are tattooed onto his forearms, and Bunny’s books are too magic infused for humans to interact with.” Hiccup looks up to Jack, and can’t read his expression, can’t decrypt his hollow smile. “I exist, I just don't have presence.”

Jack and Hiccup stare at each other, Jack’s eyes tightening, his skin turning an oxygen-deprived blue. Hiccup’s shoulders go tense. The wind blows in the distance, turning the music off. Hiccup hadn’t even realized that it was still playing.

“Me and Sophie tried looking through a bunch of old art and drawings and story books, even before mom knew about Jack,” Jamie says, breaking Hiccup’s focus and he turns to Jamie and Sophie nodding beside him. The kids trade a look before Sophie turns back to the drawings and Jamie continues, “then it got really hard when mom finally knew about Jack but couldn't see him. They never looked anything like Jack. It also made it hard to know how many stories were about our Jack, things Jack actually did, and not someone or something else. It was weird.”

Jack looks back at the drawing. A muscle in his jaw goes taunt as a white silvery sheen freezes over his lips. The frost cracks like porcelain when he says, “I don’t know about before. Maybe the original Jack died. Maybe he left when the magic started drying out. Maybe I’m the first and all those stories and myths were a part of my conception. I don’t know. But I wasn’t him, and he’s not me. There’s art of that Jack Frost. There’s…” Frost creeps up the neck, clings to Jack’s eyelashes, and eats at his cloth. “...I don’t have stories. There’s no art of me. Nothing in my image. Or there wasn’t. There was never a reference we could show Joyace, before this.”

It must be specific, Joyace had said. Otherwise, it doesn't count.

“But—what about—” His words choke in his throat, dizzying the brain as the fog conquers all. Absorbing the information is like trying to swallow the sun. “—camera?”

Joyace shakes her head, her eyes remaining on the drawing. “Doesn't work, even if the kids take the picture.” She gently lifts the sketchbook, and his drawing renders itself grossly inadequate. It was done by memory. There are inaccuracies. It’s a draft, at best. It’s smudged. While it may look similar enough to Jack for it to be recognizable, it’s but a pale shadow. “They can't see Jack in the picture, either.”

Three hundred years, he thinks, and the only physical marker of his existence fits into the palm of my hand. 

“So…” He looks at her trembling hands. “Oh.”

“I’m glad,” she says as she offers Jack the sketchbook, hovering it in the air, “that I finally got to see him. Thank you.”

Before Hiccup can think of something to say, or offer, Jack gently takes the sketchbook, and Sophie quietly turns the page. Joyace leaves, walking back to the kitchen, as sleepwalkers shed off the last reminiscence of sleep.

“Oh, hey,” Jamie says, his eyes meticulously scanning the pages from the spot next to Jack. “These are so much cooler than mine.”

Hiccup slowly turns to Jamie, his chest heavy, a pressure that reaches to the throat. It’s no silt water, but the words stick to his throat like a bitter syrup.

“You draw?”

“Yeah. Just not…” Jamie bites his cheek. He throws a scattered look at the fridge.

Hiccup glances at his sketches. Though more fantastical, these are on the more realistic side, his few finalized drafts. They’re not great by any means—still no background, no colors, no meaning beyond aesthetic—but from a kid’s perspective… 

“I like to draw dragons,” he tells Jamie, who looks back at him. Sophie’s eyes gleam, and she raises both hands in the air in triumph. Hiccup snorts. Yeah, figured that would be her reaction.

“You do?” Jamie says. 

Hiccup nods, trying to ignore the self-conscious feeling playing his ribs like a cello. “Here.” He looks over Jack's shoulder, who wordlessly hands him the journal. He flips a few pages, looking for the middle section of the journal where he knows he’s drafted some old concept ideas, careful not to rub the sheets against each other.

He lands on a page with several black and red pencil sketches on the browned pages. There’s a black, frilled shape towards the top. A small, red and crooked thing with an egg-shaped jaw with thin wisps of smoke coming out of its nostrils. A dragon lazily curled on the floor as a comically small boy desperately tries to drag it by the tail. Last, but not least, an angular beast with a long skinny neck and large gaping mouth angrily trying to snap at a much smaller dragon.

He hands the journal back to Jack, who holds it gently, angling it. Jack looks closely at the linework, brows raised. Interested, maybe.

Hiccup feels something gratifying at that, an egotistical cheering glee that he tries to push down. It’s for fun, sure, but it still stings when no one asks or looks at them like they were worth something. Sometimes, when the light of his room is too bright and Hiccup decides to use the living room, his father looks over his shoulder. He’ll nod or make a sound of confirmation, then ask, “so, what else have you done today?” It's not the same thing. Hiccup looks at Jack, unsure what he’s waiting for. Jack’s eyes traveled the page, half lidded. Something catches fire in his mind’s eye, causing the shutters to unbend, and grow soft.

They're just drawings. He tells himself they're just drawings.

“Woah.” Jamie gasps. “Do they have names?!”

“Not yet, no. Some of them do, but—” Hiccup pauses and thinks about that. “—You guys can pick something out for them?” He was having trouble naming the species, anyway.

Soph and Jamie immediately start bickering about the best naming choices. However, they stop flipping through the pages when Sophie’s eyes go wide, and she grabs the sketchbook closer to face. She whispers to Jamie before bringing her focus back to the drawing.

Hiccup angles his head and sees the sketches of the smallest dragon he could’ve thought of—more an overgrown lizard than a dragon. Bulging eyes and a small round body with a scrappy, mean look to him. There’s notes and wild line action lines depicting the dragon getting into every mess possible. A scaled down drawing on the lower corner to the right: a matured pine tree used as reference, in which the dragon barely reaches the root.

He’d inspired himself on Sir Quentin Blake’s simplistic art style for that one, only using a few scattered lines to draw the whole creature. He drew the little guy in a burst of boredom and ended up snickering at the page an hour later. He’s fond of it.

"She says it's so beautiful that she wants to marry it,” Jamie says, then shrugs, “then eat it."

"Oh." He blinks, then turns to her. "That's…I think that’s the best compliment I've gotten yet." It is. It really is. Sophie grins, all teeth and gums showing, like children in class photos that haven’t quite learned to moderate their smiles. Too full, too earnest. Hiccup looks down at his sketchbook, every page cut, then sewed and painstakingly glued by his own hand. While his older sketchbook burned with his room, this one survived the fire because of a pure fluke. He’d forgotten it in the car that his father took to work. “Here,” he says as he takes back his sketchbook. Carefully, mindful of the stitch work keeping the pages together, he rips the page off. “You can have it.”

Sophie squeals, flapping her hands before snatching the paper, and runs off to God-knows-where with Jamie following closely behind.

Hiccup can hear Joyace turn on the sink, the sound of water running over the whistling breeze.

Jack stares with a quizzical brow and a lopsided smirk. The frost spreads on his hoodie like white static.

“What?”

“My foot is my interesting redeeming quality,” Jack mocks.

It takes a second for Hiccup to catch his meaning.

“This is just a pastime.” Hiccup snorts, looking at the back of the notebook. “I told you. Kids get bored with nothing better to do.”

Jack hums, a note that twirls. “The foot prank.”

Hiccup wiggles the stump connecting to his prosthetic, making the plastic material sound itself. “The foot prank.”

Noise comes from upstairs, followed by a screech that turns into absolute silence. Jack and Hiccup turn their heads up to the ceiling. Bad omen, that.

“Nightmare scenario right there, huh.”

“Better check in on that,” Jack says, drumming his fingers on the table, slapping it once noiselessly. He slips away from the table and glides past Hiccup, the cool grazing Hiccup’s cheek.

Hiccup watches Jack walk up the stairs, the cold peeling away with him, and the smell of freshwater silt diminishes, before turning to Joyace. He can’t see her expression, her back turned to him as she washes the dishes. He leaves the notebook on the table as he cautiously walks into the kitchen. He picks up a rag hanging off the rack and starts to dry the dishes.

The wind lets out a soft rumble, rattling the room and gently pushing Hiccup back. 

“It’s okay, he can help out.” Joyace tells her, grabbing the damp cloth beside the soap container. “You can wash the table.”

The wind grumbles like the oncoming of a thunderstorm, but the room stills, and Hiccup feels a roving gust of wind moves past him and watches as the rag flies out of Joyace’s hand and hits the table with a wet, snide slap.

Joyace grins conspicuously and tells him, “she’s overprotective of her housework chores.” 

"...noted."

Hiccup turns his focus back in the drying rack, grabbing a cup.

“Where…?”

Joyace smiles at him, opening the cupboard above the sink.

They work in comfortable silence, Hiccup steadily drying and putting away the cups, or when he finds something that doesn’t belong in the cupboard, she points him in the right direction. There’s something fragile in that silence, and Hiccup’s hesitant to break it.

In the end, he doesn't have to.

“I can hear him,” Joyace says quietly. “When I'm around or when he's here, objects and light apparently don't just go through him like before, when Jack’s with a nonbeliever. And there’s the cold he carries with him. Always the cold.”

“I figured,” Hiccup says, equally as quiet. “I figured you could at least hear him. Wouldn’t make sense, otherwise.” He shifts, before looking at her with the corner of his eye. “You believe in Jack; how come you can’t see him?”

She pauses, her hands still, the soap suds clinging to her skin, coating her fingers.

“I am no longer a child,” she says simply. “Only children are supposed to see a thing like Jack.”

Yes, well. “I’m twenty?”

Joyace shrugs and goes back to washing the dishes.

Right. Hiccup is the outlier here. For some reason.

“And the kids saw him first?” Hiccup lowers the bowl and rag in his hands and frowns. “Did he…visit your house all the time? Like, in your house?” He leans back and fully turns to her. “No offense, but someone that periodically snuck into my house and visited my kids when I had no way of knowing does not scream adoption material. What kind of person just.” He spreads his hands. “Adopt forces of nature?”

Joyace levels him a look. “What kind of person gives homeless people a ride at 3am only to find that it's magic.” 

She makes an uncomfortably sound point.

The room plunges into that lake water silt scent before Hiccup turns and sees Jack quietly walk in, his hand on the arched frame that separated the kitchen and the dining room. Looking back, he finally notices the staff, the shepherds crook, resting by the front door. Something about the object lying there gravitates Hiccup’s attention. Jack has no shoes, no jacket. No possessions except for the ragged clothes on his back, and that staff. Yet, he leaves it by the door.

“Hello,” Hiccup says, pulling his eyes away from the door and flickering his focus back to Jack.

“Hullo,” Jack says, “it appears that I’ve been ejected from the upstairs premises.”

Hiccup snorts.

“And to answer your question, before Joyace knew I was a spirit, she thought I was a pedophile.”

Hiccup nearly drops a bowl and an unbidden choked laugh startles out of him. He immediately presses his hand to his lips. Joyace winces and the wind howls.

“Jack.”

“What? There was a mysterious older guy that you never saw, hanging out with your children, at your house. You’d be crazy not to make that connection.”

“Jack,” Joyace slaps down the sponge, dishwater splattering everywhere, and turns a full 180 to face in his general direction. “That was clearly not the case.”

“No, but—pedophile makes more sense,” Jack says, flippant. “How in the ever-loving hell would you assume that your kids were being visited by a Guardian spirit that can only be seen by children? Nobody in their right mind would have that as their first guess.”

Joyace flickers water towards Jack’s direction. Jack dodges.

“Speaking of, completely unrelated,” Jack says, turning to Hiccup, “you’re not special.”

Hiccup dislodges his hand from his mouth, dropping it to his chin, his thumb still pressing below his ear as it works like a lever and breathes long enough to sound natural.

“What?”

“Remember when you threatened me with a shotgun?” Jack asks, like it's been years, not a few hours, and Hiccup pulls his best poker face. Jack’s smile sharpens, and Joyace makes a sour sound from the back. “You’re not the only one.”

“It was not a shotgun,” Joyace says with great dignity, “it was the neighbor's double barrel rifle.”

Hiccup’s eyes widen and he covers his mouth again.

“No, go ahead, you should laugh,” Jack urges him. “It’s funny. Just the chances alone.”

Hiccup ignores him and focuses on Joyace.

“Did…did your neighbor ask any questions? About why you needed the rifle? Or…?”

“I. Commandeered it.”

“Did—” he snickers into his sleeve. “—Did you really?” Hiccup asks Joyace.

“It wasn’t my best moment,” Joyace says as she stiffly goes back to washing dishes.

He turns to Jack, feeling giddy and bewildered.

“How do you make such bad impressions? I have to know.”

Jack brings his hands together, as if in prayer, his expression serene.

“Unadulterated talent.”

“At stalking people?”

“At many things, yes. Including stalking people.”

Hiccup shakes his head, scoffing and with a smile on his face. “If stalking was a talent, this just proves you’re terrible at it. Two out of two zero-star reviews within first sight.”

“Nobody has seen me in 300 years. C’mon. Let me have this”

“No way.”

“Hiccup.”

“Don’t wanna.”

Jack’s composure dissolves, both him and Hiccup go into hysterics.

“Back home,” Hiccup says in a thin, weedy voice. “We had axes instead of shotguns. You probably would’ve been threatened with those instead if I saw you back at Berk.”

“Axes?” Jack says, brows raised.

“Mostly decorative ones.”

Joyace turns to him, her expression pinched. “Mostly?”

“Eh, sometimes I think we never really moved away from the Viking age.” He snorts. “We use them for festivals. Tournaments. Less…benignly so during market day. It goes crazy, let me tell you.” He pauses. “Think of it as Black Friday. I’ve seen how people get.”

While not common, it wasn’t unusual for someone from Berk to know how to use an antique weapon of some sort. Hiccup himself can use a sword, though he’s never had a dual partner other than Gobber, so it’s debatable if he’s any good. Years ago, Gobber started teaching him swordsmanship in secret and had a weirdly intense fight about it with dad once he found out. The lessons continued, but Gobber and dad’s relationship was tense for the next few weeks after. Ultimately, Hiccup kept up with the classes until he left for America.

Fuck. Wait. That could’ve been his fun fact.

Joyace blinks, then nods slowly. If the American spirit is to be believed, God knows what she’s seen during discounts. The ghosts of Thanksgiving future, a haunting omen of retail hell.

“That probably would've been better than a shotgun,” she says, mostly to herself.

Watching the shutterings of Jack’s rib cage, Hiccup notices that the air flutters in and out of him to produce sound, but nothing more. So, Jack never falters, never stutters when he says, “the wretched refuse of the teeming shore.” Jack gives him that cut-throat grin, bowing in jest. “Welcome to America.”

Joyace stares at Jack. “I don’t think I’ve heard that line since middle school. You’ve read Emma Lazarus’ poetry?”

“Worse. I was there when they inscribed it on the Statue of Liberty.”

Joyace sharply turns back around. “I’m—no, sorry—” her jaw drops. She nearly placed her hands on her head before aborting the motion, presumably so she wouldn't get dish soap in her hair. “Statue of Liberty?”

“Yeah? It was just in 1903, right?” 

“Statue of Liberty.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Jack asks with faux innocence.

Joyace levels him with a look and says, “what do you think?”

So, the Guardians kidnapped him and accused him of treason. The bogeyman himself targeted him. Hiccup threatened Jack with a shotgun, and Joyace actually grabbed a rifle. Christ on a stick, it’s a miracle nobody’s killed the man.

“Wait.” Hiccup slumps against the counter, shoulders shaking, trying desperately not to drop the bowl. “Wait—how are you still alive?”

Jack grins and shrugs. 

“Easy, I’m not.”

The nightmares. The lake. The body. It all becomes terribly funny. Here Hiccup was, dreaming about lake water flooding his lungs, and he’s cracking jokes in the kitchen, helping with the dishes. Magic’s real, once more he’s left with more questions than answers, and he’s putting bowls in cabinets. Again, he’s struck by the mundaneness of it all.  He crosses his arms over his stomach, then switches them to cover his face, and laughs.

“I don’t know if you’re dead, actually,” he says, hysterically. “You’re just floating there. Whole, I mean. There’s no—rot or anything. Nothing wonky that I know of. Just you as you are. As if not a day has passed.” That’s got to be some magic bullshit right there in the works. He’s certain of this.

But the truth is, he doesn't know how much of it is a dream and how much is fact. All he knows is that there’s some element of truth, that’s it.

There’s a pause that makes Hiccup uncover his face. He sees the remains of movement ripple through Jack’s blue cloth, but wherever Jack had been looking, he’s back to staring at Hiccup now.

“Pretty sure I died,” Jack says lightly, “I was there. I’d know.”

“Yes,” Hiccup says slowly, “but what I mean is that something doesn't add up.”

Jack shakes his head, humor laced with incredulity.

“What are we, The Goonies now? What can possibly be missing? I died. I was brought back. End of.”

The wind whistles and Hiccup begins to feel the biting, protective curve of her axis nearing them both. Joyace chides at her quietly and makes a wry pulling gesture with her head.

Of course, Joyace was still listening in. No load of dishes takes that long to clean.

“Hey Joyace?” 

Joyace sighs.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Did you know they named the lake after me?”

Joyace pauses, tilting her head without turning it around.

“They did?”

“Hiccup found out.” He stretches, then swiftly adds, “also, apparently my corpse is floating somewhere in the lake? Hiccup told me that also. Apparently, he’s possessing it whenever he sleeps. Or something like that, hell if I know.”

He blanches. “Hold on. I do not—”

Joyace turns around in silence, the water still running. She doesn’t even say anything, she only stares between Hiccup and the spot with a sheen of marble frost gnawing at the floor.

Hiccup winces and gives Joyace an apologetic look. “She didn’t know,” he tells Jack.

“I didn’t know until this morning.” Jack points at him again, but at the least he doesn’t look put off. “And I didn’t get the chance to tell her before now.”

Joyace looks like she’s making mental jumps, or maybe calculating the orbit to the moon, adjusting the numbers after remembering that there’s somehow a sail involved. After a long moment of staring between both of them, she says, “that explains some things.” 

Jack frowns. 

“What things?”

“I’m. Going to take a nap.” She says, sounding tired. “After that we can talk. My shift was short, but so is my breaking point for unhinged and unprecedented knowledge. I’m keeping it together for the kids, but good God.”

Joyace shuts off the water and walks out the kitchen like a woman on a mission. Hiccup can’t see her go up the stairs, but he can hear her thumping up the steps. The wind curls around Hiccup, and the pages of his notebook shift lazily. He can’t feel her presence after that.

Jack and Hiccup side eyes each other, bewildered. 

A moment of silence passes after that, but something must have lured the quiet in, because it stays. Hiccup tries a rigid smile that Jack matches, opening his mouth and finding that the words got stuck at the back of his head, out of reach. He plunges into hyper-awareness and straightens his back, bearing resemblance to stiff, cold fingers inside a leather glove. He shifts to neutralize the action, but nothing loosens. He peers out of the window with faux indifference, and nothing’s moving out there. The leaves stop rustling. Nothing stirs. Nothing quivers or sways.

A shadow casts over them, a cloud that sensed the turmoil and decided to reach out and match the mood, but it only makes the nervous jitter withering inside his fingers grow twice fold. The kitchen stretches, the walls reaching further than they’d been a minute ago, and Hiccup desperately wants to run or fight or irrationally tell the clouds to fuck off. The nervous energy buzzes in him and stuffs his remaining limbs with TV static.

There’s no clock inside the kitchen, but Hiccup can still feel something ticking away at his expense. Away from Jack, at least.

Trees? Not moving. Window? Still as a mouse. Maybe the wind left all the surrounding area and somehow cramped herself into the second floor of the house. Or maybe all her focus is turned to Joyace and Joyace alone. He turns away from the window and keeps his gaze locked to the floor. 

Hiccup looks down at the pool of ice that clings to Jack, thickening at his feet. Slowly spreading into the floorboards, like melted wax that’s slowly pooling across the floor. When Jack follows Hiccup’s line of sight, his posture goes taunt and the frost froths and clutters on his ankles like paint peeling off old houses.

Maybe Hiccup isn’t the only one who’s been on edge with things since their talk last night. Jack thought his death was a quiet, mundane thing, only for some stranger to drudge it up from the crystalline muck in the past 24 hours. That’d strip anyone raw. 

Both Jack and Hiccup turn to the arched threshold when they hear a light, quickly pattering down the stairs. Jamie grabs at the wall and saunters into the room and towards the fridge but slows down once he spots Jack and Hiccup. He stops in front of the fridge before he points and says, “you’re doing the shoulder thing again.”

Hiccup forces his shoulders down. Damn.

Jamie lowers his hand then turns to Jack, squinting, his face scrunches up in what Hiccup can only guess is a distasteful realization.

“Oh my God. I’ve forgotten that you’ve never really had any friends.”

“Hey—”

“You know you’re supposed to, like. Hang out in your room, right? So you can hang out with your friends without your siblings or parents getting in the way? Like I do with my friends? Not just stand awkwardly in the kitchen, waiting to talk with moms.”

Jack stares. 

“How much of that conversation did you hear?”

Jamie shrugs. He opens the fridge and digs out a container of pudding before kicking it closed.

“So. Are you guys gonna just stand awkwardly in the kitchen and keep waiting for mom, or…?”

“We were just going,” Hiccup says, nudging at Jack. 

“Sure,” Jamie drawls, unimpressed. 

Jamie stares at the both of them, waiting for them to move. Hiccup, not knowing where Jack’s room is, waits for Jack to lead the way.

Jack looks at Hiccup with wide eyes, before he starts nodding and says, “yeah. Yes. That’s where we’re going. Now.”

Jamie rolls his eyes and looks at Hiccup.

“Mom says you can stay for dinner if you want, by the way.”

“Oh.” he says, staring at Jamie, then at Jack. “Uhm.”

“Oh my God, just say yes. You both want to hang out, it's not that hard.”

“We don’t know that—” Jack tells Jamie.

“Right.” Hiccup nods sharply, hands clenched. “Yeah, okay.”

“Oh.” Jack stares at him. “You sure?”

Jamie groans and walks away through the threshold with his pudding in tow. 

Hiccup gives Jack a lopsided, uneven and loose shrug.

“Lead the way?”

Jack blunders for a second, then laughs, a sound like rocks crashing through the riverbank. When he turns away from him, a hand lingering on the threshold, a trail of frost shimmering on the wall, the nervous titter in Hiccup depletes completely, leaving a calm emptiness in its wake. 

This time, when Jack leaves, Hiccup follows.

Chapter Text

“Does he send you to your room often?” Hiccup says, quiet. 

He doesn’t know if Jamie’s listening or lingering in a corner upstairs like Hiccup would have done when he was Jamie’s age. He isn’t in the habit of subjecting himself to commanding children doing the substantial equivalent of sending two adults to their room. However, it must be highlighted, Hiccup’s social perception is deeply flawed. Perhaps flawed enough to need a twelve-year-old for guidance—it’s not rock bottom, but standing at the edge of the cliff isn’t great either. He lacks good instinct; it hinges on strained frowns, strung silences, and some vague sense of irregularity in whichever room he’s in. 

He nudges Jack and feeds on the frank and bare knowledge of why he’s been called out and looks at him.

Jack snorts. 

“Sure,” he says, walking ahead of Hiccup and leading him down the hall that’s left of the dining room. “Attempts are made.”

“Worked this time, though,” Hiccup points out.

“Jamie’s riding on the wave of having you here.” Jack doesn’t turn to Hiccup fully, but when he tilts his head, Hiccup can see the gleam of teeth, despite the dim lights. “A free boost of confidence. Add another person into the equation, and they get cocky, become careless—it’s like a power-up for kids. Boom.”

Hiccup hums, and tries to remember if he did, or felt, anything similar as a kid, but comes up blank. His childhood consisted of the sole company of Gobber and his father. He had public schooling, yes. He had acquaintances that ebbed in and out of his life: the old man that taught him art, his cousin, school projects that necessitated a partner, teachers. The closest he’s come to it was when he publicly argued with his father, but an audience was never a factor. There was never anyone to perform to.

“It rarely works,” Jack insists.

“Right, sure. Of course.”

“I’m glad we agree—”

“You're no one's boss,” Hiccup continues, “winter incarnate, free as the wind—when you’re not getting owned by a twelve-year-old.”

“Ass.”

Hiccup snickers. They pass multiple doors, but Jack falters at none of them. None of them strike Hiccup as remarkable, but mid-step when the light strikes the frost still clinging onto Jack reflects a rich blue sheen, Hiccup thinks of Blue-Beard. Of his many doors and dead brides.

Here, Blue-Beard said, are the keys. Open any door but one.

They arrive at a door at the end of the hallway. He knows it’s the right room when Hiccup brushes against it and the cold rolls out. The paint is weather-beat and haggard. The floor beneath it is warped. It feeds into the misconception that it's an older part of the house, or that the cold calcifies it, cementing in time.

“Wait,” Jack says, hand withdrawing from the doorknob, jolting back with a funny limp, “hold up.”

Even when Jack turns away, Hiccup keeps his eyes on the door. He doesn't know why it’s important to watch it, simply is. The cold seems to pulse from it, the sound breathes and echoes in the hallway. 

Strange house. The company it keeps is stranger still.

“Is this—is your room upstairs?” 

Hiccup doesn't know why he asks. He knows that this is the room. 

With half the mind to press his head against the door, he hears Jack stop. He’s so light on his feet that it’s not so much a shift of weight as it is a slight creak in the floor beams, the wood reacting to a centralized and sudden temperature change. “It was going to be.” The frost lazily scatters around Hiccup like particles of dust. “But the garage withholds the cold better. Less damage to the house.”

“Oh.”

Hiccup's eyes flicker to Jack, who's looking at him with a funny expression. A look that crosses between cool curiosity and a sharp, teasing gleam in his eye. 

“It's no frozen castle,” Jack says, “disappointed?” 

Hiccup returns the gleam, the corner of his mouth quirked. 

“This is an update, actually. From the trees.” 

It’s the right answer. Jack grins like a fox in the henhouse, proud and cocksure. The shape of it is too wide, too feral, too full of teeth. His gums are a dead man’s purple. 

“It is,” Jack says, “isn't it?”

Jack turns and disappears down the hall, crackling like dropped eggs, like the rustle of bush branches, before Hiccup could respond. Hiccup’s eyes gravitate back to the door. His hand hovers above the doorknob, testing the cold and letting it brush against his fingertips.

His mother, in one of her many travels, sent him a book on various fairy tales. This book was an old thing, with yellow pages and a well-knit spine. The illustrations were something of the fifties—he loved that book. Loved it before it burned. Even now, when the pages are nothing more than ash tossed in some wasteland or tumbled into the sea, he remembers. What he doesn't remember, he patches up with ornate script. A nonsense story he tells himself in an empty hall.

In a distant time, there was an old castle, a castle so old that even the legend of it was lost in time. Blue-Beard, in his younger and more audacious years, coveted it as its own, and stuffed the rot of it with ivory, silver gilt, and damask. He gauzed the weeping wound of it with diamond glossimer and silk. Perfumed the dour musk with primrose, crisp juniper berries, and gine. But the house sang hollow and Blue-Beard had heard the echo, henceforth vowed to fill the silence with a dutiful wife.

Hiccup wonders, distantly, if he should walk in. If he should push open the door or wait. He hears the faint murmur of voices and various doors being open and shut coming from upstairs, first Jack and Jamie, then Mrs. Bennet, and a rush of something that might’ve been the wind. Like Jamie said, the walls are thin.

A month into their marriage, Blue-Beard told his newest bride: 

I must leave you for six weeks on a matter of great consequence. With my troth, I leave you the keys to my storage rooms. To my treasure trove, my silverware, the ballrooms, all of my worldly wealth. Here, open any door but one. Busy yourself, dear-heart. Bring your giddy friends, make your parties, occupy yourself—but do not open the little door. I will know if you do, love. I will know, and that pitiless rack will wrought our ruin.

Hiccup retreats from the door, crosses his arms, and leans his back on the wall beside it, feeling the chill seeping into the arm closest to it. He lets it linger rather than rubbing palms and chasing it away.

“Found it!”

Hiccup looks up. He didn't hear Jack coming down the stairs nor, being this close to the door, didn't feel the chill that follows Jack everywhere and gives him away. Meaning he also doesn't see whatever object of Jack's endeavor has been thrown over his head—at his head. It thwacks Hiccup in the face, making his skull clack and bounce against the wall.

“Oh, shit,” Jack says, closer now from where he'd presumably been. Hiccup lowers the blanket into his arm, the other one rubbing the sore spot at the back of his head. 

“This thing is heavy,” Hiccup mutters. 

“Yeah, that's the point. Sorry, I thought you'd catch it.” 

“I’ve a thick skull,” Hiccup waves it off, adjusting the bundle of fabric so it doesn't slither onto the floor. “What's this even made of?”

“Not sure,” Jack says, sheepishly squinting at the fabric, “but I have it on good authority that it keeps the cold out.”

Hiccup hums and doesn't look at the door. Instead, he rubs the texture between his fingers, the fabric dense and silky. He then puts it on his shoulders like some great, flowing, hooded coat. 

“I had to hunt for it,” Jack says with great importance. “Everyone in this house keeps it for themselves.”

Hiccup thinks of Gobber’s smithery, the waged wars they fought tooth and nail for the finest tools of the shed, and getting up before sunrise for the chance to get an early grab. And if that didn’t work, Hiccup could always argue that, on the account of him being physically at a disadvantage, he was owed the dispensation to facilitate his case. It rarely worked. 

Hiccup doubts that it’ll work here and now. Then again, Jack has someone to vouch for. Furthermore, that person is a guest. 

“Ah. I'm the excuse, then.”

“A very good excuse.” Jack holds a finger. “Do you know how hard it is to bargain for this when you don't actually need the blanket?”

“I’m almost afraid to ask, but why would you want a blanket you don't need?”

“For the bit. And, as a bigger, better bribe.”

Hiccup snorts.

Jack pulls the door, but it doesn’t open, stuck by some miracle, or most likely the ice. The wood fibers ill-fit on the frame. 

It’s wonderfully satisfying, really. How the two of them turn full circle.

“Have you tried waiting it out?” Hiccup says, never one to miss the chance of a timely quip based on pure, unadulterated retribution. They aren’t waiting for his car in the open night, and the blanket coating Hiccup’s shoulders is hard to ignore, meaning he’s not freezing up as he'd been back in the parking lot—it allows him to bask in Jack’s expression fully. A wrinkled lip, a biting hunger in his eye. Jack tries to bury his glee with faux annoyance and fails.

“Ha. Hilarious,” Jack deadpans. “It has a trick to it, hold on.”

If there is a trick, it isn’t one that Hiccup can see the inner workings of—the cover of the machine sealed tight. Jack stares down past the door with a thoughtful, perhaps centralized look. 

Jack twists the knob.

During the night, cold and dreary, Blue-Beard’s newest bride followed the echo of poison-sweet singing until she found a gauze-edged spectre by the little door. Look, said the spectre, her sneer revealing her gums, a dead-man’s purple, guiding the newest bride’s hand to the knob, your lover’s a rogue, his soul is ill-formed. Look, the spectre says as she opens the little door, at the price of his majesty.

The cold hits him like a battle ram. It slugs and molds Hiccup’s senses like a morning up in Berk’s forest with the grey, glittering ground. Or, even more accurately, the harbor by the sea. A slosh of brittle ice filaments. The black winter waters, once a soft blue in the spring, crashing against the cliffs and spitting ice against the stone. A kind of cold that tears the throat raw. It catches Hiccup off guard, even when perhaps he should have expected it. But it's been months since Berk, since the creeping sense of lifelessness outside the parameters of his homeland became the norm. Jack, like the lake—his lake, burned all the brighter for it. A cold light.

Hiccup shifts the blanket to cover more of his face and hands.

There’s no wind or draft, the windows on the garage door are sealed shut, but this cold is too crisp, stings through his throat like spearmint, to belong in a cooped-up space. Although the air doesn’t stir, somehow, it isn't stale. There’s a sense of circulation going about. Hiccup breathes easier, although he tries not to be transparent about how weird this is.

Jack saunters in, skids to the side so Hiccup gets the main view, and wiggles his fingers. 

“Tah-dah.”

There are no paintings on the walls. No lamps, no hanging lights, no nick-nacks. There's a stack of books in a cardboard box by the dresser, on the side closest to the garage door, and it's the only thing without frost. There’s a large hammock that hangs from the ceiling, a couple of outdoor chairs and a small table. On it, there’s a chipped, tall glass stuffed with winter heath, witch hazel, and hellebores. 

The flowers look as though they were painted white, with all that hoarfrost coating them. There are chipped pieces of petals and stems on the table, as if they cracked and fell apart like porcelain. The core of the sharp, broken pieces are black with rot. The water inside the glass is frozen solid, murky.

Hiccup tears his gaze away from the rotting flowers and says, incredulous, “you have a hammock?” 

Jack shrugs. 

“It’s not like I sleep. Besides, it’s easier to maintain than a bed. Sheets get moldy if they’re constantly getting frost on them. You don’t have to worry about the furniture rotting if it’s all meant to withstand the outdoors in the first place. Joyace’s idea, not mine.”

“I…hate how that makes sense.”

Jack hums. 

“Jealous?”

“For owning every kid’s dream room? Very.”

The walls are an off-white. The dresser’s to the left, but there’s nothing on top except for a single snow globe. He looks back at the small table and sees a thin layer of dust coating it. There’re specks of dust on the flowers, on the scattered fragments.

“You, uh, don’t spend a lot of time here, do you?”

“So everyone tells me,” Jack says, leaning on the wall beside the dresser. He then migrates to the hammock, the trail of frost following him. He lifts himself onto the hammock with a strange, weightless grace. The strings holding it into the ceiling barely sway. The thick cloth doesn’t sink or become distorted by Jack’s weight. The only thing to signify Jack’s presence at all was a thin layer of frost crunching and reforming. Once he settles, hands resting beneath his head and crossing his legs, Jack gives Hiccup a grin. “You guessed it; the winter spirit doesn’t spend much time indoors.”

Hiccup doesn't say, my room was my world. How he kept all his eggs in one basket, and because of how he hoarded his worldly treasures even when they outstayed its welcome, he suffered and now has nothing to show for it. He doesn't say, this looks like my room now. With the blank walls, the empty shelves, and the sheets that serve nothing more than a means to an end. He doesn't say, we are afraid of loving meaningless things. He does not say it was easier to staunch his presence than feign it belonged there. Hiccup wonders where Jack takes his meaningless joys—what they look like and where he puts them. He wonders, briefly, if he stuffs them inside that dark, bottomless lake. Where nobody can find them and nothing burns.

“It kinda looks like an Ikea room set.” Hiccup says instead, trying to look around respectfully as possible. From the corner of his eye, he looks back at the rotting flowers and decides to get Jack some plastic or metal ones in their place. If Jack decides that Hiccup’s interesting enough to stick around. If this lasts. He turns his attention to the snow globe instead, the bright red drawing his eye amidst all the white.

“Um.” Jack sounds like he did when they met again at the door. Unsure and hesitant. “You want a snack? Or something?”

Hiccup’s gaze snaps back to Jack and staunches a smile.

“We just ate,” Hiccup points out. “We were in the kitchen a minute ago.”

Jack’s creeping gauche stance eases up into familiar impertinence. 

“Do you want something or not?”

“I’m good.”

Hiccup turns to the snow globe, squinting at the continuous stream of snow falling inside of it. 

There’s a crackling sound with movement behind him, as if Jack had sat up. 

“Ah. Best don’t shake that one.”

“Uhuh.” Hiccup wasn’t about to. He steps closer while keeping a safe distance from the shelf. “Why?”

“I don’t think you’d fancy a trip to the Pole, dressed like that.”

Hiccup looks down at himself first, registers the sentence second, and decides that it’s easier to roll with the punches. 

He sighs, and asks, “which one are we talking about?”

“Which what?”

“Pole.” 

“...What?”

“Pole.” He turns to Jack, who’s sitting up straight with his legs beneath him, his head at a slight tilt and his hands neatly folded. Still, the hammock doesn't bend to his weight. Doesn’t sway. It maintains that eerie stillness. “South or North?”

Jack looks exasperated for a moment, then goes back to grinning like a menace. 

“Think about it for a minute. You’ll figure it out.”

Hiccup squints at Jack, then at the snow globe sitting innocently on the shelf. He pays attention to the diminutive structure inside of it. It looks startlingly warm, like hot cocoa in the kitchen, a bonfire in the dead of winter. He doesn't have to ask if it’s magic or ask if Jack’s messing with him—not when it has that tell-tale hum, when light appears to be emanating from the inside without a source.

“So, North Pole then.” Hiccup turns back to Jack. “How’s it work?”

“Magic.”

“No, really?” Hiccup says, “but seriously, stop doing that. I know it's magic. But even magic has rules.” 

“You'll have to ask North about the mechanisms, if that’s what you’re asking. Or Bunny or Sandy. They're the nerd types. Wizards, alchemists, astrologers, dream-makers. That lot.”

“Opposed to you?”

Jack shifts and scoffs. 

“I don't know what you're implying.”

Hiccup eyes the box of books, the only thing in the room other than the flowers that were placed with any care. The only thing that doesn't have any frost damage. He thinks about how his sketchbook was the one thing that Jack held delicately, how he turned the pages without the frost bleeding through the paper.

“You're telling me you don't read?”

“I can read.”

“That was never the question.” 

Jack blinks, lowering his hackles. 

“Then what is?”

“I’m asking if you prefer it.”

Hiccup is willing to bet his right remaining foot that he does. It’s in his dictation, it’s in that ceaseless, playful curiosity. He can’t imagine Jack allowing anything to get in the way of his curiosity. He can’t imagine Jack being intellectually satisfied with only children’s games and tricks in his spare time. Something else had to fill his endless days.

“I didn't have a lot of friends growing up,” Hiccup continues, “books, stories—they were the next best thing to spend my time doing.” Next to the forge, his wanderings, his art. “I don't see why it can't be the same for you.” Hiccup eyes the box again, gesturing at it from under the blanket. “I'm not going to find Twilight in there, am I?”

Jack snorts derisively. 

“I don't believe you.”

Hiccup stares at him, incredulous. “Oh, magic’s fine, but what I just said is what breaks the limits of plausibility for you? What, exactly, in all of that is hard for you to believe?”

“I don't believe that you didn’t have friends growing up.”

“Have you seen my social skills?”

“Joyace and the kids wouldn't have liked you if your social skills were completely unsalvageable.”

“The youngest threatened to kidnap me, I think. I wouldn’t consider them an authority.”

“I remember you inviting me to your car.” 

“I remember threatening you with a shotgun.”

“You thought I was a crazy homeless man stalking you, and instead of going with your gut reaction, you decided to bring me home.” Jack leans forward and smiles with all his teeth. “Saving me from the cold.”

Just because of that, Hiccup scoffs and shakes his head before shifting the blanket back up to fix the make-shift hood.

“Never said I made smart choices. Also, that says nothing about my social skills.” Hiccup frowns. “And for the record, you still haven't answered either of my questions.”

Jack shifts backwards. His hands are still. The hammock barely moves.

“The Twilight one? The answer is yes, but only the first book in the series—”

“No. I mean, how does the snow globe work? How would you ‘activate’ it?” Hiccup raises his brows, wiggling his fingers. “And I ask if you prefer reading because I just know you’re into some kind of nerd shit. If not that, then something else.”

They briefly stare at each other in silence, Hiccup adjusts the blanket so that it'd fit more squarely around his shoulders, staring at the space between Jack’s eyes, mimicking the notion of eye contact, as he raises his brows. A flicker of some expression wavers across Jack's face, the same vein as that cold curiosity from before, and yet not quite. Its shadow shutters and dissipates before Hiccup could name what it was or could have been.

“...It functions on thought,” Jack says, like it’s a simple thing. “On the wanderings of thought, specifically.”

“How is it—what’s the difference?”

“You have to have imagination, is what I mean. You dream of going to the mountains? It might take you to the Himalayas. If you imagine the sea, it can take you to the sea. If you don’t know how to use it, it can use your abstract thoughts and take you somewhere you won't survive. It might take you to the benthic zone and it might send you to the stratosphere.”

Hiccup stares, he can feel his expression going slack, soft with wonder.

Jack shrugs, and says, “it’s like a Star Trek Teleporter without invoking the Teleporter Problem, except, you know, magic instead of science. You can go anywhere and even survive the trip, but you might not survive the destination.”

“Only nerds know about the transporter problem,” Hiccup says, numb. As if the fact that this motherfucker says words like ‘alchemists’ or ‘astrologers’ despite how he uses modern phrases wasn't a dead giveaway. Hiccup turns to Jack more fully. Jack sits neatly. His hands don't move. The hammock has barely moved.

“It’s weird, seeing you like this,” he says absent-mindedly, carelessly.

Something like surprise filters through Jack’s face.

“Like what?”

“Still,” Hiccup regrets it as soon as he says it, but the word has already tumbled out of his mouth like a dislodged stone, awkward and misplaced, and can’t be taken back. He stares at the hammock. “...How are you doing that?”

“Magic.”

Goddamn it. Hiccup snorts against his will.

“Hate you,” Hiccup says, “hate it here.”

“Ok, ok.” Jack laughs, the trill a silver chain. It’s an oddly delicate sound. “Sorry. How I’m doing what?”

How are you not here? Hiccup thinks about how there’s no trace of Jack, about how Joyace can move through him like the ghost of yesterday’s past, and presses his lips in a thin line, brows furrowed. How is it that we can laugh and talk, and somehow, you’re still not here? He thinks about how Jack still flinches when Joyace unknowingly glides past him. How Jack, when they first met, rambled to a stranger he didn't think could answer, mimicking the motions of idle conversation. How the hammock won't bend. What left you here, in this nothing?

The exhaustion creeps back in, swallowing him up like a bad fog. He’s painfully aware again of his lead-weight eyes and his puckered leg. He looks up from the patch of concrete floor that he doesn't remember staring at, looks at Jack’s confused yet imploring expression, and standing, suddenly, seems ridiculous.

“Move over.”

“What?”

“Scoot.”

Hiccup braves the cold and brings his hand out of the blanket to make a flicking motion. He lifts the blanket higher so it wouldn't drag as he walks over and all but falls into the spot Jack just barely makes available for him. The layer of frost shatters, the hammock makes wide, wild swings and creaks as Hiccup tries to both adjust the blanket so it can comfortably fit him like a cocoon while taking off his prosthetic, shoe, and prosthetic sock. He sets them on the floor, then finishes adjusting the blanket for optimal warmth.

Then Hiccup realizes how quiet Jack’s being, the only sound of the room being the hammock’s slowing creaks, and stills. There is a brief moment of panic where Hiccup thinks he may have launched Jack out of the hammock and tries not to sigh in relief when he turns around to find that Jack is still here, if bewildered. Jack’s got frost crawling on his skin again, a silvery sheen. In what must be in a fit of fatigue, Hiccup gets the impulsive thought of picking the icey sleets off. However, the task seems sisyphean, and rude besides.

“Hullo.”

Jack looks down at him, somehow still sitting up neatly despite all the ruckus Hiccup made. 

“...Hello?”

“Be honest,” Hiccup says, “how many of those books are stolen?”

Jack barks out a sharp, jutted laugh, looking at Hiccup like he’s somehow the more bizarre one of the two of them. Keeps laughing as he lowers himself down and lays himself parallel to Hiccup, the hammock stays still.

By Woden, God of Saxons,

From whence comes Wednesday, that is Wodensday.

Truth is a thing that ever I will keep

Unto thylke day in which I creep into

My sepulchre…

At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village, of great antiquity—

Still on the hammock as the words in his book lose focus, whether it be from the fatigue or the stinging swarm of questions that divide his attention, Hiccup decidedly gives in to the ill-defined curiosity that keeps running in the background of his mind. He lowers the (supposedly borrowed) copy of Rip Van Winkle in his hands to his lap. 

“Why don’t you do it?” Hiccup says.

Jack hums, the sound a question, but doesn’t look up from his own book—something with a bright orange cover and written in a language that Hiccup can’t completely pin down, though both the cover and language looks familiar. If he had to guess, it looked like a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish. Jack flips to the next page.

“Build yourself a castle,” he adds. 

Hiccup has seen the mass pillars, the coil of spirals that ice does make. A sandy shine, the clean blue tint. That grey swell. He could see it in his mind’s eye, its marvel. The design that would rival that of any vaulted ceiling, any column, any man-made structure. He’d seen how it makes cathedrals of coves and caves in Berk at winter’s peak.

He read a fairytale about Jack Frost, once. Some twisted, mean thing. An old man who’s every strained word had some jilted bitterness to them. A girl's stepfamily leaves her to die of the cold, and he goes to the cove to cover her in frost as he must do to all things in his path, but he softens when she treats him kindly. When she noted, sincerely, the beauty of the frost and thought it a beautiful death. He slouches off his coat of furs and gives her wealth he can never use before letting her go.

Point is, Hiccup understood it then. Understood it when he found the woman sheathed in its majesty, in the cold. It was beautiful. It wasn't a bad way to go, all things considered.

“Who says I haven’t?” Jack says, like he’s pushing a loud sound from bursting out into the open. He shifts his book to his right hand, bookmarking it with his thumb. “Maybe Elsa doesn’t have shit on me.”

“You don’t live in it, so it can’t be that good.”

“Ice melts.” 

Hiccup looks around the room, the unperturbed ice, the deadened flowers, then looks back at Jack with his eyebrows raised. 

“Oh,” Hiccup says, “I’m sorry. Is it—is the ice too cold for you? Is it uncomfy? Is that why you’re without a castle and homeless?”

“We are very clearly hanging out in a house,” Jack says with great dignity, “I have a house. We’re in a house as we speak.”

“Do you pay rent? Contribute? If the answer is no, it doesn’t count.”

“In my defense, I don’t have any income.”

“Yeah,” Hiccup says, “because you’re homeless.”

“No, because I’m a three-hundred-year-old spirit. I’m magic, people can't see me, it comes with its disadvantages. No identity means no social security number, no bank account. Zilch.”

“Which makes you homeless.”

“The economy is in shambles.” Jack throws his arm, the one that wasn’t holding a book, above his head. “And, actually! I do yard work. I contribute. So there.”

“You do yard work?”

“I do yard work.”

“You’re three hundred years old, and you do yard work.”

“I don’t know what you want from me.” Jack squints. “Are you telling me you have something against the working class?”

“Literally if you saved like one coin from just a hundred years ago, you’d have so much fucking money right now. Do you know how hard it is to live as long as you have, yet still be dirt poor and have nothing? That’s almost impressive.”

Jack opens his mouth to say something, stutters, and closes it several times.  Then he goes a little still, eyes digging in some spot on the opposite wall.

“...Maybe?”

Hiccup stares at him.

“Maybe…?”

“Maybe I have one?” Jack says, “a coin?”

“Maybe?”

“I’d have to check.”

“So, you could be rich and have a castle, and yet you have neither,” Hiccup says, dropping his head down in an imitation of courtesy, “my point stands.”

Jack looks so offended right now. Hiccup has the urge to take his phone out and snap a picture. Then again, his phone is on the dining room table and magic has bullshit rules like molecular intangibility, which is bullshit because the human brain technically counts as a camera—what is memory but a biological mechanism to store images and sounds?

“You know what? I…am quite literally a force of nature. I’m not human and never will be. I’m above human convention and needs.”

“Exactly. You can make yourself anything, anywhere.” Hiccup waves his hand, far-off places slotting in his mind, postcard-worthy sceneries, but they soon transpose into something less concrete. “You could probably live in a storm if you wanted to. A house in the clouds. A kingdom in the water. A manor in the woods. There are no limits, yet instead you choose to live with us mere mortals in a room you refuse to decorate.”

Jack points the orange book at him, a lush, multifloral waving flag.

“I’m starting to see why you never had any friends.”

Hiccup lays back on the hammock, knocking shoulders with Jack, breathed out through his nose in a huff, and looks at him for a moment, nudging his elbow. Hiccup still gets a shot of cold when he does it, despite being cocooned in a blanket and how he’s still wearing a jacket. But the white rime ice doesn’t touch Jack, his side of the blanket—constrained under translucent frostbitten skin.

“Ok, but seriously. Why not?” Hiccup says, “it’s a nice room, a nice house, but wouldn’t you prefer something—I don't know, for yourself?”

Jack breathes, like he’s making a point, then says, “and miss all the yard work?”

“There are better things than yard work.” 

“Hiccup, I’m always by myself,” Jack says, with that grin, like the fox that nabbed the chickens, like that broken slit of ice. “It would be so boring. What would I even do with an empty house?”

I started noticing things, Joyace had said, small things. Like how the backyard’s cleaner than usual. I thank my kids, and they'd give me an odd look. And that was it, the beginning of the end. Magic didn’t creep into her life with a bang, but with an honest day’s work and a clean yard. Jack and the wind looked at eternity and said, someone has to clean the yard. Someone has to sweep the floor. Someone has to wash the dishes. Let me help. Let it be me. Why can’t it be me?

“Besides,” Jack says, “I’ve seen what that kind of isolation does to a spirit, what being surrounded by all that wealth that they can’t use does to them. At one point or another they go apeshit and start kidnapping people, best case scenario. Can’t kidnap people if you don’t have a place to bring them. Checkmate.”

A gaping well looks at Hiccup from the back of his mind; a place thick with old folktales, paintings, myths, and curses that were made to discourage stupid behaviors. Truth from fabrication has never been harder to pinpoint. Or maybe—he looks at Jack—it’s never been easier. Maybe it was all true, maybe there are no poets, there are no dreamers, and there are no fairy tales. Only incomplete accounts.

“That—that’s not the victory you think it is. I'm pretty sure the wind kidnapped me here, actually.”

“What? Nah…”

“But she also saved me from getting a car ticket, I think.”

“See! Checks and balances.”

Hiccup rolls his eyes and opens his book again, flicking the pages until he hits the last passage, he’d been able to pay attention to. Besides him, Jack does the same.

…Rip’s sole domestic adherent was his dog Wolf, who was as much hen-pecked as his master; for Dame Van Winkle regarded them as companions in idleness, and even looked upon Wolf with an evil eye, as the cause of his master’s going so often astray. True it is, in all points of spirit befitting an honourable dog, he was as courageous an animal as ever scoured the woods—

Hiccup reads the same paragraph about five more times before putting the book down.

“Ok, and another thing—”

Jack snaps his book shut and groans. 

“Oh, God.”

Hiccup flew too close to the sun, swerved, and immediately plunged into the earth’s surface, where the consequences of his actions are laughing at him from the other end-side of the hammock.

Jack is talking—has been talking for some time now, a continuous flow of sound that began in response to Hiccup’s mind wonderings. He delivered in full, then continued some more, adding scores of dimes worth of lived experience with the air of a storyteller whose tale can only grow and exponence. Hiccup thinks of eddies, of still water. Fish with their many-colored scales, gleaming in the afternoon sun, before sinking back into the deep.

The hammock swings, the sun lowers from its zenith, the filters and soft rays of light withdrawing from the windows on the garage door. Hiccup’s eyes go heavy lidded, the world blurs as everything else fades into a murmur, and all he can hear is his own breathing. He sinks into the hammock, into sleep, and all goes black.

 

Once upon a time, there was a burning room. 

Red as viscera, the giddy gyre that fire did make, the melted bauble warps and boils the art, the books, the shelves and the bed. It’s as though the room was clothed with sheets of red velvet. The gold light is a flickering, diaphanous film—a silky shine. Hiccup sits in the middle of his old room, his hands flat and fingers spread on the wooden boards that once made his floor, his legs behind him and out of sight, his body at an incline; staring at the fire, yet not knowing why. The paintings shrivel and implode into themselves. The bed slumps in a whorl of glittered copper and wilts into pitch black, the embers eating at the fibers from the inside out. His trinkets and toys melt and dribble onto the vanishing floor. His books, his bookshelf, a pedestal of billowing smoke. 

The room is falling apart. His room is falling apart.

Eyes burning, he slowly rises from the floor. His shadow a dark crimson, his lame leg aglow, because red is red is red. On unsteady legs, he stumbles towards a door so small that he has to bend down to reach the brass knob. He presses his head against the door, a cold thing, a balm to a febrile born illness. 

A cold gust howls in from the cracks, and the room breathes with it. It reeks of a familiar scent, but of what he can’t recall. The wind carries in Jack’s voice, soft and hollow, “do not open the little door.” Hiccup tenses, his neck a patch of gooseflesh, curling up against the door as the wind groans. He breathes hard, squeezing his eyes shut as the wind rattles the door. Jack’s voice echoes and floods into the room. As if he crouched next to him, whispering in the shell of his ear, a low hiss, “I will know if you do, love. I will know, and that pitiless rack will wrought our ruin.”

His room is a burning wreck. The wind warbles, cool and sweet.

In truth, the room had always burned hot, even before the flames—before his foot reshaped to molten ossein. Hiccup had never been good at doing what he was told, but now he despises it. The flames just gave it a name, this slow ruin. More than that, they’re giving Hiccup a way out. It’s the same, until it isn’t. 

Hiccup places his hand to the knob, leans against the door to pry it open—a slow collapse. The room sighs and the hinges creak. Then the wind goes still.

Water swells from the floor as he crumples outside the room, yet still the fire on his leg gnaws at him, refusing to diminish. The water is dark as oil, the surface has a sticky feel, clinging to him like molasses, like an old greed. The floor—he can’t see the floor, the hallway is gushing water from the floorboards, but feels the slabs of wood. The hallway he tumbled into is expansive; a dark winding stretches with a hungry bent. Hiccup likens the columns that hold the ceiling to brinicles, neat twin lines of maelstroms. 

It’s too dark to see the details on the roof arches, though he can see the impressions of intricate carvings. The paint star-specked with artificial light—but before he could fathom them out, the roof drips black water, that scent of freshwater silt. The paintings on the ceiling, whatever they were, burst and crumples like paper. The ceiling shivers as the clumps fall with a wet clack. The water splatters on his face as the ripples wave by him. 

His phantom leg burns through it all, white hot and searing.

The audacity, he thinks, is what gets him. The irony. He’s surrounded by a water that refuses to put out the fire. Expelled from his burning room only to be shuffled into the flood. He asks for an exit, and he’s given a rotting, fetid castle that’s falling apart. Rage sparks and pierces through him before he could have the wherewithal to smother it.

He’s so angry, he can feel the smoke of his ire clot his throat and calcify his lungs. Hiccup can feel his face twist into something desperate and cold. Death by transfiguration, turning hard minerals into molten metal that drips all impurities, hammered out and pressed down until all that’s left is the splitting weapon. Sword, morningstar, net. There, his fire consumes until it’s the new daybreaker and leaves the cooling ash in its wake.  

The water ripples, and Hiccup slows his breathing enough to follow the movement. Hiccup’s sneer stalls when he sees Jack; a gleaming, gossamer veil of ice that drags against the rising water and bunches at the water’s surface. The rime drags down in crystallizing sheets, clinging to his hair and clothes and making a frigid extension out of them that reach his shoulders, his back, the floor. He has warped and waterlogged limbs, worm-soft. Tissue paper thin, as if any pressure against the skin would cause a collapse in swaths. However, the eyes were what Hiccup found most jarring—a warm, soft brown. Brown hair beneath the frost-wrought veil. None of the moonshine glint, no glitter. Despite how there was a corpse standing before him with frostbite and waterlogged rot, he seemed startlingly human. 

Jack brings a finger to his lips, his face gaunt and sullen, before grasping him by the forearm; a cold, iron grip as Jack drags and lifts him from the ground to his feet, shoving Hiccup next to a slope by his burning door as Jack resides into a dark corner.

Before Hiccup could ask any questions, there’s a silver light at the end of the hall. As the light trudges closer, the source slowly but surely reveals itself as a second Jack, sulking through the hall. The ice clings to this one like jewels, and the light that hits him gives this Jack a nimbus glow, his skin gleaming blue, gleaming teeth. Although beautiful, there’s so much ice growing on him that his outline barely resembles anything human. Tall and lean, his bent back touches the vaulted ceiling. He slushes though the hall, crackling. Crooning nonsense. He halters, looking about with wide eyes with a hard glint, before hulking onwards past them. The dark swallowing him up.

“What was that?” Hiccup asks, staring into the dark. The question comes out in a low hiss, his face taunt, “Jack, what was that?”

Jack doesn’t respond. The wind bellows, and the flickering Jack’s veil reflects the light of the burning room.

Water gargles. Water gushes from the walls. Water rises to their knees. 

Then, emerging fully from the dark once more with a knotted hand covered with the transparent veil, Jack points a talon to a hall, a black abyss. The froth-white veil gleams as Jack twists to where he was pointing to and he drifts to where the other Jack, the ice giant, whatever it was, came from. 

The door to his room is a roaring gold flame. The other direction has…whatever that was, the thing that looks like Jack, but isn't. There’s nowhere else to go, so with a limp gait Hiccup follows. Funny enough, his burning leg works as a make-shift torch.

“Look at me,” Jack rasps while they walk. He doesn't falter, doesn't turn from the abyss to face Hiccup.

“Looking at you is like looking at a field of mirror,” Hiccup says.

Jack’s head tilts, though doesn’t turn fully.

“And what am I?”

Hiccup locks eyes with the floor—with the rising water, his shuffling feet, his leg a-fire—eyes wavering. 

The words seem to bleed out of him. A messy, unfiltered flood.

“You’re the frozen sea foam in the stalled sea, the coral-choked driftwood I’d find at the shore’s gravel, the oscillating prisms yielding to the ice’s edge by the cliffs. A shard-like gleam that would reflect the sunbeams. Cold, sharp, dangerous. Yes. You’re no green of spring, and certainly not gentle, but there’s a brilliance to you, the hopeful gleam without fire or heat. That’s what you are, I think. That's what you look like.”

Jack slows to a halt. Hiccup stops beside him.

You’re comely, Hiccup doesn't say; doesn’t finish. Instead, he pushes the veil away from Jack’s face and flicks the frost on his cheeks, some echo of a gesture.  Far behind Jack, Hiccup can still see his burning room, a small, pale gleam of gold. The skin beneath Hiccup’s hand is as hard as stone. Jack stares at him from under the veil, the eyes hollow and empty.

Hiccup lowers his hands, withdrawing.

“Where are you taking me?” Hiccup asks slowly.

Jack’s eyes flicker, and Hiccup follows his gaze to a door.

“Look,” Jack says as he leads Hiccup’s hand to the knob and opens the door, “at the price of majesty.”

The door opens with a gasp, and the water consumes him—      

He hung in the dark, the water a slick velvet in his throat, a thing that settled in the sacks of his lungs, the weight dragged him down. It’s depths the color of a vibrant bruise, a smear of violets and indigo, the shade rich with a metallic black. A pool of oil.

He couldn't move. The muscles in his face paralyzed as he couldn't scream, a blank, dead expression as his eyes, the tilt of his jaw, remained angled up, to the receding light. His limbs sway in the current, and his body tips, but he doesn't move. He can’t.

The light shrinks away from him, a speck of gold. The pressure is maddening, pressing against all sides. It’s being buried alive. It’s a closed tomb, scratches coating the inside. It’s bees caught in honey. The light, this speck, flickers. Liquid in its golden movements until it's gone. A candle blown out.

He sinks. 

He sinks.

Waking up is like a knife to the diaphragm. Dazed, eyes glazed and fogged, his vision is in a perpetual blur. There’s a buzz in the background, a ringing in the air that Hiccup can’t fathom out. He inhales, high-pitched and shallow, before gagging. White foam that perforates the edges of his vision, pressure on his shoulders and a mouth full of lake water. His ribcage heaves and buckles like some flimsy rowboat chucked into the sea. His thoughts are a fog, his grapple of language slips into non-existence, but confusion slams into him with acute, brute force.

“Hiccup, hey—hey. I’m sorry I woke you up—I’m sorry, but—what—”

Thing is, Hiccup has been waking up every day for the past month believing he’s got water in his lungs. Dreams are just dreams, but Hiccup’s tears are real—they’re shackled to the corners of his eyes when he bends to the side and coughs. In a fit of instinct, he slings over onto the edge of the hammock to throw up fake fucking water over the edge. It’s this honest, instinctive reaction of dispersing the imaginary flood coating his throat that saves him from further inhaling the water that leaks from his lips and down the side of the hammock. When he retches, instead of empty air, something hits the floor and reaches his ears with a wet slap.

It doesn't stop. It pours out of his throat with a wheeze and a linen pull, the bend of his stomach has already retreated into itself, sucked into his solar plexus as far as it possibly can. He retches until all the air is pulled out from him, but the bed of muscle twitches to extract every ounce.

There’s no blood, no wound. It's all ice and water.

Chapter Text

A sudden cold bites the skin of his nape. Hiccup jerks, blinks the salt and the sleep out his eyes as the waterfall comes to a full stop and vanishes from Hiccup’s lips. Hiccup coughs an empty whine and his inhale stutters, his throat raw and thinned into an ill-carved whistle. The lights flicker and the puddle on the ground glistens. When the light settles, the puddle is gone. 

The white-blue blur stays. The cold on his neck moves, overlays his coat and grows like mildew from the finger-shaped pressure points now pressing on his bicep and shoulder blade, as if aiding for balance or support. The cold sinks its teeth in, but Hiccup can’t bring himself to care.

He pulls back from the edge, the hammock sways.

Hiccup looks down on himself, picking at the seams—all white fuzz and jagged edge. There’s a weight to it that Hiccup hadn’t discerned was Jack—reigning him in like a splash of cold water, a shock triggering the release of endorphins right out of Hiccup’s muddled brain. The touch is painful but grounding; the singing sting keeping him awake. Jack must notice where Hiccup’s eyes have been drawn to, however, and starts to draw back, but Hiccup pins Jack’s hand to his shoulder with his own before he can retreat. Hiccup’s palm and fingers immediately become raw, a shrieking white—yet Hiccup hesitates before letting go. 

“You’re real, right?” Hiccup rasps. Jack’s eyes widen impossibly further for reasons Hiccup can’t process right now. The white spreads, Jack buffers before nodding at Hiccup, slowly. “Yeah. Thought so—okay—” He breathes in deeply, ignoring his sore airways. “—Okay.”

His clothes are damp under the blanket pooling on his legs. His hair is wet, dripping over forehead and getting caught in his eyelashes, even though his lungs have been drained. The dream knew how to give the impression of coldness with its blue hues and illusion of ice, but when he woke up to the cold, to this frozen room, to Jack’s wide alarmed eyes—the cold stings, a bitter gnaw. No dream-haze, nothing to soften the blunt edge. All of it, real.

Jack stares at the ground. Stainless, clean, untouched. His jaw clinches, a muscle in his cheek pulses, and his eyes have a hard gleam to them. The clothes on his shoulder crystallizes as Jack’s grip hardens.

“What,” Jack says slowly, “was that?”

Hiccup coughs, a reedy, thin thing. He doesn't know if Jack is talking about the vanished vomit. Or how his body seized when waking up from the nightmare. Or his clothes and hair radically drying as if he never took the plunge. Regardless, it doesn't matter.

“I don’t know.”

A red light goes on somewhere then, there in the mind’s eye it blinks twice before powering up in full, signifying the reboot of a system that had unexpectedly gone down. With it, comes the realization that time and time again, Hiccup is doomed to make a fool of himself. First time in someone else’s room to hang out, and what does he do? Throw up imaginary water inches away from their furniture. 

God. Throwing up is already so embarrassing and he can’t even do that right. Way to go.

“Oh god, I nearly threw up on your hammock,” Hiccup says, “do you, uh. Have a mop, or something?” Jack stares at him, frowning. Hiccup’s head spins. “I mean, its not even there anymore, but fuck—shit.”

Jack looks at him like his order of preference should be subjugated by common sense rather than wayward doormat behavior, but common sense just disappeared in thin air and Hiccup needs to cope somehow.

“That’s not the problem.”

“No—No, I think it is. I think guests aren’t supposed to throw up imaginary water over a host's bed—” There’s a pressure building up behind his eyes, a dull ache. He lays back down, staring at the ceiling. Hiccup doesn't know how long he slept, but regardless, it wasn’t enough. He’s still tired. “—Hammock—whatever.”

“That wasn’t—” Jack slips his hand away from Hiccup’s shoulder, leaving a small trail over Hiccup’s jacket, over the forearm. “—It wasn’t imaginary, I saw it.”

“Oh. That’s good.”

“No, actually, I don’t think that’s good.”

“And the alternative is—what, exactly? That I’m only dreaming? My brain is—it’s all made up?” He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Hiccup exhales slowly and shrugs loosely, a lazy circular motion the left shoulder. “I kind of thought I was losing a marble. ‘Least now I know for a fact that magic’s involved and it’s not—it isn’t brain cancer or something.” The words clutter, rough and parched. Talking is as obscure a task as capturing a plume of smoke in his fist, but he feels his mind grow lucid. A strange tranquility. His tongue-tied stutter is due to exhaustion, nothing more. “I mean, I figured—before. But now I know, you know?”

Hiccup slumps further into the hammock, Jack withdraws, and Hiccup closes his eyes. He hears the sound of thin sheets of frost clacking, the soft hiss of delicate fractals splintering. When he opens them, Jack has his eyes pinned elsewhere, stuck in the way that lets the mind roam, with his fingers hovering over his mouth. Something must have struck because his expression widens, ripping his hand away from his face and looking at Hiccup with alarm.

“How’s your head?” Jack says.

“Hm?”

Jack's hands hover but don't touch. “Your head. Your breathing.” Jack leans over him, eyes wavering. When he talks, Hiccup can see the lilac hue of his gums, the blue veins frozen mid-pulse. The rime of frost that covers him in silvery, iridescent patches. “You were drowning just now, that does things to the brain. How are you feeling?”

“I’m—It’s fine. I’m fine.” The patches shimmer lazily. Hiccup’s eyes follow the spread. “More or less.”

“Are you light-headed?” 

Hiccup does a quick internal check. His throat is scratchy, his limbs feel heavy. He has never felt more tired after a nap than before taking it, and the amount of processing brain power needed to deal with shit like this hadn’t even existed within his system until a night ago, he’s struggling to catch up.

“Not really. Mostly tired.”

“And you…can you see well? It’s not blurry or anything? You’re breathing okay?”

“I’m—yes? To both things.”

Jack tenses. “You do see blurry?”

“No, no, I see fine. I see fine, breathe fine. I'm fine. I'm not—” When Hiccup sits up, Jack glides out of the way. “—I didn't even swallow the water.”

Right. The water.

Jack's pupils flit to the floor and back to Hiccup, bringing a hand to his face that muffles a groan that Hiccup sympathizes with. He lets it fall away, leaving a tail of white coating the spot where his hand had been, some shooting star that broke off and left a scar in the open universe. “Does this happen often?” Jack says, gesturing to the floor tiles. 

“What, the drowning or the disappearing act?” Hiccup says, tired. “Yes, both, everyday,” he says it in jest; deflection and irony is undemanding at the face of unyielding exhaustion—although one could argue it’s straight up a part of his fons et origo, but still, he hesitates. 

“You’re too calm,” Jack says, “for someone who’s just spat half a river. You’re not freaked out enough for this not to have been your first time.” 

“Not a river,” Hiccup says, automatic, “it’s your lake.”

Jack goes quiet, unstirring, reminding Hiccup of when he first lashed out at Jack about his dreams. Still. A bird laid low.

What should’ve been the first time was a while ago, when he almost heaved out lake water in his bathroom sink in the middle of the night. Gagged and spat out nothing but empty air and spit into the porcelain cavity. He was so panicked, almost had his lungs wrecked and his heart kicking against his chest, there in the dark. He thought himself delusional, some fit of anxiety. A bad metaphor. Thought some sickness had unknowingly wormed its way into him. He fretted over how much decorum he lost himself over what never was and sulked back into bed. Into a restless, dreamless, sleep.

“You really think there’s something in there, do you?” Jack says, then. 

You should know, Hiccup thinks, you, of all people, should know.

Instead, Hiccup says, “I know it doesn’t make sense—”

Jack laughs, startling Hiccup. The sound is jackal-like, sharp and crude.

“You were drowning five minutes ago, Hiccup. There was no water to even drown with. I believe you. I already believed you.” 

“Oh.” Hiccup breathes, a tension that he hadn’t known was building up releasing from his shoulders. “Point is,” Hiccup says, not unkindly, “if there was something there, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Yeah,” Jack says, then. A small, humorous smile, taking a storm in stride. “If something weird like this was bound to happen, I guess it makes sense it would be about…my lake.” He fidgets with the thick cloth that edges the hammock. “It’s always been a bit weird anyways, even by my standards.”

“What standards?” Hiccup says it lightly, smiles when he does it. 

But Jack doesn't take the bait; he shakes his head, brows furrowed and eyes distant.

“It was always odd, but it was never supposed to be dangerous.” Jack exhales slowly, an almost human notion if not for the plume of cold fog. “Never gave people dreams. Never did anything from a distance. It wasn’t dangerous unless you fell into it. But, after me, no one went near it anymore. "

Hiccup tilts his head, resting his chin on the knee he's curled into his chest.

"I lingered, at first." Jack explains, absentmindedly, "never went far. I guarded it, in the beginning. That I did. Didn’t even know why I was guarding it. But time slipped too quickly and…well, like I said, nobody ever came.”

“The water—it didn’t—yeah. The light was weird.” Hiccup sways, eyes flickering. The way Jack said this seems different, somehow, but Hiccup’s too tired to pinpoint what the change was. “Made it hard to draw. When I looked at my phone several hours had passed. It didn’t reflect anything.”

Greedy thing, the thought ripples through him, bitter and quiet, I think it would’ve swallowed the sun if it could.

Jack stares at him.

“Was this in your dream?”

“No, no.” Hiccup shakes his head. “I was there, earlier. I thought seeing it finally might—ha—cure myself. Or at least I’d finally know if my dream was accurate at all.”

“You've been there—”

“I don’t think I was supposed to," he says, pressing his lips together to fight the warm and awkward sense of self-consciousness. "The wind pulled me away, after a while.”

Jack closes his mouth, whatever he was meant to say lost in the sudden crashed train of thought.

“Pulled you out?" Jack says slowly. "Why would she need to pull you out?”

“I—” Hiccup's shoulders raise to no volition but their own. “—Almost fell in?”

“What—”

“But I—it was fine. I didn’t fall in. Because you know, she pulled me out. So we’re good—”

Jack looks at him, pauses to stare at Hiccup's hovering hands, and he says with a dazed sort of confusion, “this isn’t right, you realize?”

What exactly, Hiccup thinks, a bit hysterically: the black hole of a lake, the weird and inexplicable supernatural speed run, or the moon-is-a-spaceship thing? Everything has become a bright blur, and to be honest, Hiccup is having a hard time separating and freaking about everything one-on-one.

“Well. Ever since Jack Frost explained to me magical theory—the doors have been pretty—pretty wide fucking open.”

“Yeah, well, Jack Frost doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Jack sneers, a flash of the lilac gums, the teeth gleaming. He slows to a halt, brings a hand to his forehead where a piece of ice has lashed out across before running it through his hair. “…this isn’t exactly normal human behavior.”  

Yours or mine?

“I’d know,” Hiccup says instead, ever helpful, “I’m human.”

“Yeah, so by convention, you should be freaking out.” Jack’s eyes are open and his brows furrowed, as if inconvenienced by the discourtesy of Hiccup's daring to remain calm, “I'm Jack Frost, and I'm freaked out.”

"You don't look freaked out."

Something in Jack’s expression spasms before neatly smoothing out.

“I’m a Guardian of Childhood. While your case having no precedent doesn't help and you’re certainly not a kid, me and mine are supposed to solve and rectify supernatural mishaps before they hurt people. If you drowning in your sleep doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what does.”

“Oh. Right.” He shuffles in-place on the hammock. “Well, if it helps, I also nearly got burned alive once. I was dead for thirty—I think thirty minutes when they took me out, apparently. So, if that didn’t do it, I doubt drowning would.”

Jack stills. The temperature of the room plummets further, and oh. Maybe that hadn't been the soothing spell that Hiccup had been aiming for.

“Died? What do you mean, you died—”

“They—the, uh, the doctors—told us that I should’ve stayed dead.” Jack’s face doesn’t change, through the frost on his skin thickens and turns his skin to a bruise-like hue, but now that Hiccup’s started talking, it’s hard to stop. “Or received some kind of permanent vascular damage or brain damage—they told my parents that I was going to live the rest of my life as a vegetable. My recovery was—miraculous, they said—I think—I think I was a recently published case in some medical journal? One from the mainland, too. But then I woke up, down a leg, but up, and then—and now I’m here.” He pauses, realizing it’s possible that this is the first time he’s said any of this aloud. “Yay.”

The only sound in the room is Hiccup’s breathing. The frost on Jack’s skin bristles.

“Sorry,” Hiccup says, “that wasn’t—I meant it as—lighthearted—I meant—”

“Why are you like this?” Jack Frost spreads his hands. “How even—how?”

Hiccup smiles, something raw and honest, then says, “magic, probably. Duh.”

Jack stares at him, the frost contorts and writhes while it fans out, the eyelashes heavy with hoarfrost, the irises layering a milky film, and asks, “…was it?”

Before Hiccup could respond, there’s a cold swell as the wind gushes into the room from the slivers of unsealed gaps where the closed door and doorway don’t meet. Then the door smacks open when the kids burst in, a loud and unflinching babble. The wind spills in, the dead flowers bristling and the hammock swaying as she rolls in lazy circles ‘round the room.

Sophie, her hair sticking in all directions and still streaked with fake blood, grasps the edge of the hammock on Hiccup’s side with big, bright eyes and says, “dinner.” 

“I think we’re having meatloaf,” Jamie adds while he and the wind are playing a game of catch with a paper airplane. His eyes occasionally glide over to where Hiccup and Jack are, but he mostly keeps an eye on the airplane. “Instant meatloaf and microwave-heated broccoli. Which means that dinner’s gonna be mid at best, but we’re watching a movie instead of eating at the table. So, it balances out.” When he catches the plane, he turns to the two of them and says, “it’s Sophie’s turn to pick. Brace yourself.” 

The wind seizes Jamie, ruffling his hair until it’s all amok. Jamie calls out, “hey!” While Sophie’s doe-eyed expression melts into something sharp as she crackles in a way that’s startlingly similar to Jack, like when he’s laughing at something he knows he’s not supposed to. Sophie lunges at her brother, gnawing at the air and making chewing noises. Jamie narrowly dodges and they both scuttle out of the room as Sophie chases him out of the garage, the wind whistling and clicking after them.

Jack and Hiccup trade a look. Hiccup with his brows raised, Jack with the slanted grin.

“Jamie acts like he has genuine taste when he just picks marvel movies every time,” Jack says as he slips off the hammock with ease. Jack’s smiling, the expression tight, his tone calm yet taunt. The lightness seems forced, but Hiccup doesn't have the reserves to point it out. Besides, he’s grateful for the distraction.

Hiccup’s attempt to exit from the hammock is not so clean. He’s one foot down and the hammock refuses to keep steady for him, he settles for sitting on the edge, whats left of his legs dangling over the edge, and reaching for the prosthetic sock and prosthetic as he says, “you’ve a grudge.”

Jack circles around to Hiccup’s side, picking up and handing him the other sneaker that’s not attached to the prosthetic. “I have taste.”

Hiccup takes the shoe, muttering thanks, then adds, “and a grudge.”

“Nobody wants to watch plays or foreign films with me,” Jack says as he waits for Hiccup. “It’s just superheroes and princesses with these two. It’s genuinely devastating. I’m in a state of crisis.”

Jack extends his hand to help Hiccup up. He doesn't need it, but he takes it anyway. Hiccup’s hand immediately goes numb, losing color on contact. As soon as he’s up on his feet, Jack withdraws, pinning his hand to his side. Hiccup closes his hand to a fist and opens it in rapid succession to get some feeling back.

“What about Joyace? What does she pick?”

“Murder mysteries.” Jack turns to the door and starts to walk out, Hiccup follows him. “Also unsolved cold case documentaries.” 

Hiccup thinks back to Joyace in the depth of a strange and haunted woods, cracking jokes as she’s encased by the wind and plastic bags, the way she jumps between the lighthearted and unnerving unnatural. Then decides that her preference seems appropriate. 

“Oh?”

“Right before going to sleep, too,” Jack says, “and I'm the one that has to go turn the living room TV off.”

Somewhere ahead where Hiccup can’t see, Jamie laughs. Paper thin walls and all. A flash of memory strikes and he’s reminded of the twins back at Berk, never ones to turn down a good opportunity to cause mischief when the opportunity presents itself, and how Jack strikes him similarly in that way. “And you’ve never done anything nefarious with this information in your life, ever,” Hiccup says.

The hallway is dim, darker than when Hiccup first walked through with Jack when the sun was higher up. The frost shimmers the little light that’s there in bright white patches. Hiccup catches that sliver of a grin, the white teeth reflective in the dark. “Fine. So maybe once in a blue moon I flicker the lights ominously, make mysterious noises, and leave bed sheets up on lamps in the corner of her eyes. So what. It’s good for the soul, I’m helping. Big whoop.”

Hiccup’s throat still tickles. He swallows the sensation, straightening his neck to scrape the tingling away from the inside. Rather than focus on the mysterious sensation, Hiccup clears his throat and asks, “what movie do you think she’ll pick?”

“Dunno,” Jack says, “if she’s funny about it, Frozen.”

Hiccup gives him a thin, twisted smile.

Jack shrugs. “It’s a ritual at this point. I know the lines by heart and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

“Uhuh. Have you—do you add special effects?”

“Who do you take me for?” Jack says, hand to his chest. “Of course I do.”

When they reach the entryway connecting to the kitchen, he catches sight of Joyace. She’s balancing several cups, plates and cutlery with the experience and confidence of someone who’s found work-life balance as the mother of two hyperactive kids, the custodian of one supernatural entity, the wind, and now whatever else is going on with Hiccup. Sophie walks behind her into the living room with a jar of mayonnaise that looks too large in her small hands, followed by the wind, who chimes between them.

He watches the scene with melancholic distance, disturbing memories that don’t quite break the surface, and walks over to the chair by the kitchen table he left his satchel hanging from. He unclasps the latch, opens the bag and pulls his phone out, unlocking the code and opening the messaging app. His dad's full name stands out at the top of the message board with a surprising lack of message alerts. If it be a miracle or bad omen remains undecided. His thumbs hover over the screen and he writes: At a friends house not getting murdered. Be home after dinner. After a moment's consideration, he takes a picture of the fridge covered in Jamie and Sophie's drawings, sends it and adds, his mom insisted.

The message states READ. When there’s three dots floating on the screen, Hiccup’s brain goes blank and he hastily puts the phone back in his bag.

Jack bumps his shoulder into him, and Hiccup looks up to an odd expression on his face.

“What is it?” Hiccup asks.

Jack stares for a moment longer.

“Nothing,” Jack says, “but if you need out, take it.”

If Jack means out of movie night or out of all of this—Guardians, a sentient wind, Jack Frost—Hiccup doesn’t know and doesn’t ask. When Jack gestures with his jaw to the living room, Hiccup follows.

Sophie surprises the lot of them by picking Sleeping Beauty.

The dark faerie comes in her green glimmer, all hellfire and brimstone at the child’s christening. Her silhouette dark shadows and eloquent, sweeping gestures. She stands out like a stain from the bright, once jubilant ballroom. A lean and leering hunger to contrast the little good faes’ fluttering ball of energies. Beautiful and terrible in equal measure. Hiccup has his chin resting on his hand, a plate of shapeless meaty mush being balancing on his better leg, and thinks about how it’s decades later, yet the late 1950’s style still keeps on the hazy television screen. His eye traces the colors, the designs, the line work; thinking about how he could recreate it or borrow the parts he likes best for a later sketch still half-formed in his mind.

The screen is a better focus, anyways. Jack keeps looking at him like a marionette about to get its wires cut; got that hard glint to his eye, some keening, analytical edge like he’s got half the mind to whisk him away somewhere. Steal him away to some unapproachable wonder or some other clever machinations. As if that’ll somehow keep Hiccup from sleep.

What Jack thinks he can do, if he can do it, Hiccup doesn't know. Jack is an impossible thing, but he can’t expect Jack to solve his problems for him. Later, Hiccup is going to have to try sleeping again or find out how long he can keep up before the inevitable collapse. Soon, he’s going to have to think up something new, but of what alludes him. Right now, Hiccup has exhausted all possible solutions he can think of and needs whatever rest he can conjure up.

On the rug, Sophie lays on her belly, hands cradling her head, kicking her legs; absolutely enraptured by the movie. Her jar of mayonnaise and plate sits next to her, forgotten. The wind plays with her long strands of blond hair, while occasionally twirling Sophie’s fork. Jamie and Joyace sit at the three seat couch across the TV and behind Sophie. Jamie is eating forkfuls between low whispers, telling Joyace something about dragons as she listens with a fond expression. Him and Jack sit next to each other on the two seat couch at the furthest left wall. It's all alien to him. The family movie night, the odd clash of supernatural and the mundane.

The dull ache behind his eyes has steadily grown into a sharp stabbing pain, not yet severe but constant. His limbs feel heavy, harder to coordinate as if there's some misfire or disconnect from the nerves to the brain—his exhaustion becoming more predominant as the movie presses onward, the characters a storybook cavalcade. His eyes flicker lazily on the screen to Prince Phillip, dancing with Aurora in the old woods while singing ‘Once Upon a Dream’, and thinks: this version is kinder. 

No hundred year wait. A spell broken by true love’s kiss. Good faes that love her enough to stick around and advocate. A prince that puts aside his terror to fight a dragon for her. It’s elegant and appealing in its simplicity. The Grimm’s version is not simple, not kind. There, the cursed briar that chokes the castle parted and allowed the prince through because the hundred years were finished, the prince lucky enough to get his timing right. Whereas all the princes before him came much too soon; died tangled in the thorns. There, in the Giambattista Basile’s version, Talia wakes up because one of her babes suckled a splinter from the cursed spindle out from her pointer finger. True love had nothing to do with it.

True love’s kiss, ironically, isn't a thing in most fairy tales, that was fabricated later. When children became drawn to the stories, when the Disney version became better known than the translated storybooks scrapped together by folklorists trying to record and preserve a culture.

“What are you thinking about?” Jack asks, quiet. The light of the television screen gives the frost a glossy shine that Hiccup sees reflected from the corner of his eye.

“Of you and yours,” Hiccup whispers back, trying to match Jack in volume and not talk over the movie. “Sleeping Beauty is such an old story. Trailing back to the fall of Rome, I think? It could be—maybe older—but there aren’t surviving copies to prove it. Oldest recorded version is Perceforest, it’s an epic a—a whole six book saga I couldn’t read because it was in old french, let alone find a copy. But, um.” Hiccup looks away from the screen and towards Jack, “you’d know about all of that, wouldn't you?”

“I wouldn’t. Wasn’t there, when Rome fell.”

“No, you weren't, but—was it real? Was any version of it real?”

Jack turns to the screen, his eyes focused, and says, “dunno. Maybe it was, probably. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe all of it was right about something.” He turns back to Hiccup, grinning. “They don’t exactly give you a manual when you’re brought into the fold. When you cross some veil.”

Hiccup looks at him, eyes wavering. From the corner of his eye, he sees a flash of green fire.

“No,” Hiccup says, “ I suppose there wouldn’t.”

Hiccup’s eyes are closing, the deep claws of slumber having begun to grapple at the edges of his awareness. When Jack taps him on the shoulder, the cold jolting him more than the contact. Hiccup opens his eyes and finds him staring. A flash of irritation gashes through as Hiccup slides a hand across his face, pinning his nose and the irked noise trapped there, he shakes his head. Jack takes the hint and leans back into the couch.

Frankly, he just wants to sleep. He's socially spent, enough that he wouldn't have minded to sink into the teeth of it, and now his headache is back. It imposes on him now, in the TV’s soft glow, and the quiet conversation that ferries like a vessel through still sea, disturbing the waters and creatures staring from below.

On screen, arrows morph into roses.

He looks down, lips tight. His chest is beginning to feel a little too similar to yesterday night, when the coast was clear but it only made his chest the more constricted because of it. Soon, his knee begins to quake, his gaze loses focus. His surroundings blur, and his eyes close.

The first thing he notices is how his mouth aches. Hiccup slowly puts his hands to it and feels the shape of his maw, his too long and sharp jaws, the tall curved canines. He runs his thumbs through the top of his molars, his incisors, and realizes that he’s too many teeth. He lowers his hands, his thumbs wet with saliva and blood, the skin raw from scraping against pointed teeth.

He hears a twig snap. Hiccup rears his head to the sound and sees a large wild dog. The fur is so dark that Hiccup can barely differentiate the dog’s outline from their surroundings, but the green eyes are vivid. The retina reflects the moonlight so perfectly it’s near illuminate. A pulsing light. The pupils white, milky disks.

When it draws back it’s lips in a sneer, the gums all red, it has a set of human teeth.

“You’ve called me. You’ve stolen from me, as I’ve stolen from you. What’s done is done,” the dog says. “What want you’ve of me?”

Hiccup stares, uncertain, and tries to work his new mouth.

I’m sorry, he wants to say, I didn’t know. He wants to tell the thing in front of him: I didn’t mean to call you, to steal from you. Didn’t know I could.

He wakes with a savage jolt and torn-out breath. The clean-cut sting slices the dream away, sending it back to the back of his mind. His shoulder’s frigid, when he turns to it he sees a mass of frost gathered there, the sleets shaped like stacks of top shells, a pearlescent shine. Hiccup grabs his jaw with both hands, feeling out its shape. The frantic movements make the frost itched onto him shutter and fall apart. The cold leaves, Jack backs away, looking at him with a wide expression.

Count the teeth. The thought comes as an overwhelming wave, frantic and all-consuming. Like mania—an irrational buzzing, the phrase persists. Count the teeth.

The plate on his leg rattles and starts to slide off his leg until Hiccup tears his hands from his face and snatches the plate up, breaking the mantra. His forces his breathing to take an easy, steady tempo. He stares a hole into the floor, trying to keep from snarling. From some base reaction.

Count the teeth.

He did you a favor. He counts to three, breathes in, hoping the kids and Joyace are still as absorbed in the movie as they appear. Don’t look at me. You needed to be woken up. Reaches three, exhales. It was a kindness, to wake you up. God, please don’t look at me. Don’t notice.

Swords clash in flashes of jade, a dragon downed within its own flames.

“Hiccup,” Jack says, hushed, “was the lake there?”

Hiccup stands abruptly with his plate in hand. His headache blooming and with a mouth full of ash. “No,” he says slowly, “it wasn’t.”

He walks out of the room with his plate and two other empty ones he picked up, the dark swallowing him up as he turns from the light of the television screen, tossing out the scraps and dumping the dishes into the sink. He doesn’t turn the light on. He stares at the sink, hands grasping the ends. The only light comes from the open window where a crescent moon sits outside, the curve like a clipped nail.

No, it looks like a sail. The sole jib that which catches celestial winds.

It was just a dream. Probably a re-imagining of some verse and rhyme that his mind had plucked from the odd book or another he recently picked up in the local library. No drowning, no water, no body. No Jack. Only him and a wild, vengeful dog that stole his teeth. A meeting in a dark wood. The dream leaning on lucid, but that wasn’t unusual in his dreams; before Burgess, before the lake, before Jack. It had been a restless sleep, but sleep nonetheless. One he was awoken from.

I should wash the dishes. He stares down, unblinking. It’s not rocket science. There’s so little to do, it’ll be easy. The headache ferments a sickness, a bruise that reaches the cerebellum. The sensation at the back of his throat thickens to nausea. Just wash the fucking dishes. You can do three dishes. He turns on the water, and reaches for the soap and sponge. He doesn't remember doing them, but when the last dish clicks the drying rack, it shakes him out of his daze. He walks out the front door immediately after, the screen door swinging behind him.

Out, his mind tells him, as he exits the porch, cheek turned to the torch. The voice is experienced, his feet well practiced as he expels himself into the dark. Out. Get out. Get gone.

His shoes scuffle against the dirt, and he slows to a stop in the middle of the yard.

Fuck. He looks around, a hand clawed through his hair. My car. He barks out a laugh. I don't know where the wind put my fucking car.

He staggers back to the porch, Some ragged sound scrapes up, rattling from the sternum. He slumps down onto the steps, still half crazed, dewy eyed. Something clicks off and he goes still after that. He locks his gaze somewhere on the ground, a trite disconnection groveling at his feet. It reaches, canopies him into some some textbook description he once read, and the stillness soothes him. The quiet lulls him further into his blank daze. His breathing slows to a glacial rhythm, his body turned monolith. Hiccup couldn't move if he wanted to.

There wasn't any wind, at first. Not even a fall breeze.

Until he feels her brush against his cheek. There then gone. Only the hum of insects follow. A bird croons, there in the woods as another sings in kind. He keeps his eyes to the horizon, the stars twinkle, peaking through the black like holes from a colander. Still, he doesn't move.

He hears the door slowly creak open and Hiccup’s body tenses.

The air turns to the sting of spearmint. That scent of freshwater silt. His breath clouds. There’s the soft pad of footsteps, before the slab of wood, the step he sits on, creak. Hiccup doesn’t say anything. He can’t say anything, he realizes, drenched in mortification. He works his mouth, no sound coming out. He looks at Jack, unsure how to convey the situation. The old shame welts hot in him; here he is again, jaw locked and struck dumb. Curling in the dark as children—as spurred animals do.

But Jack's gaze slides off of him and stares ahead, staff in hand, the knuckles translucent as sea glass. A dusty blue to a deep and rich purple. Hiccup's perception of time is wrecked, so he doesn't know how long they sit in the silence. Enough for his breathing to return to normal. For some clarity to sparse its way through. For the moon to have shifted, a ship adrift in the dark.

I just walked out of these people's house without even saying goodbye, he thinks, without the fuzz and nerve-fried babble. His hands began to regain movement and fidgeting with each other. If my car had been here, I wouldn't have looked back.

This hasn’t happened in years—not counting the times with his father. He wants to ask why, feign ignorance, but he knows. He knows why—the exhaustion, a newfound foundation of the worlds inner-workings, magic—it's all too easy to slip and lapse when the stakes are high—but why couldn’t he have waited? Played the game, bear and grin the rest, and unraveled on the ride home, or in his room. But he didn’t. He didn’t. And now he's got to deal with the discourtesy of leaving someone's house mid-dinner without giving a heads up.

It’s not too late to maintain the air of common civility. He’s still here. The Bennets don’t even seem the sort to keep grudges, but he doesn’t want to be the kind of guest that abuses the forgiving nature of others.

Moonlight engulfs Jack, the patches of frost reflecting the light in a waxy shine. He's keeps his eyes locked to the forefront, with an absent-minded look. He isn't pressing; no inquiring looks, no half-hearted—ha—ice-breakers. Jack doesn't try to disrupt the silence: he doesn’t shift, doesn’t breathe; doesn’t even blink. Hiccup's sides and shoulders lower. His tongue no longer pressed and glued to the ceiling of his mouth.

The moon leers down at them like an eye swollen near shut. A thing that peers through the dark veil. It sits shrouded in a haze, surrounded by a glimmering nimbus that cuts through the clouds, and inspires some spark of wonder and discomfort in equal measure. Something about that uneasiness loosens his tongue.

“Moon’s out today,” Hiccup says.

Jack looks up. He moves the staff to his lap, balancing it on his knees.

“Yes,” he says. The ground beneath his feet has a layer of ice thickening around it in a smooth and expanding circle. “It is.”

You implied that it chooses. That it held you. That it changed you.

“You implied that it—watches?” A static sail, a ship dead in the air. ‘Round the earth it goes, trudging through the stars in stasis until it was caught by a foreign sun, doomed to orbit a foreign planet. Lost in time, lost in space. “That there’s a man somewhere in that."

“I did.” Jack laughs, the sound echos. “Didn’t I?”

Through one of upstairs open windows, Sophie's squeals, the lights from the second floor flicker and add further luminance to the porch.

“So, how does he—I mean—does he have a giant telescope, or psychic powers or what? To communicate from all the way up there."

"It's…" Jack's expression changes. Gains an edge. “Its a fucking bat signal.”

Hiccup stares at him. Secures logistics of the vision—a spotlight bayoneted from the sky. Wonders what's the truth and where's the catch.

“You’re joking."

“Only a little,” Jack says, grinning with his teeth bared. "But the light beam thing is real. They're alive, actually. The beams. Don't ask me how.”

“Because it’s magic. Right—obviously. And the—the moonbeam?

Jack nods. “The moonbeam.”

“I hate you.” Hiccup laughs wetly, resting his head on his hand and tapping his knee with the other. Hiccup frowns, looking down at the dirt. At the elephant tracks leading to and fro the house. Keeping his head down, his eyes flicker to Jack, looking at him in the corner of his eye. “Do you think it’s watching now? The man, I mean."

Jack keeps his eye on the satellite, head tilted, and hums. "Dunno," he says, "I never was able to figure it out."

Hiccup turns to the woods, and his the silver light reflect against the leaves. He tilts his gaze further up to the moon, the sickle shape not too dissimilar to a Chester smile.

"Then how can you even—how do you know he's up there?"

"Besides the moonbeams?" Jack smiles, crooked, but when Hiccup doesn’t respond, he relents. “He was the first of us. He named me, and when he called, I came.” The step creaks as Jack leans closer to Hiccup, as if sharing a secret. "I think he has selective hearing."

“Sounds lonely,” Hiccup says, his hands move in a nervous, asymmetric flutter. Shoulders engaging in the theatrics of it. “There he is, by himself and away from everyone else—and it has to be broken, doesn’t it? The ship? It can’t move—and if it’s been broken for a long time and is never going to work again, then it can’t really be called a ship anymore, can it?” Hiccup turns to Jack. “The ship—where was the ship was trying to sail to, you think? Couldn't be here—to become this—could it?”

There’s also the singularity of it. It’s the man in the moon, not the people. Was it built for only one passenger? Or is there only one survivor?

Hiccup watches the smile on Jack’s face fade and die. His face twists, his chest holding a breath it doesn't need and his eyes widen like the open wound that follows the flog. He twitches once, an almost forward motion, and his body sways into it. His eyes are black, endless chasms. There’s an animal intensity, a quiet fierceness about him as the abyss yawns. Hiccup can't read it, can't decipher any of it, but he doesn't think it's good.

The moon took me out, Jack had told him, and I couldn't be seen anymore. I forgot what I was, and I was something new. And there Jack was, left in the nothing.

“Sorry, I wasn’t sure if—sorry. I keep saying all the wrong—asking the wrong questions.”

Jack stares at him. Hiccup thinks he's staring at him and not through him, but the bright blue crystalline eyes don't blink, reflecting the brilliance of the moon and the deepness of the forest; making Hiccup feel like it's time decided if he'll walk back home and forget the car. He isn't sure what's going through Jack's mind, but he decides to wait.

“What do you think is the right question?” Jack finally asks.

Hiccup wished he knew. Experience wasn't Hiccup's best teacher. Conversations, especially with new faces, never seemed to get any better, only easier to identify where he'd gone wrong. What to avoid. He stares at the woods in front of him, so different from Berk's forests. All except for the swaying of the canopy and the deep cold beside him.

"I don't know,” he breathes, "but I think I can ask a better question." He fidgets with his hands, fists the fingers of one hand in the other, feeling the pressure. "Does he pay attention?"

Jack smiles with little humor, a brittle shape. "No," he says, eyes flickering at the moon above with a motion of the jaw. "Like I said: selective hearing."

The light from the window above blinks out and the house became subdued. No fumbling steps, no muted voices. He was hoping to apologize before the day was over, but Hiccup isn't about to disturb a mother who's likely just sent her kids to bed. Now that only leaves Jack, Hiccup, and the Moon.

Hiccup turns, stares at the front door he hasn't heard click shut yet.

"Do you have the keys of the house on you?"

"Nah.” Jack shakes his head. “They're too easy to loose track off."

Hiccup nods, then adds, "you might want to go inside, then. It's getting late." He goes to check the time on his phone, only to remember he'd left his satchel and everything that's in it back inside. He sighs. "My bag," Hiccup says when Jack sends him a questioning look. "I'm pretty sure I left it hanging on one of the kitchen chairs. I can, uh, grab it real quick—"

Jack stands on his feet in one gesture, all grace and silver motility as he holds a hand out to Hiccup. He takes it without a second thought, despite how his skin prickles as his hand looses color, though the pain not so severe as before; as Jack lifts him gently, grasping his hand with only two fingers and thumb, reducing points of contact. The wind joins in, pushing against his back to heave him upwards, and Hiccup gets the immediate impression that she'd been waiting for it. They walk back inside, grabbing Hiccup's satchel without making noise or turning the lights back on.

Hiccup hears the door click shut and thinks about how he will say goodbye. Sorry for heaving lake water in your barren room. Sorry for proving myself right about the dreams. Sorry for storming out mid-movie like children in the throes of a tantrum. His mouth goes taunt, jaw clinched as he pinches the bridge of his nose. I’m not usually like this. I’m better, promise. I’ll be better next time. Is there going to be a next time? Hiccup drops his hand to his side, the limb heavy as lead, and sighs. When Hiccup turns, still unsure of what to say, how to say it, he sees Jack looking at him expectantly.

Hiccup looks back at the closed door behind him and raises his brow as Jack says, “I’m walking with you…? If you want.”

“Oh. Oh—you can stay, you don’t have to come—” He remembers that he doesn't know where the wind parked his car and pulls a face. “—Actually. Can you get the wind to take me to my car?” Hiccup ignores how the wind crackles, dead leaves crunching before a gust draws out a long hiss. “I’ve no idea where she parked it.”

Jack smiles when he looks up to the dancing canopy, the wind whistling as the trees gently bend. “Yeah,” Jack says, “I think I can help you find it.”

As they walk into the dark woods, illuminated only by stray stray patches of moonlight Hiccup willfully avoids stepping into and his phone's torchlight, he squints down at his feet and asks, "how do you get back inside without your keys, anyways?"

“There's a crook in the upstairs window sill where I can leave it open. Its not like anyone can reach, so.” Jack spreads his hands, staff still in hand, as if to say, that’s all to it.

He pulled some similar shit back in Berk: his bedroom window was usually kept unlocked. He remembers how the curtains would twitch in the breeze, the half-hazard climb to the second floor when he knew his dad was coming home soon. The dark nights he tumbled out the window to the roof for star-gazing. Dashing out into the woods at the break of dawn. A scattering of small, thinly concealed secrets.

Hiccup snorts and says, “gotcha.”

Jack knocks his shoulder into Hiccup, and Hiccup ignores the cold to push back. The both of them grinning as they drift further into the woods.

Jack pauses mid-step, faltering next to Hiccup with a crackling, awkward laugh.

Hiccup’s suffering, looking up to the sky like he’s praying for patience—somewhere between the ship and the sentient moon rays—and Jack is laughing at him: a choked sound that’s part surprise and part glee. Like it was startled out of him and he tried to swallow the sound too late. The wind—not helpful—howls openly.

"She could put it back?"

“You sick fucks.”

The good news is that his already shit lemon car seems to be intact. Mostly.

It lays without a dent or blunder to the smooth exterior and is parked almost where it should be: neatly bottoms up by the gravel road. It reposes upended, wheeled to the sky and playing possum in catatonic state. Hiccup feels a sudden burst of unmitigated solidarity to all marvel background characters with no car insurance in the path of alien gods, who have no concept of coverage contracts, and he thinks that maybe his life is a lie and a joke.

Hiccup blinks and looks down. Zeros in at the slip of paper tucked underneath the windshield wipers.

Hiccup buries his face in his hands and whimpers. The wind nudges his side. “Is—is this because of the—fucking—cup-holders comment I made?” Hiccup lowers his hands. “That, oh, my ride may have cup-holders, but you’ll never get parking tickets?” He gestures a hand down at his atrocious, fugly-ass car, and asks the wind, “how did you even do this?! Unfuck this.”

“Here,” Jack said, swooping down and picking up the ticket in one elegant motion. “I can fix this. Easy. Abracadabra…” Hiccup watches helplessly as he crumples it into a ball and tosses it into the shrubbery. “Gone. There, done.”

“No!” Hiccup dives into the bushes. “That’s not how this works! They have my license plate. I don’t want to forget until I get that letter—” He curses under his breath, rummaging around until his he saw the pale white paper reflect against the cellphone torchlight."—Goddamn.”

When he stands back up, scowling, Jack has the decency to look sheepish while clinging to his staff. “I’m…sorry? I don’t have a car.”

“That's a terrible excuse and you know it. Also—abracadabra? Abracadabra my ass. Go do some real magic and break into the police station to erase the record of the ticket.”

“Oh yeah, sure.” Jack salutes. “Sir yes sir.”

“Wait.” Hiccup pauses mid swing, when he realizes that Jack might be serious. He turns to him, “Seriously? You’re really going to do that?”

“Sure. I mean, it sounds fun, at least.”

“That’s…” Hiccup searches for a word that would metaphorically best resemble both a green and a red light on at the same time, or: this may be a bad idea, but go on. “Illegal?”

“If they can see me enough to arrest me, that would solve more of my problems than it would create.”

Hiccup stares at his car, which has been inverted and parked by no fault of his own, shrugs, gestures at the moon and says, “you know what? This happened because of magic. Magic can deal with it."

Hiccup hears a sudden gust of wind, some clucking sound, and steps back in time to avoid the uprooted bush that's landed by his feet. He aims his phone and the torchlight where the noise had come from and stares at the torn out roots, at the up-heaved portion of forest soil, and looks at her—wherever the wind is.

"I need to know," Hiccup says to the wind while Jack makes a thoughtful noise beside him, stepping closer to the burst of undergrowth with his arms crossed, his staff pinned between them, "I need to know why you do anything. So I can prepare myself—" Jack delicately picks up the uprooted bush and places it on top of the car, as if to cover it. It slides off almost immediately. "—Mentally. Emotionally." Hiccup knows things are bad when he almost considers calling his dad to pick him up. He rubs his eyes and sighs, loosely gesturing to the car, his phone swinging and creating wild shadows. "Can’t you just turn it right-side up?"

The wind flutters and Jack translates: "she has performance anxiety."

He gives up. He picks a direction and starts walking.

"Hey! Where are you going?"

“Home?” Hiccup glares at the two of them and spreads his hands while keeping a steady pace. “Obviously?”

"Can you even see where you're going?"

Not really, but that has never stopped him before. “Bye.”

Another unexpected laugh bubbles out of Jack. "Wait," he says, his feet lifts off from the ground and starts gliding towards him. Hiccup is so startled from the act that it stops him dead in his tracks. When Jack lands next to him, he puts a hand on Hiccup's shoulder, where the cloth is thickest. "At least let me…" Hiccup composes himself, sort of, eyes momentarily stuck where Jack had taken off, and gives him a questioning look. Jack blinks several times before pulling away, leaving frost like a layer of dust.

"Let you what?"

"…It probably doesn't sound right, now I think about it."

“Well, now I’m nervous—” Hiccup means it as a joke, but there’s a gleam of distress in Jack’s eyes before the expression flickers off. “—What are you trying to say?”

His eyes stray, vacillating. He shrugs his shoulders. “I could take you home?”

Hiccup stares.

"…I see what you meant.” Hiccup pulls his phone out once again, mirroring Jack's unsettled fluster, turns the torchlight to the empty patch of road that should lead him back home, and starts walking. When he doesn't hear Jack shift in any way, Hiccup turns and says, "are you going to follow me home, or what?"

There it is again. That black, yawning abyss. A blank intensity or an open hunger.

“What I meant was that…I was going to give you a ride.”

“You don’t have a car,” Hiccup points out.

“I was gonna carry you?”

“Carry…?”

"You know." Jack flicks his fingers and waves his staff at the sky. "Air-carrier style."

The wind whooshes past and Hiccup stares at him with some surreal sort of mad thrill—once more, his eyes flicker to where Jack took off, where his feet lifted from the ground, then back at Jack. "…You ever done that before?" Perhaps its a good thing that he's as tired and lethargic as he feels, otherwise he might've jumped the gun, no questions asked. “With a passenger, I mean."

“I did it with Jamie? And Sophie. It should work.”

“Jack, I weigh vastly different than two small children.” Hiccup swings his hand to the road before them, swallowing the thought of witches on midnight brooms and great beasts on wings. “The stalking was better. Come on.”

The wind tussles Jack's hair, disheveling it further and whistling a titling, intermittent chuckling sound. Jack bats her away, thin dust trickling from his hair, his cheeks. Then trails after Hiccup with a hand in his hoodie pocket, staff resting on his shoulder.

Hiccup is about to make another joke—perhaps at his own expense, to make the peace and take away attention from Jack's blunder, when the wind picks up again, almost knocking Hiccup down from the sheer force. Jack, however, straight up fucking blows away like some plastic shell or demented flag, and Hiccup seizes Jack’s arm on instinct, clutching it tight as a stand-in anchor. His stomach gives a savage flip when his own feet begin to take off the ground, but the moment is short-lived. When the wind dies down and gravity is returned to them, Jack is back at his side and his car is up-righted in place.

Hiccup leans on Jack with shaky limbs.

“Thanks,” Jack says, cheerfully.

"—Great. Cool," Hiccup croaks, and the wind whistles softly. Good, no hard feelings. He turns to Jack, burned with the unfettered image of him fluttering and flailing in the whirlwind, and is overcome with a giggling, hysterical gurgle until he's doubled down, patting his good knee repeatedly. "You almost Looney Tooned to the next town," he wheezes. "You just—" He waves his hand with a fleeting, flapping motion, some extraordinary take-off. "—Ascended. Fuck that was funny."

Jack leans on his staff, crossing one leg over, brow raised.

"What even are you made out of?" Hiccup continues, straightening but giggling all the same. "I can't tell. One moment you're as solid as I am, then the next half the objects in the room are turning a blind eye to you and you become the embodiment of a—a tumbleweed. Oh my god, I need to draw that."

"Is that going to become a thing, now?" Jack asks once Hiccup has had room to breathe, with amusement and far from being bothered over being the object of Hiccup's laughing fit.

"What?" Hiccup asks airily.

"Drawing me," he says, with some cheek.

"Are you kidding?" Hiccup grins a wild thing, still running on the aftermath of his happy fit. "Have you seen yourself?" He pauses, smile freezing. "You can, right?" Moon-man can't be that big of a bastard. Maybe.

Jack, whose expression had been struggling under some warfare, splits back into that easy delight. "No, nothing like that. I know myself."

Hiccup relaxes, winded out but at ease, and that's when his phone buzzes once, twice, audible in the quiet that the wind had left behind. He'd been wondering when his father's restraint would reach dead end. "I really have to go now, I think," he says without breaking the eye contact. His phone continues to hum, this time at length. "Hold on, let me take this." Jack nods and Hiccup lowers the screen, sliding the green button, "I'm not dead yet—"

Jack laughs at the same time Stoick says, "where are you?"

"By the car, about to go home." Hiccup answers slowly, "I was saying goodbye."

Whatever his father intended to follow with doesn't come; instead there's a pause on the other end of the line that Hiccup uses to regret his choice of words.

"Can I talk with—"

Called it.

"No. I’m—they already left, dad." Jack waves theatrically, gives a holler, and Hiccup rolls his eyes. "Or, I did. I'm about to go in the car. I'll be home in ten, fifteen minutes max. We can—talk then."

Hiccup can hear faint shuffling—a chair being drawn out perhaps. Stoick sighs, muttering under his breath and grunts. An affirmative, as far as Hiccup knows.

"Actually, dad, make that twenty—okay, bye."

He hangs up. Holds his breath.

Jack laughs, puts on a mocking guise that Hiccup shakes his head at, and says, "is that how you talk to your father? Like someone made you eat a lemon?"

Hiccup shines his phone's torch straight at him, just because he can.

"No, actually. I talk to everyone like that."

"Liar." Jack snorts, squinting at the light and shielding himself from it with his outspread palm. "No you haven't. You're in Joyace's good books."

Hiccup blindly searches for his car keys inside the bag, silently preening. He curses and lowers the light into the bag, finding the key is stuck between two crooked, bent pages of his journal—luckily, none that have been worked on. He pulls the keys out, straightens the pages as best as he can, and closes the bag. He walks to his car, hoping to god that nothing has been damaged. It's a shitty car but its his shitty car, one he's not ready to let go off it yet—the shitty lock, as he knows, has no fix.

Jack's staff lays horizontally over his shoulders, and he walks orbiting Hiccup's beeline with a lazy saunter.

"I do, you're just good at talking," Hiccup says, not wanting to give Jack the upper hand so much as he's telling the truth. "—And not talking. You make good conversation, make things...easier to follow, somehow. I'm not—good at that." He loosely points at Jack with his car keys, blaming all this raw honesty on his wrecked sleeping schedule. "You should write a book. How to talk to people and not die. I'd buy three of them. One for me, my dad, and I would send the other one to Berk's library, where I’m sure at least one person is bound to find it." Fishlegs spends as much time in the local library as Hiccup has, if not more—and new content is hard to come by. He would read it, he's certain.

"I'm flattered." Jack says, "What makes you think I haven't written something out yet?"

"Have you?"

"No."

"Right. Tell me when you do, then."

Jack laughs, and he's all bells, bells, bells and swimming chimes; he echoes even when the moment's gone. Hiccup smiles, reaches his car, and finally tries at luck. He slips the key inside the lock. It turns and opens at the first try. He squints at the lock, thinks that’s not normal, and tries again with the same result. He's on the fifth flawless attempt when Jack asks what he's doing.

"This maddening thing," Hiccup starts, "has never, its its life—at least since it came into my possession, done its job. It always takes a couple of times to get it right on a good day." Hiccup turns to Jack, who raises his hands, then looks around. "I say it again: what the hell did you even do?"

"See, what'd I say? Abracadabra."

Hiccup opens the door, gets in, slams it closed. Jack is already making funny faces on the other side before he can ignite the damn thing. He snorts, seeing as its out of his control, starts the engine and rolls the window down.

“Before you go, I wanted to say that I don’t think you should sleep in the meanwhile. I think this could kill you.”

Hiccup barks out a laugh and says, not unkindly, “I’ll die if I don’t sleep.”

Jack huffs, a plume of fog. Frost creeps in from the window, then he sighs. “Alright. Good point. What if I check up on you? Until I get backup, at least. If you die while the team and I do our research then it’ll all be for nothing.”

"Fine.” Hiccup fiddles with the review mirror. “Hey—speaking of—maybe next time we can actually plan when we’re going to hang out—instead of taking turns appearing out of nowhere."

"…Next time?"

Hiccup sharply turns to him and points, eyes narrow. "But if you wake me up early this morning, I’m going to be pissed."

"I’m not—"

"Pissed."

Jack presses his lips before smirking and says, "no promises."

“I can literally feel my life draining away.”

Jack leans against the car, his smile crooked. “This is for your own good."

"You don't even know where I live."

Jack grins with all of his teeth. Lilac gums a dark, bruised blue. Eyes reflective in the dark.

"Of course." Hiccup sighs. “I forgot I was talking to Edward Cullen—my mistake.”

“Hey.” Jack’s smile immediately drops. “Hey now.” He starts to wobble as Hiccup slowly backs into the road.

Hiccup waves out the window. “Bye.”

There’s a moment where Hiccup thinks he’s gone too far, until he hears Jack laughing so hard it comes out like he's howling behind him, and smirks.

"Yeah.” Hiccup snorts, leaning back into his seat. “That's what I thought."

The next thing he sees is a blur flashing beyond the windshield. A dagger of reflected light, some stray shooting star in all its quicksilver glory, harshly illuminated by the headlights. Hiccup sits up straight away, leans forward, craning his neck to see better. To see if he’s gone, bleeding into the dark sky. But Jack hasn't left. Not yet. He hovers down the road like a hanged man. Like a broken swing. There, in the moonbeams. Branding the trees, the focus of every painting of dark, haunted nights. Of all the dancing, glimmering ghosts. In the museums. On the walls of collectors. On the fridge. In his notebook. When Hiccup drives past, the car shudders, breaking through a wall of cold. Leaving the scent of silt behind it.