To Write a Life in Snapshots

What am I going to do? he kept thinking, over and over to himself. Jack, Astrid, Toothless—they were all gone. The only person he might have left was his dad. Pitch had sworn to release Stoick from the shadows, hadn't he? And faeries couldn't lie.

…but faeries could find loopholes, and Pitch hadn't said anything about alive.

It was a long time before Hiccup finally managed a shuddering breath and forced himself to move. His limbs were stiff with the cold and disuse. He moved to wipe a snowflake off his face and discovered that he'd been crying at some point; the tears had dried into thin tracks of ice that flaked off his cheeks where his hand brushed them.

He drove Astrid's car to his own house, still numb.

The door opened with a long slow creak. Shadows fled at his approach as he moved one boot across the threshold. Hiccup barely heard them go. His eyes were fixed on a single point ahead of him.

A hand was splayed across the kitchen floor. It was stiff and unmoving like a dead rodent.

Hiccup's knees hit the floor in the kitchen of his childhood home. He looked down at his dad's body; it was stretched out in front of him, its eyes closed as though sleeping. There was a strange and distant keening noise, and after a long long time, Hiccup realized it was coming out of his own throat.

He grew silent.

He never meant for things to get this out of hand. He never meant for anything to go this far. He just wanted… he didn't know what he wanted. Not this.

He curled up next to the body on the hard laminate floor. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I did this. I did. I didn't mean to." He found the whole story coming out of him; he couldn't stop himself from talking between sobs. "It's real, it was all always real," he croaked, his voice thick. "There was this faery… this boy. He started following me weeks ago. I've always pretended that I couldn't see them, I just wanted my life to be as easy as possible… but Jack, he… he managed to distract me. He's…"

Thinking about Jack hurt, but he couldn't seem to make himself stop talking. He talked about Jack, then about dragging Astrid into his problems, about the wild hunt, the court, Pitch, the truth about his mother. He spend much longer talked than he would have expected; it felt like so much had happened to him, so much had changed since the last time he'd really talked to his dad, there was a lot to unload.

"And now he's gone," he said at last. "Everything is gone."

The noise that spilled from Hiccup's throat was a whimper like a wounded animal. He curled up over his father's body, forehead pressed to the still chest.

When he was a child and his mom, Val, had vanished, his father had spent a year looking for her, waiting for her to come home, but Hiccup had known—somehow, deep down—that she was never coming back. He'd felt it from the very beginning, from the moment he'd woken up on November first and come down the stairs to an empty house. A corresponding emptiness had opened up inside him, and he'd felt the weight of being a little more alone in the world settle into his chest.

His father hadn't accepted it so quickly. When Hiccup came into his parents' room that night, sniffling, choked up with tears and aching, Stoick had sent him back to his own room, saying he was being silly, Mom would be back soon. It was almost a week before Hiccup had done it again, creeping into the room when he thought his dad was asleep and crawling into his mom's side of the bed, hoping somehow it would feel like her.

It didn't. It was cold.

Stoick hadn't been asleep, either. When a weak sob escaped Hiccup, he stirred and Hiccup froze, going silent, afraid to be sent away again.

"Oh my boy," said Stoick, holding out his arm for Hiccup. His voice was half-sleepy, half-sad for his son. "Come here."

Hiccup clambered into his dad's embrace eagerly, and Stoick curled his arm around him and said, "Don't worry, we'll find her. Get some sleep."

For the year that Stoick looked for Val, waited for her, watched the news every morning and night, it became a habit. Every night Hiccup—face damp, tiny body trembling—would creep into bed with his dad and slowly fall asleep like that: fingers clinging to Stoick's ratty old t-shirt, curled up against his side in a tiny ball like a wounded kitten, comforted by the heavy weight of his dad's arm across his shoulders.