The air in Hiccup’s workshop was thick with the familiar, comforting scent of motor oil, hot metal, and stale coffee. It was her sanctuary, a place of calculated chaos where she could make sense of the world one gear and circuit board at a time. But tonight, the comfort was a thin veneer over a chasm of anxiety. On a worn-out sofa in the corner, two small forms, Harry and Camicazi, slept under a pile of blankets, their chests rising and falling in a rhythm too fragile for this world. They were living, breathing proof that the last seven months hadn't been a stress-induced hallucination.
Hiccup’s fingers, stained with grease, tapped a frantic, silent rhythm against the cool metal of her prosthetic leg. A stim. A way to ground herself when her thoughts threatened to fly apart. Across the room, the rest of the gang was trying to do the exact opposite: let their thoughts fly as far from reality as possible.
“...so you see,” Tuffnut declared, gesturing grandly with a half-eaten bag of chips, “going to the Hidden World and meeting the dragons was a good thing. If we hadn’t, we would have torn this country apart from the inside out and gotten taken down in the process.”
There was a profound silence, broken only by Snotlout’s derisive snort. Astrid, sitting on an overturned crate, just rubbed her temples.
Ruffnut nodded sagely, adding her own details. “It would’ve started with the prank on Principal Mildrew. We’d swap her car’s horn with a recording of a screaming goat.”
“Too simple, sister,” Tuffnut countered. “We’d rig the school’s sprinkler system to spray cod liver oil. The resulting slip-and-slide would cause a city-wide traffic jam, which would delay the national fish shipments.”
“The Great Fish Famine of ‘24!” Ruffnut shrieked with delight. “Panic in the fjords! People would start bartering lutefisk for gasoline!”
“Civil war,” Tuffnut concluded, his eyes wide with imaginary grandeur. “Brother against brother, fighting with frozen haddock and sharpened salmon bones. It would weaken our defenses, and then—BAM! America invades, saying they’re here to ‘stabilize the region’ with their freedom and hamburgers.”
Everyone just stared at them.
“You two,” Snotlout said flatly, “are the reason shampoo has instructions.”
Fishlegs, who had been looking increasingly horrified, finally found his voice. “That is clinically insane! We are far too intelligent and emotionally stable a country to devolve into such… such piscean pandemonium! If we had never gone to the Hidden World, our lives would have gone on completely normal. We’d be studying for our final exams. I would have finished cataloging my sedimentary rock collection. Astrid would be preparing for the national track-and-field championships. Our lives would be… predictable.”
Snotlout let out a loud, exaggerated snore. “Lame, Fishface. So incredibly lame.”
Fishlegs’s face flushed. “Oh, really? Well, if you’re such a soothsayer, Snotlout, how do youthink things would be?”
Snotlout puffed out his chest, a smirk plastered on his face. “Glad you asked. Obviously, I’d be a TikTok sensation. The Snotlout Sizzle, they’d call me. Millions of followers, sponsorships from every protein shake company on the planet. I’d be so rich and famous, my dad…” his voice faltered for a fraction of a second, the smirk thinning. “My dad would finally see. He’d clap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Son, I was wrong. You’re a real Jorgenson. And the whole… you know…’” he gestured vaguely, his gaze flicking away. “‘The whole bisexual thing? It’s cool. I love you.’”
The bravado in the room evaporated, replaced by a sudden, heavy stillness.
Snotlout’s voice dropped to a near whisper, the words tumbling out before he could stop them. “And my mom… she’d come back. She’d see me on TV and she’d find me and just… apologize. For everything. For leaving.”
He stared at the concrete floor, his tough-guy act shattered, leaving only a boy’s raw, unresolved hurt. Astrid reached out and gently squeezed his shoulder. Fishlegs’s expression was one of pure, unadulterated empathy.
The sudden weight of their pity was too much for Snotlout. He shook Astrid’s hand off, his face hardening again. “Whatever! It’s still better than your stupid fish fantasy!” he snapped, pointing at the twins.
The twins, having missed the entire emotional subtext, lit up. “Fish fantasy!” Ruffnut cried. “I would be the Fish Queen!”
“Nuh-uh! I’d be Fish King!” Tuffnut shot back. “And you,” he said, grabbing Snotlout by the arm, “can be our court jester!”
“He’s my court jester!” Ruffnut yelled, grabbing Snotlout’s other arm.
“Why do I have to be the jester?!” Snotlout yelped, trying to wrench himself free. The absurdity of the situation seemed to short-circuit his brain. “I should be the king! I’m the strongest! I’d lead the charge with a codfish claymore! My battle cry would be legendary! We’d build our fortifications out of… of hardened herring and—” He stopped, blinking. The words died in his mouth. “What am I doing? Why do I care about being some stupid fish king?” He shoved the twins away. “You’re both morons! Let go of me!”
The twins ignored him, devolving into an argument over who had primary custody of their new jester.
Hiccup’s tapping stopped. The cacophony of their stupid, pointless argument, the phantom smell of ozone from the Hidden World, the image of her mother’s blood-stained tunic, the crushing weight of Drago holding the key to both worlds in his hand—it all converged into a single, unbearable point of pressure behind her eyes.
The word cracked like a whip. Tuffnut, Ruffnut, and Snotlout froze mid-struggle. The silence was absolute. Everyone turned to look at Hiccup. Her hands were clenched into fists, her freckled face pale and taut.
Ruffnut, ever oblivious, tilted her head. “Ooh, throwing it in the ocean,” she mused, a new idea dawning. “We didn’t even think of that.”
“I agree, my dear sister,” Tuffnut added, his eyes regaining their manic gleam. “It seems we have been slacking. If we’d tossed it off the Berk cliffs, a giant squid probably would have swallowed it and gained cosmic powers, declared war on the surface world—”
The second outburst was not a crack, but a shatter. It was raw, shredded, torn from the deepest part of her. The twins flinched back as if physically struck.
Hiccup surged to her feet, her whole body trembling. “Do you all think this is just some dumb joke?!” she cried, her voice thick with unshed tears. “This isn’t a game! This isn’t some movie! This is real! It happened and we can’t change it!”
Her gaze swept over them, burning with a pain they had never seen before.
“We opened the box! We went to the Hidden World, and now everyone is suffering because of it! Drago has the music box, and he’s planning gods-know-what while we sit here arguing about fish kings! My mom—my mom who I thought was dead for twenty years—she might be… she might be…” The words caught in her throat, a sob threatening to choke her. “Heather and Dagur and all our friends are trapped there, fighting a war we started! Harry and Camicazi are sleeping on my couch because they have no home to go back to! I have to lie to my dad every single day about where I was and what these new scars are from and why I can suddenly feel the scales under my own skin!”
She hugged her arms around herself, a desperate, protective gesture. Her eyes, wide and haunted, finally settled on the floor.
“It all happened,” she whispered, the fight draining out of her, leaving only a hollow, devastating emptiness. “And it’s all because of me.”
