#mercup

“Are there geese on Berk?” Hiccup asks Eret a question the other hasn’t really thought of before as the former closely inspects a goose-shaped wooden pawn.

The two of them are sitting at the table with a board game between them that his partner is setting up. It’s a little something called Game of The Goose. Merfolk do know of play, actively participate in play, he would like to show Eret some of the games he knows, but a “board game” is something that they don’t have and Hiccup was very interested to learn more.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen geese in real life before,” Eret mentions thoughtfully as he continues, trying to remember where he could’ve seen them suddenly very important to him. In all honesty, he never paid that much attention to nature.

Not until he took over his father’s boat and paid real close attention to the sea.

In the meantime, Hiccup goes back to rummaging inside the box to grab all the other pawns as well.

“Do you know if they’re really shaped like this?” He asks, holding the red one he already had up between his index finger and thumb.

“Wooden, red and with no defining features?”

“No! You know what I mean,” Hiccup laughs. “The long necks, the short stumpy snout, and the tail! Look at how short that thing is.”

Eret can’t help the amused huff and the shake of his head as he watches Hiccup point at the red tail.

“Beak,” he corrects him with a smile as he folds the board open. Hiccup looks at the red pawn and wonders which part of the animal is meant to be the “beak.” The snout or the tail? It has to be the snout.

“Beak. My experience with birds is kind of limited, you know. I am mostly familiar with seagulls. And the odd pelican and other birds that I currently don’t know the human name of,” Hiccup tells him as grabs the pair of dice next. They intrigue him. Just two cubes with rounded edges and a bunch of dots. He notices that they’re identical.

Eret gives him a look when he mentions pelicans and watches as he looks inside his warm glass of mulled wine and takes a whiff before pulling a face. Those, the pelicans, are not from here, those are just a little bit farther away and a little bit more down south as well.

Meanwhile, Hiccup is more perplexed by the drink the other served him. He called it a “classic” for the holidays, but it smells strange. Not that he has found something on land that hasn’t smelled strange to him. Though spending most of his time in the ocean, his sense of smell works just as well as any other humans’ on land. Underwater, his smell is stronger.

“Yeah, geese look like that,” Eret tells him before he takes the pair of dice and the pawns back and puts them all up on the board. That’s when he explains the rules of the game.

Hiccup decides to go with the red pawn while Eret takes the green. They place both pawns on the starting pace and the latter lets the former start first. This way, he can explain the rules as they’re playing. Like always, he’s a sponge for knowledge and he soaks up the rules of the game as Eret explains it. From the simple system of the dice deciding how many spaces he can move forward to what the individual spaces mean and how the “goose” has to keep backtracking until the precise roll necessary to land on that 63rd space is finally rolled.

It takes a while until Hiccup wins his very first game ever played on a board game.

Eret watches his red goose finally land on the end pace and throws his hands up. “You won!”

“I won?!” Hiccup is almost perplexed. After the past ten minutes of going back and forth with his pawn, narrowingly avoiding death again and again, he can’t believe he won the game.

“You won!”

“I won!” He throws his hands in the air. “I can’t believe how much fun that was.”

When Eret explained to him what board games were, the merman in him was sceptical. Mostly because the first thoughts in his head when confronted by human inventions is; “how well will it hold up underwater?” But it was fun. Someday he’ll definitely teach his mate some of the games he and his friends used to play, like “Tag the Shark,” but if Eret is up for it, he would like to learn a bit more about the childhood customs of humans first.

“I so kicked your ass! It’s a shame you taught me how to play this game, because you’re never winning a match ever again,” Hiccup gloats and his partner laughs.

Sometimes, Eret forgets his partner isn’t actually human. Whenever he does, he will always get a reminder.

Like right now, when he wakes up in the early morning to find Hiccup standing outside in the snow. Feet bare, wearing only his pajamas and yet not shivering at all. Meanwhile, Eret comes out in his thickest socks, his boots and a thick winter jacket and still the freezing cold slaps him in the face.

He walks over to him, boots crunching in the snow. Hiccup has his hands out as he’s catching the softly falling snow.

“You know, back home,” Hiccup starts, by which he means most of the open ocean. “I would watch the snow fall. Not here from Berk, of course, because the sea has a tendency of freezing over this far north. So I would always travel further down south, where the water doesn’t freeze solid. But no matter how cold it would get, I would always take a moment to watch the snow fall.”

Standing next to him and laying a hand on his back, Eret follows his example and looks up, too.

“And? Is it any different on land?” He asks. But rather than keep his gaze skywards, Hiccup looks down instead. The snow falls on his feet and he wiggles his remaining toes on his right foot.

“I’ve never stood in the snow before. It’s like sand if sand was cold. And made of… frozen water, I guess,” Hiccup admits with a chuckle and it hits Eret all over again just how new everything still is to him. It’s his first winter on Berk and suddenly it feels as though it’s Eret’s first as well.

He finds himself wondering if he would look with similar eyes at Hiccup’s home, which is down in the depths.

Eventually he does get a little worried and Eret takes his thick winter coat off to wrap it around Hiccup’s shoulders.

“Here, take my coat,” he says and stands in front of him, the cold not mattering to him as much as his love’s comfort. Hiccup makes use of the opportunity to reach upwards on his toes and kiss Eret on the lips. Instead of being surprised, he returns the kiss and his hands land on his middle.

His lips are freezing cold, reminiscent of their first kiss when the merman had just come out of the water he belongs to. Meanwhile, Hiccup lays his hands on his significant other’s chest and can feel his racing heart beneath his sternum.

“Come on, let’s go inside and enjoy a human tradition when it’s this cold,” Eret suggests, which has his partner immediately excited.

“Which is?” Hiccup asks, always eager to learn more about the surface world, both the good as well as the ugly.