#we are hand in hand with this struggle brethren i live in the fucking South. no i am not just going to sit back and observe

[theinfinitedivides]

just saw an anon come into my inbox saying i shouldn't be out here celebrating BHM in these United States of America bc according to them since i come from a Caribbean immigrant family i don't understand the struggles that Black folk go through in this country and therefore the representation of Black icons who spent their lives in the US is not for me. hmmm. ok. like some of the earliest civil rights advocates didn't come from Caribbean families. like the police still won't shoot my ass whether or not they know where my parents come from boy don't let me find you and jump you there wi. God forbid. not tonight with your foolishness

[tysonrunningfox]

Open Flames: Part 18

Alternate name for this chapter: The time Eret III invented Nuclear Deterrent (and Fuse Helped) 

Ao3 (the masterpost is horribly behind...I should deal with that...but it’s all organized on Ao3 so I might...not)

00000

I would never say this in front of Fuse, but I’ve been blown up before.

A few times, really.  Some of them because I hadn’t learned to duck and cover quickly enough, some because after the volcano, grenades and mining charges didn’t feel like they mattered much.  Between those exposures and riding Bang for most of my life, maybe I’m acclimated to explosions and the waves of pressure that come with them.

Or, maybe, as big and hardy as everyone in Dad’s village is, they’re weak in the face of a concussive blast.

I’m the first one on my feet after the jail walls fall down, spitting metallic dust from the ancient gate out of my mouth and staggering towards the pile of clothes that I hid the sword under.  It takes a couple of tries, my feet not quite listening, my shoulder throbbing from its impromptu use as a battering ram.

Arvid groans, dabbing at the blood dripping out of his nose, too red in my slightly blurring vision.

“Get up,” I try to hiss at him, but it comes out half-shout, ears ringing when my throat rasps.  “Before they do.”

“Thought you said those didn’t work,” he curls into the fetal position and dry heaves, and someone under the rubble that used to be the wall around the door shifts, a crumbled brick falling to the side.

“I thought they didn’t.”  I get the sword, arms aching from the weight as it seemingly drags me in a tight circle, foot catching on the something and nearly tripping me.

But I’m up.  I’m the only one up.

“Idiot,” Arvid wheezes.

I look around for Bang and see Wingspark slumped by the nearest edge of the forest, shaking her head slowly, cocking it off kilter when she dares to open wide, disoriented eyes.

My nose must be bleeding too because the metallic taste in my mouth gets worse as I raise the sword into a trembling defensive position.

Berk wedding traditions couldn’t include axes, could they?  That would be way too convenient.

“There!”  Someone shouts and I spin, forcing my eyes to focus on the cohort of half a dozen men running at us over the nearest hill.  The one in front is big, holding a spear back and aiming in what I think is my direction and it’s sheer luck when the spearhead hits the flat of the sword instead of my arm, chipping off a piece of generations old rust and sending a tremor up through my sore shoulder.

“Get up, there’s more of them.”  I hiss, planting my feet in the rubble and fixing my grip tighter around the sword.  “Lots more.”

“What are they going to do, put you in jail?”  He rolls almost reluctantly to his knees and I’d tell him that he’s never been less intimidating, except I’m thinking of Fuse and my promise and how impossible it is to keep as the band of men starts running at us in earnest, shouting names and curses and threats.

“Since that’s off the table, I guess I’m going to have to go with plan B.”

“What’s plan B?”  Arvid staggers to his feet, wiping his nose on his sleeve, black eye green around the edges, and I realize, with a terrifying jolt, that I’m the only even moderately intimidating one right now.

“Make them think the fight’s not worth it.”  I decide all at once, forcing my expression serious.

“You’re going to bluff?”

“Hardly,” I grit my teeth, “I’m going to tell the whole truth.”

Because even though Fuse isn’t here, her bombs were.  Even though she can’t back me up, her legacy can.  No one would have to look too far to corroborate my story.

I wait until the cohort is in ear shot and swallow hard, trying not to think about how bad a spear would hurt piercing my chest as I lower the sword, one hand held towards them in a gesture asking them to stop.  I’m trying for casual, even as Arvid stares at me incredulous, hand shaking, smooth tongue stuck limp in his mouth as I essentially hand us over to the enemy.

Except they aren’t an enemy.

I let them look like Dad, let myself see the origin of his features in their faces.  Ingrid’s eyes.  Rolf’s scowl.

“Hey,” I call out when they don’t stop immediately and a couple of men at the back falter.  I raise my hand to my mouth and let out the most piercing whistle I can, wishing Ingrid were here to do the honors, but I’m still glad when it’s enough and the man at the front stops, obviously confused.  “If we can just pause the charge for a second, that’d be great.  Thanks.”

I wipe the dust from my hand on my pants and it comes away dustier.

Arvid stares at me in a way that makes me sure if he were holding the sword, he would have knocked my dumb ass out by now in an attempt to salvage the situation.

“Thanks,” I repeat, twirling the sword in my grip just for something to do as I take advantage of the silence, “I know we got off on the wrong foot here—”

“You were desecrating our ancestral burial ground!”  The man just to the right of the leader yells and I weigh the accusation.

“Not exactly, actually.”

“You were in Eret’s grave—”

“Oh good, I did get the runes right,” I laugh, and it doesn’t so much ease the tension as it confuses everyone so much they don’t know how to respond, “Eret III, future chief of Berk.”  I switch the sword to my left hand and hold out my right, even risking a step forward towards the shocked group.

None of them move.

Arvid snaps his fingers, summoning Wingspark closer, but it doesn’t work.  I still don’t know where Bang is, and when I find him, we’re going to have a long talk about his rescue etiquette.

“Ok,” I take my hand back, switching the sword back to it and twirling it a couple of easy times where it hangs down by my ankles.  It’s not intimidating like an axe, but maybe that’s a good thing.  “Where do I start?  Ok, well, you might be wondering what happened to your jail cell.  And while I could claim that it just spontaneously crumbled because of bad upkeep, I’m going to stick with the truth here—”

“Your dragon, that blue blasted beast—”

“Don’t, alliteration goes to his head,” I ignore Arvid’s glare, “and it’s not quite true, he had help.”  I think of Fuse and the walls I’ve seen fall, the craters I’ve seen gouge themselves into hard rock.  “I’m engaged.”

“What he means is—”  Arvid tries to cut me off and I give him my most chiefly look, the one that makes him puff up even as he stands down.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard about Berk, and I know that stories about us get warped and blown out of proportion the futher away they’re told,” I lower my voice, hoping that nasal can be deadly in the right circumstances, “but I’m not exaggerating when I say that your jail cell was just obliterated by the smallest arms in my future wife’s arsenal.”

“Is that a threat?”  The man in front bristles, reaching for the spear of the follower at his left and I take a step back to retrieve the spear that barely missed me a moment ago and toss it to him.

If I somehow talk my way out of this, Arvid is going to kill me and enjoy it.

“It’s a warning,” I wave vaguely to the south, “either I tell you now, before you’re stupid enough to kill me, or you learn the next time you near the archipelago to trade.”  I watch the leader contemplate his spear and shrug, sword waving carelessly through the air, “you might hear the rumors before she strikes, I don’t know, it all depends on how long it takes for word to get back to Berk, and with my dragon probably on his way there now, without me, it won’t be more than a couple of days.”

“Strikes?”  The question is a whisper among the men, their eyes flicking between me and the pile of rubble just starting to move with their men regaining consciousness from the blast.

“I’m sure you’ve heard rumors,” I grin, “the dragon island blown entirely off of the map, whole dragon trapper posts gone up in flame and rubble.”  I shrug, “not rumors.”

They look at the building.  Arvid looks at me and Wingspark, and the single dull sword that we have between us against at least a dozen men.

“I’m a nice guy,” I promise, left hand held up in simulated surrender, “really, my dad’s from here, I appreciate your history so much I just wanted to borrow a little piece of it and maybe I could have been a little more upfront about it.  I wish I had, given how many of your lives that would have saved.”

I feel it now, in their eyes on me, that chiefly aura that I’ve always struggled towards.  The feeling that when they look at me, I’m more than just myself, I’m larger, scarier, impossible in a way that makes people wish they were behind me instead of against me.

“The way I see it, if I’m going to keep my conscience clear here, I’ve got two options.”  I number them off against the rusty sword, “one, I consider you warned.  If you kill me right now, there will be more than Hel to pay.  Your entire village reduced to a pile of rubble so thorough that those graves will be all that’s left and even then, only the ones buried deep.”  I swallow, hoping I’ve laid a big enough foundation to bluff on even as I assess the group.

The guy in the front is biggest, but looks slow, and aside from his spear I only see a short dagger.  There’s a smaller man in the back row with a heavy iron axe in his hands, and if I could just get to him, I’d have a chance at some of them, maybe enough for Arvid to get to Wingspark.  With a little fire on our side, the odds are better, and I plant my heels to spring in case this next line doesn’t work out for me.

“Or, I kill all of you now before you can hurt me, because trust me, even a scratch, even a bruise won’t make her happy.  That’s the only way I can think of to save your families, your history.”  I gesture with the sword, “our history, really.”

The pause drags on, too long, rubble shifting and crumbling as men underneath it try to sit up.  The new cohort’s eyes drift repeatedly to the pile, obviously wanting to help their brethren and I watch them weigh the utility of the next few minutes.

“Aw Hel,” the man to the leader’s left swears, “let him go, he’s fucking crazy.”

“That explosion knocked down a shelf at my house a half mile away,” another man mutters, “he said it was small arms—”

“He stole from us,” the leader insists and I gesture with the sword again.

“Oh, come on, you guys weren’t using it.”  I adjust my grip, preparing again to charge if necessary, “and it has my name on it.”

“The other graves are untouched,” someone else argues in a tense whisper, “what if he’s telling the truth?  He said his name was Eret—”

“He’s a thief, he’s probably a liar too—”

“Trust me, if I was going to lie about my name, I would have started years ago.”  I laugh, even as Arvid takes a calculated step back towards where Wing is inching forwards.  She’s close now, maybe a run for it would be better.

“Let him take the damn sword,” the man to the leader’s right booms, “if there’s even a grain of truth in what he’s saying it’s not worth it.  No one liked Eret that much anyway!”

“I heard that Bronn!”  A shout from the sky takes everyone else’s concentration away from the stand off and the bubble of relief in my chest swells to near bursting when Skullcrusher lands on the other side of the crowd, Dad sitting on his shoulders.

Stormfly lands next to him, followed by a panicked Bang who immediately charges me, cool claws on my shoulders as he knocks me back into the dirt and starts frantically licking my face.

“Bud!”  I yelp, squirming away from the piece of what used to be a prison wall digging in to my lower back, “missed you too!  Missed you too!”

“Is that Eret son of Eret?”  The question is bouncing around the group of men when I finally get back to my feet, holstering the sword clumsily in my axe’s place against my back.

“Hi Dad,” I call out, driving in the point as I swing onto Bang, relief flooding through me when his wings twitch to the sides, preparing for takeoff.

“Go on ahead, son,” Dad says pointedly, waving me away, “I’ll catch up.”

“I don’t think I was done talking to them,” I shrug and the man dad recognized, Bronn apparently, looks between us with wide eyes.

“I think they’re done talking to you,” Dad laughs, “I’ll smooth things over.”

I want to stay but the half-relieved, half-furious, all guilt-inducing look that Mom gives me convinces me otherwise.  As I take off, I hear the first few questions echoing on the breeze, all concerning the validity of my claims that if they’d touched me, they all would have found themselves blown sky high in less than a week.

Dad’s laugh answers them for me.

Flying does little to blow the stink and dust off of my clothes, but my mind is far clearer by the time Mom guides Arvid and I down to a small camp maybe fifteen minutes outside the outskirts of the village.

“What the Hel were you thinking?”  She asks as soon as we’ve landed, launching herself off of Stormfly and flinging her arms around me in a hug so tight it might as well be a chokehold, given I’m not quite off of Bang yet.

“Mom,” I wheeze and she yanks me off of my dragon and to my feet, bracing her hands on my shoulders to analyze my face.

“Flying off like that when Fuse is seven months pregnant,” she starts listing the compilation of my crimes, but all I can hear is Fuse and pregnant and the fear settles back into that collar around my heart, “getting arrested in a village you’ve never been to—”

“Is Fuse ok?”

“As of a day and a half ago,” she softens slightly at something in my expression, probably the raw desperation flooding across everything I’ve kept together for the past…however long I was in that cell, “everyone’s watching her, I’m sure she’s fine.  Unmarried, but otherwise fine.”

“As soon as I get back,” I pull the rusty sword from my back and hold it out for her to examine, “I’m ready, I just needed—”

“Something of your dad’s,” she sighs, “something from where he’s from.  I know.”  She smiles, a little crooked, younger looking than usual with her hair windblown and her panic receding from an otherwise open expression, “and before you ask, no one told me, I guessed.  I’m sorry it took me so long to guess.  If I’d been more on top of it, maybe we would have caught you before you were about to fight off an army—”

“An army?”  I shrug, “half a company, maybe.  Hardly even a small militia—”

“Eret.”  She squishes my cheeks, dirty beard itching against my face.

“I was talking my way out of it,” the words come out slightly muffled and Arvid steps up beside me, and I feel guilty for forgetting him in the rush of the reunion.

“By telling them how his future wife would blow them up if they touched a hair on his pretty head.”

“Delegating,” I clarify as Mom lets me go.  “And can you please stop with the pretty?”

He doesn’t hear because Mom is hugging him, chin over his shoulder, which is too bad because she misses his shocked expression, eyes wide on my face like he’s looking for help.

“And you, I expected better of you,” she jabs him in the chest with a finger when she pulls away, “going along with a plan like this.  And what happened to your eye?”  She pokes at the green bruise and wipes the still trickling red under his nose with her sleeve.  “Who did this to you?”

She looks accusingly at me and I raise my hands, gesturing at the dried blood on my own lip, even though it’s probably far less obvious caked in my red moustache.

“The nose was the explosion.”  I nod, “which was an accident, the bombs had been soaked a bunch of times, it was Bang trying to blast us out that set them off—”

“Did you ice this?”  She’s back fussing over Arvid who blushes, hands in his pockets.

“I was a prisoner, Mom, no one was really offering medical care.”

“If we’d been an hour later…” she looks between us, shaking her head, and we both hug her at the same time, Arvid lifting her a couple lopsided inches in the air.

“We’re fine,” I insist, “a little deafened, maybe, but the ringing in my ears is already fading.”

“Speak for yourself,” Arvid grumbles, stepping out of the hug to twist his pinky in his ear, wincing.

“You’ve got to get home,” Mom tells me in particular, earnest instead of chastising and that makes it worse.

“I know,” I nod, “I didn’t think that’d take more than a week, but—”

“You should take Stormfly,” she pats her leg to call the Nadder over, “she’s faster.  I’ll wait for your dad and fly back on Bang.”

Bang protests weakly, nudging my leg with his wing and looking up at me with big, pathetic, watery eyes.

“I’ve got to get home too,” Arvid perks up, a little frantic for the first time since the explosion, rolling his shoulder like he’s just now remembering why he pulverized it.  “Aurelia—”

“Wing can keep up with Stormfly, can’t she?”  Mom asks and Arvid seems to center himself on the words before nodding.

“I think so.”

“We took a roundabout way to get up here to avoid trouble,” I say a bit sheepishly, “not that it mattered, but by any chance, did you guys come direct?”

“We took as straight of a shot as we could,” Mom nods, “no trouble to be seen, seems like you guys had it all corralled.”

“I do my best,” I nod, faking somber as the weight of the sword against my back starts to mount, the pull towards home and Fuse overwhelming the desire to stay here and dwell.

“Straight home,” Mom points at me and I nod.  “I mean it, if we get there before you—”

“Hel to pay, I get it.”  I swing up onto Stormfly and she fidgets as I adjust my seat to her comparatively narrow shoulders.  “I’m shocked you’re even trusting me after well,” I point at the sword and she sighs, a little sheepish in a way I’ve never seen directed at me.

Maybe at Dad, once or twice, when one of us broke something and she decided not to punish us for it.  Never at the chief.

“I’ve got to start sometime.”

“You do?”  I raise an eyebrow, trying to ignore Arvid’s impatient expression as Wingspark paces in a small circle, ready to take off.

“You’re going to be chief,” she reminds me, and it makes my negotiation of sorts at the blown jail cell feel silly and more official all at once, “and you can’t do that with your mother questioning your every move, can you?”

“Oh,” I frown, “I guess I’d assumed that was part of the program.”

“Go,” she pats Stormfly’s haunch, “you being this far from an unmarried Fuse right now is giving me gray hairs.”

“Fine,” I nudge Stormfly forward, ignoring Bang’s pathetic croon to the best of my ability, “see you at home.”

“We going?”  Arvid half checks then takes off before I get an answer, flying due south through a cloud bank, pressed low to Wingspark’s neck.

We don’t talk much.  There’s none of that adventurous feeling that carried us North on the way here, this feels far more like drudgery.  It reminds me too much of my sleepless flights between Berk and Elva’s island and I’m glad to be on Stormfly, the different seated position keeping me focused on what’s ahead instead of reliving what’s behind.

We take a single, brief stop just before sundown to feed the dragons and Arvid helps me pull the long-healed stitches out of my forearm and wrap it in a length of cloth I rip from one of Dad’s old borrowed shirts that is still layered over my own.

There’s no talk of stopping for the night and we get back into the sky, hugging the coastline for the next part of the journey so that the dragons can glide on the updraft generated by the miles of shear cliffs, preserving some of their energy towards faster flight.   The night’s colder than it was even a week ago, winter setting in with a vengeance as a few flakes start to fall on the straight just north of Berk, and I let myself have a moment’s hope for a small feast.

Or no feast.  I don’t care.

That in and of itself is refreshing, the general lack of reluctance.  After years of digging in my heels while people dragged me places that didn’t feel right, walking apathetically forward of my own volition is freeing.  Or not apathetically, that’s not right.  I can hardly think of waking up in a house with Fuse, a house that’s ours, because it feels so impossible in all of the best ways, but I can imagine the wedding.

It’s going to be…well, a wedding.

The chief is probably going to make a big, annoying deal of the ceremonial bath.  I’ll have to wear whatever my mom says and sign the contract and throw the sword on my back into a rafter.  I’ll have to fend off the well-wishers but then I’ll get to go home with Fuse and have some new claim on her and those babies that kick my hands when I talk too much.

“I’m headed home!” Arvid shouts over the wind, gesturing towards the far point of the island and I shake my head.

“Aurelia’s probably with Fuse.”

He hovers for a second, looking down at his clothes and then looking at me with a bright tinge of panic in his eyes barely visible through the fluttering snowflakes, which are picking up speed.

“You look fine,” I roll my eyes and he pivots Wingspark in a frustrated little circle.

“I’m covered in half a building—”

“Aurelia won’t care.”

“I…” He grits his teeth and I see the shadow of his jaw flexing from where I’m hovering on an updraft a few yards away, “I don’t know what to say to her.”

“It’s Aurelia,” I try, sighing when he doesn’t relax, “tell her I was cryptic and weird and said you needed to talk to her—”

“I don’t need you in the middle.”  He draws a line in the snow and asks me to stay on my side and I nod.  It feels like him taking a step back at his dad’s birth village, falling into a new boundary, and I respect it, nodding.  “I’m going to go get cleaned up.”

“Should I let Aurelia know?”

He shrugs, and then rethinks the gesture, “yeah.  If she’s there.”

“Alright.”  I half salute, sword on my back feeling too big and out of place as Stormfly angles to catch the next draft, snow flurrying from the cliffs below, “thanks, by the way.  For this.”  I shrug under the weight of the sword.

“Yeah,”  Arvid smiles, handsome again, huge again, the black eye a battle scar with a story worth telling, “thanks for this.”  He pats Dad’s sword in its holster on his hip and then he’s gliding back towards his house.

I land outside the chief’s house and Stormfly instantly trots off to the barn, tucking herself into a pile of straw and shoving her beak into a bucket of fish.  I stretch, scrubbing my hand through my iced over beard and walking towards the door before opening it to a resounding chorus of Aurelia’s frustration.

“How do you keep doing that?”  She shouts, voice going shrill as she leans over the maces and talons board set up on the table.  “You aren’t even paying attention!”

“I don’t know why you didn’t just do this,” Tuffnut demonstrates some move and the vein in Aurelia’s forehead twitches.

“That’s agains the rules.”

“I thought we were playing Thorston rules,” Tuffnut looks beside him and I edge a little further into the doorway to see the back of Fuse’s head, hair glowing with the reflection of the fire.  “So Loki’s revenge is legal, why didn’t she just do that?”

“Because Thorston rules aren’t real, Tuff,” the chief reminds him like he’s said it a few dozen times today.

“Then why do we keep winning?”  Tuffnut asks.

“I don’t know!” Aurelia snaps, tossing a game piece at his head and missing entirely.  It skitters across the floor and I stop it with my boot, watching Aurelia’s jaw drop when she follows its path and sees me in the doorway.  “You’re back?”

“No, of course not,” I joke, “just passing through.”

“Eret,” Fuse jumps up so fast she knocks her chair down, whirling towards me and managing a step before I’m across the room, lifting her into a hug and burying my face in her hair.

“Hey,” I say against her neck, arms tightening reflexively around her.  

And she smells like home, usual soot replaced with campfire and warmth.  Her hair tickles my nose as she pats my shoulders, asking to be set down, which makes it easier to rest my cheek against her forehead.  I want to slip my hand under her shirt to feel her stomach, but Aurelia’s and the chief’s eyes are boring into the top of my head and I sigh and pull away, pausing to kiss her forehead and grab her hand.

Her other hand starts working up my sleeve to check my stitches and I don’t have the heart to stop her, even when the chief’s ever sharp eyes catch the motion.

“Where’s Arvid?”  Aurelia asks first, one arm absently around my chest in a side hug as she wrinkles her nose, “you’re filthy, by the way.”

“Arvid went to get cleaned up,” I roll my eyes, “should be at your place.”

“Thanks,” she hustles to grab her coat and I squeeze Fuse’s hand as I turn to face Aurelia on her way out the open door.

“Ask him about the black eye, by the way, funny story.”

“Black eye?”  She pauses for a second before shaking her head at me, “whatever.  I’ll see you later.”  She points at Tuffnut, “for a rematch.”

“Thorston rules next time,” he waggles his eyebrows but Aurelia ignores him, slamming the door shut against the blowing snow and leaving the room in awkward silence.

Or awkward for me, at least.

Fuse seems fine with the quiet, quite obviously checking me over for new injuries until I take both her hands in one of mine, giving her a look that she thankfully accepts to mean ‘later’.  Tuffnut is also fine with the silence, looking between me and his daughter with a pleasant smile that grows the more awkward I feel.

Mostly though, the chief doesn’t seem to feel awkward, which is always a bad sign.  Worse, it doesn’t feel like I’m in trouble this time, like the concept of trouble has lost some of its meaning.  It’s worse than trouble, he’s waiting for me to explain myself, and there’s the chance that if I do it well enough, he’ll accept it.

I never thought I’d miss the fatalistic comfort of no-win situations, but here I am.

I swallow hard, tugging at the collar of my dad’s borrowed coat that should be bigger before reaching over my shoulder and pulling out the rusty sword, angling it in the firelight to show the ancient, faded runes.

“I got what I went looking for,” I start, voice a rush from holding my breath and I clear my throat before continuing.  “Eret the first’s sword.”

“You were gone for almost two weeks.”

“Yeah,” I wince and Fuse squeezes my hand, encouraging at the same time as urging me to remind the room at large that she had it handled.

She doesn’t know the half of what she has handled, frankly.

“Did you anticipate being gone for two weeks?”  The chief asks me like I’m a council member and it’s hard to remember how reasonable he is as a boss when I was just wrapping my head around him as a grandfather to my future children, but this is yet another chance to prove that I can still handle things and I make myself focus, exhaling as I step forward to set the sword on the table.

Fuse doesn’t let go of my hand.

“I did not, Arvid and I took the long way, traveling at night to avoid running into anyone, so I thought it would be six or seven days at the most,” I scratch my chin and decide on the truth, again, “but it turns out that people don’t necessarily like strangers robbing their ancestral tombs.”

“Really?”  Tuffnut raises an eyebrow, “they weren’t happy about you taking this ugly old sword off their hands?”  He runs a finger along the rust where it was recently chipped by a spearhead, “honestly, this thing is horrible, how much did you pay for it?  It looks like it’s been in a grave for a hundred years.”

“Probably more like fifty,” I correct him, recognizing my own irritated expression on the chief’s face.

“You overpaid.”

“I stole it,” I assure him.

“Good old five-finger discount,” he winks at me or at Fuse, I can’t quite tell, “there’s hope for you yet, kid.”

“So, as I was saying, they weren’t happy that I stole a sword,” I steer the conversation back to the topic that might release me, “and I ended up in jail.”  When the chief doesn’t answer immediately, I keep talking, patting my stomach and gesturing to the room at large, “which, by the way, was anyone going to tell me that I don’t fit between dragon cage bars anymore?  I’ve been on the moldy bread diet for a week and it still didn’t work—”

“How’d you get out?”  The chief asks and there’s the real question, the one that the length of my absence was just hinting at.

“Fuse, actually,” I squeeze her hand and she frowns at me, glancing at my hairline like she’s searching out a bruise or some other sign of head injury, “no, not—some smoke bombs you gave me months ago that I never used—I mean, I actually soaked them about a hundred times, I don’t know how they still worked but at some point, Bang tried to blast the cell open and they flew into a wall and…boom.”  I mime the explosion with my free hand and the chief looks at me not quite doubtfully, but waiting for the rest of the story.

“And the village just let you go?”

“After some convincing, yeah,” I nod.

“What’s the body count on ‘convincing’?”  The chief finally puts the rest of the question out in the open and I relax, for once confident that I have the right answer.

“None,” I shrug, “I convinced them we weren’t worth the trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Well,” I drop Fuse’s hand to wrap my arm around her shoulders, “I might have said that what blew up their jail was the smallest in Berk’s—and my future wife in particular’s—arsenal.”

“I don’t know that,” Fuse mutters, biting her lip as she does some mental calculation, brows pulling together, “now that I think about it, saltwater curing a smoke bomb might produce…maybe with some black sand—”

“Fuse,” I break her concentration and she glares at me briefly before her expression softens and I’d say about anything to get away from our dads right now so that we can actually greet each other.

“I’ll test it out later,” she blushes, noticing the room’s attention on her and flanking down at her stomach, smoothing a warm sweater over it and shaking her head, “at some point.”

“So, instead of killing them,” the chief raises an eyebrow, “you convinced them that Fuse would kill them if they didn’t let you go?”

“It didn’t take much convincing,” I run a hand through my tangled hair and come back with a palm covered in jail dust even after a day and a half in the wind and snow, “not after the explosion.”

“A ceremonial wedding sword and a diplomatic solution,” the chief lets himself smile and I’d ask him how long he was faking a stern face to freak me out if I weren’t so relieved and impatient with the conversation, “I never thought I’d see the day.”

“Well, it’s the day,” I shrug, unsure whether to accept the teasing as praise or push it off and ask for my next assignment.  Whether it’s my empty stomach or aching back or the fact that the dust is really starting to itch, I can’t be sure, but I’m suddenly exhausted enough to go with the first option.  “If that’s all, I think I’m going to go wash the prison off before the snow dilutes the hot springs…”

Fuse nods, cold hand slipping under the back of my shirt, and as hard as I try to keep my expression neutral with the repeated self-assurance that she’s only checking for injuries, I’m not sure that it works.  Especially because as much as I hate her worrying, I like her checking me over, all thorough attention and meticulous fingers.

And her dad is here.  And the chief is here.  And I’d throw that stupid sword into the chief’s ceiling right now if it meant house keys in my hand.

“And tomorrow is Frigg’s day,” the chief says, voice sing-song, and I blink at him.

“Ok.”

“Everyone else is on-island and you didn’t mind a small feast,” he looks between Fuse and I, “unless that’s changed…”

“What?  Oh!”  I stiffen when his meaning clicks, “tomorrow.  The wedding?  Tomorrow?”  I look at Fuse, semi-relieved when she’s startled too, wide eyes flicking between her dad and me.  “As in we go to sleep one time, wake up in the morning and get married?”

“Unless ‘tomorrow’ has changed meaning…”  The chief smiles at me, embarrassed for me and proud of me in equal parts and I don’t know why everyone is being so nice to me after I went to jail, but I’ll take it.

Especially because it feels different than pity, different than a token kind word to make up for a secret.

“Wait, like tomorrow tomorrow?”  Tuffnut jumps up and I nod.

“That’s what I just clarified.”

“It’s your last night in my house!”  He yanks Fuse away from me by her shoulders, and I wish I hadn’t set down the ceremonial sword as my own territorial instincts react.  “We have to celebrate.  Or cry.  And tell your mother—”

“The new house is just down the road,” Fuse rolls her eyes, looking pointedly at her dad and apologetically at me like she already knows it doesn’t matter and the offer to throw the sword into the ceiling still stands.

“Wait, you’ve seen the house?”  I ask, heart clenching when her otherwise irritated expression twitches into a tiny smile.

“Your mom showed me.”

“Is it—” I stop the flood of unimportant questions and try for the only one that matters.  “I mean, did you like it?”

“You’ll have plenty of time to talk about how much you love your new house once you’re done abandoning your old dad!”  Tuffnut starts dragging her towards the door and I’m unsure how real his tears are and even less sure how much I care.

“You knew this was coming—”  Fuse tries one last feeble time to shirk his arms off, and I get the feeling that as reluctant as she is, she might need this.  Especially after the last few months of distance from her dad, and I nod at her that it’s ok.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I tell her, even as everything in me rejects the distance, some new level of chiefly composure thinking of tomorrow and consequences instead of right now.

Or maybe it’s not chiefly composure, maybe it’s the kind of composure that might let me become chief.  The sign that I’m thinking of what I want in the future instead of what I’m running from in the present.

Or maybe that’s a load of dragon dung I’m telling myself because braving the snowstorm to the hot springs alone doesn’t sound very appealing after considering the alternative.

“At the altar,” she bites her lip, a little pale but still excited, eyes bright as the door shuts behind them with a gust of snow and the chief and I are alone.

“I’m not going to cry,” he jokes, and all I can think about is how we’re standing right where we were when I hugged him, “I’ve been looking forward to your last night in my house for years.”

“Yeah,” I snort, “finally going to be rid of me.”

“It’s just down the road,” he says, more to himself than to me and my chest feels a little tight.  “Stoick will finally stop bugging me that your room is bigger than his, I’m really excited for that—”

“I should go wash up,” I point at the door, barely biting my tongue against blurting out ‘alone’ in Midgard’s most disappointed tone, if only to break the moment.  “And get some sleep, big day tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” he nods, “good plan, it’s going to—exhausting, weddings are exhausting.”

I make it all of two steps towards the door when he calls my name and I turn back around, impatient eyebrows raised.

“Just one more thing—”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s your Mom?”  He asks, worried in the way that never meshes with my mom in my mind.  Then, before I can answer, he winces and catches himself.  “Where’s Eret?  Also.  I mean, Eret—not you, obviously, I mean…”. He swallows hard and shrugs one shoulder, embarrassed as he probably should be, “where are your parents?”

“Oh,” I point vaguely North, “Mom insisted I take Stormfly, because she’s ‘faster’ than Bang,” I roll my eyes and he laughs, “and she was sure that Fuse was going to be having unclaimed heirs any second.”  My heart stutters at that and I pinch the outside of my thigh, forcing my focus back to tomorrow and only tomorrow, “she and my dad should be on their way by now.”

“Great.”  He waves me off and I make it one more measly, shuffled step, “Eret?”

“What?”  I regret the edge in my voice and clear my throat, “sorry, what?”

“I’m proud of you,” he doesn’t sound like the chief and he doesn’t sound like he’s trying to step in as my father either, and I remember how ‘grandpa’ felt right for a second and my throat tightens, “for going after what you want and—”

“And not chopping off a bunch of heads to get it?”  I joke, but he doesn’t laugh.

“That’s one way to say it,” he waves me towards the door, “I’m done now, really.  Go do what you need to do.  Big day tomorrow.”