Chapter One

Fitting In

Hiccup had always had trouble finding his place in the Haddock family. Everyone around was some kind of athlete.

Worse, his dad was the Stoick Haddock, retired football player for the Berk Blockheads, and of course they expected him—his son—to be just as good, and maybe even better at sports.

That idea hadn’t exactly taken flight yet.

          What his dad didn’t realize was that football wasn’t… Hiccup. The boy wasn’t even built like a Haddock. Haddocks were sort of stocky, with beefy legs. Hiccup was skinny and pasty. No matter how much he wished it, he couldn’t grow facial hair. His cousins were already growing beards and mustaches. If he stayed outside too long, he got sunburnt. Snotlout—Hiccup’s least favorite cousin, I might add—was coming on with a beautiful tan. He was just… different.

The thing that set Hiccup apart from his relatives most, though, was that he read books every free second he had. They brought his brain to life.

          Kings and queens, princesses and princes, wizards and warlocks, dragons and fairies. The stories he read were so fantastical and yet everything seemed so real. That was why he loved books.  There was a kind of loveliness to them.

          And then he found plays.

          They were even better, because he could see real action and expression, and singing and dancing, and everything he imagined in his books… coming to life.

          He grew up with books, plays, movies. A lot of times, Hiccup knew things that a lot of Haddocks didn’t—like if you shook a liter Coke bottle, it would explode. Snotlout had done an excellent demonstration of this at Sunday dinner.

          And—you just knew this was coming.

A little after Hiccup turned 18, he got into a fight with his dad about going to college. He wanted to take literature, and naturally Stoick had objected.

          “I still believe in you, son. You may have stopped doing that, but I haven’t. I know you can have a great career as an athlete if you just trai—”

          “Dad, please. Okay, I don’t wanna do this anymore.” Hiccup twiddled his fingers, trying his best to stare his intimidating father in the face. “Please, just let me study playwriting, and I promise I’ll make you proud.” He tried to put confidence in his words, but he didn’t think much of it had come out.

          “The problem with you is that you don’t wont to be a football player, so ye don’t try. You have mountains of potential, Hiccup! Mountains! You just have to stop all…” and here was the part that his father tried to express his feelings—and failed. “…this.”

          “You just gestured to all of me.”

          “My point is, ya have to take chances. Make some mistakes. Get messy if ye have to.”

          Hiccup was starting to get anxious. This was not going the way he had hoped. “Well, why don’t you take some chances, with me? I’ll be the first ever playwriting Haddock. Only guy with a career in theater. Maybe it won’t be exactly what you want, but Dad, like you said, we should all take some chances… right?”

~*~

          The night involved a lot of yelling, a tear or two, but the end was the worst. Hiccup wasn’t going to college at all. Stoick wasn’t going to pay for his tuition.

          “If ye’re really a writer, ye’ll discover yer talent yerself! No son of mine is gonna go to college to study werds—”

          Anger welled up in Hiccup. He hadn’t read all those books to become a football player. Memories washed over him. Getting teased by his cousins, dirty looks from his aunts and uncles, and most of all his disappointed father’s face today, when he told him about his dream.

          No. That wasn’t going to happen.

          “Fine! Then… I’ll just go! Goodbye!”

          And just like that, he was gone. Stoick didn’t react. No, “Hiccup!” or “Don’t you dare, mister!” Just an angry stare that Hiccup couldn’t bear.

          Only an hour later, when he was walking down the streets, did the feelings really start to wash over him.

          It was confirmed.

          For the first time, he was really alone.

~*~

For the next four years, Hiccup survived by working as a grocery clerk at the Shop-Right Market and sleeping in a rented apartment room. This was around the time that Hiccup decided to start working on his play.

          Planning it was the hardest part, but he knew everything after planning would be ten times easier. So every free second he had--he planned.

          He almost had enough money to go to the local university. He’d done this by spending as little money as possible. He never bought new clothes until they were so ratty they would fall right off him, so a lot of times he looked homeless. He never ate out, and he never took the bus home, he never even used the phone unless it was an emergency—or if it was a call from his best friend. Sure, things were bad now, but if things worked out, his hard work would be worth it.

          He was willing to live the simple way for a seemingly impossible dream—to get his work known.

          But he knew it was going to happen.

          It had to.

          And whether he was scrimping, saving, or punching in numbers at the Shop-Right, his brain was always swirling, curdling, planning and plotting his first play; Sunbeams.

          It was going to be a masterpiece.           

~*~

          In Hiccup’s play, the main character was a girl named Eliza. She was beautiful, kind and graceful. Hiccup had put everything he dreamed about in a girl to get her character—bubbly, creative, open-minded, absentminded and naïve.

          She wanted to travel the world—and just to make it challenging, she was going to try to do it in sixty days. Along the way, she would make friends, enemies, come across enigmas and such. When 60 days was up, she'd only reached Venice, but she realized that her friends were more important than the world, and continues to travel with her new BFFs.

          Hiccup was spending as much work on the songs. His music had a lot of flute and strings—ups and downs in the notes, with a touch of drums. It added solidity.

        And the dancing. Hiccup wasn't a dancer at all--heck, he must've had three left feet--but he could visualize them in his mind just fine.

          Every day, when he came home from Shop-Right, he would grab his beloved notebook that contained every detail of the play, find a couch, and start working. Scribble, erase, scribble, flip to page whatever, repeat.

          There was no sound in the apartment as he worked except the scratching of a pencil, the rubbing of an eraser or the occasional turning of a page. Other than that, there was complete silence.

          But he didn’t feel alone.