Chapter Text
This would either be the best or the worst night of Izuku’s life. Luckily, he’d had had a best-worst night of his life about once a week since he’d been born, so he had a bit of experience with this sort of thing.
Izuku stuck his head into the forge, where Aizawa was hunched over a glowing steel sword, wiping impatiently at the rivulets of sweat dripping down his brow. Next to him was a barrel full of dented, misshapen weaponry that Izuku really should have been helping with. Oh well.
“I’m heading out!”
“Of course you are,” Aizawa didn’t even look up, groping for his hammer, “don’t die.”
“I won’t,” Izuku chirped back, “I never do. And besides, I’ve got a good feeling about tonight!”
As if on cue, the telltale whoosh-crackle of fire catching on straw thatching ripped through the forge, even through the closed window. Aizawa raised an eyebrow at him and pointedly nailed his hammer against the sword. Izuku winced.
“Finding a new assistant is going to be a pain in my ass.”
Izuku grinned and hauled his catapult into a wheelbarrow, “I’ll be quick, I swear.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
And with that, Izuku flung open the forge door and into the war.
Fires blazed. Hordes of screaming sheep and cattle by stampeded by. The air rang thick and hot with the familiar clang of metal on talons, metal on teeth. Nearby, Aizawa’s stack of hay bales had been set ablaze. Izuku sucked in a breath that tasted of smoke and ash.
The dragons had come. And he was going to catch one.
Izuku clutched the handle of his wheelbarrow and bolted towards the village. It bounced and jolted and squeaked in complaint as they flew down the hillside, tumbling over rocks and skidding on damp patches of bracken and weeds. Izuku’s heart pounded in his throat. He was close enough to hear yelling, now, and see the arching shadows of the beasts as they swooped out of range of arrows.
With a final heave, Izuku crested the last of the rocky outcrops and all but fell into the chaos below.
“Izuku!” A large, calloused hand snatched him out of the air, “what are you doing– get back inside!” Izuku hung limply by the scruff of his neck, like a cat caught in the larder. His wheelbarrow screeched to a halt in the wake of one massive boot.
“All Might!” Izuku yelped, swinging, “sorry, I was just… ah… ”
“You were just sneaking around where you don’t belong!” All Might bellowed, and Izuku flinched. All Might cleared his throat and set Izuku down gently in the slightly singed heather.
All Might was the chief of their tribe on the little isle of Berk, and his name was one of fear and renown across the uncivilised world. He certainly looked the part – huge, muscled, with a great mane of blond hair and a beard like a hedgehog struck by lightning, a little creaky in the knees, perhaps, after years of plundering and thieving his way across the archipelago, but formidable none the less.
He also happened to be Izuku’s father. Thor only knew how.
All Might cleared this throat again and patted Izuku on the head with such accidental force that he sank a couple of inches into the loamy earth.
“Izuku, my boy,” All Might said, gruffly, “you know as well as I do that it’s dangerous to be out here.”
“Everyone else is out here,” Izuku shot back, trying not to sound petulant but mostly failing, because, really, everyone else was out there, “how am I supposed to catch a dragon if I’m stuck inside all the time?”
All Might looked down at him with a vaguely constipated expression. “Ah. Yes. Catching a dragon.” He knelt on a knee, chainmail and bulky armour clattering around him.
“I know you’re anxious to prove yourself, little Hero, but you still have lessons to learn. And a little ways to grow.” He swept a critical eye over Izuku’s narrow shoulders, “the time is not right. Not yet.” Izuku held in a sigh. He’d heard those words before, but they never failed to make him feel a little smaller every time. All Might ruffled his hair affectionately.
“Hurry along back to the forge. Aizawa will be wondering where you are, no doubt! Best not to worry him.” And with that, he was off towards the fires and swooping shapes, axe raised high. Izuku watched his retreating back disappear into plumes of smoke, and then got to work hauling his wheelbarrow out of the squelchy bit of mud it was making a home out of.
He loved his dad, he really did, but he could only miss so many fishing trips, or pillages, or arena fights, or other activities meant for real Vikings before the sting of it started to get to him. And if Izuku had any hope of becoming a real Viking, he first had to catch a dragon. Catch a dragon, and bring its head back to the Great Hall on a pike to hang on the wall next to the snarling skulls of its unfortunate brothers. He’d tried for years without success. But this time, this time, for sure.
Dragons and humans had been at war for as long as anyone could remember. Only the especially wise and wrinkly elders of the tribes knew what had started it, but that didn’t really matter all that much to the Vikings these days. The dragons stole their food, killed their young, torched their fields and gutted their buildings. Many had rippling burn marks or missing limbs from a lifetime of fending off the vicious creatures. Even Izuku, who’d usually been ferried away from the worst of the action, had great slashing scars across his arms from an attack on the forge. It was as good of a reason as any to return the attacks in kind.
Izuku dragged his little wheelbarrow up a craggy hill and began to unload his secret weapon. A wooden spear-thrower, an atlatl he’d fashioned years ago (after rumours passed from fishing boat to fishing boat of the Romans’ weapons in the east – much smaller and shakier, of course), and been painstakingly repairing and improving after each failed attempt.
Izuku loaded the spear. Crouched behind the trigger – knees wet in the shallow grass. The next shriek of light – dragons scattering. Izuku aimed for a gleaming shadow around a mouthful of sparking explosions, far, far into the distance.
Time clicked to a halt.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Shhhtyck.
The spear flew out of its hold and whipped into the sky, a line of silver in the watery dark. The recoil kicked Izuku in the chest and sent him tumbling back, but he scrambled to his feet and desperately tracked his gaze after that slick streak, squinting, searching…
A scream that made the hairs on the back of Izuku’s neck shoot up let him know he’d hit his target. And there it was – the tiny, low swoop of a dragon streaking down, down, down towards the woods on the far side of the island.
Izuku gaped for a moment. Rubbed his eyes.
Had that just happened? He checked the spear-less spear-thrower. Rubbed his eyes again.
“I did it,” he whispered to himself. Quietly at first, and then, “I did it! I DID IT!”
Izuku crowed, incredulous in the empty air, and threw himself backwards towards the mounds of shrubbery. His heart shuddered in his chest. His face had stretched itself into a smile so large his cheeks ached. Large, effervescent bubbles of happiness rose from the bottoms of his boots to the very tips of his hair. He’d done it. He’d really done it.
Izuku imagined himself returning tomorrow morning, just as the sun crested the horizon, holding a dragon’s head mounted on a sword high above him so the whole village could see it. He imagined the look of pride on All Might’s face. He imagined helping haul the nets up on fishing trips he’d finally be allowed to go on, of questing like the heroes in the bards’ stories, of finally able shout out the call of the warriors with his tribesmen. He pressed his hands to his face, mouthing I did it, I did it, I did it, to no one, those welling bubbles inside him and the occasional jittering aftershock of adrenaline pushing tears to the corners of his eyes.
Above him, dragons roared and flamed and raged.
Eventually, when the dust settled and the last of the winged beasts had disappeared to whatever hole they’d crawled out of, Izuku staggered to his feet and hauled his rattling spear-thrower back to the forge. Aizawa still sat in front of the smoking fire pit, hammering dents out of a helmet. He shot Izuku a weary glance at the sound of the heavy door dragging open.
“Do you still have all your limbs?”
“Yep!” Izuku cheerfully stashed his wheelbarrow in a dusty corner, and then, because he couldn’t help himself, burst out with, “and I shot a dragon!”
Aizawa’s eyebrows climbed to his hairline. “Really.”
Izuku fumbled his scarred fingers together and swallowed. “Y-yeah. A pretty powerful type, I-I think. One of the ones with those sparkly, explosive flame blasts. It landed in the woods on the far side of the island… I’m going to go find it in the morning.”
Aizawa’s expression didn’t change. Izuku felt himself flush. But Aizawa only heaved a sigh and kicked a bucked full of swords in need of sharpening towards him.
“Then I suppose you’re going to need your sleep. The sooner you finish up with these, the sooner I’ll let you go home. Get on with it.”
Beaming, Izuku did.
By the time all the swords were straight-edged and gleaming and Izuku crept back to All Might’s chiefly hut at the head of the village, it was nearly midnight. He found All Might collapsed in a chair in front of the fire, snoring like an asthmatic bull. Grinning to himself, Izuku removed the helmet from his head and set it aside. The only sign that All Might had been in battle was the charred hem of the cloak rumpled under his head.
Supper was on the table, a rich-smelling stew with a glistening layer of fat on the surface, but Izuku felt too wired to eat much. He made himself grab an apple and a hunk of cheese, though, and chewed on them as he slid into his bedroom and shut the door quietly behind him.
It was not yet spring, and icy wind currents ripped across the little isle of Berk, howling through the wooden panels of Izuku’s walls and whistling on and on, past the island entirely and over the West Ocean and towards, if you were a fantastical sort of person, the imaginary land known as America.
Between the cold and the wind and the thudding excitement of catching his own dragon, catching his own dragon, wow, Izuku only managed a few, restless hours of sleep, shivering himself up and out of bed before the sky had even begun to lighten.
He was careful not to make any noise as he slid on his warmest tunic, the sealskin boots with the grips on the bottom, and a sword about a foot too long for him that he’d nicked from his bucket at the forge last night. It felt strange and heavy at his waist, and it unbalanced him as he tumbled out of his low window and into the dewy grass.
It was still dark, but Izuku could hear the rousing call of cliffside seagulls beginning their morning hunts. He grinned into the misty, whispering air, full to bursting with excitement and anticipation, and started towards the grassy plains.
It was a long walk to the woodlands on the far side of the island – some two and a half hours, but Izuku knew a handy, if not harrowing shortcut through a choppy stretch of sea in one of the islands sweeping bays. Clambering down the ragged cliff and braving the icy waters was a lot harder with a sword, Izuku found. When he finally dragged himself to shore, wet and limp and shuddering at the bite of the wind, Izuku vowed to learn how to fight with a knife, if only so he’d never have a repeat incident of whatever that was.
The sky had thinned and paled, and his clothes and hair had stiffened with salt when Izuku finally breached the edge of the woodlands and began his search. It was lovely here in the early morning, the jut of mossy boulders, the clamber of stretching trees, the snarl of roots and logs below nearly completely concealed by fog, and usually Izuku would stop to peer at interesting mushrooms and climb up a few promising-looking branches, but he was on a mission here. A quest. His first, in fact.
Izuku remembered the dragon falling closer to seaside than inland, so he stuck to the outskirts of the woods, tracing and retracing his steps when he thought he heard a sound, or saw a crush of shrubbery that might have been flattened by something other than the raging wind. He nicked trees with the tip of his sword to mark them. He followed the snaking lines of the bogs to check if the dragon had somehow managed to drag itself towards a water source.
The sun had heaved half its glorious head over the horizon. Then the other half, lifting the veil of damp fog with it. Izuku searched and searched and searched. Not a hide nor a hair of the elusive creature.
He was sure he’d shot it down. He’d seen it, streaking into the woods like a comet, no mistake. Izuku tugged on the roots of his hair with frustration and twisted on his heels.
The answer to all his problems was right there, somewhere in these gods-forsaken woods, so why couldn’t he find it? Honestly, it was just his luck something like this would happen – finally shoot himself a dragon only for it to be swallowed by the boggy swamps of the island like a juicy fillet of herring. That seemed like the sort of cosmic irony Izuku was used to dealing with.
In his pacing, Izuku had happened upon a particularly damp and slippery stretch of mossy rock. With a muffled yelp, Izuku felt his ankle buckled meanly, and suddenly the ground gave way into a slick, grassy line that he tumbled down over and over himself, a pebble spinning down a cliff – straight into the loom of a massive boulder that he met with the crown of his head.
Izuku groaned and sat up, rubbing what was sure to grow into a sizable lump. His sword cut fiercely into his side, and his ankle throbbed, hot to the touch. It took him a moment to blink away the fuzzies from his eyes.
Below him, just over the lip of the boulder, was a wobbly circle basin indented some several metres into the forest floor, about the size of a largish field. Tree roots dripped over its rocky walls. A glassy lake, a pond really, hugged the far edge. It looked like a giant, or maybe the great god Thor himself, had lowered a mighty boot and impressed a footprint into the earth.
Izuku was so busy marvelling at the natural phenomenon, musing over whether the lake might be fed by some underground water supply since it was so free of algae, that he almost missed the curled black shape far below him. Almost.
With a gasp he just managed to catch in his hand, Izuku ducked behind the boulder. The dragon. The dragon. Long and sinewy, and caught in the spill of some overhanging roots like a spider dangling from a web.
Izuku snuck another peek. It really was a magnificent creature.
Strong, spiny wings and tail, shifting muscle, hazy scales that swallowed the light in great, black gulps fading to a pale underbelly twisting towards the morning sky. Izuku could just see the stripe of his spear buried under the joint of one massive shoulder. He couldn’t tell if the dragon was breathing, but he was pretty sure those eyes were closed.
Some deep-rooted survival instinct stirred in the pit of his stomach. Run, it urged, run, run from this creature, this evil creature, this one is of dark and crawling places, run, run, run.
But Izuku was not in the habit of running from anything.
He ducked back away and clenched his fingers around the hilt of his sword. His heart beat a tattoo against his ribcage.
Come on, Izuku. You can do this.
Shaking faintly, but nerves steeled, Izuku flattened himself against the boulder and began to worm his way down the jagged drop. It was incredibly slow-going. Most of his footholds were slick with lichen, and he was half-afraid that the roots he was clinging on to would snap under his weight. Each time he dislodged a cascade of pebbles, or his sword clattered loudly in its scabbard, Izuku bit the inside of his cheek and prayed that the dragon didn’t wake up. And by the time he’d edged into the clearing, it seemed like luck might be on Izuku’s side.
And then the wind changed.
With a curl of fear that sent the hairs on the back of Izuku’s neck straight up, the dragon’s nose twitched once, twice, and its feline eyes snapped open.