[HTTYD] Carried Off, Finn forge subplot (part 2)

Carried Off, a DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon fanfic by Raberba girl (rough draft)

Fragment that I'll move somewhere else in the final draft:

 

"Gobber," Finn said, "How come you're not as mean to me and Val as you are to everyone else?"

 

"Because you two are the only people I like," Gobber said emotionlessly.

 

Finn was quiet for a minute, surprised to be told that the grouchy old man liked him.  "Why do you like us?" he finally ventured.

 

Gobber paused.  "...Because I loved your grandparents," he said roughly, "and I loved your dad.  Two of them left me and the other one betrayed me; I guess it's only a matter of time before you and Val break my heart, too."

 

Finn swallowed unhappily.  "Do I have to break your heart?"

 

After a pause, Gobber smiled sadly and ruffled the boy's hair.  "Don't worry about it.  I barely have any heart left to break."

 

He sounded like he was trying to be reassuring, but Finn didn't think this really sounded better.

 

Carried Off, a DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon fanfic by Raberba girl (rough draft)

"Finn and the forge" subplot, part 2

 

By age seven, Finn was fulfilling small orders and quietly fixing some of Gobber's errors.

 

By age nine, he'd sorted out, updated, overhauled, and was now completely in charge of Gobber's record-keeping.

 

By age eleven, he could handle all the forgework except for tasks that required extra physical strength - he was still a child and had inherited his parents' wiry frame, and he didn't have nearly as much time for or interest in strength and combat training as his sister did.

 

Finn was still timid and awkward around his peers, but he had become very comfortable with running the shop.  As Gobber slept or drank in a corner, Finn would take orders, perform much of the work, haggle over prices, and address concerns like a professional.  He would poke Gobber awake if he needed an extra pair of hands or, sometimes, if he was feeling brave enough to risk it, just for the company.

 

"You look too much like your dad," Gobber grumbled one afternoon.

 

From anyone else, it would have been an insult, but "From you, I'll take that as a compliment."

 

"I mean you standing at the forge there...in that stupid apron...."

 

"You should wear one when you work, too," Finn said.  After having grown accustomed to Gobber over the years, the old man's surliness didn't bother him anymore.  "I don't get nearly as many burns this way."

 

"You know Hiccup came up with that?" Gobber said, sounding like he was complaining.  "Always shrieked like a princess whenever sparks flew; showed up for work one day in some ridiculous leather getup...."

 

"I'm starting to think my dad had more sense than...well, you," Finn teased.  He was mildly surprised when Gobber was quiet for a while after that.

 

"...He did," the blacksmith said.  "Was the smartest one in the village before he went mad."

 

Finn paused so he could look over at Gobber.  "What do you mean he was the smartest one in the village?"

 

"I mean we're Vikings, we're born muttonheads.  Then you get some crazy little shrimp of a kid, always going on about how this is wrong and that's wrong and this could be better and that could be better if we'd ooooonly listened to him...him, the little brat...traitor...he left me.  He left me, the son of a...."  Gobber trailed off.  "They all left me."  He heaved himself out of his chair and stumped off to his house, presumably to sleep.

 

Finn kept working quietly, thinking.

 

o.o.o.o.o

 

The day after Finn's twelfth birthday, he was working in the forge as usual.  What wasn't quite usual was the way Gobber was watching him - alert, appraising, and quiet.  Finn finally broke the silence.  "Think I'm ready to take over your entire livelihood?" he teased.

 

"Yep, I reckon so," Gobber said softly.

 

Finn paused, surprised to be taken seriously.  "That was a joke, Gobber.  I'm just your apprentice; I'm not going to take bread out of your mouth."

 

"Eh, nothing other than ale makes it into this mouth, anyway," Gobber drawled.

 

"Nothing much," Finn agreed unhappily.  The old blacksmith had lost so much weight in the past few months that Finn was getting distressed for him, but Gobber often flew into a temper when the boy tried to persuade him to eat more.

 

"You're a man now, Finn."

 

"Sort of."

 

"I found my will yesterday.  Rewrote it."

 

"Mm?" Finn said cautiously, not liking the direction the conversation was taking.  The people of Berk lived such perilous lives that it was common sense for anyone with any noteworthy possessions to have a will ready to go at all times, but Finn didn't like hearing Gobber talk about this as if he was actively anticipating his death.

 

"Everything's yours.  Got tired of writing and didn't mention Val, so give her a few tidbits; but other than that, everything's yours."

 

Finn felt queasy with dread, and tried to tell himself that Gobber was just being whimsical.  He didn't quite dare to criticize the man in this mood, so he ventured cautiously, "It's a little odd to leave everything you own to a twelve-year-old, isn't it?"

 

"Do I look like I care?" Gobber snapped.

 

Finn came over and put his arms around the old man's neck.  Surprised, Gobber patted him awkwardly.  "Don't leave me," Finn whispered.  "I can't do any of this without you."

 

"You're a strong lad," Gobber murmured.  "You'll be fine."

 

"Don't you dare commit suicide," Finn growled, and winced when Gobber laughed.

 

"And throw away my chance to see my friends in Valhalla?  Never."

 

That made Finn feel a little better.

 

Until the aftermath of the next dragon raid, when the air was still thick with smoke and wails, and Finn had gone out to start searching for wounded survivors in the rubble.  He stopped dead at the sight of Gobber the blacksmith, dead in the ashes beside the corpse of a Gronckle, weapon still gripped in his fist, soaked in dragon blood mingling with his own.  His cold lips were smiling, as if he had seen the Valkyries coming for him before his heart stopped.

 

o.o.o.o.o

 

Finn felt too numb to cry.  He finished his duties feeling as empty as a draugr, and couldn't muster up any emotion even later, when he was told that he had been given the honor of lighting Gobber's funeral pyre first.  The war claimed too many victims for each corpse to have its own ship, but Gobber had once been well-respected in the village and Finn was the son of the chief, so it was Gobber's wishes as expressed in his will that took precedence.

 

The boy did his duty woodenly, his sister's weeping sounding distant to him even though she stood close beside him.  As Finn watched the ships burn, he realized that tears were sliding down his face, even though he still felt completely drained of emotion.

 

"I hate it when people die," Valka sobbed.  "I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it...!"

 

Knowing that she was thinking of Snotlout and her lost friends, Finn wordlessly held her.  She cried into his shoulder, but eventually sniffled to a stop and trudged to join the others who were preparing the funeral feast.  Eventually, Finn was alone on the shore, staring beyond the pyres into the darkness.  'My father is somewhere out there,' he suddenly thought.  He expected to feel something then, but nothing happened.

 

For about a week afterward, Finn shortened his hours in the forge so that he could work on sorting through what Gobber had left behind.  It was strange to realize that he suddenly had a house of his own.  Gobber, sunk in depression, had kept it as a dark, filthy cave, but it turned out to be quite a respectable little house once Finn had opened the shutters, spent some time cleaning, and made a few repairs.  When he moved his belongings in, it still didn't feel like his house yet, but it did give him a feeling of...newness, as if he had shed the last vestiges of his childhood and really was a man now.

 

He surveyed his new home from the doorway, as Valka flitted about making comments and moving things around that Finn would simply move back later.  His mother stood by his side, and after a while, she awkwardly put a hand on his shoulder.  "You'll be all right on your own, then?"

 

"I have a trade.  I know how to cook.  I'll be fine."

 

"I'm not worried about you in the lulls," she said reluctantly, "but what will you do during the raids?"

 

"What I've always done.  I won't have to run all the way from the house now; I'll can get straight to work the instant the alarm sounds."

 

"I suppose so."  Unexpectedly, she put her arms around him, and he returned her hug.  "You're growing up," she murmured.

 

"Yeah."

 

"...I'll miss you."

 

He loved his mother, so he didn't want to hurt her by saying that it would be a relief to be out of her household, where he'd always walked on eggshells and learned to endure constant criticism.  "It's not like I'm sailing off into the horizon or anything.  You'll still see me almost as much as before."

 

She held him for another long moment, then stepped away, clapped his shoulder, and strode off to return to work.

 

Valka came bouncing up.  "I'm gonna move in with you!"

 

"No."

 

"Aw, Finn, I'm old enough to move out, too!"

 

"Then find your own house.  Gobber left this one to me, not you."

 

She burst into tears, which startled and irritated him.  "Why did he have to die?!"

 

"Everyone dies.  Someday the dragons will get us, too."

 

"Don't say that!" she shouted, shoving him.  "Don't say that, never say that, I hate you!"  She rushed off.

 

Since Finn had spent much of his time as Gobber's apprentice sorting out the forge, there weren't many adjustments to make now that the master smith was gone.  The only thing to tackle was the workroom.  As an apprentice, Finn had organized the shelves and cleared a space around the desk for him to work, but there were still crates piled up that Gobber had never let him touch.

 

Finn had grown so used to the crates that he'd forgotten about his old childhood curiosity, but now, looking at them and realizing they were no longer taboo to him, those ghostly feelings started to revive.

 

He remembered how he'd burned to find out what was in those crates, how frustrated and intrigued he felt when Gobber had fiercely refused to tell him, and how frightened he had still been of the old smith then, too frightened to disobey.  He had even made up stories about all the wondrous things he'd imagined being in the crates, desperate to soothe his curiosity.  He had waited for so long to solve the mystery that he'd lost interest in it.  Now, suddenly he was free to touch and open the crates and do whatever he liked with their contents.  It was a strange feeling.

 

Finn stood there for a minute, persuading himself that he really was allowed now.  Then he pried open the first crate.

 

He was puzzled and disappointed by what he found inside:  a haphazard pile of metal.  Frowning, Finn spread out the various pieces, wondering what in the world such strange shapes had been designed for.  Each of them had been intricately crafted, but they were not any sort of parts or tools or weapons he was familiar with.  They seemed like they, or at least some of them, were meant to function as a unit, but he could not for the life of him figure out how they were meant to be fitted together.

 

Giving up, he set them all aside in a pile and moved on to the next crate, which was more of the same, this time with mysteriously-shaped materials made of leather and wood mixed in.

 

Slightly impatient now, Finn moved on to the next crate, which contained tools and odds and ends that he was much more familiar with.  The next one was filled almost entirely with paper and parchment.

 

Surprised, Finn started skimming through them.  He had been expecting mundane things like accounts or inventory reports, which some of them were, but many of the papers were more interesting.  They showed diagrams, engineer's notes, sketches.  Some of the sketches were of Gobber, which made Finn both smile and tear up.  Whoever had drawn these images had caught Gobber's likeness perfectly, though the expressions seemed foreign to Finn.  The smiles were more careless and friendly, there was a twinkle in the man's eye.  Finn suddenly wondered, as he never had before, what Gobber had been like as a younger man, before loss and bitterness had hardened him.

 

One of the diagrams caught Finn's eye, and he realized after a moment that it was because some of the odd shapes looked familiar.  He dove at the first pile of metal he had unloaded and started digging through it, slowly matching parts to the picture.  He stared, amazed, then studied the diagram closely and worked until he had more or less reconstructed the gadget.

 

'...If we'd been using this three years ago, work would have been so much easier.'  Why had Gobber kept this thing locked up?!  ...Had he even known what it was or what it did?  The handwriting on most of these papers was different than Gobber's....

 

Finn, upon closer study, realized that whoever had written all this stuff had been much better educated and had had much smaller hands than the blacksmith.  These crates hadn't been Gobber's at all - so why had they been in his workroom all this time?

 

A strange feeling wriggled in the pit of Finn's stomach.  'My father was Gobber's apprentice before me,' he remembered. It was now long past the time Finn usually went to bed, but he wasn't tired at all.  Heart pounding, he dug deeper into the pile and was startled to come across a sketch of his mother.

 

She was beautiful.  Finn knew in a vague sort of way that his mother was good-looking, but he'd never given any thought to it.  It was surprising to see her image here, someone else's perception of her, someone capturing the radiance he must have seen when looking at her, not to mention the fact that this picture had apparently been drawn when Astrid was a very young woman, before she'd gotten the scar on her cheek and before stress and trouble had aged her face.

 

Finn's fingertips hovered just above the paper, moving slowly from the image of his mother to the image of a stern-looking man Finn didn't recognize, and then to a pair of infants drawn sleeping together on a mat.  Finn, read the caption.  Valka.  Treasures.

 

Finn couldn't tear his eyes away from the image for a long time.  When he finally set it down and reached for the next thing in the stack, he was too dazed at first to realize that it was a notebook he held rather than a single sheet of paper.  He frowned, then edged the book open, feeling torn between anticipation and apprehension.

 

To be continued....