Tuff Love (A How To Train Your Dragon Fanfiction | Astrid x Tuffnut)

"Are you usually this weird around me?"

Astrid met Ruffnut's boggled eyes in complete mortification.

"Earth to Astrid." the voice beside Astrid in the noisy tavern called.

Astrid reset and looked surprised to Tuffnut's hand waving in front of her face.

The Vikings' chalky, burbling laughter, greedy chomping and smacking and slurping, and the clacking of their iron heeled boots on wood to the first round of the millclog filled Astrid's ears again with the sound of home.

"Are you usually this weird around me? It's starting to give me the creeps."

"Tuff, look." Astrid said with her eyes pointed to the dining area.

Tuffnut saw Ruffnut, as still as a lizard taking a sunbath, looking in disbelief at his direction in the middle of her normal-sized crowd of ten or more friends. Some of Ruffnut's dinner buddies shared her expression or were laughing out of their sanity at the sight of Astrid and Tuffnut as an evening pair. "What about it?" Tuffnut asked.

"They're all making fun of us." Astrid folded her arms. "Maybe we should go home."

Tuffnut filled their bowls when they were both at the potsource of the pickle-toad stew. "Ruffnut isn't laughing, at least."

Astrid dared to look a final time, and she brightened. Ruffnut puppeted to Astrid that Astrid had at least two screws loose somewhere in her brain, but Ruffnut left her best friend a smile of encouragement for her date .

After a warming meal of soup and vegetables, Tuffnut had convinced Astrid it was permissible, for one night only, to look like an imbecile by following the age-old steps of the millclog that every Hooligan had learned in their childhood, or perhaps in their mother's womb.

Tuffnut waited for the fastest round of the millclog's folk song that told of the dragonslayer who had failed in her quest to smite a Night Fury. The chant of the rhyming verses were hurried, as if the singing lead was an all-knowing tyrant who watched the poor warrior charge blindly through the forest through a terrible thunderstorm from the-unholy-offspring-of -lightning-and-death-itself all the way back to her mother's den. Tuffnut weaseled through the guffawing and dancing couples and triplets of Hooligans young and old. Astrid and Tuffnut locked hands and Astrid placed her hand on his shoulder and he touched her side, and then they patterned their legs in a skip-hop that took them in a dizzy topspin on the dance floor. At the cadence of the fiddle and tumbucket, Astrid could feel her slowly-savored stew and sweet drinks from earlier begin to splash like a whirlpool in her stomach.

"I'm gonna hurl!" Astrid squeaked to her partner in laughter. "I drank too much yaknog!'

"Say that word again, Astrid, and I'm gonna yaknog all over the place!" Tuffnut shouted, cackling over the tooting panpipes.

Astrid exploded in hysterics with him. Everything was exponentially funny when spinning-yourself-silly was involved.

Astrid asked Tuffnut with a present of her arm to take her waist and lead her in a round-rosy, because she had forgotten how fun the move had felt when a younger-and less pea-brained- Snoutlout had obliged her at every rite-of-passage festival.

The round-rosy was a fast move. The lady balanced on the lad's center for a blink's moment, and then with some well practiced maneuvers, she would twirl once around his shoulders, safely into his arms and onto the floor. If it was done right, a lady's dress would flourish like a pretty sail on the sea and she would keep on dancing with the biggest smile on her face.

If done wrong...things could get bloody.

"It's been a while!" Tuffnut excused as he and Astrid continued to jig in time to the song with hinged elbows. "I can try it, but don't say I didn't warn you if you can't sit for a week!"