makligr, httyd

xvi. father's daughter

𖣯 ✹ 🌷(makligr) ꏍ ！┈─❟
╰───►chapter sixteen; yrsa
❝ father's daughter! ❞

    "YRSA, YRSA wake up ..."

     Young eyes of a brilliant, dark brown opened. Yrsa stared, confused at the face she hasn't seen in years and years smile down at her over her bed back home in Berk. Dark, mocha skin shone like warm, toiled soil with a smile so shining, it made the sun blind. His fingers brushed over her skin, tucking away her wild, curly black hair behind her ears. 

    Her father rubbed her shoulder, gentle in his green tunic and pants. Loose and already dirty with stains from his workshop. "Come on, baby, up you get━it's almost dawn."

      "Dad?" croaked Yrsa, very confused. She remembered this day, but her voice sounded her own age━sounded like it was after years of bitterness. Not the youthful, bright and happy tone it once was. 

      He smiled back at her. Yrsa's mother once told her she had her father's smile. She never thought she could ever smile that amazingly━like everything in the world could go right if you only believed it had the chance. 

      She missed that smile. She missed that smile so much. 

      "Up," her father leaned in and pinched her sides lightly. It was then that Yrsa heard her younger self, or perhaps it was really her, wishing she still had it in her to laugh the way she did when her father tickled her. "Up, you little dragon━up! Up!"

      "No!" squealed Yrsa, squirming in her bed as she fought off her father's fingers. "No!" 

      "Arrgh!" he wrapped his arms right around her and pulled her up. Yrsa felt like she was five again, clinging onto her father around his neck and he still holding her up even when her mother said she was too big to be picked up. Neither of them listened to her, of course. She laughed, latching on like an animal with her head leaning gently against his shoulder. She stared at the door opposite, the memory playing in her mind like a distant fairytale; so long ago it almost didn't seem real. 

     Yrsa felt her father's arms around her, she felt the kiss he gave her on her temple and how he rocked her around the room. How her head swayed, and how she felt safe. How she felt at home ... she closed her eyes.

     When she opened them again, one of her cheeks were wet━as if Yrsa had been crying in her sleep. She thought she could still hear him, chuckling and murmuring to her, until she realised that was everyone else, and the world around her came back━shocking as she remembered everything that had happened. 

     She got pushed into the cell━a section below deck locked behind a set of steel green bars. The movement startled her back into a furious desperation. She could hear Helrose somewhere else━whining and crying, and others might not notice like she did. But she knew━she knew, and it was destroying her inside. Yrsa didn't know what she was more desperate for, to get her and her friends out of this situation, or to get to Helrose.

     Yrsa shoved off the grip the Dragon Hunter had of her arms and spun around to snap at Ryker, "Were are our dragons?! What did you do to them?!"

    The others stumbled into the cell behind her. All of them startled that their plan had failed where so many others had prevailed. 

     Ryker chuckled at Yrsa's fury, not at all frightened by the livid glower in her dark eyes━like the charred stone after a dragon's firestorm: haunting and deadly. "Oh, if I were you," he mused down at her, "I'd worry about yourself."