The Treasure of Eyja Nott

Dreams Like Fog Slip Away

Nine: Dreams like fog slip away

It was one of the happiest periods of Hiccup's life, qualified by the fact that he was still a condemned man in the worst prison in the North. Reunited with the godfather he could barely recall and given a companion with whom he got on like a house on fire were two things he had completely given up on. Though Hiccup loved his father and had a very good relationship with him, Stoick Haddock was a very different person to his son.

Large, traditional, loud, Stoick had been a football star at college, spend a period in the army serving his country and then he had returned home to move into island politics to serve Berk, as his entire family had before him. He tended to be blunt, was very wedded to his physical being and was completely dedicated to his job, while Hiccup was brilliant, sarcastic, adventurous and intuitive. Lanky but lean, Hiccup had been more of a runner and swimmer and had excelled at school, taking AP classes in all his Senior Year subjects, though making sure he took Norse and Viking History to please his father as well. Working as a mechanic during the first couple of years of college, he had bought Toothless, his almost-scrapped Night Strike aircraft and rebuilt the rusted hulk from the ground up while funding flying lessons from his college fund. And he had deferred his last two years as he had used the rebuilt Toothless it to set up Night Fury Transport. His father had been mad at that, growling that his son should have stuck at what he had started as he always had. For about a year, there had been a breach between them but Astrid had loyally stuck by him, working evenings and early mornings to bring in extra money until the business had got off the ground-metaphorically as well as literally. Hiccup and his equally stubborn father had been brought back together by Astrid's loyal mediation and they had talked through their differences and patched their relationship back up. And Hiccup had completed his engineering degree while running Night Fury Transport, graduating six months before he was arrested. And one thing Stoick had never wavered in was his belief in his son...

The only problem with his new situation was that almost constant company had been a little jarring in the first few days for a man who had been subjected to almost complete solitary confinement for five years and Hiccup had found he needed to draw back from the constant chatter and recentre, clearing his thoughts through the chatter. But following that brief period of adjustment, it had been a blessing...and even better when Gobber had recognised him. Following their mutual recognition as godson and godfather, that last barrier was down and Gobber had finally been honest about everything, including his original but now scrapped plans to double-cross Hiccup and leave him once they had escaped to retrieve the treasure on his own.

Thinking about it, as he lay curled in his cell, exhausted by a day of tunnelling and squinting over the map, he couldn't really blame Gobber. The prison was filled with the worst of the worst and Hiccup was probably the only innocent man in the place, the guards and Governor included-while Gobber freely admitted that his convictions for larceny, graverobbing, murder and manslaughter had been fully deserved, though justified (by Gobber) in the quest.

"There's a community of people out there searching for treasure and they get to recognise yeh," he explained. "And I wasnae one o' them so I set about it very differently. I mean, I broke into the museum of Uglithug and found a clue to the Treasure on the underside of a parchment that was mounted because no-one had ever tried to look at it properly..."

"And they put out an Archipelago-wide ABP for you for that," Hiccup added, having heard the tale three times already. Gobber grinned.

"I looked at it differently to them because I wasn't trained in Archaeology or any of those namby pamby things people study when they want to find treasure..." Gobber told him proudly.

"Like maybe the ability to read the language that the clues are written in?" Hiccup noted dryly. Gobber clapped him on the shoulder so hard he nearly knocked him off the bed-shelf.