Book 1: The First Year (ROTBTD Hogwarts AU) (PREQUEL)

9. Hiccup's POV: Mid September

School life was...strange.

For one thing, Hiccup's days were a lot more structured than he was used to. If he wasn't holed up in his dorm room, he was attending classes. If he wasn't in class, then he was probably eating, and after that he'd probably just go back to his dorm to read or nap. Great Hall, classes, Great Hall, dorm. Rinse, wash, repeat.

He might've read a few boarding school stories, but it was something else entirely to experience it. There was hardly any of the promised excitement.

But there was a lot of space. Too much of it. Big, open classrooms, wide, cavernous halls, grass and trees and hills that rolled on and on to rim of the world in varying shades of green.

The sky over Berk was clouded most of the year, blanketing the land—most of the time, literally. Here, if he climbed to the tallest tower, he was sure he'd go falling up into the open blue sky and never be seen again.

...Better to live within the walls. So he didn't get lost to a place he didn't belong in.

Another glaring difference was that it was all very...quiet. Muted. True, the castle was filled with many people, hundreds of them, more than he'd ever expected he'd see in his life.

But that couldn't even come close to comparing to dragon raids. Fire and brimstone and deadly carnage, that's what he knew. Of seeing homes rebuilt as fast as they collapsed. Of always waiting for the next threat, and always wondering, somewhere in the back of his mind, about survival.

Here, those needs were warped, like they were made both larger and smaller, somehow. Survival was less of a concern than homework. Food and shelter weren't a concern at all. Instead, each day was carefully sectioned off into bite-sized routine, and each one held a sense of order and stability. Something that wasn't made to teach how to fight or kill.

Just what exactly was such a life supposed to do for children, practically? What were the adults hoping for by making them learn this way? Because whatever it was went against every Viking survival instinct he'd ever had hammered into his skull.

There was, however, a short bout of bullying attempts in the first few days, to add a touch of flavor to Hiccup's otherwise bland-as-porridge life.

His cousin Steinn Jorgenson—Snotlout for those who knew him—had been the one who'd put in the most effort to bully Hiccup back home. He'd been sorted into Slytherin, with the others going off to Gryffindor and Hufflepuff respectively.

Of all the miserable luck that made up Hiccup's existence, they must have somehow been running short of it the day they decided the schedules because not only was Snotlout separated from his two lackies this side of the ocean but that year the first year Slytherins did not share a single class with the Hufflepuffs. If Snotlout wanted to get any decent bullying done, then at best he'd have to go hunting in the corridors.

He tried. Back in the village, with it being so small and all eyes on the Viking Reject, Hiccup would've either had to get really creative or else stop putting himself in the middle of things to get Snotlout off his tail.

Here there was a sea of strangers, endless hiding spaces, and Hiccup being very short and unnoticeable in general, and all he had to do was spark a minor distraction away from where he was and duck out of sight. Misdirection and subterfuge, the hard-earned tools of the Hiccup survival manual.

(They were hard-earned because half the time he didn't follow his own good advice.)

And really, it wasn't as if anyone knew what Snotlout was on about when he went yelling, "HICCUP!" through the corridors. By then if someone were to point him out in a crowd most would've addressed him as "Haddock", "him", "the short one", "the quiet one"—or, most popularly—"Who?"