hard as glass
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The woman who was to become Stoick's wife was the most terrifying woman in eight villages.
It wasn't that she was particularly bloodthirsty. Or even because she was an exceptionally good hand with a spear.
She just had a distressing habit of laughing so.
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Asleif Hrolfsdottir was a large, merry mountain of a woman, with a strong nose and full lips and tightly braided brown hair that threw red sparks into the sunlight. She was fearless, granted, but that went without saying for all of the young women of Berk. She was ferocious in battle and tireless at the oar and could sing battle hymns as loudly as any of them, despite the fact her booming voice sounded like someone striking a tin plate with a dead fish.
She was also, unfortunately, as sharp as the spikes on a Nadder's tail, and while she had grinned at Stoick once or twice over the rim of her mug, he could never shake the feeling that there was something far too much like a leer in it.
Talking to her was like navigating an arena of bear traps, where one false step would result in two very bright green eyes blinking innocently at you from across the table while a pair of very red lips twisted in a baffling fashion that suggested some private amusement. Stoick had never felt as tongue-tied and clumsy in his entire life. Asleif tended to bring that out in people.
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When he was young, his father had bade him to bang his head against a rock. To his lasting pride, Stoick had done so without question, and the rock had burst into fragments before the pain even registered.
The rock had not, however, snickered at him. This, he felt, was the important part.
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He tried impressing her.
The area immediately behind Asleif's house became a bizarre dumping-ground for dragon heads of all kinds. She accepted each trophy cheerfully and without fail. She very tactfully avoided mentioning that she, in fact, had been on the patrols during which most of these dragons were slain. Despite her unwavering politeness, Stoic always left feeling frazzled, not himself, and oddly feverish.
It wasn't until the third pair of Monstrous Nightmare horns that she hesitated, smiled nervously, and said that she was very sorry, but that she had no time to chat as her father and uncles were preparing for a bear hunt. The constant smell of rotting flesh attracted them like nothing else, and they'd torn apart their smokehouse the previous night.
Stoick wondered if that was a roundabout way of asking him to try harder.
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He tried, somewhat less confidently, talking to her.
This was difficult, as the life of a dragon killer in training left little room for any social growth on either of their parts. This was doubly difficult, as Stoick viewed words and the proper care and maintenance of them with sober suspicion, born of long years of being the largest, strongest, and most functionally illiterate youth in Berk. Asleif read. And while her singing voice admittedly sounded like a Gronkle engaged in passionate lovemaking, she knew whole hero ballads by heart, and could recite them at the drop of a hat, albeit tunelessly.
Stoick thought as much while she belted out portions of Odin's lament in the great hall after a long day's patrol, and while he passed by Gronkle without incident, he ground to a disastrous halt on the rocky shoals of passionate lovemaking and couldn't look her in the eye for the rest of the week.
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To his great despair, Stoick eventually backed off completely. He was out of ideas. He'd tried gifts. He'd tried great deeds. He'd tried simply talking to her, but all of it simply rolled off of her like water off a duck's back. She was polite. She was friendly. She also simultaneously terrified and baffled him by turns because she was all of these things and more, but she also had a gleam of intellect behind her eyes that turned his knees to water.
He no longer sought her out in the evenings, and he no longer jumped out of his skin to land a spot next to her on the oars. He would have happily ducked his head and never subjected himself to that kind of humiliation and anguish again, if they hadn't ended up on a particular patrol that went horribly, horribly wrong.
It was a Nadder nest. Juveniles by the dozens, and one smart, skinny, old female with one eye and an appalling amount of speed left in her bones. She had Stoick pinned up against a tree with his shield splintered and laying twenty feet away before he could blink, and when she reared her head back to strike, Stoick stared at her calmly, determined to meet his death as befit his name.
He never saw Asleif cross the clearing. She was just there. Her spear punching up beneath the Nadder's jaw and exiting at the crown of the skull. Gore, sheeting down, smearing across the spear haft and pooling on the ground.
Asleif was panting, her eyes wild. Then she released the spear with bloody fingers, grabbed Stoick by the back of the neck, and kissed him. Hard.
When she released him, and saw the look on his face, she laughed, but shakily.
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They married that spring, up on the cliff tops. Their first night together was also, incidentally, the night of one of the largest raids in the last five years.
They enjoyed themselves immensely.
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