She'd imagined her return thousands of times over her years of voluntary exile. Triumphant, repentant, defeated, vindicated: over and over and over again in a kaleidoscope of images, some joyous, some sad. Sometimes when falling asleep, missing human company just as much as she welcomed her flight's, she'd imagine every person's face, every reaction, every gasp and smile and frown.

In reality, after the defeated sea dragon slunk away into the sea with its pet human monster, there was just so much work that nobody, including Valka herself, had the time or energy to think about anything but the most immediate tasks: hunting down and exiling the scattered remains of Drago's human army, frantically rebuilding the village before the cold struck, and, most importantly, finding and rehabilitating Drago's long-abused dragons.

She longed to disappear into Hiccup's shadow for a while, to give herself time to deal with the shock of dual griefs. But when the first dragon survivors began trickling in, scarred and terrified and fretful, she could not passively watch the people of the village fail them despite their every good intention. Her son was better than most, but he couldn't be everywhere at once - and even his inquisitive kindness wasn't a match for her twenty years of hard-won knowledge. So she took over and, before she knew it, the village people - staid matrons she remembered as willowy lasses, broad men she'd known as awkward bony lads - were calling her "mistress Valka", treating her with the same mixture of proprietary pride and indulgent teasing they offered to Hiccup.

It wasn't as if she'd never left: more as if she had never existed before, here, until her son and her husband called her home.

She'd never imagined, in all her sweet or bitter lonely dreams, that she'd return as Stoick's widow.

After everything settled down, they held a feast in Stoick's honor in her house. She still owned a house, however strange it felt. The walls and furniture and wooden beams were unfamiliar, having been burnt to a crisp and rebuilt too many times, Berk being what it was. But the hearth's stones were familiar under her wondering hands.

They held a feast, full of laughter and mead and bawdy tales, half of them probably hurriedly censored for her ears. Men roared with delight and clapped each other's backs, women smiled and sang, dragons slunk around like overfed cats. Valka got drunk too fast, on the taste of that laughter as much as on the mead, sitting by Hiccup's left hand, Cloudjumper warm and content by her back. She smiled for everybody, and told what she could - Stoick's gentleness, Stoick's strength, his tone-deaf singing and his careful arms.

In the end, when everybody filed out, wishing them goodnight, Hiccup turned to her, just as thoroughly drunk, and said, he tried, Mom, he tried so hard, and when his face crumpled, it was so easy to say, oh, my darling, and hold him as if she were being held herself.

Afterwards, he fell asleep awkwardly sprawled, his metal leg dropped carelessly by the bed, and she sat over him for a while - her child, twice scarred, not innocent anymore, and all she got was to watch him lose the remains of his childhood before her very eyes.

She said you did so well, heart of mine to Stoick smiling in her mind, and stumbled off to sleep.

In her own cold bed she dreamed of the great white dragon dying alone on the devastated shore, and cried; but then she made her way over to him to touch his scarred white hide, and when her tears fell, he soared into the sky.

She remembered some things easily and found others far too annoying to deal with. She tried to re-learn to use the loom and found she couldn't. She found it hard to sleep without the soothing rumble of hundreds of dragons around. She discovered that she'd forgotten how to write. But: utensils, needles not made out of fish bones, clothes she could barter or buy without having to make them herself, furs on her bed, cooking pots, sweets, stories told by firelight, songs.

But conversation, human conversation, was the hardest of all. She had done her best not to forget, back then, holding long talks with an imaginary Stoick, reciting the old sagas until her head was bursting with them. Still, she'd spent twenty years speaking in hisses and rattles and the sweep of her arms, the intricacies of folded wings and twitching tails.

She found she could manage pretty easily one on one, even if sometimes she had to hunt for a forgotten word, or wait for a phrase to make sense. But between people coming to her for advice or healing for their dragons, and people coming to see Hiccup for decisions or solutions or just attention, their house was crowded more often than not, and sometimes she felt she was drowning in sounds and faces.

She was having a particularly bad morning, with three hurt dragons in a row, one through an accident and two through the willful indulgence of their owners, and Agdi the baker just kept talking and talking and talking at her, trying to make her admit that he did nothing wrong in feeding his poor Gronckle sweets, and at some point by the sudden awkward silence she suddenly realised she'd hissed at him, like she'd have done at any impudent dragon back in the cave.

She whirled away, feeling like she was about to burst - to melt - and then Hiccup was suddenly by her elbow, saying, why don't we go flying, Mother?

Cloudjumper and Toothless were waiting for them outside, and she swung onto her dragon's back without a word, sending him straight into the sky. They climbed higher and higher, wind whistling in her hair, cold biting into her face and naked arms, and by the time they burst through the clouds she'd forgotten everything about the earth beneath, everything but the joy of flying as high and as fast as she could.

Race you to the cliffs, Hiccup shouted, and they were off, streaking across the sky, Valka laughing and Hiccup whooping in delight behind her. Faster and faster and faster, and the wind sung in her hair and in her blood, and nothing mattered more than this.

She felt weightless, guiltless, alive. She shouted at Cloudjumper, dearest, dearest, can we try?, and didn't wait for an answer before diving off his back.

The wind caught and buffeted her, and the sea beneath unfolded like a pair of gigantic wings. There was this moment of breathless terror, overtaken by the helpless ecstasy of flight, and then Cloudjumper's talons caught her gently and firmly.

She climbed back onto his back, danced along his wings, and saw Hiccup grinning at her across the air.

He mouthed you two are magnificent at her, and she laughed and spread her arms and sang all the way home.

The swirling confusion of names and faces slowly resolved into individual people. There was Frigg, tough as old leather, perpetually angry with the world, and yet as consistently gentle with her skittish, frightened Seashocker if it was her own child. There was Asa with sharp barbs always hidden under her honey-sweet tongue; there was patient Isgerd who took it upon herself to teach Valka to use the loom. Leif, the quiet village healer with pale nervous fingers she thought about sometimes; he swapped medicines with her on occasion, trying to find where dragon and human healing methods overlapped. Thormod the carpenter, who made Hiccup's workshop into a dragon examination room for her. The Elder and her squabbling winged entourage. Gobber and his unwavering, easygoing support. The kids in Hiccup's generation - not children anymore, she thought, but so puppyishly bright compared to the older people.

She found herself with a routine, in a way: mornings spent answering requests for help, afternoons for flying and gathering herbs, evenings sitting in the Great Hall, talking and singing while her fingers separated seeds from their husks, ground them into paste, mixed and stirred and labeled. Quiet times with Hiccup before midnight, smiling at each other in exhaustion over the fire in companionable silence before going to sleep. She found herself part of a complicated barter chain, where a jar of dragon medicine in the morning went through several transformations to become a basket of eggs or a skein of wool or a cut of new cloth by midnight. She found herself having friends without wings or tails, with hands to hold and gossip to share.

She found herself, to her surprise, quietly content.

Then, five years after the battle on their shores, Hiccup begged off from his duties to go on a scouting trip, citing a burning desire to run away and become an itinerant peddler otherwise. Four days passed, and nobody was worried, since he was all too able to take care of himself and thoroughly tired of being responsible for everybody else.

On the fifth day, Toothless limped home with a wing almost too badly damaged to fix, bearing a half-unconscious Hiccup on his back, battered beyond recognition.

Hiccup came to long enough to tell his story: merchant ships asking for directions, friendly faces, welcome food. Drago hidden in the flagship's cabin, mercenaries in the hold, weapons ready, bragging of the dragons and women and riches they were going to seize. The ambush, the interrogation, the plans to use him as a hostage. Toothless breaking free, the fight, the desperate flight home. He apologised over and over again, tried to get up and fell back with a pained groan, passing out once more.

She sat by his bedside with Astrid, and they looked at each other silently, Toothless whining softly and twitching in his sleep by Hiccup's side, Valka washing Hiccup's face with a soft cloth, unthinkingly gentle. And while it was Astrid who seized her axe, it was Valka who said, he's not going to take anything else from me.

It was Astrid who led them into the battle, the twins at her left shoulder and Snoutlout with Fishlegs by her right, but it was Valka who raised their riderless flight to fight alongside.

At the end of the day, she stood over Drago dying on a deck slippery with blood, and felt neither regret nor relief, just the satisfaction of a job well done. She was only glad he didn't have dragons with him, this time, that the Bewilderbeast seemed to have left him behind.

That night she dreamed of Stoick again, and couldn't remember what he said to her, afterwards, but knew that he was at peace.

The dead were buried, the wounded were recovering. Hiccup's face was recognizable again under the fading bruises, and he was up to sitting in front of their house, basking in the sun, petting a sleepy Toothless. That was when Astrid strode to the house, with maybe half of the village following completely unsubtly behind, and bowed low to Valka.

Mistress Valka, she said, I have a request for you, and Valka felt something that was neither the silent rage nor the sullen exhaustion of the last few days, but the first stirring of joy, and wasn't surprised when Astrid said, I'd like to take your son as my husband, not at all.

She saw, to her delight, Hiccup's helplessly spreading blush, and pretended to hem and haw, putting her finger to her lips. Mmmm, do you, really? He's a fine boy, my son, the leader of his people - or so I'm told - what will you bring me for him?

Hiccup groaned and buried his head in his hands, Toothless made sounds suspiciously like snickering, the onlookers hooted and roared and shouted unhelpful advice and the dragons thrilled, while she and Astrid pretended to negotiate, trading more and more outrageous claims, and in the end it was Valka who broke down first, the helpless laughter in her bubbling up to life. She turned to Hiccup, who said yes, of course yes without looking up, the back of his neck bright scarlet, and then she hugged Astrid tight.

The third day of the wedding feast, done with all the rites and all the wishes and all the jests, they finally saw Astrid and Hiccup off to their new house, hurriedly erected on the outskirts of the village, with everybody's enthusiastic and not always useful help. Toothless took off to fly over the house in thrilled circles, the throng of laughing escorts trickled back into the square to continue drinking and dancing, and she could finally sit down with the Elder and Asa and Frigg and Isgerd and their mugs of mead, feeling full and fragile, newly-made with the tears and laughter and singing of these days. She felt unguarded and new, skittish in her own skin, and so when Leif wandered by, she couldn't help looking, and wishing he'd look back.

Asa, always the quickest on the draw, caught her look and snickered. Ah, our Leif, always lucky! What will he do with this rich pretty widow keeping an eye on him, I wonder?

She flinched guiltily, hurriedly averting her eyes, and immediately got pinned by the Elder's sharp, merciless gaze. It's been five years, you silly chit. Don't you know the dead want us to keep living?

She didn't say anything. But on the last day of the feast, when Astrid and Hiccup finally emerged, looking dazed and ridiculous and unable to let go of each other, when they brought the first fire to the bonfire in the middle of the square, she stepped into the circle to dance first.

She glided and twirled and leapt in the wavering firelight, joy and terror mingling in her heart, stars shining overhead, and around her the smiling faces whirled - her son, her daughter, her dragons, her friends, her people, her family - and in the end, it was like flying.