1. Xestsemon AU
Jan. 21st, 2012 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
questionablewit posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
faemused[Entanglement AU set a year or a bit more in the future, in no way shape or form canon, locked to birdhousesoul]
Hawke is chopping wood. The sleeves of the short-sleeved shirt she's wearing are rolled up as far as they can go, leaving her shoulders bare; it's cool out, breezy, but chopping wood is hard work even when you have her muscles.
She's still muscular, in a lean way. Thinner than she was, without regular access to brickstuff, which might have been unappetizing but was at least nutritious. Her hair is longer, shaggier, pulled back with a brown headscarf to keep it out of her face; her clothes are the usual shirt and trousers and tight-laced boots she's always favored, though much patched and darned. It's not an easy life up here, but she gets by. The villagers have accepted her by now. She's been here almost a year, working as a hunter and trapper; it was a small enough place that they didn't have one of their own, and while at first they might have been wary of the strange woman who'd walked into town, they were won over over time. Friendly gifts of meat and fur will do that. Taking down a rabid bear who'd attacked over the winter had helped rather more. They don't ask about her past and she doesn't cause trouble, and all in all it works.
Behind her is a house, more like a shack, only two rooms to it. When she'd arrived it'd been so long abandoned and run-down no one else had cared that she'd moved in. It'd taken months to fix it up, but those were months she looked back on with pride. Staring down at her hands, sawing and hammering wood, making things fit together, half-remembered lessons from her childhood spent watching Malcolm Hawke at work. You have to work with the grain, not against it. If you go against the grain you'll break the wood. Make it want what you want. She's fiercely proud of her tiny, still pretty pathetic looking shack. It keeps heat in and cold and rain out. Mostly. And it's hers.
The planet is Xestsemon, the feudal one she visited not long after arriving in the Void. She'd liked it at the time. Dirty and misogynistic and flawed, but familiar, the sort of place she knew, a society she could blend into and hide in. Rat-spit mountain villages are much the same no matter what world you're on.
Hiding had been important, for a while. It hadn't been hard. Wait until the station was just about to leave, slip down-planet with Teo, tell everyone you're coming back with someone else so they wouldn't look for her until it was too late. Plant a few false leads and move, as fast and far as possible, away from the few spaceports the planet had. Up into the mountains. One tiny speck of a person on one planet in one gigantic universe, multiverse. It went beyond a needle in a haystack, and that's just what she needed to accomplish.
It's not such a lonely life. She still has her dog, though he's beginning to show his age and then some; the rabid bear had gotten a good swipe at his side, and the scar is still there. Teo's slowed down a lot. But they manage. And she takes pride in that, too. She holds her pride close, because it's such a surprise to have it again.
And if there things she doesn't let herself think about, people she doesn't let herself think about, it's impossible to tell here, in this moment: Hawke, shirt-sleeves rolled up, woodcutter's axe in hand, chopping wood for the fire and then pausing to wipe sweat from her brow.
birdhousesoul]Hawke is chopping wood. The sleeves of the short-sleeved shirt she's wearing are rolled up as far as they can go, leaving her shoulders bare; it's cool out, breezy, but chopping wood is hard work even when you have her muscles.
She's still muscular, in a lean way. Thinner than she was, without regular access to brickstuff, which might have been unappetizing but was at least nutritious. Her hair is longer, shaggier, pulled back with a brown headscarf to keep it out of her face; her clothes are the usual shirt and trousers and tight-laced boots she's always favored, though much patched and darned. It's not an easy life up here, but she gets by. The villagers have accepted her by now. She's been here almost a year, working as a hunter and trapper; it was a small enough place that they didn't have one of their own, and while at first they might have been wary of the strange woman who'd walked into town, they were won over over time. Friendly gifts of meat and fur will do that. Taking down a rabid bear who'd attacked over the winter had helped rather more. They don't ask about her past and she doesn't cause trouble, and all in all it works.
Behind her is a house, more like a shack, only two rooms to it. When she'd arrived it'd been so long abandoned and run-down no one else had cared that she'd moved in. It'd taken months to fix it up, but those were months she looked back on with pride. Staring down at her hands, sawing and hammering wood, making things fit together, half-remembered lessons from her childhood spent watching Malcolm Hawke at work. You have to work with the grain, not against it. If you go against the grain you'll break the wood. Make it want what you want. She's fiercely proud of her tiny, still pretty pathetic looking shack. It keeps heat in and cold and rain out. Mostly. And it's hers.
The planet is Xestsemon, the feudal one she visited not long after arriving in the Void. She'd liked it at the time. Dirty and misogynistic and flawed, but familiar, the sort of place she knew, a society she could blend into and hide in. Rat-spit mountain villages are much the same no matter what world you're on.
Hiding had been important, for a while. It hadn't been hard. Wait until the station was just about to leave, slip down-planet with Teo, tell everyone you're coming back with someone else so they wouldn't look for her until it was too late. Plant a few false leads and move, as fast and far as possible, away from the few spaceports the planet had. Up into the mountains. One tiny speck of a person on one planet in one gigantic universe, multiverse. It went beyond a needle in a haystack, and that's just what she needed to accomplish.
It's not such a lonely life. She still has her dog, though he's beginning to show his age and then some; the rabid bear had gotten a good swipe at his side, and the scar is still there. Teo's slowed down a lot. But they manage. And she takes pride in that, too. She holds her pride close, because it's such a surprise to have it again.
And if there things she doesn't let herself think about, people she doesn't let herself think about, it's impossible to tell here, in this moment: Hawke, shirt-sleeves rolled up, woodcutter's axe in hand, chopping wood for the fire and then pausing to wipe sweat from her brow.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 12:38 am (UTC)He's grateful, and immensely unsurprised, that she didn't name the child after him. Anders isn't even a name, it's a nationality or something close to it; everyone from the Anderfels is an Anders. He's made it his name, over the years, fiercely disinclined to keep the name his parents gave him. Thinks of himself as Anders. The name and the baggage that goes with it aren't suited to a wanted child. As this child clearly is wanted, so much that Marian would go through this much hardship just to keep the child safe from him.
"I'm sorry," says Anders. "I didn't know. I could have helped." To think of her in labor, in this forsaken place, or even in the lowlands, in some city of this backward planet, without a well-trained healer — he hates it, and hates himself for making it necessary, as he must have done. "I wish I'd known," he says, almost angrily.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 10:29 am (UTC)But for her there was no choice at that point, only one clear priority. So she can face Anders' anger without flinching, should he direct it her way. She regrets none of her actions, could have done nothing else.
As for the rest..."I wasn't alone," Hawke says, looking down at her--their--son as she says it, remembering. "I had help, resources. I'd prepared for it." Months of hoarding every coin she could get, every trade item, every fur. Once she arrived here, bartering them for future credit. Not just goods to collect, to give her the supplies and equipment she'd need to live in her then-still-a-shack, but favors owed. And while the villagers had initially been suspicious of a strange woman walking into town with daggers on her back and steel determination in her gaze, they'd been much more willing and able to warm to a woman several months pregnant and clearly needing help. Weakness can be a resource too, if you know how to use it.
Hawke brushes a finger against Malcolm's hair again, because she can, because she treasures him beyond words. He's worth all the prices she had to pay, and more. "Moved into the village properly for a while, even. This place wasn't much to look at back then, and I couldn't get around so well. But I'd made allies. I wasn't alone."
It's only partly true, because during labor she had been alone. Oh, there'd been other women there, the one who served the village as an unofficial midwife because she had six living children of her own, and someone else to help besides. But Hawke had been alone, and she'd cursed Anders to the skies for not being there for this, blight him, even though it'd been she who'd left. Screamed for him, screamed for her mother. She has no doubts he could have helped, but it wasn't for his healing skills that she'd wanted him there.
Done now, though. And not done badly, all things considered. Not to her mind.
She leans back against the wall, pulls the scarf off from her head and runs a hand back through her hair, the same old gesture, though it looks different with the longer hair. It's a bit past her shoulders now; if she pulled it back into a ponytail she'd look remarkably like Leandra. Hawke juts her chin towards the cradle. "Want to hold him? He should be waking up soon. And waking up hungry, most likely." There's a fond exasperation in the last sentence. Malcolm is stirring a bit, roused by the sound of voices.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 11:40 pm (UTC)To his surprise, the baby's not wet. It's Anders' experience that babies almost always are, and if they're not, they're about to be, prodigiously. Gently, he cradles little Malcolm against his chest and shoulder, one hand supporting the baby's rump, the other flat and high on the baby's back. "You're a clever little thing, aren't you?" he inquires softly of the baby, who's drowsy and mercifully disinclined to fuss as yet. "With eyes and a nose and everything, and hands. Already I'm impressed."
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 11:56 pm (UTC)"Is that why you're out here? In the middle of nowhere, worse than the blighted Anderfels?"
no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 12:10 am (UTC)The baby's waking up now, what with all the attention, and in addition to being at a grabby stage he's at a point where he's started to realize there are things and people in the world, and they're all exciting. He turns wide eyes--still baby blue, impossible to say what color they'll turn out in the end--on Anders, looking surprised and delighted in the way babies do. One hand struggles to get free of the swaddling cloth wrapped around him.