1. Xestsemon AU

[questionablewit]

[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.

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Re: 2/2

[questionablewit]

Much of this not-a-story Hawke had guessed, pieced together from clues Anders has offered over the years, from her own knowledge of him, from things not said. Good to have the gaps finally filled in, and she knows what it must have cost Anders to tell it. That's another thing she'll tell Malcolm when he's older, or try to. Though he might not understand. Hearing that his father's father rejected him might not inspire much sympathy, given that Malcolm will have to feel a similar rejection.

The implication that Anders won't be around in the future is one she's heard so many times that it can't cause pain anymore; it's taken for granted, even though he keeps turning up. It's almost amusing, in its way, the inside joke that isn't funny but becomes funny for repetition. Months of effort and searching to find her, surely, not an insignificant amount of time when there's a war you're ignoring in order to take the time for searching, and no doubt part of him is itching to return to it and wondering why he's indulging this distraction. But still, months, going by the state of his clothes. And then it takes less than half an hour to imply but I can't stay. Just checking on her, a brief visit to make sure she's all right. She has to be amused, even if it's faint amusement. There are reasons they never married, and for Hawke, that's the main one. Marriage implies the promise of a future, and Anders has always been adamant that he can't give her one, no matter how much he loves her. She doesn't ask for promises that can't be given.

It matters a bit less now. It still matters, yes, but she knows the shape of her future, and she can be content with it. That's what she's been building here, all this time. So she can listen quietly, leaning back against the wall, shirt pulled up and breastband pulled down, Malcolm cradled in her arms and sucking with practiced enthusiasm.

The not-a-story isn't the sort of thing that invites comment or questions, and she spares him that. It wasn't for her, anyway; she's to guard it until it can be passed on, years from now. She nods slowly, an acknowledgement, I'll remember this, I'll be careful with it, and lets it go in silence. Malcolm's finished with one breast and been switched to the other before she says anything, and she jumps back to earlier, smaller topics. "You look like you've been on the road for years. What have you been doing with yourself?" He knows what she's been doing, after all; that's self-evident, not just in her arms but written all over the room.

Re: 2/2

[birdhousesoul]

For his part, Anders thinks there'll be no reason for Malcolm to imagine his father rejected him, because he assumes Hawke's fundamental honesty will preclude that, and she'll tell him the reason his father isn't with them is that she went to great lengths to ensure he wouldn't be with them. He also thinks what he's been doing should be self-evident. "Looking for you," he says. "The station left months ago. I've got a communicator, which sends to the only ansible in the capital city, and when the ansible operator gets around to it, they'll transmit whatever I'm sending to the station." Anders accepts the entire concept of the ansible as magic. His chief fear where this is concerned: that the communicator will get wet, or that one of his own spells will fry it. Even so, if something terribly important happened, he could make his way to the capital and prevail upon the ansible operator directly, unless there's such a state of unrest as to make this impossible, and in that case there's not much good a message to the station can do. It's not for his own sake he wants the connection, it's for the revolution. If anything happens that affects the resistance, he needs to be able to tell them.

If anything happens, on this backwater feudal planet, important as a source of food and raw materials for the station, hardly a hotbed of multiversal intrigue. A big if.

"I've no idea when they might be back. If you're staying on this planet with him, I'm not going anywhere, anyhow. Not to plague you; I'm aware my sudden appearance can't have been a pleasant surprise, given the trouble you took to make sure you'd never need to have anything to do with me again. I'll be elsewhere, keeping myself busy. I'm good at that. But if he shows signs of magic, anything, I need to know. You'll need to send for me then. For his sake, if not for yours, so I can teach him how not to kill anything unless he means it. An untrained hedge wizard is a hazard to everyone, most of all himself. Please, believe me when I say this is important. You can't learn this stuff unguided from books alone, though I'll write ... something ... if there's no other recourse. A book's better than nothing."

And that thought makes him angry all over again. This time he's really angry with her and not just with himself. She's an apostate's daughter and an apostate's sister. She knows the risks. How could she be so selfish? "I knew I wasn't your favorite person in the universe," he says tautly, "but do you really despise me so much you'd risk our child's life to be free of me? With the lineage he has, with the likelihood he'll be a seriously powerful mage? Why did you do this, Hawke? How could you?"

[questionablewit]

Hawke sighs, looking down at the top of Malcolm's head. He has his eyes closed, concentrating fully on the task at hand. "It was a matter of weighing danger against danger," she says. "It wasn't to get away from you, not exactly. It was to escape certain possibilities, which won't apply out here, or at least are less likely to apply." She adjusts her arms, gets one free so she can brush fingers against soft baby-hair.

"Think about the station. It's huge, it's populated, it's a city that moves through the Void, but for all that, it's a cage. Worse, one with a great big target painted on it. Living in that neither-here-nor-there place just on the outskirts of war was tolerable when it was just me. It wasn't once I knew there was more than me to consider." She smiles down at her son; even after this much time it's still tinged with a bit of faint wonder, in addition to the other emotions there. There is no doubt that Hawke loves this child, with every atom of her being. "This is my priority now, right here. Doing the best I can for this little one. Magic may be a problem in time, and one I don't intend to ignore, but it wasn't the first problem.

"As for why I didn't tell you..." Another pause, another deep breath. "The war is your passion, Anders. It became your cause as soon as you arrived. And that's fine, I don't blame you for that at all, it's a war worth fighting. But I'm done with war. I don't have any heart left to offer that fight, no matter how worthy it is. Think less of me for that if you will, but I can't change it. I did try. There might come a day when Malcolm's part of that war, or another war, and I'll do everything I can to make sure he's prepared for it, but it will be his choice." Her gaze turns to steel. "What I won't allow, ever, is for him to be used unwittingly as a tool for war himself, the way you used me. You can't tell me it wouldn't have been a possibility, in the right--or wrong--circumstances, if the situation was dire enough. That's why I left. Not to get away from you, but to take him as far away from the battleground and those sorts of choices as I could go. He's my first priority, must be, and I know he can't be yours. Just as I never could be, no matter how much we wished otherwise. I'm surprised you were able to get away from the war long enough to come looking for me, to be honest."

Her gaze flickers up to meet his. "This wasn't some sort of sadistic test, before you wonder. You've always told me you couldn't offer me a normal life. It followed that you couldn't offer him one."

She looks back down, and her voice is very quiet as she finishes. "But I've never despised you. Not for a minute."

[birdhousesoul]

"That's a far stretch, Hawke." He doesn't raise his voice. No need. Each word is soft and sharp. "I may be an unscrupulous man. I may plan badly. But even I am hardly likely to pack our son's nappies full of gaatlok. If your intent was to make him resent me as much as you do, so that if I ever did find him he'd deplore any cause I stood for, then I suppose your choices could make a twisted sort of sense. It doesn't seem your style, and yet I can't think of a logical reason you'd have found it more expedient, more practical, to take all the steps it must have taken, flee into this forsaken wilderness, start over with nothing, than to face me and tell me what in the Void we'd managed to do. I would have been afraid, yes. You're right that a station at war is no place for an infant. It's why I knew I never could have a family. I'd always be at war. You should have told me anyhow, because it would be right. And who do you think I was fighting for, in the first place? Mages who couldn't have children for fear of the fate they'd be consigning them to. Mages who did have children, only for the Templars to tear them away. Mage children born outside the Circle, stolen from their families and put in a bloody prison. I was fighting for him." He stares at their son, as though he's seeing a mirage, something he wants desperately and knows he'll never reach. "I wouldn't have been happy, if you told me, no. But I would have been glad."

[questionablewit]

Hawke closes her eyes, pained; Malcolm finishes his meal, and perhaps he senses her feelings or hears the sharpness in his father's voice, or perhaps it's just wind. Regardless, he makes obvious sounds of discomfort, and she places him over her shoulder, rubbing his back gently. "I know you were. I'm putting this badly. But you were fighting for me once too, for us, for mages to be able to fall in love without fear of being torn apart. It didn't stop you from using me and us, because it was necessary in your eyes in order to give that freedom to everyone else. I don't resent you, Anders, whatever you might think, and I don't intend to accuse you. But how could I have been sure it would never happen again, unless I left the battleground? You've always been able to put the greater good above the personal. I don't do that. A flaw in me, perhaps, but not one I want to change, selfish as it is. And I had to be sure, once it wasn't just me I was risking." It's always been one of her flaws. The greater good would have given Isabela to the Qunari, would have strapped Merrill to a chair until she swore to give up blood magic, would have executed Anders, would have a done lot of things that Hawke didn't do. But then, Hawke doesn't have Anders' conviction that she can recognize what the greater good is, and she knows it. She just does what she can, always.

"It wasn't just you. It wasn't even mostly you. I wanted out of the whole war, something I couldn't imagine you understanding or respecting. To you, my coming out here seems like running from something and into nothing, clearly. To me it's the other way around, always was. You were the only thing it hurt me to leave about that place. To you, this might be a forsaken wilderness; to me it's freedom."

Malcolm coughs, and she halts this line of thought for a moment, making soothing noises, nuzzling him and adjusting his position before she resumes.

"I wasn't running from you, Anders. I know what it looks like. I should have told you. I've regretted not telling you, for what little that's worth. You deserved to know. I don't know what I was afraid of. That you would try to stop me leaving, perhaps, or treat me as a traitor. Or that I might ask you to come with me and be refused." She looks up at him, entirely serious. "And the very fact that you are here shows how badly I misjudged you in that respect. I'm sorry. None of it is an excuse, I know, and I can't make it up to you."

[birdhousesoul]

Anders listens. That's all he can do. He's tired. He's spent months looking for her, and he's found her, and the quest is over, taking all its momentum and force and nervous energy. What to do when the quest ends? He's got what he came for: he knows why she left, and knows she's not unwell or in danger. To all appearances she's thriving.

"All this because you wanted freedom. Well, you certainly have it. I didn't come here to talk you into going anywhere or doing anything, and I'm aware that if I'd harbored any such intentions, I'd have been a worse fool than I am. I'll do what I can for Teo, and I'll be on my way. When I'm someplace I expect to stay longer than it would take for a message to reach me, I'll send word. Only promise you'll contact me at once if there's need. Don't be too proud. A mage child can't control his magic. You don't want him striking down the neighbors with lightning, or setting fire to someone's roof. He'll be the most distressed of all, because he won't have meant to do it, may not even understand how it happened. If you love him, you'll send for me when it's time."

[questionablewit]

"You, of all people, can't begrudge a need for freedom." Her voice is mild, even if the words aren't. She doesn't need to say more.

I'll do what I can for Teo, and I'll be on my way. Despite the open longing in his eyes as he looks at Malcolm, despite the fact that he let the station leave him behind on a planet he couldn't even be certain she was still on, all to look for her.

A hard thing Hawke has had to learn and adjust to about Anders over the years: he doesn't ask for things. His life hasn't taught him that asking is an option. You can't ask for things in the Circle, except the smallest minutae of day to day life. Nothing important, none of the things that make life worth living. If Anders sees what he wants as possible, he'll take steps, he'll fight for it, but if not he'll treat it as already denied to him, the battle lost before the combatants have stepped onto the field. It can feel like a rejection, and she's not always good at remembering it isn't, not exactly. And in this case there's good reason for his assumptions, given her actions; she recognizes that. Such isn't always the case.

He won't ask, never does. But she can offer. She hasn't pride to lose, not where he's concerned. There's far too much water under the bridge between them for pride to be a factor.

Hawke looks at Anders, over Malcolm's head. "There's space for you here, if you want it. In my life, in his. If you want to stay, you can stay. If you need to go, it'll be here for you to return to, no matter how long a time that is. Even if you can't forgive me for leaving, I'd rather you were nearby, given the choice. I'd rather Malcolm was able to know his father as his father, not just as someone I summon to teach him, years from now. He deserves more than that, and so do you."

She bites at the inside of her lip. "I can't say I was wrong to leave. But I should have told you the truth of it, asked you to come with me. Let me ask now? I wanted freedom, yes. But it was never you I wanted to be free of." Words he's said to her, in the past. Funny how old sins echo. "If it's too late for that, if I've broken things beyond any mending, so be it. Even so, there's a place for you here if you ever want to claim it. That won't change."

Malcolm, who clearly has no sense of the gravity of the conversation, chooses this moment to get bored with being balanced over his mother's shoulder and makes a grab for her hair, pulling it hard. Hawke winces, attention distracted as she reaches up to pry his fingers loose. "You certainly remind me why I used to keep my hair short, squirt," she mutters, shifting him back around to her front. He keeps tight hold of her thumb and gurgles, trying to look around the room. "Also, you have no sense of timing."

[birdhousesoul]

He'd like to believe it, and at the same time, he's almost insulted by the notion he should be expected to believe it. "Right," he says flatly. "You didn't want freedom from me. And you went to such lengths to conceal your whereabouts why, then, exactly? I know: it's because the Resistance takes such care to force its former members into co-operation. Moonshine would've come after you with bloodhounds, I'm sure, on the orders of the Acting Temporary Commander with Immediately Recallable Authority Given Provisional Trust." He pronounces each word of the title with crisp precision. The anger's draining out of him, and there's only weariness left. "I'm sorry. I can't do what you want. I can't live with you and raise a child with you and be your old friend whom you fled but now you're quite happy to have around the place."

[questionablewit]

"Moonshine, no. Sheeana, possibly. Anna, possibly. Zevran, possibly. The Fay'lia, very possibly." She rubs her forehead. "I set several leads suggesting I'd hopped planets particularly for them. I really didn't want a representative to show up and ask me for information about the station's capabilities. By now hopefully they'll have decided anything I know is too out of date, and leave me alone."

That's not the point, and she's evading the issue. She takes a long, ragged breath. "I didn't say it'd be easy for me either, just that I wanted to try. But if you can't, then you can't. I know what that one feels like." Faint hope, quickly extinguished, and she's surprised how much it hurts for something that not an hour ago wasn't even an option. "I couldn't, there. Couldn't anything. I say I wasn't running from you because I know I was running from myself, all the time I spent on that station I was running from myself, from who I'd turned into. Someone I couldn't stand being."

She's holding Malcolm with only one practiced, careless arm now; the other is free to rest by her side, dig fingers into the bearskin. "How can I explain? I can't. You and the war and my own half-crazed despair, it was all bound together. I had to get away from everything before I could even start to sort it out. You had a cause to fill your life, you didn't need me. I honestly thought that, it's what I'd learned from our last night in Kirkwall. One thing I learned. And if I told you what I planned--" She laughs, without humor. "If I'd just told you I was leaving, without bringing up Malcolm, you would have let me go, wouldn't have argued, would have thought it just. You'd made that clear more than once. I was your penance, and the weight of it was more than I could stand. So you did need me, in a way, to be something you couldn't have. I did run from that. I couldn't fill that role for you anymore, couldn't even find words for it until I was gone."

She clutches Malcolm close for a moment, then puts him back down in the cradle. He moues, but finds something to distract himself, a dust-mote in the air. Teo, who's been half-dozing next to the cradle during all of this, lifts his head and places it on the cradle's edge; Malcolm kicks a foot up, trying to reach for the dog's head and missing.

"I can ask...what I asked, now, because things aren't as they were. Not just Malcolm. Because I've had that time and distance to recover myself. Because you were able to come here, which I didn't think you'd be able to let yourself do, for so many reasons. If I could have said all this before, known myself and you well enough to say it before, I would have. I'm sorry, love. I wish things had happened differently, I wish I'd done things differently, been stronger, chosen better. Since I didn't, this is what we have to work with." Hawke makes herself look at him. It isn't easy. "What can I give you, that you'll accept from me?"

[birdhousesoul]

"Actually, by running, you made yourself more thoroughly something I couldn't have than you'd ever been on the station," Anders points out. "You did a fine job of that, but then, you've always had a way of getting things done. I'll say this much: you've set us on level ground, you've evened it out nicely. You couldn't trust me then, and now I can't trust you."

He stands, more slowly than he'd like, muscles sore and knees protesting. Too long in one place and now he's stiff. "I can't leave my own child. That has nothing to do with what I want or don't want, or what you think I should want. When you decide you want to be rid of me again, you'll have all that work to do over, laying false trails to follow. Until then, I need to be where Malcolm is. But not in your house, Hawke. Don't ask that of me. I'm done with penance now."

[questionablewit]

Hawke could point out the difference, which for her is key: this way she was an active participant, as opposed to an object he used for his own suffering. But there's been enough, and more than enough. There was a time when the statement I can't trust you would have been one of the worst possible condemnations; now she nods, accepts it.

"If you want to stay in the village it's safe enough, I'm not down there very often. If that's too near, then...where you wish. But if you ever want to see him, you can. With or without me around." That's a gesture of good faith, if he wishes to accept it, that she'll trust him alone with their child.

Hawke gets to her knees and picks Malcolm up again, juggling him a bit and holding him so they're face to face. He spits up a bubble, making nonsense sounds. "You haven't been properly introduced yet, you know. It's all been one way. Malcolm, this is your father. I've told you about him, and now you can meet him for yourself."

She rests her forehead briefly against her son's, speaking quietly. "He's a good man, one of the best I've ever known. For all the problems we've had, I've always thought that, even though we don't always agree on things. And I love him very much, even if it doesn't seem that way. It's important you know this, that you were born from love, and nothing else." She keeps her eyes closed. "It's something you'll have to learn when you're older, one of the worst lessons the world has, that it's possible to love someone very much and still hurt them, that love isn't always enough. That's something I hope you're spared for a long time. But nevermind that just now. He's here, and I promise he'll love you as much as I do. You should get to know him. He's worth knowing."

She kisses Malcolm's forehead, then holds him out to Anders, if Anders wants to take him again.

[birdhousesoul]

He could point out the inconsistency — interesting that she'll trust him alone with their child now, when she's declared she had to flee in order to prevent him from somehow involving their child in his war: what I won't allow, ever, is for him to be used unwittingly as a tool for war himself, the way you used me — but it wouldn't give Anders any satisfaction. She's holding out the baby to him, and he's not going to refuse.

He takes Malcolm in his arms and turns him to rest the baby's head on his shoulder, half-expecting protest. If the child takes after Anders at all, he ought to be yowling, unhappy to be taken from his mother. That doesn't happen. Anders instinctively sways a little, a soothing motion.

"It's not usual for Wardens to have children, you know. I always thought it highly improbable. I knew it couldn't be impossible, otherwise there wouldn't be much point in letting a Warden be king of Ferelden when he's expected to provide an heir and all." Fereldan politics are the most irrelevant thing in the world just now, and he has to chuckle at himself, a tired and anemic sort of chuckle, not much joy in it but no bitterness at least. "This ... I'm not sure I've conveyed just how much of a shock this is, for me. I didn't expect anything remotely like this. I wasn't sure what to expect, looking for you, but it wasn't this. It will take some time to get used to this. And to get used to the idea of staying on this planet more permanently, which I'll admit I hadn't planned to do."

She would have to choose the closest equivalent of the blighted Anderfels, wouldn't she?

"Just ... give me time. He's young enough yet, he won't remember anything of this first year or so. By the time he's old enough to understand people much, things ought to be friendlier between us, you and I. More civil, anyhow. I don't intend to make him suffer for his parents' mistakes."

[questionablewit]

For Hawke, the inconsistency isn't there. She can trust Anders with Malcolm here, because the war isn't here; similarly, she can say she didn't leave false trails to keep him away because she didn't think he'd be one of the ones who'd come looking, and that the reasons she left are more myriad and complicated than just that one possibility (never a certitude even in her head, but the possibility was enough), though it was the one that frightened her the most. All things she'll need to try and unpack later if he'll allow her, on some other day, though she's aware it still may not help.

For now, Hawke just nods. "I can do that." She smiles, not without irony. "Time is one thing I have a lot of, here. It's taken some getting used to." She bites her lip a bit, and if she's steeling herself, she tries not to let it show. "I have some traps set up I should go check, if you want some time with him just now."