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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[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."