1Note: Many thanks to Aliax, who ended up helping a lot despite my uncanny talent for pushing his buttons. Ness Frost/Lazy8 published a story that implied this chapter's newcomers to be dead in this universe on Archive Of Our Own, so their mere presence can be considered part of my personal spin on the story.
Warning: Mention of domestic abuse and pregnancy, including mention of miscarriages and of my idea of Emil's position on getting pregnant. I also mention cannibalism rumors concerning the mountain people that popped up in one of the other stories. I also prefer informing readers that I was in the middle of working on an earlier version of this when Tuuri died and that Aliax was no longer able to help when I got in the mood to pick it up again, so there may be mistakes and trans triggers I'm not aware of. I'm still hoping there are fewer mistakes than last time. Though since Emil faked his death, I consider that the story hae and Lalli usually tell people about their first meeting has Emil and his former female identity be different physical people. It's intended to hide the connection between Emil and "Mary Västerström", not any aspect of Emil's transidentity.
Woodlanders
Once a decade, one of the settlements in their native area would be brutally lost to an overwhelming troll attack. People believed that any survivors of a settlement lost in such a way would attract the next major attack on any settlement that took them in. The attitude towards survivors hence ranged from as little help as one could get away with to outright murder attempts. The counter to this had been to teach children to survive on their own as early as possible, and a simple instruction on what to do if you happened to be away from your home when it fell to the trolls: assume everyone not already nearby is dead, run, and stop only when you can no longer understand what people around you are saying. Tuuri had been the only one at Onni's side at the time. A couple months ago, the home they had found themselves after having to flee their native land had undergone an unusually violent troll attack. The number of dead and badly wounded had been quite low all things considered, but a newcomer to the town had blamed it on their presence. So, they had continued travelling further in the direction opposite to where their native woodlands were, and this time were tempted to not stop until they were sure nobody around had even heard of their home land.
They eventually travelled far enough that Tuuri had to learn a new language all over again, and as usual, was managing it much faster than Onni ever could. They came across farmland that seemed to get little enough trolls to not require an actual war frontline, but enough that one could earn food, bedding, clothing and whatever else the place's owner could afford to grant by guarding farms both from them and human bandits. But while Tuuri had had to learn how to fight like all the other children, she thrived the most among books, and for that she needed to live in the kind of place that would be able to accommodate this. As they were wondering which farm would look like it would offer good shelter for the night, they noticed signs of a farm in the direction they were walking towards being under attack, and run towards it to help. This was part of the instructions, as well. Not only it gave Woodlanders a good name among people they ran into, but they also knew all too well that is was sometimes the only way to get decent treatment from their hosts. And any host that would still seem reluctant to take them in after they had helped defend their farm would be a definite red flag, and a sign the outside of the house may actually be safer than the inside. Onni, Tuuri and the various farm guards held up long enough that the trolls were starting to get killed faster than they were coming in, which usually meant that they had turned a corner in the battle. But just as they were both noticing this, one of the men nearby collapsed right when a troll seemed to choose him as an opponent, and nobody was nearby enough to do something. So Onni intoned a whistle that was known to attract the attention of trolls, and was risky to use unless one had a battle partner ready to take care of the troll the second it started moving in the right direction. But his own whistle wasn't the only one that was been emitted, he could see it didn't come from Tuuri, and it had been far too similar to his own to not be from a fellow Woodlander. The troll chose to go towards Onni nonetheless, and Tuuri managed to kill it. But after this happened, it became really, really hard to convince his mind that looking for the other whistler could wait until after all the trolls he had attracted were dead, and the split attention eventually put him in a situation that forced him to block a blow going for his neck with his right arm, getting knocked over in the process. By that time, it was possible to spare people to get the wounded somewhere safe while those still able to fight were taking care of the last of the trolls and making sure that those already on the ground were dead.
Onni was bought into what seemed to be a male-only bathing room. He was stripped and washed. Someone came to stich his arm. People were telling him various things in the local language, but he could catch only about one word out of five. That meant that when someone actually asked him a question, he couldn't answer. His own memory failed him when he tried to remember what he was supposed to say to tell them that Tuuri could translate for him. Someone then said something that included a word sounding a lot like "Lalli", and left the room. The word brought memories of home back. The tears came before he could think of holding them back, which only made the person who had been stitching his arm worry. The man who had left earlier came back with someone else in tow. Onni quickly noticed the silver hair, yet the stature that was both too tall and too thin to be Tuuri. That solved the mystery of the second whistler, at least. The tears in his eyes kept him from making out the man's features. He heard the word "Onni?" being pronounced just as he dried his eyes. Onni looked up. It was impossible. He was supposed to be dead. Yet, both the face and the hairstyle were right. This was all he was able to register before the tears came back. The fact that Lalli had been called to translate took over. The questions were fairly easy to handle and once they were finished, Onni was put in a fresh set of clothes, then led out of the bathing room into a hallway. Just as he wondered why Lalli wasn't coming with him, Onni realized Lalli had been in gore-covered clothes all along and that the other men were probably not going to let him back out of a room intended for clean-up looking like that.
The man who led Onni out took him out of the small hallway into what seemed to be a dining room and made him sit on a long bench, with his back leaning on the edge of a table that was just as long. He quickly realized that Tuuri was right next to him, talking with a still gore-covered blonde-haired guard. The guard in question, who was a little taller than Tuuri, noticed Onni joining them before Tuuri did. He – Onni had figured out this country didn't let its women fight – pointed his chin towards Onni and said something. Tuuri turned toward Onni, asked after his arm, showed him her own minor wounds that had been tended to, and seemed about to introduce the guard she'd been speaking with when a woman yelled something that prompted that guard to leave the bench with what Onni guessed to be a brief farewell and walk towards the hallway leading to the bathing room. Onni cut to the chase:
-Lalli is here.
-I know. He apparently came here with the man I was just talking with. He told me that he met Lalli on a troll frontline. They got in trouble with the wrong people at some point, so they left, lived in the mountains for some time, then came here. All he ever got from Lalli on how he ended up on that frontline in the first place is that he just travelled there from home and that it was a very long trip. I didn't ask him what this place is yet, but there doesn't seem to be a central family who would be hiring the other people as hands and guards. Actually, is seems to be mostly mothers with a single child. Some of them seem to have fathers, but at least half are very obviously not the child's actual father.
If Tuuri observations were correct, this place went against several of this country's unspoken rules. One of those rules was that "ran off with a soldier" applied to a yet-to-be-married daughter almost always was a euphemism for "she's probably dead by now". A couple of unfortunate encounters had proven that assumption right. Tuuri had also heard of, and told Onni about, mountain barbarians who captured women, enslaved them and made them produce baby after baby so they could eat the children. Pregnant young women nobody would miss sounded like the perfect targets for them. The potential danger had worried Onni enough that he had made Tuuri cut her hair, even though her travel clothes were already masculine by the country's standards. This was the first time they ran into something that looked like it could be a place where such young women were actually cared for. They still agreed they would stay for now, but watch this place closely. If it turned out to be into dangerous or illegal activities, they would leave and take Lalli with them.
A black-haired woman in her late twenties wearing a long ponytail, wrapped in an apron that belonged to a castle's maid rather than a farm worker, came to speak to Tuuri. She was holding a brow-haired little girl that looked about one year old in her arms. After a few words exchanged, she put the little girl on Tuuri's lap, said something in which Onni caught Lalli's name that made Tuuri widen her eyes, and left.
-The woman's name in Cynthia. She's in charge of the farm. She told me the place is a home for unmarried mothers abandoned by their child's father.
-This is good to know. Why did she give you this little girl?
-According to Cynthia, there has been a few unfortunate cases of mothers dying and leaving their child behind. She said this little girl's mother died a few months ago. Lalli and his friend – his name is Emil apparently – took her in their care when it happened.
This complicated their plans greatly. From what they knew, communities tended hold onto their children quite tightly. If this place turned out to be more than it claimed in a bad way and Lalli had grown attached to that little girl, it was going to be hard to take him away. Lalli used to get easily tricked by children his own age when they were younger and… Onni suddenly fully realized that he was thinking all this because Lalli had turned out to not be dead just a few minutes ago and was currently in the bathing room he had just left, more than a decade after he and Tuuri had mourned him. The tears came flowing out all over again.
As if on cue, Lalli came to sit on the free bench space next to Onni, on his haunches a usual, dressed in clean, but oversized clothes. The little girl wiggled herself out of Tuuri's arms, crawled across Onni's lap and wrestled herself in the little remaining space between Lalli's legs and the rest of his body. Lalli stroked the little girls' hair, then spoke:
-Where were you?
Onni and Tuuri took turns explaining, then asked about the part of his own story that had happened before he had met Emil. As Lalli reached the point where he arrived at the castle on the cliffs, Tuuri remembered that Emil had mentioned them having to leave because of "trouble with the wrong people" and asked for more details about that as well.
-Ah, that. The castle healer took in wounded. I got badly hurt and ended up there. I became friends with the lord's niece, but I had to leave after I got better. I would visit her sometimes after that. But she ran away from the castle one evening. A troll got her. I knew people would blame me for it if I stayed, so I left and Emil came with me.
From the little he knew of this country, Onni could tell that Lalli had done something he shouldn't have, without quite realizing it as usual. But part of it had really not been his fault, and in the end, he had quite possibly made his first friend ever, only to have her die. Tuuri was the first to react:
-I'm sorry, Lalli.
-You don't need to be. I have Emil and Janine now.
This reminded Onni that still didn't trust this Emil to not have ulterior motives concerning Lalli.
-I guess this is how the two of you ended up hiding in the mountains. How did you end up here?
Emil choose that time to come sit next to Lalli, now all cleaned up and in new clothes himself. Lalli placed his hand on the other man's shoulder:
-Some people started bothering him for a stupid reason and our friend from the mountains was looking for people to guard this farm, so we said we would do it. Just so you know, I tried to teach him our language, but he doesn't understand much and can speak even less.
Onni knew he had been right to be wary of this Emil guy:
-You mean a mountain barbarian? You mean you two are involved with one of them?
Onni realized a very possible dark secret for this place the second he finished his sentence. A trap masquerading as a refuge, that Lalli and that so-called friend of his were involved in. Enough residents for it to seem safe to people who didn't know better. His thoughts were interrupted by Emil stifling a laugh.
By the time dinner was served, both Onni and Tuuri had been convinced that most of what they had heard about the mountain alleged barbarians had been rumors caused by relatively limited contact between them and people from the plains, part of which was caused by the rumors themselves. However, Onni still considered it possible for Emil to be taking advantage of Lalli in some way. The fact that he turned out to be married to Lalli per mountain people traditions only made Onni's suspicions worse. While Lalli knew trolls, some wild animals and even some people were dangerous, it was still possible for him to be tricked. Over the course of the meal, Lalli explained that ever since the head wound for which he had been treated at the castle on the cliffs, he tended to have to stay in bed for a couple days after fights that lasted too long. Emil could care for him on his own, but Onni and Tuuri could help by watching their daughter during that time. Tuuri immediately accepted, but Onni only got more cautious. If Emil was going to watch Lalli for the next couple days, he was going to watch Emil.
Tuuri convinced Onni to at least sleep for the first night, pointing out that if Lalli did turn out to need their help, Onni should at least rest enough to let his arm recover at little before providing it. However, as they went upstairs to retire in their small guest room for the night with Janine, he and Tuuri saw two women, neither of whom were Cynthia, in the hallway. They seemed to be arguing with Emil through a closed door. Just a few moments after they noticed the scene, the two women noticed Onni and Tuuri's presence, darted towards them, and tried to tell them something in the local tongue. Tuuri translated for Onni:
-Apparently, last time Emil watched Lalli while he had to stay in bed, he came out of it with a few scratches and a black eye. When they asked if it was from Lalli, he told them he didn't do it on purpose. Emil was just refusing to have one of them stay in the room for tonight. Onni, maybe…
So someone else was suspecting that something wasn't quite right between Emil and Lalli. These two suspected Lalli to be the one in the wrong and Emil to be the victim, but that didn't mean they couldn't work out an arrangement. Fortunately, both of them quickly understood that that all three of them had interest in standing guard in front of the door and worked out shifts, the first of which was taken by Sofia, the one with darker hair.
Emil couldn't exactly blame Sofia and Kaja for being worried. He knew he would be if he were in their shoes, and because of this, understood their refusal to believe him when he said that Lalli didn't injure him on purpose. Both of them had been beaten by their child's father. Of the two, only Sofia had ever gotten to be a mother to her own child. Kaja was one of the reasons Emil had crossed a bad miscarriage out of the list of stories he could tell to people knew about his body, but seemed unlikely to take "I don't want to get pregnant" as an acceptable answer. Kaja was now raising one of the children which had been orphaned almost as soon as they had been born. She and Sofia had figured out how crazy it was to tolerate certain behaviors from men and had decided to make sure that, at least in this farm, the women weren't abused by the men in any way, especially if the two were actually courting or about to get married. When it came to him and Lalli, they had, of course, picked him to watch after. But he didn't want Lalli to risk hurting anyone else then him. All Emil could do was slip in the bed, snuggle next to him, keep his hand on his head, in a position from which he could both cover his closed eyes and stroke his hair, whatever felt right if he started having violent nightmares. For the next two nights and two days, it was going to be impossible to wake him up.
xxxx
The first night had fortunately been peaceful enough to let Emil actually get a little sleep. Sofia had been the one pushing the breakfast tray into the room in the morning and pulling it back out when he had finished eating, so Emil had had every reason to assume she was the one guarding the door when Lalli got a nightmare that couldn't be tamed, and would only go away if he let it happen. He could have definitely done without Onni turning out to be the one sitting right outside the door when Lalli started screaming. He was almost surprised to get a chance to step away from Lalli and show Onni that he wasn't hurting him. But that came with a problem of its own. When he let the nightmares happen due to not being able to tame them, he also had to make sure Lalli didn't hurt himself while fighting opponents that weren't actually there, like the time during which he was recovering from the original injury. The key word in the previous statement was himself. If some people thought Lalli was crazy for having married him, he was probably a little crazy also for brushing off involuntary injuries that looked bad enough to get Sofia and Kaja worried, about as often as Lalli had to help fighting off a large wave of trolls. Other people had tried various things to stop Lalli's nightmares before, but none had worked. Emil wasn't sure how he was supposed to explain all of this to Onni if Lalli hadn't considered it necessary to do so while he still could. Onni was currently trying to wake Lalli up, and judging by his expression, was running out of ideas and getting worried. The only idea Emil got was to gently come close to the bed and try stroking Lalli's hair again, on the off-chance it would work; doing that for the more violent nightmares had consistently been a lost cause. Emil let out a deep sigh of relief and a few tears when it did work, and decided that it was a rare enough occasion to drop a kiss on Lalli's forehead, completely ignoring Onni's wide-eyed stare. However, when someone in the room finally said something, the voice was female:
-What just happened in here?
Tuuri was in the doorway and he could guess part of Kaja's face, half-hidden by the doorframe.
xxxx
On the second day of Lalli's recovery, the other, more silent question that she and Onni had been asking themselves about Emil had turned out to have a positive answer. They found out that it was one of the many things that weren't supposed to exist in this country, which usually meant it was best to hide it and only tell people under certain conditions. Emil himself had had to leave his family to live as a man, and admitted to be a little scared to be found out each time he was neither in the farm nor in the mountains. Lalli hadn't been able to tell him much about how people in his situation were treated in their native woodlands. Their home settlement had fallen before Lalli had been told about this particular subject, but he somehow still had a memory of one of their neighbors who'd been in the exact opposite situation from Emil and had told him about her. Because of that, Tuuri and Emil had spent at least two hours on the topic while on the look-out for Lalli getting nightmares. Onni was currently watching Janine in another room. Tuuri found out the mountain people were overall completely fine with situations like Emil's as well, which made her curious to know why he and Lalli had left the mountain compound to move back to the plains.
-Ah, that. There was a group of people in the village who considered that Sigrun wasn't doing enough, by only helping the women she stumbled onto during her adventures. They wanted to try a different method, and I thought I could lend them my help. They didn't want it, and it could have stayed there. But one of them got the idea that I wasn't actually who I am and actually pretending as an easy way out of the downsides of living as a woman. She started looking for "proof" in many things I did, and using what I told her to defend myself against me. Other people tried to talk with her as well, but nothing they would tell her would work because she was just that convinced to be right. This place happened to be just about to open at the time, and had the advantage of letting us help women from the plains all while having us move away from the village.
He petted Lalli's hair:
-Convincing that woman has been about as hopeless as getting him rid of those nightmares.
A well-dressed auburn-haired young man, who somehow managed to be even shorter than Emil despite apparently being grown up, barged into the room:
-Hey, Lalli, I really, really need… Ah, you're asleep. Emil, could you please wake him up?
Emil sighed:
-Hi Xander. No, not before tomorrow, at least. Can it wait until then?
-No, because I had to beg Father to let me come here to get Lalli at all. He said that if I didn't come back with a translator, he was going to punish the two silver-haired children we caught stealing from the castle's stores without hearing their side of the story.
Xander noticed Tuuri's presence:
-Oh, hi. Hey, do you speak our language by any chance?
Onni and Tuuri went to the local castle, of which the lord was Xander's father. The children turned out to be Woodlanders indeed, and to have not realized they were not supposed to take the food. The older sister apologized, and offered to stay working in the castle if she and her little brother could get food and a place to sleep. Xander's father happened to have a couple of servants who were starting to get too old to do all their work. He also knew another lord who could use Tuuri's translation services. That other lord knew yet another lord who could use their help. Onni and Tuuri ended up spending weeks away from the farm in which Lalli was settled, then the weeks turned into months. Fate eventually brought them to the castle on the cliffs, where Lalli had been treated for his bad head wound. They thanked the local lord for having taken in Lalli among the wounded, and he used the fact that they had seen Lalli recently to ask them about rumors that his niece hadn't actually been killed by a troll, but run off with him. They were able to sincerely tell them that they had been told the story of his niece being eaten by a troll after running away as well. To thank them for their help with his own Woodlander-related issue, he let them spend the night in one of the guest rooms. Fortunately, this was currently looking like their last stop, so they decided to start trying to head back to the farm the next day. The lord's wife and three children all dropped by at various points of the evening, more out of curiosity of meeting a woodlander who could speak their language than anything else. Such a thing had happened in every single castle they had stayed in so far, so they were used to it. But each visit had given them a strange hunch, as if they were missing something that was right under their noses. They both figured it out about half and hour after the lord's only daughter, the last of their four visitors, left the room. They briefly considered it could be a set of coincidences, but the family resemblance was one too many. The stayed in a daze for the better part of the evening after they realized what, exactly Lalli and Emil had done. They also knew it was their secret to keep.
