_hagar (_hagar) wrote in nomadspast, @ 2013-02-23 18:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | complete, hagar, orion |
Who: Hagar and Alice
Where: En route to the Trading Post
Why: First meetings
When: Sometime in September
Rating: PG
Status: Complete
The cart was getting awkward to pull along as the ruts in the road deepened, and Alice adjusted her grip on the handles as she pulled it out of a depression in the earth to tug it further. She was on the way to the trading post that morning, wanting to trade some rabbit and deer meat for fresh milk and some extra vegetables. It was at times like these she wished she’d been able to go through with her plans to have a farm of her own, but she made do with what she had.
The brunette looked up at the cloudless blue sky, figured it was about ten o clock. It would probably take her another hour to get to the post, then a couple of hours to get back to her place. At least she’d packed lunch. And she’d always been in shape for walking, which made the trek not such a total chore.
Picking her way past another rut, Alice muttered under her breath, then yanked the cart out of the groove in the trail. Next time she’d just bring a backpack instead of the cart. That would make traveling easier and not such a bitch.
The squeak of wheels on hard-packed dirt alone might not have reached Hagar's ears, but like a doe in the depths of the forest, she couldn't help notice to the grunting and groaning that accompanied the ruckus. She perked up, on her guard before she had a reason to be, simply out of habit. Her eyes were not as keen as a hunter's, but then she didn't make her living sighting prey in the undergrowth. What she did spy was a figure struggling uphill with a heavy cart, narrow shoulders hunched with effort. Impossible to tell the sex from a distance and shorn hair was no indication. Caution was the best approach, regardless.
And yet... Hagar darted a glance back over her shoulder towards the port where, unseen, her people were likely just now stumbling from their beds. Nights on the water were always busy, full of revelry and brawling. The stillness in her wake was almost eerie. For a moment, Hagar contemplated tracking back into more familiar territory. She could visit the trading post later, when more of her kind would be on the high roads and she wouldn't attract so much attention.
On the other hand, delays would only eat into her working hours. Better to bite the bullet, Hagar told herself, and pray no trouble came of it. She shifted the frayed strap of her satchel to one shoulder, the better to remove it if there was need. Her path took her to the fork in the road just as the other traveler reached the crossing. "That's some load you're packing," Hagar called out, a preemptive strike. The unmistakable scent of fresh blood rose from the cart and would have turned her stomach had she not spent two winters surviving on dug roots and the mercy of strangers. "Fancy a hand?" she offered. The hunter could take that as he pleased: it was an proposal candidly made.
The voice had Alice turning her head almost before she was aware of it, and her uncut bangs were blown away from her face by the breeze that suddenly gusted past. She really needed to get them trimmed, but between one thing and another she never got around to it. There were certainly more important things in this new world than haircuts.
It was a woman, and the hunter straightened her posture as she brought the cart to a halt near her left flank. She wasn’t armed except for the knife she used for skinning her kills, but a woman alone couldn’t mean her any harm, could she? This was one of those times when her androgynous features could pay off to protect her. At least until she opened her mouth.
“You wouldn’t mind?” she asked in a voice that was low and slightly rusty from disuse. She seldom talked to people anymore unless she was trading with them or engaged in a hunt and telling them for the last time not to move so loudly. Why waste words when a grunt or a movement of her hands would suffice? So she wasn’t known for her conversational skills.
“I’m only going as far as the post, but this damned road is arguing with the wheels of the cart every step of the way. Of all the things I miss before the Pulse, proper paving is one of them.”
Hagar shook her head. "Proper paving's the least of them, far as I'm concerned." Of all the things she'd anticipated—a cold shoulder, the disdain of the celibate, the eager consent of interested parties—guileless acquiescence wasn't among them. She hadn't believed the traveler to be a woman, either, but that she could credit with far greater ease.
A few brave female souls seemed to have elected to live alone after the Pulse, for reasons that concerned no one but them. Hagar neither sneered nor envied their choice.
"You'd have an easier task of it with a barrow," she said, rucking up the sleeves of her faded blue dress as she neared the young woman and her cart. "Or a mule. I hear the Oma got a couple they may be selling." The rumor had reached her through her daughter, who had taken to spending a little too much time on dry land. "—of course, if you're only passing through," Hagar mused, "could be there's no point in bothering with livestock." The question of whether or not the young woman intended to stick around in Cascade Locks couldn't have been more veiled: habit encouraged the ambiguity, for more than a few clients took poorly to being reminded they were due a fee.
“I’ve got no place to keep a mule, and I don’t trust horses,” Alice answered, immediately looking down at her shoes as the woman came closer. “They’re beautiful creatures, but they’re skittish under bad conditions and they bite. I can usually manage on my own, but I’m just having a little trouble with things today.”
The dress the other brunette was wearing was old, but she hadn’t missed the delicacy of her features or the careful way she carried herself. She forced herself to look up, her angular jaw setting with determination. It was just one woman.
“On your way somewhere? I’m not keepin’ you, am I?”
That wasn't a yes or a no, but as vagueness went, the girl seemed to be more anxious at the company of humans than four-legged creatures.
Hagar's lips tipped up at the corners. "What important engagements might a woman like me have to keep? You're all right, sweet cheeks. Let's get you to the trading post before your catch draws the wild cats from the brush. It's on my way anyhow." It was her destination, in point of fact, but Hagar saw no reason to tell her business to strangers—a lesson dearly learned over the course of many years.
"Don't think I've seen you 'round these parts before," she mused. "I'd have remembered." Compliments were another tool of her trade and she wielded them like arrows: pointy end first. "I'm Hagar, by the by. D'you have a name?"
“Alice. But you can call me Orion.” She’d read a lot of Greek mythology as a kid, and the tragic story of the hunter had struck her fancy. Now that she was an adult, it felt right somehow to take the name for herself. If she was to be a new creature in these hard times, she might as well go all the way with it.
Up close, she realized that Hagar had to be at least fifteen years older than she was, possibly more, the presence of faint lines around her eyes giving her age away, but she was still a knockout. Alice had always envied pretty girls when she was younger. In the moment of Now, the presence of someone so lovely was turning her stomach into one big knot. Stop it. She looked down at the ground again, grabbed one of the cart’s handles as if it were a lifeline.
“I’m sure the two of us together can manage it, probably in less time, too.”
"Ah, because you've got somewhere to be, do you?" Hagar pressed, a dash of mirth underpinning the query. "Best let's hurry along, then." And together they heaved, drawing the cart into motion once more.
From afar, the cumbersome burden had indeed looked heavier than it was when there were two bodies to tug upon the cart. The flies that buzzed over the fresh kill were another matter. Hagar shifted her hold upon the handles both to swat them from her face and in a vain attempt to avoid splinters if at all possible. Her companion seemed to have fallen silent the very minute they set off. A pity: what little Hagar had seen of her suggested a comely face and a fair complexion. There was no accounting for the clothes she wore, dark and shapeless as they were, yet old adages intimated they did not make the man—or woman, as the case might be.
"Alice's a pretty name," Hagar found herself saying some five minutes into their journey to the trading post. The road was meandering but easy enough to walk in daylight. A few fair voices rose from the distant fields: laborers toiling in the earth, or birds in the treetops, both were possible. "'Course, Orion's nothing to scoff at. Bit mannish, if you ask me." Which, of course, her companion had not. Hagar flashed a tight, rueful little smirk, feeling almost contrite. "Orion's a constellation, isn't it?"
“Orion’s the hunter,” the younger woman said, looking up at the sky where the stars would be twinkling down when night fell. “I track when it turns dusk by finding his left hand. That’s how I make my way back home.” She took one hand away from the cart’s grip, swatted at a fly that had landed on her shirt, then kept tugging on her burden.
“I’ve never seen you out in the woods,” she said to Hagar. “‘Course, it’s kinda hard to hunt in a dress, so maybe you just tend to the cook fires and such. I don’t get to the other tribes’ camps very much, but I...I feel like I’d have seen you too.”
Was that too much? Her social skills had atrophied to the point that she wasn’t sure what sounded harmless and what didn’t, and she didn’t want the shorter woman to think she was...was what? Unnatural? There was nothing ‘unnatural’ about her. Yes, she was a little odd, but wasn’t everyone these days? Alice shook her head at herself. She needed to get out of her own head.
“What’s at the trading post of interest for you?”
Hagar's shoulders rolled into a shrug. "Bolts of silk and casks of wine." Trifles, she meant but didn't say. It was usually quite a good sign if she managed to arouse a stranger's interest, never mind spur them to conversation. That she more often did it with her dress half undone and her hand working beneath the table was a different matter entirely.
A little patience and Alice—or rather, Orion, as she'd named herself—served up her answers almost readily. It would've been a stretch to call her talkative, but there was a brain inside that head of hers. She wasn't slow.
With the Pulse, more than a few folks had given up on sanity altogether.
"In truth, I've got a date with the Doc." Hagar liberated one hand from the cart to search blindly inside the satchel. "See this? It's a salve. Got honey and oil, I think, and some kind of weeds to make it nice and soothing... I'm thinkin' to make more but whenever I try my hand at alchemy, the finished product ends up a little... well, cockeyed. It's the case with my cooking, too." She could scrounge up a meal for her daughter if need be and often did, but she was no great cook. No one among the Lawu was ever chomping at the bit to share her table. "I'm memorable in other ways," Hagar said, trying lechery on for size. It fit her poorly.
"Must be hard, living away from civilization," she mused. "What's left of it, anyway. Does it get lonely?" Speaking of ways to be memorable: this was one angle that always reeled in the catch.
“I like my privacy,” Alice answered with a one-shouldered shrug. And she knew she was being evasive. But to paraphrase Mary Poppins, she found people individually to be just fine, it was just that collectively they were kind of stupid. It was so many people who had brought on something like the Pulse.
Still, she tilted her head curiously at Hagar’s words about being memorable in other ways. Whatever that meant. Her brain was spinning off on a not-unpleasant tangent about it, making up the dirty parts for itself. The corners of her stern and occasionally sour mouth twitched upwards, a smile that was there and gone so fast that it might not have existed at all.
“Well, you’re not a stripper,” she blurted, despite what was sure to turn into mortification once the remark was hanging in between them like a bad smell. “I guess we don’t have too many of those anymore. And you’re too...” Her conscious brain grabbed at the words, trying to seize them before she could let them fly, but it was too late. “...you’re too pretty to have been a porn star. You’re not plastic enough. So what’s your real claim to fame?”
For the first time since they'd crossed paths, Hagar found herself well and truly amused. The residue of fear that reared its head whenever outsiders descended on the settlement peeled back like a curtain; Hagar let out a hearty bark of laughter. "You ought to spend some time in the bars on the riverfront. Plenty of strippin' to go with the boozing and the gambling..." And the prizefights, but those weren't likely to sway a young woman into stopping by.
"That's not my trade, I'll admit... though I'll take that compliment and thank you. Don't think anyone's tossing around words like pretty around no more." They were living in the ruins of former glory; flattery wasn't the only thing in short supply. But back to Alice's question and the needling curiosity that seemed to fuel it. "I guess you could say I'm in good company down by the water. Mind you, I'm not one for showin' off—and at my age, not many would be moved if I did—but there's ways to make a bit of profit sellin' what Mother Nature's given me."
She shot Alice a long, evaluating sideways glance, gathering her courage with both hands. "I'd say fame's putting it a little strongly, but you really shouldn't knock it until you've had a go... say, for the price of one of those rabbits?"
It was a place Alice hadn’t meant to go at all, and the flush that climbed from the neckline of her shirt quickly suffused her face a dark red as she dropped her gaze to the dirt road between her shoes. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Behind her, the cart creaked to a halt.
“I didn’t know.” And of course, why would she have known? Didn’t make her feel less moronic, though. “That you were a h-h-h-h-...” She couldn’t even say the word. The world had grown harsh over the past three years, but part of her had clung to the hope that certain parts of it had changed.
“You’re a prostitute?” There, that was better. And her voice didn’t squeak too much. Dark eyes trailed over the older brunette’s figure, a gaze that was simply taking stock, not lascivious. Alice jammed her hands into the pockets of her frayed jeans. She wanted to ask why, but it would have sounded awful. “Was it the Pulse?”
Ah, so she was one of those. Most folks who frowned upon her choice of trade usually talked of the Bible and God's mercy, rather than constellations and ancient myth, but a wolf in sheep's clothing was still a wolf. The only way to avoid the yapping was to flee.
Without Alice to help tug half the cart along, Hagar could hardly do it on her own. They stopped in the middle of the dirt path, neither coming nor going, while Hagar's strange little companion got over the news.
"Did the Pulse turn me to whoring?" Hagar clarified, hands folding over the swell of her ample chest. "What's it to you, sister? We all do what we gotta to survive." She'd been ashamed of it before, but it was going to take a lot more than a pretty brunette with dimples in her cheeks to turn her off the path of sin. Virtue didn't put food on the table. "Don't fret, it's not catching. Still want my help carryin' this to the trading post?"
“I didn’t call you a whore,” Alice said, desperate to alleviate her embarrassment and correct her mistake. “I didn’t call you anything like that. I was just....trying to understand.” The end of the sentence was a mumble, and one hand escaped her pocket to rub across the back of her still-burning neck before tucking itself out of sight again.
“Aren’t you...don’t you get scared?” Christ, she was bungling this so badly, and she’d only stopped because Hagar had called out to her first. Maybe she should have politely declined the offer and kept going on her own. Sore shoulders from all that pulling would have been preferable to this. And all because she’d been swayed by a pretty face.
“I’m sorry if I insulted you,” the younger brunette said formally, a little stiffly as the blush finally, blessedly receded. “That was not what I wanted to do. And yeah, I would like your help if you don’t mind. It’s not much farther now and then you can be shut of me.”
"S'just a word, sweetheart. Not gonna bite you if you say it." Hagar had been called worse things in her time. Whore was no badge of honor, but at least it had the virtue of being accurate. Scared? She wasn't scared. Annoyed when people judged what they didn't understand, sure, but there was no greater threat in selling flesh than manning the town's defenses or living in the wild. Just last spring, a boy of seventeen had hit his head on a rock and died right there, on his daddy's field. He'd been a farmer and a child, and Death had still come for him.
Hagar wiped slick palms against her shins and sighed, gripping the handle of the cart anew. Perhaps silence was the better part of valor in this case, but that meant putting up with the squeak of wheels and the energetic buzzing of flies, which didn't really seem like much improvement on stilted conversation. "You're a skittish little thing, you know that? Seems funny, considerin' it looks like you're pretty decent with bow and arrow."
The trading post came within view then, just as the road flattened out into more forgiving terrain. Progress became easy with fewer jagged rocks to catch under the wheels of the cart. Men and women of all tribes milled about in the distance, chorusing voices fused into a pleasant murmur. Though it didn't seem possible, Alice seemed to withdraw even deeper into herself at the sound.
"It's Sparks you want," Hagar said, both to draw her out and to tease. "For the cart, I mean. Or JD. One or the other ought to be around the trading post. They'll likely tinker with your squeaky wheels for free." She almost managed to conceal a smile. "Won't even make you go all flustered and shit first."
Maybe it was because she called her sweetheart. Maybe it was because her traitorous brain was already conjuring up pictures of what the older woman looked like naked, which would give her fodder for when she was alone with her hand later on that night. But for some reason Alice gave Hagar a real smile, one that exposed teeth. “I guess I’m not suave, or even very good with people anymore. Especially women.”
She blew hair out of her face as she helped pull the cart past a knot of people who were conversing in the street, paused in her journey to let a middle-aged woman with a pack of kids trailing after her go by. It seemed like there were more people here now than there were the last time she’d been here, but that had been a couple of months ago. Maybe more people were congregating here for safety in numbers.
When the two of them finally reached the post, Alice brushed her hands off after checking her palms for splinters. She needed to sand down the handles of this thing, it could be a menace. Maybe somebody around here would have some sandpaper they were willing to part with. She would ask this Sparks, or maybe JD, if she could find either of them.
“Thanks for your help,” she said to Hagar. “The cart will be lighter when I leave, but without you it would have taken me another hour to reach this place. So thank you for helping me.” She held out her hand for a shake, a gesture she wasn’t accustomed to anymore, but it seemed like something a normal person would do.
Hagar brushed off the gratitude. "Don't mention it." She'd helped out for her own selfish reasons, in the hope that making nice with outsiders meant it was less likely to wind up stabbed in the back by one of them. (For every boy who split his head open on a rock there were half a dozen women raped in woods and ruins all over the country. Better not to think about that.)
A handshake to close off the journey made it all seem almost civilized, like something from the Before. Stranger still that Alice didn't squeeze down with all her might, as though to break Hagar's fingers. Maybe one look at Hagar sufficed to know no show of force was needed. Hagar's shoulders rolled into a shrug. She found it easier to return the smile and mean it now that they were within earshot of other people. "Any time you wanna get some practice with your... talkin' to women?" They could call it that, why not. "—you should stop by the marina. Ask for Hagar and they'll know to point you my way."
It went without saying that her earlier offer still hung, unanswered, in the crisp morning air. Hagar stopped short of rubbing it in as she walked away from Alice and her plentiful merchandise. No need to give people cause to stare. Rabbit for supper wouldn't have gone amiss, but they could do without. Best not to harass the wildling, lest that girlish grin turn to bared fang.
Alice watched her go, and one callused hand rubbed at her jawline as she memorized the sway of those womanly hips. It had been....how long? Being cut off from people meant she didn’t get much companionship, not even for conversation, and it had been at least four months since someone had touched her. But she wouldn’t have wanted to pay Hagar for her services. It sat wrong with her, like she would have been taking advantage. The world might have gone to shit, but she wasn’t an animal.
When the older brunette was out of sight, the hunter made a fairly brave decision and made up her mind that she just might seek Hagar out at the marina. She didn’t smile for just anybody these days, so it was worth noting that she’d managed it today. Maybe she’d bring her a couple of rabbits just for the hell of it. She’d looked a little underfed.
She could be nice when she felt like it. Maybe she’d found someone worth being nice to.