Chapter Text
There’s a kind of comfort in ice fishing that’s hard to find elsewhere.
It’s found in the dull effort of chiseling a hole in the ice, in the monotony of waiting in the freezing cold, in the periodic bouncing of the line, in the way it is simply Maria and her father and the lake.
She’s come out to the lake with her father since she was small, when he first brought her out with him just like he had brought out her elder brothers, despite her mother’s complaints. “It’s not very ladylike, Dima,” she had said with pursed lips. “Lisa,” he had whined playfully in return. Maria had watched as her mother’s lips curled into a smile. “She’ll need warmer clothes for that.”
It usually goes the same way. Her mother fusses over them when she has the time, pulling their coats tighter around them and rewrapping their scarves the same exact way. Maria’s father always complains good-naturedly and her mother always scoffs back. “You’re smothering the poor girl, dear,” he’ll tease as her mother fixes her hat. Maria always stands patiently as she waits for her mother to finish.
With the arrival of each of Maria’s younger siblings, however, her mother has had less and less time to spare. Now that Maria’s fourteen, her mother usually just wishes them luck as they step out the door and goes back to tending to one of the children. There’s much to be done with three little ones, whether it’s braiding Tonia’s hair or feeding Teucer.
Today, the walk to the nearby lake is full of conversation — the one-sided kind, as usual. Maria’s father is happy to talk, and Maria herself is happy to listen. It’s how it’s always been. They trudge through the snow, Maria holding their lines, bait, and a bucket and her father holding their tools as he goes on and on, telling stories of his adventures and those of other explorers and heroes.
He never tires of storytelling, not even when they look for a place to fish and then sweep the snow off of where they choose. He does rest his voice when it’s time to open the holes in the ice; chipping away at the ice with their chisels takes a bit too much effort and focus. They each open separate holes. When Maria was small, they only opened one, and she sat next to her father as she waited for the fish to pull at his line. Now, they each fish independently.
Her father starts talking again when they skim the chunks of ice and snow off of the water’s surface. Maria baits her hook to the sound of his voice and slowly lowers the line into the water. She can’t see anything in the inky black, and it’s a bit unnerving. She knows that with a crack of the ice she’s sitting on, she too would fall into those depths, swallowed by the darkness.
Her father can spin a story out of anything. If a fish they catch is slightly bigger than usual, or if one of her mother’s dishes is more delicious this time around, or if there’s some other mundane occurrence, her father can tell it in a way that keeps his audience at the edge of their seats. His favorite stories to tell, though, are about two topics: adventures and his wife.
Even if it’s not easy to tell at first glance, Maria’s father used to be an adventurer. He wasn’t a very high-profile one, but he was one nonetheless. He knows all of the stories passed from adventurer to adventurer and has a host of tales about his own travails, too. But he stopped being an adventurer long ago, when he settled down with the woman he decided was the love of his life. It wasn’t long after that Maria’s older brothers and then Maria herself came along.
She’s grown up hearing about the archons, from Barbatos and his city of freedom to their very own Tsaritsa, and about heroes like Mondstadt’s Lionfang Knight. In her dreams, she fights alongside them as a hero herself. She’s thought of herself as a female warrior, like the Dandelion Knight, but it’s never quite right. In her dreams, she is never a woman, but instead a man. Her… His red hair is short, and he’s tall, and he’s a man . She’s taken to imagining herself as him in her daydreams, too. His name is Ajax, she’s concluded, like the hero from her father’s stories. That Ajax had a brother named Teucer, too.
She bounces the line gently to try and goad something into biting.
In her daydreams, Ajax is bright and talkative and no one ever calls him shy or whispers about how anxious he is like her parents do when they think she can’t hear them. In her daydreams, Ajax doesn’t hide behind his loosest skirts and dresses and his largest, thickest coats. In her daydreams, Ajax isn’t the girl at school they teasingly call a mouse.
Ajax’s day-to-day life doesn’t involve going to school and going home and spoon-feeding his little siblings and doing the laundry and doing the dishes and being nobody in the middle of nowhere. After all, that’s where Maria is — sitting on a frozen lake next to the town of Morepesok, so remote that even Her Majesty the Tsaritsa probably doesn’t give it a second thought.
“Masha!” The hand on her shoulder makes her jump. “You’ve got a bite!” Her father gestures to the bouncing of her fishing line.
She pulls the line up quickly, feeling little resistance, and lets her catch flop onto the ice. It flips there pathetically, and she almost feels bad for it. She grabs it in her gloved hand when it lands too close to the hole and reaches for the hook in its mouth, carefully extracting it before she drops the fish into the bucket.
She looks away from its death throes, focusing on baiting her hook again instead.
Sometimes, she thinks, she feels like the fish, her own body and self foreign to her like the air is to the fish. As if something is fundamentally wrong, as if she can never breathe right. She yearns to fall into the water and be right again, if she ever has been.
She lowers her line into the water again and sits back to wait, because that’s all she ever does.
It’s surprising how rowdiness can still be so muted and dull.
Maria has always wondered about that.
Her life is always full of clamor, whether it’s her younger siblings crying, or her older brothers’ bickering, or her mother’s lilting songs, or her father’s boisterous laughter. She’s always busy. She helps cook and clean, minding the stove while her mother tends to her younger siblings and then tending to her younger siblings while her mother minds the stove. Her life is full of noise, of infant Teucer’s wailing and little Anthon’s sniffling, of Tonia’s excited giggles and Victor and Ivan’s huffs and scoffs.
And yet, as she goes about her everyday life, she finds herself slipping into a muffled numbness, going through the motions with little thought or emotion dedicated to any of them. Sometimes, it feels like her body is moving on its own, like one of those machines from Fontaine she’s read about in newspaper clippings. Life in Morepesok is always the same, and Maria’s body has learned the routine.
In their studies, Maria had learned about inertia.
She’s always been a satisfactory student, just proficient enough to pass but never enough to excel, not like Victor does. Morepesok is small enough to only have a single school, with two classes split between the little ones and the older children. The content is general enough to apply to everyone, for the most part, and the rest of the time is spent learning from worn textbooks they all share and the teacher’s specific lessons with different age groups. For the most part, the content is basic, the bare bones of knowledge needed to be informed, if not learned.
Snezhnaya is not a nation of scholars in the way that Sumeru is. The people learn of labor and trades, save for the brightest, like Victor, who always stays for longer for private lessons with the teacher over their most advanced textbooks. Maria has heard her parents speak in hushed whispers of finding money to send him away, to the big city or even Sumeru to study at its Akademiya.
Her parents have never whispered like that about her. Oh, they whisper, but instead it’s about what they’re going to do with her, about how to help her break out of the shell she’s always hidden in. They’re never frustrated with her behavior like they are with Ivan when he skips his classes to spend them with that girl he’s always on and off with, or when he stays out too late and comes back with the smell of beer on his breath. They’re just frustrated with her.
Still, Maria remembers that, when their teacher taught them about inertia, she had said that an object in motion would stay in motion, and that an object at rest would stay at rest.
Maria feels as if her body is the former, moving because Maria had directed it to once, and now it continues all on its own, stirring pots and washing clothes and scribbling answers to her homework. She wonders, sometimes, how far it will go that way, doing what it’s expected to with little of its own will. She wonders how long it will run its course.
Today, Maria places the last of the plates on the dinner table before taking a seat herself.
Her spot is nestled between Victor and Tonia, the dinner table so cramped that their elbows are always knocking together awkwardly. Their father always complains about it, claiming that he’s going to make them a larger table himself soon enough, much to their mother’s amusement. “Dima,” she always laughs, “You know you’re terrible at carpentry.” It’s true enough.
Like always, Maria uses her own knife to slice the largest and toughest bits of Tonia’s meal into bite-sized pieces.
“Vanya,” their mother asks, tonight, “when is Nastya coming by for dinner again?” Victor scoffs and rolls his eyes.
“Mama,” Ivan complains, poking at his food with his fork, “I told you, we’re not together anymore.” Victor huffs disbelievingly, and Maria can’t really blame him. Ivan and Anastasia, the tailor’s daughter, are always breaking up and making up in an insufferably endless cycle. Maria doesn’t hate Anastasia, but she doesn’t like her either. There’s something in the way that Anastasia looks at her with narrowed eyes and a smile that’s a tad too snide to seem genuine. Anastasia looks at her as if to say other, as if she knows a secret that Maria won’t tell even herself.
Their mother clicks their tongue disapprovingly and Victor stifles a laugh. “You’re getting older, Vanya, and if you keep treating women so callously, you’ll never settle down! I want a daughter-in-law,” she complains, “and grandchildren.” Something in Maria’s chest squirms.
“You never treat Vitya like this!” Ivan protests, “or Masha!”
Maria inhales sharply, her fork shaking in her hand. “That’s not fair,” Victor snaps, “I’m busy!”
“Yes, Vanya, Vitya’s very busy with his studies,” their mother soothes. “It’s important that he dedicates himself to them without worrying about anything else.” Victor nods decisively before shoveling more food in his mouth.
Ivan scowls. “It’s not like Masha’s all that good in school, though,” he adds, and Maria slowly places her fork on her plate before she drops it.
“Ivan,” their father warns, finally speaking up. “Masha’s only fourteen, it’s better that she focus on growing now instead of boys.”
“Sure, but if she keeps this up, I doubt any man will ever marry her,” Ivan laughs with a shrug of his shoulders.
Their father slams his fist onto the table in warning, and Anthon squeaks in surprise. Maria just keeps her head down, pursing her lips and pushing down that wriggling thing beating at the walls of her chest, begging to be let out. She pushes down anger and indignation, but there’s something else there. She’s not sure she wants to know what it is.
“See? She never speaks up for herself. How will she ever find a husband if she always keeps her head down? No one will even notice her!”
“Don’t talk about your sister like that,” their mother scolds, and Ivan raises his hands in surrender. The damage has already been done, though, and Maria stares down at her food, finding what little appetite she had replaced by nausea. Her stomach turns, and she glances up at Victor.
“I’m tired,” she says truthfully, “do you want to finish my food?”
Victor frowns at her, brow creased with worry. “You’re sure you don’t want it? You didn’t have much,” he says softly. “Just because Vanya was being a big, stupid idiot doesn’t mean that you should feel bad.” Their mother chastises him for his language, but he continues regardless. “It just means that he’s bitter about Nastya leaving him again. You know, because he’s a big, stupid idiot.”
“Vitya!” their mother scolds, and Ivan huffs in complaint. Still, he doesn’t speak again, and Maria thinks she can catch a glimpse of guilt in his eyes.
“It’s alright. I wasn’t very hungry.”
With that, Maria stands up, pinching Tonia’s cheek teasingly as she goes to take that wide-eyed, stricken look off of her face.
Padding into her room, she does her best to tune out the way her family hiss at each other, scolding Ivan for his callousness and talking about Maria as if she’s something pitiful, a caged bird or wounded animal.
Maria’s body might always be in motion, but she herself is always still.
She folds herself into a manageable size, as if she were a blanket, one she tucks deep inside her chest. She tucks herself in a place where she hides everything about her that she doesn’t want people to see — that people don’t want to see in her. She folds her wants and dreams there and pretends they don’t exist, because if they don’t exist, then she can be who people want her to be. If they don’t exist, then she’s not resigning herself to a life she can’t stand.
She tucks her hope away until she’s left with nothing but simmering anger, letting off steam with nowhere to go. Sometimes it feels like that’s what her body runs on — the pent up frustration that has become just another constant in the mundanity of her life.
Now, laying on her bed and letting out a shaky sigh, she draws her dreams out of her chest and drapes them over herself instead of crying.
Maria daydreams that she’s Ajax, that she’s standing in one of Liyue’s seaside stone forests with the wind ruffling Ajax’s short hair, that she can taste the salt of a warm sea breeze. She daydreams that her body is taller and broader, that when she looks down at her chest, she sees muscle instead of soft fat.
Maria daydreams that she’s an adventurer, as free as Mondstadt’s wind, as fierce as Inazuma’s thunder.
When knocking and the creak of a door bring her out of her reverie and she hears Ivan’s footsteps in the open doorway, she doesn’t move, facing the wall and forcing her body to be still, and hopes that he thinks she’s sleeping.
She doesn’t want to hear him apologize for suggesting that she’d end up a spinster, to hear him apologize because she will certainly find a husband in the future. She doesn’t want to think about his words, about the idea of marriage. Loving a man doesn’t seem so terrible, but being a wife does. She cannot bear the thought of being a bride, a wife, a mother, the eventual fate of most of Morepesok’s women, who are content to settle down in the comfort of constancy.
She does not want him to assure her that this will eventually be true of her, as well.
He backs away again, and Maria thinks about the third part of her teacher’s lesson about inertia. Nothing will change unless a different force acts on it.
Maria’s body will never stop going through the motions unless something stops it. Maria will never be anything more unless something pushes her.
In Morepesok, nothing changes. The winds may blow more powerfully and the cold may be more brutal some times than others, and the town’s population may shift and change as the years pass, but most everything is constant. Maria could go on like this forever if it stays that way.
She has never allowed herself to think that she couldn’t — that she wouldn’t.
But now, she rolls onto her back in her bed and stares at the ceiling, imagining that there isn’t one and that she can see the stars twinkling overhead.
“Ajax,” she allows herself to whisper aloud, savoring the taste of it, the curl of her lips and tongue and the hum of her throat. “Ajax,” she says again, just because she can, because no one is listening, because no one ever thinks that there is anything about her to listen to.
“Ajax,” she says, not knowing that she is setting something into motion, that by speaking the name of her dream aloud, she has made it tangible, given it enough strength that it will never bend as easily again.
“Ajax,” she says, unaware that dreams are powerful, and that hers is a world fueled by such things, of the abstract made concrete.
The thing about hope, Maria finds, is that it is insatiable.
It’s like a fire, the kind that starts from the tiniest sparks that find a foothold in barely-dry kindling, that flickers in the wind but refuses to go out. It’s like the kind of fire that reaches and reaches for fuel, licking at everything around it until it finds fodder or firewood.
It is hungry, and once it is lit, Maria finds, it is impossible to avoid being consumed by the flames.
She sees Ajax in her dreams and is him in them. She explores the world. She fights off bandits and monsters. She does everything her father has ever told her adventurers do and more, all as Ajax.
When Maria’s awake, there’s no escape from it either. She looks at herself in the mirror and holds her russet hair up behind her head in a lackluster imitation of Ajax’s short curls and turns her head this way and that. The name Ajax is always at the tip of her tongue, like something caged fighting to be set free. That squirming, wriggling discomfort in her chest only grows more restless.
She tries to push it down, to shove the feelings all back where they came from. She tries to fold them like she folds clothes and sheets, neatly and carefully, but finds them too stiff and unyielding. She tries to tuck it all away, a secret close to her heart for only her to know, but finds the task impossible.
There’s something that’s woken inside Maria, something where even she can’t reach, past where she hides everything she doesn’t want to think or see or feel. It gnaws at her and asks questions she doesn’t know the answer to, asking her why she can’t follow her dreams like Victor might, why she can’t be who she wants to be in the same way that she tells Tonia to reach for the stars and follow her heart. It asks her what would be so wrong about being an adventurer the way her father was.
When she thinks that the last idea is nice, that part of her presses further. When she’s washing dishes, it asks, What would be so wrong about being Ajax?
“Masha! Are you alright?” her mother asks worriedly, blissfully unaware of the thought that made Maria gasp sharply and nearly drop the plate she was scrubbing.
“It’s okay, I’m just tired is all,” Maria mumbles instead of saying, I just thought that I want to be a man.
“I’ll just… go lay down for a minute,” she adds instead of saying, It’s the happiest thought I’ve had in ages.
She does go to bed, tucking herself under her quilt and picking at a loose thread the way she would scold Anthon for doing. She stares at it, at the way the seam starts to come apart, thinks that she’s coming undone in that way, too.
When her mother checks in on her and places a hand on Maria’s forehead, she has to fight the urge to flinch away from it. “I’m fine, stop worrying,” Maria assures her mother, who clicks her tongue and runs her hand down her face to rest on her cheek gently.
“I’m your mother, it’s my job to love you and worry about you.”
Maria wonders what would happen if she told her mother about her dreams, about Ajax, about not wanting to be a girl but most of all not wanting to be a woman. She wonders how her mother would react if she said that she wanted to be an adventurer, to be a man.
I could be your third son, she doesn’t say. Would you love me then?
Instead, Maria offers her mother a fragile smile and turns onto her side to face the wall.
She closes her eyes and feigns falling asleep, keeping still until she hears the door shut as her mother leaves.
Then, and only then, does she clutch her quilt to her chest and start to plan.
She stares at herself in the mirror as she slips another pin in her hair, keeping it up and out of her face. The rest of it is already twisted and tied into a tight bun. With the help of these last few pins, it should all fit under her hat if everything goes accordingly.
She pushes the last hairpin further in until it feels like it’s scraping against her scalp, not minding the pain. All it means is that it’ll be harder for her hard work to go to waste at an inopportune moment.
She had considered cutting it all off, but that idea felt too permanent, too audacious. She knows her mother loves her hair. It felt too self-indulgent, like a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
Instead, she pulls her coat on, feeling the shape of the bag of bread tucked into one of its inner pockets and ignoring the way her hands are shaking as they slip into her sleeves. She chews on her lip as she wraps a scarf around her neck and then pulls on gloves.
Finally, she reaches for her hat. Her fingers tremble as she fits it on her head, pulling it down enough so it covers every bit of her hair and pinning it in place.
“Ajax,” she says as she stares in the mirror. “I’m Ajax,” she repeats, gaining energy.
She is Ajax. He is Ajax.
If he’s going to do this, going to go be an adventurer, be the person he had always dreamed of, he needs to get used to this.
He can’t take it anymore, the monotonous rhythm of day to day life in Morepesok, in their household. He can’t take braiding his long hair every day and wearing dresses and doing nothing other than tending to the children and cooking and cleaning and reading. He can’t take being a girl in the middle of nowhere. He can’t take it anymore. If he stays, it’ll swallow him whole and there won’t be any of him left.
Ajax glances at the table where he’s placed his father’s shortsword. It shines in the candlelight, the warm orange and gold from the flames dancing along its blade. It’s no longer as sharp as it used to be, but Ajax knows how to sharpen a blade from days spent butchering animals and gutting fish alongside his father. He’ll sharpen his blade once he’s out of the house — he’s taken too long already.
He slips it into the sheath at his waist, the tip missing a few times before sliding in.
He takes a deep breath and releases it slowly as he makes his way to the door, stepping softly so he doesn’t wake anyone. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if his parents, or worse, one of his siblings, see him.
His hands rest on the door for a moment. This is it. The point of no return. He can still unpin his hair and shed his coat and put the shortsword back where it was. He can still hide his father’s clothes under his bed and then put them back in his parents’ room. He can still be Maria, safe and sound at home.
But he can’t, so he opens the door as quietly as he can and steps outside into the howling wind. The weather doesn’t bode well — any Snezhnayan knows that going outside in a blizzard is begging the archons to strike you down. It’s not blizzard weather just yet, though, so he pulls his scarf higher up over his nose and starts walking.
If he can make it to the nearest town before the weather worsens, he can beg for shelter there. Surely someone will open the door for him in such terrible conditions. The people of Snezhnaya are said to be as cold as their homeland, but Ajax knows that his people are often more generous than the other nations believe. Someone will probably pity the boy fleeing the storm and let him sleep in a shed or even their house if he’s really lucky.
He hopes that his parents won’t go looking for him in this weather, though. They’ll probably wake up in the early morning tomorrow and realize that his bed in the room he shares with his siblings is empty. Hopefully, the note he left on his pillow should be enough. “Off on an adventure! No need to worry!” He had written. At the bottom, he had signed, “Love, Maria.” It had stung writing his given name, but he thought that signing such an important note with an unfamiliar one would only add to his family’s distress. He’ll write back eventually to smooth it over.
But first, he has to make it out of Morepesok and to the next town.
A gust of wind blasts a burst of snow into Ajax’s eyes, but the splash of cold is the least of his worries. He knows what the wind’s whistling sounds like, and the howl it carried was nothing of the sort.
There have always been wolves in the surrounding forests, but Ajax had stupidly thought that he could avoid them. The weather is worsening, though, and Ajax can barely see two steps in front of him. He tries to figure out where he is, but he’s been so high on adrenaline that he can’t tell how long he’s been walking. Half an hour? An entire one? The position of the moon is of no help, hidden behind the clouds, and the wind has been pushing him off to the side since he left. He thought that he’d be able to compensate for it later, but the situation he’s in has become clear.
He’s lost.
He can hear yips carried by the wind. The wolves are closer now. He’s not supposed to run from them, knows that their prey drive will kick in and they’ll chase him down like the neighbor’s wolfhound when a man pushed its owner, saw the dog growling, and foolishly ran, only to have the dog’s teeth sink deep into the flesh of his arm.
But there’s not much else he can do other than run. He knows that they’re gaining on him, can hear them getting closer. His hand goes to his shortsword, but he knows that he would barely be able to face off against a single wolf, much less a pack of them.
His heart is in his throat when he starts running.
The cold air stings when he breathes, his scarf sliding down his face and then falling off behind him as he desperately tries not to trip. The snow is so deep that it’s practically an exercise in futility. He will never be able to outrun the wolves. They’re persistence predators, tailing their prey at a constant pace until their target gives in.
All it’ll take is one stumble. Ajax can’t allow it to happen.
He runs until his lungs feel like they’re both burning and freezing over, until his legs are screaming for him to stop. He can’t see anything, not even the ground ahead or the wolves behind them save for dark blurs against the blinding white.
And then the ground disappears under him and he falls.