One Night in Acadia
Characters: Canada, France, brief mention of Norway
Warnings: nothing, really.
Part: 2/? (Inadvertently turned it into a sequence of France and Canada ficlets along with One Day in Huronia)
Disclaimer: Do not own. Characters only bear resemblance to living counterparts or other people through extreme coincidence. Characters' views do not represent my own.
Notes: At this point in Canadian history, my head-canon likes to suggest that Canada was not yet called Canada because he wasn't really anyone's colony yet (as the French were still failing at colonizing the land), so here we shall call him by what the French might have assumed was his original Native name, which refers to a village or a place where many people live in community.
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January 15, 1605, Ile Ste-Croix; sometime after midnight
Outside, snow fell heavy and thick against rough walls chinked with mud and cloth against the cold, drifted over the rough wooden crosses that lay at just outside the walls, padded down the hole that lay at the end of them against the coming of its future occupant. The sky was moonless, the clear voices of the stars hidden by clouds.
Inside, all was silent. Somewhere in one of the little houses lay a man dying, one of the men who always had a smile and a ruffle of the hair for him if nothing else, one of the men who had taught him how to fish with a line, instead of his hands, who had opened a slim book to him in the orange flickering evenings and patiently shown him how to use an alphabet, watched as he awkwardly learned to form his first words in French in the packed dirt of the cabin floor.
He'd gone to see him, earlier today, and the man had smiled sadly through blood-stained misshapen lips, pressed a chill stiff hand to his cheek, while his brother skulked in a corner and muttered imprecations on him and his land, how it was harsh and cold and cruel beyond European measure, and Kanata had only pretended not to hear, for the sake of the man on the bed who'd dreamt of a new home free and wild.
And then France had shown up to lead him gently away, and Kanata had cried. It wasn't his fault, was it? Was he the one driving these people away, towards death? Was the voice that howled in the wind telling the truth?
No, pet, no, it's not your fault. We are simply different. My people are not used to this place yet, but they will be. Shh, little one, you do the best you can.
He lay curled on his own little trundle bed, staring into the dark, wondering if the French really ever would get used to his home, if the man had died yet, if tomorrow there might be enough food, if the snow would continue to fall.
You are not wanted here.
Maybe he could follow the settlers out to hunt birds, and he could burrow through the drifts to find green kept secret under the snow.
Your voices and your thoughts taint the land itself, and poison seeps into the people of the land, and then the people of the land will die, withering away.
Maybe they would find just enough to keep them holding on until spring could come again.
And the rivers and lakes will die and be reborn, and the setting sun will dye every stone every blade of grass red with our new name, and the animals will fade into the forest, bodies retreating to dusty bone totems lying under glass in a drawer somewhere.
If they could just do that, maybe they could manage to stay. If they wanted to.
And then even the forests will fade away, making room for the marching invaders tall and cold and alien, and no one, not even you, understands what you have set in motion, what you have done to us who used to lie alone but not alone, cradled by the trees and the breath of the land, listening to the moon, and you will change us, thinking it best, and the poison will dye itself into the bones of the land and everything, everything will change - and you must not do that, you are not wanted, you are not wanted here!
France's face and eyes were so strange, so pale, alien and a little frightening in spite of the gentleness in his eyes when he would bend to pick Kanata up and hold him close. Dimly, he remembered others, pale and alien, but their words were strange and he'd all but forgotten them, but for a few snatches of an old lullaby sung by the palest of them all, whose solemn face did not match hands tamed to gentleness by the unruly waves of his hair.
The wind could howl things he did not understand all it wanted outside the walls, but Kanata did not want to lose the words again.
It was a big land, and Kanata was all alone in it but for his tribes, who treated him with respectful distance, because of who he was, because he was not like them, even as they were like him. To them he was one of their protector spirits, and though every tribe had myriad and wonderful stories of living side-by-side with Raven and Muskrat and Deer and Beaver, the truth was that being faced with someone like him meant that they didn't quite know how to treat him. Sometimes he wished...
Light spilled into the room as France entered, quietly, from the front where he had been speaking with someone in a low voice for some time now. Kanata shut his eyes, pretending to be asleep. He heard France moving around, back and forth, bedclothes rustling, and wondered what he was going to do if France returned to his own land - as he would have to, sooner or later, if his house-building kept failing - and never came back.
Loneliness sung in the cry of the loons.
He shivered, and sat up.
"You're awake, Kanata, pet?" Candlelight wavered and came closer, and then France was sitting beside him on the edge of the mattress, one hand reaching out to smooth his hair back. His face was smooth and golden in the dim light, eyes dark. Like this, he looked almost like Kanata's own people, but for the cornsilk rumpled hair that all but mirrored his own. "Can't sleep?"
"When are you leaving?" Kanata said, quietly, France's hand soft over his scalp.
France said nothing for a long, long time. The little candle flame burned and wavered on the boards beside them. Kanata watched the wax melting down its side, and felt his heart in his throat, hot and molten.
"Do you want me to go so badly?" he said, just as quietly.
"... Pardon?" That hadn't been what Kanata had meant.
"I understand," France said, and withdrew his hand. "I should have seen from the beginning that your home is too different from my own, too hostile to me and mine, to ever hope to make a new beginning here. A pity, indeed. Perhaps, when the spring comes, I will take those who are left, and return to Paris. I think that might be best for both of us, yes?" He began to stand. Kanata launched himself at him, and grabbed his hands before they could leave his knees. More accurately, his fingers; France's hands, slender and fine as they were, were too large to be grabbed by those of such a small child.
His grasp faltered; for a moment the wind sang angrily through his skull. Your voices and your thoughts taint the land itself, and poison seeps into the people of the land, and then the people of the land will die, withering away. And their bones will languish in the dark soil, strengthening it, healing it, but it will not be enough, it will never be enough. And the animals will retreat to the forests. And then even the forests will fade away, making room for the inexorable march...
"No," Kanata said, negating France, turning his face away from the stinging chill of the wind, and tried to explain. "No, it's... the voices of the loons and the wolves and the trees and waters, they... dig out this space inside of me... and - and what is the word, what is the word for emptiness inside?"
"Hollow?" France suggested, a little puzzled.
"No. Not nothing inside. A space where something should be and isn't any more and you miss it."
"... Lonely?" France hesitated, then knelt knelt back down, hands on Kanata's shoulders drawing his closer, and his cool blue eyes were soft and almost warm in the candlelight. Alien, but beautiful, captivating, glittering with the sight of a world old and strange beyond his imagination. If France were to leave, before he could know something of this otherness? He shivered, and France let go to pull the blanket up and across his shoulders, wrapping him like a doll in its padded warmth. "Are you saying you'd be lonely if I left for good?"
Kanata nodded, the molten feeling in his throat growing hotter.
"Would I be allowed to stay in your home for awhile longer?" He brushed one finger across his hot cheek, and Kanata bit his lip and nodded again. "I won't leave until you say I should, then, my dear. Does that sound all right?"
"Yes," he whispered, and wished he still didn't feel like crying.
-
Notes:
The French really did establish the first year-round colony on Ile Ste-Croix in 1604. The island's located in the mouth of a river between the borders of New Brunswick and Maine, within the territory known historically as Acadia (L'Acadie, in French).
Acadia, for anyone who's never heard of it before, doesn't actually exist anymore. It's kind of like the Prussia of the Canadian provinces, if it helps. When it did exist, it stretched from the Canadian Maritimes down into New Jersey. The Acadians were exiled in the 1750's by the British, scattered across the continent and even the ocean, but remained strongly nationalistic in part due to this exile. Some were reassimilated into the area centuries later; they have their own flag and anthem, and are all quite proud to be Acadian, who, if you include the failed Ile Ste-Croix settlement, have been in Canada longer than any other Europeans. They like to think of themselves as bilingual, but most other people accuse them of actually just speaking Frenglish/Franglaise (depending whether you're French or English) and make fun of them for it. This short fic hardly scrapes the surface of my current interest in Acadia.
To get back on track - the little settlement barely lasted the year, and 35 of the 79 settlers died over the winter of scurvy (a vitamin C deficiency that leads to spots on the skin, supporating gums, partial immobilization, bleeding from the mucous membranes, paleness, and depression), according to a translation of Champlain's writings. The place was known as Bone Island after some digging uncovered a large amount of graves there. The French moved the remaining settlers to Port Royal after the winter of 1604-05, and by 1608 were busy establishing the permanent colony at Quebec. It's good to know that France refused to leave Canada alone in spite of some rather distressing setbacks.
Trundle beds are a colonial/pioneer space-saving trick; basically, pallets on boards that can be tucked under a larger bed during the day to make more room in their often quite small dwellings, commonly used for children and guests.
The unnamed man and his brother remain unnamed. Note only that they are neither de Gua nor Champlain, both of whom survived the earliest settlement attempts.
Head-canon France calls everyone pet names as a general rule, because he's France, and they are written in English here simply to indicate that whatever language they are speaking, it's the same one.
Apology: I have troubles with writing young nations, because while they look like babies, as Al demonstrates so nicely in the Battle for America strips, they don't appear to talk like babies at all. Which is fine with me, but makes it look rather weird.