#actually. would it hurt to maintag this. there are four maybe five people on this whole website who Care and one of them is me.

[chiropteracupola]

i'm afraid i do not know what &c is but i am intrigued by tavern futures / lesbian handicrafts time

'this is my first the wolf and the watchman' fic', says the guy who swore so vehemently that they would write no fics for this book ever at all. as you can see, I have failed to follow through on that promise and am in fact writing Two now.

so I got absolutely knocked head-over-heels by the way that johanna makes her exit from the narrative of this book, and also by the end of it all was just very very tired of anna stina having nearly every awful thing that could possibly happen to her Happen. and thus I wanted to write something where 1) johanna is fine and 2) very few further tragical happenings occur and 3) as a treat for me they might even kiss about it. also because a few months ago I learned to spin yarn and now I am (as is usual) obsessed with applying Craft Skills I Learned into my fics.

so this is a story called Johanna Gets Out Of The Workhouse and this is a story called Where Else To Go Than The Safe Place You Made For Your Friend and this is a story called Taking The Skills You Used To Use For Keeping Yourself Alive And Using Them To Make The Future Better.

[also I'm going to go right ahead and pretend the sequels don't exist both for the sense of this fic and also just in general. I have a Foreboding that niklas natt och dag might be setting up for cardell/anna stina in the rest of the series and I have no interest in it*]

“Will you stop your fussing?” Johanna’s eyes glinted sharply, and Anna Stina was glad to see her friend’s familiar fire. So determined, as always, to have things her own way. “I think I’ve earned the right to a bit of fussing,” she replied, pulling her shawl a little more closely around Johanna’s shoulders. “Living with Tulip has made you as silly as he is,” said Johanna, but there was more of a laugh to her voice than Anna Stina had ever heard in all those dark nights when Johanna had sat at the foot of her bed and measured out tales in exchange for new-spun string. Now it was Anna Stina who sat at the foot of the bed, thick new-bought stockings keeping her feet from the cold of the floorboards. Things were not as they had been before at all, at all, and she drew her feet up under her skirts, resting her heels against the bed-frame. “Come and sit with me,” said Johanna, her knees tucked close to her chest under the quilt. It was a faded old thing, worn at the corners where it had not yet been mended, but still thick and warm despite its age. Perhaps it had been the childhood blanket of the real Lovisa Ulrika Tulip — Anna Stina had not asked, for fear of shattering the fine layer of falsehood that still lay between her and her foster-father. But no matter the girl whose quilt it had been, for she was years gone from Stockholm, and had only entered into Anna Stina’s life by the empty space she had left behind. There was another such empty place at Johanna’s side, in that bed in the upper story of the Scapegrace that ought to have been hers and her erstwhile husband’s, and Anna Stina fitted herself into it neatly.