Work Text:
It occurs to Aelwyn, glancing in the mirror on her way to grab her medication, that she looks too much like her mother.
This is a problem. Purely logically, of course, in the primary sense - Arianwen Abernant is a fugitive of Solace, and though she is to the best of Aelwyn’s knowledge still hiding out in Sylvaire as a result, the chance that Aelwyn might be mistaken for her mother is non-zero and thus too high to be ignored. (Adaine escapes this fate by being famous in her own right - hell, she has a Fantasy Wikipedia page and everything, and she isn’t even eighteen.)
Beyond naked reason, though, it’s still… Undesirable. Aelwyn has been told a thousand times how she has her mother’s nose, her pointed jaw, the lightning blue of her eyes. At least her mother’s bottle-thick lenses will obscure their similarity on that last one, but the rest…
The hair, especially, is troubling. Aelwyn hasn’t touched it since she crumpled free of her imprisonment several months ago, and it is growing upsettingly long and sideswept in a way she’s unaccustomed to. She looks like the woman who tried to end the world.
She looks like the woman who treated her sister with such disdain. Who convinced Aelwyn to do the same. Who stood by and let her husband make them cruel.
Aelwyn resolves the problem with a quick-snip pair of scissors that she “borrowed” from the school, and then with a crystal search for the nearest hairdressers’ once she realises her mistake. Thank goodness it’s a weekend and her new colleagues won’t be able to witness the ugly inbetween of her decisions.
Then she sits in it for a second, the serenity of having no problems.
And decides that she will be adopting several cats tomorrow morning, too.