Logs:After Vrianth's Flight
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| RL Date: 22 June, 2009 |
| Who: Leova, A'son |
| Involves: High Reaches Weyr |
| Type: Log |
| Where: Guest Weyr Ledge |
| When: Day 22, Month 13, Turn 19 (Interval 10) |
| An hour later? Thirty minutes later? Two hours later? A'son isn't entirely how long he's been laying here. It couldn't possibly be that long, because he can see a glimpse of the bowl from where he lays. It's still dark outside and he doubts that he's slept here for over twenty-four hours. His legs and arms are spread out and... most of the blanket is off of him. But somehow, his right side is still warm. Groggily, but still some terror lurking in the back of his mind, he turns his head to see Leova there up against him. His hand slightly curled around her shoulder. He swallows and rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. For now, immobilzed. By fear, maybe? As long as the bowl can't, somehow, see him. Them. Please oh please. Not that Leova's having so much to do with worrying right at the moment. After all, she's got more than her fair share of blankets, much as he's got more than his fair share of the bed itself: joint custody, tucked up into his side like that, with the general lassitude that follows such adventures. And surely his swallowing like that can't be so loud, nor that eyeroll so disruptive, but something... something. She stretches a little, eyes moving beneath their lids that twitch but don't quite, yet, open. /Vrianth's/ just that little bit awake, at least, only she's got the ledge and Nikoth's got the blanketing wing instead of the other way around, as the light breeze turns circles within circles where they ornament her trees. Leova stretches and A'son turns into an absolute piece of stone. His body tenses up and he closes his eyes, closes them really, really tight. Maybe she won't notice that he's there. Or maybe she will and she won't attempt to touch him or wake him or anything. After a quiet moment like this, he stretches out and mock-yawns, rolling over onto his side and away from her. That would do it. There's a low, reflexive noise for the movement, for the sudden chill. Cold now. Plenty of nights on the road were cold, but even when their disguise required the ostensible sharing of a bedroll, it wasn't like this. Nowhere near like this. And then there's silence, like that tension had crawled across the cold from him to her. More silence. Into that silence, after a while, the greenrider braces up on one hand. It's slow at first, but purposeful. She twists then, to get herself more or less upright with her feet dangling off the edge of the bed, her head in her free hand, hair tumbled over her shoulders. Not a word. With his body turned away from her, A'son can't see what she's doing. He can't see how she might look with that blanket wrapped around her. But he has opened his eyes again, he can see the stone wall while listening to the sound of her twisting across the sheets. He can hear all those little noises and /imagine/ what's going on over there. There's another swallow as he remains in his fake sleeping position. He bites down on his lip, rolling his eyes around and looking at the scattering of clothes on the floor. His clothes. His boots. Which means that he can't see, but only hear, the rustle of her hand scraping her hair back, out of her eyes and behind her ears. At least, if he still doesn't look. It probably isn't so loud, when she sniffs her fingers and winds up using one pinky to get the sand out of her eyes. It's a crisper rustle, if barely, when she pulls down the wrinkled sleeves of her dress so they cover her wrists again, when she tugs her collar back into place, all the details of the most minimal of toilettes. For careful ears, there's the slide of laces that had been yanked out of their grommets, enough to re-secure them all the way back to her neck, if not yet actually tied. The creak and shift of the mattress is her forward lean, the better to pull up one floppy-toed sock and go reaching around the floor for the other. It may be dim, but at least there's a little light, the glows not entirely gone from before Vrianth's dusk flight. A'son risks one look over his shoulder, it's very slow and quiet. He peeks just long enough to see her pull down the sleeves of her dress. Just that brief glimpse of whatever skin there is to see, gets an intake of his breath. And he's quickly dropping his head back down onto the pillow, once again pretending to be asleep. If that will do him any good now- or later. The rest of the sounds, they're dealt with as he presses one ear down into the pillow and slowly slides his hand up to cover the one exposed one. The pillow taking the impact of his head, that triggers her head turning... partway. She stops herself before she can turn past the line of her shoulder, and turns quickly back, the better for more pretending. Rummages some more. And finally ties that bow, giving it a double knot just before she gets up altogether. That might be felt, the mattress moving even more, but the thing about eyes shut and ears stopped is that it makes it harder to gauge what she /is/ doing. She could be doing just about anything. Could be, now that she's arisen from the blankets with her dress's hem back down to her ankles, surveying the bed and its supposedly-sleeping contents. Could be just looking at the surroundings. Could be, and is now, rounding the bed with one bare foot and one stockinged one, the better to crouch by the scattering of clothing and go through it for the two things she needs. At least she folds what she finds. The movement of Leova getting up off that mattress makes for a relieved expression on his supposedly still sleeping face. And he waits, and waits and waits some time before he finally opens them again. He likely waits until he thinks that she might actually have left the room before he does it. When his eyelids do flutter open, very cautiously, he sees that she's still there. Folding his clothes over there on the floor. There's a curious, sad expression that passes over him before he's squinching his eyes shut again. There's her missing sock, and it's quickly stuffed in a pocket once the latter's located amid the folds of her skirt. One down. What clothes of /his/ she finds, at least, get to be a neat pile with the still-sheathed knife on top, and while she does glance over to the /other/ side of the room... however tempting it might be, she winds up just setting them where they won't be so hard to reach. And then it's back to rummaging in the sheets by where their feet wound up, careful to try not to touch, and funny, that's where she locates the final prize. What she finds of his? /That/ gets left behind, in favor of the deliberate process suddenly speeding up: darkness, the glows shuttered. Rustling. Dimness again. The sound of water. The brief scrape of wood against stone, and then another that's more like a thud. And should he stay quiet through all of this, more footsteps will lead to the topmost cover being lifted, since he wasn't using much of it anyway, and its being given a snap so it floats down over the rest of him at about shoulder high. Silence. A faint wooden creak. And then, conversationally, "It's safe now. You don't have to open your eyes." When she speaks to him, it's almost as if she smacked him with something. Apparently that wasn't expected. And he remains a tight, immobile statute as the blanket falls down around him. It's maybe a few seconds before he opens his eyes to examine the darkness that's now fallen down around the room. His eyes take some time to adjust to this new thing before they try to seek Leova's form out in the darkness, if she's still even there. Dim to dark to... still not as light as it could be, apparently. Leova /is/ there, her skirt apparently full enough to let her sit backwards on a chair the way she's doing, and still stay just about as modest as she ever is. "Sorry," she suddenly says, and reaches down for the glowbasket by her feet, slinging its handle off one post of the chair: now it's higher up, now its light won't be blocked by the edge of the bed. Slowly, looking at him, with a brief one-cornered smile because of course he /did/ open his eyes: "Better?" "Yes, I suppose." It speaks! Since he's no longer pretending to be asleep, he starts to sit up in the bed. The blanket is held tightly around him as he scans the floor for those clothes again. They're in folded piles now. He looks surprised as he casts a sidelong glance to Leova in her chair. Inching closer, still keeping himself covered, he reaches for his pants first. "You're still here." Dryly: "Setting a good example for the weyrlings, hm?" Who'd better not be anywhere /near/ here. The greenrider makes a display of putting her hands over her eyes as he does what he does. Waits. "Right. Hopefully they're not watching the entrance to this weyr with eager eyes." A'son makes something of a face when she covers hers. Then he pushes the covers off and quickly pulls his pants up over his legs, wincing a very little bit. Then they're on and he's belting up. His shirt takes a little longer, but soon he's covering up all those marks too. "And what example do you want to set? One where we both don't run out screaming, I presume?" "Mmm." Leova could be contemplating all /sorts/ of things, her voice rougher than its usual smokiness from lack of sleep and such. But what she says is, "Yes. Pretty much." Still with the hands over her eyes. "All right with that?" And then all of a sudden she laughs, a surprised chortle of a thing. "That's fine." A'son pulls his shirt down and goes for his boots, eyeballing her. Then his eyebrows are shooting up when she starts to laugh. "What are you laughing at?" He asks suspiciously, laces coming together with swift fingers. It's evident that he'd like to get out of there, quickly. To which Leova shakes her head behind her hands, says somewhat plaintively, "Can I look now?" before adding, "Just. The run-out-screaming part. Never mind." And: "Are you in the pretend-it-never-happened camp, or the nobody's-business camp? Nice to be on the same page, see." There's also the yell-it-to-the-hills camp, but she doesn't seem to consider that on anyone's list of options. /And/: "I get to leave first. Greenrider's right." Because if it's not in Meara's manual, it should be. "Sure, look all you want." Then in a somewhat pained voice, "It's not like you haven't seen it all now anyway." A'son rubs his face before pushing himself to his feet. "It's nobody's business but ours and whoever we're sleeping with that are going to want to know what's going on." At her last, his eyebrows shoot up. "Greenrider's right? Are you kidding me? Are you really saying that to me?" "Point. /Still/." And look: he's got a shirt. It's enough that Leova sits up, hands at relative ease in her lap, not so much like the back of the chair's a set of bars between them. But also, like it'll be that much easier to get up. "Didn't reckon there's something going on, A'son. Just happened. Move on. Isn't that what we're supposed to tell the kids? And..." suddenly she's got a smile, suddenly it deepens. "Yes. Yes, I really am saying that to you," with that got-a-problem? air. The rest is all dropped by the wayside as he sinks his figurative teeth into his new "problem". He points at the exit, "You want to leave, just leave. You don't have to sit there and get all pious, telling me about greenrider's rights. You people don't have any more rights after a flight than the people you dragged into it with your raging hormones. And just because of that, /I'm/ leaving first. Winner's rights. Tell that to the kids at the barracks." And he did come in here with a hat on. And a jacket. But he's suddenly marching out to the ledge of the weyr, prepared to exit into the freezing cold without these things. "/My/ raging hormones? /Really/?" Could Vrianth's rider /sound/ more doubtful? "No, no, you can tell them. About this... winner's rights... thing. And," Leova /could/ jump up to try and chase him out, beat him out, but all of a sudden she's laughing and then her voice does it for her: "Don't forget to strut!" She clasps her hands over her head, boxing-style, and gives them a pump. Of course this is Reaches in the middle of winter. A'son does come back for his jacket and hat. Only to jab a finger at Leova, "You are such... such... It's going to take hours of bathing to get over this." Then he's really leaving, really stomping out. This time a little bit warmer than his first attempt to leave. More laughing. Leova's even laughing by the time she leaves, giving him a minute of leeway first, just enough time to get her jacket on and her pompom-hat... not worn, but stuffed into the bag with its change of clothes she'd earlier stashed. Down the steps like she's taking her time. Across the bowl, with a flippant wave to any poor soul who's out and about to see. And those baths? Even if it takes cutting through the infirmaries, even if, she'll aim to get there /first/. |
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