Logs:Assumptions
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| RL Date: 24 June, 2015 |
| Who: Hattie, Casseny |
| Involves: Fort Weyr |
| Type: Log |
| What: Hattie asks if Casseny would like to Stand for Eliyaveith's clutch. |
| Where: Nighthearth, Fort Weyr |
| When: Day 2, Month 2, Turn 38 (Interval 10) |
| Mentions: Ebeny/Mentions, C'sel/Mentions, E'dre/Mentions |
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| Midday finds the living cavern crowded and loud and too full of people for the woman rumoured to be more and more of a recluse to consider braving for any length of time. The Weyrwoman has retreated to the quiet of the nighthearth and curled up in one of the chairs nearest the hearth, her boots abandoned at the foot of her chair. She has a bowl of broth cradled between her palms, no cutlery in sight, and occasionally lifts said bowl to her lips to take a slow drink of the near clear liquid. Hattie's managed to secure the cavern to herself, for now, and perhaps that's why she lets her head loll against the chair's high back between mouthfuls of soup, her eyes not so much open as half-closed. With a couple of quick, soundless steps, Hattie's reverie is intruded upon; Casseny, both hands curled on the warm sides of an oversized mug, halts at the knowledge of this. Instinctively, weight retreats, gliding onto her heel. Fully: she intends to leave. But the cozy light strikes her eyes from another angle and her mood's shifted. After a slow, controlled release of breath, so does her body. Eyes slant towards what's in her hands. She strides in, unaware if Hattie's soup craving will betray her presence for a sip before she sits. Regardless, the healer girl hooks a seat too near the Weyrwoman to be accidental and to far away to be strictly conversational with a soft scrape and thunk-- and then keeps on going towards the hearth. The powerful, nurturing herbal smell of what's in her mug saturates the space between them. Another day, Hattie might notice Casseny's presence long before she manages to realise she has company, but this afternoon she only seems to clock that she's not alone any more when the healer actually moves into view. She blinks her eyes wide and lifts her head from the back of her seat to try and sit a little straighter, then peers out over the top of her bowl to watch the younger woman's progress towards the hearth. The goldrider doesn't speak, but nor does she attempt to hide the fact that her silence only means observation, not an ignorance to her presence. Perhaps her focus would be sharper if she were not so obviously half-asleep, her support of the bowl somewhat wobbly - something she might be completely unaware of. Casseny upholds the silence while Hattie awakens-- marginally-- and observes. Gentle clinks and clatter of moving dishes are her only greeting. Setting her own sizable mug down, she links a finger in one of the spares left around the hearth's klah offering to check its cleanliness. It's rejected, but the one beneath it becomes receiver for a good cup's worth of the healer's tea. As the liquid swishes around, an entirely different scent seems to rise-- the herbal a mistake, a trick, or something Casseny has on her own person. The tea, as the girl scoops up both mugs and nears the chosen seat she'd nudged, betrays now cinnamon and-- something hearty. A nut, maybe. Sweet. It looks creamy but also oddly pink colored when Casseny slides the new mug across her leg to be poised at her knee where she's sat, towards the Weyrwoman. Her chin tips, eyes following, to point to the bowl of broth. Her own observation has begun-- or continues now-- in steady earnest, and she waits a second too long to be socially acceptable before speaking up, of the half-offered tea. "A new blend," perhaps the Weyrwoman might favor her with a taste. Hattie tries another sip of her broth, but this one is enough to betray the tremor to her, liquid sloshing a little too high against the bowl's sides for her liking, and she moves, leaning as though to set it down beside her boots, a motion reinforced by the pointed attention Casseny directs towards it. Leaning down looks to be easy enough, yet she's a touch shaky in drawing herself upright again, as if staying half-slumped like that is preferable to anything else at all at that moment. Still, she manages to maintain her dignity and succeed in sitting up once more, and so lets her weary gaze settle on Casseny once more, before she drops her focus to the mug and obediently - a little too obediently - reaches to accept it. She's cautious at first, its contents given a sniff, but then she dares a sip... and promptly curls back up, mug drawn close to her chest. Approval, if through unconscious reaction. "Yours?" she asks. A self-satisfied glint flashes in Casseny's eyes, is swiftly murdered; it was out of place, anyway, amongst the girl's otherwise easily neutral motions. Left with only her own mug, she slides it also along her legs, leaning forward and letting her arms lay across her pants. Gangly elbows stick out at angles. Her latest turn day has been no gift of filling out her form. If anything, she's grown taller. "Part," she admits, readily. Perhaps too much so, "I made the base creamier. Molly at Santuary made everything else better. Mine was..." But in searching, even shortly, for the right word, Casseny realizes she's betrayed herself by speaking too soon. To conclude, she chooses a one-shouldered shrug that might suggest the original tea too anything to really give words to. Maybe she can't figure out how to describe it, after all. Her gaze slants down as she drifts off, little else but a thinning of her lips showing her scold-- that the shrug wasn't her initial thought. Whatever it was, the tea now tastes reminiscent of an apple-cinnamon pastry, indulgent but without quite so shameful a heaviness as a real treat. "She's a good girl." It likely isn't meant to sound patronising - her words certainly don't have that slant - but Hattie easily acknowledges in that statement that she is far from being able to class herself in that youthful category. "I think you'd rather I say that you're good at your job, or that you might have found something else I can stomach and survive on, than I say the same about you. Am I right?" She lifts the mug again and takes a longer drink this time, if still cautious, owing to its heat. "Or is there a way that you'd have people speak of you? Not that any of us get to choose that." After the slip-up once, Casseny's folded back into her long, deliberate way of measuring her response, unperturbed by a lull in the conversation, or that another might find it trying-- boring. "'Good'," she feels it out, some judgment and Hattie's proof already made in the vaguely dismissive flavor of her tone. "I'm not... wildly interested in people speaking of me," she decides, retaining some rockiness, not in her answer but the entirety of the subject. "But if they did, I'd like it be an honest way. About how I've made something of myself, when I have. And then they will promptly move on, because there are things to be done." Her voice gets a little loftier, a little dryer. "And speaking of Casseny reminds them to go, and do better." "People will speak of you whether you like it or not," is Hattie's opinion and judgement all in one. "And whether you've an interest in them doing so at all. But I don't think I can argue with wanting it to regard accomplishments, if it must happen." She drinks again and wedges herself a little more securely into the corner of her chair, one knee bracing against an armrest. "Then..." Her dark gaze lifts from momentary study of the concoction in her mug and settles rather weightily on Casseny. "Then, they might say, why wasn't the Weyrlingmaster's daughter on the Sands for either of those clutches? Did she value her craft? Did she not want to be? Did her mother stop her?" A peaked eyebrow drops. What short, fanciful tale Casseny had been spinning unravels in the wake of Hattie's words. Though they are not, particularly, foreign. When a little displeasure can't break the mask of soft patience on her face, it travels lower, causing her arms to tighten then relax. Her toes suffer into the floor, squeaking against the leather of her boots. "They might," she concedes after a bit. Her head drops, hair starting to drape, before she tosses it back. A quick lick of her lips. She hasn't touched her own tea and the heat inside her fingers is fading, dying. She's wholeheartedly more involved in the tale of Hattie's mug than her own. "I wouldn't hold it against them." Then who? Herself, maybe. Her mother? "I'll listen." Firm. Her dryness has been watered by a tempered passion. "Maybe I don't like, nor am interested, but it's poor to shut out entirely." "It's hardly fair of me to question you about what I wouldn't my own children to feel pressured into," Hattie confesses not so repentantly, the situation acknowledged for what is - her words for what they are - and nothing more. "...But have you never thought of it?" For all that talk of pressure, there's none there, or so she'd have it seem, her enquiry an idle one until she continues. "Your father is a brownrider, I believe. And your..." She hesitates and buries her nose in her mug to try and hide that hesitation. "Well, I don't know what you call him. The Weyrsecond. My daughters who don't have two riders for parents seem the least interested in Impression, of my children." The Weyrwoman flexes a shoulder in a careful shrug. "But there's time... for you. Not much, I imagine, before shells break. But... some." Casseny's evaluating eyes burrow as if straight through that mug to the expression Hattie seeks to shield. But nothing reactionary comes of it. Her elbows bob restlessly in the open air, all jaunty. "I call him E'dre, mostly." No more detectable affection than Hattie's reference to the Weyrsecond; neither is anything else quite identifiable. If they had been playing poker, Casseny's cards might have been inside her tunic. "As a child, I thought about it plenty," because she's no longer a child. "But then somebody showed me what healing could be and that felt-- good. I feel really fortunate. I," but then, rather than fumble through a sentence, she decides to exhale without words and let it be. A little second where she recalls her tea; the disconcerting pink color brings a tug to the corner of her mouth. She lifts her eyes to Hattie. "People will question me. Whether it's fair or not." "If you ever Stand for any clutch, it's highly likely that people will assume that your mother's dragon, or your father's, or even the Weyrsecond's 'Searched' you because you wanted the chance." Hattie must see no point in shying away from the potential of that reality. "We've had volunteers, these last two clutches. People who asked. People who were asked. People who wanted to try. Not all of them had a dragon declare that they were right for any of it, and now some of them have a dragon of their own to raise and look after. And look after them." Rather than watch Casseny, she too obviously directs her gaze towards the hearth when she asks, "So? Do you want to try, as they did?" Words are only so much. Try as she might to remain mature about it, Casseny's lips sourly continuously over the notion of assumptions, though she appears to hold none of this against Hattie, the speaker. She wanted honesty and, shoved in the back there, is a note of actual appreciation. And, as the Weyrwoman sums-- and look after them-- she even quirks half a fond smile. All of it dashed on the shores of her prevailing pensiveness. She rocks her heels back, stretches her long neck. Left fingers release her mug to leave a trail of touches along her leg above the knee, eventually stopping, squeezing. Letting go, she turns the hand over and affixes one of her focused stares on that palm. "Yeah..." is an uncharacteristic mumble, and seems to surprise even herself, her eyebrows lowering with a pinch. "There's-- not a lot of time." Is this good or bad. "Don't take on so," Hattie chides, not completely oblivious to that souring. "They'll believe the same of my children, or any child of a ranking rider, more so than wingriders." Or so she assumes, evidently. She waits Casseny out, unwilling to speak again until she hears one way or the other, and, as before, she does her very best not to stare at her and make that waiting a much clearer, heavier thing. Her mumble spurs her into action - what small motion it is - and one hand relinquishes her mug for long enough to go rummaging in one pocket and draw out a white knot untouched by lint or dust, though one loop is awkwardly twisted a little. "Then I suppose you better take this and go to see the Headwoman. Now. And decide whether you're going to move into the barracks. There... not being a lot of time." "I'll do that." Casseny takes the white knot by its awkward loop, pulling it back to her other hand where she, without looking or really deciding to, begins to methodically work out the imperfect crease. Without her moving to stand right away, it's almost as if she believes that's what Hattie asked of her: here, straighten this. Soon enough, relatively speaking, she remembers her actions, rising from the seat with a knot in one hand and, in the other, an absolutely cool bit of creamy tea. "Now." Posture perfect, her neck looks extra long when she cranes it towards the night hearth entrance. A hundred thoughts fly by, calculated, stored. There's only one when she turns to address Hattie, "It's alright. I've decided. I'd like to come by later with more tea, and something to go with it." She'd like, yet she doesn't sound so much like she's actually asking permission of the Weyrwoman. Hattie observes new Candidate with new knot, the working out of the crease and efforts to make it exactly as it should be, something akin to understanding for that much in the softening of her gaze, an odd approval and even the itch to put the loop to rights herself there and gone as she lifts her focus from that relatively small matter and tries to apply her attention elsewhere. Specifically, to blinking up at Casseny herself again, only Casseny the healer, now. As is on the way to being a well-formed habit, she submits to one even so young as she, the dip of her chin silent agreement, backed by a single word. "Okay." "Okay," Casseny confirms with all the practical satisfaction of a mother hen; healer Casseny, indeed. Then, transferring the knot to hang off a finger of the hand supporting her mug, she neatly salutes. Candidate Casseny. "Ma'am," is as good as goodbye or, as it were, see you in a bit. On long legs, she's quickly and easily out of the room in no time, without a look back-- but potentially, just so Hattie won't see the way she takes on. |
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