Logs:Irianke's Assistant
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| RL Date: 6 April, 2015 |
| Who: Lycinea |
| Involves: High Reaches Weyr |
| Type: Vignette |
| What: Sometimes time and pressure makes a diamond. Not this time. |
| Where: Caved In Room, High Reaches Weyr |
| When: Day 5, month 6-Day 21, month 6, turn 37 |
| Mentions: Azaylia/Mentions, Farideh/Mentions, Ghena/Mentions, H'kon/Mentions, Irianke/Mentions, Keysi/Mentions, Leova/Mentions, Nimae/Mentions, Quinlys/Mentions, Telavi/Mentions, Z'riah/Mentions, Zalmai/Mentions |
| OOC Notes: Annnngst. Adult themes. A lot of fear/death/morbidity. Many many thanks to Irianke for contributing moments for me to incorporate and for looking it over to make sure everything I made up seemed okay! Lya is scattered and I didn't try to specifically date this because ICly she didn't register what was told to her about how many days had passed, but I tried to go in IC order. After the third, it just didn't matter to her. Crawling by Linkin Park was perfect motivation music for this vig. |
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| Crawling in my skin
Did the wall move since she came this way? Was it always so that she had to hold her breath to get here? The stone scraped across Lya's torso, rough and unforgiving. She had told that girl-- no, not 'that girl', Keysi. She had to remember. That was Keysi. Before now, she was just someone who had a face in the Weyr, someone like her, unknown to one another for never having had to interact - or at least, never beyond exercising their function(s) to one another. They were never real people to each other before, Lya thought. But now? Now, Keysi was real. Keysi was one of the people she would die with. The least she could do was remember her until they were all forgotten. The darkness closed in. She was sure that rock moved. Shifted. She heard nothing, but she saw. Saw. The shadow had changed. The shadow in the dark, the darker dark? It was different. Or-- was she looking the wrong place? It was impossible to tell. She coughed. She knew she wasn't breathing right. Nothing had hit her ribs, other than the rock she landed on under Keysi, but the dust-- it was choking. She couldn't go even a minute without coughing again. She feared the moment that this consuming darkness would take from her her voice. Not that her voice had ever been special, but it had been hers. Something no one could take away from her. Something no one else could control. It got her in trouble a lot. She remembered how one of the aunties had taken her in hand and how her backside had stung the first time she mouthed off to them. But she hated to think of them winning. Them. There was always them, and her. Was that true anymore? She didn't know. Would anyone grieve her? Would anyone remember? Wasn't she supposed to be doing something? She couldn't get enough breath to think, here in the dark. Floating, as if just out of reach was-- everything, everything useful, anyway, so she put her back to the stone, sunk to the floor as the dead weight she knew she would certainly soon be, and sobbed until fell asleep.
Her heart raced and she knew she must be alive. So she felt along the wall. Wall? Rock. Whatever. She felt, followed, saw a glow, a faint glow, and followed.
She just wanted to live.
Lycinea's thought as she clutched the ruined dress between her dirt-marred, white-knuckled fists surprised her. Irianke had left to return to her duties as Lya knew she must, but she had left her with a promise. Irianke had promised they would get out. Lya thought about it. She had never loved anyone before, that she knew of or could remember. Maybe she'd loved her own parents when she was a baby. Unless she was already with the couple in Balen by then. Maybe she'd loved them before they brought her to the Weyr and left her there, but if there was love there, she'd forgotten what it felt like in the intervening turns. She loved Irianke now. Funny that she had only met Irianke five months ago. Funny how some people get under your skin that fast. She laughed. Then cried. The tears were never far from her. She found fighting them wearying and was glad when she had no more to cry. It was the only time she felt even marginally functional in this tomb. No, not tomb, she chided herself. Irianke had promised. And she had resolved to believe her. Only, she couldn't. They told them the time, but it didn't help. It was hard to believe its passage when all you knew with each breath is that it was one fewer that you had remaining in your life. Hard, when you couldn't believe that the sun rose and set because there was no sun. No moons. No life. Every stale breath was a reminder that no amount of imagination could surmount. Lya was good at imagining. She wasn't good at many things, but imagining... that was one. She remembered those first days with Irianke, after she had demanded of the assistant headwoman who gave her the assignment and referred her to the harpers for remedial math lessons if this was some kind sick joke. The woman had insisted the joke was on Irianke if she hadn't enough sense to choose an assistant better than Lya. The woman hadn't seemed to mind letting the goldrider learn her own mistake in time. That, as much as the bizarre circumstance of someone like Irianke being willing to take a chance on someone like her, had made her work very hard indeed. She was so nervous in those first days. She was sure she trembled when she cleaned the woman's many, many knickknacks - a task not entirely trusted to the cleaners, and she remembered when, in that first fraught seven, she dropped the glass grapes as she tried to get clean the joining of one glass globe to another on the complex piece. It had shattered and Irianke had found her in tears, trying to find all the pieces, in the vain hope that she might somehow be able to get the glasscrafters to piece it back together. She was sure she'd be sacked then. Not only breaking the weyrwoman's things, but crying in the most unprofessional manner. Crying over shattered glass. That was laughable now. Now that the people around her wept over cracked bone and she over her cracked control. Irianke hadn't sacked her, of course. She had smiled in that way she has for Lya. It was the first time, and Lya remembered it made her feel. She wasn't sure what, but she felt something. Calmly, she had advised her to take a breath. She tried to follow that advice now. She breathed in. She choked. But she didn't die.
She tried to call it up now, as real as if she were there now instead of here. She could feel the heat of the water, the sloosh of the wetness across her bare skin, the grit of the sand. That's where she went wrong. The grit, in the context of the fantasy, was so nice but the grit that she couldn't rid from her skin now with the cloth and water, that she couldn't help but chew with every breath, word, and mouthful... It was ruined. She was back in the dark. Back in the dark with the three-- no, four people she would die with. There was the man now. It had only been the women, but now there was the man. A wingsecond. She'd seen him sometimes. If she thought hard, she could probably remember his name without reminding. She thought. H'kon. That was it. H'kon. The man. The wingsecond. Now that it wasn't just women, maybe someone would care enough to rescue them. Dare she hope? Not really. He was only a wingsecond after all. Replaceable. Just like the rest of them. Maybe if it had been a weyrwoman, they would have tried harder. There are only so many golds after all. That's why Irianke had come. Was it wrong to be a little bit glad that Aishani had died? Even if everyone agreed it was awful. It brought Lya Irianke. Maybe it was wrong. But she was glad anyway.
Lya pressed the fabric of the dirty(er) dress between the tips of her pointer fingers and thumbs, as if she might iron the many wrinkles her grips had put in it and reminded herself that Irianke cried too. Would Irianke cry if she were here, now? She didn't think so. But maybe around the corner where no one would see her, or where only Lya would. She thought about all the moments when she had arrived to find Irianke weeping, not nearly as many as she herself was having here, but not as infrequently as the rest of the Weyr likely believed. She followed directions the first time, but afterward, never needed them again. The defeated look on the weyrwoman's tear-streaked face was all the cue she needed to put the kettle on, brew the tea and fetch the biscuits. Lya never knew why, but it always seemed to help. Once there were no biscuits to be had, when the wheat had stopped (she still didn't understand how that happened; how does wheat just stop?), there was still tea, and it still helped, if perhaps a little less. She wondered if Irianke made herself tea when she cried, when Lya wasn't there to see and comfort her. Sometimes, Lya arrived to find the goldrider red-rimmed. Most often, those mornings were the one seven of the month where the weyrwoman avoided overnight visitors, when she changed her attire to brighter colors. Lya wondered if it helped, especially when she would come to find the goldrider red-rimmed anyway. She looked at the bright-colored dress in the light of the glow and suddenly clutched it to her. It didn't smell of Irianke anymore, but she couldn't smell anything but dust and the human decay as they all marinated in their own sweat, fear and tears. There was no way to describe the combined smell, beyond not good. She sighed into the dress. It was beginning to smell too. If only she could keep herself from hugging it so much, from keeping it so close, perhaps perhaps perhaps then it wouldn't be ruined quite so much. Then she remembered. She remembered how Irianke would twist the ring of black pearl on her finger whenever she was... Well, Lya suspected it was stressed. But others would probably call it introverted (as much as Irianke ever was). Those days, Lya's eyes would measure the toughness of the day in twists. Some days, there were more twists than could be counted. She reached down to the hem of the dress, and fingered a tear that was already there. With a held breath (that only made her cough), she tore the dress. Just a tiny bit of it. A small strip. She wrapped it around her finger, the same finger Irianke wore her ring of black pearl on, and she tied it off. Now she would count her days here in twists, too. On the days of counted twists, sometimes Irianke would tell her things. Little things, here and there. Things that filled in gaps in Lya's knowledge of her weyrwoman. She would mention a thing here and there about weyrlinghood. Lya gathered that it had been a very difficult time for the woman. No wonder she wanted to be involved with Quinlys and her team. She wondered, sometimes, knowing Tela, if Irianke had told them of her trials, if they might understand her better. She hated how misunderstood the weyrwoman was. How ready Lya's whole home was, to paint Irianke an interloping villain. She shuddered. On those days, sometimes Irianke would look at Lya in a way that would make Lya lean her weight to the balls of her feet, nearly drawn in as a comet to a greater star. She always held her breath while the goldrider decided whether or not to say, or to ask. Lya knew Irianke could have asked anything of her, even to get her a greater star, and Lya would have done whatever she could to make it happen. Who knows what impossible tasks she might be set and succeed at. Being Irianke's assistant, surely, had once seemed one of those. Now it was as natural as breathing, to think of her weyrwoman's needs before herself. Sometimes... sometimes, Lya wondered if Irianke might not feel the same way about Nimae. She could never tell from the letters she saw exactly how Irianke felt about Nimae. Certainly, they weren't friends as such, but then, she knew, she and Irianke weren't friends either, and yet... and yet. She never meant to snoop, the weyrwoman's business was her own, but... when she helped tidy up when Irianke had fallen asleep on her chaise lounge with work all about her, sometimes she saw without meaning to see. The letters to her son, she understood (or at least, understood there's something she couldn't understand, never having received letters from her own mother). The ones to that one rider back in Igen were perplexing. Lya saw how Irianke was with the men she brought home. Charming, provocative, confident. These letters... they always seemed to fall flat. Like playing pretend, and doing it poorly. Lya knew Irianke could pretend well. She saw the way she looked sometimes after her suitors left: tired. Worse than playing pretend badly, Lya thought, thinking about the things she had read. They weren't lies, exactly, to that rider. But they were truths couched in the most flattering light possible. On the days she returned exhausted from even just one meeting with Weyrwoman Azaylia, the letter would read pleasantly. It wasn't that Irianke wasn't cordial with Azaylia, of course she was, and it wasn't that she wasn't professional, she was always that too (Lya admired her ability to be so, so much; it always felt something too out of reach for her to achieve). But when she came home from those meetings, sometimes the schedule would be shifted around, sometimes, she needed a cup of klah, or something stronger, and the vibrant energy that Lya associated as so much a core trait of the Igenite goldrider always seemed diminished, Irianke seemed diminished. Lya worried sometimes that training her took a similar toll where even she could not see. She never saw any letters to Azaylia, but she wondered what they would have said. If they would have been like the ones Irianke wrote home to Nimae. Letters. She sighed. Lya had asked Irianke for paper and pencil and they had been faithfully delivered. In the light of one of the glows, she had written notes. To Farideh, she had apologized. She had hated how things were between them, and only wanted them to be better. Farideh could be Lady Igen for all she cared, as long as she was still her friend. Even if Farideh would make her walk two paces behind and carry her skirts. She wouldn't like it, but she would do it if that's what it took to have the fight be over. But Farideh had come and told that stupid story with the Weyrleader, so she never sent the note. To H'vier, she had written a request. She knew he had means. She asked him to find her parents after she was gone, to tell them she hadn't been awful, and maybe to lie and tell them she had been someone to be proud of and that they would've liked her, even if Lya knew most people did not. It was the sort of comforting lie good parents deserved to hear. But then, Lya didn't know who her parents were or if giving her up could be qualified as a good act that would make them deserving of the comfort, so she never sent the note. And H'vier did not come to see her. To Z'riah, she had written, and every line she had crossed out. She hadn't known what to say to him, only had known she wanted to write him. Then he had come. She had tried to figure out what to say, and still couldn't. So they had talked about nothing. At least he told her the damned cat was fine. Little Kitten who'd gotten her into this whole mess, who she wasn't sure she ever wanted to see again, was fine. Not caved in or crushed after all. (Later, in the dark, she let herself sob into the dress with her relief. No one would know the difference between this time and all the others. To Telavi and Irianke, she had written two very different letters of gratitude. She didn't send them because she knew both women would be cross with her if she sent them. Like admitting defeat. They could find them in the rubble, if they ever bothered to dig out their bodies, which she doubted. She hugged the dress and sobbed again. Why not. She had no dignity left to lose. The next time she cried, it was H'kon's fault again. He was trying to organize something or another, and his voice had been--- hard, Lya thought. She'd blubbered and then sobbed, and was useless again.
This was different. She woke with her heart racing - and that's where the similarities ended. R'oan had been smiling at her, she thought, as she blinked into the darkness. Hadn't he? That obnoxiously handsome rakish smile. The one he'd had when she'd found him in the bath. She had felt his lips on hers, his hands tangled in her hair and-- his blood in her mouth. That hadn't been especially exciting, bit in the dream he hadn't stopped kissing her, but she had stopped biting him. His hand had brushed down her side, only unlike most of the other times such a thing had happened in her life, she'd wanted it. It was a nice dream, even if she woke feeling disgruntled and too hot. For the time it took her to recover, the cool of the stone she slept against had been wonderful. It was the first time any of this had been even good. The glows had been dimmed, she noticed distractedly. She could make out Leova under her blankets, and somewhere, she could hear the murmur of voices - though whether they were from without, within or only in her head, she didn't know. They were distant, in any case. There was nothing urgent she need do. She looked at the plate of mostly uneaten food near her and thought about taking a bite of the bread, but she knew it would only taste like dust and that turned her stomach. She didn't want to feel nauseous again (still?). So she closed her eyes. R'oan. She focused on him. First his frame. She sketched him in her minds eye, remembering him as he had looked when they met at weaver, how he had looked when they met again in Irianke's bath with her weyrwoman absent. His hair, dry in the first, wet in the second. She thought about how he had looked at her, how they had spoken of kissing but neither giving ground to admission of any genuine interest. It was interesting to think about, she decided. More interesting what led up to the kissing or not kissing than the actual kissing itself. She was fairly sure, though she couldn't really remember well enough to say with certainty, that kissing R'oan would be an equally 'wet' experience. Here in the dark, she could admit to herself that she had liked kissing Z'riah, but he was a greenrider, so that was hopeless. And she was going to die down here anyway, so what was the point? She sighed and shifted. The rock was too hard. Not comfortably hard like toned muscle, like she imagined R'oan's would be. R'oan again. She sighed. This was hardly the time or the place to develop sexual curiosity. And yet. What else did she have to do with her time? So she let her mind wander, thinking through the experiences she'd had and then shoved deep down inside of her to never be examined. Now, she had nothing but time and a need for distraction. It was better than going crazy, she argued with herself. Quietly, some part of herself wondered if, for her, developing sexual interest at all or wondering about it wasn't going crazy after all.
Someone was almost always crying. Sometimes, she could still realize that it was herself. The best moments she had anymore were when she managed to not, managed to function. Irianke wouldn't want a broken assistant, she told herself. She had to keep her fracturing self whole, in spite of the fissures she felt were beginning to riddle her. Someday, Irianke's promise would be fulfilled, she wanted to believe. At least Irianke was still visiting her. She thought it must be every day. She often brought food. She never stayed long. But she came. Lya wasn't yet wholly forgotten, but how long had she been here anyway? Time didn't mean anymore now than it did the first time she found herself in the cramped dark of this place. The tunnels that used to be so comforting were now suffocating, confining, and she thought of dashing her self against the rocks in hopes of escape. She reasoned that she must still be sane because she knew it wouldn't work anyway. The more time she spent sobbing in the darkness with these other four people, the more the notion became appealing. Everyone was in their own private nightmare, she thought. She was. It was reasonable to think they might be too, wasn't it? Or was it? She'd been staring at the wall, thinking about how much rock she could dig out herself before her fingers were too bloody and useless to go on (H'kon had dug himself out, hadn't he? But Lya wasn't like H'kon), when the wingsecond asked her to drink and she burst into tears. (Not for the first time.)
The healers were relieved when she began to be able to hear them in the hours spent in the infirmary that night. Sometimes, words were hard to catch for days to come, certain sounds that just are harder to hear. But she managed. She couldn't get clean enough, but she acted like everything was okay. She wanted to be near Irianke. That meant going back to work as soon as possible. If she just pretended everything was okay, perhaps no one would notice the way her hands trembled sometimes, or the way she flinched when she kicked a pebble and it skittered over stone. Perhaps no one would tell Irianke how she sometimes fled the tunnels and needed the sun, or how, when she couldn't get there fast enough, she would collapse sobbing until she could convince herself to just get up. Perhaps no one would notice how scared she was, no one would guess that every breath feared the next would be choked by dust, that her next blink would leave her only with darkness, and no one would see the way she twisted the strip of yellow cloth tied around her finger whenever she wasn't busy doing something else. Perhaps they could all pretend that the cave-in had simply been an unfortunate accident, like the death of the Weyrwoman. Perhaps they could all just go on going on, ignoring anything that didn't fit the mold. Perhaps no one would notice that Lya never had, and now she was worse than ever. She might be useless now. At least coal had its uses. A diamond, she was not. |
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Comments
Roz (13:15, 11 April 2015 (EDT)) said...
I loved this glimpse into Lya's thoughts! I also love how close she's gotten to Irianke in such a short period of time, and the insight into their boss-employee-but-not relationship. So good. <3
Edyis (14:23, 11 April 2015 (EDT)) said...
I really don't know what to say about this vig. Each part was intriguing in it's own way so to pick just one and go that was awesome is really difficult, so yeah, the whole thing! XD
Edyis (14:23, 11 April 2015 (EDT)) said...
I really don't know what to say about this vig. Each part was intriguing in it's own way so to pick just one and go that was awesome is really difficult, so yeah, the whole thing! XD
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