Logs:Late Bloomer
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| RL Date: 20 March, 2013 |
| Who: Mave |
| Involves: High Reaches Weyr |
| Type: Vignette |
| What: Mave scratches an itch that turns out to be more. |
| Where: Resident Quarters, High Reaches Weyr |
| When: Day 13, Month 4, Turn 31 (Interval 10) |
| Mentions: Jo/Mentions, Barnabas/Mentions |
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| I'll be an adult. It hung in her head after she'd left Bones' side on the lake shore, knocking around at the insides like if it were just a pebble stuck in the shoe of her brain. Poke, poke. A small discomfort, too minuscule to quite bother with but large enough to nag. You shake your foot a little between steps and it dislodges, so you forget about it for a while until-- there it is again. I'll be an adult. She took it all the way to bed that night, after propping her mother against her hip to talk her through a medicine she'd tried to refuse to take every evening for the last month. She'd only half heard the familiar protestations because that pebble was scratching at her foot-skull. Sitting on her own cot, listening to her mother's harried breathing, she considered what it meant. Only a turn. One simple turn between other turns. Bones had certainly cast the idea aside. But it had burrowed into her, finding the creases worn by a different thought and using that to creep where she couldn't pull it out. She'd be an adult, it sprouted plentiful leaves, but what was she doing? Turns out, it wasn't a pebble at all, but a seed she'd been stepping on, that had wheedled into her skull through some softer baby remnants, and planted itself in the mush of her brain. She'd watered it with worry and it'd sprung to life. What do you do? Cleaned, laundered, fixed glows, moved furniture, tidied records... all the comforting, practical things she'd learned to do in the lower caverns that she'd been perfectly content with before were being sucked up dry by the hunger of that greedy weed. It'd never bothered her before, she complained internally as she writhed against her -- newly washed and dried by her own hand -- sheets; she found nothing menial about being a caverns worker. It was nice. But what was nice? The world didn't seem very nice sometimes. But she knew that, too. Knew that storms could arise out of the depths and steal part of your heart away, carrying it out into the blue yonder, flipping its white crests at you to prove how little it cared about that maybe you were using that part, and at least it would've been nice to be able to say goodbye. Punching people in the throats wasn't very nice, for instance, but she still found herself liking Jo. Maybe Jo had planted that seed; it'd been kicked up with the sand that'd dirtied the rider's jacket and bounced off her and into Mave's mushy brain and then been watered by Bones' sighs. She wasn't quite sure why she'd decided to have Bones teach her as if Jo wasn't already. But she thought now, in the dark and the wrestle of her wrinkled sheets, that it had something to do with things. Children blurred together pretty much. A plain of happily whipping grass. But as children grew up, they began to grow differently. Some would bloom one way, and others another, in arrays of individual colors. Some with plump round leaves, or sharp layered leaves, or even scores of thorns. Everyone had a thing, and even if they shared things, they did things differently. Mave couldn't remember ever having a thing. Nothing had been coaxed out by lessons or training; she'd shown absolutely no aptitude towards anything in particular so she'd just been left to be -- a twig amongst flowers. And, comfortable with knowing herself and her limitations, she'd accepted. She still felt like she did... but now she also itched, like her skin was too tight. And she was starting to have opinions and to say them. Festering little bugs had taken up residence on her twig and were trying to scramble out of her skin. She scratched at her arm idly on the bed. Jo's teaching you a thing, murmured the sprouting pebble, wriggling a little deeper. But it's still her thing. She's just lending it to me for a while. Mave replied. Like the betting. She'd done... fine, really. No one was angry. Everyone got their money. But nothing was special. People had mostly gone to their usuals, and she'd failed to stand out. Then again, what did standing out get you. And hadn't she enjoyed it while she'd borrowed it? So. Said the seedling. So, said Mave. If other people were willing to share their things, what was the harm in trying out a few? She didn't need to be the best at them, it'd just be something interesting to do. You could learn a lot about a person from their thing. And if Bones taught her how he did something, and Jo taught her how she did something, and they got mixed together in the mush... Sometimes, the person who didn't have a thing was the best one for helping making other people's things shine. She could be that person. The shiner person. It was a thought, anyway. So Mave threw her shoulder onto the bed and rolled over onto her side, scrambling legs tangling the sheets between them. Punching the pillow a few times, she finally laid her head down, surrendering to a quick sleep now that she'd weeded all the distracting wonderings out of her head where, inside, free from entanglements, a little flower bloomed. |
Comments
Nicky (Nicky (talk)) left a comment on Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:35:12 GMT.
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What a beautifully written little scene. I loved it! It's lovely to see Mave in this light. :)
Azaylia (Dragonshy (talk)) left a comment on Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:13:59 GMT.
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Wow. That was... it was so real, you know? Just a girl. Just a girl trying to figure stuff out and not having a talent but maybe..? Not everyone is destined to save the world, or rewrite history. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing, this exploration of character, and you did it beautifully. :D
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