Logs:Soon, Maybe, Eventually
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| RL Date: 18 October, 2015 |
| Who: Farideh, Drex |
| Involves: High Reaches Weyr |
| Type: Log |
| What: Late night cravings lead to late night worry. |
| Where: Kitchen, High Reaches Weyr |
| When: Day 12, Month 1, Turn 39 (Interval 10) |
| Mentions: Irianke/Mentions |
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| The night is cold and stark. It is well past the time of evening that normal people are out and about in the lower caverns, even those seeking after-dinner victuals. In the kitchen, only the night chef is left on duty to man the hearths, but the look he gives them goes unheeded by Farideh as she squeezes Drex's hand on her way to the storage pantry. "I think I saw them earlier. If not--" Her smile quickly turns to a perplexed look back at him; whatever that look holds, it likely doesn't bode well for the handyman-sailor. Drex rather looks like someone that was rousted from a deep sleep in the dead of night, dragged out to the kitchens, and is now kind of bemused about why they're there, but his brain hasn't caught up enough yet to actually ask the question. He notices the weird look they get, and he gives a kind of half shrug, somewhere between don't ask, and who the fuck knows, man, and that's the look he has when Farideh glances back. "Uh, what was that?" He rubs his free hand through his hair. "Butternuts did you say?" "You don't listen when I talk," Farideh complains, but she isn't terribly upset by it because food. "I said," with an irritated tone of voice, "I wanted toast with those-- the thing--" She makes a motion with her hands like she's screwing on the lid of a jar, and then her face flushes with color as she clearly can't remember what it's called. "Nothing. Forget it." Now, she sounds even more agitated, though the solution is just to enter the pantry and start digging around for whatever it is she's searching for; regardless of the night cook and Drex both. "No, I was, I just--" Drex flails, patently lying at this point. "Uh, right. Toast." He totally remembers now, conveniently after she's repeated it. He has the advantage of height, so he stretches up over her head to grab random containers, reading (or trying to) the labels: "Bur-me-to?" he sounds tentative, scowling, and putting it back, grabbing the next: "Free-na-tos?" In fairness, the writing is scribbled, but he hasn't exactly been practicing his reading lately, either. There are plenty of shelves and plenty of containers, bins, and sacks filling them all, but each name Drex reads off the container gets a scowl, much darker than the last, from Farideh until she finally glances up at him. "What? What are you reading? That doesn't make sense. That--" Reaching for one of the glass jars and trying to look up at him at the same time isn't the smartest idea, and it ends in a broken jar on the floor between her feet; a jar at which she just stares for an unseemly amount of time. Cue waterworks. "What? No,," Drex insists, scowling. "That's totally what it says." When she reaches for the jar, the sailor's scowl deepens; he's far too slow to try and catch (or even attempt to catch) the falling jar, and he just looks at the smashed jar with a kind of bemusement. At least until Farideh starts to cry, and then it's the goldrider that receives that self-same look. "Hey, it's just a jar," he says, in a gentle-but-confused kind of way, reaching an arm around her. Death of a jar requires lots of crying and pitiful sounds, right? That night chef on the other side of the storage pantry is probably looking at them real strange about now. "It's not just a jar," Farideh responds, in the same choked up voice, one hand covering her mouth. "It was the jar. There's not another one-- I just wanted-- I can't do this." "Oh." Drex frowns for a moment down at his crying girl, then squints past her at the jar. "Not all of it touched the ground. See? Some of it's still stuck to the glass. I'm sure we can get enough--" he starts to try and move past her, to examine it closer (and presumably rescue what's left), when Farideh's words make him frown, abruptly. "We can -- why don't you roust one of your riders and send them out to somewhere else that has it?" Through all of the tears and sniveling, Farideh manages to glare at Drex. "Not the stupid jar." She wipes at her eyes with the knuckles of her right hand, trying to get a hold of her roiling emotions; it's harder in theory than actuality, as the tears continue to roll from her eyes. "It's-- everything. Do you know what I mean?" Does he? He really doesn't. "I do," Drex lies. "It's going to be fine, Fari. I promise." He brushes a thumb across Farideh's cheek to clear the tears. Farideh exhales softly while she's staring up at Drex's face, with her watery eyes, but she doesn't speak, doesn't make a sound. She does pull back and away eventually, to grab a new jar and further in, a spoon, which she takes back out into the kitchen, to one of the tables tucked into the nooks. Whether he'll follow or not, she sits down and digs into the jar of what simply looks like preserves. There's the sounds of clinking glass, like he makes half an effort to clean up. Only half of one, as evidenced by the crunching under his boots as he follows her towards the nook, sliding in opposite her, one elbow planted on the table and the palm of his hand serving as a makeshift pillow as he watches her eat. "You know," he says, eventually, "You make this kind of weird face when you're eating. All," he scrunches up his face, clearly exaggerating, grinning at her. "Wonder if our kid will have a weird scrunchy-eating-face, too?" It's hard to say if she's heard the effort he's put into cleaning up after her mess, but Farideh's too busy spooning lumps of congealed fruit into her mouth that mix with the salty tears still making tracks down her cheeks. "No," she says, making a funny face at him now. "As long as her ears don't stick out like yours do." She stares at him all serious like with the spoon in her mouth, and it's out she's shoving it back in the jars and sighing. "We aren't ready to be parents, Drex." "That's fine," Drex says, self-consciously pressing at his ears as if to push them back, "She can grow her hair long and cover them. Boys'll love that." And then his expression goes through a series of, my girl, and I know what boys my age are like, and oh fuck. It's probably why he only answers Farideh belatedly, after a long stretch of silence. "Maybe. But aint like we're gonna stop it now." Which he probably recognizes as not-particularly-comforting, since he follows up with: "I didn't have any parents, and I turned out ok." Relatively speaking. "He's going to be amazing." "You want boys to look at her?" Genuine surprise sparks in Farideh's eyes and then she laughs, at the idea. "No," comes after her laughter has petered off, her expression sobering, "I can't stop being pregnant now, but we could--" She starts the thought, and stops, chewing on her lower lip while avoiding his gaze. "What makes you so sure? Everything could be horrible. Everything could fall apart. We could ruin her life," she says, her hands actually cradling her still-small baby bump; her eyes following. "Fuck no," is Drex's stern sentiment, softened only by her laughter. "Could," the sailor allows. "But, you're pretty smart. I mean, aside from the weird cravings for weird things in the middle of the night," with a grin. "Figure you'll do right by him. I'm going to try my best not to fuck him up. Between the two of us, we might actually be ok." He stretches out a hand over the table to cover hers, where they press over her belly. "I think that saying I'm pretty smart and you'll try not to fuck him up aren't-- it doesn't sound bolstering." Farideh continues biting on her lower lip with some type of thoughts weighing on her mind. "We could foster her-- with someone, somewhere, that might be better than-- us." She still looks sad saying it out loud, but glances up guiltily at Drex. "Irianke never sees her son, and he-- supposedly hates her, because she's-- always been busy, always been-- more of a goldrider than a mother. What if she hates me, too? It feels weird, somehow." "Maybe not, but it's true," Drex says, like that's far more important. Now his face scrunches up for real at her mention of fostering. "Foster him where? Some hold? I don't... I don't want our kid to hate us. Or not to know who we are." It's takes a minute, but Farideh sighs and frowns. "What's wrong with holds, now?" She flexes her fingers where they rest on her belly, her gaze falling again in silent contemplation. "Do we have control over that? What if we're overbearing and she hates us for that? What if I'm too busy with the Weyr, and you're never around because you're on the ocean somewhere, and she hates us for not prioritizing her? What if she simply hates us for us and not being-- I don't know-- crafters or holders or--" Drex's face contorts, like he wants to answer that question -- what's wrong with Holds -- but at the same time recognizes the signs of a trap when he sees one. "What if he grows up to hate weyrfolk? What if he throws up the second he steps foot on a ship? What if I'm taking captive by a group of female pirates and forced to be their sex slave and he ends up with a billion half siblings? What if you decide to be Weyrwoman of Pern and have Roszadyth take over all the Weyrs for him to inherit," as each what if gets more preposterous, his grin widens. "What?" Farideh's frown returns as she searches his face in light of his expression. "She," emphasized frankly, "could be a lot of things, but I'm-- I don't know. Riders here just put their kids in the nursery, and the nannies are there all the day long. Doesn't that seem weird?" Her nose scrunches up, along with her mouth. "It's not unusual. They call them weyrbrats for a reason," she murmurs, at last. "I aint a rider," Drex reminds her, firmly. "I am," Farideh reminds him in return, if significantly stiffer. "So," Drex says, after a beat, "He'll only be half of a weyrbrat." Immediately, Farideh makes a disgruntled sound. "How exactly do you expect that to work? You can't bring a baby on a ship, and I don't have enough time in my day to tend to a baby by myself." Instead of answering, Drex stands, and offers out a hand to her. "We aint gonna come up with the answer when we're half asleep in the middle of the night." After a considering look, "You want to take it with you?" he gestures to the jar. Anger rises up easily in answer to Drex's stance, to his getting up and trying to diffuse the argument, but it must show some maturity on Farideh's part -- or sleep deprivation -- that she looks down at the jar before she accepts the hand to help her to her feet. "Yes," she admits, unashamedly, and snatches up the jar with her free hand. "It's not over, you know. We'll have to talk about it eventually," she tells him, ominously, with a scowl; just not now, not when she suddenly looks as tired as he says she likely is. "Eventually," Drex concedes, "But not tonight." He (mostly) stifles the grin that surfaces as she snatches the jar, reaching an arm around her waist in preparation for the long walk back to her weyr. "Soon," is Farideh's counter, with all the sullenness one might expect of someone who's prideful and has lost an argument. She doesn't begrudge the arm he winds around her waist, and even leans against him on their walk back to their weyr; all traces of irritation gone. |
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