Logs:Time Flows Like a River
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| RL Date: 11 November, 2015 |
| Who: V'ret, Zoth |
| Type: Vignette |
| What: A weyrling and his dragon find ways to pass the time. |
| When: Month 2 of weyrling training. |
| Mentions: Jocelyn/Mentions, Yesia/Mentions |
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| Time passed. It seemed to do so more smoothly than Ev had expected it to, in the early days where he'd struggled to fill the hours. The work was work, but work wasn't a struggle. Work flowed like water, ran over the days and smoothed them until they seemed like no barrier at all to the passage of time. The exams weren't what he'd expected. He'd always assumed he knew plenty about history, or at least as much as anybody needed to know. His writing is good, if too wordy. His math is... okay. But nearly three thousand years worth of history had passed in the corridors he walked every day, wearing them just as smooth, and what he knew of it wasn't more than a drop. When he had free time away from his dragon, he read. With no intention of letting anyone think he was the soft, bookish type, he read away from prying eyes, books stashed in the caverns in disused broom closets and vacant rooms. Some of them were supposed to be locked, but they weren't particularly good locks. He might never spend much time behind a bar again, but he still had other skills, older ones. « Jocelyn takes notes », Zoth observed, once, awake but placid. If V'ret's mind raced until it eroded obstacles, then Zoth's was entirely still. Deceptive. Deep. What was down there? When his voice dripped, it was smoother than water, thicker. Blood. I don't need notes, and I don't have time to take notes. There's too much to get through. It was like a card trick. You didn't, he thought, practice those out where anybody could see when you dropped the whole damn deck and ended up chasing down cards from under chairs for half an hour. The work happened behind the scenes. The work happened behind closed doors, locked doors. « And then when people see, they think it is effortless? » Over his one drink in an evening, he had the blonde girl from the kitchens pick a card. Her name was Annona, but that hardly mattered. It wasn't a date. It wasn't allowed to be a date. It was, he told her, just meeting a friend for a drink. He had her pick a card, and then he plucked it out of the air, and she was delighted. She wanted to know how he did it. Magic. Of course it's magic. And having clever hands. He said it with a straight face. He'd practiced saying it with a straight face. He practiced everything. She blushed. With Zoth in his head, it was like he could find his center, there, in the stillness, and sometimes things actually come out just the way he'd practiced them. His nerves didn't jangle the way they used to. « Why do you care if they see you struggle? » He didn't have an answer for that. It was in his bones. It was like breathing. When another weyrling made a comment once about his taking off, there wasn't a moment where he considered just telling the truth. You can't expose yourself to people like that. Instead, there was a grin, a joke with a not-very-veiled reference to masturbation. « Most people would prefer, it seems, that others not think that they were engaged in such activities. » Maybe I just like having less boring secrets. They were babies--toddlers, now, maybe? V'ret knew next to nothing about children and had no intention of ever remedying that deficiency--but they weren't. At least, Zoth wasn't. Were the rest of them? Looking at the other dragons, hearing their thoughts only secondhand, he wondered about that. Zoth took a positively gory level of interest in the anatomy of the creatures that became his meals, that started to bleed into an interest in other kinds of anatomy. That added more books to the list. I wish you could read. No obvious hint of frustration. « You borrow my eyes, I borrow yours. » But Ev didn't, not very often. Zoth considered that one girl, of every woman in the Weyr, to be an unacceptable distraction. « Left to your own devices, you would think of nothing else. You would accomplish nothing else. » One afternoon by the lake, he'd almost said something foolish. But whatever it had been, it hadn't coalesced into words at the right moment, and even if it had, what did he expect? « Perhaps, if you would not want that from any woman who would give it to you, you should consider why it is that you insist on setting yourself up to fail. » You would prefer it if I failed. « I prefer you to focus on the things in life that are of genuine import. » He read, without taking notes, just letting the facts bounce around like pebbles as they poured in. The names and dates were dull and lifeless. Between them, some things weren't. In retrospect, it seemed less a surprise that the Lord of Seven Holds had fallen to a Benden bronzerider than that the man had managed to survive long enough to take that much territory in the first place. He thought about it while Zoth tore into something that had once drawn breath. « Most people, » said Zoth, « are sheep. » Somewhere in Crom, a man came home drunk and started a screaming match with his wife. He bloodied her lip with the back of his hand, but it could have been worse. In the morning, sober, he promised to buy her something pretty to make up for it. She had a whole dressing table full of pretty things. V'ret thought of them almost not at all, and time passed. |
Comments
K'del (16:48, 11 November 2015 (PST)) said...
Oh, that was fun!
Squishy (16:49, 11 November 2015 (PST)) said...
I can't begin to count all the ways I loved this, it was really interesting getting a look at what goes on beneath the surface. I can't wait to see more.
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