Difference between revisions of "Logs:Like Being Free"

Ah, the luxuries of a weyr: no obnoxious roommates rattling the bunks at oh-dark-thirty, no echoey noise from residents wandering the caverns, not even much natural light force an early awakening.At some point in the very early morning Szadath abandoned his couch, though he might just be out on the ledge to judge from the sound of talons scraping against stone. Not that it probably matters, since Taikrin sleeps like the dead. Or she /was/ sleeping like the dead... now she's sort of flopping around in that don't-want-to-wake-up-but-it's-happening-anyways way.

Riorde has always been a light sleeper, with her short lifetime of early risings and little privacy. Other mornings, it's prompted her to sneak out past Szadath as if he were a watch-dragon imprisoning her, dangle her legs off the ledge without fear of the drop, and watch the waking world below and the sun lighting the sky above. But this morning, Szadath's presence outside inhibits her and keeps her a-bed, not quite trusting to be around the brown alone as if the relationship between him and his rider were more one of a mistress with her beast, who can't entirely be trusted outside her presence. So Riorde stays put, but the staying put makes her restive, too awake to just happily lie there. She sits up. Slides back down. Turns on her side. Gets in elbow in her back with Taikrin flopping about. Elbows back. Sits up again.

It must be that last elbow that does it, because Taikrin grunts, mutters something completely unintelligible, pauses, then stretches her arms up over her head as far as they can go. And then? She's awake. Fully aware. Just like that. Turns spent as a prisoner will do that to a person! Still sprawled on her back, she blinks up at Riorde, then offers a half-smile. "Hey," she greets, her voice is hoarse with sleep. "Morning already, yeah?"

Mornings, Riorde tends to be sparing with her words. But clipped as her response is, there's a hint of relief to it that Taikrin's (finally) awake. "Yeah." After a minute, she yawns, stretching her arms behind her head, and continues exaggeratedly, "For ages and ages and ages."

"Faranth help you, poor thing, havin' to sleep in. Life's so hard," Taikrin teases, lips pulled to the side as she makes a face. But then she leans in for a kiss, just a quick one, and relents, "Hope Szad didn't snore too much, huh? He /swears/ he don't, and I never can tell, but I hear tell it's bad after he gorges himself." Outside, there's a distinct rumble of protest.

Riorde nods solemnly, but a glimmer of a smile right before Taikrin kisses her shows she knows she's being teased and doesn't mind playing along. "Didn't hear him." Though it's a small enough matter, there's reason for her to skirt truth when it comes to making sure she doesn't pique the dragon or the woman he's attached to; maybe Riorde chose not to hear him. Instead of dropping her arms, Riorde rests them along the back of the pillows. "You're not sleeping in because of me coming up so late, are you?"

Taikrin appears to be making a morning of it; she scoots back and off the bed, retrieving a wadded up shirt from the floor to pull over her head while she talks. "Nah, I've got watchduty in Nabol for the dinner shift, so I'll be up late tonight anyways. You want one?" She hefts one of the redfruit piled on her desk, as if preparing to toss it to Riorde. "Anyways, y'didn't have to run off on your friends, or whatever, on my account. Get a good look at his firelizard, though?"

In response Riorde readies herself to catch the redfruit, holding up her right hand with an open palm. "It was okay," she says, not quite as indifferent as she'd like herself to be. "We talked. They're not common, are they? I thought I read something about Lords having them or something." As she hears herself speak, her expression grows speculative to match the train of her thought, turning it into something more than just idle comment. "He is one of our Blood though."

Flying redfruit! Catch! "See a lot of 'em down south, where they have warm beaches. Southern, Ista, that sort of thing. Kind of rare up here though, on account of you have to find the eggs and keep 'em warm and I hear it's hard to do." Taikrin shrugs, as if the whole thing is of no account, and munches on a bite of her fruit. "Blood? Like, he's one of your leaders, right?" Poor brownrider, she clearly hasn't been paying as much attention as she ought.

"Not quite. He's not one of the elders." The 'yet' she leaves off, and there's a hint of disdain in the way she pronounces elders. But exile squabbles and personal disagreements aren't something to Riorde wants to share, so she leaves it there and bites into the fruit she'd caught. "Do you think I should stand?" she asks like it's an idle question, out of the blue.

"Stand?" The question must catch Taikrin off-guard, because she squints at Riorde and the fact that she's /sitting/ and tries to parse it and-- "Oh. Well. What brought this one?" She's trying to quash the surge of excitement, and only partially succeeding. Her aimless weyr-wandering brings her back to the bed to perch lightly on the side. "I think," she begins carefully, "That if you think having a dragon around and staying here is what you want to do, you should go for it."

The answer Riorde gets is not the answer Riorde wants, and her face shows it. "I don't know. People keep going on about how it's such an honour and all that." Which is exactly what she said to Devaki the night previous, just with a different spin. "And then I wouldn't have to get married. /You/ seem happy..." For a moment, her regard turns sharp, penetrating. "What was Rhaelyn going on about, anyway?"

"Having a dragon's like--- like being free. Nobody can trap you underground-- or, or on an island, or whatever." Taikrin's face goes a little soppy in that way that dragonriders do, so much so that she's too slow to catch her slip. "Nobody makes a dragonrider do what they don't want." This, of course, is demonstrateably false unless one has a draconic memory. But when Riorde's look goes sharp, Taikrin's goes withdrawn. "Isn't she always going on about something or other?" It's not an answer, it's a parry.

Riorde's eyes remain fixed on Taikrin as she speaks, and even when she might easily raise a point of protest -- remember not so long ago, the thing with K'del -- a willful effort to believe what Taikrin seems to believe herself overpowers and silences any objections. "Yeah, she is," Riorde replies, a little reluctant even though it was her that changed the subject. "I was just curious," she continues, now casual and then with light force: "It doesn't /matter,/ I was just wondering in case she starts up again."

"I don't know nothin' about no necklace," she's quick to insist. It sounds not rehearsed, but like something Taikrin has said an /awful/ lot in her life. She's even got the instinctive hunch to her that comes from being accused. "If she's tryin' to imply I would'a stole it, I didn't. Reckon /she/ probably took it, and now she's gonna try to pin it on me or somethin', on account of how I wouldn't search her." That's some impressive paranoia there. But is it really paranoia if they're actually out to get you?

"Oh I didn't mean /that/." Still, it's interesting to watch Taikrin reacting; Riorde's eyebrows go up. "Probably," she agrees after a pause, rather nonchalant in the way she accepts the conspiracy theory. "That sounds like her. I meant whatever she was implying about you--before. You know, before you impressed."

"I told you." Taikrin goes flat, popping back up to her feet to pace away towards her desk, then adding over her shoulder, "I was minebred. Did some jobs, eventually ended up here. Stood for Iovniath's last clutch. Impressed Szadath." There's a letter on her desk; rather, there WAS a letter on her desk. Now it's just little shreds of paper.

Riorde, still watching, makes a visible effort to look at ease in contrast to the very palpable tension Taikrin gives off. She leans back again, lazily reclining, and plays with the edge of Taikrin's covers. The fascination she has for everyday things like that isn't faked. "Right. It doesn't matter, like I said. Just curious." Light stress on her words brings them out of the realm of the purely casual; her subject change is similarly calculated. "Anyway, we're not supposed to be allowed to stand even if we wanted, on account of what happened."

Taikrin leaves the bits of paper mounded on her desk, then turns to sit atop it with arms folded across her chest. "It really ain't very interestin'. I mean..." Lips pursing, she turns to stare at the bend in the rock that leads outside, to where Szadath is presumably napping. "... what've you heard?" She watches Riorde out of the corner of her eye, as if to judge the younger woman's expression as she adds, "Supposed to don't much matter, with dragons, in my experience."

"Nothing really." Riorde finishes her redfruit, licking juice from her fingers, before she slides out of Taikrin's bed and moves to collect her own shirt from the floor. "Had more important things to ask about than where you came from," she adds, gaze darting towards Taikrin before the shirt drops over her head. She pulls her hair free with one quick motion then crosses towards Taikrin, looking for a place to put the fruit core she's holding. "Don't know about the dragons," she says, unconcerned, "but K'del said we could if we wanted. But we can't tell anyone." That obviously excludes the people you're sleeping with. Right?

"He did?" K'del's act of charity is maybe the most surprising thing Taikrin's had to deal with this morning, and it's already been full of doozies. "Said he would let you-- who's we? You and Rhaelyn and that other girl? Without even search?" She sets her own apple, half-eaten as it is, atop all those papers (sticky letters, hurray!), then re-folds her arms. "I think you should. If you think-- if you think you want a dragon. Dragons don't care where you come from or whatever, they just want-- you."

Riorde has too much care for precious, priceless papers and hides, even those that aren't hers, not to follow Taikrin's lead and so continues holding her core. "Iolene asked. Rhaelyn wasn't there; I was." She stands on one leg, using her foot to rub an itch on the back of her calf, and slips out of the strict reporting facts. "I don't know," she says, not hiding her uncertainty. She looks at Taikrin as a younger girl looking for answers to big, unanswerable questions, anxious and hopeful. "Do you think one would want me?"

"So Rhaelyn-- she /doesn't/ know? Or she wasn't asked?" Taikrin is very intent on this particular point. But, finally, she relents enough to uncross her arms and move to rest both hands on Riorde's shoulders. "Don't know why it wouldn't. You can take care of yourself, and you're clever, and I reckon you could beat half those boys into bloody pulps," which is high praise from the brownrider, "And I've seen dragons pick way, way worse. You'd be fine. I can ask Szadath, if it makes y'feel better?" She leans in confidingly, to mock-whisper, "But he's a /terrible/ search dragon."

"She doesn't know," Riorde clarifies. "No one does." Not quite accurate, but accurate enough in Riorde's mind to state it as fact. Her shoulders are as thin and sharp as the rest of her, collarbones painfully present even though she's filled out from her former state of malnourishment. Taikrin's words, understood as compliments, bring out a quick, slightly embarrassed smile as she agrees, "I could." She hesitates when it comes to the brownrider's offer, but not because of Szadath's lack of skill. "No," she determines eventually, "that's okay. I think, whatever I decide, it should be me who does the deciding."

"If it helps," Taikrin ventures, oh so very casually, "Impressing Szadath was the best thing I ever did in my life. Probably /saved/ me life; reckon I'd be dead a couple times over, by now, if I didn't have him watching out for me." She's looking outside again, though mostly it's so that she can be looking at any place /except/ Riorde. "I ain't gonna push you into it," oh yes she is, "But-- I think it'd be good for you. And you'd be good at it."

Riorde doesn't answer in words, but she gets a thoughtful look on her face, studying Taikrin more closely than she normally looks at the other woman and at her leisure to do it with Taikrin looking elsewhere. "I miss being good at something," she says eventually, not quite an acquiescence but close to it. "I used to be good at things."

And Taikrin will continue to look outside, even as a dull flush, apparent even in the dim light of the weyr, suffuses her cheeks. "You're good at plenty of stuff." She looks back, finally, and ventures a half-grin. "Didn't hear me complainin' last night, anyways." But, more seriously, "Tell me what I can do to help you."

"Good with a knife," Riorde relates a little proudly before she modifies it for truth. "Well, good with gutting fish. I'll get good with the rest." She grins back with an answer that follows on both to knife-fighting and to the other things Taikrin alludes to. "I learn quick." After this attestation, she adopts a similarly serious tone, though hers is laced through with appreciation. "I'll see if we need anything; I'll let you know." Then she leans forward with the intention of kissing Taikrin, impetuous-- but then, there's no one else here to see it and no one here to hide it from.

"Dragonriders ain't /supposed/ to be knife-fighting, you know," Taikrin shoots back, teasing, with special emphasis; there's no way /all/ of her scars can be from before she impressed Szadath, after all. But now she's being kissed, and she's never /ever/ protested that before, even when Szadath pushes back inside. He flops down on his couch with a rumble of appreciation for where Taikrin is putting her hands, and how much his rider is clearly enjoying the morning-makeouts.