Difference between revisions of "Logs:Torn (2)"

"Dal?"

His mother seems uncertain, somehow, her arms too tight around Jaymin's tubby frame. His father puts his arm around her waist, as if he, too, is taking comfort from that physical proximity.

"Ma. Father. Hi."

It's only then that Dal realised how awkward he feels, too. Perhaps part of it is Bria's words, ringing in the back of his head; part of it, too, is the sudden realisation that everything really had changed. Forever.

"I didn't think you'd be here. I would have looked for you."

"You're our son, Dal. Of course we came. If it's important to you - "

He can see that his father doesn't understand. He doesn't understand why his son would have accepted Search in the first place, and he doesn't understand, now, what his Impression means.

None of it means that they don't love him, though.

"It is important to me, Father. She is."

"Dada?" Jaymin is reaching his arms out, and without thinking about it, Dal takes him, holding him close, and breathing in the smell of soap and milk and the lavender his mother puts in the pillow cases. He smells of home.

"Hi Jay. Did you see? Did you see me with the dragons?"

"She looks pretty." His mother again, blurting the words out uncertainly, as though she's not entirely sure that's what she's supposed to be saying.

Jay has buried his head into Dal's shoulder, tubby fists clinging to his father's shirt. It hurts, suddenly: he's blissfully, amazingly, perfectly happy, in a way he hasn't been since Ellisa, but at what cost? What about Jay?

"She's beautiful, Ma. She's... I can't describe her."

"It's good to see you smile, son. I just wish..."

"You'll look after Jay for me? Until I can...?"

"Until what?"

The party is going on around them. It feels, suddenly, oppressive - Dal finds himself leading his family away from it, down into the caverns. Jay is falling asleep against his shoulder, solid and comforting.

"Until I can take him again. Once I'm a rider..."

"Dal..."

He can feel both of them looking at him, their gazes heavy. He knows what they're thinking. He knows that they're quite possibly right. He knows, too, that it was selfish to do this... selfish, and yet how can he regret it? Across the bowl, she is sleeping, and even in sleep the very thought of her makes him want to dance, or cry, or maybe both.

"We'll work it out. Somehow. I won't be an absent father, Ma. It'll be easy to visit. Eventually, I'll be able to put him to bed every night."

"We'll see what happens, son. Give the boy to your mother. We need to get him home."

It feels like a dismissal. Like his fatherhood is being overruled and overwritten; it feels like a kick to the gut.

Suraieth is stirring. He can feel it in the back of his mind, like ripples in a lake he wasn't even aware of. Right now, amid everything, it just makes him feel worse. He'd like to argue, and promise things, and hold on to Jay for just a little longer... and he can't.

And he wants to go, as much as he doesn't.

He leans down, pressing a kiss to Jay's dark head, then hands the boy's sleeping form back. "I'll come home as soon as I can," he says. "I promise."

Later, Suraieth is mystified by his emotions. « You love him, and you love me. How can that be wrong? He is small, and I will not be; I do not see how the two can interfere. It is not logical. »

"Not love," he finds himself whispering into her shoulders, the hide oil-rich beneath his mouth. "Duty."

How can I balance my duty to you, Su, and to the Weyr, with my duty to him?

« Worry, » she says, placidly. « is a waste of energy. Worry will change nothing. You must not fear. »

It's a strange thing. She's not comforting in the active sense: she's not warm, and she's not loving, and she's not soothing. And yet, in the stillness of her waters, and the absolute motionless of her form beside him, it's hard to remember what he was so afraid of.

I must not fear.