Logs:Memory in Ink
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| RL Date: 1 January, 2015 |
| Who: K'zin, Telavi |
| Type: Log |
| What: K'zin makes an impulsive decision. Telavi discovers it on his skin. |
| Where: Artful Artifice Weyr (K'zin's), High Reaches Weyr |
| When: Day 12, Month 9, Turn 36 (Interval 10) |
| Mentions: Belatrace/Mentions, Kinzi/Mentions, Mirabel/Mentions, Rone/Mentions, T'lan/Mentions |
| OOC Notes: Back-dated! Tattoo and story is inspired by K'zin's PB's role on the television show Switched at Birth. |
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| "Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch," the quiet and quickly repeated words might be what intrudes into Telavi's sleep. K'zin, having come home, having slept beside her, having gotten up (too) early and now at the heated wash basin tending to something red and black on his bicep, isn't, apparently able to keep in these bemoans of pain. He's not crying. No. That glimmer means nothing in his eyes. Tela flops over, fine strands of hair frazzled out of her braids, one blue-tonight eye peering over the edge of her pillow-- or maybe K'zin's pillow, maybe she stole it in his absence or rather it crawled to her for sanctuary-- and speaking of crawling, "...Did something bite you?" Something with lots of legs?! So good of Telavi to take in that wayward pillow. Hopefully the obnoxious blue firelizard snuggled on its edge in a state of extremely uncharacteristic repose won't be disturbed to actions such as screeching and flying at her. "Uh--" Uhhhhhhhhh. K'zin glances over his shoulder toward the greenrider with a guilty look. "Nnnnnnoooo....... You should go back to sleep." Just how long he thinks he can hide the new addition from her... well. No one much gives K'zin credit for an abundance of brains; it's these situations that are the reason for that. That is uncharacteristic. Maybe the firelizard's been poisoned!! But if it has, Telavi doesn't seem to care; after all, if K'zin hasn't been poisoned by anything many-legged and venomous, that's the important thing. "You--" You-u, sing-song, "sound guilty." Guil-ty. "Was it a... knife?" The glimpse she got doesn't look like a bruise... "Nnnnnnoooo." It's an answer to the knife, not to the guilty. There's a dusky flush for that. He sighs, setting aside a bandage that, oh yes, has blood on it and in a disturbingly large spread. "Well, here." Not the bandage with the blood on it, a clean rag is proffered out by the other hand. "Would you help me clean it? Carefully?" K'zin finally turns so she can see. The girl tattooed on his arm. It's not even the kind of girl one would expect to see K'zin of all artists with. It's a little girl, seven or eight wear a shift that's caught in some eternally frozen breeze, wearing a helmet three sizes too large for her and wielding the sort of axe that's oft used to chop wood in places that need do so for the daily fire. Blood has Telavi recoiling, not that there's far to go; in the next breath, though, she's carefully edging up and around and past the firelizard-- without even yanking the pillow out from under him at the last moment-- to, "Carefully," confirm. Then she... doesn't drop the rag, if only because it's fabric. "What?" Tela's still peering at K'zin's arm, at least until her gaze rises up to K'zin's face. She wipes her fingertips off on the very corner of the rag, just in case, but, "That... is not the runner." It's not even a little girl runner. "Uh," this is the syllable of the day. K'zin looks a little abashed and swallows. "No." No, not a runner. "It's a girl," he says sort of stupidly. (Can it be anything but stupid if he's stating the obvious so obviously? Maybe he thinks the swelling obscures it.) "I probably should've-- I don't know, talked to you first?" He sounds uncertain. After all, what are the rules governing the getting of tattoos and how it applies to people who have some sort of interest in one's body for almost five turns? A little girl. "Why a little girl? With an... axe?" Telavi, so confused. At least she doesn't stop gathering the things she'd used for tending him after fights-- needed far less often these days-- or address his last question. "Is that Kinzi?" It's not Rasavyth. "Uh," it's a great sound, isn't it? K'zin certainly thinks so. "Nnnnnno." He moves to sit on the edge of the bed nearest the water basin, shifting so with just a little twisting she can have a good angle with the mostly uncovered glow. "It's Mirabel." He reaches his other hand up to rub the back of his neck self-consciously. "...Mirabel?" It's distracted as well as repetitive, but recognizably not that distracted; Tela's washing her own hands, is all, as the numbweed sits in its jar like a promise. Soon. Soon it will be his. The single-word question seems to make K'zin's neck itch more since he has to rub it at an increased pace for a few seconds before letting his hand drop away. "Uh." Somewhere, there's an answer, surely. "She's my daughter." He says it with a straight face and everything. "What?!" This is not sleepy-making. This is wake-making. See that numbweed jar she's reflexively grabbed? Tela's hoisted it like she's going to throw it and all that blissful salvation is going to be gone in a flurry of spiky pottery shards. "Since when?!" The numbweed, noooooo! That makes K'zin rethink (think for the first time? Was there thinking involved before now?) He's getting to his feet to try to cup a hand around her hand with the numbweed. "I'm kidding. Kidding." It's half-apology, half-plea to spare the numbweed. Oh no no no. That hand's going behind her back, she's stepping back. "What?" How is Telavi supposed to navigate whiplash when she has only one hand to talk with! "--For real? Not--?" K'zin's hands come up since they can't physically protect the jar. "For real," he says meaningfully. "I don't have any that I know of." Not that he's probably kept tabs, of course, that would be too practical. "Mirabel was a girl from a farm in Nabol." He takes a breath. "She's--" It's awkward to say this aloud, "She's sort of my hero." He's not sure she'll understand that, "Anyway. So that's who and why." That's all he needs to say right? Telavi of all people won't want to know the whole story, surely. "Well, when you do," Telavi says like it could happen any day now, and like he'll know what she means to have happen then-- but then he's telling her about this Mirabel and that means sighing out a breath and going back to the tending. Mirabel, hero? "How is she your hero?" she wonders as she starts to clean, the numbweed staying in reach. She has to wonder, it says so in the code of her existence. "'Mirable,' 'miracle,' that's kind of fun." Madness. What's the world coming to when Telavi wants to Know Things. (Probably nothing because it's been there since the Dawn of Tela.) K'zin wrinkles his nose for a moment in silent protest, but of course, he'll answer her. "There was one day when I was helping out in Nabol that Ras had gone flying while I worked. We didn't think anything of it at the time. It wasn't an official helping then. I was just helping plant a field. I was out there when a handful of Rone's men showed up. I was going to--" He frowns a little, "Well, probably do something that would get me and the Weyr in some kind of trouble, but Belatrace grabbed my arm so I wouldn't go." He reaches up with his free hand to scrub across his face. The men were talking and then here comes Mirabel out from the barn, looking a little like that," in a shift dress, with the axe, "with her younger brothers behind her. She was seven, I think and her brothers five and younger. She stomped right up to her father and Rone's men and told them off. Maybe those particular men didn't want to be there, or were the sort press-ganged in themselves, or maybe they just figured there was nothing worth taking with the seeds just going to ground, but they left. Mirabel was feasted as a hero that night, for all that it probably wasn't her at all." Okay, is he done now? Of course he was helping. This sigh is softer, releasing that much more adrenaline, curving her lips through a wordless murmur of acknowledgement; Tela's that much more gentle in getting off the excess blood and goo, careful, careful. In the end, "Do you... admire most that she was all in their face? Or that she did it while being that little, or that... she got away with it? I'd have been so scared that she'd get hurt." Of course, she'd probably also have worried that he'd get hurt, and he's so much bigger and older than the little girl. "I... Dunno?" K'zin's brow wrinkles. Clearly, he hasn't thought that in depth about it. "Just her courage, I guess. I don't think there was a one of us that wasn't afraid for her, though we did outnumber them." He considers with an almost-frown then. "I think there's something to be said for times that make heroes of the most unlikely of us. I'd like to think Ras could be a hero someday." Which he must realize sounds a little silly. "Anyway," now the sad part, the real reason, "I was back there yesterday and Belatrace said she died of fever last month." His expression darkens, but he's trying (and not doing too poorly) at making it seem like it's not "If he tried, I don't see why not," Tela says with a little sniff-- only then, "What? No!" It's a quieter distress. "That's not supposed to happen, that's not how the story goes... I'm sorry, K'zin, her poor family." "Did one of them do this?" His arm. "They're in a fairly isolated spot," K'zin sighs this somehow answer for the assertion about the story. "T'lan designed it. Then a guy down at MineCraft did it for me. He does reliable work. Clean, too." The bronzerider shifts his gaze down toward his arm. "It doesn't look infected, does it?" "No-o," but is Telavi any expert? "I thought it didn't look like your art..." but as she keeps looking at it, her tone slides from a trifle pleased at noticing to more like perplexed. "How are you supposed to take care of it, anyway, anything special? Tell me it doesn't need, I don't know, tunnelsnake venom and twenty-Turn brandy." K'zin looks at her side-long, like maybe she's a little crazy. But a moment later he's probably remembering that giving such looks to one's girlfriend is not healthy for anyone. "No. Just wash it twice a day and reapply the salve for the first seven or two. Til it scabs. Then don't mess with the scab." Easy. Even an idiot bronzerider could do it. If only the tattoo were more conveniently placed. It really, really isn't. Luckily, at the moment, Tela's primarily continuing to peer at the ink in question; perhaps she's regretting not having gotten enough of a lecture on the care and feeding of tattoos from certain other people known to have them. "That sounds simple enough. At least, until it starts itching... I hope it won't itch too much." It is too early to be suggestible, isn't it, even before she starts to add the numbweed? It's later-- when she's almost done, the ointment a filmy, whitish ghost overlying the new tattoo-- that she murmurs under her breath, "...A fever." K'zin has been silent except for the couple of "ouch"es that serve as punctuation before the numbweed part of her efforts are gotten to. He's probably been trying not to think of it, but he's probably failing miserably; the man has a new tattoo after all. It's some moments later when he says quietly, helplessly, "It feels like all I can do is remember her. She had so many brothers and sisters." Like someone else we know. "I'm not even sure her own family will remember." Of course they will. But K'zin's either not thinking rationally (hello, impulse tattoo) or he's just been so long disconnected from his own family, even with recent mending, that he trusts to the bonds of family. If only Telavi could apply numbweed to that-- of the non-fellis non-addictive variety. It's when she's used that salve up, when it doesn't even ghost her fingertips, that she ghosts those fingers through his hair; she's been biting her lip, quiet, quiet. "They have to, if they don't have to forget," she starts only to stop. A quick breath later, "What about a story? For littles, with your drawings maybe even?" Not T'lan's, even if he is a nice young man. K'zin thinks about it, he does. But then there's a quick shake of his head. "No. This is enough." He looks toward the greenrider apologetically, "I'm no good with littles." She knows that, doesn't she? "Last time," when he was a candidate, "I at least had long hair for them to put bows it." He shifts, moving with the intention to press a kiss to her forehead before going to his wardrobe to find a sleeveless shirt for the time being. "Do you want to go for breakfast?" Even if it is Very Very Early. "It's the nice thing about a book," Tela murmurs, "You don't have to be there." But it's soft, a sparkle to her eyes for K'zin and the bows. And since they're up anyway... "Let's. I'll just have to do something with my hair--" Which could take a full hour, but it's a mark of her commitment to speed that, this morning, she resorts to a scarf. K'zin's silence answers plainly enough what he can't bring himself to say again: no. The bronzerider finishes changing his clothes in the meantime, tending to both hearths so things will be toastier when they get back (but not dangerously so). Then he's a few moments to spend with Ras before Telavi's ready. A-breakfasting they shall go. Maybe there will even be berries. |
Comments
H'kon (00:58, 6 February 2015 (EST)) said...
Mirabel is the name of a Montreal airport! (The more you know.)
Edyis (02:51, 6 February 2015 (EST)) said...
Aww. Cute story.
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