To Be Invisible

Writers: Duskdog
Date Posted: 2nd August 2024

Characters: N'jen
Description: Nijen narrowly misses a mauling at the Hatching
Location: Dolphin Cove Weyr
Date: month 10, day 5 of Turn 11
Notes: Mentioned: Nidre, Corland

It felt like there should be blood.

The brown dragonet had seemed to be coming straight for him. A big brown, strong and beautiful, rushing across the Sands to meet him -- and Nijen, heart in his throat, ready to receive.

He hadn’t realized until the last second that the brown wasn’t here for _him_. He tried to move out of the way, but not far enough or fast enough. The hatchling bowled him over, clambering over his prone form as if he were nothing -- not much of an obstacle, and certainly not a _person_ -- right front foot coming down on his chest and left hind on his hip as the dragon made his way across. It _hurt_, and he was distantly aware of the squeaky sounds of pain and fear that were all he could manage as he tried desperately to catch his breath.

Was this how he was going to die?

He did not die.

Strong hands were on him, helping him up, and then abruptly stopped as the brown Impressed whoever had been helping him. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear the change in the hatchling’s cries, and then the deep but gentle voice of Corland, and he knew that he had been forgotten.

He finished getting to his feet on his own, though his knees were shaking, and looked down at himself. It felt like there should be blood. But there wasn’t. The talons hadn’t hit in the right way to slash him open, though his robe bore a few tears. It seemed the fabric, thin as it was, had been just enough to save him some minor scrapes, at least. He was fine. He was unImpressed, but he was fine.

So why did he still feel like he was going to faint?

The heat of the Sands, just the heat of the Sands, that’s all. There were still a handful of dragonets left, and one of them might be his. He couldn’t miss His, if they were still out there somewhere, even though there was a part of him urging him, desperately, that he should run as fast and far away as possible.

As soon as the last hatchling had Impressed and someone arrived to usher the disappointed candidates off the Sands, Nijen gave in to the urge -- not quite to run, but to hurry. He couldn’t even feel the disappointment so much, buried underneath a layer of relief as it was. Just getting off the Sands, away from the blood spattered across it, was all he could think about.

Someone stopped him at the exit, asked him if he was okay. Insisted on looking him over.

“I’m fine,” he heard himself saying. “Look, no blood!”

“Could be something broken,” they said.

“No, just got the wind knocked out of me, that’s all! Nothing hurts.”

He _did_ hurt, though. Not like anything was broken, but like he’d taken a bad tumble. Pain in his tailbone, his hip, his shoulder. Pain where the dragon’s feet had stepped. Things that were only a dull ache now, but might blossom into a larger ache tomorrow, once the adrenaline of the event had well and truly worn off.

“I’d like to give you a closer check, just to make sure,” they said. “Better to find a broken rib now than for your lung to find it later.”

He didn’t want to be checked -- he just wanted to be alone -- but he couldn’t bring himself to argue about it anymore.

Shortly, he found himself sitting on the side of a bed while a healer looked him over, asked him questions. He answered dutifully, but he wasn’t really listening consciously. It felt like he almost couldn’t hear the voice of the person who kept gently pressing on parts of him, moving his limbs around, over the sound of his own thoughts and his own beating heart.

He’d seen candidates get mauled before. He was weyrbred, and he had attended many Hatchings. Sometimes it happened due to the candidate being foolish, sometimes due to inattentiveness or slow reflexes, and sometimes it wasn’t anyone’s fault at all -- just a clumsy baby dragon moving in an unexpected way at an unexpected time. But this was his first time seeing it up close, on the Sands, as a candidate himself, his first time experiencing, first-hand, the strength and desperation of a newly-hatched dragon.

He didn’t know which hurt worse: being rejected by the dragon, or the realization that he just wasn’t even there at all, as far as the dragon was concerned. It wasn’t even really a rejection, in that sense. It was just… not mattering enough for the dragon to even take the time to consider him and then discard him. It was not existing at all, because the dragon already knew who he wanted, and then being stepped on as casually as Nijen himself might step on a trundlebug without noticing that it was even there.

There was the fear of being badly hurt, or even killed by a hatchling, yes. But there was also the terrifying smallness of being overlooked, being so unimportant that an otherwise gentle and heroic creature would crush him like a bug without even a second thought in that moment where the quest for Impression was so all-consuming that everyone and everything else was null.

It was hard not to take it personally.

His hands were trembling. The quaking fear in his stomach hadn’t subsided much, even though the healer’s hands and voice were gentle. Had everyone seen him fall? Had everyone heard those embarrassing sounds that he’d made, seen the fear in his eyes, seen the way he still shook even when he’d walked off the Sands still on his own two feet? It felt like there was no way they hadn’t seen every thought in his head, even though objectively he realized there was no way that could be true. They had probably just seen him go down, and once they’d realized he wasn’t dead or hurt, had been distracted by the brown’s Impression, and then every other dragon still left on the Sands.

Somehow being dismissed as soon as the drama was over hurt, too, even though the thought of everyone seeing everything and knowing how much he -- a weyrbred boy with a goldrider for a mother -- was affected by it was mortifying.

…Did they even know? He was still very new here, and he didn’t exactly go around introducing himself as Nidre’s son. He very much doubted she went around referring to him as her son, either. It probably never even came up, so she had no reason to mention it, even if she’d wanted to (much like the dragon hadn’t even acknowledged his presence enough to legitimately reject him). Maybe it was better that they didn’t know, anyway, especially after this shameful display today. Not only had he not Impressed, but he’d failed to dodge a dragon, and now here he was in the Infirmary, practically pissing his robe, despite not actually being injured at all.

One boy probably had a broken arm. Another looked like he’d been sliced up even worse. And what had happened to Nijen? A little tumble. A few little bruises, maybe. The healer had decided he was fit enough to be released back to the feast, at least -- or to his bed to rest, they had suggested, with a sympathetic look. Completely fine. And yet he was still feeling so small, and so scared.

As he left the Infirmary, he wondered: had his mother’s eyes lingered on him? When everyone else had mercifully forgotten him in order to watch the rest of the Hatching, had she still watched just to make sure that he was truly okay? Had she seen his fear? Was she ashamed that he had gone down at all, ashamed that he seemed so shaken by it? He had come all this way -- uprooted his life and left all his friends behind -- just hoping that he wouldn’t lose the chance to finally get to know her, but now maybe he had ruined everything just because he couldn’t get his head on straight after seeing baby dragons do what baby dragons did, which should be nothing new.

He wasn’t sure which was worse, though: the thought that she had seen and was ashamed of him, or the thought that she hadn’t actually noticed him at all.

Last updated on the August 11th 2024

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To Be Invisible