The Little Things
Dragonsfall Weyr
Amber Hills Hold
Vintner Hall
Healer Hall
Hidden Meadows
Dolphin Cove Weyr
Dolphin Hall
Emerald Falls Hold
Harper Hall
Printer Hall
Green Valley Hold
Leeward Lagoon Hold
Barrier Lake Weyr
Sunstone Seahold
Citrus Bay Hold
Writers: Jane
Date Posted: 31st December 2006
Characters: R'haran
Description: Coming across a memento from a former lover makes R'haran remember.
Location: Dragonsfall Weyr
Date: month 1, day 9 of Turn 4
The stabbing pain in his chest eased and he breathed again.
Ahh.
The little things could still catch at him that way.
Having moved aside a pile of thick socks that would be needed when winter rolled around again at Dragonsfall Weyr he had then rummaged around the back of shelf to find the dragonpoker cards he had pushed in there after his last loss at the game. With the socks moved and his impatient searching, something else had been dislodged. Not just dislodged from the shelf to drop to the floor at his feet, but dislodged from his past to cause that stab of pain and regret.
Pushing the socks back into their place he bent down slowly, reverently, to pick up the senior weyrling knots. It wasn't that long ago, he consoled himself, so it wasn't ridiculous for his eyes to be suddenly so full of unshed tears that the knots blurred. In the first days of the Pass, but the Pass wasn't so old in Turns, it just felt as if this new way of life had been with them forever.
After Turns and Turns of never feeling the need for a weyrmate, never feeling the need to formalise any of the casual pairings that at their longest had lasted only months, he had fallen hard for the young bluerider. A young man nearly forty Turns his junior, but that hadn't mattered to either of them in the end. Certainly when he had first caught sight of the weyrling – and he had been so sure then that love at first sight was a fiction of books and ballads – he had berated himself for letting the arrival of the Pass turn him into a foolish old man.
He had told himself that he was trying to make up in some way for the change from his significant role in the preparations for the return of Thread to that of a rider of an injured green who would never fight the returned menace he had predicted. He was feeling old and useless and becoming besotted by a weyrling bluerider was surely nothing more than a reaction to that.
For all his hard-won knowledge of people and their motivations he had underestimated T'nau and the young bluerider's quiet determination to admit what _he_ had felt and to do something about it.
R'haran lifted a hand to drag his palm across each tear-filled eye, then across his cheeks to catch the tears forced out by the gesture. There.
He could see them clearly now. They were just a set of weyrling bluerider knots that a young man he had once loved left behind when he had been killed during training. R'haran had helped to clear out the empty weyr, afterwards, and nobody had objected when he had taken the discarded shirt with the knots attached.
The shirt he had finally been able to give up when he had found himself in another relationship. He had told himself then that it was time to move on – to commit himself fully to his new partner – but even so he had unfastened the knots from the shirt and hidden them away at the back of the press, unable to completely abandon T'nau's memory.
And here they were; rediscovered Turns after that second weyrmating had drifted into friendship and then into nothing when T'masin had transferred to a Northern Continent Weyr.
Fingers calloused for guitar and harp ran lightly over the cord, eyes again filled with tears noted sadly that the colours were still as sharp and bright as they had been the night they'd laughingly undressed each other and the shirt had been abandoned on the floor of the T'nau's weyr.
His head knew that the rank knots that ought to have faded almost into anonymity would have been those of a graduated bluerider, not those of a senior weyrling for those would have been abandoned within a few months of being awarded. The logic made no difference to a heart that grieved.
With another swipe at his eyes he turned and deliberately put the knots back into the dark recesses of the shelf. As he did so he caught sight of the box that contained the old dragonpoker cards he had been searching for and he drew them out, slipping them into his pocket. As he stacked the wall of socks back between himself and the memories he knew that some day in the future he would rediscover the knots and grieve again for his lost love. It would hurt, but he would never want it not to. In the meantime, though, people were waiting for him and the promised cards.
The books and ballads were right about that, too: Life did go on.
Last updated on the January 2nd 2007