Best Friends

Writers: Jane
Date Posted: 18th March 2007

Characters: Jh'slaen, F'naren
Description: F'naren asks about Jh'slaen's friendship with D'val.
Location: River Bluff Weyr
Date: month 3, day 5 of Turn 4

"Watching the rain?" F'naren asked as he started across the dragon weyr.
He paused and rubbed Saradath's eyeridges in an affectionate but unnecessary gesture. Jh'slaen's green was deeply asleep.

"Yeah. This place knows how to rain, doesn't it?"

Their home had been a long way inland of the coastal Weyr; higher in altitude so with quite a different climate. Summers were warm, winters were cool, rain came in winter and rarely in the torrential downpours typical at River Bluff.

F'naren moved to stand beside the greenrider and looked out at the rain falling in sheets past the wide cave mouth. "You weren't down in the dining cavern."

"I was. Earlier. Just grabbed something and ran." A behaviour that had become typical since the trouble with his opinions had started.

"You missed D'val."

Jh'slaen shrugged. "I'll catch up with him." Things never seemed quite as bad with the other greenrider around but he'd lost most of his nerve when it came to sitting in the dining cavern waiting for either D'val or F'naren to appear.

"You like him?"

Jh'slaen looked away from the rain and around at the brownrider in surprise. "Of course. Don't you?"

F'naren nodded. "Mmm. Sure."

"I'm not sleeping with him."

"Of course not."

"Why 'of course'?"

"Because you're a weyrmating waiting to happen and you don't think he's the right man for you."

"No. A weyrmating waiting to happen?" he repeated with a grin. It wasn't a new thought but it had been his family's comment, only then they were saying he was 'a betrothal waiting to happen'. His lack of interest in women, his insistence that he was waiting for the right one to marry, had been more about his interest in men, he thought. Perhaps everybody had been right and he was just predisposed toward commitment and permanence.

"No casual relationships for you - which is probably disappointing D'val."

"You think so? He's ..."

"Attractive?" F'naren prompted with a waved hand to disclaim the thought as being his own.

"Very. Just not ... not the person I'm looking for. Just a friend."
Something in F'naren's expression caught Jh'slaen's attention. "Not my best friend."

F'naren laughed. "Funny we should have been so insistent about that,"
he said, thinking back to their shared childhood on neighbouring cotholds. They had corrected anybody who dared to call them 'friends'.
They were 'best friends' and everybody around them had had to remember that. "I thought you and he might have more in common, these days, than you and I."

"I always knew it was men for me, Fin. You just didn't know until Saradath." That revelation had begun a difficult time in their friendship but in the end the Turns of being as close as brothers outweighed everything else. "And if you say a word about 'my own kind' as if we're wherries or avians or something, I'll push you off the ledge."

The brownrider made a show of stepping back from the ledge and from Jh'slaen. "You and he have things in common that you and I don't have."

"And you and I have _nineteen_ Turns of friendship in common that he and I don't have. Where was D'val when you dared me to jump off the cliff into the swimming hole? Where was he when we got walloped after eating the cane berries just when they finally got ripe? Where –"

"Can't imagine how they knew about those cane berries," F'naren commented with a grin. They had been baffled as seven Turn olds, until they'd caught sight of themselves in the cothold's only mirror. Blue lips, blue tongues. "I get it. Best friends, still?"

"Still." Jh'slaen agreed and then grinned. "Probably always."

Last updated on the March 22nd 2007

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Best Friends