Everywhere but Here (2/2)

Writers: Iluva
Date Posted: 23rd June 2025

Characters: R'fayne, C'fayne, Marillia
Description: R’fayne’s first visit to his mother since Impression prompts some reflection
Location: Emerald Falls Hold, Dolphin Cove Weyr
Date: month 6, day 4 of Turn 12
Notes: Mentioned: Tirraze, O’rosin

R'fayne

===flashback to Impression m10 d2 t11 ===

R’fayne tried not to look at anyone’s shoulder knots.

The bond was new, intense. Sublime and terrifying. Joy, wonder, surprise - it was all there, facets of experience that appeared largely exclusive to the newly Impressed, but universal. He traced the mind - Skadith’s mind - melded with his again, and again, and at some point it occurred to him in feeling more than thought their minds might actually be indistinguishable, that this really was permanent.

But did everyone feel like a layer of their skin had been peeled back? It felt like his own had been replaced with Skadith’s, new, and open, and raw. He felt so fragile, vulnerable, like the slightest thing could strike lightning through him, unravel him at his edges. A look, a word, a mere touch could shatter him.

Others didn’t seem to notice. Now in full swing, the Hatching Feast roared merrily around him. Music and laughter, wine and toastings to the new weyrlings. A few candidates who put on their bravest faces to disguise the dejection and disappointment. R’fayne stood off to the side while the sound of too many voices flowed around him. It was a miracle that he could make out anything at all. So many people smiling, happily flanked by wellwishers, paying no attention to anything else, too intent on their own joy or the sudden ecstasy of wholeness to look like they were troubled. Parents left and right. Glasses pouring wine and ale being slopped. Laughter and pride, belonging.

R’fayne didn’t feel that way. He felt raw, hollow, apart.

He’d seen enough of his siblings for the next month by now. Thankfully they had finally wandered off to harass someone else with their congratulations, only Kalayne’s smile lingering in his mind’s eye longer than C’gai’s teasing. But it couldn’t cut through the tightness in his throat, the heaviness in his gut.

For the first time in a long time, R’fayne felt awkward.

It didn’t feel like he thought it would. It didn’t feel like it should be the true shape of things. It felt wrong. He felt wrong. But feeling _him_, breathing in the dark, lying on his side with that first desperate meal digesting and nothing but warm safety around him - that felt right.

It was R’fayne who felt wrong.

He found himself staring at a man he didn't know, had never seen before. Someone's father, a crafter, in a steel blue tunic, with a child tugging at his arm. “Is there food here?” the child asked. They were pointed to the table nearest them adorned in trays of meatrolls and pies and sauces and R’fayne blinked, frozen for a second until the little blue headbutted him into the sands. }:Food.:{ The dragon had demanded, his voice quiet, certain. The child just scowled. “UGH. Not _healthy_ food! _Real_ food.” he cried, and turned away in disgust.

R’fayne took a moment to breathe, to let himself hold the fragile mind attached so strongly, so trusting it was practically sitting in the palm of his hand. The thing he’d always wanted. But he didn’t want this. He didn’t, yet he _wouldn’t_ disturb, unsettle, or upset him in any way. Couldn't bear the thought. The paradoxical nature of the moment was almost too much for him to grasp.

How could there be something wrong with what had happened, if it wasn’t what he’d always wanted, imagined, _needed_?

He turned away from the father and his son, trying to sort the present from fresh memory, fidgeting with the collar of his shirt, yet constantly feeling that mind all over his, like it really was always supposed to be there. He couldn’t make sense of it. He could barely believe it had actually happened - the moment of locking eyes with a blue dragon asking for food, refusing to be swayed and butting him to the ground. Trailing off the Sands with him in disbelief to feed the hunger gnawing through their stomachs. Screams ringing out behind them as a big brown pounced on the holdbred Candidate, the spray of blood across the sands. The vivid shapes in his psyche burned, and then suddenly burned away at their edges like fire consuming parchment, curling away to reveal a woman.

Tall, elegant, her face immaculately painted. She wore a long sweeping gown cut to accentuate her neck and her dark hair was twisted up into an intricate style with pearls and pins peppered throughout. When she leaned in, he bent to kiss her cheek automatically, his lips dragging into a smile. “Mother.”

“Rilfayne,” His mother flashed a tighter version back at him. Her hands, their hug, was little more than a skim, a brief brush of contact. “Congratulations to you, dear. You must be so pleased, at last.”

“Thank you.” he said, skipping over the sentiment entirely. “And it’s R’fayne now,”

“R’fayne,” She said thoughtfully. Weighed it, tasted it. “Your father will be pleased.” Her expression smoothed again. “This was quite a surprise. But I suppose Hatchings are full of those.”

“It's tradition.” R’fayne said coolly. “Just be happy no one died.”

“Mmm.” Marillia said noncommittal, using the awkward pause to let her gaze drift. “This place is just as I remember.”

R’fayne used the break in eye contact to finally look around too, then honed in on the broach she was wearing, “Nice pin. Did father give it to you?”

“Oh, yes.” She touched it absently, that brassy shine achingly familiar, “Before your time. I wore it all the time when we were together. It hasn’t tarnished any, has it? It’s no easy thing to try to Impress a dragon, so it’s a symbol of strength, as far as I'm concerned.” Her fingers fell away. “After what’s happened, I guess I should’ve given it to you.”

“No, he gave it to you. It’s only right you kept it.”

“That’s not quite what I mean.”

R’fayne frowned slightly. “What _do_ you mean?”

Marillia tensed. “Let’s… let’s not do this here.”

“Do what?” Already he had a sense of what. It wasn’t about his father at all.

Marillia sighed, clearly collecting herself. “I know not to judge what happens here too harshly. But, well, _this_ is not what I wanted for you. And I am pleased for you, I suppose. But did you have to throw it in my face?”

There it was. “You’re seriously going to give me a hard time over Impressing?”

“No. Just… to that particular color?”

His stomach clenched sickeningly tight. “He’s the same as any other dragon.”

“Is that fair to say? Even girls are Impressing blue now.”

No, _there_ it was. The quiet part that spoke in tension and discomfort and drawn brows, like there was something unpleasant in the air, like a thorn protruded every time they tried to touch. As if there was every reason _not_ to touch.

R’fayne felt himself lunge inside, forward, back, it didn’t matter. But he didn’t move. “What’s wrong with that?”

“You want to do this here?”

He arched a brow.

“Fine.” She continued, “I just hate to see how much you have allowed this place to plunge you into its bad habits. You’ve lowered yourself, when if you controlled yourself you might be further. They _need_ men who can control themselves. And you _are_ stronger than that.”

**Apparently not, Mother.**

“There’s nothing wrong with him.” R’fayne snapped, and for the first time he felt indignation over shame - felt love over anger, pain over denial. He honestly didn’t know what to say. “It’s not like I can just give him back.” He said quietly, but the words tasted like ash, blasphemous and bitter on his tongue, twisting wrong within the recesses of his very soul.

“No, of course not.” She softened a little, “I know that.”

“Anything else?”

Marillia's eyes flashed briefly. “No, but I just wished you…”

“What?” R’fayne bit back in a low voice.

“Well, I would have appreciated some warning. I wouldn’t have come.”

“Faranth, Mother. Do you ever hear yourself?” R’fayne sounded a little mystified but his insides constricted painfully into a cold knot.

“I _am_ happy for you…”

“You’re not. You’re embarrassed.”

“It’s _awkward_.” She shook her head, “I just would have stayed home and spared myself the shock, that’s all.”

“Mother, why don’t you just say what you really mean?” **Say it.**

“R’fayne,” she emphasized the correction, “You're not a child. What you do is your own choice, your responsibility.” ‘Your shame’ is what he heard in a soundless echo. “But there are people I know here. From Emerald Falls. And now I’ve got to walk around -” she cut off as someone passed by, “... I just wish I hadn’t found out so… publicly. You always talked of bronze, I never realized…”

“That something like _this_ could happen?”

“Yes.” She answered flatly. “Anyway it doesn’t matter any more, does it?”

“Right. Got it. You just didn’t want me to embarrass you in front of your friends.”

Marillia narrowed her eyes. “You asked.”

“Why don’t you go home, then?

She watched his expression darken into quiet, stilted rage. “R’fayne. Don’t do this.”

“If you’re uncomfortable, maybe there’s another bluerider willing to take you /between/.”

Marillia reached to take his hand. “Please, don’t do this. I came to see _you_. You’re still my son. This is your Feast.”

R’fayne looked down at her with nothing but hardness in his eyes. “I am expressing myself badly if it sounds like I care.”

Then he walked away. For once he didn’t know what else to say, feeling all the more confused about what had happened, but now the fury in his gut grew heavier, drove through him deeper and deeper. He rode a blue now, and maybe that said something - or everything - about his fitness for leadership all along.

Trying to collect himself, he grabbed a glass - wine or water, it didn’t matter - and swallowed it, tasting bitter rage in every gulp. It didn’t move the way his mother’s words stuck in his chest like a stone.

Everything he had imagined was tainted, cheapened, and false. Gone, shattered into fragments, ground into dust. The reality of it was the same whether it said anything or remained silent: he would never have leadership, he’d probably never lead anything. He was a cog now. And a cog he would stay. Why would anyone care about being that, or more than that?

His father sensed the tension and hopelessness in him well before he reached him.

His cane took more of his weight than usual, the approach almost glacial after sitting cramped in the stands, but his web of wrinkles were lit with a smile from across the room. It didn’t matter that R’fayne tried to resist, C’fayne still pulled him down by the shoulder into a crushing hug. His hands held onto him like wrought iron bars, soothing him, grounding him.

“There you are.” C’fayne said warmly, “Well, well, Ril. By the Egg, you’ve done it.” Rather uneasily R’fayne felt some cogent part of himself relax. And then suddenly all of it, the pleasure and the pain, the joy, the disbelief, the anger, sank down through him like he was nothing.

“You’re still in shock, huh?” C’fayne chuckled. “What a fine little dragon he is. Veserith said he’s a bit of a quiet fellow.” But there was something just slightly changed when his father said softly, comfortingly, just for his ears, “And blue is still a fine color, you know that.”

R’fayne nodded, but he just felt burnt, limp, tired. Wrong. “Thank you.” He managed a smile, but still - why did those words sting so badly?

Exhaustion had worn him thin, and whittling the barrier between him and Skadith dangerously thin with it. He felt him, more acutely than ever, in that dreamless sleep, satiated and blissfully unaware - trusting and adoring and quietly delighted to find _him_ there, even though he hadn’t gone anywhere.

A short while later he was standing next to Skadith’s wallow, staring at that innocent form of the innocent mind woven. A mind intertwined and entracing and completely trusting against his own. He could sense, as strongly as he could sense anything, that this sort of love was forever.

And it was forever that was the hard part. That he’d have to keep this in, away, forever, even if Thread was trying to tear it out of him. That this innocent, beautiful creature had chosen _him_, a man who didn’t want and certainly didn’t deserve him.

Skadith’s outer eyelids twitched back, the shimmering blue bright and strong through that translucent inner veil. R’fayne couldn’t even bring himself to look directly at it.

This dragon didn’t deserve him.

The doors that he’d longed to open and pass through with a bronze, or, shells, even a brown were gone, slammed shut in his face. At least an unranked bronzerider’s station could always change on a mark - one goldflight, one accident, one temporary fill-in for someone. At any time, the life of a bronzerider could catapult him from obscurity into prominence, networking, infinite opportunity.

Even the big brown that had attacked Obrosin- well, O’rosin now, would have been better. He would have had a shot at it eventually, if injury didn’t take them out early: earned his tenure in some rank, transferred to another Weyr when a position opened up, done some time as a Wingthird or ‘second, whatever it took. Whatever there was to do he’d have done it.

But now he couldn't even bear to appreciate the depth of that mind, the bond suffused with love so strong and so complete his eyes hurt, couldn’t admire the rich night-sky effect of Skadith’s hide as he breathed.

All he knew was this: they were stuck together.

And all he wanted was to disappear.

===end flashback==

}:She’ll be expecting you.:{ Skadith finally said, voice quiet and subdued beneath the golden fringes of sunlight.

She could wait.

Pressing his palm flush against the warmth of his dark foreleg, R’fayne let himself absorb his calm, his steadiness, his strength. Everything about it felt right. It was hard to imagine he’d been so afraid of his life now, of the dragon that had always been so solid and so certain of him.

**I won't be long.** He assured him as he turned and headed to main building’s entrance into the Hold, looking back just once at his dragon.

Skadith had already tucked in near a stand of trees, face following the sun. }:I’ll be right here.:{

Last updated on the June 24th 2025

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Everywhere but Here (2/2)