Didn't Nobody Tell You, The House Will Always Win?

"Mmm."

The noise that came out of the corner of their small room was a lackluster one. The boy that emitted it was sullen and tired. Though the slash on his finger had long since healed, he still had yet to reintegrate it into the way he traversed his carvings. He held it poised outward with a wooden pendant in his palm. Shipfish twined in the center - again. He must have gone through at least ten discs of the same design, and this one was new just today. Ghris might not have been able to tell, though, since it was the same as all the rest, but Hakotep knew the difference in the grain. He turned it this way and that, finger out, and furrowed his brow.

The truth was that he had not slept much at all the night before. He had been silent about it, but nearly every candlemark he was up with his eyes open, trying to find something in the dark to take his mind off of its obsession with anxiety. The dreams were petty and pointless but frustrating nonetheless. He whittled endlessly at a piece of wood just for all of his work to result in nothing, or for the grain to split; he wound a thread about a spool only for it all to come curling back off; he found himself wandering in a land of blackness and floating furniture that was all too big; he stood before a hatching egg that kept repairing its cracks. And with each frustrating end to a dream, he found himself more and more anxious, and with the sensation of grinding a plait of hair between his teeth. It was bizarre and the only remedy he found for it was staying up.

When Rukbat rose, he finally got a brief wink of sleep, and when he surfaced again, Ghris had been gone as usual. He saw to his chores and returned demurely to the room. He'd been there for most of the day, the blankets kicked down to the end of his bed because he'd heated it up enough by simply sitting there for so long. His pile of wood shavings was getting unruly again but he didn't care to sweep it out.

The dark-skinned boy looked up at Ghris and caught a flash of gray in his hair. His hands calm to rest on his leg and he blinked, then saw it again.

"Ghris," he frowned, "You've got something on your head."

The creature revealed itself and Hakotep's lips pressed together. A pillie, then. He'd seen them around the Weyr, skittering about the lake or with their caretakers, and the first thing he worried about was how big it was going to get. There was barely enough room for two people in their small dwelling, and depending on how fast the creature grew, it could easily take up a good percentage of the precious floor space. A rock in the night to trip over.

The coo elicited nothing from Hakotep. He watched it with the same disapproving look all through its first appearance to its journey to his bed.

"You Impressed a bug," he muttered. A bug! A scuttling water-bug. What sort of right did a thing like that have to be on his bed, or even on land in the first place? But he didn't shoo her away. Instead, he regarded her with a very disappointed, concerned scowl. He seemed so unhappy that the groan welling up in his throat was nearly visible before it sounded.

He was tired and had no time for bugs. "You live on that side of the room," he told the pillie, waving his hand in the direction of Ghris' bed. Then he ignored the creature entirely and expected it to go away - by its own will or by Ghris' hands. He set to carving again, but the tension in his face never released. He firmly believed that he had reason enough to be irritable. With the hatching fast approaching, he found himself increasingly anxious. Stress became pent-up inside of him. It wasn't that he was afraid of coming back to the same bed dragonless, but more that he had no idea what to expect. He couldn't wrap his mind around it.

He tucked his knees up where he lay, forming a very enclosed shape in the corner of the bed. If it had only been Ghris who had come home, he would have been more inviting. Only marginally, but still. And he felt a little bit of guilt at that, and offered some sort of consolation to his dear friend.

"She's cute," he said, but he didn't really mean it. Well, she was - for a bug - but he didn't care if she was. No time for bugs. Something else was eating him in a bad way instead.

Hakotep switched his knife out for a smaller, sharper one and began to refine the shape of the two shipfish. There were more somethings than just a bug that liked Ghris - stupid boy. Hakotep, however, seemed to be acting more the part of a boy than Ghris was, finally showing his age as younger. He could brush his hair all he wanted and line his eyes with kohl, but the dark circles that hung beneath them betrayed how moody, hormonal, and upset the Igen kid had made himself. The pillie's affections only made him look wearier, as if she'd sapped out his energy with her feelers.

He made a misstep with his knife and swore at it.

He exhaled carefully and set the carving down in his lap. Ghris spoke and Hakotep heard him; he almost hung onto the words for the relief they offered. He needed to talk about it, but at the same time, he desperately didn't want to. What ailed him was private and he stubbornly labeled it as too private even for Ghris to know.

"I didn't sleep well," he dodged. "Just... not having a good day." But it was every day lately, and there he found the flaw in his evasions, but left it there. He looked down at the carving in his lap almost like he wanted to pick it up, but left that there, too.

He laced his fingers together to keep them occupied. He wanted to pick at the hem of his shirt or at the pendant or anything. He rubbed at one hand with the other shifting tension from knuckle to knuckle. What was he supposed to say now? Ghris had found him out - not that it was a difficult thing to do. Staying inside kept him away from the nosing of people he didn't care about, but Ghris...

If he had to say it to anyone, it would have had to be Ghris.

"It's just the hatching," he said, trying to make it out to be something simple. He had to strain to admit it, though, as thought it were some terrible weakness. "I mean, you're probably worried too, right? Normal." But Hakotep ducked his head into his thin hands and when he pulled back up, there was frustration written on his brow.

"It's so stupid," he spluttered. "I-- I could care less if I Impressed. It doesn't matter. I get a few retries, anyways, and even if I run out of those I still get to stay here with you, but I-- What if something goes wrong? What if I do Impress but my dragon isn't mine, it's meant to be someone else's, and I only got it because they're somewhere else in the world and they never got Searched and I'm just the back-up plan?" He jammed his teeth together and stared fiercely at the wall.

"They tell us all this shell-shard stuff about how hatchings go and how dragons know how to pick, but how am I supposed to really know? It's just so... big. The whole idea of it. And-- And I can't get my head around it. There's so much potential for-- for success, or for failure, and I don't know what to think. I don't know anything." His hands came up to his hair, then, running through it out of worry. "I really, really don't know anything. I'm just some kid from some hole in the desert, y'know?"

Finally, he turned his head and his eyes fell on Ghris. Mostly, they held concern, but the simple act of looking over softened them. He forced out a smirk. "Better to be one of those dimglow girls. They're all just excited because they don't understand."

Hakotep swallowed back any protest he had wanted to make when Ghris spoke and the silence left there held for a few minutes between the two beds. He plucked at the hem of his sleeve. Then, finally, "You're right. You're right."

The words were quiet and tired, though, and Hakotep was saying them in an attempt to make himself believe. He was so desperate that it worked, partly. Maybe Ghris was right. Part of what he was saying was definitely the truth - that they were the ones there, stuck in some cold stone barracks with the privilege of Standing weighing on their shoulders. Them, and the kids in the rooms all down the hall, and that was it. No one else. Iluropoth had picked him out in Igen from a crowd of scared children. Hakotep had thought he was better than that -- that it didn't matter much to him and that he would just be happy no matter what. And yet here he was, scared so deeply that he lost sleep over it.

Did a dragon really need him? What help was he going to be beyond hands to feed? It was all theory. Half of what Ghris said was theory, but for whatever reason, hearing Ghris say it made it a little bit more truthful. Sincere, he supposed. Better coming from someone who was in the same boat than from some candidatemaster who had already been dealt the winning hand.

The thread on his sleeve began to come loose. He felt lost. He was a very long way from home, and for what? To continue being a boy who tries to skip chores and sleeps in late. His mother didn't miss him - he knew that. Maybe Andril didn't, either. It was strange to have nothing tying him back to his home beyond his skin and his naivety. He thought, then, that maybe he wasn't a long way from home, but rather, was very close to it. But he felt so uneasy in the Weyr that he hesitated to call Dalibor home. But he was there - Ghris was right. He was there and not anyone else.

He sunk lower in his bed until he was lying down and looking up at the ceiling. Some kid from some hole in the desert. He let out a whisper of a sigh. He felt much younger than he would have liked to. All he was was some sixteen-Turn-old being faced with the unknown. The unknown has always been frightening to everyone. Hakotep was not special.

"We do think too much," he muttered.

Hakotep's pulse caught when Ghris left his side of the room. He was suddenly overtaken by a very intense nervousness. Heat rose up into his cheeks as Ghris came astride him, but the hue of his skin buried the redness. It was a guilty nervousness and a sort that he was all too familiar with. It was the feeling of Andril coming to him for comforts when Hakotep's mind did not want to give them but his body did. And this was strange because all Ghris had to give was a hug. The boy's arms were between Hakotep's body and the pillows under his spine and, for a while, Hakotep wasn't sure what to do. He tucked his face in against the hollow of Ghris' neck, but his arms still lay clutching his carving on his belly. It was his reservations that stayed them. Something in him wanted to hold on and never let go, and this frightened him.

His half of the embrace was lacking for too long, though. What was it like to hug someone and not be hugged back? Hakotep didn't know. It was always his fault that this happened. He squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his arms to wrap around Ghris. One hand rest on the herder's ribs and one on his shoulder blade. For a moment his arms were loose, but then he pressed his face harder against Ghris' neck and clutched at him dearly. He had more to worried about than the Hatching, but Ghris didn't need to know that. As much as he could, though, he let it all go. His breath was hot against Ghris' skin as he pushed it out of his lungs, carrying with it the negative energy that made his ribs clamp up around his heart. His muscles softened and, eventually, his arms slid back to himself and his head dropped back to the pillow.

He looked at Ghris. His dark eyes held a sort of exhausted gratitude, but he was entirely too stubborn to thank him aloud. A hand raised up to brush softly along Ghris' side, but it dropped back down again after. Intimacy was prohibited among candidates. Hakotep knew that. So he let out a tense, vocal sigh and let his eyes twitch closed again.

Outside, it was nearing evening - perhaps around dinnertime, but Hakotep wasn't hungry. He'd barely eaten all day, but now, all his body wanted was sleep. Ghris' voice was soft in his head like a mantra, but the words made him grimace. 'We'll be okay.' It was stupid. Of course they would be. They'd be fine. Hakotep, by now, was rejecting his worries and stamping them with a big fat 'inconsequential.' Stupid, petty, inconsequential. Worry for the sake of worry and not for any real gain. Glad that's over, Hakotep thought to himself, but it wasn't over, he wasn't glad, and his worries weren't really nothing. A little irrational, maybe, but they were affecting him. The denial of his weakness made him feel better, though.

"Yeah, yeah," he grumped quietly to Ghris. Then he pried an arm out from under him and pushed the herder off. He didn't want Ghris to go, but he knew he needed him to. The hug had run its course. There was only so far that Hakotep would let things go. There had to be limits, for his own sake, because he knew very well that he was capable of taking things farther than his academic security would allow -- capable of holding onto Ghris and never letting go. Those sorts of things were strictly prohibited and, despite the little parts of his head that told him 'no one will know' or 'you're able to decide what's good for you and what isn't, not some stupid old rules', he wasn't going to blow his chance at candidacy like some dimglow wherry.

He was proud of his self control, at least.

With Ghris gone, Hakotep blindly reached out to put his knife and carving on the nightstand. Then, he rolled over with his back to the rest of the room. Sleep could take him at any moment and he wouldn't protest. He wasn't going to get anything done that evening and, perhaps, an early bedtime would do him good. He tugged the leather tie out of his hair and redid it, and afterwards he curled his body up under the furs.

"Name your bug," he commanded, muffled by the bedding.