The Things They Said Could Restore Me (Azzy)

[Cathaline]

She was stalking L'xon.

Did he notice or not? It was impossible to say, but for several days now, as the cold winter winds descended on Dalibor, she had been popping in and out of rooms that he was in - his weyr, the dining hall, random corridors in the lower caverns. Her long-nosed little face turned until she could hone in on him, memorising him, and then she would pop away again in a whir of little green wings.

Occasionally she got it wrong and would appear in front of somebody else - Yhimere or Letorin mostly, people she knew pretty well. But at last, after a couple days of getting it right, she appeared before him and flitted over to hover in the air in front of L'xon, a little folded bit of hide clamped tight in her back paws. She offered it to him with a demanding chirp, and when he did not respond instantaneously, she zipped closer and tried to force it into his mouth. Then she perched on top of his head and leaned way over to stare into his eyes.

The hide had several lines scrawled on it, and they read:

Hi, L! This is Yamarashi. Apparently Jazz decided that a bunch of sad Candidates needed to be less sad and she's been giving out flit eggs like candy ever since. I made sure Yamarashi really definitely recognised you before I decided to send her out to be a spy, because I know how much you like spies.

I've been thinking about a lot of things lately. Like mostly how much it hurts to have something in my head again. I think it was supposed to help, and it kind of does, but she's pretty demanding. Maybe she'll grow out of it when she's not hungry all the time. She kind of makes me hungry all the time too, I didn't know flits could do that, but then again maybe it's just my head and the weird things it's doing but anyway - I think I might be leaving. Not forever. Just for a few weeks or so to visit my family and get my mind out of this numb place it's been and I was wondering, if I do go on a sabbatical, if perhaps you would be so kind as to give me a ride. If you know what I mean. And I think that you do. Because you're so good at offering me rides. If you know what I mean. And I think that you do.

Shhh. Secrets.

- N.

[Azhdarchid]

L'xon was in the dining hall when he was fed the message tube. He had tried to reach for it, but the flit hadn't waited for such courtesies. Spitting the leather out into his hand, he glanced at the surrounding diners, then untied the tube and spread out a couple inches of it against his palm. The bluerider's face crumpled- save for his nose, which remained statuesque and raptorine despite the zag in its bridge -and he let the hide cozy back shut, thrusting it into the pocket of his winter coat as he grit his teeth in disgust. He did not, however, make any attempt to dislodge the firelizard.

"This jester will not find imagined tales of the aftermath of Halventh's Flight failures such a happy topic once it is reported to the Candidatemaster." He abandoned his elaboration there, with a shrug, and ate the rest of his dinner. He headed outside in a disgruntled march, lips carving a thin frown across his pale face. Summoning Halventh, he rode to his weyr, advancing deep within and sitting down on his bed, still fully dressed for the demanding weather outdoors.

L'xon yanked off his gloves and jammed his fingers into the concealed note, extracting it and unrolling the hide to its full extent, slapping open the glow on his bedside table. Dark eyes searched down the document, running twice over some lines: she's been giving out flit eggs, how much it hurts, makes me hungry- I think I might be leaving. Sniffing as he read over the subsequent reassurance, Lex's thoughts left Newt entirely. He mulled over, rather, the consequences of Newt. The webs spun by Newt. And he got back in time to discover some unabashed praise of himself. Of them. It wasn't just in words but in crude, juvenile, half-faded drawings along the fringe of the hide, like ancient graffiti rediscovered.

Unsmiling, he got up and went to his desk to assemble a smaller patch of hide, its contents simple:

Soon.

"Yamarashi," he said, and waited for the word to call the beast. He stuck the folded square of hide in her paws and sent her on her way.

Weslieth, Halventh twittered just a minute later. L'xon ~says~ one of your Candidates sent him a rude, erratic message. In a way all these things were true. Newtollen did. L'xon has only known him as a good person until now. Please address his unusual change of character. The message has also mentioned something about, hm, "running away?" We are not sure. You should clarify this immediately. If it is only a break from Candidacy that he desires, send him to us that he might apologize, and then we will take him to wherever he calls home, as a show of good faith.

Oh, and L'xon says it was a bad idea to give him a firelizard.[/i]

[Cathaline]

The Candidatemasters had spent the last several months - going on a turn now - addressing Newt's unusual changes of character, which only grew worse and worse with every hatching he attended. Even bidding him to stay off the sands hadn't helped. Jazz had offered him a firelizard egg along with the one she'd bought Seph; the boy had replied with, for him, good grace, and whatever L'xon thought, she'd been keeping a close eye on his bond with Yamarashi. Who was a menace, by the way. Not an Oracle-level menace, but not as pleasant as Seph's dual pinks.

"Are you running away?" she asked Newt gently when she called him in to her office.

"No," he said, horrified. "Dalibor is my home. All my friends are here - Yhimere and Letorin are here. It's not running away, it's just visiting my parents, right? And then I'll be back. I just need a break from..."

Newt made a gesture that encompassed the world as a whole, which he could not run from, even if he tried.

"Right," Jazz said. "You know it's against the rules to be disrespectful to dragonriders, don't you?"

"Disrespectful to - who? I'm perfectly respectful! I never - " She raised an eyebrow, and he had the decency to flush. "Yamarashi likes to shove things into people's mouths, I don't know, I'm trying to train it out of her. She's a baby."

"Do you like her?"

"She's fine," he said. "She's not a wher." High praise coming from Newt. "I'm glad you gave me the egg. I am. It's like a test ride of how much I can stand having something else in my head except I don't have to traumatise innocent Yusks anymore, and that's all to the good, isn't it? I just think I need to get out of here and not get in trouble for it. Like. I'm sorry, that's a horrible way to put it, isn't it?"

"Sort of," Jazz said with a small smile. "If you need a break for a month or two, we can give you that. I know Kalenna and Yuri have been advocating it. I just didn't expect to see you suggest it."

Newt shrugged, and glanced down at his torn hands, the ragged old scars on his palms. "I've been getting to know my brain pretty intimately lately," he said. "I'm not doing anybody any good here, am I? Just making perfectly good people worry about me every time they set eyes on me, so - if I can go, then I'd like to. But I'll come back. I'll always come back. Can you save my room for me?"

"I can try."

Weslieth sang back, after some time, Thank you for letting us know, Halventh! We've been talking to him - well, Jazz has been talking to him. He's going to come and see you soon.[/i]

Which was how Newt ended up dragging a bag into L'xon's weyr, and immediately complained, rubbing at his eye under his glasses, "What do I have to apologise for? What did Yamarashi do? It was not an erratic note, by the way. That's how I write. That's how I talk. Rude, I will cop to, however. Sorry. I can be better. I want to be better."

[Azhdarchid]

L'xon waited till Newtollen had complained all the way to the cusp of the inner weyr.

"Apology accepted." He grabbed the Candidate's hips and dragged him forward, kissing around his lips before he caught the other mouth with his own in a brief, deeper entanglement. His fingers were digging against the bone by then. Letting go, he picked up Newt's bag and carried it back out to the dragon's den, where Halventh awaited. "You can never use names again. Not even letters." He hitched an arm up the dragon's leg and half-walked, half-climbed to the crest where shoulder and neck joined.

On his knees against the forward round of Halventh's shoulder, he fastened the bag into the blue's leather rigging. "But I will tell you the rest of what you did wrong later. I suppose you don't even have to tell me where we're going yet." He waited for the Candidate to join him on the draconic spire, then buckled Newt in like a second piece of luggage, tugging on the bottom edges of his coat to test the material. "You know we will have to Between twice. And when you're there, and you realize your life is lonely for a lack of dragons and whers, we will have to again. Again and again. That is Weyr life. Is this really what you want? And do you only want to Between once...or twice?" The dragonrider looked over his shoulder.

[Cathaline]

Newt made a startled sound into L'xon's mouth, his hands grasping at the bluerider's shoulders. Even after all this time it felt so natural, so familiar, one of the many things he was giving up by leaving. But only for a short while, and it wasn't as though he could have this very often anyway, right? "I'm sorry, but you wouldn't recognise Yamarashi or my handwriting. I really did make very sure she knew exactly who she was delivering it to, okay? She's not so - get off you little monster," he insisted when the green creature popped out of between and tangled herself in his wild brown hair, swatting ineffectually at her. She creeled at him and clung on tighter.

This was all happening so fast, too fast. Newt had bid his goodbyes to everyone else who mattered, of course, but there was a yearning in his heart to stay, regardless. But if he stayed he had to be a Candidate, there was no in between, you didn't get to take time off from lessons and chores and still lurk around the Weyr, that wasn't how it worked. It wasn't fair to the other Candidates. And he couldn't be a good Candidate right now, he'd proved that over and over and over with mistake after mistake, this particular mistake hovering right at the crest of the mountain he'd built.

Scrambling onto Halventh's back, he patted at the blue's side before submitting to the strapping. He licked his lips, watching L'xon from behind his spectacles, and for once, he thought about it.

Then he said, "Twice. I'd suffer it twice for you." There were things he would not suffer, but between wasn't so bad, was it? No, not really. "And when I'm lonely I'll come back. It's just so stifling here. You know what I mean? Can't do anything, so many restrictions. I'm suffocating and I've tried everything else and I don't want to be this way forever. Maybe it won't help, but at least I'll have tried and I can come back and say, hey, guys, I tried. If you don't try things then you can't succeed, it's a simple fact of science, and science is life."

[Azhdarchid]

"Wouldn't recognize her? She has been hunting me for days." He watched the tiny green fuss with her purported master, exhaling through his nose when Newt failed to dislodge her.

I can keep her entertained, Halventh chimed in. The dragon's voice, as always, warmed the air with its confidence. He knows I would not let him fall, right? he continued, not as a real question but as a desire for communication to pass in the coy way most dragons preferred. L'xon had trouble putting his lips to the air like he could to Newt's flesh, though. For you, Newt had said. Nothing had cooled or collected itself in the intervening months. Not a hint of revelation or redirection.

But it was not fair to expect that of a boy so broken he fled for home. He ignored most of the rest of the Candidate's words as Halventh coiled 'round and made for the ledge. The blue lifted off, rumbling at his rider's hesitation. That served better command than a polite request, and L'xon relayed: "Halventh says he will not let you go. You can be afraid, but know he is always there, even if you cannot feel him." The blond sighed as his dragon's wings fluttered against the insubstantial ice in the air. Halventh started relaying destinations to the Watch: first, a stop at an Igen oasis, then the island Hold proper to deliver their cargo. Oases held some of the rarest flowers on Pern, and were good places to pick up gifts when meeting again after a long tme apart.

L'xon had settled back to his own thoughts. "And your parents, they are good people?" Newt might have grasped the base of this question, which was the last L'xon was able to ask before Halventh disappeared from the Daliborian winter.

"Here, we're here," he said as they manifested again, this time in darkness a shade off Between, the catalog of differences only revealed as frostbitten nerves twitched back to life. There was light, gloomy behind a thick and unnatural cloudform that had Halventh briefly hunching his neck in alarm. But the moonlit silver was just moisture, and stars peeped through it. Yet as the dragon hovered alone in the hundreds of leagues of desert, it began to rain.

The blue bellowed low as the first drops speckled him and his passengers. "I don't believe it," L'xon murmured, but pointed Halventh groundward nonetheless. "Scouted this out a month ago and put some supplies down. If I am right, they will still be there." If not then it would be wet sand and a dragon's wing. "The traders of this area rely on oases, but this one is so far off the nearest civilization they would have to add many days to their journey just to include it. My expectation is that it's not profitable. And they're a profit people."

The cluster of trees stood out like a stain in the dunes, the circle of water flashing moon-like up at them. "I guess it is winter here too," L'xon snorted as Halventh sunk into the sand he landed on. But he smiled, seeing the flaps of canvas he had tucked back between a couple blue-top palms. As the dragon waited, the rider's hands tightened on the bone ridge ahead of him.

Yet it had always been better not to ask Newtollen if his mind still lived. For both of them. L'xon left him to his own devices, even to untie, chucking his own coat on the ground the instant he'd dismounted.

Yamarashi, Halventh called, sniffing around for the little hanger-on.

"I meant for it to be more like a bed," Lex explained, quite apart from his dragon's efforts to wrangle the flit into distraction. He had already crossed to the supplies, a already-set tent with a closed front flap. He divided the sagging gateway and pinned it up, brushing open an orange-filtered glow just inside. A downy mattress, soft blankets, and a proper desert warmth hid away from the rain. "I thought it might be nice not to be outside." He did not know, as he said it, whether he meant nice for him or nice for the Candidate. "But, well." He extended his hand toward the lush interior, and looked back at last for his passenger.

[Cathaline]

"Wouldn't recognise her as mine," Newt clarified. He assumed there were probably loads of people who wanted to write letters to L'xon. It seemed like a natural way of communicating to a Harper-bred led, who did not yet have a bonded of his own in order to comprehend that Halventh was Lex's postal service. "I didn't want you to get it and be like, who's sending me this nonsense, and ignore it?"

He quieted down again when they lifted off, grabbing height while Halventh presumably took care of the niceties. Let me down, I want to get off, Newt thought, briefly, and tried not to fly into hysterics before he even went between. "I know. I know he's got me. I know. Of course they - "

The void snatched his words and, as usual, sent his mind howling for cover, stripped it open and flayed the nerves. One of these days it had to get better, right? Your parents, are they good people, he would be seeing them soon enough, and in the meantime he had Lex and Halventh, there were good things, warm things on the outside and he wasn't trapped, he was going to be okay, he was doing something productive and making tough choices in order to see to that -

Newt flinched and came fully back to himself when a raindrop splashed on his nose, and another splayed onto his glasses. "Ack," he said, reaching up to try to shield his eyes with a hand that trembled. His nose crinkled, and he started to smile, a little, when L'xon talked about his supplies and his plans. It was nice to be wanted, even if most people would denounce them for this. His tongue flicked out to taste the rain, and he said softly, "Thanks."

Yamarashi was fascinated by the rain, and unlatched her claws from his hair and scalp, fluttering her tiny wings. When Halventh called out to her, she launched herself into the sky and zipped forward to land on his head, chittering happily at him. Yes, she liked water, she liked everything to be this wet and wonderful, and she strutted down the long length of his muzzle while she told him all about it.

Freed of that obligation for the moment, Newt unstrapped himself and slid down to the ground, stretching quickly; they hadn't been up long, but still long enough for muscles to start to cramp. He peeked into the warmth of the tent, and then turned to curl his fingers into Lex's collar, drawing him closer. "You like me," he breathed just before their lips met. Newt might not understand why, especially in his current state, but he certainly grasped that nobody set up secret tent rendezvouses a world away for a random fling. Lex could have anybody, and for most of them he would feel no pangs of conscience, and yet, here they were.

After a moment, he let the bluerider go and ducked into the tent, starting to shed his dripping clothes before he touched the nice dry mattress. "It's really great," he said, with mounting enthusiasm as his mind came back from the darkness. "You have a definite talent for the illicit. Apparently I don't. Are you going to punish me for my rude, erratic, terrible note, or are we just going to pretend that definitely never happened at all?"

[Azhdarchid]

Halventh crooned for Yamarashi, who streamed against him wild and unfiltered. He had not paid firelizards attention before save how they could garner him attention. But Yamarashi's connectivity made her just another small piece of the Candidate Newtollen, and the blue appreciated that he could have some too. The green glow of his facets twitched forward, inner lids clutching closed against the rain. He squinted at his diminutive passenger, smaller even than a human. Wet, was it?

He dropped more of his weight onto his comparatively small forelegs, bearing towards the center of the oasis and the rippling pool drinking the rain. L'xon had already joined Newtollen in the tent- "Yes," the rider had sworn against the Candidate's lips -Halventh left behind, shutting the flap against the rain and the cooling night. The glow inside the tent remained on, the only light whispering back at the stars for a thousand miles.

Halventh impressed upon the firelizard his trajectory, then dropped his head to the water's edge and slopped up rolls of water on his long tongue. He kept moving, snout panning back and forth across the pool before rising out once the silver climbed to his ankles. But even dragon willpower would not submerge him, and he had to settle for the churning bath that washed down his belly as he laid out in the center. Splaying his hind legs to best enhance the relieving chill, he dropped his neck down and shifted it side-to-side till he had dug far enough to cover the fleshy bases of his ridges. His chin found a sandbar to rest upon, so he did not have to keep his own snout raised and Yamarashi's perch clear. A selection of silver fish too minuscule to interest a dragon pricked inconsistencies in the water's reflection, flakes of extra light wafting around the new blockade in their pool.

With the dragon submerged, a few eight-legged amphibious types cautiously resumed their peeping calls to each other. Like the fish, they survived only in this one place. Once it departed, they would too. Useless flowers dangled in chains from exotic treetops, unserved, unable to pollinate past the borders of the oasis, which had already been delineated thousands of turns prior. No wherries visited this place anymore for a more migratory exchange of seeds. But Igen still protected the little treasures: Halventh could see the scar of a seared burrow underneath the short grass on the opposing shore. He looped his tongue out, over his nose, and tried to tag his green sprite on the wing.

Let me down, I want to get off, he thought, remembering what he had heard just before between, even though he had told Newt otherwise. Maybe L'xon was not very convincing. Halventh did not know. He was not good at evaluating the more subtle noises humans made.

What? L'xon popped up in alarm, tangled in a heat Halventh had already been sipping from, but now fumbling through it at the dragon like a fish in the sand. Yet despite his confusion, he recognized the parroting had come from Halventh and not from the other young man in the tent. He hadn't stopped, despite the question, after all.

Sorry. It is okay, the blue reassured his rider, and Lex drifted out again. But he switched the Candidate back on the fluffy top of the mattress, suddenly vengeful for a request poor Newt had not even made. Halventh shut his outer lids, taking shallow breaths as L'xon's attention drifted off him, but of course never truly left. These strange isolations, a necessity for Newt's protection, made him the only dragon in the Weyr, his rider the only man, and in the absence of the web their communications with each other amplified. The monsoon started fumbling harder against the desert, but Halventh did not feel it. He opened a wing by a few degrees so Yamarashi could cuddle within the membranes, whenever she'd had enough of wet.

The emptied clouds presided over an unimpressive lightening of the desert sky. In another couple hours, Rukbat would burn the remains away. L'xon stepped out of the tent. The grass was already dry beneath his bare feet.

"And you can never again send her in public. Only into my weyr. And if I am not there, she has to come back to you with the message. She cannot leave it lying around," he explained. "And no names." The blond swallowed back his intensity, then looked over his shoulder. "Bring me my clothes. You need to pick some of the flowers here. Give them to your mother." Flowers as a shield: everything the rider did was for Newt's protection. And very soon his role would end. And he could move on. Not even Halventh could protest it, because Newt was not going to know.