That'll Do (Azzy, Chek)

[Cathaline]

Yamarashi knew, somewhere deep in her bones, that Newt was alive. Knew it, but couldn't communicate it. It was more than a feeling, it was a piece of her identity, the one thing that kept her more or less sane in a time of pain, fear, and abandonment. She couldn't go to Newt because she could no longer fly; she couldn't make him come to her, because he was too far away for her telepathic pleas to reach him, though perhaps on some level she drifted with him in his dreams. She was trapped, indefinitely, tethered to Dalibor and slowly going mad. Or madder.

Although she knew Yhimere, she had no strong connection to him. Despite Newt's gatecrashing proclivities, Yhimere had often been busy in the short time Yamarashi had lived here with her person. She recognised his face well enough to successfully deliver letters when Newt made sure to imprint it upon her, but she wasn't as cozy with him as she was with Letorin and his fair.

And definitely not as cozy as she was with a certain bluerider who had been powerfully imprinted on her subconscious, because a letter sent to him could not be allowed to go awry by a mistake made by a tiny firelizard's brain.

Still, for a short while, a couple of days, she had no choice. She couldn't fly. She didn't know where Newt was. She didn't know where the yellowhead man was. Yhisk looked at her like she was a meal. Everything hurt. Yamarashi resided by and large in the crook of Yhimere's neck, leaning up often to nip at the arm of his glasses, which reminded her of happier times -

And then she saw him. The yellowhead man, across the dining hall.

She uttered a shriek and flopped off of Yhimere's shoulder and into his pie. Doggedly, with a single-minded determination, she crawled across the table, dropped to the floor, and weaved past feet, occasionally nipping at an ankle that startled her by jiggling. At last she came to the appropriate pair of boots and scrabbled madly up L'xon's leg, not caring if her little claws tore at his trousers and possibly at the skin beneath them.

By the time Yamarashi reached his lap, she was exhausted by the effort, her still-healing wounds throbbing. Her left wing was missing, the whole side a mess, stuck with bandages; her right wing was crumpled, and one back leg was missing, a cauterised stump. She tucked herself against his stomach, breathing heavily, and offered him a flicker of emotion - of loss and hurt and relief to be someplace that came close to being a home.

[Azhdarchid]

It was a strange thing, aging without anyone noticing. Not looking any different, least not yet, but knowing another grain of sand had been counted against him and Halventh. L'xon had been cutting an idle circle into his dinner steak, reenacting one of the cozy little cakes Eywren used to mark the occasion. Except instead of berry juice, out poured wherry's blood-

"Yaah!"

Luckily or unluckily, no one was sitting adjacent to the bluerider and so no body received the robotic jerk of his arm or the steak knife at the end. An advanced prickling of the skin climbed him toes to hips, and the glassy flick of his eyes to the new contents of his lap did not relax him at first.

Then his elbows sunk back in, and he laid his cutlery down, and his shoulders drooped out of alert. The cloth already draped over his thighs served to bag the firelizard, who bled her thoughts to him like an open wound.

Yamarashi? Halventh said to the green, for it was his mind too. As L'xon knotted one fist around the neck of the impromptu bag, the dragon rose from his ledge on the east wall rookery. The rider abandoned his steaming dinner and carried Yamarashi outside, into the hard, snowless air of Spring. Once he broke free of the cavern mouth and the wind struck his cheeks, he loosed his cargo into his palms, pressing her first to the jagged clefts stung down the right side of his face, mouth flat to her bandages. He pulled out the collar of his jacket and transferred her beneath, against the warm pulse of his neck, depressing her one remaining hind foot with his finger to warn her against kicking.

He pinned her in with the collar and his hand, in a gesture that suggested a slashed throat. Halventh swam down through the windless, constricting air and swept his wings forward over both of them as he landed. He had already started passing doses of succor to the little warrior, sipping from her the venom of her days.

Did he come back? L'xon asked, voice haggard as if the thinness of the atmosphere had touched it. Everyone had heard already: Newtollen was dead. The circumstances unknown past speculation. The cause for the judgement unknown past the authority it rose from. Dead unless he had actually returned with his firelizard-

Newtollen is not here, Halventh breathed out with the same physical hesitancy. Only Yamarashi. Ever a dragon, his voice slipped out of human interest and toward curiosity. I did not notice her return... L'xon did not falter no matter what the beast reported:

She would not be here if he'd died. She would be wild. Not that there was anything left on Pern for a wild firelizard minus a wing and a leg. His freezing fingertips searched under his collar for the flit's neck and stroked it. Who did the bandages?

...a kind friend. Halventh sensed the discolor of their bond immediately. She is tired, he explained. L'xon's stroking halted.

Well what does she want? Food? A warm nest? The dragon's tongue flipped in a brief display of his own displeasure, since the blond did not seem too attuned at the moment. L'xon's voice treated these ideas as demands, criteria to be met before a reward be granted.

Just you are enough for now, he replied, pleased with this answer, and not just because it was the truth. His long face tilted. Though a firelizard never turns down food.