Fossils and decay

[jkatkina]

Name:	jkatkina
Story:	Fensirt
Colors:	Amber 8. fossil Skylight 18. Urban decay
Supplies/Styles:	Graffiti: Valentine's Day Challenge (Option #1) Oils ("in the aftermath")
Word Count:	1122
Rating:	G
Summary:	The new can sometimes help move past the old. Kaitan pries.
Notes:	I know I said the next would be Kaitan's arrival story, but this is for the Valentine's challenge! I couldn't resist.

"So how come you know all this stuff?"

Tuanada rumbled, thinking while his feet found their broad way over uneven ground. Kaitan's hands were more comfortable in his hair, keeping purchase without pulling.

They had taken the day out to the badlands, Kaitan having assured him that she had the time to spare today and didn't have tutoring. He wouldn't brook her skipping time with her tutors, and his new position as another kind of de-facto tutor turned out to be a fantastic piece of leverage.

The badlands were good for basic practice in cooperation: bad for training a class of newbies, perhaps, but one-on-one, with an experienced Rider and a hungry-for-learning human they were a fantastic place to practice agility and staying astride over sharp inclines and declines. For the last hour or so he'd been instructing her on how to tilt and lean her weight to compensate for the contortions he had to make while climbing. Her youth gave her an edge; she was doing well at it.

That question, though. There was nothing for it, although Tuanada felt a resistance to spoiling the newness of this friendship with the old miasma of his failed partnership. It was what it was, and that's all it was.

"I used to have a rider," he admitted, evenly. "A riding partner. We worked together in one of the city contingents."

He could feel Kaitan lean forward, as if to peer at him, but she didn't pause. "And you don't anymore?"

He harrumphed in his chest, a humourless laugh. "If I did, she'd probably have tossed you for an usurper, little red."

Kaitan squawked her casual dismissal of that. "She could try. So what're you doing in Rider training, before you came out here?"

Leaving her bad grammar aside, Tuanada shook his head ruefully, pausing on a wide ledge. "It's the best way to meet a new partner. Ah, or I thought it was."

"No, but what happened?" she clarified, merciless. "Who was she?"

"She retired, more or less. We went our separate ways."

Kaitan snorted. "She did, or you did?"

Tuanada's rue intensified. Her prying was astute, and irritating, and he wasn't sure one so young had a right to guess so well where to poke. It annoyed him, but it also offered the dangerous temptation of actually laying it all out for her, as he hadn't really for anyone else.

But that was irresponsible. His hurts were his own, not something for her to pile upon her own cares. "Come to think, she did."

"Dummy, then, her," Kaitan drawled. Tuanada whipped his head around and glared at the impudent teenager; she looked taken aback, and his expression muddled, and then softened. That was old instinct. Dairie could take care of herself, these days.

"Her name was Dairie," he offered, steady, and picked his way up another little ridge. "A human from the city, from a family with other Rider pairs. We met early in our own training year, and worked together for three more after."

Despite himself, this was bringing him back to it all. The truth was that there was no pat answer for the child, or if there was, he'd never known it. The feeling was still fresh, when he blew the dust off: the feeling of something wrong, noticing the little differences in the way Dairie and he had fit together, compared to the way their compatriots had settled into one another so easily. They had never found quarters together, as so many young Rider pairs did; her claiming she had to stay home and help take care of her younger siblings, perfectly reasonable, not everyone lived with their partner.

The waning warmth, which felt like a growing chill to his heart, nursed by distance, so that every hour they spent together working felt like high stakes.

He had always accepted that this was simply a normal he had to get used to, that his expectations had been shaped so that the reality was inevitably going to disappoint. It had to be that, because when he gently probed, Dairie brushed him off, which meant that nothing was really wrong, right?

That had made it all the harder when she had met him at the compound one day with a litany of things he'd done wrong; he was distant, he was cold, he was too stolid to really make something of himself and that meant she wouldn't ever be anything either, since they were a team. It wasn't working. It had been claws to the cheek -- it had been enough that he had turned and left without waiting to be told that she was leaving first.

She'd never come after him, of course.

He paused his climb on the next big sun-baked slab of rock and breathed in dust, breathed out heat. "Sometimes it doesn't work out between a Rider and a human. It happens. If you... if someone wants to try again to find a partner, they can join the yearly trainee batch." It helped to couch that old heartache in pragmatism, and Kaitan was looking at him with naked interest. "In fact, it's encouraged, especially for daemons. It helps to have a few experienced minds in a crowd of new trainees. It works out, most of the time. So that's how I ended up back in training, little red."

"So if it usually works out, why're you out here?"

"It didn't work out for me," he huffed. Kaitan huffed back, and, to his surprise, patted him on the neck.

"I get it, I mean. My mama said it didn't work out with my papa, when I was little. It's fine, though, she had the caravan and so did I. Turns out we didn't need him."

The parallel was the familiar parallel of the uninformed; Rider pairs weren't families or marriages or romantic partnerships, but they did have an emotional resonance that Tuanada had to suppose sat somewhere in the vicinity. Besides, it was clumsy but it was also the most personal thing he'd heard Kaitan admit to beyond the story of her arrival. When he peeked over his shoulder he could see what it cost her to; her lips were thin and she looked grave.

He pressed his ears forward in a smile. "Turns out you didn't," he told his new friend and student, gentle and thoughtful as he considered the whole shape and arc of relationships that had led him out here. With Kaitan eager and sharp and relying on him, and the whole of the red horizon making itself seen by pieces as they climbed the rough rocks, he found that it was harder to live in the past. "Turns out neither of us did."

Comments

[dray]

It's an interesting take on that 'growing up with your spouse' situation that we sometimes get in real life. I like seeing how that changes when you have two different species trying to work out their work/living situations, their ambitions and dreams.

I would love to read the moment when Tuanada or Kaitan admit one of those to the other. Like, super-much.