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rainbowfic2013-10-16 09:57 am
jkatkina) wrote in rainbowfic2013-10-16 09:57 am
Entry tags:
She wants the old days back, when he was only fifty feet up
| Name: | jkatkina |
| Story: | Fensirt |
| Colors: | Scarlet #5 (I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.) Skylight #5 (Fifty stories up) |
| Word Count: | 1478 |
| Rating: | G |
| Warnings: | none |
| Summary: | Ostensibly, Iunis is a grownup; Kaitan thinks otherwise. |
| Notes: | I'm having a huge blast writing for this kid. She's a terrible person right now. This is a slower character-piece that happens directly after Kaitan takes a spill. |
Pars had done Kaitan the favour of buying her a day, citing her fall as a reason to keep Iunis off of her back. The first problem was that the excuse required her to spend the day inert -- every teenager's dream, of course, but the enforced quiescence had grated on her. She hadn't been able to help but sneak out the back door.
The other problem was that Iunis was canny to her. She hadn't gotten three streets over when a Messenger daemon had run out on the cobble in front of her, standing as tall as he could on his long hind feet. He'd come almost to her waist.
Ever since her inauspicious arrival in the city, Kaitan had tread carefully when it came to daemons, particularly blue ones. Besides, Messengers would swarm if you were impertinent enough to try and knock one over. She'd sighed, her shoulders slumping, and waved hands in the air for him to lead on.
The offices of Fensirt's leadership were high in the bluffs, like the suites of castles in asandus territory. The climb to reach them was even nice, if you didn't mind the stairs; the switchbacks brushed against the cliff's interior face, and so every second flight sported windows that cast hot sunlight against the smooth red walls, sent it bounding from ornamental copper plates. The light everywhere in Fensirt ended up ruddy, filtered through red dust and reflected off of red stone, but inside the bluffs more than anywhere one could feel immersed in a sea of desert orange. Kaitan liked it, and so she took her time, although the impatient daemon sent to fetch her would sigh gustily every time he had to halt his little blue body on a landing and wait for her to catch up.
Still, the quiet climb couldn't last forever and soon enough she stood facing the heavy curtain of her eldest brother's door.
The fact that she resented his presence in that particular room would have come as no surprise to Iunis. He still wasn't comfortable in the role himself, but that was no excuse to pander. He had earned the office, although he had taken it sooner than he would have liked.
To Kaitan he was ancient, twice her age and far beyond the natural range that would let her ever consider him a true sibling. The irony was that, to most others, thirty was dangerously young to steward the city. His father had died so unexpectedly that foul play had been called, and despite bringing in an asandus coroner who had cleared Finius's death as tragic but natural, it had cast a pall over Iunis's declaration of intention. No one had been enthusiastic about his ascension -- least of all him. But none of Finius's other children would have taken on the job, and this would not be the generation of Friaves that bought their freedom from stewardship.
He might have reconsidered that stance if he'd had the foresight to realize that taking on responsibility for the city also meant taking on responsibility for Kaitan.
She was waiting outside the door, so he called, "Come in."
She'd been Finius's foundling, a slip of a thing blown in with a decimated caravan one spring. The caravan owner had claimed that she was Brieju's get, Finius's niece, and it was left unsaid that there was no way to prove the connection. There was a certain resemblance, Finius had exclaimed, a shape around the jaw and in the brows that marked her, but Iunis couldn't vouch for that. He had never met his aunt. Brieju had left many years ago, and to his knowledge Kaitan never spoke of her mother. The only thing he could say was that it would be appropriate if a Friave who had reneged on her responsibilities and disappeared into the dust had begotten such a belligerent creature.
She kept her eyes down as she pushed through the curtain, and came to a stop on the patterned carpet before his high workdesk. He studied her.
She was small for fifteen, as if she'd stopped getting taller once she'd stopped wandering the desert. She'd let the sun tattoo dense freckles across her face, shoulders, arms -- it left her almost all one tone, the red of her hair not much darker than her ruddy face, her washed brown eyes not much darker still. That red hair -- the red of the caravans and the city, the red of the bluffs and the desert, a damning mark against the question of her heritage. Brieju, like the rest of her family, had been dark.
She'd dissemble, given the chance, so he wouldn't give her the chance. "It looks as if you've recovered from your fall."
"It wasn't a bad fall." Her eyes flicked up to meet his and then down again.
"Pars suggested that it could have been a very bad fall. I also had him explain to me what exactly happened that left you in the path of a contingent of Riders."
He waited and watched as Kaitan shifted. Finally she looked up at him, her expression guarded. She wouldn't offer anything. He pressed, "what were you doing when you fell?"
"I was getting back a bracelet that I dropped."
It had been the answer he was expecting, and that spiked his ire. He and Pars had talked for some time and the younger brother had finally, reluctantly offered his own theories about what had happened. Iunis lowered his head, looked the girl in the eyes, trying to muster up the look that his father had always given, when one of his children had erred. "Kaitan, don't lie."
She hitched her shoulders up. "You always say I'm lying."
He struggled, wrestling down his immediate response in favour of something more tempered. "Why were you up there?" he pressed.
To his surprise she didn't immediately reiterate her claim; instead, as he watched, the girl bared her teeth in a grimace, looking down at her feet and clenching her fists. He watched as her shoulders raised with a sucked-in breath... and stayed there as she looked him in the eye again. "I went with Pars because I wanted to see the Rider pairs practicing. I want to go through training and pair up with a Rider."
"What?!" Never mind that she'd just side-stepped out of answering his question. "Even if you could be trusted with the responsibility of going through training, I think you lost the right to that vocation long ago." She knew that! Of all things, she'd picked the one that would be a political nightmare to try and swing. The Rider teachers would never allow it. Even if Iunis would let her out the door.
"That's not fair! They can't still punish me for that!"
"You never faced punishment for that." He stood up, swept an arm towards the tall windows that lined this office, to the view out towards the dunes. "You were given a second chance."
"And I haven't done anything since! I want to go to Rider training. Give me a chance to... to be responsible."
"You get chances all the time! Look what you did with the chance Pars gave you!" It was gratifying to see her face redden, for a moment, until he realized that he was invested in winning a shouting match with a teenager. "Kaitan, the Rider compound would never consent to training you, and I will not push them. My father kept you from getting chased off by their leadership, the least you could do is to honour his efforts by staying out of their way."
Her eyes slid away from his, but her face was drawn in disgust. She looked at the chair behind him, the chair that had been Finius's, and then back at his face, and he faltered. Too many others -- himself not the least of them -- shared that sentiment; that he was trying to fill a seat that was still too large for him. Personally, publicly -- and every moment of it a reminder of his own personal loss. He had hardly had time to mourn his father's death before stepping in to fill his absence.
"Can I go now?"
The wind had gone out of his sails. For good measure he met her eyes, but against that hot anger he felt tired. "Go." After she left, he didn't sit down again for some time.
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