[M'try] M'try. Isobel. Past. Tense.
RL Date: 2/10/10
IC Date: 13/2/21
Inner Caverns, Fort Weyr(#524RJs$)
The inner caverns are a winding system of relatively well-lit tunnels and tubes, both natural and manmade, all composed of dark granite. Every commonly used tunnel and passageway has niches carved at regular intervals to hold glows or oil lamps that are regularly tended by the Weyr's residents, with glow-changes being a common chore for the children.
At the heart of the warren, lies the commons cavern, a hub from which many other smaller caverns break off. The crafter's workrooms are short walk down a broad hallway from the commons. A tunnel halfway between the two leads to the bubble cavern that contains the hot springs, which can also be reached from the Bowl. A curving loop of passage connects the main tunnel with the one that winds up at the human infirmary and the dragon infirmary hub, beyond. The Glass Fountain, Fort's bar and restaurant, is a bit more out of the way at the end of several passageways and a short flight of stairs. The best way to find the beer is to follow the trail of tipsy folks on their way home, or the sound of clinking glass and conversation. Relatively well marked with a bold arrow carved into the rock, a broad passageway dives nearly straight from the heart of the caverns and down to the unloading area and beyond to tunnel out of the Weyr.
Isobel hasn't been haunting the weyr the way she did before her marriage. A short visit to At're here and there, but that's all. She hasn't contacted M'try, nor told him she was going to be at the weyr today. And yet here she is, emerging from the resident common room as if she belonged in these corridors.
M'try's a man with a purpose-- or so one would think to judge the way he strides crisply out of the hot springs, still toweling his hair but otherwise looking a little more kempt than usual. He's even gone and shaved, though his haircut has grown a few weeks shaggy, sadly. Excepting the towel, including the satchel slung across his shoulder, he's clearly on his way somewhere. Only, wherever that is will have to wait, 'cause there's Isobel and it's a little like getting sucker-punched. Stopped short, once he gets his head around the incongruity of it, he's able to say a remarkably contained, "Hi." Not eloquent, but, again, like getting sucker-punched.
Or like having someone grab the roots of your hair and peel your face off to display everything you're thinking and feeling. A remarkable series of expressions flickers across Isobel's usually well-controlled face. Her eyes widen in delight, then she flushes with what looks like anger, and wilts a little in disappointment, and finally lets out a sigh of resignation. "Hello, M'try," she says quietly and calmly.
M'try at least managed to do no more than blanch. But, then, he's spent most of his adult (and a good portion of his adolescent) life masking his expressions. Realizing he's carrying it, realizing that he's just been using it, realizing what that's done to his hair, he folds up the towel with a few deft flips of one hand, folds that hand and the towel with it behind his back, and offers the other hand-- for shaking, one can assume. "How have you been? How are you?" He's immediately sorry to ask the same question twice, essentially, and shows it in a quick press of his lips and twitch of his nose, but done is done.
Isobel steps forward and reaches out to place her hand in M'try's. She doesn't move to reclaim it immediately. "I've been - I'm doing well," she says, awkwardly. "I've missed you." Simple and straightforward.
Pressing the hand he holds, just briefly, M'try has the presence of mind to give it back to Isobel before any notable length of time passes. It's public, after all. "I'm..." Hmn. "...not sure if I should say that I'm sorry to hear that or glad to hear that. Either way," reclaiming a jaunty tone that suits him well, "I'm glad to see you. Visiting your brother, then?"
Jaunty doesn't seem to go over well with Isobel. There's something steely in her eyes. "Yes, and a few other people," she says with a lift of her chin. "You look as if you're on your way somewhere." Her glance flicks to the satchel, then settles on his face again, one eyebrow quirking slightly.
Yeah, well, the alternative to jaunty is M'try being a big old bag of wussy, so-- "I'm not. I just like to look that way." That's a lie, and he doesn't bother trying to make his tone sell it as truth, only adjusts the satchel with his towel-free hand, pats it as if satisfied with the shift. "To tell you the truth, I'm very much at a loss for what to say. Which doesn't happen to me often."
"No, it doesn't, does it?" Isobel says pointedly. She falls silent, then, and lets the silence grow, not at all inclined to alleviate the awkwardness he must be feeling.
M'try's a smart kid. "You're mad at me." That after a pretty long time, during which he twists his lips slightly to one side, measures Isobel in her determined silence, shifts his satchel one more time, and looks toward the tunnel out at least three times. Seriously contemplating bolting. Because he's a brave guy like that.
Isobel isn't entirely dense, either, and when he starts looking for escape routes, she loses patience. "Well, yes," she says forthrightly. "I am. Are you going to /run away/?" Half disbelief, half profound contempt for the idea, or maybe for him.
"Very probably. Given the chance." M'try and shame are not well-acquainted. He smiles at Isobel with only the barest of chagrin, and that's probably feigned just because it seems appropriate.
"Faranth's shell," Isobel mutters, and it may be the first time she's sworn since she had her hand slapped as a child and learned what swearing was. "Were you /always/ such a spineless wherry, and I just never noticed?" No sooner are the words out than she follows them up with, "Don't answer that," and a roll of her eyes.
Good thing she added that qualifier, because M'try had actually opened his mouth to answer. He stops, thankfully, and folds his lips mutely for a spell. A pretty long spell. Apparently, he's expecting that Isobel still has something to say, given the kind of questioning look that he pins on her. More? Or...?
Isobel closes her eyes and lowers her head with a heavy sigh. Her forehead creases as she closes her eyes tighter still and turns her head to the side, as if to make extra super sure she doesn't accidentally look at him. Her shoulders slump as though someone had just loaded a great weight onto her back.
Predictably, "I'm sorry." M'try takes a good, bolstering breath, folds his other hand behind his back along with the towel-hand, and explains, "I usually try to brace people for the intense cowardice in advance, but I must have neglected to mention it. Are you all right?" The last is asked with honest concern, but also resignation: a tiger (or, in his case, a cowardly lion) can't change his stripes.
"No, no. It's my fault," Isobel says, reaching up to scrub at her face with her hand, conveniently covering her eyes, and still not looking at him. "I shouldn't have made assumptions. You see, when you asked me to - stay in your weyr - I thought that meant you were willing to take a risk, make a sacrifice. I suppose," and now she finally drops her hand and opens her eyes, "that we ought to have established that up front. Or... not."
Slowly, choosing his words with even more care than usual; "I'm not the one risking anything, Isobel, nor have I anything to sacrifice." M'try doesn't particularly care to say this, and he has to take a very big breath to prepare himself for it, but-- "I'm not the one that got married."
Isobel flushes with anger again. "What else was I supposed to do? /I agreed to stay with you./ I was going to give up everything for you." She snorts faintly. "But you, you couldn't even..." Either M'try's failures are so obvious or so numerous that Isobel doesn't bother to state them, only shakes her head.
"I know what I couldn't even do. But I will thank you to recall, and I quote, 'Father will be so angry.'" M'try's long memory is summoned with an utter and unmistakably bitter tone, one that's gone by the time he continues. "I don't blame you, Isobel. I just don't understand what, exactly, you expected me to do. What you thought I could do, even. I don't mind so much failing to live up to someone's expectations, only I generally prefer to know what those expectations are." Reasonable.
Isobel looks momentarily confused: she can't figure out what her father being angry has to do with anything. Or at least not with the present conversation. When M'try professes a lack of understanding, she rolls her eyes again. "You don't /understand/?" she repeats in disbelief. "What did you think you were doing? Why did you ask me to stay, if you didn't have a plan, if you didn't - if you /knew/ you couldn't stop them from sending me home? I loved you, I trusted you." She takes a step forward so that she's standing in his personal space, her hand twitching as though she might just be about to hit him. But she doesn't. Her hands stay at her sides, and she glares at him fiercely, so caught up in the argument that she seems to have completely forgotten they're standing in a public corridor.
There's a twinge, a brief betrayal of honest hurt that pulls his brows together, rounds his eyes, creases his forehead, but it's not for the accusations or even the possibility that he might get hit. It's the observation, which M'try makes in a slow, soft voice; "Past. Tense." Reaching up, scratching the back of his head just at the base of his skull, he inhales, exhales, says, "I'm sorry, Isobel. I didn't have a plan. And are you sure you want to have this conversation here?" Because he would never be unaware of something like that, personally, not for long.
It's only now that Isobel looks like she's about to cry. "Oh, /now/ you're going to act like you care how I feel about you," she says. And she shakes her head, maybe in answer to the question. "I'm leaving," she announces, and ducks around him, walking down the corridor, almost running. But not to the exit. Instead she ducks down the first hallway she comes to, not caring where it goes, and leans against the wall the moment she's cleared the corner, pressing her face against the cool stone.
M'try should go after her, stop her, kiss her, fix things (somehow). He knows this. Intrinsically. But what M'try /knows/ and what M'try /does/ don't always overlap. He takes a couple of steps along the hallway, starting toward the corridor in Isobel's wake, and then he just... doesn't keep going. Instead, sketching a hasty smile to an auntie that passes and peeks nosily, "You're looking particularly radiant today, Ethel, have you got new wooden teeth?" Offering her an arm, leading her along in the direction that's /not/ going to pass Isobel's refuge, he listens to a very detailed account of how Ethel is going to have a boil lanced later today.
And thus all of Isobel's newfound suspicious about M'try's testicular fortitude are confirmed. When she finishes crying alone in the corridor, she wipes her face with her handkerchief and departs for the bowl to find a ride home.
IC Date: 13/2/21
Inner Caverns, Fort Weyr(#524RJs$)
The inner caverns are a winding system of relatively well-lit tunnels and tubes, both natural and manmade, all composed of dark granite. Every commonly used tunnel and passageway has niches carved at regular intervals to hold glows or oil lamps that are regularly tended by the Weyr's residents, with glow-changes being a common chore for the children.
At the heart of the warren, lies the commons cavern, a hub from which many other smaller caverns break off. The crafter's workrooms are short walk down a broad hallway from the commons. A tunnel halfway between the two leads to the bubble cavern that contains the hot springs, which can also be reached from the Bowl. A curving loop of passage connects the main tunnel with the one that winds up at the human infirmary and the dragon infirmary hub, beyond. The Glass Fountain, Fort's bar and restaurant, is a bit more out of the way at the end of several passageways and a short flight of stairs. The best way to find the beer is to follow the trail of tipsy folks on their way home, or the sound of clinking glass and conversation. Relatively well marked with a bold arrow carved into the rock, a broad passageway dives nearly straight from the heart of the caverns and down to the unloading area and beyond to tunnel out of the Weyr.
Isobel hasn't been haunting the weyr the way she did before her marriage. A short visit to At're here and there, but that's all. She hasn't contacted M'try, nor told him she was going to be at the weyr today. And yet here she is, emerging from the resident common room as if she belonged in these corridors.
M'try's a man with a purpose-- or so one would think to judge the way he strides crisply out of the hot springs, still toweling his hair but otherwise looking a little more kempt than usual. He's even gone and shaved, though his haircut has grown a few weeks shaggy, sadly. Excepting the towel, including the satchel slung across his shoulder, he's clearly on his way somewhere. Only, wherever that is will have to wait, 'cause there's Isobel and it's a little like getting sucker-punched. Stopped short, once he gets his head around the incongruity of it, he's able to say a remarkably contained, "Hi." Not eloquent, but, again, like getting sucker-punched.
Or like having someone grab the roots of your hair and peel your face off to display everything you're thinking and feeling. A remarkable series of expressions flickers across Isobel's usually well-controlled face. Her eyes widen in delight, then she flushes with what looks like anger, and wilts a little in disappointment, and finally lets out a sigh of resignation. "Hello, M'try," she says quietly and calmly.
M'try at least managed to do no more than blanch. But, then, he's spent most of his adult (and a good portion of his adolescent) life masking his expressions. Realizing he's carrying it, realizing that he's just been using it, realizing what that's done to his hair, he folds up the towel with a few deft flips of one hand, folds that hand and the towel with it behind his back, and offers the other hand-- for shaking, one can assume. "How have you been? How are you?" He's immediately sorry to ask the same question twice, essentially, and shows it in a quick press of his lips and twitch of his nose, but done is done.
Isobel steps forward and reaches out to place her hand in M'try's. She doesn't move to reclaim it immediately. "I've been - I'm doing well," she says, awkwardly. "I've missed you." Simple and straightforward.
Pressing the hand he holds, just briefly, M'try has the presence of mind to give it back to Isobel before any notable length of time passes. It's public, after all. "I'm..." Hmn. "...not sure if I should say that I'm sorry to hear that or glad to hear that. Either way," reclaiming a jaunty tone that suits him well, "I'm glad to see you. Visiting your brother, then?"
Jaunty doesn't seem to go over well with Isobel. There's something steely in her eyes. "Yes, and a few other people," she says with a lift of her chin. "You look as if you're on your way somewhere." Her glance flicks to the satchel, then settles on his face again, one eyebrow quirking slightly.
Yeah, well, the alternative to jaunty is M'try being a big old bag of wussy, so-- "I'm not. I just like to look that way." That's a lie, and he doesn't bother trying to make his tone sell it as truth, only adjusts the satchel with his towel-free hand, pats it as if satisfied with the shift. "To tell you the truth, I'm very much at a loss for what to say. Which doesn't happen to me often."
"No, it doesn't, does it?" Isobel says pointedly. She falls silent, then, and lets the silence grow, not at all inclined to alleviate the awkwardness he must be feeling.
M'try's a smart kid. "You're mad at me." That after a pretty long time, during which he twists his lips slightly to one side, measures Isobel in her determined silence, shifts his satchel one more time, and looks toward the tunnel out at least three times. Seriously contemplating bolting. Because he's a brave guy like that.
Isobel isn't entirely dense, either, and when he starts looking for escape routes, she loses patience. "Well, yes," she says forthrightly. "I am. Are you going to /run away/?" Half disbelief, half profound contempt for the idea, or maybe for him.
"Very probably. Given the chance." M'try and shame are not well-acquainted. He smiles at Isobel with only the barest of chagrin, and that's probably feigned just because it seems appropriate.
"Faranth's shell," Isobel mutters, and it may be the first time she's sworn since she had her hand slapped as a child and learned what swearing was. "Were you /always/ such a spineless wherry, and I just never noticed?" No sooner are the words out than she follows them up with, "Don't answer that," and a roll of her eyes.
Good thing she added that qualifier, because M'try had actually opened his mouth to answer. He stops, thankfully, and folds his lips mutely for a spell. A pretty long spell. Apparently, he's expecting that Isobel still has something to say, given the kind of questioning look that he pins on her. More? Or...?
Isobel closes her eyes and lowers her head with a heavy sigh. Her forehead creases as she closes her eyes tighter still and turns her head to the side, as if to make extra super sure she doesn't accidentally look at him. Her shoulders slump as though someone had just loaded a great weight onto her back.
Predictably, "I'm sorry." M'try takes a good, bolstering breath, folds his other hand behind his back along with the towel-hand, and explains, "I usually try to brace people for the intense cowardice in advance, but I must have neglected to mention it. Are you all right?" The last is asked with honest concern, but also resignation: a tiger (or, in his case, a cowardly lion) can't change his stripes.
"No, no. It's my fault," Isobel says, reaching up to scrub at her face with her hand, conveniently covering her eyes, and still not looking at him. "I shouldn't have made assumptions. You see, when you asked me to - stay in your weyr - I thought that meant you were willing to take a risk, make a sacrifice. I suppose," and now she finally drops her hand and opens her eyes, "that we ought to have established that up front. Or... not."
Slowly, choosing his words with even more care than usual; "I'm not the one risking anything, Isobel, nor have I anything to sacrifice." M'try doesn't particularly care to say this, and he has to take a very big breath to prepare himself for it, but-- "I'm not the one that got married."
Isobel flushes with anger again. "What else was I supposed to do? /I agreed to stay with you./ I was going to give up everything for you." She snorts faintly. "But you, you couldn't even..." Either M'try's failures are so obvious or so numerous that Isobel doesn't bother to state them, only shakes her head.
"I know what I couldn't even do. But I will thank you to recall, and I quote, 'Father will be so angry.'" M'try's long memory is summoned with an utter and unmistakably bitter tone, one that's gone by the time he continues. "I don't blame you, Isobel. I just don't understand what, exactly, you expected me to do. What you thought I could do, even. I don't mind so much failing to live up to someone's expectations, only I generally prefer to know what those expectations are." Reasonable.
Isobel looks momentarily confused: she can't figure out what her father being angry has to do with anything. Or at least not with the present conversation. When M'try professes a lack of understanding, she rolls her eyes again. "You don't /understand/?" she repeats in disbelief. "What did you think you were doing? Why did you ask me to stay, if you didn't have a plan, if you didn't - if you /knew/ you couldn't stop them from sending me home? I loved you, I trusted you." She takes a step forward so that she's standing in his personal space, her hand twitching as though she might just be about to hit him. But she doesn't. Her hands stay at her sides, and she glares at him fiercely, so caught up in the argument that she seems to have completely forgotten they're standing in a public corridor.
There's a twinge, a brief betrayal of honest hurt that pulls his brows together, rounds his eyes, creases his forehead, but it's not for the accusations or even the possibility that he might get hit. It's the observation, which M'try makes in a slow, soft voice; "Past. Tense." Reaching up, scratching the back of his head just at the base of his skull, he inhales, exhales, says, "I'm sorry, Isobel. I didn't have a plan. And are you sure you want to have this conversation here?" Because he would never be unaware of something like that, personally, not for long.
It's only now that Isobel looks like she's about to cry. "Oh, /now/ you're going to act like you care how I feel about you," she says. And she shakes her head, maybe in answer to the question. "I'm leaving," she announces, and ducks around him, walking down the corridor, almost running. But not to the exit. Instead she ducks down the first hallway she comes to, not caring where it goes, and leans against the wall the moment she's cleared the corner, pressing her face against the cool stone.
M'try should go after her, stop her, kiss her, fix things (somehow). He knows this. Intrinsically. But what M'try /knows/ and what M'try /does/ don't always overlap. He takes a couple of steps along the hallway, starting toward the corridor in Isobel's wake, and then he just... doesn't keep going. Instead, sketching a hasty smile to an auntie that passes and peeks nosily, "You're looking particularly radiant today, Ethel, have you got new wooden teeth?" Offering her an arm, leading her along in the direction that's /not/ going to pass Isobel's refuge, he listens to a very detailed account of how Ethel is going to have a boil lanced later today.
And thus all of Isobel's newfound suspicious about M'try's testicular fortitude are confirmed. When she finishes crying alone in the corridor, she wipes her face with her handkerchief and departs for the bowl to find a ride home.