Quote:
Take two, since Gaia went and ate the main of this yesterday. >(
Balizarth honestly still couldn't understand it. What had been so different about that woman, what about her had impacted his U'zan so deeply that he had changed. It was befuddling to the bronze in a number of ways, and not the least bit irritating, because even now that she was gone (and he'd hoped U'zan would be able to focus and get back to work now, by Faranth's own egg) she was still somehow consuming more of his time than she ought to do. That being, any at all. Each time in the past, when a woman had left his rider's side (or been left by his rider, as was more often the case), the man had simply... moved on. Gone off swanning through life as if nothing was amiss, and come flouncing back home in a matter of days (sometimes hours) with a new partner on his arm. But now, now... the man was... writing. To her.
No, it was decidedly unusual, and the bronze could not help but grumble where he lay upon his ledge, one eye half fixed on his rider's back as he worked at his desk. Distracted as the man was, it was all too easy to peek through his eyes as well, see what nonsense she had him going on about this time. Maybe he'd finally get some insight, though really, Balizarth suspected he'd still be just as confused thereafter.
From this angle though, the bronze could make out that this wasn't the first scroll of parchment U'zan had begun on. There were corners and scraps poking out of the bin nearby, and at least two more tucked away under the one he was currently hemming and hawing over. The bronze gave a snort at that—she ought to be glad for even a word, let alone whatever travesty of a novel the man was whittling away at. He'd long ago demanded his rider teach him to read as well, and that came in handy now as the bronze focused in, physical eyes closing as he mentally squinted to make out his rider's looping handwriting.
There were two sheets of parchment set side by side, one full of scuffs and scratches and half-blotted starts and finishes, which wasn't like U'zan at all. The man was usually quite silver-tongued (which extended to his pen), and too confident not to simply go with whatever came to mind... but now Balizarth could see he'd made quite a mess of things.
The letter started off casually enough—on the clean, apparently final version that he was currently copying to fresh parchment, at least—the wording carefully chosen and meaning balanced perfectly, a line of familiarity that hinted at exactly nothing deeper one way or the other. And he could tell by the abuse of the inkwell on the original copy, strikes and slashes carved through so much of what he'd first wrote (and then what he'd rewritten, and rerewritten) that there was something more than a desire for casual perfection or perfect casualness balanced on how those words were perceived. He'd swung the tone of the letter back and forth one way and then the next until it seemed at last to satisfy him enough to move on, though it left the better part of half the page useless on the previous draft.
A fair number of the sentiments the bronze could just barely make out had him snorting at their ridiculousness, because of course there was no possible way that that had been what his rider'd been feeling this whole time. He'd said as much of his heart to any number of suitors before, and never meant it, so why should he now? For all that the bronze loved him, U'zan could very much be the boy who cried wolf about these things, and it pleased the dragon to note that no such nonsense had made its way into the final copy. That way only lay troubles, and not just because she had gone to live at Western Weyr now. No, to Balizarth even a goldrider wasn't quite good enough for his U'zan, so there was no point in trying to rekindle anything that'd been finally and rightfully snuffed out. The informal, nonchalant version of the letter which he had settled on and was now transcribing was surely a much better approach, if he had to make one at all, Balizarth decided.
Satisfied that his rider hadn't gone about making a fool of himself while insisting on contacting the woman, he turned his attention nonetheless to the clean copy U'zan was nearly finished with. He let his—their—eyes trail over it, skimming the lines... and then frowned, as much as a dragon might frown. The words on the page carried a distinct note of regret, but not quite enough to want to reverse things to how they'd been—that was somewhat shocking to the bronze, who perhaps until that moment hadn't really, truly understood the tangle of emotions that had lodged in his man's chest the moment he'd seen that little gold whirling rainbow eyes up at the woman. Looking back at the first (or was it second? third?) draft, Balizarth could see the passion that U'zan had wanted to admit to, the words more fiery and less exactingly picked out, a clearer picture of the truth than what the version he was finishing belied... But then he'd scrapped it, all of it, and started over, as if he couldn't quite admit to any of it lest he give the whole game away. In the end he'd said quite a lot of things in his final letter, but none of them what he'd meant, not one line from the original making its way into the mix.
Something about the whole affair left an odd, unsettled, almost unsatisfied feeling in the pit of the dragon's stomach and on the back of his tongue. Deftly he returned to his own head as U'zan scrawled his typical flamboyant signature at the end of the scroll, and with a barely-there sigh rolled it up to tie off with a strip of silk ribbon. Wasting no time the man summoned a firelizard, giving quiet instructions and sending the message off and away in a blink, before the dragon could even realize he was considering saying something to the man about why he could feel the sense of resignation rolling off him in waves. For all that the dragon did not care for that woman, that Phryana... he cared even less for the disquiet he could now recognize in his rider's heart. She should have realized what she had. U'zan should have realized...
But the message was gone, and the past was over and done with, and with a smile that almost reached his eyes, U'zan had come striding over to mount up onto Balizarth's back, patting his neck at the unusually tender mental nudge the bronze gave him. Usually the prospect of drills was enough to please the dragon... but as he took off, even though there was nothing now that either of them could do about things, he couldn't help but pause to wonder how things might have turned out if they'd gone just a little different. If Phryana hadn't left, if U'zan had been able to understand from the start, if their lives had been the rough draft, and not the final, watered-down, edited version.
Because he'd seen, through the rewrites and strike-throughs and do-overs, between the crumpled and then uncrumpled folds and ridges of that rough draft, now left forgotten on the edge of his rider's desk, to be swept out along with all the other unrealized and unadmitted-to sentiments... in the rough draft, U'zan really had had loved her.