Known unto you, and to myself, disguised (open)

[Ghost of Fire (Fëanáro)]

3073.13.01|morning|kitchen and surrounding area

It was really hard to make friends somewhere when the first thing everybody heard about you was that your father was the Threadfodder deadglow who had tried to blackmail the Weyr by capturing and torturing a Silverlight weyrling. It was made even more difficult when one was acutely aware, every time one came too near a dragon, how little most of them were inclined to trust one.

Isn’t it enough that I helped the rescue party escape? Tivax asked himself, forlornly staring off across the cavernous feast hall from the corner where he’d taken his food to. The plate, now empty, sat in front of him, but he had not yet decided to carry it back and give it to those who were washing the dishes. By Faranath’s shell, I don’t even claim his name anymore. Inside his own thoughts, there was no need to specify whose name he was referring to; the name of his father, Noixay, Tiberax Noixay.

Returning his gaze to his immediate vicinity, Tivax picked up the plate and headed back over to the kitchen, his mind only loosely on what was going on around him. So loosely was his mind connected to his surroundings, in fact, that he managed to bump into someone from behind and then, in staggering back from them, to trip over a chair behind him and land flat on his rump.

Lovely, just lovely, he thought. He’d heard it said that a man should be careful when he wishes, lest he gets what he wants but not in the way he wants it, and this certainly seemed to be bearing that out. He’d wished to be the center of attention, meaning admiring attention, and here he was, the center of attention — amused and/or pitying attention probably.

[Lark]

"Ha! Wherry-brained clutz fell over a shardin' chair! No wonder his da' got found out if that sort of luck runs in the family!"

Xiana narrowed her eyes at the candidate that made the remark, Niro snorting and nuzzling in against her hair. She wouldn't say anything, no she would definitely not come to the boy's aid. The candidate, Harper, well she was someone who stayed silent and in the background strangely enough. However, that didn't mean she didn't feel some remorse for the boys situation.

Sighing finally when the candidate who had made the remark seemed to finally ignore the young man, Xiana walked gingerly over to where the fellow candidate was. Reaching out a hand with a bored expression, Xiana waited for whatever it was the other person would do. She didn't expect to hear the bully to remark about her aid though. "Oh look, the Harperbrat is going to try and help. Looks like she actually does have a heart and isn't a grey."

Niro hissed at the change in His' feelings, the normally complacent bronze snapping his tail in the air. Taken aback, the candidate who had spoken out stepped back cautiously, running off when the king flit took to the air and Xiana turned toward the boy and spoke in a complete monotone, "I would run. He's not very happy."

[Ghost of Fire (Fëanáro)]

Tivax felt his face burning. Why would they just not realize that he wasn’t his father. He started to push himself up, intending to ignore the comment, just like he ignored the comments every day, but then a had entered his field of vision. Doubtless, it said something about his mood that the first thing he noticed was that the hand was palm up, so it wasn’t someone getting ready to start a fight, although, in his current mood…

He caught hold of the proffered hand and pulled himself up, then remained silently amazed throughout the ensuing, rather one-sided argument. After all, no one really wanted to tangle with a firelizard, they could get nasty, protecting those that they looked to.

“Thank you,” he said to the brown-haired girl that had helped him up, as he scooped his plate back up and righted the chair. He gave the plate to the kitchen worker who was collecting them, then turned back around and caught the girl’s eyes with a smile.

“Nice touch, telling him to run like that,” he commented.

[Lark]

The harper apprentice watched half-heartedly as the boy got up and brushed himself up, checking over him for any wounds he might have gotten while tripping. Not, of course, that any wounds received from something as simple as tripping would be life threatening. However, Xiana finished her assessment and nodded subtly to herself. He was fine, she could leave now she supposed. The other candidate though didn't seem done with their little meeting, and the apprentice was caught between being polite and going and spending time alone to clear her head.

When he said thank you, she nodded more obviously this time. "You're welcome." It wasn't incredibly passionate or said too much about how much she actually was involved in the whole affair though, it was just an answer to his statement. When he smiled, well that changed things a bit. Xiana took a small step back and hid the movement by grabbing for Niro who was still flying around her head. "I suppose." She flicked her gaze from the boy to the exit where the candidate had run away toward, a small lift at the corner of her mouth giving away her secret pleasure at the past events.

[Ghost of Fire (Fëanáro)]

Nothing seemed to be willing to go right today. First the whole thing about tripping over the chair, and now people reacting to smiles by retreating. Tivax was convinced, with all the certainty of a teenager, that life was out to make him miserable. A small voice piped up that he wasn’t nearly as miserable as he had been back at his father’s camp, but he ignored it. He didn’t want to hear about how good this area was comparatively, because that got in the way of a good woe-is-me sulk, which he was just starting to indulge himself in.

At least she didn’t run away screaming, he told himself, shaking off a bit of his private doom-cloud. Seeing her faint smile, he turned towards the exit, only just than realizing that it was the exit that the other Candidate had retreated through. He grinned, recalling the other boy’s look of fear as he’d scampered up the hallway. That, he decided, was worth the rest of the day going wrong. Just to have seen the other boy, who’d been tormenting him since he arrived, driven off by a firelizard was enough perfection to last the entire day.

“What’s your name? Your firelizard’s name?” Tivax hesitated slightly. “I’m Tivax No… Tivax Cavernborn.” Tivax flushed slightly; vowing to never take the name of one’s family was all well and good, but it made introductions awkward, to say the least. He hoped that the girl would be willing to be friends with him; he was almost perpetually lonely still.

[Lark]

Well now, this wasn't going as Xiana had expected. The harper had planned to go into some deserted room after this to practice her routines for the hatching feast....she didn't want to deal with the other candidate. However, she supposed that being polite couldn't hurt anything, besides, the boy was sorely mistaken if he thought that his father's legacy was a bad thing in her eyes. Xiana would not want to get in the middle of the feud yet, but she did agree with the man about the Silverlights if only because the world they lived in was unjust and corrupt. There was no reason why Dark-bred dragons or cross-impressions shouldn't be accepted, yet they were constantly debated upon.

No, it was better to just remove the variable from the equation than let it stay and cause further stress. Things were bad enough in the world, as she had seen first hand, without the added problem of dragons. Pulling herself from her thoughts, and the anger that always accompanied them, Xiana flicked her eyes up to Tivax's, groaning inwardly now that the boy had asked for an introduction and given one in return. She had to now, it really was the only polite thing to do in this case. Sighing, and yes she didn't make a move to mask it either, Xiana patted her shoulder for Niro to land on.

"I'm Xiana, apprentice harper. This is Niro, my only friend."

[Ghost of Fire (Fëanáro)]

Tivax very nearly echoed Xiana’s sigh. It seemed perfectly clear to him that talking to him was just an annoyance to her, though she had introduced herself and her firelizard. Instantly, his fantasy of getting her to teach him to play guitars vanished. However, he couldn’t really bear to retreat back into his shell of loneliness.

“Why your only friend?” Tivax asked, “Don’t the other Harpers count?” He was being nosy and he knew it, but his only direct personal experience with Harpers was with Gillian, which had left him with the Impression that all Harpers were extraordinarily friendly and on excellent terms with one another. At the same time, he wasn’t quite feeling bold enough to offer to be another friend; he’d offered such a few times, to various individuals, since arriving at the Weyr, and the end result had been constant rejection, even once he’d stopped using his father’s name, after the first two weeks.

[Lark]

He...did not just ask her why Niro was her only friend....and he certainly did not just ask about other Harpers. Xiana had half the heart to put the candidate out of his misery and walk away at that moment, her eyes betraying the once slight interest she had had to now be a complete lack of caring and total apathy. It was one thing to ask for a name, but to actually ask about her life...to try and get to know her. Well, she supposed it was the "polite" thing to do, and maybe the candidate was just lonely, but Xiana wasn't interested. She didn't want to deal with him, and she was too tired of being in the Weyr with everything it meant to ever act like she could be interested.

So, apparently she was only in this for it to be to his benefit. The question was however, would Xiana allow herself to stick around just because she knew the other candidate needed company. The answer, was unfortunately, yes. Amazingly, yes. Impossibly, yes. The harper was actually going to sit down and talk, though how much she would be talking, Xiana was not quite sure. Besides, this was practice in a way, she needed to get used to dealing with people that annoyed her, which this one was quickly approaching to. "No, they don't count when they only see you as potential dragon fodder.....I suppose we have a kind of....similarity in that we both blame our fathers for where we are."

Okay, so that part had sort of slipped out. Xiana gritted her teeth as she thought of the rider.

[Ghost of Fire (Fëanáro)]

Tivax might have been willing to cut his losses before he made a complete and total deadglow out of himself, had even been planning on it, but Xiana’s last comment caught his interest, and even though he knew better, he wanted to know what, exactly, her father had done.

It must have been pretty awful, he thought, If she’d even half-willing to compare him to my father. After all, most… ok, all, of his fellow Candidates had made it crystal clear that a) his father was a looser, and b) he was a looser because of that, and triply a looser for not knowing even the most basic things about Hatching etiquette and for losing it when around strongly emotional dragons.

“What happened?” he asked, his interest almost morbid. “Is it ok if I pet Niro?” He didn’t want to mention it, but this was actually the closest he’d gotten to a friendly seeming firelizard, for most of them had taken on the attitude of what seemed like half the Weyr and ignored him at best, and of course, it wasn’t like his father had allowed them around.