Name:	jkatkina
Story:	Fensirt
Colours:	Scarlet 6. I'd cut up my heart for you to wear if you wanted it. Skylight 10. Alone on the rooftop
Supplies:	Stain: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” —Oscar Wilde
Word Count:	1257
Rating:	G
Summary:	Tuanada asks some hard questions. The next one I do will probably be the story of Kaitan's arrival in Fensirt.

The change in his odd charge over the last few days was a palpable thing. At first, when he had leapt the fence and bluntly told her he could teach her a few things about riding, she had been eager, hungry for learning, but so drenched in suspicion he could practically smell it on her. It had taken two meetings for that suspicion to even begin to drain away, for her to stop challenging him with every second word, even as her painful hope was written on her sleeve.

She was such a raw creature: her defenses were crude, and her feelings, when they frequently broke through, were bright, unrefined.

Her sit was unsettled today, excited, legs squeezing too tightly, feet forward in the stirrups, fingers tight in the ropes of his hair. She didn’t thump on his back when he trotted, though, not like so many of the trainees started out doing.

They slowed as the bluff began to rise, which left Kaitan restless but also made room and breath for conversation.

He fielded a suspicion he'd been nursing. “You’ve ridden before.”

“Nah,” she told him, a thrum of excitement broadening her voice. “Not so much. When I was a little I ran around with the Hunters, that’s all.”

He had to laugh. She was small enough now she must have been tiny as a child. “And you’d hitch rides?”

“Well, why not?” Defensiveness coloured her voice.

He huffed and tossed his head. Still prickly. “Why not indeed? And how do you find the proper article in comparison, hmm?”

There was a pause from the girl, uncertainty like she’d not expected his answer. “You’re, uh. Bigger,” she offered, guarded.

Without thinking he laughed, low under his breath, and to his surprise, after a moment her bright cackle joined in. He’d heard her laugh, breathless with glee, when he’d first picked up his pace to a trot, but he’d let that laugh be a private thing carried away by the wind of the flats. This was unguarded, this was almost as gleeful. It sustained the bubble of laughter in his own chest.

“Way bigger!” She exclaimed again when their shared chuckle had died down.

But the outburst had set him silent, set him to thinking. He’d been put to her to convince her not to be a rider, though in truth he was not as dedicated to that notion as those who had asked him to might have liked him to be. He was not entirely settled on why he had even agreed to do this, except some sun-brained notion of symmetry and sympathy. He was a Rider trainee who was no longer a Rider: she was an aspiring Rider trainee who could never be a Rider. It seemed appropriate for them to let go of that dream together, and he had assumed that it would be as clear that she needed to as much as he did.

But that was an abstraction, and the human who was fidgeting with the stirrups was a solid and very present reality that demanded pragmatism. The Rider council hadn’t barred her from entry for no reason, his notions aside.

He rounded a turn in the path, chewing on these thoughts. Kaitan, who apparently felt freer now, exclaimed. “I climb up here sometimes! It’s different from this angle, but look, there’s that one big crack—”

“Kaitan. Why do you think you deserve a chance to be a rider?”

She went all stiff on his back. He’d expected that. What he didn’t expect was her shifting her weight hard to one side, looking to fling herself from the cloth saddle. He yowled alarm and crab-stepped, skipping to the wall of natural stone beside them and pressing against it. She squirmed and yelled a wordless protest at him, half mashed between his body and the stone, halfway to the ground.

That was no good. When he felt her squirming go still, he stepped away from the rockface more carefully, so that when she thumped to the ground it wasn’t the wild fall she’d tried for. He rounded on her then, and stared with his ears back. “What was that?”

She was already back on her feet and mantling her arms like she planned to fight him. One elbow was skinned and welling a little blood, but she hadn’t seemed to notice at all. She was spitting mad.

“If you’re just gonna be like Iunis and everyone, well, you can just run back off right now! I thought you were giving me a chance! A real one!”

“What makes you think that I’m not?” Tuanada tried not to put his ears back.

“Because — because you brought that up, and you’re gonna use it to make me say that I don’t, like it doesn’t matter that I’ve done everything everyone’s told me to since then and I’ve been good and I’m trying to be useful like Pars but no one will let me, they just say boring things like carry boxes and learn math—“ she stopped and spat a curse at him, trembling. “It was so long ago! Why can’t everyone just forget about it! What do you want me to do?!”

The desperation of her words was strange, from someone so young, and couched in such a young outburst. For that, the anger of it didn’t touch him much; it was the same kind of thing, he thought, as Qensuna’s eagerness to please. Besides, she was so small — such a compact container for such a tempest, and it gentled him towards her. How could such a little thing be expected to reckon with so much feeling?

He sat down, carefully and deliberately, and put his ears forward, speaking as gently and practically as he could. “It’s a question you’ll have to answer, time and time again, if you really want to press this route. We all have things in our past that we can’t undo. Why are you trying to dive headfirst back into yours?”

That stopped her in her tracks, a blind turn that scattered a screaming wind. She stared at him, confused and belligerent. “What?”

"There are so many other things you could ask to do that wouldn’t meet such resistance. Why do you want to do this one?”

She looked at him, her confusion steadying into a rising suspicion. When she didn’t take the opportunity, he added in growing surprise of his own, “has no one asked you to explain that before?”

“No,” she said, and then amended, “sort of. But he didn’t care, he was just looking for more ways to tell me I’m being stupid. You’re doing that too, aren’t you?”

But she didn’t sound so sure, and in her growing uncertainty, Tuanada’s own certainty began to solidify. He crossed his forepaws and lowered himself all the way to the dusty, poky scrub that lined the little alcove off the path. She still looked like a cornered, scruffed child to him, now without even the force of her anger to make her large.

“I know very little about this,” he explained, apologetic. “I know you hurt one of my kind, and I know that you’re a foundling, but not much else. Is there more story there?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, and hunched back, her shoulders up. But after a long moment, she began to sit down, too, using the steadiness of the bluff behind her to lower herself. She wrapped her arms around her knees, and when he gave her time, she began to speak.