Loud and Soft

Posted on Thu Mar 30th, 2023 @ 7:14pm by Brown Rider B'hram & Blue Rider Adrea

Mission: 3531 AL
Location: River Cove Weyr
Timeline: M1 D13

“No. And I have no intention of changing my mind on that. Now go,” Adrea told the man with a flick of her wrist to send him away. In the back of her thoughts Sayith was sending her drowsy affirmations and bleary suggestions that he could be scratched again as he baked in the sun and napped. As that had been a chunk of her morning, she had no intention of hiking back up there to roll over and snore within moments of her appeasing his needs.

Instead, she turned her attention towards one of the newer faces in the Weyr, not to mention the wing. He was a tall man, though his bearing certainly didn't match that. He made himself smaller and plain, which was the absolute antithesis of Adrea. He was holding a sheaf of papers and watching others pass by, looking just as lost as he had the day that he had arrived. Setting her hands on her hips, she made a path through the people to reach him. Seeing her looking intently at him, B’hram instinctively took a step back into the wall.

“Easy, B'hram, I’m not going to bite you. I don’t know you that well,” she laughed as she stepped to his side and leaned against the wall far more casually than he was. “Friend… I need you to relax some. You look like you’re ready to pass a stone every time someone talks to you. We’re not that bad: I promise. If anyone gives you trouble, you have a great number of us here to mediate for you. And if we can’t come to an understanding, we smash a chair over their head. You’re ours, now. We’ll take care of you.”

B’hram smiled shyly, unsure of what to do with such a brazen promise of violence on his behalf. From what he’d seen Adrea was the most terrifying kind of woman. She was loud and radiated confidence and sexuality in just the right way that his mentor would have loved. For him, it read threat in very simple terms. “I appreciate the concern, but I don’t want to be a bother.”

Adrea quirked a dark brow, her expression softening greatly as she studied his face. “Why would you think that you’re a bother?”

He tucked his papers to his chest as anxiety started to build in a thorny knot in his stomach. He felt a warming note of concern as Laith roused from his own nap and sensed the tension rising. “I mean, I greatly dislike violence. And I’d much rather keep the peace.”

“Then for you, my friend, I shall strive to keep the peace.” Adrea looked at him for a moment, silently gauging the way his shoulders drooped and his hands were crinkling the edges of his paper. “I am rather alarming to you, aren’t I?” When he nodded, she leaned in a little closer and dropped her voice to barely a whisper. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. Much of my bravado is just for show. I’m rather happy sewing for hours on end.”

“Speaking of which-“ her voice returned to its usual pitch and timber. “You have to let me put together something a bit more new for you to wear. You’ve got patches on patches in some of these spots. Maybe trim up your hair if you’d trust me to do so? Get you feeling good and new for your new weyr? A good tuic does so very much for how one feels inside. Let’s get you feeling better? Perhaps on another day unless you’ve got the time now?”

“Now?” he asked, but it sounded like acceptance to Adrea, who took his elbow and steered him back towards the sleeping chambers. That anxiety in him continued to grow until she moved aside her curtain and he saw that her room was indeed filled with baskets of cloths and threads and yarns and such lining the wall. All of the extravagance and the imaginary trap that he’d pictured disappeared when he saw that aside from the heaping cloth in the baskets, her room was just as simple and innocuous as his was. Her sewing was his bookkeeping.

“Have a seat on the stool there and let me get a look at what I have that would suit you. You have-“ she turned around and lifted the curls that fell in his face long enough to get a look at his eye color. “A bit of honey in your brown eyes. And the dark hair, mmmm…” Rifling through her baskets, she selected a few that were a good fit, then weighed her desire to adds some flash against his need to be quiet and narrowed down her choices.

“So this brown is as soft as can be. Feel it. Isn’t it lovely? I think that this would very much make a practical tunic for you for every day wear. And since you’ll need festival wear just in case, this light blue would do lovely things with your eyes.” Seeing his shoulders brace again, Adrea switched tactics. “Not too bold or flashy of a color. More like the easy ebb of a stream. Peaceful. Happy. The breeches I think will be a darker blue and maybe a natural flax for the other? Hmm.”

Proud of herself, the woman laid the rolls of cloth on her furs, then urged B’hram to stand once again. “Let me take some measurements with this cord and then you’ll have to come back later to make sure that everything fits well. I have a reputation to uphold for my needle work as well, you know. It has to be well made.”

B’hram nodded as she showed him the simple cord marked and ever so gently measured his shoulders and marked the cord with a stroke of charcoal, then his chest, then shoulder to waist, waist to floor, then without touching his inseam. The marks all looked like a bunch of nothing to him, but she seemed to read it as well as a printed word. The thought made him smile just a bit. “You can actually read that?” he asked, his voice tinged with wonder.

Choosing the material for the pants, Adrea tossed that onto her sleeping furs as well. “As clear as day I can. I can read in general, but these tell me all that I need to know to build a frame, then adjust from there. Like making a bed, or a shelf or a bin: it’s full of shapes that make up you.”

Now they were speaking a language that B’hram understood. Even if he didn’t know the symbols, he knew that they should mean something, and that had his attention. “Could you show me?” he asked as he leaned forward a little.

Relieved that he’d relaxed his shoulders and the tick in B’hram’s jaw had finally stilled, Adrea sat on the floor across from him and nodded her head. “So, most clothes are simply made, not made for a person unless they have the pull to hire someone to sew just for them. Just as shoes and boots are made at whim and you have to search out a pair that’s not too bad or get some wraps, or how belts are cut and notched as you’re there. Many measure with their hands, but that’s too imperfect in my opinion. There’s too great a room for error if one woman’s hands are small and another’s are like a man’s. This cord means no guessing unless I forget what order I measured in. When I’m done, I wash the cord and it’s ready for the next person.”

Feeling that there was a commonality between them now, B’hram perked up even more. “Were you an apprentice in weavercraft then before you were chosen? I wasn’t good enough to be a scriber, but I travelled with one for many years. My choosing was accidental-“

“Nonsense,” Adrea interrupted sharply. She didn’t mean to, it just slipped. “A dragon’s choice is never accidental. Your dragon probably felt how warm your heart was or how gentle you are and decided that your heart sang to his. It’s not an accident at all.” It might not have been true for anyone else, but it was a conviction that Adrea believed in firmly.

“And no, I wasn’t plucked from apprenticeship. That’s a story for another time, my friend.” She smiled tightly as it wasn’t exactly a topic that she was ever keen to discuss. “I’ll fetch you when you’re ready for me to have you try on what I make and stitch the last few bits. Until then… do try to relax some?”

As B’hram was accustomed to feeling out what he should say or where he should be based on body language or tone of voice, he was innately aware of overstepping some unseen line in the sand. She’d given him the cue to leaving, forgetting her offer to try to trim his curls. He stood and bowed his head respectively, then backed out of the room as unobtrusively as he could. That almost led to a collision with another woman, but she was more graceful than he was and side stepped before he hit her.

His decision was that Adrea was just as complicated as every other woman that he’d met. And still frightening, but maybe less so since she’d tried to extend a hand to him. That he saw clearly, even if his stomach warned him against it. Perhaps eventually he could hear her fully and not worry as much. Until then, at least, she seemed willing to talk.