Who

Ibrahim

What

Buried feelings surface, and they're not pretty.

Mild cursing

When

It is before dawn of the twenty-eighth day of the first month of the fourteenth turn of the 12th pass.

Where

Jungle Campground, Southern Weyr

OOC Date 27 May 2018 05:00

 

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The Black Tent

“I still care about you…”

Liar. Perhaps they were right: he merely used me to try to know where our resources are, to force us all into a damn Hold. To change us into people we are not.

It's been months since Ibrahim lost his first love, and it still hurts, deep down. Oh, he’s remained serene on the surface, and even shared a bed with the occasional lover since. He's spent little time in the Weyr proper, preferring not to spend time within it, to be forever reminded that he wasn't enough for her.

Bitch. Selfish, self-serving bitch.

I'm sorry, she says. You deserve more, she says. She was right about that much. He deserved more than this, to be relegated to mere, childish whim and temporary fancy until she found something better. He was nothing to her, for he had no dragon, and therefore knew and understood nothing of life.

The belief she held, that she knew better than he what was good for him — to pretend she cared about him when she cared not at all — it galled, still.

Ibrahim moved restlessly around his tent, having little to do but think. There was little here, in this place, for him. And yet, going back to the family — to his old way of life — seemed just that one step too far backward. It would mean marrying, having children, giving in to a life he was ill suited to.

It would mean giving up everything.

And yet, the ache of loneliness rode hard tonight: there was no one to ease that burden for him. Not here, not at the Weyr; there was nowhere he could go, no one whose company he craved bar one, and she plainly cared not at all for what she's done to him. She had more important things on her mind, plainly, than the one she's so easily discarded.

With a low snarl, Ibrahim threw the knife he hadn't been aware he'd picked up into the tent support, taking a perverse pleasure in the way it sank into the wooden support with a thick, satisfying crunch.

Never again. He promised himself. Never again will I give my heart to a fickle bitch, only out for what will serve her and her alone.

His things from the Weyr are packed tight in their cases, tucked cleanly away where they will not remind him of painful things, of a life once lived, of hopes and dreams crushed in a single moment.

From now on, he is wildling — his own interests above all.

It was safer that way.

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