He wrecks it all.

It's not as though there's that much to wreck in the first place: K'vre's always been a spartan man, not given overmuch to the collecting of things. But here, in this place, in his sanctuary away from the world, he destroys everything he's cared enough to keep.

« Give 'em bloody hell, » Rhovvth inserts, having waited for the right pause, the right panting of harsh breath and racing pulse. « All of them fucking cunts, » he adds, helpfully: « I never liked that wall-art anyway. Looks like someone with a runner-stick up their arse drew it, all fancy. Fucking presumptuous, » he declares it.

« You can have a portrait of me commissioned instead. » Vanity, thy name.

K'vre falls to his knees in the shambles, his chin fallen to his chest. He's not sure if he's sobbing or roaring, or something in-between, but his beard is wet, and he's fairly positive that he's not bleeding from his eyes.

"I'm an asshole," he says dully into the sudden silence. Rhovvth, for all of his bluster and ego, is very still upon his ledge. The dragon has slanted his head along the small - for him - entrance into the rider's private quarters, and all of the considerable brown's length is pushed up against the separating wall, as if in valiant attempt to seal off his rider's pain from the rest of the world.

« Well, we've all been knew, mate. » Rhovvth says bluntly. His mindvoice hints of corpserot tonight — Thread will fall soon, perhaps as early as the morning — but the lingering nostril-sting of salt remains the high note. And sulphur. He's all swamps in his ill-hid worry, all bogs for this darkest night. « I picked your fancy ass, after all. I didn't just do it for your pretty face. »

K'vre has no response for that but a wretched laugh. It's humorless, and the sound reverberates with the noise of a broken man's brokenness.

« Maybe if ye're damn fool ass hadn't come back and gone straight for the drink, » Rhovvth pushes himself back into all the spaces that are vacant in K'vre's heart and mind and soul: into those hollows flood brine and salt, primordial and meaningful. « That was your first mistake. »

"Oh, was that it?" the brownrider says, his eyes lifting finally to his lifemate. "That was the first one?" he says thickly, still lost at sea, adrift without mooring. It's more likely to be listed as his most recent mistake, but who's counting? K'vre cut his ties - as he always does - and came home empty. There was only one thing to do, with a chasm yawning so wide, something needed filling… and him with a whole half a liquor shelf that never gets used.

A few of the meaningless trinkets he actually keeps. Useless and dusty from ill-use, collected on a spare shelf; whiskey and rum, poignant gin and bitter vodka. He kept the bottles for guests, ha!, like he has guests, like he has a life in which guests have a place.

But tonight? Tonight, this wretched man came home and he drank them. Drank enough of the gin to put him on his ass, at least - juniper's blessing lost on the man, turned to a curse - and finally the anger flickered again, rose up. Easy enough to rage at a teenager, and easier still to rage at himself. He is as low as he's ever reached.

He can still see her in his mind's eye. He's not even sure which her he's referencing. All the softness that enters his life leaves: it was a rule he learned early in life, with his mother's death. He's a proper steward's son, Kevrael, and the reason for his shaping is in the misplacement of feminine kindness in his earliest turns.

And then there was another her. His heart still constricts when he thinks of her face, as faded and worn with memory as anything in his life. It's almost lost to him, now — the curve of her cheek, the bow of her lips, the charismatic set of her eyes — but he still conjures by her when the panic of forgetting some facet of her existence returns.

The only thing he hasn't destroyed is her trunk, locked and sealed in the corner. He doesn't even see it, these days. It's just another fixture, as set-in-stone as the walls that curve around him, as the dragonflesh that closes him in from the outer world.

"I miss her," he chokes out, words four turns in the making and guarded jealously.

Rhovvth finally makes the attempt, turning his head slant-wise to butt his nose into the private chambers. He's too big to get very far, and with a nose of disgruntlement he withdraws his head, shoving a paw into the space instead: for all the world he looks like a cat in front of a bolthole, and K'vre the prized mouse within. A giant talon rakes across the hearth-rug and finally touches the man within. A shiver of relief ripples over dusky hide. « I've got you, you pansy sonuvabitch, » the dragon says, his voice husky with emotion.

Grief is shared by more than one party.

K'vre's shoulders crumple downward, and he finally - finally - lets go of a knot he's kept tightly wrapped for the better part of half a decade.

This moment and the aftermath isn't for anyone to see but those who share in the grief; suffice to say that it happens, and private words are shared between bondmates. One party cries himself into a husk. The other empties his endless oceans in a torrent of privately-shared love. Eventually, they cross all the seas and reach the other side.

Only then, red-eyed and empty in a new fashion, K'vre sets to putting his meagre life back together.

The mattress goes back on the frame, and clean bed-linens applied. The only piece of wall-art he owns is rolled together to be sent back to the Harper for piecing together; the runner depicted within is truly ruined otherwise. He sets his chairs upright, thankful that he didn't break any of those legs.

Shattered remains of pottery are swept up. In his idiocy of this midnight cleaning he gets a shard in a foot, and loses another half-mark to coaxing it out and cleaning the wound. He tries supplies fresh-brought, and doesn't think too hard about the gifter.

The brownrider empties most of the bottles from his liquor shelf over the side of his weyr's ledge — he has to promise Rhovvth he means no funny business by the expanse before the brown will let him get that close to the edge — except for his elderberry brandy and a pristine bottle of Jheverak. And, after long debate, the last couple fingers of gin left in the bottle. It was helpful, after all, after a fashion. It deserves to stay, if only to fix the memory in his mind.

The rider half-covers the glow in the niche by his cot, and relights the fire in his hearth, finally - sorely - getting ready to lay down his weary head. Instead of putting his clothes up, he simply puts the bin next to the clothespress.

And there he pauses, his hand resting lightly on a gift wrapped in brown damask chased with gold. He looks down at it, finally sober, and lifts it into his hands, cradling it. He doesn't even test the weight of it, though some part of him recognizes how light it is.

The greater part of him doesn't want to know. It's the first gift that's not been by-way of a bottle or free drink that he's received in the last two turns. He has no family to mark the passing of his turns, only his wingmates, and he loves them fiercely, passionately, but Parhelion is not a family that nourishes. Parhelion is a family of stricture and rules, and he thrives within it, albeit bleakly.

Fresh in the catharsis of his grief, he's too raw-edged to think about that which drove him to destroy everything in his weyr worth breaking. He's too heartsore to worry about yet another woman.

So instead, he moves the yet-wrapped gift to his mantle, and with much precision places the wrapped parcel at the very center.

"For a bad day," he tells .. himself, or Rhovvth, or perhaps the gift itself. "But not today."

Today was bad enough.

He blows out the candles and goes to his bed, alone and cold with only the low crackling of the hearthfire to accompany him.

« Good night, fucker. »

… and the scent of brine giving way to seawater, a red castle by the sea to guide him through all of his worst days. Tonight, Rhovvth adds a presence, a single forepaw reaching into the private chambers. The brown doesn't beg his rider to come bed down with him on the ledge, but the yearning is there, palpable in a third charm of salt.

K'vre rests back against his thin mattress and stares at the darkened ceiling for a moment, feeling drained, feeling weary in a way that exceeds even his own perpetual worries.

And then with a sigh he rolls out of bed, taking a single blanket and a pillow with him as he hobbles out. His hips and knees creak as he goes, the day's activity catching up with him. "Shove aside," he gruffly tells Rhovvth, and the brown's eyes whirl fastest blue, a blue that matches the color that a gawky dragonet's eyes were when he first selected this scruffy loner for his very own.

And so K'vre finally sleeps, cradled silently in the hollow of Rhovvth's neck, his memories giving way to exhaustion, his pain giving way to the blessed silence of sleep.

Not alone, after all.