Post by rainstormamaya on Mar 10, 2011 22:40:38 GMT 10
Title: Assimilation
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 427
Pairing: Team Girl Power (Buri/Thayet)
Round: 1/B
Summary: Buri learns to fit in with the locals. George and Rispah see right through her.
After the desert, Buri goes back to Corus. Thayet is living in rooms in the palace, attended by new ladies-in-waiting, guarded by Tortallan men-at-arms who she has charmed already, and who take pride in protecting their future queen: she doesn’t need Buri. Perhaps she wants Buri, but Buri doesn’t give her a chance to tell her so; she accepts Lady Eleni and Sir Myles’ invitation to stay at their townhouse instead. She has a lot to learn about Corus, about Tortall. She soaks up all the tidbits of important information that Myles carelessly drops because he knows that this fourteen-year-old girl will be Thayet’s dagger hand in the years to come, commits to memory all that Eleni will teach her of Tortallan healing methods, studies maps of Tortall, geographical and political. Most of all, she goes out into the city: by day, with Eleni and Rispah, watching their backs and learning the ways of middle-class merchants, by night, with George, Raoul, Douglass and Sacherell, picking up the violent skills of the Tortallan underworld.
She’s a fast learner, she always has been, and this is vital knowledge. She enjoys some of it, no matter how incongruous she feels, no matter how much she twitches in large crowds, no matter that she sometimes forgets herself and checks her surroundings, suddenly frantic that Thayet is gone. Thayet isn’t gone, of course. Buri hasn’t lapsed. She’s no stupid child. Thayet was never there really there. But all Buri’s training cannot stop her forgetting that she isn’t, though – or perhaps remembering that she should be.
Rispah smiles at her sometimes with sad, knowing brown eyes, and sometimes George ruffles her hair and buys her a drink or a pastry, a kind gesture from out of the blue masked by a smooth excuse that they don’t have apple turnovers in Sarain, and he intends to remedy this deprivation. Every now and then Buri thinks that Myles has an inkling, and of course Eleni has always known, but Buri is sure that no-one else has any idea.
She wanders through the crowds and learns to speak like a Tortallan, dice like a Tortallan, mend like a Tortallan, rend like a Tortallan, and all the time her phantom sense of Thayet, doing the same thing in a different way in that palace on the hill, prickles and spikes. Buri wonders if maybe one day between the two of them they will learn to be Tortallan enough to leave each other behind, breaking the ties of kinship, of friendship, of love; but privately, she doubts it.
QC by: journeycat
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 427
Pairing: Team Girl Power (Buri/Thayet)
Round: 1/B
Summary: Buri learns to fit in with the locals. George and Rispah see right through her.
***
After the desert, Buri goes back to Corus. Thayet is living in rooms in the palace, attended by new ladies-in-waiting, guarded by Tortallan men-at-arms who she has charmed already, and who take pride in protecting their future queen: she doesn’t need Buri. Perhaps she wants Buri, but Buri doesn’t give her a chance to tell her so; she accepts Lady Eleni and Sir Myles’ invitation to stay at their townhouse instead. She has a lot to learn about Corus, about Tortall. She soaks up all the tidbits of important information that Myles carelessly drops because he knows that this fourteen-year-old girl will be Thayet’s dagger hand in the years to come, commits to memory all that Eleni will teach her of Tortallan healing methods, studies maps of Tortall, geographical and political. Most of all, she goes out into the city: by day, with Eleni and Rispah, watching their backs and learning the ways of middle-class merchants, by night, with George, Raoul, Douglass and Sacherell, picking up the violent skills of the Tortallan underworld.
She’s a fast learner, she always has been, and this is vital knowledge. She enjoys some of it, no matter how incongruous she feels, no matter how much she twitches in large crowds, no matter that she sometimes forgets herself and checks her surroundings, suddenly frantic that Thayet is gone. Thayet isn’t gone, of course. Buri hasn’t lapsed. She’s no stupid child. Thayet was never there really there. But all Buri’s training cannot stop her forgetting that she isn’t, though – or perhaps remembering that she should be.
Rispah smiles at her sometimes with sad, knowing brown eyes, and sometimes George ruffles her hair and buys her a drink or a pastry, a kind gesture from out of the blue masked by a smooth excuse that they don’t have apple turnovers in Sarain, and he intends to remedy this deprivation. Every now and then Buri thinks that Myles has an inkling, and of course Eleni has always known, but Buri is sure that no-one else has any idea.
She wanders through the crowds and learns to speak like a Tortallan, dice like a Tortallan, mend like a Tortallan, rend like a Tortallan, and all the time her phantom sense of Thayet, doing the same thing in a different way in that palace on the hill, prickles and spikes. Buri wonders if maybe one day between the two of them they will learn to be Tortallan enough to leave each other behind, breaking the ties of kinship, of friendship, of love; but privately, she doubts it.
QC by: journeycat