Reflections [Kerrin]

Kerrin, as always, was a notoriously self-absorbed boy; he had not even considered the inappropriateness of his greeting to the injured girl until he picked up on the dry note of irritation in the single word she breathed in reply. When he did, though, he paused, an awkward silence befalling him as he remembered that - oh yeah - Indivara was horribly disfigured, or at least would be once those stitches were out and the wounds were left to form scars over the formerly flawless skin of her finely-featured face. He hadn't remembered that, though, because he didn't really care... his friend was alive and was going to be okay and after that he'd pretty much fallen into the deep pit of his own self-pity and hadn't given it much thought beyond that. So what was he supposed to say? Amber eyes stared into icily narrowed blue via their reflections, and in the end, he said nothing.

Silence was very rarely Kerrin's answer to anything, even situations like this one. But then, he had been feeling out of sorts lately, and not at all like his usual self. He guessed Indivara was feeling much the same, as he waited expectantly for her usual physical or verbal lashing for his lack of consideration, or at least some snide remark about his shallow focus on her clothing when that was really the very last thing that should have mattered right then... and nothing of the sort spilled from her trembling lips. Instead she lashed out at the mirror, hurtling her brush at its fragile glass surface, which seemed to stubbornly mocked the futility of her efforts to express her anger by not breaking. Kerrin still winced at the clatter of brush against glass as if he'd been physically struck himself, as reflective surfaces of any kind were a hot commodity at Katila Weyr, and the target of Indivara's rage was one of very few sizable examples on the entire Southern Continent.

How many dragonriders would have been inconsolably upset at the blow to their vanity had she had shattered it? Nevermind how inconsolable he would be. With no dragon to call his own, the sharding bath house mirrors were one of the few joys he had left to look forward to for the next turn or three!

Somehow he managed to hear her curse over his concern for where he would be able to look at himself, however, and Indivara was met with a wide-eyed stare for a few brief seconds before Kerrin realized the true focus of her anger.  Of course. There was no way Indivara could hate dragon-kind any more than he could, but with no one to blame but themselves for their own rotten situations, where else could they channel their frustrations? With a deep but quiet sigh, and then a wry, humorless grin playing lightly on his lips, the older weyrbrat nodded his agreement. "Yeah," he said, kneeling a moment to pick her brush up from the floor. When he rose, he was standing behind her, his fingers gently pulling her long, wet hair back behind her shoulders. "I hate them too."

Kerrin didn't know how Indivara would react when he began to carefully run the hairbrush through a lock of her dark, tangled hair, starting at the ends where the knots were easiest to work out and slowly working his way up the long strands. She was a fiercely independent girl, after all, and for that matter the older weyrbrat didn't often go out of his way to do anything nice or helpful for others - even, if not especially, Indivara - so he had no precedent to work on. If she wanted to turn around and smack him, though, she could. He was pretty used to that.