When All Else Is Lost, The Future Still Remains
Deirdre Kathryn Fitzgerald, once model and singer extraordinaire, dropped her chin so a fall of golden-red waves hid her distinctive face and turned to stare out the plane window.
Clouds and blue sky was all she was, of course, but at least while staring out the window, no one could see the tears that fell unchecked from her brilliant emerald eyes. Long sun-kissed lashes fluttered as if even keeping her eyes open was a trial, but the tiniest flicker of strength remained, and so she continued to stare blindly across the heavens, wondering why all her guardian angels had disappeared at the same time.
Five months ago, on September 5th, her family had been in a car accident that had eventually and painfully taken them all from her. Her recording deal had fallen through the day before the accident, and two of her musicians had quit the day after. Turner had abandoned her, claiming he’d fallen in love with some blonde bimbo, and the modeling agency had terminated her contract when, in the space of two months, she’d put on fifteen pounds, losing the anorexic look they favored in exchange for something svelte and real, something leanly and – as she saw it – femininely attractive.
Oh, and the fortune she’s supposedly been in line to inherit, it was a fortune of debt. After selling all the properties save a small condo, the jet, her father’s company, all the cars and her shares in any number of endeavors, she was finally, blissfully free of her ‘inheritance’.
And, joy of joys, she was penniless, jobless, and on a plane to see a condo her great-aunt had left to her when she’d died over five years ago.
No wonder she had a headache.
Mind, the screaming baby, the arguing siblings, and the face that the people right behind her were bound and determined to join the mile-high club didn’t much help her outlook on things either.
The woman sitting beside her flipped through an outdated magazine, popping and chewing her gum like there was no tomorrow, and Deirdre caught her own heavily make-uped face looking at her moodily from the open pages.
Jackhammers went to work on her skull.
Marian, her older sister, was supposed to be getting married in two weeks time. She had been so excited, so enthusiastic and complete over the top with everything she planned.
Would her parents have tried to take a second mortgage on the Swiss estate? Or maybe the one in Ireland.
Because Heaven forbid reality should have intruded upon their reputation and forced them to take account for their actions.
The plane gave an uncustomary and unexpected shudder and Deirdre stiffened and muttered a quick prayer, hoping that someone, somewhere was listening.
The seatbelt light flickered on, and Deirdre tightened her own, fumbling for her cross pendent and closing her eyes. She’s always been a horrible, miserable flyer, and it looked like this time she might actually have justification.
When another bump made her teeth snap painfully together, she figured it might be a storm they were coming into, or crosswinds, but the image out the window remained calm and clear.
Save the thin line of black smoke...
That was the last coherent thought she had. In only seconds, the cockpit exploded, the pressure plummeted, and as objects struck her and her fellow passengers as they were sucked out of the plane, they dropped through the clouds to show the ocean rushing up to meet them.
And Deirdre knew her last angel had left, just as she knew she was about to die.
~ * ~
“-not her time,” a voice whispered softly, nudging her away from some half-remembered paradise and back toward somewhere she didn’t want to return.
“Put her...then. She’d never...survived...No one...you know...all dead.”
“It’s...time yet.”
The voices faded in and out, back and forth, and while part of her wanted to listen, needed to, she couldn’t figure out how. Or why she
would need to.
She was dead.
Wasn’t she?
“Fine.” A new voice came through crisp and clear, almost painfully so. “Choose a planet they’ve yet to discover and send her there.”
No. No, please, she thought fearfully, wanting nothing more than to see her mom and dad, Marian and Kelton, Daphne and little Leighton.
Something, someone, almost like a caress…
“They will wait for you. Hold on.”
No.
“Hold on.”
Pain. Oh Lord, even thinking hurt.
“Hold on.” The voice had changed, and she was suddenly aware of herself again.
She would have preferred not to be.
“She’s comin’ to! Just hang on, love.” A second voice, more hands, and-
She tried to scream when someone poked her burning leg, but she barely made a mewling noise.
“I know it hurts her,” a third voice, arrogantly masculine, snapped, “but it’s got to be done.”
Swallowing, breathing, everything hurt. She couldn’t tell what she was moving, what was being moved.
Her eyes fluttered open.
“There’s a lass,” a woman soothed, bathing her brow and blocking enough light to keep her eyes from feeling like they were being scalded.
More pain, more pain than she’d ever experienced, and voices. She must have drifted in and out of consciousness, because faces blurred together and the flashed of pain jumped around.
She remembered snapping bones. Red-stained bandages and the needle’s sharp, miniscule prick. Soothing hands, disgusting drinks, and a man shaking his head.
He had such sad eyes.
Ten days after they found her she opened her eyes and returned enough to reality as to have the ability to actually focus her attention on her surroundings.
It was a dark, low-ceilinged room of a natural, almost rock-like material. Not daring to move too much, she just allowed her eyes to roam, to take in the curtains surrounding her bed and the man slumbering in the chair by its end.
Experimentally she wiggled her toes and fingers, took increasingly deeper breaths, then rolled her head from side to side.
Flickers of pain. Stiffness. Not too-
She let out a hoarse moan when her left leg screamed in protest to being disturbed.
The man came slowly awake.
He actually jumped when he saw her eyes watching him.
“Romme, send to Ikara for broth, quick!” He shot off in a husky, oddly accented tongue.
His dark eyes studied her uncertainly.
Finally he grunted. “Bruising’s finally fading. You actually are flesh-coloured instead of a mottled black and purple. How’s your head?”
Deirdre blinked once.
Twice.
“My-” she croaked, stopping to clear a painfully raw throat and moisten her lips. “My head?”
“You had quite the gash. Mind, head wounds always bleed more than other locations. No, don’t do that.” He took her slowly moving arm back away from her face, patting her bandaged hand and smiling gently. “You have any number of half-closed, half-healed wounds. Last thing you need to be doing is opening any of them up again.”
“Where am I?” She said, trying to work up some saliva so she could actually swallow.
Surprise flashed across the man’s face as he checked her pulse. “You don’t know? You don’t recall?”
“I was flying,” she replied slowly, frowning at the disjointed memories. “To...the condo...America. The cockpit...the explosion! Am I dead?”
The man chuckled at her question and bent over her leg, studying its color and temperature. “I don’t know anything about Amer-I-ca, cock-pits, or any explosions hereabouts, but I don’t figure dying hurts quite so much as you’ve been forced to endure.”
“No,” Deirdre whispered, “I suppose not.”
Which meant she was...where?
“You’re at Nidus Ryslen for the time being,” he finally answered, tucking her leg back under the sheet and sitting down again. “You were found not far from here, and we didn’t dare risk sending you elsewhere, not as banged up as you were. Besides, what with all the people coming and going, there are plenty of volunteers to keep an eye on you, and more than enough hands to make sure you were cared for.”
A flush crept up her neck and Deirdre turned her head away from his watchful eyes. “I don’t want to be a bother,”
“No bother,” he waved his hand. “Though I’ll tell you now we had some healer-students in here working on you as well as the full-fledged deal.”
“You mean interns?” She asked. “And where’s the doctor? I’d really like to,”
“No doctors here, my dear. Just healers. Doctor is one of them foreign words. Where did you say you were from?”
“Not from around here.”
“Obviously. What planet?” The eyes took on a hard edge. “Someone just dropped you here to die, didn’t they?”
“No,” she whispered unhappily, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Someone dropped me here to live.”
~ * ~
“You just sit there and look pretty,” Ikara warned, waving a wooden spoon in Deirdre’s direction when she stirred and attempted to sit up a little more.
An impossibility, considering the number and the thickness of the blankets she was ensconced in.
“Ikara, I have a broken leg. I’m not brain-dead. At the rate you’re allowing me to try things though, I soon will be.”
D’run and J’rin entered in time to hear her last growled comment, and D’run laughed as he dropped a kiss on Ikara’s cheek. “What’s this? The patient is becoming restless?”
“The patient is bored out of her mind. I want to see a dragon, D’run.”
All three laughed at her eager, hopeful voice, and D’run gave her a careful once over. “I don’t know, Dee. I don’t want to be moving you before,”
“D’run, I swear, if you don’t let me up and out with help, I’ll crawl outside all on my own. Please.”
D’run gave her a careful, hard look, and Deirdre knew he was thinking about whatever it was D’lrik had told him about their first conversation. Though he’d only been keeping an eye on her until one of the healers returned from eating, D’lrik had stayed until he’d all but pulled her life story from her, and she had, with increasing enthusiasm, told him.
Looking back, she was slightly embarrassed, but she reckoned he was the first person ever to actually ask her questions about her life, to sit and listen, to make her feel like he cared about what she was saying.
It was an amazing and rather saddening revelation.
Regardless, thanks to her instant liking of D’lrik, and his kind and patient ability to explain to her where she was and what Ryslen was like, she had adjusted surprisingly well to her ‘new’ life. She took every day as an adventure – as much as one could wrapped up in three blankets and watched like a fledgling – and she lived to learn. After all, modeling, her type of music, and an Art History major wasn’t going to do her much good from what she could see. Oh, D’lrik had told her if she was good, it would be easy to get a job singing somewhere, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to sing again. On Earth, singing had been a way for her to express the emotions and feelings she was otherwise unable to voice, whereas here, she didn’t want to turn into that secluded, angry, lonely person again.
Ever.
“I suppose a brief outing wouldn’t hurt,” D’run muttered softly to J’rin, who was grinning and nodding.
Ikara had her back turned and was discussing something about ingredients for that night’s supper.
“Come on then,” J’rin said, carefully maneuvering her left arm around his neck as he helped her gain her feet.
Or rather, foot.
Though Ikara gushed and scolded when she turned back around, she reluctantly admitted that her color was up a bit, and her eyes were ‘living’, so as long as it was short, she would agree.
“Short,” she warned the two men, not bothering to try and tell Deirdre not to be too long, knowing she wouldn’t listen.
“Just out and back in,” D’run promised his weyrmate, winking when she turned and went back to her countless tasks.
“Out and back,” J’rin joked as they moved slowly down the hall, Deirdre bearing her weight on her right leg, but using the two men as crutches when she needed to use her left leg.
Did they have crutches here? Surely they did. She’d have to see if she couldn’t wheedle a pair out of D’run or J’rin.
Though D’run and J’rin talked while they walked, introducing Deirdre to people she hadn’t met before and the like, most of her concentration went into remembering not to jar her left leg. To put the right in front of the left, back and forth, stiffening muscles and relaxing them.
Who knew walking was so difficult? Once a person learned, it wasn’t really something they thought about, but now...
“Just through here,” J’rin coaxed, seeing the fine sheen of sweat on her brow and the white lines around her mouth.
Her eyes glistened wetly as she looked out on her new planet with a sense of awe. It was like Earth and yet not, it was softer and harsher, more stark and simple and comfortable yet less welcoming in other ways, making her think of pilgrimages and settlers and the ‘Wild West’.
And it was snowing.
Winter had always been her favorite season. To watch the huge white flakes drift lazily out of the sky to blanket the cold, barren earth in a protective layer of pristine snow. Some of the best memories she had from her childhood involved playing outside in the snow, skiing in the Swiss Alps, snowshoeing through the highlands and going dog-sledding in Canada.
When she started to cry [and, of course, cursed herself for being so overly emotional] D’run must have started to wonder how his weyrmate would react to a puffy-eyed charge and decided enough was enough. Deirdre even let them escort her back to the healing quarters, where she curled up in her bed and pretended to drop quickly off to sleep.
She did, eventually. But it was only after examining the memories she’d all but forgotten, and then with a smile on her face.
* ~ *
“Yeah, I know how to use them,” Deirdre growled when Ke’li teased her about needing guards to clear a path for her as she wielded her crutch-weapons. “I broke my ankle when I was thirteen, so I was on them for six weeks.”
“How old are you now?” Ke’li asked innocently, grinning when she glared at him. “I’m just thinking it must have been a while ago, because you’re not very good with them.”
Standing on her right leg, Deirdre took a swing at Ke’li’s ankles, laughing when she caught him lightly and he yelped in surprise.
“Sorry,” she said with a shrug when he turned a suspicious eye on her. “Must have slipped. I’m not very good with these, you know.”
“Hmm.”
Pausing outside a hall, Deirdre blew a strand of hair off her face and watched three females riders, followed by four males, exit, talking excitedly about the hard state of the eggs.
Breakfast eggs? Deirdre wondered, shrugging and deciding to keep making her way around, wondering how she could get rid of Ke’li so she could do some real exploring.
“What’s down there?” She asked, motioning to the hall the riders had exited from, using the stop as a well-deserved rest.
“There? The Hatching Sands,” Ke’li answered with a sly smile. “You seen them yet?”
She shook her head, blowing at her hair again. “Can’t say I have. What’s hatching?”
Ke’li laughed. “Eggs, Deirdre. Surely you knew that, though.”
“Eggs?” Deirdre asked sarcastically. “Who would have guessed? Yes I knew that,” she snapped, “but what kind of eggs? Whose eggs? When?”
“Flurry eggs, from all sorts of dragons, and soon, by the sounds of it,” he confessed, dropping closer to her side and smiling again, this time fondly, as if remembering something. “You’ve never seen a hatching, have you? No, of course not. You’ll have to watch this one. It’s...amazing.”
“I’d be allowed to?” Deirdre asked, craning her neck to take a look down the hall.
Lots of dragons, he’d said. Meaning many in one place. While she no longer gaped when she saw one or two, she did study them more intently than someone who had grown up around the huge beasts.
And who could blame her? On Earth, they were nothing more than myths, legends of an era long gone and the wishful thinking of any number of fanatics. Here, though, they were flesh and blood, with personalities and quirks, preferences and friends and enemies and jobs and habits.
Endlessly fascinating.
Tilting his head to one side in a way Deirdre was coming to recognize as his outward sign he was communicating with his dragon, Ke’li winced and nodded. “Look, I have to go. I’ll send someone to escort you back to Ikara, all right? But can you just hang around here until they show up?”
“I’ll just keeping moving,” Deirdre waved her crutch in a general direction, and Ke’li nodded distractedly and trotted off.
Deirdre, with only a moment’s hesitation, headed toward the sands.
She could see it slowly opening up, so it was easier to study things as she slowly gained ground. The ceiling was ridiculously high, and as her eyes ran down the wall, she picked out lounging dragons on natural-looking ledges and people moving around carved tiers, stands, and the different levels of sand. Where it looked at though it should have been divided between only a few dragons, now the lines were mixed and matched, meshed and ignored as there were just too many dragonesses for them to all have their own little area of sand.
And it was hot! Her hair was starting to take on more of a curl, just from the higher humidity in the area, and she could feel it on her face and through her clothes, the heat coming off those sand granules.
Dragging herself the last few feet to a lower wrap-around tier, Deirdre sat down and just watched. She watched the people moving back and forth, talking to the dragons and each other, checking on the eggs and the sand, the tiers and the ledges. She watched the dragons sleeping and communicating, she hummed along with a humming female, laughed when two of the females took snaps at each other, snickered when a male tried to interfere and almost lost a chunk from his neck.
She just...watched.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” An older woman appeared by her side and took a seat, waving the man who had appeared with her toward whomever it was he wanted to talk to. “Deirdre, isn’t it?”
“Did the crutches give me away?” She asked lightly, moving them out of the way and avoiding the woman’s piercing look.
Though she laughed, it was also apparent her company wasn’t fooled by her jovial tone.
“We’ve had many here from other planets, but most of them were aware that theirs wasn’t the only settled planet out there.” She waved when someone called a greeting and leaned back, continuing in her conversational voice. “I’d imagine it would be quite a shock to wake up on a new planet, knowing you could never return home, surrounded by things you’d grown up believing fictional. And yet,” she continued, sounding surprised and pleased, “I’m told you adjusted very quick and very well.”
Deirdre had no reply to such comments, so she remained silent, her eyes caressing the shapes on the sand.
“What do you want, Deirdre? Where do you see yourself going once you’ve recovered?”
Deirdre blushed and looked away, shrugging. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I was so numb before, used to having everyone else plan my life out for me. Now that I have the choice, well, I don’t know. I just want to see what happens, you know? I’m not in any rush to find something to immerse myself in.”
No expression crossed her face, but Deirdre had a feeling her words hadn’t been exactly expected, but neither were they surprising.
“Do you know what a searcher does? Or what it means to be searched?”
“Something to do with the eggs,” Deirdre replied with another shrug. “I don’t really understand it, but then I’d never really asked about it either.”
“To be searched means one of the searchdragons has found a quality in you to their liking, meaning you have the potential to bond a dragon and they want you to stand at a clutch much like this one. Do you follow?”
“I follow,” Deirdre said softly.
“It’s actually not a thing that happens to most people. You wouldn’t believe it looking at places like here, but when you think of how many people inhabit this planet, and all the other planets than have contributed bonders at one point or another, it’s a rare gift to be granted the chance to bond a dragon.”
“To some,” Deirdre agreed. “Of course, others would expect to be chosen, while others no doubt want nothing to do with bonding a dragon.”
The woman made a face and laughed, looking as though she was about to say something before shaking her head. “The searchers tried to find you earlier, but you weren’t with Ikara, so I agreed to tell you should I see you.
“Some of the dragons have decided that, now that you’ve healed a bit, you fit here. They want you to stand at the clutch.”
Deirdre bit her lip and nodded her understanding. Considering what they’d been talking about, she wasn’t overly surprised, but it was a bit of a shock. She wasn’t sure if it was a good shock or not.
“Humans from Earth have bonded before, so we know you have as good a chance as any who are searched, and considering the number of eggs here, well,” the woman laughed, letting Deirdre know her chances were better than most.
Still, was it what she wanted? She’d only just started living for herself, and know this woman was telling her she might be able to bond a dragon who she would have with her for the rest of her life.
“What’s it like to bond a dragon?” She finally asked, knowing this time that she’d surprised the woman. “I mean, what does it feel like?”
She thought about her answer, patting her graying hair. “It was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” she finally answered. “I wouldn’t trade what we have for anything in the world. It’s deeper than any human connection can go, yet in a completely different way. A dragon would become a best friend, like an appendage you didn’t realize you’d been missing. The bond,” she shook her head, at a loss for words, but Deirdre smiled and gently touched her arm, silently communicating that she had all the answer she needed.
“You would thus suggest I go for it,” Deirdre said unnecessarily, and the woman turned to watch her with knowing eyes. “What if I make a mistake?”
The woman smiled. “That’s why we have Weyrlingmaster’s to assist in training. You would receive all the education you needed to care for the dragon, and all the help you needed.”
Deirdre swallowed. She was being offered an incredible opportunity, she knew that, but she was almost hesitant to do it, was half expecting someone to call her or page her or appear over her shoulder with the answer.
But this time, she had to do it herself.
All on her own.
“All right,” she whispered, heaving a heavy sigh as she exchanged one burden in exchange for another that felt, oddly, much lighter. “What do I have to do?”
The woman smiled and patted her arm. “You just did it, my dear, and now all you have to, and can do, is wait.”
