It had been turns since Saith's inexplicable urge had finally begun to make sense. The bronze chafed utterly at being outside of Weyr with no kin to call his own, but there had been something else there, something that had filled him with a longing that positively burned. An urgency, a need. To fight. But dragons could not, or perhaps should not, fight dragons. For all that he'd been a pirate, Lex had never asked Saith to make that choice. It would not have occurred to him to put his dragon in such a position.
Now Lex found himself in remedial training, months in, and feeling... out of place. Maybe it was better to say that he felt lost at sea. There had been many opportunities to bow out gracefully before this but he hadn't taken any of them. Grace was not precisely his strong suit in the first place, but when it came to Saith he would have done almost anything. To say that the bronze was happy would be an understatement; Saith was positively joyous, in a way that his rider had never truly known until now.
If the pirate was a trifle adrift, well... such was his burden to bear. Currently he found himself going over the same wing drills he'd been at last sevenday, and feeling no more confident about them. Oh, aerial maneuvers he knew in plenty, but this? This felt like so much more. There were other people, other lives counting on him. It seemed that everything had been fun and games up until now. At least he was not alone in being new to this. There were several clutches of weyrlings along with some stray riders such as himself in training. Even though he'd begun to recognize the same faces, that didn't mean that Lex felt that he belonged.
... Not that that stopped him from occasionally glancing at some faces in particularly. Well, one face, if he were being honest with himself. He'd been this close to acting on that impulse during a Flight, and he knew he hadn't been alone. That... had probably been due to the Flight itself. Up until now he'd never really known the true strength of a Queen Flight. It really had taken him quite by surprise. If he hadn't suddenly gotten an uncharacteristic sense of ... of... restraint, he'd have tumbled the man, and happily so. Not acting hadn't stopped him from wanting, and he'd had the worst headache following. The object of that desire was too close at hand, as well, working on some sort of drill of his own on the sand table, if Lex were any judge.
Why he was still looking when he should've been memorizing, the man didn't know. Shaffit all.
Uta
