storypaint (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
storypaint) wrote2009-01-07 03:51 pm
storypaint) wrote2009-01-07 03:51 pm
So You Want to Be (Dairine gen)
Title: So You Want to Be
Length: 2119 words
Prompt: Yuletide 2008: Dairine Callahan for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
astrophelstella
Pairing: Dairine/Roshaun implied; mostly Dairine gen
Other: dark; main character death
Excerpt: Dairine had been working as the children's librarian at the New York Public Library for seven years when Roshaun walked through the door.
Dairine Callahan graduated eighth in her class instead of first, because she'd been called away during finals for an intervention on Venus, but it wasn't a big deal. Dairine was small, but she would do great things. Machine language whispered in her dreams, still, and quicklife patiently searched the universe for a person she felt like she didn't really know anymore.
She was on track to becoming a local Advisory, and she hadn't lost anyone else since that irritating prince had disappeared, when it happened.
She dropped out of college and went home to her father. After a year indulging misery and finishing someone else's wizardly projects, when she could, when she felt like it would matter, she went back for a master's degee in computer science.
Dairine had been working as the children's librarian at the New York Public Library for seven years when Roshaun walked through the door.
*
She was 35. Sometimes she thought she was too old, like she should have stopped aging when her life changed, but age meant change, and growth.
Dairine was still hurting, but she would never neglect the Oath, or her duties.
She was doing paperwork, and in the back of her mind, considering a difficult spell, when the boy sat down in the too-small chair across from her. At first, she didn't recognize him, curled into the tiny chair with his knees close to his shoulders.
He reached across the desk and handed her a lollipop. She looked up, startled, into bright green eyes.
"Roshaun!" she said, feeling old, feeling strange, because here she was, 35, and there he was, looking just the same as he had when he disappeared, right down to the floppy t-shirt.
She ran a hand through her red hair (she had already begun to find grays, what a surprise), and she asked, "Where have you been?"
Roshaun sighed dramatically, and it was so much like him that she laughed, her voice loud in the quiet library.
"I thought the library was Nita's thing," he said, not answering her question, "but here you are."
"I..."
"Are you going to eat that?" he asked, pointing to the lollipop she was clutching like a lifeline, and when she shook her head, he took it back, and she watched him enjoy it, bemused. She knew that his people didn't age at the same rate as hers did, but he hadn't changed at all.
The crunch was loud and she winced. He grinned.
"Roshaun, where have you been?" she asked again. His round child's face (was she ever that young?) hurt her. She'd spent a lot of time looking for him, but she didn't know what to do with him now.
She picked up a book from the pile on her desk and set it down again.
"It's a long story," he said, twirling around the lollipop stick as if it's not a big deal, and she thought about the last twenty years, and her anger flared. He was just so... irritating. They had fought constantly back then, hadn't they? She thought she should have grown up by now.
"Can you come back when I get off work?" she asked, and he didn't complain, but neither did he promise, walking out of the library as easily as he'd come in.
She didn't get any real work done for the rest of the day.
*
He was there at the door when she left, leaning against the doorframe with the same casual attitude, but this time she gulped past the anger. It was Roshaun. He was her friend. His Timeheart had a place for her. (She suspected that hers might have one for him, too.)
"Did you take care of my Sunstone properly?" he asked, falling into step beside her. He loomed, but at least he'd managed enough illusion that they didn't get too many stares from passersby.
The Sunstone rested in her otherspace pocket most of the time, and she had taken care of it. The Lone One had developed a bit of fascination with their sun, but with the things Dairine had learned from Roshaun's father, she'd been able to intervene.
It was sort of strange, the way her specialty has shifted into starwork. Or it would be strange if one didn't understand the working of the Powers. There was no waste.
Dairine fumbled with her keys when she reached her car, but when she'd managed to unlock the doors and Roshaun was sitting beside her in the passenger seat, she reached into her portable claudation and pulled the torc out, tossing it into his lap with more of a casual manner than she actually felt.
She could feel the old need to impress him rising up again, the need to out-casual, out-do him, but she had gone past that, right? Right?
They sat in silence as she drove, and Roshaun made no attempt to examine the stone. He took glances at her in the rearview mirror. When she reached her apartment, she could hear Spot's alarm.
He wasn't sure quite what to think either, and Dairine felt a little better for the sympathy.
"So, are you going to explain this to me?" she asked, her voice cracking, and he followed her inside.
*
Spot was sitting under the coffeetable when she opened the door, but it scuttled out and threw up several stalked eyes to examine Roshaun.
"Has he gotten smaller?" Roshaun asked, kneeling down to offer his hand to Spot, and Dairine nodded. There weren't as many book wizards nowadays, but Spot was still ahead of the pack with computer technology. His colleagues made sure of that.
"Hello," Spot said to Roshaun before slinking back under the table. Roshaun gave Dairine a look, lifting her eyebrows, and Dairine returned it. Her computer was never very sociable, but generally more than it was now.
She strode ahead of Roshaun into the tiny kitchenette, and started the coffeemaker. It was a habit she was trying to break, but not too hard. In any case, this was probably a pretty good excuse. Roshaun examined the calendar on her fridge with great interest before sinking into her single kitchen chair.
"Well?" Dairine burst out finally.
Tapping his fingers on the table, Roshaun asked, "What happened to Nita?"
"What?"
"There aren't any photographs of her or Kit here, and the Aethyrs didn't have her listing. What happened, Dairine?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Dairine said, hunching her shoulders and staring at the coffee pot.
"Did you fix the problem she was trying to solve?" he asked insolently, and she whirled around.
"She fixed it. Without me, without asking for anyone's help, even Kit's. The problem is taken care of. Wizards don't give up on something because it's hard." She choked. "We cleaned up the mess afterwards, a small timeslide to take care of the civilians, and it's all fine. Have you gotten less sensitive since you left?"
"I... I'm sorry," Roshaun said, looking chastened. "That was rude of me. My social skills have indeed suffered in my absence. The... ones I was with... they didn't communicate like we do, and..."
"Okay," Dairine muttered, turning back away from him and breathing deeply. She could feel the tension all the way down her spine. She didn't say anything else until she had the coffee cup in her hands.
"Do you--?" she said, gesturing to her cup, but he declined. She took another deep breath and leaned back against the counter, facing him, studying him.
He was exactly the same. Surely he should have aged at least a little.
"Where have you been?" she asked again, lips pursed, and he ran a hand absently through his hair before replying in the Speech, using technical words she hardly knew. They weren't astronomical terms-- she would know them-- but words that had to do with the unnegotiable link between time and space, especially time, and very, very small distance.
She had no idea what he was talking about, and the thought was actually more scary than interesting. She'd done enough dimension-crawling to know that some of those places were practically unlivable, and practically inescapable.
But here he was.
"My father," he said suddenly, interrupting himself in Wellakahit. "He couldn't be..."
This time it was Dairine's turn to look away. It had been a long time since she'd been to his planet, but the unrest last time had been staggering... even with the star behaving itself. She'd meant to go back, to check at some point, but Roshaun's father was a wizard in his own right. She couldn't look after him, and he wouldn't want her to.
"I need to go home," he said, rising abruptly.
"Why.... why did you come here first, then?" she said, oddly dismayed.
Roshaun mumbled something she could barely hear, and she asked him to repeat it. He didn't look at her when he did.
"I want you to come with me."
Dairine laughed, her voice harsh in the quiet room. "I think that caused enough trouble in the past."
"I need you to come," he said, scuffing his foot across the floor. He looked like a boy with his first crush, and she didn't laugh this time, but her heart thudded just a little.
"I could use someone strong to help me rebuild my planet," he said. "What remains of my culture, the Powers know. But I--," he paused, meeting her eyes, "--I am the Sun King. I won't shirk my duties. Come with me, Dairine. You can come back to Earth afterwards, if you want."
"If I want?" Dairine said. "This is my home, Roshaun, I'm quite attached to it."
"But what's still here, Dairine?" he said, his brows narrowed in pseudo-sympathy, and suddenly she hated him for his sympathy-- pure hatred, the way she felt when Nita died, when her mother died, when the Lone One cast shadows across the sun again and again. The feeling passed and she felt a little cleaner.
"Life is still here," she said. "I took an Oath."
"And what have you been doing? The girl who moved planets is a children's librarian?"
"I'm a wizard, Roshaun," she said. There was something utterly cruel in his posture and his words, and she found herself saying something she never expected to say to another wizard (something they all hated to say to one).
"'Get thee behind me,'" she said first, because there was always an occasion for a literary reference. "Fairest and Fallen, greetings and defiance."
All of the emotion dripped out of Roshaun's face, and after a moment of wizard's silence, It laughed, and then disappeared as though It had never been sitting there in her kitchen in the first place.
See you later, Someone whispered in her mind, with a twist of pain, and Dairine clutched her head and began to cry. She let her hands fall to her side after a moment, exhausted, and Spot came to rub against her fingers like a cat.
"Trouble," Spot said solemnly.
"You got that right," Dairine said, taking a shuddering breath before getting up to rummage in her closet for her wizarding supplies.
She was going to Wellakh. She knew It was there-- that It had come here to trap her-- that she wasn't twelve years old anymore, full of power.
But she was a wizard, and she had a duty.
*
There were ten get-well cards on Dairine's desk when she came back to work, still hobbling a little bit, pale as though she'd sunburned and had to grow new skin. Her coworkers all came by, one by one, during the day to confirm the gossip they'd heard about her sudden absence.
"Illness," she explained very briefly, not wanting to get into the truth of sick planets and broken suns and the grin of Someone wearing a dear friend's shape. Wellakh had been sick, all right, and she was still a little sick with grief, but there were new wizards there now-- six of them, not royalty, but servants for a planet used to one wizard or maybe two.
After a while, her coworkers went away and left her to her job. She took the books out of the book return and held them up to her face, inhaling that familiar old book smell.
Sure, libraries had been Nita's thing, but there was room for specialties to change. That was growth, after all.
The last book in the pile was a small paperback, well-loved, the Dewey decimal number inked in her own handwriting. She looked at it for a long moment, staring in disbelief, tracing the title with one finger.
So You Want to Be a Wizard...
She smiled and shelved it with the rest of the series.
Length: 2119 words
Prompt: Yuletide 2008: Dairine Callahan for
astrophelstellaPairing: Dairine/Roshaun implied; mostly Dairine gen
Other: dark; main character death
Excerpt: Dairine had been working as the children's librarian at the New York Public Library for seven years when Roshaun walked through the door.
Dairine Callahan graduated eighth in her class instead of first, because she'd been called away during finals for an intervention on Venus, but it wasn't a big deal. Dairine was small, but she would do great things. Machine language whispered in her dreams, still, and quicklife patiently searched the universe for a person she felt like she didn't really know anymore.
She was on track to becoming a local Advisory, and she hadn't lost anyone else since that irritating prince had disappeared, when it happened.
She dropped out of college and went home to her father. After a year indulging misery and finishing someone else's wizardly projects, when she could, when she felt like it would matter, she went back for a master's degee in computer science.
Dairine had been working as the children's librarian at the New York Public Library for seven years when Roshaun walked through the door.
*
She was 35. Sometimes she thought she was too old, like she should have stopped aging when her life changed, but age meant change, and growth.
Dairine was still hurting, but she would never neglect the Oath, or her duties.
She was doing paperwork, and in the back of her mind, considering a difficult spell, when the boy sat down in the too-small chair across from her. At first, she didn't recognize him, curled into the tiny chair with his knees close to his shoulders.
He reached across the desk and handed her a lollipop. She looked up, startled, into bright green eyes.
"Roshaun!" she said, feeling old, feeling strange, because here she was, 35, and there he was, looking just the same as he had when he disappeared, right down to the floppy t-shirt.
She ran a hand through her red hair (she had already begun to find grays, what a surprise), and she asked, "Where have you been?"
Roshaun sighed dramatically, and it was so much like him that she laughed, her voice loud in the quiet library.
"I thought the library was Nita's thing," he said, not answering her question, "but here you are."
"I..."
"Are you going to eat that?" he asked, pointing to the lollipop she was clutching like a lifeline, and when she shook her head, he took it back, and she watched him enjoy it, bemused. She knew that his people didn't age at the same rate as hers did, but he hadn't changed at all.
The crunch was loud and she winced. He grinned.
"Roshaun, where have you been?" she asked again. His round child's face (was she ever that young?) hurt her. She'd spent a lot of time looking for him, but she didn't know what to do with him now.
She picked up a book from the pile on her desk and set it down again.
"It's a long story," he said, twirling around the lollipop stick as if it's not a big deal, and she thought about the last twenty years, and her anger flared. He was just so... irritating. They had fought constantly back then, hadn't they? She thought she should have grown up by now.
"Can you come back when I get off work?" she asked, and he didn't complain, but neither did he promise, walking out of the library as easily as he'd come in.
She didn't get any real work done for the rest of the day.
*
He was there at the door when she left, leaning against the doorframe with the same casual attitude, but this time she gulped past the anger. It was Roshaun. He was her friend. His Timeheart had a place for her. (She suspected that hers might have one for him, too.)
"Did you take care of my Sunstone properly?" he asked, falling into step beside her. He loomed, but at least he'd managed enough illusion that they didn't get too many stares from passersby.
The Sunstone rested in her otherspace pocket most of the time, and she had taken care of it. The Lone One had developed a bit of fascination with their sun, but with the things Dairine had learned from Roshaun's father, she'd been able to intervene.
It was sort of strange, the way her specialty has shifted into starwork. Or it would be strange if one didn't understand the working of the Powers. There was no waste.
Dairine fumbled with her keys when she reached her car, but when she'd managed to unlock the doors and Roshaun was sitting beside her in the passenger seat, she reached into her portable claudation and pulled the torc out, tossing it into his lap with more of a casual manner than she actually felt.
She could feel the old need to impress him rising up again, the need to out-casual, out-do him, but she had gone past that, right? Right?
They sat in silence as she drove, and Roshaun made no attempt to examine the stone. He took glances at her in the rearview mirror. When she reached her apartment, she could hear Spot's alarm.
He wasn't sure quite what to think either, and Dairine felt a little better for the sympathy.
"So, are you going to explain this to me?" she asked, her voice cracking, and he followed her inside.
*
Spot was sitting under the coffeetable when she opened the door, but it scuttled out and threw up several stalked eyes to examine Roshaun.
"Has he gotten smaller?" Roshaun asked, kneeling down to offer his hand to Spot, and Dairine nodded. There weren't as many book wizards nowadays, but Spot was still ahead of the pack with computer technology. His colleagues made sure of that.
"Hello," Spot said to Roshaun before slinking back under the table. Roshaun gave Dairine a look, lifting her eyebrows, and Dairine returned it. Her computer was never very sociable, but generally more than it was now.
She strode ahead of Roshaun into the tiny kitchenette, and started the coffeemaker. It was a habit she was trying to break, but not too hard. In any case, this was probably a pretty good excuse. Roshaun examined the calendar on her fridge with great interest before sinking into her single kitchen chair.
"Well?" Dairine burst out finally.
Tapping his fingers on the table, Roshaun asked, "What happened to Nita?"
"What?"
"There aren't any photographs of her or Kit here, and the Aethyrs didn't have her listing. What happened, Dairine?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Dairine said, hunching her shoulders and staring at the coffee pot.
"Did you fix the problem she was trying to solve?" he asked insolently, and she whirled around.
"She fixed it. Without me, without asking for anyone's help, even Kit's. The problem is taken care of. Wizards don't give up on something because it's hard." She choked. "We cleaned up the mess afterwards, a small timeslide to take care of the civilians, and it's all fine. Have you gotten less sensitive since you left?"
"I... I'm sorry," Roshaun said, looking chastened. "That was rude of me. My social skills have indeed suffered in my absence. The... ones I was with... they didn't communicate like we do, and..."
"Okay," Dairine muttered, turning back away from him and breathing deeply. She could feel the tension all the way down her spine. She didn't say anything else until she had the coffee cup in her hands.
"Do you--?" she said, gesturing to her cup, but he declined. She took another deep breath and leaned back against the counter, facing him, studying him.
He was exactly the same. Surely he should have aged at least a little.
"Where have you been?" she asked again, lips pursed, and he ran a hand absently through his hair before replying in the Speech, using technical words she hardly knew. They weren't astronomical terms-- she would know them-- but words that had to do with the unnegotiable link between time and space, especially time, and very, very small distance.
She had no idea what he was talking about, and the thought was actually more scary than interesting. She'd done enough dimension-crawling to know that some of those places were practically unlivable, and practically inescapable.
But here he was.
"My father," he said suddenly, interrupting himself in Wellakahit. "He couldn't be..."
This time it was Dairine's turn to look away. It had been a long time since she'd been to his planet, but the unrest last time had been staggering... even with the star behaving itself. She'd meant to go back, to check at some point, but Roshaun's father was a wizard in his own right. She couldn't look after him, and he wouldn't want her to.
"I need to go home," he said, rising abruptly.
"Why.... why did you come here first, then?" she said, oddly dismayed.
Roshaun mumbled something she could barely hear, and she asked him to repeat it. He didn't look at her when he did.
"I want you to come with me."
Dairine laughed, her voice harsh in the quiet room. "I think that caused enough trouble in the past."
"I need you to come," he said, scuffing his foot across the floor. He looked like a boy with his first crush, and she didn't laugh this time, but her heart thudded just a little.
"I could use someone strong to help me rebuild my planet," he said. "What remains of my culture, the Powers know. But I--," he paused, meeting her eyes, "--I am the Sun King. I won't shirk my duties. Come with me, Dairine. You can come back to Earth afterwards, if you want."
"If I want?" Dairine said. "This is my home, Roshaun, I'm quite attached to it."
"But what's still here, Dairine?" he said, his brows narrowed in pseudo-sympathy, and suddenly she hated him for his sympathy-- pure hatred, the way she felt when Nita died, when her mother died, when the Lone One cast shadows across the sun again and again. The feeling passed and she felt a little cleaner.
"Life is still here," she said. "I took an Oath."
"And what have you been doing? The girl who moved planets is a children's librarian?"
"I'm a wizard, Roshaun," she said. There was something utterly cruel in his posture and his words, and she found herself saying something she never expected to say to another wizard (something they all hated to say to one).
"'Get thee behind me,'" she said first, because there was always an occasion for a literary reference. "Fairest and Fallen, greetings and defiance."
All of the emotion dripped out of Roshaun's face, and after a moment of wizard's silence, It laughed, and then disappeared as though It had never been sitting there in her kitchen in the first place.
See you later, Someone whispered in her mind, with a twist of pain, and Dairine clutched her head and began to cry. She let her hands fall to her side after a moment, exhausted, and Spot came to rub against her fingers like a cat.
"Trouble," Spot said solemnly.
"You got that right," Dairine said, taking a shuddering breath before getting up to rummage in her closet for her wizarding supplies.
She was going to Wellakh. She knew It was there-- that It had come here to trap her-- that she wasn't twelve years old anymore, full of power.
But she was a wizard, and she had a duty.
*
There were ten get-well cards on Dairine's desk when she came back to work, still hobbling a little bit, pale as though she'd sunburned and had to grow new skin. Her coworkers all came by, one by one, during the day to confirm the gossip they'd heard about her sudden absence.
"Illness," she explained very briefly, not wanting to get into the truth of sick planets and broken suns and the grin of Someone wearing a dear friend's shape. Wellakh had been sick, all right, and she was still a little sick with grief, but there were new wizards there now-- six of them, not royalty, but servants for a planet used to one wizard or maybe two.
After a while, her coworkers went away and left her to her job. She took the books out of the book return and held them up to her face, inhaling that familiar old book smell.
Sure, libraries had been Nita's thing, but there was room for specialties to change. That was growth, after all.
The last book in the pile was a small paperback, well-loved, the Dewey decimal number inked in her own handwriting. She looked at it for a long moment, staring in disbelief, tracing the title with one finger.
So You Want to Be a Wizard...
She smiled and shelved it with the rest of the series.