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Technically, it was morning. Oh, the sun hadn't rose, but there was only a few hours before daylight came. Night was falling away, but doing so reluctantly. It'd been a cold night too, and the chill of it still made the air sharp and unpleasant. In that darkness, the weyrlings slept. Well, most of them.

T'rus, for his part, was not in his bed, though Akerth was curled up and resting up for another day of hard work and micromanaging. By all rights, T'rus should have been sleeping next to him, not standing just outside the barracks shoving meat into the maw of a screeching young firelizard.

Stupid thing. Stupid Y'ul. The creature just had to be fed in the middle of the night, and it'd be the whole barracks awake with him if he hadn't rushed outside to feed it. As it was it'd gotten a few sharp cries in before he'd made his way outside. It was still trying to make a ruccus, but he was doing his best to keep its mouth so full it couldn't scream around the meat.

Her, he reminded himself. Her, not it. Captain. He was supposed to feel some affection for the creature. Right now, the emotion he felt toward it her was closer to hate. Shards, but he was tired. Three days of this now. Three days!

"That noise would the sharding little wherry that hatched from the egg you gave me." For all the evident irritation in his word choice, his tone was in fact, quite mild, almost entirely without inflection. He was tired and Y'ul had moved from the list of possible allies to the list of those he had little use for. As such, he made little enough effort to charm, falling into the sort of cold neutrality that he usually left lurking beneath the surface where it couldn't effect or disturb. "It doesn't much like sleep, or people."

Or other firelizards, for that matter. Captain had finished gulping down the most recent bit of meat shoved down her throat, and, spotting, Song, had gone from screaming to hissing. Her eyes whirled red and the tiny thing projected aggression and possessiveness on the widest band she could manage. T'rus was hers!

"Go back to sleep, Y'ul." T'rus continued, with the same lack of obvious emotion. "There are lessons in the morning. It's almost done eating which means it'll sleep and shut up. And your gold there's upsetting it."

At Song's command, Captain began to cower, going from aggressive protector to pathetic victim. She stopped making noise as ordered and huddled into a tiny new hatched ball, her eyes still swirling with red as she tried to bury herself in T'rus's lap. Such a mean gold, picking on a poor, baby green like herself.

"For what it's worth," T'rus began, in that same mild, almost dismissive tone, "Akerth is not of a kind to 'spew' anything about anyone. What problems he has with Erath, he'll not be afraid to tell her directly. And they are like to be legitimate ones."

There was probably defensiveness there, though it certainly didn't color the inflection of his words. Akerth was his dragon, after all. For all that they showed little in the way of mooning affection to each other, there was love there. That was how it worked, after all.

"As to this one--" He didn't do anything so affectionate as stroke the small green, but he did move his hand to cover her, so she needn't keep burrowing into his lap, away from Song. "It's mine now. I take care of my things."

"Go back to bed. Or go-- somewhere." He gestured vaguely in the direction of anywhere else. T'rus was not one who liked to feel much of anything, and the irritation that Y'ul was currently adding to was certainly a something. "I think the peace we will best find is the one I seek between our dragons. Distance."