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Adetsu had, in fact, been his asleep. Sleeping, unlike not thinking, was something he wasn't particularly good at. The whole point of laying down and closing your eyes was not being active. And so, it was nights when his thoughts caught up with him, when there was nowhere left to go, nothing left to push.

Because of this, Adetsu spent his days going as hard as he could, and usually preferred to go to bed late. If he was exhausted enough, sleep came with relative ease, and if his dreams were sometimes troubled, and they were, it was rare that he remembered them, come sunrise. Sunrise, when he was usually up. Late to bed, early to rise. Bound to make a man something, right?

As he wasn't particularly good at sleeping, he did so only lightly, often skating that narrow line where consciousness still beckoned on one side, intruding and coloring dreams. At Kaeyne's soft spoken question, his eyes opened, and he turned to face his comrade.

"Yes," he said, equally softly. "What is it?"

Kaeyne didn't generally wake him simply for the fun of it.

The touching had been strange. Adetsu would have found it strange even without the tunnelsnake attack, but that certainly hadn't helped matters. He hadn't particularly like the press of outside minds on his own. It had been an alien sensation, and for someone as intensely internal as Adetsu, an uncomfortable one. The tunnelsnakes had just been tunnelsnakes if unnaturally huge ones. He planned to bring a beltknife to the hatching, if he had to hide it, strapped to his leg. He wasn't going in there unarmed again.

"You are not twelve, 'yne," Adetsu replied, his own words just barely vocalized. He did not bother arguing over who was 'more' than the other. He knew a pointless argument when he saw one. They would merely chase each others tails. Kaeyne was sun and rain to him, was everything.

Almost everything, chimed in traitorous memory, but he ignored it. He focused, instead, on the light touch of Kaeyne's fingers, grounding himself forcibly in the present. This moment, with this man, who was real. Who would stand beside him at the hatching. Who had never made promises he had not kept. The other was, the other was not here. He would not think of it.

"You are you now. We change." Pretty deep, philosophical stuff, for Adetsu. But if there was one thing he understood, it was the way the past fed into the present, how each called to the other, while remaining independent. "If you are not wanted by a dragon, than I do not wish one for myself."

"It is not something I have ever thought to want. Until we came here, father wished me to follow him into his craft. He has no one else." He leaned into every touch, though his own hands were still. He found it difficult, splitting his attention so. Adetsu worked on one track at a time. If Kaeyne wanted him to talk, he would have to deal with a man who was otherwise still. "Now, I suppose, he still does. Only, a different craft."

It might seem strange to some, that Adetsu had failed to long, until now, for any path his father had not given him. But he was a Ghenzan. It was what Ghenzans did. Even when he had found Exrin, he had not thought of his devotion to his friend as a betrayal to his father. His father had, but Adetsu had never quite understood that.

He had been, in so many ways, an obedient son. And now it came to this, a defiance, of sorts. An indulgence his father allowed because the man expected his son to walk away without a dragon, prepared to impress a White, as promised, at the next irregular clutch.

Adetsu was fairly certain his father thought he'd be more hurt to walk away dragonless than he actually would be. It would, however, be an inconvenience. There was a plan in place. It required him to impress. So he wished to. Even if the touching had made the idea slightly more uncomfortable.

"They say you can't," he said, his eyes on Kaeyne. "But I would not, if I could."

He did not hate, often. His father, sometimes.

"It will not happen. I will not impress, without you." He sounded sure. He thought he was. Mostly, sure that if anyone deserved a dragon, it was his Kaeyne. If anyone were to impress, it would be the man at his side. If only one dragon impressed of the whole clutch, that dragon would go to Kaeyne.

Such a sweet image. The two of them, drifting off like that. Worried, still, but comforted by the existence of the other. As they were. As they surely always would be. And maybe, with events threatening that would surely change them, it would be nice to rest on such an image, to leave them sleeping so until the eggs on the sands called them to action.

Not so. Not this time.

They slept, for a few passing hours, even Adetsu managing reasonably uninterrupted rest. And then, a scratch. A thumping sound. That one woke Adetsu, though it was the sound of pottery breaking that had him sitting upright, dark adjusted eyes searching for the source of the sound. There, no longer on the shelf, but on the floor below it, the sand filled pot he'd put the firelizard egg he'd kept.

Shattered pottery now, just a pile of sand. And somewhere in the center of it, something wiggling.

Oh.

Oh!

Now? Really?

The egg jumped, twitched, the shell flaking away. Adetsu could not tell, in such dim light, what color was showing beneath.

"Shards," he said, without actual ire. "Should have eaten it."

The egg was hopping now, bumbling back and forth and rattling against sand and pot shards. A mess, Adetsu realized, that he'd have to clean up come sunrise. And now Kaeyne was awake. Well, that was inevitable. Adetsu glanced back toward his comrade with a look that might be called apologetic, if one knew him well enough to read it.

Mostly, though, it was hard to read any expression in the dark. Which is probably why Adetsu stood, flipping open the glow basket on the wall before approaching the shattered pot. With the light, he could see little bits of green showing through where the egg had flecked away. Good to know. And the thing certainly was anxious to get out, bumping against his bare foot as he studied it.

Kaeyne was talking, and it took Adetsu a moment to process what was being said. Glancing in the direction Kaeyne had gestured, he gave his head a quick shake. "We can't," he said, though not with the force the comment perhaps demanded. "It's--"

"Would it eat it?" Contemplative now, as initial resistance gave way.