Welcome to Gaia! ::

She'd only visited Bereck once since they'd gotten to Trine, before being eaten up by work and Gathers, halfway skinny dipping and glass melting onto fingers. She had a bandage wrapped around two of her fingers, the two digits bound together, and a part of one eyebrow singed itself a wee bit in the upflare.

Freaking apprentices.

Don't put soaked rags near to the torches because sometimes they have oil.

Ugh.

Either way, she'd managed to get into the infirmary and have it looked at. With the day off, well, why not? Time to go and check up on her very favorite healer in the world. She'd been only visiting the sharding place when an apprentice lit his head on fire. Part of his face? Something. The only good part of this is that she had on her normal clothes instead of the gross working clothes.

"Masterhealer~" The young glasscrafter all but chirped as she turned around the corner towards his cot. She kept her voice as soft as a chirp could be, in case he slept, tone pleased never the less. "I have come to harass you once more on this day. Bow to my attentions."

It's bad, but it takes a few seconds for her to realize this is Aleck sitting there. It wasn't as if she never saw him at a bedside before - quite the opposite - but it came as something of a surprise, like seeing a mythical Loch Ness Monster. You want to think that's what you're seeing but sometimes eyes deceive.

Only a few seconds though and she grinned, dimples and all, any past grumpiness gone. "Aleck!" She slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes darting over to Bereck. When he didn't wake, Rochelle all but bounced over to Aleck, hand lowering to speak in a much lower tone, but no less pleased. "We've been looking for you! You're gone when we visit, vice versa, everything like that. Are you here or is this, like, a ghost of infirmaries past?"

He looked so...

Beaten.

Not beaten up as she sort of remembered him getting when they were smaller, before and after Rocham took her in and away from the creche. That involved bruises and Aleck looking less like he had the heart ripped out of him. Even in the infirmary he had more to him than this and that hurt. Like really, really hurt. <********, how things had changed, become reversed and odd and awkward.

"Yeah, we're good. He's less of a s**t when not in the public eye. Gives me hope that he has a heart or a soul or something under neath the piss and vinegar." Rochelle grinned, though it died after a second. Aleck asked his question, commented on the Gather, and for all intents and purposes, Rochelle ignored him. She looked around for a chair and found one, picked it up. Aleck soon had a chair next to him, on the side of his good arm, and a Rochelle sitting her a** right in it. She kept her voice low enough to where she didn't think she'd make Bereck wake up screaming.

"So, look. I never told you how much I appreciated you a few years back. I really wouldn't have made it intact if you hadn't have come poking around that first time and it was a big deal. You only asked me how I was once and understood why I told you to not ask that, because having your dad hurt is shitty and people need to learn not to ask that. And," She shrugged, half turning in her chair to size up the taller Candidate/Apprentice/friend thing. "I'm not going to ask, you know, that. I'm offering hugs, like you did, and because I want to and not out of some ******** up idea of obligation. If you don't want to, that's fine, I can talk about Gathers or bandage wrapping or whether or not Carltis knows how to smile without looking like a hungry feline. That's fine. But the offer's there."

Somewhere near the end of her rambling, rochelle started feeling rather at odds with herself and what she tried to say at Aleck. He blinked and looked at her and in that moment her only real thought was Oh s**t I stepped over a line.

But no. No, he moved closer and there were arms and a face tucked against her neck. The glasscrafter blinked and wrapped her arms around him in return, one hand skating up his back to cup the back of Alecks neck, fingertips just brushing his hairline.

Her head tilted to press her cheek to sandy blond hair. "I'm not going anywhere."

Because, really, when your world shattered and lay on a bed, half aware and sick, a person needed stability. She had at any rate. So Rochelle squeezed, and leaned closer.

As before, Aleck relaxed into her hold like someone sinking into a hot spring, his hands passing each other behind her. When she pressed her cheek to his hair his shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. She was real, and warm.

And she still smelled like citrus.

He wasn't sure how much time he passed there except enough for a depleted resevoir to begin to replenish-

And his blue eyes flew open and stared, startled, at the big weyrbrat who'd once again caught him in an intimate, ought-to-be-hidden moment - or so it was for him, anyway.

The way Aleck stared at him made him feel awful, like he really shouldn't be here at all. That Rochelle's arm stayed around the blond further enforced that, and he wished he'd just turned around and left when he'd seen them. They'd been close before, hadn't they? Aleck looked so... worn. He felt stupid, and wanted to do something to help and make himself feel less awkward and stupid but he didn't know what.

For a lack of better ideas he decided to just answer Rochelle's question, or at least the last one because he wasn't sure what to say to the first other than 'outside'.

"Oh. Well. I went to a card game last night with some of my winnings from the gather and I won these." Taking a few slow steps forward, careful not to clump noisily in his big boots and disturb the man asleep in the bed, he took the lid off the pot and showed the contents to the couple(?) before him; three firelizard eggs nestled in sand. Two of them were really very small: one swirling-amber shelled and one grey, and the third - slightly larger but still rather small - was pink.

"The amber one's mine," he went on with a tad more confidence, because he did have something to offer them and they might like him more for it and not mind that he'd butted in. "I thought though... well three eggs, three of us? Thought you might like one each."

"No way - there's a little gambling scene out here? You need to take me at some point, I'm fabulous at dice." Because that was the important part, really. Rochelle took the hint from Aleck shifting and pulled her hand back from around him. She'd almost managed to become contained when Carltis pulled out the eggs.

The glass crafter promptly felt like a right tit for making jokes over lack of soul. Or a heart. Or something. He fingers twisted together, unsure of what t make of a random, nice, rather thoughtful gift from ... Carltis of all people. (She didn't think bad of him, really, just that they were broke and selling the eggs could make him a decent amount of money... and he liked marks.)

(Those were horrible reasons to be surprised.)

"Sweet damn - thanks, Carltis." Rochelle smiled up at the older Candidate, her head cocking to the side. "I would tell you how sweet that is but I don't think you'd appreciate that. Look at this, you managed to shut off intelligent words in my head - and yes, I know, haha, intelligent words, Rochelle, that's funny and s**t."

Aleck and his kind of smile little smile unnerved a bit but it seemed they were all acting a bit interesting. "With our luck they'll hatch while we camp and all the food is gone. And, just. yeah. Thank you. You still want to, right?"

Maybe he'd been sitting in the gloom for too long, or hadn't been an honest part of a group in a while - something, because he felt just a little out of sync with this scene. Carltis had won three flit eggs. He was giving them to.. them, one each. He was having trouble putting his finger on what was so remarkable about this - all he knew was that this wasn't what you usually did with flit eggs. You were supposed to sell them, or give them away if you knew people who deserved pretty nice gifts. But usually you sold them. This was strange. Why wasn't he selling them?

Aleck blinked again, and his faint smile faltered.

Oh. Oh.

"This is.. really nice of you," he managed, his social interaction routines whirring to life. He got up stiffly, feeling a bit awkward having someone loom over him. "I mean.. it is. Really." He met the other weyrbrat's eyes, not quite sure of what he'd find there, and - weird feelings over having a not-quite-moment disrupted aside - quirked a tentative half-smile. "Uh. Thanks."