allthatgoes | little noise (something I have no good icon for yet) (Reply)

Rating: G
Word Count: 666 ahahaha oops.
Characters: Isibél Ó Móráin and a young dragon.
Summary: ~1916. There's a potential for a new playmate in a nearby source of sound. Potentially canon but I may have gotten details wrong because I'm asleep, and Iz's player might just not like it, so ask Scout if it's canon!
Notes: Inspired by this image by Lisa Hunt, though he doesn't quite look like that and his neck is really not that long (possibly yet). Although some of that tarot deck does have art that looks like DL dragons, that ain't one of 'em. Also, that isn't my scan even though I do own the artwork.

She looked like fun, he thought.

It wasn't really often that he thought all that much – he wasn't very old, only two, or ten, or twelve, or something, and he forgot that kind of thing a lot. Time wasn't an issue; he was not an adult, not yet, and that was the only important thing. Being not an adult meant getting to do things like play.

Playing, sometimes, meant watching people on the shore. There weren't usually many in his standard places to swim, and he didn't ever really encounter anyone on the shores when he slunk up to the rocks to get some sun.

But recently there had been some noises around the cottage where the people who protected them lived (and he didn't know if they really protected him, per se, but he certainly heard them talked about as protectors; his mother had called them 'readers' because that was the word they used, but not in the same language his family used, and it didn't make sense to him because he didn't know what 'reading' was), and as 'recently' was kind of a distant concept to him, it was possible 'recent' had been a very long time indeed.

The source of the noise had been a man, at first – he had seen him go, and the younger reader, the one with the dark hair, he'd seen her cry, too. It was very sad, he had thought, and his siblings had told him not to watch, and he was very young and so he didn't listen very much but eventually one grabbed him by the ear and dragged him off into the seas.

(It had hurt.)

But the source of the noise changed and then the noise had its own little person, a brand new reader (and his parents had insisted there used to be more of them at one point) who at first was very very small, smaller than he had ever been after hatching, and then the little noise started to grow, and soon it was walking and running around on its own and was definitively a) a girl, b) not louder than she had been but making different noises than she used to, and c) prone to playing by the shore instead of, say, trying to dive off a cliffside.

That was too bad, because then he could've caught her.

He really did want to play with her. Some of his relatives had had two-legged folks (and in some instances, he thought, four or six, though he couldn't recall any of those) who they played with, and grew old with, and spent every moment with, he knew it. It hadn't happened in a while, but it was still possible, wasn't it?

After all, she was a reader.

Whatever that meant, it meant they were better than any other two-legged thing to try to talk to.

For days, he watched from a distance, trying not to bother her, not wanting to scare her – and finally, he got the chance to do something he'd never done before; talk to a two-legged thing.

He'd heard the one with the red hair calling out "Isibél!" and the little noisemaker had turned and responded to it, and so he decided that today,w hen she was nearby enough, he was going to try it, too.

The problem was, he didn't know how to talk with his tongue. He knew how to talk with his mind, and so he sampled it out, over and over, Isibél Isibél Isibél – but he didn't know her mind well enough,a nd he couldn't reach out far enough to have her hear him, and so he swam all the way to the edge where he wasn't really allowed to be where people were playing, and tried to actually speak.

'Isibél' wasn't an easy first word.

It came out more like "shiiiiiiiiiii," before he gave up.

But he was closer then! So he tried again: Isibél!

The little girl turned and saw him, and her eyes widened, and she beamed.

His day was made.