Touchstone 1 - Stray

on my part.
    That sounds ridiculous and weird. But I know it’s something I couldn’t put up with.
    Saturday, March 15
    Rain thoughts
    The weather outside was finally calm enough that I could go up to the roof today after another morning of being zonked out with aether testing. Tare really is prone to horrible weather so it’s no wonder the Muinans arriving here had such a struggle: constant cyclone-level storms made surface-dwelling almost impossible. It was still windy and spattering occasional raindrops when I went up, but nothing so bad I couldn’t enjoy it.
    I’d managed not to think particularly of Ruuel for the whole of yesterday, but I dreamed about him last night, and the rain reminded me of the dream, which had been of a moment during that session with Fourth. So easy to look up my log, to go back to a brief glance I’d taken of him while Sonn was working on the phasic gate. He was in profile to me, gazing out into the greyness – looking at one of the Ionoth horses – with the rain pouring down his face and his hands loose at his sides. Ungodly beautiful.
    As crushes go, this one’s starting to verge on girly-obsession.
    It’s really interesting comparing how I write about Ruuel now to the first few times I saw him. I didn’t mention his looks at all, except in passing, but it’s not like I didn’t notice what he looked like. Well, maybe back on Muina I didn’t, since the light wasn’t good and I was just so overwhelmed by the sheer fact that there were people. When I saw him and Taarel together, I thought them both very good-looking, but only really focused on her. He surely can’t be steadily getting prettier. Is it just that I like him more each time I see him, or wasn’t I paying proper attention before?
    His eyes are his most dominant feature, dark and clearly drawn. His face is delicate around the temples, and he has a clean, not very heavy jaw line. Arched brows, better shaped than mine, which is unfair. He keeps his hair clipped short, shaped to his skull. A swimmer’s build, lean and not heavily muscled, with wide shoulders. I think I like his hands best. Last night was the second time I’ve dreamed about him, and both times have been about his hands in some way, about how careful he is not to touch things, and how precisely and sparingly he moves.
    I think maybe I understand a little more why I’m stuck on someone who is really not my type, and who has barely spoken to me. Not just that he’s good-looking and dangerous, though I expect that helps. Not that he was professional during the testing session, or even that he crossed thirteen spaces to save my life. I think it’s because of the way he behaved when he caught up with me. He didn’t treat me as stupid, just told me what would happen if I tore a hole into Earth’s real-space, and let me make my choices about it. Nor did he tell me to hurry up, giving me the time to say goodbye. I don’t know if he was being considerate, or thought that the best way to handle my ‘psychological aspects’, but I appreciated it.
    Once I’d had my fill of gazing at Ruuel-in-the-rain, I reviewed his report from that session. I quite like reading reports for the missions I’ve been on, though I avoid viewing the log extracts overmuch. It still seems too invasive to peer through someone else’s eyes, for all that it’s a fact of life for everyone here. After a lot of debate, I did play the hypocrite and access Ruuel’s attached log, skipping to that same scene and looking through his eyes at the Ionoth horses, trailing streams of invisible light which curled and plumed like an impossible mane behind them. All those Sights. Then I went back to the very beginning of the testing session, and saw that he’d started the mission log from just before I walked in the room. I watched for a few minutes, up until Nils arrived, and gave up at a point where Ruuel was looking at me. Nils was talking, bending toward me, and I was obviously squirming, giving him an irritated, amused glance, face red.
    I looked very human. Not too bad, I guess, but…mortal. And writing that pisses me off. These people aren’t gods. Heroes, maybe. Asses, quite a few of them. Soldiers. Killers. Specialists.
    And I’m a very useful stray. I have to remember that Ruuel was just as ready to call me ‘stray’ as those idiots from Fifth and Seventh. I don’t even use his first name in a diary written in a language that only I understand because, well, he hasn’t