Once upon a time, a junior assistant to the Headwoman's senior assistant got herself in a bit of a goldflight-induced pickle. Quite overwhelmed by the course of things, it took Breannli, for that was her name, a few months — right up to the clutching, in fact — to realize just how big of a pickle it was. Fortunately for her, of course, /she/ wasn't required to spend any time at all on the Sands, and managed to spend the rest of her pregnancy in a relatively low-stress way, at least to the extent that her ankles never got so swollen she had to get new shoes. When her son was born, she named him Brentram, because after all, his father's name was T'mar, and a handsomer bronzerider she never had seen.
T'mar wasn't particularly impressed or interested in raising Brentram, which was something of a shock to Breannli. She rallied, nonetheless, and the rest of the Headwoman's Assistants' staff rallied with her, and young Brentram was raised to understand that dragonriders weren't necessarily universally honorable men, but nonetheless they were deserving of respect for how they risked their lives and limbs to protect all others on Pern, and as long as he remembered that he could probably bear it no matter /how/ insufferable they were when they came and ordered him to fetch them things, especially if he could remember that they were bossing him around because they didn't actually know where the whatever-it-was was stored. A much kinder man took up with his mother in time, and gave him a little sister, Libbi, who immediately enchanted him.
Brentram was also taught any of a thousand little details of life at Fort Weyr, in the course of his childhood and growing up to be a young man, so that he could understand how lucky he was to have been born there, and how blessed he was to live there, and how important Fort Weyr was, historically and politically and economically and … geologically? Well, perhaps not that one, but the point was: Fort was the best place in the whole world to be, and he got to live there! How great was that?
The answer suddenly became "a lot less great than it was last week," when Brentram was just thirteen, when suddenly his father, the moderately-insufferable T'mar, became the Weyrleader by fluke of headwinds. On the bright side, that meant that he was going to be even busier and even less likely to give Brentram the sort of disdainful "what am I supposed to do with /this/?" kind of looks he'd given his son on prior occasions. On the less-bright side, this somehow automatically translated to the idea that any and all of T'mar's many children should be thrown onto the Hatching Sands, possibly before the eggs themselves made it there, because clearly they'd all Impress.
Two or three of them probably did, although Brentram had never really kept track of which of his father's children were which. He, at thirteen, mostly knew the terror of primal-instinct dragonets who were bigger than he was, and the pain of burned feet. At least, in the weeks following the Hatching, he had a growth spurt (finally) to console him in the wake of all the well-meaning consolation others were heaping on him. He was only thirteen; he didn't know enough about the world around him to be certain that a dragon was in /this/ clutch for /him/, after all. (Especially with his mother's many, many reminders that dragonriders weren't infallible — what thirteen-year-old wanted to believe he himself might be less than perfect?) There /would/ be a dragon, in the future, if and when he decided he wanted one; that was the way it worked, right? When they weren't so /scary/, he'd want one.
In the meantime, the hectic life of a Candidate's chore roster kept doing him in on a nightly basis. No more, for him, was the relative idyll of a weyrbrat's life; he was supposed to be proving himself as a future dragonrider, whether or not he knew what he was doing, and that meant that he wasn't supposed to have time for fun and games — not when there were dirty latrines to clean! His discontent rose at least as fast as the list of chores he was supposed to do on any particular day. And then another Flight, at fourteen, and another round of adding to the roster of Candidates, and another round of expectations and dreams and wonder, and another Clutching and another Hatching and then suddenly, suddenly, he was … left on the Sands, again, in the wake of all his new friends running off with their new dragons.
Again, at fifteen, and at sixteen, and he was starting to get both exceedingly practiced at the life of being a Candidate and exceedingly tired of life at Fort Weyr as a weyrleader's-brat candidate who couldn't have any /fun/, or even any single job that he could do well and then have however much free time he /wanted/. To hell with having a dragon, in short: Brentram wanted a /girlfriend/. Or a boyfriend, or at least to figure out for /sure/ which it was he wanted! And a chance to remember what hobbies he used to have, and work on them again, when /he/ wanted to and not when they took the shape of candidates' chores! And sure, sure, it was highly important to be a Candidate and to help keep up the number of dragonriders, especially with the chaos happening all around them — with the wrong-kind-of-destruction of the Red Star, and all the anger and rage surrounding AIVAS and the new technologies, one thing was utterly certain: dragonriders were going to have to save the day again. Somehow. Infallible or not.
But life at Fort wasn't making Brentram a dragonrider, or anything other than irritated with his lot in life. He barely ever even got to spend time with his little sister, who he loved more than anything — this wasn't /living/! And so, one night, as he paid more attention than he strictly ought to the meeting he was attending as a discreet serving drudge, the meeting between his father T'mar and other Weyrleaders who were muttering about how something had to be /done/ about those Eastern Weyr people who didn't understand the /proper/ place of a Weyr in the hierarchy of Pern, well — he spoke up, long before his second thoughts could catch up to him, and offered to go and find out what was going on around Eastern, where nobody would suspect him, because after all, he was just a kid.
That was the first time his father had ever looked at him with respect. (And a great deal of surprise, and a small amount of "wait, who are you again? Oh, right, you're one of my sons," admittedly, but still, the respect was genuinely there!) That, and that alone, was enough to carry Brentram through packing his bags, and enough to fly him off to Eastern to take up his new position as a better-paid, more-intelligent drudge — the dragon who actually flew him there was just an afterthought. And, as he settled in, he was left to realize that he was /really/ not going to see Libbi any time soon — but at least he finally had occasional bits of free time, once the giant piles of laundry were done. All in all, it could have been a lot worse.
