The last few days had been unpleasant ones, the passive - that's what he was now, or had always been he guessed but it was definite now - had been dragged from his home in his Vienda while his parents screamed at each other and had found himself landed in Brunnhold. They'd tattooed his flesh, his upper arm left feeling as if it had been set ablaze. It itched, it hurt and he burned. He had begun to truly bawl his eyes out when they reached the tattooing stage.
Before he reached Brunnhold, the child had been oddly numb, unable to process what had happened, both in terms of the negative initiation test and the argument that his parents had had. It hadn't felt like a mistake exactly, just... incomprehensible. There had been tears certainly but they'd been more covert, finding the numbness washing away before he slept each night, emotion welling up to leave him falling into an exhausted slumber on drenched fabric. Since he'd gotten to Brunnhold, the tears had really begun in earnest and he couldn't stop them.
His new patron couldn't make them stop either. He'd been assigned a room, had it pointed out to him by a man who was apparently in charge of a whole wing of dormitories before the man took him aside and tried to explain things to him. Leon had tried to explain it all to him about work arrangements, sleeping arrangements, meal arrangements and everything else that would make up his new life for the rest of his life. Fionn had always been prone to wallowing in his own misery even before this was thrust upon him but it was like he'd been practising for when things would really go downhill.
So he cried. Leon tried to calm him down, first trying firm words because it wasn't as if kindness was going to go far here. The kid would have to learn sooner or later that this was hard. When that didn't work, the patron settled for clouting the blond boy about the head, which just made him cry more because then he actually had something to cry about. Thoroughly exasperated, Leon had tried kind words in the hope of getting through in some shape or form but Fionn continued to cry, great ugly sobs that left his face scarlet and blotchy, coughing and spluttering while his nose ran like a tap. Disgusted, the patron took the boy by the arm - his newly tattooed arm, which had somehow redoubled his tears - and forcibly dragged him to the laundries.
The area wasn't anywhere near as busy as it would be during proper term time but there were still plenty of people around the campus, students and staff still conducting activities over the Summer Break, but it also included the ever-present passives of course. There was still work to be done but nowhere near as much as usual and most of the work was manual enough, lacking little skill or intelligence and that meant that it was the perfect place to chuck the weeping boy so he could learn the meaning of hard graft without him causing too much trouble.
Fionn found himself thrust into the care of a wooden-faced woman well into her thirties who was apparently overseeing things here. Leon dropped him off with a mutter of "he's your problem now" and he'd found himself staring up into the face of this very stern woman while fresh tears threatened. She took one look at him before producing a handkerchief from somewhere and rubbing it roughly across his face in a very no-nonsense manner that shocked the tears to a stop.
"Now, that's enough of that carry on. You're far too old for the like of that. Don't be a spoiled brat. Things are going to be this way from now on and there's no point in crying about it. Don't be such a girl!" she snapped out before marching him towards steaming tubs and an older blond although he was still quite young, not yet out of his teens. Fionn stared up at him with wide eyes, thinking at first that he was a young woman with his longer hair and a certain softness to his features but it was a boy.
"You! Watch this one and make sure that he learns how to work here. I don't want him moping about the place, it isn't what he's here for. If he doesn't pull his weight, I'm holding you responsible," she told him before turning on her heel and marching off, presumably to throw her weight around somewhere else.
Fionn stared up at the older boy, brown eyes huge, watery and very red-rimmed. A grubby looking handkerchief was clutched in his fingers, the one the laundress overseer had used on him and thrust into his grasp. He blew his nose, sniffing snottily as he gazed up at the other.
"Hello," he managed in a small voice, a hand moving to rub at the place where he was tattooed, the strange fabric of his new uniform making it itch. The rub made it hurt anew again and the tears came. The pain, the strangeness of it all, the unfairness of it making the tears flow again and he buried his scarlet face into the wet cloth.