[Sept. 1/11] The Dining Hall, Early Evening

[silentsorrow]

Supper at Thrones Academy was always quieter at the end of the year.

At the very beginning of the year, it was different. Older students found their tables—some claimed in years past, others rearranging themselves to suit how friendships had changed over the course of the two month long holiday all returning students had endured—while the newest class, the ninth graders, congregated at the tables set up for them. In the weeks that followed they would realize that they were allowed to move to other tables. And they would realize that no one wished them to do so.

For now, they were thoroughly engrossed in talking to those of their year and the rest of the grades were varying degrees of relieved about it. The new kids did not notice the way that the Headmistress, Lenore Aubrey, did not at them even once for all that their tables were closest to her.

The older students knew why.

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[silentsorrow]

At a table near the far doors, where the very oldest of the students preferred to sit, was a girl who was not counted amongst their number and yet had an entire table to herself.

She was tall and slim with delicate long fingers that toyed with her glass as she read quietly through a historical romance she'd borrowed from the library. Long hair was pulled back from her face, held by a wide clip at the nape of her neck.

Not even the shout from a table over, when two friends in different years met up for the first time in months, grabbed her attention. It was like she was deaf to the world around her and the others were content to leave her in her bubble.

Sarah turned to the next page and waited for everyone to settle down so that supper would be brought out. Ordinarily they ate in the cafeteria and carried their own food but for important days and holidays, they were here, in a lofty hall with stained glass windows and cushy high-backed chairs, all of them dressed smartly, and they would be served by others.

[tomorrowrain]

Raine hadn't expected to be allowed to sit with the other students of his grade. He'd come to school today prepared to be turned away, and he'd gone through the motions of trying to connect with friends that he'd been going to school with for two years. He'd even taken the being blatantly ignored in stride.

It didn't hurt any less, having known it was coming. If anything, he'd spent his summer dreading today, hoping that maybe, for once, he'd be wrong.

There wasn't exactly a wealth of other seating room to choose from. Every table he approached saw students draping jackets over the backs of seats that were empty, which would stay empty, laying a claim simply so that he couldn't sit near them. Almost every table. There was one...

"Hey. Mind if I sit here?"

He'd seen her eating all alone on more than one occasion. He'd even heard the rumours about her, but he'd never taken them to heart. She didn't feel like some sort of bad omen, didn't leave his skin crawling the way some people did. She was just... quiet. Quiet was just fine with Raine.

[silentsorrow]

It took her a moment to realize that someone was talking to her. Very few people did. Her teachers, the darkly sarcastic librarian, the counsellors--for all the good they did--and the Headmistress did.

But of the students...?

Her eyes slid over to him and she found herself mildly surprised. Not a new kid then, who didn't know any better. A student who'd been here for long enough to know where he should and shouldn't sit.

Sarah found herself abruptly aware of the way the people one table over were staring. She ignored them the way she ignored him and firmly turned to the next page in her book.

He could do what he wanted, she supposed.

[tomorrowrain]

Raine's teeth worried at his bottom lip for a moment while she seemed to consider his question, to consider everything about him. And while she dismissed him just as easily as everybody else in the room had, she was the one who had the entire table to herself. And he was the one with noplace else to sit.

He nodded a little, glancing at the staring people and shaking his head at them before inching around the table, choosing a seat a few down from Sarah's, and settling in.

"I'm sorry I disturbed your reading," he offered, well aware that in saying so, he was going right ahead and disturbing her reading all over again. "I'll try not to interrupt you too much from now on. Good book?"

[silentsorrow]

Sarah's hand paused mere inches from her glass before resuming it's path. She turned it precisely, once, and then drew her hand back to rest on her lap.

Was he truly as silly as he sounded? she wondered tiredly.

She glanced sideways at him, eyes cool but not actively hostile, and after a pause three heartbeats too long to inspire confidence in her ever answering, Sarah lifted her novel enough for the cover to show. A man in incredibly inaccurate faux-Victorian costume cavorted with a scantily clad woman with a spectacular sunset highlighting her curves.

If she'd been the laughing sort, Sarah would have had to bite down a smile. The cover implied a dreadful lack of taste.

The book was lowered carefully and she stared down at the page wondering what she was doing. Sarah knew she shouldn't encourage him-- that would only make him expect her to talk and she... she couldn't, for all that they said her throat was fine. When she didn't talk to him, he would go.

Just like she wanted. The way everyone else had.

Except us, whispered her constant, cold company in voices no one else could hear. Sarah, known as Sorrow, nodded her head. She was never really alone.

[tomorrowrain]

Raine waited. Raine waited, a light smile on his lips, even as she hesitated to answer him. Her idea of three heartbeats too long might have been three too long for anyone else, but Raine was patient, possibly to a fault. And Raine was confident.

When Raine had confidence about something, he was beginning to find that his patience tended to come in pretty handy.

His lips twisted up in a little smile as she showed him the book's cover, and he bit at his bottom lip a little as he ducked his head. Oh yeah, she had pretty terrible taste.

"Maybe I can borrow it when you're done?"

That's okay. So did he.

[silentsorrow]

Sarah was beginning to think that, perhaps, she'd be unable to go back to her book tonight. That was wrong though, wasn't it? She stared down at the pages and tried to decide if he was making fun of her or not.

Her eyebrows drew together slightly, but that was all the frown she permitted herself to show.

[tomorrowrain]

"Or not," Raine replied easily, making himself comfortable in his seat as he reached for his bag and started rummaging through it. "I've got a bit of reading left to do in this one, anyhow, and I'd probably get the two stories confused if I dropped it halfway to start on a new one."

He pulled out a well-read book with the cover half missing, but what was visible looked to be a swords-and-science kind of horrible sci-fi novel. A rather buxom woman in some futuristic-looking armour was holding a broadsword, one-handed, against an unseen foe that had likely been on the missing half of the damaged cover.

From the look of the book, it was possibly questionable as to whether or not he'd ever actually read anything else.

[silentsorrow]

Her eyes flickered over to him once he started moving and when he pulled out the book, her lips pursed just slightly. Sarah was almost certain that wasn't a library book. Master Dominic Madison, the librarian, would have eviscerated him for treating any book so badly.

Sarah, more unsure now than she'd been about the possibility of him making fun of her (his book, after all, did not look much better than hers taste-wise), raised her eyes to glance at his face.

Ah, she thought, lowering them again. That was why he sat with her.

[overcompensating]

Loser. Loser. Loser. Hot chick. Loser. Potential loser-ish sidekick. Kid who was going to be providing him with lunch money for the rest of the year. Loser.

Liam's eyebrow was raised as he sat at the table, waiting for food and taking careful stock of the people surrounding him. His peers were going to be the important ones, of course. Beating out a social hierarchy with him at the absolute top was going to be a necessity, if he wanted any sort of respect in this school. And from there, he could start working on the upperclassmen. Students in grade ten or eleven all the way up to... whatever. Even among their ranks, it was easy enough to pick out who was who. The teachers' pets, the cheerleaders, the chess club dorks and the freak table, which currently consisted of two.

There was no way in hell he'd be ending up at that table, if he could help it.

Loser. Loser. Cheerleader. Loser. Possible football partner. Loser. Loser. Man. Everyone in this school sucked.

[karma_kiss]

"Is someone sitting here?" Aron asked the guy in the next seat over. Of course, his politeness was immediately negated as he sat down without waiting for an answer. "Excellent."

His teachers always had said he was abrupt. He absently rubbed one thumb along his stone. Both of his hands were in thin leather gloves, black, because he'd wanted something to cover up the blue rock he was stuck with, and it looked less suspicious if he worn gloves on both hands.

"Aron," he added briskly. "Pleasure, etc."

[overcompensating]

Prep. Possibly gay.

"Dude. Did you seriously just say 'et cetera?'"

Liam's eyebrow? Creeping up his forehead already at this one, yes. Who said that? For real? In person?

[karma_kiss]

"My condolences," Aron said breezily, leaning back in his chair. "I do hope you get the nurse to check your hearing. Presumably you'll need it."

... Apparently he'd used up his store of politeness for the day already. Oh well, Aron thought, the idiot he was talking to looked like he could stand being insulted a few times.

[overcompensating]

Condolences, now? Oh yeah. This Aron guy was definitely gay.

"Right. Look, pal, you're not going to impress anybody around here talking like you just stayed up all night reading a thesaurus. Kinda just makes you look like a douche, you know?"

Liam's advanced vocabulary. Fear it.

[karma_kiss]

"Simply because your vocabulary has scarcely evolved beyond 'point and grunt' does not mean that the rest of us must lower ourselves to your level." Aron's eyes glittered with dark amusement. "Indeed, you could even say this is a chance for you to better yourself. Reach unprecedented degrees of cognizance and stun us all with the true verisimilitude of your perspicacity."

See, now he was abusing his vocabulary.

[overcompensating]

Hey! Liam knew what perspicacity was! They'd used it on the Simpsons that one time!

"Do you really want me to show you my verisimilitude?"

That word, however, he didn't know the meaning of.

[karma_kiss]

Aron arched an eyebrow expressively.

"If your idea of verisimilitude involves teaching me a lesson," Aron replied. "Then good luck. I'm sure the Headmistress will be delighted!"

When she was sitting perhaps fifteen feet away, absolutely.

[oath_keeper]

Cassidy busied herself with straightening her skirts as she sat in order to have an excuse to not look at the firstie tables. She'd already counted them, in the moments it had taken to enter the room and reach her normal table.

It was hard to miss the firsties when they made up a good portion of the school's population. And even harder when she knew that over the next few days she'd be reading medical reports on all of them, with only their names blacked out. Their faces would be branded into her mind.

"Twenty-sixth," she murmured. "That's one less than last year."

Last year, where no one had made it. Cassidy pursed her lips. She didn't add that the classes had been smaller since theirs and... and, well, Sorrow's. Cassidy arched one eyebrow as one of the 11th-ers sat down at Sorrow's table.

Odd, that. Cassidy shifted a little.

[truly_courageous]

"Kinda weird, them starting to dwindle like that," Alexis agreed, flopping in the seat across from Cassidy's, a clear view of the firstie table and nothing in her expression that even suggested that he was having an issue with that fact. Even while most of the people sitting on her side were really interested in their conversations or tabletops, generally. "You think there's something to that?"

There was a weird sort of hope in that, in an undertone that most people wouldn't know to look for.

She didn't want to see more people die. If the numbers were going down steadily, then... maybe people wouldn't have to, someday.

[oath_keeper]

Cassidy smiled faintly, a shadow of fleeting comfort, as her eyes flickered to the firstie table. This time, she kept watching them for a moment before looking away.

"If there is," she said, "they've not breathed a word of it to anyone here. I'd have heard something by now."

Most things, eventually, got to Cassidy. If only because people assumed she already knew. "Perhaps it's to do with the hold-out States. Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana refused to permit testers into their schools this year."

Cassidy's voice was bland, like she had no opinion on what she was saying. That, of course, wasn't true.

[truly_courageous]

Yeah, well, Alexis was generally too outspoken to give a damn about little things like subtlety.

"Oh, yeah? And here I always thought it was going to be, like, New York, first. Progressive sort of state, you know? I wonder who leaked to those three, though."

Not like it would keep the testers out for long. They'd find ways back in; they always did, after all. But for the time being... hey. Some lucky kids out there.

"Or maybe parents just got fed up with their kids not comin' home."

Tactful like a brick.

[oath_keeper]

"New York," she said dryly, "does what's best for New York. At least, that's my understanding. Besides, it's not like those who survive talk about what goes on once we're out of here. It's probably a power play of some sort."

Cassidy drummed her fingers on the table. "Poor kids, either way," she said feelingly. "A rouge talent? What if one of them has an accident?"

And statistics proved fatal 'accidents' were more likely amongst runaways and no shows at the school.

What magic wanted, Cassidy noticed, magic tended to get.

[truly_courageous]

"Can't blame 'em for trying, anyhow. Damned either way, when you get right down to it." Alexis shrugged, slumping back in her chair for a moment before reaching to make a grab for one of the rolls sitting in the basket in the middle of the table. "I heard a handful of the elvenths starting up some kinda betting pool. Gonna have to have a word with 'em about that, I'm thinking. Can't have 'em scaring off the firsties before they're finished unpacking, you know."

[oath_keeper]

"Malicious or a defence mechanism?" Cassidy mused, resolutely not shifting to look at the elevenths. "We," meaning the H.A.H., "have been warned about potential tensions this year. Everyone's upset about... what happened last term."

Which twenty-seven students had died by their own hands and not a single one of them had come back.

[truly_courageous]

"It's... hard not to be. I mean, between our class and that Sarah girl, it's been pretty bad, but something like that... that's kind of unheard of."

Alexis sighed, sticking her thumb through her bun and then pulling it apart.

"I mean, I haven't heard of anything like it before. Some of them are taking it as an omen."

The face she was making showed just what she thought about that sort of talk. Let the grown-ups talk about omens, elevenths. You don't know nothin' yet.