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

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

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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Hey, now. Raine could make a whole lot of soggy days if he was feeling really vindictive. Which, admittedly, was something that he didn't feel very often.

"... Twelve... thirteen. Thirteenth grade? That's not too bad, right? I mean, halfway there."

Which, when put that way, just made it seem even longer. People were only now turning their backs on him, starting to realize what it was that his stone and its placement really meant. They probably weren't about to turn back to him any time soon. And nobody that he knew of had ever really wanted anything to do with Sorrow. She'd been the weird one. The creepy girl. The single survivor in her grade.

She shrugged a little. It was. There was no changing it unless she wished to attempt to kill herself and if she came back a second time then Sarah knew that Sarah wouldn't exist any longer and it would be only Sorrow.

Right now, she was still Sarah underneath. If she came back again--she wouldn't want to be. Intent was dangerous when it came to magic.

Sarah wondered how to respond to him when the doors opened and servants began bringing food in. She gestured to the doors--look, there was food coming--and then folded her hands on her lap and studied them.

Raine looked up as she gestured, and then hurried to put her book into his bag and to find a place to stash it so that it wouldn't be in the way. Considering there was a whole table to the two of them, that wasn't particularly difficult. His bag got a seat of its own, on the side of him opposite to Sorrow.

He looked up, watching the servants bustle around the room, serving the other tables first. Were the two of them really so unnerving? And when they finally did get to their table, the service was... brisk. Professional. But hardly warm. Were two teenagers really so unnerving?

"Thank you," he said graciously, all the same. "It looks great."

It looked like food, at least. That was generally good enough for him.

Sarah bobbed her head in thanks, ignoring the way the man flinched at her movement and Raine's words. Steam still rose from the plate-- they might serve them last, but no one wished to risk the Headmistress's wrath at horrid service.

She folded her napkin on her lap, as if she wasn't aware of the way the servants had retreated quickly. She was, but that was an old, dull hurt. No more than she deserved, really. Despite herself, she couldn't help but glance over at Raine to see how he was taking it.

It would get worse. She knew that from experience.

Raine was steadfastly reminding himself as the man retreated that this was exactly what he'd been expecting on his first day back at the school. Still, he couldn't help but stare at the backs of the servants as they left again, as if there was no possible way to get away from the table quickly enough.

Just something else to add to the list of stings and bruises he'd be picking up today, he mused wryly to himself. His smile was a bit strained, but he didn't let it let up for an instant. A frown would have been worse. He'd spent all of last year frowning at certain people. None of them were alive, anymore.

"You know, I think they like us," he said airily, picking up his fork. "Saving the best for last, and all."

She just shook her head as she lifted a forkful of vegetables. He did not really believe that, Sarah knew. Privately she doubted he could keep a smile up for the year.

At least she was not ignored by those who'd been her classmates.

Of course, her classmates were dead. She wondered which was easier to handle.

"You don't believe me?" He idly nudged a few peas around on his plate, trying to work up some sort of appetite. "It was practically the royal treatment, you know. The food is still warm, even."

Just like always. And he knew it.

"And is it just me, or did we get better cuts of beef? I think we got better cuts of beef."

Yeah. Sure, Raine.

Was he born so silly, she wondered, or had he learnt to be so?

For all of that, Sarah noticed that he wasn't really eating despite his flip words. As she took a drink of water she thought about what to do. Ignoring it was the easy path and she was tempted by that.

But he sat there and he talked to her and he'd not said one thing about her lack of speaking. It was a small thing, really, but her mother had always said that everything had to be repaid.

That memory, unlike most of hers pre-death, was not faded with time at all. There were too many things to repay for her to forget that. She rolled a sip of water around her tongue and found herself unaccountably vexed by her inability to think of how to have him eat.

He would do no one, especially not himself, any favours if he didn't. Sarah leaned forward and tapped the tablecloth some inches away from his plate. Eat, don't play.

But the peas were so... so round! And green! They rolled well.

"Right," he said, glancing at her finger and then back at the plate. "Sorry. I guess I just get easily distracted. Short attention span."

It was difficult to focus on much of anything when any one thing that got his attention could trigger a vision. If he kept jumping around, he didn't have to worry so much about inane gut feelings about what would happen if he ate the peas before the carrots, and so on.

Of course, eating the damn food instead of staring at it would also keep that from happening. He skewered the pea on the end of his fork and then ate it. A moment later, the fork was returning to his plate to poke at his salad a little.

Sarah pulled her hand back and thought about his hesitance. She continued to think about it, and about the mystery he presented in sitting at this table in particular, as she ate.

Prying about his powers would invite questions into hers. Sarah dismissed that as an option.

She shifted in her seat, crossing her left ankle over her right, and decided that, perhaps, ignoring the mystery would be for the best.

If nothing else, it meant that there wasn't much left for him to ramble on about, and eventually he did start eating. He was going through the motions, mostly. The meat was good and the salad was good and the rest of the meal? Still good. But he wasn't paying much attention to it. While he ate, he mostly lapsed into a place where he wasn't paying much attention to anything.

He did, however, save one pea on his plate. Just for the purpose of rolling around with his fork when the rest was gone.

"Not bad," he murmured. Even if he hadn't really tasted it.

Now, conversations which had lulled while everyone ate, began to pick up once more around them. Sarah didn't acknowledge Raine's comment--there was hardly anything there to acknowledge except to call him a liar, which she wouldn't do.

Instead, she found her eyes drawn to the tables no one looked at. The ninth graders. The food she'd eaten turned to lead in her stomach as the sight of one familiar head, a pair of eyes that she'd known better than anyone... before.

She'd ignored him earlier and would continue to do so. It was hard to not look at him sometimes. And harder still to not think that he, too, would be a curse.

Her brother, Seth, rolled his eyes at some comment a girl with a pert face said, and laughed. Sarah set her fork down a little too hard and closed her eyes.

Raine glanced up at the thump of the fork, looking at Sorrow intently before glancing over his shoulder at... At the table that he didn't want to look at. There was a wave of something from them, fate tangled up in misery and triumph and it took him a moment too long to pull his gaze away from them.

The grade nines were making him dizzy. They had last year, but last year had been worse.

"You know one of them?"

She knew that she should just shake her head and deny it. If it got out that Seth was related to her... Sarah pitied the existence he'd have at this school. It would not be easy being Sorrow's brother. That was one good thing: even those older than her barely remembered the name she'd started with. He'd have more of a chance then.

But Raine had asked. She drew her fork down in a line on the table, to represent another table, over that way, and then counted off places with movements of the fork.

There, fourth on the left. She knew that one. They had the same eyes, for all that his were vibrantly green and hers were a washed out grey-blue. Sarah reached for her water but stopped and tucked her hands on her lap, out of sight, when she realized that they shook just a little.

Raine was silent for a while longer, considering first her shaking hands, and then looking at the table and counting the places until he spotted the boy with the brilliant green eyes. He let his gaze sweep past him, looking again at the others at the table so that the murmurs that were rising up from the other students were solely about Jasper already picking out the walking dead, and not about that one boy in particular.

Those eyes were going to stay with him. That had been enough.

"I see," he sighed, turning his face back down toward the table, mashing the last pea on his plate mercilessly with the bottom of his fork. "I have a little sister," he offered, quietly, "but she won't be old enough to even be considered for this place until I'm in grade seventeen."

Maybe by then, he'll learn not to look at the nines at all. Or, better yet, how to turn it off.

The whispers coiled around her, like invisible chains, when she realized that she was talking to perhaps the only person in the school who might even be able to tell who would live and who would die.

She wanted to ask him about Seth. She wanted to not care, to be cold enough that even the fact that there were twenty-five new students this year and most of them would likely not make it to the next, wouldn't matter.

They called her Sorrow, because she grieved. Would she have more to grieve about?

Sarah turned her gaze to where he was destroying what had used to be a pea. Did he know what she thought? Did he know of the ghosts that walked the halls, wondering why no one could see them and not sure how it had happened. She had already today seen four of those who should have been in tenth grade. Would she wind up seeing Seth as one?

By the time his sister was tested, Sarah would be gone from the school, and he would be alone, like she'd been for years. Her hand trembled as she leaned across the table to try and gently touch his free hand. Sarah braced herself for the flinch that would come-- her hands were always cold. The ghosts brought winter's chill to even the warmest of days and they liked her.

Raine didn't flinch. He'd been expecting the chill, though he wasn't entirely certain why, and he actually welcomed it. It wasn't an unpleasant coldness, after all. Her hand had been offered in comfort, and he met it with a wry twist of a smile.

"Thank you."

A smile didn't touch her lips and she looked away, like she'd been caught doing something she wasn't supposed to have done. Sarah pulled her fingers away and, with a nod of her head towards him, one that didn't give him a way to see her expression, she gathered her bag in one smooth motion and got up, heading for the doors, even as they began bringing dessert in.

The servants pressed themselves against the wall to avoid touching her and she picked up her pace. Behind her, she could hear the start of whispers about how even Sorrow wanted nothing to do with him.

They were wrong and they weren't and the moment Sarah entered the long hallway that separated the great hall and the other formal rooms from the rest of the school, she paused long enough to unlatch one of the floor length windows. Outside was the crisp briskness of fall, the hint of a storm in the air. She shut the windows behind her, even though she couldn't re-latch them, and stared up at the gathering clouds for a moment.

Wind whipped at her face and Sarah thought it was fitting that the weather would be as unsettled as she was now. A ghost, a young man, with curly hair and a solemn face offered her his hand to help her step down from the flower bed.

She let him. She was the only one they could touch: who was she to deny them that? And better still, as she walked with the ghosts, it gave her something to think about that wasn't a different young man who'd she'd given her book to, or Seth.

Raine watched her go, ignoring the whispers and pulses that his power tried to feed to him as he focussed on her back. He was trying to ignore the other students, too, but they were speaking far more loudly than his power was, at the moment. They might all have been whispering, but a hundred whispers amounted to a dull roar.

Abandoning his fork and gathering up his bag, he stood and made his way toward the doors. It would be quiet in his room, so long as he didn't sleep. He needed that, right now, more than anything.

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

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