[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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[tomorrowrain]

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.

[silentsorrow]

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.

[tomorrowrain]

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."

[silentsorrow]

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.

[tomorrowrain]

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.