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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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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

The light chewing on the bottom of his lip that he'd been doing turned into a fairly solid bite as she looked at his face, and then looked away again. Nothing hard enough to hurt himself, but definitely enough for him to feel it.

It took his attention away from the tight twisting of his insides.

"It's a pretty terrible book," he admitted, looking down at it for a moment before he went to cram it into his bag again, "but it's fun. I mean, I know how it all goes, beginning to end, but I've had it since I was a kid. I got to the end of the book and learned how it ended on my own terms."

And now he was rambling.

"I should have read more novels before coming here."

Now he was nervous. Sarah studied her book without seeing it for a long moment--she was maybe half-way through it and it had been getting interesting, but...

She didn't really know why she did it but she closed her book and silently slid it across the table towards him.

Perhaps the library would have another copy. He could read that one. What his stone was mattered little to her.

"... Really?"

He shouldn't have been surprised. But then, even clairvoyance as powerful as his had the potential to become couldn't predict everything. Not yet, at least. He only really had experience with it for a year, now, after all.

"Thank you. Um... Sorrow, right?" That was the only name he'd ever heard the other students call her. It seemed to fit, in a kind of sideways sort of way that skirted around the hurtful way that their peers had intended it to. "I'm Raine. Eleventh grade."

The other students had already taken to calling him Jasper this year, as if the meaning of the stone itself was some sort of great insult. He didn't see any need to report that much to the girl who was barely acknowledging that he existed. After all, a nickname like that was as plain to see as the stone that had been embedded into his forehead.

Her shoulders prickled with the feel that other peoples' eyes were on them. Sarah wasn't surprised about that. They always stared if she did anything that wasn't what they expected. And, too, she thought that they stared because of him.

She knew what jasper meant and spared a moment to pity him for having to wear his stone where everyone could see it. Her stone, at least, was hidden. Few people in the school knew what it was. Sarah intended to keep it that way.

His name at least gave her something to be quietly amused at in a way, she thought, with another glance at him, was not hurtful. Surely he'd figured it out before. Before her caution thought better of it or the stares got to be too much, she dipped two of her fingers in her water and wriggled them over the cup.

Rain, see?

She liked that about his name.

"Just like that," Raine agreed, his smile creeping back onto his face as he watched the little ripples bounce up against the inside of her glass. "But I try to keep from ruining too many sunny days. I mean, unless there's somebody who's really asking to have a picnic rained out or something."

Hint hint, staring people.

Sarah wiped her fingers on a napkin as several chairs abruptly shifted at other tables, before lifting her shoulders in a small shrug at him.

People stared. It happened. Would he threaten everyone in the school? That was too much work for her.

Realizing that she'd not answered his question before, she contemplated ways to do so. Sorrow was name enough for her, and more comfortable than her own, from before. A reminder, too.

Instead, she answered the question he'd implied asking when he'd stated his grade. Sarah pointed to herself and then tapped on the outside of her cup thirteen times. Thirteenth grade.

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.

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

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