[Sept. 16/11] The Gardens, Early Evening

[tomorrowrain]

This wasn't his garden, and Raine knew it. It was hers. Sorrow's. But sometimes he borrowed it too, when there was a gap in his consciousness, when the shivers and whispers and suggestions in the back of his mind told him that he could have it to himself, and the whispers were rarely wrong, these days.

There hadn't been any whispers tonight, though. He'd just desperately needed fresh air, couldn't barricade himself in his room all the time and couldn't keep his head up at the dinner table and was so, so damn tired of smiling all the time while other people flung their jeers and barbs at him.

His name wasn't Jasper, but it was starting to feel as though that was all that he was allowed to be, anymore.

And so he sat in the gardens, his book in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and he looked up at the sky as the clouds drifted in. It would rain soon, even though the forecast had called for cloudless skies and a warm night. That on its own was almost enough to make him smile, just a little, as the first small drops of water soaked into his hair, ran down his face, and splattered onto the pages of the only book that he ever bothered to pick up, these days.

All it took was a stone to make liars out of the most experienced of the career fortune tellers. But then, most people didn't bother listening to the weatherman in the first place, did they?