skymuffins | [Sept. 3/11] Casey's Room, Evening

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[Sept. 3/11] Casey's Room, Evening

Casey hadn't been out much since getting back to the academy.

He could hear them. Every last one of them. Except for the ones that he couldn't, of course, except they weren't here at all. There were the happy ones, firsties, the lot. They didn't know. Didn't know and he couldn't tell them, and it was all confusion there, and hard to tune out. Impossible. The ones whose family wouldn't look at them. The ones who missed home. The ones who couldn't find their family.

And the others. Always the others, this time of year. The ones mourning, but from a distance. They knew. They always knew. Every year, there were some. This year?

This year, he couldn't hear any at all. They weren't here. They were gone. It had been terror and excitement and worry and more terror and then sharp pain and then gone.

Gone gone gone gone gone gone gone and the only ones who knew were everybody but them. They were nothing but silence, now.

With his hands clapped to the sides of his head, Casey curled up on the floor in the corner of his room, staring at the carpet. He'd spent a summer in relative silence, well away from here. And now he was back here, and all there was to do was drown in the silence. This year, it was so much louder than the incessant chatter of the firsties.

The firsties who would be the nexties, soon enough.

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In the few days that they'd been back, Raphael had secured a list of the names of every firstie they'd gotten this year. In reality, the list hadn't been hard to obtain--they were free for the asking, though he'd gotten, as he did every year, a doubtful look for asking--and he'd spent some time pouring over it to memorize their names.

He knew some of the faces already, though he couldn't always match the names to the faces yet. That would come.

More importantly, he'd spent the day out in the cemetery--skipping class again, which might matter if his grades slipped--with the list and had used his stolen hours to explain who the people on the list were to the dead.

He didn't know if it would help, when the new children joined the rest of the dead, but he liked to pretend that they'd be friends when that happened rather than new acquaintances and they couldn't be friends if they didn't know each other.

Evening left him pensive, as the dead got restless and he felt shivery and insubstantial, as formless as the dead were now, and knowing he had things to do that didn't involve dying (not yet) he'd bid them farewell and headed back.

There were living to attend to, though most of them didn't understand half as well as he did about anything that mattered. Raphael walked past his door, to the next, to the last (because the others were back in the cemetery), and leaned against it with a a soft thud.

Really, he wasn't sure why he bothered. He never was.

And that thud had Casey looking up with a start. There on the other side of the door, there was a feeling of familiarity. A sort of reassuring calm that he'd grabbed onto with a gusto and refused to let go of, now.

It didn't matter much if the calm was right or wrong, sane or otherwise. It was something he knew. In the face of a throng of firsties, all screaming doomed happiness into his brain, it was welcome.

It was more than welcome.

Door's unlocked. Always is.

The words brought a faint twitch to his lips, too mild to be called anything like a smile. Was that an invitation? He supposed it was enough of one for his purposes and opened the door.

Darkness hit him, an inky black that made the small amount of light that slipped in through the curtain cracks seem feeble. Raphael stepped into it, let the door fall shut behind him, and waited patiently for his eyes to adjust.

"Was there someone," he asked, his voice as eerily serene as his thoughts, "who said that in darkness came peace?"

"Dark is" quieter. "Peace doesn't" happen when it's "all bright in" here.

Casey's eyes were out of focus, staring in the direction that Raphael's thoughts were coming from.

He wasn't looking at him. He was listening. Who needed light, when you could see the world through everyone else's eyes?

How are "they?"

The two-toned voice--one audible, the other only in his head--was old and familiar and Raphael contemplated the question as he made his way over to the desk chair and sat in it with easy confidence.

Walking around in dark rooms was not a new skill for him. The small bit of light in the room still looked sad. Raphael thought about twitching the curtain over to cover it but then left it. Why shouldn't the light be sad?

"Everyone is as good as they can be," Raphael said conversationally. "It will likely get worse."

The firsties hadn't yet, to his knowledge, found out about what had happened last year. And the cemetery was adjusting as well as it could to the new influx of people.

"The girls might check on you," he added, "if you do not adjust in a few more days."

Casey gave a slow nod in reply to that, chewing on the thoughts spoken and the words left unsaid alike. And then, quietly, he spoke again, this time setting into the spoken word with a bit of added focus.

"They've been thinking about it," he shared. "But it was bad this year. They think I might need more room."

He shook his head, then. Room didn't make any difference. He could have all the space in the world, it didn't change the fact that walls and skulls alike were paper thin.

"Would it help?" Raphael asked, mildly curious. If Casey had told him before, he couldn't remember. It was possible that he'd forgotten, if it hadn't been important to know for a while. "Do I bother you?"

Raphael stretched his long legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles, and rested one elbow on the desk meditatively.

Even if he did, Raphael did not seem inclined to leave.

"No," Casey replied, still looking up toward Raphael, past him, through him. "Room is only room. It doesn't make people stop thinking. But your thinking is okay. Your thinking can stay."

Please. Please stay. The rest of the school was fear and sorrow and excitement directed nowhere and it would burn. Burn burn burn like hell when they all knew. Burn right through his head, spilling his brains on the pavement every year without fail.

You understand. You know. They don't. They can't won't never will, until they're making friends with the ones who you've introduced them to. Are they excited? The numbers are smaller this year. They might not get as many friends, but they got so many last time...

"They're thrilled." His voice was quiet, barely there, but it didn't matter. Casey would hear him even if he stayed silent and that was part and parcel of your thinking can stay. "I could hear them all laughing on the wind. There's nothing to hurt them over there, you know, and the only strife comes from personality conflicts and none of those matter either because it's peaceful. So there's only joy."

His voice was a touch dry, whereas his thoughts were a bit wistful. Would he recognize joy, if it came to him?

Did it matter?

"When did you last eat?" Raphael turned his head to look where Casey was. "They would be unhappy if someone joined them unexpectedly. Ripples spread."

Ripples did spread, that was true enough. Casey had seen it happen dozens of times. A stray thought turning into a murmur. Another mind grabbing hold, spreading it more. Sooner or later, everyone carried that thought, true or not, in their minds like a poison.

Ripples spread.

"Not hungry." A little hungry. "It's too loud." I have food.

He gestured vaguely to a half-empty box of pudding cups. Totally food.

"Peace sounds nice. Doesn't it?"

Raphael couldn't see what Casey gestured to--it was too dark--but he was content enough with fact that the other had food of some sort. It would hold him and if not eating had not yet brought Cassidy to the door, then it was fine.

Raphael felt fine. That meant Casey was well enough, in a physical sense.

In a mental... well, what was fine?

"There are days," he allowed, "that it does not seem horrific."

And there were days when he thought it was not for him. Never for him.

I think sometimes there might be other Tektites there. Not failed firsties, nexties, gonesies. Survivors. Maybe fourtheents like us. Maybe they wanted quiet. Everyone is so loud. Do you know how loud it is? I bet if there were fourteenths like us in the graveyard, they'd like how quiet it is.

Casey scuffed a foot against the floor, and then finally focussed in on Raphael.

"You don't like the quiet as much. But you're always surrounded by it."

"Am I?" Raphael tilted his head thoughtfully. "I suppose, perhaps. Even when I'm surrounded by other people?"

If anyone would know, it would be the person he was talking to.

As for the rest...

"I cannot know how loud it is for you. You may be right about the others, though I've never seen them."

"Everything is quietest around you," Casey confirmed. "People go quiet, they worry less when they should be worrying more." I worry less. You're quiet. "The quiet is nice. Nobody else understands the quiet" like I do "but trust me, it's nice."

The rest of the student body might beg to differ. They were all wrong.

Right. Wrong. Right. Wrong.

Same thing.

"Then that's how it should be," he murmured, thinking of the stone embedded in his spine and toying with a bit of heliotrope he'd pulled from his pocket. He always carried some with him and playing with it now, in the dark, when he was all but invisible anyway amused him on a deep level.

How many ways were there to hide?

"You know the quiet because you know the loud. What do you think of those who understand neither?"

"Deaf. Blind. Their minds are their eyes and they don't listen at all."

It made sense if you were a telepath. Honest.

You can't stop hearing. You can close your eyes and make the light stop for a bit, but there are always echoes. Nobody else gets the echoes. They think the noise stops at "words" but they're wrong. So wrong. They just don't know how to hear. So they laugh and cry and scream and sometimes it gets so "loud" it rattles.

He covered his ears.

"They aren't screaming yet. They're confused. They're happy. I don't like it."

"Then think about me a bit more," Raphael said, with a shrug that meant just about anything. "I'm none of the above."

Nothing but empty, eerie serenity.

Like a glassy black lake over unfathomable depths. Somewhere in there, things weren't nearly so calm.

But it was a good night, for him, and there was nothing in his head that Casey hadn't felt before.

It was true. And Casey was taking those words as an invitation to make himself right at home, curling up in the silence in Raphael's head, where nobody else's thoughts could wander.

It's good in here. Like normal. Like summers. Summers are too short, I think. They should make them longer...

"Only if they make them cooler," Raphael said, unconcerned about the occupation of his head. Why not? There was room enough for two of them. "The sun is nice but when the humidity rises..."

He didn't much care for that.

It made him feel unsettled.

Too wet? Too wet. I don't like that, either. The only way to feel cool is to get wetter and there are always noises at the pool or the beach. The beach is worse, though. Loud, loud people. Strangers.

The voices he didn't know were worst of all.

"They should move summer to the winter, then."

"When the world is muffled," Raphael agreed. "And more lovely, besides, cloaked all in white."

The stark white with the sharply lined browns of bare trees reaching towards a painfully blue sky...

That was beautiful.

And utterly silent.

"Most people here don't like the snow," Casey observed, frowning and leaning sideways a little, slumping against the wall. "They think it's too cold. They don't want to go outside."

He shook his head a little.

They don't appreciate the quiet. The firsties are the worst.

"We didn't appreciate the quiet then either," Raphael said, reaching over to twitch the curtain shut to close out the light. There was only so much sadness he could take from it. "They are very young."

Far younger than any of those who'd made it past the first hurdle.

"They won't be for long," Casey agreed, addressing the unspoken sentiment more than the words that Raphael had actually bothered to give voice to. "They'll be young for the year, and then they'll be old like us, or they won't be. But they won't be young."

The sad bit of light was gone now, and Casey sighed a little, shifting around in the darkness to lay down on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.

Nobody stays young here. Even the people who act like they do. They're usually the oldest. They know it. They know how much people need to see survivors, so they survive, and they don't feel. "Not on the outside." But in? They feel it most because they don't let it bleed.

"Survival," Raphael said, "takes all forms."

If other people wanted to pretend they didn't hurt, he was hardly going to argue with them. After all, truly, he didn't hurt most of the time.

Which he supposed was another way to cope.

"It does," Casey agreed, keeping his eyes pointed upward, there in the dark.

How is Monster today?

"Monstrous," Raphael said, with a shrug. "I saw him this morning and not a hair since. I will have to look for him before I retire for the night."

Which meant sleep was probably not happening and he didn't care. Finding Monster always took priority.

"He never warms to me."

You know how cats are. Stubborn. Proud. He'll come around in his own time.

Casey's mouth turned into the faintest hint of a wry smile.

"Try catnip again? They like that."

"It makes me scratch and bite," Raphael shared. "I am not sure that is an improvement. Still, I suppose that growing some would be a task well suited to me."

He certainly grew enough of a different plant in his room.

"It's a kind of peppermint, I think," Casey shared. Because that seemed... important, somehow. "Do cats like peppermint? I never was sure."

It seemed likely, though.

But then, knowing Monster, it was entirely possible that he didn't, either.

"I think it depends on the cat," Raphael mused. "Much like how not all of us care for sweets."

That made sense to him.

"It's all about how their brains are wired?"

Casey mulled thoughtfully on that one for a moment, and then he was sitting up again, ever fidgety.

Maybe if we put out a little of everything, he'll come to that?

Raphael considered that. It seemed unlikely, in truth, because Monster always did the most inconvenient thing.

Still, setting out everything counted as rather inconvenient, he supposed.

"We can try," he allowed. "I have more things in my room--care to come?"

He would leave that up to Casey. It mattered little to him either way if his offer was taken up or rejected.

Casey was silent for a moment, considering all the implications of that invitation carefully before deciding that he'd rather follow the quiet mind than continue sitting in the darkness. And then he nodded and pulled himself to his feet.

"I want to. You bring the quiet with you. And I can help. Inconvenient doesn't bug me."

"Most of us," Raphael mused as he stood up, tucking the heliotrope back into a pocket, "learn to not be bothered. At least when we are unable to avoid ever being so."

There was only so much, after all, that training could overcome when it came to their stones.

Casey, for example, would always hear the murmurs. He spent so much time in the heads of other people, it was a wonder he ever bothered to come back home to his own, really.

"It's a trade-off," he decided. "Chores are okay. They come with silence."

Or, at least, calm. Which was almost the same. Casey hadn't heard silence in years.

And Raphael rarely heard anything but. Which was for the best, for everyone involved.

"Come, then," Raphael said, gesturing for Casey to follow him with two fingers. "We shall see if Monster will appear."

Raphael doubted it but then, really, whenever had Monster done what he expected?

Perhaps he would show.

It was worth a shot, wasn't it? Always worth a shot, and it spared either of them from sitting in the darkness with idle hands and questionable sanity.

"And if he doesn't," at least we'll have "put things out for him." Right?

Which Monster was bound to appreciate in his own special way.

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[Sept. 3/11] Casey's Room, Evening

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