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

[space_casey]

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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[ange_du_sang]

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.

[space_casey]

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."

[ange_du_sang]

"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.

[space_casey]

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.

[ange_du_sang]

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.

[space_casey]

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.