[Oct. 25/11] Casey's Room, Morning

[space_casey]

There was something akin to a disturbance in the force today, coming from Casey's room. Or, rather, a telepathic blip, a pocket of worry that threatened to suck anybody nearby into it and leave them continuing down the hallway in a daze. And normally Casey was prone to some pretty good luck. It was right there in his stone, after all. But this...

"Where did it go where did it" go where did it "go?"

It wasn't anything important, except for how it was. It was a thing that followed him around, survived the worst and then the best but the best was really the worst and it was all still the same thing all over again.

It wasn't much and it was everything and it was gone.

At least Casey had the light on this morning while he tore his room apart, looking.

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[ange_du_sang]

Raphael had been up for hours, as was his wont, and when he wandered down the hall that was his, and Case's, and the girls (and no one else's because everyone else was dead) he was in a rather pleasant mood, for him.

His shirt was also blood-stained, which it had not been when he'd woken up.

That didn't bother him--it was his own blood after all, from experimenting in one of the labs.

Perhaps it was that he was attuned to Case's presence, as he was utterly used to Case in a way no one else could claim. Perhaps it was the vaguely unsettling dream he'd woken up with.

Perhaps it was because Case was broadcasting. That was the most likely reason, though not nearly so curious.

Rather than knock, Raphael simply opened the door and leaned against the frame. "You're leaking."

... That counted as hello.

[space_casey]

It's getting out everything's getting out it's everywhere can't you feel it and nowhere all at once? It was here, it's not here, it was "right here" and now it's "gone."

Casey turned over his pillow for what was probably the thirteenth time, frowned to see that the offending gone thing wasn't under it, and then slipped down to the floor and attempted to wedge himself under the bed.

"You haven't seen it, have you? You don't" know "where it might have gone? Maybe it walked away. Sometimes things do that."

But it can't but it can't but it can't.

[ange_du_sang]

He took another step into the room, eyebrows raising as he shut the door behind him.

"If you do not calm down," Raphael noted, "you will have someone with a sedative come looking for you. What are we looking for? Come, you're riled up enough that if it's around you won't find it because of your agitation."

And while he spoke, Raphael twisted his fingers like so, which set his stone thrumming in the back of his mind.

It wanted blood. He asked it for peace, which it gave off grudgingly. There was no need for drugs when Raphael was around.

[space_casey]

Casey exhaled, patting around under the bed for a moment more before wiggling out from under it.

"It was mine." It was his. "It had a dragon on it and I never got one at my last school," couldn't afford it "and he was from there too and he gave his to me" to remind me of home "and it was" ours.

He anxiously wrung his hands together, his attention on his ring finger, as if maybe that would bring it back.

"I lost our home," he said, sitting on the floor and looking up at Raph, up and through and clinging to the peace that was being offered to him.

[ange_du_sang]

Raphael always had some level of peace lingering around him. It cleared away doubts and made people feel better without him ever having to do anything--a virtue of his stone.

The peace he was using now was more directed, filling the room but going no further. In a way, it was a gift for Case.

He didn't use this peace often.

"We'll find it," Raphael said, because he knew of lost dreams and lost people and the things that connected them. "It's small so there are many places it could be. Did you take it off last night?"

[space_casey]

Casey shook his head no.

"Never," he murmured. "It stays on all the time. I wear it and then there's always home here, all the time, I" he "never take" takes "it off. We're" proud of it.

He looked around the floor quietly, at the heap of blankets that had been ripped from the mattress that morning, and sighed.

It isn't here. I would have found it by now.

Luck.

[ange_du_sang]

That got a frown but Raphael took him at his word.

"There are very few with the ability to sneak up on you in the school," he said, picking up a blanket and folding it absently before reaching for another. So help him, but he disliked a mess. "And even less of a reason for why."

[space_casey]

"They don't like me," Casey confirmed. "In their heads I'm just" him. Him him him and I don't get a "name."

He quietly watched Raphael fold the blankets, and then reached over and picked up a pillow, hugging it to his chest.

"They're afraid." But not because they took something. "Things are gone. Just things."

[ange_du_sang]

"More than just yours?"

Raphael sounded careless, like he was focused entirely on the simple task of folding blankets and setting them at the foot of Case's bed.

Beneath the serenity, the endless pool of it that made his mind nearly opaque to casual reading, he was thinking hard.

That was unusual. Worse, if it was not just Casey, there would be little chance of calming him.

[space_casey]

More. Just a few. "More than usual. Not toothbrushes or anything like that." A doll. A necklace. Some baseball cards. "Things. Nothing important."

Whole worlds. Homes.

Casey's eyes were fixed on Raphael's folding, until he was sitting beside himself, outside of his own head, watching the proceedings from somewhere between his own head and Raph's.

Toys and junk. All toys and junk.

[ange_du_sang]

"One man's junk is another's treasure."

Finished with the blankets, Raphael moved on to picking up random things. A sock, a pencil, a pudding cup that had managed to escape from where Casey kept the rest of his food.

Junk.

He felt a bit cold despite the unmoved calm of his mind and the peace that still poured off him, there if Casey wanted it.

Raphael knew what it was like to keep a world in a treasure.

"How long have you heard complaints like that?"

[space_casey]

Days. Today, yesterday, the day before. Not many. And then more... And more. And more.

Casey wrapped himself in that peace like it was a blanket, the himself-outside-of-himself staying close to Raph, zeroing in on the quiet and the calm and the familiar.

Things people think about. They lose their think-things.

[ange_du_sang]

"Nothing else? Just those?"

Raphael tried to imagine someone who knew enough about many people to claim their important bits of what would be junk in any other's hands.

It was troubling.

[space_casey]

The list was small.

Casey would have been on it, but his own think-thing was gone, and with it, his tether to life before grade ten. He had no interest in anyone else's. He just wanted his back.

"Just those," he whispered, reaching back into his own head just long enough to say those words aloud. "Other days, people lose things and find them. Jasper couldn't remember where he left a library book. Jasper only remembers forward. It was in his bag."

Because everyone cared. Really.

[ange_du_sang]

If he'd been a more tactile person, he might have reached to brush Case's hair, as reassurance.

Raphael was not that tactile. It was enough for him to be leaking soothing calmness deliberately.

"I will find it," he said quietly. "If there are those who are good at the taking, I am good at the seeking."

Mostly because Raphael had very little care for other peoples' boundaries when they weren't in them. He never took but he wandered while searching for Monster.

[space_casey]

Sometimes, wandering was enough.

Can I help?

He was going to help, whether he got permission or not. Even if he wasn't actively listening, he heard, after all.

[ange_du_sang]

"As if I would do this without your help," Raphael said. "Have I ever struck you as that kind?"

Ignore the fact that right now, yes, he was being quite kind.

[space_casey]

... Casey was going to ever-so-tactfully just not answer that question.

I don't know where to start. I can listen. I listen a lot, and people are never aware that I am. But they're always so loud. "It's not the nines. Nines couldn't do this yet."

He didn't want to listen to the nines. They were confused, it made his brain hurt, no nines. No.

[ange_du_sang]

Probably for the best.

"No," Raphael said. "I think you're right. It cannot be the nines. Their powers are not awake enough for that. If there are thoughts about the things people miss then there should be thoughts from the one who has taken them. Otherwise, why take them?"

Why take them at all?

"I will search physically."

[space_casey]

"And I'll listen. I haven't heard anybody" thinking "about taking people's before-things." But maybe they do not think "or can't be heard."

So many options. There weren't many people that Casey couldn't hear, either.

[ange_du_sang]

"That's a very limited list," he noted, knowing Casey knew that as well or better than he did. "You're one of the most powerful in your field currently at the school."

And one of the least trained. Leakages were harder to block out as well.

[space_casey]

"I just hear more," Casey replied, stubbornly. "It's their own fault if they don't know how to listen."

Well! It was.

[ange_du_sang]

"I am not arguing that."

Except he sort of had.

Raphael set the clutter he'd accumulated on Casey's desk. "Are you well enough to leave your room?"

[space_casey]

Casey looked up abruptly, as if stepping back into his own head more thoroughly than he'd been all day, and considered the clutter.

"I won't" leak "if that's what you're worried about," he informed Raphael. "I want to find my thing." I'll be good I'll be good I promise I will I won't "bleed so people are afraid."

[ange_du_sang]

Raphael idly considered the blood on his sleeves before even thinking of how to answer that.

"I care not if they are afraid of your leaks," he said finally. "But if you are overwhelmed, it will be up to me to deal with you."

And Raphael was in the sort of mood where it was even odds how great his care would be.

[space_casey]

"I'll curl up" in my safe place, "I'll be okay there," Casey replied, looking up at Raphael with a stubborn set to his jaw. "People are loud everywhere but there. And..."

He hesitated, not wanting to get too hopeful, lest he find himself disappointed later on.

We'll find it?

[ange_du_sang]

Raphael was loathe to say an untruth.

There was no absolutely guarantee that they'd find it.

"We'll do our best to find it," he said. "And if we don't, we'll keep looking. The missing homes won't stay lost forever."