InsaneJournal

RafeDraft - Chapter One

Rafe was dreaming.

It did not seem to be a particularly unpleasant dream, which was unusual. The part of him that was still partly conscious wondered what he should make of this, but the much larger part that was asleep was too busy searching for dust bunnies beneath Alex's sofa to pay much attention to philosophical ponderings.

"I'm afraid they're all gone," he said, extracting himself from the furniture. "Someone must have come in and taken them while you were out."

Alex shook his head sadly. "A damned shame, that's what it is." Then: "Oh, hey, I've got something for you." He produced a small box from behind a chair. "Aria dropped it off last night."

Rafe took the box, and opened it. Inside was a head, half decomposed, its rotting hair tangled and pooled around it.

The head opened an eye and grinned at him. "Long time no see," it said.

Rafe yelped and dropped the package, which shattered into fragments when it hit the floor. The part of his brain that was still awake noted that really, he ought to have seen this coming, but then there was no time for thinking because suddenly there was a knife in Alex's hand and he was brandishing it at Rafe, and something strange happened to his voice, and he was telling Rafe that he had to stop, there was nothing to be gained and all Rafe wanted to do was hit him, hit him until he bled and it was dark and cold and he couldn't move and he couldn't think and all he could do was scream, scream and hope that someone would finally hear him--

"Rafe?"

Someone was shaking his shoulder.

"Rafe? You all right?"

With an effort of will Rafe managed to yank himself back into consciousness. "Mnh," he said. "Uh." For a moment the dream returned, and he felt as though he were paralyzed, his legs and arms completely numb, but he forced his head upwards and the feeling faded.

It took him a moment to take stock of his surroundings. He was... in the main office, at school. Odd. Leslie was leaning over his desk, looking worried.

"Hi," said Rafe, for lack of anything better. "'M fine."

"If you say so." Leslie stood back, but she continued to watch him uncertainly. "You weren't here all night, were you?"

"I..." Had he been? He couldn't remember. "No, I think... I just woke up early and decided to come over." Rafe straightened up a little and started to self-consciously rearrange the papers he'd been sleeping on. "I-I guess I just drifted off. Sorry."

"It's no problem." Leslie hung up her jacket and went to unlock her office. "I just don't want you losing sleep over your work, especially at the end of the year. You know we worry about you."

"No, I get... I get plenty of sleep." The papers now arranged beyond his ability to improve, Rafe patted his hair down and loosely re-tied his short ponytail. "I guess I just drifted off," he said again.

"Hmm." Leslie disappeared through the door and the sound of drawers opening and closing issued forth. "Well, just take it easy today. I know you care about the school, but it is the last day. No point in overdoing yourself."

"Yes ma'am." Rafe sighed, leaned back, and caught sight of his pen, which was floating about three inches above the desk. He grabbed it quickly and shoved it into a drawer just as Leslie returned, absorbed in a manila folder of grade five report cards.

"Hey, Rafe," she said. He started guiltily, but she wasn't looking at him. "Emery Chase is still sick, right?"

"Uh. I--yeah, Kimberly said he was still pretty bad yesterday. Unless something happened he's probably going to be home again."

"Have I told you lately how much I appreciate your encyclopedic knowledge of the student body? I can't remember what his friend's name is, the one that walks to school with him, always wearing that cap..."

"Chris Campbell," said Rafe.

Leslie scribbled the name down on the appropriate sheet. "God bless you, Rafe. I hate sending these home with the wrong neighbor. For some reason everyone calls me about it, instead of the grade teachers."

She drifted back into her office. Rafe fiddled briefly with an eraser and cast a guilty look at the neatly stacked papers. What had he been doing? He knew that, in theory, he must have woken up and dressed and walked all the way over and worked on something for at least a few minutes before falling asleep, but the last thing he could remember was going to bed last night.

At least he had gotten dressed. One of these days he was going to show up in his pajamas, and then he'd be in real trouble.

In the distance, there was the sound of an outside door opening and closing, and then a patter of footsteps. Rafe glanced at the old clock hanging over the door. Seven thirty. About time for the rest of the staff to be arriving. He grabbed a piece of paper at random and tried to look as if he'd been busily engaged in his work.

"Morning!" said an entirely too cheerful voice. "How's everyone?"

"Mm," said Rafe, somewhat distractedly. He had just discovered that it was difficult to look very busy when your pen was still securely shut in a drawer. He retrieved it, but warily, ready to shove it back in if it showed any signs of levitating again.

Leslie's head emerged from her office. "Marissa! Can you distribute the report cards for me? I still have about five different letters I have to write."

"Right away, ma'am!" Marissa took the folder and headed for the door, pausing halfway there to shoot a curious look at Rafe. "Hey, you feeling okay?"

"What?" said Rafe, startled.

"You just look... kind of pale, I guess. You been sleeping okay?"

"Yeah. 'M fine."

Marissa lingered a moment longer, watching him with a strange expression on her face. Rafe pointedly busied himself with a random piece of paper, and eventually she gave up, and wandered out into the hall.

He managed to enjoy a few minutes of near-silence before the rest of them started to trickle in, hanging up their coats, looking for folders and chatting amongst themselves about nothing in particular, so that after a little while there was a constant background hum of conversation as they filtered in and out. Rafe tried to ignore it, but it was like trying to ignore the mosquito that finds its way into your room at three in the morning and refuses to leave. He'd almost manage to engross himself in a form, but then someone would laugh or Leslie's door would slam and he'd lose his concentration and forget where he was and have to start all over again.

He could feel a headache beginning to blossom in his temples. And it wasn't even nine yet...

Eventually the room began to empty out, as the time for the morning bell approached and the teachers drifted off to their various classes. Rafe's head continued to throb, but he gritted his teeth and tried to make the numbers on the page stay still. Leslie might talk about it being the end of the year, but he still had work to do, and he'd be damned if he was--

"You all right, Rafe?"

It was Bryce, the old kindergarten teacher. Rafe choked on his angry reply and arranged his features into a suitably pleasant expression.

"Hmm?" he said.

Everyone else had left, but Bryce lingered, watching him with an all-too-familiar worried look. "You just look a bit... drawn around the eyes. Have you been eating all right?"

"As well as I ever do."

"Well... take care of yourself. You know we worry about you."

"Yes, Bryce."

Bryce left, leaving Rafe alone with his paperwork.

Third time today, he thought morosely. Oh, they meant well, certainly, but it seemed like no one could even say hello to him these days without mentioning how pale he looked, or how thin, or how tired. Just because he didn't spend all his time outdoors, or stuff his face at every opportunity, and maybe he had been sleeping poorly but that was hardly--

He stopped, and thought. Three people in a row... it was still early, but there had been the--the pencil, and that slightly puzzled way Marissa had looked at him before...

Damn. Damn damn damn. He'd hoped, just once, just for one day, he could manage to get by without them...

He glanced at Leslie's door, which remained resolutely closed. Carefully, he eased open the bottommost desk drawer and regarded the small bottle that sat inside. It was white, with a simple twist cap and a plain paper label that said, in neat block letters: HEADACHE.

"Well," he muttered, "I guess it's that time again."

He took the bottle, slipped it noiselessly into a pocket, and crept out into the hall.

#

The bathroom was blissfully silent, save for the quiet tap of Rafe's shoes on the tile. It was still too early for any students to be wandering around inside, but he checked for feet under the stall doors anyway, feeling vaguely foolish. His privacy thus determined, he turned to the mirrors and inspected his eyes.

Normal. He breathed a sigh of relief. A bit bloodshot, maybe, but perfectly blue, with no sign of irregularities. He was safe, then. The look must not have meant anything after all. Maybe he wouldn't need the pills today.

A fresh jolt of pain went through his head, and he winced. On second thought, though... if it was starting up this early in the morning, maybe he was better safe than sorry.

He took the bottle out of his pocket, tipped two small capsules out into his palm, and swallowed them easily. Well, that was it, then. Nothing more but to wait for them to kick in.

If they even did, of course. He could vaguely recall a time when the headaches came only once a month, less if he was lucky, but now it was rare for him to last until lunch without an attack, and sometime in the past three years they'd gone from dull aches to real, honest pain. The pills were getting less and less effective at holding them off. He'd see a doctor, but...

And then there were the dreams. Strange dreams, not his usual tortured mess of old memories and older monsters that were gone as soon as he woke up, but intense, vivid, if brief nightmares that stayed fresh in his mind for days afterwards. They always ended with the same image, that--that darkness, the cold, and the panic. And there was something else, some nagging feeling that there was another layer to it, something just beyond the surface that he couldn't quite reach--vague ideas of people and places he thought he recognized, like things he'd known a very long time ago but forgotten over the years...

But of course, you could believe anything in dreams, and it didn't necessarily make them true. He shook himself a bit. He was just being melodramatic. His eyes were fine, and he though he could just about feel the headache starting to ebb. There was nothing to worry about. School was essentially over, anyway. All he had to do was coast through the rest of the day however he could, and then he would be a free man for a whole two months. Leslie had had that look that meant she would be keeping a watchful eye on him, but if he just made sure to look a bit perkier when she was in the room then there shouldn't be a--

--help me--

Rafe froze. The room was empty, he knew it was empty, but the voice had sounded so close--like someone was standing just behind his shoulder, whispering into his ear--

There was a staticky feeling in his head, and he could feel the dream creeping up on him again. The corners of his vision started to go dark, his fingers started to go cold and numb, and the voice... it was like a radio stuck between stations, mostly white noise and nonsense, the occasional word jumping out at him through the fog. It sounded like--he couldn't be sure, it was too faint. Someone crying? Someone in trouble?

He strained to make it out, as the coldness crept up his hands and into his arms. The voice was getting fainter, and the white noise was getting thicker, but it felt like--like there was something there, something just out of his reach, and he could find it if he stretched just a little farther--

The bell rang harshly in his ear and the feeling vanished as quickly as it had come. Rafe realized he'd been holding his breath and inhaled sharply. Hallucination? he thought, but no. Small objects flying around was one thing. This... he'd never felt anything like it in his life.

From outside he could hear the students stampeding along the hallway to their classrooms. He leaned his head against the cool mirror and breathed deeply for a moment, then straightened, replaced the bottle in his pocket, and slipped back outside.

#

The day would probably have gone a lot better if the voice hadn't kept coming back.

The first time it returned he was collecting attendance logs from Miss Garcia's fifth grade class. The sudden burst of pseudo-static made him yelp and stagger backwards, nearly toppling straight onto the poor confused woman. He stammered something about a dizzy spell and rushed out, only to sheepishly return a minute later to collect the papers he'd left behind.

It showed up again as he was making a reasonably important phone call to their usual supplier, distracting him entirely; he snapped back to reality a good five minutes later with the guilty realization that the line was dead and he had no idea how their conversation had ended.

He dozed off during first recess and awoke to discover that his right hand had scrawled 'help me' all over the budget report, in heavy black ink. Moreover, his extra pencil was several feet away and trying to drill itself into the wall. He retrieved it with a sigh and resigned himself to a long afternoon of retyping.

Leslie stopped in around eleven to express her concerns. “Are you sure you feel all right?” she said, placing an unusually motherly hand on his wrist. “You look like you're coming down with something. There's really not that much going on, if you think you need to go home and rest I'm sure we can cover for you.”

“I'm perfectly fine,” Rafe replied, pulling his hand away. “Got things to do.” And that was certainly true - the status of next year's office supplies was still unverified, the student registry was in an appalling state, the budget report was still only half-typed, and he couldn't just not take care of it all, how could he consider himself worthy of employment if he started simply up and leaving?

Leslie seemed unconvinced but retreated without comment, leaving Rafe alone once more with his typewriter and the ever-present buzzing in the back of his skull.

#

Lunch happened, eventually, an event that was only distinguishable from those ten or fifteen minutes before first bell by the fact that it stuck around for longer. Containers rattled, thermoses clattered, and always those lively and pointless threads of mismatched conversation, about their days, about their classes, and oh the twins were arguing about Old Earth again, aren't they just precious--sometimes Rafe wished the school was big enough for a proper teachers' lounge, just so they would stop using his office as one.

Something thumped down onto his desk as he was carefully whiting out his third mistyping of 'retroactive accrual'. He stared at it. It was a sandwich.

He looked up. Marissa was standing in front of him, grinning in a pointed sort of way.

He returned to staring at the sandwich.

"It's for you," said Marissa. "Your red-haired friend stopped by again. He said you'd almost certainly forgotten your lunch again, and that I was to make sure you ate this even if I had to stuff it down your throat."

"Oh," said Rafe. Alex again. He meant well, everyone meant well, but the man simply didn't know when to give up. It was getting annoying.

Rafe picked up the sandwich and unwrapped it carefully. It was chicken salad.

"Thanks," he said.

Marissa raised an eyebrow expectantly.

Rafe tried not to grimace and took a bite out of one corner. "I do eat without being prompted, you know," he said, and swallowed. "I do it all the time."

"I'll believe it when I see it," said Marissa.

She turned away, satisfied that Rafe's nutrition had been looked after. Rafe looked morosely down at the sandwich.

He was probably going to have to eat at least a little bit of it. She might notice if he didn't, and then no doubt she'd make a fuss, not impolitely, but just loud enough that someone else would hear and then the news would get around that oh, Rafe isn't eating again, and they'd be ever so nice but then there would be the discreet little food items showing up in his desk, and the worried looks, and the oh-so-casual inquiries about his health. It had happened before, a month or two ago. In the end he'd gotten so fed up with it all that he'd started bringing in enormous lunches just to shut them up.

Most of the food had been sneaked off to the poorer students, of course. They needed it a lot more than he did. He simply wasn't hungry these days. That wasn't a crime, was it?

He gave the sandwich another half-hearted nibble. It was nice, he supposed, to have people around who cared enough to look after you like this. He just wished they'd mind their own business for once.

His head was starting to hurt again. He gave the room another cursory glance; Marissa had temporarily vanished, and no one appeared to be looking at him.

Quietly, he slid open a drawer, dropped the sandwich inside, shut it again, and returned to his paperwork.