So. His roommate was suicidal. And he found out about it after the fact.

Apparently his teachers knew. He'd tried going to one class; as soon as the teacher saw him, he was hauled into the hallway and told to take a break. A break? What good was that supposed to do? He needed to do something. Anything. He couldn't stay in his --- his almost not-shared room. He couldn't sit in the library. It was too quiet and his thoughts just ran wild. He was too restless energy, a not-quite frantic but ceaseless vibration running just beneath his skin.

He couldn't even work it off, though; rain and snow didn't agree. Plus hail kind of hurt. So he was left to prowling through the mansion, unable to keep himself in one place for more than a few forced minutes. TV couldn't distract him, he wasn't hungry, and he only had to eye one wandering teacher and point out that his roommate was in the hospital. Then he happened to wander past the Danger Room.

Maybe he could work this off after all. He kept stalking for a while, and eventually got around to checking the booking sheet. No one was planning on using it for a while. Wonderful. He scrawled his name across a good-sized block of time, and his next pass had him in his room for just as long as it took to change and collect his batons.

"Training dummy," Aiden snapped at the empty room. Talking to a room had finally moved from weird to normal, but he didn't have any patience right now and a room hardly needed him to be polite. It just had to know what he wanted it to do. "Set weather around the dummy: heavy snow, calm wind. Keep the floor clear." He should probably get around to finding shoes that could keep their grip in snow at some point. "Music on. Shuffle from Guren no Yumiya. Increase volume."

Aiden didn't want to think about strategy or footwork or combinations or maximizing control. He just needed to take out his frustration on something. His frustration at not being able to get to the hospital where Persi was recovering. At having no way to talk to his roommate. At having no idea what to say when he did have the chance. He could hear the thudding of baton against dummy over the music. "Increase volume."

How could Persi do something so stupid? What could have driven him to that point? Someone should have noticed something. Aiden should have noticed something, even if he was useless with people. There had to have been something. Sure, Persi had never really been happy, but neither had Aiden. Things had been normal! They'd actually been that way long enough to become normal.

His breath came in bursts with the force of each simple, bludgeoning strike. Too slow. "Change dummy to defence, be-- make it intermediate." Faster. Harder. Louder, to drown out his thoughts. The dummy sprang into motion and Aiden dropped into a proper stance. He ignored the moment he spent short of breath before his body adjusted and whisked away all the pain and weariness he might have felt otherwise. He kept pounding at the dummy, darkly noting that a number of defences the thing tried were indeed susceptible to being simply blasted aside with enough force. There was something to be said for brute strength after all. Fancy that.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why did he have to be so stupid? Aiden paced around the half-mutation-generated half-danger-room-generated blizzard, trying to give his hands some time to stop tingling. As soon as they were responding properly again he returned to the dummy. Hitting it properly took concentration at this setting, and focus, and attention, and all the things that stupidly kept trying to rail about how monumentally stupid his roommate was.

Death didn't fix things, not unless the person dying was going to kill or torture a bunch of other people. Dying to protect people fixed things. Dying to prevent horrors fixed things. Dying for whatever harebrained, pointless, enormous-plot-hole reason Persi had convinced himself with did not fix things. A strike went sour and sent Aiden careening sideways. He picked himself up again and continued.

What could he have possibly been thinking? From what he'd been told, there was no doubt that Persi had been thinking something. Knives didn't just magically appear in the forest, and Persi didn't have a history of wandering around aimlessly in the middle of the night. No, he had gone out there and he had known what he was going to do.

Had things really been that bad for him? Persi's mutation had been acting up lately, if he'd put the endless stream of minor obsessions and what little he knew of his roommate's abilities together properly. Aiden couldn't really empathize, since his own didn't exactly plug into the thinking part of his brain, but he could certainly sympathize. Even if Persi had never seemed comfortable with his mutation, though, Aiden couldn't wrap his head around how that could convince Persi to try to kill himself. He'd seemed to be doing better lately anyway.

This wasn't getting anywhere. Beating on this dummy wasn't distracting him. He could still hear his own thoughts over the music, even if the force of the sound vibrated in his bones. "Clear simulation," he muttered, returning to pacing for a moment. The snow thinned out a little, since he could see his hand twelve inches from his nose instead of six, and then he was kicking snow from the ground with each step. Well, might as well get the stupid part of his mutation over with. Getting things stuck in your head all the time probably wasn't any worse than fainting on a regular basis.

He was even getting better at lying down before he fell down, if he paid enough attention to how quickly his colour was coming back.