They continued to sleep, safe and warm in their stacked beds, oblivious to his knocks and the mess.
He woke Sywyly first, afraid that Nev might be unnecessarily upset by the sight of his things flung around. The girl's bunk was on the bottom as well, far easier to get to without Rabbit cracking his head open on the ladder.
"Sy," he whispered. "You okay?"
"Why?" She yawned.
"Someone was in here. They trashed the place."
The siren pushed up onto her feathery elbow, sharp and curious eyes taking in the whole of her room. "Yeah. Okay," she said. And then she flopped back onto her pillow and continued her interrupted rest.
- - - - -
He tried to subtly press her the next morning, but it quickly became clear that Sy was not interested in tiptoeing around. She seemed happy in the wake of the intrusion, tweeting little songs as she ate her cereal and grinning when her brother joined in. Nev was obviously in a similar mood and Rabbit was loath to break either, but he had to know what was going on around here. Something so demonstratively destructive—even if it hadn't actually broken anything—couldn't be allowed to just stick around. The next time it showed up it might attack, or worse.
Rabbit waited until later that afternoon before he broached the subject again. Liv and Jim had gone out, and he and the sirens were trying to choose a board game they wouldn't give up playing halfway through.
"So. Last night." If subtlety didn't work, maybe a direct approach would.
"We had a visitor." Nev's voice had taken on that quality it got when he was inordinately pleased with something, when he met someone new and wanted to both take in everything about them and dazzle them in turn with how obviously awesome he was.
"A visitor who trashed your room."
Nev glanced at Sy out of the corner of his dark eyes, then shrugged the smallest shrug he could manage.
"They didn't break anything."
"That's true, but—"
"Benben." Sy's small, dark hand rested on his. "You don't have to worry. We'll clean everything up."
Had it been a mess they'd actually made, Rabbit would have been ecstatic. "That's not what I'm worried about."
"I guess you could try to... catch it? Whatever it is."
She was making fun of him. Or not making fun exactly, just pandering like he was the kid here and she was trying to teach him some grand life lesson. It made him feel stupid, then irritated for being so easily cowed by a nine-year-old.
"You know what? Maybe I will." He watched her closely for any sign that she might be lying, but if she was, she was doing a damn good job of it. He had a feeling, having seen her attempts before, that she wasn't. But what did that mean? She was advocating that he chase after some mysterious animal that she obviously liked, encouraging him to end its life, possibly violently. She couldn't actually want the creature to come to harm, which meant that she just didn't think he could do it. She had no faith in his ability to catch the thing, and that only made him want to do so all the more fervently.
"Yeah. I will. I'm going to catch it and talk to it. Loudly. Make sure it knows it's not welcome here."
There was silence for a handful of seconds after that, and then Neverain laughed, a musical twitter of delight. "Don't hurt yourself, Dad. We'll be fine either way."
Rabbit let out a frustrated huff, returning his focus to the small stack of board games in the corner. "I won't." He had never been one to hurt other beings, not even at his most destructive. He was usually the one getting hurt instead.
He took a long breath, barely noticing that it was deeper than he could usually manage without coughing as he sighed it out again.
"Right. So, Monopoly or Mouse Trap?"