Just another damn day -- {Cari && Altair}

Altair moved her head from side to side, cracking her neck. ”That’s disgusting,” her companion said, wrinkling her nose. Al gave her a wolfish grin, but didn’t say anything else. They got along well enough that Altair’s temper rarely got tested and she could stand being in her presence for longer than five minutes. That’s all it took with her to consider someone a ‘friend’. However, she never called people her friends, simply because she knew that her relationships with other people weren’t like that. She was never a friend to someone, maybe a ‘buddy’ or an ‘acquaintance’ or ‘someone I know’. She was fine with that. Altair wasn’t someone who needed others to rely on, only her sister, and she would never say that out loud. After getting over an addiction, she didn’t want to reveal a dependency on anything else.

”Staying after for detention today,” Felicity said as they walked back to the dorms, stretching her arms above her head and yawning. ”I’ll be able to catch up on sleep. Went over Johnny’s last night. You?” Altair smirked. ”Well I didn’t go over Johnny’s but yes, I got detention to help me catch up on sleep.” What she had was a night job, something that others didn’t know about, save for Leo and Brett. Not that she was ashamed or hiding it. Just that not a lot of kids her age went to skin joints or paid for hookers. ”Can’t wait to see you there,” Felicity said sarcastically. That was probably why Altair didn’t mind her at all—she didn’t take anything too seriously.

Coming into the dorms, Felicity snapped her fingers to demonstrate her college-level powers and the flame in the heath grew in a momentary blaze before settling back to a respectable size. Turning to look at the couch she jumped and said, ”Fuck, didn’t see you there. Goddamn, I need to get some sleep.” She gave a lazy wave in Altair’s direction before heading back to her dorm room, and Altair took a seat in one of the plush recliners, throwing her legs over one arm and leaning her back on the other. ”Cari, right? New kid.” Altair only knew this thanks to the hazing that every freshman went through. Sometimes she got into it, but she was content enough now that she had no desire to cause harm to Cari. ”Altair Bennett. Eleventh grade.” She gave a slight, sardonic wave from her seat and popped the gum in her mouth. Even though I should be graduate. She needed something to keep he occupied, and she supposed that talking to this girl and kicking the stilettos on and off her feet would do.

Altair studied the fellow blond who had apparently been startled by Fee being startled, which amused the older girl. It was always nice to be in a good mood—for others she spoke to, that is. She liked being angry and in a fight, however. She was glad to see that she wasn’t mistaken, since Altair wasn’t usually one to take an interest in others or their affairs. She’d just heard the name from someone in passing and recognized her from when he pointed her out. One of the freshies he was going to haze, apparently. And that was it. No one much cared about new students. Sure, she and her sisters had caused an upset because they were triplets from Great Britain who showed up in the middle of the year in a grade they weren’t supposed to be in. But even that settled down. The new wave of freshman this year didn’t cause too much of a stir, because people either mocked fresh meat for being short or simply ignored them.

Altair shrugged. She could understand a little. She made herself look older for a lot of reasons, occupation being one, but seventeen-years-old wasn’t too much of a stretch for an eleventh grade. Still, for her, it was the fact of the matter she had to be in a grade lower than hers. ”I should be a senior or even graduate by now, but the Academy is full of shit cause my sisters and I came here late.” She didn’t elaborate much on that. Her family and her life was her business, and she didn’t feel the need to spread it around. She also didn’t appreciated that from others. Even though she had all the makings of a teenage bitch, she was not one to gossip about people’s family’s. Sure, she may make comments about things she heard, but never talking about other people’s shit. Unless, of course, she didn’t like them. That was another story.

She nodded her head in the girl’s direction as she placed her purse on the floor and used one hand to pull out a bottle of nailpolish a friend let her borrow. ”No classes right now or what?” she asked in her usual short, choppy tone that didn’t show interest, but didn’t sound at all bitchy either. She opened the bottle and reached up to her toes, trying to keep herself entertained. She liked to be kept busy. Otherwise she got fidgety, and sometimes she thought of the drugs, and how good they had been for her. Of course, thinking of Syria and how her life had been taken by them was enough to will those thoughts away.

Altair had done a pretty good job of pulling her life together since Syria’s death, and that included schoolwork. Surprisingly enough, she didn’t get into as many fights, especially not over the smallest of things. She’d been even more of a bully when first coming to the Academy, a way of marking her territory, asserting her dominance. Her fall from grace—or rather, from the runway—had started an addiction she had now pretty much conquered, and she’d given up her shiny little toy of a Ducati and was now actually trying to give a fuck in school. She could recognize an opportunity when she saw it, and graduating from the Academy may be the best thing for her. She wanted to get back into modelling, she wanted to have that life again, because she knew she could do it. ”That’s a great way to start off freshman year,” she said dryly. It was hard to tell when she was being humorous, but it was generally when she wasn’t trying to claw out your throat.

She leaned forward to blow on her toes a bit, wrinkling her nose when she saw a bit of nailpolish smeared off her nail. It was like a coloring book, you can’t go outside of the lines. ”How’s the war been treating ya?” she asked distractedly, working her fingernails into the spaces that were mussed up. ”Probably told ya about it at orientation. It’s calmed down from last year, but people are still going at it.” Even after wars ended, there were still hostilities and bitterness. Especially Thunders, since that was just in their nature. She wasn’t really one for holding grudges, but she would fuck with people continuously if she didn’t like them. Save for Dale—she’d rather stay out of his way now, not wanting to screw herself up even more. She knew he outmatched her, and a part of cleaning up her life was realizing that she really couldn’t be wasting time like that. She had bigger fish to fry.

Altair smirked, snorting lightly at the words as she wriggled her toes and leaned back to wait for them to dry before she applied another coat. ”You’ll just have to see,” she said. If she were more inclined to share stories about her life, she may have told the girl that she had barely scraped by before she started taking shit seriously. Altair started to use detentions as study time, she actually did her homework whenever she found the time instead of whenever she felt arsed, and she had managed to graduate because of what must have been god’s gracious will. She wasn’t complaining. There was still the question of whether she wanted to attend college or not, but she still had a few years to figure that out. It had been her intention to stay before—for Syria’s sake—and she guessed now she could stay for Rowena’s. That is, if she wanted to stick around. Only time would tell.

Her lips curved into a grin. Even though she had never been a freshman in the Academy, she remembered what it was like to be new to the concept of a war. She found it qquite thrilling upon her arrival, even though she had just missed the first one last year, and she was glad that she could at least experience one in her time there. She had a different view of the war than some others—the peace-loving Earth students came to mind—because she wanted the fighting and the mayhem and the contest. ”Good for you, I s’pose,” she said. ”It honestly not very fair for the fresh meat. You never know when an upperclassman or graduate may attack.” Seeing as Altair enjoyed violence, she loved it when a ‘Water person’ started a fight. It gave her something to make her feel powerful, gave her something to push against. And that was all life was about for Altair—getting on top. That was actually not true, and even she could admit it. It was also about taking care of her family, which consisted of one sister.

She leaned forward once more, running a finger lightly down her big toe to inspect. It seemed dry enough, and so she opened her bottle again and began the second coat, still managing to keep her focus on conversaton. It was a good distraction, actually—she liked to keep her mouth occupied when her hands were busy. She smirked at the thought, and in her head rang a chorus of ‘that’s what she said’. ”But you can’t plan to stay out of their way forever, yanno. Even if the war ends soon, they’re obnoxious with their pranks.” It only encouraged Altair in her begavior, and she was knew a select few Water students knew that and used it to instigate. She wasn’t complaining. ”Peace doesn’t change that.” Just like peace didn’t change the hostilities or the alliances. Things were the way they were because they just worked.