Enneagon
Chapter 3: Gatsby and Co.
I know the title's weird, I thought it was cool and abstract, don't come at me.
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-Fireclaw88
-hollyfrost666
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Love you guys :)
Although I did want to mention that FFN is being a little bitch at the moment, so take this as me pre-apologizing for any reuploads.
On with the fic!
[Hexagon Academy, Briox]
[9.5.2065]
Thank the Stars it was Saturday.
Cinderheart collapsed bad-temperedly into her bed, thoroughly fed up and angry.
As it turned out, the Hexagon rumor mill had excitedly been working itself into a frenzy. Cinderheart, who had dealt with constant rumors the year before, probably wouldn't have cared. But these rumors were unlike anything that she had ever experienced before. The previous morning, a girl from Wind that Cinderheart had never seen before came up to her, extremely angry.
"How could you!", the Wind girl howled, in all seriousness.
"What?" Cinderheart stumbled back against the lockers and just stared. She had absolutely no idea what was going on.
"You knew! You knew what she was doing to him and you just watched you horrible-"
Hollyleaf had chosen that moment to come back from the bathroom. "What's going on here?", she asked mildly. The Wind girl had turned to Hollyleaf, recognized her as Lionblaze's sister, and seemed to think that she had found an ally.
"This-", the girl sputtered, "-this! Heathertail hurt him and you didn't do ANYTHING! You don't care! You just like him because he's popular! He deserves better you dis-"
"Right", Cinderheart snapped. This kind of interaction had happened often enough the previous year that she had more or less learned how to deal with it. "You're fucking nuts, please get out of my face."
"Who do you think you are?" Hollyleaf butted in coldly. "Do you have authority over other people now? Since when is it up to you to decide who people date? Lionblaze was my brother the last time I checked, so if anyone has any say over who he dates, its Jayfeather and I. Get out of our way." Having said her piece, Hollyleaf grabbed Cinderheart by the arm, roughly brushed the girl aside, and stalked off down the hall.
And then there were the people who threw all caution to the wind and brazenly asked her if she really had murdered Heathertail. To which Cinderheart had replied that she would be happy to commit another murder if the offenders didn't get the fuck out of her face that instant.
Next to her, Hollyleaf rolled over in her covers. She lay on her back in a mess of tangled sheets, with her dark hair splayed out across the pillows. "You okay?", she asked cautiously.
"No", Cinderheart snapped, and it was the truth. Cinderheart couldn't recall ever feeling more angry in her life, both at the situation and at the insensitivity of her classmates. It was like they didn't give a damn that people were dead, and that the seven of them had gone through the trauma of a lifetime. It was like they didn't care that the people they were harassing were only then starting to recover from the wounds that the events of March 9th had torn open.
And more than that, it hurt knowing that Hexagon cared more about the juicy gossip behind it all than the fact that there were grieving families and students who didn't need to be reminded of everything mere months after it had happened.
Hollyleaf was lying on her side with her cheek propped up with one hand. She looked pained. "I really hate this place sometimes", she muttered aloud. "I think people with rich doting parents are generally raised to not give a damn about anyone else."
She sat up and ran a hand through her ruffled hair. "There's this one line from the Great Gatsby. Where Daisy and Tom Buchanan destroy people's lives and just retreat back to their wealth like nothing ever happened. That's what this school feels like sometimes."
Leave it to Hollyleaf to make classic literature references in the middle of casual conversation.
Cinderheart was surveying her with interest. "What do you mean?"
"I think that people here are so rich that they don't think that other people's problems affect them."
Cinderheart debated on telling Hollyleaf that her family, as the descendents of the oil baron Rockefeller, fell under the umbrella of "people with ridiculous amounts of money". But Hollyleaf, who was smiling now, read it off her face.
"You've met my parents, they were too busy partying to raise kids. That's why they got Rain. And we all know what a hardass she can be."
Cinderheart, her mood lifting, snickered a bit. "She seems like the kind of person who doesn't believe in presents."
"Yeah, well. She was raised on the bad side of Wiesbaden. Her mom worked four jobs to pay off her absentee dad's gambling debts. She looks at money like she's scared it'll evaporate."
In that moment, Cinderheart understood why the siblings loved Rain the way they did. Despite the fact that their economic situations were completely different, their childhoods were remarkably similar.
Rain's parents had never been around either.
"Are we shit talking Rain?", came a gleeful voice from the door, and Berrynose walked in, accompanied by some of the other boys. Foxleap sat on the edge of Hollyleaf's bed with his sweaty gym shorts still on.
Gagging in disgust, she kicked him off.
"No, Berrynose", Cinderheart informed the brunette. "We were just talking about how good of a parent she is."
Cue the visible disappointment.
Foxleap started cracking up, but grew serious quickly. He surveyed the two girls quietly, then said, "We talked to those guys from before. They won't do it again."
Cinderheart thought that she'd see Foxleap be serious when hell froze over, but here he was, his face strangely solemn. "Those guys" referred to a group of rowdy boys who had spent the entirety of seventh period the day before pressing them for details.
"...what did they say?", Hollyleaf asked gingerly, eyeing Cinderheart with an expression one would wear when handling an active bomb.
Or maybe when carrying a snake nest.
Cinderheart winced, and silently vowed to be a bit nicer to Hollyleaf. She knew that Hollyleaf didn't hold her foul mood against her, but it wasn't like the nasty behavior of their classmates was Hollyleaf's fault.
Foxleap's face twitched with irritation. "They told me to stop being a snowflake and that they were just kidding anyway."
….scratch that.
The anger rebounded full force.
"So how did you get them to shut up?", Cinderheart asked forcefully, voice trembling with the effort of trying to rein in her temper.
Berrynose snorted. "Ivypool, Lionblaze and I came back from soccer practice, that's what. They took one look at Ivypool and scampered. Fucking pussies."
"Oh, is that what we're talking about?", came a voice from the doorframe, and Cinderheart looked up to see her boyfriend letting himself in. "Those assholes from before?"
"Hey, Blaze", Hollyleaf said. "How was practice? I saw Ashfur practically stewing in his own anger a little bit ago."
Berrynose and Lionblaze collectively winced, and Cinderheart laughed. She'd left practice early for a checkup with Spottedleaf, and had missed seeing Ashfur explode in frustration on the middle of the field.
Berrynose rubbed gingerly at his right quad and made a face like the memory pained him. "Shitty", he informed her.
"Yeah, we didn't exactly play great today", Lionblaze said. "Ashfur got so pissed, he had us doing squats for like half an hour strai- Cinderheart, you bitch, stop laughing!"
But Cinderheart just stuck her tongue out and kept cracking up.
"Schadenfreude", Berrynose grumbled irritably and shifted his weight off of his sore quad. "Next time Ashfur blows up, I'll camp out in the bathroom for the rest of practice. Then I can laugh at you lot when you're sore."
The topic of the assholes from seventh period remained firmly unspoken for the rest of the day.
…
[Hexagon Academy, Briox]
[9.15.2065]
She could smell the dust from the track all the way from the gym lockers. She had missed it, the sound of feet pounding on the packed orange ground, and the way the dust would stir in small clouds by your ankles when you ran.
Briarlight adjusted the prosthetic carefully in her tennis shoes, making sure that it sat snugly against what remained of her leg. The prosthetic was black with silver plating, with a silvery dragon design that ran around the plastic calf and over the top of the plastic foot. That was a perk that she found herself rather enjoying about the prosthetic: being able to draw and paint on whatever design she wanted.
The dragon was new. She had only needed to mention that she wanted a design on it for Hazeltail to whip out a pot of acrylic paint and get to work.
Hazeltail was damn talented, so the silver dragon came out looking almost exactly as she had imagined it. And the best part? Whenever she wanted something new, all she had to do was wipe the leg down with acetone and hand it over the Hazeltail, who would have a new design on it within the day.
Overall: the leg was awesome.
That wasn't to say that she didn't miss having flesh there. She missed being able to lay a hand on her leg and being able to feel it there. She missed having an actual limb there, and not just a plastic appendage that only somewhat filled the void her leg had left behind.
But Briarlight was an optimist by nature. Sure, not having her real leg sucked. But there was worse out there. For Star's sake, she could have been paralyzed.
Or dead.
She would gladly suffer through the months it had taken to accustom herself to the leg twice over if it meant that she would still be able to run, and that was why she had come to the track.
Briarlight tugged her brown hair into a neat ponytail, grabbed her water bottle off a bench, and left the girl's gym lockers to meet Jayfeather outside. Jayfeather's black-and-blue hair was starting to get long. The blue streak in his hair hung like bangs over his face, and the rest of it trailed down the back of his neck in a smooth black mass.
She felt a sudden need to tie it out of his face, and tugged thoughtfully at a spare hair tie on her wrist.
She knew damn well that there was no point. Jayfeather was blind, what did he care if his hair was hanging in his face? It wasn't like it made a difference in the visibility or something.
But….still.
It took her a couple seconds to realize what was bothering her. She couldn't see his face properly anymore, not when he looked like a bipedal sheepdog with unnaturally blue hair.
"Can you turn around for a sec?", she asked him, without telling him why.
He was immediately suspicious. "...what for?", he asked warily.
Briarlight grinned to herself. "You're smirking, aren't you?", Jayfeather said dubiously, but obliged. Jayfeather was short enough that she didn't need to ask him to bend down, and Briarlight started pulling his hair together for a rough bun.
When she finished, Jayfeather was wearing a black-and-blue samurai style topknot. He reminded her a bit of Icecloud, what with the topknot hairstyle and the suspicious expression on his face.
He felt around carefully for the knot, surveyed her handiwork, then let his hand drop.
He was apparently pleased with her handiwork.
Or he just didn't care enough to complain about it.
In the background, Tigerheart shot by on the track, and the two of them went to join him.
End Chapter 3
I'm finding myself becoming more and more fond of Briarfeather….and to think I wasn't into it when I started writing Hexagon.
How things change lmao
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Azra out!