Knife in the Dark

School

If I wanted to hurt him, I would have done so, but as it happened I just wanted to make a warning. The spasm and the kick together, however, resulted in him collapsing, before scrambling to his feet, dusting the dirt off his uniform, and walked off, obviously trying to maintain some sense of pride.

I say back down and stayed there until the end of recess. When the bell rang, I walked inside, ready for more classes. The corridor was a nightmare. There was nowhere to move, all I could do was simply try and walk through groups of people milling in the hallways, making it impossible to pass through.

When I finally reached the end, where my classroom was. I noticed that Katana and Sling were in the same class and, while they tried to hide it, they were alright with it.

I had to keep up appearances, so I walked to the end of the classroom and found that this class was art. Not saying I don't like drawing and art and all that stuff, but I hate being taught it.

Katana sat and drummed his pencil on the table for the entire time, while Sling simply blanked out, which was a habit of her's, where she would get lost in a train of thought for so long that the rest of the world faded away and there was only that one thought. She showed me how to do it once, it was a scary and disturbing experience for me and I have never tried it again.

English came after art, and while the teacher was nice, the work wasn't. I was given my first assignment on day one, asking me to summarize and write an essay on a book by the end of the week, which would have been fine, but for the fact that my word limit was only 800 words, making it insanely hard for me to get my points across in that space.

When school broke for the day, all I wanted to do was go and hide with Adrianus in my room and never come out, but fate didn't let that happen. I was walking towards the rest of the Storm, who could see me, when someone punched the back of my head.

The punch wasn't able to do much, because as soon as my messy hair started to be suppressed, I turned and punched back at my attacker who, unsurprisingly, was the kid from lunch.

His punch drove him straight into my fist, making even more of a scene than first intended. He crumpled from pain, howling on the ground as blood started to trickle from his nose. I turned and ran before anyone could try and stop me.

I caught up to my friends, who had turned, thinking I was coming. They all seemed quite happy with how their first day's went, making me extremely jealous of each and every one of them. They kept up this happiness all the way home, which only made it worse for both myself and for them, as the more happy they felt, the worse I became, ruining the entire mood of their conversations with pessimistic comments that only made people feel bad and did nothing in contribution to anyone. The five minute walk home felt like hours of torture, and I felt terrible for being such a bad friend to the rest of them, but there wasn't much I could do, it was like being stuck in a well with smooth walls, and trying to escape, even though I knew I couldn't, which made it worse every time I failed to climb out of it.

When I got home I went straight upstairs and pulled out my laptop. With Adrianus watching the screen, I started typing my assignment, which I finished a draft of in 10 minutes, with non-stop touch typing. When I was done I looked at the cat thoughtfully, wondering what I was going to do now. I re edited the essay as much as I could, and then went and drew Adrianus, who stayed perfectly still, just like a model for a painter, which in some ways he was. He sat there on my bed, looking like a king of his own domain, his sharp eyes catching the light of the window. When I had finished I showed it to him. He seemed to approve and curled up again, so I pulled the blanket over him and left him to sleep while I went downstairs.

Katana and Rapier were having a sword fight in the weapons room below, while Guisarme and Loch sat with Voulge and their animals while they sharpened their blades with stones. Raven and Sling were chatting, while Sling's frogs played around inside a hamster wheel, with Bec de Corbin's Raven watching over them. Glaive was sitting with his snake Katana's Retriever and Rapier's Macaw, doing homework that appeared to be trigonometry but I couldn't tell from this distance. I wandered over to where he was and looked over his shoulder at it, working out that it was in fact factorization of quadratic trinomials. If Glaive knew I was watching, he gave no indication of it, instead keeping his mind firmly on the task in front of him, one of the many things assassins are trained to do.