"Dang it."
Stella gave a careless glare to her report card grade and sighed. Her slight groans and incoherent noises of disappointment were barely audible over the grumbling of the bus engine. She did art in school because she was good at it, at least she thought so. What she wasn't good at was writing, reading consciously for more than five minutes about things she needn't know and give in a pile full of essays and masterpieces worth A grades by the next week. Stella supposed she really bit off more than she could chew when she thought her options through.
She'd have to hide her grade from her mom. God, she'd kill her so bad, Stella thought, and even though her mom barely gave a care about anything she did in all honesty, at the very least her mom didn't want her to be stupid. And Stella understood that. She thanked God she wasn't stupid.
Her steel eyes gazed away from the report card and around the bus and out the windows. The seat next to her was the only spare on the whole bus. All of the other passengers were either students from her college or workers from the office building nearby. All of the students huddled up in groups, laughing loudly together or ignoring one another, blandly texting anyone else.
That's a little pointless.
It was raining outside. Everything had a dull white tint thanks to the boring grey clouds and the boring humidity and the boring weather that bore boredom. Stella couldn't remember the last time the flower gardens she drove past photosynthesised actual, pure sunlight. Only smoggy energy bulb worth light.
The bus passed Wayne Enterprises and she'd found herself staring. She wondered why some rich guy with dead parents needed such a tall building for a workplace. She didn't really know what they did there, but she'd never heard the Enterprises' name in the press much, except for when Bruce Wayne did something unimportant- like walking out of the back of a store or something. She wondered why a billionaire would sit there on his ass all day being fed from a silver spoon to just be payed more money; it was a waste. All for a hopeless cause.
Stella supposed that was what money really was, just a hopeless cause to keep humanity in a single form line from desperation and rebellion.
Her mind drifted from her thoughts and back to the here and now as she was once more snidely greeted with the failing grade of her art degree. Stella wasn't paying much attention to her surroundings as the bus ground to a halt; her mobile phone slyly slid off her lap and under the seat in front, and she helplessly tried to bend down and grasp it without either falling or looking like an idiot. As the bus set into motion again, it just swam further down the row of seats. Dammit.
Stella shrank back into her seat and heaved a heavy breath of exasperation. She supposed she couldn't get her phone until her stop, and that was if nobody picked it up first.
There came a man onto the bus, although tall and dressed quite obviously, the light haired girl didn't bat an eye over to him. Not out of ignorance or awkwardness, but because her mind was stressing too much over her failing grade and how sad the weather made her feel to barely pay attention to his presence. The man, dressed in a deep purple suit, looked immediately to the spare seat beside her. He watched how her brows furrowed in worry and how her ankles kept crossing one over the other, how she squirmed and shifted uncomfortably. He liked the squirmers.
"Excuse me, can I, uh, sit here?"
Stella didn't look up to the purple-clad man who questioned her just out of sheer social awkwardness and instead just continued to smile and nod and say, "Yeah, sure.", whilst looking at the empty seat before it was filled with a man maybe four of five years older than her (just judging by the length of his legs). Her head instantly connected the fact that his trousers were purple. Why purple?
