How long can one stare without blinking?

[Frostbite]

Lorelai looked around the observatory tower with dulled eyes. She rarely came up here, and the last time she remembered being up here she was with.. something that just automatically blocked itself in her mind. It was as if the mental image that was forming was a picture that just started burning from the center until it and the memory was all gone. It felt like so long ago, but it didn’t mean anything now. It was one of those annoying little things that came up, though she easily focused on something else. Something more pleasant.

Solitude. Sweet solitude.

There was no one up here. For all she knew, no one really bothered with the place. There wasn’t much to it other than windows to look out of, and a couple chairs scattered around to sit around in. This would do. She rearranged a two of the chairs so that they were facing each other next to one of the windows.

Taking a seat in one of them, she propped her feet up on the other one and leaned against the back of her chair, and against the wall beneath the window. Music was still playing in her ears, keeping her in that wonderful world where it was just the song playing and Lorelai by herself, drowning out the stupid real world. Her brown eyes stared at her feet for a while, just noticing the small details of her converses that seemed to accumulate with time and use. One of the sides was starting to rip a little. I might need to get out that spare pair, Lorelai thought to herself as if it were an important thing to consider, tilting her head as she continued to survey her shoes.

After a while, her gaze trailed off of her shoes and towards the window she was sitting next to. It looked out over somewhere around the lake area, and she spotted that barrel she had started her fire in. She scoffed to herself as she looked at it from far away. No one knew about it. Well, Lurai did. She didn’t seem to have ratted her out, because otherwise Lorelai was sure she’d be getting an earful of some righteous spiel and maybe a detention or two instead of sitting here like she was. She let out a laugh before slouching in her seat so she could better stare at the ceiling. It had been what she was doing in the first place, after all, and she’d been meaning to resume doing that.

And so she would. She sighed to herself and knit her fingers together over her stomach, continuing her staring contest with a ceiling.

[Apogee]

“Hello, there.”

Donna appeared out from behind one of the cross beams, her lazy smile not indicating in the slightest that floating around the ceiling of the observation tower was unusual or in any way weird. She had braided her long green locks back off her face to reveal her steely blue eyes and was munching happily on a hobnob. The crumbs rained down over Frostbite unnoticed by Donna as she drifted aimlessly about the ceiling.

Donna had gone up there shortly after Beast had set her loose. Thankfully she had been far enough away from Kat’s vocalizations to avoid anything more than a headache and a slightly disturbed equilibrium… or maybe she was always just a bit dizzy. Either way, she’d wanted to count the steps in the mansion, and had made it all the way to 354 before she’d gotten to the tower and decided to have a little snack. Maybe it was the biscuits, but Donna had suddenly found herself weightless and hadn’t figured out how to get down yet. She drifted over Frostbite again, once again showering the older girl with cookie bits.

“You’re the icy girl, aren’t you?” she asked, amid a mouthful of biscuit. “I remember. You attacked us all at the cookout right before that pale one hit you.” She snorted. “I detest bullies, you know. It wasn’t right that she hit you when you were defenseless. Mmm… chocolate.” Donna shoved a whole hobnob into her mouth and went back to just chewing and floating. “I like your hair, you know.”

[Frostbite]

A displeased glare came over Lorelai’s face as she quickly sat up from the way she’d been sitting as she wiped the crumbs off her face and shook out her hair, her wonderful solitude ruined. This was one of the girls she hadn’t really seen or talked to, and she was sort of glad. The way she was just floating around and dropping crumbs all over the place, spewing off like freaking Loony Lovegood. In other words, she seemed like a complete astronaut.

“Thanks…” she said, making a face and brushing the crumbs off her front as she watched the girl float around aimlessly. Had she been just hanging around this whole time and now only just decided to show herself? What a freak, lurking around like that, Lorelai thought to herself. “Quit dropping crumbs on me, will ya?” she said, her face forming another glare as she watched her float around warily. This one didn’t seem like she fit the typical zoo description that fit the rest of the school, but even still Lorelai was already counting ways to add her to the list. She’d even brought up the bleached bitch, albeit seemingly on her side. It didn’t matter though, that had been a lapse of emotion she was glad to be rid of and though it ended with her having a bruised up face, she’d nailed at least one of the people who pissed her off the most.

She then smirked at the sound of the word ‘bullies.’ “Detest bullies? Well then, maybe I oughta warn you…I just did the same thing. She earned it,” Lorelai said dismissively with a shrug, looking up at the floating girl with an amused smirk. What she did didn’t matter now, so she may as well own up to pulling the same exact thing Haven had done to her. Besides, she wanted to see the reaction. Would this one go after her too? Or would she annoy Lorelai enough to the point she’d do it again? Either way, she was for however it’d go. It was something to do, since she clearly lost that staring game with the ceiling she’d been trying to continue. She watched the girl float around, watching for the reaction she was expecting.

[Apogee]

Rolling so that she was doing the backstroke through the air, Donna shrugged and continued her directionless, airborne activity as though she hadn’t a care in the world. She was far more attentive than she appeared and the New Mutant considered Lorelai’s words carefully, munching on her cookies as she processed. Humming under her breath, the green-haired girl waved her boots in the air, amused by… well, but nothing in particular. She was just perpetually amused. “Bully… not a bully… victim… potted plant…” she shrugged, popping another biscuit in her mouth and hovering well above Lorelai’s head. “Hardly matters what I think of you, does it mate? If bein a bully is what blows your hair back… you’re the one who’ll have to deal with those consequences, not me. Oh, look. A bee.” Donna held out a hand as though she was going to try and catch the small buzzing insect that had apparently mistaken her hair for a patch of grass.

“Hm?” Donna lost interest in the bug and looked down at Lorelai, her expression never changing from her usual lazy smile, her eyes half closed in biscuit ecstasy. The truth was she really didn’t like bullies. Who did really? People who threw their weight around or lashed out, people who hurt others for their own entertainment… it ticked her off. There were so many other fun ways to work out anger. Working out, cathartic letters… eating. Donna shoved another hobnob into her mouth and sighed. Happy and lighthearted, perhaps, but the green haired girl was also stuck floating around the ceiling of the observation tower. She had her own woes to worry about and couldn’t be bothered judging Lorelai for hers. Especially not when they were of the Paragon’s own making. Not that Donna had been around long, but she’d witnessed the bed sheet debacle, saw first hand what a deliciously cruel bastard Rumble was. That Lorelai had volunteered for that sort of treatment made Donna shudder. The little performance at the cookout was enough to put anyone in a shit mood.

“Hey, mate.” Donna called down from on high as she drifted past Lorelai again. She kicked her legs in an attempt to paddle over toward the blue-haired Paragon. “Wanna cookie?”

[Frostbite]

Lorelai raised an eyebrow, not amused at the weird floating girl. “No,” she said, looking at her with a bored expression, and then at something else. She was again mentally kicking herself. There she was, looking for solitude that should’ve been easier to find, although this just proved that there really was someone in every single place, and depending on where you were presented what kind of person you’d find yourself running into. Of course she’d find herself in a room with someone who seemed plain freaky, although if Lorelai was being honest, at least it wasn’t someone she wanted to beat the complete snot out of. Regardless, she still was less than pleased about finding herself in the tower with some astronaut who was dropping cookie crumbs all over her.

“I don’t give a f*ck about the zoo animals around here. They start something, I’m going to finish it. Plain and simple. Otherwise, I’ll be somewhere else, happily ignoring them,” she said, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. She sounded as if it were the most obvious answer ever, and leaned her head back with a sigh and a roll of her eyes. Then she wondered why she was even talking to this chick in the first place. It was a waste of her time, especially with the chick just pointing out random things that didn’t have any purpose.

“Right. Well,” Lorelai said, slightly annoyed. She’d been inspecting one of the beams that the girl wasn’t floating around, but then stood up. She looked over to where the girl was floating around, and gave her a fake smile, as she didn't feel like wasting more of her time talking to someone that didn't matter. “Ta,” she said, and turned to leave.

[Apogee]

Donna watched the blue haired girl leave, chewing thoughtfully as she hung upside down like a bat. It was highly entertaining for the young Welsh to literally walk along the ceiling, her rubber boots leaving dirty footprints behind as she paced. It was the small things like that that truly delighted her. Simple pleasures. Simple joys. It gave people the illusion that Donna herself was simple, but the truth was that those still waters ran deep. True, Donna was a space cadet, a spinny, dizzy cheerio of a mutant, but there was a certain amount of astuteness behind those steely blue eyes, if not exactly ‘intelligence’.

She liked people. She liked to watch them, talk to them, study them. Of all the interesting things that colored her world, people were by far the most fun. At fifteen she could hardly understand all of the complexities of human nature, but Donna had her own theories, whittled down to their barest most basic. For instance, she new an insecure bitch when she saw one. “Biiiiiiiiitch.” She sang it, spinning on her toes while her ponytail dangled down toward the floor. The New Mutant giggled, suddenly face to face with a tiny, dangling arachnid. “What do you think, Charlotte? She’s just running running, always running. Seems silly when no one is chasing her, hmmm?” If the spider had an answer it wasn’t one that Donna understood, but she wasn’t one to be rude. “Silly, Charlotte… wanna cookie?”