The Team // A Formula One AU

Nikita

I find myself sneaking into the first room I see, wooden flooring cold on my bare feet, the moon lighting my path along the corridor. I think it's the room the cool kids got, or what I expect they think is cool anyway. I'm stuck with the normal ones. The not so stunningly handsome average straight-thinking and non-corrupted ones. Okay.

I push the door and it comes open. Wow. This is going to be so easy. Sure enough, the British guys and the Spanish weirdo are asleep and I recognise some others from that clique.

Funny how things settle.

I pick up a heavy watch from someone's bedside table and weigh it in my hand. Hundreds of euros worth of silver. Can I take it? Maybe not yet. I set it down and wander a little further. Water bottles, thermals, clothes everywhere. Some of them stuck up posters. Pathetic. We're only here for a week. I've never hung a poster in my life. Never settled anywhere.

It's sort of a miracle they're all asleep, although they do train very hard, trying desperately to find a place in this insane team. Poor souls. I snort laughter and look out of the window. Just stupid fields and stupid roads. Just like every other window I look out of.

One of them stirs and I turn to watch they don't wake with ninja silence. The popular ones are often the most vulnerable. Especially when they sleep. So devoted to this sport, so self-centred and fixated with the idea of 'brothers'. Brothers are not desirable.

A suitcase lies on the floor by a bed and I open it silently. A laptop. If I didn't have to spend the foreseeable future with these idiots I could take everything. I start a mental list. Laptop, five hundred euros. Watch, two hundred and twenty. Designer clothes, four hundred. A selection of high-spec phones. At least a thousand. These people are rich or at least have rich families willing to pay for all this junk. Some people don't know when to stop. Some people never had to work for anything.

A dim light flashes on.

I grab the phone from the metal dressing table and disarm it the ringtone before it starts. Who the hell calls someone at three in the morning? Morons. I exhale gently and place it back on the dresser. All those years at the orphanage did give me a couple of life skills.

I think it's time to go now. I turn around and leave through the half closed door, pulling it shut behind me. It's not until I get back to my room that I notice the watch heavy in my hand. I bite my lip, why does this always happen? Could I risk taking it back? I sigh just as the bright full moon is covered by dark clouds and the shine of the silver is dulled. I close my fist around it. Of course I can't take it back. I've never been able just to take it back.