Flames and Starlight

44🌘

Laura

Before I knew it, a month went by. An entire month. Seriously, I blinked, and the month was gone.

After the whole fiasco with Ruben at the police station, Ben had called a meeting for everyone in the Clan, he announced that there were going to be new rules in place that everyone was to follow that was non negotiable:

Every member of the Clan was to report to the Apex as soon as they got back from either work or school.

Every member of the Clan was to stay within the Clan territory if they were not at school, work, a doctor's appointment, or grocery shopping unless they had at least one other person with them. Only important and essential purposes were permitted.

Everyone was to cease social interaction with people outside the Clan and lay low.

Basically, we were stuck here and couldn't do anything.

I understood where Ben was coming from, of course. He was doing everything in his power to keep us safe and make sure Caius didn't get in, and I was grateful for that, as were everyone else, though I could tell others were getting restless.

The Clan did have a lot of stuff here to occupy everyone, such as the movie cabin, the acres and acres of woods that could be explored, the exercise spots, the picnic area - everyone was able to do something. But at the end of the day, everyone was tired of being in the same territory and wanted to be somewhere else, and I agreed one hundred percent.

Despite school, work, and home being the only places I usually was able to be at since I was so busy, I still liked to go to the mall or movies whenever I had the chance. Grandma told me to just focus on school right now, to not worry about finding a job. She didn't want me going out any more than I had to and since she was financially stable and wanted me to work to get real-world experience and to keep me busy so I wasn't distracted by everything that was going on in my life, but with Caius out there and the new restrictions for the Clan in place, she wanted me to stay in the territory as much as possible. 

And I suspected she was trying to get me to speak and hang out with Alison and Derek more.

Even though we were living in the same cabin and lived in the same Clan, I made it a point to avoid them and stay away from them as much as possible. I still had a lot of conflicting feelings about them and didn't know how to feel about them living here.

Grandma told me they were finishing out the semester at our old school before going to Starlight Academy since it's always harder to go to a new school when the semester is almost over and finals were coming up. There was one more week before the semester in both our schools would be over, which meant sometime soon, they'd be going to the same school as me.

I'd almost forgotten what it was like to go to school with my siblings and see them every day. It would definitely take some getting used to. 

The only time I really saw my siblings was during dinner. Grandma told me that family dinners were mandatory, and I better be there or have my ass kicked across the continent. She actually said that word for word. During those dinners, we were civil, though definitely not close to repairing our relationship.

After school, I would spend a lot of time with Tara, Victoria, Skylar, and Christian a lot. I hung out with them and did my homework with them until Ruben got back from work. We were slowly becoming even closer friends and I loved watching their family dynamic. Seeing the siblings get along made me think of how Alison, Derek, and I used to before we grew apart. Seeing them did cause a pang of sadness and loneliness as I missed the way my siblings and I used to be, but it also made me feel a part of their family from hanging out with them every day, and it also gave me hope that things would get better between me and my own siblings.