Walking in each others boots

Wake Up and Fit In!

AN:

I've had Hartly/Amy in the tag of this fic since the beginning, but this chapter is where we finally start to see a bit of that come through. I'm not sure where I'm going to take it going forward in the fic, and it won't be the main focus, but it should still play at least a minor role.

"Amy! You need to get up and get ready for school! You are not making me late again!" Jake's words stir Starling from her sleep. She pushes herself up on her elbows and looks around at her surroundings.

"Do I have to?" She mumbles to herself.

"Yes!" Jake's reply makes her jump a little. She hadn't expected him to hear her. "You were supposed to be up thirty minutes ago!"

"Fine"

"I'm not leaving till you turn your lights on!" Jake shouts, and she can faintly hear him tapping his foot outside her door.

Starling swings her legs over the side of the bed and firmly plants her feet on the ground before pushing herself up and stumbling toward the door. Finding the light switch takes a couple of seconds of fumbling, but she regrets it as soon as it flips on. The small amount of light filtering through the curtains in front of Amy's window was nothing compared to the blinding rays emanating from the overhead light. She squints her eyes and throws her hand up to block out as much of the light as possible.

"Don't get back in, bead. If I have to come to your room one more time, I'll throw your bed halfway to Centropolis." As Jake walks away, Starling can hear him mumbling about how she would never get anything done without him.

Starling sighs and turns to look at Amy's room, and its emptiness strikes her again. There was no dresser draws to hold clothes and no mirror hanging on the wall. There wasn't even a dirty clothes hamper for her to root through. On her second scan, she notices another door in the corner of the room. She walks over to it, slightly more stable on her feet than only moments before.

When she pulls the door open, it screeches loudly, but that's not what catches her attention. A plain white Ikea dresser draws takes up ninety percent of the closet space. Some of the clothes in the closet have been pushed to either side of the dresser, but most are bunched up on top of it, unable to entirely hang down.

In her time fighting the villains under Onix's control, Starling had come to realize that they had little connection or understanding of the outside world, and this just reaffirmed that belief. She is confronted with an unorganized mess when she opens the top drawer. Looking at the top layer of clothing, she can see shirts, sweaters, pants, and skirts. Starling yanks open each and every drawer to find them in the same state.

The setup is entirely antiquated to what Starling is used to. If she's going to be getting her clothes from this collection for an indefinite amount of time, this could not persist. She yanks the first drawer out of its slot and upends its contents onto the ground. She places the drawer on the ground gently and grabs the next one. Once all the drawers have been emptied, she begins sorting the mountain of clothes into smaller piles of long sleeve shirts, short sleeve shirts, sweaters, pants, shorts, skirts, and a couple of other odds and ends. As she sorts, she grabs a simple outfit for the day and throws it to the side to pull on when she's done.

"Amy, Hurry up!" Jake shouts.

"Ok. Give me a second!" Starling yells back, throwing the last of the clothes into their piles.

"No, know." Starling rolls her eyes and starts changing her clothes, promising herself that she will finish her work later.

Starling walks over to the desk in the corner of the room to check Havoc's phone to see if she has responded to any of the questions she sent the previous night. When the phone clicks on the first notifications displayed on the screen are from the contact she had added last night. Before She can read the snippet of text on the home screen, she becomes aware of a rumbling sound growing outside the house. Starling parts the curtains to peer out the window. A yellow school bus boasting Valley View School District on its side appears around the corner, rumbling down the street. It stops before the Madden house momentarily, and its door slowly swings open.