Obsessions ⇢ Tony Stark

1 | Who Pissed In Your Cereal?

"You should really visit Mum and Dad. They miss you." 

"They don't miss me, Serena, they just miss being able to control me. Besides, I feel suffocated in that house - no, thank you." 

"They only want the best for you, Ellie." 

"They don't know what that is! They only think they do," Eleanora spat harshly into her Motorola DynaTAC flip phone. 

Serena sighed. "Ellie, one day, you will come to realise all the things they did for you and you will be grateful." 

"I don't want to go to Med or Law school!" Eleanora replied agitatedly. "What if I want to go into... I don't know... teaching!" 

"Teaching?" Serena replied with evident distaste. "Ellie, you wouldn't enjoy that." 

"How the fuck would you know? You don't know me at all, and the only reason you're calling me is because Mum and Dad told you to, which just goes to show how under-their-control you are. Don't you see that you've become their little puppet? They only want us to do well so it reflects well on them, but I don't want to be a lawyer or a surgeon. Law sounds boring as hell, and I'm too emotionally unstable to be a doctor. I could not deal with losing people. And I love science, but I don't want to be a researcher. I want to help people first-hand, not from a lab. I want to work with people with disabilities, or do social work, or-" 

"Eleanora," Serena interrupted sternly, as though she could no longer stand what Eleanora saying. "I don't know what's gotten into you, but I highly recommend you correct your pathway now, before it's too late." 

"I already have." 

"Ellie-" 

Eleanora hung up. 

She took a deep breath, glancing around the Stanford University campus, wondering how many of the students that walked past hated their house as much as she hated hers. And then she glanced down at her watch. 

Shit. 

She scrambled to her her feet and hurried off in the direction of the lecture hall she needed to be in. She wasn't exactly late, she knew she would get there in plenty of time. The problem was that an unexpected proportion of the students in her physical chemistry class were left-handed, which resulted in her missing out on a left-handed seat if she didn't get there early. 

Eleanora raced through the building, and burst into the almost-full lecture hall, which she immediately realised contained no vacant left-handed seats. She stifled a groan and slumped down into a seat in one of the back few rows, grateful that all her notebooks were hardback as she pulled one out with unnecessary vigour and dropped it on her lap, ignoring the fold-out table. 

"Who pissed in your cereal this morning?" 

Eleanora glanced at the person next to her, who she recognised as Tony Stark. The boy had already graduated from MIT at age 17, and then for reasons unbeknownst to anyone at Stanford, had decided he wanted another degree, from across the other side of the country. Although most people knew him as the son of the famous Howard Stark, he was beginning to make a name for himself with his rapid academic progress. 

Although Eleanora had seen him around the campus and in her class, she had never actually spoken to him before. Mind you, the one time she did go to ask him a question about when an assignment was due (because he was the closest person to her at the time), the blonde succubus beside him literally hissed at her. Not that Tony himself noticed, he was too engrossed in some calculation to pay attention to her actions.