Tavros pulls his teeth back from his bottom lip when it begins to sting, glancing away from the clock on the wall. The teacher is finishing up, but she'll probably milk the time left of class for all it's worth. He follows the progress of the second hand as it comes full circle, only now allowing himself to drum his fingertips on his knee.

"Testing," The emphasized twang of Dave Strider's voice cuts in, the sound kicking back a bit through the speaker. Everyone hushes.

He smoothes on through.

"Good afternoon, ladies, gentlemen, and Karkat Vantas."

Tavros hears a scandalized squawk from somewhere near the back of the room, followed by the crackle over the loudspeaker that means that Dave is being scolded by one of the school's secretaries.

"As I'm sure many of you amorous youngsters are aware, junior Prom tickets go on sale at the school store directly after the bell tolls at the end of the day. Better get on over quick, 'cause they'll sell out fast. And you don't want to see your sweetheart on someone else's arm if you don't fork over the dough in time. Make checks payable to The Prosperity/Derseville School District and please remember to form an orderly line so's we don't have a repeat of last year's Homecoming riot. All right, keep cool and do your schoolwork, kids. Strider out."

In one big rush, the entire class finishes putting away their things and zipping up their bags, sealing up the vacuum of noise immediately after Dave is done and the bell rings. The teacher calls out after them to answer the questions at the end of the chapter they're reading.

Tavros doesn't hang back like he usually does, and instead wheels himself straight out from behind his desk and out the door into the hall. He'll be braving a larger crowd this way, but he's too anxious to wait this one out. Mostly, people leave enough space for him to get by anyway when they see him coming.

He's planned ahead and he doesn't need to make a stop by his locker, even though it's on the way. This just needs to get done. He can't really let himself fall out of the confidence he has spent days working himself up to. It cost a lot of self-instilled pep talks in front of his closet mirror, and he doesn't want to run the risk of someone walking in on that again.

When he turns into the next hallway, he breathes out long and slow, looking ahead. He notices Karkat has gotten past him at some point and is shouldering off his bag as he walks into the room. Tavros steels himself and follows him.

"Hello, Tavros," Aradia says, smiling brightly, close-mouthed, when she catches sight of him from behind the counter. She passes off some papers to Karkat and sits up to walk around him towards the doorway.

"Hey, Aradia. Hi, Karkat," He responds.

Karkat makes some sort of non-committal grunt in the back of his throat, focusing on his papers, eyes cast down and brow knit like usual.

"Have the tickets gone on sale yet?" He asks, not quite sure who to direct the question to.

"Just did," Aradia answers, putting a hand up against the frame of the door. "Well, I'm off. Good luck today, Karkat,"

Another grunt.

"Have a nice day, Tavros. I'll see you tomorrow," She says as she leaves.

"Bye," Tavros says. There are other students beginning to appear behind him, so he pulls up tighter to the counter. "Uh, two, please. That's seventy, right?" He already has the check filled out. His parents knew the date was coming up and handed it over to him without much comment.

He'd earned the money by working and doing extra chores around the house for the last few months. It hadn't been necessarily meant to go towards Prom, but he wanted to pay for these himself.

"Sure, yeah. Give me a second," Karkat mumbles as he pulls out a neat stack of tickets and unwinds the elastic from around them. Karkat has practically made all the after-school activities in the school run this year. It's not technically his job; he's the junior Class president and doesn't really have many duties or much authority-but he claims the senior who is supposed to be doing these things is an incompetent fuckwit who would shaft the entire operation if he even wanted to handle it instead of foisting off all responsibility on someone else while he gets blown by some dumb bobble-headed bitch in the stall of the boy's bathroom like an especially retarded, overly-inbred bonobo.

Exact words. Tavros has been present for that particular rant on more than one occasion.

He's taken well to the task, at any rate.

"All right, here you go, enjoy," Karkat says, sounding less than enthused as he passes two tickets over.

"Thanks," He lingers for a moment, wary of the growing crowd behind him. "Are you going to the dance?"

"Yeah, whatever. I guess. Nothing fucking better to do. And I planned this shit, so I might as well see it out until the bitter end."

Tavros stifles his nervous laugh when it's still in his chest. It comes out sounding like a cough.

"Cool. I know Gamzee's going, and Nepeta and Equius are decorating, so I guess they, um, I guess they probably will too? Well, see you," He waves and pushes himself back.

"Bye," Karkat mutters after him, and then, "Thirty-five dollars. No, there isn't a deal for buying multiple. This isn't a goddamn charity raffle, what does it look like, you moron, Jesus Christ."

He huffs a laugh, because Karkat can't hear him as he wheels into the crowd, especially when his attention has turned elsewhere. When Karkat focuses on something, he doesn't have much left over for anything else.

But now he's got the tickets in his lap and he's going to put off having his freak-out for as long as possible. Even if it's inevitable.

Oh, god, now he's thinking about it. How is he going to do this?

It's not like no one else wants to ask Dave Strider to go to Prom. He's totally cool. Undeniably. And he has to work up the nerve—where he doesn't have much nerve in the first place—to ask this guy out romantically.

Dave is gay; he's told him that himself, nonchalant and matter-of-fact, when they were messing around with the schools mixing system together one time last year. They're friends (and that was a hard enough thing to get up to, it took weeks of encouragement from Gamzee) and they share a group of people between them. A group of hormonal teenagers who date in and outside of each other, messy, and tangled, and constant. It's a thing. It happens. Of course they're going to talk about it.

But he knows that doesn't make his chances that much better. He's seen the guys that Dave checks out; Tavros isn't exactly in the same league.

His anxiety haunts him as he leaves school (his parents have picked him up ever since kids started calling him "Short-Bus" in middle school) and it kinda just stays there looming over his shoulder for the rest of the night-during dinner, when he does his homework, brushing his teeth. He puts the tickets in the drawer of his bedside table for safe-keeping before he goes to sleep.

A/N: Title paraphrased from the song "Do You Want To" by Franz Ferdinand.

I love Feferi. I love Eridan. I do. But they're not in this story because they have better things to do right now.

...I promise I'll write an accompanying piece that focuses on them sometime.

I am the lamest. It is me.

Other relationships included are (in case anyone is sensitive to these things:)

John/Vriska, Sollux/Feferi, Sollux/Karkat, Rose/Kanaya, Aradia/Equius