Warnings: Several queer headcanons, and outright slash. Don't like, don't read. There are major Iron Trial spoilers, and a Copper Gauntlet spoiler (I am spoiling Chapter One, but I warn you it was a hell of an unexpected twist). If you haven't finished Iron Trial, or begun Copper Gauntlet, maybe don't read (for your own good). Rated for cursing and minor sexual content/themes in future chapters. Labeled "drama" because I felt that was more appropriate than "angst".

"Call," Tamara said, "Just because you think you can ward off the gay, that doesn't mean you actually can."

Call just gave her a look, like: We go to an underground school for mages; I secretly possess the soul of an evil overlord; and my own dad tried to kill me once. But me being straight is the thing you find most implausible?

Call sighed, casting around for something sarcastic to say, that would indicate to Tamara how done he was with this conversation. It wasn't like they hadn't already had this argument a thousand times, anyway.

"You shouldn't assume everyone likes Aaron just because you do, Tamara," he said.

Tamara rolled her eyes.

"For the last time, I do not have a crush on—"

"So, you're in love with me, then? Well, that explains why you're so determined to break up me and Celia," Call quipped.

Tamara glared.

"Celia is my friend, Call," she said sternly. "And she doesn't deserve to have her heart broken by some callous idiot, who's just using her to avoid his gay feelings for his best friend."

Call glared right back.

"Would you stop saying that?" he snapped.

"What?" Tamara said, clearly mocking him. "Gay? Gay, gay, gay—"

"Shut up! I am not gay, Tamara—!"

"You are for Aaron," she said, like she'd personally closed the case and there was no need to examine the evidence further.

"Just because Jasper thinks so, is no reason to listen to him," Call said.

At that moment, Jasper walked into the deserted library, as if his name being spoken had summoned him.

"Still in denial, Call?" he smirked.

Jasper had only caught the last bit of their conversation, but he'd walked in on this argument enough times to have the gist of what was going on.

"So, you wouldn't mind if, for instance, I started dating Aaron?"

Hearing Jasper say that, even if he was joking, even if Call knew he was trying to get to him—it made Call feel sick, like he'd gotten knocked around by wyverns and accidentally inhaled their gas.

"GO AHEAD!" he shouted. "Dammit, can't you guys just give it a rest?!"

"Call—!" Tamara called after him, but he had already stormed out.

Jasper whistled.

"He's so predictable," Jasper said. "I can't believe we've all known each other this long, and he's still such an idiot, he hasn't noticed he always reacts the same way whenever anyone mentions "Aaron" and "date" in the same sentence."

Jasper shook his head.

"I wasn't kidding," he told Tamara. "I've waited this long because I kept expecting something to happen between them, but obviously, nothing's going to. I really will steal Aaron from him, just watch."

If Tamara was honest, she had figured Jasper was full of it, just blowing off steam and talking nonsense because they were all sick of Call's drama. She hadn't expected him to actually ask Aaron out; and she was better prepared for elementals to emerge from her breakfast lichen than she was for Aaron to say yes.

"Aaron," she said, catching him in the Refectory just ahead of the lunch rush. "Are you really dating Jasper?"

She couldn't decipher the look in his eyes. There was just...nothing there. Not anger, not malice, not denial, not regret. He looked overworked, more than anything else; he looked tired, like he'd been studying all night for a test, or he'd overstepped his bounds with his chaos magic.

"Yeah," he said at last, "I am."

"But—"

Aaron held up a hand to silence her expected outburst.

"I know you think Call likes me, Tamara. And for awhile there, I even thought you might be right. Look, I appreciate you supporting my feelings for Call, all these years, but..." —Aaron looked like he was choking on his words— "Call likes Celia. Looking back on it, it's been obvious since Iron Year. I should've known they would end up together, but you kept insisting it was me Call really liked, and I let myself think that, because I wanted to."

"Aaron—"

"Tamara," Aaron said evenly, "Jasper's gay, and we're friends, and he likes me. I admit, I never thought I'd ever date Jasper, but you know...We've all been through a lot together. I don't know what's next for us, but we're in our Gold Year already, and...I want to give him a chance, Tamara. I want to give myself a chance to get over Call. Please, for my sake, can you let it drop, Tamara? Don't bug Call about this anymore, either. You're just upsetting both him and Celia."

"Fine," Tamara sighed.

She didn't want to let the matter drop, but she didn't see how she could win this fight without alienating all her friends. So, at least until she thought of a better plan, she agreed to stop arguing.

She watched the two couples all throughout lunch. It occurred to her that that was maybe a little bit creepy, but she brushed off the feeling. It was okay to be worried about your own friends, she reasoned.

Call and Celia seemed...amiable, if not in love, which in Tamara's opinion, was what they always looked like. Like friends instead of lovers; just friends who, you know, held hands, and fed each other chocolate-covered raisins and candy corn.

Aaron and Jasper didn't seem any different from usual, either, until Jasper decided, very suddenly, to stage a very public kiss—and Tamara rolled her eyes. Jasper and his theatrics. Some things never changed. Wanting everyone to know he was dating the Makar, and Aaron was off-limits now? Typical Jasper.

Celia gasped, more out of surprise than disgust. Call's hands clenched and, Tamara noted, he seemed to have to consciously unclench them. At his side, as if sensing Call's unease, Havoc growled.

There was a sudden roar of applause, like Aaron had done something really brave, even though a) Aaron had been out since Bronze Year, and b) Aaron hadn't actually done anything. He was on the receiving end of this whole fiasco—it was Jasper who had initiated it.

Call rolled his eyes. Someone whistled, and someone else shouted, Show-off! Which pretty much summed everything up, in Call's opinion.

"Call, are you alright?" Celia asked, finally noticing that Call looked seconds away from challenging Jasper to a duel to the death.

"Yeah," he managed. "PDA just grosses me out, that's all. Like, geez, can't they get a room or something?"

Celia giggled.

"We kiss all the time," she pointed out.

"Yeah, but that's different," Call said.

Celia smiled, thinking he meant it was different because he enjoyed kissing her, because he got to be an active part of the kissing, and not just awkwardly watch someone else do it.

Call frowned, knowing that that wasn't what he meant, not at all, not even a little bit; and he was a jerk for allowing his girlfriend to think she was being flattered. Tamara was right, that's what he was thinking, that's what he was actually admitting to himself. He felt his jealousy burn through him, like he'd swallowed a grenade that had just exploded inside his stomach and launched an inferno within him.

Without thinking, he leaned forward across the table, and kissed Celia. It wasn't enjoyable. Her mouth was cold, like always. It was soft, but not in a pleasant way—kissing her felt...mushy, like he was making out with lichen oatmeal. He couldn't help but wonder what kissing Aaron felt like; that pissed him off, and he pushed himself against Celia harder, trying to get lost in the feel of her, in the action of swapping spit with her, in whatever "heat of the moment" existed. But it was impossible: He felt nothing, and he hated it.

What was the point of being impulsive, if it didn't solve anything? He had hoped to confuse himself, to bury himself in sensations, to cover up what his conscious mind had finally stopped letting him hide from. His feelings for Aaron were there, and they were real, and oh, God, they were so much stronger than this.

He pulled away from Celia, defeated. Really, he'd been confusing sexual orientation with romantic orientation this whole time. Call knew he was asexual, and he'd tried to tell himself that that was why Celia had never excited him. But it was a lie. A great, big, enormously stupid lie. And Tamara had known. She'd tried to tell him, but he had refused to listen. Call didn't want to think it was his own fault Aaron was dating Jasper, but maybe it was.

He thought of something Tamara had said to him, when she came out as aromantic. He was the first person she'd told, and talking about it had prompted Call to admit to being asexual himself. They had agreed, then: You can't force yourself to have feelings you don't have. They had promised to stand by each other in a world that glorified sex and romance and was always conflating the damn things. With Tamara's help, Call had become okay with the part of himself that didn't want to have sex—that didn't want to have sex, ever—but he hadn't realized that being ace didn't make him immune to confusing strong platonic feelings, feelings of friendship, for love.

Tamara had told him a thousand times how easy it was, to convince yourself you were in love with someone when you weren't, because romance was "normal". It was expected, especially and always when you were friends with anyone of the opposite sex. Tamara had taken her time coming to terms with being aromantic, because there had been so many times when she'd thought she was in love; but loving someone and being in love with them were different.

Once she finally accepted that romantic love wasn't the most important kind, and that she wasn't heartless for experiencing sexual attraction without the requisite romantic feelings, she had come to realize what Jasper, and Call, and Aaron (and heck, even Celia) meant to her. And that her feelings of love and affection for her friends didn't have their colors muted by the lacking presence of something "more".

Call wanted to hit himself upside the head, but he thought that would seem strange to the other kids in the Refectory. He had, after all, just kissed his girlfriend. Who kisses a girl, and then thinks, That was a bonehead move! when you're already dating?

Call should've realized Tamara was right, all those times she had insisted his feelings for Celia were platonic.

"I've heard how you talk about her," she had said, one night when they were arguing. "And I've seen how you talk about Aaron. It's not the same!"

"Yeah?" Call had scoffed. "You're aromantic, Tamara. I don't think you know what you're talking about."

Tamara's expression, he remembered guiltily, was reminiscent of someone who'd had a brick thrown at them. There was more hurt there, more broken trust, than there would have been if he'd just slapped her. He had apologized to her later, told her how out of line he was; but he was never going to forgive himself for that, even if Tamara did.

Saying something that cruel, to one of his best friends—that was worth thirty, fifty, one hundred points in the Evil Overlord column, for sure. He'd never felt like such a whopping douchebag. That was the sort of thing he'd expect Jasper to say; and that he'd expect himself to defend Tamara against. They were in this together. What had he been thinking?

But Call knew the answer to that. He'd been thinking he didn't want to be gay (Jasper would make fun of him), and that he didn't want to be gay for Aaron in specific (Aaron would hate him). He had been thinking about when he was twelve, and he came to the Magisterium for the first time. And sure, there had been magic and dragons and wild revelations. But the most amazing thing had been that, for the first time, Call had a solid group of friends. He didn't want to jeopardize that.

He was convinced his feelings would go away, or that he'd fall for somebody else, or that maybe he'd even end up aromantic like Tamara, and this would all be a happy misunderstanding. But when it didn't happen that way, he took the first out he saw: it came in the shape of Celia, the only girl in school willing to date him. Eager to date him, in fact. And if he wasn't attracted to her at all, well, he chalked that up to being asexual.

He really should've realized that holding hands and kissing weren't sex acts, because he wasn't repulsed by those things; he wasn't even neutral about them. He actively wanted to do them, just not with Celia. It wasn't dating that made him uncomfortable: it was dating Celia.

He should've known, he kept thinking. But even Call knew he was full of it. He did know. He had known the whole time it was Aaron he wanted, that it might only ever be Aaron. Celia was just a distraction, a way to forget that, a way to ignore it. If he could just bury these feelings deep enough, he'd thought, maybe it would be like they'd never existed.

But they did exist. And he finally, finally got it. What was it Tamara had said this morning? Just because you think you can ward off the gay, that doesn't mean you actually can.

Call understood the situation perfectly, and the situation was, he was in love with Aaron Stewart. He had been in love with Aaron Stewart for years. And as he looked across the Refectory at Aaron and Jasper, he met Tamara's eyes. He was dating Celia. Aaron was dating Jasper. The full horror of that reality had finally sunk in. Tamara had tried to prevent this, but Call hadn't listened.

What am I going to do? Call thought.

He'd never been this lost, or confused, or afraid. And that was counting the time Master Joseph had told him he was the Enemy of Death.

"Call?" Celia said, snapping him out of his reverie. "Are you alright? You look flushed."

He blinked at her.

"There's nothing to be embarrassed about," she said, as if deciding that blinking a few times was Morse Code for, I can't believe how stupidly attracted to you I am. I kissed you in public! Silly me. "Everyone's paying attention to Jasper and Aaron, anyway."

"Yeah," Call agreed. "They are."

He was including himself in that statement.

A/N: Here's the deal. I will update this fic in a week. I will take a day off for every (non-"Update!") review I get, though. So, if you want to see the next chapter sooner than that, please review!

Next time!

He'd never really made out with Celia. He'd kissed her, a few times, but when she made out with him...he didn't feel alive, hyper-responsive, and aware of everything she did. He felt as dead and stiff as a corpse beneath her, like an object being acted upon, with no will of its own. He'd never tried to escape her—kissing was just something couples do—but only now did he recognize the difference between actively engaging her, and just not fighting her.

Kissing Celia, kissing Aaron—it was the difference between the lichen facsimile of pizza, and pizza, real pizza. One was okay, but the other? That was the only kind worth having.

Stay tuned!