Chapter 3
Two OCs mentioned here: Ivory Coast (Didier) and Argentina (Anita)
Gilbert had been stomping back from PE when he was cornered by Erzsébet.
"Gilbert, can I ask you a favour?" she asked. Gilbert blinked. Her voice was sultry and shy, and he wasn't ashamed to admit that made him just that much hotter. He leaned against the wall with a cocky grin and nodded.
"Anything for you, Liebling," he said. Erzsébet cringed inwardly at the endearment and tried to ignore it. This was for a greater cause, after all.
"Listen, could you possibly actually stay this afternoon and help Roderich clean the classroom? I feel so bad not being able to stay and help myself, see, so…"
She turned the charm on to eleven and gave him a kick-ass set of puppy eyes. Gilbert flushed slightly and cleared his throat.
"Well, er, if you want me to…" he muttered. Damn, he knew she was playing him, but he couldn't resist those eyes… She cheered, clapping her hands and looking very cute.
"Yay! Thank you so much, Gilbert!"
And off she skipped. Gilbert scowled. He'd been hoping to at least get a kiss on the goddamn cheek for his trouble. He'd like nothing more than to skive off this afternoon like he usually did, but he was a man of his word and… Oh, who was he fooling? He'd goddamn skive if he fucking felt like it.
And he was just walking towards the exit, laughing with Francis and Antonio, when he was collared and stopped.
"Uh, yeah?" he asked.
Roderich's scowl was eloquent on so many levels. "Considering half the mess in the classroom was made entirely by you, you're going to help clean it up!" he ordered.
Gilbert slumped and let his arms dangle. "Do I have to?"
"Yes," was the short answer.
Gilbert howled his distaste at the idea and tried to struggle away, but Roderich was stronger than he looked. Eventually Gilbert found himself with a broom in hand, sweeping the floor with as much misunderstood emo belligerence as he could muster as Roderich cleaned the desks. The place stank of that horrible pink cleaning alcohol, and it made Gilbert gag.
"Are we nearly done yet?" he demanded. Roderich stopped scrubbing Francis's desk (which was covered in pencil conversation with his neighbour Didier), gazed to the heavens for strength and sighed.
"We've haven't even been here ten minutes already," he said, moving onto the desk behind Francis's. "Oh, Anita forgot her mobile phone…"
Gilbert quickly abandoned his chore, letting the broom clack on the floor more than happily, and snatching the phone from Roderich's unprepared hands.
"Ooh! Let's read her messages!" he said eagerly, unlocking it and trying to find the menu (it was very different from his own). Roderich snatched it back before he could.
"Don't be stupid," he snapped. "I'll keep it safe and give it back to her tomorrow!"
Gilbert pouted, grabbing for the phone. "Come on, give it back!"
Roderich leaned back with the phone out of reach in his outstretched hand, placing a hand on Gilbert's chest to push him back. Both froze when they realised what they were doing, and more importantly how close they were. Gilbert leapt back, scowling. Fighting down a blush, Roderich frowned at Gilbert.
"You can't do that, that's a violation of Anita's privacy."
"Aw, man, you're no fun! You're an old stoogy!"
Roderich looked highly offended at the definition, scrabbling for a comeback. "'Stoogy' isn't even a word," he said finally. Gilbert placed his hands on his hips, threw his head back and laughed like the best villain in any good B movie.
"Yes, it is, because I just invented it!"
Roderich pressed his glasses up and sighed again. He sighed a lot when he was around Gilbert, for multiple reasons. "It takes years for a word to become current in the English language once it's been invented, you know."
"'Muggle' is in the dictionary!" Gilbert protested, folding his arms. Roderich mirrored him.
"Yes, but its impact on popular culture is impressive, and it's been around since 1997," he countered.
"Well…" Gilbert groped for a witty retort. Unfortunately, he was usually the one people made witty retorts to, and therefore he didn't have an unending supply of sarcastic sequiturs like England or Francis. "Your nose is off-centre!" he announced triumphantly.
Roderich's eyebrows flew upwards. "What on Earth has that got to do with anything at all?"
Gilbert raised a finger and waggled it in Roderich's face. "It has everything to do with everything! If your nose is off-centre, of course you won't ever reach the level of coolness of the awesome me!"
Roderich threw his hands up in the air and turned on his heel, snatching up the cloth he had been using to scrub the desks. "I give up! You're completely insane."
"Aw, shucks, Roderich, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me!" Gilbert teased, sticking his tongue out at Roderich's back.
"Yes, well, that's more than you've ever said to me," he muttered.
"Wassat?"
Roderich cleared his throat and waved his free hand. "Nothing, nothing. You can go if you want."
"Really!" Gilbert asked eagerly. Roderich nodded. Gilbert whooped and abandoned his broom for the second time in about five minutes, and grabbed his bag as he dashed from the room.
"Du idiot," he muttered. Once he was sure Gilbert wouldn't be coming back, he glanced up and down the corridor and headed to the bathroom. Was his nose really off-centre?
He peered in the mirror, inspecting it from all angles, with and without his glasses. It looked perfectly normal to him, if a bit more prominent than usual. He looked at his face dead on, and didn't see anything wrong with it.
"Trottel…" he mumbled, flushing slightly. For as long as he could remember, Gilbert, Francis and Antonio had picked on him. They were all the same age, and had all gone to the same nursery school, primary school and middle school. They'd picked on him for playing more with Erzsébet, who was a girl (when they'd finally realised it). They'd picked on him for his beauty spot (his mother had called it that so many times it had stuck by now), his glasses and his curl (he'd noticed Antonio's hypocrisy in this department), even his hairstyle, that he'd often gone home and cried as a small child. Of course, Gilbert had always been worst. He'd pushed Roderich into puddles and mud patches more than once, one time even into a patch of nettles, and no matter how hard his mother had told him to ignore the German boy, he couldn't help but feel so hurt by it.
Once the final year of secondary school had rolled around, Francis had given up his bullying in favour of chasing skirts and trousers, and Antonio had stopped because the idiot had probably forgotten why he'd been doing it in the first place. Gilbert, however, seemed to reserve Thursdays for 'let's pick on Roderich' time. Gilbert and the rest of the Bad Company Trio may have found it funny to fill his locker full of frogs, but he and Erzsébet certainly hadn't, even if she did like frogs.
And then Erzsébet and Roderich had started dating. They'd certainly liked each other very much, but the spark hadn't been there. Unfortunately, the person who'd made him feel that spark had been, to his eternal chagrin, Gilbert.
He hated the fact Gilbert had some horrible influence on the pubescent male side of him, no matter how hard the inflexible logical side tried to squash it flat, pour kerosene on it and use a dozen or so matchbooks to light it. Gilbert's cocky grin and arrogant stance and haughty self-aggrandising monologues were something so completely antithetical to himself that he couldn't help being attracted.
He hoped Erzsébet wasn't trying one of her schemes, as usual.
Far across the other side of town, Erzsébet lounged at her desk, gazing at the screen that showed her the inside of the 4a classroom. She'd installed the camera with Feliks and Kiku's help during lunch, when classes were out of bounds, and connected it to her phone, which connected it to her modem, via Wi-Fi. She'd been thoroughly bored with how things were going up until now. Gilbert had been bitching and slumping like a two-year-old (nothing new there), and Roderich had been nothing but his usual steadfast self.
Things, however, looked up for her when Roderich found Anita's cell phone. She sat up straighter when Gilbert lunged for it, and the moment of total stillness. She liked to think a spark had gone between them, a jolt of sexual tension. Of course, she didn't know how far she'd actually come to the truth.
All the same, she took a screen shot of the recording for posterity and quickly printed it out. Feliks would want to see it anyway.
She quickly realised there was nothing more to see and sighed in disappointment. Evidently, they were not about to make out immediately.
"Erzsébet, the phone!" her dad called, and she left the computer to go get it.
Endnotes:
Let's translation time!
Liebling = darling
Du idiot = you idiot
Trottel = jerk (or so I heard)
