Thanks to wavingthroughawindow and whatifweareallfictional for reviewing"

wavingthroughawindow: Thank you! I may have gotten a little bit carried away with the descriptions, but they were fun to do. And I agree: I wish Matthias had lived.

whatifweareallfictional: Thank you so much! Yeah, I may have been laughing to myself while I typed that. And I think it's an occupational hazard when reading/writing something happy about a character who's dead: you'll remember it's not true, and feel sad about it. I hope you like this one!

Disclaimer: I don't own Six of Crows.

Prompt: That text isn't gonna get you a date, kid.

From: wavingthroughawindow

Setting: School, Modern AU

Word Count: 479

"Kaz, do you think Wylan will respond if I text him this? Maybe even agree to go out on a date with me?"

Kaz looked up from his desk, expression faintly rumpled, like laundry that hasn't been ironed yet. "No." His eyes instantly returned to his work.

It was unclear whether he was answering the question - unlikely, Inej thought, he didn't even look at the phone.

"But Kaaaaaaaaaaaz," Jesper wheedled, stretching out further on the bed. Inej, perched on the side of said bed, scowled slightly when the motion nearly dislodged her from her position. Not that Kaz was at all thrilled that the two of them had barged into his dormitory and plonked themselves onto his bed anyway, but Jesper could at least show a little courtesy. Saints knew she expended enough energy trying to teach him it. "You didn't even look at the screen!"

"I don't need to," Kaz said. "Because this conversation will go exactly the same way as it did last time. You'll whine and beg that I give you my feedback on your love life, I don't get any chance to do my homework, Inej will sit on the side-lines smirking, and none of us leave here happy." Jesper shot her a wounded look, and she couldn't help it: she smirked.

"I don't need to read the text message to know how this will end," Kaz continued. "You'll angst about it for half an hour - which you've already done - then, no matter how positive the feedback is, promptly delete the text without sending it. Therefore Wylan will never get the chance to respond. Therefore he won't agree to go on a date with you, because you'll never have asked him. Therefore, the answer to your inquiry is no."

Jesper's eyebrows had been gradually hiking further and further up his face, but at the last few words they dropped to just over his eyes - stormy stratus clouds assembling his face into a sulk. "You're mean," he grumbled.

He ended up deleting the text message a few minutes later.

Wylan's blue eyes were wide, his golden hair rumpled - Jesper had once described the boy as "cherub-like", but Inej was fairly sure she'd read in some book on mythology somewhere that cherubs were hideous, two-faced monsters capable of clawing your eyes out, and she didn't think that was the analogy he'd been going for. Indeed, the kid had never seemed more angelic than when he frowned at his phone in the school canteen, biting his lower lip.

"Inej," he said suddenly, turning so his chair faced hers. "Do you think Jesper would reply if I texted him this?"

Inej, thinking back to the conversation from last night, didn't even have to read the message. "Yes."