Hello again! It's been a while. I need to write my college essay, but instead I stared at this for four hours today. I'm kinda ehh about it, I dunno.

Many thanks to beta-chan paradorx, long may she uphold my honor.

ALSO: Yancy is now on twitter! Find him at NurseBecket

"This is just weird," Yancy commented as Raleigh strolled into his office, twirling a fresh new keychain around one finger. Raleigh replied only with a grin.

"Miss me?" he asked, collapsing onto the medical cot with ease. Yancy weighed his options.

"I miss your gas money," he finally said. Raleigh rolled his eyes. When they had gone down to the dealers for a new car to replace the one Yancy had been nearly crushed to death in, they had struck up an awesome deal—for two cars.

"I'm still only half convinced that you have a license at all," Yancy continued. "Like, when did that happen?"

Raleigh made a noncommittal noise, a verbal shrug, and watched with a lopsided grin as Yancy attacked the cast on his arm in an attempt to scratch at it. "Hey can you get me a soda from the fridge?" he asked off-handedly as he itched.

"… The fridge?" Raleigh repeated carefully.

"Yeah, the fridge. Keeps things cold, used for beverages."

"Yancy, the fridge is right next to you." Raleigh pointed out.

His older brother hefted up his still plaster-encased forearm. "I almost died yesterday," he said in a pitiful voice, "have mercy."

With an exaggerated sigh Raleigh pushed himself to his feet and retrieved a soda can from Yancy's small fridge against the wall. He then shook it vigorously and placed it on his brother's desk before beating a hasty retreating, snickering to himself. Yancy shouted abuse after him.

In the main offices, Tendo was muttering to himself and typing. Raleigh stopped at his desk after retrieving his papers from his inbox, rapping his knuckles on the ledge around the bullpen to get his attention.

"What?" Tendo demanded hotly.

"What's the matter with you?" Raleigh asked, leaning on the ledge surrounding the bullpen.

Tendo looked around for eavesdroppers before leaning in secretively. "The tests from last week? They're missing."

"Missing?" Raleigh felt cold wash down his spine. "How could they be missing?"

A helpless shrug. "Hell if I know. Stacker's keeping it close to the vest, hoping that they can show up, maybe they shipped out without getting scanned or something. I don't know, but I'm worn out looking for them." His elbow knocked into his soundboard and it let loose a wild noise. "And I think someone broke my toy, man."

Raleigh could offer little solace or advice beyond a few words of goodwill and a promise to keep an eye out—for the tests, not the soundboard hater, who really could be anyone on the staff. What he was going to look out for, he had no idea, but it seemed to lessen Tendo's mad descent into a panic attack.

He walked into his classroom as the bell was ringing, and after the morning announcements (sing-song and rhyming, with some rockabilly music played from Tendo's soundboard, which seemed overly sensitive) he was setting up his PowerPoint, a mouthy student towards the front raised his hand and called out, "You were pretty late today."

"And you bullshit your free response reading questions," Raleigh responded. "We all have our problems."

"I think he means that you usually show up early and talk to Ms. Mori," a girl in the back added without raising her hand.

Raleigh paused and surveyed his students. "If any of you follow Yancy on twitter, I will fail you," he ordered warily. He noted a few sheepish looks but for the most part they all looked serenely at him. "Frankly you guys, I'm your teacher, not your source of entertainment. My personal life is my own."

They all seemed to back down and kept quiet during his presentation, although a few were muttering about how he shut his door, rather than keep it open like he usually did to make eyes at Ms. Mori across the hallway. He ignored them as best as he could, but did lapse and throw a whiteboard eraser at the boy in the front who would not shut up about it towards the end of the class block. His second class was mostly a rehashing of the first, with similar questions and accusations, with considerably more things thrown to problem kids. The other eraser, a stress ball, a wadded-up lump of paper.

When nutrition break came around, Raleigh ducked his head low and headed out the door with the mass of his students, who all looked at him like he was crazy. Which he probably was.

Once inside the masses flocking to and fro, he knocked right into a small, hyperactive ball of inked skin and black leather. Newt almost fell down before Raleigh steadied him, but he couldn't save Newt's palm full of quarters as they rolled underfoot of the throng in the hallways. Newt looked forlornly at his lost snack money and at the quickly emptying vending machine over Raleigh's shoulder.

"Sorry, man," Raleigh told him. "Lunch is on me."

"Nah, it's okay," Newt waved it away, and then observed Raleigh more minutely, through his thick-rimmed hipster glasses. "What's up with you, dude? You look harried."

"Just trying to go see how Yancy's doing during the break," he answered quickly, checking over and around Newt for a flash of blue and black hair in the masses. Newt noticed.

"Are you looking for someone?" he asked shortly, and then he answered himself, "What's going on between you and Mako anyway?"

"Nothing," Raleigh said, too quickly. "I've got to go."

Newt eyed his back as he hurried away, and his mind began the dangerous thing it sometimes did: thinking.

"You have got to be kidding me," Yancy groaned.

Raleigh made a strangled noise. "I've lost control of my life," he decided.

Yancy snorted. "I'll say."

Raleigh dragged his hands down his face. "She just… she knows so much about me! I mean, if that isn't a bad enough situation, I don't want to, I dunno… accidentally make it worse." He couldn't articulate how strange it was to know that Mako was walking around with all of his fears and hopes inside of her head; that she had the image of him, teary-eyed, holding onto his brother like he was a lifeline. It shook him down, left him defenseless.

In his defense, she also seemed to be avoiding him, as well.

A wadded-up ball of paper ricocheted off of Raleigh's head and he cracked open an eye. Yancy was looking at him sternly.

"You're a mess," Yancy proclaimed. "You need to sort out your feelings for her, bro. Take a free day, but come tomorrow…" he pointed a threatening finger. "You're going to stop being a wimp or I'm locking you in a closet together."

Raleigh sat up. "You wouldn't."

Yancy's gaze was dangerous. "Try me."

Raleigh beat a hasty retreat at the end of the break, leaving Yancy alone.

"Tendo," Yancy groaned loudly after the bell had gone off. "Tendo!"

"What?" Tendo snapped.

Yancy waited. Shouted, "Tendo!" again. With a loud, pointed sigh, Tendo got out of his seat and walked to stand in the doorway of Yancy's connected office. Yancy had his feet propped comfortably up on his desk and his hands folded behind his head. His phone buzzed on the desktop.

"What?" Tendo repeated tersely.

"Answer my phone," Yancy lorded.

Tendo blinked. "You're kidding. It's right in front of you."

"I almost died yesterday," Yancy rallied. "Pity me."

A tick began in Tendo's jaw. He really did not have time for this. He walked forward, picked up Yancy's cell, swept a thumb across the screen to answer it, and said sweetly, "Hello this is Yancy Becket's Phonesex Hotline, how may I direct your dick?"

Yancy let out a strangled sound and threw himself across his desk. Tendo dodged, throwing Yancy's phone at his head, and retreated to his bullpen with Yancy yelling incoherently after him. Herc stood in the doorway of his office, observing, for half a second before he decided that he had better things to do with his time and shut his door. Pentecost's door was already shut, as usual.

Tendo groaned into his hand as he returned to his desk, eyeing the pile of search work that he needed to get done. He then weighed his options and decided to screw all of it.

He swiveled his chair around and gave his full attention to his soundboard.

"Mr. Geiszler?"

"Hmm, what?"

"Class started."

Newt blinked and looked up from his laptop, noticing that his class had in fact already arrived and was sitting there quietly, waiting his instruction. "Oh! Right. I thought it was break," he explained.

"Break ended fifteen minutes ago," one student commented dryly. Newt made a face.

"Well, I'm a little sidetracked right now," he said.

He couldn't see who responded, but he did hear the muttered, "What else is new?" drifting in from the back of the class. He steeled his jaw and shoved his thick glasses farther up his nose.

"What are we supposed to do today?" a kid off to one side asked, hand in the air. It was a common question in his class.

"I don't know," Newt said, and flinched as the same student in the back scoffed loudly. "I don't care," he amended. He cast his mind around helplessly, arms waving wildly. "Clone something!"

"Clone something?" the class gasped.

"Yeah!" Newt latched on to the idea. "Here," he dug around in one pocket of his tight black skinny jeans and came up with a key, which he threw heedlessly to the closest student, "Here's the key to the chemical cabinet. Go nuts."

A nervous burst of conversation bubbled up and Newt sighed loudly, frustrated. "Either that or you can go next door to Sasha's. I think she has a class now. Sasha!" He pulled open their connecting door. "Do you have a class right now?" A loud fiery explosion of blue flames responded and he shut the door. "She has a class right now."

The students all decided that they had a better chance of surviving the year if they stuck to Newt's cluttered and overstocked Biology room rather than brave the short stroll into Mrs. Kaidanovsky's Chemistry class. They began to take stock of what was in the tall chemical cabinet against the wall.

"How much is this assignment worth?" a class representative asked him.

"A test grade," Newt snapped. "Now, get to it." He waved his arms again like a conductor and his class erupted in hurried attempts to get to the ragged computers against one wall and the chemical cabinet.

Newt was not a patient guy. He rushed and sprinted until he tripped and majorly hurt himself, all in pursuit of the one thing he really loved: knowledge. With three . under his belt many of his rock-metal friends were quick to ask why he would settle for teaching public high school. All he could ever think to respond was that he liked the work, loved the people. Here, him rushing around with his hands stained from one dissection or another didn't get him laughed at. He was considered one of the best science teachers because he gave himself utterly and completely to the subject he taught. Kids could grill him for hours with any questions they might have and he would answer. They never touched a textbook in his class, just experimented and learned at their own pace. Newt never did anything by half. Which was sometimes good (good for work, good for grades, and good for the few students who didn't snicker at him under their breath from the back of the classroom), and sometimes bad.

He wasn't sure yet where his current plan was going to end up landing on the scale of his life. He hoped for the former.

He left his class in the hurry to research how something could get cloned in the first place, with a little bit of guilt, and headed next door—not to Sasha's. The other direction.

"Hermann," he said without preamble, his short frame shoved inside the doorway of Hermann's math class, "I need your help."

"What?" Hermann asked. Newt wasn't sure whether he was referring to his announcement's purpose or just questioning in the first place why Newt would need his help, ever.

Newt said just two things: "Mako," and "Raleigh."

Hermann put down his chalk and addressed his AP Calculus class. "I'll be right back."

Yancy ground his teeth and tried to shift his weight. From how often Raleigh barged in for the express purpose of lying on the medical cot, he was finding it hard to get into a comfortable position. He blamed Tendo, fully and completely.

"Can you shut that off?!" he demanded, not for the first time.

Tendo's voice was barely audible over the racket he was making with his soundboard. "No!" He was warping together sounds, alone in the bullpen, into something that Yancy could only describe as rockabilly dubstep. Normally his noise-making was tolerable, but whatever was wrong with his soundboard made it extra sensitive and extra loud.

Yancy grumbled and pushed himself off of the medical cot, an idea forming in his mind. He dug around his desk drawers and found an air horn with a stopper in the flute that Raleigh had given him last year at the start of the football season. He had never used it. Not until now, that was.

He wound tape around the top button, holding it down with the stopper still in place. It was barely inside, meant to keep the flute from being cracked when first purchased, with the added effect of keeping it silent. Yancy crept up to the door to his office, which opened right next to Tendo's bullpen, across from where he kept his desk. Tendo's back was to Yancy as he screwed around with his soundboard, coaxing noise from it.

Yancy drew back his arm, and threw.

The air horn hit the ground inside the bullpen, and the stopper came loose, allowing the full, ear-shattering explosion of noise to come out. Tendo fell out of his chair, the soundboard crashing down next to him, and screamed for Yancy's head.

Smug, Yancy shut the door to his office.

Hermann looked down his nose at Newt, even though they were basically eye-to-eye. "What is it?" he demanded.

Newt hastily outlined his meeting with Raleigh in the hallway. "The tension on him was brutal, let me tell you—they need some serious help."

"And what do I have to do with it?" Hermann asked, shifting weight off of his bad leg. Standing out in the open hallway, they had to keep their voices low and hushed. Occasionally Newt could hear loud cursing and crashing coming from his classroom.

"Well for one, you care about them in your own, stuffy-British-uncle kind of way," Newt said, and then sped up to cover Hermann's attempt to refute him, "but besides that, it's bugging pretty much everyone on the staff."

Hermann's smile was twisted in the familiar way. "And I was your first choice for a partner-in-crime?" he asked, clearly expecting Newt to disagree.

"Yeah!" Newt exclaimed, and Hermann was quick to hide his pleasant surprise, "but then again this plan is like, minutes in the making, so just run with it."

"But there is a plan?" Hermann grasped at verbal straws.

Newt opened his mouth. Closed it. "Figuring out a plan," he decided, "is in the plan."

Hermann rolled his eyes. "Fantastic," he muttered, but his tone was warm, and Newt grinned victoriously.

Yancy nodded off to sleep, tilting his desk chair back with ease. He was drifting on the edge, dreaming of ice and cold water, when suddenly it wasn't a dream, and he was drowning in cold water.

Tendo threw another water balloon, hitting Yancy square in the chest, toppling him over backwards. Yancy was too busy spitting the remains of the first balloon out of his mouth to shout anything, but his eyes screamed murder as he glared over his desk at Tendo, standing smug in the doorway to his office.

"I hate… you…" Yancy growled, extracting rubber from his teeth.

With a smarmy grin, Tendo held up his hands innocently. "I saw a movie like this once," he said, and reached his hands back over his head, grabbing something attached between his shoulder blades. He came up with a watergun, and blasted Yancy with a thick stream just as he was standing up.

"TENDO CHOI," Yancy roared, and leapt over his desk to chase after the cackling secretary. "THIS CAST ISN'T SUPPOSED TO GET WET."

Tendo skirted around his bullpen, heading for the front entrance of the offices instead, with Yancy hot on his heels.

Herc emerged from his office, a sheaf of papers in hand. "Stacker," he called out as he crossed the hallway, eyes focused on his paperwork, "Did you see this memo? I—" the rest of his sentence was lost in a grunt as Tendo and Yancy barreled into him full speed, kicking and punching as they went down.

"The hell?!" he demanded, and both parties froze guiltily. Yancy had one hand on Tendo's ankle, and Tendo was about to pull on Yancy's hair. Herc blinked, looking at them.

"Do I want to know?" he asked carefully.

"Uh…" Tendo stuttered, "He started it?"

Yancy tugged reproachfully on his leg. "I did not start it!"

Herc did not raise his voice. He simply stood, and looked at them. "I don't care who started it," he said with horrifying calmness, "but if it doesn't stop, I will finish it." With that final threat, he gathered his papers, and entered Pentecost's office, closing the door behind him.

"I think my life just flashed before my eyes," Yancy said, slumping to the floor.

"Ditto," Tendo sighed, relaxing as well. Then, he pounced. "I saw a lot of your mom." He was up and running before Yancy even got his feet under him.

"This is hopeless," Hermann objected. "Not to mention a breach of privacy."

"It's their classrooms, not their bathrooms," Newt pointed out. "Now, shush." The two of them slinked along the wall towards Mako's room, keeping low. Once they reached her windows, they slowly peeked up, and saw her standing at the front of the class, the whiteboard behind her covered in all kinds of kanji. As she spoke, every few moments she would look to her door and then look quickly away. Newt pointed, tracing a line from her door, directly across the hall—to Raleigh's room. The two quickly, or, in Hermann's case, hobbled as quickly as possible, across the way to Raleigh's windows, where a mirror of the same pitiful ritual was performed. Raleigh's ended with him throwing something at a student who undoubtedly called him out on the lovelorn looks he was giving his shut door.

Their observation complete, the two geniuses returned to the hallway outside their own classes to plot.

"I keep thinking," Newt muttered, "and all I'm coming up with are plots to bad romcoms. This is ridiculous."

Hermann harrumphed quietly, but didn't continue down the obvious route to insult how Newt's default setting was on ridiculous, for which Newt was grateful. Finally, a spark. It shone in his eyes for a moment before being snuffed out.

"I had an idea, for like, a second there."

"Well?" Hermann asked. "What's my point in being here if not for peer review?"

"I was just thinking… I got that sweet gig chaperoning the school dance on Friday," Newt explained. Hermann nodded. He too was slated to keep track of the teenage masses at the venue Friday night, a few hours of hard work which reaped great benefits, as chaperones were not required to host early morning detentions.

"And I was thinking, how great would it be if we got Mako and Raleigh together at the dance?" Newt finished, and then waved it away. "Never mind. I'd give up my spot, but it's only one." He settled back into thought and missed what Hermann said next. "What?"

Hermann colored slightly. "I said that I… I would be willing to sacrifice my spot. For the greater good." He puffed out his chest.

Newt blinked. "You'd do that with me?" he asked, shocked.

Hermann's face grew slightly redder. "If it's for Ms. Mori," he said, "Yes. I would."

Newt's face brightened, a smile fit to break his face taking over. "Yeah, Hermann!" he cheered. "Okay, at lunch, you ask Mako to cover for you, and I'll ask Raleigh. We can't let either of them find out."

Excitement was catching, and Hermann was smiling as well, echoing back Newt's body language. "Yes. Yes, good plan. Good." He looked slightly ridiculous, and Newt was inches away from hugging him when all the windows in his classroom blew out with a concussive force.

"And keep the noise down, will you," Hermann said stiffly as he walked into his classroom, "I'm trying to teach in here." He slammed the door on Newt's horrifically huge smile.

"Sure thing!" he called out, but it was drowned out by the fire alarms starting up.

"Are you alright?" Raleigh asked, standing up from his desk as Newt let himself into the classroom. The students all stared at how he was covered in ash and something glowing blue. His hair was slightly smoking.

Newt waved a hand. "No big deal, just a cloning mishap in the lab today. But I actually need you to do me a favor."

It was hard to deny someone who looked like a poster child for why radiation poisoning was bad. "Sure. Name it."

"Take my place and chaperone the dance on Friday?"

Mako answered the door, surprised that anyone would knock. Hermann stood on the outside of her door, looking rather serious, his back held ramrod straight.

"Dr. Gottlieb!" Mako greeted him. "Is something wrong?"

Hermann had looked very happy with how she remembered to address him formally, as he preferred. But then he placed a mask of sorrow on his face, almost too well to be believed.

"I'm afraid, Ms. Mori, that I'm in a bit of a predicament," he began. "I seem to have had a scheduling mishap, and cannot make it to the dance on Friday."

"Do you want me to cover for you?" she cut to the point quickly.

He bobbed his head. "Would you? That's wonderful, thank you very much." With a bit more posturing and thanking her, he walked down the hallway, and she missed how once there, a small figure covered in ash met him and high-fived him triumphantly.

"Hey, Yancy, I'm about to head…" Raleigh stepped into Yancy's office. "…out."

"Go ahead," Yancy said, spreading his arms out as far as he could, "take your best shot."

Raleigh began to nod, slowly, taking in his brother's appearance: paint and shredded strips of paper in his hair, his clothes damp with several noticeable staples in the material, and one hand handcuffed to his filing cabinet.

"Yeah," Raleigh drawled after what seemed like ages, "I'm a mess."

He left Yancy to his fate and entered the main offices, going to drop a note in Herc's box about taking on the chaperone gig. He stopped in his tracks.

Tendo jerked a chin at him. "What're you looking at?" He was handcuffed to his desk, in a similar state as Yancy.

Raleigh gave no reply.

For clarification, Herc handcuffed them. Because.

See you next time, in "Interpretive Dance"