(A/Ns: requested by moody-marshmellow-093. prompt: "oh please, like this is the worst I've done". fic/AU: Nepenthe. thanks for requesting this one! and sorry it's a little shorter, the other ones were longer than i planned them to be,,, fyi, this takes place approx. 6 months after Nepenthe ends (well... when ch 15 will be set), and yes, i know AS exams aren't actually a thing anymore.

please drop a review if you can! these fictober requests were super fun to write.

content warnings: swearing, smoking.

disclaimer: i do not own Pandora Hearts

Fictober #4 - "Oh please, like this is the worst I've done"

It was the day of their first AS Level exam. And they were shitting themselves, to put it bluntly.

And that included Leo, as well. Leo, the student who Elliot, and eventually most of their class, had held on such a pedestal.

Currently, it was 8:15am, some of the students of their Latin class already lined up outside the exam hall. Because, for some reason, language exams were always earlier. And to no surprise, not many people did Latin. (Not anymore, at least.)

There were only four of them there already, those four being Elliot, Leo, Oz, and Lottie. Leo was pacing back and forth, Elliot and Oz were frantically memorising vocabulary, and Lottie was leant against the wall on her phone, evidently unfazed by the fact they had an extremely important exam in half an hour.

Abruptly, Leo stopped in his tracks, cursing under his breath. "Shit."

"Well this is a change~" Lottie chuckled, but kept her eyes locked on her phone. "I have to say, I've never seen you uneasy about anything academic."

"Hm," Leo hummed. "I can read it, but I'm terrible at writing in Latin." There was a short pause where no one said a word. "How long before the exam starts?"

"We'll be taken inside in 15 minutes," Oz answered, and then face-planted the vocabulary sheet. "Haaah, I'm never going to remember all these words when I get in there!"

"Elliot, come to the bathroom with me," Leo demanded, hastily scanning their surroundings, before whisking the other back inside and down the corridor. As expected, Elliot didn't protest, unwilling to exacerbate the other's stress. He'd learnt that lesson multiple times before.

Fortunately, not many students were in school yet, so no one thought it was weird when Leo opened the door to the disabled toilet, and dragged Elliot inside with him.

No one except Elliot, at least. "What the hell?! I-I don't want to watch you use the bathroom!"

"I'm not using the bathroom, idiot," Leo shook his head, locking the door before meticulously glancing over the walls. And when he locked eyes on the smoke alarm, Elliot facepalmed internally; he knew exactly how this was ultimately going to end up.

Sticking a hand in his inside pocket, Leo hopped up onto the toilet seat, pulling out a ruler and unscrewing the four screws. Then, he pulled off the front, grabbed the pair of scissors from his blazer pocket, and cut the top wire, with rehearsed precision, before placing the front back on the alarm.

"How the hell do you know how to disable that?" Elliot asked, genuinely perplexed.

Behind the shield of his hair, Leo smirked, keeping one hand dedicated to screwing the appliance back on the wall whilst placing a cigarette between his teeth with the other. "Believe me, I've taken apart enough smoke alarms over the last couple of years."

"Right…" Elliot murmured, as Leo stepped down from the toilet, turned his back to Elliot, and pulled out a lighter. When he heard the click of the lighter, Elliot's heart dropped. "What the fuck?! Y-You can't smoke in here!"

Leo scoffed, mockingly dragging on the cigarette before pulling the it away from his lips along with a cloud of smoke. Staring down at the cigarette, he flicked the ash off onto the ground, and said, "Oh please, like this is the worst I've done."

Curious, Elliot couldn't help but ask, "Well… what is the worst you've done?"

For a moment, Leo just stared at him, unresponsively. Then, he held up the cigarette, and questioned him. "You mean, like, regarding this, or just… in general?"

"Um… both?"

"Hm…" Leo thought aloud, wandering over to the window and cracking it open, before inhaling deeply on the cigarette once again. "Well… oh, I took the entry exams for this school at the college I'd been kicked out of, and I finished the Maths exam halfway through, and I was so bored, but they wouldn't let me leave because there was 'allocated time', or some bullshit. So I ended up asking to be taken to the bathrooms. And I just lit up in there."

Elliot bit back any comments. "And… in general?"

"That's a very open question, you know," Leo snickered, leaning against the window pane now, as he tapped off the ash outside. He smirked; flaunting his recalcitrance would always be one of the funnier ways of teasing Elliot. "Probably the time I lit up in my old college bathrooms, and some kid came in from year 13 and told me not to smoke in there. So I threw a book at him, told him to piss off. He tried to punch me, so I dodged, broke his arm, and then knocked him out. His friends came in, and I beat most of them up until a teacher finally worked out what the noise was. Most of them ended up in hospital from head injuries. That was funny."

"The fuck?" Elliot cocked an eyebrow judgementally. Leo, however, seemed totally unfazed. "Alright. Sure."

He saw through him, nonetheless.

He saw the light trembling in his hands. He saw the way he paced restlessly around the bathroom. And most prominently, he saw how nicotine did next to nothing to help that.

Wrinkling his nose at the smell of the smoke, Elliot leant against the door, and said, "You'll be fine, Leo."

"Fuck, I hope so," Leo muttered, sucking the life out of the cigarette, flushing it down the toilet, and then turning back to Elliot. "Come on. We have an exam to do."

Those words did little to soothe Elliot's nerves. At most, he was merely reassured by the fact Leo was nervous too.

By the time they got back to the others, most of their class had gathered outside the exam hall.

Oz was, to no surprise, the first to respond to their return. "Where the hell did you go?! You took forever!"

"Ah, is that even a question?" Lottie chuckled, winking at the two, who stood awkwardly in silence. "We can smell the smoke on you, you know~"

Elliot froze. Leo, on the other hand, seemed unbothered by the callout, throwing his arms up sarcastically and brushing it off with a dismissive shrug of his shoulders. "What can I say? I was nervous."