AN: Pretty simple, calm chapter before things *really* start to ramp up again. Thanks for the love! Enjoy 3

The rest of chemistry went pretty smoothly. Drake actually did try to pay attention, since paying attention to something as boring as chemistry was still better than dwelling on the thoughts in his mind. He still doodled in his notebook throughout most of the class - keeping his hands busy actually helped him to pay attention most of the time, believe it or not - but those doodles were also joined by some notes and chemical equations that he was sure he wasn't going to be able to remember or use, but at least he had them for when Josh inevitably tried to help him study later. At least he was trying.

But after chemistry came the challenge that he'd been anticipating: class without Josh. He would have Mindy, so he wouldn't be completely alone yet, and neither would Josh, having AP calculus with the nerds, but Drake's heart was still hammering away in his ribcage in anxiety at the knowledge that he would be separated from his brother for the next hour.

The three of them left chemistry together, stopping at Mindy's locker first, then Josh's, and finally Drake's, only making small talk in order to ignore the reality that they were about to face. But as Drake closed the door of his locker, having exchanged his chemistry books for history ones, there wasn't another option. Drake looked up at Josh, but couldn't bring himself to say anything.

"We're gonna be okay," Josh said. Drake forced himself to nod in agreement, despite the fear he felt. "It's not even an hour, and we're just gonna be down the hall from each other. I know where your class is, and you know where mine is. Mindy is gonna be with you, and the nerds are gonna be with me. We're gonna be okay, alright?"

"Yeah, yeah, we'll be fine," Drake forced out. He took a breath and squeezed his books. "I'll meet you back at your locker?"

"Of course," Josh immediately responded. "We'll be back before you know it."

"We gotta get going or we're gonna be late," Mindy said, although it sounded like it pained her to say it. She reached up and hugged Josh, rested a hand on his cheek and kissed him. "He'll be okay. I'm gonna take care of him," she whispered, but Drake still heard her. On the one hand, he resented the implication that he needed to be taken care of, but on the other hand, perhaps it was an accurate implication, at least for the time being.

"I know you will," Josh replied to her before turning back to Drake. "I'll see you in fifty minutes, okay?" He started to walk away, but his steps were slow.

Drake nodded, although he immediately wished that he'd hugged his brother again, no matter who was watching. But, as much as he hated it, he allowed Mindy to put a gentle hand on his back and coax him away from Josh. He kept his eyes on Josh even as he walked away, his breathing picking up with every step further. It was okay, he could do this, it wasn't even an hour, he would be alright and so would Josh.

"You're both gonna be okay, I promise," Mindy said as they rounded a corner. Drake finally turned away and actually looked where he was going.

"I don't know why this is so hard," he said.

"Because the two of you went through something awful together and now you're codependent and trauma bonded, duh." Drake just looked at her, trying to figure out exactly what she said meant. Mindy gave a slight huff and rolled her eyes at him, but it was paired with a smile this time instead of the derision the expression used to hold from her when aimed at him. "The two of you were already closer to each other than anyone else in the world. Now, you've been through something horrific, and the only other person who truly understands it is him. Additionally, while you were going through it, he was the only source of comfort you had, and vice versa. This is a pretty normal reaction for the two of you to be experiencing. Should you both go to therapy and learn how to be apart from each other? Definitely. But that doesn't mean this isn't normal for what you've been through."

Drake didn't respond, but followed Mindy into their history class. The teacher, whose name Drake had never bothered to learn, gave him a polite smile that she didn't usually send his way, but didn't otherwise acknowledge him. The other students didn't say anything either, but the jocks did look at him in a way they'd never looked at him before, and immediately started whispering to each other.

Drake had always, at best, had a tenuous relationship with the jocks of Belleview High School. That was mostly because Drake had made out with most of their girlfriends, at least that's why he figured they didn't like him. That was always his assumed reason for another guy around his age to not like him. To his knowledge, none of those girls had ever been actively dating anyone else when Drake had made out with them, but some of them had broken up with their jock specifically to go out with Drake for a few weeks. It had happened several times, more times than Drake could actually remember, when he thought of it. Add to that the fact that he was popular but not a jock, and it was a recipe for a rivalry, healthy or otherwise. But this time, the jocks definitely had the upper hand, and Drake could tell that the jocks knew it too.

Mindy sat down in front of the jocks, and Drake took the seat next to her. Usually, they didn't sit next to each other if they could help it, and people noticed.

One of the jocks, Jackson, flicked Mindy on the shoulder.

"Since when are you friends with Twinkle Puff Parker?" he asked with a laugh. Drake's face immediately started heating up at the nickname, but he didn't turn around. Josh always said that it was best to just ignore people who said things like that.

"Since when did a Neanderthal learn to speak coherently?" Mindy fired back. She looked Jackson up and down in disgust, scoffed, and turned around again to face the front of the class while Jackson's friends all chuckled.

"Don't be such a bitch," Jackson whined. "That's Parker's job now anyway," he added.

Mindy stood up immediately and turned back around, her chair squeaking on the floor as she did so.

"So I'm a bitch because I'm standing up to an asshole like you?" she said, raising her voice enough that the teacher turned around from where she was writing on the whiteboard. "If that makes me a bitch to stand up for my friend then I'm happy to be one. We should all be bitches then."

"Mindy, it's fine," Drake muttered. He appreciated what she was trying to do, but he really didn't want any more attention on himself.

"Miss Crenshaw," the teacher warned, although she didn't sound as invested as perhaps she should have been. The jocks chuckled and calmed down, and Mindy slowly sat back down, glaring at them as she did so. "Now let's begin. We'll resume where we left off yesterday in our discussion of the life of an elite in the Roman Empire. It is theorized that slaves made up anywhere from ten to twenty percent of the population. Now depending on the exact status of the Roman elite, often called patricians, they could have up to thousands of slaves, ranging from strong men to work the fields, women to carry out domestic tasks, and, horribly enough, many young girls and young boys, for-," she broke off, her eyes darting to Drake. Students around the room looked at him awkwardly, and Drake just wanted to disappear. He sank down in his seat and dropped his head to stare at his hands, fidgeting with the long sleeves of Josh's sweatshirt. He was okay. Josh wasn't right next to him, but he was still with him. Drake wrapped his arms around himself and closed his eyes, forcing himself to think of how safe he'd felt that morning, waking up with his brother's arm protectively around him. "Let's move on. The patricians also enjoyed a significant level of influence over politics…"

Her voice was tuned out over the snickering from the jocks behind him. Drake glanced at Mindy, who offered him a sad smile.

"Hey, Drake," the jock directly behind him, Buck, whispered. "I think I know what role you woulda played in Ancient Rome."

"Would you just be quiet?" Mindy seethed.

The snickering continued, but Buck didn't say anything else. Drake took a deep breath and squeezed his arms, trying to hold it together. He needed Josh, he couldn't handle this without him. A quick glance at the clock proved that he still had forty-five minutes of class to go.

"I don't know if I can do this," he whispered to Mindy, his voice breaking. She looked at him with heartbreak in her eyes.

"Yes you can," she whispered in reply. "I'm right here. You can do this." Drake shook his head as he bit his lip. Every bit of his focus was going towards keeping himself from crying again. "Yes you can, but I bet you can't doodle those idiots like you doodled Mrs. Hayfer last year."

Despite himself, Drake immediately smiled and stifled a giggle. Now that was something maybe he could do. Drake sat up in his seat and picked up his pencil. He wouldn't be taking any notes on Ancient Rome today, but he could certainly doodle Jackson and Buck as the worst gladiators Rome had ever seen, getting eaten by lions in that big arena, the Colossal or the Coloseus or whatever it was called. Drake didn't really care about Romania anyway.

Josh had never cared less about AP calculus in his life than he did that day. No matter how much he tried to pay attention, he just couldn't. All Josh could think about was Drake, and wonder if his brother was okay. He knew Mindy would protect him, but that knowledge wasn't helping as much as he'd hoped it would.

Josh knew there were some dumb jocks in Drake's history class, including Buck, the very same jock that had given Josh a black eye and nearly given Drake a concussion back at the end of ninth grade, the very same week that Josh and his dad had moved in with Drake, Audrey, and Megan. It had only been a year and a half since then, but it felt like a lifetime ago. Josh was four inches taller and over a hundred pounds lighter, his voice had dropped significantly, and he just wasn't the same dorky loser he used to be. Drake, on the other hand, well, he was maybe an inch or so taller, and his hair was longer, but in a lot of ways, he was exactly the same as he had been at fifteen - or, he used to be. Josh knew both he and Drake were different now than they had been even two weeks earlier, and he was sure that even someone as idiotic as Buck - the guy was a super senior, having been held back and still needing to pass the same history class that Drake was in as a junior - was going to be able to tell and use that to his advantage to hurt Drake, someone he'd disliked for over a year.

The clock had never seemed to move slower as Josh stared at it, willing the seconds to tick by faster so that he could get back to his brother.

"Josh, are you okay?" Eric quietly asked, leaning over slightly from the seat next to him.

Josh glanced over at his friend's concerned gaze and took in what his own appearance must have been like. He was chewing on his lip, staring at the clock, while his pencil tapped in time with the way his knee was bouncing. The teacher hadn't called him out for not paying any attention to the lesson, but based on the way that half the class kept glancing at him, he wasn't exactly being subtle.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he muttered. What else was he supposed to say?

"You know he'll be okay with Mindy," Craig added from behind Eric. "Mindy scares all the jocks. They're not gonna mess with Drake too much as long as she's there."

"But she can get too heated sometimes and get thrown out of class, and if that happens, then Drake is alone."

"That doesn't happen anymore," Craig continued. "She's way better at managing her emotions than she used to be. She'll be able to keep it together and be there for him. She knows how much he means to you, so because she loves you, she's not gonna let anything happen to him."

Josh stopped tapping his pencil.

"She loves me?" he asked. He knew the answer was yes, but how did the nerds know that?

"Of course she does, anyone can see it," Eric chimed in. "She'd do anything for you, even though anyone could also see that you care about Drake more than her."

"But that's totally different-."

"I know," Eric interrupted. "We all know it's not the same, I'm sure even the biggest idiot jocks know that too, but it doesn't change the fact that you clearly love Drake more than you love Mindy, and yet, Mindy is still with you, despite knowing that she's in second place to him. Why would she accept second place if didn't truly love you? Have you looked at her lately? She could get any guy she wanted, and yet she still chooses you. Why? Because she loves you. You're really lucky to have her."

Josh leaned back in his chair, his knee finally stilling as he stared blankly ahead in the general direction of the equations of the board. The more he pondered it, the more he knew that the nerds were right. It was obvious that Mindy could get any guy she wanted, she was easily one of the most beautiful girls at Belleview, and he already knew that she loved him. It was what they said about Drake that was sticking with him more. Josh supposed he did love Drake more than anyone else, and he wasn't entirely sure when that had started, but at some point over the prior year and a half, Josh had gone from just wanting Drake to like having him around to wanting to protect him and encourage him and help him in any way he could. Of course, some of that was now due to their trauma more than anything else, but even before all of that, maybe even before what happened in Hollywood, Josh had loved Drake more than anyone. He'd fully embraced the fact that Drake didn't hang out with anyone except for him - aside from his strings of dates, but those were gone now too - and had completely stopped encouraging him to find other friends like he used to. For being so popular, Drake was so lonely, and Josh was seeing the consequences of that now more than ever.

What did Drake's popularity mean if it didn't protect him from the other students' torment? As far as Josh knew, there wasn't any way that anyone at school could've known the details of what happened, at least who it had happened to. And yet they'd either somehow just figured it out that Drake was the one who had been assaulted and not Josh, or they just didn't care whether or not Josh was. Josh was okay with that, he didn't mind not being treated radically differently by anyone, but it did put things into perspective that that wasn't Drake's experience. Drake's popularity hadn't given him any friends, it had given him the largest possible target on his back for ridicule and teenage cruelty, from jocks that were jealous of his looks and heart and talent and ease with girls, from the girls who threw themselves all over him because they saw him as nothing more than a sex object, and from everyone in between.

But at least Mindy was there to try to protect him, despite knowing that she came in second. Josh smiled to himself. How could he not love her?

"What is it?" Craig asked.

"I think I love her too." Josh smiled wider as he thought of his beautiful girlfriend. Despite how much she had initially hated Drake, she was now putting herself in the line of fire for him, all because she loved Josh, and therefore, loved what was most important to him. How had Josh never taken the time to appreciate her the way that he should have? How could he have ever thought that he didn't love her? Josh was the luckiest guy in the world to be with her, and he needed to tell her that.

Josh began tapping his pencil again as his impatience grew. He needed to get out of class, kiss his girlfriend, and make sure his brother was okay, not learn about differential equations. Being able to pass the AP test in the spring was very important, but it wasn't as important as his favorite people. He'd made up his mind.

Josh stood up from his desk and walked out of the room, only with a muttered "I'll be back" to the teacher, who, thankfully, didn't try to stop him. Like he'd told Drake, being the teacher's favorite paid off. He walked down the hall and took a left, walked down that short hallway, and took a right, stopping at the first door on the right. Josh stepped in without knocking.

Drake's head immediately shot up, but when Josh offered him a smile, he visibly relaxed, smiling back. He held up his notebook, and Josh grinned wider at the sight of the doodles that were covering the pages - although Josh would have to make sure Drake actually knew the lesson later. Drake smiled wider, and it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, apart from the look of fond annoyance that Mindy was currently sending him.

"Mr. Nichols, can I help you?" the teacher asked, looking at him with a mixture of confusion and annoyance on her face. Josh preferred to look at his brother and girlfriend.

"Yeah, um," he paused. Drake was okay. He was doodling, he was smiling, he was okay, despite the jocks sitting behind him, clearly trying to get his attention in as subtle of ways as idiots like them could manage. But that wasn't all Josh needed. "Can I talk to Mindy for a second? It'll be real quick, I promise."

The teacher sighed, looking back and forth between Josh and Mindy before finally waving her hand.

"Just this once," she said.

Mindy grinned and stood up, practically bouncing over to Josh, her skirt swishing around her thighs as she did so. She was so unbelievably gorgeous.

"What is it?" she asked as the two of them stood in the doorway.

"Just this." Josh immediately leaned in and kissed her, his hands coming up to cup her face as she began kissing him back.

"Yeah, that's my brother!" Drake called out.

Josh smiled into the kiss, letting himself chuckle as a few other kids made some joking cheers. Mindy's hands were in his hair as the other students got more rambunctious and the teacher told them to cut it out. Finally, they pulled apart.

"I love you too," Josh said. He couldn't stop smiling as Mindy beamed up at him. This was the happiest he'd been since- since before. Josh glanced over at Drake, who was looking at him with all the pride in the world. Josh just kept smiling.

"Miss Crenshaw, please take a seat," the teacher practically begged.

Still looking at Drake, Josh said "I'll see you after class." After Drake nodded, Josh turned back to Mindy, lifted her hand up to his lips, gently kissed it, then smiled as he turned and walked away. He could hear the class erupting into discussion the moment he was out of eyesight, but he didn't mind. Even if the only thing that had done was just get the attention off Drake for a minute, then it was still worth it.

Josh silently walked back into his own classroom and took his seat. His own teacher gave him a look, but otherwise didn't say anything to him. The nerds, on the other hand, leaned in immediately.

"What's going on?"

"Is everything okay?"

Josh grinned again and nodded slowly.

"Yeah," he said. "Right now, everything really is great."

Maybe coming back to school so soon hadn't been such a bad idea after all.