A, You're Adorable (Klance) [DISCONTINUED]

Three: C is for Can-do

You can't have my number. I don't have a phone. *Visibly continues texting*

Ah, lunch. Everyone's favorite escape from the harsh reality of school. A time of napping, eating, meming, and generally pretending like you don't have an essay due next period. It was when the fight for outdoor benches grew to feudal-level dibs-calling so intense that Pidge asked to leave class five minutes early so she could save them a table. She never disappointed.

Every day without fail, Lance sat next to Keith to jostle for space and steal his food. Sometimes Keith grew so perturbed that he actually shoved back hard enough to make him slide, laughing, onto the grass. Still the Cuban sat next to him.

"Get a room," Pidge grumbled after Lance took Keith's juice box for the third time. "If you want to indirectly kiss him so badly you might as well go the whole hog."

"If I ever kiss him," Keith huffed, "it'll be on my own terms."

"What terms would that be?" Hunk deadpanned. "He has to sing 'Death of a Bachelor' in Korean while wearing the suit from 'The Ballad of Mona Lisa' before you even consider? Or something that matches your edge even closer?"

"Or maybe he'll have to dress up as one of the girls from Love Live," Pidge snorted. "Nico-nico kiss-me-Keith!"

Lance stuck his tongue out. "Hecc y'all."

Keith, first of all, streamed more Green Day and FOB than P!ATD. Secondly, he had only played Love Live once. He wasn't a total edgelord, though. Maybe the fish thought so, but he wasn't entirely as emo as his fingerless gloves let on. At least it stopped people from approaching him for help during Study Hall.

"Oh, Keith, te quiero," Lance mockingly adopted Keith's pose from Art. "Bésame bajo la luna."

Like many times before, Keith regret choosing to take Chinese. Ching chong ling long ding dong ping pong his stupid butt.

He sighed and ran a hand through the back of his mullet. There was no hum of cicadas in the background, just the distanced chatter from the other tables and underclassmen clustered around the trees and against the walls. The breeze picked up, bringing an amber leaf over to smack Hunk in the face as Wonder Trade finally granted him Nilla the Vanillish. The wind smelled like damp forest litter.

Pidge grunted, patting her head. "Is it raining?"

Lance stuffed his thermos away. "Space Dad's lab is open today."

"Better than having to deal with Honerva in the library."

Elizabeth's friend from Keith and Pidge's class was sitting at their usual table. She didn't bother moving when they sat down.

"Look, man, I'm sorry I took your apple juice," Lance whined. "Study with me next period! Get over it. I need help. I'll give you some of my chicken and rice."

"No one wants your stupid chicken," Keith scoffed.

"Yeah people do!" he turned to the sophomore at the table. "Grace from Math, you want some, don't you?"

She looked up. "I don't eat chicken."

"Come on!"

"Chicken doesn't make up for apple juice," Shiro nodded sagely from his desk. "You can take a man's meat, but never his juice box. That's just cold. Some boundaries need to be respected."

Lance whined. "Space Daaaad, don't take his side. I don't wanna fail Lit."

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. And, by that same logic, there was no way Lance was going to fail the Lit test if Keith spited him enough. So why bother wasting his time rambling about The Tempest when he could be finishing an AutoCAD assignment for Engineering? Space pilot Brownie Points weren't going to earn themselves.

"You aren't even going to study. There's no reason for Keith to waste time with you," Pidge demolished her cheese stick in two bites.

Shiro tossed a paper ball across the room and into the bin in the back. Grace clapped.

"You doing anything after school? I found some old movies at a garage sale that I wanna watch," Hunk offered.

No one had a life outside their friend group. They hadn't planned any Friday trips into town or dates. Casablanca it was, then. Keith's dad would approve.

"Alright, kids," Shiro called. "It's five to twelve. Time to get to class."

"Yay, History pop quiz," Pidge sighed.

Lance offered Keith a hand up. Ha, no. There was no bribing him into talking about how life is the stuff of dreams, however edgy that was.

Study Hall was a waste of time, even more so than Art. The supervising teacher didn't bother confiscating phones or monitoring volume until things got unbearable. Students could be working on college apps or playing Osu, and he wouldn't bat an eye just the same. The tables were always askew from the seating chart that no one followed after lunch, and the stray half-empty chip bag littered the floor. Lance usually sat at Keith's table to keep him company, but today he made a point to sit directly across from him.

"If you say 'notice me senpai' I am not talking to you," Keith growled before he could say anything.

"Can-do, babe. Now, tell me about Miranda."

"Miranda is a moon of Uranus. It was discovered in 1948 and pictures of its southern hemisphere were taken by Voyager 2 in 1986."

"Babe, don't do this to me."

Lance's flirty tactics worked only on the part of Keith's brain that played that seal meme ("gayyyyy") on loop. "Study her yourself. You like checking girls out."

"But Keeeeeith-"

The Tempest was William Shakespeare's last play. It was generally accepted (especially by Lit teachers) that Shakespeare wrote the main character, Prospero, as a sort of self-insert in order to get a message across to his audience that his plays would render him immortal only with their help. It was an odd comedy of sorts, what with the imminent marriage at the end and the reinstatement of the right duke, which took place on a magic island in the Mediterranean where Prospero controls every happening. What mind-numbingly standard material for Lit class.

Keith smirked at Lance when the bell rang. "Good luck, yobo."  

//

Image: Elizabeth from ch.1 (left), and Grace from Math (right); drawn 12 Sept. 2017