There were no alarms telling anyone to get out of bed that morning. Emil woke up not knowing where he was for a few seconds, then finally realising that he was in his brother's bed. The funny thing was that it was the first time in years that he had actually slept properly. It felt amazing. There was a small imprint next to him, most likely left by Lukas, who had probably gotten out of bed earlier. How much earlier, Emil didn't know until he rolled over and saw the time on the clock that sat on Lukas' bed side table.
10:30 am, Tuesday.
"Shit," Emil muttered under his breath, stumbling out of bed, suddenly energised by a rush of panicky adrenaline that ran through him. "Lukas!" He shouted angrily.
"Mm?" Came a relaxed reply from the kitchen. Emil followed the voice, collapsing onto the walls occasionally because his legs hadn't fully woken up. Once he reached the kitchen he stopped and gave Lukas the pissiest look he could muster.
"Why the hell didn't you wake me up?" Emil demanded.
"Because I didn't think that you should go to school today, especially because of last night," Lukas explained, maintaining his relatively uninterested tone as he continued to type on his laptop with – probably about his third – cup of coffee for the day steaming next to him.
"To hell with that, I'm going to be late!" Emil argued as he began to hurriedly sort out his morning coffee and smear a thick layer of Nutella onto a slice of bread.
"Since when do you care so much?" Lukas questioned with a laugh that seemed quite condescending to Emil. "I thought you hated school and never wanted to go."
"I care because I don't want Leon to think I'm bitching out on him already," Emil argued, disappearing into his bedroom.
"Language," Lukas mentioned, not seeming very affected by Emil's cussing.
"To hell with that too. If I can speak three languages, I should be allowed to cuss in all them." The house was quite small, in fact, small enough to continue a conversation from any point in the house and not have to shout too much. Emil threw his uniform on, not caring how messy he looked and quickly raked his hands through his hair.
"Do you really have to argue it that way?" Lukas complained.
"Yes, yes I do. Now lay off before I start swearing in Danish at you." Emil reappeared in the kitchen, throwing his bag onto a vacant stool and pouring his coffee into a travel mug.
"You know how to swear in Danish?" Lukas queried, almost choking on his drink.
"Don't you?"
"No." Emil gave a smirk.
"Didn't the kids at school teach you how to swear?" Emil teased. Lukas gave a disapproving look as he handed Emil's bag over, still half opened with papers and books sticking out from just about every single direction. Emil grabbed it with a nod and stole an apple from the fruit bowl at the end of the bench.
"The kids at school taught me how to draw magic circles for demon summoning instead of cursing in Danish," Lukas explained lazily, still not looking up from his work.
"Oh, dritte!" Emil exclaimed.
"What did I just tell you? Even if it's in Norwegian it still counts!" Lukas huffed.
"Don't care. I need you to write me a note for me being late, especially seeming that it's your fault."
"Ugh, fine," Lukas groaned as he got out a pen and paper and started writing agonisingly slowly.
"Hurry up!" Emil whined like a child. Lukas sighed and wrote a little faster and once he had finished, the note was snatched from underneath his hand and Emil ran for the door – almost forgetting his shoes – and jogging to school.
Why he wanted to get to school that badly, he didn't understand. Nothing made sense to him after yesterday, like suddenly the sun had come out and blinded him so he was forced to stagger around like a fool trying to find his place in the world. It felt so uncomfortable to be in this new mood, it almost scared Emil to know how much he had changed over one day.
He arrived at school and turned in his note so he wouldn't get a detention and hurried off to class. What class did he have? He obviously couldn't remember because he began rifling through his locker to find his time table. Maths. Ugh.
He used to be really good at maths until he fell behind and had just barely been passing the semester. He only now hated it because he had fallen so far behind and had never felt motivated enough to catch up. Emil knocked on the classroom door, hiding behind his text books in shame as the teacher came to open the door.
"Finally decided to turn up, Emil?" He playfully taunted. Emil said nothing and darted over to the safety of his usual desk, only to find that some asshole was sitting at it.
"Hey, I thought you'd ditched me," Leon smirked. Emil rolled his eyes and sighed, why was Leon sitting in his damn seat?
"I'm not very keen on doing that." Emil took the vacant seat behind Leon, and wasn't too happy about his spot being stolen, but now was not the time to get possessive over furniture. The teacher continued writing examples on the board and ranting about how learning to solve quartic polynumerals in graphing and going on about how it would only be important for next year and that not ever in actually using it real life should not be a reason to slack off. For the first time in forever Emil actually paid some attention to the pointlessness and wrote down the notes.
But nothing made sense. What the hell was a polynumeral, what the hell was a quartic and how the hell do you solve equations? There was something mentioned about solving quadratic equations in last year's class, but was he paying attention? No, because by then he had stopped paying attention in that half of the year. God he hated realising how much he had missed out on.
The teacher assigned them questions to do from the chapter and the room slowly progressed into a small hum of chatter as everyone began their work. Instead of attempting the impossible work in front of him, Emil sat back and tuned into other people's conversations as he usually did.
In one corner, there were the two German brothers. One was trying to do the work whilst the other was trying to hook pens onto the others shirt collar and complaining about how bored he was.
"Maths is stupid. Why don't they teach us stuff that we will use in life?" The silvery haired one complained, sticking another pen onto his brother's shirt collar.
"And that attitude is why you're two years behind," the blonde haired one answered with a sigh, pulling the pens off his shirt collar.
"Hey! I'm not two years behind! You're just two years ahead, smart ass, kleiner bruder!" He complained.
Emil shifted his attention further down the row past some kids who were actually doing their work toward the front. There were two girls at the front. One with a short bob and the other with long ash brown hair and a bow. The one with the bow was muttering frustratedly to the other in Russian whilst aggressively picking at the desk with her sharp point of her compass.
In front of him was Leon, who was talking to this Polish guy – whom by the way was wearing a skirt – about the fashion in Iceland and all of the trends Feliks had picked up on while he was there. Emil let out a long sigh, feeling his stomach sink and the feeling of abandonment creep up his spine.
To the other side was a rather interesting conversation, or a debate one could say, about AFL.
"Everyone calls soccer football and it's just wrong, because soccer is soccer and football is foot ball. It makes no sense sense for someone to call soccer football. I asked if there was a football team here and they point me over to the soccer team. And I say no, football football, not football soccer," the guy argued, waving his hands around as if he was trying to control his building up anger.
"Dude, I know how you feel. Everyone's always saying 'oh, you're an American who wants to play American football'," the other sympathised, trying to put on a really terrible Icelandic accent.
"But the problem is, I'm not a bloody American! No one else knows what the hell AFL is and no one plays it! And no, I don't want to play your freakin' ridiculous American Football Grid Iron sort of shit."
Emil switched his attention back to Leon and Feliks, who seemed to be having fun engaging in a full on rant about skirts.
"I should, like, be allowed to wear a skirt whenever I want and not be judged for it," Feliks sassed, shaking his head so his perfectly styled blonde hair bounced around a little bit.
"I totally agree. And I must admit, your legs do look really nice in the skirt," Leon pointed out. An unfamiliar feeling came across Emil when Leon complemented Feliks. He couldn't stick a label on it because he didn't really know how he felt. Emil didn't realise he was staring until Leon turned around and started talking.
"Hey, earth to Emil," Leon cooed, waving a hand. Emil snapped back into reality, shaking his head clear.
"Wha...?"
"Like, dude. How come you were late today?" Leon asked, turning around halfway on his chair to face him. Emil opened his mouth to say something, but didn't have time to reply. "Trying to ditch me?" Leon teased.
"N-no," Emil stuttered uneasily. Was he feeling nervous? "Sorry, my brother forgot to wake me up this morning."
"That's ok," Leon smiled. "At least your brother lets you sleep in. Yong Soo was up at five in the morning trying to hack into the neighbour's wifi because we haven't set ours up yet." Emil gave a tiny smile. Leon did look a little tired from his early morning, but it probably didn't help that he had a late night as well.
"Is he really loud or something?" Emil wondered.
"Well yeah, but we also have to share a room. So that freaking sucks," Leon complained.
"My brother's really quiet most of the time..." Emil mumbled, turning back to his work and pretending to scrawl some numbers and letters on the page so it looked like he wasn't dumb as shit and was actually doing something.
"Lucky," Leon muttered with a grin and turned back to his work and quickly scribbled out an answer. To him, maths wasn't really that important. His parents had other ideas though. They were happy with basically anything he could get a doctorate in, which would usually require a supreme knowledge of the art of mathematics.
"So Feliks, where are you from?" Leon asked, briefly looking up from his work to meet his gorgeous bright emerald eyes.
"I'm from the fabulous place called Poland," Feliks said with a small flip of his hair and a smile that could literally summon sparkles. "Like, where are you from?"
"A probably not so fabulous as Poland place called Hong Kong," Leon admitted with a smug smile.
"That, like, sounds almost equally as fabulous as Poland. I've always wanted to go there and check out the fashion and stuff."
Emil continued to sit behind the two, listening to their conversation feeling horridly awkward. He and Feliks hadn't really ever talked much, so it would be almost painful to interrupt or join in on the conversation, especially since he didn't want to come across as desperate, needy, attention whoreish or possessive. He also wasn't too happy about the fact that Leon was kind of ignoring him. He wasn't sure if they were actually going to be friends or not, or if Leon was trying to make other friends as well. The whole lot of it was giving Emil a headache and filling him with unnecessary anxiety.
"Yeah the fashion's pretty good, you should visit if you ever have the opportunity," Leon said.
"Hey, the bell's, like, gonna go real soon. So do you, like, want my number or something? So we can message and stuff," Feliks asked with an endearing smile.
"Sure, I literally just got my phone set up last night," Leon assured with an easy smile, handing over his phone with a new contact open. Feliks took the phone and quickly punched in his number and named it.
When Leon got his phone back, he couldn't decide between giggling or flushing a thousand shades of red.
It said <3 Feliks/Felicia <3, which Emil unfortunately saw and felt that unlabelled feeling rush through him again. Leon tucked the phone back into his pocket with an almost victorious smile. The bell rang signalling the end of the period and everyone packed up. Feliks practically bolted out of the classroom – still somehow managing to be skipping at the same time – and giving Leon a wave with twinkling fingers, disappearing into the corridor.
Emil let a disapproving huff slip out, making Leon turn around to face him. He seemed quite happy, books in hands, loose and cool looking uniform, brilliantly styled hair and the same glimmering amber eyes Emil had seen yesterday.
"Problem?" Leon asked with his thick eyebrows furrowed. Emil shook his head, receiving a shoulder shrug from Leon. "What've you got now?"
"Norwegian," Emil mumbled, giving the obvious impression that he didn't like the subject one bit.
"Well, I've got art. Um," Leon winced, rubbing the back of his neck. "I know I have a map and all, but could you show me where the art rooms are? I got lost this morning. Twice, trying to find this place with the map." Leon felt terribly embarrassed about his inability to read maps, or as he called it, maplexia.
"Alright," Emil sighed. He should have been happy about getting to spend a little bit more time with Leon, but now he wasn't so sure.
-:-:-{A/N}-:-:-
Update is a day late because I was insanely busy writing a 12,000 word fic in a week for a school assignment. That fic is now posted as an apology for my lateness, it's a HongIce mafia one, called Rivalry is in Blood. It's completed so you guys might like to go read it.
- Fjords
Names Used:
Feliks - Poland