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Ro was quite frankly fed up with following Keefe Sencen around school all day.
Every day.
Every week.
Every month.
Every year.
For the rest of his school career.
Sure, most days it was at least moderately amusing — there were perks to having the most disruptive and destructive elf to have ever lived as your ward; most of which were entertainment value of some sort.
But alas, the actual lessons that his royal snottiness did occasionally have to attend to at least keep up the vaguest pretence of giving a shit about his grades were so very boring.
SO
FLIPPING
BORING
Ro oftentimes felt like bashing her skull in on the corner of the little shit’s desk, or bashing the little shit’s skull in on the corner of his own desk, or gouging out her eyeballs with his pen, or gouging out his eyeballs with his own pen, or picking up whoever was teaching the lesson and hurling them bodily out the window with nothing but brute force and a mighty roar.
That, Ro knew, would be cathartic.
But ALAS!
HAVE MERCY!
SHE COULDN’T DO ANY OF THOSE VERY FUN AND VERY HELPFUL THINGS BECAUSE IT WAS. NOT. PROFESSIONAL.
Or some similar bullshit.
So most days, the only entertainment Ro got to enjoy was blatant and self-indulgent and usually involved her very own Lord Funkyhair being embarrassed and/or exploited in some way or another.
Today, it was both.
Cassius Jr. was an elf on a mission, it seemed.
Ro had been banned from the detention hall after one extraordinarily entertaining afternoon in which she and Lord Funkyhair broke not one, not three, not five, but eight of the glass panels that made up the almost-but-not-quite-very-top of the sparkly-pyramid-elf-school by throwing around miniature smash-and-blows with human contractions called “sling-shots” (useless inventions in the combat department but greatly amusing nonetheless) during an after-class detention.
The look of pure, purple-hued outrage on Lady Iskra’s face soothed aro to sleep for weeks afterwards…
Even though she wasn’t allowed in the detention hall anymore, Ro was still required to wait outside for His Royal Hair-Gelledness to finish up before they could go back to the Shores of Solace and torment Keefe’s dad before dinner. Usually, Keefe would come out groaning his boredom to the ceiling and flopping all over the place while he begged Ro to save him from the tortures of unsolicited punishment. Yesterday, however, Keefe was different.
Weird.
Unsettling.
He was honest to all that was holy and stinky smiling.
And not just the sort of smiling one might do when in all actuality they had just experienced something unpleasant as opposed to satisfactory; oh no. He was smiling a happy smile, partly smug and even a tiny bit devilish, but genuinely happy . It had freaked Ro the hell out even if she would never admit that to his face.
Because who in their right mind was happy after detention?
Well, there was her answer: Keefe Sencen was not in his right mind. Never had been. Not when she’d first met him after he’d beat her father (her father , the king of the ogres ) in a duel, not when he’d rushed headfirst into danger all those times over the past few months, and certainly not now, when he was happy after a detention.
Insane child.
For the rest of the night and most of the next morning, Ro was on edge, waiting for Keefe to crack and start laughing maniacally as he unveiled his evil plot to dominate the world. (The worst part about that sentence was that he actually could should he wish to, what with his new abilities and his megalomaniacal brain. Which, y’know, scary.)
It wasn’t until lunchtime that everything finally fell into place.
At the dinner table the night before, Lord Cassius had put down his fork and asked Keefe what he was playing with on his finger. Keefe had answered that it was just a ring he’d found on the floor that day, and Ro hadn’t thought much of it, instead staring at the clock above the kitchen counter as she calculated exactly how long it would take her to tie all of Lord Gassius’ tailcoats together if she excused herself to the bathroom.
(Four minutes and thirty-two seconds was the answer. She’d heard him cursing up in his ensuite as she and Keefe used the leapmaster in the living room to get to Foxfire the next morning.)
At lunchtime, Keefe sped through the line in the cafeteria, pushing past several elfy prodigies on his way to the indigoobers and battails on offer. Ro watched on in amusement as he then strode purposefully over to the small table in the middle of the cafeteria that Tam, Linh and Marella were seated at. She watched, interest spiking in her chest, as his steps faltered the closer he got before he rallied himself and plonked his lunch tray down in between Marella and Tam.
Instead of sitting down, Keefe leant forwards on his palms and ducked his head to say something indistinguishable to Tam. Marella and Linh shifted away from them, sharing strange smiles as they continued on with their conversation.
Ro sidled closer with her half-full tray, straining her ears to pick up tiny scraps of what the elves were saying with her superior ogre hearing.
“…Sophie said that we could maybe…” Linh was saying.
“…can only come if my mum doesn’t need…” Marella said back.
Keefe laughed brightly, and Ro used it to hone in on his voice.
“…don’t be ridiculous, Bangs Boy. I didn’t steal it. Please, what do you take me for, a common crook?”
Tam’s voice was lower and quieter, harder to pick up than Keefe’s bright, crackly tones. His expression was more closed off, too. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, and that frustrated Ro to no end.
“As if. If I was a criminal, I’d be the greatest damn criminal this universe has ever seen,” Keefe said. “My face would be on all the wanted posters. My bounty would be so big the Council wouldn’t even be able to pay it.”
Tam muttered something to Keefe with a completely unimpressed expression. Keefe seemed slightly taken aback for a split second before his face split into a shit-eating grin and he leaned even closer to the Shade, fumbling with something on his fingers… He slid off that silver ring he’d been wearing at dinner and presented it to Tam with a purposefully dramatic flourish.
“…found it during detention. I thought to myself, ‘there’s only one emo Shade in this school who would wear something so presumptuously badass,’ and here we are.”
Tam glanced between the ring and Keefe’s face before taking it and sticking it on his right ring finger. It blended in with his collections of black and silver rings so well that it looked like it had always been there. His lips moved with more words that Ro couldn’t pick up on, and then Keefe was grinning bashfully, and suddenly Ro felt like she was intruding on something so amorously confidential that she had to look away.
Marella and Linh had inched their chairs even further away from Keefe and Tam’s little convention as it wore on and were slowly eating all the indigoobers off Keefe’s tray without his knowledge.
Ro went back to the lunch line, thinking long and hard about everything she thought she knew about Keefe and everything she’d just seen, and decided that she would have to reconsider her stance on Team Foster-Keefe.
As she picked up some extra indigoobers (for she knew that Keefe would complain endlessly about his lack of the fruity treats once he’d finished making love to Tam with his eyes) Ro grinned, because now she had material for her own version of the Ballad of Ro and Bo to torment Lord Funkyhair with.
It would need to be retitled, because the Ballad of Ro and Bo — revamped didn’t have such a nice ring to it.
No, she’d need to brainstorm some more before she decided, but for now it could be called the Ballad of Idiot One and Idiot Two - a work in progress until she came up with something better.