Work Text:
If you really searched through the rubble that was the stuffy history classroom of a high school, you’d actually find it to be a pretty nice day. The trees right outside the window shuffled as a breeze went by, complementing the near perfect weather. If you payed close attention, you could see small birds perching on the grass to search for scraps of food; as they almost always did after the student’s busy lunch rush, leaving bits and pieces of their meals all over campus grounds. Though it seemed that that day somebody had decided to leave their school lunch concoction on the floor for an unknowing janitor to discover a few hours later. Gross. But birds clearly don’t know that.
It was a beautiful day. Even Arthur could admit that. The downside was that specifically the period he had after lunch was almost always awful. It just seemed that teenagers stop caring about the British crusades at 2pm, and since it was such a fascinating topic, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why.
Nonetheless, he continued with his spiel about the Catholic Church’s declaration of war, to his student’s dismay. A boy seemed to be distracted with his computer in the far left corner, while 4 girls on the other side of the classroom seemed to be attempting (in whatever way they thought they were) to chat in secret, which he deducted by the way that their expressions would widen every few seconds at something one of the others said. Not to mention the children in the middle throwing ripped up pieces of paper at one another (another thing he couldn’t understand; they’re tiny pieces of paper— they can only be thrown about 3 inches away from you anyways?).
“Okay, alright lads. I know that you’re all riled up, but we should be using this energy to focus—“ he paused for emphasis, lowering to a whisper, “—on the second crusade, yeah? Important stuff… Yeah okay, can anyone of you remember what year the first British crusaders were dispatched?”
The room was silent for just a moment before a rather sarcastic child raised his voice unprovoked,
“Oh I remember that, cause Mr. Kirk told—“ Giggles emerged from around the classroom, even more studious kids compared to the one speaking. “I mean, Mr. Kirkland told us.. I dunno, yesterday. It was like, a while ago right?” His friend next to him sighed and then let out a half-suppressed laugh at his response.
“Bro.. What?”
“Hey, tell me if I’m wrong guys! But like, I swear that’s what Mr. Kirk told us.” The classroom certainly looked tickled at his sarcastic remarks, and not to mention the loving nickname his outgoing pupil had given him. Which again, was for some reason hilarious to them. Arthur surely didn’t understand this new generation of children. They just seemed to become more rowdy every year…
Arthur retorted, “Okay, well. You’re very close. You were only, say, 800, 900 years off? Not terrible.” Another student snickered;
“You suck, Ladonia.”
“Bro, Mr. K, do you hear her?”
“Oi, Let’s all be kind to each other.. May 1147, got it?” He turned and scribbled away on the board, his back turned to their seats. “Someone else, please? What country did they stop at? Also important.. overall.” He continued to write, but there was no response from his typically quick-witted classroom. In fact, minus the sound of some shuffling, there was almost no noise at all.
“Come on, chat to me. Even guesses!” He said, mildly disappointed. Arthur started to come to the conclusion that they must have not been paying attention to a single thing the past 3 days, the way nobody even tried to answer. The British man heard Ladonia once again spew random words from his mouth. “Yo”, “Shush”, “Ayo”, whatever, it was all the same anyways. This was commonplace in his lectures, he says something serious and his louder students feel the need to snark at it or turn it into a joke. Americans are friendly, he will admit, but dear Lord, the youth have a plentiful yet simultaneously limited vocabulary.
Arthur finally turned around to face his students. There was something unsettling about the way they were so still and smiley, but he couldn’t place a finger on it.
Unbeknownst to him, a fierce workplace foe was peeking into his private institution of learning for the past minute. His mouth was curved into a large smile, and he had a finger raised to it to signal to the students to not say a word about his presence. The man mimicked the words Arthur said as they came out of his mouth, making exaggerated faces to accompany the ridiculousness of it all. Ladonia and his friends who sat by the door were particularly pleased by his presence, hiding their silent giggles from the professor.
When Arthur finally managed to follow the student’s eyes to the right of him, an irritated expression painted his face.
“Bonjour, mon ami!”
Some of Ladonia’s friends chimed in before his teacher, with the most American accent you could imagine,
“Oh yeah, Monsieur Bonne.” One said in a “smooth” tone.
“Monsieur Bonne, you’re gonna come take over our class right? Teach us about the amaaaaazing French?”
“Ou hou, if Monsieur Kirkland would so graciously have me, I could teach him the far superior French style!”
The peers chuckled at the teacher’s response. If anything, he certainly was a fan favorite. Probably because he either didn’t understand the youth’s sarcasm, or decided to pretend that he didn’t, responding seriously to it. It certainly wasn’t helped by his borderline cartoonish accent, Arthur thought. In any case, Francis Bonnefoy— or Monsieur Bonne, which students pronounced Bon-eh (and an added R at the end for comedic affect... which Francis of course pretended he didn’t notice), was in his classroom now, walking towards him in the middle of the room.
“Good Afternoon, Francis. What on earth do you need this fine day?” Arthur decided to ignore his colleague’s almost innuendous response about him, as he was used to it… even in their classroom setting.
“Well sir, I have many of mes petits étudiants français in your class, so I came to drop a small reminder onto them, is all.”
“Oh really? In the middle of my lesson? You’re much less disruptive than usual, friend. You in need of a sickie?”
“I am not, Monsieur! In fact, I wanted to remind you all that since your parent’s campus visit night is coming soon, to bring your wonderful decorations for our magnifique classroom tomorrow!” Francis craned his neck to look at the Brit. “The competition for us… teachers. So let’s blind them with our beauty, non?”
“Mr. Bonne I will blind all the teachers. Don’t worry.”
“Ladonia, please?” Was the only response Arthur could come up with. “You really think you’re leng? My class could look a thousand times better than yours if I put as much less focus on history as you do with your language! Allas, I care more about inner knowledge than appearance of my room.”
Francis scoffed, “We can tell, mon ami. Though you do seem a bit uneasy at my mention of classroom aesthetics. I must say, it makes me feel quite bad!”
The students once again broke out into laughter from their professors’ unprofessional banter.
“Oh all right. Well, their parents will see in the coming weeks who the fittest of us reflected in their grades! Simple, really.”
Arthur had fully unconsciously decided to go off course from his lesson at this point. No going back now! He had to prove to his disciples how much better he was than that French twat.
“Oh, Kirkland, you are so fiery!” He in turn did a clawing motion to elicit more laughs. “King Arthur is going to throw free A’s “a-round” the table, so shoo shoo to lap it up, enfants!”
The students all pretended to be shocked and surprised, making fake gasps. Though he appreciated the history joke Francis had made, he had to get out of this situation, get this man out of this classroom— fast.
“Well.. pardon my language, but I do happen to know that your teacher may or may not have a stick up his arse.”
The class finally erupted the loudest they had during this whole interaction. How embarrassing! Not only that, when Arthur turned to his colleague, he was laughing at his own joke! Even worse! He had just about had it with this arbitrary visit, and the desire to kick this over-zealous Frenchman out of the room grew even larger than it had consistently been since he entered. If he didn’t act now, he may have to resort to violence, which would be fairly undesirable considering the school-setting.
While the room was busy chattering over each other, Arthur leaned in to whisper into Francis’ ear,
“Listen wanker, if you leave now, I’ll spare you from a great deal of pain later, ‘kay? Im sure you don’t want to make this physical.”
Once again, a smile itched up to Francis’ face, as it had while he was hiding from the Englishman’s view in the doorway earlier.
“Oh Arthur, if you wanted “that kind” of help decorating the room, you’re very naughty to talk about it here… the French have incroyable pain tolerance, you know?”
The man practically coughed up a hairball at these words, how could he insinuate such a thing?! As if he would ever do that with such a man! His charmingly good looks didn’t make up for— or, wait what was he thinking? That stupid idiot Frenchie was planting wrong ideas in his brain now! God knows what he’s teaching those kids!
“What the bloody hell is wrong with you? You’ve really gone mad— haha! You’re— just!— You can’t— Ugh! Just leave already, will you!” The history teacher’s face flushed red, he didn’t understand anything about anyone, including himself, lately! The thought of what Francis could be thinking about a few feet in front of him right now- utterly disgraceful! In a classroom?
“Whatever you say! I know you won’t want an hideous English dump for the parents though.~”
“I— go!”
“Au revoir!”
Some students shouted goodbye to their French teacher, but none of that mattered. Arthur stood there in the midst of his wildly unbehaved class huffing and puffing like he never had before. Why was he so incredibly worked up over this? Francis was such a moron, God!
He glanced at the clock above the door. 10 minutes. Great. Learning time decimated, students even more riled up than before, and his colleague making such suggestive comments towards him? You might as well abolish the school system at this point!
—
5:30pm. The school day had ended hours ago. Even after-school extracurriculars had finished. But for some godawful reason, Arthur was practically chained to his desk in silence, imagining many horrific, unsavory scenarios that he would rather end it all now than come true.
But he still sat there, seemingly waiting for something. Definitely not someone.
This generation really was rotting his brain.