#navy?

That too was ridiculous. Arthur knew he’d hate prom; all the popular people voted for who was the most popular and made a big fuss out of relatively little. Not to mention the shit refreshments and the fact he’d be spending the night packed in an enclosed space with a bunch of teenagers who smelled only mildly better than any usual evening. Large crowds were not his favourite thing. Larger crowds thinking the world of themselves and probably elbowing him or judging him constantly were even farther from it. But then again there was that romanticism pulling at his heartstrings, unaided by the little notification on the prom-posal that told him ‘Alfred Jones likes this’.

Arthur was a sap. He knew it, he knew he was an utter idiot and a complete useless, infatuated fool who was completely and totally in love with his best friend. It was utterly cruel – and though he knew fine and well that the fantasies of Alfred asking him to go to prom (quietly, alone, none of the giant fuss of these proposals his school-mates made.) were never going to happen, he couldn’t help being just a little disappointed that his outlandish wish hadn’t happened.

He sighed again, running his hands through his hair and trying not to act too disgustingly lovesick despite the fact there was no one around to witness it. It wasn’t as if Alfred felt the same way and Arthur didn’t want to risk the wonderful friendship they had by admitting his feelings on the off chance the American really did return them. Of course, when he’d decided this he’d only passed a few weeks of realising he had a crush on Alfred; he’d thought it was a passing infatuation, not a deep feeling that would tug at him relentlessly for the following ten months.

And it was their last year. Alfred was going halfway across the country to pursue engineering and Arthur himself was going abroad to England again – and he didn’t know if he’d want to move back. The end of school brought about far more turmoil than Arthur had expected, but he hadn’t been anticipating the complication of falling in love with his best friend.

The guitar riff of Arthur’s favourite Queen song suddenly blasted in his ear and he turned sharply to pick up his phone, quite intent to reject whomsoever was calling him and return to his pathetic self-pity – only to find Alfred’s grinning face staring at him from the front of his phone. He couldn’t very well refuse to answer Alfred. Not in the least for the fact he was his best friend – Alfred never gave up calling until the phone got picked up. Plus he was one for texts; he hardly called unless he was in need of something immediately.

“What?” Arthur grumbled into this phone, sitting back in his chair once again as he settled down to listen to whatever Alfred needed his attention for.

“Hello to you too.” Alfred snorted and Arthur could just picture the way his friend rolled his eyes. He had such an unfairly attractive face. “I need your help real quick; what colour am I wearing to prom?”

Arthur frowned, startled, sitting up a little straighter in his chair. The words so innocently posed to him ran straight through like a knife, freezing Arthur to the spot in his chair. He couldn’t deny it was a very real sense of fear that rushed through his heart as he heard those words; was Alfred going with someone? Was this is way of telling him that he’d found some pretty girlfriend or boyfriend to go dancing with all night instead of him?

“I didn’t realise you were going to prom…” He mumbled, hoping the petulant tone he heard himself use didn’t register over the line.

“Yeah, real funny.” Again, the unimpressed tone Alfred used whenever Arthur was short or dry with him carried across the receiver, and this time Arthur frowned in confusion. “C’mon help me here, I thought you would’ve picked it out already, you’re better than me at this and you usually nit-pick this kind of stuff. I’m picking my suit though; you just need to tell me what colour.”

Arthur leant forward, putting his head in his hand as he tried to push the thought of Alfred taking a date to prom that wasn’t him out of his mind. There were rather more pressing matters to deal with, after all. “One, I don’t nit-pick, I just know better than you what looks good. Two, why on earth would I have picked out a colour for you?”

“Uh, so we don’t end up wearing the same colour and look like one of those totally dweeby couples?”

Arthur froze, his eyes fixed on a nonspecific spot on the wall as he processed Alfred’s words. Dweeby couple… It sunk in slowly, echoes of the word ‘couple’ ringing in Arthur’s ears even as confusion slowly spread through his mind. Had Alfred been in front  of him there was no doubt Arthur would have been staring at him in place of his off-white wall, fixing Alfred with the bewildered, wide-eyed gaze that he inflicted upon the poor structure now.

“—Since when are we going to prom?” He asked, or more accurately, accused; a quiet intonation of his voice demanding Alfred answer soon before he lost it.

But Alfred hesitated, the line dead with silence that stretched out probably longer in Arthur’s mind than reality but still painfully too long for him.

“Shit…I forgot to ask you-“

It was Arthur’s turn to fall silent; the lack of words lying heavily between them only accompanied by the slight fuzziness of the phone speaker. Whether it was the shocking revelation that Alfred Jones actually wanted to go to prom with him, as a couple, on a date – or the fact that his best friend was the singlemost idiotic bastard on the entire face of the earth that kept Arthur silent was a mystery. But it was no surprise that the words that eventually broke the painful silence were punctuated with a vicious kind of irritation.

“You bloody idiot Alfred Jones—“

On the other side of the line, Alfred winced, but Arthur was no witness to his friend’s discomfort.

“Okay, yeah, I’m dumb, big surprise. I forgot the most fucking important part of going to prom was asking you out- it was supposed to be romantic…” Alfred bit his lip, a momentary hesitation and Arthur felt himself softening just a little bit as those words sunk in. “Kinda missed out on that, huh? Or maybe—fucked this up, ah, shit—“ He muttered and Arthur could clearly picture the way the other boy would rub the back of his neck in embarrassment. “I mean…do you wanna go to prom with me? As my date. All…gay and shit. Damnit, fuck- forget it, forget I said anything I get it if you don’t wanna—if you don’t feel that way just-“

“Of course I’ll bloody well go with you! I’ve been wishing for months that you would ask me!” Arthur cut the other off before he could blabber his way into changing his mind or hang up altogether, though perhaps yelling down the receiver wasn’t the best way to return someone’s feelings. Then again, nothing about their relationship had ever quite been conventional.

“Really? Oh my God, Arthur you- I—I really—I promise I’ll be the best boyfriend ever, our first date is going to be so much better than this, I promise. I’ll actually come over and ask you out properly like I’ll do the whole proposal I was supposed to do-“

Arthur remained quiet, curling up slowly in his chair with a small smile on his features and a rapidly warming complexion as he mulled over the word ‘boyfriend’. Quite how Alfred had managed to be so oblivious to the key part of his prom preparations, he was sure he’d never quite know, but the other was rather well tuned to surprising him.

“—So what colour should I wear? I meant it when I said you know better than I do.”