It's Understandable: A Tronnor AU

2. The Three Hour Experiment

2:55pm. A shrill ringing broke out. At this time of the day, the sound was supposed to be treasured, freeing, but Troye now felt otherwise. It made his entire body tense, because it was Thursday, and the ringing of the last bell meant he had to go meet with Mr. Howell. He was feeling stressed, upset; he didn't want to talk about his problems. He wanted them to stay in their vault, where nobody knew they existed but him.

Trying to hide his want to cry as he slunk down the hallway, he pushed out his jaw and dropped his eyebrows. He tilted his head back, and the effect was complete; he looked like the most unapproachable person in the world. Intimidating on the outside, so nobody would dare look at the black hole that is his inside. It was a notorious talent of his.

When he got to Mr. Howell's office, Connor wasn't there yet, and Troye might as well have skipped it. From the looks of his posture and the gifs he was scrolling through on his desktop, Mr. Howell had forgotten about the meeting anyway. Troye stood in the doorway, shifting his weight, but Mr. Howell simply laughed at an emo trinity joke and continued perusing blogs.

"Ahem." Troye coughed, and the British man looked up with wide, embarrassed eyes.

"Oh, um, sorry about that." He muttered, closing Tumblr and organizing the mess of papers on his desk. "Welcome, Troye. Take a seat."

Troye sniffed distastefully, not moving an inch. "I don't want to be here." He said clearly, his stance angry and resilient.

Mr. Howell's smile dropped immediately, and his eyes' hold on Troye was hard to decipher emotion from. He folded his hands calmly, and spoke even calmer. "I know you don't."

"But..." Troye stammered; he had been expecting Mr. Howell to get authoritative. He planned his defence around being forced into a chair, but his selected words were now irrelevant. Now, he didn't know what to say. "Why are you making me, then?" He huffed, sounding more like a child than the suppressed adult he intended to act like.

Mr. Howell leaned forwards in his chair. "Oh, hello there." He said happily.

Troye made a confused face; was this teacher crazy? He was about to walk carefully away from this weirdo, when he realized that Mr. Howell wasn't even talking to him. He was talking to the source of obnoxiously loud breathing, coming up next to Troye.

"Sorry I'm late." Connor puffed, his face red from exertion. "Ms. Sings wouldn't let me out of music until I mastered Through the Fire and Flames on the rain-stick. It took me all class, and she gave me a C-."

Mr. Howell laughed out loud. "You look like you just ran a mile. Don't worry, Troye just got here. If you'd both sit down..."

The look Mr. Howell gave Troye enraged him. He smiled, but there was no friendliness in his brown eyes. Telling him Troye had no choice, that's what that face meant. Mr. Howell knew Troye's type; the angry Australian wouldn't fight back with Connor there, because he could never think straight when one-on-one confrontation turned into one-on-one with bystanders-on-the-side. Too many possible opinions overwhelmed him, so he dropped lamely into the chair and crossed all his limbs in protest.

He looks pretty mad. Connor thought to himself. It's probably because of me. And, with that, Mr. Howell realized that getting the boys through this was going to be harder than he thought. At one hand, he had a gloomy, suicidal boy with a bad attitude and the thickest barriers in the universe and, at the other, he had a boy who was too shy to look anyone in the eyes, and whose persona could transform into a devastated danger to himself at the drop of a pin. Even slumped in two of the school's most comfortable chairs, in one of the safest rooms, their force fields seemed impenetrable. But that didn't mean Mr. Howell wasn't going to try his hardest to break them.