"Blind Leading The Blind", Sarah Jane Adventures, Clyde/Luke
Title: Blind Leading The Blind
Fandom: Sarah Jane Adventures
Pairing: Clyde/Luke
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2755
Genre: Slash
Summary: At the time, Rani puts it down to the shock.
Author’s Notes: I know that I should stop writing Clyde and Luke as a couple, because it’s a kids’ show, but they’re just reallyreally cute and I’ll just be the one writer on the internet sick enough to do it. Besides, if the show didn’t want me writing slash with the boys then someone should stop Clyde and Luke touching each other all the time. Because… seriously. If you’re watching it, count how many times they’re all over each other in each episode. Anyway, mild spoilers for the Clown story arc thing (i.e the existence of Rani in the first place!).
It’s understandable when Sarah Jane can’t let go of Luke for a few minutes; Clyde is grinning and trembling just slightly, so slightly that Rani can only tell because he’s standing right next to her.
“Come on,” Sarah Jane says at last; “Let’s get you home.”
Luke manages a grin for Rani and Clyde, and they all walk out of the circus museum, Sarah Jane’s arm still possessively tight around her son. Rani and Clyde trail behind.
“Is it always like this?” she asks quietly.
Clyde shrugs. “Sometimes it’s worse,” he replies. “Makes you feel like a superhero, though, right?”
Rani can’t help the smile that splits her face. “A bit,” she admits.
Clyde smiles back, hand brushing her shoulder. When they reach Sarah Jane’s surprisingly ugly car, she finally lets go of Luke and indicates the passenger seat for Rani.
“I think I’ve got some explaining to do,” she says.
On the drive back to Bannerman Road, Sarah Jane tells Rani about travelling in space and time. In the backseat, Clyde is telling Luke all about how he personally saved the world; he repeats half the jokes he told in quick succession and then, because Luke still looks understandably peaky, whispers a decidedly filthy joke that Rani doesn’t remember him telling in front of Sarah Jane. In fact, Rani tunes out Sarah Jane in order to listen to the punchline, and has to struggle to keep from choking.
“I’m not entirely sure I followed that,” Luke says.
“Ah, mate,” Clyde sighs, “We’ll get there one day.”
Rani listens, open-mouthed, as Sarah Jane describes saving the world from a race called the Slitheen; eventually she becomes aware that silence has fallen behind her. Glancing back, she notes that Clyde has shifted to the middle seat, and has wrapped his arm around Luke’s shoulders. Rani remembers the tightness in Clyde’s jaw - I’m not having this - when Luke was taken. Luke’s head is leant against Clyde’s shoulder, his hair ruffled up against Clyde’s chin. They’re both listening to Sarah Jane, slight reminiscent smiles on their faces.
At the time, Rani puts it down to the shock.
+
Every morning before school, Clyde meets Luke and together they come and get Rani. Clyde is usually eating toast, stolen cheerfully from Sarah Jane’s breakfast table, and getting Luke to explain the basic principles behind the homework he hasn’t done.
“Where do you actually live?” Rani asks one morning after about a week.
Clyde sucks Marmite off his thumb, and tells her which estate he lives on.
“But…” Rani frowns. Clyde lives about five minutes from the school. And he realises she’s figured this out, because he glares, and jerks his head slightly to where Luke is walking a little behind them, talking to Sarah Jane on the phone.
“Don’t say it,” he advises. “Anyway, Sarah Jane makes way better toast than my mum; she always kind of burns it for some weird reason.”
Rani smirks.
“Ok, not a really weird reason,” Clyde concedes. “I mean, I don’t think our toaster’s alien, I think it’s just crap.”
“I could probably fix it for you,” Luke offers, catching them up. “I think it would just take a screwdriver… and maybe part of your microwave.”
“My mum will never let you come over again,” Clyde warns.
“Only a little part of your microwave that your mum won’t even miss,” Luke shrugs, grinning.
“Are you serious?” Rani asks.
“Unfortunately, yes.” Clyde smiles. “I get free Sky Plus on the TV in my room because Luke did something random with some wires.” He smacks a hand against Luke’s back. “Which is pretty cool.”
“Will you do that for me?” Rani asks eagerly.
“Of course,” Luke tells her.
They discuss how they’re going to achieve this without letting Rani’s mum find out what they’re up to all the way to school; it takes Rani a long while to notice that Clyde’s hand is still resting between Luke’s shoulders, casual but consistent.
+
After school one Thursday Sarah Jane is out actually chasing up a story. Luke, Clyde and Rani watch bad science-fiction movies and spend time mocking the aliens.
“I think we could face that one down,” Clyde decides, waving his hand at a spider-like creature.
“I’m not good with spiders,” Luke mumbles.
“How would you face down a spider?” Rani asks, raising challenging eyebrows at Clyde.
Clyde shrugs. “I bet Sarah Jane has a giant bug-zapper thing upstairs. Mr Smith could probably make one.”
Luke makes them popcorn; his microwave works twice as fast as a normal microwave, Rani notes. When he gets back, Clyde has stretched out right across the sofa. Luke sets down the bowl of popcorn on the coffee table and, instead of bitching like most people Rani knows, just looks miserably at where he was sitting until Clyde sighs and moves.
“We’re going to have to give you lessons on arguing,” Clyde decides, as Luke sits back down. “It’s something we’ve sadly neglected so far.”
“…Lessons?” Rani is too curious, it’s true; her mum always says she should stop asking people awkward questions. Luckily, Sarah Jane has been pleased to answer the majority of them. Clyde and Luke exchange a significant look.
“You tell her,” Luke murmurs, reaching for popcorn.
“I wasn’t even there,” Clyde says.
“Someone tell me,” Rani insists, curiosity piqued.
“Luke got grown in a lab by aliens,” Clyde shrugs.
There’s silence, but for the screaming of characters on the television. Rani feels inclined to disbelieve them, then notices Luke’s tense body language.
“Oh my God,” she manages. “Are you…”
“I’m human,” Luke insists quickly. “I just got born like this. Two years ago.”
Rani, for once, finds herself utterly speechless.
“Don’t hold it against him,” Clyde tells her, shrugging. “He may not have played with Pokemon cards as a kid, but, you know, he’s not so bad.”
“Thanks,” Luke mutters, and Rani realises that he isn’t being sarcastic.
A few pieces fall into place. I’m not weird, I’m just different. Luke isn’t like everyone else because he doesn’t interact like everyone else. It’s not immediately obvious, but now she wonders why she didn’t notice it before. It explains a lot of things.
“That’s pretty cool,” she admits.
“It is?” Luke’s hopeful eyes remind her a little of a puppy.
“Very cool,” Rani assures him.
“See?” Clyde elbows Luke. “You should be perkier. People actually like you.”
Luke ignores him and reaches for more popcorn, but his lips are curling into a smile.
Fifteen minutes later they’re all engrossed in the movie; in spite of the utterly rubbish aliens the film is actually kind of good. Rani glances over at the boys and notes, not entirely surprised, that Clyde has stretched out across the sofa again, head resting comfortably in Luke’s lap.
She frowns thoughtfully, and decides to work out exactly what’s going on with them.
+
Sarah Jane lets Rani help her out with her ordinary journalism; throwing out tips and hints and anecdotes about researching articles that Rani finds as interesting as the anecdotes about aliens.
“The research is important,” Sarah Jane impresses on her.
Luke is using his laptop on the kitchen table when Rani walks down the stairs.
“What are you up to?” she asks.
“Emailing Maria,” Luke replies. “I’m telling her about that Pathangan ship that crashed here last week.”
“Right.” Rani glances over his shoulder and sees that Luke has written a lot. Like everything else in his life, he clearly takes this seriously. Meticulously writing to Maria; Rani finds herself smiling. Luke is sweet.
Her eyes skip over the email; she sees her own name coming up frequently, but she doesn’t mean to take note of Maria’s email address. She really doesn’t.
Later, her fingers hover uncomfortably over her keyboard. She shouldn’t email Maria; after all, they have very little in common except for the whole saving the world thing. But nonetheless she starts writing and the words pour out. She tells Maria about how amazing the universe is; about the aliens she’s faced, about Sarah Jane and how she knows she still misses her.
Her determination to see that it’s not just her imagination going made makes her add: Clyde and Luke. What’s the story with them?
Rani doesn’t get a reply for a day and spends the whole time obsessing about time differences and whether she’s managed to offend a girl she’s never met but whose shadow she’s still kind of in. But she checks her email before she goes to bed and finds a detailed email from Maria waiting for her. It turns out Maria takes the communications thing as seriously as Luke does; it must be hard for her, all the way in America.
She sounds nice; Rani can already tell she’ll be emailing her back. There are so many people that she can’t talk to that it’s kind of nice to find someone that she can.
At the end of her message, Maria says: Clyde and Luke are easy. They’re dating; they just haven’t noticed it yet. Let me know if they ever figure it out!
Rani thinks that if a girl who lives in Washington now knows all about Clyde and Luke it does seem rather tragic that they haven’t worked it out for themselves yet.
+
They go for ice cream to celebrate sending a nasty group of little blue aliens home in their ship without anyone getting hurt in the process. Apparently, this is a slightly rare occurrence, though Sarah Jane glares at Clyde for mentioning this.
Luke likes vanilla ice cream. Rani isn’t surprised about this either; as far as she’s been able to tell, Luke likes the simple things in life, like he wants to get the hang of them first before it gets complicated.
Clyde has a sundae with brownies and about four flavours and sprinkles and sauces and that is somehow right too.
“You are boring,” Clyde presses.
He and Luke are sat on one side of the table, with Sarah Jane and Rani on the opposite side. The boys are sat eerily close together in that way they always are; Rani finds herself overlooking it now, in the way everyone else seems to. It’s just normal now.
“I’m not boring,” Luke retorts, and eats another mouthful of vanilla.
“You could try other flavours,” Rani offers. She has three kinds of chocolate and hot dark chocolate sauce. She gets the feeling that she’s going to want to be sick when Sarah Jane drives them home, but right now that doesn’t matter.
Luke gets a distinctly adorable uncomfortable expression.
“Here,” Clyde says, loading up his spoon with brownie and what is possibly fudge or toffee ice cream or… something. It looks sticky. “Try these.”
“I’m all right,” Luke replies. “Really.”
“I am not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” Clyde insists. “We’re going to have to have ice cream lessons at this rate.”
Luke rolls his eyes; something he seems to have got the hang of in the last couple of weeks.
“Fine,” he sighs, and lets Clyde feed him an incredibly messy spoonful of ice cream.
Rani has been friends with boys before, and those boys? Did not act like this.
She opens her mouth to just tell them what they apparently still haven’t noticed; but Sarah Jane catches her eye and shakes her head just slightly. There’s a smile on her lips, like she finds this as cute as Rani does.
Rani obediently says nothing, but takes advantage of the boys’ laughter to lean over and steal a brownie from Clyde.
+
They get separated by a race called the Mantaar; each of them has a piece of technology they have to put in different places in the warehouse the Mantaar are using as their base. Rani runs through narrow alien-made corridors until her phone bleeps and tells her where she’s meant to be; Luke did something funny to the mechanism and now it does all sorts of things it’s not meant to but that are pretty cool anyway. He did the same thing to Maria’s before she left; apparently she can now make phonecalls anywhere in the world at a rate of about a penny a minute. Luke is an awesome liability, even though Clyde always claims that some shadowy government agency are going to come take Luke away one night.
(Sarah Jane says she knows a surprisingly large number of people in the shadowy government agencies and so they’ll probably be all right.)
Rani puts her device down on the floor and switches it on; the screeching sounds echoing along the walls tells her the others have done their bit too.
She meets Sarah Jane and Clyde back in the middle of the building, but Luke is nowhere to be found. Sarah Jane pales but Clyde is the one who goes tearing off without any sort of plan, apparently picking a corridor at random and going to look for Luke down it.
“Clyde!”
Rani and Sarah Jane run after him; the corridors are singing with sound and aliens stumble past them, hands clapped to what are presumably their ears. Sarah Jane sends Rani an imploring look, Sonic Lipstick in hand.
“I’ll find them,” Rani promises, leaving Sarah Jane to handle negotiations with the Mantaar leader.
The screaming noise breaks off abruptly, and Rani rounds a corner to find Clyde pulling Luke to his feet.
“Stupid idiot,” he says, voice soft and worried. Luke looks a little woozy, a bruise rising on his temple.
“Sorry,” he manages, body trembling a little, knees beginning to fold. Clyde clenches hands around Luke’s upper arms, keeping him upright.
“You are an idiot,” he insists, and Rani can hear the last traces of real fear in his voice. “Ok?”
“Ok,” Luke agrees weakly.
Rani takes a step back and hides behind the corner when Clyde leans forward and presses his lips to Luke’s. Hard and certain and just once, a quick kiss born of dying adrenalin. Luke doesn’t really even seem to register it, and, as he moves Luke’s arm around his shoulder and starts supporting him down the corridor, neither does Clyde.
+
The bruise is just starting to fade when Rani finally loses her temper. Clyde and Luke have spent the entire last week being themselves. There’s no tension, no awkwardness; just their weird friendship that seems altogether too tactile to just be a normal friendship. Rani knows she’s promised Maria and Sarah Jane and even herself that she won’t point it out to the boys until they’re ready to handle acknowledging it. But she’s driving herself mad with tension that probably exists only in her head.
They’re doing homework in Rani’s living room when she finally cracks. Her mum is out shopping and her dad is staying late at the school, leaving them with the house to themselves.
“What’s the matter, Rani?” Luke asks, apparently noticing that she’s stopped doing algebra and is staring at him and Clyde. The two of them are sitting on the carpet, knees touching, contentedly getting on with their maths. It’s cosy and simple and suddenly Rani wants it to just be like that between them; not all tangled up and unspoken.
“Clyde kissed you,” Rani says helplessly.
Clyde stares at her, eyes wide, apparently unable to speak.
For some reason, Luke doesn’t look up from his algebra. “I don’t remember that,” he murmurs. “Is this going to turn into a joke of some kind?”
Now Clyde is staring at Luke. “You don’t remember?” he asks, sounding a little incredulous.
Luke glances at him. “So… this isn’t going to be a joke?”
“Joke?” Clyde sighs. “Luke, much as it pains me to admit it, I occasionally am serious. I’m working on it, but…”
“I have no idea what’s going on here,” Luke says, carefully and slowly.
Clyde looks at Rani. She raises a significant eyebrow, because now she’s started this she’s kind of determined to have it finished. Clyde nods, turning to Luke, curling a hand under his chin and leaning in to kiss him. Luke makes a small, bewildered sound but doesn’t pull away shrieking.
“I’ll go and get something to drink,” Rani decides, fleeing to the kitchen as Clyde slips his fingers into Luke’s hair.
When she gets back ten minutes later with tea, the boys are doing homework again, sitting with their knees pressed together like nothing at all has changed in the last fifteen minutes.
Rani smiles, sitting back down and passing them both mugs. Maybe nothing really has.
Fandom: Sarah Jane Adventures
Pairing: Clyde/Luke
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2755
Genre: Slash
Summary: At the time, Rani puts it down to the shock.
Author’s Notes: I know that I should stop writing Clyde and Luke as a couple, because it’s a kids’ show, but they’re just reallyreally cute and I’ll just be the one writer on the internet sick enough to do it. Besides, if the show didn’t want me writing slash with the boys then someone should stop Clyde and Luke touching each other all the time. Because… seriously. If you’re watching it, count how many times they’re all over each other in each episode. Anyway, mild spoilers for the Clown story arc thing (i.e the existence of Rani in the first place!).
It’s understandable when Sarah Jane can’t let go of Luke for a few minutes; Clyde is grinning and trembling just slightly, so slightly that Rani can only tell because he’s standing right next to her.
“Come on,” Sarah Jane says at last; “Let’s get you home.”
Luke manages a grin for Rani and Clyde, and they all walk out of the circus museum, Sarah Jane’s arm still possessively tight around her son. Rani and Clyde trail behind.
“Is it always like this?” she asks quietly.
Clyde shrugs. “Sometimes it’s worse,” he replies. “Makes you feel like a superhero, though, right?”
Rani can’t help the smile that splits her face. “A bit,” she admits.
Clyde smiles back, hand brushing her shoulder. When they reach Sarah Jane’s surprisingly ugly car, she finally lets go of Luke and indicates the passenger seat for Rani.
“I think I’ve got some explaining to do,” she says.
On the drive back to Bannerman Road, Sarah Jane tells Rani about travelling in space and time. In the backseat, Clyde is telling Luke all about how he personally saved the world; he repeats half the jokes he told in quick succession and then, because Luke still looks understandably peaky, whispers a decidedly filthy joke that Rani doesn’t remember him telling in front of Sarah Jane. In fact, Rani tunes out Sarah Jane in order to listen to the punchline, and has to struggle to keep from choking.
“I’m not entirely sure I followed that,” Luke says.
“Ah, mate,” Clyde sighs, “We’ll get there one day.”
Rani listens, open-mouthed, as Sarah Jane describes saving the world from a race called the Slitheen; eventually she becomes aware that silence has fallen behind her. Glancing back, she notes that Clyde has shifted to the middle seat, and has wrapped his arm around Luke’s shoulders. Rani remembers the tightness in Clyde’s jaw - I’m not having this - when Luke was taken. Luke’s head is leant against Clyde’s shoulder, his hair ruffled up against Clyde’s chin. They’re both listening to Sarah Jane, slight reminiscent smiles on their faces.
At the time, Rani puts it down to the shock.
+
Every morning before school, Clyde meets Luke and together they come and get Rani. Clyde is usually eating toast, stolen cheerfully from Sarah Jane’s breakfast table, and getting Luke to explain the basic principles behind the homework he hasn’t done.
“Where do you actually live?” Rani asks one morning after about a week.
Clyde sucks Marmite off his thumb, and tells her which estate he lives on.
“But…” Rani frowns. Clyde lives about five minutes from the school. And he realises she’s figured this out, because he glares, and jerks his head slightly to where Luke is walking a little behind them, talking to Sarah Jane on the phone.
“Don’t say it,” he advises. “Anyway, Sarah Jane makes way better toast than my mum; she always kind of burns it for some weird reason.”
Rani smirks.
“Ok, not a really weird reason,” Clyde concedes. “I mean, I don’t think our toaster’s alien, I think it’s just crap.”
“I could probably fix it for you,” Luke offers, catching them up. “I think it would just take a screwdriver… and maybe part of your microwave.”
“My mum will never let you come over again,” Clyde warns.
“Only a little part of your microwave that your mum won’t even miss,” Luke shrugs, grinning.
“Are you serious?” Rani asks.
“Unfortunately, yes.” Clyde smiles. “I get free Sky Plus on the TV in my room because Luke did something random with some wires.” He smacks a hand against Luke’s back. “Which is pretty cool.”
“Will you do that for me?” Rani asks eagerly.
“Of course,” Luke tells her.
They discuss how they’re going to achieve this without letting Rani’s mum find out what they’re up to all the way to school; it takes Rani a long while to notice that Clyde’s hand is still resting between Luke’s shoulders, casual but consistent.
+
After school one Thursday Sarah Jane is out actually chasing up a story. Luke, Clyde and Rani watch bad science-fiction movies and spend time mocking the aliens.
“I think we could face that one down,” Clyde decides, waving his hand at a spider-like creature.
“I’m not good with spiders,” Luke mumbles.
“How would you face down a spider?” Rani asks, raising challenging eyebrows at Clyde.
Clyde shrugs. “I bet Sarah Jane has a giant bug-zapper thing upstairs. Mr Smith could probably make one.”
Luke makes them popcorn; his microwave works twice as fast as a normal microwave, Rani notes. When he gets back, Clyde has stretched out right across the sofa. Luke sets down the bowl of popcorn on the coffee table and, instead of bitching like most people Rani knows, just looks miserably at where he was sitting until Clyde sighs and moves.
“We’re going to have to give you lessons on arguing,” Clyde decides, as Luke sits back down. “It’s something we’ve sadly neglected so far.”
“…Lessons?” Rani is too curious, it’s true; her mum always says she should stop asking people awkward questions. Luckily, Sarah Jane has been pleased to answer the majority of them. Clyde and Luke exchange a significant look.
“You tell her,” Luke murmurs, reaching for popcorn.
“I wasn’t even there,” Clyde says.
“Someone tell me,” Rani insists, curiosity piqued.
“Luke got grown in a lab by aliens,” Clyde shrugs.
There’s silence, but for the screaming of characters on the television. Rani feels inclined to disbelieve them, then notices Luke’s tense body language.
“Oh my God,” she manages. “Are you…”
“I’m human,” Luke insists quickly. “I just got born like this. Two years ago.”
Rani, for once, finds herself utterly speechless.
“Don’t hold it against him,” Clyde tells her, shrugging. “He may not have played with Pokemon cards as a kid, but, you know, he’s not so bad.”
“Thanks,” Luke mutters, and Rani realises that he isn’t being sarcastic.
A few pieces fall into place. I’m not weird, I’m just different. Luke isn’t like everyone else because he doesn’t interact like everyone else. It’s not immediately obvious, but now she wonders why she didn’t notice it before. It explains a lot of things.
“That’s pretty cool,” she admits.
“It is?” Luke’s hopeful eyes remind her a little of a puppy.
“Very cool,” Rani assures him.
“See?” Clyde elbows Luke. “You should be perkier. People actually like you.”
Luke ignores him and reaches for more popcorn, but his lips are curling into a smile.
Fifteen minutes later they’re all engrossed in the movie; in spite of the utterly rubbish aliens the film is actually kind of good. Rani glances over at the boys and notes, not entirely surprised, that Clyde has stretched out across the sofa again, head resting comfortably in Luke’s lap.
She frowns thoughtfully, and decides to work out exactly what’s going on with them.
+
Sarah Jane lets Rani help her out with her ordinary journalism; throwing out tips and hints and anecdotes about researching articles that Rani finds as interesting as the anecdotes about aliens.
“The research is important,” Sarah Jane impresses on her.
Luke is using his laptop on the kitchen table when Rani walks down the stairs.
“What are you up to?” she asks.
“Emailing Maria,” Luke replies. “I’m telling her about that Pathangan ship that crashed here last week.”
“Right.” Rani glances over his shoulder and sees that Luke has written a lot. Like everything else in his life, he clearly takes this seriously. Meticulously writing to Maria; Rani finds herself smiling. Luke is sweet.
Her eyes skip over the email; she sees her own name coming up frequently, but she doesn’t mean to take note of Maria’s email address. She really doesn’t.
Later, her fingers hover uncomfortably over her keyboard. She shouldn’t email Maria; after all, they have very little in common except for the whole saving the world thing. But nonetheless she starts writing and the words pour out. She tells Maria about how amazing the universe is; about the aliens she’s faced, about Sarah Jane and how she knows she still misses her.
Her determination to see that it’s not just her imagination going made makes her add: Clyde and Luke. What’s the story with them?
Rani doesn’t get a reply for a day and spends the whole time obsessing about time differences and whether she’s managed to offend a girl she’s never met but whose shadow she’s still kind of in. But she checks her email before she goes to bed and finds a detailed email from Maria waiting for her. It turns out Maria takes the communications thing as seriously as Luke does; it must be hard for her, all the way in America.
She sounds nice; Rani can already tell she’ll be emailing her back. There are so many people that she can’t talk to that it’s kind of nice to find someone that she can.
At the end of her message, Maria says: Clyde and Luke are easy. They’re dating; they just haven’t noticed it yet. Let me know if they ever figure it out!
Rani thinks that if a girl who lives in Washington now knows all about Clyde and Luke it does seem rather tragic that they haven’t worked it out for themselves yet.
+
They go for ice cream to celebrate sending a nasty group of little blue aliens home in their ship without anyone getting hurt in the process. Apparently, this is a slightly rare occurrence, though Sarah Jane glares at Clyde for mentioning this.
Luke likes vanilla ice cream. Rani isn’t surprised about this either; as far as she’s been able to tell, Luke likes the simple things in life, like he wants to get the hang of them first before it gets complicated.
Clyde has a sundae with brownies and about four flavours and sprinkles and sauces and that is somehow right too.
“You are boring,” Clyde presses.
He and Luke are sat on one side of the table, with Sarah Jane and Rani on the opposite side. The boys are sat eerily close together in that way they always are; Rani finds herself overlooking it now, in the way everyone else seems to. It’s just normal now.
“I’m not boring,” Luke retorts, and eats another mouthful of vanilla.
“You could try other flavours,” Rani offers. She has three kinds of chocolate and hot dark chocolate sauce. She gets the feeling that she’s going to want to be sick when Sarah Jane drives them home, but right now that doesn’t matter.
Luke gets a distinctly adorable uncomfortable expression.
“Here,” Clyde says, loading up his spoon with brownie and what is possibly fudge or toffee ice cream or… something. It looks sticky. “Try these.”
“I’m all right,” Luke replies. “Really.”
“I am not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” Clyde insists. “We’re going to have to have ice cream lessons at this rate.”
Luke rolls his eyes; something he seems to have got the hang of in the last couple of weeks.
“Fine,” he sighs, and lets Clyde feed him an incredibly messy spoonful of ice cream.
Rani has been friends with boys before, and those boys? Did not act like this.
She opens her mouth to just tell them what they apparently still haven’t noticed; but Sarah Jane catches her eye and shakes her head just slightly. There’s a smile on her lips, like she finds this as cute as Rani does.
Rani obediently says nothing, but takes advantage of the boys’ laughter to lean over and steal a brownie from Clyde.
+
They get separated by a race called the Mantaar; each of them has a piece of technology they have to put in different places in the warehouse the Mantaar are using as their base. Rani runs through narrow alien-made corridors until her phone bleeps and tells her where she’s meant to be; Luke did something funny to the mechanism and now it does all sorts of things it’s not meant to but that are pretty cool anyway. He did the same thing to Maria’s before she left; apparently she can now make phonecalls anywhere in the world at a rate of about a penny a minute. Luke is an awesome liability, even though Clyde always claims that some shadowy government agency are going to come take Luke away one night.
(Sarah Jane says she knows a surprisingly large number of people in the shadowy government agencies and so they’ll probably be all right.)
Rani puts her device down on the floor and switches it on; the screeching sounds echoing along the walls tells her the others have done their bit too.
She meets Sarah Jane and Clyde back in the middle of the building, but Luke is nowhere to be found. Sarah Jane pales but Clyde is the one who goes tearing off without any sort of plan, apparently picking a corridor at random and going to look for Luke down it.
“Clyde!”
Rani and Sarah Jane run after him; the corridors are singing with sound and aliens stumble past them, hands clapped to what are presumably their ears. Sarah Jane sends Rani an imploring look, Sonic Lipstick in hand.
“I’ll find them,” Rani promises, leaving Sarah Jane to handle negotiations with the Mantaar leader.
The screaming noise breaks off abruptly, and Rani rounds a corner to find Clyde pulling Luke to his feet.
“Stupid idiot,” he says, voice soft and worried. Luke looks a little woozy, a bruise rising on his temple.
“Sorry,” he manages, body trembling a little, knees beginning to fold. Clyde clenches hands around Luke’s upper arms, keeping him upright.
“You are an idiot,” he insists, and Rani can hear the last traces of real fear in his voice. “Ok?”
“Ok,” Luke agrees weakly.
Rani takes a step back and hides behind the corner when Clyde leans forward and presses his lips to Luke’s. Hard and certain and just once, a quick kiss born of dying adrenalin. Luke doesn’t really even seem to register it, and, as he moves Luke’s arm around his shoulder and starts supporting him down the corridor, neither does Clyde.
+
The bruise is just starting to fade when Rani finally loses her temper. Clyde and Luke have spent the entire last week being themselves. There’s no tension, no awkwardness; just their weird friendship that seems altogether too tactile to just be a normal friendship. Rani knows she’s promised Maria and Sarah Jane and even herself that she won’t point it out to the boys until they’re ready to handle acknowledging it. But she’s driving herself mad with tension that probably exists only in her head.
They’re doing homework in Rani’s living room when she finally cracks. Her mum is out shopping and her dad is staying late at the school, leaving them with the house to themselves.
“What’s the matter, Rani?” Luke asks, apparently noticing that she’s stopped doing algebra and is staring at him and Clyde. The two of them are sitting on the carpet, knees touching, contentedly getting on with their maths. It’s cosy and simple and suddenly Rani wants it to just be like that between them; not all tangled up and unspoken.
“Clyde kissed you,” Rani says helplessly.
Clyde stares at her, eyes wide, apparently unable to speak.
For some reason, Luke doesn’t look up from his algebra. “I don’t remember that,” he murmurs. “Is this going to turn into a joke of some kind?”
Now Clyde is staring at Luke. “You don’t remember?” he asks, sounding a little incredulous.
Luke glances at him. “So… this isn’t going to be a joke?”
“Joke?” Clyde sighs. “Luke, much as it pains me to admit it, I occasionally am serious. I’m working on it, but…”
“I have no idea what’s going on here,” Luke says, carefully and slowly.
Clyde looks at Rani. She raises a significant eyebrow, because now she’s started this she’s kind of determined to have it finished. Clyde nods, turning to Luke, curling a hand under his chin and leaning in to kiss him. Luke makes a small, bewildered sound but doesn’t pull away shrieking.
“I’ll go and get something to drink,” Rani decides, fleeing to the kitchen as Clyde slips his fingers into Luke’s hair.
When she gets back ten minutes later with tea, the boys are doing homework again, sitting with their knees pressed together like nothing at all has changed in the last fifteen minutes.
Rani smiles, sitting back down and passing them both mugs. Maybe nothing really has.