trinityofone (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
trinityofone) wrote2006-04-03 08:36 pm
trinityofone) wrote2006-04-03 08:36 pm
Oh. Wow.
I just realized: with the three essays I turned in today, I've officially written all the papers I'm ever going to write in college.
*speechless*
So, um. What do you think I should do to celebrate?
*speechless*
So, um. What do you think I should do to celebrate?
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Rodney knows that the only reason he got assigned one of the tiny offices that are crammed into the attic space of the Long Library is because he's a monumental pain in the arse.
By rights, he should be down in the Hamilton with the good little physicists, in a big, bright concrete office where he has all the space he needs, and his students can pester him as much as they want. His tiny little office - all eighteenth century wood and carvings held together with dust and wood lice, four floors and fifteen twisting, turning flights of stairs from ground level, at the other end of campus from his classes - is supposed to be a punishment for him. The administration's less-than-subtle way of saying fuck you to a faculty member they don't like, but can't afford to lose.
It's supposed to be a punishment, but Rodney really doesn't care, hardly even thinks about it. He likes how still it is, how quiet; how the pressure and weight of centuries of books and study and dust have made it so peaceful that he can work easily no matter how many hundreds of tourists are wandering around and gaping with dull-eyed incomprehension two floors below him. He likes how there are no idiotic colleagues around to object to the times when he puts on Shostakovich or Grieg and lies on his back on the bare boards of the floor and listens. He's done some of his best work up here, locked away in this office, fingers of one hand tapping away on his keyboard, fingers of the other snapping away in time to the rhythm and beauty of the numbers and the formulæ in his head, with all the roofs and spires of Dublin spread out in front of him.
Rodney knows it's supposed to be a punishment, and he knows that's supposed to rankle with him, that it should. But he hardly ever thinks about it.
Maybe he does think about it when he first meets the new head of the Manuscripts Library, a man with a shock of dark hair, and a lowly lilting Galway accent, and an office directly opposite his.
Maybe he does think about it the first that John leans just that little bit too close to him, smile just that little bit too open, curve of shoulder and line of his arm just that little bit too much, too fine for Rodney to look at without stammering. Maybe the first time John talks about maths with him.
Maybe he does think about it the time that John slips him a ticket to the recital in the NCH that's been sold out for months, the one that Rodney would sacrifice his hypothetical first-born to see, and smiles a little at him, and says "You wouldn't be doing anything on Saturday, would you?"
He thinks about it the first time he fucks John across his desk. Skin slipping and skidding on old wood, worn cotton rustling across the pages of some Junior Fresh exam Rodney should be correcting. It's slow until it's fast, controlled until Rodney breaks, breath hitching in his chest like he's crying, like he's laughing. He closes his eyes when he fucks John deep, opens his eyes when he comes. He fits one palm to the flushed curve of John's cheek, looks at the way John is looking at him, and then he thinks Really not a punishment at all.
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I WANT TO REMEMBER TRINITY, DUBLIN, ALL OF IRELAND--I WANT TO REMEMBER IT JUST. THIS. WAY.
quytwefrfykgjhg
I love you forever and ever.
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Love the description of the office (I immediately thought: Oh man, can I have that office?) and Rodney seemed so at home there. Lying on the floor listening to Grieg! Oh, Rodney.
And well, you know, John was--was-- *flails*
(Completely off topic from the squee, I've seen "maths" used a lot in this fandom. I'd say "math" or "mathematics", never "maths". Is that a because-I'm-American thing, or have I just strangely never heard it before? Just curious. :) )
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Have you seen the Long Library (http://images.google.ie/images?q=long%20library%20trinity&oe=UTF-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&percentage_served=*:100&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi), BTW? Best. Visuals. Ever., this story.
Re: maths--that's what people in the British Isles call it. I'm really not sure why it's popping up in SGA fandom so much--unless Canadians say it? Do they? Huh.
But in this story it's perfect, 'cause John and Rodney are Irish and John is from GALWAY. *dies*
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Radek comes to visit him in July. It’s only a flying visit, a couple of days snatched between a quantum physics conference in Bern and a lecture tour in America, but it was one Radek was determined to make. It’s four years since he’s seen Rodney, since Rodney handed in his third doctoral thesis and sat impatiently through his last viva, since Rodney got on a plane home because he needed a couple of weeks to ‘think things through’ before he accepted one of the dozens of offers of grants and fellowships and research positions which had been piling up almost since before he took his first undergraduate degree. ‘Thinking things through’ seemed to involve him taking a job at a university (a good one, but not a great one, not enough research funding, Radek knows) in Ireland, buying an apartment, turning down every offer that’s made to him and refusing to return most people’s e-mails.
It causes a couple of murmurs among some of the more perceptive members of the scientific community; especially those who had been around at the time of the explosion (both metaphorical and literal) which occurred when a fifteen-year-old Rodney had published his first paper. It causes Radek to worry; not that he would ever say so to anyone, and not that he would ever say so to Rodney. They know each other too well for that. But this is not the Rodney he’s used to, this Rodney who is content with seemingly so little, who doesn’t seem to want to crack open the universe and see inside the heart of a star and travel through a black hole just for the joy of discovery and the knowledge of truth. This is not the Rodney who would sit up all night to work through equations because he knows, he knows he’s right, and the others are wrong, the Rodney who used a combination of an exotic accent and a bludgeoning manner to charmingly browbeat every department secretary, TA and research fellow at Northeastern into submission.
So he doesn’t say it to Rodney when he arrives that July, but he pays careful attention to what he says, how he says things, watches him out of the corner of his eye when Rodney’s cooking dinner for them in his tiny second floor apartment, or showing him around the university, or cursing at the volume of traffic. He watches him when they’re sitting in a poky little pub in Temple Bar, with Radek feeling mellow on some good whiskey, with Rodney more than half-drunk already. They talk cautiously around different things: the appalling stupidity of Adam Kavanagh’s latest paper in Annalen der Physik; the greater stupidity of whoever peer-reviewed it; life in Ireland, life in America; truncated and carefully edited versions of four years of their lives.
“I’m not going to go back, you know,” Rodney says abruptly, staring into his seventh tumbler of whiskey and water.
Radek says nothing for a moment, takes another sip of Paddy’s, lets it scald his mouth and burn his throat on the way down. “Can’t or won’t?” he says in the end, voice infinitely careful, infinitely soft. He’s known Rodney since the other man was a gangly and wild-haired teenager who’d just stepped off the plane from Ireland; he’s seen him at his best and at his worst, and he knows when to push, and when to pull away.
Rodney’s fingers fiddle for a moment with the beer mat in front of him, tearing it into small shreds, then smaller, before stilling. “It used to be can’t,” he says eventually. “Now it’s won’t.” He looks up at Radek, blue eyes steady, and Radek looks back, nods eventually at what he sees there.
He settles back in his seat, raises his glass, makes himself comfortable, and it’s like the last four years have never happened, except in all the ways that they have. “Tedy,” he says after a minute, with a small grin, “You are not going to tell me?”
Rodney takes a deep breath, rounds his shoulders and clasps his hands in a way that Radek can interpret exactly, for all that Rodney doesn’t know it. “His name is John,” he begins.
Radek listens.
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I'm teary-eyed. This is so sad, and yet so hopeful, too. Something bad happened, just out of view, and I'm not sure what it is but it hurts. Poor Rodney. And yet...he has John (yes) and he has this Radek, who is just wonderful.
[wait, you are HERE]
Anyway, if you are inspired, I would love read more. A novel, really.
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Now I'm seeing him as an undergrad, spending wet Saturdays in long-vanished cafes on Quay Street, drinking downstairs at the Crane later because upstairs is crammed, packed with tourists. Or enjoying one of those perfect May days, sprawled on the grass at the Spanish Arch, tossing scraps to the swans.
You've made me homesick for a town I haven't lived in for 15 years!
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(And you just know that John's father had some tiny little farm somewhere up in the back of beyond, all stone and a thin scatter of soil. Even if the land had been better, it would have been too small to turn much of a profit; Bill Sheppard farmed there til the day he died, but the only things he made his living from were small EU subsidies and smaller government grants.
John knows he should have sold it on when his father passed away. He's lived abroad for years, in Dublin for several; and there are plenty of people who want to build holiday homes in the area now, people who would pay him obscene amounts of money for a ramshackle old cottage and a couple of acres of lands because they think the harshness of the land, the vastness of the sky, is picturesque and pretty.
He doesn't, though. He tells himself it's because of laziness and an opposition to yet more ugly new-build concrete bungalows on a land that's meant for stone and sky and open air; he tells himself that because he doesn't want to admit that it might be because of sentiment.
He doesn't want to admit it to himself, but he brings Rodney there anyway. The drive back is longer than John remembered it, the traffic even worse. Rodney sleeps through most of it, four and a half hours of bad roads and worse drivers, only waking up once they leave Galway City behind them, muttering something about leaving the last vestiges of civilisation behind them. John just grins to himself, enjoying the expression on Rodney's face as the roads they take get narrower and rockier, become lanes, become bohreens, as the landscape gets wider and the sheep get more abundant. "Christ," Rodney says, "I woke up and found myself in Peig, didn't I?"
Rodney's less than impressed with the cottage itself; John admits it could use some work, but at least there's indoor plumbing now, and electricity, and a tv that picks up all four channels (There's only four?), but no, Rodney, there's no broadband, there's no phoneline.
John's rarely seen Rodney speechless, but being mostly cut off from the outside world apparently manages that; it's kind of nice, and he takes advantage of it. He wrestles Rodney into his coat, coaxes him outside, striding off across the fields that John loved as a child and hated as a teenager. The air is clear, wind so cold that it stretches John's smile tight across his face, burns and fills his lungs. The Atlantic is a blue-grey slash in the distance, the ground rocky underneath their feet; and when Rodney catches his foot and stumbles, he grabs John's hand to steady himself, and John doesn't let go.)
Or something. :)
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He wrestles Rodney into his coat, coaxes him outside, striding off across the fields that John loved as a child and hated as a teenager.
I think this is the curse of anyone who grows up in the country (which I did, Siria! Really!): you love it, then you hate it, then you move away and miss it for the rest of your life.
I love this story, every piece.
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Oh noes :(
anyone who grows up in the country (which I did, Siria! Really!)
Hee.
I hope your you-know-what is coming along okay, and that you have a chance at enjoying that big orange thing in the sky that's, you know, warm.
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"Christ," Rodney says, "I woke up and found myself in Peig, didn't I?"
Waaahhahahahaa! Rodney suffering through Irish classes. Sweet suffering Jesus, there's an image.
He'd definitely be a Dub. Northside, somewhere old and middle-class, like Drumcondra or Clontarf. Went to a rugby school on the Southside, maybe Blackrock. The Dart, every morning, past the striped towers and the broad flat strand. And well done, now I'm missing Dublin too!
John has to be from the west somewhere. He's got that mountainy look, like he had a grandfather who had an old overcoat held closed with a bit of string, who'd lift John up to sit on the top bar of the gate and lean in beside him to watch the new calves in spring.
a tv that picks up all four channels (There's only four?)
Stop stop stop. Now I'm wondering if John watches TG4, knows all the announcers' families. And Rodney groans every time he turns it on, but secretly enjoys Ros na Rún. And ok, the rugby on Saturdays.
*heads to the Aer Lingus website*
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I know it's bad form to laugh at your own stuff, but I swear, the thoughts of Rodney learning Irish - and probably being taught by some ancient harridan of a Sr Concepta or a Sr Majella - made me giggle so much to myself I started hiccuping in the library. He would just bitch so much about declensions and an Modh Coinníollach; but he'd secretly love it because he could use it to insult foreigners on those rare occasions when he didn't want them to know exactly what he was saying. (Good for note taking, too; because while Kavanagh was forever going on about his Irish heritage, all he could do was mispronounce sláinte; Rodney delights in ostentatiously leaving research notes around the labs, where he knows Kavanagh would steal them if he could just understand what they meant)
He'd definitely be a Dub. Northside, somewhere old and middle-class, like Drumcondra or Clontarf. Went to a rugby school on the Southside, maybe Blackrock.
Oh lord. That's so amusing. He'd have the entitlement thing, definitely; I'm just trying to imagine him in one of the rugby schools with the rest of the D4 crowd. That's too funny.
Now I'm wondering if John watches TG4, knows all the announcers' families. And Rodney groans every time he turns it on, but secretly enjoys Ros na Rún.
John probably does; I'm sure deep down, he's still a bit of a Gaeilgeoir. And I have a deep suspicion that Rodney knows every plot twist and character relationship that's ever happened on Ros na Rún. He's probably even got a bit of a sick thing for Fair City; but then again, we can't expect him to have standards in everything. ;)