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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But Vancouver is far away.
... write porn?
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The thing that's even more sad is that she'd probably have to fight me for him. (Trin, honey, you know I love you. But the gloves would be off. Unless we could come to some kind of equitable time-share arrangement.)
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There were two guys a while back floating around here a couple of weeks ago who looked freakishly similar to a younger Rodney and John - and a younger Rodney and John in kilts at that - but unfortunately they were Scottish tourists who have long since left.
I think I just need to give it up and move to Canada.
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Although there is a restaurant called Flanagan's on O'Connell Street...
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As I didn't even read your reply before writing my own.
Porn. Yes.
But then again, I am selfish.
I am also living in vain hope of being able to move to Vancouver.
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I am also living in vain hope of being able to move to Vancouver.
Amen, sister. Amen.
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...Maybe I should write an academic AU? Where J&R sex each other as a done-with-papers gift?
Or someone should write it FOR me!
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mmmm. Academic AU! that would be tasty indeed...
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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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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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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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