Fic: Office Hours 1/3
May. 15th, 2006 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneWell, there's good news and bad news. The good news (I suppose) is that hey! This is the academic AU I was talking about! The bad news is, it's only half of it (divided into two posts because LJ is mean). The challenge deadline is today, so I have to post, and while I'm sorry I can't have the whole thing for you, what I do have is 11,000 words, so it's quite a big chunk. And hopefully posting this will inspire me to get the rest done soon.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy what there is.
Title: Office Hours
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Category: AU
Length: ~11,000 words
Summary: Professor John Sheppard had a gift: by the end of the first class, he could always tell exactly who that semester’s troublemaker was going to be.
A/N: Written for the Cuff ‘Em, Vamp ‘Em, or Just Make ‘Em Come Already Kink and Cliché Challenge. My prompt was Power Issues (Teacher/Student Pairings).
A/N2: Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
siriaeve and megolas for betaing and reminding me to write, dammit! Also, thank you to cathexys for additional help and suggestions.
Banner bysiriaeve
Office Hours (Part I)
John Sheppard had a gift. “A genetic thing,” said his friend Elizabeth, laughing and raising an eyebrow: he could always tell, by the end of the first class, exactly who that semester’s troublemaker was going to be.
John surveyed the cramped room he’d been assigned as his students filed—shuffled and slumped—in, untangling the sets of headphones trailing from their iPods and stuffing their backpacks under the desks. He had fifteen people registered for this seminar; and as singly, in groups and in pairs, they flopped down in the row of chairs arranged in a half-circle against the back wall, he felt the first rise of claustrophobia. He went over to the far wall and heaved up the big, heavy window, letting in a slightly sharp January breeze.
“Okay,” he said, once it was well and truly ten past the hour. He sat down in his chair, which tilted back, emitting an obnoxious groan, and picked up his roll sheet. “Paul Abrams?”
A mop of curly brown hair mumbled, “Here.”
“Carson Beckett?”
A boy wearing a truly hideous wool sweater that looked like something a doting aunt might have knitted him said “Present!” anxiously.
John made another checkmark. “Katie Brown?”
“Here,” and John almost put the check in the wrong box, distracted as he was by the giant fake daisy the girl had dangling off the end of her pen.
“Laura Cadman?”
“Here”—forceful voice and intense moment of eye contact; And we have our first contestant, ladies and gentlemen, John thought. The girl was classic Berkeleyan: knit bag pooled at her feet, stack of violently pink pamphlets under her binder, even a red beret perched jauntily on her blonde head. John made another kind of note, one that didn’t go down on paper.
“Charles Campbell?”
“Chuck,” the boy corrected pleasantly. John did write that down, though he likewise didn’t need to. It was another gift he had: he learned his students’ names on the first day and he never forgot them. Never.
“Aiden Ford?”
“Here, sir.”
John shifted forward, his chair squeaking some more. “Um. Professor Sheppard is fine. John, actually,” he said, trying to give them all an encouraging grin. “You can all call me John.” A lot of people went in for that here.
Not, apparently, Aiden Ford. He pulled his baseball cap down more firmly on his head, for a moment looking as uncomfortable as John felt.
“Uh,” he said, moving on, “Brendan Gall?”
A pasty, round-faced boy with a Marvin the Paranoid Android pin stuck to his jacket’s lapel. John didn’t expect a problem; he expected a lot of Star Trek references. “Here.”
“Peter Grodin?”
“Present.” Slight trace of an accent, Adidas tracksuit, hand clutched protectively around a Strada takeaway cup—John would be willing to bet fifty bucks this kid lived in I-House. He made a check.
“Patrick Kavanagh?” John said, and blinked. “Are you named after the—”
“Yes,” snapped a boy with a greasy black ponytail and a pair of glasses he pushed sharply up his nose. “Yes, yes I am, and wow, I think you must be the very first person to ask me that.”
Okay... So Cadman had some competition.
Moving swiftly on... “Miko Kusanagi?”
“Here.” Barely a whisper. John was going to have his work cut out for him, getting her to talk.
“Nick Lorne?”
“Here.” Dry voice, bellied by an almost-friendly grin. The guy was wearing a frat jacket, though. That made John slightly nervous.
“Rodney McKay?”
“Yes.” Skinny blond, almost cherubic-looking. Probably the class peacemaker, the one who would agree with what everyone was saying, even if the two opinions directly contradicted one another. John bit back a sigh.
“David Parrish?”
Another skinny kid, this one barely glancing up from the little black notebook in which he was scribbling to mutter a distracted, “Here.” Poetry, probably, John thought. Bad poetry.
“Leonard Shelmerdine?”
“Here.”
Thank God, John was getting seriously bored. “Jeanette Simpson?”
“Here,” said yet another blonde girl, flicking her hair and glaring at him like it was his fault her name happened to fall toward the end of the alphabet.
“Okay, good,” John said. “So I think that’s—wait, I’m sorry,” he said, noticing a scraggly-haired guy whose beard was scraping the desk. “I don’t think you’re on my list. What’s your name?”
The guy blinked, like he was just registering that there were other people in the room. “Halling—wait, is this Soc 118?”
John bit his lip and somehow refrained from slamming the blackboard where he had written ENGLISH 150/12 - WESTERN LITERATURE in big, block capital letters. “No.”
“Sorry, dude,” the guy said, picked up his stuff, and left.
“All right,” John said, “now that we have that out of the way—” and launched into his familiar speech about how he was Professor Sheppard, and this was their Senior Seminar, and the topic was Western Literature (“Western like Western United States, not Western World”), and yes, they really did have to write a twenty page paper, and no, not in Comic Sans Bold with two-inch margins.
He handed out the syllabus. There were hmms and groans and at least one snort. He answered the usual questions—“Why is this on the syllabus? Why isn’t this? East of Eden—isn’t that really long? I already checked with the student store, and they said they didn’t have— Why aren’t there more women/African American/Chicano/Native American/Swedish authors on the course? Are we going to watch the movie of that?”
“No,” John said tiredly, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “But if we have some extra time, I thought maybe we could watch Blade Runner—”
“International or Director’s Cut?” asked Gall, and right then, John decided that he wasn’t going to lecture for the remaining fifteen minutes; he needed a cup of coffee and some time to check his e-mail, and he needed them now.
“Any other questions, you guys can come see me in office hours, which are upstairs in room 428, half an hour after this class both Tuesdays and Thursdays. Okay? Okay, I’m going to let you go early—” And thank God, most of them took that in the spirit it was intended, and happily fled the room.
John fled, too, racing across Sproul Plaza to C’est Café, then racing back again, hot coffee coming perilously close to sloshing all over his hand. He jogged up Wheeler Hall’s broad, thick stairs to his office because it was pretty much the only exercise he ever got. When he reached the fourth floor, the building’s dramatic high ceilings abruptly compressed, and John (suppressing, as always, the urge to duck his head) walked swiftly around the corner to his small, garret-like office. Kavanagh was already waiting outside his door. So much for e-mail. Great.
“Patrick. Hi,” John said, smiling stiffly. He unlocked the door and ushered him inside. “What can I do for you?”
Kavanagh opened his backpack and produced the syllabus. John saw that copious notes had already been scribbled all over it in bright red pen.
“There are some points I would like to discuss...”
Fifteen minutes later, John had managed to work his cell phone out of his pocket while still continuing a stream of steady, understanding nods in Kavanagh’s direction. Holding the phone under his desk, he tapped out a hurried message to Elizabeth. Call me--please--emergency!
When the phone rang, he almost shouted in relief. “Hello?” he said, in his best surprised voice. “Nice, John, very nice,” he heard her murmur. “Professor Weir!” he continued, shooting Kavanagh an apologetic look. “Oh, no—really? Well, I'm meeting with a student, can’t it—An emergency? Well, of course, if the Chancellor—”
He put a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and turned to Kavanagh, standing. “I’m so sorry, but something’s come up. Feel free to e-mail me or come back on Thursday—”
“Thursday isn’t good for me,” Kavanagh said, pissily.
“It isn’t?” said John. He tried to look sincere. “That’s too bad.”
He had his satchel, he was halfway out the door. As he stepped out into the hallway, practically herding Kavanagh in front of him, he saw the cherubic blond, McKay, push himself off the opposite wall where he’d been leaning. “Professor—” he said.
“I’m sorry!” John said, gesturing at the phone. “You can e-mail or come back Thursday—”
“Thursday?” said McKay.
“Thursday,” promised John, trying to keep the note of defeat out of his voice. He ducked past Kavanagh, who had made the mistake of choosing to wait for the painfully slow elevator, and practically flew down the stairs. One class down, he thought, as he made his escape, only a couple dozen more to go.
And if he was really lucky, his bicycle would still be where he’d left it that morning.
“More wine?” Elizabeth asked, and John gratefully held out his glass for a refill.
“Come now,” said Radek, Elizabeth’s boyfriend, “it cannot have been that bad. After all, you did not have someone electrocute himself on first day.”
Radek taught in EECS. “No,” John admitted. “We have sadly little electrocution in the English Department.”
“Could have an endless stream of ‘freedom fries’ jokes,” said Ronon, Elizabeth’s other boyfriend. He taught French. “Those just get funnier and funnier.”
John tried to offer Ronon a sympathetic expression. On TV, Jack Bauer proceeded to beat the crap out of some guy in a turban.
“A toast,” said Elizabeth, holding up her own glass. She had carefully explained to him the origin of the wine, and John had tried to listen. “To another semester of learning with Berkeley’s best and brightest.”
John thought that maybe she was being sarcastic. Or maybe she wasn’t being sarcastic. He wasn’t sure.
“I will raise my glass to that,” said Radek.
“Que Dieu nous vienne en aide,” Ronon said.
They all looked to John.
He toasted, too, because they all were.
Later, as he was leaving, Radek noticed that his bike’s back tire was out of alignment. John listened to him and Ronon quietly bicker over how best to fix it, trying not to think too hard about the things they bickered over behind closed doors. He was standing on the stoop, just outside the little circle of light where Radek and Ronon knelt, when Elizabeth came up behind him. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He rolled his shoulders. The wine, the slope of the path—Elizabeth’s house was set, somewhat delicately, into the El Cerrito hills—made him feel slightly unsteady on his feet.
“I’m fine,” he said. Tilting his chin forward, his hands in his pockets. “A little worried about getting my bike back in one piece.”
“You have a car,” Elizabeth said.
He did. A chunky white Volvo that he hated, but that had been cheap, that had been practical. “I thought you said you’d start using it more at night. It’s safer.”
“Sorry,” said John. “Next time.”
The bike did glide better when Radek handed it back to him. He turned his back on the warm glow of Elizabeth’s window and coasted down Colusa Avenue. He felt his heart rise in his chest as he picked up speed. His thighs squeezed tight to the bicycle’s metal frame. Then gently—gently, gently, gently—his hands lifted off the handlebars. Arms up and open, he slid on into the darkness.
In class on Thursday, there were fourteen students instead of fifteen.
John made a quick mental rundown. “Where’s Abrams?”
“He dropped,” said Gall.
“Okay,” said John, flatly. He knew he shouldn’t care, but he had an odd tendency to take that sort of thing personally.
It had been two days since the last class, and he’d known better than to expect them to actually read anything in that short span of time, so he lectured a little about Mark Twain and Roughing It and the developing myth of the West. He was doing fine until an almost knee-jerk “Any questions?” slipped out.
Kavanagh had several. He’d clearly already read Roughing It, which John appreciated, but he seemed to disagree with everything John had said, and for that matter, with John, in general. John opened his mouth to thank him for his contribution the moment he paused, but Cadman was quicker on the draw, darting into the fray and somehow finding a way to disagree with both Kavanagh and John, and possibly with Twain as well. John bit his lip; in their minds, he was clearly extraneous. If they had their way, they’d be the ones teaching the class.
That didn’t sound so bad, actually.
They were still arguing when the hour ended; Cadman had even started gesturing angrily, nearly striking Beckett, who’d been unfortunate enough to sit next to her, in the face. John rubbed the back of his neck and raised his voice. “Please finish Roughing It for Tuesday, so you’ll also be able to contribute to this discussion...” The class filed out, none of them looking particularly enthused at this prospect.
Rejoicing in the fact that Kavanagh (last seen still arguing with Cadman as they made their way across Sproul Plaza) had said Thursdays weren’t good for him, John went to Café Milano and got himself a cup of coffee and a slice of black forest cake. Wanting to avoid the teaming mass of bodies, booths, and leaflet-thrusters that was Sproul, he took a somewhat roundabout route back to Wheeler, scrambling down a muddy bank and hopping stone-to-stone across one of the wider stretches of Strawberry Creek. A couple of students looked at him oddly when he emerged from the bushes, but he brushed the leaves off his jacket with dignity and trotted up the steps. Four flights, just the slightest burn in his chest. It felt good.
It wasn’t until he’d turned the corner that he saw that his office door was open—that he realized that he’d left it open. And someone was inside. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle: knowing his luck, Kavanagh had managed to rearrange his schedule.
But it wasn’t Kavanagh. It was McKay: leaning on a shelf, balanced on elbow and skinny hip, a slim volume of Yeats, obviously snatched from John’s own shelves, splayed open between delicate fingers. He looked like such a moppet, but when he glanced up, his eyes were wide and blue and startlingly adult.
John didn’t want to spill his coffee, so he set it down on the desk.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, although his office hours didn’t start for another ten minutes.
It wouldn’t matter. McKay had already made himself at home.
He sat down before John could offer, sprawling in the seat, hands held ponderously above his chest, all sharp angles and prominently-boned wrists. John moved awkwardly around to the other side of the desk and sat down, looking up and trying to appear interested. “There’s something I want to discuss with you,” McKay said.
John sighed; it was only the first week. “Sorry,” he said, “but twenty pages is the department’s requirement, not—”
McKay laughed. “Twenty pages? Please. I could write that in my sleep. I’m not here to talk about requirements, Professor.” He leaned forward, licking his lips; John took a hasty sip of coffee. “I’m here to discuss Mulciber Rising.”
John choked. “You read my novel?” No one had read his novel.
“Of course,” said McKay. “I don’t enroll in a class without a reason.”
Funny; John taught it without one. “You enrolled in the class because you read my novel?” he asked. His voice sounded like an echo to his own ears: and McKay was watching him.
“I thought you had something to say,” he said, and John swallowed, not liking that somehow. The past tense, had.
“Well, thank you,” he said anyway, politely. “I hope so.”
He waited for McKay to say something else. He thought it was his turn, even though John was suddenly the one with a thousand questions: Where did you find it? How did you even hear about it? You read it, really? And: You liked it? Why? Was there something there that I did, that I did right?
But that was stupid; there was nothing there; and anyway, who was he, this kid who’d probably been able to drink legally for less than a year, to tell him?
“What I want to know is,” McKay said, fingers touching down on the edge of the desk, “why haven’t you written anything else?”
His face was perfectly guileless, but his words hit John like punch. He felt his chest tighten, that horrible, black anger rising up, but with effort he forced it down. Breathe, breathe. “I’ve had other projects,” he said mildly. “And I’m not in favor of writing something just to have written it.”
McKay’s lip twitched, and John had a horrible moment of thinking that he had failed, that he wasn’t fooling him. But that was silly: John wasn’t trying to fool anyone. What did he have to fool them about?
“Why did you write Mulciber?” McKay asked.
Because he couldn’t not. He’d been young, not much older than McKay, probably, and he’d been bursting with it, ideas and characters and their lives, their world. And he thought he’d safely delivered them into his world, the real world, but clearly they hadn’t held the same life in anyone else’s eyes. His book hadn’t flopped: that was too dramatic, too public a term—it involved making some sort of splash in the first place. No, John’s book, the people he had created: they had simply disappeared, fallen off the radar, and that was that, wasn’t it? He had failed; he was a failure.
But very quiet about it, still: and life went on.
“There was a story I wanted to tell,” he said, and shrugged, like it was no big deal, like he still felt stories flowing all around him. Like he still had the courage to try to tell them.
McKay looked like he had a lot to say: his whole body was thrumming with it, energy and youth and a sense of endless possibility. His lips parted, and John noticed that they were crooked. Not peacekeeper’s lips.
“Did you have any other questions?” John asked hastily. “About the course?”
One last flicker of those eyes, then McKay was standing. “No,” he said. “See you Tuesday.”
“Tuesday,” John echoed.
It had to be better than Thursday. He’d never really gotten the hang of Thursdays.
Tuesday, Cadman and Kavanagh launched right back into their argument like they had never left off, with the special addition of Simpson butting in to inquire why they couldn’t interrogate the text from a feminist perspective. John knew he should step in, try to get some of the other people in the class to talk—or even a chance to—but, well. It was a discussion class. At least they were discussing. Better this than uncomfortable, pin-drop silence, and him prodding at them like Ben Stein. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
He pinched the bridge of his nose. He had another headache. His students’ voices were like a dull buzz, a throb that pushed insistently at the back of his brain. He could drown it out, though—he had learned to. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, McKay was staring at him. When he caught John’s eye, he smirked.
“Wow,” he said suddenly, cutting through whatever it was Kavanagh was still saying. It was startling: not just because of the volume and clarity of McKay’s voice, but because John was pretty sure that it was still only the second word he had spoken in class. A dozen pairs of eyes turned to stare at him, and he grinned, folding skinny arms over scrawny chest and leaning back in the chair. “You are all incredibly, astoundingly wrong.”
Parrish stopped scribbling in his notebook. Shelmerdine awoke from his doze. Simpson huffed, Kavanagh said, “Excuse me?” and Cadman leaned in close. “We’re discussing literature,” she said. “There is no right and wrong, only interpretations.”
McKay’s chin tilted up, calmly defiant. “There is no one right answer, I’ll grant you that. But there are plenty of blatantly wrong ones, and you’re all displaying an impressive array of them today.” He turned to Kavanagh. “You don’t seriously think that Twain was trying to make some deep statement about post-colonialism, do you? Or about feminism? Please. He was trying to be funny. I know senses of humor are thin on the ground at this university, but could we cut the crap already? You might actually learn something.”
At this point John knew he was supposed to say, Settle down, please and Let’s not make this personal and Thank you, Rodney, but let’s remember that Patrick’s opinions are equally valid...
He said nothing. He stared.
John was oddly out of breath when he reached the top of the stairs, and his chest stayed tight as he rounded the corner. The hallway outside his office was empty, and his door securely locked. Well. That was a relief.
Clearing away some space on his desk, he found the piece of black forest cake he had bought the week before. The frosting had melted all over the plastic container and the cake itself was rock hard. He picked it up and tossed it into the trash, where it clunked against the metal can and a half-empty bottle of Coke that he’d let go flat. The frosting had seeped onto a yellow legal pad on which he’d made some notes; it was only one corner that was a little crusty, but John held the notepad up for a second before chucking it in the bin, too.
He sat down behind his desk and sipped his coffee while his computer booted up. There was an uncapped pen sitting on the edge of his engagement calendar, dotting the page with red; John scribbled a bit across the corner of the page, checking to see if the pen still had ink. It did. He started drawing something that was maybe a tree.
“Working hard?”
John started, the pen skittering out of his hand. McKay was standing at the other side of his desk, backpack slung low over his bony shoulders. “Oh,” John said. “I didn’t hear you knock.”
“I didn’t,” said McKay. He sat down.
John blinked at him. His tie felt tight and awkward; he was sure it was crooked.
“So,” McKay said. “You have a class of pretentious morons. Are you going to do anything about that?”
“Do?” said John, thinking, Does he speak to everyone this way?
He suspected that he knew the answer. “Yeah,” McKay said. “Something to shake them up a bit. It’s their last semester; they’re going to be going out into the world soon, convinced that their ridiculous theories and skewed points of view actually have some bearing on how things actually work.”
John wasn’t sure if McKay was refreshing or just incredibly naïve. Probably both.
“Have you read the latest New Criterion?” John asked. Because Kavanagh’s little theory would have been right at home there, he didn’t add.
McKay waved the implication away. “Yes, but only because I’m apparently a masochist.” He paused, blond hair sliding into his eyes as he dug through his backpack. “This one wasn’t entirely migraine-inducing, however,” he said, and tossed a paperclipped photocopy of an article from the Tolstoy Studies Journal onto the desk.
John thumbed the edge. He recognized it. He’d gotten two free copies. He still had them, in a file folder; he’d decided at the last minute not to send one to his father.
“You read my paper,” he said, in a tone that was hard for even him to read.
“I like to do my research,” McKay said, somehow smug without being braggy. “Besides, War and Peace has always been a very significant novel for me.”
John felt the same flush of excitement he always did when someone else mentioned it, a pathetic rush of hope that someone else would have seen it and loved it as he did. That had been at the heart of the article in front of him; it had been one of the driving forces behind his dissertation, too. When he had the energy, he occasionally tried to sneak it onto the syllabus for one of his seminars. “How so?” he asked, levelly.
“Well,” said McKay, “Tolstoy is the reason I’m an English major, really.” John’s shoulders straightened. “I read War and Peace when I was nine. I was always bored in school and my teacher gave it to me, obviously thinking that it would keep me occupied for a while. Idiot,” he said, smiling almost fondly.
John found he was smiling, too.
“I read it all in a rush, five days, completely caught up: hiding it under the dinner table and everything. The house I grew up in, it had a screened-in back porch, and I used to read out there sometimes. That’s where I was when I finished it, curled up in this ridiculous wicker chair. Early afternoon, the sun just slanting down. I finished and I set the book down, and I just...stared. And—”
John’s lips formed the word unconsciously: And...
“And I thought,” said McKay, clever curve of lips, “I can totally do better.”
John didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he said, “Right.” He looked hopefully (pointedly) toward the door.
McKay, unsurprisingly, did not take the hint. Instead he leaned forward, pressing close against the desk. John did not start back; he did not lean forward, either. His spine was rigid.
“Professor Sheppard,” McKay said, “have you ever thought about how you would rewrite the world?”
The thought did pass through, but John had found the answer to his earlier question, and it chased all other speculation away. Naïve. Definitely, painfully naïve.
John remembered that, though he was trying hard to forget.
Elizabeth looked at him disapprovingly as he packed the chunk of the cake Ronon had baked and Elizabeth had insisted John wrap up and take with him into his satchel. “I thought you said you’d drive,” she said.
“Next time,” he promised.
He could feel the Tupperware container biting into his back as he bent over to secure his bike outside his apartment building, and again as he jogged up the stairs. He dropped his satchel on the chair inside the door, went into the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of orange juice. Standing at the counter, he loosened, then undid, his tie, letting it curve over the slope of his neck. The top few buttons of his shirt followed, undone by the twistings of his thumb.
There were still several sips of juice left in his glass, but he left it on the counter and went back into the living room. Jogging the mouse, he brought his computer back to life. His latest game of Klondike was taking up the top corner of the screen. He played, lost, and closed the window. He opened Word.
Twenty minutes later, he closed it again with an emphatic click. He stripped off his shirt, jacket, pants, and stepped under the hot shower spray. Rough pinpricks on the back of his neck; he leaned against the tile, forehead to wrist, and jerked off mechanically. He washed his hair.
Dry again and dressed in a t-shirt and a fresh pair of boxers, he crawled into bed. He flipped between Leno and Letterman for a while and then went to sleep.
McKay was waiting outside his office, sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out in front of him, and one knee drawn up. There was a book propped on it; when McKay stood, blue eyes flashing up, John saw that it was The Portrait of a Lady.
“You know,” said John, unlocking the door, “office hours aren’t mandatory.”
“Am I taking up your valuable time?” McKay asked, the question teetering on the edge of sarcastic.
Yes, John thought, almost said. Would have: only the lie of it struck him suddenly, what little difference it made whether McKay left or stayed. If he stayed, at least John was less likely to have to field questions from Kavanagh, or assure Brown that four months was plenty of time to write twenty pages, really. And if anybody came by, at least it would look like he was being productive.
He started to gesture to the chair, but McKay had already sat in it.
“Do you like Henry James?” he asked, looking up, tracking John as he moved around the desk and began unpacking his satchel. John made an noncommittal noise, coupled with a noncommittal roll of his shoulders. “Be honest.”
John paused, his hand coming up against an unfamiliar object. “No,” he admitted.
“Hmm,” said McKay, tapping the book on his thigh. Then he said, “Is that cake?”
It was. Still sealed tight in Elizabeth’s Tupperware container. John had forgotten all about it.
“You want it?” John asked, not thinking: McKay’s eyes lit up, and it was like all the stray animals his father had always told him not to feed. Now he’d never get rid of him.
Too late, John thought, but he felt less grim than he’d imagined, pushing the container across the desk. “I don’t have a fork,” he said, but McKay didn’t seem to mind: he pried the lid off and dug in, long fingers scooping up crumbs and carefully guiding a chunk of cake into his mouth. “Why don’t you like James?” he asked, mouth full, licking chocolate off his fingers. Precise motions, strangely captivating.
John was once again struck by how young McKay looked—how young he was, and really, this shouldn’t be a surprise, as all of John’s students were young. But McKay, oddly unnerving or just odd, had the capacity to make John forget. To confuse him until John was no longer sure how to control their interaction.
“Why don’t you like Tolstoy?” he asked.
McKay frowned, gesturing with a fingerful of cake. “I do like Tolstoy,” he said.
“That’s not what you said before.”
Eyeroll. “I said I could do better; that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate some of what he did. Don’t jump to conclusions, Professor.”
John could pull faces as well as anybody. “Thanks for the advice. Why are you here?”
It was an unusually blunt question, for him. But unless he wanted to permanently put his name down for twice a week snacktime with Rodney McKay, he had to—
“I’m writing a novel,” McKay said, finger sliding clean and chocolate-free out of his mouth. Crap, John thought, bracing himself for the inevitable, Will you read it/edit it/give me your honest opinion as long as it’s unreservedly positive? But McKay just said, “That was good cake, did you bake it?”
“No,” said John, abstractedly; he was trying to figure out if McKay was purposefully directing the conversation so as to keep him off-balanced, or if he simply lacked even the most basic social skills.
“It’s homemade,” McKay pressed—clearly, he was an expert.
“My friend—well, my friend’s boyfriend made it.” John himself still had a hard time picturing Ronon baking; he didn’t relish the prospect of being drafted to ask him for a recipe or—
McKay snapped his fingers. “Ralph Touchett,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
The fingers rotated forward, pointing at John’s chest. “You remind me of Ralph Touchett.”
John blinked. “I remind you of an anti-social, consumptive Henry James character with homosexual tendencies and an incestuous crush on his cousin?”
“Hands in your pockets,” McKay said, and John, damnably, jerked them out, catching the left on the liner of his blazer.
John scowled. “What’s your point?”
“No point,” McKay said, leaning back. “I’m trying to make a closer study of human behavior; like James, who revolutionized the internal monologue—imperfectly, yes, but he opened up his characters’ minds and displayed them on the page.”
“And you’re going to do him one better,” John said, dryly.
McKay inclined his head. “Of course.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“Not really. I’ve been observing the other students in class. And you.”
“And what have you discovered?” John asked: clearly inquiring, he thought, about the other students. About the origin of Beckett’s sweaters, and Brown’s pen, and Cadman’s leaflets; about what made Kavanagh so tightly wound, and Kusanagi so quiet, and Lorne so closed off for someone with such a friendly grin. But McKay looked him straight eye and said:
“You’re even less pleased to be there, in class, than we are. You have to work to breathe without sighing. Your chest feels perpetually tight. You think most of the rules and the bureaucratic part of your job are stupid, but you have a deep traditionalist streak; you cling to it. That’s what—that’s what I sincerely hope—that bowtie is all about. You ride to campus without a helmet. You keep your hands in your pockets to hide how often they’re fists.”
He was wrong of course, John thought, swallowing through the tightness. His hands weren’t fists; they were open, gripping the edge of the desk.
“And you’ve stopped writing,” McKay continued. “That’s what I can’t figure out. Why would you stop writing?”
John didn’t say anything; he didn’t trust himself. McKay’s eyes flickered over him, mouth downturned and genuinely confused. Then his gaze sharpened, focused.
He pointed at John’s coffee cup, untouched at his side. “Are you going to drink that?”
Continued in Part II
Anyway, I hope you enjoy what there is.
Title: Office Hours
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Category: AU
Length: ~11,000 words
Summary: Professor John Sheppard had a gift: by the end of the first class, he could always tell exactly who that semester’s troublemaker was going to be.
A/N: Written for the Cuff ‘Em, Vamp ‘Em, or Just Make ‘Em Come Already Kink and Cliché Challenge. My prompt was Power Issues (Teacher/Student Pairings).
A/N2: Many thanks to
siriaeve and megolas for betaing and reminding me to write, dammit! Also, thank you to cathexys for additional help and suggestions.Banner by
siriaeveOffice Hours (Part I)
John Sheppard had a gift. “A genetic thing,” said his friend Elizabeth, laughing and raising an eyebrow: he could always tell, by the end of the first class, exactly who that semester’s troublemaker was going to be.
John surveyed the cramped room he’d been assigned as his students filed—shuffled and slumped—in, untangling the sets of headphones trailing from their iPods and stuffing their backpacks under the desks. He had fifteen people registered for this seminar; and as singly, in groups and in pairs, they flopped down in the row of chairs arranged in a half-circle against the back wall, he felt the first rise of claustrophobia. He went over to the far wall and heaved up the big, heavy window, letting in a slightly sharp January breeze.
“Okay,” he said, once it was well and truly ten past the hour. He sat down in his chair, which tilted back, emitting an obnoxious groan, and picked up his roll sheet. “Paul Abrams?”
A mop of curly brown hair mumbled, “Here.”
“Carson Beckett?”
A boy wearing a truly hideous wool sweater that looked like something a doting aunt might have knitted him said “Present!” anxiously.
John made another checkmark. “Katie Brown?”
“Here,” and John almost put the check in the wrong box, distracted as he was by the giant fake daisy the girl had dangling off the end of her pen.
“Laura Cadman?”
“Here”—forceful voice and intense moment of eye contact; And we have our first contestant, ladies and gentlemen, John thought. The girl was classic Berkeleyan: knit bag pooled at her feet, stack of violently pink pamphlets under her binder, even a red beret perched jauntily on her blonde head. John made another kind of note, one that didn’t go down on paper.
“Charles Campbell?”
“Chuck,” the boy corrected pleasantly. John did write that down, though he likewise didn’t need to. It was another gift he had: he learned his students’ names on the first day and he never forgot them. Never.
“Aiden Ford?”
“Here, sir.”
John shifted forward, his chair squeaking some more. “Um. Professor Sheppard is fine. John, actually,” he said, trying to give them all an encouraging grin. “You can all call me John.” A lot of people went in for that here.
Not, apparently, Aiden Ford. He pulled his baseball cap down more firmly on his head, for a moment looking as uncomfortable as John felt.
“Uh,” he said, moving on, “Brendan Gall?”
A pasty, round-faced boy with a Marvin the Paranoid Android pin stuck to his jacket’s lapel. John didn’t expect a problem; he expected a lot of Star Trek references. “Here.”
“Peter Grodin?”
“Present.” Slight trace of an accent, Adidas tracksuit, hand clutched protectively around a Strada takeaway cup—John would be willing to bet fifty bucks this kid lived in I-House. He made a check.
“Patrick Kavanagh?” John said, and blinked. “Are you named after the—”
“Yes,” snapped a boy with a greasy black ponytail and a pair of glasses he pushed sharply up his nose. “Yes, yes I am, and wow, I think you must be the very first person to ask me that.”
Okay... So Cadman had some competition.
Moving swiftly on... “Miko Kusanagi?”
“Here.” Barely a whisper. John was going to have his work cut out for him, getting her to talk.
“Nick Lorne?”
“Here.” Dry voice, bellied by an almost-friendly grin. The guy was wearing a frat jacket, though. That made John slightly nervous.
“Rodney McKay?”
“Yes.” Skinny blond, almost cherubic-looking. Probably the class peacemaker, the one who would agree with what everyone was saying, even if the two opinions directly contradicted one another. John bit back a sigh.
“David Parrish?”
Another skinny kid, this one barely glancing up from the little black notebook in which he was scribbling to mutter a distracted, “Here.” Poetry, probably, John thought. Bad poetry.
“Leonard Shelmerdine?”
“Here.”
Thank God, John was getting seriously bored. “Jeanette Simpson?”
“Here,” said yet another blonde girl, flicking her hair and glaring at him like it was his fault her name happened to fall toward the end of the alphabet.
“Okay, good,” John said. “So I think that’s—wait, I’m sorry,” he said, noticing a scraggly-haired guy whose beard was scraping the desk. “I don’t think you’re on my list. What’s your name?”
The guy blinked, like he was just registering that there were other people in the room. “Halling—wait, is this Soc 118?”
John bit his lip and somehow refrained from slamming the blackboard where he had written ENGLISH 150/12 - WESTERN LITERATURE in big, block capital letters. “No.”
“Sorry, dude,” the guy said, picked up his stuff, and left.
“All right,” John said, “now that we have that out of the way—” and launched into his familiar speech about how he was Professor Sheppard, and this was their Senior Seminar, and the topic was Western Literature (“Western like Western United States, not Western World”), and yes, they really did have to write a twenty page paper, and no, not in Comic Sans Bold with two-inch margins.
He handed out the syllabus. There were hmms and groans and at least one snort. He answered the usual questions—“Why is this on the syllabus? Why isn’t this? East of Eden—isn’t that really long? I already checked with the student store, and they said they didn’t have— Why aren’t there more women/African American/Chicano/Native American/Swedish authors on the course? Are we going to watch the movie of that?”
“No,” John said tiredly, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “But if we have some extra time, I thought maybe we could watch Blade Runner—”
“International or Director’s Cut?” asked Gall, and right then, John decided that he wasn’t going to lecture for the remaining fifteen minutes; he needed a cup of coffee and some time to check his e-mail, and he needed them now.
“Any other questions, you guys can come see me in office hours, which are upstairs in room 428, half an hour after this class both Tuesdays and Thursdays. Okay? Okay, I’m going to let you go early—” And thank God, most of them took that in the spirit it was intended, and happily fled the room.
John fled, too, racing across Sproul Plaza to C’est Café, then racing back again, hot coffee coming perilously close to sloshing all over his hand. He jogged up Wheeler Hall’s broad, thick stairs to his office because it was pretty much the only exercise he ever got. When he reached the fourth floor, the building’s dramatic high ceilings abruptly compressed, and John (suppressing, as always, the urge to duck his head) walked swiftly around the corner to his small, garret-like office. Kavanagh was already waiting outside his door. So much for e-mail. Great.
“Patrick. Hi,” John said, smiling stiffly. He unlocked the door and ushered him inside. “What can I do for you?”
Kavanagh opened his backpack and produced the syllabus. John saw that copious notes had already been scribbled all over it in bright red pen.
“There are some points I would like to discuss...”
Fifteen minutes later, John had managed to work his cell phone out of his pocket while still continuing a stream of steady, understanding nods in Kavanagh’s direction. Holding the phone under his desk, he tapped out a hurried message to Elizabeth. Call me--please--emergency!
When the phone rang, he almost shouted in relief. “Hello?” he said, in his best surprised voice. “Nice, John, very nice,” he heard her murmur. “Professor Weir!” he continued, shooting Kavanagh an apologetic look. “Oh, no—really? Well, I'm meeting with a student, can’t it—An emergency? Well, of course, if the Chancellor—”
He put a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and turned to Kavanagh, standing. “I’m so sorry, but something’s come up. Feel free to e-mail me or come back on Thursday—”
“Thursday isn’t good for me,” Kavanagh said, pissily.
“It isn’t?” said John. He tried to look sincere. “That’s too bad.”
He had his satchel, he was halfway out the door. As he stepped out into the hallway, practically herding Kavanagh in front of him, he saw the cherubic blond, McKay, push himself off the opposite wall where he’d been leaning. “Professor—” he said.
“I’m sorry!” John said, gesturing at the phone. “You can e-mail or come back Thursday—”
“Thursday?” said McKay.
“Thursday,” promised John, trying to keep the note of defeat out of his voice. He ducked past Kavanagh, who had made the mistake of choosing to wait for the painfully slow elevator, and practically flew down the stairs. One class down, he thought, as he made his escape, only a couple dozen more to go.
And if he was really lucky, his bicycle would still be where he’d left it that morning.
“More wine?” Elizabeth asked, and John gratefully held out his glass for a refill.
“Come now,” said Radek, Elizabeth’s boyfriend, “it cannot have been that bad. After all, you did not have someone electrocute himself on first day.”
Radek taught in EECS. “No,” John admitted. “We have sadly little electrocution in the English Department.”
“Could have an endless stream of ‘freedom fries’ jokes,” said Ronon, Elizabeth’s other boyfriend. He taught French. “Those just get funnier and funnier.”
John tried to offer Ronon a sympathetic expression. On TV, Jack Bauer proceeded to beat the crap out of some guy in a turban.
“A toast,” said Elizabeth, holding up her own glass. She had carefully explained to him the origin of the wine, and John had tried to listen. “To another semester of learning with Berkeley’s best and brightest.”
John thought that maybe she was being sarcastic. Or maybe she wasn’t being sarcastic. He wasn’t sure.
“I will raise my glass to that,” said Radek.
“Que Dieu nous vienne en aide,” Ronon said.
They all looked to John.
He toasted, too, because they all were.
Later, as he was leaving, Radek noticed that his bike’s back tire was out of alignment. John listened to him and Ronon quietly bicker over how best to fix it, trying not to think too hard about the things they bickered over behind closed doors. He was standing on the stoop, just outside the little circle of light where Radek and Ronon knelt, when Elizabeth came up behind him. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He rolled his shoulders. The wine, the slope of the path—Elizabeth’s house was set, somewhat delicately, into the El Cerrito hills—made him feel slightly unsteady on his feet.
“I’m fine,” he said. Tilting his chin forward, his hands in his pockets. “A little worried about getting my bike back in one piece.”
“You have a car,” Elizabeth said.
He did. A chunky white Volvo that he hated, but that had been cheap, that had been practical. “I thought you said you’d start using it more at night. It’s safer.”
“Sorry,” said John. “Next time.”
The bike did glide better when Radek handed it back to him. He turned his back on the warm glow of Elizabeth’s window and coasted down Colusa Avenue. He felt his heart rise in his chest as he picked up speed. His thighs squeezed tight to the bicycle’s metal frame. Then gently—gently, gently, gently—his hands lifted off the handlebars. Arms up and open, he slid on into the darkness.
In class on Thursday, there were fourteen students instead of fifteen.
John made a quick mental rundown. “Where’s Abrams?”
“He dropped,” said Gall.
“Okay,” said John, flatly. He knew he shouldn’t care, but he had an odd tendency to take that sort of thing personally.
It had been two days since the last class, and he’d known better than to expect them to actually read anything in that short span of time, so he lectured a little about Mark Twain and Roughing It and the developing myth of the West. He was doing fine until an almost knee-jerk “Any questions?” slipped out.
Kavanagh had several. He’d clearly already read Roughing It, which John appreciated, but he seemed to disagree with everything John had said, and for that matter, with John, in general. John opened his mouth to thank him for his contribution the moment he paused, but Cadman was quicker on the draw, darting into the fray and somehow finding a way to disagree with both Kavanagh and John, and possibly with Twain as well. John bit his lip; in their minds, he was clearly extraneous. If they had their way, they’d be the ones teaching the class.
That didn’t sound so bad, actually.
They were still arguing when the hour ended; Cadman had even started gesturing angrily, nearly striking Beckett, who’d been unfortunate enough to sit next to her, in the face. John rubbed the back of his neck and raised his voice. “Please finish Roughing It for Tuesday, so you’ll also be able to contribute to this discussion...” The class filed out, none of them looking particularly enthused at this prospect.
Rejoicing in the fact that Kavanagh (last seen still arguing with Cadman as they made their way across Sproul Plaza) had said Thursdays weren’t good for him, John went to Café Milano and got himself a cup of coffee and a slice of black forest cake. Wanting to avoid the teaming mass of bodies, booths, and leaflet-thrusters that was Sproul, he took a somewhat roundabout route back to Wheeler, scrambling down a muddy bank and hopping stone-to-stone across one of the wider stretches of Strawberry Creek. A couple of students looked at him oddly when he emerged from the bushes, but he brushed the leaves off his jacket with dignity and trotted up the steps. Four flights, just the slightest burn in his chest. It felt good.
It wasn’t until he’d turned the corner that he saw that his office door was open—that he realized that he’d left it open. And someone was inside. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle: knowing his luck, Kavanagh had managed to rearrange his schedule.
But it wasn’t Kavanagh. It was McKay: leaning on a shelf, balanced on elbow and skinny hip, a slim volume of Yeats, obviously snatched from John’s own shelves, splayed open between delicate fingers. He looked like such a moppet, but when he glanced up, his eyes were wide and blue and startlingly adult.
John didn’t want to spill his coffee, so he set it down on the desk.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, although his office hours didn’t start for another ten minutes.
It wouldn’t matter. McKay had already made himself at home.
He sat down before John could offer, sprawling in the seat, hands held ponderously above his chest, all sharp angles and prominently-boned wrists. John moved awkwardly around to the other side of the desk and sat down, looking up and trying to appear interested. “There’s something I want to discuss with you,” McKay said.
John sighed; it was only the first week. “Sorry,” he said, “but twenty pages is the department’s requirement, not—”
McKay laughed. “Twenty pages? Please. I could write that in my sleep. I’m not here to talk about requirements, Professor.” He leaned forward, licking his lips; John took a hasty sip of coffee. “I’m here to discuss Mulciber Rising.”
John choked. “You read my novel?” No one had read his novel.
“Of course,” said McKay. “I don’t enroll in a class without a reason.”
Funny; John taught it without one. “You enrolled in the class because you read my novel?” he asked. His voice sounded like an echo to his own ears: and McKay was watching him.
“I thought you had something to say,” he said, and John swallowed, not liking that somehow. The past tense, had.
“Well, thank you,” he said anyway, politely. “I hope so.”
He waited for McKay to say something else. He thought it was his turn, even though John was suddenly the one with a thousand questions: Where did you find it? How did you even hear about it? You read it, really? And: You liked it? Why? Was there something there that I did, that I did right?
But that was stupid; there was nothing there; and anyway, who was he, this kid who’d probably been able to drink legally for less than a year, to tell him?
“What I want to know is,” McKay said, fingers touching down on the edge of the desk, “why haven’t you written anything else?”
His face was perfectly guileless, but his words hit John like punch. He felt his chest tighten, that horrible, black anger rising up, but with effort he forced it down. Breathe, breathe. “I’ve had other projects,” he said mildly. “And I’m not in favor of writing something just to have written it.”
McKay’s lip twitched, and John had a horrible moment of thinking that he had failed, that he wasn’t fooling him. But that was silly: John wasn’t trying to fool anyone. What did he have to fool them about?
“Why did you write Mulciber?” McKay asked.
Because he couldn’t not. He’d been young, not much older than McKay, probably, and he’d been bursting with it, ideas and characters and their lives, their world. And he thought he’d safely delivered them into his world, the real world, but clearly they hadn’t held the same life in anyone else’s eyes. His book hadn’t flopped: that was too dramatic, too public a term—it involved making some sort of splash in the first place. No, John’s book, the people he had created: they had simply disappeared, fallen off the radar, and that was that, wasn’t it? He had failed; he was a failure.
But very quiet about it, still: and life went on.
“There was a story I wanted to tell,” he said, and shrugged, like it was no big deal, like he still felt stories flowing all around him. Like he still had the courage to try to tell them.
McKay looked like he had a lot to say: his whole body was thrumming with it, energy and youth and a sense of endless possibility. His lips parted, and John noticed that they were crooked. Not peacekeeper’s lips.
“Did you have any other questions?” John asked hastily. “About the course?”
One last flicker of those eyes, then McKay was standing. “No,” he said. “See you Tuesday.”
“Tuesday,” John echoed.
It had to be better than Thursday. He’d never really gotten the hang of Thursdays.
Tuesday, Cadman and Kavanagh launched right back into their argument like they had never left off, with the special addition of Simpson butting in to inquire why they couldn’t interrogate the text from a feminist perspective. John knew he should step in, try to get some of the other people in the class to talk—or even a chance to—but, well. It was a discussion class. At least they were discussing. Better this than uncomfortable, pin-drop silence, and him prodding at them like Ben Stein. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
He pinched the bridge of his nose. He had another headache. His students’ voices were like a dull buzz, a throb that pushed insistently at the back of his brain. He could drown it out, though—he had learned to. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, McKay was staring at him. When he caught John’s eye, he smirked.
“Wow,” he said suddenly, cutting through whatever it was Kavanagh was still saying. It was startling: not just because of the volume and clarity of McKay’s voice, but because John was pretty sure that it was still only the second word he had spoken in class. A dozen pairs of eyes turned to stare at him, and he grinned, folding skinny arms over scrawny chest and leaning back in the chair. “You are all incredibly, astoundingly wrong.”
Parrish stopped scribbling in his notebook. Shelmerdine awoke from his doze. Simpson huffed, Kavanagh said, “Excuse me?” and Cadman leaned in close. “We’re discussing literature,” she said. “There is no right and wrong, only interpretations.”
McKay’s chin tilted up, calmly defiant. “There is no one right answer, I’ll grant you that. But there are plenty of blatantly wrong ones, and you’re all displaying an impressive array of them today.” He turned to Kavanagh. “You don’t seriously think that Twain was trying to make some deep statement about post-colonialism, do you? Or about feminism? Please. He was trying to be funny. I know senses of humor are thin on the ground at this university, but could we cut the crap already? You might actually learn something.”
At this point John knew he was supposed to say, Settle down, please and Let’s not make this personal and Thank you, Rodney, but let’s remember that Patrick’s opinions are equally valid...
He said nothing. He stared.
John was oddly out of breath when he reached the top of the stairs, and his chest stayed tight as he rounded the corner. The hallway outside his office was empty, and his door securely locked. Well. That was a relief.
Clearing away some space on his desk, he found the piece of black forest cake he had bought the week before. The frosting had melted all over the plastic container and the cake itself was rock hard. He picked it up and tossed it into the trash, where it clunked against the metal can and a half-empty bottle of Coke that he’d let go flat. The frosting had seeped onto a yellow legal pad on which he’d made some notes; it was only one corner that was a little crusty, but John held the notepad up for a second before chucking it in the bin, too.
He sat down behind his desk and sipped his coffee while his computer booted up. There was an uncapped pen sitting on the edge of his engagement calendar, dotting the page with red; John scribbled a bit across the corner of the page, checking to see if the pen still had ink. It did. He started drawing something that was maybe a tree.
“Working hard?”
John started, the pen skittering out of his hand. McKay was standing at the other side of his desk, backpack slung low over his bony shoulders. “Oh,” John said. “I didn’t hear you knock.”
“I didn’t,” said McKay. He sat down.
John blinked at him. His tie felt tight and awkward; he was sure it was crooked.
“So,” McKay said. “You have a class of pretentious morons. Are you going to do anything about that?”
“Do?” said John, thinking, Does he speak to everyone this way?
He suspected that he knew the answer. “Yeah,” McKay said. “Something to shake them up a bit. It’s their last semester; they’re going to be going out into the world soon, convinced that their ridiculous theories and skewed points of view actually have some bearing on how things actually work.”
John wasn’t sure if McKay was refreshing or just incredibly naïve. Probably both.
“Have you read the latest New Criterion?” John asked. Because Kavanagh’s little theory would have been right at home there, he didn’t add.
McKay waved the implication away. “Yes, but only because I’m apparently a masochist.” He paused, blond hair sliding into his eyes as he dug through his backpack. “This one wasn’t entirely migraine-inducing, however,” he said, and tossed a paperclipped photocopy of an article from the Tolstoy Studies Journal onto the desk.
John thumbed the edge. He recognized it. He’d gotten two free copies. He still had them, in a file folder; he’d decided at the last minute not to send one to his father.
“You read my paper,” he said, in a tone that was hard for even him to read.
“I like to do my research,” McKay said, somehow smug without being braggy. “Besides, War and Peace has always been a very significant novel for me.”
John felt the same flush of excitement he always did when someone else mentioned it, a pathetic rush of hope that someone else would have seen it and loved it as he did. That had been at the heart of the article in front of him; it had been one of the driving forces behind his dissertation, too. When he had the energy, he occasionally tried to sneak it onto the syllabus for one of his seminars. “How so?” he asked, levelly.
“Well,” said McKay, “Tolstoy is the reason I’m an English major, really.” John’s shoulders straightened. “I read War and Peace when I was nine. I was always bored in school and my teacher gave it to me, obviously thinking that it would keep me occupied for a while. Idiot,” he said, smiling almost fondly.
John found he was smiling, too.
“I read it all in a rush, five days, completely caught up: hiding it under the dinner table and everything. The house I grew up in, it had a screened-in back porch, and I used to read out there sometimes. That’s where I was when I finished it, curled up in this ridiculous wicker chair. Early afternoon, the sun just slanting down. I finished and I set the book down, and I just...stared. And—”
John’s lips formed the word unconsciously: And...
“And I thought,” said McKay, clever curve of lips, “I can totally do better.”
John didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he said, “Right.” He looked hopefully (pointedly) toward the door.
McKay, unsurprisingly, did not take the hint. Instead he leaned forward, pressing close against the desk. John did not start back; he did not lean forward, either. His spine was rigid.
“Professor Sheppard,” McKay said, “have you ever thought about how you would rewrite the world?”
The thought did pass through, but John had found the answer to his earlier question, and it chased all other speculation away. Naïve. Definitely, painfully naïve.
John remembered that, though he was trying hard to forget.
Elizabeth looked at him disapprovingly as he packed the chunk of the cake Ronon had baked and Elizabeth had insisted John wrap up and take with him into his satchel. “I thought you said you’d drive,” she said.
“Next time,” he promised.
He could feel the Tupperware container biting into his back as he bent over to secure his bike outside his apartment building, and again as he jogged up the stairs. He dropped his satchel on the chair inside the door, went into the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of orange juice. Standing at the counter, he loosened, then undid, his tie, letting it curve over the slope of his neck. The top few buttons of his shirt followed, undone by the twistings of his thumb.
There were still several sips of juice left in his glass, but he left it on the counter and went back into the living room. Jogging the mouse, he brought his computer back to life. His latest game of Klondike was taking up the top corner of the screen. He played, lost, and closed the window. He opened Word.
Twenty minutes later, he closed it again with an emphatic click. He stripped off his shirt, jacket, pants, and stepped under the hot shower spray. Rough pinpricks on the back of his neck; he leaned against the tile, forehead to wrist, and jerked off mechanically. He washed his hair.
Dry again and dressed in a t-shirt and a fresh pair of boxers, he crawled into bed. He flipped between Leno and Letterman for a while and then went to sleep.
McKay was waiting outside his office, sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out in front of him, and one knee drawn up. There was a book propped on it; when McKay stood, blue eyes flashing up, John saw that it was The Portrait of a Lady.
“You know,” said John, unlocking the door, “office hours aren’t mandatory.”
“Am I taking up your valuable time?” McKay asked, the question teetering on the edge of sarcastic.
Yes, John thought, almost said. Would have: only the lie of it struck him suddenly, what little difference it made whether McKay left or stayed. If he stayed, at least John was less likely to have to field questions from Kavanagh, or assure Brown that four months was plenty of time to write twenty pages, really. And if anybody came by, at least it would look like he was being productive.
He started to gesture to the chair, but McKay had already sat in it.
“Do you like Henry James?” he asked, looking up, tracking John as he moved around the desk and began unpacking his satchel. John made an noncommittal noise, coupled with a noncommittal roll of his shoulders. “Be honest.”
John paused, his hand coming up against an unfamiliar object. “No,” he admitted.
“Hmm,” said McKay, tapping the book on his thigh. Then he said, “Is that cake?”
It was. Still sealed tight in Elizabeth’s Tupperware container. John had forgotten all about it.
“You want it?” John asked, not thinking: McKay’s eyes lit up, and it was like all the stray animals his father had always told him not to feed. Now he’d never get rid of him.
Too late, John thought, but he felt less grim than he’d imagined, pushing the container across the desk. “I don’t have a fork,” he said, but McKay didn’t seem to mind: he pried the lid off and dug in, long fingers scooping up crumbs and carefully guiding a chunk of cake into his mouth. “Why don’t you like James?” he asked, mouth full, licking chocolate off his fingers. Precise motions, strangely captivating.
John was once again struck by how young McKay looked—how young he was, and really, this shouldn’t be a surprise, as all of John’s students were young. But McKay, oddly unnerving or just odd, had the capacity to make John forget. To confuse him until John was no longer sure how to control their interaction.
“Why don’t you like Tolstoy?” he asked.
McKay frowned, gesturing with a fingerful of cake. “I do like Tolstoy,” he said.
“That’s not what you said before.”
Eyeroll. “I said I could do better; that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate some of what he did. Don’t jump to conclusions, Professor.”
John could pull faces as well as anybody. “Thanks for the advice. Why are you here?”
It was an unusually blunt question, for him. But unless he wanted to permanently put his name down for twice a week snacktime with Rodney McKay, he had to—
“I’m writing a novel,” McKay said, finger sliding clean and chocolate-free out of his mouth. Crap, John thought, bracing himself for the inevitable, Will you read it/edit it/give me your honest opinion as long as it’s unreservedly positive? But McKay just said, “That was good cake, did you bake it?”
“No,” said John, abstractedly; he was trying to figure out if McKay was purposefully directing the conversation so as to keep him off-balanced, or if he simply lacked even the most basic social skills.
“It’s homemade,” McKay pressed—clearly, he was an expert.
“My friend—well, my friend’s boyfriend made it.” John himself still had a hard time picturing Ronon baking; he didn’t relish the prospect of being drafted to ask him for a recipe or—
McKay snapped his fingers. “Ralph Touchett,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
The fingers rotated forward, pointing at John’s chest. “You remind me of Ralph Touchett.”
John blinked. “I remind you of an anti-social, consumptive Henry James character with homosexual tendencies and an incestuous crush on his cousin?”
“Hands in your pockets,” McKay said, and John, damnably, jerked them out, catching the left on the liner of his blazer.
John scowled. “What’s your point?”
“No point,” McKay said, leaning back. “I’m trying to make a closer study of human behavior; like James, who revolutionized the internal monologue—imperfectly, yes, but he opened up his characters’ minds and displayed them on the page.”
“And you’re going to do him one better,” John said, dryly.
McKay inclined his head. “Of course.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“Not really. I’ve been observing the other students in class. And you.”
“And what have you discovered?” John asked: clearly inquiring, he thought, about the other students. About the origin of Beckett’s sweaters, and Brown’s pen, and Cadman’s leaflets; about what made Kavanagh so tightly wound, and Kusanagi so quiet, and Lorne so closed off for someone with such a friendly grin. But McKay looked him straight eye and said:
“You’re even less pleased to be there, in class, than we are. You have to work to breathe without sighing. Your chest feels perpetually tight. You think most of the rules and the bureaucratic part of your job are stupid, but you have a deep traditionalist streak; you cling to it. That’s what—that’s what I sincerely hope—that bowtie is all about. You ride to campus without a helmet. You keep your hands in your pockets to hide how often they’re fists.”
He was wrong of course, John thought, swallowing through the tightness. His hands weren’t fists; they were open, gripping the edge of the desk.
“And you’ve stopped writing,” McKay continued. “That’s what I can’t figure out. Why would you stop writing?”
John didn’t say anything; he didn’t trust himself. McKay’s eyes flickered over him, mouth downturned and genuinely confused. Then his gaze sharpened, focused.
He pointed at John’s coffee cup, untouched at his side. “Are you going to drink that?”
Continued in Part II
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 07:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 07:16 pm (UTC)Also: *totally didn't use to print fanfic off in the high school library and read it during boring classes* *of course not*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 07:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 07:25 pm (UTC)I haven't read the article yet; the e-mail I keep getting distracted from sending was going to say, "That looks really interesting! I can't wait to read it!" Which is true. *g* I wish I had more hours to the day, though (or didn't need to sleep for so darn many of them!).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 07:38 pm (UTC)And cherubic!Rodney.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 08:28 pm (UTC)And the image of John going down the hill, arms spread out on his bike is just beautiful.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 10:42 pm (UTC)How refreshing to see John as the professor and Rodney the fresh-faced know-it-all student. And all the gangs here too. John's initial assessment of Rodney was hilarious, as was Halling!
And I keep getting these silly little blips of 'yay' every time a book or author I like gets a mention - I mean Ralph Touchett, how freaking cool is that!!
All this and a Douglas Adams quote too....
Okay so....onto part two!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 10:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 11:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 02:45 am (UTC)I can see this so perfectly. John jaded and tired and Rodney going "well of course it can be better, and I'll do it" and John having no idea of what to do with that...
So yes, I'm very happy. Trotting off to read the second part now.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 04:40 am (UTC)I love this story to pieces, but I'm right now in the middle of reading War and Peace for the first time, and I don't want to be spoiled. Do you give any of it away in the rest of your story?
(It's set in Berkeley! My school! I keep squealing at all the local references. John running up and down the stairs at Wheeler! and avoiding Sproul! and jumping across Strawberry Creek!)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 09:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 08:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 12:43 pm (UTC)I'm not sure if your music choice is intentional or not, but it is hysterical. And your John here -- well, he reminds me of my senior thesis advisor, that same sense of talent and enthusiasm gone underground. Except John is less bitter and sadistic, and a lot more adorable than my thesis advisor ever was. If there's more I'd love to read it -- good luck on your exams!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 12:48 pm (UTC)John's characterization in this is definitely based on several professors I've had, at least one of whom I still love intensely and ache for. I'm glad you're enjoying it so far--there is a second part, linked above. And hopefully more soon!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-16 04:32 pm (UTC)Bwaaaaaaahahahahaa! Oh, already I love this. Turning around the canon underestimating.
Ronon, Elizabeth’s other boyfriend.
::choke:: Okay, now I love this *more.* I'm going to be incoherent soon, I can tell.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 12:55 am (UTC)John made a quick mental rundown. “Where’s Abrams?”
“He dropped,” said Gall.
ahaha! it's so quick and beautiful and unnecessary. perfect.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 11:54 am (UTC)LOL this description made me laugh, it was great:
"Skinny blond, almost cherubic-looking. Probably the class peacemaker, the one who would agree with what everyone was saying, even if the two opinions directly contradicted one another."
french teacher ronon! [luaghs]
So freaking weird.
Date: 2006-05-20 08:08 am (UTC)What's weird is that I'm reading this on the day I graduated from Berkeley. Haha, I'll take that as a good sign of things to come, although you're already making me miss a lot of the stuff I'll be leaving behind tomorrow. *sniff* I-house! Cafe Milano! Naan n Curry! And the Happy Happy guy.
(P.S. Do you go to Cal? Cuz you have everything down liek whoa. :D)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-28 03:46 pm (UTC)Rodney's impressions of John seemed surprisingly accurate for someone who proclaims no social skills. I like the way you've written him as "more than meets the eye."
-- heading on to Part II!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-31 04:27 pm (UTC)I found the slightly expanded view of each of these characters refreshing and fascinating. Usually I admit to a bias toward Rodney in fics as he is my favourite character but your John was a real puzzle so I enjoyed him slightly more this time. Not to say I didn't like the way you wrote Rodney but he is more of an open book then John, as, I'd say, he generally is. With John you are never really sure what he is thinking and you really played this up making him someone I enjoy figuring out.
Thanks for the story.