Work Text:
Logan yawned as he pressed the off button on his alarm, clumsily grabbing his glasses from the nightstand. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed as the short curls and knots inevitably wrapped themselves around his fingers. He muttered to himself as he walked to the bathroom that he shouldn’t do that. It wasn’t helpful to actually getting knots out like a good comb, but the act always brought him a strange amount of comfort.
He moved from the bathroom back to his room to take out his clean, pressed blue and black stripped tie and polo. Frankly he was going to need all the comfort he could get today, the faculty was having a racial sensitivity awareness meeting.
He moved to the kitchen to make himself a black coffee, 2 eggs and two slices of toast. He understood why the meetings were useful, on an intellectual level. If white people aren’t reminded every 5 minutes that nonwhite people are people, they might forget. He just hated that he had to go and be the only black face in the room while white presenters teach other white people why saying, ‘You’re not like those people. Not in a bad way, you’re just different from a lot of black people I know in a good way.’ Isn’t the compliment they think it is and pat each other on the back while they pull the same shit a week later-
Ding
He pulled the toast out of the toaster and slathered it with Crofters. Maybe a bit more. A little more. And maybe just a spoonful for himself for luck and good graces for the rest of the day.
As he drove to the University he took a few deep breaths, luckily traffic wasn’t too miserable, he found it fairly easy to put on his professional face. He was Dr. S, winner of the Robert H. MacArthur award for his work in ecology. He was intelligent, confident- but never arrogant, and firm but never harsh or angry. He walked down the halls with an air of untouchability, but was willing to give lighthearted ‘good morning’ whenever he saw a student he knew pass or a fellow teacher that he knew or nodded at him.
Despite how much he occasionally bitched, he really did love his job, he loved having all eyes- well most students eyes- on him as he talked about the nature of the understory. He had samples of lichen that he had the students pass around the auditorium so they could get a really good look at the fungi. He talked about how useful they are in maintaining the ecosystem and converting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He loved listening to them, his students were brilliant, often coming into situations with viewpoints he’d never even considered. He loved reading their discussion boards after class.
Students always entered his class with different levels of attachment to the environment, some were climate change deniers who joined the class to be contrary, others were here because they thought it would be easy science credits- he wasn’t in complete denial of the nature of teaching a college course- but he also knew the few in the course that genuinely wanted to be there. They interacted with the material with a level of passion that reminded him of himself in his youth. And some part of him hoped that his own level of interest rubbed off on those who were neutral or even outright hostile towards the subject matter.
He moved towards his desk in the corner of the room and took out an envelope with a hand written letter from one of his students. It was about how the student had changed their major just because of his class. He’d sparked a passion in the student and made him believe that he could have an impact on the world around him. Discovering that he had made a real, tangible difference in a person’s life- it was one of the greatest moments in his career.
One more class, than his lunch break, and of course-
The ever dreaded meeting.
Their voices were an endless, tiring drone, he found himself doodling on a piece of paper out of shear boredom until they reached a point in the meeting where they said something hilarious:
“We’re going to do a roleplay exercise so you can see how it feels.”
Of course, despite the subject of the meeting, none of them could really get it and he sure as hell wasn’t going to go out of his way to relive events where white people called him, ‘aggressive’ for speaking in a clear and concise manner but as the aggressor just to help them understand.
Or at least, he wouldn’t do it in the here and now.
For now he would be polite, all, ‘Can you understand why it may be upsetting to imply this’? and ‘I know your intentions were not meant to be unkind, but the effect of your words ultimately makes your intent irrelevant.’
A few hours later and he found himself at a slightly dingy apartment a few towns over. He pressed on the buzzer for Remus’s room, “Hey, it’s me.”
“AY bro! You sound like shit.”
Logan gave a small snort, “Matches how I feel, got any good beats ready?”
Logan could practically hear the grin on his face. When Remus was giddy it always meant trouble, “Always, stop being a stranger and get in here!” Yep, there were definitely going to be shenanigans afoot. But that was to be expected when Remus was your producer, everyone who was into underground stuff knew his name. Though not always for positive reasons.
“I’ve been thinking about using the sound of broken glass as a beat drop on this one,” Remus practically dragged Logan into his room and sat him on the moth-eaten chair. “You know like Shatter, 4 beats of silence then the rapper comes back in and the beat goes harder than ever you know? But that’s for the big project, I’ve also been messing around with the sound that different like, levels of hardness- it’s goo so it’s not like hard, hard, not like this di-”
“The viscosity.” Logan nodded.
Remus snapped his fingers, “Yeah, that bitch! Just like, using the temperatures to create the notes!” He clapped his hands, “So, what do you want for the night? What’s the mood?”
Logan sighed and tilted his head up as he looked at the ceiling. “The somber, harshness of hating the inevitabilities of life.” He blinked, “That’s oddly specific-”
Remus shook his head, “No, hey man. Don’t worry, I gottcha. You wanna record or nah?”
“Nah, not this one, this one’s just a warm up you know? Maybe a later one though I dunno lot of factors on hand.”
Remus nodded, “Gottcha gottcha gottcha,” he moved towards his laptop and looked through his tracks, squinting before his eyes lit up and he said, “Try this one on for size.”
The song started off with a dial tone noise with a fast-paced piano trilling between middle C and C#, the tones were discordant and harsh, but Logan found that they matched his own discordant feelings, towards his job, towards his life, towards himself. He let out those feelings through his words matching the pace of the music as it shifted and changed. Sentence after sentence flowed past his lips, the words adding clarity to his emotional state, giving him a sense of self that encouraged him to change his dynamics to match it, going from meek and discordant to harsh, clear certainty in seconds between lines.
He would admit it wasn’t his best work, clearly, some of his word-play could have been better thought out (’I’ve met bitches with more intellect/at least Spot knows how to speak/Don’t mean much when you use acrolect/to say ‘let me take a peek’ was unnecessarily vulgar and likely didn’t sound as good aloud as he thought it did.) but he felt alive when he said it. The music ran through his veins and into his soul as he spoke.
No matter whether a day was awful or great he would have this place. His sanctuary.