Chapter Text
The sky had been grey for the better part of the week, each day the clouds grew increasingly swollen with rain, snow, or, a perennial New England favorite, wintry mix. Nearly three years had passed since you moved to Cambridge for an associate professor of psychology position at Harvard, and yet each year when January rolled in you were newly stunned at how bitter the cold could be, and how the snow seemed to magically double overnight. Trudging from the faculty parking lot to the building your office is in, you adjust your scarf so it covers your nose and ears, cursing under your breath as the wind whipped even fiercer. The door of the building is within sight when a particularly strong gust manages to undo the triple wrap you thought had secured your scarf, causing it to loosen and fly away. In the same moment, the sky decides to end its indecision, and a veil of freezing rain begins to mist around you. Shoulders slumped and squinting against the rain, you watch as your scarf soon becomes a distant slash of red in the distance. You feel droplets freezing against your face, and try to burrow down into your jacket for some modicum of protection against the elements. It’s not even 8am and already the day has gone to shit. You think about the mountains of paperwork waiting for you, the emails piling up in your inbox, the endless grant proposals you have to write. And now you have to deal with all that without your favorite scarf. Tears sting at the corners of your eyes but almost immediately freeze, and you allow yourself a moment of weakness, a break in your usual scholarly composure.
“Fuck Tuesdays!” You shout into the wind. “Fuck Tuesdays and especially fuck Tuesday mornings that start before 8!”
A voice responds behind you.
“Are you work-shopping some kind of Garfield spin off?”
You spin around, eyes widening for a moment before they’re forced to squint again against the rain. A man stands a few feet away, holding a red blur that you quickly identify as your scarf. You close the gap between you two and attempt to smile, though by this point you can hardly feel your face, and it probably looks more like you’re baring your teeth at this nice stranger who, you notice despite the limited visibility, clearly has very nice bone structure.
“Leaving academia to pursue stand-up,” you joke.
“Maybe don’t quit your day job then,” he says, a hint of a smile in his voice, relinquishing the scarf as you take it with stiff fingers. You glance upwards, trying to place the tall, dark, man-shaped blob that stands before you, but nothing about him seems familiar. You’re certain you haven’t seen him around the psychology department before. He puts his hands back in his pockets, but not before you notice they’re shaking in the cold.
“Sorry you had to chase this old thing,” you say with a grimace, guilt rising in you as you look down and attempt to shove the damp scarf into your bag, “I appreciate it, though”.
This time there’s no response, and when you look up the man is gone, vanishing as quickly as he appeared.
Twenty minutes later, after you’ve fully defrosted in the warmth of your office, you allow your mind to wander back to the mysterious savior of your scarf. The parking lot you came in from was by and large only used by staff of the psychology department. The department isn’t small, but you still know most people by name, and almost everyone by face. Despite being obscured by sleet the man had cut a striking figure, and though visiting professors were common there would certainly have been whispers of any new and handsome addition to the faculty. You pursed your lips as you looked at the scarf laying across the radiator drying, shook your head, and dove back into the abyss of emails.
It’s the usual gamut: students freaking out about the upcoming semester, passive-aggressive conversations between coworkers on chain emails, higher ups pushing for more more more publications. You rub your temples and sigh, about to go take a lunch break when one final message catches your eye. It’s from the dean, the subject reads Student Advising, though you had already received your list of kids at the start of the fall semester. Confused, you click on it, wondering if it’s an error, though the dean rarely makes mistakes. Dean Meyer is an older woman, kind but firm, with nerves of steel that must have developed after fighting through the bullshit existence was for women in academia in the 60s and 70s. Even still, years later, she had needed to argue fiercely for you to be hired into your current position. She wouldn’t be reaching out personally if it wasn’t important. The message reads:
I’d say I hope you had a restful winter break, but I know you better than that. Since you seem to enjoy keeping busy I wanted to ask a personal favor. For the spring semester there’s an incoming freshman named Peter Parker. He was scheduled to start at the school of engineering this fall, but deferred a semester after his aunt passed away. She was his last living relative. He’s been having a hard time, and I spoke with his academic advisor; we felt it may be best if he had another faculty member to speak with, one not so involved in the engineering department. He’ll be on campus a few days before classes start to get settled in, so I’m hoping you can schedule a time to meet with one another. I’ll attach his contact information below (I am assuming you’ll say yes to this favor).
All the best,
Dean Meyer
You reread the message again, sighing. Dean Meyer knew you were also an orphan, the loss of your parents had been what sparked your interest in psychology in the first place, so clearly she felt you were in a position to help the poor kid. Thoughts of lunch forgotten, you began to look through his file, compiling school counseling resources and other links to share, just in case. You were no therapist, but having a someone to lean on (who wasn’t directly connected to your courses and grades) could be invaluable. There was certainly no shortage of people who had offered their shoulders for you to cry on when you were first orphaned. It was time to pay it forward.
The building was quiet as you worked, with only a few staff and students on campus for winter courses. Around 2pm you heard a knock at the door, pulling you out of your work-induced trance. Annoyed, you looked up from your laptop, frown quickly dissolving as you saw your friend standing in the doorway.
“Wanda!” You grinned, “I thought you were on sabbatical until summer!”
“What can I say,” she said with a shrug, “my project in New Jersey ended sooner than anticipated.” She shut the door behind her and walked over to you. “Besides, how could I bear to be away from this face for so long?” she asked, pinching your cheeks.
You rolled your eyes but couldn’t wipe the smile from your face. Wanda was the resident grief, trauma, and bereavement expert; the other faculty treated her with respectful but solemn distance, and she’d admitted that before you two became friends, she often felt isolated and lonely at work. But when you were together she was a version of herself you didn’t see most other times: wry, warm, a little goofy. She was perched on the edge of your desk now, peering at your wrinkled scarf that was still sitting on the heater.
“Bacon’s looking a bit crispy,” she quipped.
“For once there’s an interesting story behind that,” you responded, leaning back in your chair with a sigh.
As you recounted the tale of the mysterious man who had saved your scarf Wanda’s eyes grew wider and wider.
“So you’re saying you had a meet-cute with a Yeti,” Wanda said, grinning wickedly at you, “you guys are going to have such cute babies. When’s the wedding? Is it in the alps?”
You made a gagging motion. “Just because he was tall, dark, and presumably handsome doesn’t mean I’m going to pine after some stranger.”
“A very chivalrous stranger,” Wanda added.
“Correct.”
“Who saved your mother’s scarf from the perils of a Massachusetts storm.”
“I guess.”
“Who, despite the cold causing his hands to shake, made the effort to get your scarf back to you in the freezing rain.”
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Okay, okay,” Wanda waved you away, “I deal with sadness as a career, allow me to indulge in fantasies where my best friend is swept off her feet by a guy who actually deserves her.”
“Don’t guilt trip me, or I’ll have to use my puppy dog eyes on you,” you said as you began to pout your lower lip.
Wanda laughed and pretended to shield her eyes, “Anything but that!”
“Besides,” you added, “he was probably too old for me anyhow. I think I saw some white at his temples. Though, I guess it could’ve been snow.”
Wanda grew suspiciously quiet and began to rapidly type things into her phone.
“Uhm, hello? Earth to Wanda? We were in the middle of a conversation?” You teased, waving your hand in front of her face.
Her concentration didn’t waver, and a few moments later she was shoving her phone screen in your face. She’d pulled up a pdf of a flyer, detailing a lecture schedule for a winter course offered to the medical students. You skimmed it, taking in the details. Neurosurgery elective...guest lectures throughout the semester...the future of robot-assisted surgeries...all are welcome to attend... The top of the flyer gave details about the course, and the bottom half was a schedule of the guest lecturers, complete with a short blurb on their topics and a picture of the speaker. Your eyes drifted down to the last guest, Dr. Stephen Strange, and landed on the photo next to his name. You couldn’t be sure, but something about his features seemed familiar. Next to you, Wanda was nearly vibrating with anticipation.
“Is that your yeti? If so, he is definitely not too old for you,” she said with glee.
“It just might be,” you replied slowly, unable to look away from the picture, “but how the hell did you find this? This course has nothing to do with any of the classes we teach.”
Wanda shrugged, “They work on the brain, and we look at how the brain works, it’s reason enough for me to keep an eye on things.”
“Fair point.”
“Also,” Wanda smiled sheepishly, “Victor just might be one of the people organizing the event.”
There it was. Wanda had had a crush on Victor Shade since he had first started at Harvard four months earlier. An Oxford transplant with floppy hair, a soft British accent, and a mind like a machine. He specialized in artificial intelligence, and was currently working diligently with the medical school on creating smarter, faster, and more accurate diagnosing programs. You had watched the two dance around each other for months after a chance meeting at a faculty event. They were always finding some excuse to bump into one another, and it would have been nauseating if it hadn’t been the first time you had seen Wanda genuinely interested in someone.
You looked at the flyer again. “January 9th? That’s tomorrow!” you said, frowning.
Wanda draped herself dramatically over your desk, knocking over a cup of paper clips in the process.
“Hey!” you exclaimed, trying and failing to catch them before they fell.
“Say you’ll come with me,” Wanda pleaded, “say you’ll come with me and that we’ll have a double wedding up in the alps”.
“I can promise you one of those things,” you relented with a tired sigh, and began to clear out time in your calendar.