Chapter Text
Beyond practicalities like sharing storage closets, joint staff rooms, and parents’ evening desk rows, the teachers in Princeton-Plainsboro Highschool’s humanities department didn’t really have much in common with each other.
Like any reasonable person, Mr. Robert Chase didn’t let that come between his associations. He’d made fast friends with most of his coworkers, and had even been in a relationship with one of the English teachers for a solid six months.
It wasn’t like the similarities in the subjects they taught had been a particularly strong factor in his choice to spend time with them, though. He got along just as well with half-decent people outside of the humanities department— and, for the record, just as awfully with irritating bastards inside of it.
If one Professor Eric Foreman happened to be in the latter list… well, Chase thought, that said more about Foreman than it did him. The man was too strict, to the point that even Chase’s own students spoke of him as a hardass who set too much homework.
Of course, work-allergic teenagers were hardly the best judges of character— but their hatred was, as Chase had come to find out, more than justified. Even in polite conversation, Foreman came across as arrogant and argumentative, and in all the conversations they’d had together, he’d been made to feel as though the man was constantly looking down on him for not having a 4.0 GPA and a fancy suit and a swanky professorship and a bunch of published articles on Louis IV, or whatever it was history buffs like him wrote.
He had decided, in response, that he would treat Foreman the same way Foreman treated Chase: with a perfect cold civility. He would give the man a nod if they were in the staffroom together, and he wouldn’t turn his nose up at a place beside him at the staff dining table, but he would never go out of his way for Foreman, nor would he particularly seek him out.
More often than not, he would choose to slip out of the staffroom if he knew Foreman was on his way back from a lesson, or duck away from joint-teacher responsibilities that would have required them to work together unless absolutely necessary— but those decisions were not personal slights against Foreman as much as they were a respectful gesture for their careful boundary of mutual distaste. They both worked to maintain a delicate balance— neither man would move beyond basic greetings, neither man would seek the other out, and the two would remain perfectly content with the big wall they’d both helped to build between their relationship.
If anything could be said to have shattered that wall, then, it was the sound of three hard knocks on the Geography classroom’s door.
Chase, who had been marking papers lackadaisically prior to the interruption, looked up from the stack to the other side of the room. The strength of the knock was unfamiliar— most people just walked in— but his desk was too far away to see the door.
He squinted, then called out a breezy, “Come in.”
The door jolted open, revealing a very worked-up Foreman in its wake.
His hand gripped onto a takeout-coffee cup for dear life, and his lips wobbled just a little; he stared at Chase with a level of awkwardness, as if he expected Chase to read his thoughts and know, on instinct, exactly why he’d shown up.
When Chase locked eyes with him, he struggled to disguise the way his face dropped.
“Morning, Mr. Foreman,” he said flippantly, gaze returning to his papers.
Foreman’s eyes landed on Chase; his mouth opened, then closed, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say.
Eventually, he shut his mouth and adjusted his glasses— and, with the air of a Victorian aristocrat, he shut the door behind him.
“Good morning, Mr. Chase.”
The two were both silent for a while until Chase, already tired of Foreman’s presence in his room, looked up and met his eyes.
“What’s up?”
The man before him bristled, looking very much like he didn’t want to be there (something that Chase would have been offended by, if not for the fact that he also didn’t want Mr. Foreman to be in his line of sight).
He took a deep breath.
“…May I… sit down?”
Chase turned properly, then, raising an eyebrow.
“If you have to,” he said, frowning.
Hands shaking slightly, Foreman sat down at one of the child-sized desks, biting his lip.
With a look of exhaustion, he peered up through his lashes at Chase and spoke three words which clarified his concerning demeanour completely.
“They’re shipping us.”
Chase blinked. “Excuse me?”
“They’re shipping us,” Foreman repeated. “The children.”
He took his glasses off, wiping them with his sleeve; a nervous gesture.
“They asked me if I got my coffee from you this morning,” he said. “They said you go to the same café as me. You know what comes next.”
A silence overcame them; Chase looked at Foreman, and a baffled look came into his eyes.
He gave a sigh. “Well, fuck me. Did they tell you why?”
“The hell am I supposed to know?” Foreman groaned. “Didn’t they say anything to you?”
“No more than they’ve said to you, obviously!” he exclaimed. God, it was so Foreman to act like Chase was at fault here, he thought bitterly to himself. “Our rooms are next to each other, we’re both into men, and we’re single. That’s all it takes for these kids.”
Foreman blinked; he furrowed his eyebrows.
“How do you know I’m single?”
It took Chase a second to register the question.
He balked for a moment.
“…I just, uh, heard. …Y’know. Stuff gets arou—”
“How the hell do you know I’m single?!”
His voice was stern; Chase felt like a deer in headlights as he looked over.
He groaned.
“Look, the kids—”
“The kids don’t know,” he exclaimed. “Did you—“
“—They told me you like jazz music.”
If Foreman could have paled, Chase was sure he would have at that moment.
He put his head in his hands despairingly, burying himself into his own chest as a wave of embarrassment struck him.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
“Come on,” Chase said. “It’s, like, the number one rule of teaching. You put something on the internet, these kids are gonna get it.”
Foreman huffed.
“How did they even get on—?”
“They have their ways.”
He ran an irritated hand through his hair, and a flicker of curiosity came into his eyes.
“…What was it, anyway? Hinge? Couchsurfer?”
Foreman gave a look like he wanted to kill himself in front of Chase to change the trajectory of the latter’s life.
“Grindr.”
“Ouch,” Chase said, struggling to hide the vengeful excitement in his voice.
When Foreman finally looked up from his potentially-career-ending flushfest, a simple question was on his lips.
“So,” he said. “What now?”
Chase shrugged.
“I dunno. Send in your 2-weeks notice, I guess, or else we can try to ignore it.”
Foreman grimaced.
“You really think I can ignore it? It’s affecting these kids’ grades. They’re too busy talking about my private life to focus in class.”
“Relax,” Chase said, raising an eyebrow at the man’s implicit suggestion that he was the only one struggling from what seemed to be a joint career-assassination, “I’m just as annoyed as you. I had to deal with it before I started dating Allison.”
“And how’d you deal with it then?!”
“We didn’t,” Chase explained. “They just backed off when it lost its…”
He paused.
“…Novelty…”
He trailed off.
His eyes widened slightly, and his gaze fell from Foreman’s face as he spoke, an odd note of clarity overcoming him.
“…Novelty?”
Foreman frowned; he peered at Chase curiously, who met his eyes with an odd vigour.
It took him a few seconds to understand.
He looked appalled.
“You’re not...”
Chase rested his head on his fist.
“You have any better ideas?”
“No, but…”
A groan. “There has to be other solutions. Can we talk to Cuddy???”
“You think she can stop the kids after your GRINDR got leaked?!” he argued. “She can barely take on the school NURSE, and he’s on her payroll.”
“Alright, then get back with Allison,” Foreman said. “They’ll get off you if you’re taken, which is what matters.”
Chase shook his head.
“The kids won’t buy it.”
A raised eyebrow.
“What, you don’t wanna get back with her?” he asked. “Rough breakup?”
“She broke up with me. Trust me, if I could get back with her, I would,” Chase groaned.
“Then why don’t you?”
A sigh.
“‘Cause the kids found my Grindr.”
At the confession, Foreman faltered slightly.
“Well,” he said, eyebrows shooting up in a mix of despair and bafflement, “damn.”
“…Look,” Chase eventually managed, cutting the small stretch of silence, “if we can just fake it for a month or so in front of them, it’ll get boring. They’ll be off our backs, and we’ll never have to talk to each other again.”
Foreman looked defeatedly to Chase.
It took him a moment to respond; when he did, though, it was with a heavy sigh.
“Nothing physical,” he acquiesced. “And when I say a month, I mean a month. Including weekends.”
He looked away; then, grumbling to himself, “This better work.”
A surge of accomplishment ran through Chase’s body, and a thoughtful look came into his eyes.
“…Well, then,” he said, “I guess we can start simple.”
He stepped towards Foreman.
“What kind of coffee is that?”