Work Text:
Adam could report her for this. Adam should report her for this. He struggles to unlock his apartment door with the tremor in his hands, and he tells himself it’s because he’s angry. Because he is angry, that’s definitely something he’s feeling, but the problem is that he’s also in shock, incredibly flustered, maybe relieved, and mostly humiliated.
He realizes he’s fumbling with the wrong key and grits his teeth, stopping when it hurts. This is Amy’s fault, obviously. Nothing bad has ever happened to him, he’s pretty sure, that wasn’t somehow Amy’s fault.
It’s only because he’s unlucky enough to run into her in the library, both approaching the study room at the exact same time, and he doesn’t see her in his peripheral until he’s close enough to smell her perfume. It’s something too woody and pleasant than really suited her, her hair short and fuzzy from growing out a shaved head.
Amy’s tonguing at her lip piercing when she turns and sees him, and her expression sours quickly to distaste.
“Adam,” she says, looking at him like he’s something in her fridge that’s started going moldy.
“Amy,” Adam says, politely ignoring her reaction. “How are midterms?”
“Fine. Was just going to study in here for a while.”
“Um,” Adam says, stepping awkwardly around her and into the doorway. He clears his throat roughly. “Actually, I was just about to use this one.”
“That’s so funny,” Amy says, her voice light and plasticky. “‘Cause I was just about to use it, as well!”
“Could we share it, maybe?”
“Ha, no.”
“Yeah, didn’t think so.”
Amy glances up and down at where Adam’s blocking the doorway, then says, “You really look like a dick right now, you know that?”
“Do I.”
“Well, you always do, but especially right now.”
“I’m sure. Hey, question, did you reserve this room in advance?”
“Nope. Did you?”
“I did, actually,” Adam blurts.
Amy leans around him to tap the small, rectangular screen on the wall by the door, and something feels like it’s lodged in Adam’s throat. And not just because Amy’s standing uncomfortably close to him. The screen turns on when Amy touches it, brightly proclaiming the room is available until 6PM. She offers him an apologetic, simpering smile, and Adam’s face burns.
“Mhm. You should lie more, it’s cute.”
Adam’s face promptly burns even hotter. “Fuck you.”
He watches smugness settle over Amy’s face at the lackluster response, and she steps closer to him. “Study somewhere else. It won’t kill you.”
“No, but I won’t be able to focus. I can’t think when there are people talking about nonsense around me.”
He’s not actually lying about that one—there are always other people talking, and while Adam doesn’t mind the noise, his thoughts always get snagged on other people’s conversations, and they’re always talking about nothing, just substantial enough to distract him but dry enough to annoy him. Not-quite-right explanations of meiosis and slight misinterpretations of Middle English texts that make him itch to correct them, even casual conversation sets him on edge if they mention a professor he has a thought or two on. He can’t stand it.
“What an awful fucking shame other people go to university,” Amy says. She clasps her hands together, smiling with her lips pressed tight. “I think we really need to work towards a world where you’re the only person on earth really committed enough for education, and then you can have every library to yourself, all the time.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
The faux smile on Amy’s face vanishes. “Get out of the way, Adam.’
“No.”
“Move.”
“You can’t brute force me out of the way, Amy.”
“What, because we’re academics?” She tips her head, and her singular dangly earring glints in the light. “Hm. What a narrow way to think.”
“Are you suggesting you’d punch me?”
Amy looks over her shoulder, and the tattoo that winds up her collarbone and up her neck pulls with the movement. She turns back to him and shrugs. “There’s no one around.”
“You won’t.”
“I’ll kick your ass, Blackwell, and you won't hit back because you think it makes you a gentleman not to punch women in the face.”
Adam laughs, harsh and sudden. “Oh, I assure you, I’d punch you back.”
She grins so hard he can see her dimples, her teeth flashing. “You would? You’d give me a pretty little fistfight, up here in the Russian Drama section?”
“Sure.”
“‘Kay, say something that'll piss me off. It’ll be easy for you, promise.”
He looks at her, wondering with faint revulsion how she still looks like that even when her makeup’s smudged and her hair looks stupid and she’s wearing a shirt for a band Adam has only heard annoying people talk about. He catches a flash of pink tongue as she lolls her piercing back and forth through her lip, raising her eyebrows expectantly.
“Go on,” she says. “Hit me.”
“Amy, I think you weaponize your persona as a forward-thinking leftist to gain an advantage in academic opportunities over people who actually deserve it, even when you know it’s eroding your rationality. You’re outspoken not because you want your ideas to reach a lot of people, but because you want to reach a lot of people.”
He watches with satisfaction as her face flickers with confusion, shock, a brief flash of hurt before anger swamps it again.
“What the hell, Adam?”
“What?”
“That’s not even funny, that’s- you piece of shit!”
“Sorry, you’re saying you wanted it to be funny—?!”
“We were fucking joking, I thought you were gonna–!”
“I was literally just doing what you told me to! Don’t tell me to piss you off then–”
There’s a crunch and Adam’s vision blurs and suddenly Amy Stirling just punched him in the face. He feels it reverberate through his head, rattling it enough for all his thoughts to slip off the shelves inside and leave a scattered mess on the floor.
He blinks hard and pain throbs through his face, the taste of blood seeping out from under his gums. Amy’s shaking, just slightly, clutching her fist to her chest.
Adam opens his mouth to say something, but all that escapes him is a weak, breathless wheezing sort of noise. One of his eyes starts watering.
Without even thinking he shoulders roughly past her, the warmth of her bony shoulder hitting his, and he hurries away from the study room. He stumbles his way towards the nearest elevator, because he doesn’t know if he could keep from tripping down a flight of stairs, and he hears a door slam behind him.
He looks back against his better judgement. Even with his doubled vision he can see that the screen next to the study room door is telling him very firmly, in red text, that the study room is no longer available.
So, definitely reportable behavior. She punched him. Not in one of their apartments, or- behind a lecture hall or wherever people in university fight, inside a university-owned library. There’s a portal for student concerns, a downloadable incident report form he could fill out, and he’s sure any given professor he runs into would be happy to file something on his behalf.
He gets his apartment door open and closes it behind him, swearing under his breath when his glasses slip off of his face. They clatter onto the floor and he has to fumble to lock the door before crouching to search for them. He almost crushes them under his knee—he struggles to see anything without his glasses at the best of times, let alone when one side of his face is swelling with bruising. His eye throbs, pulsing across his vision in an ugly distortion of light.
What’s worse is when he picks up his glasses and one of the legs falls limply outward, the point where it meets the frame apparently having taken part of the hit. He wonders if he could file Amy Stirling herself as an incident.
He can fix the leg of his glasses just fine. It’s fine, it’ll be like nothing ever happened. He feels for where they're out of place and presses with his thumb--in the dim lamplight of his room, there's a soft click, and they’re fixed. Then he leans over to check his reflection in the mirror on his desk and promptly he remembers that his face is bruised.
It’s pretty bad. His eye is partly shut by the swelling, there’s a mark at the end of his eyebrow from the leg of his glasses, and he can see the beginning of a black eye forming.
Periorbital hematoma. The pocket of tissue under your eye fills with blood from burst capillaries because skull structure diverts it from bruising at the point of impact. Point is, everyone is going to know. And if anyone asks who punched him in the eye, he’s going to have to say Actually, she punched above the ear, the eye is just the direction the blood is forced to flow, and then they’re going to understand why someone punched him in the eye.
He could skip some classes, but he despises skipping classes. And either way he has a mandatory meeting with Professor McCandless tomorrow, and Adam doesn’t know if he wants him to bring it up or ignore it completely.
He’ll file a report. He’s fucking embarrassed, but he will. It’ll take forever and they’ll just tell Adam not to antagonize people and Amy not to punch people and say that both of them better behave or they’ll report this to the police next time, and they’ll both smile and apologize to one another.
It’ll be a massive waste of his time, but it’ll also be wasting Amy’s time, and that makes it worth it. It is midterm season, after all.