Chapter Text
So desperate was Newt for entertainment he showed up fifteen minutes early to the café. He then spent twenty-five minutes drinking a dark roast he liked less and less with each sip and willing something exciting, like a gunman or attractive person with lower-than-average standards, to walk in. No such luck. The only somewhat attractive person to walk in was wearing a bow tie--which automatically disqualified him from getting into Newt’s pants on principal--and was his very-straight and very-platonic friend, Tendo Choi.
Tendo spotted Newt and came over, dropping his messenger bag on the seat opposite of him.
“How’s it going?” He asked, presenting Newt with his fist. Newt bumped it with his own.
“My brain is atrophying.”
“Great, I’ll be right back.” And got in line to place his order. Newt flopped down in his chair in an attempt to get greater blood flow to his brain. He only sat up again when he heard Tendo sit down.
“You were saying?”
“Why did we move to bum-fuck Ohio?” Newt asked.
Tendo pointed half a bagel at Newt while chewing the other half. “For the free money,”
“Why would we leave Boston, the home of everything good and right in this world?”
Tendo, who was from San Diego, rolled his eyes.
“Leave the birthplace of Sam Adams beer--”
“Actual pig swill but okay.”
“And the Pixies? For money? For shame, I say. For shame.”
Tendo swallowed. “Well, yeah I did, but if I recall correctly you did because you were quote ‘sick of that rat bastard Dr. Lawrence jacking your shit.’”
Newt scrubbed his hands over his eyes. “Dude, I’m losing my mind. I can’t do this for another two years. I’ll die, and you’ll have to study my enormous brain, that shrunk, from boredom, which was how I died.”
“Unless you develop a really cool fungus in there no thanks. And it’s twenty-one months actually.”
Newt groaned again and dropped his head onto the table with a thunk. Tendo chuckled in his ridiculously deep and rich tone. Newt tried to glare at him but even the temper tantrum he was throwing was getting boring. Tendo relented.
“What about the whole teaching thing?”
Newt sat up again. “What about it?”
“How is it? I can’t turn around without tripping over some kid who can’t set up a mini-prep.”
“And you love it.”
Tendo put on a glazed sort of look and sighed dreamily, but his act wasn’t enough to hide his sincerity when he said, between bites, “I do.”
Newt sighed, not dreamily, and fiddled with his empty mug.
Goode University was not a Princeton or Brown or even a Cornell or Oberlin, and they knew it. To make up for it in the eyes of would-be-ivy-leaguers was the university’s Silas A. Pretorius fellowship, which trained up prickly, scatter-brained, poly-PhDs like Newt into the kind of faculty you could trot out to donors and feature in pamphlets and blog posts no one really read.
Last winter, after the worst two weeks of his life, Newt had gone from “eccentric” and “exuberant” to “uncooperative” and “distant.” And it was made clear to Newt he’d be his PI’s, Dr. Lawrence, bitch forever if he couldn’t show the bare minimum of face time with whoever he was contractually forced to see.
The plan, then, was to become the biology equivalent of Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society and make MIT beg for him to come back. As a bonus, he would hate Ohio so much that any lingering grief and anguish-related events in Boston would be wiped away.
There was just one problem with said plan.
“I’m teaching and going to meetings. Last week one of my lab gremlins poured agar all over the bench and I only screamed a little. It was a valuable teaching opportunity or whatever. I’m doing every stupid, boring thing they want me to do. What else could they possibly want from me?”
Tendo pointedly looked at Newt over the rim of his cup and answered as if Newt was actually asking. “They want you to be involved on campus. Join committees and network. That kind of thing. You could come to bar trivia on Thursday nights with the faculty.”
“Ugh, pass. That’s the only night I get the lab to myself,” Newt said.
“You just hate that you’re bad at it.”
“No comment.”
“You could join the IRB, they’re always looking for another board member.”
“But they’re not that desperate.”
“Fair,” Tendo said. He smirked, clearly out of options, and took another sip of coffee. Jokingly, he said, “There’s the holiday party decoration committee, they’ll take anyone at this point.”
Newt snorted, preemptively dismissive. “What holiday party?”
Tendo gave him a flat look. “The holiday party we get an email about every two days? That party?”
Newt shook his head. “Never heard of it.”
“Well, Corrine needs volunteers. You could help with that.” Tendo put down his empty cup and picked up the rest of his bagel. “It’s not an underground robotics fight club, but…”
“If it’s not Bot Brawl I don’t want it,” Newt said, sitting up in his seat and leaning over the table to hear Tendo better over the din of the café. “But that’s got to be just for a day. It can’t be a big enough deal to win me brownie points, can it?”
Tendo pointed his bagel again at Newt, but managed to swallow before speaking this time. “Apparently it is. A huge deal, even. All the department’s in the STEM complex go out for it. There’s a competition or some--”
“A competition? What’s the prize?”
Tendo shrugged. “Bragging rights.”
Newt had done much more for much less.
He pulled out his phone and attempted to check the Biology Department’s faculty calendar. The fact it hadn’t loaded by the time Tendo finished his bagel was a testament to the café’s truly shitty WiFi or to Tendo’s enthusiasm for bagels. When it finally loaded Newt clicked on the event, but other than the time and place of the eventual party, there was nothing else.
Tendo stood, grabbing and slinging his messenger bag over his shoulder.
“They’re having a meeting this afternoon, if you wanted to check it out.”
Newt shut his phone off and stood.
“Yeah, okay,” Newt said, grabbing his coffee cup and taking a sip. “Should be really easy, right?”
Hermann managed to butcher three sugar cookie snowmen before anyone deigned to enter the Engineering wing. He looked up when the door creaked open, so desperate he almost smiled, to see Vanessa pushing the door open with her back while holding two styrofoam cups. Despite liking her a great deal Hermann’s face fell. When she saw Hermann, mid-squeeze of a piping bag with orange icing, she smiled.
“Decided to join the festivities this year?”
Hermann mumbled, “Clearly, to no avail.”
Vanessa sat beside Hermann and slide one of the cups toward him. It’s contents smelled strongly and suspiciously of mulled wine. “Has anyone been in yet?”
“Not a soul.”
She looked around, eyes scanning the strung-up snowflakes and streamers in silvers and blues. He had been careful to pick colors that complimented Goode University’s violet and white school colors, a show of attention and care that now engulfed Hermann’s cheeks in flame. He looked down to see his fourth snowman did not have a carrot nose but instead a case of jaundice. He swiped it and his frosty brethren into the bin at the end of the folding table.
“It is lovely in here, Hermann.” Vanessa said, “You’ve always had an eye for detail.” She looked back at him. “I know you think it means nothing but you worked very hard. Harder than anyone else has for years.”
Hermann sniffed. That was the worst part of all. He managed to shirk holiday decorating contest responsibilities until his fourth year at Goode, but was told that it was a rite of passage for the Engineering Department faculty. No one wanted to do it, and Hermann certainly didn’t have the time for it, but he was representing his fellow faculty members, their students, even their department and he put in what he considered an appropriate amount of time to honor that.
“Not that anyone will notice.”
“Hey!” Vanessa said, knocking her shoulder gently into his. “I do.”
“I meant faculty.”
“Which I am.”
“Sciences faculty, and students. I’m glad Fine Arts and the rest of your ilk aren’t present, I could only take so much rejection and scorn in one night.”
“I’d ask them to be gentle.”
Hermann shook his head. “That would only encourage them.”
He was being ridiculous, a child who had declared vehemently that he didn’t want to attend a birthday party of a once-friend anyway who then sulked in his room the day of. Not that Hermann would have any experience with that at all.
Vanessa sighed. “Well, you never have to do it again. Next year I may even convince Jaz to invite you to the Bacchanalia.”
Hermann shuddered at the thought. The Fine Arts and Humanities Departments had a clandestine celebration of the Winter Solstice involving caves and poetry recitations. Vanessa laughed at Hermann’s not-so-gracefully concealed dismay.
“I’m joking, I’d never do that to you.”
Despite himself Hermann’s spirits lifted. His dearest friend was at his side and knew him well enough to tease him without fear. He couldn’t begrudge the faculty and students with a tolerable to above-average home life for missing a school-sponsored holiday party. Instead, he reached for his drink of dubious origin and took a sip. He wrinkled his nose at the taste.
“This is mulled wine.”
Vanessa nodded and drank what must have been half of her cup. “Yes, it is.”
“This is a dry event.”
Vanessa winked at him. “But this is making a very good argument for why it shouldn’t be.”
“Where did you get this?”
Vanessa finished her drink before answering. She was too well-bred to look sheepish, but Hermann would have been hard pressed to describe her expression any other way.
“Well,” she said, “where everyone else is.”
Newt stood in what was allegedly the center of the Biology Department’s office space, basking in his greatest accomplishment since arriving at Goode.
Where there had been black-speckled concrete floors and glass-walled break and meeting rooms were dark rugs borrowed from the auditorium renovation across campus and garish, ornate stick-on wallpaper courtesy of the bargain bin of Party City—the spiderwebs and gold filigree made up of tiny skulls were easy to ignore in the dim lights and glow of battery-operated candlesticks.
Not that anyone was looking too closely at the wallpaper anyway. Most people’s eyes seemed to drift up and follow the enormous evolutionary tree made of paper chains, each branch a different color.
The rest saw Topher Parker from his Tuesday-Thursday seminar walk past, coated in gray paint and paper chains hanging off his wrist. The shade looked very similar to the mysterious spots of gray on the tablecloths of the snack tables—boasting a balance of era-appropriate inedible and modern snacks--and some people’s coats. Newt decided that if asked it was ‘ectoplasm’ and totally washable. Hopefully.
As he passed Topher projected his voice in a vaguely offensive French accent, which was not helped by Topher’s wobbly affect, “Hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ--”
He looked over at Newt and waved before continuing on. He’d been at it for the past hour, which was fifty-eight minutes longer than people had paid attention to what he was saying.
Newt had to hand it to him. He really wanted that extra credit.
As Topher passed Newt spotted two late arrivals at the end of the hall. One was a beautiful woman in long braids and a fashionable dress that somehow managed to not look like she was trying too hard. The man who was a ‘we are not fucking, thank you very much’ distance away from her only looked more stodgy in comparison.
Really though, Newt assumed that there was no way they were a couple because she was way out of his league.
Or maybe because he very much wanted this guy and him to play for the same team.
Even from afar Newt lingered on the details. The man’s intense eyes, his stern mouth, his long throat. He was swamped in his big suit jacket and wool pants but it wasn’t hard for Newt to imagine the lithe body and broad chest underneath. Which he only too happily did.
Most of all, he looked like someone who would not only tell Newt what to do, how he wanted it exactly, but would enjoy it too.
It didn’t matter much to Newt that the guy was dressed the most on-theme, including Topher. In fact, Newt was trying to work it into a line. Seems like you and I have similar tastes, no, deeply untrue just by looking at Newt in his Godzilla Christmas sweater and skinny jeans, and he didn’t know Newt was behind all this. You know where you can put your Dickens?, no that would for sure get him kicked out of the party, and Goode. And the state of Ohio.
The only thing that gave Newt pause was the red bowtie at the base of the man’s elegant throat, but could Newt blame him for being in the spirit? He could maybe make an exception, it was Christmas after all.
The man stopped and read the banner over the doors, at first at a glance then again with his brows furrowed. A Very Dar-kens Christmas. The woman rejoined the man then read it aloud as if the guy didn’t get it. You know, Newt had already explained enough times tonight, “Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens? Victorian times?”
From the way his mouth twisted into a scowl Newt could guess he did and wasn’t a fan.
Tendo slung an arm over Newt’s shoulder with ease. He handed Newt another cup of mulled wine that they were hiding in his office.
“You would not believe who--” he started before noticing where Newt was looking. “Ah. She’s fine right?”
Newt blinked. “She? Oh, right, yeah. Super fine.” He said. The super-fine ‘she’ was speaking to the man again, who asked her something urgently. The woman turned back to look through the crowd, then seemingly landed on Newt. Which was ridiculous, surely she was looking at his very attractive friend. Newt turned to said attractive friend.
“Quick, act like we’re talking.”
“We weren’t?”
Newt glanced out the corner of his eye to see the woman leaning away from the man. She took his arm in hers and gently tried to steer him towards the party, but the man stayed exactly where he was and looked right at Newt.
Despite himself, Newt flushed. Maybe he’d have more luck with a party-related pickup line after all.
Tendo looked where Newt was looking and winced. “Oh yeah, watch out for that guy,” he said.
“Who is he?” Newt asked.
“Uh, Engineering professor, Gottfried or something. He did the decorations for their department this year.”
The man would not take his eyes off Newt, now glaring. Newt felt his fingertips tingle.
“Oh, yeah?”
Tendo whistled. “And he does not seem to like you.”