Chapter Text
In his time working at Grover Cleveland Middle School, Ryland Grace had seen plenty of crushes. It happened all the time. Middle school was the time when kids were starting to explore romance and so there were all manner of very awkwardly crushing kids all over the place, most of whom weren’t anywhere close to as subtle as they thought they were. It was endearing and adorable, a good percentage of the time. Sometimes, it was painful to watch, of course, if they were cringe and especially if they were mean, but for the most part, Grace found the kids in his school at least were as polite and respectful as one could expect kids that age to be. Which wasn’t always much, granted, but still.
Grace had always done his part to subtly encourage nervous kids to be forward with their feelings, putting them in pairs for projects with their crushes if he thought there was a decent chance of them being reciprocated (and they weren’t being creepy). He was pretty proud of his skills as a matchmaker. In fact, he’d gotten two wedding invitations from couples who ended up going the distance, though one of them was obviously a shotgun wedding so Grace wasn’t entirely convinced he’d done the right thing there. The point was, Grace knew a thing or two about what love looked like at this point, or at least the varying levels of convincing similarity preteen infatuation had to it.
Yet for all his success in matching up his students, Grace’s love life had been abysmal. He’d come to accept that he just wasn’t meant for love. He’d completely burned his bridges among his colleagues after going up against that scoundrel Dr. Warren, so there went a bunch of women who were of a similar level of knowledge and shared interests. His relationship with Linda had been going so well until she’d cheated on him with that braggart Mark. The man was all muscles, no brains. Ridiculous! And his dates since becoming a teacher had been either awful or epically awful.
It really just seemed like when it came to love, Grace was cursed. A silly idea, but he had an instinctive knack for screwing up any date which came across his path, saying the exact wrong things in a situation. It was pretty much always his fault, he knew. He had a propensity for going on long rambles and tangents which left the women he was dating bored to tears. Sometimes, he would derail an activity because he’d come up with some idea for his class or to improve on his grand idea of non-carbon based life (which he’d defend until the death) and needed to jot it down. One time, he’d gone on an astringent rant about a certain councilman, only for him to turn out to be his date’s father, which he should have realized because the two looked very similar and had the same uncommon last name. It had been years since any date had ended with a kiss, much less more.
Every time Grace put himself out there, he ended up suffering for it, so he eventually decided he was just done pursuing love. He didn’t need another person in his life to be happy, right? He had his goldfish Oceanus and he had his very satisfying job and he was proud to be a soldier in the war against ignorance and pseudoscience, battling misinformation, mischief making, and poor attention spans every day in the classroom. He was, genuinely, happy, living a life which made him content and joyful. This was not him trying to cope; it was the truth. And if love was meant for him, then he could wait for it to come to him.
Little did he know how much he would both regret and cherish these words later on.
If there was one thing both teachers and students at GCMS had in common, it was their love of gossip. Of course, they didn’t gossip about the same things, but sometimes they did when there was an important enough manner at hand. Grace, despite vocally placing himself above such pettiness, was not immune to gossip himself. Though he did try to put his foot down when it came to gossiping about the kids, because really, middle school was hellish enough without your teachers talking about you behind your back. This time, however, it was not Jerry Rabinowitz’s brazen efforts to try to date both Kate Trout and Gloria O’Shaughnessy without the other’s knowledge which made its way into the teacher’s lounge gossip, but rather a teacher which was on the minds of everyone at the school.
Roberto “Rocky” Ortiz was the newest science teacher and there were three things everyone could agree on about him: a) he was devastatingly attractive (even committed lesbians couldn’t stop talking about how hot he was, purely from an aesthetic standpoint), b) he was an extraordinary decent individual and thus beloved by his students and c) he was astoundingly, ridiculously weird. It was like he had been born in a barn or something. It went beyond mere social awkwardness or even the neurodivergence which Grace was all but certain he himself possessed.
Then there were all sorts of sillier rumors, like him never blinking or him freezing in place every once in a blue moon or him being able to handle objects which were burning hot without so much as blinking. Some people said he was an alien in disguise or a robot or a tentacled horror from beyond the stars in human form. Grace thought those types of rumors were hilarious, though he still had an obligation to refute them.
Stupid rumors regardless, it could not be denied Rocky was weird. And very hot, a part of his brain not so helpfully announced. Rocky had only been there a few weeks and Grace had gotten a chance to observe him firsthand. He moved in a rigid, erratic gait. He never ate anything within view of anyone, nor drank anything, not even coffee (which was practically mandatory when you were a middle school teacher). He claimed his religion forbade eating in front of strangers, yet somehow would never elaborate on what that religion was. His speech patterns were erratic and choppy and his knowledge levels were haphazard. He could talk your ear off about ridiculously obscure scientific concepts or television shows he liked to watch, but he was missing knowledge about radiation or politics or even the very existence of pizza.
But there was something very endearing and lovable about Rocky. He was one of the nicest people Grace had ever met. It was like he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. In fact, he found himself puzzled and frazzled whenever he faced instances of prejudice, either against him or by his students towards others. The concept didn’t seem to compute with him. He’d gotten into trouble with Principal Stratt once for using a slur once, having picked it up from the students with no idea it was a bad word. And he’d miraculously managed to skirt by with a warning, which was insanely lenient for the terrifying tyrant that was Eva Stratt. True, she was only terrifying if you got in her way, and you only got in her way if you weren’t doing what was best for the students, but even watching her go postal on someone else was a brutal sight to behold.
Rocky always greeted his peers with a genuine (if rather off-putting smile) and often gave them “words of great encouragement,” as he so charmingly put it. He comforted people when they were feeling down, whether they be student or teacher, and no problem seemed too small enough for him to listen to and give his advice. Granted, the advice was often strange and many times the outcome was disastrous (though fewer than one might suspect) but it was sincere and came from the heart. But if you wanted to just be listened to (which was the case for many people), he was your guy. By this point, there were more than a few students who might literally die for Rocky, so popular was he among them.
“You’re staring,” Olesya Ilyukhina, math teacher, smart aleck extraordinaire, and Grace’s best friend said with a smirk. “Pretty, isn’t he?”
“Yes – no! Maybe!” Grace could feel his cheeks turning red. He hoped Rocky wasn’t listening from all the way across the teacher’s lounge, but right now, he was distracted with staring at a coffeemaker as if it was a staring contest and he expected it to blink first. He seemed otherwise dead to the world. Grace would be deeply surprised Rocky he even realized he wasn’t alone right now.
Yao Li-Jie (or just Yao as he always went by), the stoic but very kind history teacher who was Grace’s other best friend, cast him a knowing glance. “It’s not often we get a man as attractive as him in our halls, and I am not even attracted to men.” Yao was in a stable, committed marriage and had been for the last twelve years. He had two kids and he’d mentioned that a third was on the table in the future. “Grace, my good friend, you seem to be rather interested in him.”
“Just – just professionally!” Grace stammered, hating himself for not being able to give a more eloquent or even convincing answer. “I’m not gay! And besides, he’s probably not gay either! And dating colleagues is a recipe for disaster!”
“Hey, look, I’m more sapphic than Sappho herself, but if I liked guys, I’d go for him.” Olesya laughed suddenly. “And, Grace, you are the very definition of a disaster bisexual. It is so obvious, you can see it from space! We all know this.”
Grace put his head on the table and groaned. He never should have mentioned his little celebrity crush on Ryan Gosling to them. Okay, yeah, he was bisexual. Fine. It didn’t change anything. He was convinced he would have just as much luck with dating men as he did with women, if not worse because he was new to the whole process. If he was gay and it was the woman part that was the problem, things might be different, but Grace knew he liked both.
“Still, it’s unprofessional and it’s only setting myself up for humiliation! What if things are too awkward? What if he thinks I’m weird?”
“The man tried to rip a fire hydrant out of the ground with his bare hands,” Yao pointed out. “He does not seem like a man who is particularly put off by weirdness.”
Grace knew it, but the truth was…he did like Rocky. A lot. And, yeah, while he wasn’t quite willing to admit it to his well-meaning but endlessly teasing best friends, he did have a crush on him. But that was the problem! Blind dates where you never had to deal with seeing the person again if it failed were one thing. But Grace was down pretty darn bad for Rocky by now and getting rejected would hurt and then they’d have to work together and that pain would keep on being brought up over and over again.
But then again…they were certainly right about Rocky probably not being the type to be freaked out by it. Rocky’s proclivities were a total mystery – he seemed to find beauty standards in general to be stupid or incomprehensible – but it was not outside the realm of possibility he liked guys. It wasn’t barking mad he liked Grace either, just the regular kind of mad. He could have a chance and even if he failed, Rocky was the type to just not care afterwards. He was such a great guy like that!
“What is going on here, question?” Grace let out a yelp as Rocky was suddenly hovering over him. For a man who acted like walking was something new to him, he could move at lightning fast speeds when he wanted to. It wasn’t just him spacing out which had caused him to not notice either; both of his friends were equally surprised.
“Uh, nothing!” Grace said quickly.
“Yeah, we were just talking about our grading. Which we have to go and do!” Olesya said with a wink and Yao nodded solemnly and the two of them went away and left Grace alone with his crush, the bastards.
Rocky stared at him, open earnestness in his facial expression. “Was it something Rocky said? Did not mean to cause problems!” He looked glum. “Am always causing problems. Cannot get along with people. Not the same as them.”
All those years of people getting on his case for his quirks, telling him to keep his hands still, subtly and sometimes not all that subtly telling him his endless rambling was annoying, flashed in Grace’s head. He got what it was like to feel alone.
“Don’t worry about it, Rocky. Just be yourself and you’ll be happy, that’s what I always tell the kids.” It didn’t always work out in practice, of course, but the world was full enough of people who were trying to get them to conform. They deserved someone who would be a voice for them to be themselves.
The advice seemed to work for Rocky, who brightened up. “Yes! Is true! Is what Adrian always tells me!”
“Oh,” Grace said cautiously. “Is Adrian your wife?”
“No, no, no! Is my mate!” Oh, a roommate. Made sense. Grace would have described rent prices in the Bay Area as brutal if that wasn’t an insult to brutes and brutality everywhere. “Is very wise, very smart. Much more so than Rocky.” If Rocky, a man who knew more about nuclear fusion than most scientists in the field, thought Adrian was a genius, she must have been the next Einstein.
Grace’s stomach lurched and he wanted to throw up. How could he ask out this amazing and wonderful genius? Even if he was now staring at a pen as if it contained all the secrets of the universe. His strangeness just made him even more attractive! “Grace bothered by something, question?”
“Just…nervous about something, Rocky.”
“No reason to be nervous! Grace great! Can handle anything!”
“Do you want to go to the movies with me?” The words erupted out of Grace’s mouth with absolutely no recollection of his brain commanding it to say them. They just seemed to spill out involuntarily.
Rocky bounced up and down with his chair. “Yes, yes, yes! Would love to! Is a great movie about the story of toys which just came out! We see together, question?”
“Yeah, but, uh, Rocky, just so there’s no confusion, I’m asking you out on a date.” Grace flinched, expecting rejection.
“A date? As in courting Rocky romantically?” Grace nodded. Rocky seemed to shut down for the better part of a minute, not moving or blinking…not that he ever saw Rocky blink. Then he rebooted and gave a dazzling if somewhat too wide smile. “Yes! Amaze, amaze, amaze! Rocky would love to date Grace!”
“Wait, you would?”
Rocky nodded so enthusiastically and vigorously he had to grab his head and physically cease the movement to stop. “Rocky would! Grace is aesthetically pleasing and interesting and good with the children!” He pronounced children like it was a word in a foreign language. “Date is marvelous! Must tell Adrian first, of course, but should be no problem!”
“Uh, cool! Awesome!”
“Will pick Grace up at seven! See him them! Also smell, hear, and hopefully touch, but sight is considered very important.”
Grace was left in such a daze that he barely even noticed Rocky leave. “I have a date with Rocky Ortiz. Oh my God. Oh my God. What am I going to do? What am I going to wear?”
Whatever happened, Grace knew he could not fuck this up. He would put his best foot forward and by tomorrow, he’d be able to say he was Rocky’s boyfriend. How cool was that?