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Be My Yoko Ono
For as long as Alec could remember the first day of school was one he looked forward to for weeks. New shoes, new pencils, new friends to make, and Nana saying how proud she was of him.
This year was different though. He couldn't feel less excited if he tried. The first day of college was three weeks away and his stomach was a knot of dread.
It was the turning point, he figured. It was all new rules on an all new playing field. It didn't help that he was moving out of state, living in the dorms, and was expected to maintain both a 2.5 GPA and to uphold some archaic-sounding 'morality clause' if he wanted to keep his football scholarship.
Nana had helped him pack over the last few weeks and kissed his forehead before they got in the car to take him to the train. "I wish I could drive you down myself, but this old rust bucket wouldn't make the trip, and you know we can't leave Todd alone that long if we want the house still standing."
"I know, Nana, it's okay," he said, clutching his backpack to his chest. He was nervous and excited all at once. He figured if he could just rock the football part of college, the friends and the classes and the rest would just fall into place.
The impending sense of dread that had been growing hit a plateau as he walked up to the dorm building. He was nervous, but his new dorm building was within spitting distance of the football stadium. He had seen it once, briefly, on the tour he took with Nana at the beginning of the summer, and he was so excited to get in there and get moving.
Hardison decided he would drop off his stuff in his new room and head over there. Maybe if he was lucky, he would meet some of the other guys on the team. Knowing someone else before the first day of practice would be helpful.
He met a caretaker by the front door, weeding a flower bed. "Hi, can I help you?" the girl asked, dusting dirt off on her shorts and squinting up at him.
"Yeah, I'm uh... Supposed to live here? Do I have to go somewhere to get my keys?"
Apparently, no one had remembered he was moving in early. It took nearly forty-five minutes to figure it out, but he spent that time chatting up the yard work girl, Tina. She was a third year film major, doing summer work for the school, and she also made a point to mention, three or four times, that she just loved football. Not a bad way to waste his morning.
Finally, a guy with a file folder and harried expression showed up. "Ah, here we go. Sorry for the mix-up. You're Alec Hardison?"
Hardison nodded.
The man glanced down at the papers in his hand. "Business major and, oh, you're a football player! Well, that explains the early move in."
He nodded again. "Yeah, wide receiver. Practice starts tomorrow."
"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Of course, no one tells me anything. Frickin' bureaucracy right? Anyway, go Wallabys!"
Tina offered to help him carry his stuff upstairs, even though he didn't have that much stuff. He accepted anyway with a grin. Only been in town for an hour, and he was already meeting interested ladies. Hardison thought he'd at least have to wait for football season to start for that kind of luck.
It didn't take long to move his two Rubbermaid bins worth of stuff into the dorm room. He thanked the guy when he handed off the keys and got Tina's number before she left to get back to work, promising to call her once he was settled in.
He looked around the room, glancing between the two mirror image sides of it. There was a black desk at the end of each bare bed, and a tall, wooden wardrobe next to each desk. There was about one bed width between the two beds. Hardison was pretty sure he could punch his roommate in the face while they were both in bed without trying too hard.
Not tons of room. It was going to be one interesting year. He grabbed the left side of the room and started unpacking. Clothes, laptop, picture of Nana and his brothers and sisters, a pair of high school football trophies; it didn't take long to get his half of the room set up the way he wanted it.
Hardison dropped down onto his bed and looked around. It really wasn't much, but it was apparently going to be home for the next eight months.
Scratch that, he thought, glancing out the window above the empty bed. That football field was home. He grabbed his keys and headed to the stadium.
--
Even though it was only a two hour drive to get to the university, Eliot had had more than enough of being trapped in the car with his mother and older sister. He was more than happy to endure their tearful goodbyes when they dropped him off in front of the dorm building.
He got his keys and ID from the girl in charge of new student move-ins. "I think your roommate was an early move-in, so it shouldn't be too chaotic up there. Good luck!"
He mumbled his thanks and went searching for something with wheels that he could use to move his stuff. Not that he couldn't carry it by himself or anything. Eliot just had his reasons for wanting to get all his stuff upstairs in one trip without needing anyone's help, and not all of them were about the raid he was supposed to be ready for in forty-one minutes.
"Almost there," he muttered, once he'd loaded his things onto the flat cart that he'd found and was pulling it to the elevator. He wanted to check on his stuff to make sure everything was okay, but just before the elevator doors closed, someone shoved their way through them.
"Hey, sorry," the guy said, stepping awkwardly around Eliot's load of things.
"No worries," Eliot said, even though his stomach was clenching. He recognized the guy's type, all sweaty and out of breath, his knees covered with grass stains and dirt. Jock, Eliot thought. Fantastic. I bet the building is full of them.
"What floor?"
Eliot looked at the key ring in his hand. "Six."
"Cool."
They rode up in silence, which was fine with Eliot. He was definitely looking forward to making some friends with similar interests, but definitely on his own terms. He had been stuck with the idiotic jocks in his hometown for long enough, and now that he was free from high school, he didn't even have to look at another one ever again if he didn't want to.
The tall guy followed him off the elevator and passed him without another word, headed down the hall. Eliot counted off the doors in between the one he was standing in front of and the one the guy went into.
Great, so they were roommates.
He bit the bullet and followed the guy, unlocking the door and pausing in the doorway when the guy spun around, startled, with a polo shirt in his hands. "Oh! Hey elevator guy. You're my roommate?"
"Looks like," Eliot said. He took a deep breath and pulled the cart in after him. The door shut with a very final sounding click.
"Alec Hardison."
"Eliot."
They stared at each other, but after a second Alec looked away to put his shirt on, his face popping out from the collar with a goofy grin. "So, I have to run out to a thing soon, but do you need any help unpacking or something?"
"I'm fine." Eliot was aware how forced and unfriendly he sounded. He just didn't really care.
Alec watched him a for a few seconds, then shrugged. "Cool, man. I guess I'll see you later." He left right away, which was fine by Eliot.
"Jesus, I thought he was going to stay all day." Eliot sighed, dropping down to his knees next to his belongings. "Sorry, Mills."
He picked up the backpack that was set carefully on the top of the pile and tugged the zippers all the way open. An eye appeared almost immediately from the darkness inside, followed by a scaly little head and feet. He picked up Millicent carefully and set her on the empty bed. "You hang out, I'll set up your tank."
Any kind of pet was against the dorm rules, but Eliot would be damned if he was going to leave her at home to the dubious care of his family. Sure, he'd survived eighteen years with them, but it was a little different for the bearded dragon stuck in an enclosed tank every day. He'd fight the dorm policy tooth and nail if he had to.
The tank just fit on the desk with about two inches of extra room, which meant he would be doing all his homework on the bed, or, if his roommate planned to spend a lot of time in their room, the library.
"There you go, princess," he said, settling her into the tank and turning on her lights. "Perfect."
Eliot regarded his belongings for a few seconds. A couple boxes that wouldn't take too long to unpack.
He shoved his boxes off onto the floor and left the cart out in the hall to be someone else's problem. Briefly, he considered putting sheets on his bed, but instead, he flopped onto his stomach on the bare mattress and dragged his laptop out of its case. It booted up with a comforting, familiar whir.
Sheets and unpacking and everything else could wait until after the raid, he decided.
--
Hardison was supposed to hang out with most of the football team at a pre-semester keg party off campus that night. He was excited for his first big college party, but he had agreed to meet up with his new friend, Andy, first. They were going to the mall to meet some guy Andy had met online to buy a couple fake IDs.
"You sure you're okay with this, man?" Andy asked when they hopped off the bus.
"Yeah, sure. Why wouldn't I be?" In truth, there was a little voice in the back of Hardison's head that sounded like Nana, and it was full-out disapproving of his entire day at this point, but he ignored it as best he could. The entire team was going to be at the party and he didn't think it would look good on him if he was the guy who didn't show.
"I dunno. You just seem pretty... straight-laced."
Hardison was about to say something, to get defensive, but when he turned, Andy was grinning. "Hope I'm wrong." He wagged his eyebrows at Hardison.
"Yeah," Hardison said, still mildly affronted.
"Yeah, bet you're a real animal with a few drinks in you."
It was pretty clear Andy wasn't being a dick on purpose, so Hardison lightened up. They'd only known each other for a few days, but both being freshman from out of town, they became friends like instant oatmeal -- it's right there, it's easy, and even if it's not the most nutritious thing ever, it will tide you over until you can find something more filling. And hey, instant oatmeal could surprise a guy.
The guy in the photo on Hardison's fake ID was a forty-nine year old Hispanic dude from Long Island, but Andy assured him it was legit and to pay the man. It was all seeming like an afternoon of fun and games until Andy looked at Hardison seriously for a moment. "You're going back to your room to change before the party, right?"
"You're gonna give me a complex or something, man." Hardison laughed. "Yeah, fine, come with me and then we can grab dinner on the way."
Back at the residence building, Hardison put his ear to the door before he opened it. "I think my roommate is here," he whispered to Andy as a warning. "I don't even know the guy though."
Andy shrugged. "Whatever, I'm sure he's fine. I'm stuck living with Crazy David."
Hardison chuckled softly to himself. Okay. Eliot probably wasn't as bad as Crazy David, if Andy's stories about his atrocious roommate were anything to go by. Eliot didn't even look up from his computer when they went in.
"Hey," Hardison said. He wasn't even sure if Eliot realized he wasn't alone anymore.
"Hey," Eliot said belatedly, clearly engrossed in whatever he was doing. He flicked his eyes up, barely sparing them a second.
Whatever, Hardison thought. So what if we're not going to be buddies. At least he doesn't count his toenail clippings like Crazy David.
"Holy shit -- Spencer?" Andy was staring at Eliot with the biggest grin on his face. "You're fucking kidding me."
Eliot looked up slowly, and his face went from impassive and sort of apathetic to angry. Like, really angry. Poke a sleeping tiger with some dynamite angry.
"You guys know each other?" Hardison asked. The tension in the air was almost physical at this point, and he had no idea what was going on. That didn't feel like a safe combination.
"Yeah, man," Andy said with a laugh. "High school. You didn't tell me you were living with this fag."
"Go die, Andy." All the colour had drained from Eliot's face, and he was shaking ever so slightly around the edges, but he seemed remarkably controlled for someone so angry. Hardison had been called a fag before, and he did not remember being so calm. He remembered the forty day suspension from school and how upset Nana had been, though.
"Uh?" Hardison said. "Why don't we --"
"He didn't tell you that he's a big cocksucker? Man, Hardison, you must have checked the wrong box on the residence forms." Andy was still laughing, and Eliot still looked like he was trying not to strangle him. "Wait, unless you're a queer, too?" Andy turned suddenly to Hardison, which was more than a little intimidating.
Hardison took an instinctive step back. "What? I -- no. No, not even funny."
"It's a little funny," Andy said with a shrug. "I bet Crazy David is looking pretty good right now. At least you know he won't try to rape you while you sleep, right?"
"Get. Out," Eliot said between clenched teeth. He rose halfway off the bed, and Hardison panicked just a little. He wasn't sure what would happen if a fight broke out, or what he was supposed to do, or how much trouble he'd get in if something big went down in his room before the semester had even technically started.
"Come on," Hardison said, snatching a different shirt off his bed and nudging Andy towards the door. "Let's head out."
"See you around, faggot," Andy said with that same smug smirk. The last thing Hardison saw before the door snapped shut behind was Eliot sagging back against the wall and covering his face.
Hardison didn't know why exactly, since it really had had nothing to do with him, but he felt like crap about it anyway.
--
Eliot couldn't focus on his game after that. He thought college was going to be different. He thought the call of a higher education wouldn't appeal to as many fucking dumbasses as his shitty, backwater country town had. He thought there would be a chance that he would actually enjoy his life a little after high school.
And, of course, it had to be Andy. Out of all the abusive, homophobic fuckheads he'd ever known and had to suffer, Andy was the second biggest asshole of them all. Good thing Dad is basically illiterate and thinks college turns everyone into ignorant, bleeding heart hippies, or else I'd have two of them to deal with, he thought, disgustedly. He shoved that thought away, because he was not going to be 'that guy with the clear and obvious daddy issues.'
He logged off his game without saying goodbye to anyone and opened the window above his bed to get some fresh air. Eliot considered going outside and exploring the campus a little to try and take his mind off his rage, but he wasn't going to leave his room if there was any chance he would run into Andy and Alec again.
Not that he could avoid Alec for very long. Just existing in the same town Andy and his idiot football cronies in high school had been bad enough, but now he was apparently living with one within whispering distance.
He'd worked too hard for too long to get to college, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let a group of assholes chase him off now. If Alec had a problem living with him, then it was Alec's problem entirely, and Eliot wasn't going to walk on eggshells or pretend to be someone or something he wasn't just to appease some jock.
Sighing, Eliot started to rummage through a box for bed sheets. He made his bed and tucked them around the mattress with military precision because it was so ingrained in his brain that doing it any other way would feel weird now.
Once the sheets were on the bed, he dug a little further into the box and found a photo frame one of his best friends back home had made for him. It had a picture clipped from their senior yearbook, the only part of the yearbook Eliot had given a damn about. Once he'd removed the picture, he'd tossed the rest of the book. He didn't need reminders of the last four years.
It just looked like a group of teenagers, but it was the school's tiny GSA club that Eliot had been a part of. It was pretty close to the only thing he owned that had major sentimental value. He set it next to Millicent's tank and finally felt himself relaxing again.
He settled back onto his bed and started clicking mindlessly around on the internet, letting himself get distracted by Tumblr and tried to forget how mad he just was. It was easy when his dashboard was filled with pictures of llamas and Community gifs and Arrested Development quotes over Lord of the Rings screen caps.
Eliot found one he thought was particularly funny and printed it for the little cork board over his desk. It was going to be okay, he thought to himself. "Right, Mills?"
The lizard peered up at him, then looked away a second later as if he was the most boring thing on the planet. Between her pretending he didn't exist, his unlimited internet access, and the knowledge that assholes were all around him being judgemental and ignorant, college was already starting to feel like home.
--
Hardison had never considered himself sheltered by any means. He had drank alcohol before, even a lot of alcohol a few times. But his teammates could really drink. He had trouble keeping up. In retrospect, that probably should have been his first indication to stop trying, but fuck that, flip cup was fun.
He had no idea how he'd gotten back to the dorms, but he woke up face down in his own pillow with his head pounding worse than... something that pounded.
"Nnghh," he said eloquently to his pillow. It took about thirty seconds of serious work before he managed to turn over. He had that gross, stiff feeling of having fallen asleep in his jeans and when he glanced under the sheet, he confirmed that was true.
"If you were checking to make sure I didn't assault you overnight, you're fine," Eliot said sharply from his side of the room, cutting through Hardison's mental 'are all my hungover parts still attached?' check list. He groaned inwardly. So that shitty, awkward confrontation with Andy had actually happened and it wasn't all last night's vodka playing tricks on his memory.
"What? No, I know that." Hardison knew immediately that talking was the worst idea. "Oh god, I'm going to die."
Eliot snorted. "Serves you right. I'm getting drunk on the booze vapours from here."
Hardison sat up, fighting off his oppressive sheets. "Are you always doing something on your computer?" he asked, when he saw Eliot sitting cross-legged under his own blanket with his laptop open.
"Is that a problem for you?"
"No," Hardison said quickly. He was so not prepared for the level of hostility in Eliot's voice. He settled back against the wall with the intention of getting his head to stop spinning before he headed for the shower. Moving at all, it turned out, set his head straight to throbbing. He considered briefly if he could die from a hangover, and if so, how did he go about doing that.
"Do you have some Tylenol or something?" he asked Eliot finally, trying to sound extra pathetic so that his angry roommate would take pity on him.
"...Yeah, hang on." Eliot tore himself away from his laptop with a sigh and started rummaging in his desk drawer -- a lot louder than he needed to, in Hardison's opinion.
"Thanks, man," Hardison said when Eliot dropped the bottle into his lap and went back to his computer. Eliot didn't say anything. "Look, about all that stuff yesterday, with Andy --"
"If you have a problem living with me, take it up with the RA."
Hardison didn't say anything else. He waited for a few minutes until he felt like he could stand up without his head exploding, then pulled some clean clothes from his wardrobe and slunk off for the showers.
Eliot was gone when he got back. No real loss there. It really seemed like Eliot hated him, so if they could minimize exposure to each other, maybe they'd both survive their cohabitation.
There was a text from Andy on his phone about meeting for their first class the next morning. Hardison wasn't looking forward to English Studies 1003, but it was a basic class that almost every first year student had to take. Somehow he and Andy had ended up in the same class so at least he wouldn't suffer through it alone.
He was just pulling on his jeans, thinking about his class schedule, when a little noise behind him caught his attention. He turned.
"Holy shit."
The lizard stared back at him.
Hardison didn't know what to do. Obviously, it hadn't just wandered in. It was in a tank and had lights and shit set up. There were some leafy looking plants in a dish inside the tank. This was a pet. Eliot's pet, obviously. Eliot's spiky, hateful-looking pet.
"What the fuck," Hardison said, inching a little closer and leaning forward so he was eye to eye with thing with only the glass between them.
"Hi," he said. He didn't know what else to do. Was he supposed to ignore it? It was watching him get dressed. That was weird.
"What, uh... what are you?" He was making uncomfortable small talk with an unidentified lizard. "What -- ack!"
The lizard puffed and its scales started to darken around the face. Hardison was pretty sure he'd killed it.
Eliot picked that moment to come back in, crunching an apple and staring at the spluttering Hardison.
"What are you doing?"
"There's a lizard in our room. So, uh, I'm panicking just a little."
"That's Millicent. She's fine. Pretend she's not here."
"It's... she's staring at me."
"Well, that's what she does. She's not so good at algebra, see..."
Hardison eyed Eliot surreptitiously from the corner of his eye. Eliot fiddled with one of the lights over Millicent's tank for a moment, then went back to his computer.
"What kind of lizard is she?" Hardison asked, still eyeing the monster in the box. Her colour was going back to normal, so the weird grey shade must have been just to fuck with his head. Jerk-ass lizard.
"Bearded dragon."
"Weird." Hardison felt far too gross to go out and do anything, but just sitting quietly in his room with the lizard still staring at him and his roommate ignoring him was kind of weird, too. "So," he said, hazy hangover brain apparently deciding that small talk would be fantastic right about now. "What are you studying?"
"History."
"That's cool, I'm taking business."
Eliot sighed deeply and closed his laptop. "Are we going to be these people? The people who can't stand each other but chat and pretend we're friends or something just to make everything seem normal? Or do you genuinely not get the awkward here?"
"Oh no, I get it," Hardison said, feeling his face heating up. He wasn't sure when he'd said he couldn't stand Eliot, but apparently, there'd been a memo he had missed.
Eliot sighed again, sounding even more disgusted. "Fine, whatever."
"Look, I get that you probably don't like me much for bringing Andy here after those things he said yesterday, and I just --"
"Those things he said?" Eliot cut him off. "Those things were the truth. Is that what you wanted to confirm? Yes, I'm gay. Can we please drop it now? Actually, no, I'm leaving. Have a nice day."
Eliot left so fast that Hardison couldn't even get another word in.
"I was just going to tell him I was sorry," he told the lizard. She turned away from him.
--
The library was quiet on a Sunday afternoon, a fact that Eliot appreciated immensely. He tried the distraction route again, but it didn't help. He couldn't concentrate on trying to be distracted because his mind kept coming back to Alec's stupid baffled face and how he probably didn't want to start a fight with Eliot. Eliot had been in enough fights and the subject of enough bullying that he was pretty confident he knew the signs and signals associated with someone about to kick the crap out him. Maybe Alec's hangover had been preventing him from being a total jag off or something.
Instead of reliving the stupid conversations all over again, he pulled up the list of books he was going to need for his first semester. Eliot had spent a lot of time over the summer buying them second hand online and from used bookstores so he wouldn't have to pay cover price, but the list for his English Studies 1003 had just been posted. While he was on the school's website, he clicked on the link marked 'clubs and activities' out of curiosity.
Most of the page was dedicated to the Wallabys in all their incarnations -- women's volleyball, co-ed curling, doubles badminton, and especially the football team. Eliot really didn't care about that, but a listing for an LGBTQ support group caught his eye. Immediately above it, a different link proclaimed spots still available in the Dungeons and Dragons Club.
It definitely intrigued him, but he paused. Maybe it was too much... But then again, he was allowed to be more than one stereotype, right?
Eliot fired off emails to the administrators of both clubs about meeting times and wandered off into the wilds of the library, looking for one of the novels from his English class so he could get a jump on reading for the semester. He was a pretty quick reader, and maybe he'd have a better understanding of the text if he read it through once on his own before they deconstructed it in class.
Eliot was looking for Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, but not in any real rush, taking his time and savouring the feeling of the spines of old books under his fingers as he wandered up and down the stacks. He enjoyed the feeling. It reminded him of learning and the quiet solitude of the books. He got along with books. Eliot decided he'd spend a lot more time in the library instead of his own room this semester.
He got to the fiction section and began looking in earnest for his book. That is, until he turned a corner and saw his roommate crouched in front of the next bank of shelves.
For the love of Thor... Eliot thought. He really wasn't going to catch a break, it seemed. He turned quickly on his heel and headed to the bank of study carrels, which luckily was as far away from the fiction section as he could get.
Fifteen minutes later, when he felt he was in the clear, Eliot was setting up his headphones to watch X-Men when there was a tap on his shoulder. He didn't even have to try and guess. He knew how his luck always turned out. He knew who it was going to be.
"What?" It came out a little less hostile than Eliot meant it, which he owed to the fact that he was tired. He wanted to tell Alec to leave him the fuck alone and just move out already, but he was saving his energy for the first day of classes.
Alec looked a little startled. "Hi. Sorry to bug you, but..."
Eliot stared expectantly for Alec to spit it out.
"Do you know how to find books in here? I'm not much of a library guy, and you just seem..."
"Seem what?"
"Like a nerd? Sorry. Sorry," Alec said quickly. He looked like he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him, which, in Eliot's opinion, was a pretty good start.
"Yeah, well, I am a nerd," Eliot said. He was slightly surprised to hear that he didn't sound like he wanted to bite Alec's head off. Maybe, out of all the things Alec could corner him in a private place and call him, 'nerd' really wasn't the worst. He sighed and got up again. It was worrying him slightly that Alec wasn't more hateable. "What are you looking for?"
"Uh, a book for my English class. Here's the list. It's that one."
Eliot looked down at the messily handwritten book list for English Studies 1003 to where Alec was pointing to Cranford. Of course it would be. Although Eliot felt sure he knew the answer, he asked anyway. "Is this your first class?"
"Yeah, tomorrow at ten am."
"Professor Weaver?"
"Yeah, you too, huh? Want to come with me? I mean, we're going to the same place for the same class. We could be study buddies or something."
Eliot wasn't sure how Alec thought that would work, being a self-proclaimed 'not a library guy.' "I'm not that kind of nerd," Eliot warned him. "You can't con me into doing all the work for you."
Alec chuckled -- a, rich, easy sound -- then winced. Evidently, his hangover was still haunting him. "Of course not. I think that violates the school's honour code, anyway."
"The school has an honour code?" Pretty much every school did, so that wasn't shocking, but he was interested in how Alec knew about it. He walked back into the stacks without looking behind him to make sure Alec was following.
He was, though, and still talking. "Yeah, about like, behaviour and manners and junk. A lot of weird stuff in it too; holdovers from the good old days, I guess."
"Sure, but... you read the honour code?
Alec chuckled again. "Surprised I can read?"
Eliot didn't turn around so Alec wouldn't see him grimacing. "Not what I said. Just a weird choice of light reading."
"I have to stick to the code if I want to keep my scholarship," Alec explained as Eliot located the right shelf and started searching for the book. He wondered briefly why he was even bothering, but then he reminded himself that he was trying to be a better person for some strange reason.
"Scholarship?" he asked finally. He wasn't entirely sure what constituted casual conversation with someone like Alec, but it seemed a fair enough question.
"Yeah, football."
"Ah. Of course." Eliot thought for a second that he would be surprised, but he wasn't.
"You're judging me right now, aren't? you?"
Eliot concentrated on the shelf in front of him, looking for the right title, while his mind raced with potential answers.
"I'm not sure yet," he said finally. He pulled the novel from the shelf and handed it to Alec. "How about I let you know when I decide?"
Alec stared for a second, glancing between the book and Eliot's deadpan expression. "Yeah, okay. Deal."
--
Hardison dozed in bed until the last possible second before class the next morning because it was the pretty much the only day he had left before Christmas break to sleep in. Between practice and eight am classes, he was expecting to get very little sleep in the next few months.
Eliot was talking to Millicent in a quiet voice, words Hardison couldn't quite make out, but he was amused nonetheless. Eliot pretended he was such a no-fun hardass, but there he was coddling a tiny monster.
The actual first day of classes passed in a blur. Hardison left for English Studies 1003 with Eliot in a mostly comfortable silence. Eliot hadn't spoken to him since the conversation in the library, but it didn't really bother him.
As they approached the English building, Hardison was going to say something, to comment on the greenness of the campus or how old all the buildings looked, but Eliot was gone.
Just up ahead, Andy was leaning against the building doors. Hardison smiled. Talking to Andy was a thousand times easier than talking to Eliot.
"So, how's life with the new roommate?" Andy asked. There was something in his voice, some vague, mocking feeling that Hardison didn't fully understand.
"Fine," he said, then changed the conversation to something he was more comfortable with. "So, practice tomorrow at five am. It's going to be a long semester, right?"
Football was a much safer topic of conversation. They talked about football until class started, and then they whispered about it.
The professor was just like any other teacher on the first day of school, blabbing on about class rules, how they would be graded, and the wonderful adventure that was literature studies.
Hardison cared about passing the class so he could stay on the team. He did not, however, care even an ounce for literature studies. Judging from the looks on the faces of his fellow prisoners, there were maybe three students who actually did.
He noted that Eliot was one of them, writing furiously as the professor went on with his romantic monologue about the magic of metaphors and how much he loved Oscar Wilde.
There was a little part of Hardison's brain that was happy to see that Eliot was just as nerdy in class as he was in their dorm. Studying would be a lot easier if he had someone around who, you know... knew how to do it.
Then Andy started a game of Hangman on a sheet of notebook paper, and the rest of the class was passed with increasingly raunchy clues and increasingly gory deaths for the poor hanged man.
Hardison spent the rest of the day bored out of his skull with his other two Monday classes, the introduction to business class and some bullshit course about university success. He met back up with Andy and some of the other freshmen on the team to compare their respective first days. He was already starting to feel at home.
"Meet you for practice tomorrow?" Andy said when he turned to leave Hardison in front of his dorm.
"Yeah man, right here, quarter to five?"
Andy groaned. "Yeah, looks like we're going to get used to that, huh?"
Hardison nodded, feeling weirdly excited about the landslide of busy that he was coasting inevitably toward. "Yeah, man. See you then." He went upstairs to email Nana about his first real day of university like he promised he would, but before he even got on the elevator, Andy was texting him about a party off campus that night, and did he want to go and have a few beers.
Nana had always told him he would sleep when he was dead, though she was more referring to getting up to go to church or do his chores. He thought the premise was the same though. He texted Andy back, saying that he wanted to change first, and headed up the stairs two at a time and walked in on something very strange happening in his room.
"You're not listening to me, Soph," Eliot said, half shouting to the empty room. "I didn't say it was bad. I just said I wasn't sure if it was completely in character for Six to say that. For fuck's sake, you asked for my help."
"Uh?" Hardison said, not wanting to intrude on what was either a private conversation or Eliot fully losing his mind.
"Sorry Sophie, roommate just got home."
"You're a dick," said a girl's voice from Eliot's computer speakers.
"I know. Call you back." He clicked a few buttons, and Hardison heard the disconnecting-from-Skype noise. So that answered at least one of his questions.
"Sorry, man, didn't meant to interrupt you getting reamed out."
"She's being totally unreasonable," Eliot said offhandedly. "It's no big deal."
"Right," Hardison said. He could tell Eliot wasn't pleased about his reappearance from the way he kept eyeing his laptop like it was a juicy ham and he was starving. "Don't let me keep you or anything. Do your thang."
Eliot nodded. "Did you have... nice classes?"
"Yeah, I guess. Nothing really mind-blowing. Uh, I'm going out with some of the guys on the team tonight, so you'll have the room to yourself for a while. I'll try not to be too noisy when I get home."
Eliot coughed, half covering his dry laugh. "Sorry," he said, not sounding sorry. "But were you trying to be quiet last time you came home drunk?"
"I was not... sorry, sorry. I know. I'll be better this time. I, uh, have to be careful about what I do, right, because of the scholarship thing..."
"Well, and the fact that you're not twenty-one."
Hardison waved it away like it was a minor detail. "Sure. So I'll be quiet and respectful and all that if you just, like... don't mention to anyone that I occasionally enjoy some beverages that happen to be alcoholic."
Eliot stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. "Sure thing, Alec."
"Oh, god, no, don't call me 'Alec'. Only Nana calls me Alec. Call me Hardison. I basically insist."
Eliot nodded. "Right."
"Right."
Hardison watched for a second the way that Eliot's fingers were drumming against his knee like he was typing, rapid fire, and he took a small amount of twisted pleasure in delaying Eliot from his weird internet addiction for even a few moments. Finally, he turned away with a little smirk and started rummaging through his drawers for something he wanted to wear.
"See you later," he said, grabbing his sweater. Eliot didn't look up.
--
"Sorry," Eliot said, the moment his best friend, Sophie, answered the Skype call.
"You better be. You're a terrible beta."
"I'm a fantastic beta. You just don't take criticism well."
She made him pick which colour to paint her nails while they discussed her story some more, which he objected to on the grounds that being gay didn't automatically make him good at that kind of shit, but she rarely let his feelings get in her way. It was just one of those things about their friendship.
So, when she attacked him in a flurry of questions a little while later, he wasn't really surprised.
"Is your roommate hot? Are you going to fuck him? Send pics."
He clicked back over to the Skype window from the blog post he was reading. "Excuse me? What makes you think that you have any right --"
"Save the wounded, 'you can't objectify me like that' bullshit for someone else and spill. Is he hot?"
Eliot was beside himself with indignation and the sudden realization, that yeah, yeah he was kind of hot. "I don't know. I've never noticed."
Sophie leaned towards her webcam, face suddenly taking up too much of his screen. "Are you going to make a move?"
"He's straight and, uh."
"Uh?"
Eliot scrubbed his hands over his face. Sophie was going to flip out when he told her, and he knew that the ground would not be kind and swallow him whole. "He's on the football team and best friends with Andy."
"Andy who?" Her eyes narrowed dangerously and she shoved the cat off her computer desk so she could fold her hands in her traditional 'I am very upset and someone will die' manner. "Andy from high school, Andy the bigot? That Andy? I'll cut his head off."
Eliot shrugged. "It's not a big deal."
"The prick who basically made your life hell basically every day since fifth grade suddenly being best buds with your roommate is no big deal? What, is the new roomie a sportsball jock, too?"
Eliot shuffled through some of his notes from his British history class to try and look busy so he could avoid looking at her. "Yeah."
They didn't talk for a while. Sophie went back to typing and Eliot reblogged a couple photos of kittens in teacups to his Tumblr to pass the time. He wanted Sophie to say something that would make him feel better, but then he wasn't really sure what that would be or what he was actually feeling.
"You know that means you'll have to do him while he's in his sportsball uniform, right? Do those boys wear uniforms?"
"Yes," Eliot said. "And no, no I won't be doing that."
"Pics or it didn't happen."
"There won't be pics because it's not happening. I should go," he said, even though he didn't have a good reason to go. He wouldn't be going anywhere.
Sophie made a face, one she probably forgot he could see. "You'll text if something happens, right?"
"Look, I'm not --"
"I didn't mean something sexy," she said, holding her hands up in surrender. "Just anything. You know you can always talk to me."
"Yeah. I love talking about my feelings," he said, deadpan. "I'm gonna go. Think about what I said about that Brennan and Gaius sex scene and email me when that chapter is done." They said goodnight, and Eliot shut down all his messenger programs. He closed Twitter after a few minutes too, deciding he was sick of all the other people.
Millicent wasn't other people, though, so he took her out and let her wander on his bedspread for a while. He felt antsy in a way he couldn't completely identify, but he thought maybe it was just anxiousness to get on with his life. Time seemed to stretch impossibly long in front of him and he wanted to rush through it, intent on getting to the next part.
He woke up from an uneasy sleep to an alert from his computer going off. It took him a minute to find the right tab, but when he did, he was even more baffled. A new Facebook message and friend request. From Hardison.
im durnk maybe and lost keys. are u awakke?
Eliot stared at the message for a few moments. He knew he had a couple of options, but he wasn't sure what the best one was. He decided to do what any rational person would: he opened his folder of gifs, picked a number at random, and did what the gif told him to. Of course, it wanted him to go be the hero. Stupid dumb luck.
Sighing at the animation, he clicked 'accept' and messaged back. Yes, where are you? Do I need to come find you?
It was a few minutes for the reply to come back, and when it did, Eliot wasn't sure if he was supposed to be relieved or annoyed.
no i'm outside thebuildnig bringshirt
Eliot went downstairs with a sweater, sort of dreading what he'd find. All he really found was Hardison. Shirtless Hardison. Very drunk, very handsy, very shirtless Hardison who insisted on repeatedly telling Eliot how awesome he was, a fact that he already knew. Eliot basically had to force the sweater on him, despite the fact that he was shivering, but once he finally had it on, he let Eliot drag him inside.
They made through the front doors and to the elevator without major incident. Eliot pushed Hardison over just a little so he was leaning on the wall and not Eliot's shoulder. Then Hardison made yet another terrible life choice and started talking.
"I love oatmeal, man. I mean, not love-love it. But I like it a lot. How did you know you were gay?"
"I... what?"
"Gay. You're gay, right? That's cool and stuff. But how did you know? Did you wake up and realize you were afraid of vaginas?"
This wasn't a conversation Eliot really ever wanted to have with anyone, but there was something so painfully earnest about the drunk football player wearing his Greetings from Arrakis hoodie, playing with the same frayed threads that Eliot fiddled with when he was bored or anxious.
"I guess I just knew? My enormous, life-consuming crush on George Harrison helped tip me off, too. And for the record, I'm not afraid of girls, I'm just not interested." Not the most poignant story he'd ever heard to describe the moment, but it was the only one he had.
"Ringo's my favourite."
Eliot chuckled, a genuine laugh that he wasn't expecting. "Okay, I'll give you that one."
"I mean, I like them all. Good music, too."
"Definitely."
"Is this bonding?" Hardison asked, slurring his words just a little while Eliot manhandled him off the elevator and towards their room. "We share a common interest, so are we bonding now?"
The way drunk-Hardison said 'interest' was possibly the most creative thing Eliot had ever heard. Points for that, he supposed. "I guess so."
"Are you going to put me to bed?"
Eliot batted Hardison's hands away from his for the fifth time while he tried to fit the key in the lock. "Yeah, if you let me get us inside, asshole."
Hardison leaned back against the wall next to the door pretty complacently after that, and made faces at Millicent once they were in and Eliot was finding him Tylenol yet again. He forced a bottle of water into Hardison's hands. "Drink this. All of it. And try not to die."
He crawled back into bed and left Hardison to find his own way. He was already a good enough person for going downstairs in the middle of the night and fetching his idiot roommate; he really wasn't expected to do any more than that.
Fifteen minutes later, once Hardison was passed out and snoring obnoxiously, Eliot got up and put a blanket over him. He didn't take off Hardison's shoes, though. Drunk idiots could sleep in their shoes.
--
Hardison barely saw Eliot for the stretch of time leading up to the Wallabys game against the Manticores from upstate. If they won the game, they'd be in the running for the conference championships, which was kind of a big deal.
It would be a big deal any time, really, but the Wallabys had been sort of a joke for the last couple years. But the team had a new coach this year, Coach Donner, and he was a kind of a badass. He had apparently completely revolutionized their practice regimen and all the guys who were not new to the team were in love with him pretty hardcore. He reminded Hardison a lot of one of his coaches from high school, so that was pretty cool. Except now that the game was basically on top of them, Coach was way harder on them.
It was also kind of big deal because it was giving him the opportunity to avoid Eliot, which was a glorious little bonus. He wasn't sure what exactly had happened the night he asked Eliot to let him in the building, but he'd woken up the next day (with a disgusting, probably illegal hangover) in Eliot's clothes and for once, his roommate was already gone.
Hardison trudged back to the dorm after yet another practice that 'ran a little long' and nearly cried in the shower because the hot water felt so good on his aching muscles. He dragged himself to his room, intent on making sweet love with his pillow for the next five-and-a-quarter hours until it was time to go back -- gasp and shock -- to football practice.
"Hey," Eliot said, looking up from whatever he was doing. Hardison didn't consider himself a neat freak, but he didn't understand how Eliot could focus on anything in such a cluttered space. In addition to the papers, binders, dog-eared books, and pencils strewn across the blankets, he had his laptop on his knees with Millicent right behind it. She must have enjoyed the heat it was throwing off or something, because she had a creepy little lizard smile that she turned on Hardison when he came in the room.
"Hey," he said. The siren call of bed sang in his mind, and as much as he would love to sleep, he didn't think he could with the lizard staring so intently. "I'm not food," he reminded her, poking a finger in her direction to reinforce his point.
"Going to text, guys, roommate just got home," Eliot said to the computer. Hardison bit back a 'wow, giant nerd' comment, because as funny as he still found them, Eliot did not.
"And she's not going to eat you," Eliot said, nudging the beast in question with his toe. "Unless you're secretly a football-playing mango."
Eliot sounded sort of blank. Like he was trying to keep his tone neutral. Hardison wasn't sure if it was true, but "Right. Um. So. I guess I didn't really thank you for the other night. I know I shouldn't have... I was really stupid."
"You were," Eliot said calmly. "But you're a jock. I didn't expect otherwise."
Hardison started to retort, but figured he could let it slide one time in payment for Eliot doing him a favour. "All right, fine. So, thank you. I won't let it happen again."
"Good," Eliot said, and then he didn't say anything else.
Hardison fidgeted on the edge of his bed. He felt like there was something else to say, something specific about their conversation that night. He couldn't bring himself to say anything, even if he had have been able to find the right words.
Instead, he asked about the papers. "Uh, what are you doing, if you don't mind me asking? Tell me that's not an assignment for English."
Eliot chuckled. "Definitely not. I'm playing an online campaign with some of my friends who don't have their own D&D groups. I won't be noisy or anything, if you're going to bed."
"... Seriously?"
"Yeah, all the dice and everything are computer-based, so no noise."
"No, I meant you're seriously playing that? It's Dungeons and Dragons, right?"
Eliot rolled his eyes. "Yes, and when will I stop shocking you with this stuff? You act like I'm sacrificing kittens to my dark god, Baal, or something every time you come in and I'm shouting at Sherlock and John or Skyping with Sophie about her Battlestar/Bones crossover... Dude, get used to it."
"No, no, I'm all on board with letting your geek flag fly, man," Hardison said quickly, already seeing Eliot starting to wind up. "I just thought that that was something you had to do with a group of people."
"Yes," Eliot said, sighing and rolling his shoulders like talking with Hardison was the most tiring thing ever. "I'm playing with all of my tiny friends who live inside the com-pu-ter."
Hardison wanted to tell him to fuck off, but he was so tired that the conversation was actually kind of funny. He snickered for a second, then caught sight of Eliot's disgusted expression and burst out in full-blown laughter. It was refreshing just to laugh. Eliot evidently did not agree.
"Sorry," Hardison said, once he'd caught his breath. "Sorry. You just look so irritated that I exist, and it's funny."
"Yeah, maybe I am," Eliot said, sighing again.
Hardison peered at the papers closest to him and quickly decided that they may as well have been written in an alien language. "Is it even any fun? That looks like algebra or something."
"It's my AC. Armour class. Like... how hard it is for the bad guys to hit my character," Eliot said sounding so put upon. "Besides, if it wasn't fun, would I be doing it?"
Hardison shrugged. "Maybe? I don't get it at all, man."
"Now you know how I feel about football."
Hardison crawled under his blankets and got as comfortable as he could on the narrow dorm bed. He thought about Eliot's words and it occurred to him that A, it was a very profound thought, and B, his pillows were really soft. Eliot was probably some kind of nerd genius. Maybe his pillows were made of baby clouds. Eliot looked really nice when the computer screen lit up his face like that.
Then Hardison was asleep.
--
Eliot stayed at the school long after his last class on Friday morning, hanging out in the back study room in the library that doubled as LGTBQ headquarters. He got into a long discussion about politics that turned into a fight, then a story-swapping session until finally, reluctantly, he headed home.
The sun was starting to set as he cut across the lawn in front of the library, and all the campus lights had come on by the time the residence building was in sight. As he passed the busy football stadium, it occurred to him that there was a game in progress, and judging by the frantic noise, it was getting pretty close.
Eliot had never really been interested in football more than in a vague, passing way that he figured all people felt now and then towards things other people told them they were supposed to like. He had a paper for his early civilizations class due in nine days, and he wanted to proofread it again before he submitted it, so he knew he should get back to his room, but a rebellious little part of his brain that clearly didn't want 95s in all his classes told him it was Friday night and that he should live a little.
He also thought briefly about all those presumably homophobic jocks who would die of mortification if they knew he was in the stands, watching their asses in those tight spandex pants. That alone was enough to tempt him into the stadium -- the snarky statement he would be making, not the asses themselves, of course.
Everything Eliot knew about football was either from television or movies. And although Friday Night Lights had been on his to-watch list for a while, he hadn't actually started it yet, so that 'everything he knew' consisted of very little. Tight pants, end zones, everything was measured in yards. That basically covered everything he knew.
He was able to pick Hardison out of the crowd of guys on the field. Not, he told himself, because he recognized the ass, but because everyone had their names sewn onto their jerseys. So by that, he was able to deduce that the Wallabys were the ones in orange and the other team would be the ones in black.
Eliot had no idea what was going on on the field, but the clock was starting to run down, and the crowd was tense. The score must have been close, although it looked like the Wallabys were trailing by five points. He didn't want to ask someone to explain on the off chance that they would, you know, actually explain.
The referee (see, maybe he knew more than he thought) blew his whistle about fifty times in three minutes, and there was one massive roar from the crowd, and then apparently, the game was over.
As far as things that were interesting to watch, Eliot had had more fun with his old school Windows screensaver with the multicoloured tubes. From what he could tell from the excited voices around him, the Wallabys had won and were now going to be in some kind of championship game.
Well, that was good. Go Wallabys, school spirit, rah rah. Eliot decided he really, really didn't give a crap. He turned around and got out of the stadium before the crush of people overwhelmed him.
He was just in the door when his phone went off.
It was a text from Hardison, who had insisted they trade numbers so Hardison could text him during English Studies 1003. Which he did, frequently, and it drove Eliot up the wall while he was trying to concentrate. Even when he turned the ringer off, he could see Hardison texting away, not even trying to hide it. He and Andy had taken to sitting a little closer than Eliot really liked, mostly because three continents wouldn't have been enough space between him and Andy.
Hey, saw you at the game. Pretty cool, right?
Yea, good work. Or, Eliot assumed it had been good work, since the Wallabys won.
Celebrating tonight at Devin's, you want to come by for a drink?
Eliot stared uncertainly at the last text from Hardison for a few moments, then panicked a little and logged onto to Skype to call Sophie.
"How deliciously homosexual," she said, clapping delightedly. Eliot resisted the urge to call her a dirty name.
"Definitely go, dear."
"Yeah, but to a house full of football players?"
"Your roommate invited you to join him a merry celebration of wine and debauchery, I think standard etiquette dictates that you attend."
He sighed and let his head fall back against the wall. "There was no mention of debauchery."
"It was implied. I can tell these things, you know. Built-in debauchery detector."
Eliot texted Hardison back to ask where the place even was, resigned to the fact that Sophie was right more often than she was wrong, and despite the potential presence of debauchery, he might as well try to have a little traditional college fun in his first year.
He spent the next half hour convincing Sophie that he was not going on a date while at the same time trying to pick a shirt to wear that said 'hello, I'm here to party' that didn't then go on to say 'and by that, I mean adventure party, because I have a D&D joke screen-printed on me.' Eliot had a pretty limited wardrobe when it came to theme.
"You look perfect," she said, when he showed her his final attempt at looking like a non-geek. It wouldn't pass real scrutiny, like at a country club or the Vatican, but it would probably get him into a football party. Which was not something he had ever thought he'd be aiming for.
"Thanks," he said, sighing in a way that made Sophie giggle.
"Do you even like this guy?" she asked.
Eliot shrugged. "We're friends. He's nice enough, if a little immature. He's not the Kirk to my Spock or anything, though."
"Kirk wasn't Spock's Kirk to start out with either, though, if JJ Abrams is to be believed." She wished him luck and ended the call, leaving Eliot to puzzle out her meaning.
He headed out, intent on wandering the streets of the city before heading to the party in an attempt to burn off some inexplicable extra energy he suddenly found himself with.
--
What Hardison really wanted after the game was to go back to his room, have a hot shower, and sleep for six straight days, but after he'd invited Eliot to the party, he felt like he didn't have any choice but to go. He didn't see Eliot when he got to the room, and that made him worry a little bit more about the invitation.
He headed to the party with Andy in tow and didn't mention that he'd invited Eliot. Andy was still very anti-Eliot, and Hardison had just taken to never mentioning anything that might get him going, partially because he didn't want to make waves and partially because Andy was really kind of nasty when he got started.
Hardison felt a huge hand clap down on his shoulder the second he and Andy walked into the party. "Good fuckin' hustle today, man!" It was Devin, the team's star quarterback. He was grinning and handing out beers left and right. Everyone was still sort of high on the victory, and Hardison felt buzzed before he even took the beer.
"Thanks," he said, grinning goofily and twisting the cap off his bottle.
"Gonna play like that in the conference championships?"
"Gonna play better," Hardison said with a wink.
Devin laughed again, and Hardison felt good. They'd won, they were in the conference championships, and everyone was happy. It wasn't hard to feel good about that.
By the time he and Andy had won their first game of beer pong, he had checked his phone for texts from Eliot about eighty times. He was worried he'd offended him or something. He didn't really get what it meant to be a socially awkward geek, but he thought he might of upset Eliot by inviting him to something crowded and noisy.
"Texting your girlfriend?" Devin asked, raising an eyebrow.
Andy turned around when Devin spoke, smacking Hardison in the arm. "Girlfriend, dude, why didn't you tell me? Is she hot?"
"No, no girlfriend," he said quickly. It was Eliot he was waiting on a text from, not a girl. So, why did he have that same goofy, light headed feeling he'd had right before he had asked Leslie Richards to prom? Well, clearly it was the beer and, if it wasn't, he probably shouldn't be trying to figure out what it was after he'd had so much beer.
"Nah, just invited my roommate to have a few drinks. He's pretty cool," Hardison told Devin, shrugging it off like it wasn't anything.
"Spencer? That freak? Why did you invite such a --"
"Oh. My god," Hardison burst out. He'd finally snapped and heard enough of Andy's toxic anti-gay, anti-Eliot bullshit. If he had to hear one more jackass comment about how wrong it was to be gay, he was going to personally put Andy through a wall.
"He's so much more than just a gay guy, you asshole. Yes, oh my god, he's gay, get over it. He's also a history major, and a former Boy Scout, and a ridiculous down home country boy with a drawl he tries to hide. Sometimes, he's a paladin, and even though I don't know what that means and I've said that repeatedly, he still gets so fucking excited about it. And he's smart, and funny, and sarcastic, and he's the nicest person I know around here, even though he'll never admit it. And you know what else? Fuck you, Andy, you homophobic dillhole. Maybe if I was a little bit luckier, maybe he'd be my boyfriend, too."
The words (and technically Hardison, to split hairs) came out in a rush, in a jumble of thoughts that had been half formed on the tip of his tongue for days, maybe weeks. Hardison was glad to finally have it all said.
For about two point nine seconds. Then the weight of his words caught up with him.
He had just sort of come out to the majority of the guys on the football team, not to mention the rest of the people within earshot at the crowded party. And in exact accordance to all sitcom laws everywhere, there was silence in the kitchen, and everyone had heard his little outburst. He was commanding the full attention of everyone in the room.
"Uh, I mean... um," he said eloquently, trying to think of the proper follow up.
"Actually, I was just going to say that he's a total nerd," Andy said, then he chuckled. It was the laugh Hardison imagined little fish in the ocean heard, right before a shark bit them in half. "But if you're gay --"
"Wait, you're gay?" Devin said, turning to Hardison with a look of complete seriousness.
Hardison was not an idiot, though he was beginning to suspect that wasn't entirely true. He knew how quickly these kinds of situations could escalate. He started casually scanning the room for his exits, counting in his head the number of people between him and outside. "Well, funny story about that actually..."
"That's cool. Both my moms are gay, too. You want another beer?" Devin offered him the bottle, looking around with his eyes flashing, daring anyone to saying anything else on the subject. No one did, not even Andy. There were a few smiles, Hardison could see. Some seemed genuine, some seemed mean. A few were just drunk smiles. He knew there was still going to be trouble, but maybe he'd escaped it for the time being.
Andy was opening and shutting his mouth silently, suddenly finding himself to be the fish instead of the shark. He looked like a bomb had just gone off next to him.
"I should go," Hardison muttered, wanting to flee the scene before the shock wore off and people started asking questions. He had enough answers he needed to find for himself, before practice first thing on Monday morning.
Coming down the front walk with his mind almost entirely somewhere else, he barely had time to jump out of the way when he nearly bowled someone over. "Oh, sorry, I... hey."
"Hey," Eliot said.
"I was just leaving," Hardison muttered. "But you can go inside and have a few drinks, if you want."
Eliot laughed dryly and started walking away from the house, nodding for Hardison to follow him. "No, I was just leaving too. Like Andy said, I'm kind of a nerd. Not really the socially-drinking party boy type."
"You, uh..."
"Heard all of it? Yeah, I did."
Hardison didn't say anything. He didn't know where he was even supposed to start. It was sixteen blocks back to the dorm building, and they didn't speak for fourteen and a half of them.
"So. The Wallabys won the game today, I hear," Eliot said.
Hardison struggled not to laugh. It was fucking absurd, he thought, to be talking casually about goddamn football when less than half an hour ago, Hardison announced he was probably gay or something and wanted to be gay and do gay-type activities with his roommate to the entire college football team. What the hell was the world coming to? Well, at least Eliot wasn't yelling at him.
"Yeah," Hardison said. "It's kind of a pretty big deal."
"Isn't football always a big deal?" Eliot unlocked the front door of the building and held it open for Hardison.
"Yeah, I guess," Hardison said.
They fell back into silence again until they were in their room. "So," Eliot said, busying himself with Millicent's tank.
Hardison kicked off his shoes, enjoying the satisfying thunk they made when they hit the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and wiggled his toes in the carpet. "Look," he started.
When thirty seconds passed without anything further, Eliot finally turned around. He leaned against his own desk and looked Hardison up and down expectantly. "Look at what?"
"You, um... Right. Um." Hardison was having some real trouble forming a coherent thought. His buzz had completely worn off, and he was painfully sober and aware of what was going on. "So, you heard, um. What I said."
"I did," Eliot give him an apologetic look. "Do you want me to talk? You seem to be having some trouble."
Hardison nodded gratefully. He didn't really even care what it was Eliot had to say, as long as he was the one saying it. Hardison considered how awful it would be if he pulled his blankets up around his head.
"You have so much shit to deal with right now, just inside your own head. Trust me, I've been there," Eliot said.
"Actually, I --"
"Shut up, I'm talking. I can give you names of people to talk to, at school or online or whatever. Or you can talk to me, I guess, since I've been through it all already. But like you said, you're not that lucky. You can't just declare that you're gay and live happily ever after with the first gay person you lay eyes on." Eliot looked down at his fingernails, and Hardison got the distinct impression that maybe he was still speaking from experience.
"Work through your shit," Eliot said again. "Then, in a month or two, if you still want, I'll let you buy me dinner."
That actually sounded like a really fair deal, Hardison thought, though another part of him still wanted to rush in, damn the angels and all the rest. "Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense."
"Of course it makes sense, I'm a genius," Eliot said, giving him that scathing 'you're a moron' look that Eliot had down so well.
"Thanks for coming to the game today," he said.
"Oh, god." Eliot groaned. "If we actually, you know, start dating, am I going to have to learn football?"
"No," Hardison shrugged. "But it might help."
Eliot smiled. It was almost a smirk, and Hardison knew he probably meant to smirk, but it was a little too soft on the edges, and it seemed like a genuine smile. The feeling in the pit of Hardison's stomach came out of nowhere, like being hit with a sack of squirming puppies that breathed sunshine and butterflies. That smile.
"Am I going to have to learn Dungeons and Dragons?" he asked, finally, when the dry feeling in his mouth had passed.
"No, but it might help," Eliot said. There was the smile again and Hardison knew he needed to go to sleep before he said or did something even more foolish than he already had. Thank god Eliot chose that moment to go brush his teeth. Hardison changed into pajamas and skipped brushing his teeth so he wouldn't have to meet Eliot's eyes in the bathroom mirror, under the bright lights. He knew Eliot would be able to see all his awkward feelings because he felt like they were written on his face as clear as day.
"Goodnight," Hardison said when Eliot came back. He'd already retreated under his blankets, like they would protect him from the confusion of the day.
"Goodnight." Eliot turned off the light, and the room fell blissfully quiet and still. Even Millicent, normally a little zippy at night, seemed to settle right into sleep.
"You know, you did good today," Eliot said, quiet in the darkness. "And I don't mean football."
"Yeah," Hardison said. He thought maybe he had, too, even though there was also a lot of bad to go along with it.
"You're going to be okay."
"Yeah."
--
When Hardison woke up the next morning, a lot less hungover than he had in the past, but still immensely uncomfortable for a whole host of new and exciting reasons, Eliot was gone, but he'd had left a sticky note on the wall above Hardison's bed.
Gone to D&D group, around tonight after 9. Don't let Mills trick you, she ate already. <3
There were a thousand or more questions burning in his mind, and he knew it was going to take so much soul searching and talking it out and maybe even fighting it out before he had all the answers, if he ever even got to a place where he had 'all' the answers. But in that jumble of questions, in all those convoluted lines of questioning, two questions floated to the front of his mind, demanding answers.
Hey, he texted Eliot. Why does d&d take all day? And what does <3 mean?
This year was different though. He couldn't feel less excited if he tried. The first day of college was three weeks away and his stomach was a knot of dread.
It was the turning point, he figured. It was all new rules on an all new playing field. It didn't help that he was moving out of state, living in the dorms, and was expected to maintain both a 2.5 GPA and to uphold some archaic-sounding 'morality clause' if he wanted to keep his football scholarship.
Nana had helped him pack over the last few weeks and kissed his forehead before they got in the car to take him to the train. "I wish I could drive you down myself, but this old rust bucket wouldn't make the trip, and you know we can't leave Todd alone that long if we want the house still standing."
"I know, Nana, it's okay," he said, clutching his backpack to his chest. He was nervous and excited all at once. He figured if he could just rock the football part of college, the friends and the classes and the rest would just fall into place.
The impending sense of dread that had been growing hit a plateau as he walked up to the dorm building. He was nervous, but his new dorm building was within spitting distance of the football stadium. He had seen it once, briefly, on the tour he took with Nana at the beginning of the summer, and he was so excited to get in there and get moving.
Hardison decided he would drop off his stuff in his new room and head over there. Maybe if he was lucky, he would meet some of the other guys on the team. Knowing someone else before the first day of practice would be helpful.
He met a caretaker by the front door, weeding a flower bed. "Hi, can I help you?" the girl asked, dusting dirt off on her shorts and squinting up at him.
"Yeah, I'm uh... Supposed to live here? Do I have to go somewhere to get my keys?"
Apparently, no one had remembered he was moving in early. It took nearly forty-five minutes to figure it out, but he spent that time chatting up the yard work girl, Tina. She was a third year film major, doing summer work for the school, and she also made a point to mention, three or four times, that she just loved football. Not a bad way to waste his morning.
Finally, a guy with a file folder and harried expression showed up. "Ah, here we go. Sorry for the mix-up. You're Alec Hardison?"
Hardison nodded.
The man glanced down at the papers in his hand. "Business major and, oh, you're a football player! Well, that explains the early move in."
He nodded again. "Yeah, wide receiver. Practice starts tomorrow."
"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Of course, no one tells me anything. Frickin' bureaucracy right? Anyway, go Wallabys!"
Tina offered to help him carry his stuff upstairs, even though he didn't have that much stuff. He accepted anyway with a grin. Only been in town for an hour, and he was already meeting interested ladies. Hardison thought he'd at least have to wait for football season to start for that kind of luck.
It didn't take long to move his two Rubbermaid bins worth of stuff into the dorm room. He thanked the guy when he handed off the keys and got Tina's number before she left to get back to work, promising to call her once he was settled in.
He looked around the room, glancing between the two mirror image sides of it. There was a black desk at the end of each bare bed, and a tall, wooden wardrobe next to each desk. There was about one bed width between the two beds. Hardison was pretty sure he could punch his roommate in the face while they were both in bed without trying too hard.
Not tons of room. It was going to be one interesting year. He grabbed the left side of the room and started unpacking. Clothes, laptop, picture of Nana and his brothers and sisters, a pair of high school football trophies; it didn't take long to get his half of the room set up the way he wanted it.
Hardison dropped down onto his bed and looked around. It really wasn't much, but it was apparently going to be home for the next eight months.
Scratch that, he thought, glancing out the window above the empty bed. That football field was home. He grabbed his keys and headed to the stadium.
--
Even though it was only a two hour drive to get to the university, Eliot had had more than enough of being trapped in the car with his mother and older sister. He was more than happy to endure their tearful goodbyes when they dropped him off in front of the dorm building.
He got his keys and ID from the girl in charge of new student move-ins. "I think your roommate was an early move-in, so it shouldn't be too chaotic up there. Good luck!"
He mumbled his thanks and went searching for something with wheels that he could use to move his stuff. Not that he couldn't carry it by himself or anything. Eliot just had his reasons for wanting to get all his stuff upstairs in one trip without needing anyone's help, and not all of them were about the raid he was supposed to be ready for in forty-one minutes.
"Almost there," he muttered, once he'd loaded his things onto the flat cart that he'd found and was pulling it to the elevator. He wanted to check on his stuff to make sure everything was okay, but just before the elevator doors closed, someone shoved their way through them.
"Hey, sorry," the guy said, stepping awkwardly around Eliot's load of things.
"No worries," Eliot said, even though his stomach was clenching. He recognized the guy's type, all sweaty and out of breath, his knees covered with grass stains and dirt. Jock, Eliot thought. Fantastic. I bet the building is full of them.
"What floor?"
Eliot looked at the key ring in his hand. "Six."
"Cool."
They rode up in silence, which was fine with Eliot. He was definitely looking forward to making some friends with similar interests, but definitely on his own terms. He had been stuck with the idiotic jocks in his hometown for long enough, and now that he was free from high school, he didn't even have to look at another one ever again if he didn't want to.
The tall guy followed him off the elevator and passed him without another word, headed down the hall. Eliot counted off the doors in between the one he was standing in front of and the one the guy went into.
Great, so they were roommates.
He bit the bullet and followed the guy, unlocking the door and pausing in the doorway when the guy spun around, startled, with a polo shirt in his hands. "Oh! Hey elevator guy. You're my roommate?"
"Looks like," Eliot said. He took a deep breath and pulled the cart in after him. The door shut with a very final sounding click.
"Alec Hardison."
"Eliot."
They stared at each other, but after a second Alec looked away to put his shirt on, his face popping out from the collar with a goofy grin. "So, I have to run out to a thing soon, but do you need any help unpacking or something?"
"I'm fine." Eliot was aware how forced and unfriendly he sounded. He just didn't really care.
Alec watched him a for a few seconds, then shrugged. "Cool, man. I guess I'll see you later." He left right away, which was fine by Eliot.
"Jesus, I thought he was going to stay all day." Eliot sighed, dropping down to his knees next to his belongings. "Sorry, Mills."
He picked up the backpack that was set carefully on the top of the pile and tugged the zippers all the way open. An eye appeared almost immediately from the darkness inside, followed by a scaly little head and feet. He picked up Millicent carefully and set her on the empty bed. "You hang out, I'll set up your tank."
Any kind of pet was against the dorm rules, but Eliot would be damned if he was going to leave her at home to the dubious care of his family. Sure, he'd survived eighteen years with them, but it was a little different for the bearded dragon stuck in an enclosed tank every day. He'd fight the dorm policy tooth and nail if he had to.
The tank just fit on the desk with about two inches of extra room, which meant he would be doing all his homework on the bed, or, if his roommate planned to spend a lot of time in their room, the library.
"There you go, princess," he said, settling her into the tank and turning on her lights. "Perfect."
Eliot regarded his belongings for a few seconds. A couple boxes that wouldn't take too long to unpack.
He shoved his boxes off onto the floor and left the cart out in the hall to be someone else's problem. Briefly, he considered putting sheets on his bed, but instead, he flopped onto his stomach on the bare mattress and dragged his laptop out of its case. It booted up with a comforting, familiar whir.
Sheets and unpacking and everything else could wait until after the raid, he decided.
--
Hardison was supposed to hang out with most of the football team at a pre-semester keg party off campus that night. He was excited for his first big college party, but he had agreed to meet up with his new friend, Andy, first. They were going to the mall to meet some guy Andy had met online to buy a couple fake IDs.
"You sure you're okay with this, man?" Andy asked when they hopped off the bus.
"Yeah, sure. Why wouldn't I be?" In truth, there was a little voice in the back of Hardison's head that sounded like Nana, and it was full-out disapproving of his entire day at this point, but he ignored it as best he could. The entire team was going to be at the party and he didn't think it would look good on him if he was the guy who didn't show.
"I dunno. You just seem pretty... straight-laced."
Hardison was about to say something, to get defensive, but when he turned, Andy was grinning. "Hope I'm wrong." He wagged his eyebrows at Hardison.
"Yeah," Hardison said, still mildly affronted.
"Yeah, bet you're a real animal with a few drinks in you."
It was pretty clear Andy wasn't being a dick on purpose, so Hardison lightened up. They'd only known each other for a few days, but both being freshman from out of town, they became friends like instant oatmeal -- it's right there, it's easy, and even if it's not the most nutritious thing ever, it will tide you over until you can find something more filling. And hey, instant oatmeal could surprise a guy.
The guy in the photo on Hardison's fake ID was a forty-nine year old Hispanic dude from Long Island, but Andy assured him it was legit and to pay the man. It was all seeming like an afternoon of fun and games until Andy looked at Hardison seriously for a moment. "You're going back to your room to change before the party, right?"
"You're gonna give me a complex or something, man." Hardison laughed. "Yeah, fine, come with me and then we can grab dinner on the way."
Back at the residence building, Hardison put his ear to the door before he opened it. "I think my roommate is here," he whispered to Andy as a warning. "I don't even know the guy though."
Andy shrugged. "Whatever, I'm sure he's fine. I'm stuck living with Crazy David."
Hardison chuckled softly to himself. Okay. Eliot probably wasn't as bad as Crazy David, if Andy's stories about his atrocious roommate were anything to go by. Eliot didn't even look up from his computer when they went in.
"Hey," Hardison said. He wasn't even sure if Eliot realized he wasn't alone anymore.
"Hey," Eliot said belatedly, clearly engrossed in whatever he was doing. He flicked his eyes up, barely sparing them a second.
Whatever, Hardison thought. So what if we're not going to be buddies. At least he doesn't count his toenail clippings like Crazy David.
"Holy shit -- Spencer?" Andy was staring at Eliot with the biggest grin on his face. "You're fucking kidding me."
Eliot looked up slowly, and his face went from impassive and sort of apathetic to angry. Like, really angry. Poke a sleeping tiger with some dynamite angry.
"You guys know each other?" Hardison asked. The tension in the air was almost physical at this point, and he had no idea what was going on. That didn't feel like a safe combination.
"Yeah, man," Andy said with a laugh. "High school. You didn't tell me you were living with this fag."
"Go die, Andy." All the colour had drained from Eliot's face, and he was shaking ever so slightly around the edges, but he seemed remarkably controlled for someone so angry. Hardison had been called a fag before, and he did not remember being so calm. He remembered the forty day suspension from school and how upset Nana had been, though.
"Uh?" Hardison said. "Why don't we --"
"He didn't tell you that he's a big cocksucker? Man, Hardison, you must have checked the wrong box on the residence forms." Andy was still laughing, and Eliot still looked like he was trying not to strangle him. "Wait, unless you're a queer, too?" Andy turned suddenly to Hardison, which was more than a little intimidating.
Hardison took an instinctive step back. "What? I -- no. No, not even funny."
"It's a little funny," Andy said with a shrug. "I bet Crazy David is looking pretty good right now. At least you know he won't try to rape you while you sleep, right?"
"Get. Out," Eliot said between clenched teeth. He rose halfway off the bed, and Hardison panicked just a little. He wasn't sure what would happen if a fight broke out, or what he was supposed to do, or how much trouble he'd get in if something big went down in his room before the semester had even technically started.
"Come on," Hardison said, snatching a different shirt off his bed and nudging Andy towards the door. "Let's head out."
"See you around, faggot," Andy said with that same smug smirk. The last thing Hardison saw before the door snapped shut behind was Eliot sagging back against the wall and covering his face.
Hardison didn't know why exactly, since it really had had nothing to do with him, but he felt like crap about it anyway.
--
Eliot couldn't focus on his game after that. He thought college was going to be different. He thought the call of a higher education wouldn't appeal to as many fucking dumbasses as his shitty, backwater country town had. He thought there would be a chance that he would actually enjoy his life a little after high school.
And, of course, it had to be Andy. Out of all the abusive, homophobic fuckheads he'd ever known and had to suffer, Andy was the second biggest asshole of them all. Good thing Dad is basically illiterate and thinks college turns everyone into ignorant, bleeding heart hippies, or else I'd have two of them to deal with, he thought, disgustedly. He shoved that thought away, because he was not going to be 'that guy with the clear and obvious daddy issues.'
He logged off his game without saying goodbye to anyone and opened the window above his bed to get some fresh air. Eliot considered going outside and exploring the campus a little to try and take his mind off his rage, but he wasn't going to leave his room if there was any chance he would run into Andy and Alec again.
Not that he could avoid Alec for very long. Just existing in the same town Andy and his idiot football cronies in high school had been bad enough, but now he was apparently living with one within whispering distance.
He'd worked too hard for too long to get to college, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let a group of assholes chase him off now. If Alec had a problem living with him, then it was Alec's problem entirely, and Eliot wasn't going to walk on eggshells or pretend to be someone or something he wasn't just to appease some jock.
Sighing, Eliot started to rummage through a box for bed sheets. He made his bed and tucked them around the mattress with military precision because it was so ingrained in his brain that doing it any other way would feel weird now.
Once the sheets were on the bed, he dug a little further into the box and found a photo frame one of his best friends back home had made for him. It had a picture clipped from their senior yearbook, the only part of the yearbook Eliot had given a damn about. Once he'd removed the picture, he'd tossed the rest of the book. He didn't need reminders of the last four years.
It just looked like a group of teenagers, but it was the school's tiny GSA club that Eliot had been a part of. It was pretty close to the only thing he owned that had major sentimental value. He set it next to Millicent's tank and finally felt himself relaxing again.
He settled back onto his bed and started clicking mindlessly around on the internet, letting himself get distracted by Tumblr and tried to forget how mad he just was. It was easy when his dashboard was filled with pictures of llamas and Community gifs and Arrested Development quotes over Lord of the Rings screen caps.
Eliot found one he thought was particularly funny and printed it for the little cork board over his desk. It was going to be okay, he thought to himself. "Right, Mills?"
The lizard peered up at him, then looked away a second later as if he was the most boring thing on the planet. Between her pretending he didn't exist, his unlimited internet access, and the knowledge that assholes were all around him being judgemental and ignorant, college was already starting to feel like home.
--
Hardison had never considered himself sheltered by any means. He had drank alcohol before, even a lot of alcohol a few times. But his teammates could really drink. He had trouble keeping up. In retrospect, that probably should have been his first indication to stop trying, but fuck that, flip cup was fun.
He had no idea how he'd gotten back to the dorms, but he woke up face down in his own pillow with his head pounding worse than... something that pounded.
"Nnghh," he said eloquently to his pillow. It took about thirty seconds of serious work before he managed to turn over. He had that gross, stiff feeling of having fallen asleep in his jeans and when he glanced under the sheet, he confirmed that was true.
"If you were checking to make sure I didn't assault you overnight, you're fine," Eliot said sharply from his side of the room, cutting through Hardison's mental 'are all my hungover parts still attached?' check list. He groaned inwardly. So that shitty, awkward confrontation with Andy had actually happened and it wasn't all last night's vodka playing tricks on his memory.
"What? No, I know that." Hardison knew immediately that talking was the worst idea. "Oh god, I'm going to die."
Eliot snorted. "Serves you right. I'm getting drunk on the booze vapours from here."
Hardison sat up, fighting off his oppressive sheets. "Are you always doing something on your computer?" he asked, when he saw Eliot sitting cross-legged under his own blanket with his laptop open.
"Is that a problem for you?"
"No," Hardison said quickly. He was so not prepared for the level of hostility in Eliot's voice. He settled back against the wall with the intention of getting his head to stop spinning before he headed for the shower. Moving at all, it turned out, set his head straight to throbbing. He considered briefly if he could die from a hangover, and if so, how did he go about doing that.
"Do you have some Tylenol or something?" he asked Eliot finally, trying to sound extra pathetic so that his angry roommate would take pity on him.
"...Yeah, hang on." Eliot tore himself away from his laptop with a sigh and started rummaging in his desk drawer -- a lot louder than he needed to, in Hardison's opinion.
"Thanks, man," Hardison said when Eliot dropped the bottle into his lap and went back to his computer. Eliot didn't say anything. "Look, about all that stuff yesterday, with Andy --"
"If you have a problem living with me, take it up with the RA."
Hardison didn't say anything else. He waited for a few minutes until he felt like he could stand up without his head exploding, then pulled some clean clothes from his wardrobe and slunk off for the showers.
Eliot was gone when he got back. No real loss there. It really seemed like Eliot hated him, so if they could minimize exposure to each other, maybe they'd both survive their cohabitation.
There was a text from Andy on his phone about meeting for their first class the next morning. Hardison wasn't looking forward to English Studies 1003, but it was a basic class that almost every first year student had to take. Somehow he and Andy had ended up in the same class so at least he wouldn't suffer through it alone.
He was just pulling on his jeans, thinking about his class schedule, when a little noise behind him caught his attention. He turned.
"Holy shit."
The lizard stared back at him.
Hardison didn't know what to do. Obviously, it hadn't just wandered in. It was in a tank and had lights and shit set up. There were some leafy looking plants in a dish inside the tank. This was a pet. Eliot's pet, obviously. Eliot's spiky, hateful-looking pet.
"What the fuck," Hardison said, inching a little closer and leaning forward so he was eye to eye with thing with only the glass between them.
"Hi," he said. He didn't know what else to do. Was he supposed to ignore it? It was watching him get dressed. That was weird.
"What, uh... what are you?" He was making uncomfortable small talk with an unidentified lizard. "What -- ack!"
The lizard puffed and its scales started to darken around the face. Hardison was pretty sure he'd killed it.
Eliot picked that moment to come back in, crunching an apple and staring at the spluttering Hardison.
"What are you doing?"
"There's a lizard in our room. So, uh, I'm panicking just a little."
"That's Millicent. She's fine. Pretend she's not here."
"It's... she's staring at me."
"Well, that's what she does. She's not so good at algebra, see..."
Hardison eyed Eliot surreptitiously from the corner of his eye. Eliot fiddled with one of the lights over Millicent's tank for a moment, then went back to his computer.
"What kind of lizard is she?" Hardison asked, still eyeing the monster in the box. Her colour was going back to normal, so the weird grey shade must have been just to fuck with his head. Jerk-ass lizard.
"Bearded dragon."
"Weird." Hardison felt far too gross to go out and do anything, but just sitting quietly in his room with the lizard still staring at him and his roommate ignoring him was kind of weird, too. "So," he said, hazy hangover brain apparently deciding that small talk would be fantastic right about now. "What are you studying?"
"History."
"That's cool, I'm taking business."
Eliot sighed deeply and closed his laptop. "Are we going to be these people? The people who can't stand each other but chat and pretend we're friends or something just to make everything seem normal? Or do you genuinely not get the awkward here?"
"Oh no, I get it," Hardison said, feeling his face heating up. He wasn't sure when he'd said he couldn't stand Eliot, but apparently, there'd been a memo he had missed.
Eliot sighed again, sounding even more disgusted. "Fine, whatever."
"Look, I get that you probably don't like me much for bringing Andy here after those things he said yesterday, and I just --"
"Those things he said?" Eliot cut him off. "Those things were the truth. Is that what you wanted to confirm? Yes, I'm gay. Can we please drop it now? Actually, no, I'm leaving. Have a nice day."
Eliot left so fast that Hardison couldn't even get another word in.
"I was just going to tell him I was sorry," he told the lizard. She turned away from him.
--
The library was quiet on a Sunday afternoon, a fact that Eliot appreciated immensely. He tried the distraction route again, but it didn't help. He couldn't concentrate on trying to be distracted because his mind kept coming back to Alec's stupid baffled face and how he probably didn't want to start a fight with Eliot. Eliot had been in enough fights and the subject of enough bullying that he was pretty confident he knew the signs and signals associated with someone about to kick the crap out him. Maybe Alec's hangover had been preventing him from being a total jag off or something.
Instead of reliving the stupid conversations all over again, he pulled up the list of books he was going to need for his first semester. Eliot had spent a lot of time over the summer buying them second hand online and from used bookstores so he wouldn't have to pay cover price, but the list for his English Studies 1003 had just been posted. While he was on the school's website, he clicked on the link marked 'clubs and activities' out of curiosity.
Most of the page was dedicated to the Wallabys in all their incarnations -- women's volleyball, co-ed curling, doubles badminton, and especially the football team. Eliot really didn't care about that, but a listing for an LGBTQ support group caught his eye. Immediately above it, a different link proclaimed spots still available in the Dungeons and Dragons Club.
It definitely intrigued him, but he paused. Maybe it was too much... But then again, he was allowed to be more than one stereotype, right?
Eliot fired off emails to the administrators of both clubs about meeting times and wandered off into the wilds of the library, looking for one of the novels from his English class so he could get a jump on reading for the semester. He was a pretty quick reader, and maybe he'd have a better understanding of the text if he read it through once on his own before they deconstructed it in class.
Eliot was looking for Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, but not in any real rush, taking his time and savouring the feeling of the spines of old books under his fingers as he wandered up and down the stacks. He enjoyed the feeling. It reminded him of learning and the quiet solitude of the books. He got along with books. Eliot decided he'd spend a lot more time in the library instead of his own room this semester.
He got to the fiction section and began looking in earnest for his book. That is, until he turned a corner and saw his roommate crouched in front of the next bank of shelves.
For the love of Thor... Eliot thought. He really wasn't going to catch a break, it seemed. He turned quickly on his heel and headed to the bank of study carrels, which luckily was as far away from the fiction section as he could get.
Fifteen minutes later, when he felt he was in the clear, Eliot was setting up his headphones to watch X-Men when there was a tap on his shoulder. He didn't even have to try and guess. He knew how his luck always turned out. He knew who it was going to be.
"What?" It came out a little less hostile than Eliot meant it, which he owed to the fact that he was tired. He wanted to tell Alec to leave him the fuck alone and just move out already, but he was saving his energy for the first day of classes.
Alec looked a little startled. "Hi. Sorry to bug you, but..."
Eliot stared expectantly for Alec to spit it out.
"Do you know how to find books in here? I'm not much of a library guy, and you just seem..."
"Seem what?"
"Like a nerd? Sorry. Sorry," Alec said quickly. He looked like he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him, which, in Eliot's opinion, was a pretty good start.
"Yeah, well, I am a nerd," Eliot said. He was slightly surprised to hear that he didn't sound like he wanted to bite Alec's head off. Maybe, out of all the things Alec could corner him in a private place and call him, 'nerd' really wasn't the worst. He sighed and got up again. It was worrying him slightly that Alec wasn't more hateable. "What are you looking for?"
"Uh, a book for my English class. Here's the list. It's that one."
Eliot looked down at the messily handwritten book list for English Studies 1003 to where Alec was pointing to Cranford. Of course it would be. Although Eliot felt sure he knew the answer, he asked anyway. "Is this your first class?"
"Yeah, tomorrow at ten am."
"Professor Weaver?"
"Yeah, you too, huh? Want to come with me? I mean, we're going to the same place for the same class. We could be study buddies or something."
Eliot wasn't sure how Alec thought that would work, being a self-proclaimed 'not a library guy.' "I'm not that kind of nerd," Eliot warned him. "You can't con me into doing all the work for you."
Alec chuckled -- a, rich, easy sound -- then winced. Evidently, his hangover was still haunting him. "Of course not. I think that violates the school's honour code, anyway."
"The school has an honour code?" Pretty much every school did, so that wasn't shocking, but he was interested in how Alec knew about it. He walked back into the stacks without looking behind him to make sure Alec was following.
He was, though, and still talking. "Yeah, about like, behaviour and manners and junk. A lot of weird stuff in it too; holdovers from the good old days, I guess."
"Sure, but... you read the honour code?
Alec chuckled again. "Surprised I can read?"
Eliot didn't turn around so Alec wouldn't see him grimacing. "Not what I said. Just a weird choice of light reading."
"I have to stick to the code if I want to keep my scholarship," Alec explained as Eliot located the right shelf and started searching for the book. He wondered briefly why he was even bothering, but then he reminded himself that he was trying to be a better person for some strange reason.
"Scholarship?" he asked finally. He wasn't entirely sure what constituted casual conversation with someone like Alec, but it seemed a fair enough question.
"Yeah, football."
"Ah. Of course." Eliot thought for a second that he would be surprised, but he wasn't.
"You're judging me right now, aren't? you?"
Eliot concentrated on the shelf in front of him, looking for the right title, while his mind raced with potential answers.
"I'm not sure yet," he said finally. He pulled the novel from the shelf and handed it to Alec. "How about I let you know when I decide?"
Alec stared for a second, glancing between the book and Eliot's deadpan expression. "Yeah, okay. Deal."
--
Hardison dozed in bed until the last possible second before class the next morning because it was the pretty much the only day he had left before Christmas break to sleep in. Between practice and eight am classes, he was expecting to get very little sleep in the next few months.
Eliot was talking to Millicent in a quiet voice, words Hardison couldn't quite make out, but he was amused nonetheless. Eliot pretended he was such a no-fun hardass, but there he was coddling a tiny monster.
The actual first day of classes passed in a blur. Hardison left for English Studies 1003 with Eliot in a mostly comfortable silence. Eliot hadn't spoken to him since the conversation in the library, but it didn't really bother him.
As they approached the English building, Hardison was going to say something, to comment on the greenness of the campus or how old all the buildings looked, but Eliot was gone.
Just up ahead, Andy was leaning against the building doors. Hardison smiled. Talking to Andy was a thousand times easier than talking to Eliot.
"So, how's life with the new roommate?" Andy asked. There was something in his voice, some vague, mocking feeling that Hardison didn't fully understand.
"Fine," he said, then changed the conversation to something he was more comfortable with. "So, practice tomorrow at five am. It's going to be a long semester, right?"
Football was a much safer topic of conversation. They talked about football until class started, and then they whispered about it.
The professor was just like any other teacher on the first day of school, blabbing on about class rules, how they would be graded, and the wonderful adventure that was literature studies.
Hardison cared about passing the class so he could stay on the team. He did not, however, care even an ounce for literature studies. Judging from the looks on the faces of his fellow prisoners, there were maybe three students who actually did.
He noted that Eliot was one of them, writing furiously as the professor went on with his romantic monologue about the magic of metaphors and how much he loved Oscar Wilde.
There was a little part of Hardison's brain that was happy to see that Eliot was just as nerdy in class as he was in their dorm. Studying would be a lot easier if he had someone around who, you know... knew how to do it.
Then Andy started a game of Hangman on a sheet of notebook paper, and the rest of the class was passed with increasingly raunchy clues and increasingly gory deaths for the poor hanged man.
Hardison spent the rest of the day bored out of his skull with his other two Monday classes, the introduction to business class and some bullshit course about university success. He met back up with Andy and some of the other freshmen on the team to compare their respective first days. He was already starting to feel at home.
"Meet you for practice tomorrow?" Andy said when he turned to leave Hardison in front of his dorm.
"Yeah man, right here, quarter to five?"
Andy groaned. "Yeah, looks like we're going to get used to that, huh?"
Hardison nodded, feeling weirdly excited about the landslide of busy that he was coasting inevitably toward. "Yeah, man. See you then." He went upstairs to email Nana about his first real day of university like he promised he would, but before he even got on the elevator, Andy was texting him about a party off campus that night, and did he want to go and have a few beers.
Nana had always told him he would sleep when he was dead, though she was more referring to getting up to go to church or do his chores. He thought the premise was the same though. He texted Andy back, saying that he wanted to change first, and headed up the stairs two at a time and walked in on something very strange happening in his room.
"You're not listening to me, Soph," Eliot said, half shouting to the empty room. "I didn't say it was bad. I just said I wasn't sure if it was completely in character for Six to say that. For fuck's sake, you asked for my help."
"Uh?" Hardison said, not wanting to intrude on what was either a private conversation or Eliot fully losing his mind.
"Sorry Sophie, roommate just got home."
"You're a dick," said a girl's voice from Eliot's computer speakers.
"I know. Call you back." He clicked a few buttons, and Hardison heard the disconnecting-from-Skype noise. So that answered at least one of his questions.
"Sorry, man, didn't meant to interrupt you getting reamed out."
"She's being totally unreasonable," Eliot said offhandedly. "It's no big deal."
"Right," Hardison said. He could tell Eliot wasn't pleased about his reappearance from the way he kept eyeing his laptop like it was a juicy ham and he was starving. "Don't let me keep you or anything. Do your thang."
Eliot nodded. "Did you have... nice classes?"
"Yeah, I guess. Nothing really mind-blowing. Uh, I'm going out with some of the guys on the team tonight, so you'll have the room to yourself for a while. I'll try not to be too noisy when I get home."
Eliot coughed, half covering his dry laugh. "Sorry," he said, not sounding sorry. "But were you trying to be quiet last time you came home drunk?"
"I was not... sorry, sorry. I know. I'll be better this time. I, uh, have to be careful about what I do, right, because of the scholarship thing..."
"Well, and the fact that you're not twenty-one."
Hardison waved it away like it was a minor detail. "Sure. So I'll be quiet and respectful and all that if you just, like... don't mention to anyone that I occasionally enjoy some beverages that happen to be alcoholic."
Eliot stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. "Sure thing, Alec."
"Oh, god, no, don't call me 'Alec'. Only Nana calls me Alec. Call me Hardison. I basically insist."
Eliot nodded. "Right."
"Right."
Hardison watched for a second the way that Eliot's fingers were drumming against his knee like he was typing, rapid fire, and he took a small amount of twisted pleasure in delaying Eliot from his weird internet addiction for even a few moments. Finally, he turned away with a little smirk and started rummaging through his drawers for something he wanted to wear.
"See you later," he said, grabbing his sweater. Eliot didn't look up.
--
"Sorry," Eliot said, the moment his best friend, Sophie, answered the Skype call.
"You better be. You're a terrible beta."
"I'm a fantastic beta. You just don't take criticism well."
She made him pick which colour to paint her nails while they discussed her story some more, which he objected to on the grounds that being gay didn't automatically make him good at that kind of shit, but she rarely let his feelings get in her way. It was just one of those things about their friendship.
So, when she attacked him in a flurry of questions a little while later, he wasn't really surprised.
"Is your roommate hot? Are you going to fuck him? Send pics."
He clicked back over to the Skype window from the blog post he was reading. "Excuse me? What makes you think that you have any right --"
"Save the wounded, 'you can't objectify me like that' bullshit for someone else and spill. Is he hot?"
Eliot was beside himself with indignation and the sudden realization, that yeah, yeah he was kind of hot. "I don't know. I've never noticed."
Sophie leaned towards her webcam, face suddenly taking up too much of his screen. "Are you going to make a move?"
"He's straight and, uh."
"Uh?"
Eliot scrubbed his hands over his face. Sophie was going to flip out when he told her, and he knew that the ground would not be kind and swallow him whole. "He's on the football team and best friends with Andy."
"Andy who?" Her eyes narrowed dangerously and she shoved the cat off her computer desk so she could fold her hands in her traditional 'I am very upset and someone will die' manner. "Andy from high school, Andy the bigot? That Andy? I'll cut his head off."
Eliot shrugged. "It's not a big deal."
"The prick who basically made your life hell basically every day since fifth grade suddenly being best buds with your roommate is no big deal? What, is the new roomie a sportsball jock, too?"
Eliot shuffled through some of his notes from his British history class to try and look busy so he could avoid looking at her. "Yeah."
They didn't talk for a while. Sophie went back to typing and Eliot reblogged a couple photos of kittens in teacups to his Tumblr to pass the time. He wanted Sophie to say something that would make him feel better, but then he wasn't really sure what that would be or what he was actually feeling.
"You know that means you'll have to do him while he's in his sportsball uniform, right? Do those boys wear uniforms?"
"Yes," Eliot said. "And no, no I won't be doing that."
"Pics or it didn't happen."
"There won't be pics because it's not happening. I should go," he said, even though he didn't have a good reason to go. He wouldn't be going anywhere.
Sophie made a face, one she probably forgot he could see. "You'll text if something happens, right?"
"Look, I'm not --"
"I didn't mean something sexy," she said, holding her hands up in surrender. "Just anything. You know you can always talk to me."
"Yeah. I love talking about my feelings," he said, deadpan. "I'm gonna go. Think about what I said about that Brennan and Gaius sex scene and email me when that chapter is done." They said goodnight, and Eliot shut down all his messenger programs. He closed Twitter after a few minutes too, deciding he was sick of all the other people.
Millicent wasn't other people, though, so he took her out and let her wander on his bedspread for a while. He felt antsy in a way he couldn't completely identify, but he thought maybe it was just anxiousness to get on with his life. Time seemed to stretch impossibly long in front of him and he wanted to rush through it, intent on getting to the next part.
He woke up from an uneasy sleep to an alert from his computer going off. It took him a minute to find the right tab, but when he did, he was even more baffled. A new Facebook message and friend request. From Hardison.
im durnk maybe and lost keys. are u awakke?
Eliot stared at the message for a few moments. He knew he had a couple of options, but he wasn't sure what the best one was. He decided to do what any rational person would: he opened his folder of gifs, picked a number at random, and did what the gif told him to. Of course, it wanted him to go be the hero. Stupid dumb luck.
Sighing at the animation, he clicked 'accept' and messaged back. Yes, where are you? Do I need to come find you?
It was a few minutes for the reply to come back, and when it did, Eliot wasn't sure if he was supposed to be relieved or annoyed.
no i'm outside thebuildnig bringshirt
Eliot went downstairs with a sweater, sort of dreading what he'd find. All he really found was Hardison. Shirtless Hardison. Very drunk, very handsy, very shirtless Hardison who insisted on repeatedly telling Eliot how awesome he was, a fact that he already knew. Eliot basically had to force the sweater on him, despite the fact that he was shivering, but once he finally had it on, he let Eliot drag him inside.
They made through the front doors and to the elevator without major incident. Eliot pushed Hardison over just a little so he was leaning on the wall and not Eliot's shoulder. Then Hardison made yet another terrible life choice and started talking.
"I love oatmeal, man. I mean, not love-love it. But I like it a lot. How did you know you were gay?"
"I... what?"
"Gay. You're gay, right? That's cool and stuff. But how did you know? Did you wake up and realize you were afraid of vaginas?"
This wasn't a conversation Eliot really ever wanted to have with anyone, but there was something so painfully earnest about the drunk football player wearing his Greetings from Arrakis hoodie, playing with the same frayed threads that Eliot fiddled with when he was bored or anxious.
"I guess I just knew? My enormous, life-consuming crush on George Harrison helped tip me off, too. And for the record, I'm not afraid of girls, I'm just not interested." Not the most poignant story he'd ever heard to describe the moment, but it was the only one he had.
"Ringo's my favourite."
Eliot chuckled, a genuine laugh that he wasn't expecting. "Okay, I'll give you that one."
"I mean, I like them all. Good music, too."
"Definitely."
"Is this bonding?" Hardison asked, slurring his words just a little while Eliot manhandled him off the elevator and towards their room. "We share a common interest, so are we bonding now?"
The way drunk-Hardison said 'interest' was possibly the most creative thing Eliot had ever heard. Points for that, he supposed. "I guess so."
"Are you going to put me to bed?"
Eliot batted Hardison's hands away from his for the fifth time while he tried to fit the key in the lock. "Yeah, if you let me get us inside, asshole."
Hardison leaned back against the wall next to the door pretty complacently after that, and made faces at Millicent once they were in and Eliot was finding him Tylenol yet again. He forced a bottle of water into Hardison's hands. "Drink this. All of it. And try not to die."
He crawled back into bed and left Hardison to find his own way. He was already a good enough person for going downstairs in the middle of the night and fetching his idiot roommate; he really wasn't expected to do any more than that.
Fifteen minutes later, once Hardison was passed out and snoring obnoxiously, Eliot got up and put a blanket over him. He didn't take off Hardison's shoes, though. Drunk idiots could sleep in their shoes.
--
Hardison barely saw Eliot for the stretch of time leading up to the Wallabys game against the Manticores from upstate. If they won the game, they'd be in the running for the conference championships, which was kind of a big deal.
It would be a big deal any time, really, but the Wallabys had been sort of a joke for the last couple years. But the team had a new coach this year, Coach Donner, and he was a kind of a badass. He had apparently completely revolutionized their practice regimen and all the guys who were not new to the team were in love with him pretty hardcore. He reminded Hardison a lot of one of his coaches from high school, so that was pretty cool. Except now that the game was basically on top of them, Coach was way harder on them.
It was also kind of big deal because it was giving him the opportunity to avoid Eliot, which was a glorious little bonus. He wasn't sure what exactly had happened the night he asked Eliot to let him in the building, but he'd woken up the next day (with a disgusting, probably illegal hangover) in Eliot's clothes and for once, his roommate was already gone.
Hardison trudged back to the dorm after yet another practice that 'ran a little long' and nearly cried in the shower because the hot water felt so good on his aching muscles. He dragged himself to his room, intent on making sweet love with his pillow for the next five-and-a-quarter hours until it was time to go back -- gasp and shock -- to football practice.
"Hey," Eliot said, looking up from whatever he was doing. Hardison didn't consider himself a neat freak, but he didn't understand how Eliot could focus on anything in such a cluttered space. In addition to the papers, binders, dog-eared books, and pencils strewn across the blankets, he had his laptop on his knees with Millicent right behind it. She must have enjoyed the heat it was throwing off or something, because she had a creepy little lizard smile that she turned on Hardison when he came in the room.
"Hey," he said. The siren call of bed sang in his mind, and as much as he would love to sleep, he didn't think he could with the lizard staring so intently. "I'm not food," he reminded her, poking a finger in her direction to reinforce his point.
"Going to text, guys, roommate just got home," Eliot said to the computer. Hardison bit back a 'wow, giant nerd' comment, because as funny as he still found them, Eliot did not.
"And she's not going to eat you," Eliot said, nudging the beast in question with his toe. "Unless you're secretly a football-playing mango."
Eliot sounded sort of blank. Like he was trying to keep his tone neutral. Hardison wasn't sure if it was true, but "Right. Um. So. I guess I didn't really thank you for the other night. I know I shouldn't have... I was really stupid."
"You were," Eliot said calmly. "But you're a jock. I didn't expect otherwise."
Hardison started to retort, but figured he could let it slide one time in payment for Eliot doing him a favour. "All right, fine. So, thank you. I won't let it happen again."
"Good," Eliot said, and then he didn't say anything else.
Hardison fidgeted on the edge of his bed. He felt like there was something else to say, something specific about their conversation that night. He couldn't bring himself to say anything, even if he had have been able to find the right words.
Instead, he asked about the papers. "Uh, what are you doing, if you don't mind me asking? Tell me that's not an assignment for English."
Eliot chuckled. "Definitely not. I'm playing an online campaign with some of my friends who don't have their own D&D groups. I won't be noisy or anything, if you're going to bed."
"... Seriously?"
"Yeah, all the dice and everything are computer-based, so no noise."
"No, I meant you're seriously playing that? It's Dungeons and Dragons, right?"
Eliot rolled his eyes. "Yes, and when will I stop shocking you with this stuff? You act like I'm sacrificing kittens to my dark god, Baal, or something every time you come in and I'm shouting at Sherlock and John or Skyping with Sophie about her Battlestar/Bones crossover... Dude, get used to it."
"No, no, I'm all on board with letting your geek flag fly, man," Hardison said quickly, already seeing Eliot starting to wind up. "I just thought that that was something you had to do with a group of people."
"Yes," Eliot said, sighing and rolling his shoulders like talking with Hardison was the most tiring thing ever. "I'm playing with all of my tiny friends who live inside the com-pu-ter."
Hardison wanted to tell him to fuck off, but he was so tired that the conversation was actually kind of funny. He snickered for a second, then caught sight of Eliot's disgusted expression and burst out in full-blown laughter. It was refreshing just to laugh. Eliot evidently did not agree.
"Sorry," Hardison said, once he'd caught his breath. "Sorry. You just look so irritated that I exist, and it's funny."
"Yeah, maybe I am," Eliot said, sighing again.
Hardison peered at the papers closest to him and quickly decided that they may as well have been written in an alien language. "Is it even any fun? That looks like algebra or something."
"It's my AC. Armour class. Like... how hard it is for the bad guys to hit my character," Eliot said sounding so put upon. "Besides, if it wasn't fun, would I be doing it?"
Hardison shrugged. "Maybe? I don't get it at all, man."
"Now you know how I feel about football."
Hardison crawled under his blankets and got as comfortable as he could on the narrow dorm bed. He thought about Eliot's words and it occurred to him that A, it was a very profound thought, and B, his pillows were really soft. Eliot was probably some kind of nerd genius. Maybe his pillows were made of baby clouds. Eliot looked really nice when the computer screen lit up his face like that.
Then Hardison was asleep.
--
Eliot stayed at the school long after his last class on Friday morning, hanging out in the back study room in the library that doubled as LGTBQ headquarters. He got into a long discussion about politics that turned into a fight, then a story-swapping session until finally, reluctantly, he headed home.
The sun was starting to set as he cut across the lawn in front of the library, and all the campus lights had come on by the time the residence building was in sight. As he passed the busy football stadium, it occurred to him that there was a game in progress, and judging by the frantic noise, it was getting pretty close.
Eliot had never really been interested in football more than in a vague, passing way that he figured all people felt now and then towards things other people told them they were supposed to like. He had a paper for his early civilizations class due in nine days, and he wanted to proofread it again before he submitted it, so he knew he should get back to his room, but a rebellious little part of his brain that clearly didn't want 95s in all his classes told him it was Friday night and that he should live a little.
He also thought briefly about all those presumably homophobic jocks who would die of mortification if they knew he was in the stands, watching their asses in those tight spandex pants. That alone was enough to tempt him into the stadium -- the snarky statement he would be making, not the asses themselves, of course.
Everything Eliot knew about football was either from television or movies. And although Friday Night Lights had been on his to-watch list for a while, he hadn't actually started it yet, so that 'everything he knew' consisted of very little. Tight pants, end zones, everything was measured in yards. That basically covered everything he knew.
He was able to pick Hardison out of the crowd of guys on the field. Not, he told himself, because he recognized the ass, but because everyone had their names sewn onto their jerseys. So by that, he was able to deduce that the Wallabys were the ones in orange and the other team would be the ones in black.
Eliot had no idea what was going on on the field, but the clock was starting to run down, and the crowd was tense. The score must have been close, although it looked like the Wallabys were trailing by five points. He didn't want to ask someone to explain on the off chance that they would, you know, actually explain.
The referee (see, maybe he knew more than he thought) blew his whistle about fifty times in three minutes, and there was one massive roar from the crowd, and then apparently, the game was over.
As far as things that were interesting to watch, Eliot had had more fun with his old school Windows screensaver with the multicoloured tubes. From what he could tell from the excited voices around him, the Wallabys had won and were now going to be in some kind of championship game.
Well, that was good. Go Wallabys, school spirit, rah rah. Eliot decided he really, really didn't give a crap. He turned around and got out of the stadium before the crush of people overwhelmed him.
He was just in the door when his phone went off.
It was a text from Hardison, who had insisted they trade numbers so Hardison could text him during English Studies 1003. Which he did, frequently, and it drove Eliot up the wall while he was trying to concentrate. Even when he turned the ringer off, he could see Hardison texting away, not even trying to hide it. He and Andy had taken to sitting a little closer than Eliot really liked, mostly because three continents wouldn't have been enough space between him and Andy.
Hey, saw you at the game. Pretty cool, right?
Yea, good work. Or, Eliot assumed it had been good work, since the Wallabys won.
Celebrating tonight at Devin's, you want to come by for a drink?
Eliot stared uncertainly at the last text from Hardison for a few moments, then panicked a little and logged onto to Skype to call Sophie.
"How deliciously homosexual," she said, clapping delightedly. Eliot resisted the urge to call her a dirty name.
"Definitely go, dear."
"Yeah, but to a house full of football players?"
"Your roommate invited you to join him a merry celebration of wine and debauchery, I think standard etiquette dictates that you attend."
He sighed and let his head fall back against the wall. "There was no mention of debauchery."
"It was implied. I can tell these things, you know. Built-in debauchery detector."
Eliot texted Hardison back to ask where the place even was, resigned to the fact that Sophie was right more often than she was wrong, and despite the potential presence of debauchery, he might as well try to have a little traditional college fun in his first year.
He spent the next half hour convincing Sophie that he was not going on a date while at the same time trying to pick a shirt to wear that said 'hello, I'm here to party' that didn't then go on to say 'and by that, I mean adventure party, because I have a D&D joke screen-printed on me.' Eliot had a pretty limited wardrobe when it came to theme.
"You look perfect," she said, when he showed her his final attempt at looking like a non-geek. It wouldn't pass real scrutiny, like at a country club or the Vatican, but it would probably get him into a football party. Which was not something he had ever thought he'd be aiming for.
"Thanks," he said, sighing in a way that made Sophie giggle.
"Do you even like this guy?" she asked.
Eliot shrugged. "We're friends. He's nice enough, if a little immature. He's not the Kirk to my Spock or anything, though."
"Kirk wasn't Spock's Kirk to start out with either, though, if JJ Abrams is to be believed." She wished him luck and ended the call, leaving Eliot to puzzle out her meaning.
He headed out, intent on wandering the streets of the city before heading to the party in an attempt to burn off some inexplicable extra energy he suddenly found himself with.
--
What Hardison really wanted after the game was to go back to his room, have a hot shower, and sleep for six straight days, but after he'd invited Eliot to the party, he felt like he didn't have any choice but to go. He didn't see Eliot when he got to the room, and that made him worry a little bit more about the invitation.
He headed to the party with Andy in tow and didn't mention that he'd invited Eliot. Andy was still very anti-Eliot, and Hardison had just taken to never mentioning anything that might get him going, partially because he didn't want to make waves and partially because Andy was really kind of nasty when he got started.
Hardison felt a huge hand clap down on his shoulder the second he and Andy walked into the party. "Good fuckin' hustle today, man!" It was Devin, the team's star quarterback. He was grinning and handing out beers left and right. Everyone was still sort of high on the victory, and Hardison felt buzzed before he even took the beer.
"Thanks," he said, grinning goofily and twisting the cap off his bottle.
"Gonna play like that in the conference championships?"
"Gonna play better," Hardison said with a wink.
Devin laughed again, and Hardison felt good. They'd won, they were in the conference championships, and everyone was happy. It wasn't hard to feel good about that.
By the time he and Andy had won their first game of beer pong, he had checked his phone for texts from Eliot about eighty times. He was worried he'd offended him or something. He didn't really get what it meant to be a socially awkward geek, but he thought he might of upset Eliot by inviting him to something crowded and noisy.
"Texting your girlfriend?" Devin asked, raising an eyebrow.
Andy turned around when Devin spoke, smacking Hardison in the arm. "Girlfriend, dude, why didn't you tell me? Is she hot?"
"No, no girlfriend," he said quickly. It was Eliot he was waiting on a text from, not a girl. So, why did he have that same goofy, light headed feeling he'd had right before he had asked Leslie Richards to prom? Well, clearly it was the beer and, if it wasn't, he probably shouldn't be trying to figure out what it was after he'd had so much beer.
"Nah, just invited my roommate to have a few drinks. He's pretty cool," Hardison told Devin, shrugging it off like it wasn't anything.
"Spencer? That freak? Why did you invite such a --"
"Oh. My god," Hardison burst out. He'd finally snapped and heard enough of Andy's toxic anti-gay, anti-Eliot bullshit. If he had to hear one more jackass comment about how wrong it was to be gay, he was going to personally put Andy through a wall.
"He's so much more than just a gay guy, you asshole. Yes, oh my god, he's gay, get over it. He's also a history major, and a former Boy Scout, and a ridiculous down home country boy with a drawl he tries to hide. Sometimes, he's a paladin, and even though I don't know what that means and I've said that repeatedly, he still gets so fucking excited about it. And he's smart, and funny, and sarcastic, and he's the nicest person I know around here, even though he'll never admit it. And you know what else? Fuck you, Andy, you homophobic dillhole. Maybe if I was a little bit luckier, maybe he'd be my boyfriend, too."
The words (and technically Hardison, to split hairs) came out in a rush, in a jumble of thoughts that had been half formed on the tip of his tongue for days, maybe weeks. Hardison was glad to finally have it all said.
For about two point nine seconds. Then the weight of his words caught up with him.
He had just sort of come out to the majority of the guys on the football team, not to mention the rest of the people within earshot at the crowded party. And in exact accordance to all sitcom laws everywhere, there was silence in the kitchen, and everyone had heard his little outburst. He was commanding the full attention of everyone in the room.
"Uh, I mean... um," he said eloquently, trying to think of the proper follow up.
"Actually, I was just going to say that he's a total nerd," Andy said, then he chuckled. It was the laugh Hardison imagined little fish in the ocean heard, right before a shark bit them in half. "But if you're gay --"
"Wait, you're gay?" Devin said, turning to Hardison with a look of complete seriousness.
Hardison was not an idiot, though he was beginning to suspect that wasn't entirely true. He knew how quickly these kinds of situations could escalate. He started casually scanning the room for his exits, counting in his head the number of people between him and outside. "Well, funny story about that actually..."
"That's cool. Both my moms are gay, too. You want another beer?" Devin offered him the bottle, looking around with his eyes flashing, daring anyone to saying anything else on the subject. No one did, not even Andy. There were a few smiles, Hardison could see. Some seemed genuine, some seemed mean. A few were just drunk smiles. He knew there was still going to be trouble, but maybe he'd escaped it for the time being.
Andy was opening and shutting his mouth silently, suddenly finding himself to be the fish instead of the shark. He looked like a bomb had just gone off next to him.
"I should go," Hardison muttered, wanting to flee the scene before the shock wore off and people started asking questions. He had enough answers he needed to find for himself, before practice first thing on Monday morning.
Coming down the front walk with his mind almost entirely somewhere else, he barely had time to jump out of the way when he nearly bowled someone over. "Oh, sorry, I... hey."
"Hey," Eliot said.
"I was just leaving," Hardison muttered. "But you can go inside and have a few drinks, if you want."
Eliot laughed dryly and started walking away from the house, nodding for Hardison to follow him. "No, I was just leaving too. Like Andy said, I'm kind of a nerd. Not really the socially-drinking party boy type."
"You, uh..."
"Heard all of it? Yeah, I did."
Hardison didn't say anything. He didn't know where he was even supposed to start. It was sixteen blocks back to the dorm building, and they didn't speak for fourteen and a half of them.
"So. The Wallabys won the game today, I hear," Eliot said.
Hardison struggled not to laugh. It was fucking absurd, he thought, to be talking casually about goddamn football when less than half an hour ago, Hardison announced he was probably gay or something and wanted to be gay and do gay-type activities with his roommate to the entire college football team. What the hell was the world coming to? Well, at least Eliot wasn't yelling at him.
"Yeah," Hardison said. "It's kind of a pretty big deal."
"Isn't football always a big deal?" Eliot unlocked the front door of the building and held it open for Hardison.
"Yeah, I guess," Hardison said.
They fell back into silence again until they were in their room. "So," Eliot said, busying himself with Millicent's tank.
Hardison kicked off his shoes, enjoying the satisfying thunk they made when they hit the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and wiggled his toes in the carpet. "Look," he started.
When thirty seconds passed without anything further, Eliot finally turned around. He leaned against his own desk and looked Hardison up and down expectantly. "Look at what?"
"You, um... Right. Um." Hardison was having some real trouble forming a coherent thought. His buzz had completely worn off, and he was painfully sober and aware of what was going on. "So, you heard, um. What I said."
"I did," Eliot give him an apologetic look. "Do you want me to talk? You seem to be having some trouble."
Hardison nodded gratefully. He didn't really even care what it was Eliot had to say, as long as he was the one saying it. Hardison considered how awful it would be if he pulled his blankets up around his head.
"You have so much shit to deal with right now, just inside your own head. Trust me, I've been there," Eliot said.
"Actually, I --"
"Shut up, I'm talking. I can give you names of people to talk to, at school or online or whatever. Or you can talk to me, I guess, since I've been through it all already. But like you said, you're not that lucky. You can't just declare that you're gay and live happily ever after with the first gay person you lay eyes on." Eliot looked down at his fingernails, and Hardison got the distinct impression that maybe he was still speaking from experience.
"Work through your shit," Eliot said again. "Then, in a month or two, if you still want, I'll let you buy me dinner."
That actually sounded like a really fair deal, Hardison thought, though another part of him still wanted to rush in, damn the angels and all the rest. "Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense."
"Of course it makes sense, I'm a genius," Eliot said, giving him that scathing 'you're a moron' look that Eliot had down so well.
"Thanks for coming to the game today," he said.
"Oh, god." Eliot groaned. "If we actually, you know, start dating, am I going to have to learn football?"
"No," Hardison shrugged. "But it might help."
Eliot smiled. It was almost a smirk, and Hardison knew he probably meant to smirk, but it was a little too soft on the edges, and it seemed like a genuine smile. The feeling in the pit of Hardison's stomach came out of nowhere, like being hit with a sack of squirming puppies that breathed sunshine and butterflies. That smile.
"Am I going to have to learn Dungeons and Dragons?" he asked, finally, when the dry feeling in his mouth had passed.
"No, but it might help," Eliot said. There was the smile again and Hardison knew he needed to go to sleep before he said or did something even more foolish than he already had. Thank god Eliot chose that moment to go brush his teeth. Hardison changed into pajamas and skipped brushing his teeth so he wouldn't have to meet Eliot's eyes in the bathroom mirror, under the bright lights. He knew Eliot would be able to see all his awkward feelings because he felt like they were written on his face as clear as day.
"Goodnight," Hardison said when Eliot came back. He'd already retreated under his blankets, like they would protect him from the confusion of the day.
"Goodnight." Eliot turned off the light, and the room fell blissfully quiet and still. Even Millicent, normally a little zippy at night, seemed to settle right into sleep.
"You know, you did good today," Eliot said, quiet in the darkness. "And I don't mean football."
"Yeah," Hardison said. He thought maybe he had, too, even though there was also a lot of bad to go along with it.
"You're going to be okay."
"Yeah."
--
When Hardison woke up the next morning, a lot less hungover than he had in the past, but still immensely uncomfortable for a whole host of new and exciting reasons, Eliot was gone, but he'd had left a sticky note on the wall above Hardison's bed.
Gone to D&D group, around tonight after 9. Don't let Mills trick you, she ate already. <3
There were a thousand or more questions burning in his mind, and he knew it was going to take so much soul searching and talking it out and maybe even fighting it out before he had all the answers, if he ever even got to a place where he had 'all' the answers. But in that jumble of questions, in all those convoluted lines of questioning, two questions floated to the front of his mind, demanding answers.
Hey, he texted Eliot. Why does d&d take all day? And what does <3 mean?
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I love it! *tiny voice* Sequel? *nudge nudge*
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Be My Yoko Ono -
Thanks so much!
Re: Be My Yoko Ono -
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(Anonymous) 2012-10-09 12:39 am (UTC)(link)you kept their characteristics the same even if their intrests differed
I really liked that and DEVIN
super coolio and a sequel would be awesome
Even of them further into their relationship(maybe a proposal :p)
And them reflecting on the past