[fic] Groovy Tuesdays
Sep. 23rd, 2011 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keTitle: Groovy Tuesdays 1/1
Author:keire_ke
Rating: R
Pairing: Goku/Hakkai
Disclaimer: Written only to be enjoyed free of charge. All characters belong to Minekura Kazuya.
Summary: It wasn’t that Hakkai habitually judged people based on his first impressions of them, but it did sometimes happen that a neat label firmly affixed to the forehead caused him to miss the elephant in the room.
Author's notes: Written for the 7th Night Smut fic exchange, forgenkisakka
Betaed byrroselavy
Groovy Tuesdays
Tuesday #0
The college experience was, on the whole, a breath of fresh air. Hakkai was not one to give in to complaining, but it was so gratifying to finally ditch the underdeveloped Neanderthals populating the high school scene and spread his wings, so to speak, in an environment more suited to his intellectual level.
That wasn’t to say Hakkai was harbouring particularly inspired hopes about higher education. To hope is to invite disappointment, after all, and Hakkai was far too much of a cynic to entertain hopes. No, he had, at the tender age of fifteen, got used to the thought that his intellectual peers were few and far between, regardless of the scene, save perhaps Mensa. It was the principle of the thing. Being in college meant reading during lunch and not getting a carton of juice spilled on the pages, intentionally or not. It meant carrying stacks of books and not being followed by derogatory remarks from people whose careers would later consist of the words “would you like fries with that?”
To be fair to the high school he attended, the name-calling only happened once, and the unfortunate individual responsible had spent the rest of the year giving Hakkai a wide berth, because a nerd he may have been, but bullies he did not abide.
Hakkai did feel a little bad about it later, in the privacy of his mind, because someone who so utterly failed at recognising danger should perhaps have been given the courtesy of an explicit warning, one that his monkey brain would have processed. Ah, the follies of one’s youth, when black was black, white was white and the scales could be plunged into Hades with a single feather thrown as a counterweight.
Long story short: Hakkai was very pleased to finally be in college. His depressing little town could go on being depressed all by itself. He had, well, not plans, but he had some ideas. Little illusion, it had to be said; Hakkai was a young man with the disposition of an elderly gentleman who expected of the world no more and no less than to keep turning. His plans lacked the lustre that would be expected from a new graduate, full of hopes for the future and fully expecting to conquer the world. Hakkai intended to get his degree and get a steady job, which would advance him through life at a laconic, yet comfortable pace.
At worst, he would head home to take over the nuclear plant, which would suit him just fine.
That decision was, hopefully, still years ahead of him.
Tuesday #1
“What has you so fascinated?” someone asked, a little too close to Hakkai’s ear.
“Sanzo.” Hakkai nodded, pausing to deliver a disapproving glare at the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. “Those things are disgusting.”
“The only reason you would have a say in my smoking habits is if we were fucking.” Sanzo smirked. “Either put out, or shut up.”
This was… unusual. “Are you feeling alright?”
“Gojyo bet me I can’t proposition more people in a day than he does. I’ll call you up as witness if he asks.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Probably not. He’s a fucking sorry excuse for a human being.”
“I see.”
Sanzo snorted and took a long drag. “What are your extra-curriculars?”
“I’m playing tennis on Fridays, why?”
“Do you fancy a game of mahjong, now and then? You said you play.”
“Mahjong? Why?”
“Because the club has reservations for the student lounge, room five, Tuesdays from five to seven.”
“Room five?” Hakkai’s eyebrows wandered up his forehead, waved hello to the hairline and decided to stay for a chat. “Isn’t that…”
“Yes it is. Which is why it will be full, or at least full enough to pay for itself. Are you coming? We’re missing a fourth.”
“Sure, sign me on.”
“Excellent. Joining fee is ten, then I think we agreed on five a month, or so. We are supposed to buy our own beer, but Gojyo flirted a batch of coupons off the old hag, so we’re set until January.”
Sanzo lifted the cigarette in a mocking salute and wandered off, leaving Hakkai staring. This was one peculiar guy, he often thought. Sanzo was one year older that Hakkai, the son and sole heir to a very posh conglomerate of god knew what, at university to kill time, apparently, because Hakkai had yet to see him do any studying. They’d met at orientation, which, Hakkai later learned, Sanzo had been forced to host because his aunt was the dean.
Well, to be more specific, they’d met when Hakkai had decided he could figure out the idiot-proof map he was handed all by himself, ducked behind a building to cut the way across campus and not be mobbed by enthusiastic college girls in tiny T-shirts, and found Sanzo smoking his way through a pack of expensive, thin, feminine cigarettes.
“They taste good, or else I wouldn’t hide here,” Hakkai had heard by way of explanation. “Gojyo would get on my case and then I’d have to kill him for being a fuckhead.”
“And Gojyo is?”
“A useless dickwad whom I tolerate on account of him being occasionally amusing.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t.” The cigarette had been ground into the brick and Sanzo had grinned. “I don’t get it myself, so you have no chance in hell.”
Despite the crude vocabulary, which Hakkai disapproved on principle, Sanzo was (to his personal great dismay, which was another thing Hakkai discovered later) intensely likeable. It had to do partly with his exceptional good looks -- Hakkai, were he a little less practical and a little more drunk, would liken him to a creature crafted by the gods of fine arts and delivered to earth in a seashell of curious floating properties -- and his overwhelmingly negative attitude towards everything. It was as though Sanzo filled the requisite position of local dick, but did it with enough style that people flocked to see the fallout.
Which was why Hakkai decided the mahjong club and semi-free beer would be a welcome end to a full Tuesday schedule. The laboratory he was enrolled in ended at five, but the building in which it took place was directly opposite the lounge. Since word of mouth had it the laboratory had yet to take more than eighty percent of allotted time, Hakkai figured he would have plenty of time to cross the main square to get to the student lounge.
Tuesday #2
As predicted, the smug PhD teaching the lab finished half an hour early, which left Hakkai just enough time to drop off the superfluous books in the library, consult the course booklet one more time (damn, they were scheduled to get a second teacher before the semester was done) and buy a coffee before heading to the lounge.
Sanzo was silently protesting the smoking ban by smoking his cigarette as close to the door as possible.
“Took you long enough.”
“Sorry. Labs last until five.”
“Which would hold weight if it wasn’t the coffee shop I just saw you exit.”
“You said five, not quarter to.”
“Whatever.”
The student lounge had started off as a regular bar, skulking in the corner of the first floor of the low building. They served beer there -- about three different kinds -- a handful of drinks, and charged next to nothing. There were also a few foosball tables and regular tournaments. Most of the students found the place to be a haven for their overeducated little brains, and it was. The conversation was simple, the drinks cheap, and if one knew the bartender, the foosball was free. This was more than the general population required to be happy.
Then some of the rich, bored and hip decided it wasn’t enough, so another bar was opened, this one catering to the artsy population. Hakkai had been in room two once. He didn’t get the rabbits. Someone tried to explain the idea behind the post-modern art, but to Hakkai, if the art required an explanation, it was not worthy of the label, not that art was something he was interested in. He never set foot in there again.
Rooms three and four were respectively devoted to rap and hip-hop, at least until it turned out that no one but a select few regulars knew which was which, and so room three became a rock bar.
Room five was quiet, quaint, and opulent. They served quality tea and, if someone really insisted, beer. Most students claimed it got on their nerves, but Hakkai adored it, despite the prices of drinks.
“Hey Hakkai,” Gojyo said, looking him up and down with a lascivious grin. Hakkai got used to that early on. It didn’t bother him -- in fact, he fully expected the looks to, one day, land them in the bedroom. Gojyo was a very handsome man and no stranger to casual sex.
“Gojyo, nice to see you. How are you doing?”
“Fighting the dickhead to leave my Playstation alone.”
Sanzo shrugged. “Not my fault it’s the right place to rest my beer on.”
“You are living together?” This was news. Very, very strange news. Hakkai feared to imagine the chore wheel. Then again, there couldn’t have been that much to do -- empty the ashtrays, take out the empty cans, cleaning done.
If he thought about it a little harder, this described the chore wheels of most of the student population.
“It seemed like a good idea at a time,” Gojyo said and shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t know why, either. I reckon I was drunk.”
“Story of your life.”
“Go to hell,” Gojyo said with a cheerful grin and the argument became friendlier and cruder. It was fascinating to watch, Hakkai conceded, so it was no surprise he entirely missed the arrival of their fourth.
“Hey guys, so sorry, class held me up.” A kid collapsed into the fourth seat, opposite Sanzo, and beamed. “Did I miss anything?”
Hakkai, evidently, had. Subconsciously he was expecting someone similar to the three of them, tall, lanky and sardonic. Not this kid, who oozed idealism and good humour from every pore.
“Hakkai, Goku, Goku, Hakkai.” Sanzo’s glass wove a lemniscate in the air.
Goku beamed, again, leading Hakkai to believe this was his default face setting and held out his hand. “Hi!”
He had ridiculously large and bright eyes, for which he compensated with an equally ridiculous mop of hair, that flopped onto his forehead on one end and stayed up straight on the other. Hakkai wondered what he studied, advanced hair gel application? It couldn’t just be the gel, though, because the hair that trailed down to the nape of Goku’s neck was fine and soft, or so it seemed. He had the look of a confused high school graduate, too young in his parents’ mind to go to work, so instead stuck in any old course the university had to offer.
The handshake, on the other hand, was firm and business like, which was a surprise. The rest was grins and cheers and teeth worrying his lower lip until he looked like he was just kissed to within an inch of his life.
“Get beer,” Sanzo said. “Since you’re late.”
“Sure.” Goku unfolded and stood up, abandoning his shirt on top of his bag. The club was quite warm, but not quite so to excuse the formfitting T-shirt, which ended where the jeans began, allowing the occasional peek at the skin beneath.
“Oi, kid. Coupons!”
By the time Goku returned with four beers, nachos, four hot-dogs and a cola, the tiles were already on the table. They played until the clock hit seven and the club started filling up.
Hakkai returned to his dorm that night tipsy and a little horny. The coupons were good for a beer each, and Gojyo had a whole roll of them, seemingly dedicated to their weekly mahjong meetings.
The horny part stemmed from the casual manner in which Goku swallowed half of a hot-dog at a time, licking the mustard from his upper lip after every bite. Teenage boys, Hakkai sighed, as he threw himself on the bed and imagined the kid’s mouth on him, they were good for something.
Tuesday #3
“Here are your reports back,” Dr Homura said, indicating a pile on his desk. “You can collect them as you leave. Since this is your first report, if you manage to figure out what you did wrong, I will change your marks.”
The class was progressing satisfactorily. Hakkai nodded in all the important places, raised his hand to every other question, careful to be seen, yet careful not to appear too eager. College was only marginally more sophisticated than high school, and though he didn’t care about being labelled, he was not keen to serve as a walking reference box to his classmates, which would happen if he accidentally let it slip he understood the material better than they did.
He knew he was smart, which was why the mark on his report felt rather like a slap to the face.
“A sixty-one,” he told Sanzo when he took his seat at the mahjong table while Gojyo fetched the beer. He should do better in his sleep! What the hell was he thinking? Hakkai asked himself, uncertain whether he meant himself or Homura.
He glared at the offending paper on the table, where it lay innocuously covering the tiles.
“Can I see?” Goku asked. His hand hovered over the paper.
Hakkai shrugged. “If you want.”
“Huh,” Goku said, as he turned the pages. “Who’s teaching you, Homura?”
“Yes, why?”
“Well, you didn’t subtitle the charts, there’s about ten points right there, and he’s a hard-ass about proper referencing, but this here you did totally wrong.”
Hakkai allowed himself a second to collect his thoughts. “I’m sorry?”
“Well, I ain’t too sure which ohmmeters you lot were using, but far as I recall, this range would mean you overestimated the uncertainties like whoa. It seems kinda large, too.” He flipped back to the front, stared away for a moment. “I think it oughta be half that.”
Hakkai collected his report with, what he hoped, was a polite smile. “Thank you. I will look into it.”
“No prob,” Goku said and beamed. His lips stretched over his teeth, glistening where he’d just licked them, and quite frankly, Hakkai could stand a little more of Goku’s insolence, if it meant more smiles like that one.
Gojyo chose that moment to arrive with beer and the game began, though Hakkai couldn’t shake the feeling that Sanzo’s very nasty grin was directed at him. He chased the thought away. Sanzo like the rest the shark species, when he grinned, grinned nastily, there was no way around it.
Tuesday #4
“You were right,” Hakkai told Goku stiffly. “Thank you. Homura agreed to adjust my mark.”
“Oh, hey, awesome!” Goku beamed and his full lips stretched in a bright smile. His tongue poked out between his teeth, dragged along the uneven edge, and Hakkai’s gaze followed the motion like he would track a killer bee across the room. “Happy to be of service.”
Tuesday #5
Goku looked frazzled and sleep-deprived. It was an oddly attractive look on him. His skin took on a pinkish hue in the room’s low light, which, Hakkai reflected, wouldn’t be all that different from how Goku would look in his bedroom. He kept rubbing on his eyes, like that would keep the sleep out, but only managed instead to rub it further in, until he looked ready to nod off as soon as a flat surface became available.
“The hell is wrong with you?” Sanzo asked, shoving a pint into Goku’s hand.
“No sleep. Or not enough sleep. Can’t remember.”
“Jesus, drink the beer and go the fuck home.”
It said something that the only thing Goku was capable of doing in answer was to blink sleepily.
“Fuck that. Drink the beer, I’ll drive you home.”
“You already had a beer,” Gojyo reminded Sanzo.
“Fuck. Hakkai, you drive?”
Hakkai paused with the glass half-way to his lips. “Of course.” This would indicate Goku lived off-campus, which was a surprise.
“Here.” Sanzo dug in his pocket and produced a set of car keys. “Take him home? The state he’s in, he’d fall into a ditch and die before he got there.”
“Naturally.” Hakkai stood and, with some effort, manoeuvred Goku into a standing position as well. “Where are you parked?”
“Just behind the lodge. Parking space three B.”
Hakkai found the car with little trouble. Finding out Goku’s address was a little trickier; fortunately the flat itself was less than two miles away. It looked homey, Hakkai thought, as Goku went through his pockets for keys and opened the lock. No car on the drive-way, and no light inside, the parents were probably still at work.
“Thanks,” Goku said, dragging his eyes from the ground at Hakkai’s feet to his face. “So sorry I can’t invite you in right now, but I’m dead. Remind me to buy you a beer, ‘kay?” He yawned hugely and he was gone.
Hakkai smiled at the closed door. That sounded promising.
Tuesday #6
Goku didn’t show up. Gojyo brought a solemn, pale colleague of his to fill in the requisite position.
The game suffered for it.
Tuesday #7
Hakkai considered murdering Homura and hiding his body in the dumpster behind the lecture hall.
“Hey,” he heard. Goku was standing behind him, with his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants and a curious smile on his face. “You okay? You don’t look happy.”
“I’m afraid Dr Homura and I don’t see eye-to-eye on the subject of my grades.”
“Can I help?”
Hakkai glared at the offending report in his hand, but handed it over. Goku dropped his bag on the ground and came to rest against the wall beside Hakkai. The casual slant of his shoulder caused the collar of his T-shirt to slip and kiss the collarbone beneath. Hakkai watched the crease between his eyebrows, the way it smoothed on the slope of his nose and dove straight into the cupid’s bow of his mouth.
Goku’s fingers traced an equation down the end of page three, he flipped to page four, followed it through to the end.
“I think this is a mistake,” he said eventually, frowning. “The denominator of the derivative here oughta be to fourth power.” He slid to the floor, resting the paper on his knee and rummaged in his bag for a pencil and a piece of paper. He proceeded to copy the original equation and fly through the process, which resulted in a multiple variable derivative, which Hakkai found rather impressive.
It surprised him. It wasn’t like it was hard.
“Yeah, definitely to the fourth power. You got this?”
“Yes, thank you.” Hakkai accepted his paper. “Don’t suppose you’d want to get coffee?”
Goku beamed, flashing most of his teeth and narrowing his honey-coloured eyes to merry little slits, which seemed to be grinning all on their own.
“Absolutely.”
They almost missed mahjong. Almost, because half past five Sanzo sauntered into the coffee shop, responded to most of the friendly hellos the patrons bestowed on him with a scowl which could curdle milk, and raised an eyebrow at them.
“The fuck is wrong with you clowns, did you lose your mobiles?”
Goku blinked up at him. “Forgot mine.”
“Silenced,” Hakkai said. Now that he checked, there were six missed calls, two from Gojyo, three from Sanzo, and one from Kanan.
“It’s half past, get your asses down to the lounge.”
Hakkai followed and wondered how was it possible that he spent an hour without noticing the flow of time. Time management was usually easy to the point of infuriating when the buses ran behind schedule and yet Goku’s chatter about the LHC and black holes had a gravity about it that warped time and space, until Hakkai was walking out of the coffee shop with the certainty that this last hour was too short, too narrow to contain what happened therein.
Goku beamed at him over Sanzo’s shoulder and he returned the smile.
Tuesday #8
Goku was absent, again.
Hakkai was beginning to find this frustrating, but there was a text on his mobile with a heartfelt apology and a promise to buy him coffee on Wednesday.
Tuesday #9
Goku beamed at him across the tiles and tipped the beer glass to his lips, swallowing the last of it in one gulp. His fingers flickered against the tile, until he made a decision and threw a tile to the centre of the table.
Gojyo’s eyebrows rose. “Hot damn, squirt.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Gonna call you whatever the hell I want, squirt.”
“Long-legged cockroach.”
“Shrimp.”
“I’d rather be a crustacean than a bug.”
“Who are you calling a bug, you underweight monkey?”
“Who are you calling a monkey, asshole?”
Hakkai hid a smile behind his hand.
“This isn’t high school, gentlemen,” Sanzo said. “So shut your yaps and act civilised for ten minutes, before we cart you off to the zoo.”
“Bugger your kind self off.” Gojyo grinned and stole Sanzo’s beer.
Naturally, there was only one way this could have gone. Hakkai sighed and scooted closer to Goku, when the two opposite got a little too exuberant with their hand gestures, the game forgotten.
“What is their problem?”
“Dunno, but it’s funny to watch.”
It was. It really was. Especially when Goku grinned and shrugged and then scooted closer, so that their shoulders were brushing.
Tuesday #10
This was the week Hakkai realised he might have missed something. Not a small something either. He realised he might have accidentally committed the mental equivalent of perusing the night sky for interesting celestial bodies, writing down the position of each planet and major star in order of brightness, and then missing the full moon in her blinding glory.
What prompted his realisation was this: Hakkai walked into the student lounge to a pounding rhythm that levitated small glasses into the air and caused them to burst against the nearest hard edge. He winced and made a mental note to convince Sanzo that maybe mahjong wasn’t necessary today, or that it could be played somewhere more quiet. The steel mill, for instance.
It was a little shocking to discover that the source of the noise was room five. Hakkai, now curious, wrenched the door open, displacing a very drunk girl who giggled at him. He catalogued the damage being done to the previously very refined sanctuary.
He was pleasantly surprised to discover very little. At the very least, the company was civilised. Somewhat civilised, he amended when the giggling girl at the door fell over and didn’t get up. She curled next to a wall, holding on to the leg of a chair like she was drowning.
“Beer?” Sanzo appeared before him, glowering and radiant, with a spare pint in his hand.
“I take it there’s no mahjong tonight?”
“Does it look like we’re playing mahjong? Get real.” He took a swig and cast a glare about the room, clearly expecting it to come up scorched, but the most he achieved were a few smiles. Only Sanzo.
“So what is going on?” Hakkai asked, lifting the beer to his lips.
“A warm up.”
“To what?”
The door opened just then and in came Goku, suited up like he was auditioning for Men in Black: The Completely New and Original Musical Version, Not Starring Will Smith, grinning broadly and pumping his fist in the air.
“Boo-yeah, motherfuckers!” he yelled over the crowd.
The roar that greeted the display nearly took off the roof. Hakkai was a little shocked to discover Dr Homura, in the corner, cheering the loudest.
Goku spotted them, over the shoulders of a throng of the various PhDs and post-grads who’d lined up in front of him. He waved and then got distracted, so Hakkai merely sipped at his beer and watched Goku knock back a shot of tequila someone handed him. Then another.
By the time he made his way through the crowd to collapse at their table he was more than half drunk. There was a line of cinnamon on his cheek and an orange wedge in his mouth.
“Good party, eh? You’re welcome.” Gojyo said, dropping into his seat with an expertly balanced slide of the tray onto the table. The tray contained a bottle of tequila, four empty shot glasses, one full of cinnamon, a knife and an orange.
Goku groaned around the wedge. “Jesus, I just had like four of those.”
“Be grateful, I think I snatched the last bottle. Ain’t a graduation party till you get shitfaced properly, baby monkey.”
“Don’t call me that. And it’s Tuesday. Why would I want to get shitfaced on a Tuesday, anyway?”
“What is the occasion, anyway?” Hakkai asked, leaning forward to snatch a shot as Gojyo poured it.
“He,” Sanzo said, inhaling a portion of cinnamon and coughing when it went into his lungs instead of his throat, “Just got his PhD. Hot from the press!”
“Not exactly true,” Goku said, knocking back a shot and flopping back against the backrest. “The shiny paper is gonna take a while.”
A hand landed on his shoulder and he scrambled up to follow it -- to another crowd of well-wishers, who were intent on hugging the life out of him, or at least give him acute alcohol poisoning.
Hakkai was relatively sure his mouth was hanging open in the vicinity of his knees as he tried to negotiate his way around the cinnamon, spilt in the crook between his thumb and forefinger, and the hand in which he held the shot.
He must have made quite the funny picture, because Sanzo and Gojyo both chortled at the sight and knocked their glasses together. Hakkai was certain he would never understand this weird relationship they had, if he lived to be a hundred years old.
“I did think he had no idea. God, that’s funny.” Sanzo downed the shot and bit down on the orange wedge, before Hakkai could reliably process a thought.
“What, seriously?” Gojyo glanced at him curiously. “The kid’s been going on about it forever!”
Hakkai recovered enough to stare at them. “Really?”
“You are either the least inquisitive person in existence, or you’ve got some serious problems, man.” Gojyo saluted him with a glass.
“How did you meet, then? You are undergraduates, the both of you?” Hakkai was certain he couldn’t handle any more surprises in his present state. At least not surprises like this one.
“Yes, we are. Goku was my tutor when I was in high school,” Sanzo said.
“Seriously?”
“He taught my first-year physics class,” Gojyo volunteered. “Made a right mess of it, mind.”
“Don’t blame him for you being too stupid to understand.”
“Fuck you, really. He was a sucky teacher.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Your parents probably paid him better.”
“Which is why private education is better than college,” Sanzo said conclusively. “I feel like I’ve been assaulted by déjà vu.”
“I don’t think it’s actually possible to be assaulted by something that, by definition, exists only in your brain.”
“My brain is an insistent fucker. I wouldn’t put it past it.”
“I don’t think your brain has enough firepower to manage assault.”
“I can manage assault just fine.”
“As if. You have people to assault for you.”
“I manage it,” Sanzo said. “Which is what manage means, having people you pay to do shit you can’t be arsed to do yourself.”
“Fuck you, man.” Gojyo looked morosely into his glass. “I think we’d better acquire something non-alcoholic.”
“Pussy.”
“Bitch.”
“Dickwad.”
Hakkai rested his forehead against the table and smiled into its shiny surface. Just his luck, it seemed.
“Hey, everything cool?”
He opened his eyes to find Goku’s face, peering at him across a scant distance of about a foot. His flushed cheek was pressed against the lacquer. His breath misted on the surface. Going by the smell, if Hakkai put a match to it the table would go up in flames.
“I might be a little drunk.”
“Just a little, I think.” Goku beamed. “I’m too. Oh, tomorrow will be painful.”
“You don’t say.” A moment’s pause, enough to gather his wits. “You didn’t tell me anything.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“A doctorate is no big deal?”
“Well, okay, it is a big deal.” Goku ducked his head and his flush became more pronounced. “Didn’t wanna scare you off.”
“Glad we agree there. What was your thesis on?”
“Quantum field frying fresh foliage,” Goku said, and Hakkai took his time parsing the comment. Eventually it dawned on him that he either misheard, failed to register, or just plain old didn’t understand a word of what Goku said.
Strange, the combination was a little arousing.
“I got absolutely nothing of that.”
Goku laughed and licked his lips and the flickering light shone in his eyes when he looked at Hakkai and smiled, like it was his job to smile at people. “I’m kinda drunk right now,” he said.
“You said. Or I said. Someone said.”
“I think it was me.”
On the opposite side of the table Sanzo and Gojyo had achieved a temporary truce, which for them was synonymous with another competition. This time it was binge drinking. Hakkai suspected this would take most of the night, and it was only six.
Tuesday #11
Hakkai twirled his pen, tapping his foot absently to the tune of a song he heard on the radio in the cafe. Only two words of it still stuck in his brain, one of them unsurprisingly being “love” and the other “baby,” the rest lost in a meaningless jumble of lalalas and uh-ahs and accordions. If he ever chose to trace the author, he would need NASA tracing equipment, he feared.
“Hi!” someone said from the front of the class, and Hakkai very nearly dropped a pen in shock. Goku was beaming at the lot of them, holding his hands folded across a large file. “Unfortunately, Dr Hwan is on maternity leave, so I will be taking over her portion of the course.
“The grade you get for this part counts towards forty percent of your overall grade, so don’t flounder on it. We’re gonna have a pop quiz each week, before we start lab, which counts for twenty percent, the rest will be based on your reports. Extra points are awarded for performance.”
Fuck, Hakkai thought when Goku opened his file, spilled the papers across the desk. He shuffled through them in an attempt to locate something, bit his lip, then triumphantly recovered a printed sheet and a handful of its copies.
“Alright! We’re gonna start with the quiz, should be harmless enough.”
Hakkai accepted the page with grace and groaned internally when he saw the questions. For crying out loud, they were first year students, no reason to spring this mess on them!
Still, he found as he plunged through the offensive inquiries, it could have been worse. Goku took the time to sort through the mess on the desk, and it was clear he was to be kept from paperwork at all cost, because his way of dealing with it consisted of picking up a page, scanning it, arranging it in a corner, picking up another, arranging it in a different corner, then repeat, until he ran out of corners or papers. If the former came first, he sighed and shovelled them all onto a single pile. If it was the latter, he beamed and shovelled them onto a single pile. Either way, it was a mess.
“All done?” Goku asked and Hakkai hurriedly put his mind back to physics and not the distracting vision of Goku on the desk.
He managed to finish in the nick of time. Choosing a seat in the back of the room paid off now, when he hurriedly scribbled the last syllables and signed it with a flourish.
The class progressed as well as Hakkai could have hoped, at least up until the point where he set his notebook on fire. It wasn’t wholly his fault, he thought, grabbing a cup of water and dumping it onto the flames. For one thing, the Bunsen burner was entirely temperamental, coughing up geysers of fire at the most inappropriate times, and for another, Goku was flickering in and out of sight between the shelves, monitoring everybody’s progress. His nose twitched as he did so, and every now and then he would look up from whatever disaster Hakkai’s fellow students were concocting and their eyes would meet.
Hence the flaming notebook.
“Are you okay?” Goku asked, sounding remarkably unconcerned. If Hakkai didn’t know better, he would have said Goku was holding in laughter, but of course that couldn’t be true, because laughing at a student who nearly set the room on fire would be against school regulations. Wouldn’t it?
“My notes aren’t.”
“Ah. Some paper towels ought to take care of that.”
The stunt earned Hakkai nothing but embarrassment, even if there was merit in having Goku glance at him twice as often and smile until the corners of his eyes crinkled.
Hakkai was slowly suspecting he might be in more trouble than he could reasonably handle. It wasn’t necessarily that Goku ceased helping him out with his reports (he could handle that), but rather that he found watching Goku was more engrossing than listening to the safety measures he instructed to the class. Hakkai managed never to repeat the flaming notebook incident, but were a few near-misses, which he would rather strike from everyone’s memory.
The final straw came when the prospect of winter break depressed Hakkai, rather than made him happy. He should have been looking forward to going home. He missed Kanan. He missed his dreary little town. He missed the socially adept mental rejects of his high school, even if Facebook kept him informed of their sad little lives.
“Hakkai, wait up,” Goku said when the class was done.
“Yes?”
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Goku considered the tips of his shoes. “Do you wanna go see a movie or something before you go?”
“Won’t that get you in trouble?”
“It might, if you’re under age, or something. I don’t touch the exam questions, and anyway I ain’t gonna let you slack off, so you can forget that. I mean.” He was flustered and still staring at his shoes, and somehow, in the nervousness his accent curled and thickened and rolled the words in something soft and sticky. They slid through Hakkai’s mind and stuck like the best guilty pleasure, deep-fried, sugary snack. “Yeah, it could get me into trouble. I probably shouldn’t even be asking, ‘cuz that’s harassment or whatever, except you are staring at my arse half the time, so I figured asking you out can’t be that bad. In comparison, I mean.”
“I’m not under age.”
“That’s a relief!”
“I’d love to,” Hakkai said, relishing the grin he received in return. He turned to leave, when a thought stopped him. “What are the chances of Sanzo hurting me very badly if I try to make trouble for you?”
Goku scratched his head and shrugged apologetically. “Probably high. He’s my best friend and he thinks I needed looking after.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Tuesday #12
Sanzo noticed right away.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“What?” Gojyo looked at Hakkai, then Goku, then Sanzo, and again, until his eyes crossed. “What took long enough?”
“Yes, what?” Goku cocked his head and grinned. “Seriously. Nothing happened.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh, whatever.”
“Play it safe, kids,” Sanzo said. “Mug Gojyo for condoms.”
“I am older than you,” Goku said as Gojyo started to sputter. “By, like, years. I know who to mug for condoms.”
“I’m not sure you even know what a condom is for, and, for the love of god, don’t try to convince me otherwise, I like my brain unbleached.”
“Screw you, really. I am older than you!”
“Repeating it doesn’t make it any more believable. Which one of us gets carded in bars?”
Goku groaned. “Don’t remind me.”
“You really get carded in bars?” Hakkai asked, though the question was redundant, at best. Goku looked seventeen, exactly the age of a kid who is cocky enough to walk into a bar and assume he looks just old enough to buy beer.
“Sometimes.”
“If by sometimes you mean every goddamn time we go somewhere off-campus, then you are correct.”
“It doesn’t happen every time!”
“Name one bar we’ve been to you didn’t get carded.”
“Uh, that place in Richmond. The one with the balloons?”
“I got the beers then. The barman never even saw you.”
“Right.” Goku frowned. “That really isn’t fair. Think I oughta get my birth date tattooed on my forehead.”
“Then you’d have to cut your hair.” Gojyo straightened his legs. “Or wear it in pigtails or something. Over your forehead.”
“Says the expert on the subject.”
“What, I don’t know about women’s hairdos?” Gojyo asked and grinned.
“What you don’t know, could fill the Internet and it would eclipse the porn.”
“Not when half of what I know is porn.”
Hakkai had an odd choice in friends. He really did.
“Did you tell him?” he asked Goku under his breath, safe in the knowledge that Sanzo and Gojyo, once they got going, would only gain volume and lose attention to anything not directly related to their spat.
“Huh? No, not really. It’s not like there’s a whole lot to tell, yet.” Goku bit his lip and dragged his tongue against the reddened flesh until it glistened and beckoned with the alacrity of a lighthouse on a dark and stormy night.
This was one of those frequent moments when Hakkai wished for privacy. A lot of privacy. Hopefully caused by specicide, so that he would never be disturbed again, because six billion minus two still counts as an extermination of a species, especially when the remaining two are male and thus unable to reproduce.
“That was weird,” Goku said.
“Excuse me?”
“You had the same expression Sanzo gets when he thinks about murdering people. Okay, that sounds very weird. He doesn’t really think about murdering people. At least, not often and not for real. It’s just that sometimes, you know.”
Hakkai shook his head and smiled. “I know.”
Goku grinned. “Do you wanna get dinner later?”
“Of course.”
Tuesday #13
On the last Tuesday of the semester they finally got around to having sex. It was very romantic, obviously.
Well, no, Hakkai thought, it actually wasn’t romantic at all (unless the presence of a fireplace automatically awarded a situation a degree in romanticism) and it barely qualified as sex.
What it was, however, was a certain kind of magic, the sort that animated broomsticks and caused violent splotches of colour on ballroom wear, and dear lord, had he just made a Disney reference? He must have been coming down with whatever Goku managed to catch on the cusp of December.
There had been kissing in the movie theatre, because that was what movie theatres were for and Goku wasn’t a fan of Lars von Trier’s dreary vision of the world anyway. There had been teeth and tongues and a little hickey, which prompted Hakkai to go clothes-shopping, because he only wore two turtlenecks and he had precious little time for laundry.
Now, a few weeks later, they were seated by the fireplace in Goku’s house, surrounded in equal measure by tissues, which they took turns flinging into the fire, and paper. Goku was up to his elbows in reports and tests, which he absolutely had to grade by the next morning, and Hakkai, not to be a slouch, was fixated on his exams, pausing only from time to time to fetch a fresh box of tissues.
Goku, it seemed, had allergies. In early December. It took some special talent.
“Thanks,” he said, scratching his nose dejectedly. “I think it’s Christmas’ fault, but it’s not for another three weeks and I’m already dying. It’s not fair.”
“This happens every year?”
“More or less, yeah. I’ve no idea, I can roll in hay and not tear up, but first week of December, I am a frigging fountain. It’s gross.”
“I’ve seen worse,” Hakkai said genially, and he had. The worst the allergy did to Goku, aside from the elevated consumption of tissues, was paint his nose a cherry red, which was as adorable as it was hilarious. “Have you considered the theory that you’re Santa’s elf who was abandoned by his elfy parents? It would explain the allergy, somewhat.”
“I kinda think the adjective for elf is elven. And if that were true, I can’t say I blame them. I would sure as hell abandon myself, if I was a Christmas elf and my kid was allergic to Christmas.”
He shrugged and sneezed at the same time, wiped his nose, and when he looked up and his eyes shone just right, Hakkai felt that there might be serious consequences if they didn’t kiss immediately. It seemed sensible, then to keep moving forward, until Goku’s back hit the couch and his hands were in Hakkai’s hair and Hakkai’s were under his shirt.
Hakkai was definitely sticking with this university for his PhD, if it meant getting abs like Goku’s.
This was why their first time, which Hakkai envisioned as slow and tender and involving a bed, and chocolate and custard and possibly also marshmallows, instead became a mutual hand-job on a carpet of lab reports and used tissues.
All right, so it wasn’t a carpet of reports, but a stack of them on the coffee table, even if one of them ended up on the floor, shoved off the table with a careless swipe of a hand. One could only hope the hand was clean at the time.
Goku gasped and arched his back as he came, clinging to Hakkai until the last of the tremors were gone, leaving him boneless and exhausted. Hakkai managed to last a little longer, but in addition to the other million little skills that Goku had acquired in his twenty-something years of age was the art of dragging his thumb over a guy’s cock until his brain liquefied and the orgasm shook the crust of the earth.
“Oh, hell, we shouldn’t have done that,” Goku said, when their mental faculties returned.
Hakkai raised an eyebrow at him, reaching for the tissues to at least imply clean up. “Can’t say it was that horrible.”
Goku hit him on the shoulder and kissed him sloppily on the mouth. “I gotta give the students the reports back, you realise? It’s gonna be awkward!”
Fortunately, the only possible awkwardness would be internal, as the papers were nowhere near the danger zone.
“We should clean up,” Hakkai said, picking himself up off of Goku and into a standing position. The scattered tissues did their job, but there were still splatters of come on their clothes and skin. Working in this condition would be counterproductive, he felt.
Goku sighed and, without preamble, tugged his T-shirt over his head. Hakkai watched him for a long moment, not fully comprehending, but certainly admiring, as Goku unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them, kicking them up to his hand like he would a ball.
“Shower?” he asked, glowing golden in the firelight, as the little, shiny particles of dust floated above his head. His smile widened and Hakkai nodded eagerly.
Tuesday #1
Hakkai had Mondays off the second semester, so when Kanan asked him to remain longer and help out with refurbishing her office, he couldn’t refuse, even if a part of him wanted to be back at college.
Goku had called every night over the break, reporting progress with his research, the drunken shenanigans he had been in the middle of courtesy of Sanzo and Gojyo (it appeared that Goku was Sanzo’s unofficially adopted brother, for the general purpose of Christmases and other holidays. Hakkai had tried not to be too jealous about that), and simply to talk about nothing in particular.
Hakkai missed him.
This was why he stood by the cafe, quarter to eight on the first Tuesday of the new semester, with his bag over his shoulder and his phone in his hand. Goku texted he would be along shortly, and however long a definition of “shortly” Hakkai was to assume, surely it had already passed.
“Hey!” Goku called from the opposite end of the square, and a moment later Goku’s arms were around him.
“Good morning. How was your holiday?”
“Haven’t I shared already?” Goku beamed, bright and true, showing off all his teeth. “I think I told you everything that’s happened, in detail!”
“I take it you had fun.”
“Not as much fun as I would have had with you, but yeah, it was pretty awesome. How about you?”
“Met some friends, helped my sister. It was pleasant.”
Goku smiled. “I missed you. Coffee?”
“I have classes in ten minutes.”
Goku’s grin turned feral. “Oh, I know. Come on, I’m buying. You professor won’t mind.”
Later, when Goku dropped his jacket on the desk and a stack of photocopies on the desk’s edge, Hakkai reflected that there were disadvantages to dating one’s teacher. Quite a few of them. Dating Goku, on the other hand, was something for which he was willing to make allowances.
The follies of youth, he told himself, grinning at the January bleakness through the window. How colourful the world was thanks to them.
THE END.
Author:
keire_keRating: R
Pairing: Goku/Hakkai
Disclaimer: Written only to be enjoyed free of charge. All characters belong to Minekura Kazuya.
Summary: It wasn’t that Hakkai habitually judged people based on his first impressions of them, but it did sometimes happen that a neat label firmly affixed to the forehead caused him to miss the elephant in the room.
Author's notes: Written for the 7th Night Smut fic exchange, for
genkisakkaBetaed by
rroselavy Groovy Tuesdays
Tuesday #0
The college experience was, on the whole, a breath of fresh air. Hakkai was not one to give in to complaining, but it was so gratifying to finally ditch the underdeveloped Neanderthals populating the high school scene and spread his wings, so to speak, in an environment more suited to his intellectual level.
That wasn’t to say Hakkai was harbouring particularly inspired hopes about higher education. To hope is to invite disappointment, after all, and Hakkai was far too much of a cynic to entertain hopes. No, he had, at the tender age of fifteen, got used to the thought that his intellectual peers were few and far between, regardless of the scene, save perhaps Mensa. It was the principle of the thing. Being in college meant reading during lunch and not getting a carton of juice spilled on the pages, intentionally or not. It meant carrying stacks of books and not being followed by derogatory remarks from people whose careers would later consist of the words “would you like fries with that?”
To be fair to the high school he attended, the name-calling only happened once, and the unfortunate individual responsible had spent the rest of the year giving Hakkai a wide berth, because a nerd he may have been, but bullies he did not abide.
Hakkai did feel a little bad about it later, in the privacy of his mind, because someone who so utterly failed at recognising danger should perhaps have been given the courtesy of an explicit warning, one that his monkey brain would have processed. Ah, the follies of one’s youth, when black was black, white was white and the scales could be plunged into Hades with a single feather thrown as a counterweight.
Long story short: Hakkai was very pleased to finally be in college. His depressing little town could go on being depressed all by itself. He had, well, not plans, but he had some ideas. Little illusion, it had to be said; Hakkai was a young man with the disposition of an elderly gentleman who expected of the world no more and no less than to keep turning. His plans lacked the lustre that would be expected from a new graduate, full of hopes for the future and fully expecting to conquer the world. Hakkai intended to get his degree and get a steady job, which would advance him through life at a laconic, yet comfortable pace.
At worst, he would head home to take over the nuclear plant, which would suit him just fine.
That decision was, hopefully, still years ahead of him.
Tuesday #1
“What has you so fascinated?” someone asked, a little too close to Hakkai’s ear.
“Sanzo.” Hakkai nodded, pausing to deliver a disapproving glare at the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. “Those things are disgusting.”
“The only reason you would have a say in my smoking habits is if we were fucking.” Sanzo smirked. “Either put out, or shut up.”
This was… unusual. “Are you feeling alright?”
“Gojyo bet me I can’t proposition more people in a day than he does. I’ll call you up as witness if he asks.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Probably not. He’s a fucking sorry excuse for a human being.”
“I see.”
Sanzo snorted and took a long drag. “What are your extra-curriculars?”
“I’m playing tennis on Fridays, why?”
“Do you fancy a game of mahjong, now and then? You said you play.”
“Mahjong? Why?”
“Because the club has reservations for the student lounge, room five, Tuesdays from five to seven.”
“Room five?” Hakkai’s eyebrows wandered up his forehead, waved hello to the hairline and decided to stay for a chat. “Isn’t that…”
“Yes it is. Which is why it will be full, or at least full enough to pay for itself. Are you coming? We’re missing a fourth.”
“Sure, sign me on.”
“Excellent. Joining fee is ten, then I think we agreed on five a month, or so. We are supposed to buy our own beer, but Gojyo flirted a batch of coupons off the old hag, so we’re set until January.”
Sanzo lifted the cigarette in a mocking salute and wandered off, leaving Hakkai staring. This was one peculiar guy, he often thought. Sanzo was one year older that Hakkai, the son and sole heir to a very posh conglomerate of god knew what, at university to kill time, apparently, because Hakkai had yet to see him do any studying. They’d met at orientation, which, Hakkai later learned, Sanzo had been forced to host because his aunt was the dean.
Well, to be more specific, they’d met when Hakkai had decided he could figure out the idiot-proof map he was handed all by himself, ducked behind a building to cut the way across campus and not be mobbed by enthusiastic college girls in tiny T-shirts, and found Sanzo smoking his way through a pack of expensive, thin, feminine cigarettes.
“They taste good, or else I wouldn’t hide here,” Hakkai had heard by way of explanation. “Gojyo would get on my case and then I’d have to kill him for being a fuckhead.”
“And Gojyo is?”
“A useless dickwad whom I tolerate on account of him being occasionally amusing.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t.” The cigarette had been ground into the brick and Sanzo had grinned. “I don’t get it myself, so you have no chance in hell.”
Despite the crude vocabulary, which Hakkai disapproved on principle, Sanzo was (to his personal great dismay, which was another thing Hakkai discovered later) intensely likeable. It had to do partly with his exceptional good looks -- Hakkai, were he a little less practical and a little more drunk, would liken him to a creature crafted by the gods of fine arts and delivered to earth in a seashell of curious floating properties -- and his overwhelmingly negative attitude towards everything. It was as though Sanzo filled the requisite position of local dick, but did it with enough style that people flocked to see the fallout.
Which was why Hakkai decided the mahjong club and semi-free beer would be a welcome end to a full Tuesday schedule. The laboratory he was enrolled in ended at five, but the building in which it took place was directly opposite the lounge. Since word of mouth had it the laboratory had yet to take more than eighty percent of allotted time, Hakkai figured he would have plenty of time to cross the main square to get to the student lounge.
Tuesday #2
As predicted, the smug PhD teaching the lab finished half an hour early, which left Hakkai just enough time to drop off the superfluous books in the library, consult the course booklet one more time (damn, they were scheduled to get a second teacher before the semester was done) and buy a coffee before heading to the lounge.
Sanzo was silently protesting the smoking ban by smoking his cigarette as close to the door as possible.
“Took you long enough.”
“Sorry. Labs last until five.”
“Which would hold weight if it wasn’t the coffee shop I just saw you exit.”
“You said five, not quarter to.”
“Whatever.”
The student lounge had started off as a regular bar, skulking in the corner of the first floor of the low building. They served beer there -- about three different kinds -- a handful of drinks, and charged next to nothing. There were also a few foosball tables and regular tournaments. Most of the students found the place to be a haven for their overeducated little brains, and it was. The conversation was simple, the drinks cheap, and if one knew the bartender, the foosball was free. This was more than the general population required to be happy.
Then some of the rich, bored and hip decided it wasn’t enough, so another bar was opened, this one catering to the artsy population. Hakkai had been in room two once. He didn’t get the rabbits. Someone tried to explain the idea behind the post-modern art, but to Hakkai, if the art required an explanation, it was not worthy of the label, not that art was something he was interested in. He never set foot in there again.
Rooms three and four were respectively devoted to rap and hip-hop, at least until it turned out that no one but a select few regulars knew which was which, and so room three became a rock bar.
Room five was quiet, quaint, and opulent. They served quality tea and, if someone really insisted, beer. Most students claimed it got on their nerves, but Hakkai adored it, despite the prices of drinks.
“Hey Hakkai,” Gojyo said, looking him up and down with a lascivious grin. Hakkai got used to that early on. It didn’t bother him -- in fact, he fully expected the looks to, one day, land them in the bedroom. Gojyo was a very handsome man and no stranger to casual sex.
“Gojyo, nice to see you. How are you doing?”
“Fighting the dickhead to leave my Playstation alone.”
Sanzo shrugged. “Not my fault it’s the right place to rest my beer on.”
“You are living together?” This was news. Very, very strange news. Hakkai feared to imagine the chore wheel. Then again, there couldn’t have been that much to do -- empty the ashtrays, take out the empty cans, cleaning done.
If he thought about it a little harder, this described the chore wheels of most of the student population.
“It seemed like a good idea at a time,” Gojyo said and shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t know why, either. I reckon I was drunk.”
“Story of your life.”
“Go to hell,” Gojyo said with a cheerful grin and the argument became friendlier and cruder. It was fascinating to watch, Hakkai conceded, so it was no surprise he entirely missed the arrival of their fourth.
“Hey guys, so sorry, class held me up.” A kid collapsed into the fourth seat, opposite Sanzo, and beamed. “Did I miss anything?”
Hakkai, evidently, had. Subconsciously he was expecting someone similar to the three of them, tall, lanky and sardonic. Not this kid, who oozed idealism and good humour from every pore.
“Hakkai, Goku, Goku, Hakkai.” Sanzo’s glass wove a lemniscate in the air.
Goku beamed, again, leading Hakkai to believe this was his default face setting and held out his hand. “Hi!”
He had ridiculously large and bright eyes, for which he compensated with an equally ridiculous mop of hair, that flopped onto his forehead on one end and stayed up straight on the other. Hakkai wondered what he studied, advanced hair gel application? It couldn’t just be the gel, though, because the hair that trailed down to the nape of Goku’s neck was fine and soft, or so it seemed. He had the look of a confused high school graduate, too young in his parents’ mind to go to work, so instead stuck in any old course the university had to offer.
The handshake, on the other hand, was firm and business like, which was a surprise. The rest was grins and cheers and teeth worrying his lower lip until he looked like he was just kissed to within an inch of his life.
“Get beer,” Sanzo said. “Since you’re late.”
“Sure.” Goku unfolded and stood up, abandoning his shirt on top of his bag. The club was quite warm, but not quite so to excuse the formfitting T-shirt, which ended where the jeans began, allowing the occasional peek at the skin beneath.
“Oi, kid. Coupons!”
By the time Goku returned with four beers, nachos, four hot-dogs and a cola, the tiles were already on the table. They played until the clock hit seven and the club started filling up.
Hakkai returned to his dorm that night tipsy and a little horny. The coupons were good for a beer each, and Gojyo had a whole roll of them, seemingly dedicated to their weekly mahjong meetings.
The horny part stemmed from the casual manner in which Goku swallowed half of a hot-dog at a time, licking the mustard from his upper lip after every bite. Teenage boys, Hakkai sighed, as he threw himself on the bed and imagined the kid’s mouth on him, they were good for something.
Tuesday #3
“Here are your reports back,” Dr Homura said, indicating a pile on his desk. “You can collect them as you leave. Since this is your first report, if you manage to figure out what you did wrong, I will change your marks.”
The class was progressing satisfactorily. Hakkai nodded in all the important places, raised his hand to every other question, careful to be seen, yet careful not to appear too eager. College was only marginally more sophisticated than high school, and though he didn’t care about being labelled, he was not keen to serve as a walking reference box to his classmates, which would happen if he accidentally let it slip he understood the material better than they did.
He knew he was smart, which was why the mark on his report felt rather like a slap to the face.
“A sixty-one,” he told Sanzo when he took his seat at the mahjong table while Gojyo fetched the beer. He should do better in his sleep! What the hell was he thinking? Hakkai asked himself, uncertain whether he meant himself or Homura.
He glared at the offending paper on the table, where it lay innocuously covering the tiles.
“Can I see?” Goku asked. His hand hovered over the paper.
Hakkai shrugged. “If you want.”
“Huh,” Goku said, as he turned the pages. “Who’s teaching you, Homura?”
“Yes, why?”
“Well, you didn’t subtitle the charts, there’s about ten points right there, and he’s a hard-ass about proper referencing, but this here you did totally wrong.”
Hakkai allowed himself a second to collect his thoughts. “I’m sorry?”
“Well, I ain’t too sure which ohmmeters you lot were using, but far as I recall, this range would mean you overestimated the uncertainties like whoa. It seems kinda large, too.” He flipped back to the front, stared away for a moment. “I think it oughta be half that.”
Hakkai collected his report with, what he hoped, was a polite smile. “Thank you. I will look into it.”
“No prob,” Goku said and beamed. His lips stretched over his teeth, glistening where he’d just licked them, and quite frankly, Hakkai could stand a little more of Goku’s insolence, if it meant more smiles like that one.
Gojyo chose that moment to arrive with beer and the game began, though Hakkai couldn’t shake the feeling that Sanzo’s very nasty grin was directed at him. He chased the thought away. Sanzo like the rest the shark species, when he grinned, grinned nastily, there was no way around it.
Tuesday #4
“You were right,” Hakkai told Goku stiffly. “Thank you. Homura agreed to adjust my mark.”
“Oh, hey, awesome!” Goku beamed and his full lips stretched in a bright smile. His tongue poked out between his teeth, dragged along the uneven edge, and Hakkai’s gaze followed the motion like he would track a killer bee across the room. “Happy to be of service.”
Tuesday #5
Goku looked frazzled and sleep-deprived. It was an oddly attractive look on him. His skin took on a pinkish hue in the room’s low light, which, Hakkai reflected, wouldn’t be all that different from how Goku would look in his bedroom. He kept rubbing on his eyes, like that would keep the sleep out, but only managed instead to rub it further in, until he looked ready to nod off as soon as a flat surface became available.
“The hell is wrong with you?” Sanzo asked, shoving a pint into Goku’s hand.
“No sleep. Or not enough sleep. Can’t remember.”
“Jesus, drink the beer and go the fuck home.”
It said something that the only thing Goku was capable of doing in answer was to blink sleepily.
“Fuck that. Drink the beer, I’ll drive you home.”
“You already had a beer,” Gojyo reminded Sanzo.
“Fuck. Hakkai, you drive?”
Hakkai paused with the glass half-way to his lips. “Of course.” This would indicate Goku lived off-campus, which was a surprise.
“Here.” Sanzo dug in his pocket and produced a set of car keys. “Take him home? The state he’s in, he’d fall into a ditch and die before he got there.”
“Naturally.” Hakkai stood and, with some effort, manoeuvred Goku into a standing position as well. “Where are you parked?”
“Just behind the lodge. Parking space three B.”
Hakkai found the car with little trouble. Finding out Goku’s address was a little trickier; fortunately the flat itself was less than two miles away. It looked homey, Hakkai thought, as Goku went through his pockets for keys and opened the lock. No car on the drive-way, and no light inside, the parents were probably still at work.
“Thanks,” Goku said, dragging his eyes from the ground at Hakkai’s feet to his face. “So sorry I can’t invite you in right now, but I’m dead. Remind me to buy you a beer, ‘kay?” He yawned hugely and he was gone.
Hakkai smiled at the closed door. That sounded promising.
Tuesday #6
Goku didn’t show up. Gojyo brought a solemn, pale colleague of his to fill in the requisite position.
The game suffered for it.
Tuesday #7
Hakkai considered murdering Homura and hiding his body in the dumpster behind the lecture hall.
“Hey,” he heard. Goku was standing behind him, with his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants and a curious smile on his face. “You okay? You don’t look happy.”
“I’m afraid Dr Homura and I don’t see eye-to-eye on the subject of my grades.”
“Can I help?”
Hakkai glared at the offending report in his hand, but handed it over. Goku dropped his bag on the ground and came to rest against the wall beside Hakkai. The casual slant of his shoulder caused the collar of his T-shirt to slip and kiss the collarbone beneath. Hakkai watched the crease between his eyebrows, the way it smoothed on the slope of his nose and dove straight into the cupid’s bow of his mouth.
Goku’s fingers traced an equation down the end of page three, he flipped to page four, followed it through to the end.
“I think this is a mistake,” he said eventually, frowning. “The denominator of the derivative here oughta be to fourth power.” He slid to the floor, resting the paper on his knee and rummaged in his bag for a pencil and a piece of paper. He proceeded to copy the original equation and fly through the process, which resulted in a multiple variable derivative, which Hakkai found rather impressive.
It surprised him. It wasn’t like it was hard.
“Yeah, definitely to the fourth power. You got this?”
“Yes, thank you.” Hakkai accepted his paper. “Don’t suppose you’d want to get coffee?”
Goku beamed, flashing most of his teeth and narrowing his honey-coloured eyes to merry little slits, which seemed to be grinning all on their own.
“Absolutely.”
They almost missed mahjong. Almost, because half past five Sanzo sauntered into the coffee shop, responded to most of the friendly hellos the patrons bestowed on him with a scowl which could curdle milk, and raised an eyebrow at them.
“The fuck is wrong with you clowns, did you lose your mobiles?”
Goku blinked up at him. “Forgot mine.”
“Silenced,” Hakkai said. Now that he checked, there were six missed calls, two from Gojyo, three from Sanzo, and one from Kanan.
“It’s half past, get your asses down to the lounge.”
Hakkai followed and wondered how was it possible that he spent an hour without noticing the flow of time. Time management was usually easy to the point of infuriating when the buses ran behind schedule and yet Goku’s chatter about the LHC and black holes had a gravity about it that warped time and space, until Hakkai was walking out of the coffee shop with the certainty that this last hour was too short, too narrow to contain what happened therein.
Goku beamed at him over Sanzo’s shoulder and he returned the smile.
Tuesday #8
Goku was absent, again.
Hakkai was beginning to find this frustrating, but there was a text on his mobile with a heartfelt apology and a promise to buy him coffee on Wednesday.
Tuesday #9
Goku beamed at him across the tiles and tipped the beer glass to his lips, swallowing the last of it in one gulp. His fingers flickered against the tile, until he made a decision and threw a tile to the centre of the table.
Gojyo’s eyebrows rose. “Hot damn, squirt.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Gonna call you whatever the hell I want, squirt.”
“Long-legged cockroach.”
“Shrimp.”
“I’d rather be a crustacean than a bug.”
“Who are you calling a bug, you underweight monkey?”
“Who are you calling a monkey, asshole?”
Hakkai hid a smile behind his hand.
“This isn’t high school, gentlemen,” Sanzo said. “So shut your yaps and act civilised for ten minutes, before we cart you off to the zoo.”
“Bugger your kind self off.” Gojyo grinned and stole Sanzo’s beer.
Naturally, there was only one way this could have gone. Hakkai sighed and scooted closer to Goku, when the two opposite got a little too exuberant with their hand gestures, the game forgotten.
“What is their problem?”
“Dunno, but it’s funny to watch.”
It was. It really was. Especially when Goku grinned and shrugged and then scooted closer, so that their shoulders were brushing.
Tuesday #10
This was the week Hakkai realised he might have missed something. Not a small something either. He realised he might have accidentally committed the mental equivalent of perusing the night sky for interesting celestial bodies, writing down the position of each planet and major star in order of brightness, and then missing the full moon in her blinding glory.
What prompted his realisation was this: Hakkai walked into the student lounge to a pounding rhythm that levitated small glasses into the air and caused them to burst against the nearest hard edge. He winced and made a mental note to convince Sanzo that maybe mahjong wasn’t necessary today, or that it could be played somewhere more quiet. The steel mill, for instance.
It was a little shocking to discover that the source of the noise was room five. Hakkai, now curious, wrenched the door open, displacing a very drunk girl who giggled at him. He catalogued the damage being done to the previously very refined sanctuary.
He was pleasantly surprised to discover very little. At the very least, the company was civilised. Somewhat civilised, he amended when the giggling girl at the door fell over and didn’t get up. She curled next to a wall, holding on to the leg of a chair like she was drowning.
“Beer?” Sanzo appeared before him, glowering and radiant, with a spare pint in his hand.
“I take it there’s no mahjong tonight?”
“Does it look like we’re playing mahjong? Get real.” He took a swig and cast a glare about the room, clearly expecting it to come up scorched, but the most he achieved were a few smiles. Only Sanzo.
“So what is going on?” Hakkai asked, lifting the beer to his lips.
“A warm up.”
“To what?”
The door opened just then and in came Goku, suited up like he was auditioning for Men in Black: The Completely New and Original Musical Version, Not Starring Will Smith, grinning broadly and pumping his fist in the air.
“Boo-yeah, motherfuckers!” he yelled over the crowd.
The roar that greeted the display nearly took off the roof. Hakkai was a little shocked to discover Dr Homura, in the corner, cheering the loudest.
Goku spotted them, over the shoulders of a throng of the various PhDs and post-grads who’d lined up in front of him. He waved and then got distracted, so Hakkai merely sipped at his beer and watched Goku knock back a shot of tequila someone handed him. Then another.
By the time he made his way through the crowd to collapse at their table he was more than half drunk. There was a line of cinnamon on his cheek and an orange wedge in his mouth.
“Good party, eh? You’re welcome.” Gojyo said, dropping into his seat with an expertly balanced slide of the tray onto the table. The tray contained a bottle of tequila, four empty shot glasses, one full of cinnamon, a knife and an orange.
Goku groaned around the wedge. “Jesus, I just had like four of those.”
“Be grateful, I think I snatched the last bottle. Ain’t a graduation party till you get shitfaced properly, baby monkey.”
“Don’t call me that. And it’s Tuesday. Why would I want to get shitfaced on a Tuesday, anyway?”
“What is the occasion, anyway?” Hakkai asked, leaning forward to snatch a shot as Gojyo poured it.
“He,” Sanzo said, inhaling a portion of cinnamon and coughing when it went into his lungs instead of his throat, “Just got his PhD. Hot from the press!”
“Not exactly true,” Goku said, knocking back a shot and flopping back against the backrest. “The shiny paper is gonna take a while.”
A hand landed on his shoulder and he scrambled up to follow it -- to another crowd of well-wishers, who were intent on hugging the life out of him, or at least give him acute alcohol poisoning.
Hakkai was relatively sure his mouth was hanging open in the vicinity of his knees as he tried to negotiate his way around the cinnamon, spilt in the crook between his thumb and forefinger, and the hand in which he held the shot.
He must have made quite the funny picture, because Sanzo and Gojyo both chortled at the sight and knocked their glasses together. Hakkai was certain he would never understand this weird relationship they had, if he lived to be a hundred years old.
“I did think he had no idea. God, that’s funny.” Sanzo downed the shot and bit down on the orange wedge, before Hakkai could reliably process a thought.
“What, seriously?” Gojyo glanced at him curiously. “The kid’s been going on about it forever!”
Hakkai recovered enough to stare at them. “Really?”
“You are either the least inquisitive person in existence, or you’ve got some serious problems, man.” Gojyo saluted him with a glass.
“How did you meet, then? You are undergraduates, the both of you?” Hakkai was certain he couldn’t handle any more surprises in his present state. At least not surprises like this one.
“Yes, we are. Goku was my tutor when I was in high school,” Sanzo said.
“Seriously?”
“He taught my first-year physics class,” Gojyo volunteered. “Made a right mess of it, mind.”
“Don’t blame him for you being too stupid to understand.”
“Fuck you, really. He was a sucky teacher.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Your parents probably paid him better.”
“Which is why private education is better than college,” Sanzo said conclusively. “I feel like I’ve been assaulted by déjà vu.”
“I don’t think it’s actually possible to be assaulted by something that, by definition, exists only in your brain.”
“My brain is an insistent fucker. I wouldn’t put it past it.”
“I don’t think your brain has enough firepower to manage assault.”
“I can manage assault just fine.”
“As if. You have people to assault for you.”
“I manage it,” Sanzo said. “Which is what manage means, having people you pay to do shit you can’t be arsed to do yourself.”
“Fuck you, man.” Gojyo looked morosely into his glass. “I think we’d better acquire something non-alcoholic.”
“Pussy.”
“Bitch.”
“Dickwad.”
Hakkai rested his forehead against the table and smiled into its shiny surface. Just his luck, it seemed.
“Hey, everything cool?”
He opened his eyes to find Goku’s face, peering at him across a scant distance of about a foot. His flushed cheek was pressed against the lacquer. His breath misted on the surface. Going by the smell, if Hakkai put a match to it the table would go up in flames.
“I might be a little drunk.”
“Just a little, I think.” Goku beamed. “I’m too. Oh, tomorrow will be painful.”
“You don’t say.” A moment’s pause, enough to gather his wits. “You didn’t tell me anything.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“A doctorate is no big deal?”
“Well, okay, it is a big deal.” Goku ducked his head and his flush became more pronounced. “Didn’t wanna scare you off.”
“Glad we agree there. What was your thesis on?”
“Quantum field frying fresh foliage,” Goku said, and Hakkai took his time parsing the comment. Eventually it dawned on him that he either misheard, failed to register, or just plain old didn’t understand a word of what Goku said.
Strange, the combination was a little arousing.
“I got absolutely nothing of that.”
Goku laughed and licked his lips and the flickering light shone in his eyes when he looked at Hakkai and smiled, like it was his job to smile at people. “I’m kinda drunk right now,” he said.
“You said. Or I said. Someone said.”
“I think it was me.”
On the opposite side of the table Sanzo and Gojyo had achieved a temporary truce, which for them was synonymous with another competition. This time it was binge drinking. Hakkai suspected this would take most of the night, and it was only six.
Tuesday #11
Hakkai twirled his pen, tapping his foot absently to the tune of a song he heard on the radio in the cafe. Only two words of it still stuck in his brain, one of them unsurprisingly being “love” and the other “baby,” the rest lost in a meaningless jumble of lalalas and uh-ahs and accordions. If he ever chose to trace the author, he would need NASA tracing equipment, he feared.
“Hi!” someone said from the front of the class, and Hakkai very nearly dropped a pen in shock. Goku was beaming at the lot of them, holding his hands folded across a large file. “Unfortunately, Dr Hwan is on maternity leave, so I will be taking over her portion of the course.
“The grade you get for this part counts towards forty percent of your overall grade, so don’t flounder on it. We’re gonna have a pop quiz each week, before we start lab, which counts for twenty percent, the rest will be based on your reports. Extra points are awarded for performance.”
Fuck, Hakkai thought when Goku opened his file, spilled the papers across the desk. He shuffled through them in an attempt to locate something, bit his lip, then triumphantly recovered a printed sheet and a handful of its copies.
“Alright! We’re gonna start with the quiz, should be harmless enough.”
Hakkai accepted the page with grace and groaned internally when he saw the questions. For crying out loud, they were first year students, no reason to spring this mess on them!
Still, he found as he plunged through the offensive inquiries, it could have been worse. Goku took the time to sort through the mess on the desk, and it was clear he was to be kept from paperwork at all cost, because his way of dealing with it consisted of picking up a page, scanning it, arranging it in a corner, picking up another, arranging it in a different corner, then repeat, until he ran out of corners or papers. If the former came first, he sighed and shovelled them all onto a single pile. If it was the latter, he beamed and shovelled them onto a single pile. Either way, it was a mess.
“All done?” Goku asked and Hakkai hurriedly put his mind back to physics and not the distracting vision of Goku on the desk.
He managed to finish in the nick of time. Choosing a seat in the back of the room paid off now, when he hurriedly scribbled the last syllables and signed it with a flourish.
The class progressed as well as Hakkai could have hoped, at least up until the point where he set his notebook on fire. It wasn’t wholly his fault, he thought, grabbing a cup of water and dumping it onto the flames. For one thing, the Bunsen burner was entirely temperamental, coughing up geysers of fire at the most inappropriate times, and for another, Goku was flickering in and out of sight between the shelves, monitoring everybody’s progress. His nose twitched as he did so, and every now and then he would look up from whatever disaster Hakkai’s fellow students were concocting and their eyes would meet.
Hence the flaming notebook.
“Are you okay?” Goku asked, sounding remarkably unconcerned. If Hakkai didn’t know better, he would have said Goku was holding in laughter, but of course that couldn’t be true, because laughing at a student who nearly set the room on fire would be against school regulations. Wouldn’t it?
“My notes aren’t.”
“Ah. Some paper towels ought to take care of that.”
The stunt earned Hakkai nothing but embarrassment, even if there was merit in having Goku glance at him twice as often and smile until the corners of his eyes crinkled.
Hakkai was slowly suspecting he might be in more trouble than he could reasonably handle. It wasn’t necessarily that Goku ceased helping him out with his reports (he could handle that), but rather that he found watching Goku was more engrossing than listening to the safety measures he instructed to the class. Hakkai managed never to repeat the flaming notebook incident, but were a few near-misses, which he would rather strike from everyone’s memory.
The final straw came when the prospect of winter break depressed Hakkai, rather than made him happy. He should have been looking forward to going home. He missed Kanan. He missed his dreary little town. He missed the socially adept mental rejects of his high school, even if Facebook kept him informed of their sad little lives.
“Hakkai, wait up,” Goku said when the class was done.
“Yes?”
“Are you going home for Christmas?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Goku considered the tips of his shoes. “Do you wanna go see a movie or something before you go?”
“Won’t that get you in trouble?”
“It might, if you’re under age, or something. I don’t touch the exam questions, and anyway I ain’t gonna let you slack off, so you can forget that. I mean.” He was flustered and still staring at his shoes, and somehow, in the nervousness his accent curled and thickened and rolled the words in something soft and sticky. They slid through Hakkai’s mind and stuck like the best guilty pleasure, deep-fried, sugary snack. “Yeah, it could get me into trouble. I probably shouldn’t even be asking, ‘cuz that’s harassment or whatever, except you are staring at my arse half the time, so I figured asking you out can’t be that bad. In comparison, I mean.”
“I’m not under age.”
“That’s a relief!”
“I’d love to,” Hakkai said, relishing the grin he received in return. He turned to leave, when a thought stopped him. “What are the chances of Sanzo hurting me very badly if I try to make trouble for you?”
Goku scratched his head and shrugged apologetically. “Probably high. He’s my best friend and he thinks I needed looking after.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Tuesday #12
Sanzo noticed right away.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“What?” Gojyo looked at Hakkai, then Goku, then Sanzo, and again, until his eyes crossed. “What took long enough?”
“Yes, what?” Goku cocked his head and grinned. “Seriously. Nothing happened.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh, whatever.”
“Play it safe, kids,” Sanzo said. “Mug Gojyo for condoms.”
“I am older than you,” Goku said as Gojyo started to sputter. “By, like, years. I know who to mug for condoms.”
“I’m not sure you even know what a condom is for, and, for the love of god, don’t try to convince me otherwise, I like my brain unbleached.”
“Screw you, really. I am older than you!”
“Repeating it doesn’t make it any more believable. Which one of us gets carded in bars?”
Goku groaned. “Don’t remind me.”
“You really get carded in bars?” Hakkai asked, though the question was redundant, at best. Goku looked seventeen, exactly the age of a kid who is cocky enough to walk into a bar and assume he looks just old enough to buy beer.
“Sometimes.”
“If by sometimes you mean every goddamn time we go somewhere off-campus, then you are correct.”
“It doesn’t happen every time!”
“Name one bar we’ve been to you didn’t get carded.”
“Uh, that place in Richmond. The one with the balloons?”
“I got the beers then. The barman never even saw you.”
“Right.” Goku frowned. “That really isn’t fair. Think I oughta get my birth date tattooed on my forehead.”
“Then you’d have to cut your hair.” Gojyo straightened his legs. “Or wear it in pigtails or something. Over your forehead.”
“Says the expert on the subject.”
“What, I don’t know about women’s hairdos?” Gojyo asked and grinned.
“What you don’t know, could fill the Internet and it would eclipse the porn.”
“Not when half of what I know is porn.”
Hakkai had an odd choice in friends. He really did.
“Did you tell him?” he asked Goku under his breath, safe in the knowledge that Sanzo and Gojyo, once they got going, would only gain volume and lose attention to anything not directly related to their spat.
“Huh? No, not really. It’s not like there’s a whole lot to tell, yet.” Goku bit his lip and dragged his tongue against the reddened flesh until it glistened and beckoned with the alacrity of a lighthouse on a dark and stormy night.
This was one of those frequent moments when Hakkai wished for privacy. A lot of privacy. Hopefully caused by specicide, so that he would never be disturbed again, because six billion minus two still counts as an extermination of a species, especially when the remaining two are male and thus unable to reproduce.
“That was weird,” Goku said.
“Excuse me?”
“You had the same expression Sanzo gets when he thinks about murdering people. Okay, that sounds very weird. He doesn’t really think about murdering people. At least, not often and not for real. It’s just that sometimes, you know.”
Hakkai shook his head and smiled. “I know.”
Goku grinned. “Do you wanna get dinner later?”
“Of course.”
Tuesday #13
On the last Tuesday of the semester they finally got around to having sex. It was very romantic, obviously.
Well, no, Hakkai thought, it actually wasn’t romantic at all (unless the presence of a fireplace automatically awarded a situation a degree in romanticism) and it barely qualified as sex.
What it was, however, was a certain kind of magic, the sort that animated broomsticks and caused violent splotches of colour on ballroom wear, and dear lord, had he just made a Disney reference? He must have been coming down with whatever Goku managed to catch on the cusp of December.
There had been kissing in the movie theatre, because that was what movie theatres were for and Goku wasn’t a fan of Lars von Trier’s dreary vision of the world anyway. There had been teeth and tongues and a little hickey, which prompted Hakkai to go clothes-shopping, because he only wore two turtlenecks and he had precious little time for laundry.
Now, a few weeks later, they were seated by the fireplace in Goku’s house, surrounded in equal measure by tissues, which they took turns flinging into the fire, and paper. Goku was up to his elbows in reports and tests, which he absolutely had to grade by the next morning, and Hakkai, not to be a slouch, was fixated on his exams, pausing only from time to time to fetch a fresh box of tissues.
Goku, it seemed, had allergies. In early December. It took some special talent.
“Thanks,” he said, scratching his nose dejectedly. “I think it’s Christmas’ fault, but it’s not for another three weeks and I’m already dying. It’s not fair.”
“This happens every year?”
“More or less, yeah. I’ve no idea, I can roll in hay and not tear up, but first week of December, I am a frigging fountain. It’s gross.”
“I’ve seen worse,” Hakkai said genially, and he had. The worst the allergy did to Goku, aside from the elevated consumption of tissues, was paint his nose a cherry red, which was as adorable as it was hilarious. “Have you considered the theory that you’re Santa’s elf who was abandoned by his elfy parents? It would explain the allergy, somewhat.”
“I kinda think the adjective for elf is elven. And if that were true, I can’t say I blame them. I would sure as hell abandon myself, if I was a Christmas elf and my kid was allergic to Christmas.”
He shrugged and sneezed at the same time, wiped his nose, and when he looked up and his eyes shone just right, Hakkai felt that there might be serious consequences if they didn’t kiss immediately. It seemed sensible, then to keep moving forward, until Goku’s back hit the couch and his hands were in Hakkai’s hair and Hakkai’s were under his shirt.
Hakkai was definitely sticking with this university for his PhD, if it meant getting abs like Goku’s.
This was why their first time, which Hakkai envisioned as slow and tender and involving a bed, and chocolate and custard and possibly also marshmallows, instead became a mutual hand-job on a carpet of lab reports and used tissues.
All right, so it wasn’t a carpet of reports, but a stack of them on the coffee table, even if one of them ended up on the floor, shoved off the table with a careless swipe of a hand. One could only hope the hand was clean at the time.
Goku gasped and arched his back as he came, clinging to Hakkai until the last of the tremors were gone, leaving him boneless and exhausted. Hakkai managed to last a little longer, but in addition to the other million little skills that Goku had acquired in his twenty-something years of age was the art of dragging his thumb over a guy’s cock until his brain liquefied and the orgasm shook the crust of the earth.
“Oh, hell, we shouldn’t have done that,” Goku said, when their mental faculties returned.
Hakkai raised an eyebrow at him, reaching for the tissues to at least imply clean up. “Can’t say it was that horrible.”
Goku hit him on the shoulder and kissed him sloppily on the mouth. “I gotta give the students the reports back, you realise? It’s gonna be awkward!”
Fortunately, the only possible awkwardness would be internal, as the papers were nowhere near the danger zone.
“We should clean up,” Hakkai said, picking himself up off of Goku and into a standing position. The scattered tissues did their job, but there were still splatters of come on their clothes and skin. Working in this condition would be counterproductive, he felt.
Goku sighed and, without preamble, tugged his T-shirt over his head. Hakkai watched him for a long moment, not fully comprehending, but certainly admiring, as Goku unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them, kicking them up to his hand like he would a ball.
“Shower?” he asked, glowing golden in the firelight, as the little, shiny particles of dust floated above his head. His smile widened and Hakkai nodded eagerly.
Tuesday #1
Hakkai had Mondays off the second semester, so when Kanan asked him to remain longer and help out with refurbishing her office, he couldn’t refuse, even if a part of him wanted to be back at college.
Goku had called every night over the break, reporting progress with his research, the drunken shenanigans he had been in the middle of courtesy of Sanzo and Gojyo (it appeared that Goku was Sanzo’s unofficially adopted brother, for the general purpose of Christmases and other holidays. Hakkai had tried not to be too jealous about that), and simply to talk about nothing in particular.
Hakkai missed him.
This was why he stood by the cafe, quarter to eight on the first Tuesday of the new semester, with his bag over his shoulder and his phone in his hand. Goku texted he would be along shortly, and however long a definition of “shortly” Hakkai was to assume, surely it had already passed.
“Hey!” Goku called from the opposite end of the square, and a moment later Goku’s arms were around him.
“Good morning. How was your holiday?”
“Haven’t I shared already?” Goku beamed, bright and true, showing off all his teeth. “I think I told you everything that’s happened, in detail!”
“I take it you had fun.”
“Not as much fun as I would have had with you, but yeah, it was pretty awesome. How about you?”
“Met some friends, helped my sister. It was pleasant.”
Goku smiled. “I missed you. Coffee?”
“I have classes in ten minutes.”
Goku’s grin turned feral. “Oh, I know. Come on, I’m buying. You professor won’t mind.”
Later, when Goku dropped his jacket on the desk and a stack of photocopies on the desk’s edge, Hakkai reflected that there were disadvantages to dating one’s teacher. Quite a few of them. Dating Goku, on the other hand, was something for which he was willing to make allowances.
The follies of youth, he told himself, grinning at the January bleakness through the window. How colourful the world was thanks to them.
THE END.
