Work Text:
Gil hears that the religion professor’s wife recently died. People whisper: he only took enough time off to arrange and attend her service, the poor man. Gil thinks, he must be fucked up from all that, and enrolls for his class next term.
It’s an upper division course. Professor Kotomine sends out the syllabus as a .doc file and one of the five required texts is an out-of-print fifth edition (specifically not the sixth or seventh edition). The classroom is in the oldest building on campus, three flights of stairs up with a broken thermostat.
Professor Kotomine is a good enough lecturer, his voice is deep and steady and Gil thinks it’d be easy to fall asleep to. He wears a small gold cross on a chain around his neck and dresses in about three layers every day. Gil wonders what drives any human with a soul to own so many sweater vests.
Gil shows up for every class.
---
Gil’s never been to any office hours before, and Professor Kotomine’s office is even more out of the way than his classroom because the hall where the religion department is located is in the asscrack of campus.
The upside is that nobody else bothers to come to office hours (in the beginning, at least, before they figure out that Professor Kotomine will never tell them which of the midterm material is exclusively from class and not the readings).
There’s nothing in the office but a desk, an empty bookshelf, and a couch that Gil has taken to lounging on, resting his feet on the armrest. Of course Gil doesn’t ask about the material. Instead he learns that Professor Kotomine has five degrees (triple-major in Ancient Near East Studies, Physics, Communications, a Master of Divinity, a doctorate in Philosophy) and he’s only visiting faculty.
The next week, Gil shows up again as Professor Kotomine is busy typing on his laptop, the screen light reflecting off his glasses, so he raps his knuckles against the doorframe.
“Hey, Kirei.”
“Don’t call me that,” Kirei says, without looking up from the screen.
“Right, so, Kirei,” says Gil, tossing his backpack on the desk.
He asks about Kirei’s wife, and when he doesn’t get told off for being rude or inappropriate, he asks how long they’d been together and if they’d had kids, and then when he still hasn’t gotten kicked out he asks how she died.
From his perch on the couch, he watches for a reaction.
---
Kirei lives on the edge of campus, university-owned housing. Gil hangs around the department so he knows Kirei used to have a house further away in the city with his wife, he hasn’t sold it, but he won’t live in it. He wonders if it’s a sentimental thing.
On the correct hunch that Kirei doesn’t go out much, Gil brings wine, knocks on the door, and walks right in without waiting for an invitation when Kirei answers.
Kirei doesn’t ask him why he’s there, though Gil wishes he would.
He answers anyway: “Your office hours are too short. People will wonder if you really care about your students’ learning, professor.” Then he makes it his mission to go through every cabinet in Kirei’s kitchen looking for wine glasses. Kirei tells him to watch out (too late) because he’s apparently haphazardly stuffed some knives into a high cabinet and one of them falls and nearly leaves Gil one toe short of ten.
He finds the wine glasses.
“You never went through with it?” Gil asks, gesturing with his glass at the bible Kirei keeps on the table.
“I met my wife before I received my holy orders,” Kirei says. He drinks Gil’s wine with as much enthusiasm as he’d drink water, and probably cough syrup too. Gil isn’t sure if Kirei is humoring him, and wonders why he even bothers since Kirei seems intent on never betraying a human emotion.
“Why did you start teaching, then?”
Kirei takes a sip from his glass and answers, “It seemed like the next thing to do.”
“Do people tell you you’re really boring?” Gil asks.
“Often,” Kirei says, and Gil almost thinks he sees Kirei smile.
“I don’t think you’re boring, Kirei,” says Gil, putting his feet on the table. “I just think you’re bored.”
Gil doesn’t get drunk easily anymore, but after his third glass he has a good excuse to touch Kirei’s shoulder while he’s talking. After the first bottle runs out and he gets up to find Kirei’s stash, he sits back down on the couch close enough that their thighs touch.
Kirei doesn’t pull away, and of course Gil is keeping score, so he counts that as a victory. When he finds that Kirei’s shoulder makes a comfortable headrest, he asks, “Why don’t you live in your old house?”
He feels Kirei tense—and Gil, smile spreading across his face, definitely counts that as a victory—before he stands up from the couch and says that he has to get ready for bed.
Technically, Kirei never told him to leave. So out of spite, Gil drops himself into Kirei’s bed in his dirty day clothes and tucks every corner of the blanket under himself. He falls asleep before the shower stops running.
---
There hasn’t been anybody really serious since Gil was a high school freshman angrily kicking rocks behind the school. Someone he’d been sure he’d never seen before in any of his classes showed up out of nowhere to interrupt his tantrum.
They were short, small, but it was impossible for Gil to guess how old they were from their face and the way they carried themself. They asked what his problem was.
“My teachers are idiots, my parents are idiots, everyone at this school is an idiot,” he’d said. They’d asked, after all.
The kid replied, “You don’t have to be like that.”
“Shut up,” Gil had said. “You don’t know anything about me.”
And the kid looked at him without a twitch in their serene expression and said, “I know enough to know you’re a brat.”
Gil hit them. They hit back, harder. Gil ended up with his cheek pressed to the concrete and the kid sitting on his back.
“I win,” they’d said. Gil twisted his head around to look up at them, arms crossed and something that could’ve almost been a triumphant smile on their face. He found he couldn’t breathe, and even though they were heavy for someone so small, he didn’t think it was just because of the weight on his back.
---
It gets warmer, and Kirei shows up to class with his sports jacket thrown over his arm, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt. Gil’s been spinning his pen around his fingers and he drops it immediately because Kirei has arms that make him look like he works construction for a living instead of reading bad papers written by worse students.
Kirei has to write something on the chalkboard (Gil has no idea what, because he’s looking at his biceps instead) and the thin material of his shirt strains over his back muscles.
Every dead-end conversation he’s had with Kirei has been worth it.
For hyperbole, Gil could pretend he can’t even keep track of how many bottles of wine he’s brought over to Kirei’s house at this point. But it’s the 17th bottle and he could’ve gotten laid so many times by now that it’s totally within his rights to practically deposit himself in Kirei’s lap while he grades assignments.
Gil curls his fingers around the back of Kirei’s neck, calculated and slow. Kirei turns his head sharply to meet Gil’s eyes, drops the paper he’s holding and grabs Gil by both shoulders.
Yes! Gil thinks, with a mental fistpump.
“No,” Kirei says, shoving him back and leaving to get ready for bed for the 17th time since Gil started visiting.
Gil looks at the paper Kirei left at the top of the pile and writes a big red F on it along with some callous commentary about the frankly appalling construction of the student’s argument. Then he lays down in Kirei’s bed and takes up as much space as he can.
Kirei always leaves the house before Gil wakes up. In the morning Gil realizes he has a wine stain on his shirt and contemplates the more-obvious-than-usual walk of shame before he opens Kirei’s closet and changes into one of his button-downs instead.
He leaves his shirt on Kirei’s floor.
He’s ten minutes late to class, picks a seat in the front row and waves. Kirei looks up from his notes. In the same tone as the one he’d been lecturing in, he says, “Wash that before you give it back to me.”
The entire class stares, and Gil isn’t getting lucky, but he is totally winning.
---
The summer after Gil graduated from high school (against all odds), Enkidu told Gil that they were going to die. Gil already knew, of course, he was sharp and Enkidu was sharper but there was only so much someone could do to hide that they were slowly and certainly wasting away.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Gil asked.
Enkidu took his face into their hands, calloused and dirty, and didn’t answer.
Gil looked away, hurt because it’d been four years and he thought he deserved to have heard it from his closest (only) friend.
“I didn’t want to think about leaving you alone,” Enkidu said.
And maybe his teachers and parents and classmates really were all idiots, but then, Gil was coming to realize that he was the biggest idiot of them all.
---
In his spare time, Gil fumes. He’s a catch, isn’t he, as far as he’s concerned people should be lining up to suck his dick. He doesn’t think about how he could’ve avoided the problem himself by pursuing someone more mutually interested.
Still, he doesn’t stop inviting himself over to drink on Kirei’s couch, and he doesn’t stop asking questions (Did you kill anyone when you were in the Marines? Do you ever check in on your daughter? What does your dad think of you now?) and making guesses about the answers Kirei refuses to give him.
And Kirei tells him he talks too much, but he never tells him to leave, never tells him to stop touching his hair or leaning against him on the couch.
Gil is grading papers in Kirei’s bed (and he thinks he can see where the job satisfaction comes from, now, having crafted 25 intricately worded insults in red pen so far) when Kirei enters the room, drying his hair with a towel.
“Joining me?” Gil asks, putting the assignments aside and patting the mattress next to him.
Kirei leaves—expectedly.
He comes back, unexpectedly, without the towel, and gets under the blanket.
Gil is going to petition to make this date a national holiday, and it doesn’t even matter if he’s just worn Kirei down enough that he’s sick of sleeping on the couch. Kirei’s place is tiny and he tends to suffer unnecessarily, so it’s a twin bed, and it’s comical considering his frame. But it also means Gil doesn’t have to move much to wrap an arm around Kirei’s torso and rest his forehead against Kirei’s back.
---
Gil wakes up alone, but there’s a shirt folded on the nightstand and when he shakes it out he realizes it’s his, and the wine stain has been bleached out. He still takes one of Kirei’s, instead, grinning as he does up the buttons.
The last time he’d thought something was romantic was when he and Enkidu had skipped his graduation and gotten smashed on plastic bottle vodka in the parking lot of an out-of-business strip mall. They’d snuck onto the school field at night, after, and Enkidu somehow managed to shove mud in his hair, but then they took his hand and told him congratulations and Gil felt like he owned the world.
This is nothing like that, so it’s a relief.