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.au fic: The Hours of Instruction - D/M (eventual NC17) 1.?
Title: The Hours of Instruction
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13 for now; R/NC17 eventually. Possibly blasphemous.
Disclaimers: If the boys were mine, this season would not be happening.
Advertisements: Catholic school AU. Let me say that again: Catholic school. For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
wordclaim50 challenge #01 (AU) and philosophy_20 challenge #08 (Faith).
Notes: I've reached the point of end-of-term burnout and have to do something fun before I do harm to myself or others. So, I scribbled this out... It's been sitting around for a while, and I figured now would be a good time to do something about it.
THE HOURS OF INSTRUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
They whipped past the sign for Trinity Academy, a blur in the corner of Martin Fitzgerald’s eye.
He already knew the motto on the school crest: Spes. Pietas. Studium.
He didn’t mind the third. But the second… Definite problems with that.
“It’s not too late, you know,” he said, watching the woods roll by on both sides of the road. In the middle of nowhere – the very middle of nowhere, he thought despairingly, though under other circumstances he would have liked being away from the noise of the city.
“The deadline for the tuition refund’s already passed,” his mother answered, “so I’m afraid it is.”
Martin sighed, earning a reproving look.
“I’m not even Catholic,” he tried again – a futile argument, but one of the few remaining. He had others, but was not about to voice them.
“These days that doesn’t make a difference.”
“We’re not even Catholic. We haven’t been to church in years.” It was true; they’d used to go for Christmas and Easter, a political move to convince his father’s supervisors at the Bureau that he wasn’t a complete heathen. He and his sister had been baptized, mostly so the grandparents could record their names in the Fitzgerald family Bible. Martin’s parents had been married in St. Paul’s in Boston, but only because it had been a tradition of his mother’s family, not because his parents were particularly religious. Martin pointed this out. “Besides, you told me you and Dad would have gotten married at City Hall, if Grandmother hadn’t had a fit.”
“Martin, this is your future,” his mother said, deaf to reason and the hypocrisy of an atheist sending her son to Catholic boarding school. “Trinity Academy has one of the most highly-regarded academic programs in the country, and now that we can afford to send you here… We’re sending you.”
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
His mother didn’t say anything for a moment. The soft hum of the Mercedes’ engine filled the air between them, the shush of a late summer breeze across the windows. Trees and trees and trees, footpaths scarcely visible through them, the landscape rising now into gently rolling hills, and Martin wondered where the school was. Underground?
“Give it a year,” his mother said after a few minutes, and Martin wasn’t sure if it was a plea, a command, or a suggestion she was giving him. “When you come home for the summer, we’ll talk then, and if you don’t want to come back, we’ll find some place else. Okay?”
Not that he had much of a choice other than to nod and mutter his agreement.
“Good.” His mother reached over to pat his knee approvingly and Martin shrank away. She drew her hand back with a laugh. “Do you think the driveway’s ever going to end?”
Martin hoped it wouldn’t, but all too soon the trees thinned out into a wide open field and right there was where he’d be spending the next nine months of his life.
The buildings all looked as though they had been pupped by a cathedral – grey stone carved in elaborate cornices, slate roofs, robed, mysterious figures glaring down from their niches, probably gargoyles somewhere, the spire of the church towering over everything, even the athletics complex in the near distance seemed to belong to a monastery. Green lawns dotted with stands of bushes and flowering trees rolled away into the distance, a sea from which the school seemed to rise. And, all around, a barrier from the rest of the world, were the woods of upstate New York.
A knot of cars clustered at the foot of one massive building, bright, synthetic intrusions on a scene that otherwise looked like it belonged seven hundred years in the past.
There was a line for unloading, and Martin watched as boys and their parents piled out of their cars, lugging suitcases, garment bags, duffels that were probably stuffed full of miscellaneous last-minute items. None of the kids looked too profoundly depressed, if not excited – but then who was at the start of school? – as they picked up their bags and waved good-bye. The parents, after one last affectionate assault, piled back into their cars and drove away – Mercedes, Cadillacs, Jaguars, and expensive every last one of them.
Not a surprise, but Martin was still irritated.
Modesty and humility apparently hadn’t suggested themselves to whoever designed the school’s promotional material. He’d read the statistics on the academy’s alumni that the brochures provided: most went on to prestigious universities, the elite law, medical, and business schools – Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Columbia. The brochure offered the testimony of a handful of CEOs for major companies, high-powered lawyers, medical researchers, some senators, a couple Nobel Prize winners, high-profile intellectuals in conservative think-tanks… and, Martin thought, not a monk among them.
Obviously none of the students were lining up to take the oath of poverty.
“Well, here we are,” his mother said. The click of the parking brake was final, ominous. “Get your stuff.”
Obedient, mostly because he couldn’t come up with any last-minute objections, Martin climbed out and walked around to the trunk. Pulled out his luggage – matching black luggage, of course, pretentious as all hell, and yeah, he was so going to blend in here.
He’d just gotten his pullman out and the garment bag properly attached to it, his duffel over his shoulder, when he turned around and came face-to-face with a priest. Grey-haired with dark eyes and a warm smile that Martin found difficult to return.
“Ah, a new face,” said the priest.
“Martin Fitzgerald.”
“I’m Father Bryant, Theology professor and rector for Sobel House,” the priest said, offering his hand, which Martin took reluctantly. “Welcome to Trinity Academy, Martin.”
“Thank you, sir. Father.” Martin winced internally. How did he address the man?
“Here’s your room assignment,” Father Bryant said, tucking a keychain into Martin’s hand. “You’ll be in Grey House, the second floor; the number is on the tag. Do you have the orientation materials?”
Martin, not trusting his voice, nodded and gestured to his duffel bag, where the folder was crammed in with some books and his swim gear.
“Then we shall see you at dinner tonight at six sharp. We ask that you do not be late, as we will say grace on the hour.” Father Bryant patted him on the shoulder, a not-so-subtle attempt to steer Martin away so he could deal with the next car and the next kid. “If you have any concerns, you’ll be rooming with a student who’s been here for a year; he should be able to answer any questions you may have.”
Martin nodded again, not really hearing the last part, overwhelmed suddenly and desperately afraid that Father Bryant would see it. Desperately afraid his mother would, and when he turned to her he had to bite back a sigh of relief when she gave him her customary hug and stepped back to observe him from arm’s length, very brief smile appearing at the corners of her mouth.
“Behave yourself, Martin.”
“Always do,” he said. Their typical exchange ever since he’d been old enough to realize how often she was away.
“Of course.” Smile still barely there, but secret and conspiratorial. “Remember: we’ll talk at summer.” He could only nod, watch as she stepped off the curb and back around to the driver’s side, climbed in, and just like that had the car turned around and heading back down the drive, tires crunching on the gravel. The next car, a huge black SUV, pulled up and two boys and their luggage tumbled out, almost flattening Father Bryant who had advanced to greet them.
Woodenly, Martin started walking in some direction – a direction, he didn’t have a map and none of the buildings had signs posted outside them. He fell in with a crowd of other boys, all of whom seemed to know each other, and they ignored him, which was fine, and he listened to them talk until they all turned and headed up the steps to a building that was, as Martin discovered when he stepped inside, Wilson House.
Muttering to himself, he walked back out, chose a direction at random, and started walking again.
The campus, Martin realized, was laid out as two quadrangles side by side, the student and teacher housing forming three sides of one and the academic buildings forming the rest. Not that the layout told him anything helpful; none of the buildings were marked, which was completely ridiculous from his perspective as a new student, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around who could help – just clusters of boys walking up and down the paths, none of whom Martin could bring himself to trust.
He finally finally found Grey House – there was, apparently, a distinction between the dormitories, which were houses (and never dormitories; it sounded plebian, Martin supposed), and the class buildings, which were halls – and no thanks at all to whoever thought it would be a good idea to carve the building names in almost illegible Gothic script above the doors. A saint – John, the inscription under the statue’s niche said – glared down at him. Martin paused at the foot of the stairs, staring up at the saint’s blank granite eyes.
I know exactly what you are, the statue seemed to say.
Martin glared back, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. Only when he was in the silent, tiled hallway did he release a breath and realize that he’d been waiting for something to happen. A lightning bolt, thunder, being struck dead or turned into stone, the ground opening up underneath him, something to indicate objection to his atheist presence, and with some dismay he thought that he’d barely been here an hour and he was already half-convinced of the existence of a vengeful higher power.
Grey House was familiar enough, tiled hallways – marble – and nineteenth-century woodwork that was probably wasted on most of the kids here. A few bulletin boards with notices posted on them for athletics tryouts, competitions, clubs to join. Mercifully the stairs were in plain view and Martin walked up, pullman cracking against the steps, past a series of portraits of the various rectors of the building – there was a statue of St. Ignatius in yet another niche at the landing of the second floor – and a sign posted next to the doors leading to the second-floor hallway.
Laundry pick-up for this building is five o’clock Friday.
Martin rolled his eyes.
More of the same on the second floor: marble, woodwork, no frowning men in black, though. He fished out his keychain to check the number: 216.
Found it and wondered briefly why he needed a key; the door wasn’t locked, and from what he remembered, the doors weren’t supposed to be locked.
His cell for the coming year was utilitarian and plain, a lot like Westmore, with two beds – he’d known he was going to have a roommate, so that wasn’t a surprise – two desks, one wall turned into closets and storage, bookcases. Each half of the room a mirror image of the other, down to the desks and chairs positioned next to two windows looking out over a path leading into the woods.
A crucifix hung on the far wall between the windows, and Martin stared at it for a long moment, thought absurdly, You’re at a Catholic school, and wondered why it still came as such a shock.
It wasn’t that the crucifix was large or ornate or anything – as plain as the room, wood, resin, or some plastic dyed to look like wood, the kind Martin imagined was made in bulk specifically for large Catholic institutions. Nothing extraordinary to call attention to it, except for the fact that it was positioned in the center of a plain wall, the eye drawn to it as much as the scenery outside, stark and visible and God he really was at a Catholic school.
With an effort, Martin shook himself out of it and walked more fully into the room, dumped his stuff in a corner to deal with after he had a chance to look around.
The crucifix had preoccupied him so much that he’d almost missed the signs of another person’s presence in the room, and speculating about his roommate was a welcome distraction.
One of the shelves held a few odds and ends – an autographed baseball in a glass case, plastic models of motorcycles, their bright red and neon paint incongruous against the monotony of cream walls. One of the bookcases already had books in it: advanced chemistry, calculus, a textbook on American history from the colonization up through the Civil War, Invisible Man and The Scarlet Letter, a Bible, a large volume on Aquinas, Bonaventure and the Scholastics, which depressed Martin just looking at it.
And, crammed in at the end of the bottom shelf, was a history of the New York Mets, a mystery novel shoved in next to it, tucked behind the larger book like a guilty secret.
“Weird,” Martin muttered to himself, having not expected either the novel or the model collection, and he wondered why he hadn't. He’d heard some of the conversations the other boys had been having out on the lawn and they had sounded familiar enough – how much it sucked that the summer was over, vacation, sports, girls. They weren’t monks in training, Martin reminded himself. Think of the CEOs.
He checked his watch – quarter after five, still too early to go down to the dining hall (which was in Coren House, and most emphatically not a hall, but a room) and his roommate was nowhere to be seen. Sheets and a blanket were folded at the foot of his bed, and Martin supposed he should actually make his bed up if he wanted to sleep tonight, or unpack or do something other than what he was doing now, which was leaning over his roommate’s bed, trying to figure out the signature on the baseball.
“Martin Dihigo.”
Barely barely Martin managed to keep from cursing as he whirled around, nearly falling back onto his roommate’s bed – a hand on the mattress saved him – and stared wildly at the person who’d managed to sneak up behind him.
A boy, his age, was standing there in the doorway, regarding him with a mixture of amusement and assessment. Sharp eyes, intelligent, and Martin straightened under their regard.
“Um, no… Martin Fitzgerald,” he managed to say, once he recovered and moved as surreptitiously as possible over to his own side of the room. “I’m new.”
“No, I meant that’s who signed the baseball,” the boy said, leaning against the doorframe, smirk settling comfortably on his lips. Martin fought hard not to stare. “Martin Dihigo. My dad met him once.”
“Oh.” Brilliant, Martin. First you get caught snooping and now you’re making an ass out of yourself in front of your roommate.
Your hot roommate. Dark hair, eyes also dark but alight with humor and a guarded sort of curiosity. Tall, athletic, graceful even standing there, leaning, arms crossed over his chest and Martin became aware, helplessly, that he was in fact staring.
“I’m Danny Taylor, by the way.” A soft voice, hint of an accent, almost deliberately unemphatic – Martin wanted to lean closer to hear, wanted to lean closer for other reasons, too. Slow amusement in that voice that said I know you’re looking and Martin was pretty sure he was going to die with embarrassment.
But the boy, Danny, didn’t offer any more than his name and his hand for Martin to shake, which Martin took automatically, unable to look away.
-tbc.-
Now... to bed.
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13 for now; R/NC17 eventually. Possibly blasphemous.
Disclaimers: If the boys were mine, this season would not be happening.
Advertisements: Catholic school AU. Let me say that again: Catholic school. For
wordclaim50 challenge #01 (AU) and philosophy_20 challenge #08 (Faith).Notes: I've reached the point of end-of-term burnout and have to do something fun before I do harm to myself or others. So, I scribbled this out... It's been sitting around for a while, and I figured now would be a good time to do something about it.
THE HOURS OF INSTRUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
They whipped past the sign for Trinity Academy, a blur in the corner of Martin Fitzgerald’s eye.
He already knew the motto on the school crest: Spes. Pietas. Studium.
He didn’t mind the third. But the second… Definite problems with that.
“It’s not too late, you know,” he said, watching the woods roll by on both sides of the road. In the middle of nowhere – the very middle of nowhere, he thought despairingly, though under other circumstances he would have liked being away from the noise of the city.
“The deadline for the tuition refund’s already passed,” his mother answered, “so I’m afraid it is.”
Martin sighed, earning a reproving look.
“I’m not even Catholic,” he tried again – a futile argument, but one of the few remaining. He had others, but was not about to voice them.
“These days that doesn’t make a difference.”
“We’re not even Catholic. We haven’t been to church in years.” It was true; they’d used to go for Christmas and Easter, a political move to convince his father’s supervisors at the Bureau that he wasn’t a complete heathen. He and his sister had been baptized, mostly so the grandparents could record their names in the Fitzgerald family Bible. Martin’s parents had been married in St. Paul’s in Boston, but only because it had been a tradition of his mother’s family, not because his parents were particularly religious. Martin pointed this out. “Besides, you told me you and Dad would have gotten married at City Hall, if Grandmother hadn’t had a fit.”
“Martin, this is your future,” his mother said, deaf to reason and the hypocrisy of an atheist sending her son to Catholic boarding school. “Trinity Academy has one of the most highly-regarded academic programs in the country, and now that we can afford to send you here… We’re sending you.”
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
His mother didn’t say anything for a moment. The soft hum of the Mercedes’ engine filled the air between them, the shush of a late summer breeze across the windows. Trees and trees and trees, footpaths scarcely visible through them, the landscape rising now into gently rolling hills, and Martin wondered where the school was. Underground?
“Give it a year,” his mother said after a few minutes, and Martin wasn’t sure if it was a plea, a command, or a suggestion she was giving him. “When you come home for the summer, we’ll talk then, and if you don’t want to come back, we’ll find some place else. Okay?”
Not that he had much of a choice other than to nod and mutter his agreement.
“Good.” His mother reached over to pat his knee approvingly and Martin shrank away. She drew her hand back with a laugh. “Do you think the driveway’s ever going to end?”
Martin hoped it wouldn’t, but all too soon the trees thinned out into a wide open field and right there was where he’d be spending the next nine months of his life.
The buildings all looked as though they had been pupped by a cathedral – grey stone carved in elaborate cornices, slate roofs, robed, mysterious figures glaring down from their niches, probably gargoyles somewhere, the spire of the church towering over everything, even the athletics complex in the near distance seemed to belong to a monastery. Green lawns dotted with stands of bushes and flowering trees rolled away into the distance, a sea from which the school seemed to rise. And, all around, a barrier from the rest of the world, were the woods of upstate New York.
A knot of cars clustered at the foot of one massive building, bright, synthetic intrusions on a scene that otherwise looked like it belonged seven hundred years in the past.
There was a line for unloading, and Martin watched as boys and their parents piled out of their cars, lugging suitcases, garment bags, duffels that were probably stuffed full of miscellaneous last-minute items. None of the kids looked too profoundly depressed, if not excited – but then who was at the start of school? – as they picked up their bags and waved good-bye. The parents, after one last affectionate assault, piled back into their cars and drove away – Mercedes, Cadillacs, Jaguars, and expensive every last one of them.
Not a surprise, but Martin was still irritated.
Modesty and humility apparently hadn’t suggested themselves to whoever designed the school’s promotional material. He’d read the statistics on the academy’s alumni that the brochures provided: most went on to prestigious universities, the elite law, medical, and business schools – Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Columbia. The brochure offered the testimony of a handful of CEOs for major companies, high-powered lawyers, medical researchers, some senators, a couple Nobel Prize winners, high-profile intellectuals in conservative think-tanks… and, Martin thought, not a monk among them.
Obviously none of the students were lining up to take the oath of poverty.
“Well, here we are,” his mother said. The click of the parking brake was final, ominous. “Get your stuff.”
Obedient, mostly because he couldn’t come up with any last-minute objections, Martin climbed out and walked around to the trunk. Pulled out his luggage – matching black luggage, of course, pretentious as all hell, and yeah, he was so going to blend in here.
He’d just gotten his pullman out and the garment bag properly attached to it, his duffel over his shoulder, when he turned around and came face-to-face with a priest. Grey-haired with dark eyes and a warm smile that Martin found difficult to return.
“Ah, a new face,” said the priest.
“Martin Fitzgerald.”
“I’m Father Bryant, Theology professor and rector for Sobel House,” the priest said, offering his hand, which Martin took reluctantly. “Welcome to Trinity Academy, Martin.”
“Thank you, sir. Father.” Martin winced internally. How did he address the man?
“Here’s your room assignment,” Father Bryant said, tucking a keychain into Martin’s hand. “You’ll be in Grey House, the second floor; the number is on the tag. Do you have the orientation materials?”
Martin, not trusting his voice, nodded and gestured to his duffel bag, where the folder was crammed in with some books and his swim gear.
“Then we shall see you at dinner tonight at six sharp. We ask that you do not be late, as we will say grace on the hour.” Father Bryant patted him on the shoulder, a not-so-subtle attempt to steer Martin away so he could deal with the next car and the next kid. “If you have any concerns, you’ll be rooming with a student who’s been here for a year; he should be able to answer any questions you may have.”
Martin nodded again, not really hearing the last part, overwhelmed suddenly and desperately afraid that Father Bryant would see it. Desperately afraid his mother would, and when he turned to her he had to bite back a sigh of relief when she gave him her customary hug and stepped back to observe him from arm’s length, very brief smile appearing at the corners of her mouth.
“Behave yourself, Martin.”
“Always do,” he said. Their typical exchange ever since he’d been old enough to realize how often she was away.
“Of course.” Smile still barely there, but secret and conspiratorial. “Remember: we’ll talk at summer.” He could only nod, watch as she stepped off the curb and back around to the driver’s side, climbed in, and just like that had the car turned around and heading back down the drive, tires crunching on the gravel. The next car, a huge black SUV, pulled up and two boys and their luggage tumbled out, almost flattening Father Bryant who had advanced to greet them.
Woodenly, Martin started walking in some direction – a direction, he didn’t have a map and none of the buildings had signs posted outside them. He fell in with a crowd of other boys, all of whom seemed to know each other, and they ignored him, which was fine, and he listened to them talk until they all turned and headed up the steps to a building that was, as Martin discovered when he stepped inside, Wilson House.
Muttering to himself, he walked back out, chose a direction at random, and started walking again.
The campus, Martin realized, was laid out as two quadrangles side by side, the student and teacher housing forming three sides of one and the academic buildings forming the rest. Not that the layout told him anything helpful; none of the buildings were marked, which was completely ridiculous from his perspective as a new student, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around who could help – just clusters of boys walking up and down the paths, none of whom Martin could bring himself to trust.
He finally finally found Grey House – there was, apparently, a distinction between the dormitories, which were houses (and never dormitories; it sounded plebian, Martin supposed), and the class buildings, which were halls – and no thanks at all to whoever thought it would be a good idea to carve the building names in almost illegible Gothic script above the doors. A saint – John, the inscription under the statue’s niche said – glared down at him. Martin paused at the foot of the stairs, staring up at the saint’s blank granite eyes.
I know exactly what you are, the statue seemed to say.
Martin glared back, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. Only when he was in the silent, tiled hallway did he release a breath and realize that he’d been waiting for something to happen. A lightning bolt, thunder, being struck dead or turned into stone, the ground opening up underneath him, something to indicate objection to his atheist presence, and with some dismay he thought that he’d barely been here an hour and he was already half-convinced of the existence of a vengeful higher power.
Grey House was familiar enough, tiled hallways – marble – and nineteenth-century woodwork that was probably wasted on most of the kids here. A few bulletin boards with notices posted on them for athletics tryouts, competitions, clubs to join. Mercifully the stairs were in plain view and Martin walked up, pullman cracking against the steps, past a series of portraits of the various rectors of the building – there was a statue of St. Ignatius in yet another niche at the landing of the second floor – and a sign posted next to the doors leading to the second-floor hallway.
Laundry pick-up for this building is five o’clock Friday.
Martin rolled his eyes.
More of the same on the second floor: marble, woodwork, no frowning men in black, though. He fished out his keychain to check the number: 216.
Found it and wondered briefly why he needed a key; the door wasn’t locked, and from what he remembered, the doors weren’t supposed to be locked.
His cell for the coming year was utilitarian and plain, a lot like Westmore, with two beds – he’d known he was going to have a roommate, so that wasn’t a surprise – two desks, one wall turned into closets and storage, bookcases. Each half of the room a mirror image of the other, down to the desks and chairs positioned next to two windows looking out over a path leading into the woods.
A crucifix hung on the far wall between the windows, and Martin stared at it for a long moment, thought absurdly, You’re at a Catholic school, and wondered why it still came as such a shock.
It wasn’t that the crucifix was large or ornate or anything – as plain as the room, wood, resin, or some plastic dyed to look like wood, the kind Martin imagined was made in bulk specifically for large Catholic institutions. Nothing extraordinary to call attention to it, except for the fact that it was positioned in the center of a plain wall, the eye drawn to it as much as the scenery outside, stark and visible and God he really was at a Catholic school.
With an effort, Martin shook himself out of it and walked more fully into the room, dumped his stuff in a corner to deal with after he had a chance to look around.
The crucifix had preoccupied him so much that he’d almost missed the signs of another person’s presence in the room, and speculating about his roommate was a welcome distraction.
One of the shelves held a few odds and ends – an autographed baseball in a glass case, plastic models of motorcycles, their bright red and neon paint incongruous against the monotony of cream walls. One of the bookcases already had books in it: advanced chemistry, calculus, a textbook on American history from the colonization up through the Civil War, Invisible Man and The Scarlet Letter, a Bible, a large volume on Aquinas, Bonaventure and the Scholastics, which depressed Martin just looking at it.
And, crammed in at the end of the bottom shelf, was a history of the New York Mets, a mystery novel shoved in next to it, tucked behind the larger book like a guilty secret.
“Weird,” Martin muttered to himself, having not expected either the novel or the model collection, and he wondered why he hadn't. He’d heard some of the conversations the other boys had been having out on the lawn and they had sounded familiar enough – how much it sucked that the summer was over, vacation, sports, girls. They weren’t monks in training, Martin reminded himself. Think of the CEOs.
He checked his watch – quarter after five, still too early to go down to the dining hall (which was in Coren House, and most emphatically not a hall, but a room) and his roommate was nowhere to be seen. Sheets and a blanket were folded at the foot of his bed, and Martin supposed he should actually make his bed up if he wanted to sleep tonight, or unpack or do something other than what he was doing now, which was leaning over his roommate’s bed, trying to figure out the signature on the baseball.
“Martin Dihigo.”
Barely barely Martin managed to keep from cursing as he whirled around, nearly falling back onto his roommate’s bed – a hand on the mattress saved him – and stared wildly at the person who’d managed to sneak up behind him.
A boy, his age, was standing there in the doorway, regarding him with a mixture of amusement and assessment. Sharp eyes, intelligent, and Martin straightened under their regard.
“Um, no… Martin Fitzgerald,” he managed to say, once he recovered and moved as surreptitiously as possible over to his own side of the room. “I’m new.”
“No, I meant that’s who signed the baseball,” the boy said, leaning against the doorframe, smirk settling comfortably on his lips. Martin fought hard not to stare. “Martin Dihigo. My dad met him once.”
“Oh.” Brilliant, Martin. First you get caught snooping and now you’re making an ass out of yourself in front of your roommate.
Your hot roommate. Dark hair, eyes also dark but alight with humor and a guarded sort of curiosity. Tall, athletic, graceful even standing there, leaning, arms crossed over his chest and Martin became aware, helplessly, that he was in fact staring.
“I’m Danny Taylor, by the way.” A soft voice, hint of an accent, almost deliberately unemphatic – Martin wanted to lean closer to hear, wanted to lean closer for other reasons, too. Slow amusement in that voice that said I know you’re looking and Martin was pretty sure he was going to die with embarrassment.
But the boy, Danny, didn’t offer any more than his name and his hand for Martin to shake, which Martin took automatically, unable to look away.
-tbc.-
Now... to bed.
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