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He tries not to feel lost and lonely, like some freshman undergrad on their first day, but he’s never been that great at change, and going to a new school on the other side of the country for his PhD is different to say the least. He doesn’t like to think how long it’ll take him to settle in again. It’s been a while now and he still doesn’t feel all that settled.
He gets a call every week or so from his sister asking if he’s unpacked his boxes yet or if he’s still just living out of his luggage, what his students are like, what the faculty’s like, who he’s met, and please, God, say he hasn’t alienated the entire department yet. He’ll roll his eyes even though she can’t see, and she’ll know somehow that he’s doing it and chastise him for it, and he’ll laugh and try not to think too hard about how she’s thousands of miles away and he won’t see her or any of his family until next year at the earliest.
Laura had been his best friend when they were kids. She’d always had a pack of friends who hung on her every word and he… hadn’t. When she’d play sports and go to clubs, he’d sit and read in a corner somewhere until she was finished so they could walk home together. When he got older, he hung out by himself at the school gym in the weight room without a spotter. The holidays were better, with the cousins coming round for Christmas and parts of the summer, but Derek was younger than them and still tended to keep to himself.
He would have to get better at making friends with people who were not his own family, though, if he would be working and studying here. Laura would check on his friend-making progress, and if he didn't make any headway soon, he’d start getting concerned calls from his mother, he knew it. Sometimes, he thought they still saw him as that short skinny kid tripping over his own laces. Even back then, most people had taken one look at the expression on his face and walked the other way.
Stop frowning, you grumpy little cupcake, he hears Laura tease, someone could be falling in love with your smile!
I’m not frowning! he’d protest, Dad says this is my ‘resting face!’
And Laura would pinch his cheeks and make fun of his eyebrows until he chased her all the way home.
As he turns around a corner, he spots a pair of undergrads handing out fliers. He straightens his back, looks dead ahead without making eye contact, using his standard “don’t fuck with me” body language as he walks past them. He’s used it to great effect on many a person with a clipboard.
The moment he’s walking past them, almost in the clear, a strong gust of wind knocks the stack of flyers next to them over and they scatter like so many startled pigeons.
One catches against the cuff of his jeans. Out of the corner of his eye, he recognises one of the symbols at the top: an inverted triangle striped with pink, purple and blue.
Huh.
His eyes move to the two students, a short redheaded girl and a blond boy who looks like he’s escaped from a Playgirl centerfold, as they run around trying to catch the papers still making a valiant attempt at freedom.
“Let me help you,” Derek says, and tries to form an expression that is courteous and not the least bit threatening. The girl smiles and the boy scowls in a vaguely pouty sort of way (Rookie, Derek thinks) but nods his thanks. “Doesn’t this school have a pretty big LGBTQ?” He only meant it as idle conversation as they chased after the remaining flyers, but the question is more controversial that he’d anticipated by the looks of things because both of them look like he’s stolen their cat and tried to get it microchipped.
“Yeah, it does. But, you know, the B was kinda silent. The T too, to be honest,” the girl says with artificial casualness. As she speaks her shoulders become more squared and she plants her feet that little bit more firmly on the ground.
“Oh,” he says, eloquently. “Well. I might see you guys around sometime. If I can find wherever this building is.” He points at the spot circled on the tiny map on the flyer he’s holding. Their expressions loosen slightly and the boy nods at him again.
He walks away replaying the interaction in his head, uncertain if he should count that as successful or not. Well, Laura, he tried.
*
In the end, he does go looking for the building and, yes, he does find it, thank you, Laura. When Laura had said that his vague suggestion to the students he’d met (Jackson and Lydia, according to the club website) that he’d try and join had used up all his social interaction tokens for the month, he’d Google-mapped the building right then. He could interact with people. Look at him, here, interacting.
He wonders if interacting could be defined as sitting awkwardly to one side as the rest of the group talks to each other in a bizarre code of in-jokes and contextually obscure references to “that one time.” Laura, he thinks, I tried, I really did.
It doesn’t help that they all know each other so well. Jackson and Lydia are dating; Danny is Jackson’s ex, he caught a reference to “when we were dating” a little while ago; Scott and Stiles have probably been best friends since kindergarten if their conversation is anything to go by; Allison appears to be Lydia’s best friend; and Allison and Scott are dating. Some of them come from the same town, it seems, but he’s still figuring out who and if there were possibly two or more different groups that had converged in college.
Stiles flops down next to him and continues talking to Scott. They’re talking about some science fiction book, or possibly a movie (Derek missed the beginning of the conversation and isn’t sure which it is) and disagreeing, loudly, about what the ambiguous ending meant.
“No, because the kids were wearing a different pattern of plaid! That obviously means that-”
“That could have been a costume goof!”
“Death of the author! Even if it were, authorial intent doesn’t matter, it’s what’s in the actual text that’s important and even if it was a screw up, and it wasn’t by the way, I’ve read so many interviews you wouldn’t even believe, the costuming is so significant-”
Derek tries to look like he’s following along, because occasionally Stiles will turn to him and say, “Am I right?” He finds that it’s easiest just to nod or even make some kind of subvocal grunt rather than try to make any kind of contribution, though he clearly isn’t fooling Stiles, who keeps shooting amused looks Derek’s way when he realises how in over his head Derek is. Derek is finding it kind of adorable against his own better judgement.
He should just leave and accept that he’s only capable of being friends with people who are required by blood to love him, but Stiles is giving him that look again, damn him, and it’s making it harder to resolve on never coming back.
Stiles leans over and bumps his shoulder against Derek’s and squeezes his knee. “I’m sorry, dude, we do talk about things that aren’t quite as niche sometimes. You know, every second Thursday and the first Tuesday after the full moon.” Derek furrows his forehead and Stiles laughs. “Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up in no time.”
*
Every so often it'll hit him just how young all these kids really are. There’s about six, seven years between them, and it’s usually not an issue (because you are mentally still a teenager, says Laura in his head) but now and then they’ll start off about some cartoon and hearts will be clutched and exclamations of “my childhood!” will be made and he’ll realise that he has no idea what they’re talking about.
They belong to a completely different generation, or near enough. They got phones younger than he did, they don’t remember the internet before Google, the internet before Youtube a bit better but not much, they have never copied a song from the radio onto a cassette, and, possibly most upsetting, they don’t remember Captain Planet.
They also realised that they weren’t straight with the help of an entirely different media landscape than him. When Ellen came out, he was a quietly ecstatic ten-year-old. He was thirteen when Queer As Folk aired, though not allowed to watch it because of all the sex scenes. Eight months later, he snuck the DVD set out from behind a suspiciously green potted plant in his uncle’s media center, and Peter turned a tolerantly blind eye because it was his fourteenth birthday.
(Two weeks later, Derek found himself deeply regretting his stint in cat burglary when Uncle Peter ambushed him as he was returning the DVDs. After icing his head and picking all the terra cotta shards from the carpet, Derek was treated to his uncle’s exhaustive revised version of The Talk, which involved less scaremongering about unwed teenage mothers and significantly more lavish praise of personal lubricant than the one he’d gotten in health class. Then, he gave Derek a gift bag containing condoms, lube, miniature travel-sized tubes of lube, and several DVDs. Derek still has that copy of Top Gun. Laura long ago claimed Victor/Victoria and the first season of Will and Grace, and Derek suspects that the badly subtitled Chinese films found their way back to Uncle Peter’s house.)
By the time he was a college freshman, he barely noticed when Brokeback Mountain was released and was a bit cynical about it. Oh, just spit, that’ll work. Yeah, have anal sex with your wife, that’s totally the next best thing as having anal sex with Jake Gyllenhaal. After all, it’s the ass you’re interested in, not the person the ass is attached to.
For some of these kids, though, from the sounds of things, it had changed their lives.
*
“Don’t you have an office?” Derek looks up from the data he’s transferring from his much abused field journal to his laptop.
“Uh, yeah, I guess?” He’s not really sure what Allison is getting at here.
She shrugs and makes a gesture that encompasses the textbooks, journals, and legal pads he has scattered across the round table in the corner of their club room.
“I mean, you’re here a lot. Isn’t it distracting? If I had an office, I’d rather work there.”
Derek doesn’t respond, just looks at her, trying to figure out if she’s subtly asking him to leave or just making conversation.
“I just- I just mean, you know, we can get pretty loud and all….”
His office is small and drafty and opposite a complete douchebag who bangs the door against the wall, denting the shit out of his plaster, when he comes in to bitch to Derek about their head of department. Which he does, a lot, without any invitation or indication that Derek is even remotely okay with it.
“It’s warmer here,” he finally responds and looks back down. He has to remind himself that he’s as welcome here as Allison and that she didn’t say that she wanted him to go back to his office or anything.
Allison stands next to the table for another two painfully awkward seconds before tapping it with the flat of her hand, smiling uncertainly in his direction, and wandering back to sit next to Scott by the TV.
Derek looks back down at his notes, feeling wrong-footed, trying to find his place.
Wolves are so much easier to understand than humans.
*
He’d already known that he wouldn’t be able go home to see his family for the holidays, but it’s still tough to hear people complaining about having to see their parents, their grandparents, their drooly old dog that their uncle lets sit on his lap at the table, their sisters….
He needs to work on his dissertation anyway.
“Dude, you should come home with me!” Stiles has been on this for the past twenty minutes. “Be the Harry Potter to my Ron Weasley. Except it’s just me and my dad, I don’t have an enormous clan of red headed siblings to spring on you and overwhelm you with their love and acceptance, but hey, I’ve been told that I can be pretty overwhelming all on my lonesome, so there’s that. Plus, my dad always makes enough for three people anyway, and then he gets all drunk and maudlin and doesn’t talk about how he made food for my mom and she’s, you know, at that big Thanksgiving dinner in the sky, so it’ll be no problem making enough for you. Speaking of my dad, he’ll probably think you’re my boyfriend if I bring you home, so you’ll probably want to shatter his illusions in that direction as soon as possible so he doesn’t start asking you what your intentions are or anything awful and embarrassing like that. He’ll love you though, he’ll probably assume you know how to talk about sports and power tools and stuff. He won’t know that I’ve actually talked to you about sports and you might as well come from Mars with how good you are at team based activities. So….”
Stiles is looking at him expectantly. Derek feels a little warm, and he got lost halfway through when the word ‘boyfriend’ appeared out of nowhere, but he’s pretty sure that Stiles is waiting for an answer.
“I need to work on my dissertation,” he says, and he can feel his sister’s disapproval from three thousand miles away.
*
He cannot stand this douchebag Harris who has the office across from him. There are species of fungus that smell like rotting meat that he would rather have across the hall from him.
After his little chat with Allison, Derek had taken to spending his mornings inputting his data in his office while he waited for the Student Union doors to be unlocked. It is, actually, more convenient to not have to lug twenty extra pounds of notebooks all the way across campus, and Derek is an early riser by nature, and why not make use of the time if he’s going to be awake anyway? But Harris, the bastard, is also an inconveniently early riser, and he has taken to spending his mornings drinking his coffee in Derek’s doorway and talking at him while he tries to work.
Instead of the usual three part opera based on the tragic injustice of how he wasn’t made head of the department, this time he’s trying to take an interest in Derek’s life. Derek suspects that he’s trying to go on a charm offensive because there’ve been rumours that Dr. Deaton might be transferring to another university. (Derek knows this isn’t true. If Alan had planned on leaving the university so soon after his arrival, Derek would have just gone to Oregon to start from scratch.)
“So most of your friends are undergrads, aren’t they?”
“Mostly,” Derek says to the computer screen as he types with mildly excessive force.
“I see you hanging around with Lydia Martin sometimes; she’s made quite the name for herself in the Mathematics Department.”
Maybe if he just keeps typing and says nothing he’ll go away.
“Very bright young woman. Although, I remember she and her boyfriend made a big stink and formed some sort of bisexual separatist group, it was the funniest thing. It made the local news and the student newspaper, I walked past her as she was being interviewed. She got quite histrionic and uppity about it all. You would have been new to the university then, or it might’ve been before your time-”
“It’s an advocacy group.” Derek looks up, mildly alarmed to realize that he’s spoken out loud.
“What?”
“Not a separatist group. I don’t think they really exist anymore.” Damn it, the plan had been to ignore Harris, but his irritation is forcing the words out of his mouth.
“I just laugh because in a few years she’ll probably be married with kids, and half those kids she hangs around with will be quietly trying to forget that they ever made such a song and dance about how unique and bisexual they are,” Harris continues breezily, as if Derek hadn’t interrupted. “The other half will use it to show how exciting and liberated they are, no doubt. Maybe I’m just a bad liberal-”
Dear God, does he think that he’s going to get some kind of an award for these insights? Derek thinks, "To you, Adrian Harris, we give this trophy acknowledging you as the most daring thinker of the modern age. You, who refused to compromise on the truth in the face of a group of college kids who refused to feel shitty about themselves, will be remembered forever."
“but-”
“Yes. I get it.” Derek stops pretending to be working and looks up at Harris. If you can’t say something nice, tear the guy’s throat out and make it look like an accident, as Laura would say. “They’re young, and they identify as bisexual. Maybe some of them won’t in a few years, but that doesn’t mean that belittling them and acting like it’s inevitable is doing anything but revealing your own ignorance and the place of extreme hegemonic privilege you’re taking it upon yourself to judge them from.”
Harris gives him a constipated smile. “You’re very liberal; I was too at your age, but in my experience bisexuality is something a lot of young people experiment with when they’re either too cowardly to commit to the idea of being gay, or they’re too young to realize that being ‘interesting’ is a little harder than having a girlfriend in college-”
Derek carefully closes his laptop lid.
“-a lot of literature indicates that true bisexuality is very rare, if it does exist. Wait and see, and I’d be prepared to put money on this, in a few years-”
Derek stands so abruptly his writing table slides forward with a shrill screech. Harris startles back. “Listen, asshole, I don’t have to listen to your discriminatory bullshit. There’s the door.”
Apparently, swearing and being physically threatening is much more effective than using your words, he reflects as Harris scurries out while muttering apologies.
When he arrives at the club room later, Stiles manages to get the story out of him with a certain amount of wheedling and puppy eyes.
“Oh my god, what a dick. Does he not know that you’re bi? I mean, has he not heard about that one time in NYU when you rage quit your degree and transferred into an MA in gender studies for, like, three days because one of your profs said there was no biological evidence for bisexuality? There’s an article about that on the first page of Google when you search your name.”
A few classes on post structuralism had been enough to send him back to the Biology Department with his tail between his legs, desperate to measure something empirically. After a certain amount of pretending he cared about professionalism and apologies he practised in front of the mirror, he’d gotten back into the ethology programme. He still wanted to run away to the Women’s Studies Department some days though.
“Apparently that one passed him by,” Derek says. “Thanks for respecting my privacy, by the way, your friendship means so much to me.”
Stiles smiles and smacks his shoulder, “Hey, point him out to me sometime and I’ll sort him out for you. A bi for a bi, a truth for a truth-”
“Oh god, not the puns, please.” Derek buries his head in his hands to the sound of Stiles’ laughter and feels at home.