Storm Chasing: Catch Up Over Coffee
Title: Storm Chasing: Catch Up Over Coffee
Author: clodia_metelli.
Rating: K+
Characters: OC, War, Famine.
Summary: War's not the only one taking time out in academia.
Disclaimer: I do not own Good Omens and I make nothing from this except my own entertainment.
Word Count: 560
Italy, Pyrrhus, Carthage (x3), Macedon (x2), Antiochus | Pyrrhic Victories | Mater Punica |
~ catch up over coffee ~
The projector’s broken.
All the maps. All the slides. Italy’s coast and the stepping-stone islands chaining west to east across the Adriatic and Italian black-figure pottery dug up in unlikely places. The heights of the Postojna Pass.
All the lecture. Professor Plum glares up at the malfunctioning technology. “Anyone got a brick?”
The class titters, which surprises him, because he’d meant the question seriously. He shuffles through his lecture notes again. The words SEE SLIDE jump accusingly out of innocent text. He squelches the thought of telling them all to go away and get coffee somewhere, he’ll put it all online when he gets back to the office. Then he says it anyway, because sod it, what else is there to say? When they only titter again, and stare expectantly at him, he huffs and decides he’ll make the best of a bad job.
He lasts thirty-five minutes, which is longer than he expected. Afterwards, he can’t remember how he found himself saying, “Oh, I had a lovely slide here, full of naked people - well, that’s a lie, but it could have been.” Or, unwisely, because it was not a lie, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, I always wanted to be a train driver anyway.” He does remember the rising tide of embarrassment and anger blotting out their blank stares (“You’ll need a good imagination for this one”) in a surge of red.
It’s not going to be a good day. Not at all.
The department’s on edge and there’s a manic buzz in the air. Halfway through term and the marking’s piling up and everyone’s sneezing, because by now the students have stirred their personal plagues good and proper into the whole cauldron of exotic germs. From his office on the ground floor, Professor Plum can hear doors slamming two storeys up and the thunder of feet hurrying down the creaking stairs. Everyone’s busy and everyone’s tired and tempers are breaking all over the place. Professor Plum sits at his desk and drinks his coffee and tries to forget how much he really, really wanted to hurl things at that projector. By the time he remembers the weekly seminar, he’s missed lunch and is already late, so he has to make a run for it. He doesn’t even notice the young woman from the morning’s abortive lecture lounging by the photocopier, or manage more than a muttered apology when he brushes past a thin man coming down the shallow, uneven stairs.
(And:
“Hi,” says Famine. “Long time, no see. How’s it going?”
War grins her perfect grin and rolls her head slowly from side to side, while somewhere overhead a retired philosopher and ex-departmental head remembers how bloody annoying he always found his younger colleague and successor, and still does. There’ll be sparks come question time; but then, with philosophers there always are.
“Pretty good,” she says. “You?”
Famine sits himself on a table covered in blank cover-sheets for submitted work. “Same,” he says, and returns her smile thinly. His beard is sleeker than ever. “I thought I’d take a break from business for some personal development. Hungry lot, academics, especially right now.”
“Yeah,” says War, thinking of Professor Plum, with his research and his articles and his humorously ruined lecture. “I guess. Hey, want to go for coffee?”
Famine considers it. “Sure,” he says, “why not?”)
On to Filia Punica
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