Fic: Physics Project (Jacob/Joseph, PG)
Title: Physics Project
Author: faurefowl
Recipient: mwmm23
Pairing: Jacob/Joseph
Summary: Jacob really hates high school.
A/N: Written for the prompt ‘High School AU!’ Sorry about the rubbish title. Merry Christmas!
~
Jacob hated high school. Seriously. He hated it the first time around, when all the girls cooed over this kid who was having trouble with joined-up writing but could have tutored them in science, the time he went through years in months, only doing the science, the novelty of the school. He hated that. When he finally got to college after that he was the only student there not allowed to live on campus, the only student whose mom still made him a packed lunch every day, but it was better. For some reason they seemed to expect it, and the professors were always less bewildered than the ones in high school had been, less intimidated by this little kid who not only understood all the theories, but made his own, ones that they discussed with other academics, some that he published, some that he debunked himself.
They didn’t care that he was about nine years younger than the average student. The worst bit was when his parents decided that he should go back to high school. They wanted him to have ‘a normal high school experience’, like that was going to happen now. Yeah, that was the worst bit.
Some of the teachers were nice. Miss Leeds, his physics teacher, was sweet. She was a little bit baffled by him, and thought he was shy. He wasn’t shy. He knew all the answers, yeah, but he wasn’t answering the questions because he didn’t want to. He wanted to fit in a bit better than that. The other students knew that he was technically a prodigy. They knew that he’d done all of this, that he’d been to college, that he could have taught the lessons. But Miss Leeds, nice though she was, didn’t understand this, and tried to draw him out of his shell.
‘I’m sure Jacob knows the answer. Jacob?’
Calling on him when he hadn’t put his hand up really bugged him. ‘Uh… electromagnetic field?’
Miss Leeds beamed at him, and Jacob slid down in his seat, staring balefully out at the rest of the class. His English teacher had the same odd reaction to him. He’d never really been that good at English, and for some reason Mr Trousdale seemed to take it as a personal affront that this boy who was so clever at science had never had anything like the same aptitude in his subject.
‘Are you listening, Mr Glaser?’
And sure, maybe Jacob wasn’t listening. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was day-dreaming. Or maybe he was just trying to figure out why they were really supposed to care about Scout and Jem and Boo Radley.
Other teachers were nice. The math teachers. History. Geography. Current affairs. They got that he didn’t want to be treated differently. These were his favourite classes because they were the ones where the other kids were more able to forget that Jacob was different. But not in science. Not in physics. And that was where it all started.
‘This term we have a project lined up for you! So if you could all get into pairs, I’ll tell you the possible topics!’
Jacob sighed. If there was one part of school he hated more than any other, it was projects. He thought that he should enjoy it more, after all, you got to spend the whole time with a friend, working together. It was just… you wouldn’t think it, but no-one ever really wanted to pair up with the prodigy. Which was why he was surprised when, after a moment of shuffling around from everyone else in the classroom, a pile of books were dumped next to his and someone slumped into the chair next to his.
‘Hi,’ said the boy now sitting next to him. ‘I’m Joseph.’
Jacob had seen Joseph around the class, normally sitting at the back next to the slightly irritating bushy-haired girl he usually paired with, who seemed to idolise him. Jacob glanced towards Joseph’s normal seat and saw her, looking rather put out, partnering with the weird blond kid who hadn’t seemed to work out that trousers could come down to your ankles and not end somewhere around mid-calf.
‘Jacob,’ he offered, with a smile at the thought that this time, at last, he wouldn’t be working alone.
‘Nice to meet you, my friend,’ said Joseph, and they shook hands.
When Miss Leeds noticed that Jacob had a partner, she fairly beamed at him. He thought he resented the implication that he had no friends or something, but then a) he didn’t, b) she gave them terraforming as a topic, which was something he knew wasn’t actually on the syllabus but was a pet love of his, and c) Joseph had just called him ‘my friend’, so perhaps he wasn’t that hopeless after all.
And then, the cherry on top of having a partner (who could be a friend, possibly, maybe, someday), and studying terraforming, was when he turned to Joseph, who grinned at him, and simply said, ‘Terraforming? Oh, sweet!’
And after that, everything was different. Joseph would sit down next to him at lunch, sometimes accompanied by the almost-sulking Marie, as Jacob discovered her name was, but usually alone, he would come up to him at recess, even manage to find him in the library, where Jacob found that they were suddenly study partners, Joseph helping him with his English and Jacob helping Joseph with his History. Then, one day, after school, Jacob found that they were almost at his house and he was dreading the last bus stop which would take Joseph home.
‘Uh… wanna come back to mine?’ he found himself blurting out. Joseph stopped and looked at him quizzically. ‘My mom’s always telling me to bring friends home if I want. I mean, if you don’t want to that’s fine, I mean… um…’
Oh great, this was the stupidest idea in the history of really stupid ideas. Like really really dumb.
But a grin was spreading over Joseph’s face. ‘Seriously? That would be great.’
‘We could work on our project,’ said Jacob, and Joseph had just said yes shut up shut up.
But all Joseph said was, ‘yeah, sure,’ without even a funny look, and they continued to walk on to Jacob’s, not talking about anything that even remotely related to the project.
They arrive, and his mom is almost embarrassingly welcoming, and yeah, thanks, way to prove it as if he didn’t already know that he has absolutely no other friends? But she offers them drinks, and asks if Joseph is staying for dinner, and of course he says, no, I don’t want to be any trouble, and then of course she says it’s no trouble at all, and then suddenly yeah, Joseph is going to be there for dinner, and so, drinks in hand, they go up to Jacob’s bedroom and are supposed to be thinking about terraforming and the presentation they have to give.
Jacob wants Joseph to think his room is cool, and it really isn’t. He hasn’t changed how it looked since he was a kid, and he still has that poster up from that exhibition he’d gone to see with the exhibits that had been found at sea and his solar system sheets, but Joseph is so much cooler than Jacob had even thought because even though he must think it’s stupid, he takes a look around, grins at Jacob, and says, ‘sweet room, my friend.’
And Jacob tries not to grin back overly much at that, at the fact that Joseph doesn’t think he’s a total dork and also at the ‘my friend’ because they totally are friends by now and seriously, he could kiss Miss Leeds for this.
And so they’re sitting on his bed, looking at data on the fossils found on Mars and theories of how the world came to be habitable, even this crazy conspiracy theory about archaeological sites being linked on the earth’s electromagnetic grid and the believers’ conviction that the only reason that there doesn’t appear to be a site like there should be in Maine is because ‘no-one’s found it yet’, and Joseph says, ‘here, give me a look at that,’ and moves over and suddenly he’s sitting right next to Jacob instead of across from him and wow, Jacob’s wondering if he’s ever heard of personal space but he doesn’t really care.
‘“Primordial hill”, huh? Well, I hope they find it, then,’ Joseph says, staring at the papers in front of him as if they’re actually crazy in and of themselves, and Jacob laughs.
‘Seriously? You’d want to live in a hill while the world reshaped itself?’
Joseph laughs. ‘Wouldn’t you? You’d come out after this brief period of natural disasters and world-changing events to find everyone else dead, but the world would be new! And pure! Think of how clean the air would be! We could drink from streams! We could dance in the starlight!’
‘I’m OK with this dirty, stinky world with people in, thanks,’ Jacob responds. ‘Though if you want, we can still dance in the starlight.’
‘Quite right too, my friend.’
And then suddenly, Joseph is right up in his face and seriously does he not know what personal space is and Jacob thinks his OJ is spilling on his pillow and friends don’t do this, surely, surely this is a bit weird? But he doesn’t mind because Joseph’s mouth is on his and his hands are firm on his shoulders and Jacob thinks of films and how he should close his eyes and put his arms round Joseph’s waist or something but instead he balls his hands up into fists and rests them on Joseph’s chest and sort of blinks until he can convince his eyes to stay shut.
And then suddenly Joseph pulls away from him and looks at him and doesn’t say anything, and Jacob thinks that he almost looks like he’s the one who just got jumped. And so Jacob doesn’t say anything either, until one of them has to say something, and so he just goes ‘huh’, and Joseph nods, like that’s the right response.
And then there’s silence again, and seriously, he might not have any friends, but that’s not right. ‘Dude, you just kissed me.’
‘You kissed me back.’
And yeah, that’s true. Can’t argue with that. But he kind of feels that Joseph’s missing an important point here. ‘Yeah, but you kissed me. Why did you kiss me?’
And Joseph shuffles the papers in front of him and then says, ‘Why, did you not like it?’
Jacob wants to punch him.
‘God damn you, Joseph! Can you give me an actual answer?’
And Joseph doesn’t say anything, just kind of looks at his hands and so Jacob waits because what else can he do, and then suddenly Joseph just shouts, ‘Because I wanted to, OK? I just wanted to, and I’m really sorry, and it was stupid.’
And Jacob had thought that inviting Joseph back to his after school was stupid.
‘Not really,’ he offers, because yeah, he did kiss back, and it wasn’t like he minded it. It was just a surprise, he thinks, wondering if it would work if it happened again. ‘I mean… like, you’re still my friend, right? You just wanted to kiss me.’
And Joseph nods and shakes his head and Jacob wonders if he’s got it horribly horribly wrong and Joseph doesn’t really want to be his friend after all, if this was all some horrible joke.
‘I kinda still want to kiss you.’
‘Oh.’ And Jacob’s hand goes to his neck, holds the ring on the chain around it, the one that no-one knows is there, because it’s against the rules for girls to wear jewellery to school, but this makes him feel better. ‘I mean, you can if you want.’
And so he does, and Jacob remembers to close his eyes this time, but still isn’t quite sure what to do with his hands, so he just puts them on Joseph’s arms and kisses him back until Joseph pulls away.
And then Joseph speaks in a rush and Jacob thinks it might be because his brain is still AWOL and he’s not quite sure what to do.
‘We still OK, my friend?’
And Jacob grins at him, because of all the stupid things that afternoon, that question was the stupidest.
‘Course.’
And they do get called down to dinner later, and they do get a good mark on their project. Miss Leeds still tries to help Jacob, and Mr Trousdale still seems to hate him, as does Marie. But that’s not important. And that’s not what Jacob and Joseph care about. They care about the stupid things, because they’re the most important.
Author: faurefowl
Recipient: mwmm23
Pairing: Jacob/Joseph
Summary: Jacob really hates high school.
A/N: Written for the prompt ‘High School AU!’ Sorry about the rubbish title. Merry Christmas!
~
Jacob hated high school. Seriously. He hated it the first time around, when all the girls cooed over this kid who was having trouble with joined-up writing but could have tutored them in science, the time he went through years in months, only doing the science, the novelty of the school. He hated that. When he finally got to college after that he was the only student there not allowed to live on campus, the only student whose mom still made him a packed lunch every day, but it was better. For some reason they seemed to expect it, and the professors were always less bewildered than the ones in high school had been, less intimidated by this little kid who not only understood all the theories, but made his own, ones that they discussed with other academics, some that he published, some that he debunked himself.
They didn’t care that he was about nine years younger than the average student. The worst bit was when his parents decided that he should go back to high school. They wanted him to have ‘a normal high school experience’, like that was going to happen now. Yeah, that was the worst bit.
Some of the teachers were nice. Miss Leeds, his physics teacher, was sweet. She was a little bit baffled by him, and thought he was shy. He wasn’t shy. He knew all the answers, yeah, but he wasn’t answering the questions because he didn’t want to. He wanted to fit in a bit better than that. The other students knew that he was technically a prodigy. They knew that he’d done all of this, that he’d been to college, that he could have taught the lessons. But Miss Leeds, nice though she was, didn’t understand this, and tried to draw him out of his shell.
‘I’m sure Jacob knows the answer. Jacob?’
Calling on him when he hadn’t put his hand up really bugged him. ‘Uh… electromagnetic field?’
Miss Leeds beamed at him, and Jacob slid down in his seat, staring balefully out at the rest of the class. His English teacher had the same odd reaction to him. He’d never really been that good at English, and for some reason Mr Trousdale seemed to take it as a personal affront that this boy who was so clever at science had never had anything like the same aptitude in his subject.
‘Are you listening, Mr Glaser?’
And sure, maybe Jacob wasn’t listening. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was day-dreaming. Or maybe he was just trying to figure out why they were really supposed to care about Scout and Jem and Boo Radley.
Other teachers were nice. The math teachers. History. Geography. Current affairs. They got that he didn’t want to be treated differently. These were his favourite classes because they were the ones where the other kids were more able to forget that Jacob was different. But not in science. Not in physics. And that was where it all started.
‘This term we have a project lined up for you! So if you could all get into pairs, I’ll tell you the possible topics!’
Jacob sighed. If there was one part of school he hated more than any other, it was projects. He thought that he should enjoy it more, after all, you got to spend the whole time with a friend, working together. It was just… you wouldn’t think it, but no-one ever really wanted to pair up with the prodigy. Which was why he was surprised when, after a moment of shuffling around from everyone else in the classroom, a pile of books were dumped next to his and someone slumped into the chair next to his.
‘Hi,’ said the boy now sitting next to him. ‘I’m Joseph.’
Jacob had seen Joseph around the class, normally sitting at the back next to the slightly irritating bushy-haired girl he usually paired with, who seemed to idolise him. Jacob glanced towards Joseph’s normal seat and saw her, looking rather put out, partnering with the weird blond kid who hadn’t seemed to work out that trousers could come down to your ankles and not end somewhere around mid-calf.
‘Jacob,’ he offered, with a smile at the thought that this time, at last, he wouldn’t be working alone.
‘Nice to meet you, my friend,’ said Joseph, and they shook hands.
When Miss Leeds noticed that Jacob had a partner, she fairly beamed at him. He thought he resented the implication that he had no friends or something, but then a) he didn’t, b) she gave them terraforming as a topic, which was something he knew wasn’t actually on the syllabus but was a pet love of his, and c) Joseph had just called him ‘my friend’, so perhaps he wasn’t that hopeless after all.
And then, the cherry on top of having a partner (who could be a friend, possibly, maybe, someday), and studying terraforming, was when he turned to Joseph, who grinned at him, and simply said, ‘Terraforming? Oh, sweet!’
And after that, everything was different. Joseph would sit down next to him at lunch, sometimes accompanied by the almost-sulking Marie, as Jacob discovered her name was, but usually alone, he would come up to him at recess, even manage to find him in the library, where Jacob found that they were suddenly study partners, Joseph helping him with his English and Jacob helping Joseph with his History. Then, one day, after school, Jacob found that they were almost at his house and he was dreading the last bus stop which would take Joseph home.
‘Uh… wanna come back to mine?’ he found himself blurting out. Joseph stopped and looked at him quizzically. ‘My mom’s always telling me to bring friends home if I want. I mean, if you don’t want to that’s fine, I mean… um…’
Oh great, this was the stupidest idea in the history of really stupid ideas. Like really really dumb.
But a grin was spreading over Joseph’s face. ‘Seriously? That would be great.’
‘We could work on our project,’ said Jacob, and Joseph had just said yes shut up shut up.
But all Joseph said was, ‘yeah, sure,’ without even a funny look, and they continued to walk on to Jacob’s, not talking about anything that even remotely related to the project.
They arrive, and his mom is almost embarrassingly welcoming, and yeah, thanks, way to prove it as if he didn’t already know that he has absolutely no other friends? But she offers them drinks, and asks if Joseph is staying for dinner, and of course he says, no, I don’t want to be any trouble, and then of course she says it’s no trouble at all, and then suddenly yeah, Joseph is going to be there for dinner, and so, drinks in hand, they go up to Jacob’s bedroom and are supposed to be thinking about terraforming and the presentation they have to give.
Jacob wants Joseph to think his room is cool, and it really isn’t. He hasn’t changed how it looked since he was a kid, and he still has that poster up from that exhibition he’d gone to see with the exhibits that had been found at sea and his solar system sheets, but Joseph is so much cooler than Jacob had even thought because even though he must think it’s stupid, he takes a look around, grins at Jacob, and says, ‘sweet room, my friend.’
And Jacob tries not to grin back overly much at that, at the fact that Joseph doesn’t think he’s a total dork and also at the ‘my friend’ because they totally are friends by now and seriously, he could kiss Miss Leeds for this.
And so they’re sitting on his bed, looking at data on the fossils found on Mars and theories of how the world came to be habitable, even this crazy conspiracy theory about archaeological sites being linked on the earth’s electromagnetic grid and the believers’ conviction that the only reason that there doesn’t appear to be a site like there should be in Maine is because ‘no-one’s found it yet’, and Joseph says, ‘here, give me a look at that,’ and moves over and suddenly he’s sitting right next to Jacob instead of across from him and wow, Jacob’s wondering if he’s ever heard of personal space but he doesn’t really care.
‘“Primordial hill”, huh? Well, I hope they find it, then,’ Joseph says, staring at the papers in front of him as if they’re actually crazy in and of themselves, and Jacob laughs.
‘Seriously? You’d want to live in a hill while the world reshaped itself?’
Joseph laughs. ‘Wouldn’t you? You’d come out after this brief period of natural disasters and world-changing events to find everyone else dead, but the world would be new! And pure! Think of how clean the air would be! We could drink from streams! We could dance in the starlight!’
‘I’m OK with this dirty, stinky world with people in, thanks,’ Jacob responds. ‘Though if you want, we can still dance in the starlight.’
‘Quite right too, my friend.’
And then suddenly, Joseph is right up in his face and seriously does he not know what personal space is and Jacob thinks his OJ is spilling on his pillow and friends don’t do this, surely, surely this is a bit weird? But he doesn’t mind because Joseph’s mouth is on his and his hands are firm on his shoulders and Jacob thinks of films and how he should close his eyes and put his arms round Joseph’s waist or something but instead he balls his hands up into fists and rests them on Joseph’s chest and sort of blinks until he can convince his eyes to stay shut.
And then suddenly Joseph pulls away from him and looks at him and doesn’t say anything, and Jacob thinks that he almost looks like he’s the one who just got jumped. And so Jacob doesn’t say anything either, until one of them has to say something, and so he just goes ‘huh’, and Joseph nods, like that’s the right response.
And then there’s silence again, and seriously, he might not have any friends, but that’s not right. ‘Dude, you just kissed me.’
‘You kissed me back.’
And yeah, that’s true. Can’t argue with that. But he kind of feels that Joseph’s missing an important point here. ‘Yeah, but you kissed me. Why did you kiss me?’
And Joseph shuffles the papers in front of him and then says, ‘Why, did you not like it?’
Jacob wants to punch him.
‘God damn you, Joseph! Can you give me an actual answer?’
And Joseph doesn’t say anything, just kind of looks at his hands and so Jacob waits because what else can he do, and then suddenly Joseph just shouts, ‘Because I wanted to, OK? I just wanted to, and I’m really sorry, and it was stupid.’
And Jacob had thought that inviting Joseph back to his after school was stupid.
‘Not really,’ he offers, because yeah, he did kiss back, and it wasn’t like he minded it. It was just a surprise, he thinks, wondering if it would work if it happened again. ‘I mean… like, you’re still my friend, right? You just wanted to kiss me.’
And Joseph nods and shakes his head and Jacob wonders if he’s got it horribly horribly wrong and Joseph doesn’t really want to be his friend after all, if this was all some horrible joke.
‘I kinda still want to kiss you.’
‘Oh.’ And Jacob’s hand goes to his neck, holds the ring on the chain around it, the one that no-one knows is there, because it’s against the rules for girls to wear jewellery to school, but this makes him feel better. ‘I mean, you can if you want.’
And so he does, and Jacob remembers to close his eyes this time, but still isn’t quite sure what to do with his hands, so he just puts them on Joseph’s arms and kisses him back until Joseph pulls away.
And then Joseph speaks in a rush and Jacob thinks it might be because his brain is still AWOL and he’s not quite sure what to do.
‘We still OK, my friend?’
And Jacob grins at him, because of all the stupid things that afternoon, that question was the stupidest.
‘Course.’
And they do get called down to dinner later, and they do get a good mark on their project. Miss Leeds still tries to help Jacob, and Mr Trousdale still seems to hate him, as does Marie. But that’s not important. And that’s not what Jacob and Joseph care about. They care about the stupid things, because they’re the most important.