FIC: Absolution
Title: Absolution
Author: angevin2
Play: Richard II
Characters: Richard, Carlisle, Aumerle; deals with Richard/pretty much everyone he has ever met on one level or another, but mostly with previous Richard/Henry and Richard/Anne. I have tagged it as gen nevertheless, but it sort of inhabits a grey area.
Warnings: Dodgy sexual ethics; theology; brief references to fatal car wrecks
Rating: PG-13 mostly for language. There is some offstage sex both before and during the fic (well, the stuff before it is not technically occurring offstage, but it is certainly not in this fic).
Summary: Richard has had plenty of casual and underhanded sex before -- the difference is that this time it bothers him.
Notes: Academic!AU fic for gileonnen. This is a followup (written with permission) to her "Faculty Planning," without which this will probably not make copious amounts of sense. Go read that one first; it's really good.
Richard is perfectly aware that virtually none of his colleagues like him, so when the revised faculty planning rota comes out it scarcely affects his life in any meaningful way, except that interactions with members of other departments involve less supposedly-subtle eyerolling and more glaring. At one point he is completely convinced that Dr. Fitzwater from the English department is going to spit in his face. More than he does in the course of normal conversation.
Even Edward York, who started the whole thing by pointing out that it was largely on Richard's account that the history department was getting fucked over, has been muttering about ethics and scandals and tenure reviews. It is vaguely infuriating, despite that Edward is really very pretty when he's angry, and Richard has few qualms about making his annoyance known.
"I don't see what your problem is, Edward," Richard says. "I bent over backwards to get the rota changed."
Edward gives him a look which is simultaneously disapproving, long-suffering, and faintly crestfallen.
"Of course you did," he says. Richard can almost hear him rolling his eyes as he turns and leaves the office. He has developed a sixth sense for knowing without looking when people are rolling their eyes at him. It's a feeling he has very nearly learned to enjoy, but it seems different when Edward does it.
***
There is a message from Henry on his mobile phone. He hesitates longer than is quite comfortable, fingering the bruises on his neck, before deleting it unheard, and wonders when he started thinking of Bolingbroke by his first name.
***
The one person who doesn't seem fazed by the controversy is Thomas Carlisle from theology, who has yet to mention it to him at all. The omission is extremely disconcerting, since Carlisle is a Jesuit and generally interested in ethics, and although he is typically left-wing enough that Richard can usually just about forget that he is technically a man of the cloth, it still seems like the sort of thing where he would have a word or two (or many) to say to Richard on the topic.
At least, this is what Richard assumes is going to happen when Carlisle invites him to lunch, so he is thrown for a considerable loop when it doesn't come up. Carlisle asks him how he's been, and since answering with Oh, just fine, I've alienated the entire Arts and Sciences faculty and I can't stop thinking about tearing Henry Bolingbroke's clothes off and fucking his brains out against a wall -- yourself? would bring up a lot of issues he isn't ready to talk about, he hesitates for a moment, exercising his frustration on an undeserving piece of garlic naan.
"I've been better," he finally admits.
Carlisle raises an eyebrow. "Is it anything you'd like to talk about?" he says. "Or would you prefer to continue mutilating your lunch? Because if you're not going to eat that, I want it." He gestures towards the forlorn shreds of naan littering Richard's plate before returning placidly to his fish vindaloo, which he puts down without breaking a sweat. Richard has occasionally suspected that their friendship, such as it is, was born somewhere around the middle of the Scoville scale: neither ordained clergymen nor bisexual academics have that many other chances to engage in stereotypical expressions of machismo.
Richard picks up one of the pieces of naan and eats it, largely out of pettiness. "I would prefer not to," he says, reflecting briefly on the failure of referentiality that juxtaposition generates.
"Suit yourself," says Carlisle, with a shrug, and starts talking about a paper he'd recently heard at some conference Notre Dame had held on the topic of Christianity and the modern university. Richard cannot escape the impression of water dripping on his forehead, as relentless as it is metaphorical: he finally feels it necessary to broach the issue himself on the grounds that an undoubtedly awkward conversation is on the whole preferable to having a complete nervous breakdown in the middle of Tandoori Hut.
"Well," Richard says, after a moment of uninspiring, unencouraging contemplation of his rogan josh, "there is one thing."
Carlisle's expression is knowing. "I'm listening," he says, and Richard begins to suspect he's been set up. He removes his glasses, ostensibly to wipe them off, but really on the off chance that the conversation might be a tiny bit less awkward if Carlisle's face were a bit blurrier. There's a reason confessionals have screens, after all (besides preventing the seduction of attractive penitents, but Richard is pretty sure he isn't going to face that particular problem).
"So," Richard finally says, replacing his glasses. "Is this the part where I say 'bless me, father, for I have sinned, it has been,' oh, let's say, 'forty-two years since my last confession'?"
"Oh, come now," Carlisle says. "I'd only have guessed thirty-eight -- " but he stops in mid-sentence, perhaps because he has noticed that Richard is, shockingly given the context, glaring at him. Instead, he straightens up, suddenly serious. "Of course you know I can't give you sacramental absolution," he says, "since I assume you're not Catholic -- "
"I'm English, Thomas," Richard says, looking long-suffering in turn. "What do you think?"
Carlisle doesn't take the bait. " -- and even if I could I probably couldn't do it here," he concludes. "Do you think you need it?"
They've come to the point, then. Bugger it all. In a manner of speaking. Richard heaves an only-slightly-calculated sigh.
"Well," he says. "I assume you've heard about the faculty-planning rota."
If Carlisle has heard -- and he certainly has, because Richard knows perfectly well that he is good friends with Dr. Abbott, who represents the theology department for the committee -- he doesn't let on. "What about it?" he says.
Richard grits his teeth, feeling as though he has somehow been thrown back in time and is actually in a first-year tutorial at Oxford again. Which would actually be preferable to his current situation, now that he thinks of it. He makes a vow to himself to avoid future social intercourse with people who teach Aquinas for a living.
Nevertheless. Now that he has brought the damned thing up, he is rather stuck with it. He wishes this conversation were taking place at a time of day at which it were socially acceptable to drink gin.
Right then. Clearly the way to go about it is just to say it. Rather like tearing off a plaster.
"I also assume, though you're clearly not going to tell me so," he begins -- clearly the rapid plaster-tearing is not precisely happening -- "you've heard that the version that came out of the meeting isn't the same one that the committee passed."
"In fact, I had heard words to that effect," Carlisle concedes.
"You've probably also heard words to the effect that a certain narcissistic little drama queen from the history department was the driving force behind it?"
"It's bad form to gossip, you know," Carlisle says, "and anyway, I've heard much stronger words than that."
Richard rolls his eyes, uncomfortably aware that he is getting to the point where he's going to have to own up to the fact that his underhanded maneuvering involved rough awkward frottage on a copier, and he isn't even getting formal absolution out of it. He resolves to leave out the part about the copier, at least.
He certainly doesn't want to tell Carlisle how much he'd like to do it again.
At least the major advantage of having this sort of conversation over lunch is that one can defer awkward statements on account of etiquette. He takes a bite of garlic naan, chewing it long enough that it begins to taste sweet as the carbohydrates break down. Carlisle is watching him with genuine concern.
"You know, Richard, it isn't usually this difficult to get you to talk," he says, which very nearly makes Richard smile. "If you really don't want to, we can drop it. I'm not actually your confessor, after all."
Richard buries his face in his hands for a moment. He is so tired of all of this. Maybe he'll wake up now and it will be six years ago and Anne will be next to him, and she'll wrap her arms around him and he can shake off this insane dream. He's been feeling that way a lot lately -- rather, a lot more often.
He can't bear to think what Anne would say if she knew what he'd done, and it's that thought that finally brings the words out, because whatever Carlisle is going to have to say to him, he very likely deserves worse.
"I got Bolingbroke to change the rota by fucking him against the maths department copier," he says.
It's strange how easy it is to say it -- not easy, precisely, but painless, as if he'd admitted it under truth serum, or as if he were not actually having this conversation but watching himself have it from somewhere else. Carlisle looks rather pained, pressing his hand to his eyes for a moment as if to collect his thoughts.
"I'm sure I don't actually need to tell you the many, many things wrong with that," he says.
"Well," Richard says, feeling strangely lightheaded now that he's admitted what he's done, "do you want to start with the underhandedness? Or the shameless deception? Or the gay sex? That one's a classic, after all. 'Gravely disordered,' no?"
Carlisle is unamused. "The catechism does in fact say that, yes," he concedes. "But in this case? It's the least of your problems." He gestures emphatically with his fork, as if the potato speared on the end of it were an instrument of divine wrath. "What on earth were you thinking, Richard?"
Richard looks away, out the window, watching people passing by with textbooks, shopping bags, Au Bon Pain carryout. There is one girl walking a ridiculously tiny dog. He feels a brief pang of envy: those people aren't him.
"I hope that's a rhetorical question," he says, not looking back at Carlisle.
"Is that because you don't have an answer?" Carlisle asks by way of reply. "Or because you don't want to share it?"
"I don't see why I have to," Richard snaps, aware that he is ignoring the fact that he raised the issue in the first place. Carlisle, typically, has his number on this one.
"If you didn't feel it was necessary, you wouldn't have mentioned it at all," he says. "Because I suspect you know that if you're left to your own devices you'll just keep destroying yourself."
Richard can feel an insistent pain slowly growing somewhere behind his eyes, as though there are tiny gremlins attacking his optic nerves with pickaxes. He is in no mood for this. Even if it is his own damn fault for bringing up the matter. Next time, he promises himself, he'll just fucking deal with it.
"You know," he says, "I'm getting damned sick of this Socratic armchair psychiatrist bullshit."
"All right, then," Carlisle says. "You've behaved in an incredibly unethical manner. You undermined a democratically-resolved procedure for your own benefit, and you did it by seducing one of your colleagues. If any of this becomes public knowledge, your career is very likely over. So, then, what are you going to do about it?"
They seem to have reached an impasse. Richard rubs the bridge of his nose as if trying to poke his brain out of its stress-induced torpor. "Have a complete nervous breakdown?" he suggests. "That's all I've got, really."
"You could always do something to fix the problem," Carlisle says with a shrug.
"Such as?"
Carlisle smiles at him ruefully. "I don't think I should give you a penance if I can't absolve you," he says.
***
Nobody is showing up at office hours and today's graduate seminar on homoeroticism in the Order of the Garter has been uncharacteristically sluggish, and that's probably why Richard keeps picking up his mobile phone and staring suspiciously at it, fingers hovering over the buttons, before putting it back down and marking yet another undergrad essay on how Fin Amour Is All About Manly Relationships and Not Real Women At All Really.
It's all completely ridiculous, really. The whole thing makes him feel like some clueless fifth-former, sitting there freaking out about whether he should let on that he has a thing for a guy, except that he was not this damn twitchy about it when he was an actual fifth-former.
If he were really willing to let himself think about what was going on, it would probably end up being all about how it's not just all some sort of repressed pent-up lust, and for fuck's sake it's not like he's never had casual or even slightly underhanded sex before, but that part of him is stuck back at Oxford twenty years ago and since he's lost Anne and Robbie he's flailing about trying to recapture anything from those days that he possibly can, but of course he isn't going to think too hard about that, because the last thing he wants is to spend the entire night mired in whiskey and despair, so fuck that for a game of soldiers (as his father used to say when he didn't think Richard was listening, and why the hell is everything ever in his whole fucking life about dead people, anyway?)
In his desk drawer there is a shard of concrete streaked with worn, chipping red paint. He takes it out for a moment, turning it over and over in his hands, longing for that day in Berlin, when it seemed like the whole world being reborn, so badly he can taste it, shutting his eyes desperately against the memory of a more recent day and another red-streaked pavement, the officer's voice terribly, unbearably kind -- please try to stay calm, sir, we're trying to get your wife out --
Christ. He can't think about this.
With a decisiveness that is really a desperate stab against encroaching panic-edged darkness, he closes the drawer, picks his phone back up and rings up Greene to see if he wants to have drinks tonight. It might be distracting. If he's getting laid, he won't have to think.
***
Edward York is the only person Richard has ever met who is less of a morning person than he is, and Richard has taken to thinking of his grumbling about the department's habitual scheduling of his classes and the cosmic farce that is his life as one of the more entertaining parts of his morning routine, so it is a bit surprising when he turns up in Richard's office before class, looking considerably more awake than he usually does at that hour. Certainly he's more awake than Richard feels as he sits at his desk watching the steam from his teacup curling in the air.
"I come bearing page proofs!" he exclaims, overdramatically, dropping a pile of papers onto the desk. "I think it's time for Routledge to breathe down your neck for a while."
The words they certainly wouldn't be the only ones hang in the air for a second, unspoken. Richard decides to chance it with the tea. It's still too hot. Of course it is.
"What's with you?" he says. "Did you just get laid or something?" Never mind that he is currently living proof of the fact that having gotten laid recently is not a failsafe way to improve one's mood. He makes a mental note to himself to inform Greene, and all other people he might term "friends with benefits," that sticking around for breakfast is generally considered polite.
Edward blinks at him, all innocence, as he sits in the chair opposite the desk. "Whatever makes you say that?" he says.
Richard rolls his eyes. "It's -- " he checks his watch -- "8:45, and you aren't being surly and foul-mouthed. And you're wearing a pink shirt."
"I wear this shirt all the time," Edward says.
"Look," Richard says. "Are you doing that thing where you get me to talk about the business with the rota by being overbearingly cheerful at me? Because you wouldn't be the first. I can spot it from a mile away now."
"Don't blame me for your guilty conscience," he says (Richard begins to object but thinks better of it). "But if you must know, I did just have coffee with Henry Bolingbroke."
Richard presses his hand to his forehead in an effort to drive away the incipient return of the pickaxe-bearing gremlins, and tries not to wonder what else they might be up to, since Edward seems far more chipper than mere coffee deserves, even coffee that is not lukewarm department-office bilge. Not that he is jealous or anything.
"How nice for you," he says. It comes out somewhere between a groan and a sigh. Must everyone he knows be so fucking smug about the whole affair? Apparently.
Edward raises an eyebrow. "It was, rather," he says, as he stands up. "Look, I've got to go and explain the War of Three Henries to a bunch of undergrads now, but do you want to do lunch? I had a few thoughts about revisions to the section on Elyot and Wyatt." Richard must be hesitating more obviously than he intends to, because he adds, "I promise I won't talk about the late unpleasantness."
"Well." Richard tries to smile at him and makes it halfway there. "If you're sure. I'll see you then."
Edward nods, and turns to leave.
"By the way," he says on his way out the door, "you should call him back."
***
It is probably the page proofs that finally inspire him to action. Richard is mired in pages of Lusty Bachelers, Gentil Knyghts: Ideal Manhood from Capellanus to Castiglione and wondering how on earth he could possibly have written such complete rubbish. Clearly it is just as well that his career is eventually going to explode in a cloud of recrimination and awkwardness.
He picks up the phone: this is certainly not at all what Carlisle had had in mind when he had urged Richard to take action, but Richard cannot bring himself to care. Fuck his stupid life, anyway.
He takes a deep breath and dials Henry's number.
Author: angevin2
Play: Richard II
Characters: Richard, Carlisle, Aumerle; deals with Richard/pretty much everyone he has ever met on one level or another, but mostly with previous Richard/Henry and Richard/Anne. I have tagged it as gen nevertheless, but it sort of inhabits a grey area.
Warnings: Dodgy sexual ethics; theology; brief references to fatal car wrecks
Rating: PG-13 mostly for language. There is some offstage sex both before and during the fic (well, the stuff before it is not technically occurring offstage, but it is certainly not in this fic).
Summary: Richard has had plenty of casual and underhanded sex before -- the difference is that this time it bothers him.
Notes: Academic!AU fic for gileonnen. This is a followup (written with permission) to her "Faculty Planning," without which this will probably not make copious amounts of sense. Go read that one first; it's really good.
Richard is perfectly aware that virtually none of his colleagues like him, so when the revised faculty planning rota comes out it scarcely affects his life in any meaningful way, except that interactions with members of other departments involve less supposedly-subtle eyerolling and more glaring. At one point he is completely convinced that Dr. Fitzwater from the English department is going to spit in his face. More than he does in the course of normal conversation.
Even Edward York, who started the whole thing by pointing out that it was largely on Richard's account that the history department was getting fucked over, has been muttering about ethics and scandals and tenure reviews. It is vaguely infuriating, despite that Edward is really very pretty when he's angry, and Richard has few qualms about making his annoyance known.
"I don't see what your problem is, Edward," Richard says. "I bent over backwards to get the rota changed."
Edward gives him a look which is simultaneously disapproving, long-suffering, and faintly crestfallen.
"Of course you did," he says. Richard can almost hear him rolling his eyes as he turns and leaves the office. He has developed a sixth sense for knowing without looking when people are rolling their eyes at him. It's a feeling he has very nearly learned to enjoy, but it seems different when Edward does it.
***
There is a message from Henry on his mobile phone. He hesitates longer than is quite comfortable, fingering the bruises on his neck, before deleting it unheard, and wonders when he started thinking of Bolingbroke by his first name.
***
The one person who doesn't seem fazed by the controversy is Thomas Carlisle from theology, who has yet to mention it to him at all. The omission is extremely disconcerting, since Carlisle is a Jesuit and generally interested in ethics, and although he is typically left-wing enough that Richard can usually just about forget that he is technically a man of the cloth, it still seems like the sort of thing where he would have a word or two (or many) to say to Richard on the topic.
At least, this is what Richard assumes is going to happen when Carlisle invites him to lunch, so he is thrown for a considerable loop when it doesn't come up. Carlisle asks him how he's been, and since answering with Oh, just fine, I've alienated the entire Arts and Sciences faculty and I can't stop thinking about tearing Henry Bolingbroke's clothes off and fucking his brains out against a wall -- yourself? would bring up a lot of issues he isn't ready to talk about, he hesitates for a moment, exercising his frustration on an undeserving piece of garlic naan.
"I've been better," he finally admits.
Carlisle raises an eyebrow. "Is it anything you'd like to talk about?" he says. "Or would you prefer to continue mutilating your lunch? Because if you're not going to eat that, I want it." He gestures towards the forlorn shreds of naan littering Richard's plate before returning placidly to his fish vindaloo, which he puts down without breaking a sweat. Richard has occasionally suspected that their friendship, such as it is, was born somewhere around the middle of the Scoville scale: neither ordained clergymen nor bisexual academics have that many other chances to engage in stereotypical expressions of machismo.
Richard picks up one of the pieces of naan and eats it, largely out of pettiness. "I would prefer not to," he says, reflecting briefly on the failure of referentiality that juxtaposition generates.
"Suit yourself," says Carlisle, with a shrug, and starts talking about a paper he'd recently heard at some conference Notre Dame had held on the topic of Christianity and the modern university. Richard cannot escape the impression of water dripping on his forehead, as relentless as it is metaphorical: he finally feels it necessary to broach the issue himself on the grounds that an undoubtedly awkward conversation is on the whole preferable to having a complete nervous breakdown in the middle of Tandoori Hut.
"Well," Richard says, after a moment of uninspiring, unencouraging contemplation of his rogan josh, "there is one thing."
Carlisle's expression is knowing. "I'm listening," he says, and Richard begins to suspect he's been set up. He removes his glasses, ostensibly to wipe them off, but really on the off chance that the conversation might be a tiny bit less awkward if Carlisle's face were a bit blurrier. There's a reason confessionals have screens, after all (besides preventing the seduction of attractive penitents, but Richard is pretty sure he isn't going to face that particular problem).
"So," Richard finally says, replacing his glasses. "Is this the part where I say 'bless me, father, for I have sinned, it has been,' oh, let's say, 'forty-two years since my last confession'?"
"Oh, come now," Carlisle says. "I'd only have guessed thirty-eight -- " but he stops in mid-sentence, perhaps because he has noticed that Richard is, shockingly given the context, glaring at him. Instead, he straightens up, suddenly serious. "Of course you know I can't give you sacramental absolution," he says, "since I assume you're not Catholic -- "
"I'm English, Thomas," Richard says, looking long-suffering in turn. "What do you think?"
Carlisle doesn't take the bait. " -- and even if I could I probably couldn't do it here," he concludes. "Do you think you need it?"
They've come to the point, then. Bugger it all. In a manner of speaking. Richard heaves an only-slightly-calculated sigh.
"Well," he says. "I assume you've heard about the faculty-planning rota."
If Carlisle has heard -- and he certainly has, because Richard knows perfectly well that he is good friends with Dr. Abbott, who represents the theology department for the committee -- he doesn't let on. "What about it?" he says.
Richard grits his teeth, feeling as though he has somehow been thrown back in time and is actually in a first-year tutorial at Oxford again. Which would actually be preferable to his current situation, now that he thinks of it. He makes a vow to himself to avoid future social intercourse with people who teach Aquinas for a living.
Nevertheless. Now that he has brought the damned thing up, he is rather stuck with it. He wishes this conversation were taking place at a time of day at which it were socially acceptable to drink gin.
Right then. Clearly the way to go about it is just to say it. Rather like tearing off a plaster.
"I also assume, though you're clearly not going to tell me so," he begins -- clearly the rapid plaster-tearing is not precisely happening -- "you've heard that the version that came out of the meeting isn't the same one that the committee passed."
"In fact, I had heard words to that effect," Carlisle concedes.
"You've probably also heard words to the effect that a certain narcissistic little drama queen from the history department was the driving force behind it?"
"It's bad form to gossip, you know," Carlisle says, "and anyway, I've heard much stronger words than that."
Richard rolls his eyes, uncomfortably aware that he is getting to the point where he's going to have to own up to the fact that his underhanded maneuvering involved rough awkward frottage on a copier, and he isn't even getting formal absolution out of it. He resolves to leave out the part about the copier, at least.
He certainly doesn't want to tell Carlisle how much he'd like to do it again.
At least the major advantage of having this sort of conversation over lunch is that one can defer awkward statements on account of etiquette. He takes a bite of garlic naan, chewing it long enough that it begins to taste sweet as the carbohydrates break down. Carlisle is watching him with genuine concern.
"You know, Richard, it isn't usually this difficult to get you to talk," he says, which very nearly makes Richard smile. "If you really don't want to, we can drop it. I'm not actually your confessor, after all."
Richard buries his face in his hands for a moment. He is so tired of all of this. Maybe he'll wake up now and it will be six years ago and Anne will be next to him, and she'll wrap her arms around him and he can shake off this insane dream. He's been feeling that way a lot lately -- rather, a lot more often.
He can't bear to think what Anne would say if she knew what he'd done, and it's that thought that finally brings the words out, because whatever Carlisle is going to have to say to him, he very likely deserves worse.
"I got Bolingbroke to change the rota by fucking him against the maths department copier," he says.
It's strange how easy it is to say it -- not easy, precisely, but painless, as if he'd admitted it under truth serum, or as if he were not actually having this conversation but watching himself have it from somewhere else. Carlisle looks rather pained, pressing his hand to his eyes for a moment as if to collect his thoughts.
"I'm sure I don't actually need to tell you the many, many things wrong with that," he says.
"Well," Richard says, feeling strangely lightheaded now that he's admitted what he's done, "do you want to start with the underhandedness? Or the shameless deception? Or the gay sex? That one's a classic, after all. 'Gravely disordered,' no?"
Carlisle is unamused. "The catechism does in fact say that, yes," he concedes. "But in this case? It's the least of your problems." He gestures emphatically with his fork, as if the potato speared on the end of it were an instrument of divine wrath. "What on earth were you thinking, Richard?"
Richard looks away, out the window, watching people passing by with textbooks, shopping bags, Au Bon Pain carryout. There is one girl walking a ridiculously tiny dog. He feels a brief pang of envy: those people aren't him.
"I hope that's a rhetorical question," he says, not looking back at Carlisle.
"Is that because you don't have an answer?" Carlisle asks by way of reply. "Or because you don't want to share it?"
"I don't see why I have to," Richard snaps, aware that he is ignoring the fact that he raised the issue in the first place. Carlisle, typically, has his number on this one.
"If you didn't feel it was necessary, you wouldn't have mentioned it at all," he says. "Because I suspect you know that if you're left to your own devices you'll just keep destroying yourself."
Richard can feel an insistent pain slowly growing somewhere behind his eyes, as though there are tiny gremlins attacking his optic nerves with pickaxes. He is in no mood for this. Even if it is his own damn fault for bringing up the matter. Next time, he promises himself, he'll just fucking deal with it.
"You know," he says, "I'm getting damned sick of this Socratic armchair psychiatrist bullshit."
"All right, then," Carlisle says. "You've behaved in an incredibly unethical manner. You undermined a democratically-resolved procedure for your own benefit, and you did it by seducing one of your colleagues. If any of this becomes public knowledge, your career is very likely over. So, then, what are you going to do about it?"
They seem to have reached an impasse. Richard rubs the bridge of his nose as if trying to poke his brain out of its stress-induced torpor. "Have a complete nervous breakdown?" he suggests. "That's all I've got, really."
"You could always do something to fix the problem," Carlisle says with a shrug.
"Such as?"
Carlisle smiles at him ruefully. "I don't think I should give you a penance if I can't absolve you," he says.
***
Nobody is showing up at office hours and today's graduate seminar on homoeroticism in the Order of the Garter has been uncharacteristically sluggish, and that's probably why Richard keeps picking up his mobile phone and staring suspiciously at it, fingers hovering over the buttons, before putting it back down and marking yet another undergrad essay on how Fin Amour Is All About Manly Relationships and Not Real Women At All Really.
It's all completely ridiculous, really. The whole thing makes him feel like some clueless fifth-former, sitting there freaking out about whether he should let on that he has a thing for a guy, except that he was not this damn twitchy about it when he was an actual fifth-former.
If he were really willing to let himself think about what was going on, it would probably end up being all about how it's not just all some sort of repressed pent-up lust, and for fuck's sake it's not like he's never had casual or even slightly underhanded sex before, but that part of him is stuck back at Oxford twenty years ago and since he's lost Anne and Robbie he's flailing about trying to recapture anything from those days that he possibly can, but of course he isn't going to think too hard about that, because the last thing he wants is to spend the entire night mired in whiskey and despair, so fuck that for a game of soldiers (as his father used to say when he didn't think Richard was listening, and why the hell is everything ever in his whole fucking life about dead people, anyway?)
In his desk drawer there is a shard of concrete streaked with worn, chipping red paint. He takes it out for a moment, turning it over and over in his hands, longing for that day in Berlin, when it seemed like the whole world being reborn, so badly he can taste it, shutting his eyes desperately against the memory of a more recent day and another red-streaked pavement, the officer's voice terribly, unbearably kind -- please try to stay calm, sir, we're trying to get your wife out --
Christ. He can't think about this.
With a decisiveness that is really a desperate stab against encroaching panic-edged darkness, he closes the drawer, picks his phone back up and rings up Greene to see if he wants to have drinks tonight. It might be distracting. If he's getting laid, he won't have to think.
***
Edward York is the only person Richard has ever met who is less of a morning person than he is, and Richard has taken to thinking of his grumbling about the department's habitual scheduling of his classes and the cosmic farce that is his life as one of the more entertaining parts of his morning routine, so it is a bit surprising when he turns up in Richard's office before class, looking considerably more awake than he usually does at that hour. Certainly he's more awake than Richard feels as he sits at his desk watching the steam from his teacup curling in the air.
"I come bearing page proofs!" he exclaims, overdramatically, dropping a pile of papers onto the desk. "I think it's time for Routledge to breathe down your neck for a while."
The words they certainly wouldn't be the only ones hang in the air for a second, unspoken. Richard decides to chance it with the tea. It's still too hot. Of course it is.
"What's with you?" he says. "Did you just get laid or something?" Never mind that he is currently living proof of the fact that having gotten laid recently is not a failsafe way to improve one's mood. He makes a mental note to himself to inform Greene, and all other people he might term "friends with benefits," that sticking around for breakfast is generally considered polite.
Edward blinks at him, all innocence, as he sits in the chair opposite the desk. "Whatever makes you say that?" he says.
Richard rolls his eyes. "It's -- " he checks his watch -- "8:45, and you aren't being surly and foul-mouthed. And you're wearing a pink shirt."
"I wear this shirt all the time," Edward says.
"Look," Richard says. "Are you doing that thing where you get me to talk about the business with the rota by being overbearingly cheerful at me? Because you wouldn't be the first. I can spot it from a mile away now."
"Don't blame me for your guilty conscience," he says (Richard begins to object but thinks better of it). "But if you must know, I did just have coffee with Henry Bolingbroke."
Richard presses his hand to his forehead in an effort to drive away the incipient return of the pickaxe-bearing gremlins, and tries not to wonder what else they might be up to, since Edward seems far more chipper than mere coffee deserves, even coffee that is not lukewarm department-office bilge. Not that he is jealous or anything.
"How nice for you," he says. It comes out somewhere between a groan and a sigh. Must everyone he knows be so fucking smug about the whole affair? Apparently.
Edward raises an eyebrow. "It was, rather," he says, as he stands up. "Look, I've got to go and explain the War of Three Henries to a bunch of undergrads now, but do you want to do lunch? I had a few thoughts about revisions to the section on Elyot and Wyatt." Richard must be hesitating more obviously than he intends to, because he adds, "I promise I won't talk about the late unpleasantness."
"Well." Richard tries to smile at him and makes it halfway there. "If you're sure. I'll see you then."
Edward nods, and turns to leave.
"By the way," he says on his way out the door, "you should call him back."
***
It is probably the page proofs that finally inspire him to action. Richard is mired in pages of Lusty Bachelers, Gentil Knyghts: Ideal Manhood from Capellanus to Castiglione and wondering how on earth he could possibly have written such complete rubbish. Clearly it is just as well that his career is eventually going to explode in a cloud of recrimination and awkwardness.
He picks up the phone: this is certainly not at all what Carlisle had had in mind when he had urged Richard to take action, but Richard cannot bring himself to care. Fuck his stupid life, anyway.
He takes a deep breath and dials Henry's number.