Verity's Book 2.0

College AU: Mordred Meets Lethira

Please don't let the fact that you haven't read my books dissuade you from reading this avalanche of fluff.

~*~

The wall behind the professor's desk had a long, vertical line tracing through the strips of peeling paint, slightly off-center, evidence of some long-ago join. One extra-long paint strip curled around itself and nuzzled the wall, like a dog looking for a scratch behind the ears.

Mordred stared fixedly at it, chin ensconced on his crossed arms.

"... I know a lot of you are feeling drained, as we move into finals..." The professor's drone grew louder, filtering vaguely through a haze of disinterest.

"No kidding," Therelane mumbled somewhere nearby.

The rest of the doubtlessly inspiring motivation speech was lost on Mordred. He woke from his study of the black, off-center line to hear a loud throat-clear and Professor Hawke's voice saying, "Dismissed, Mordred Kenhelm."

Mordred blinked around the empty room. He stumbled up to his feet, snatching up his binder with heated ears, and hurried out the halfway open door into the hall, where several girls were loitering and giggling together. The high-pitched noise grated on his tired ears.

Therelane was waiting for him one door down. "I was just about ready to go back in for you," he said with visible relief. "Did Hawke keep you for something?"

Mordred shook his head, feeling no inclination to vocalize.

They came out of the building into the nippy air, Therelane apostrophizing chemistry under his breath. "...I'll never understand a blasted word in his lectures anyhow. Wish I knew how you've still got a B in the class — you do have a B, right?"

Mordred ducked into the side door of the main building and made for the coffee bar.

"That's not your second one today, is it?" Therelane was right on his heels, hesitant disapproval sounding in his tone.

"Stop being my mother, Therelane."

"Were you up all night?"

"I went to bed sometime. I think."

Therelane fell into a dissatisfied silence and poured himself a token coffee when Mordred was done.

"Ruining it," said Mordred with a teasing grin, nodding towards the heavily creamered liquid in Therelane's cup.

Therelane snorted, stirring vigorously to hide his red face. "You're done till lunch, right? We'll go back to the dorm and you can rest for an hour or two."

Mordred shook his head. "Psychology class at 11. Wait — what time is it now? Therelane, how long were you waiting for me?" He spun around, searching for a wall clock.

"10:53." Therelane rubbed his watch face and looked up at Mordred with a wince.

"It's all the way across campus — I'll have to drive." He plunged a hand into his pocket and came up empty. "Where are the keys? Oh — I left them in my coat, didn't I — where's my coat—"

"Did you leave it..."

"— in the classroom, yes! Drat it!" Mordred took off with long strides back across the hall, breaking into a run.

He burst back into the chemistry classroom, ignored Professor Hawke stacking laboratory reports at the other end, and scanned desperately around until his eyes lit upon the familiar blue-black bundle draggled across a seat. Coffee still clenched in one hand, he rummaged the pockets and found the keys, hooking them on one finger and tucking the coat over his other arm as he bolted for the door again.

It was halfway to the car that he realized he had forgotten his class binder when he got the keys. And that his psychology textbooks were sitting with his completed paper in the dorm.

As he froze, puffing breaths came from behind him. Therelane appeared, staggering to a halt, a bulky load of books in his arms. "Are you going to need these?"

Mordred seized the psychology books, seeing the loose corners of his paper and notes protruding beneath the front cover, and wrung Therelane's hand with a distracted thank-you. For the second time that day, he bolted back towards chemistry.

Skidding up to the glass doors at breakneck speed, he reached for the handle only to have it swing towards him. Coffee splashed over his hand as he jerked himself up short, mouth open for an apology to the girl he had nearly barrelled into.

She looked up at him, and something in Mordred's heart went dry.

He saw her all in a breath: rusty, soft hair, curling back at the temples and pulled into a tidy side tail, petite shoulders and slim, pretty hands holding a clipboard to her chest, and a mouth that was still busy laughing at something else. But most of all he saw her eyes.

He had never seen eyes so huge, so wonderful, so shadowy-hazel and bronze-lashed and full of quiet life.

They blinked at him and lowered in a moment of timidity. Her lashes were long, he noticed in a distracted, precise kind of way. Very long. How did lashes —

"Excuse me."

It took him all of three seconds to realize that the soft, diffident request was coming from the girl in front of him. He panicked.

"I almost ran into you." He was desperately sorry, he would never do it again, didn't she understand, why did she look so confused?

"That's all right." She smiled, a polite stranger-to-stranger smile, and Mordred's heart rocked and clouded his brain with the subsequent dizziness.

"I'm sorry."

"Thank you, but it's quite all right. I didn't even notice." She nodded carefully at the door. "I'm off to class."

He sprang out of her way, nearly dropping his armload of books, coat, and coffee, muttering apologies that came out incoherent no matter how hard he tried, and furious with himself for standing there like a pig with less than half a brain.

What was wrong with him?

Which class was she going to?

Why did he care?

***

"Thank you for joining us, Mordred," remarked Elbert Corass, professor of psychology.

Kenneth looked sideways at Mordred, who ordinarily would have responded to the professor's good-humored rebuke with either a poker face or a vague and sleep-deprived apology. But Mordred did not even blink. He continued moving to his seat in a zombie-like walk, eyes unfocused and face drawn in a look of sublime abstraction.

Kenneth would have thought him sleepwalking if he had not been fully dressed and clutching a half-drunk cup of coffee.

Kenneth glanced at the clock. A quarter past. Mordred had never been this late before.

What was going on?

***

Lethira clicked her pen once or twice and scribbled her name at the top of the page for today's English notes. She'd almost been late on account of that other student — poor boy, he hadn't seemed to know who he was or what he was doing. She stifled a smile at the memory of his wind-tousled hair and blankly staring eyes. He had been sweet, if a little profuse, in apologizing. Probably just woken up.

Whoever he was, they would probably never see each other again. Hopefully he made it to his class on time.

~*~

Well, that was the most fun I've had in months. Now to finish the McDonalds one.