nuclear fusion up the walls , - - - [thad]

[MICHAELANGELO DONATELLO GRACE]

nuclear fusion up the walls ! [cs=2][bg=060606][atrb=border,0,true,b]

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tag ! morgan && thaddea ;; word count ! 691 ;; setting ! teacher’s lounge ;; outfit ! business slacks and a button-down shirt ;; [cs=2][bg=060606][atrb=border,0,true,b]

There was no one else in the teacher’s lounge, which he supposed was a good thing for the sole reason that he’d made a mess. Of course, it was a restrained mess. It was limited to the round table in the corner and to the chairs surrounding it. Papers in seeming disarray covered all but one of the chairs and the table’s entire surface, layered relatively high in haphazard, overlapping piles. To anyone else, there was absolutely no sense and no order to the spot that seemed to have birthed the definition of chaos. A couple of pens, which had once been in a relatively contained group on top of the papers, had rolled apart, one landing on the floor and daring anyone to walk by so it could trip an unsuspecting teacher merely seeking caffeine. The handwriting styles, some messy, some neat, mixed with typed pages, most flawless, a few doggy-eared, a source of irritation despite the horror the paper s offered otherwise. You’re never going to get it done, Braedon teased gleefully. If the voice were a real person, He was pretty sure he would have seen someone tap dancing. But Braedon wasn’t real. He was just a bothersome figment of the professor’s imagination. Nonetheless, sometimes voicing an argument helped keep him sane (even if ti made him look unwell to anyone observing), and he snapped, “Shut up.” He afforded a glance upward, looking about to reassure himself that there was indeed no one around. And there wasn’t. As far as he could tell. Was it a possible symptom of schizophrenia not to see things that were actually there? He hoped not. Mostly they were just positive symptoms, as far as he’d learned from the past few years. Like the voices. As if on cue, Braedon continued, You’re not gonna get it done. Not now, not never. The wind rolled his eyes. “‘Not never’ is a double negative, so you just said I am getting it done,”

[/color] Michaelangelo grumbled, which provoked Braedon to tell him to shut up and, thankfully, retreat into silence again. Much better.

He turned back tot he papers surrounding him. He’d left the one chair empty in case he wanted to sit in it, but currently, he was more comfortable on the floor. Papers sat around him in a ring, along with a handful of law books ( a few outdated, but they could still be useful for comparative exercises), pens, pencils, three differently-colored highlighters, the textbook he used for his classes, and a cup of coffee placed at a dangerous angle atop one of the books. He had his planner in his lap, marked up so badly that Elsa wished, on more than one occasion, that he would never miss class because no substitute would have any idea whatsoever what they were supposed to do from the planner alone. It wasn’t even that his handwriting was horrible—it was better than that of most of his male students, and that wasn’t bragging—but rather that he crossed out so many things and drew arrows and made notes at odd angles that it would take the majority of any class period to decipher what he was trying to say. That was, in part, why he was trying to get the planner done now. So he would have something to go off later in the semester.

Of course, it’d probably end up useless. He’d transcribe it neatly onto a new planner or calendar or a plain sheet of paper. As he was doing so, he’d most likely change it again. And even if he didn’t, he’d probably do a lot more scribbling when he looked at the plans later, all the while grumbling to himself just what had been thinking in organizing it the way he had. Yeah, it was a useless endeavor, but he wasn’t in the right mindset to do anything else. Besides, he’d already gotten set up, organized even if it didn’t look that way to anybody else. Luckily, there was no “anybody else” currently around to glare at him or give him weird looks for working with the mess he’d created.[/div][/color][/size][/font][bg=000000][atrb=align,justify][atrb=border,0,true][/td][/tr] [tr][td]

notes ! Sorry it took me so long, dear >< oh, and braedon and elsa are both voices he hears o3o ;;

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[THADDEA ARYN MELANTHA]

but i flew too high

She really didn’t have a moment to spare. She’d reached her time limit, the minutes allotted to each event in her carefully planned schedule. Seconds were literally ticking by – the seconds she had carefully dictated would be used for her return trip to the home she currently shared with Mr. Thomas Roth. She had given herself fifteen, though the trip usually only took ten. She always counted in extra minutes for traffic or unpredictable circumstances. Indeed, the situation she now found herself in was highly unpredictable indeed. A student had paused at the end of the time allotted for grading the next day’s papers. Though she was on a tight schedule, the student had been insistent. They’d asked this question and that question and Thaddea had truly been stuck between a rock and a hard place. To refuse assistance would be inexcusable, an utter failure of her job. Yet to disrupt her schedule would put her entire day into chaos. In the end, she’d had no choice but to answer each question. She hadn’t done it with a smile (she rarely ever did), and her answers had been curt – to the point. Now she was hurrying towards the teacher’s lounge, specifically to the small locker assigned as her own.

She’d already put a laminated label on the outside. The other professors and teachers cast it sideways glances, but Thaddea didn’t mind. She’d found the labeler quite recently at an office supply store, and it had been her newest sense of joy. She’d labeled everything in her home (drawers, cabinets, baskets, the very mundane). Then she’d moved on to her office, and her classroom, and finally her locker. Each thing had its place, and its place was clearly identified by her neat perfect labels. They were an utter joy to her, though this joy was a quietly expressed thing. She gripped the handle, sailing briskly through the doorway. She didn’t pause to chat, or even to consider who might be in the room. Instead she crossed immediately to the locker she had labeled “Professor Melantha”. She produced a key, quickly turning the lock. Inside hung very few items – her favorite trench coat, her house keys, only the practical things one ought to carry. She folded the coat over her arm, tucked the keys in her fingers. The closed the locker, re-locking it with an efficient click. She whirled on her toes – every move mechanical, robotic. But it was simply the way she moved, the way she had moved for quite some time.

She was startled to turn and see another professor, one whom she hadn’t bothered to previously notice. He was staring at her, but not in the usual manner. Often they gave her looks of incredulity, of skepticism or pity. This one looked cagey, perhaps even suspicious, like he was trying to hide a dirty little secret. And in all honesty, Thaddea didn’t give a damn what his dirty little secret was. She glanced at her watch. According to her schedule, she now had eight minutes until she was supposed to reach her home. But something felt awkward, like she was stepping on the toes of some expected social interaction. While she might have once known these social norms, might have once engaged in them effortlessly, they’d been wiped from her consciousness by the strength of her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The old Thaddea, or rather Phaedra, would have been shocked and disgusted. But this new woman who had taken her place, well she saw it simply as the way things were – one had to step on toes in order to achieve perfection. Her lips tightened into a line and she dipped her head curtly to the other man before making her way to the door.