... the proper structure of the alpha-helix is useful in that it increases

The blinking cursor paused on the screen as the typist leaned back in his chair, deep in thought. Glancing askew at the open textbook, he had to wonder what the hell he was doing. He didn’t even like biology. And, he realized as he scanned the text on the screen once-over, he was going to have to dumb it down anyway. No one was going to believe–

The dormroom door slammed open, and immediately slammed shut, breaking his line of concentration and causing him to wince, both times. Seth swore, between the bunk bed, the desks, and the triple-load of coursework, there just wasn’t enough room for two bodies in here.

Erik buried himself in the bottom bunk, thirty seconds away from bawling his eyes out. Which meant it was boy trouble… again. Seth scowled, and tried to concentrate on the assignment. It wasn’t the homosexual orientation that bothered him; rather that Erik had long-since become the poster-child for gay angst. It could get so badly stereotypical that, it Seth didn’t know better, he’d have wondered if it were all merely posing. The telltale sniffles started, prompting him to pause again. At the first hiccup, he began his count slowly. Three. Two. One...

"Seth?"

"Yes?"

"Am I a bad person?"

"No." A more empathic man might have left it at that. Seth was neither empathic, when it came to brutal honesty, nor in a particularly good mood. "If only because there are no bad people, only different views along the spectrum of human-made morality."

"Oh." It had gone over his head, although that was probably for the best. In the following silence, Seth managed to reread his lagging sentence before Erik recovered to pester him again. "Seth?"

Aggravated, he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. This was not the way to spend a perfectly fine Autumn Saturday. "...Yes?"

"What’re you working on?" Erik clambered to the end of the bed, trying to get a look in over his shoulder. He wouldn’t understand the complexity of the graphs and figures, and he probably wouldn’t understand half of the words on the page.

"Your homework," Seth replied bluntly.

"Really?"

"Yes."

Erik springboarded off the bed and desperately hugged at him from behind the chair. It was a surprise, and a start, and of all the stupid...

"You’re so good to me! I don’t know what I’d ever do without you!"

He didn’t know why he put up with it, either, although he guessed it had something to do with Erik’s bright eyes and totally ignorant, naivete. For some reason, Erik was still trapped waiting for Prince Charming to ride up and whisk him away, which, while amusing, left him blind to the real world. Why he wanted a biology degree, Seth didn’t know, especially seeing as he spent more than half his credits on medieval and ancient histories. And the truth was, Erik wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if they hadn’t been lumped together in the same small living space.

And even with his help, he didn’t know how Erik managed to pull a 2.5. Maybe it had something to do with his pretty-boy figure, or all the glitter he got everywhere. Although, if Seth were a professor, the last thing he’d want was glitter all over his classroom.

"Will and Kara are coming down later, if you wanted to see them..." Seth mumbled, trying to shrug Erik off of him, "and would it be too much trouble, in your fragile emotional state, to ask you to let go of me?"

"Oh! I’m so sorry." Erik recoiled as if he’d been burnt. "I keep forgetting you’re..."

There was a pause, and Seth spun around to actually hear the end of this sentence. He quirked an eyebrow at Erik’s sudden tripping over his own tongue. What’s-his-face – whoever the boy of the week was – forgotten, and he was already all blush and innocence.

"I mean, I keep forgetting, you’re... um... you know? Straight."

He even said it like straight was a bad word.

Kicking the floor, Seth spun back to his desk. "... Right."

"But... Will and Kara are really coming? Here? Won’t that be wonderful? Are you going out? What should I wear?"

Seth studied the wire frames in his hands. If there were bad people, beyond the morally reprehensible, he was likely at the top of the list.

If there was one certainty in the world, it was Will. Calm, considerate Will, usually with Kara looking absolutely divine at his elbow. That he was invited to play for the evening by total strangers was no surprise; he wowed the crowd by merely practicing, and the lounge was lacking in terms of decent entertainment anyway. Apparently, they’d fired the band and roughed it, all on account of money. But Will was always free – his music was for the people, anyway, he’d said, not the establishment.

They were getting married. That was a change only in the legal sense. There’d be a ceremony and a reception and all the pomp and grandeur, but they’d been devoted since high school. It wasn’t a change.

In contrast to his cousin, Neil had changed. From the mindless basement inventor, to the mindful apartment inventor – seeing how difficult it was to keep one’s cleaning deposit, in this day and age – to the boy-genius running his father’s company into the ground and having a gleeful time doing it, all the while forcing the old man to lose all his hair at the ripe young age of fifty-two. He’d fired his company valet, and was here on his lonesome, but not that it seemed to bother him. He was eccentric, sure, but he almost reveled in the social nightlife the bar and his lot offered.

Lance was, predictably enough, slipping Erik alcohol. Sure, it was all fun and games, but the latter was under-aged as far as drinking was concerned... although what really got to Seth was that Lance wasn’t going to be there in the morning to coax Erik through a hangover.

It was almost like old times, but for the hazy film that obscured what old times were supposed to be.
 
 

For his part, Seth merely observed the goings on. He found comfort in comparing the people around him to simple atomic structure – a person was a nucleus, and others surrounded them like electrons. Some people shared electrons, but... it began to make him feel strangely lonely. There was little telling who was an electron and who was a nucleus.

"You look miserable," Neil told him, breaking away from the easily contained groups and, in so doing, breaking the chain. They all might have been Will’s electrons – or perhaps Kara’s as well... but Neil was a loose electron, bouncing from shell to shell as he saw fit.

"This isn’t really my scene," Seth replied flatly. He wasn’t miserable, he was just...

"No," Neil said, "That’s not it."

He hadn’t realized until then, until Neil said something about it. And maybe he wasn’t particularly happy, but...

"No, I suppose it isn’t."

Tracy. Boy of the week’s name was Tracy Franklin, and he was on the track team. Former boy of the week, anyway, and the only reason he remembered was that Tracy appeared out of the dark of the parking lot.

It seemed to happen in an instant – they were saying goodbye, and the next someone cried out – Erik cried out, he corrected – and Tracy being all stalker-like and ... well, Seth never really liked him anyway. But what mattered was that Erik was on the ground, and Tracy was gloating over him, and what went around came around.

What came around, he corrected himself again, was Will. Calm, quiet Will... with the only change being that now he was seething. And there was blood on his flute.

"Can you get Kara home?" he asked dryly, looking to Lance. Breaking free of his astonishment at the scene, Lance nodded.

"Where are the campus’ police?" He turned, eyes reflecting strangely in the parking lot’s night lamps. Seth realized that Will was asking him.

"Are you kidding?" He wasn’t sure what to say – things like this just didn’t happen in his daily experience of life. "If you tell them anything, they’re going to want to know what happened to him, too; and at best they’re probably going to detain you, and-"

"I know." It dawned on him that he was going to turn himself in. And why, because it was the good and honorable and morally right thing to do. Of course it was. He looked to Kara, who stood patiently by Lance. She looked worried, certainly, but she shared Will’s calm. Shaken as he was, he’d still be damned if their synchronous mannerisms didn’t creep him out some days.

"Down the hill," he instructed, sounding distant even to himself, "Near the gate."

"Will you be alright getting back?"

Looking to Tracy, still cowering on the ground, Seth felt sick. "Yeah?"

"You sure?"

"Yes, we should be." Supporting Erik underarm, he took a staggered lead towards the dorms, stepping heavily past the man whining and sniffling his own blood. Will might have been the knight in shining armor, but it seemed where Erik was concerned that it he was always stuck being the janitor.

The dormitory was quiet, with everyone asleep. The doors were locked, so there wasn’t much chance of Tracy getting in without tripping up Campus Security. That was, if he still had it in him after getting his nose busted in like that.

Even Seth had to admit, that was a pretty sweet comeuppance.

They collapsed together on the stairs, worn out and out of breath. Erik looked worse for wear than he probably was... due in part, Seth gathered, to the state of his makeup. Really he should have asked, seeing as the kid looked pretty roughed up. Instead, he said the first thing to come to mind. "Why biology?"

Erik straightened up and rubbed at his eyes; perhaps there was more to the motion, but it only seemed to serve in making his mascara worse. With a weak smile, he proffered up his explanation.

"Well, my dad wants me to be a doctor." Seth was expecting an and to that statement; he didn’t get one.

"I see," he said shortly, "And I suppose the best way to study... medicine?" Erik nodded. That was worse than he thought, "is to compare the anatomy of every flaming peacock of a man on the planet. Perfect logic."

"No." Erik pouted and curled his arms around his knees. "That’s different. It’s hard to find a good man."

The undercurrent was you wouldn’t understand. Erik’s blatant ignorance was getting to him again; he shouldn’t have been angry or snippy, but the kid really...

... really did think that every last gay man was a stereotyped fairy. And Seth wasn’t being fair, again.

"You’re looking in all the wrong places."

"How would you know?"

And he was sitting there, pomp and pretty in his glitter and his smeared makeup, pouting and all stupidly innocent. Seth twitched. How would I know, indeed?

"... outside that... violent incident last week, which I’m going to overlook in light of your friends’ conduct and Franklin’s less than stellar record in such matters, I must say I’m concerned."

"One of the best and brightest students in our fine University – and that’s saying a lot Seth – to be so errant in his conduct as to..."

The Dean broke her business-like diatribe and sat down heavily in her chair. Shaking her head, "Really, Seth, what were you thinking? Out in the open, on the dormitory steps?"

Seth didn’t say anything, and Erik followed in keeping his mouth shut. It was a good thing, being Seth’s friend, because elsewise he would have broken down in tears and confessed six ways from Babylon, to whatever they wanted him to do. Seth, on the other hand, calmly adjusted his glassed and sighed.

"It was a lapse of judgement, Ma’am."

The woman stared at Seth skeptically, and Erik fidgeted on his behalf. But the older student was nothing but calm and composed. "And in the cafeteria lobby?"

"Also a lapse of judgement."

"... And, the daycare playground?"

"The same."

How Seth could remain so easily composed in the face of such terrifying adversity left Erik in awe. He almost seemed bored. That he could be such an adventurous person on the inside, yet the same old bored-boring dull Seth was...

But then, he always had something more than Erik could speak for himself. He was a planner, an organizer, and an overall genius, and without him the whole of their group would have been separated by time, long ago.

"And if I let you off," the Dean was saying, and Erik jerked his head up in surprise, "can you at least promise me there won’t be any more... ‘lapses of judgement,’ in the public eye?"

"Of course."

"Good," she dismissed him offhand. "I’ll see you Thursday."

"I appreciate your concerns, Ma’am," Seth said, standing and replacing his chair. "Thank you."

The woman returned to her paperwork, as if they’d never come in, and Seth left without another word. It was a strange, scary place – neither had given Erik a second glance after he’d arrived – and so he followed Seth out, into the halls, wide-eyed and outright stunned.

"How’d you do that?" he managed to finally ask, and Seth paused to glance at him.

"What do you mean ‘How’d I do that’?" The boy continued to stare at him; he shrugged irritably and continued, "Okay, look, I did it the same way I kept your grades up for the past two years. Magic! Pure, pixie-dust magic."

As if to prove it were indeed possible, Erik’s eyes widened even further, and Seth inwardly cowered. Now he was going to take him literally, and possibly think it was some kind of gay wonder he’d been missing out on, or something stupid and wholesomely, innocently Erik.

...Now of all times, in the Administrations Building, when he had a promise to keep.