Romance short. A repressed wizard is at odds with the Dean of Magical Arts’ new secretary.
4k. Silly banter back and forth between a grumpy Mr Fish and a smug new personal assistant of the Dean’s — Mr Cross. Adapted from a TweetFic.
Everard Fish had never been a very flexible man, nor a friendly one. He was rigid by his nature, he liked things to be in order, well-organised, efficient — despite these preferences, he had chosen academia as his vocation, and worse than that, he was a wizard.
Individual scholars might be trusted on to be organised and to keep a space in order, but Fish had never found that colleges and universities were themselves well-kept — too many people, in his mind, got into it for the love of their areas of study, and this affection distracted them from more important matters: record-keeping, paperwork, a good, robust filing system.
He didn’t have enough love for his area of study to let himself get distracted by it, and he was aware that while he was a competent academic and a good tutor — he received decent enough reviews from his students, even if his personality counted against him — he wasn’t inspired enough in his work to attain any great position for it.
For a year or so, he’d taken to approaching an alternate strategy — on top of his own research, he assisted the Dean of Magical Arts at his desk, in the hopes that he might ascend new bureaucratic ranks if not professorial ones.
He wants to advance. Desperately, he does — and not merely for the sake of it, either, not just because he wants the title or even the increase in wages, but for the work. It seems unfair, somehow, that it should count against him that he’s got coarse edges, that he’s a hard man.
His work is still sound. Fish might not have impressive magical flair like Cassidy or Ondore or any of the more powerful mages on the campus, and perhaps his research isn’t in a flashy and generously budgeted area of study like Pyromancy or Transfiguration, but Alteration is still useful, and his work is widely cited, widely used, even if it is… dry.
He doesn’t want to be stuck forever. Skill should count for something — the Alteration department has gone without a head for nearly two years now, and by all rights, he should have the title.
It’s all very well going on about “people skills”, but he runs the department anyway, and has everyone submit their documents on time, keeps everything running smoothly — and at the same time, he volunteers his time in the Dean’s office, takes on a lot of the paperwork that the Dean hates doing off his hands.
He never gave any thought to the idea that the Dean should take note of his work, recognise the value in it, and promptly hire another person to do it, and he can scarcely conceive of what he’s seeing when on one Monday morning he walks into the Dean’s office and finds a man outside it, a man at a new desk, a man he’s never seen before.
Fish stands in the doorway and stares at him, at the desk that’s obviously be taken out of storage and cleaned off for him — he’d had to badger maintenance for months before they gave him his own desk in the Alteration offices. He’d had to share with Ivy Kylix, who ate at his desk, and left crumbs everywhere.
He’d been grateful once he’d actually had a desk of his own, even though it had been thick all over with dust and cobwebs and he’d had to scrub it clean himself — this one is at least a hundred years older than his is, and looks completely clean.
The man at the desk is plump, with purple-painted lips and matching lip polish, his hair glossy black and with a carefully poised curl to it. He sits primly in his pale blue suit, wearing a ruffled blouse underneath that’s a lighter purple colour than the hue at his lips and fingertips.
He looks up at Fish with his perfectly plucked eyebrows raising, looking him up and down. His eyes are purple, too, a pale lavender colour.
“Oh, yes, you,” he says. “Your services will no longer be required — the Dean has invested in a proper assistant, as you can say.”
Fish stares at him, his mouth opening and closing as he feels his blood boil under his skin, as he counts in his head all the letters he’s written out these past few weeks, all the pieces of paperwork he’s completed and filed away, all thework he’s done to be replaced by a little upstart who isn’t even clad in wizard’s robes.
What the fuck should he know about wizards’ business?
“I shouldn’t look so upset, Mr Fish,” says the new secretary primly. “I’m sure you can volunteer elsewhere in the building if you find yourself underworked.”
“I don’t mind myself underworked — ”
“Good. I’m sure you have duties to be getting on with, then.”
Fish stares at him, mouth agape, sweat beading on his forehead and prickling on the back of his neck, under the collar of his robe. “Are you even a wizard?” he demands, his voice cracking embarrassingly with rage in the middle.
“A wizard? Me?” asks the Dean’s new secretary, and laughs. Actually laughs!
“You can’t even do magic?” demands Fish, stepping right forward, and although the secretary is a good deal shorter than him as he stands to his feet, something about the smile on his face makes Fish feel small.
“Oh, I can do a little,” he purrs, raising his eyebrows and keeping Fish’s gaze. There’s a smug ease to his tone that Fish doesn’t like — why should he feels so at ease in a setting like this one, when it’s no place of his? “Why, Mr Fish, would you like me to show you some?”
“Get the fuck away from me,” snaps Fish, stumbling back.
“I rather thought you were invading my space,” says the secretary, still smug, still easy. Fish stares at his plump, pretty hands, clasped in front of his rounded chest, instead of at his plump, pretty — Pretty… normal! — face. “Which you’re more than welcome to, by the way.”
“Fuck off,” snaps Fish.
The secretary’s laugh echoes in his ears as he leaves, and Fish’s skin feels like it’s burning as he goes back to his own cubicle, not even an office of his own, but a cramped little square of shelves and a piled high desk among half a dozen other wizards.
Later in the afternoon, he asks the Dean if he still doesn’t need assistance with anything — in the breezy, uncaring and distracted way the Dean has, he says that his new secretary is far better than Fish ever was, which stings.
* * *
The secretary is called Cross.
He isn’t a wizard, but that doesn’t stop him from interrupting senior staff that go over time speaking in meetings — which is ridiculous! They never used to pay close attention to those time limits before, they were just forgotten bylaws!
He takes minutes, too.
The other wizards barely even notice him, and half the time when Fish complains about Cross’ smug and superior manner or how irritating he is, they barely seem to know who he is.
The ones that do, Fish suspects, are fucking him.
“Are you fucking Cassidy?” he demands of Cross when he comes into his office outside of the Dean’s — his office! Cross has an office all of his own, not just his own desk! Cross!
“Not in this moment,” says Cross, not looking up from his desk as he sets some papers in order. “I have an opening, though — and free time, too.” He smiles thinly at his own joke, and Fish’s cheeks burn red as he scowls at him, fists clenched at his sides, stomach churning.
“No one wants to have sex with you,” snaps Fish.
“Oh?” asks Cross. “You think Cassidy was under duress, do you?”
“Isn’t it enough to be gay? Do you have to be a slut?”
“I don’t have to be, no,” says Cross, sounding infuriatingly unbothered. “But having long abandoned by childhood dreams of being a professional cyclist, I thought I might try my hand at being an amateur bike.”
“I know why you’re here,” snaps Fish.
“For the bountiful plenty of healthy cock, yes,” says Cross casually. “You seem so nervous, Mr Fish. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable under my desk.”
Fish curses and walks out.
He does not feel like he’s won.
* * *
The schedule format changes, and a few people mention how much more readable it is at a glance, which makes Fish feel so abruptly angry he wants to vomit — sort of in a protective way, like a vulture. Quite horribly, he actually agrees with them, although he’d die before he admitted it.
Cross doesn’t even say thank you, just sits there and smiles and inclines his head, then briskly brings them onto the business on the agenda.
Budgets start being finalised more quickly. Student registers are sent out an extra month in advance.
It comes to the point where a request for new equipment or a meeting is accepted or denied within three days instead of what was sometimes three months, because the Dean believed paperwork was anathema to good magic and refused to do it except when entirely necessary even though Fish wasn’t able to forge his signature on much of it — and despite his insistence that he hated it, the Dean nonetheless felt all the paperwork crucial to the running of an institution, and wouldn’t do away with it.
Fish, infuriated with the piles of student marking and grant proposals he wasn’t going to get accepted piled up at his desk, is staring into space when Cross comes in.
The hands that land on his shoulders are small, fat, and delicate, with purple-painted nails, and yet deceptively strong when they dig into his shoulders and force out some of the tension they find there.
Fish groans out loud and has to bite his hand to go quiet.
There are other people here. It’s a row of cubicles, each with their own desks or cobbled-together tables — the newest addition to the office, a big man called Able, is making do with the top surface of a chest of drawers — but the point is that there’s no walls between Fish and the rest of them, no doors, no privacy.
He can hear other wizards at work, hear Biggs chanting over something, can hear the whir and flow of a few running enchantments, and Whacker’s wheely chair is squeaking like it always does when he fidgets.
It’s been a long time since someone has touched him, and his teeth are leaving distinct imprints in the back of his hand, sweat dripping down his face as he presses his knees tightly together and hopes his robe hides everything.
“You poor thing,” murmurs Cross in his ear, breath so hot Fish feels like he’s boiling, so drawn tight he feels like he might well finish any second.
“Get the fuck off me,” Fish hisses, almost praying that Cross will ignore him no matter how disgusted it makes him feel with himself.
To his relief and impossible disappointment, Cross lets him go.
“Perhaps a yoga class will do you good, Fish — or perhaps just a proper massage.”
“Maybe if you did any real work instead of gobbling cock all day, your shoulders would hurt too,” snaps Fish. “Get out.”
Cross smiles down at him, smiles that close-lipped, impossible smile that makes Fish wonder what his lipstick feels like, tastes like, what his mouth tastes like, wonders how Cross kisses. It’s been years since Fish kissed anyone, which is the only reason he wonders.
“Why, Fish,” says Cross pleasantly in a voice like dripping honey, and when Fish presses his knees more tightly together under the table, so much so he feels like they’ll bruise, Cross angles his gaze very pointedly down at this crotch and wets his lower lip. “Are you stressed?”
“What the fuck do you want?”
“My goal is always efficiency,” says Cross in an undertone, leaning in, close enough that he could kiss Fish, close enough that Fish smells the sweet note of his cologne, close enough that they’re almost touching and he can feel how warm Cross is.
His heart is beating fast in his chest and he’s trying to avoid thinking about his half-hard cock, feels like a fucking teenager, and when Cross reaches down and delicately plates two fingers over his knee, Fish feels like he’ll explode, his heart ready to burst.
“Were you not so tightly bound, Mr Fish,” says Cross deliberately, “I imagine that you’d be far, far more efficient. I’d like to say sucking your cock would fix everything, but one gets the impression a man like you that you’d be better off being put in your place.”
The noise Fish lets out is involuntary, a sort of keening squeak: he disgusts himself and worse than the self-disdain, he sees Cross look nigh-triumphant.
“No one actually wants to fucking touch you, you freak,” he spits. “People just know easy when they see it.”
Cross’ purple lips curve into a further smirk, his eyes half-lidded as he glances down at Fish’s crotch, and then looks up again to meet his gaze.
“Yes,” he agrees primly, still managing to sound seductive whilst being entirely polite. “You can see some people are easy at a glance, can’t you?”
Fish doesn’t even know what he’s doing as he launches himself to his feet, has never been in a fight before, knows no combat magic to speak of, just knows he wants to start something, and Cross doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t even step back.
He and Fish are chest-to-chest.
People are turning to look, peering over his cubicle walls, and Fish wants to die from the humiliation of it, because he’s soaked with sweat and red in the face and trembling and angry, and Cross looks cool as anything as he slides his hand down Fish’s chest in the shameless way he does everything.
“As I was saying,” he says slightly louder, so the other wizards can hear. “Try to get your students to go to the yoga class, won’t you? We’d like more of an uptake.”
Fish can’t say anything, just stares at Cross as he walks away, his hips sashaying from side to side. Fish doesn’t realise he’s been staring at the curve of his fat arse, incredibly visible without a robe to hide its suit-clad roundedness, until he goes to sit back down again and he can’t get it out of his head.
It’s infuriating.
Cross gets around and it’s impossible not to know about it, because people look at him, flirt with him and let him flirt with them, touch him.
Fish sits there, almost vibrating, as Mutter puts his hand on Cross’ hip and looks up at him as they exchange papers.
Mutter is seventy. At least. Maybe more!
And Cross leans over to show him a particular part of a contract’s language so that Mutter’s hand slides from Cross’ hip down to his arse instead.
Fish complains.
He complains to the Dean, who tunes him out — the Dean does this regardless of what Fish says, about Cross or anything else — and he complains to Cross directly, who is just encouraged by it.
Cross does not respond to shaming with shame: he responds with more smiles, more catty comments, and invitations for Fish to join in.
Multiple times in meetings, he touches Fish’s hand or his shoulders. Once, he fixes Fish’s robe, and then lets his hand stay on his chest.
“Don’t you think it’s disgusting?” Fish demands. “He’s not paid to whore himself out!”
“You think I should give him a raise?” asks the Dean.
Infuriated, Fish walks out of the office. He’s been doing this sort of thing a lot, of late.
* * *
They’re at a bar when it comes out, in the aftermath of a presentation of thaumaturgy. Fish’s head is filled with religious symbols he doesn’t entirely understand, and he’s sipping at punch. He wasn’t exactly invited to the bar — he never is. He just walked with everyone else, and no one told him to fuck off.
Cross isn’t here — he doesn’t drink, he says, because he prefers other vices. When he said it, Mutter asked if he meant sex, and he said, “No, I meant manacles.”
Fish can’t get the image of handcuffs out of his head when he’s trying to listen to everyone talk. In amongst the revolving icons of his head, of candles and wax, and different chalked symbols on the board, he thinks of Cross’ pretty hands gripping at the chain between a set of cuffs.
There’s another distracting element — as distracted as he is by pleasant thoughts of Fish, he’s distracted by unpleasant thoughts of Cassidy.
He hates Cassidy.
Cassidy is charming, easy, flirtatious — he’s been married and divorced twice, and apart from his wives and many ex-girlfriends, it seems like everyone loves him.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he’s saying. “He all but begs for it.”
“I don’t know, because he’s a man?” asks Strong, who’s a lecturer in applied numerology, and Cassidy laughs.
“He doesn’t act like one,” he says. “All he wants it to be either on his knees or on his back — I’m amazed he gets time to get his work done.”
Fish is quiet, his mouth full of punch that tastes sweet and acidic on his tongue. He’s feeling a little light-headed, the room moving around him. He doesn’t drink much, usually.
“It’s not about acting,” mutters Strong. “You still have to look at him.”
“I don’t,” says Cassidy. “I’m sure no one really wants to — I just put him on his hands and knees and thinks of someone that’s actually attractive — it’s not as if he knows the difference.”
Fish swallows. In the absence of punch, his mouth feels very dry.
“All he cares about is where the next cock will come from, just like anyone of his sort,” Cassidy goes on. “If anything, I’m providing a public service — a charity of sorts. He knows he’ll never get anything better.”
Fish is aware of the soon-to-be bruises on his knuckles before he’s aware of Cassidy crying out in pain, or Cassidy on the floor, or everyone shouting at him. None of them stop him, though, from leaving and getting the tram home, and no one brings it up later.
He’s not even written up for it — it turns out that Cassidy is embarrassed to have let a man like Fish catch him out. Fish is a reedy man, has never so much as thrown a punch before, but it was a lucky strike, and Cassidy wears sunglasses in the week to hide his black eye.
* * *
When he goes into the university the next morning, Cross drags him into a closet and Fish bristles, gets ready to fend him off, but all Cross does is turn on the overhead light and lift Fish’s hand up toward it, carefully examining his knuckles.
“Does that hurt?” he asks as he presses on the joints of each of his knuckles, where the flesh has bloomed a dark red-purple. “Does this hurt more or less? How about this?” He bends and unbends Fish’s fingers one by one, palpates the flesh, checks his thumb.
Fish, made mute in the moment, lets him.
“I was a nurse,” says Cross. “For a few years, I was a nurse in A&E, worked with patients before I focused on administrative duties. Do you know why I left?”
Fish shakes his head.
“Because I never had time,” says Cross, “for anything. I didn’t have any hobbies, any relationships, any free time — and when I did take free time, I felt guilty, because other people were working hard in my absence, and patients were in pain or dying.”
“So now you suck everyone’s cock?” asks Fish.
“Not everyone’s,” says Cross. “Some people suck mine.” He turns Fish’s hand over, pressing at the base of each of his fingers. His hands feel too soft and too warm to be long in a hospital. “I overworked myself for years, Mr Fish. Now, I don’t.”
He lets Fish’s hand go.
“Doesn’t seem like you’ve done yourself any damage, but keep an eye on it. It’s easy to hurt yourself, throwing punches. I think I should thank you, shouldn’t I? For defending my honour?”
Fish, hyperaware he was talking about Cross sucking cock give seconds go, feels as if he’s about to pop out of his skin.
Cross says, “I’ll apologise first, for provoking you as I do. You just remind me of myself, that’s all — and you’re so easy to work up.”
“I know,” says Fish.
“Thank you for defending my aforementioned honour, well-used as it is,” says Cross, fixing Fish’s robe and not letting his hands linger at all this time, “and I’ll stop playing with you.”
Fish stares at him. “Why?”
“Because it upsets you, doesn’t it? Makes you feel insecure, oversensitive, makes you feel conflicted and confused? Turns you on, yes — but it terrifies you, too. Not the sex, not being gay, but the loss of face, your ego. It’s hard enough to get anywhere without people laughing about you too.”
Fish studies the lines of Cross’ face, the purple colour in his eyes in the dim light.
“As I said,” Cross says pleasantly, calmly, “you remind me of myself.”
He leans back, and Fish grabs his wrist, stopping him short. Cross arches an eyebrow, looking up at him expectantly.
“You flirt with everyone,” says Fish. “If you stop, they’ll think something’s going on.”
Cross’ lips curve into their shiny, purple smile, and he turns his hand in Fish’s, stroking a featherlight touch over the back of his hand and making his body shudder. It feels like. He isn’t used to it.
“Of course,” purrs Cross, eyes glittering. “We wouldn’t want anyone to think anything untoward was happening between you and I, would we? Speaking of — ”
Cross kisses him hard enough that Fish sees stars, and both his hands tousle in Fish’s hair. The lipstick has some kind of product on it to keep it from feeling waxy, he supposes — it feels glossy and smooth, like latex, and it tastes like cherries.
“My own recipe,” murmurs Cross against his mouth, and pulls away.
Fish leaves the closet five minutes after he does, bleary and oversensitive.
The Dean asks why he’s wearing Cross’ lipstick when he goes into his office, after asking what’s messed his hair up and receiving a terse retort that the Dean’s never cared what Fish has looked like until now.
Fish walks out again in short order, and tries his best to concentrate on his work.
* * *
At a little past six o’clock in the evening, after a meeting spent jabbing him with implicit needles, Cross says, “If you’d like, Mr Fish, I can help you with your next set of grant proposals.”
“Is that a euphemism?” asks Fish.
Cross leans over him, smiles, looks utterly undeterred. “Would you like it to be?”
They set an appointment for that weekend — Fish’s place, at 8. Cross, to Fish’s inexplicable surprise, arrives by bicycle, and is wearing lingerie under his clothes.
When Fish complains about this to the Dean the following Monday, the Dean asks, “How do you know what was under his clothes?”
Fish finds himself smiling like he’s gotten away with something when he leaves the Dean’s office.
Cross winks at him as he goes.
FIN.
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