some Faculty fic ETA: Homecoming part 1

[sophinisba]

Here some Faculty fic I just wrote for layne67! Happy belated birthday, Layne! Maybe there will be some more later. Here is me trying to post without angsting! Not betaed or even read over... PG for now.



By the summer of 2004, five years since Zeke's graduation and four years from Casey's is enough for both of them to have finished college. Zeke's grown up enough (and Casey's toughened up enough, even if he hasn't gotten much taller) that he's stopped trying or pretending to push Casey around. Casey hasn't spoken to his parents in the two years and four months since he told them he and Zeke were more than just roommates and friends, and Zeke doesn't know where his parents were (though that's nothing new). Zeke has a decent job and Casey has a better one, and their apartment isn't a palace but it was starting to feel like home. And New York is far enough from Herrington and high school far enough away from their minds that when Zeke reads out the letter from the Herrington Class of 1999 Reunion Planning Committee, Casey laughs out loud.

"Come back and relive the trauma! Class of '99, the fucked-up-edest in the history of Ohio!"

Casey sometimes gets punchy when he talks about the aliens – middle of the day and completely sober, but he gets punchy. At night sometimes he dreams about them and wakes up shaking (though never screaming, Zeke's noticed) and Zeke finds the pills for him and holds him until he goes still, though they won't get back to sleep. But in daylight he's grinning, giggling, grabbing for the letter. "So many memories!" he enthuses. "Visit the gym! The pool! The football field!"

"Your year was more fucked up," says Zeke, handing it to him and lying back on the couch. "Younger, more impressionable. The ones below you were even worse."

"Nah," says Casey, calming a bit now he's got the letter in hand, reading and thinking and talking at the same time. "Freshman are used to not knowing what's going on. You guys thought you were on top of the world... and then the world turned into a slimy green fucking slippery thing underneath you."

"And on top of us."

"And with tentacles."

"Okay, fine, maybe class of '99 wins, but don't lump me in with 'you guys'. I'm not one of them."

"You did fail to graduate in '98, so, um."

"Right, but I also failed to become an alien, so see? I'm not one – "

"We should go."

"What?"

Zeke sits up to get a better look, because Casey's voice was teasing a minute ago but now it's firm, and yeah, his face is set, like when he decided to quit lying to his parents, and when he told Delilah they needed to fight the aliens.

"We should go to the reunion. We don't have anything to be afraid of back there."

"What's with you?" He's standing up (which means standing over him) in an attempt to seem more formidable than Casey, but there's not much hope of that, really, not when he's got his mind set on something like this. "You don't even want to go back at holidays anymore, and now you want to go back and stand around in that gym with a nametag and schmooze with those losers?"

"No, I want to go back and laugh over the fact that I was ever scared of any of them."

"But you can laugh at them from here," says Zeke. "We're busy."

"It's not till October. We can get time off. Could be good for them too – Herrington hasn't had any surprises in way too long."

"That's the way Herrington likes things."

"Well, yeah, but..." He takes a step closer to Zeke then, which means touching him, and touching his hands to Zeke's chest and staring up at him with his big eyes, making Zeke wonder how he ever thought they looked innocent. "Don't you think it would be good for them to see the alien killer heroes turned into homosexuals?"

A Herrington High class reunion will not be fun. Zeke knows this. "It'll be boring."

"Not with you and me there." Casey's smiling again because he knows he's won, just waiting for the formal surrender.

"Yeah," Zeke says, and that gets him the kiss, so it's not a total loss.



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