Chapter Text
Monday
When Rose returns to the classroom, the TA flags her down. “Miss Tico, a word,” she says quietly, and the two of them step just into the hallway. About a minute later, Rose reenters the classroom with her TA, making an angry beeline for her seat at the lab table.
When she sits down again, her lab partner glances at her out of the corner of his eye; but he doesn’t say anything. To think she’d found him cute, with his accent and his bright blue eyes and that shiny red hair all clean-cut and carefully styled… fucking asshole. She’s so mad—she’s so mad she could scream—but instead she focuses on the test in front of her, doubling down to try to remember the formula she knows she’s messed up on question 7. For the next half-hour she channels all her energy into completing the test. “You probably won’t finish,” Phasma had said at the start of lab. “Don’t panic. As always, the exam will be curved.”
When Phasma calls time, Rose is retracting the lead on her mechanical pencil. Not a moment too soon. She’s fairly certain she’s messed up on at least a couple of problems, but she’d managed to put down an answer for every question.
Phasma instructs them to pass their papers to the end of the row and is giving them some last-minute announcements about their next lab; but Rose feels her lab partner’s eyes on her.
“You know what?” she reaches into the front pocket of her backpack. “Here. This is what I was digging out of my bag, you absolute moron.” She dumps the tampon on the desk in front of him.
The stuck-up redhead glances at the thing, taking in the pink plastic wrapper before pushing it back toward Rose. “What you pulled out of your bag was white. Looked like paper,” he sniffs.
“They have different wrappers,” Rose hisses, pulling another out of her front zipper pocket and brandishing it at him. The wrapper of this one is more predominantly white with just a few light-pink swirls.
Hux glances at the tampon with distaste. “How was I to know?”
“How were you not—are you kidding me? Don’t you have a girlfriend, or a sister, or a mom—hell, even my best friend who’s not interested in women knows that we menstruate!”
Hux seems to bristle a little, but instead of opening his mouth he just stands and starts to leave.
“No. Hey!” Rose grabs for him, snagging his sleeve. “You accused me of cheating!” He pulls his arm away quickly, but when he turns back to look at her, Rose can see that his face is warming. Just a few more moments and he’ll resemble a tomato. She almost laughs. A past version of herself would have found it adorable—but she’s too full of angry energy. Instead she just stares him down, waiting for his apology.
“I thought you were,” is all he says, the accent making him sound even more stuck-up.
Rose grinds her teeth and watches him leave without another word.
.
3:56 p.m.
rzteacup: oh you are not gonna fucking beLIEVE what my day has been like
rzteacup: your species is SO. FUCKING. STUPID!!!!!!
rmtghx: Species?
rzteacup: ok so when a woman pulls something out of her bag and excuses herself to go to the bathroom
rzteacup: it’s because she’s BLEEDING
rzteacup: from her VAGINA
rzteacup: and NOT because she’s CHEATING on a PHYSICS EXAM
rzteacup: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
rzteacup: I know it’s like three weeks in the semester but so help me GOD I am going to my TA to SWITCH LAB PARTNERS
rzteacup: God he’s such a DICK
rmtghx: The lab partner?
rzteacup: Y E S
rzteacup: stupid fucking jealous stuck-up British ASSHOLE
rzteacup: APPARENTLY never even seen a tampon before
rzteacup: does he live under a fucking ROCK
rzteacup: if you’ll excuse me I need to take some ADVIL and go CURL UP IN A BALL AND DIE because my UTERUS HURTS
rzteacup: and if you don’t hear from me again it’s because I’m in JAIL
rzteacup: because I MURDERED that FUCKING GINGER IDIOT
rzteacup: SORRY I AM VERY ALL CAPS
rzteacup: SOS SEND CHOCOLATE
Whether Teacup says anything else next is lost to Hux for approximately the next four minutes, as his phone goes one way and the rest of him goes another. Even the surprise of falling down a particularly steep set of stairs isn’t enough to overtake the shock he’d begun to feel as the messages poured into his chat app.
When he’s recovered—when a concerned bystander has brought him his phone and ascertained that he hasn’t broken anything—he opens the app again, blindly sending three chocolate bar emojis to buy some time to think.
At the other end of the chat is his best friend and closest confidant, a girl he’d met (of all places) in the YouTube comments section of a video from a Starkiller concert. At this point he knows at least a million things about her—her favorite meal, her tendency to overbook her own schedule, her hectic living situation (three roommates, two of whom are a gay couple who spent their entire first year living in the apartment pretending not to be in love), the way she’s lived her life in the shadow of her beloved older sister—the standard made more impossible when her sister had died, compounded as it was by grief. He’s had no idea what she looks like, no hints about where she lived, only a generic idea of a university schedule that didn’t surprise him when it matched up with his—don’t most schools run on the same schedule? Or was that stupid to think?
Because now—now there is no disputing that the girl at the other end of the chat is also his lab partner Rose Tico, whose sudden flash of temper at the end of class had been a surprising departure from her regular sunny personality. His lab partner, who is so far breezing through their physics course but for a couple of misremembered formulas, who has explained problems in the lab manual two, three, four times if he needs them, trying to help him understand. His annoyingly chipper and high-achieving lab partner, who had stopped during today’s test to slip something out of her backpack into her pocket, glancing around suspiciously as if checking to see if anyone had seen her. Hux knew the look of someone hiding something; he’d called it right away, gone to Phasma as soon as the girl left the room.
He’s in a daze as he walks home from the sciences building. It makes sense, in a way. When he first met his lab partner, her name had slightly resembled Teacup’s handle, but he’d written it off as serendipity. Ridiculous. She didn’t strike him as a Starkiller fan, the cheerful, petite girl in sorority letters who’d blown into the classroom at the last minute to take the seat next to him—one of only two or three open seats left. He’d fully expected to have to do all the labs himself, to report to the TA week after week that his ditzy partner didn’t deserve credit. Instead, she’d become his reluctant tutor, smiling through his icy replies and remaining almost infuriatingly patient. So what if Teacup was also in a sorority. The idea that she was also his lab partner was just too far-fetched.
Or, well. Apparently not.
He’s standing in his living room now with absolutely zero recollection of arriving there. A loud curse from the back of the house doesn’t startle him so much as bring him back into awareness as he checks his phone out of habit.
First there’s the chat app:
4:18 p.m.
rzteacup: TA says we can’t switch. partners are set. FML
rzteacup: also I was being a total jerk
rzteacup: sorry for all the period talk
rzteacup: but srsly gonna take some Advil and pass out
Then there’s a text, the first in a new conversation, erasing any last ounce of doubt he may have had:
4:21 p.m.
PHYS Lab Partner Rose Tico: It’s Rose from Physics lab. I’m sorry I snapped at you today.
Hux stares down at the phone, imagining ways to break this new revelation to her—hey, it’s me! Any way he slices it, it seems like a terrible idea—especially after how he’d acted today.
“What are you doing?” Ben comes into the living room, gnawing on a piece of toast. “You’ve been standing there staring at your phone for the last five minutes.”
Hux glances back down at the phone again, toggling between the messaging apps as he writes careful replies. First, his texts:
4:26 p.m.
Me: Not my finest moment either.
Then the chat app:
4:26 p.m.
rmtghx: Nolite.
It’s shorthand for one of her favorite quotes, some fake-Latin about perseverance. At this point all he needs to say is the first word—they both know the rest.
Ben has finished his toast and is watching him as if he’s grown two heads. Hux shrugs. “Playing double agent.”