It was a rainy Sunday. For much of the school week Dooku would have the crock pot going while he was away, and dinner would be mostly ready by the time he got home - sometimes he did something else, as the act of puttering around at the stove and oven was stress-relieving to him. His mother teaching him to cook was one of the few positive things he had to say about her, and it was a necessity with how long he'd been a bachelor. To Dooku, cooking was almost an art form - something he prided on doing well; he liked learning new recipes and trying new foods, though he had some favorites he went back to time and again. Today was a rarity in that he didn't feel like cooking, for once, and was willing to go out and be around people in a restaurant as a form of treating himself after what had been a more difficult week than usual.
After taking a half-hour to weigh the possibilities, he decided on Indian. He put on his trenchcoat and a jaunty fedora, and spent a few moments petting Beowulf - who was sitting in his cat tree watching birds peck outside - before heading out.
As he left the house, he heard muffled yelling from next door, as if Sören and Seth were fighting in one of the back rooms of Sören's house, like the bedroom or the kitchen. Then the yelling moved closer, into the living room, near the window and front door. Dooku lingered before getting in his jeep, listening, feeling that icy knot in the pit of his stomach again.
"God, you can't do anything right," Seth yelled. "You're completely fucking worthless."
The words touched Dooku on the raw, remembering his own parents telling him he was worthless, many times over during his childhood and adolescence. You'll never amount to anything had also been a common refrain, even when he'd been at the top of his class. And when he graduated from Oxford, with the intent to go into teaching - as his own teachers had been his only source of support, he wanted to pay that forward - his father disparaged him for not working with his hands like "a real man". They had noble blood, but in the old country they had always been a family to work the land themselves, to rely on their own labor rather than that of servants, having as few as they could get away with. Dooku's response had been to leave for the United States and not look back. At some point he just stopped taking it, not even bothering to cross the ocean to visit London when his parents were dying - he'd gone to England in 1983 and made it a point of not visiting them. But long after he'd stopped taking it, he'd still feel the hurt whenever he remembered their words. He couldn't imagine what it must be like for Sören now, in the thick of it.
Dooku ached for him.
"If I'm so worthless why are you even with me?" Sören asked.
"I ask myself that too. Used to be the answer was you're a hot little piece of ass, but you're not even that anymore, you just lay there..."
"Not this again."
"OK fine, not this. We'll talk about what else is fucking wrong with you, like you crying all the fucking time. Look at you, crying now. You're pathetic."
"Can you just stop? Please? I said I'm sorry for the spill. Let it go, let's do something and get our mind off this -"
"How can I get my mind off this when you fuck up constantly? I am so tired of you dropping shit and spilling shit, jumping out of your skin over the least little thing. I wanted to be with a man, not a fucking pussy."
And Dooku had a feeling he knew why Sören was having those accidents - he was nervous all the time, startled easily, thanks to Seth.
Sure enough, Sören replied with, "Maybe if you weren't yelling at me all the time I wouldn't be so on edge, flinching -"
"Sure, blame it on me instead of owning your shit. Then again, what do I expect from a grown man who still needs to sleep with a doll." Sören started swearing in Icelandic, and Seth cut in with "I told you to cut that shit out and I still saw you with it anyway, like a little bitch."
Seth going after Sören for that felt like it hit below the belt; Dooku remembered being shamed by his parents for still keeping his teddy bear, Winston. He started to walk towards Sören's front door. As he did, he saw Sören look out the window, and their eyes met and Sören mouthed the word "NO", shook his head, and made an X with his hands before spreading them out. Sören walked to the window and pulled down the blind.
"Seth, I don't want the neighbors to hear this," Sören said, his voice moving away from the window. "Seriously, let's calm down and try to do something else, já? Like watch a movie?"
Their voices moved out of the room. Dooku sighed. He still wanted to go to the door and ask Sören if he was all right - he was sorely tempted to get a few licks in on Seth, wanting to make the man cry and cower with the same kind of fear it seemed Sören lived in continuously. But he didn't. He got in his car and drove to the Indian restaurant.
And as he ate, his thoughts kept returning to Sören. Hurting for him.
That night he had a hard time sleeping, thinking of Sören again. Wishing there was something he could do.
_
Sören and Dooku taught on different ends of the campus and different departments, so their paths rarely crossed except sometimes in the canteen and at faculty meetings. On Monday, Dooku made it a point to study Sören's schedule, and though his own classes let out first he lingered on campus, waiting for Sören's last class to finish, and made a beeline for Sören's classroom.
Sören's eyes widened and eyebrows raised with surprise as Dooku walked in. "Professor Dooku."
"Professor Sigurdsson." Dooku hovered at the outside of Sören's classroom, until Sören made a sweeping gesture for Dooku to come in.
Sören swallowed hard. He was in the process of putting away art supplies. "So, ah, what brings you here?"
"I think you already know, Professor Sigurdsson."
Sören rolled his eyes and took a deep breath. "Please, call me Sören. My last name is a patronymic, not a surname, everyone is on a first-name basis back home."
"All right." Dooku nodded. Then he did something that he never did, amazed that he was letting his guard down with someone he despised until recently. "You can call me Nicolae."
Sören folded his arms and leaned against the edge of one of the work tables, half-sitting on it. "So... Nicolae. You heard me and my boyfriend fighting again yesterday -"
"I was going to come over and check on you, and tell him to stop, but you said no."
"Jæja..." Sören ran a nervous hand through his curls and rubbed his beard. "Last time you intervened it, ah, kind of made things worse. He was really pissed about that. I didn't want to throw gasoline on the fire."
Dooku sighed. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm sorry." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I just..." He frowned. "It's not even that the noise is a disturbance to me. It's that seeing you mistreated, itself, is a disturbance to me. I don't like the way he talks to you. I don't know why you put up with it." Their eyes met, and held. "You deserve better."
Sören looked down, at the floor, and rubbed his curls and his beard again. He resumed putting the art supplies away into bins, saying nothing.
"I mean it, Sören."
"You don't even know me," Sören muttered, turning his back, paintbrushes and tubes of paint noisily landing into bins.
"I don't need to know you to know that people should behave decently to other people. And -"
"Look." Sören turned around again, gritting his teeth, before he let out a sigh and his body language relaxed just slightly. There was another awkward silence as Sören looked down, and then his eyes were tear-filled and defiant as they looked back up into Dooku's own. "I don't need you to feel fucking sorry for me."
"It's not pity, Sören." Dooku's voice softened. "It's compassion."
Sören turned his back and slammed more supplies into their bins. "Whatever it is, I don't need it. As far as why I put up with it... I've tried to dump his arse several times now. He won't leave me alone."
"That sounds like a job for the police and a restraining order."
"Jæja, because the police are such paragons of tolerance in this country, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to help gay people just like they're thrilled to help black people. Get the fuck out of here with that nonsense."
Dooku knew that Sören was right - he distrusted the police himself, and he was an elderly white man in the closet - but in his desperation to help try to fix things somehow, it was what he reached for.
And then Sören said, "I mean it. Get out of here, I... I need to be alone right now."
"Dammit, Sören." Dooku let out a little growl. "I'm just trying to help. You don't know how upset I was last night, listening to his filth -"
"Not nearly as upset as I was, trust me." Sören whirled around. "And the only thing worse than him talking to me like that? Is your pity. Call it compassion if you want - same thing, different fucking name."
Dooku wanted to scream with his frustration. He tried to be calm in the face of his inner storm, his voice raising only slightly as he said, "It's not pity. I do care. And forgive me for caring. Damn you, Sören, and your stubbornness... damn you and your pride." As soon as the words were out of his mouth he felt an unnerving sense of déjà vu, not understanding why, which made it all the more maddening.
He turned on his heel and stormed out, but not before Sören yelled, "Jæja, fuck you!" after him.