Endurance Test

by Merry Amelie (MerryAmelie@aol.com)

Archive: MA only

Category: Alternate Reality, Qui/Obi, Romance, Series

Rating: PG

Summary: Testy professors

Series: Academic Arcadia -- # 78
A chronological list of the series with the URLs can be found under the header 'Academic Arcadia' at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/master-apprentice/files/
My MA story page: http://www.masterapprentice.org/cgi-bin/qs.cgi?keyword=Merry+Amelie

Feedback: Is treasured at MerryAmelie@aol.com Disclaimer: Mr. Lucas owns everything Star Wars. I'm not making any money.

For
My current beta team: Nerowill, Emila-Wan, and Carol
Mali Wane for posting
My former betas: Alex and Ula

Chalk dust blended with powdered donut sugar on the long tables set up in the conference room at Taton. At 8 am, a couple of coffee rings already decorated their chipped laminate surfaces, thanks to the few intrepid souls who had sleepwalked in from the parking lot.

Grading for the Intro Lit Group Final was just getting underway.

Ian stood at the board, writing out a partial credit key for Question Seven, which he had submitted: Give five reasons that the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw might be real. Ian wrote ten, and as long as the students cited any of them, they'd get points.

The atmosphere was surprisingly similar to a classroom just before the start of class. Teaching assistants and professors were gossiping and complaining while the course director placed stacks of essays in front of them, ripe for grading.

The Xerox lady had dutifully copied four different versions of the exam to foil cheating. Their covers were color-coded in green, blue, brown, and tan.

Ian sat down next to Gary, his T.A., and started on a blue pile, trying to tune out the chatting, laughing, pages rustling, pens tapping, and all the other ambient noise vying to distract him.

He had been given Question Two: What is the relationship between Howard Roark and Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead? Chuckling to himself, Ian had the urge to duck out of the room and call Quinn in his office, just to riff on what that friendship could have been. Of course, his work ethic won out, and he decided to wait until he got home to indulge his sense of humor.

When Ian took a sip of coffee, he saw Gary looking at him with ten minutes of blather in his eyes, so he picked up his pen again with alacrity. It was a wonder that any work got done at all, he thought wryly.

Since it was the spring semester, there were twenty sections instead of forty-five, but correspondingly fewer professors to grade. By 8:15, most had arrived, but there were still only thirty-five of them to grade hundreds of questions apiece. Nobody would leave until every single one was done.

Hard as this sounded, it was actually better for Ian than grading his one hundred papers himself. His conscientious nature caused him to agonize over the answers, teasing out partial credit wherever he could find it. That was how he'd usually spend most of the forty-eight hour period between the final and turning in the grades to the secretary.

This way, they'd be done by early evening, judging from past experience, and Ian would simply have to add the exam scores to the rest of the grades to calculate final averages.

But for now, Ian read answer after answer detailing Howard and Gail's bond. He was already a third done with his stack. Eventually, he got up to refill his coffee, wishing he were savoring Quinn's special blend at home, then went right back to work. Lunch was only an hour away.

Oppo's catered these grading marathons, and when Ian next surfaced, it was to the delightful aroma of fresh mushroom pizza. Two slices later, he was ready to tackle the remainder of his pile.

The endless stretch of the afternoon, broken only by an occasional trip to the bathroom, seemed more elastic than the rubber bands Ian used to hold batches of paper. Time felt measured by abacus.

The callus on his forefinger started to itch, and he rubbed it against the table edge. He had to fight the urge to tap it repeatedly. He was not made to sit still for hours.

Incipient aches in his head and back were duelling for his attention by the time he finally finished. But the papers were done! He stretched his arms and legs, and yawned for good measure.

After that, only the administrivia was left. He tabulated the scores by calculator and submitted them to the course director, who wrote the grade distribution on the board when everyone was through. When Ian had assigned grades and copied them on his roster, he left his exams with her and headed for home.

Quinn, meanwhile, had the house to himself for his own grading extravaganza, and was taking full advantage of it. Dogs out in the yard, phone off the hook, train at full steam -- quintessential working conditions.

Of course, he had only ten exams from his Literary Languages seminar and twenty-five from his Green Ink class, focusing on books with an ecological perspective. This just meant that he could lavish more time on individual papers.

Quinn decided to save the Literary Languages marking as a treat for later, and immersed himself in the ecology exams. Absorbed in reading about the environmental damage done since Silent Spring, he spent hours at his desk without a break.

When he finally got up for some yogurt, he was still pondering Rachel Carson's influence, and how her scholarly warnings hadn't been enough to reverse the destructiveness of modern society.

At Bailor, he'd been naive enough to think that the greenhouse effect was incontrovertible, and that its threat would have an impact on the real world. But economics was a bigger factor still, that and the human tendency to put off the bill as long as possible.

His beautiful pine trees greeted Quinn's gaze when he looked out the window, seeming to belie Carson's concerns, but Quinn well knew that even his own leafy haven was not immune to the ravages of pollution. A lifelong nature lover, he had lobbied for this course to enlighten complacent students.

The class was offered in conjunction with the Biology Department, so Quinn had the unusual honor of teaching some science majors. He liked the different perspective they brought to the material, and wanted to create more interdisciplinary courses. Of course, the departmental council was opposed to this. The humanities and sciences were often viewed as the great divide, but many Liberal Arts colleges had found a way to bridge the gap.

Danny Walker, now an instructor at Vaderbilt, was a good example of that blend. Despite earning his doctorate in English, he'd never abandoned his first love, engineering. Ian had introduced him to his cousin Amy, an older woman, and they'd married right after his Luke graduation. They now lived in Mossley, where Amy said she couldn't walk two feet without bumping into one of his gadgets.

Quinn and Ian had been able to catch up with them at the gymnastics championships. Danny had already written a tech manual, thus uniting both his areas of expertise, and Amy had been elected to the town council.

Focusing his mind firmly back on work, Quinn washed his spoon and returned to his desk. Now on to his treat; he'd asked the class for an Elvish translation of 'Luthien Tinuviel'. He looked over the papers, grinning when he saw that some of the students had even managed the rhyme scheme, one of the most difficult aspects of translating any language. Lost in Tolkien's magical realm, he only surfaced at the sound of Ian's key in the door.

Grading done, the professors were free to concentrate on each other. Grinning with mischief, Ian carefully stowed Quinn's exams in his briefcase, then sat on his desk, legs brushing his husband's. Knowing the limitations of his chair, Quinn rose to take Ian in his arms.

"Finished for the day, lad?" Quinn nuzzled the red-gold hair under his cheek. Spring sunshine had already lightened its strands.

"Actually, I'm just getting started." Ian yawned despite his jaunty words.

Quinn chuckled, then yawned as well. "How 'bout a little sleep first?"

"Sounds good," Ian mumbled into his shoulder, letting himself be dragged up.

Sleepwalking again, Ian barely made it to the bed before falling into a cozy heap with Quinn on the comforter. Contentedly snuggling even closer, they dozed off in no time, not even needing to count exams to fall asleep.