This is just irredeemable 100% dumb fluffy slashfic. Takes place in the Broadband AU continuity. (This is the only fic in that so far so don't go hunting.)

Four weeks into the semester, Inigo is already weeping openly with his face buried in his pillow. Gerome opens his eyes wearily, reaches over, and awkwardly pats his head at the wrong angle.

"Calm down, it's going to be fine," he grumbles in a voice that could not have reassured the most optimistic three-year-old that things would be fine.

"No," Inigo says into the pillow, "you don't know what happened today."

"What happened today," Gerome deadpans.

Surely Inigo is well aware of Gerome's absent sympathy at 1 AM on a school night, but he takes his opening anyway. "I bombed my audition and then I bombed my history test."

"I'm sure it was fantastic."

"No, it was horrible. The tape was messed up, you could still hear the radio broadcast the song was recorded over, who even uses cassettes anymore anyway. So the music was all off. And one of my heels fell off while I was waiting. I thought about pulling off the other one too but I was afraid of messing the other shoe up worse, so I did the whole thing lopsided. It was so terrible that the judges wouldn't even look at me when I left."

"They'll consider your circumstances."

"This isn't the middle school play, Gerome! An artist has to deliver consistently without excuses. They're not going to call me back. They won't even call me back to turn me down, it's beneath them. They'll burn my application. Ugh. I really fucked it up. And then, and then, I go to school and I'm so worked up I thought the fourth amendment was for civil rights, I mean like equality, and it's obviously not, it's search and seizure—I mean is equality even an amendment?"

"Fourteenth amendment. Close. You'll be fine."

"No, they put the grades up a few hours ago. I got a fifty percent."

"They'll probably curve it."

"It's fifty percent, Gerome! I'm going to fail."

"Look, take it from me," says the junior to the freshman. "Your professor will realize everyone is failing, offer some kind of extra credit opportunity, and pass the worst of you with a C as long as she recognizes your face."

"No way."

"Grade inflation, believe me. You're not going to fail. Go to sleep."

"This was a horrible idea." Gerome seems to remember warning him against trying to juggle a budding career with college, but Inigo had been very optimistic. He resists the urge to I-told-you-so at him. "I'm not going to get any roles and I'm going to fail out of college and end up panhandling on the street."

"Seriously? Your parents are not going to let you panhandle on the streets."

Inigo gives a muffled whiny sound Gerome can only interpret as some Inigo-specific shade of discontent. He mumbles, "But I don't want to have to rely on them."

"You're not going to be a panhandler. Go to sleep."

Inigo takes his face out of the pillow. He gives Gerome a teary look. It makes him very uncomfortable.

"And I'm not going to let you become a panhandler," Gerome grudgingly adds.

"That's the nicest thing you've said to me all day," Inigo sniffs. He scoots over to Gerome's side and insistently nuzzles against his arm. Gerome grudgingly permits it. Whatever gets him to stop crying. At the foot of the bed, Gerome's sphinx cat—awoken by the noise—lifts her bald head to stare at Gerome.

"Look, you're making Minerva jealous," Gerome lets himself mutter.

"She can share."

When Gerome wakes up, Inigo's hair is making his arm itch, and Minerva's paw is on his face. Their alarm hasn't gone off yet. He's gotten less than six hours of sleep.

She paws his mouth again, for emphasis.

"I'm up, I'm up," he says in his sweetest voice. He disentangles himself from Inigo and gently picks Minerva up from his chest and sets her on the floor.

"You're nicer to her," Inigo grumbles with his eyes still shut. Gerome ignores him and goes to the kitchen with Minerva at his heels. He opens a new can of Felidae and spoons it into her bowl, making sure to poke it a few times so it'd be easier to lap up.

He pats her above the tail as she eats, and whispers, "Is that good? Is everything tasting all right, Minervy-kins?" She swats her skinny tail against his cheek. Affectionately. "That's good. Eat up." In the other room, the alarm goes off.

Inigo appears in the doorway with still-swollen eyes and a terrible case of bedhead. "Seriously. You're nicer to her than me."

The cat and her master look up in unison. "She was here first," Gerome answers for both of them.

"You're a terrible boyfriend."

Gerome shrugs.

"You never make me breakfast."

"You usually don't get up in time for breakfast."

"You could make it and leave it with a bowl cupped over it to keep it fresh." Gerome gives him an are-you-serious look. "My mom used to do that for my father and me when we slept in."

"My mother," Gerome answers flatly, "rearranged my father's knick-knacks on the mantle from smallest to largest."

"I think that might be the problem," Inigo muses. "Maybe she didn't hold you enough as a child."

"No," Gerome says. "Yours held you too much."

Minerva, satisfied with her first few bites of breakfast, breaks from her bowl to rub against Gerome's legs, then Inigo's. Inigo reluctantly pets her with one foot.

"I wish, just sometimes, you were more affectionate," Inigo says. "I mean. I know you're not the type to... coddle me and whisper sweet nothings. I know, I'm not delusional." Minerva circles back to Gerome, who absently leans his shin against her side. "But I really did have a terrible day yesterday."

Gerome crosses his arms and takes a good hard look at Inigo's face.

"And I... well, the truth is, sometimes I just want to know that you do care about me. God, this is embarrassing to say out loud."

"It's embarrassing to listen to," Gerome says.

Inigo gives an awkward laugh and mumbles, "Sorry."

"—Hey, listen up."

Inigo's eyes flicker up to Gerome's. (For Gerome, this is the worst time to notice that he likes the way Inigo's pale eyelashes move when he shifts his gaze.)

"I figure that if you really want... affection that much, you'd end up taking it from me anyway. As you did last night. Anyway. I meant it when I said you probably did fine. You're a good dancer. If it sounds like I don't care, it's because I refuse to encourage your self-defeating imagination."

Inigo looks back down at the cat at their feet. "I did seriously mess it up. I'm not exaggerating."

"Then audition for something else. And blow them out of the water."

Inigo squirms like a shy girl and leans back against the wall, rubbing his big toes against each other in thought.

"And now, I have to go to class."

"Okay. See you," Inigo mutters.

Gerome grabs his face and kisses him on the way out, leaving Inigo glowing in his wake.

Inigo manages to calm down by that evening, when his cell phone starts ringing across the room in the middle of his dance practice.

From the futon, Gerome lowers his biology textbook to remark, "Call Me Maybe?"

"I only use that ringtone for strangers," Inigo says, more troubled by this than his own questionable taste in music. He tip-toes across the room to answer the phone.

"Hello? —Um, yes, this is Inigo Ward... ...Oh, Ms. Kokonis! How nice of you to call back." Inigo has that classic expression that Gerome recognizes from high school, when he would ask out a girl knowing she'd turn him down with a cutting turn of phrase. Gerome buries his face deeper into his text to avoid vicariously drowning in Inigo's disappointment. "Yes? ...Oh. Um, that's very kind of you... oh. Th-thank you! Yeah... yeah, Saturday at three?" Gerome peeks over the top of his book. "Sure, I can do that... Sounds great! Absolutely. Thank you very much!"

Inigo waits for the other party to hang up first. When the cell phone flashes back to its main screen, he strikes a victory pose.

"What did I tell you," Gerome monotones.

"They said they saw a lot of potential and they wanted to get a chance to see me in proper shoes!" Inigo half-screams, throwing himself all over Gerome on the futon.

"Watch the textbook!" he hisses.

"Come on, stop reading about fish! Big news! I got called back!"

"I can't read about fish when your head is in the way! Ugh. Congratulations." Gerome awkwardly sets the textbook to the side, where it slides off the futon and lands half-open on the floor. "God. The only thing I have to say is that I told you so."

"No, you totally told me so. You were absolutely right. And I'm so happy."

Gerome pats his back or something, because he figures that's what Inigo probably wants.

"I'm going to be a real dancer," he halfway weeps into Gerome's shoulder.

Gerome thinks to himself, You always were. But Minerva is still watching them, and he doesn't want her to think he's a sap.