Tucker pulled out his keys, working to get the door to his dorm room open, groaning and griping to whoever decided classes at eight in the morning was a good idea. "Stupid class, with its useless, non-transferable credits making me take this bullshit again." He swings the door open, chastising himself, "I can't believe I put my feet on the ground this morning at 6:30 and I was still late to my 8am class. Must be some sort of talent..."
"I like my talent better. It has less swearing, and crying."
Tucker jumped, not expecting to see his roommate there, sitting on the floor surrounded by papers.
Tucker scowled. "I wasn't fucking crying, I was yawing into my pillow."
"You have very wet yawns, Tucker."
"Shut up, Caboose. And what are you doing in here anyway, don't have class or something?"
Tucker kicked an empty can of RedBull, watched as it bounced off the corner of his desk and rolled under the bunk-bed he shared with Caboose. He shrugged, setting his bookbag on his desk. It wasn't like it he slept on the bottom bunk anyway.
Caboose picked up a paper from one of the messy piles around him, looking at it before putting it down again. "Mister Sarge let his friend teach today so he could go to this meeting thing."
"Wait, you mean Lopez? His assistant? That guy that only speaks Spanish?"
"Oh, no, he speaks English, just not around Mister Sarge for some reason..."
Tucker pulled out a bag of chips from his bag, setting a soda down beside it. "It's probably because he fucking hates the guy. That doesn't explain why you're here now though."
"Oh, Lopez let us leave as soon as Mister Sarge left."
Tucker snorted. He didn't know Lopez very well, only heard what some of his sort-of-friends said about him, but from he had heard, the guy hated his boss more than he liked his job, so he did everything he could to fuck with the him, but nothing ever worked. In fact, Sarge often clapped his hand on the other's shoulder, saying that he was the best teaching assistant he's ever had.
Sucks to be Lopez.
The thought went as fast as it came when Caboose held up a piece of paper in triumph before bringing the page down to eye level, scrunching up his brows and reading the page intently, if slowly. He was at this for a while before he put the page in a relatively neat stack in the corner with a sticky note by it saying 'for ms shelia' in a messy scrawl with a few of the letters facing the wrong direction, but spelled correctly this time.
'Huh, not bad.' Tucker thought absently, opening his bag of chips and cramming a handful in his mouth. When Tucker spoke next, it was accompanied by a spray of chip dust. "What's with the papers anyway, I thought Shelia typed all those out for you?"
Shelia was Caboose's helper. She was a nice woman, if a little doting (she once made Caboose and Tucker lunch, of which Tucker didn't complain about. Free food was great). She would accompany Caboose to his classes and type up his notes during lectures then email them to Caboose so he could read them on his eReader. It was found that Caboose was dyslexic and that the larger spacing and font size on an eReader made reading go by faster and easier for him, so the presence of so many papers was weird since he stopped having Shelia write them.
Caboose looked up from where he was sorting. "Oh, these are from my community college. Ms. Shelia said she'd try and type them for me so I can read them later."
Tucker looked over at the piles, wondering what class would have so many notes. "Really, what class?"
"Philosophy."
Tucker was glad he hadn't be drinking his soda just then because it would be all over the room. Unfortunately, he inhaled on his chip instead of chewing it.
"Tucker?"
Caboose got up from his pile of papers to walk up behind Tucker and, taking the palm of his hand, let a solid whack hit across Tucker's back.
"Fuck."
After a bout of hacking, Tucker was able to breath again. He was just glad he didn't hack up his lungs, Caboose could really hit hard.
"You should really chew your food, Tucker."
"Shut up, Caboose."
After taking a sip of soda, Tucker asked, "What does a mechanical engineering major need with philosophy notes?"
"It's my miner."
"Something tells me you said that like coal miner."
"No, not coal, philosophy. You don't need a hardhat for that. I checked."
"Whatever. Why is that your minor?"
"Because that's a good question."
Tucker groaned. Of course Caboose would love a minor that was nothing but asking questions. The guy did that enough as it was.
"You know what? I don't want to know. Let's get these papers sorted so I don't slip and die in the morning."
The next morning, Tucker didn't slip and die on papers as he rushed to get to class on time. In fact, he didn't have to rush at all since Caboose had reached up towards the top bunk, grabbed Tucker's feet, and dragged Tucker out of bed at five in the morning.
After screaming, cursing, and one cold shower in which he could wake the fuck up so he could be coherent enough to strangle Caboose, the two of them left their dorm with enough time to go get breakfast together.
Tucker wasn't fond of being dragged out of bed, but after enough mornings of that, he was able to wake up before Caboose, drag the other man's blanket off him, and then hide it for a day as revenge.
He would later get Caboose chocolate chip pancakes at the off campus diner as a thank you for getting his sorry ass to class on time.
It hadn't been the most comfortable of solutions to his problem, but it had been a solution and, besides, Tucker figured that was what roommates were for: being annoying but ultimately giving a shit about one another.
Author's Note:
I actually was a note taker at my community college, though I never made anybody lunch (not a part of the job, you know). But Sheila goes above and beyond, and it's not like Caboose or Tucker really mind so...
Why mechanical engineering for Caboose? Well, despite some of his short comings, he actually is knowledgeable about mechanics (in a way). I'm specifically talking about Caboose transferring Church from the Epsilon unit into the relic, then being able to explain how and why Church wasn't a ghost and was actually an AI. I also believe Caboose would be good with vehicles if he weren't so clumsy and didn't talk to all of them like they had advance programming in them and could talk back...
And philosophy because I believe that Caboose is a really curious person and that he thinks differently than most of the other characters on the show: "Time, line? Time isn't made out of lines. It is made out of circles. That is why clocks are round." You've got to admit, that's an interesting point. Who's to say that time is a linear concept? What if it is circular and we're heading towards the end, only to have time be "reset" in a continuous loop?
Anyway, if I got anything wrong in my writing of dyslexia, don't hesitate to say so. I have no personal experience with it and all of my (questionable) knowledge comes form google.
I hope you all enjoyed this. Thanks for reading!