A/N:

Welp, have this glorious college!AU one shot for the first day of NaNoWriMo. Here's hoping I don't creatively burn myself out this month like I did back in March!

Enjoy :)

Summary: Normally it would be Tooth that would lose herself for hours in the library, however it was exam time and Pitch hadn't emerged from the stacks for at least an entire day. Whatever will Tooth do when she can't find her boyfriend? (College!AU)

Words:

1838

Prompts:

Location: The library

Scenario: Reminding someone to eat

"Lost in Thought"

Between the two, Tooth would have always pegged herself as the one to disappear into the stacks in their university library and let herself be consumed with the ever crushing need to study and learn more. Too often had she been the one to lose track of time and have to rush to her next class because she lingered too long between the shelves of unmitigated knowledge.

But this week? This week was final exam week, and Pitch's thesis–the one he had been procrastinating on–was due.

Her boyfriend was one that tended to barely go to class and yet ace all of his tests, due to his understanding of the material. He grasped things much more easily than their classmates–and if she had to admit it, herself included–and he always seemed at ease at the end of a semester, secure in his grade for any particular class. This semester, however, had his capstone class, the one class that culminated everything he had learned in the past four years into a single grade that would determine if he graduated or not with a degree in hand.

And frankly, him procrastinating on this fifty page paper that was due at the end of the week just to manically rush it in the last 72 hours felt like poetic justice to Tooth, who had slaved over every single homework assignment, test, final paper and exam as if each one was the catalyst to whether she passed or failed her courses.

Tooth was enjoying his panic a little too much right now. But instead of telling him I told you so before he left to the library early in the morning the past two days, she merely handed him a coffee she prepared beforehand and kissed him goodbye. But now it was dinnertime on the closing of the second day, and Tooth hadn't seen hide nor hair of Pitch since early that morning. There would be sparse texts throughout the day, mostly in reply to her own correspondence, but no triumphant quips, no tangents, no side conversations at all today.

So as his dutiful girlfriend of two years, it was her job to hunt him down, thrust a sandwich in his hands, and make him stop for the day so he would have a fresh brain for editing tomorrow before the thesis comes due at midnight.

She just didn't plan on it taking her an hour to find him in the stacks.

The library itself had seven floors, excluding the vault of rare tomes in the basement, each with different sections dedicated to a specific floor. The first floor, which was open to the public, had everything a general library would need, including a fairly comprehensive children's literature collection, which was meticulously cultivated by the early childhood majors and the school board who wanted to help the struggling parents in the area with raising literate children. Past the first floor, however, a guest would need to have a university ID to gain access to the stairwell. The seventh floor was where she was headed, the stacks of non-fiction reports and papers nearly floor to ceiling with small cramped tables and rickety chairs interspersed between every other row.

The lighting was unfortunately dim on this floor, the metal bookshelves towering high enough to block most of the direct light every third aisle. The journals closest to these ceiling lights were a little crispy, and very delicate, and Tooth had always vowed to never touch those particular publications in the fear of them crumbling to ash in her grasp.

With how many nooks and crannies that were in the stacks, Tooth chose to do a cursory look across everything, to see if she could spot her boyfriend's spiky hair amongst the general seating area. When she couldn't see Pitch anywhere, she started pacing down the main aisle, looking down each of the rows in turn.

When that then didn't produce the boyfriend she had been missing all day, Tooth began the arduous process of walking down each and every aisle, scanning the tables and desks spread out to accommodate all of the students cramming this last week of school.

It was then that she finally found him, in an obscure corner, sitting on the floor with all of his materials spread around him, his bookbag strewn across the floor, gutted of its resources, a mechanical pencil stuck behind one ear, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, his gaze intent on the laptop in front of him as he scanned the text tiredly.

"Knock knock," Tooth said quietly as she rapped her knuckles on one of the metal shelves. A small yelp in the next aisle over meant she had inadvertently startled some innocent crammer with her noise. It did, however, also mean that she successfully gained her boyfriend's attention, his lanky frame jerking as he looked up in surprise.

"Tooth! What are you doing here?" Pitch asked, his gaze drifting back down to his electronically written paper. "I'm almost done. Have to finish this edit and annotate these last few figures and then I'll be ready for round three of edits!" he declared quietly. Toothiana couldn't help the frown that tugged at her lips.

"Pitch, it's been sixteen hours," she said before kneeling down next to him. "You have thirty-two more hours until the paper is due, so your last edit can wait until tomorrow, okay?" Tooth added before she reached down to start cleaning up his research piles.

"No, not those, I need those to–" he started in a mild panic, his sleep deprived brain muddling his thoughts. Tooth flipped the papers in her hands around to show him his own shorthand marks of being finished with those pages. They both knew those marks meant the pages could be shredded and binned, with the giant red slash mark down the middle with the date and time that he slashed it.

These papers held three of those marks, all in different colors.

"I think you're done for the day," she murmured to him, one hand reaching into the messenger bag at her side and pulling out a water bottle, which she handed to him. "Drink. You've been surrounded by these dusty pages for so long, it's a wonder you haven't turned into a mummy yet," she teased. "Have you eaten yet today?"

Tooth stared him down with narrowed eyes when he shook his head no, and waited long enough for him to crack open the water bottle and start drinking before she continued to gather up the "done" pages. Leaving the papers without the slash marks alone, she grabbed Pitch's bookbag to store the slash mark papers inside to dispose of later. Looking around, the area already looked a hundred times better than when she arrived.

At the crumpling sound of the empty water bottle, Tooth finished tidying up and accepted the empty bottle from Pitch, setting it aside for now before pulling her messenger bag in front of her and opening the flap. With the laptop set to the side, Pitch stood up and stretched, letting his 6ft 6 frame fill the impossibly tall space before he sat on the floor again. With a small smile, Tooth then pulled out a turkey wrap–something she had deemed light enough on his starved stomach and clean enough so he could eat it in the library–and handed it to him, along with another water bottle and a sandwich baggie of grapes.

The moan he gave with the first bite of the wrap was enough to send pleasant tingles all the way down to her toes, and she had to remind herself that the library was absolutely no place to ambush her boyfriend, even with this secluded of an area back here.

As Pitch continued to devour the offerings she brought him, Tooth grabbed the laptop and saved the document he was currently working on. She waited with bated breath as the document took far too long to save, in her opinion.

"We need to get you a new laptop. Perhaps something as a graduation present?" she asked with a small grin before handing the computer back to him.

"No, this one works just fine," he replied with a shrug before finishing off his second bottle of water in ten minutes.

"This one is also ten years old. There's nicer, faster ones out there, Pitch," Tooth replied. "Some guys update their electronics as much as other guys do with cars, or girlfriends."

"Well, I like the one I have already, so no need to upgrade," Pitch mentioned offhandedly. Tooth raised a perfectly trimmed brow.

"A laptop, car, or girlfriend?" she asked, a warning in her voice.

But of course, as smoothly as he could, Pitch replied in his suave voice without missing a beat.

"Well, I don't have a car, and I'm willing to upgrade my laptop as a graduation present, so…" he replied with a grin, staring at her and watching as she flushed in delight. "Although just like laptops, I can always upgrade without going to a newer model. It would just require new software. I hear the girlfriend model gets a fancy new fiancee upgrade if you install a certain ring software." Pitch waggled his eyebrows, looking remarkably well for a man who had just spent the last 16 hours huddled on the floor in a gremlin-like writing frenzy.

"Pitch!" she whispered, blushing madly.

Pitch stretched again, his grin wide before tucking his remaining papers and laptop into his backpack before gathering up the trash and handing it off to Tooth, who put it in her messenger bag to toss once they left the building.

With the little area all cleaned up, and extra library journals and materials put on the cart to be reshelved later, Pitch draped an arm around Tooth's shoulders as they headed back to the outdoors.

"For the record, I am going to ask you for real, not just insinuate. You're not allowed to know when I'm going to propose, or how, but just know that I want to marry you. I hope you feel the same way," Pitch clarified as he opened and held the door for Tooth to pass through first.

"For the record, if things continue the way they are now, I will say yes. Just, please, no public proposals. Those always look to be so embarrassing," Tooth replied, grinning widely as Pitch joined her side and held her hand as they walked back to their apartment.

"Duly noted. No public proposals."

"Oh! And nothing in front of friends and family. I kind of want that to be just between us," she added.

"Can I at least hire someone to photograph your reaction?" Pitch asked with a slight grin, squeezing her hand affectionately.

"That should be fine. But no proposals at night, either! You know I'm not a fan of the dark," she added. Pitch kissed the side of her head, and she flushed again at his easy show of affection.

"I love you."