A/N: Whoo! Back at it again! …I haven't written a fic for Suite Life since 2014 (recently I'm doing more Steven Universe and Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom fics over on AO3 these days), but I was excited to try my hand at it again! Was worried I almost missed out because I kept getting not notified at every turn. XD
You've Heard of Coffee Shop AUs, Now Get Ready for Disability Services Office AUs!
by purplecitrusella
Bob sat in one of the two waiting chairs the disability services office had and idly wondered why on earth the disability services office of all places only had two places to sit down.
…Then again, outside that rush of freshman appointment after freshman appointment he observed seemed to be meticulously scheduled back-to-back about two weeks into his first year of college, far after any returning student probably would have secured a pile of letters for the semester, he had never actually had to wait to talk to someone.
Especially not three days into classes, when the office's official guidance was to maybe pop in three days before classes, to make sure you had enough letters to present to those real curmudgeonly teachers who wouldn't take you at your word until you had that magical slip of paper, the one that got teachers who didn't actually understand how the ADA worked to listen to you. Maybe.
Bob really had not forgotten to. Honestly. Sixth grade with almost no accommodations had been all he needed to never balk at the things again.
—But Mom had dragged him to a second cousin's wedding, despite his protests, despite his cries that he'd be running late for getting to campus and his dorm and all his pre-semester stuff to do, and… well…
He could probably wait until the one Saturday of the semester the office kept limited hours for those students with the weird class schedules who couldn't get in to get their letters any other time. Right? He could get by on the Kurzweil 3000 subscription the university paid for on his personal laptop, just for the first week, and get the test and notes accommodations cleared up Saturday. …Right?
No, because his health teacher seemed to have a stick up her butt regarding basically all his accommodations—he was sure that'd be a fight come time to schedule his accommodated testing appointment for the first exam of the course—and his finance teacher was nice enough and had let him take his typed, recorded notes that first day but had said she'd expected to receive a letter by her next class.
Weirdly, the professors for his Creative Writing major were surprisingly understanding even without the letters, though he supposed that was probably helped by his new Intro to Creative Writing teacher having dyslexia herself…
… …
…Anyway, he had ducked into the student center on a rainy Thursday, grabbing some lunch from the Taco Beast booth in the building's cafeteria before heading to its… west? left? right… end?
The end he knew the office to be in, near a stairwell, beside some bathrooms, catty-cornered from the multicultural center office. He needed those letters before 4:00. And despite the fact that it was only nearing 1:00 p.m. and he knew he should have enough time, some part of him that didn't care to think about how time worked was convinced he was going to be late to finance class. Or worse: empty-handed, forced to take haphazard written notes that didn't actually summarize what he wanted to remember and thus made less than no sense later. Assuming he didn't first have trouble reading his handwriting when he hadn't taken the time to keep it perfectly neat, that is.
Urgh. Come on. This was taking ages. He didn't have this kind of time.
(He glanced at the wall clock. It had been two minutes on the nose since he had sat down.)
Sigh. Maybe he could pass the time without worrying so hard about it if he doom scrolled through Chatter.
At the very least, it was better than staring at the clock and tapping his feet. He opened up his phone.
Meme. Meme. Inflammatory political post. TV show post. Meme. Trending post from a writer. Influencer post. Post from someone he's actually following.
The door opened.
He looked up.
A lanky girl with stick-straight light brown hair backed out of the door so that she could keep her eyes and attention on the person behind (or, well, in front of) her.
"Thanks so much for meeting with me and changing my letter, I know I should've come days ago and I do usually come days ago—well, not days ago but like, I mean, the advice you give about coming before—ah, you know what I mean—"
"—Addison." The older woman put a hand on her shoulder. "Please tell me you're not on the sugar again."
The girl cleared her throat. "…It's caffeine these days."
"…Not pills, I trust." Bob, looking back to his phone in the hopes it would make it less obvious he was listening in, marveled at how Ms. Dunkle was always so able to balance sounding like a professional, a student's equal in the environment of professionals and pre-service professionals that was university… while also sounding like their mom.
"Right, and get killed by a drug dealer. Yeah. No way."
Bob rolled his eyes. A drug dealer? You could get caffeine pills in Paul Revere Mini Mart!
"Been getting enough sleep?" Ms. Dunkle asked, a hidden skepticism in her tone telling Bob she was thinking something very similar but keeping it to herself.
He looked up from his phone again, for just a moment, to see the girl's weight shift. "I've been pulling all-nighters."
Ms. Dunkle blinked. "…We are… three days into the semester, Addison."
She gestured wildly. "Yeah! And I'm not repeating what happened last semester! It took all of spring to dig my way out of academic probation!"
Ms. Dunkle sighed. "Constant all-nighters are a good way to get yourself back into it."
…Bob could respect the hustle. Academic probation was no joke, and probably the only reason he hadn't been put on it or else held back way back in sixth grade was that the school agreed to let him hit seventh grade only if they rewrote his IEP to have way more pull-out time and resource room periods than he might have otherwise been comfortable with (than he might have otherwise needed) just to get him back to his own baseline.
It felt like he spent more time in special education classes than he did in the normal ones for a bit—even math, and he hadn't even failed math!—until halfway through the year, when Mr. Forgess started easing him back in.
(And when his would-be friend—still friend now—Zack decided to fake dyslexia. Hm. Funny, the things you remember, mulling over the past like that.)
Still: all-nighters three days in? Most teachers weren't even assigning serious class work yet, even in the higher-level classes juniors like him took! This girl must have been a piece of work.
She had grown quiet and part of him wondered if she'd left, but he looked up to see her still there, calmed down, before she uttered a quiet, "Thanks again… though." She offered Ms. Dunkle a firm nod, and to that, the older woman smiled.
"It's my job."
"—Still. Oh! Look at the time, I got a class I'm about to be late to. Bye!"
Bob looked down and pretended to be interested in getting something out of his backpack before this Addison girl could turn around and see his staring and eavesdropping. Something told him he did not have the energy to get into an interaction of any sort with her, and the way her brisk exit from the room pushed a palpable wind in his direction told him his hypothesis was right. If he ever ran into her outside this office, it would be too soon.
Ms. Dunkle called over to him. "I'll be ready for you in a moment, Bob! Hope you don't mind waiting another minute or two."
"No prob!" he called back as she stepped back into her office.
He hefted his backpack onto his lap and took another glance at his phone.
Ah, Zack was online, and he had posted a picture of his friends from back on the S.S. Tipton.
"can't wait to hang with these guys at the hottest party of the year lol"
…Huh, Zack had invited him to that party; he hadn't been aware some of Zack's sea school friends were in town and coming, too.
He fired off a DM at Zack.
"hey whos the grill at the edge of the picture"
…Dang it, predictive text.
"girl"
The response felt near instantaneous, but maybe that was just because of the anxious waiting he had been doing just minutes ago.
"Woody's ex, they broke up a few months back"
Bob typed back.
"i take it she's not coming then"
"she normally doesn't when Woody comes but he's busy tonight so she accepted the invite for once", Zack replied. "why? you want me to introduce you?"
"maybe?" Bob wrote. "she looks cute. i guess"
"i'll see what i can do lol"
He reacted to the DM with a thumbs-up and placed his phone in his pocket, content to just wait at this point. Not that he was left waiting long.
"Bob?" Ms. Dunkle leaned her head out of her office door. "I'm ready for you."
******'******
My assigned pairing:
Bob- Zack and Cody's friend in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (who also made one appearance in On Deck). He is portrayed by Charlie Stewart, who appears to have stopped acting; his last credit was in 2013.
Addison- A classmate of Zack and Cody's in The Suite Life on Deck, and Woody's girlfriend (even though they broke up in this story because Plot). She is portrayed by Rachael Kathryn Bell, whose most recent acting credit was in 2016. Apparently, she married in November 2018, though? Good for her! And she's apparently an indie alt-rock musician under the name Little Luna now? She directs her own music videos for her songs? Cool!
…Zack makes that brief appearance near the end, but I presume I don't have to explain who Zack or Dylan Sprouse (who is still in the business and very recently married Barbara Palvin in mid-July 2023!) is to this crowd. XD Woody (played by Matt Timmons) is also mentioned, as is Mr. Forgess (presumably Bob's teacher-of-service (special education teacher) at Buckner Middle School, played by Ernie Grunwald, who currently portrays the Chill Grill's chef in Raven's Home).
So! A Strange Love fic where nothing actively happens between the pairing. (Well, unless you decide Bob has a positive reaction when Zack introduces him to definitely-Addison later. Hmm.) …Does it still "count"? I like it, so I'd like to hope it does. XD
Bob's experiences with disability services and teacher reactions to accommodation letters are in some ways based on my own university experiences. (No dyslexia in my case, but the accommodation grind is real either way. XP)
I joked with some friends that because July (when I started and finished writing this) is disability pride month I can't stray from the topic of disability in my fics lately, but in all truth, the idea of a mundane not-really-meeting in a disability services office entered my mind in a fleeting moment while I was rewatching Bob's debut episode after I got my pairing and set up camp, so it's what I ended up writing.
It was harder than I expected to write this, probably in part due to my time away—I felt, even after rewatching relevant episodes and moments with both, that I was more comfortable writing Bob, which is probably why he takes the front seat here. I think I shied away from Addison both because of my not being as comfortable writing her and because she's not actually canonically disabled so I sort of decided to be vague about why she was at the disability services office. (Contrast Bob, whose dyslexia never comes up after his first appearance, probably due to it being in one of TSL's few Banned Episodes™, but which is still presumably canon.)
…Okay, author's note's getting long (understatement of the year), so… I'd like to thank Lodylodylody for hosting a new iteration of this collection after so many years! It was fun to return to writing Suite Life fic and this collection specifically, even if I'm a little rusty and I have a pile of WIPs for other fandoms clamoring for my attention. XD
Thanks for reading!
