#stonyaugust | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lazywriter7 · 1 year ago

Text

Written for Stony AUgust over at @stonyauniverse , for week one/alternate professions.

non functional requirements

There’s a man-shaped twig blocking the door to the lecture hall.

“You coming or you going?”

The twig startles – blue eyes darting under wheat yellow hair. Gwen pulls the worn strap of her tote bag more firmly over her shoulder, MacBook weighing it down, grimacing all the while.

“Sorry.” The twig apologises in a surprisingly deep voice, then opens the door for her. Cute gesture if class hadn’t already started and now she’s gotta squeeze past him through the tiny door.

The guy re-evaluates his chivalry after a couple seconds of awkward silence. He ducks through into the hall but lingers, and Gwen sidesteps him to dump her crap on the floor near the closest seat on the second last row.

“Recording’s kicked off, so we might as well. This is lecture four of System Design Engineering.” The lecturer’s voice crackles over the speakers. Looks like he’s just gotten started, so that gives her a couple minutes to get setup. “Today we’ll be going over NFR’s, or non-functional requirements. What they are, how they’re defined. These can apply to any kind of computing systems, system architectures, front end or backend APIs, you name it. Any kind of – sorry, was that a hand?”

“Morning Tony.” Someone greets from close to the front row. Gwen, who’s waiting for her Macbook to complete its primeval, laborious booting up procedure, feels her shoulders sag even further down. God, not this shit again.

“Did your coffee machine explode again?”

“Implode, and no.” The lecturer – Tony – cracks a brief smile. The band t-shirt he’s got on is mostly just wrinkles, his hair flattened straight down the sides like it hasn’t been washed in a couple days. Really gives Gwen such an inspiring picture to look up to for her own prospective career in academia. “And just for that not-so-subtle commentary on my opening salvo today, I’m gonna teach this entire lecture using a metaphor.”

“Was it Justin Hammer?” Someone else calls from the front. “Did he hog the servers to train machine learning models on LinkedIn posts?”

“Fuck no.” Tony says, and winces immediately in the bout of snickers that erupt. “And now you’ve got me swearing on the recording. Gonna put all of you heathens on a bus to the downtown community college, don’t think I won’t do it.”

The students hush in anticipation. Tony blinks, knuckles at his nose under the wireframe glasses, and looks to the ceiling as if in despair. “I mean. I… pre-emptively apologise, and intend no insult to any students, or family of students listening to this, who may have attended community college. Community college is an institution. Just like… jail.”

“You sure your coffee machine didn’t explode?”

“Shut up Miles.” Tony gestures half-heartedly at the screen behind him, where the slide has finally changed.

Gwen’s brought up her note-taking tool by habit on her up-and-running Mac, but she doesn’t have high hopes. It’s not like the guy doesn’t know his stuff, he’s just easily derailed into tangents and rambles and spicy opinions on SpaceX, and Gwen likes to be systematic about learning new things. Start at the beginning, finish at the end, with preferably zero stand-up material along the way. If she’d wanted jokes, she’d put on a late-night show.

And then to add insult to injury, someone creeps up the side and sinks down on the seat right in front of her, blocking her eyeline to the lower third of the screen. The bluish light dances silver over the light-coloured mop of hair… it’s the twiggy dude, from the doorway. Did he just find a seat?

“Think about a relationship.” Tony’s saying, up at the lectern. “Parent and child, cousins twice removed, romantic partners. Whoever. There are the expectations, the responsibilities… the requirements, you could say, which are obviously defined and the bare minimum for the relationship to exist. If you’re a parent, you gotta house and feed your kid. If you don’t do that, you fail at the basic requirements of being a parent. So if you turn up with your deadbeat ass at your kid’s wedding, they’re justified to go all, ‘you’re not my dad’.”

A guy in the third row raises a pen into the air. “Can I explain it like that in the exam?”

“I’m not going to be the only one marking, Ganke, so I’d actively encourage it.” Kinda nice, how he remembered so many names though. Gwen has been in this course for six months and only knows faces. “However, there are certain requirements which may not be essential for the relationship to be defined and functional but are still important. Like if your parent loves you.” A twitch. “Loves the kid, that is.”

In the seat ahead of her, Twig’s shoulders have risen up to his ears, frame gone all stiff. Gwen bites back a sigh and moves over to the next seat, just to eliminate the distraction.

She thinks about Dad in the next breath, awkwardly jabbing at his cereal and darting glances at her over the table, and immediately shoves it down.

“You might be tempted to think of it as how good a system is at fulfilling a base requirement – like how good of a parent they are, depending on if they do or don’t love you. And that’s not incorrect; whether a website is able to serve a high volume of traffic, or have an uptime of ninety nine percent, is absolutely about how good it is at serving its base requirement, which is to present an accessible resource over the internet. But if the thresholds of those non-functional requirements aren’t met, if the website keeps throwing a 404 more frequently than is acceptable, then it impedes said basic requirement. Even though uptime isn’t in the strict definition of the deliverable. You feel me?”

Silence. Someone from the far end meekly chirps a yes.

“Ohhkay.” Tony paces out from behind the lectern, keen eyes scanning the room like he’s actually, really invested. That’s… that’s a nice thing about him too. “Imagine I’m in a relationship, right? My partner and I, we define what a romantic relationship means to us and what we expect of each other going in. Like… monogamy, maybe. Or meeting at least once a week. So as long as I don’t go cruising, or ghost this guy for a month, I’m technically fulfilling my promises as a boyfriend. Those are your functional requirements.”

There’s a tiny murmur in the room at ‘guy’, but it dies out quick. Not exactly a surprise from the man who wears bi flag-coloured sunglasses to Orientation week.

“But to the enlightened, relationships are about more than that.” Tony’s lips curl at one end, like the words amuse him. Or that he’s speaking them? “Dependability. Emotional support. Prioritising the other person’s needs. All that chicken soup for the soul stuff; your non-functional requirements.”

“So I gotta think about it, the third time I reschedule date night. Get lost in a work thing and forget to respond to a text. Several texts. Forget to buy the milk, even though he told me to and put a reminder on my phone. Make life decisions on my own. These things take… a toll.” Tony isn’t making eye contact with the crowd anymore. His eyes skitter up to the ceiling and away again, restless even as his voice continues on methodically. “Maybe my partner can put up with it. Does put up with it. But just because I’m serving the base functionality of a romantic partner, doesn’t mean I can ignore these things. These are also essential to the health of the relationship.”

“But you gotta design for that. I can’t sit there like a dimwit going, ‘oh I’ll just do better next time’ and expect it to magically happen. That I’ll just… be better, with no effort on my part aside from intending to.” Gwen drops her eyes to the plastic tabletop, scratches and pen marks running over the surface. This is weirdly intense. “I have to have the right system in place. Maybe I vow to reply to a text every time I’m downing a cup of coffee. Set up regular delivery orders for milk online. Make it to the date, even if it is an hour too late and not in the place I wanted, just so we’re there together. Plan in advance so that things can get better, instead of crossing fingers and blowing on an eyelash. Do the work.”

She lifts her gaze by an inch, still vaguely discomfited, and catches Twig’s jaw clenching in profile, limned by the light of the screen. He shifts in his seat, raises a fist to wipe brusquely at something under his eye. It’s all very quiet. Tightly controlled.

“And that’s how systems need to function. Sure your primary focus is to get the thing up and running, but you need to think about performance, and security, and reliability when you’re architecting a solution. Two weeks before go live is not the time to realise that you’re pulling from an old-timey relational database when you actually needed caching. That the base components of your system just… don’t work together the way you want.” Tony pauses, blinks a couple times. Like his words have outstripped his thoughts and it’s all starting to come together. Form an obvious conclusion. His mouth turns down, goes wry again. “It gets real expensive to fix things then.”

And so it continues. The hour goes by faster than usual, Gwen startling a little by the time Tony wraps up the lecture, a whole five minutes before time like he always prefers to do.

Or… plans to do, perhaps. Mid-morning lectures, people usually have to empty out of these halls fast to get to the next one, but there’s a disordered cluster of students still lingering around the lectern, shooting the shit and exchanging laughs with Tony. He looks visibly better at the end of the hour, more energetic than he did at the start of the lecture. Like it actually rejuvenated him – which isn’t the worst ideal to look up to as a prospective academic.

Whatever, Gwen isn’t getting ahead of herself. She’s got band to get to.

Of course, when she stuffs her laptop into the tote bag and does a brief check to make sure everything’s in there, she can’t see her fob. Can’t get into the rehearsal room without it, so she gropes for it fruitlessly for a couple of minutes, before resorting to dumping the bag out on her seat. Chocolate wrappers flutter to the ground, a pen cap without a pen rolling down to join them. Handouts from her other classes, worksheets, one physical notebook, a set of drumsticks… no fob.

Ugh. She ducks under her seat to check, nose twitching as the longer end of her bangs ruffle past. There, small and plasticky-blue against the maroon carpet. Fishing it out through the tiny gap is an ordeal, and by the time she has it secure in her pocket, the hall’s empty.

Or not quite. She’s shovelling her stuff one-handed while pacing up the stairs to the exit, when, “–mean to show up at your place of work.”

“You’re my boyfriend Steven, not a stalker. It’s fine.”

Hang on. What?

Tony and some guy – Twig, she can tell by the bony shoulders – Steven, are standing in front of the door. Tony and his boyfriend. Who was in their class. Who was probably not in their class, just physically present in this… particular class.

Tony seems to be frenetically running through similar thoughts, because his mouth just doesn’t stop moving, hands gesturing through the air like a conductor gone loose. “Well, not fine fine. I guess, considering what I – considering all of the… I didn’t know you were in the audience, obviously. I’ll just do as Taylor does and write a song about it the next time.”

Fuck. Can she just… push past them, really quickly? Or right in the middle of them. She’s been to parties where she doesn’t know anybody before, this can’t be any more awkward than that. Probably.

Steven’s already thin lips press tight together. He’s standing very, very straight, not a thing to criticise in that posture. Captain Stacy would be proud.

“Are we,” He starts, deep voice as startling out of that reed-thin frame as it was the first time, stumbling over the words just a little, “breaking up then?”

“What?” Tony breathes, and it’s like it’s stoppered his flow of thought completely.

Steven’s lips flicker up weakly. “You said Taylor.”

“No, no,” Tony’s hands flutter again – he pulls them back and tucks them close over his chest, just a little protective. “Stupid joke, you know me.” And then, just a little wry. “Of all the times to know a modern music reference.”

It’s like he’s laying out bait, an easy diversion. Steven could say something about preferring The Beatles and they needn’t tug on this line of thought, make things unravel.

Maybe it’s why Gwen hasn’t cleared her throat or done anything to clue them off to her presence yet. Something in her is so discomfited, twisted up with the second-hand awkwardness – she can’t let them go on but it would be worse if they saw her – but there’s also a second voice in her head, the one that’s good at moderating and peeling people open from a distance.

if you stop them talking now, when will they try again?

Steven doesn’t take the bait. Something in him strains like he wants to take a step forward, but he doesn’t move. Instead, he says quietly – “I do know you.”

“I know how much you think about us. How much it matters to you to get things right, and I guess I just…” Steven’s mouth purses, soft and unhappy, “take it for granted, all of that work, because it just happens to be who you are. Who you’ve chosen to be.”

“Steve, don’t – we’re both workaholics–”

“We are.” Steve acquiesces, but the words that follow sound implacable. “But you plan around it. Every single thing you said in the lecture, you… you booked those regular grocery deliveries for us, and I cribbed at you about it because they deliver in those plastic bags and the emissions from the delivery trucks–”

“It was a valid fucking point–”

“It was a stupid point, and you were right to tell me that.” Steve says it without hesitation. “I cancelled on our weekend away, again, and you were right to call me out on that this morning too. You just don’t…” A little softer. “Sometimes you don’t say anything.”

A beat.

Tony unfolds his arms, eyes fixed somewhere off-centre around Steve’s collarbone. His voice has dropped to match Steve’s, simmering with something indecipherable. “I was really… happy when you agreed to be with me. Stunned out of my head, sure. But happy. I wanted to get it right. It would have never occurred to me to… with our history, with my history, it just didn’t compute sometimes that…”

Steve cuts in, mouth twisting with it. “That I’d be the screw-up in the relationship?”

“Careful sweetheart.” Tony lifts his eyes, and they’re still warm. “Name-calling is my department.”

But he seems to be taking Steve’s previous words to heart.

“I know…” He swallows. Drops his hands completely, lifts his chin and talks. “I know how much that place means to you, I know how much you’d have killed to have a queer shelter in the neighbourhood, heck in the city, growing up like you did. I want someone who cares about what they do, I’d have been bored to shit with a person coasting by on a job that meant nothing to them. You wanna do paperwork till one am, I’ll be right there on the couch with you marking papers. That is fine, the donations from your own pocket are – don’t cut me off Steve – are fine, even if it is a little like Mrs. March teaching the kids to give away their Christmas meal to the less fortunate. That’s the guy I chose to be with.”

“You need to save the world. You can’t help yourself.” Tony bit into his lip, smile here and gone in a flash. “And I’m just a guy who teaches a couple university classes, while trying to get a startup off the ground for the last five years. But this morning when you…” He sucks in a breath, exhales it soundlessly. “When you looked like you couldn’t imagine how I’d think we wouldn’t cancel… how you disdained the idea of. Of spending time with me, instead of saving the world. Then it felt pretty shitty.”

For a moment, Steve doesn’t say anything at all. His face is pale, cheeks lost of any colour. His eyes have gone red. “I. I’m sorry.”

Tony clears his throat, voice forcibly bright. “Not gonna say you’d never think like that?”

“… doesn’t matter.” Steve says simply. “It’s how I made you feel.”

“There are those unrealistic moral principles I know and love.” Tony’s smiling, only a little watery around the edges. He moves into Steve’s motionless frame, hands reaching out again, this time to catch him by the elbows and smooth down to hang onto his wrists. “We’ll work on it.”

Steve is staring down at their hands, both like they’re condemned and something miraculous. “In the lecture. When you said that the components of the system didn’t work together the way you’d want…”

He looks up. Tony meets his eyes, gives a little shrug. “A better guy would know how important what you’re doing is. Would maybe resent its importance a little less.”

“Tony, I’m not a better person than you are.” Steve’s voice is thick, almost choking with the entreaty. His hands turn in Tony’s loose clasp, gripping back tightly. “Tony.”

Tony gives a little burble of a laugh. Bends over low, forehead brushing Steve’s shoulder. “We’ll work on me too.”

They lean into each other for a moment. Tony’s face is almost hidden behind Steve’s golden locks. “I don’t really care, if you’re better or worse than me. I’m keeping you.”

Steve pulls back. Leans up a fraction to press their lips together, both their eyes fluttering shut.

They pull apart, smiles pulling up on those mouths like mirroring sunrises. Steve leans in for another peck, then quietly pushes the door to step outside. Tony follows him.

Gwen sits down on the floor, fifteen metres away, laptop thunking into the carpet. She bends her head down to her belly, and breathes.

Fuck, she’s going to feel the anxiety of this in her back for weeks.

Band practice is a loss. The entire morning might be a loss. She needs a cupcake, and some grunge music. But even as vague ideas for the upcoming day begin to coalesce, she can feel a curious lightness shoot through her body. Like she can take it. The aches and pains, the barista shift in the afternoon. Like the world is alright, actually, and she’s not gonna keel over just yet.

This is why she doesn’t watch rom-coms.

She pulls herself up eventually and finally exits the hall. And there, by himself in the corner, completely failing to look like he’s doing anything but waiting for her – is Tony.

The world is a nightmare. She doesn’t stutter. “Did you know I was in there?”

Tony looks like he’d be rubbing the back of his neck abashedly, if he were that kind of guy. Instead, he visibly decides to brazen it out. “Not until the last thirty seconds before we left.”

Small mercies.

“Were you… did you have something to talk to me about? My office hours are 2-3, but–”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Gwen interrupts, entirely out of patience. That’s what’s going through his head right now?

Tony shuts his mouth with a click, eyebrows rising.

“There’s nothing.” Gwen forces. And then, just as involuntary as the swear – “You’re a good teacher.”

Tony blinks. Gwen remembers him bantering about with her classmates, not losing a step.

“Thanks, Gwen.” His nose looks a little red. So do the very tops of his cheeks. He looks unaccountably pleased.

Gwen’s lips tilt up.

“You could do better than him, you know.”

“I wouldn’t want to.” Tony beams at her. Turns around, waves two fingers. “See you next week.”

The rehearsal hall is in the same direction that he’s walking in. Gwen unerringly walks the other way. By the time she loops the quad and makes it there, she’ll have thirty minutes left. Half of band practice is better than none.

She taps a rhythm on her outer thigh, blows a strand of her bangs out of the eyes. Tugs the tote bag higher up. Band, then lunch, and then maybe she can call her dad.

#stonyaugust #stevetony #stony #lazywriting #fanfic #alternate universe #outsider pov #pre serum steve #no powers au #steve rogers #tony stark #gwen stacy #steve/tony #elaborate computing metaphors for the win

26 notes · View notes