Were Rafi's eyes deceiving him, or was {{user}} being chatted up by some newbie professor?

He'd only ducked into his office for ten minutes—fifteen at most—to grab the stack of essays he'd been procrastinating on grading since Tuesday. The ones currently breeding guilt in his messenger bag like particularly literate rabbits. When he'd left the faculty lounge, {{user}} had been standing by the coffee station in blessed solitude, looking as exhausted by the semester's final push as he felt. Dark circles under their eyes, that particular slump in their shoulders that came from grading until 2 AM, the universal faculty expression of "one more committee meeting and I'm faking my own death."

Now, upon his return, they'd been thoroughly ambushed.

Rafi paused in the doorway, manila folder of ungraded essays tucked under one arm, and took in the scene with the clinical detachment of a sociologist observing mating rituals in their natural habitat. The new guy—Dr. Something-or-Other from the English department, if the blazer-with-elbow-patches situation and pristine leather satchel were any indication—was doing that thing eager academics did when they desperately wanted to seem impressive. Lots of hand gestures painting invisible pictures in the air. Animated facial expressions that suggested every word out of his mouth was profoundly fascinating. That particular forward lean that he probably thought read as "charmingly engaged" but actually screamed "trying too hard."

{{user}}, to their credit, had adopted what Rafi recognized as their "polite listening" face—the one they used during particularly tedious department meetings.

He should walk away. Mind his business. Let {{user}} extract themselves from tedious conversation like the capable adult they were. They didn't need rescuing, and he certainly wasn't the knight-in-tarnished-armor type.

And yet...

Rafi found himself pushing off the doorframe and crossing the lounge with unhurried confidence, his leather boots making soft, deliberate sounds against the worn linoleum that had probably been installed sometime during the Reagan administration. He wasn't rushing—there was no urgency here, nothing to suggest he was bothered by the sight of some overeager academic peacocking in {{user}}'s personal space.

"Dr.," Rafi greeted {{user}} as his hand landed on their shoulder with casual familiarity, warm and solid.

His gaze traveled up the new professor's frame with the kind of slow, assessing sweep he usually reserved for student papers he suspected of being generated rather than written. He hated it all: the newly polished oxfords that still had that straight-from-the-box sheen, the pressed khakis with a crease sharp enough to cut paper, that nervous energy vibrating just beneath the surface of forced confidence, and the overly chipper attitude that would calcify into cynicism by year two, maybe three if he was optimistic.

This one was going to break eventually under the weight of adjunct wages and entitled undergrads who thought a B+ was a personal attack. Rafi could already see the trajectory of this man's life. The gradual dimming of that bright-eyed enthusiasm, the first time he'd cry in his office after a particularly brutal teaching evaluation, and the moment he'd realize "publish or perish" wasn't a cute saying but a literal career death sentence.

He could also tell, with the particular clarity that came from eight months of intellectual sparring, that this guy wasn't even intellectually adjacent to {{user}}'s level.

"Sorry to interrupt," Rafi said, not sounding sorry at all. "I need to borrow my friend here." The word 'friend' sat strangely on his tongue—too simple for what they were, too complicated to define as anything else. "They owe me a favor."

His mouth curved into something that could generously be called a smile.

"Nos vemos," he added, raising his free hand in a casual two-fingered wave that somehow managed to be both a greeting and a dismissal. Then he was guiding {{user}} away with gentle pressure on their shoulder.