Knight in a Sweater Vest — Ian Duncan x F!American!Reader:
cw: fluff/none; Senor Chang ig; is Greendale a warning?; oh, talk of final exams (maybe avoid this if you’re stressed about your own lmao — or maybe it’ll be a good pick-me-up? idk); an american attempting to write a british character explaining slang without speaking to even one (1) british person
a/n: sorry if the pov is weird. it’s sort of 3rd person Ian Duncan pov but reader is still referred to as you (it’s just more focused on Duncan’s internality than yours!). also, Duncan is kind of a simp here (mostly because i think it’s accurate).
“Professor Duncan!” An unfamiliar voice accompanies an insistent knocking from the hall.
Ian sighs. What now? He turns to his office door. “Come in,” he calls tiredly. If you must. The door swings open to admit a student. But not one of his. Strange. Before Ian can expel the (he notes, quite attractive) woman from his domain, you slam the door shut again behind you.
“Does this door lock?” you pant a little as you lean against the door. Whether that’s to catch your breath or ensure no one can follow you in, Ian isn’t sure — but you’re clearly running from something.
“Uh… well if it ever did, it doesn’t now,” Ian replies bemusedly. “What are you doing in here? You don’t take any of my Psych classes.”
“Do you know every one of your students?” you query with a small smile.
“No. Well, uh, I mean, I try, of course… uh… hey, wait, you answer my question!”
You smirk a little. “Mm, sorry. You’re right. There was, um, talk of a second Spanish final even though we already got our first ones back. I figured if it looked like I’d already left for the summer, I couldn’t be roped into it,” you explain.
“Sure, sure, very sensible. But what does that have to with my office?”
“Location, location, location, teach. And by that I mean, El Tigre,” your voice teems with the utmost respect for your sanest teacher, “decided that the best way to ensure this strategy of his would be to chase down the Spanish students nearest to him in the hall and force them to sit another exam.”
“And my office was just in the vicinity, correct?”
“Correct. Also, by reputation, you seem like you’d be more than willing to help a grateful student disrupt Señor Chang’s plans.”
“Well, that’s true. Always good to know that my reputation proceeds me,” he smiles a (hopefully winning) crooked smile at you.
“Better than the other one, right?” You shake your head knowingly.
“The… other one?” he asks nervously.
“The one that paints you as a mildly predatory, consistently drunk, mostly uncool, heavily British professor whose primary research was disproved by Abed Nadir of that infamous study group?” you suggest, though somehow it didn’t seem like you were trying to be unkind. If anything, you seemed rather delighted by his standing.
“Disproved seems harsh. Surely, he’s an outlier and shouldn’t have been counted?” Ian counters, pleased to see that his rebuttal brings a smile to your face.
“Yes, I suppose I heard something about that too. I’d go for the ‘and don’t call me Shirley’ thing but it seems too obvious. Plus, I like Shirley. But for the record, I tend to believe the first set of reputational rumors,” you reassure him with a wink.
“I appreciate that, …?” He trails off, hoping for a name. You offer one, along with a hand for him to shake. He takes it, and neither side seems all that eager to let go.
But suddenly, there’s a crash from outside the door. “Duncan!”
“What do you want, Chang?” Ian brushes past you (totally oblivious to the way you become rather flustered by the action) to yell at his nemesis through the door. All the while, thinking, Nemesis, really? That’s what my life has come to?
“You think I give a crap about you, Harry Potter? ‘Cause I don’t!” he clarifies (rather petulantly). “Where’s my student, Duncan?!”
“That’s Professor Duncan to you, Chang! And how should I know where your students are? Are you truly so bad at teaching that your students banded together to pull a reverse Spanish Inquisition?”
“Oh yeah, that’s the kind everyone sees coming, right?” you whisper to Ian through a smile, having snuck up behind him to watch the show. He starts a little at your sudden proximity — entirely too focused on quarreling, but still feels a pleasant shiver shoot through him from the feel of your breath on his ear. Ian’s (of course) also happy to know you get his old British comedy references. Well, really, what Brit wouldn’t be? he reasons. A cultured American is hard to come by; it doesn’t mean anything more than that.
“Right again, skiver,” he says, keeping his voice down so Chang can’t hear the two of you and smiling at the way you play off his humor.
Your head tilts and your brow furrows slightly. “Skiver?”
“Oh, uh, right, I suppose Americans would say ‘slacker’,” he explains and his smile widens at the way you pout slightly (and adorably) — justifiably offended at his implication that not taking another Spanish final is somehow shirking your collegiate duties. Holding eye contact with you, he calls out to Señor Chang, “There’s no one else in here, you fraud! Leave my department alone!”
You and Ian listen for a moment just to make certain that Chang has really given up and sure enough, the sounds of posters being ripped down and “Out of the way, Magnitude, rapido, rapido” can be heard as he storms off down the hall, likely going to find another unsuspecting student to rope into sitting a superfluous two-hour exam.
“Thanks,” you breathe out, relief flooding your features as you sink down onto his office couch.
“Anytime.” Ian shrugs off your gratitude; he genuinely wanted to help you (something that doesn’t happen often around Greendale — at least, not for him). But before he can say anything else, you glance down at your watch and immediately cut him off,
“Listen, I really gotta run; I still have my Philosophy final today and it’s across campus. I’ll keep an eye out for your offered courses next semester, teach. Thanks again for the save!” You stand up again and flash Ian a dazzling smile, then rush out of his office in the opposite direction to the one you’d heard Chang take.
Ian sinks back into his desk chair, completely thrown. Since when were there people who went to Greendale who looked like that? And did you say you’d be looking for a class of his next semester? He turns your name over in his mind, kicking himself that he didn’t get a surname. Would the dean let him look through student registration rolls until he found yours? Could he somehow devise a Psych experiment that would get those computer lab nerds under his control to do it for him? And how could one five-minute encounter possibly leave him with this many questions?
“Until next time, skiver,” he promises aloud, smiling to himself.
a/n deux: sooo, pt. 2? lmk! (i might lowkey start overusing skiver as a nickname just so i don’t have to say you as much lol, although i think this weird technically-sort-of-split pov made that easier.) i think my timeline might be a little off too (pretty sure magnitude was introduced after chang became a student or whatever) but idc. reader is lowkey being written as a simp too ngl but ian maybe won’t know that for a while depending on how the pov works out the next time inspiration strikes. speaking of which, if you have any ideas for skiver!reader (or just other ian duncan thoughts), send them my way! i’m obsessed, my inbox is always open, and i’d love some inspo. (also i genuinely wrote this after some (cute) guy accidentally bumped into me in public — i think you can spot where that influenced me lmao)
