god so a few days ago i saw someone suggest that hlvrai!gordon takes a job as a theoretical physics professor after the black mesa incident and i can’t get it out of my head so here are some headcanons i just thought of in the shower:
in the beginning, most students like his classes cuz he’s young and pretty chill most of the time and easy to talk to
pretty soon though people realize that there’s definitely Something Going On With Him
“i swear i saw dr freeman chasing some guy in a ps4 hoodie around walgreens on saturday” “man that’s fucked up”
gordon agrees to allow bubby and coomer in as guest speakers one day and that goes.. about as well as you’d expect (coomer almost causes an explosion, bubby listens attentively for whispering students just so he can loudly tell them to shut the fuck up)
benrey hacks into gordon’s computer remotely during a lecture while gordon is projecting his screen in front of the entire class just to ask him if he’s gonna eat his leftover chinese takeout
“who was that? your boyfriend?” “no he’s just my live-in eldritch entity. don’t worry about it”
sometimes gordon will Say Things and his students can’t actually tell if he’s joking or not
tommy likes to walk sunkist around campus and once everyone figures out that he and gordon know each other they bully gordon into showing them daily pictures of sunkist
this also eventually leads to daily pictures of joshua
gordon starts using joshua as a bartering chip (he’ll bring him in on the last day before exams if everyone is passing the class)
coomer occasionally pops in to distribute complementary sodas. gordon does not ask where these come from
much to everyone’s chagrin, lecture will occasionally be cancelled last-minute for an “emergency” (aka benrey wanted to cuddle and wouldn’t let gordon leave)
sometimes these emergencies actually are emergencies, such as the time when bubby and coomer lit their stove on fire and decided to call gordon instead of the fire department
students from all different majors begin taking gordon’s classes just for the Experience
“i have adhd and if i’m not constantly moving i’ll die so today we are going to be playing basketball as part of our lesson. if you get a question right you get a chance to throw a ball into the H E L L P I T and score a point for your team”
someone discovers justintv. gordon never hears the end of it
tommy sits in on his lectures every now and then and always ends up having serious discussions with different groups of students about beyblades
he puts smiley stickers on all the papers gordon grades that get As
this incentivizes more people to get As
gordon’s pass rate every semester is usually close to 100%. his classes aren’t particularly easy, but attendance is always high because it becomes apparent over time that something absolutely buckwild is bound to go down and nobody wants to miss it
this, of course, excludes the day when gordon arrived to an empty classroom. he later learned that it was because benrey stood outside the door for a half hour beforehand and physically barred anyone who wouldn’t present him with their passport from entering
students get tricked into taking thorough notes by listening for details to support their personal theories about gordon’s past
none of them come even remotely close to guessing the truth but gordon gets amusement out of the rumors regardless
whenever he starts to feel bored he’ll throw them a bone just to see where they’ll take it (“make sure you guys remember the concept of wave-particle duality in case you ever end up fighting for your life on an alien planet like i did” “ok now we KNOW he’s just fucking with us”)
he never dips below five stars on ratemyprofessor
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