kingdon co-teacher au - 2k - gen (for now)
frank pov companion to emotional consonance
At some point during his second attempt at rehab, Frank realizes that his life can be measured by a series of small, idiotic choices compounded by genuinely bad decisions—most of which were made with either good intentions or a complete lack of forethought—that ultimately snowballed into huge fucking messes.
Sometimes, when he’s failing to fall asleep in a too-empty apartment or sitting in traffic in a too-quiet car or zoning out during a too-boring staff meeting, he likes to picture different flow charts spelling out each step of his dumbassery:
EXHIBIT A (ROBBY): EYE CONTACT ➡️ ALMOST LOSING HIS JOB
(continued below / read on ao3)
Small, idiotic choice: When he overheard Robby invite Heather out for drinks at the end of the day a month into his first year teaching, Frank made inadvertent but lingering eye contact with both Robby and Heather
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Genuinely bad decision #1: Despite hearing the awkwardness in his voice when Robby added, “and you’re welcome to join too, Langdon,” Frank still jumped at the chance to get to know his new department chair and hopefully impress him by being cool and charming (two things Frank had, of course, never been accused of being)
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Genuinely bad decision #2: Staying at the bar after Heather left and getting Robby to confide in him about that whole situation, even though he had a wife and baby waiting for him at home, because he was still trying to be respected or liked or understood
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Genuinely bad decision #7: Telling Robby about his dad and his substance use issues and how desperately he wanted his approval, even though Robby was a coworker and “new teacher mentor” and had never given any indication he actually liked Frank as a person, not just a teacher or sounding board for his issues.
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HUGE FUCKING MESS: Robby blowing the fuck up when he found out about Frank’s little benzo issue, even though he was handling it, dammit, and making him self-report and then submit for leave and enter a rehab program without stopping to talk to Frank or anyone else who had been through similar programs or self-reported as a teacher; Frank isn’t obtuse enough to blame Robby for ending his marriage, because Frank had been doing that well enough on his own, but he definitely sped along its demise by bursting into Frank’s house with the key Frank had given him in some mistaken bid for friendship (bad decision #15) and telling Abby everything without giving Frank a goddamn second to breathe
That’s the flowchart he returns to the most, but he has a few other he likes (hates) to run through: Exhibit B (Back) - Moving His Parents ➡️ Drug Addiction; Exhibit C (Bunny) - Making Abby Think He Hates Talking About His Feelings ➡️ Being Stuck with a Goldendoodle; Exhibit D (Charlie) - Watching South Park ➡️ Outing His Sister in High School.
His therapist Leanne is fucking fascinated by this thought pattern, of course, when he mentions it on one of the days he feels only 30% present, so tired he can barely keep his eyes open but unable to sleep for anything. She asks him to draw one, so he goes with Exhibit D; it’s more of a dull ache by now instead of the overwhelming guilt that threatens to drown him when he revisits Exhibits A, B, or C. She listens attentively as he recounts the absolutely cringeworthy series of events that led him to 1. not understand that homophobia was a real thing when he 2. told his class that he thought his sister liked girls so that 3. Charlie got shit the rest of her time in Erie.
(Charlie has banned him from apologizing for it. She says it’s mostly a funny story and that it’s actually kind of sweet that he couldn’t understand why anyone would be homophobic. She would not be impressed to hear that he’s still thinking about it enough that his therapist now knows the story.)
Leanne studies his flow chart for long enough that he would be anxious if his body was capable of feeling anything other than exhausted.
“Usually flow charts have at least one point where the arrows branch,” she says, setting the paper down. “This is more of a timeline than a flow chart. Do you ever include the other choices you could have made on these?”
It makes Frank feel like a fucking idiot, which is surely not her intention, because duh. Flow charts show how something flows.
“I guess I’m not really used to thinking about options,” he admits, which feels like an unbelievably dumb thing for an adult—a father, a teacher, an ex-husband, an addict—to say out loud. “I just do the thing that seems like what you’re supposed to do.”
Leanne hums in the way that Frank has come to learn, two stints in rehab later, is therapist non-verbal speak for “you’ve said something very troubling and therefore fascinating. Prepare to learn about yourself.”
So he sits in Leanne’s office, a space that feels genuinely calming, not like it’s forcing you to notice how muted and reserved and therefore serene it is (he’s qualified to judge, at this point), and makes his stupid little timelines, except he’s supposed to make them into actual flow charts.
Leanne has to prompt him at first (what could you have done instead of going to the bar? Who else could you have confided in about your father? How else could you have built a professional relationship with Robby?), but he gets the hang of it. When their time is almost up, he feels like Leanne has taken the checkers game of mental torture he created for himself and turned it into chess, which makes it even less likely he’ll ever be able to turn his brain off enough for him to sleep.
“I understand why it might seem that way to you,” Leanne says, when he tells her some probably-incoherent version of that, and it does seem like she’s genuinely trying to understand his perspective, which is one of the things he likes about her. “The reason I wanted to spend time on this is because decision making and cognitive flexibility are skills, and we need to practice skills in order to master or apply them. I mean, I know I don’t need to tell you that.”
Another thing about Leanne: she used to be a teacher. He feels like he spends 70% less time explaining context when he tells her stories about work than he did with any other therapist he had. It’s awesome.
“Clearly, this isn’t a skill you’re used to applying in your personal life,” she continues. “And these examples are top-of-mind and vivid to you. My hope is that you’ll start seeing yourself as more of an active participant in your personal life, rather than going along the path of least resistance or the path marked by others as right for you, and an important part of that is being able to hold multiple possibilities in your mind at once.”
(He can see her background as a teacher in moments like this, when she automatically clarifies that this is all about his personal life because she understands how many decisions he has to make at school. It’s something they return to frequently, the disconnect between his ability to accomplish things and follow through and show up and succeed in the classroom and his complete dysfunction outside of it. He thinks it frustrates her a little, how he can’t transfer skills, but maybe she views it as a fun challenge. At least, that’s what he chooses to believe.)
“This is some of that owl shit again, isn’t it?” he asks suspiciously. He’s onto her.
Leanne chuckles. “If by ‘owl shit’ you mean the wise mind, then yes, but I would be curious to learn how it’s been coded like that in your brain.”
Frank squints, trying to recreate the ladder of word association he might have fallen down before. It clicks.
“Wise, wise girl, Annabeth from Percy Jackson, Athena, Athena’s symbol was an owl, owl,” he rattles off, bouncing his leg. Watching the new Percy Jackson show had been a nice distraction for, like, two days of his forced leave. He’s not usually a fantasy guy or whatever (besides Lord of the Rings, which is more like a religion), but he can’t wait for Tanner to be old enough for it.
“Of course,” Leanne agrees. He thinks that Leanne is stopping herself from looking too visibly amused. He loves making therapists crack. “Anyway, I don’t want you to stay up all night playing—” She glances down at her notes. “—'chess games of mental torture,’ but I do want you to try to notice the times in your personal life when you make decisions. I’m not asking you to make different decisions that you normally or otherwise would, just to notice when they come up.”
“I’ll try,” he says, since he’s doing this crazy new thing called not making promises you don’t intend to keep and he has a shockingly low success rate at completing his therapy homework. He knows he’d be able to do them if Leanne set up a gradebook and entered Missings in for the assignments he fails to complete, but she thought he was joking when he asked about it. He loves getting good grades. It’s what makes him so good at teaching AP Chem: all those little nerds’ brains work the exact same way his does.
(Before rehab, he chose not to have that thought while reading through their 504 plans for ADHD and Anxiety and Depression, but he’s had time now to acclimate to it all. He’s a little worried about that when he goes back to work, the idea that he’ll start to see substance disorders in students in a way that he used to be able to ignore.)
As predicted, he forgets about his homework the second he walks out the door, and he has some new and urgent concerns the next time he sees Leanne, so it falls by the wayside. He also figures out a new method to calm his brain and fall asleep (jerking off in the shower right before bed, weirdly, and it makes him feel fifteen again), so he has less time to chart out his failures. He forgets about it altogether for a while.
It’s a surprise, then, that he finds himself flashing back to Leanne’s office and her chess torture practice on his first day back at PTMHS when he mentions the science department group chat (small, idiotic choice) and watches Mel King’s face crumple and carefully smooth itself out, like she can erase her emotions by pretending they don’t exist. Or maybe that she just shouldn’t let anybody else see them? He’s not sure what to make of how much he wants to know which it is, actually.
That’s the moment that he makes a decision that will inevitably snowball into a huge fucking mess, even though he doesn’t think it’s a bad one. He can’t ever bring himself to regret doing anything that helps her.
“Hey, let’s go back to the room so you can check out what we’ll be working with and we can figure this out,” he says, and he’s watching closely enough to see the flash of excitement on her face before she tamps it down. He wonders what it would take to make her smile big enough that she can’t hide it, and then how far he would go to find out.
I have the power to make my own decisions, he reminds himself. I don’t have to take the path of least resistance.
It turns out to be a good mantra to have, since the decision to care about Mel King is certainly not the path of least resistance.
ace4ace mel x langdon my LOVE my LIFE in literally every way. grey/demi-aroace spec Mel who has never allowed herself to consider relationships because she doesn't have the time and doesn't care that much in the first place - until wait a second suddenly she cares a LOT. sex-favorable or sex-indifferent langdon who didn't MIND having sex with abby but is thrilled that his schedule has opened up for his more favored activities of cooking for mel or watching docuseries together. a kingdon who have only come to terms with both being sex averse now that they feel so comfortable in their relationship together. a kingdon who are sex-favorable/neutral who have sex once a year just as like, a way to spend time together on a thursday evening. langdon who is throwing off the yoke of heteronormativity and mel who is living a life she didn't know she could have. ace4ace kingdon my everything
i thoroughly approve!!!!
i mostly live in the headspace of extremely-demi!mel and demier-than-he-ever-thought!frank treating sex as exploration and just trying shit out and figuring out what they do and don't like (there are a lot of things they don't like!) but viewing it mostly as a way of being closer to each other and getting to know each other better. as a form of play no different than dressing up for ren faire. and them having a lot of fun with it but only because it's each other and not because they need sex in general.
BUT. BUT BUT BUT.
i can absolutely see your vision and i think it's incredible! i'm very into the idea of frank not ever even considering whether he really wants sex or not because sex is just what you do, especially when you're a hot straight guy with a hot girlfriend and then wife. and he was good at sex! because he wasn't really worried about himself while he was having it, he could pay close attention and learn very quickly what things his partner liked and didn't like. when things were good with abby, he really enjoyed making her come! and the praise he got for it! and feeling like he was accomplished at something! etc.
he starts to suspect that mel is a virgin but honestly he could not care less about that, he's looking just forward to sex with her because he's just so excited about the idea of making her feel good in another, newer way. he has skills and he is going to use them to make melissa king feel INCREDIBLE and maybe get her brilliant million-miles-an-hour brain to pause for a few minutes. like that post about enjoying closing tabs in your wife's brain: he loves doing little tasks for mel that she finds overwhelming, giving her one less thing to worry about, taking on certain responsibilities so she doesn't have to worry about them. and he thinks maybe sex can be another form of that, so he's psyched about it. and maybe he will also come sometimes but he doesn't really care about that.
so when they finally get together, he starts to lead them towards sex because that's what you DO. and they definitely both adore cuddling and being as physically close to each other as possible and maybe they also like kissing who knows? so it's okay at first but with each step, mel is getting more and more tense. and he's like ??? but she keeps reassuring him that she loves him, she wants to be close to him, he should keep going.
but once they get to some heavy petting, he's like "no way in hell, something is wrong, we are not doing more until we work this out." so she finally bursts and tells him that, yes, she's in love with him, she wants to be his partner in everything for the rest of her life, she wants to be close to him all the time and climb into his skin, but she just doesn't want to have sex?
she thought she could do it even though she'd really never thought about sex before him. like, before she met him, she was just so sure that she'd never find someone who would love her as much as she loved them and also be willing to put up with the hard parts of her life, so she'd pretty much made peace with never having any kind of romantic partner.
until she met him. and then she wanted all that stuff so so so bad, like sometimes she felt like her inner organs and skeleton had been removed and replaced with yearning for him, and she just assumed that the sexual attraction would accompany the other kinds of wanting. how could it not? sure, she'd never thought about sex beyond masturbating every couple of months when she needed the release, but that was just a physical thing, as purely functional as eating or drinking water. but that was before she was in love! now she's in love and she loves frank's body because it's part of him and also because it's extremely aesthetically appealing, so surely if she acclimates herself to the idea of sex, it will be good with him specifically.
after all, cuddling and sometimes kissing are the pleasurable kind of intense stimulation. she especially likes it when they're naked together, skin against skin. she loves wrapping herself around him or having him weigh her down. she pretty much always has her legs in his lap when they're reading on the couch or lets him rest his head on her chest while they lie in bed. she's so comfortable with his body in a way that she'd never dreamed of being comfortable with anyone else's. so surely, surely, she's been telling herself, she'll reach the point where she's comfortable with sex.
but now they're here, they're trying to do it for real, and it turns out that no, her body and brain just don't want that, not even with him.
and she's practically crying trying to reassure him that it's definitely not him, it's her, if there was anyone in the world she'd want to have sex with, it's definitely him, and if it's important to him, she will try to learn how to be okay with it, but it might take her a while because the fluids and the stickiness and the super intense sensations are just too much to even think about now, much less actually experience, but she'll work on it, she will, please don't break up with her, she can be a real girlfriend, she can.
...and if she can't, if she really can't, if she really tries and it just doesn't happen, maybe he can, like, have casual sex with strangers to meet that need she can't meet? except she hates the thought of that, hates it so much that it almost makes her ill, even though she would never judge anyone else for an arrangement like that and thinks it's fine for other people. but even though she doesn't want to be intimate with him like that, she's just absolutely heartbroken at the thought of him being intimate with someone else.
and she's so scared that this is going to be a deal breaker, that she's going to lose this perfect thing she's only just starting to believe she even has, that it's even possible for her to have.
but of course it wasn't possible. not for someone like her. she shouldn't have started to believe it.
meanwhile, frank is cycling through every stage of grief and every other emotion known to man. he's horrified that mel would try to push herself to do something she doesn't want to do. he's full of self-loathing at the idea that if he'd kept going, she would have just let him. (stupid boy! later, she will explain to him that she knows he never, ever would have kept going if he didn't believe she was 100% into it, like that's not even a question for her.) he's so relieved he could die that she still wants to be with him and cuddle with him. he's even sicker than she is at the thought of him going out to find someone else to have sex with.
his brain is doing the spinny loading thing, his mouth hanging open like an idiot, his eyes glazed over, and mel, weepy and panicking, can't read him at all.
and then he snaps out of it. does he break into almost-hysterical laughter? maybe! but either way the conversation ends with him cradling her face in his hands and telling her that as far as he's concerned, they never have to have sex ever. as long as she lets him live with her and take care of her and make her laugh and hold her and cook for her and learn every single thing about her, that's all he's ever going to need and more than he ever thought to ask for.
and maybe it takes her some time to actually believe that. like, at first she's pretty sure he's just saying that because he loves her and he thinks it's the right thing to do. she's heard enough allo people talk about sex, especially men (if she comes from a conservative background, she's probably heard it framed as sex being something all men need the way they need oxygen, that they think about sex every seven minutes, etc.). so she's constantly worried that he really, really wishes they could have sex and he subconsciously believes she'll come around eventually and that he'll resent her for still not wanting it.
things get easier after he explains that, really, he's never cared all that much about sex for its own sake, that he only had it with abby because abby wanted it and it was a way he could make her feel good, and he just always assumed that people were exaggerating when they talked about needing sex. that before he met abby and since they stopped sleeping together (long before their marriage officially ended), he didn't think about sex at all. that if mel broke up with him, he'd just be single forever because a) no one else would satisfy him after he's had a taste of mel and b) he just really doesn't care about sex, mel, he really doesn't.
it still takes a while for her to fully internalize that he means it. but she sees the pleasure he takes in cooking for her and running errands with her and playing with the kids with her and sharing audiobooks and tv shows with her and holding her at night and introducing her as his girlfriend and all that other stuff. and how over the moon he is when she takes care of him and develops an intensive pain management plan for him and runs interference with abby when things get tense and stands up for him to robby and tells him how good he is at things and how beautiful he is to her and what a good dad he is and how much she loves his kids.
that isn't put on. frank is so, so happy. even the bad pain days or the times when he almost relapses, even when they argue or misunderstand each other, even when she has a rare meltdown and he has to take charge of the unpleasant situation, even when they're both stressed balancing their very demanding jobs with their caretaking responsibilities...even then, she can't deny that this is what he wants. that he chose her and this life and he clearly wants it. and once whatever rough patch they hit is smoothed over, he goes back to being incandescently happy.
and that's when she starts to trust it. not that she ever thought he was lying to her, she just thought maybe he was lying to himself. but no. what she can give him is enough for him. he doesn't need something she can't give, and he doesn't even feel like he's missing out on something he might have with someone else. this is another way they're alike, underneath all their surface differences. this is another way they fit together.
Atlantic Puffins. The adult puffins return to the cliffs around 21:00 to bring food back to the nests, and the golden hour light is perfect for photographs.
photos by me. 2025-06-07, Runde, Norway. Our trip was so, so wonderful.
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