[[the grad school AU literally no one asked for]]

Re-uploading this as a series of linked drabbles, because that's more how I see it playing out—so if you've seen it before, what was once one chapter is now three.

In a roundabout way this will contain something of a TLJ spoiler, but mostly of the variety of those Facebook posts that are all, "The Last Jedi spoilers but I give you no context." Otherwise, this is very much not TLJ spoilers, so much as it is my non-Star Wars-versed brain transplanting two characters into a context I understand much better: graduate school.

P.S.: I own nothing.

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Solo

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Rey dislikes the new postdoc immediately: he's in the way in the lab. He's getting too much attention. He's making Dr. Skywalker weirdly edgy. And he's kind of stupid handsome.

Dr. Solo, he's called. Just his name makes Rey want to roll her eyes. She doesn't speak to him if she can help it, but as it is, she can't help it—all because of her stupid office.

At first it was an honor, getting moved out of her shared office into the private one that used to be Poe's. Now Dr. Dameron, he was off to his own postdoc; and he'd been one of the department's star researchers. Rey liked to think that the office meant something, that she was following in his footsteps—but since the start of the semester with Dr. Solo, she's learned the error of her assumptions. The one private graduate office is directly next door to the one private postdoc office—so that every time her new colleague has a question, guess whose door he comes knocking on.

"Rey," he repeats.

He's standing in the doorway to her office—a door she hadn't thought she'd need to close, as it's late on a Wednesday evening. Rey was sure no one would be here except for the handful of staff who clean the building after dark. She has earbuds in, but she can't keep pretending she doesn't hear him.

"Yes?" she asks, coolly, removing the earbuds.

"I don't seem to have my key to the mailroom."

"You don't keep it with your office key?"

"I, ah," he glances at the wall behind her. "Well, that's the problem."

"You locked your keys in the mailroom?" Rey can't help but sound incredulous. Solo is so physically imposing in the doorframe, but half the time he opens his mouth he doesn't seem like he has the guts to be researching for Dr. Snoke, much less already through his degree. His dark hair messily frames his face, and his eyes look weary—as if he's already been losing sleep, this early on.

In response to her question, Solo just frowns at her.

They're not a week into the semester and he's already bothered her seven times. He can't work the copier. He needs paper for the printer. He keeps forgetting how to get to different parts of the building, the idiot. –Never mind that the building is a weird architectural mishap in an ill-conceived yin-and-yang-inspired color scheme: some hallways and classrooms are done in white-painted cinderblock and tile and others are black tile and—horror of horrors in a science building—carpet. The labs are and grad students are all in the white parts of the building; only the professors' offices are in the "dark" sections. It's a running joke, that the professors' home base is "the dark side"—just one of the small ways Rey and her colleagues comfort themselves under the constant unreasonable demands of finishing their graduate degrees.

Not that she'd share that with Solo. He has no sense of humor. "Fine," she stands, grabbing her own keys from where they are next to her on the desk, wondering how long she'll have to babysit this man who can't do anything for himself. "Let's walk down there and check."