Professor! Abby Anderson x Reader
**THIS IS AN AU CHARACTER PERSONALITIES MAY NOT MATCH UP TO CANON**
i wrote this half asleep lowkey
Her fingertips drifted absently up and down your arms, the slow rhythm almost enough to lull you to sleep. The fire crackled nearby, filling the room with soft pops that settled into the silence between you.
You shifted against her, your thoughts wandering until one landed with enough force to pull a smile onto your face. "You know what I want?" you asked, tipping your head back to look at her.
Professor Anderson lowered her chin and brushed a kiss against your hair before meeting your eyes. "What is that?" she asked, the corner of her mouth lifting as though she already expected the answer to be ridiculous.
A quiet laugh escaped you. "A Dr Pepper from the gas station."
She let out an amused breath through her nose, her shoulders shaking faintly. "Is that all?" She tilted her head, studying you for another moment before glancing toward the kitchen. "Do you want to take my car?"
You sat upright so quickly the blanket slid into your lap. "Seriously?" The excitement in your voice made her smile widen.
"I wouldn't have offered if I didn't mean it." She pointed toward the kitchen counter where her keys rested beside a bowl of fruit. "Go ahead."
You climbed off the couch, already shuffling toward the counter before she stopped you.
"Oh." She reached into the pocket of her slacks, pulled out her wallet, and slipped a twenty-dollar bill free. "Here." She held it out between two fingers. "Get me a Snickers."
You accepted it with a grin. "Okay." Your smile only grew wider. "Thank you."
Before you could leave, she caught your hand gently. Her fingers wrapped around yours for only a moment, but her expression turned unexpectedly serious. "Drive carefully."
The garage door groaned overhead as you pressed the wall button, cool evening air spilling inside while the opening widened. You climbed into the driver's seat, adjusted it slightly, and slid the key into the ignition. The engine rumbled awake beneath your hands, vibrating softly through the steering wheel.
You backed slowly into the driveway.
For a few quiet minutes, you let yourself imagine a different future.
Your degree would become more than sleepless nights and borrowed textbooks. One day, you'd have your own real paycheck with your name printed across it. You'd be able to buy groceries without checking your bank balance first. Maybe you'd have enough to help with the bills instead of always feeling guilty for needing help yourself. The future stretched out before you in small, ordinary dreams that suddenly felt enormous.
You smiled to yourself as the tires hummed against the pavement. The engine purred beneath your hands while the highway unfurled ahead, bordered by dark pines that swallowed the last traces of daylight. For a few peaceful miles, it was easy to believe your life had finally begun moving toward somewhere better.
The sharp vibration of your phone shattered the quiet.
Your smile faded as your eyes dropped to the screen glowing inside the cup holder.
The sight of her name pulled the warmth from your chest as quickly as it had arrived. Marnie never called without a reason. She preferred texting, filling your phone with little updates and blurry pictures whenever she missed you. A phone call meant urgency.
At least it wasn't your mother.
You swallowed the thought before it could spiral into something darker. Keeping one hand on the wheel, you reached toward the glowing screen, accepted the call, and tapped the speaker button as the highway stretched endlessly ahead.
"Ruby?" Your little sister's voice came through the speakers, small and trembling.
You swallowed. "Hey, Mar." Your own voice softened instinctively. "What's going on?"
She sniffled loudly before answering. "I miss you." Her voice cracked on the last word.
You tightened your grip on the steering wheel. "I miss you too." You forced a small laugh that fooled neither of you. "How's everything?"
Marnie let out a bitter scoff. "Not good." You heard her wipe at her face before she continued. "You already know."
You closed your eyes for the briefest second at a stoplight. "Yeah." The word barely left your mouth.
She drew a shaky breath. "Can you come see me?" The question hung between you. "I could use my sister right now."
You loved Marnie more fiercely than you knew how to explain. You would've crossed the country for her.
But home wasn't simply a place.
You shook your head even though she couldn't see you. "I'm sorry." The apology felt painfully inadequate. "I've got exams coming up." You laughed weakly, trying to make the excuse sound less cruel. "And..." You stared through the windshield. "I don't have the money."
Before Marnie could answer, raised voices burst through the speaker. The sudden shouting was muffled at first, as though the phone had been pressed against her chest, but your mother's voice cut through the chaos almost immediately. Even distorted by the speaker, you recognized that sharp, familiar anger.
Marnie's protest broke off halfway through the sentence. You heard hurried footsteps, the rustle of fabric, and the scrape of the phone changing hands. A second later, the line steadied, and your mother's breathing filled the silence before she spoke.
Then your mother's voice replaced hers. "So you hang up on me," she spat, "but not Marnie?"
"She called me." You kept your voice quiet, hoping calm might keep the conversation from turning into another fight.
The argument swelled until it drowned out every other sound. Your mother's voice crashed over Marnie's, each sentence louder than the last, while Marnie tried to speak through sobs that kept catching in her throat. A bitter laugh cut through the shouting, followed almost immediately by another cry.
The voices tangled together until they became impossible to separate. Anger, laughter, pleading, weeping, they blurred into one familiar noise, the same chaos that had echoed through your childhood home for as long as you could remember.
You pulled into the gas station while the argument continued through your speakers, the bright white canopy lights washing over the windshield. Tires crunched across old salt and gravel as you eased into a parking space.
A sharp cry split through the speaker, so sudden your hands locked around the steering wheel. Before your mind could convince itself it had been something else, another followed, thinner this time, strangled by sobs. Beneath the shouting came the dull, familiar sound you had spent years trying to forget.
Your mother had hit Marnie.
Your breath snagged halfway into your lungs. Every muscle in your body went rigid as your pulse roared in your ears, drowning out the argument still spilling from the phone. Before you had time to think, your thumb jabbed the screen, ending the call.
Silence crashed into the car.
The absence of voices rang louder than the screaming had. You sat frozen behind the wheel, staring through the windshield without seeing the gas pumps in front of you. Your chest refused to rise, your fingers clamped around the steering wheel until they ached.
Finally, you shut off the engine and climbed out of the car. You left the driver's door hanging open behind you, too numb to notice, while the cool night air slipped beneath your pajamas. Beneath the fluorescent lights, your body refused another step, as though it had forgotten how to move.
Across the parking lot, the red numbers on the gas price sign burned through the darkness so brightly they could have been the sun. You stared without blinking until your eyes stopped trying to keep them in focus. The glowing numbers softened at the edges, split into two shimmering images, then fractured again. Each point of light multiplied, scattering across the darkness until the gas prices no longer looked like numbers at all.
You swallowed hard, unable to look away.
Was this what Genesis looked like?
Tears pooled along your lower lashes, bending the light until every glowing point divided again. New stars flared into existence at the edges of your vision, multiplying without hurry until the black sky was no longer a sky at all but an endless expanse strewn with distant fire. One star became two. Two unraveled into dozens. Soon there were hundreds suspended before you, each one trembling against the next, galaxies unfolding behind your unfocused gaze as though creation itself had chosen this lonely parking lot to begin again.
For one impossible moment, the parking lot ceased to exist.
You watched the first light tear through endless darkness. You watched the universe split itself open beneath a force so immense it gave birth to stars, to planets, to suns that would burn for billions of years before collapsing into silence again. It was beautiful in the same way a wildfire was beautiful from miles away, too vast to comprehend, too violent to survive.
A thought settled quietly inside you.
Maybe creation had always sounded like screaming.
Not thunder rolling across an empty sky. Not the voice of God speaking life into the darkness. Not music. Just a little girl begging her mother to stop.
Your chest tightened until breathing became an effort. The stars no longer looked eternal. They looked wounded, fragments hurled across an infinite sky by a catastrophe so enormous that, given enough time, people forgot it had ever been an explosion at all. They simply called it the beginning.
Maybe every universe began with violence. Maybe stars were only beautiful because something unimaginably catastrophic had happened first. Worlds weren't born gently. They exploded into existence, scattering broken pieces across endless darkness until enough time passed that people stopped calling them ruins and started calling them constellations.
Your mother had always been her own kind of gravity. Every room bent around her moods. Every conversation curved toward her anger. Every child she brought into the world learned to orbit the same unpredictable force, circling carefully, endlessly, hoping this time they wouldn't be pulled too close.
You had spent your childhood measuring the distance between safety and the sound of her footsteps, learning that love could disappear as quickly as a slammed door and return only long enough to make you question whether the bruises had ever been real.
The stars continued drifting apart. Maybe that was all growing up had ever been. Not becoming someone new, but gathering enough distance from the thing that kept trying to pull you back.
Maybe you had always been Pluto.
A lonely body wandering through the wrong solar system, circling a sun that had never claimed you. No matter how faithfully you returned, you remained too distant to warm, too small to matter, existing only because no one had found a way to erase you completely.
You wondered if a cruel god had placed you inside a family whose gravity was never meant to hold you. Every orbit ended the same way. You drifted close enough to hope for warmth, only to be flung back into the cold before you could convince yourself you belonged.
Maybe that was your purpose.
To keep circling the people you loved while watching them suffer simply because you existed beside them.
Your mother suffered. Marnie suffered. Even Professor Anderson had inherited the wreckage you carried. The farther you looked, the more your life resembled a trail of debris scattered behind a dying planet. Everywhere you went, someone bled. Someone cried. Someone was left carrying a weight that should never have been theirs.
Maybe the universe wasn't punishing you. Maybe it had simply written you into the wrong constellation, and everyone who wandered too close became another casualty of the collision.
The question had followed you ever since the day you packed your belongings and drove away for college, lingering in the back of your mind no matter how hard you tried to outrun it. You hadn't turned down that street once since leaving. You hadn't driven past the cracked sidewalks, the sagging porch, or the windows where you used to watch the neighborhood from behind locked doors. Pretending the house no longer existed had always been easier than admitting you were terrified of what still waited inside it.
A cold gust slipped beneath your sweater and pajama pants, raising goosebumps across your skin. The chill barely registered. Tears rolled quietly down your cheeks, warm against your face before disappearing beneath your jaw, and this time you didn't bother wiping them away.
Why didn't your mother love you?
The question had changed as you'd grown older. As a little girl, you'd wondered what you'd done wrong. As a teenager, you'd convinced yourself that if you cleaned more, argued less, earned better grades, or stayed invisible long enough, she'd finally look at you with kindness.
Now you were an adult, and the question had become quieter, heavier, stripped of hope but no less painful.
Why keep having children if loving them never seemed to matter?
You dragged your sleeve across your face with more force than necessary, willing yourself to stop crying before anyone noticed.
After drawing a shaky breath, you forced your feet toward the entrance. The automatic doors slid apart with a mechanical chime, and a wave of warm air greeted you, carrying the familiar scent of burnt coffee, rolling hot dogs, spilled soda syrup, and old floor cleaner.
The convenience store felt strangely ordinary.
A man stood near the coffee station stirring powdered creamer into his cup. Two teenagers laughed quietly in front of the refrigerated drinks. The cashier scanned lottery tickets for an older woman without sparing anyone else a glance. The world continued moving exactly as it always had, untouched by the sound of your little sister crying through a phone speaker only moments before.
You wandered to the soda fountain and filled a paper cup with Dr Pepper, watching the dark soda splash against the ice until it reached the rim. Then you found a Snickers bar near the register, set it on the counter, and paid without looking at the total. You couldn't have described the cashier afterward if someone had asked. The entire exchange passed in a blur.
The cool night air met you again as you stepped outside.
Professor Anderson's car waited beneath the canopy lights, its polished black paint reflecting the harsh fluorescent glow in long ribbons across the hood. It looked impossibly clean, impossibly expensive, untouched by the kind of life you'd grown up in.
You stood there with your drink in one hand and the candy bar in the other, staring at the car while your thoughts drifted somewhere far beyond the parking lot.
Part of you wanted to turn the key, drive home, and pull Marnie out of that house no matter what happened afterward. Another part of you wanted to keep driving in the opposite direction until the road ended, protecting the fragile life you'd finally begun to build.
You closed your eyes and drew a slow, trembling breath before opening them again, the cold air burning your lungs as reality settled heavily back onto your shoulders.
Instead, you drove back to Professor Anderson's house.
The ride passed in a blur. The Dr Pepper sweated quietly in the cup holder while the Snickers rested untouched on the passenger seat. You couldn't remember a single turn you made. By the time you pulled into the driveway, the numbness had settled so deeply inside you that climbing out of the car felt mechanical.
You carried the soda and candy inside before quietly closing the front door behind you.
Professor Anderson had changed the television.
The nature documentary was gone, replaced by another one. A pride of lions wandered across a sunburnt savanna, golden grass bending beneath the wind while a calm narrator explained their hunting patterns.
You set her keys on the coffee table with a dull clink. "Can we watch something else?" you asked, the words leaving your mouth sharper than you'd intended.
Professor Anderson paused halfway through a bite of her Snickers. Her brows drew together as she slowly turned her head toward you, studying your face before she answered.
"We can," she said evenly. "If you ask me properly."
Instead, you collapsed onto the couch beside her, letting your body sink into the cushions. You set the Dr Pepper on the coffee table without opening it and pressed the heel of your hand against your forehead, trying to quiet the pounding behind your eyes.
The documentary continued playing. A lioness stalked through tall grass while the narrator's steady voice filled the room.
Professor Anderson remained silent.
Instead, she watched you. Her attention never drifted back to the television, lingering on your face until the quiet between you became impossible to ignore.
Her attention lingered just long enough for the silence to become unbearable.
Before she could ask what was wrong, the words burst out of you. "Why do people have children if they're just going to be cruel to them?"You scowled, sipping your doctor pepper.
Professor Anderson lowered the candy bar into her lap without taking another bite. Her expression softened, concern quietly replacing the mild irritation she'd worn only moments before.
"Did your mother call again?" she asked.
You let out a bitter laugh that caught halfway through your throat. "My sister did." Your fingers tightened around the edge of the couch. "Then my mother took the phone."
Professor Anderson nodded slowly, giving your words room to settle before speaking again. "How are you feeling?"
You looked at her, anger rising so quickly it surprised even you.
She didn't flinch beneath your glare. "You can tell me," she said gently.
A sharp breath escaped your nose. "What's the point?" you snapped. "You'll never understand."
Professor Anderson held your gaze for a long moment before giving a small nod. "You're right," she admitted quietly. "There are parts of your life I can never truly understand."
Her honesty only frustrated you more. "No." You dropped your eyes to your hands. "It's all of it." Your voice had lost its edge, leaving only exhaustion behind. "You don't understand any of it." You swallowed hard. "Your mother loved you."
Professor Anderson looked down at the Snickers bar in her hand before turning it over once between her fingers.
"My mother died when I was young," she said softly. A faint, humorless smile crossed her face. "I was still a child." She looked back at you. "There wasn't much time for either of us to disappoint the other."
You stared at her, guilt washing over your face. "I'm sorry," you whispered. "I... I forgot."
Professor Anderson gave a small shrug, her expression remaining calm. "I know." She rested the candy bar on the coffee table. "It's alright." There wasn't any resentment in her voice.
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