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Academia AU
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TERROR AND BEAUTY ( joshua, alecto ) A kiss with a fist is better than none: two professors who loathe each other. Enemies to lovers? No, how about enemies and lovers? |
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TERROR AND BEAUTY ( joshua, alecto ) A kiss with a fist is better than none: two professors who loathe each other. Enemies to lovers? No, how about enemies and lovers? |
no subject
"I wouldn't say it was boredom," he replies, his tone even, steady, measured, as though he had given the off-hand question a great deal of thought. He reaches into the folder he is carrying, pulls out an extremely high resolution image of several painstakingly pieced together fragments of old artifacts, scattered faintly with worn out letters, and holds it out for Alecto to see. "I wanted to talk to you about these."
They were fragments of what was likely poetry, source currently unknown, recently unearthed to much interest and excitement in the classical space. The originals were sealed in a vacuum chamber somewhere in Athens, but technology was really amazing these days.
no subject
"Very interesting," he says, genuinely excited but forcing his tone to be even as he pulls out an old key when they reach the very top of the stairs. "Though you could have just sent this all in an email. Was a personal visit really necessary?"
His office is at the end of a dim hallway, his name in a brass card holder by the side on the wall. He unlocks the ornate door and shoulders it open, allowing Josh to walk in first before he follows.
It was a beautiful room, and much bigger than it looked from outside - airy and white with a high vaulted ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the embroidered curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant; their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot and black tea and a faint inky scent of camphor. Everywhere you looked was something beautiful - oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels - a dazzle of fractured color as if you stepped into one of those little Byzantine churches that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt and tesserae.
He sets his things down at the desk, arranging them neatly. He doesn't sit, simply gazes at Josh from across the hardwood.
no subject
"If I sent these to you in an email, you wouldn't even have opened the attachments before saying 'No,'" he replies wryly.
"Besides, some of your students heard our argument two weeks ago about the verba dicendi and word apparently got back to the department chair." He doesn't know why the man was surprised; he'd known about at least their correspondence in publications when he'd made Josh the offer, a correspondence which - while overtly professional - was certainly not indicative of a consistent alignment in perspective. "So I thought I'd make a public statement about not actually wanting to murder you."
no subject
He remembers that argument, remembers having tossed papers in the air dramatically while they raised their voices at each other. He remembers how they got into each other's faces, close enough that their noses bumped as they continued to yell, switching through an alarming variety of languages to insult each other with. He remembers grabbing the front of Josh's shirt, wrinkling it beyond saving and how flushed Josh got, how the red color tinted the tips of his ears, the top curve of his mouth -
"I guess you're right about that. I think I should just go ahead and have your email address blocked anyhow." Ugh, he loathes him.
(And he's so glad he's here.)
"...You can leave the photos there," he gestures to to the table near the armchairs and the tea set. "I'll take a look at them later this evening."
He moves slowly, elegantly, to the front of the desk now, leaning back against it, studying the shape Josh cut against his office door. "...I like what you've done with your hair," he says suddenly. "It looks better, short and pushed back like this."
no subject
He puts the entire folder down on the table, setting the pictures he'd brandished earlier on top of it. He hesitates, almost wanting to explain, but if the pictures themselves weren't compelling to him in and of themselves, this wouldn't have worked anyway.
"Thanks," he says, shortly, but sincere. "I remember you said -" He cuts himself off, gazing back at Alecto, finding himself at a loss for words - a very rare circumstance, for Mr. Joshua Archer. "Well, I'll... get out of yours for now then. It was good to see you." He glances at the folder again, and then slips out the heavy door.
no subject
"Oh, falla finita," he groans under his breath before lifting the volume of his voice, "Joshua, wait." He wonders if he'll regret this later.
Alecto goes to the door in a few quick steps, grabbing Josh's upper arm to prevent him from leaving entirely. He's warm, always has been. It feels like holding the sun in the palm of his hand.
"Stay a while." A beat. Quickly, he adds, "I need a lot more context for those images. Unless you plan on setting me up for failure and embarrassment. Sit. I'll make tea and we can discuss."
no subject
"Alright," he says, a tremor of movement sliding down his spine, and then he turns back into the room, breaking the moment of stasis.
Then he grins. "Like I need to actually plan to set you up for failure." It's very clear he means this as a joke.
no subject
He motions for Josh to grab a seat first as he goes to the water boiler and fusses about with the tea set. Soon, the room is abloom with the smell of brewing darjeeling: warm florals and muscatel. Alecto brings two dainty ceramic tea cups enameled with gold over to the table and settles down next to Josh for once, instead of in front of him. A wordless way to communicate his willingness to collaborate, not fight.
A solid half hour passes as he allows Josh to give him the background of this artifact, its history and provenance, and any significant research already done. Now and again, Alecto interjects with a comment or a personal grievance about method or some tiny linguistic detail, but otherwise he remains content to listen, absorbing what he's told. He's rolled his sleeves up by now, appearing far more casual than he ever would in public, leaning to rest against the back of his seat, ankle crossed at the knee. He makes a stunning picture as the sun begins to set, seeped in hues of burnt gold and orange, as if he were some vintage tintype a lover would keep close to their breast.
no subject
Whatever their disagreements, he trusted Alecto's insights into history and provenance moreso than his own, even if the more obscure principles of interpretation were a subject of constant debate. He sips at his tea initially, to be polite, but it goes cold quickly as he gets more and more absorbed in the conversation, leaning in to emphasize a particular point, his foot brushing absently against Alecto's leg when he stretches out.
But now it came to the crux of the matter. "One of the candidates I'm supervising is working on some code; to combine multiple layers of imaging into a coherent 3-D model." He points to two of the pictures, virtual slices in the artifact's cracked layers. "None of these layers form a complete thought on their own; it's not possible to tell in isolation whether a mark is debris or deliberate. But -" he reaches for Alecto's hand, automatic, unthinking, slides their palms together, in illustration "- like this, it might be possible to better extrapolate. But that just gets us a clearer image. They'd need an expert to oversee the virtual reconstruction, to make sure all the pieces are properly aligned, that it's consistent with the appropriate alphabet and grammar."
"But at the end of the day..." There'd be an image of a complete artifact, legible, readable. The few fading marks that were still visible seemed to indicate a poem or writing of some kind, the vague outline of several stanzas. And maybe it would only be a copy of something, or something else entirely. But it seemed exactly the kind of puzzle that might appeal to Alecto Crabtree.
no subject
As they studied this present mystery together, Alecto had picked up on one of the active verbs carved into the artifact in the photo and that threw them down again another avenue talking about loss of self, about Plato's four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; Alecto became colorful and animated, rambling about what he called the burden of the self and why people want to lose the self in the first place -
And so another hour passes.
And when their hands come together suddenly, a symmetry of palm to palm, fingertip to fingertip, bone to bone, Alecto starts. He stares, staying still, as Josh goes on to talk about technology, and 3D and other acronyms for things inside of complicated computers that Alecto usually balked at. But he has, this time, no objections. All he can seem to focus on is that skin to skin contact, a very physical representation of the mental connection they've just forged -
Josh starts to trail off and the silence that falls manages to shake Alecto from his disrupted state. He stares at their joined hands and slowly, consciously untangles them. He clears his throat, awkwardly.
"Well. Consider me deeply interested. I've made some notes," he says, placing his small notebook down next to the photos on the table, his lines of cursive written in a masculine, rather nineteenth-century hand, with Greek e's. The ink was still wet. "And I'd be happy to take this on. It's been a long time since I've found such an odd puzzle to work through. So -" He looks Josh directly in the eye, their faces very close. "Thank you for this. Though I will have to see about moving my schedule around a bit. This semester I've signed on to do a bit more than I would have liked." He murmurs something else about timing and the pains of having to be a student advisor and the terribly dull theses he had to oversee this year.
no subject
They'd never had an opportunity - unless you counted the back-and-forth of their editorial correspondence as such - to really collaborate on something, to actually bring both aspects of their expertise. For all that Josh considered the realm of classical studies old-fashioned, somewhat outdated, he'd been just as fascinated by it when he'd first embarked on his academic career; in the end, he'd strayed hardly at all, even with the addition of technology and computers and programming added into the mix. Still deeply invested in the ways and philosophies of thought that underlay modern day developments, the thread of history that connected them to the people of the past, not just the past on its own. All the tools they had to decipher and learn and piece together that puzzle, seeking common humanity.
"For my student, of course," he adds, off-handed, a little too late to be completely natural, however genuine the sentiment, and then leans back again, glancing out the window with a startled look.
"It's...late," he says, apologetic. "Thank you-" for your time springs to his tongue, the trite formality of professionalism, something he could say or sign politely in five or six languages. But it seems far too small for what this had turned into, an olive branch extended and accepted, an opportunity to see each other in a new context.