Chapter Text
With every passing day, Martin Blackwood became more and more convinced he was a masochist.
The primary evidence to this point was, of course, that he’d committed himself to studying Classics at university, a course which required the work ethic of an engineer and rewarded that time and effort with about as many job prospects as one might expect for an eight-year-old with a LEGO set. Martin had spent many hours throughout secondary school and sixth form trying to convince his mother—and himself—that he’d be able to find something after university graduation if she let him pursue Ancient Greek literature, that no, it wouldn’t be a waste like she thought it would, before he finally had bitten the bullet and committed to Oxford’s Classics programme anyways. Underneath his begging and convincing, he’d been as worried as she was, but it wasn’t exactly his fault that he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else. He’d always loved the stories and mythology, after all, and he wasn’t the worst at learning languages. Surely it couldn’t be that difficult, he’d thought as he sent in a confirmation of his track to his advisor. At the very least, it’d keep him occupied and interested for a few years.
That was how he’d found himself dragging his feet miserably to the first meeting of his intermediate Greek course for his third year Michaelmas term, thinking about what an absolute idiot he’d been and praying the floor of the Ioannou Centre would turn to quicksand beneath him: oops, sorry I couldn’t make it, got stuck in the floor, guess I can’t study Greek anymore! My bad! His right shoulder sagged under the weight of his bag and his left under the weight of his apprehension as he ducked into the empty classroom, ever cursing his obnoxious height as he folded himself into one of the tiny wooden desks near the back of the room. He was glad to see he was the first one there: more time to try to force those stupid case uses into his brain before the lecture really kicked off.
It wasn’t that Martin didn’t enjoy Ancient Greek. He really did find it fascinating, had ever since he’d started as a fresher. The fluidity of the sentence structure, the rhythm of the poetic metre, and the puzzling work necessary for a proper translation drew him in for hours at a time, lost among the lines and flipping incessantly through his grammar and vocabulary reference materials until his hands were a pleasant kind of sore. Whenever he’d finally break out of his translation-induced fugue state, he would lean back from his laptop or notebook with an air of quiet introspection as he thought about the many people in history who had done the same work that he had, from his own professors reaching all the way back to the ancients themselves. It was thrilling to feel included in the tradition, despite its many flaws. But, that was reading and translating; studying was an entirely different story.
Studying Greek required diligence, everyday practice, and a single-minded drive that Martin simply didn’t have. It was infuriating. He’d been warned by his professors since the beginning of his studies that learning Greek, really learning it, would require him to firmly establish it as part of his daily routine, and he’d truly wanted more than anything to feel motivated to practice his declensions and principal parts. But, it wasn’t totally his fault he could never get through more than five minutes of flashcards before his eyes glazed over. It simply wasn’t interesting, and he could always check his references or the Perseus online database to see if he was translating something correctly, anyways. It only really mattered for his class, though unfortunately for him, that was also the only place where his general Greek ability had concrete consequences. So, as he watched his classmates filter into that first meeting of Greek Prose: Plato, the haze of summer still clogging up his synapses with sweat and blinding white sunlight, he had the sneaking suspicion that the term was not going to start well.
Early October light danced in the classroom windows as the professor greeted the UK’s best and brightest—and also Martin—with quiet Hello, good morning, how are you ’s as they melted into the dinghy wooden desks scattered around the tiny classroom. As the rest of the students went through first-day introductions, sharing names and pronouns and half-hearted fun facts, he only half paid attention, still trying to cram those damn passive participle endings in while he still had the chance. Alphas and epsilons cartwheeled across the page in front of him as he tried not to think about how rude he was being by ignoring the other students, but it wasn’t like he didn’t care to meet them—quite the opposite, really. He’d be able to catch up with them later, though. Of course, when the professor got around to him, he shared his own information quite readily— Hello, ah, my name is Martin Blackwood, he/him, I’m a third-year in the IIB Classics course, and my favourite classical writer is…well I know he’s not a writer per se, but definitely Homer —but once she moved on to the next student, he buried his nose back in his textbook with renewed fervour.
He wasn’t quite quick enough. Once the introductions had finished, the professor—Dr. Richardson, he was pretty sure he'd heard her say Richardson—announced that they were to begin the course with sight reading the first lines of Symposium, and Martin found himself hopelessly lost. And, naturally, because the universe had it out for him for whatever reason, he was the first one that she called on to translate.
“Mr. Blackwood! You’re a Greek focus, how about you get us started today?”
Martin gulped. Right. “Um. Well. Alright, then.” He let out a short, emotionless chuckle, and took a deep breath. He looked at the Greek in front of him. The first line read: “δοκῶ μοι περὶ ὧν πυνθάνεσθε οὐκ ἀμελέτητος εἶναι.”
His mind went blank. His eyes swum as he stared at the line, seeing the words yet completely unable to process them. He could feel anxiety bubbling in the pit of his stomach, and his head began to buzz with the beginnings of panic. All of this, naturally, only served to make itself stronger and his retention ability weaker. He gulped, and accepted his fate. The only way out was through.
“Okay, well, this is, um, Apollodorus speaking, and the first line goes, ah, ‘I will give…’, no, ah, sorry, δοκῶ is ‘I will seem…’, um…‘to me…around’? ‘about’?...um…‘of those things…far away’? No, wait, that’s a verb…‘you suffer’? No, that doesn’t make sense…anyway the next bit is, uh, ‘not to be’…well, I’m, uh, I’m not quite sure what ἀμελέτητος means, honestly…” He felt his face grow hot. “Er. Sorry. You know, summer holiday and all that. I’m, um, having a bit of trouble remembering.” He gave a weak, apologetic smile to Professor Richardson, trying to ignore the look of barely-concealed disappointment that had risen on her face as he limped through the sentence.
“Alright, well, thank you for the start, Martin. How about we go to someone else?” Her eyes scanned the classroom, landing on a boy sitting in the far back corner on the opposite side of the room. “Jonathan? How about you give Martin some help?”
Martin and the rest of the students looked over to inspect the new victim. He was rather small, and everything about him was dark: his forest green jumper complimented his brown skin and black, grey-streaked hair, parts of which had been pulled half heartedly into a bun—to keep it out of his face, Martin assumed, though it didn’t seem to be working very well. Wisps of hair fell down across his sharp facial features and over the lenses of his round, frameless glasses, but as he sat up, he tucked the errant strands behind his ears with his long fingers. His hands reminded Martin of a violinist’s, and he felt his heart skip a beat. Stop it, he chastised himself. But, he watched with fascination as the boy unfolded his spine from where it had hunched over his own study materials.
It seemed as if had also been cramming: papers and texts covered the small desk entirely, with his notebook and Plato commentary spilling over the edges of both his textbook and a small stack of what appeared to be library books with titles like The Evolution of the Indo-European Language and Philological Investigations of Late Euripides: 420–405 BCE. As he looked up, though, Martin noticed with a twinge of bitterness that his face lacked the desperation he could feel pushing through the surface of his own. The boy—Jonathan, it seemed—cleared his throat and examined his copy of Symposium for a moment before responding, “It’s just Jon. And yes, of course. This first line roughly translates to, ‘I will seem to be not unpracticed concerning these things about which you are asking.’”
Professor Richardson's eyes brightened with relief as Martin simultaneously sank down in his chair. “Wonderful, Jon! Δοκῶ μοι is generally translated as ‘methinks’ or ‘I seem to myself,’ but that was excellent. Now, can you tell me about πυνθάνεσθε? You translated it as active, but it’s a passive form. Can you explain why you did that?”
“Πυνθάνομαι is a deponent verb. It appears to be passive in form, but it has an active meaning.”
Of course. Martin slid even further down in his chair. He should’ve known that. He felt embarrassment burning his cheeks as his classmates continued to translate the next lines with relative ease. He closed his eyes, trying to absorb the professor’s intermittent commentary on the text, but all he could hear was the load-roaring waves of shame in his ears. When he finally opened his eyes, he looked back over towards Jon to see:
He was staring directly at him.
His expression was absolutely unreadable, but as Martin looked quickly back at his commentary, he could feel Jon’s eyes boring into his skull. It was like Jon was looking directly into his psyche and evaluating just how much of an incompetent fraud he was. Come on, Martin, he chided himself. That attempt can just be chalked up to nerves. How would he know it wasn’t just a fluke? But he still couldn’t shake the uncanny sense that Jon knew exactly who Martin was, what he did and didn’t know, and what he was trying to hide from the rest of the class, and as those dark eyes continued to examine him he decided he’d do whatever it took to avoid that gaze in the future.
He also decided he hated that Jon guy from Greek.
————————
It took until 11:00 that night for Martin to stop replaying the incident over and over in his mind. Even as he went to his other two classes, he had not been able to get the image of Jon out of his head. As much as he wanted to wipe the first hour of his day from his memory, all he could think about was Jon’s matter-of-fact translation, barely missing a beat as he navigated Plato’s prose with the comfortable ease of a seasoned linguist. Martin’s face had been locked in a permanent scowl as a result, which only served to make him feel guilty; it wasn’t like he liked being angry. He still wanted to hit something, though, and he wouldn’t object if Jon volunteered that judgy look on his face for the cause. So, for the time being he allowed the emotions to fester, and he promised himself that he would be kinder starting the next day. It may have even been possible: as he sat at his desk with the first-day materials for his Epic Poetry seminar sprawled before him, he felt his sanity begin to return to him as he poured over the assigned reading of the first seven books of the Iliad.
Poetry was always a welcome distraction, be it archaic or Romantic, and he had a particular fondness for Homer. The idea of oral tradition, of stories passed down generation upon generation with only the power of memory and spontaneous artistry to keep it alive, spoke to something deep and almost primal within him. Because it was alive. Every line of metre, every formula, every epithet drew him in as he absorbed the history of a people who would probably never have imagined that someone like him would be reading their words and studying their heroes a full 2800 years later. Their material lives may have been decaying ruins or lost completely, but their songs, their art, their culture remained intact despite the ravages of time, inviting him in as he turned through pages and pages of story. He could lose himself in the lines with ease, and that is exactly what he did. He didn’t have time to think about his problems when he was consumed by thoughts of councils of divinities and warrior-kings and love that ran parallel to rage.
He didn’t talk about it much—mostly because he was sure Tim would never stop laughing at him—but he also wrote his own poetry sometimes, during evenings where the setting sun turned the leaves on the tree outside his flat orange and gold, or on nights when melancholy crept over him and hollowed out his chest. Martin had grand plans for it, too. He hadn’t much of it to share yet, but in the grating boredom of the second hour of his lecture periods, he would often daydream about publishing an anthology of his own, complete with translation works alongside originals. It was a silly dream, maybe, but he was taken in by the thought anyway. He kept a dusky blue Moleskine journal on his person at all times, and he had already filled it halfway with snippets of verses that came to him in moments of extreme clarity or confusion. While he’d never had any sort of formal education in the art, he fancied himself acceptable at it. He’d also started working in iambic pentameter recently in an attempt to emulate the sound and rhythm of Homer in honour of his course selections that term, and reading translations of the epics for his homework only served to make his passion for writing stronger. He did wish at times that he could have someone he could share his work with, even as it was in its early stages, but he had a penchant for making them rather personal, and as much as he loved the friends he had, he wasn’t exactly about to bare his soul to them.
As he continued to work, he found the stillness he had been missing all day, and the process of textual analysis did wonders for sorting out his cluttered mind. When he finally surfaced from his trance, a quick glance at the red numbers on his small desk clock revealed that it had long since passed 1:00. Wonderful. He grimaced as he remembered that his alarm was set for 7:00 the next morning. As he prepared for sleep, the sharp edges of the day now sanded down by his readings and by a pleasant tiredness, he resolved to give this Jon another chance tomorrow. He had been rather quick to react, after all; maybe the next morning’s class would be better. With that promise, Martin climbed into the warm folds of his duvet, head clear but for a hesitant, yet stubborn, feeling of hope.
————————
As he took a long swig of his beer, Martin thought miserably about how he should never trust himself again.
After a particularly rough Friday full of Ancient Greek-induced emotional agony and Jon-induced self-hatred, he, Sasha, and Tim had gone to their local—the Bull’s Eye—for much-needed drinks. Martin had never been much of a drinker, always preferring a nice cup of jasmine tea over beer or liquor, but when Sasha had seen him enter their flat with an energy about him that could only be described as “decrepit” (her words), she had immediately grabbed her wallet and keys and announced that they would be going out because it’s a Friday night and you’ve got to relax sometimes, Martin, you look like someone just kicked your dog, and he had agreed with a sigh.
So, there they sat, Tim off getting another round while Sasha and Martin griped about their most recent annoyances. Sasha had just finished complaining about her thesis advisor—“I don’t understand why he still teaches, he obviously thinks all of his students are stupid even though we all understand the ethical nuances of modern cybersecurity systems better than his crusty old arse”—so the baton had officially passed to Martin. Sasha looked at him with anticipation, fingers tapping against the table and leg bouncing in anticipation as Martin prepared to divulge his own share of frustrations.
Martin took a deep breath, then another sip of his drink. There was only one way this could go, of course. “Well, there’s this guy.”
Sasha gaped at Martin, wagging her eyebrows suggestively as she took another large gulp of her pint. It was hard to hear her over the noise of the bustling of the Friday night pub crowd, but Martin could just make out her response. “ Oh? Does Martin Blackwood finally have a CRUSH?” She reached across the pinewood table and grabbed his hand with both of her own and shook it emphatically. “Oh, please tell me something interesting is finally happening to you.”
She grinned at him and leaned closer, eager to hear his reply. He squirmed in his seat and, yanking his hand out of her grip, took a healthy sip of his own beer before saying, “Absolutely NOT. There’s this guy that I can’t stand in my Greek class. He’s a perfect arsehole, and I think he might be out to get me.”
Sasha pouted at him and sat back against her side of the booth, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose from where they had slid down. “Okay, first off? Paranoia does not suit you. But alright. What’d this guy do?”
Martin’s cheeks burned as he remembered the first day, and the many that had followed since. Four days a week at 10 AM, he would walk into their lectures, horribly bungle a translation, and Jon would always be the one to fix his mistakes. Martin didn’t know why Professor Richardson always called on Jon specifically to correct him, but it was as if she had decided to pair them off: the star student and the miserable failure. A system perfectly calibrated to produce maximum agony. To top it off, every time this happened, Jon always stared at Martin. He swore he could feel his eyes drilling tiny holes into his brain, and part of him was starting to get worried they would go right through his skull and leave him floundering on the floor, his brain pouring out around him in a sticky grey puddle of biohazard as punishment for forgetting the fifth principal part of ἄρχω. Mortifying.
He finished off his beer and clunked it noisily against the dark wood hard enough to hear over the steadily-growing noise of the Eye’s clientele. “He just– UGH.” Martin clenched his fists and closed his eyes for a moment before continuing, trying desperately to manage his frustration despite the encouragement it was receiving from the alcohol. “He always knows the answer to everything , so when I get things wrong he always just. LOOKS at me.”
Sasha blinked. “Wait. Is that it?”
Martin tightened his grip on the pint glass in front of him and said, “No, it’s just–” He let out a huff. “It’s hard to explain? It’s like he knows exactly what I don’t know, and he’s judging me for it. And it’s not only that he looks at me, cause you know, we all look at people sometimes, right? But he stares.” Sasha crossed her legs and folded her arms, raising an eyebrow in scepticism. Martin pointedly ignored her body language and continued, hunching his shoulders and gesturing wildly. “It’s like he’s looking beneath my skin, like he’s– like he’s seeing just how incompetent and stupid I am, and like he’s trying to tell me how deeply unimpressed he is with my whole…deal.” He slumped forward onto the table, resting his head on top of crossed arms.
A drunk passerby suddenly slammed against the table, almost knocking over their empty pint glasses and causing Martin to leap back up before mumbling a nearly incoherent, “Fuck, sorry mate—” and tottering away in the direction of the bar. Sasha sighed and ran a hand through her curly hair, then used it to make a rolling motion as if to say, yeah, yeah. “So he’s elitist. I’m sure everyone else in the class is on your side, Martin, that’s usually the case when there’s a prick in your course. I don’t see how he’s out to get you specifically.”
Martin shook his head, fast and emphatic, and said, “No, no, that's not quite it, he–” He reached for his drink before remembering, with a prickle of annoyance, that he had already finished it. He let out a long exhale and said, “Look, I’ve dealt with rich, snobby know-it-alls before, but this is different. He only ever looks at me, when I mess up.” He sat back against the vinyl back of the booth and crossed his arms. “So, I’ve decided that I hate him.”
To his surprise and mild outrage, Sasha laughed at this, leaning forward once again to rest her elbows on the table. She pushed a loose lock of her deep brown hair out of her face and adjusted her thick glasses once again before giving him a very pointed look, a playful grin dancing on her face. “Martin. It almost sounds like this guy likes you.”
Of course, that was the moment Tim decided to return from the bar, a pint in each hand. His eyes widened as he processed what Sasha had just said, and the toothy, maniacal grin that split open his face in response distantly reminded Martin of the axe scene in the Shining. He placed one of the pints in front of Sasha and kept the other one for himself as he slid into the booth next to Martin with a very loud, “OOH, has our Martin got himself a SUITOR?”
Martin sputtered, his traitorous face going beet red as he managed, “N-NO!! No, god, that is absolutely not at ALL what is happening.”
Sasha accepted the pint from Tim, reaching over to pat him on the cheek in thanks without even looking over at him, which, impossibly, made Tim’s grin grow wider. She curled her fingers around the glass and pointed limply at Martin with her free hand. “Look, I don’t know much—”
Tim scoffed at this, and Martin heard him mumble something like, “Alright, summa cum laude—”
Sasha shot him a vicious look, then continued. “—I don’t know much , but when some guy in your class stares at you and you alone a bunch of times, unprompted, I do know that it either means he wants to trap you in his basement for eternity—”
“Exactly— ”
“—Martin, shut up. OR, it could mean that he is hopelessly smitten with you and he has no idea what to do about it. Since you study what is possibly the gayest, yet by far the most virginal, major on campus, I’m willing to bet money on the second of those options. It’s not like any of you have anything else going on in your social lives, so where else are you going to meet someone?” As if to punctuate her point, Sasha downed her entire pint in one go, slammed the glass on the table, and leaned back in her chair.
Tim gazed at Sasha’s empty glass with a look that could only be described as reverence, but Martin just eyed her sceptically. “How can you be so sure about that, though? No offence, but that sounds like a load of, of bollocks, if I'm being honest.”
Sasha grinned. “It’s easy. Tim stares at me like that all the time.”
Tim whipped his head around to face her. “Are you insinuating that I’m in love with you?”
“No, I’m insinuating that you want to trap me in your basement for eternity.”
Tim raised a hand to his heart in fake pain and gasped dramatically before saying, “You hurt me, Sasha. You hurt me.”
“GUYS.” The two of them paused their banter and turned back to Martin, who was growing more haggard by the second. They could really be exhausting sometimes, especially if there was a particularly good bit of gossip. Not that there was a good bit of gossip, because Jon meant nothing to him. Besides, it was getting rather late, and while it was a Friday night, he had made plans with a mate to go to the library to research for their epic poetry research paper the next morning that simply could not be postponed. Maybe Sasha had a point about Classics majors having no life, he thought idly. “Could we please just change the subject?”
Tim pouted at him. “Awww, Marto, are you embarrassed about your loathsome Greek lover? It’s okay, as I’m sure you know, gay relationships were quite common in ancient Athens—”
“Tim, please shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“C’mon, you know you love me.”
“—and DON’T CALL ME MARTO—”