Original: "410 CE". Slash
Summary: Medieval History's new hire will not stop raiding Classics. But Rome's not falling this time, if Jerzy has anything to say about it.
Warnings: Professors trying to imitate human beings, badly.
Two weeks after surviving his 3-year tenure review, Professor R. K. “Reg” Pearsall broke into the Classics department’s tea pantry and was caught brewing a Sumatra by Jerzy Jampich.
Break in in this case was a strong term for loped cheerfully past the secretaries, but Jerzy, who specialised in Cicero’s speeches, always had a flair for the dramatic. And it was a very short jump from Reg to the dramatic, anyway. Reg was tall in the way of folk heroes or circus freaks, and had an endearing enthusiasm for Icelandic jumpers. Today’s specimen was black and white, which he probably thought was subtle. Jerzy had seen more subtle bagpipe corps.
“Hullo Dr Jerzy!” Reg beamed, unrepentantly measuring Sumatra into a mug that said “I’m impossible to date...Like Beowulf.”
Jerzy floundered. “What...what are you doing here?”
“Our coffee machine’s on the blink.” Reg deployed his most persuasive Gawain the Golden-Tongued smile. Not that Reg was afraid of Jerzy. The Medieval History faculty spent so much time reading heroic epics that they all inevitably developed the delusional urge to train in some martial art and live the Thor dream. Reg could probably kill a man with just his thumbs.
“But,” Jerzy said, trying to get all the unspeakable breach of interdepartmental relations into that one syllable.
“Hush, now. I’m here on the sly!” Reg sing-sang, exactly like someone here on the sly would not.
“You look sly as a zebra,” Jerzy stammered.
“Zebra, Debra. No worries, there’s extra for you,” Reg soothed, and snatched a random mug from the drainer like the dirty barbarian he was and poured all of two centimetres out, ignoring Jerzy’s helpless handflap. Suddenly his hands were full of burning ceramic and he needed to fumble to keep from dropping Dr Alexia Gordon-Spencer’s Pallas Athena mug on the tile. By then Reg had gallumped away, whistling like a madman.
Jerzy found Sullivan Richards, their Medieval Latinist, savaging an empire biscuit in the cafe. God, had any of them even advanced to silverware? “What are you doing here, Jampich?” Sullivan puzzled, frowning at the paper cup clutched listlessly in Jerzy’s hands. “Coffee in your lounge, isn’t there?”
“Medieval’s machine is broken,” Jerzy reported dutifully. “Your bloke Pearsall killed the last of ours.”
Sullivan Richards guffawed, spraying icing everywhere. “Is not. Pearsall just doesn’t like French Roast.”
Well, then. War it was.
“Sally?” Jerzy drummed nervously on the secretary’s desk. He suspected Classics had hired her specifically for her resemblance to Medusa. “Can I ask a favour? Coffee’s out. Er, for the next time, I rather fancy a French Roast, could you manage it?”
It was the most brazen thing he’d done since use a pen in the Rare Book Room on the sly. Jerzy felt fantastic.
------------------------
A week later Jerzy, trying to wrangle a pile of cumbersome facsimiles down the corridor, found himself face-first inside R. K. Pearsall’s latest Icelandic jumper as he made good his escape from the Classics lounge.
“Sfffwwrrff,” Reg said around the pastry half-wedged in his mouth. His jumper was unrepentantly red. Jerzy felt a tick forming in his eye.
“Those--those are for the talk tonight!” he accused. He blinked furiously through the smudges his face had made, during its brief but bruising contact with Reg’s impossibly elevated torso, on his reading specs.
“Jam in your hair,” Reg observed, pastry consumed in two savage bites, and picked at Jerzy’s hair with his free hand. Like a gorilla! Reg, sensing, it seemed, that he was in immediate danger of being assaulted with a Vergilius Augusteus facsimile, pulled playfully at Jerzy’s de-jammed hair to force him to make eye contact.
“So, a Greek bloke walks into a tailor’s shop with a pair of trousers.”
“What?” Jerzy sputtered.
“The tailor takes the trousers and looks them over, you know, and says to the man, ‘Euripides?’ The man replies, ‘Eumenides?’”
“What?” Jerzy sputtered again, a whole octave higher. But Reg was already galloping off to his heathen kingdom upstairs, to, to--to wears furs and sacrifice first-years to his moon goddess, probably.
“I teach Latin!” Jerzy bellowed after him, terrifying several heavily tweeded paleographers and, he noted with satisfaction, putting a definite hitch in R. K. Pearsall’s imbecile goose-step. “Bloody Cicero!”
He hadn’t shouted that loudly since his undergraduate Latin department had reenacted the Conquest of Gaul with Romance Studies. Jerzy felt fantastic.
------------------------
“I’m interested in the use of Virgil in medieval dream visions,” R. K. Pearsall bloody lied to the keynote speaker at the Classic department’s yearly conference reception, slurping merrily away at the free wine.
“You teach Norse sagas,” Jerzy hissed, once the speaker was manhandled off through the sea of tweed. “You teach Beowulf.” Reg, as usual, was dressed like a wooly great totem pole, looking altogether too pleased with himself.
“Oh, Dr Jerzy. Wine, wine, wine,” Reg scolded punningly, startling an amused snort out of him.
“For God’s sake, Reginald. What is your--what? Why?” Jerzy blinked at his adversary, vaguely disoriented by the heavy scents of wine and wool and postgraduate students.
In this past two months Reg successively shananiganned Classics’ coffee, pastries, printer, copier, stationary, monogrammed pens, and taught the first-years in his Latin class to respond to his commands with “Jerzy, sure!” But for the three years that came before, Jerzy’s recollections of R. K. Pearsall consisted entirely of the unnerving mental image of a perplexed grin and Icelandic jumper bouncing up and down the corridors at high speed and great elevation. Tenure had evidently done his thick Viking head in.
Reg smiled lopsidedly. “A centurian walks into a bar and asks for a Martinus. The barman says, ‘Don’t you mean a Martini?’ The centurion replies, ‘No- if I wanted a double, I’d have asked for one!’” He waited out Jerzy’s usual stunned silence, face slowly relaxing into something almost wistful. “Latin, right?”
Jerzy gaped. He wondered if he hadn’t done his bow-tie too tightly, or if the whole ridiculous situation really was fitting itself together in his head like scraps of a damaged papyrus. Finally, he said carefully, backing towards the door to be heard above the din, “Cicero lived from 106 to 43 BCE. He died December 7th, actually.”
At last, victory. Reg looked flabbergasted, at a complete bloody loss. “Sorry, what?”
“Not impossible to date,” Jerzy clarified, and felt something cheeky relax across his face for the first time since--well, he hadn’t tenure yet. Since never. Reg still looked gobsmacked, although there was light and understanding rising slowly in his eyes like a Renaissance. "Can you kiss me or will your Viking kinsmen hang you for that?"
Jerzy felt fantastic.
Warnings: Professors trying to imitate human beings, badly.
Two weeks after surviving his 3-year tenure review, Professor R. K. “Reg” Pearsall broke into the Classics department’s tea pantry and was caught brewing a Sumatra by Jerzy Jampich.
Break in in this case was a strong term for loped cheerfully past the secretaries, but Jerzy, who specialised in Cicero’s speeches, always had a flair for the dramatic. And it was a very short jump from Reg to the dramatic, anyway. Reg was tall in the way of folk heroes or circus freaks, and had an endearing enthusiasm for Icelandic jumpers. Today’s specimen was black and white, which he probably thought was subtle. Jerzy had seen more subtle bagpipe corps.
“Hullo Dr Jerzy!” Reg beamed, unrepentantly measuring Sumatra into a mug that said “I’m impossible to date...Like Beowulf.”
Jerzy floundered. “What...what are you doing here?”
“Our coffee machine’s on the blink.” Reg deployed his most persuasive Gawain the Golden-Tongued smile. Not that Reg was afraid of Jerzy. The Medieval History faculty spent so much time reading heroic epics that they all inevitably developed the delusional urge to train in some martial art and live the Thor dream. Reg could probably kill a man with just his thumbs.
“But,” Jerzy said, trying to get all the unspeakable breach of interdepartmental relations into that one syllable.
“Hush, now. I’m here on the sly!” Reg sing-sang, exactly like someone here on the sly would not.
“You look sly as a zebra,” Jerzy stammered.
“Zebra, Debra. No worries, there’s extra for you,” Reg soothed, and snatched a random mug from the drainer like the dirty barbarian he was and poured all of two centimetres out, ignoring Jerzy’s helpless handflap. Suddenly his hands were full of burning ceramic and he needed to fumble to keep from dropping Dr Alexia Gordon-Spencer’s Pallas Athena mug on the tile. By then Reg had gallumped away, whistling like a madman.
Jerzy found Sullivan Richards, their Medieval Latinist, savaging an empire biscuit in the cafe. God, had any of them even advanced to silverware? “What are you doing here, Jampich?” Sullivan puzzled, frowning at the paper cup clutched listlessly in Jerzy’s hands. “Coffee in your lounge, isn’t there?”
“Medieval’s machine is broken,” Jerzy reported dutifully. “Your bloke Pearsall killed the last of ours.”
Sullivan Richards guffawed, spraying icing everywhere. “Is not. Pearsall just doesn’t like French Roast.”
Well, then. War it was.
“Sally?” Jerzy drummed nervously on the secretary’s desk. He suspected Classics had hired her specifically for her resemblance to Medusa. “Can I ask a favour? Coffee’s out. Er, for the next time, I rather fancy a French Roast, could you manage it?”
It was the most brazen thing he’d done since use a pen in the Rare Book Room on the sly. Jerzy felt fantastic.
------------------------
A week later Jerzy, trying to wrangle a pile of cumbersome facsimiles down the corridor, found himself face-first inside R. K. Pearsall’s latest Icelandic jumper as he made good his escape from the Classics lounge.
“Sfffwwrrff,” Reg said around the pastry half-wedged in his mouth. His jumper was unrepentantly red. Jerzy felt a tick forming in his eye.
“Those--those are for the talk tonight!” he accused. He blinked furiously through the smudges his face had made, during its brief but bruising contact with Reg’s impossibly elevated torso, on his reading specs.
“Jam in your hair,” Reg observed, pastry consumed in two savage bites, and picked at Jerzy’s hair with his free hand. Like a gorilla! Reg, sensing, it seemed, that he was in immediate danger of being assaulted with a Vergilius Augusteus facsimile, pulled playfully at Jerzy’s de-jammed hair to force him to make eye contact.
“So, a Greek bloke walks into a tailor’s shop with a pair of trousers.”
“What?” Jerzy sputtered.
“The tailor takes the trousers and looks them over, you know, and says to the man, ‘Euripides?’ The man replies, ‘Eumenides?’”
“What?” Jerzy sputtered again, a whole octave higher. But Reg was already galloping off to his heathen kingdom upstairs, to, to--to wears furs and sacrifice first-years to his moon goddess, probably.
“I teach Latin!” Jerzy bellowed after him, terrifying several heavily tweeded paleographers and, he noted with satisfaction, putting a definite hitch in R. K. Pearsall’s imbecile goose-step. “Bloody Cicero!”
He hadn’t shouted that loudly since his undergraduate Latin department had reenacted the Conquest of Gaul with Romance Studies. Jerzy felt fantastic.
------------------------
“I’m interested in the use of Virgil in medieval dream visions,” R. K. Pearsall bloody lied to the keynote speaker at the Classic department’s yearly conference reception, slurping merrily away at the free wine.
“You teach Norse sagas,” Jerzy hissed, once the speaker was manhandled off through the sea of tweed. “You teach Beowulf.” Reg, as usual, was dressed like a wooly great totem pole, looking altogether too pleased with himself.
“Oh, Dr Jerzy. Wine, wine, wine,” Reg scolded punningly, startling an amused snort out of him.
“For God’s sake, Reginald. What is your--what? Why?” Jerzy blinked at his adversary, vaguely disoriented by the heavy scents of wine and wool and postgraduate students.
In this past two months Reg successively shananiganned Classics’ coffee, pastries, printer, copier, stationary, monogrammed pens, and taught the first-years in his Latin class to respond to his commands with “Jerzy, sure!” But for the three years that came before, Jerzy’s recollections of R. K. Pearsall consisted entirely of the unnerving mental image of a perplexed grin and Icelandic jumper bouncing up and down the corridors at high speed and great elevation. Tenure had evidently done his thick Viking head in.
Reg smiled lopsidedly. “A centurian walks into a bar and asks for a Martinus. The barman says, ‘Don’t you mean a Martini?’ The centurion replies, ‘No- if I wanted a double, I’d have asked for one!’” He waited out Jerzy’s usual stunned silence, face slowly relaxing into something almost wistful. “Latin, right?”
Jerzy gaped. He wondered if he hadn’t done his bow-tie too tightly, or if the whole ridiculous situation really was fitting itself together in his head like scraps of a damaged papyrus. Finally, he said carefully, backing towards the door to be heard above the din, “Cicero lived from 106 to 43 BCE. He died December 7th, actually.”
At last, victory. Reg looked flabbergasted, at a complete bloody loss. “Sorry, what?”
“Not impossible to date,” Jerzy clarified, and felt something cheeky relax across his face for the first time since--well, he hadn’t tenure yet. Since never. Reg still looked gobsmacked, although there was light and understanding rising slowly in his eyes like a Renaissance. "Can you kiss me or will your Viking kinsmen hang you for that?"
Jerzy felt fantastic.