Chapter Text
“All right everyone, I want you all to have chapters twenty-six to forty-one read by our lecture next week. We’ll be taking a deep dive into both verisimilitude and the narrative structures that surround it, so I want you all to be prepared to discuss.
“Also, a reminder: if you find yourself struggling to get through the verbosity of the text on its own, I welcome you all to listen to an audio version as you read. I often found that having the recording and the text in front of me helped keep my mind from wandering too much. As always, you can find links to free audio recordings listed on the syllabus. All right, all right, I’ll let you get on with your evenings, go on and enjoy your weekends, just don’t—”
Jon tunes out the rest of his professor’s cheery calls of dismissal as he packs his laptop into his bag. His knees crack as he stands, his spine sore from the three hours sat in the horrid plastic chair of the lecture hall. Flexing his hands produces more cracking as he tries to rid them of their stiffness. There is a persistent lingering pain in his leg that never seems to wane. One would think him far older than his twenty-two years, what with the joint pain and steadily greying hair, but Jon has so long gotten used to his particulars that it no longer really phases him. Sure, there are the odd days where he has random flare ups of pain — peculiar phantom aches in places he’s never been harmed, to his knowledge. Most, he could ignore: a stiffness in his right hand, a hollow ringing in his ribs, bouts of vertigo.
There is, however, one pain that takes him out for the day when it rears its head, a sharp, blinding ache in his chest, just above his heart. He’d seen multiple doctors about it, but all of them assured him that they found no existing damage or condition to be of concern. Those diagnoses, or lack thereof, of course, didn’t really reassure Jon as he was experiencing it, though. Thankfully, today seems to be a pain-light day, and as he shoulders his bag, he grabs his cane to make his way down the stairs towards the main exit.
He makes his way back to the dorm hall, stopping briefly to pick up a tea on the way home, his fifth of the day. Despite having put in milk and sugar, it burns bitter in his mouth just like all the others, and he has to force himself to get through it. He likes tea, he’s sure of it, but he can never quite get it to taste how he wishes it would. At least the caffeine will help him stay awake through some of the readings he has to do. He fumbles with his keys and kicks the door closed behind him, dropping his satchel on his desk as he makes his way in.
He changes out of his day clothes into something more comfortable, and grabs some of his leftovers from the mini fridge, before popping them in the microwave. As he waits he starts pulling out books and notebooks from his bag, and piles them up in order of importance and impending deadlines. He can’t stop yawning, these big, jaw cracking things, and he presses his fingers to his tear ducts to brush away the gathering damp. The beeping of the microwave startles him.
Settling at his desk with his meal, Jon starts flipping through his notebook, rereading his class notes in hopes to actually take them in. He always understands things better when he’s able to go over them in his own time. Choking down the last dregs of his now-cold tea, he sets aside his first notebook and reaches for the one from his eight-thirty lecture.
He makes little notes in the margins of his pages with one hand as he eats absent-mindedly with the other, writes reminders about things he’ll need to look up in future, comments on things he knows his professor has wrong. By the time he gets through his class notes, it’s pushing nine-thirty. He drops his empty leftover container in the trash and sets aside his notebooks, yawning deeply. The tea hasn’t done much to help his exhaustion, but he wants to get at least half of the chapters read for his eighteenth-century literature course, so despite a bit of brain fog and drowsiness, he pulls out the thick tome and opens it to chapter twenty-six.
The buzzing glow of his desk lamp illumes the pages a sickly yellow, the shadows cast stretch the words. He keeps blinking heavily, reading and rereading the same three lines — something about regency courtship, he thinks, though if pressed he couldn’t for the life of him tell you what it said. He drops his forehead down on to the pages, his chin-length hair brushing his cheeks, and wishes that he could simply know what the chapters hold through osmosis. He has to get started on a research paper tomorrow, will lose most, if not all, of the day to it, so he really needs to get these pages read tonight. Tugging a bit on his hair, he groans and then sits back up. He rubs his eyes roughly, seeing stars long after he pulls away, and tries to make sense of the cloying words on the page, bemoaning the density of each sentence as they span quarter paragraphs without pause.
He gets through a chapter, struggling through each page as his sleep-heavy mind drifts. Jon knows he’s not truly retaining any of this — he’s too unfocused. He’s about to give up and call it quits for the night and just hope he finds time some spare moment tomorrow when he remembers the words of his professor. He doesn't know if listening to a recording will help at this point, but it's worth a shot. He pulls up the syllabus on his laptop and searches for the links to the audio websites. The first one leads him to a site that doesn’t have the novel he’s reading on file, and while the second link does have it, the audio files are corrupted and all he can hear is static. Finally, on the fourth link, he finds the full audio book with working sound, recorded fairly recently within the past year, and he could weep for the relief.
He sets the speed of the video up to one-point-five and tries to get back into reading. The recording, it turns out, actually does help to keep his mind active, and though he keeps yawning, he makes it through six chapters interrupted only by the occasional ad. When chapter thirty-two ends, he hears the crisp and stern sounding female voice sign off on their recording. He supposes he’ll have a new voice to follow along with in the subsequent chapters, and pauses the video. He takes a moment to head to the washroom and to stretch, hoping his back will be kind to him tomorrow morning — or, he supposes, glancing down at his watch to see it’s nearly three, later this morning.
He decides he’ll finish out one or two more chapters before calling it a night, and sits back down at his desk, popping his headphones back in as he hunches over the book once more. He taps his spacebar and the audio resumes. Immediately, he’s struck by the change in vocal tones, from that stern, unrelenting reader, to a clear and peculiarly kind-toned masculine voice. Jon blames the odd racing of his heart on too much caffeine consumption catching up to him, and shakes his head, settling back in to follow along.
He’s having a bit of a harder time getting into this chapter, as his chest keeps panging with this oddly deep-rooted ache — not like the pain he usually experiences there, just a heady feeling that he could perhaps describe as profound yearning? Yearning for what though, he has no idea. He’s not too far into the chapter when he notices a wet splotch appear on the page. Startled, he looks up towards his ceiling, tired eyes searching for a leak. He can’t see anything amiss, so he tries to shrug off the strange feeling and continue from where he left off. The soft-voiced man continues ever forward in his reading and as Jon tries to get back into it, he notices two more splotches appear. When he lifts his head this time, he feels a slow drip roll down his cheek and slip off his chin. With mildly trembling hands, he raises them to his cheeks and notices that he’s crying.
“What on earth?” Jon whispers to himself. When did he start crying? He tries to brush away the tears but they just keep pooling in his eyes. He pulls out his headphones as he stands to reach for tissues. He must be more exhausted than he thought, if he’s at the point where he can start crying without even noticing it. He sits down heavily on his bed, presses his hands to his eyes.
Maybe it’s time to go to sleep, he thinks. If only he could get his heart to stop racing. He plucks a bit of scrap paper off his desk and places it in the novel as a makeshift bookmark, and scrolls back the recording a couple minutes. He places one earphone in and tries to figure out where he left off. He feels more tears slip down his cheeks, and he brushes them away idly as he scrubs through the audio. He finally finds his place and pauses it there, before closing his laptop for the night.
He heads out to brush his teeth and wash his face, chest still pulsing with something. As he makes it back and gets into bed, he drifts off with the sound of someone else’s warm laughter in his mind, a name just brushing his lips before leaving him. He sleeps.