Chapter Text
Jonathan Sims shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be in Dr. Elias Bouchard’s debate class when he was captain of the entire team. As a TA, maybe, but as a student? It’s ridiculous, what Dr. Bouchard is asking of him. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. It’s…humiliating.
His lip curls at the word, at the shame of it all. When he first joined the team, he learned about the competitive version of the activity he was more than happy to do without structure or trophies entirely by going to practice rounds and tournaments. He was thrust in the deep end, and he struggled to learn to swim. Eventually he figured it out, and he started winning tournaments, but that little bit of insecurity from those disastrous first tournaments remains.
The fact that he was pulled into doing this class pinches at the worry in the back of his head, that Dr. Bouchard secretly thinks that he’s not good enough, that he’s not quite clever enough to keep up with the trust-fund students that littered the activity, the ones that went to the expensive schools that had their own teams. It’s a ridiculous hang-up to have, and he knows it.
Jon doesn’t really have a choice in being there. At the meeting he had with Dr. Bouchard the week before classes, he was told that he technically did not have to sign up, but Dr. Bouchard needed sixteen students for the course to make, and there were only fifteen registered. Without Jon, he would lose the class, and all of these students would lose important credit. Jon didn’t see why this was his problem, and he said as much to Dr. Bouchard’s face, and he had replied in a soft, low voice, “I made you captain of the team, not just because I thought you were capable enough, but also because I thought you cared about the program as a whole. But even if the team is all you care about, you know that we recruit from the class, and hopefully we’ll be able to recruit enough new people that we won’t have to use Michael for practice rounds anymore.”
It's the smallest argument, in the grander scheme of things, but Jon hates that they have to rely on a debater from another university to have eight people for a practice round (even if that debater is Gerry’s boyfriend) so much that it actually did the trick. He allowed Dr. Bouchard to register him for the Monday lecture from 15-17:30.
It didn’t matter how much he didn’t want to do it. Dr. Bouchard was right, as he always is. Jon had signed up at the recruitment fair, but most of the other debaters that had stuck around—Agnes, Jude, Oliver, Gerry—had been recruited from the class. That had worked out surprisingly well for Jon when Gerry wormed himself into being Jon’s debate partner, roommate and, well, his only real friend. Unless you counted Georgie, and Jon usually chose not to.
Jon arrived forty minutes early, because he was so anxious about being late. He sits primly at a desk in the front row to the far left of the aisle, close to the door in case he needs to make a speedy escape. He tries to remember to keep his back straight. He tends to slouch when he sits, or fold his legs into strange angles, but he refuses to allow himself to melt into the putty he sometimes indulges in when he’s alone if there’s anyone who could see him. He has an image to protect. He’s someone who knows what he’s doing, a professional. Technically, yes, he is only a student in the class, but heaven forbid any of his classmates think of him as a peer.
His classmates file in once it gets closer to the actual start of class, and Jon tries to look at them while avoiding eye contact. He has, historically, been very bad at conversation and tries to avoid it at all costs.
A young man in a bright pink Hawaiian shirt that somehow looked good against his tan skin and skinny jeans that were a bit too tight saunters his way into the class. He drops into the middle of the front aisle and makes eye contact with Jon.
Jon sometimes finds himself blindsided in discussions about how attractive people can be, but there was no mistaking it: this man, with his carefully ruffled black hair that must have taken an hour to look like it just happened to be disheveled and easy smile, was hot and he knew it. Jon usually rolls his eyes at people like this, people who like to be the center of attention, but then the man looks over at Jon and grins.
“Hey, I’m Tim,” he says, reaching a hand over the two desks to try to shake Jon’s hand.
“Oh, er, Jonathan. Sims.” He reaches out to shake and breathes a sigh of relief when their fingers barely brush. Jon doesn’t like physical contact; it feels like stinging nettles, sharp and pointy during the contact and then itchy when it’s gone. He brushes his fingertips against his jeans to try to get the sensation to go away, hoping it’s not obvious what he’s doing.
If Tim noticed, he doesn’t let on. “Nice to meet you, Jonathan Sims!” The bass in his voice fills the entire room, a fact which doesn’t bother him. “What unholy horror forced you to sign up for this class?” He leans in like they’re sharing a secret.
“Dr. Bouchard.” The answer slips out without Jon’s permission, and he flushes at the insinuation that Dr. Bouchard is an unholy horror, because of course he isn’t. But he is the one who made Jon sign up for this class. “Er, sort of. What about you?”
“Program requirements,” he admits with a sigh. “I’m far too amiable to be argumentative.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Jon counters, relaxing a bit into his seat. “People who are nice and charming are the best debaters because they can lull the competition into letting their guard down, and when they bring up rebuttals and evidence that refutes their opponents’ claims it doesn’t come across as douchey or condescending. Being too amiable is really a good quality, all things…” Jon catches the wide-eyed expression on Tim’s face and realizes he's infodumping, and immediately cuts himself off. “Um, considered.”
Tim blinks, and then he lets out a long laugh, tilting his head back and letting his eyes drift shut. “You’re not a beginner, are you?”
“O-oh, no. I’m actually captain. Of the team.” Jon remembers himself and straightens his spine out.
“So then why are you here ?” He’s incredulous, but he’s still laughing.
“Dr. Bouchard, remember?” Jon replies, and he’s surprised when Tim snorts.
“Right, of course. Silly me.”
Before Jon can think of some question to ask Tim to continue the conversation—he found he didn’t mind, entirely, talking to Tim, and thought that maybe he would be a good candidate to the team—a Black woman in a crisp blazer and box braids twisted into a knot on the top of her head sits down in the desk on the other side of Tim, and Tim turns the full weight of his attention on her.
“Sasha!” he says with delight, and he immediately switches into speaking Spanish.
Since he doesn’t speak Spanish, Jon doesn’t feel guilty as he lets his eyes wander again. He freezes when his eyes land on a strangely familiar White woman in the back corner who is glaring at him so intensely, that he worries for a minute that she might kill him. It comes to him all at once—the library desk worker he got into an argument with last week. He didn’t recognize her at first, because her hair is blue now and it was pink before. He hopes that she doesn’t remember him, but based on the poisonous look she’s giving him, she absolutely does.
“Christ,” he mutters, rubbing a hand over his face, imagining Dr. Bouchard’s derision that someone in the class despises him already. Usually someone had to suffer through a conversation with Jon before deciding that he was the human equivalent of a cactus.
Jon knows that he’s not exactly the nicest person to get along with. He knows that most people think he’s an asshole. Even if he didn’t see the looks that people gave him, it would be pretty obvious by his painful lack of a social life. He knows that he’s the problem, he just doesn’t know how to fix it.
This time, though, it wasn’t his fault! He wanted to check out a book that was necessary to his research, and yes, technically it wasn’t supposed to leave the library, but the library closed at three a.m. and if he stopped, he didn’t know when he would find his groove again. He thought that he would just ask if he could check it out for the night, or even offer to leave his iPad as collateral, but the desk worker was having none of it. She immediately called him an idiot for thinking the rules didn’t apply to him and Jon replied that it wasn’t his fault that the rules were asinine. It had gotten quite heated, and he hadn’t gotten his book. He still hadn’t finished his research.
Jon avoids looking back at the blue-haired woman, and instead focuses on the Black woman sitting right behind Tim. She has dangly spider earrings that make him shudder. Her top is made out of delicate white lace spun out into intricate patterns, like a web with a makeover. It’s beautiful, Jon has to admit, but he knows he won’t be getting close with someone who likes spiders that much. Next to her is a Black man with an oversized cardigan and a skeleton key necklace, and he keeps glancing at the spider woman with as much trepidation on his face as Jon feels.
A couple seats down from him are two women. The first has brown skin, a dark green hijab, and intricate, swirling graphic liner across her eyelids in the same shade as her headscarf. Jon always wanted to do makeup designs like that on himself but could never find the patience to practice, and he’s a bit jealous of her technique. The White woman on her left has an expression so severe matched only by the almost-white shock of blonde hair in a pixie cut.
There’s an assistance dog laying in the space between their desks with shaggy, spotted brown, white, and back fur with a “Do Not Pet Me, I’m Working” sign on his vest, and Jon frowns that this sort of sign was even necessary here, that people would mess with a working assistance dog. The sign shouldn’t make him angry, but the reminder of people’s casual ableism wears at him.
Dr. Bouchard walks in five minutes before class and stops by Jon’s desk, touching two fingers to the title on his paper. “Thank you for being here, Jonathan.”
“No worries, Dr. Bouchard, I didn’t have much say in the matter.” He doesn’t mean for the comment to come across as sarcastic, but Dr. Bouchard huffs out a laugh anyway.
“And I doubt you’ll ever let me forget it.” He shakes his head before walking to the front to get everyone’s attention and beginning his introductions.
Jon opens his notebook and dates the page. He won’t need to take extensive notes on the content, but having an overview on what has already been discussed in class might be useful later. He expects that Dr. Bouchard’s introductory lecture to British Parliamentary debate will be familiar and that he’ll be able to tune out after the syllabus overview. Dr. Bouchard looks at Jon, and then he winks. Jon frowns, until he looks at the PowerPoint on the screen behind him.
It’s the presentation that Jon made himself after his first year to synthesize everything he wished he knew at his first tournament to show the new members. Dr. Bouchard must have his own presentation from past years, but he’s using Jon’s to… mock him? Tease him? Have an inside joke? To remind him of exactly how much time he’s wasting? He doesn’t know which interpretation he prefers, so he tunes it out. He doodles a cluster of eyes in the margin of his notes, and then scribbles them out when it feels like they’re staring too much.
He glances back at Dr. Bouchard, who has moved on past the main structure of BP, (eight people, two sides, four teams all competing against each other with fifteen minutes of prep time) and is now describing how the rounds are judged by ranking the teams at the end by a panel of judges. He remembers how overwhelmed he was at his first practice round and then he had to wait in the hallway replaying his awful speech in his head while Dr. Bouchard and two other professors from the Comm department discussed how they should be ranked, and a small shudder passes through him. That deliberation period is still the worst part of the activity for him.
Jon wonders how the rest of his classmates are taking this onslaught of information, so he slouches in his seat and twists his shoulders to the right so he can watch them without being too obvious. Or coming across a creep. He frowns at the thought, as intrusive as it is. He’s not being creepy , he needs to figure out who to recruit. That’s all.
Tim is watching the presentation with a small smile, like he’s in on a joke, and then he leans over to the woman on his right to whisper something. She presses a finger to her lips to shush him, but she grins at the joke despite herself. Jon watches her go back to her notes, and he adds a tick next to her name in his “would make an excellent addition to the team” tracker in his head.
Maybe if he recruits her and Tim early enough, they could send Michael back on his merry way to his own university, and the thought puts a smile on Jon’s face.
He glances at the scary woman with the assistance dog, and they haven’t moved at all, not a single inch. The woman with the captivating makeup has leaned forward and she is watching Dr. Bouchard with focused intensity. She isn’t taking notes, but it doesn't seem that she needs to.
He pointedly does not look at the blue haired librarian. He knows he can’t see half of his classmates, but without completely turning around, he can’t get a good look at them. He shifts his hips a bit more open so he can twist to the right and casts a glance just behind him to the right to see if he can get a good look at any of the rest of the class.
In the row right behind him, one seat to the right, is a large White man with curly auburn hair, a dusting of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and a knitted blue sweater that brings out the pale blue of his eyes. There’s a vague hint of blush in his almost cherubic cheeks. He takes notes with a BIC pen with barely an inch left in the inkwell. Jon is never able to hold onto a pen for long enough to use all the ink, and he wonders how this man managed. Every time he finishes a note, he touches the pen cap to his mouth, and it twists Jon’s gut. He isn’t sure why.
The man looks worried, carrying the tension in his eyebrows and the small frown in his face. His eyes are what really give him away, though, because they keep darting back and forth from his notebook to the screen like he can’t quite keep up.
Jon frowns, too. This man was wasting his nerves on the explanation when the truly harrowing experiences are still to come. Jon didn’t even get a comprehensive presentation when he started. All he got was a bored half-explanation from his more experienced partner who was more than happy to let Jon flounder and drown, and this man gets a whole PowerPoint—that Jon made himself—telling him exactly what to do, and he’s worried ?
Jon’s staring, he realizes with horror, and more than that, he’s glaring at him. He snaps his eyes back to the front and flushes with embarrassment. He doesn’t know why the man’s potential nerves bother him so much, but he doesn’t take the time to unpack it.
“—you’ll be paired with the same partner for the whole semester, and your combined record at the classroom tournament and the real tournament will be thirty percent of your final grade. I expect you to work closely with your partner over the course of the semester and, unless there are dire circumstances, changes to partners will not be allowed.”
Jon’s blood freezes in his veins. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. He can’t work with a total stranger. Jon’s caustic personality is only amped up in high-stress situations, like having 15 minutes to prep an entire case.
He burned through four partners before Gerry got recruited to the team. Jon expected that partnership to be trainwreck number five, what with Gerry’s heavy, black eye makeup and piercings and overall “take no shit” demeanor. But instead of retaliating to Jon’s inevitable snappishness, he countered with a stern, “None of that, thank you,” before pretending like Jon hadn’t insulted him. For some reason, it worked, and they’ve been partners ever since. It’s funny, that the goth is the calm and measured one of the pair of them, but Jon relies on his calmness to survive tournament days.
There’s no way that Dr. Bouchard forgot Jon’s issues with partners (it was the talk of the team that first semester), and he couldn’t possibly think that pairing up one of these novices with him will end well for anyone. As Jon thinks this, Dr. Bouchard turns his gaze to him and gestures out toward him, and the rest of the class turn to look. He feels all their eyes land on him at once, and he sinks an inch lower in his seat.
“Now, Jonathan Sims here is the captain of the debate team proper—go ahead and wave, Jon.”
Jon grinds his teeth together, glaring at Dr. Bouchard with as much venom as he thinks he can get away with, before raising a hand. He leaves it up in the air for a second before setting it back down on the desk. He presses the flat of his hand into the cool surface and focuses on that sensation, and he doesn’t look at the faces of anyone else, too afraid of what their expressions will be—too afraid that they’ll be laughing at him.
“But I want to reassure everyone that being his partner will not put you at an advantage. Rest assured, that I will be grading him much harder than the rest of you. I expect to see quite a bit of improvement from you this semester, Jonathan,” Dr. Bouchard says in his clipped Professor Voice. Jon nods curtly, as if it wasn’t a joke. Was it a joke? He can't tell. Does he actually need to improve? Dr. Bouchard had implied this would be an easy class for him, so it seems absurd to just throw this curveball at the last minute, and what would improvement even look like? No, stop , he halts his thought spiral before it gets out of control.
“I hope you like where you’re sitting, because I’m basing partnerships and where you’ve sat today. Call it fate! In that case, Jon, you’ll be paired with Martin Blackwood. Timothy Stoker, you’ll be with Sasha James. Basira Hussein…”
Dr. Bouchard reads down the list that he has in front of him, but Jon can’t hear because of the static filling his brain.
He slowly turns to look at the man behind him, the one sitting closest to him, the one who seemed overwhelmed at the very basics of debate. Sure enough, he lifts his hand in greeting as he gathers his stuff to move down toward Jon.
Oh, no.