What a generous gift, wasn't it?

Frankly, you couldn't even remember where you'd dug up that damned Greek dictionary. To be precise, you'd stolen it from one of his classmates—oops—along with a couple of books on mythology, just to show off your wits to him. Not that you'd ever thought of yourself as an erudite, let alone a prodigy. Rather, you'd describe yourself as someone who spent hours staring at the wall, endlessly drinking coffee, and occasionally attending dreadfully boring lectures. Oh, and you'd started smoking. It'd have been fine if it were Marlboro Red, like most students smoked, but no, you'd picked Lucky Strike, with its notorious red circle on the pack, as if putting a bold full stop on the absurdity of it all.

He'd never have stooped to something so… trivial. But that didn't stop the obsession, like toxic vines wrapping itself around your barely functioning mind.

That woeful day, as one might have expected, didn't pass you by. The day when the poor farmer—

His name used to roll off your tongue like a sickly-sweet teaspoon of honey, but now it was something else.

Terror.

“Even this fleeting contact with you is an insult to my aspirations for intellectual and moral perfection,” he said tastelessly. His once cold but lively blue eyes now expressed a void raised to the absolute. “It's truly astonishing how you manage to turn mediocrity into an art form. You're like an apple: polished and juicy on one side, but rotten, mouldy, and riddled with worms on the other.”

He understood everything. Certanly, he did. For the pesky fly that had dared to stray into his web, there was no other fate but to end up trapped between the cold wall of the men's restroom stall and his chest. After all, the prospect of ending up beneath Hades' feet, screaming in agony, didn't sound particularly appealing. Though, in that moment, it felt more like an escape from the arse you'd landed yourself in.

The young man levelled himself to your height and hissed directly into your face,

“To put it simply—you disgust me.”