A/N: Characters and premise of Gabriel's Inferno are the property of Sylvain Reynard. Miss Carbone and Tony Alioto are original characters. This story was inspired by the sporking at Das Sporking, so it is a fix-fic/spite-fic from the point of view of one of the grad students in Gabriel Emerson's Dante seminar. Dialog between Gabriel Emerson and Julia Mitchell is generally taken directly from the book.
"Miss Carbone?"
Dr. Emerson had a way of making names sound like accusations. I'm not a soldier, a dog, or a freshman, to jump when my name is called, so I took my time in focusing on him.
"Professor?"
"Why do you think Dante put his political opponents in the circle of hell assigned to heretics?"
My pretense of thinking, gaze locked on his cold blue eyes, bought me a couple seconds to swap laptop screens in case he pulled his trick of walking around behind me.
"Spite."
Dr. Emerson exhaled like a buffalo. "Spite is not a quality we attribute to the great poets of their time, Miss Carbone."
"Why not? The whole Guelph versus Ghibelline ruckus started as a dispute over papal versus imperial power and then spiraled down into gang turf wars."
He snorted again, but his eyes were already scanning the room for a new victim. "Miss Mitchell?"
Nothing but the scratching of pens on paper and the tap of keyboards answered him. Dr. Emerson was obsessed with seeing students taking notes, though his lectures were all Dante 101, way below what we should have been doing in a graduate course.
"Miss Mitchell?"
Dr. Emerson was looking over our heads, so I wasn't going to resist turning to look, too. Miss Mitchell was in the back row, head down, scribbling frantically in a notebook. She'd chosen the wrong moment to get caught up in writing fan-fic, it looked like.
"I expect an answer, Miss Mitchell, if you'd care to join us."
Not a buffalo: he looked like a bull, if bulls were tall and broad-shouldered, with bright blue eyes and very expensive tweed jackets.
Miss Mitchell, who'd finally raised her head to notice him, opened her mouth as if she meant to whimper, then must have thought better of the urge. She had the little sharp features and big brown eyes of a cartoon mouse, to the point that I expected to see whiskers twitching against her paste-white skin. Mouse-colored hair was drawn back severely, and even at a distance, her swallowing was visible above the buttoned collar of her plain white shirt.
An instant message popped up on my laptop screen. She's the one.
"Is English your first language?" Dr. Emerson bellowed at the unfortunate Miss Mitchell. In the front row, Christine Peterson worked her very best derisive laugh.
She can't be. A second after I hit Send, Tony Alioto, sitting next to me, snickered at the message.
Everybody knew that Dr. Emerson hit on women grad students. We traded tips on how to avoid that kind of attention from him. I'd placed my faith in fourteen pieces of flair on my military-surplus jacket, thirteen of them promoting radical leftist causes. The fourteenth was in Klingon.
"Since Miss Mitchell seems to be carrying on a parallel seminar in a different language, perhaps someone else would be kind enough to answer my question?"
Little Miss Mitchell turned bright red and ducked her head. The rest of us looked any direction but at Dr. Emerson. I'd have bet I wasn't the only one who'd forgotten what the original question even was. He was on course for an explosion, the kind he was legendary for, the kind that my adviser swore meant he wouldn't get tenure this spring.
"Io posso dire, se รจ anima, che l'ho perduta per parte ghibellina," said a voice from the front row. I can say that, if there is a soul, I have lost it for the Ghibelline cause. Christine had saved us. I didn't recognize what she was quoting, since my own era is the Risorgimento, but she segued neatly into the overlapping plaints of Farinata and Cavalcanti in the sixth circle of hell.
At the end of her answer, she tossed her dark hair with a little sigh. Rumor had it that Dr. Emerson hated sexually aggressive women and feared smart ones, so Christine's form of self-protection was to show off her cleavage and her brains.
Go Christine! Tony messaged to both of us. I responded with three thumbs-up emoticons. Dr. Emerson turned his back on us to transcribe one of Cavalcanti's love poems on the board. Christine helpfully offered corrections for three words. I tapped away at my laptop, planning a story in which the Enterprise came across a planet of warring city states and Lieutenant Uhuru brokered peace.
"Something funny, Miss Mitchell?" Dr. Emerson snapped. His eyes must have gone straight to her when he turned back to the class. Told you so, Tony messaged me. Obsession incoming.
This time, she actually whimpered. I wasn't sure if I wanted to grab her out of Emerson's way or strangle her. The guy sitting next to her, Paul Norris, turned red beneath his halo of golden curls. "I was just asking her what page we were on," he said.
"Hardly an appropriate question for a doctoral student, Paul." Right, we doctoral students never lost our place in a text. "But since you asked, we began with the first canto. I trust you can find it without Miss Mitchell's help?"
But Christine was in the tenth canto, Tony messaged me. We'd really never begun the first canto at all, since Dr. Emerson's first-day background lecture had drifted all over the place.
"Oh, and Miss Mitchell? See me in my office after class."
On Dr. Emerson's next shift of attention to the board, I risked a glance over my shoulder. The mysterious Miss Mitchell was still scribbling away, while Paul Norris watched her like a cat.