Chapter Text
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LIBRARY NOTICE
The following items are overdue:
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Title: The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth
Due Date: 05/07/2026
NONFICTION WORDSWORTH
Item ID: 9786612040658
Title: Leaves of Grass
Due Date: 05/07/2026
NONFICTION WHITMAN
Item ID: 9781722504038
Title: John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters
Due Date: 05/07/2026
NONFICTION KEATS
Item ID: 9780007558117
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The news arrived in Tom's inbox at the worst of times.
Over the course of the day, he’d been to hell and back several times over, and he was very very tired of it. A whole mess of inconveniences, from discovering he’d consumed his last breakfast muffin yesterday to missing his afternoon bus, left him scrambling. The students certainly noticed and the professors ducked into their respective lecture halls when they noticed the slightly sour expression on his face. This sort of behavior meant he was bound to be the talk of the Senior Common Room, which irked him all the more. At the moment, he invested his time in the seemingly endless pursuit of grading papers, frantically attempting to update his students’ marks in time for midterm reports and scowling while doing so. A pen was barely visible in solid, motionless form as it stretched and shook in his grasp. He was positive his hand would be permanently stained with ink after his endeavors into critiquing the work of his law graduates. These thoughts had begun to affect his mood, which in turn affected his general countenance. Irritability radiated off him in waves. For a man of many smiles to be taken down to such dismal spirits was something distressing indeed. Quickly as possible he must finish this work and be done with it. Until then, there existed no respite from his broken spirits.
The thought guided him until his strained eyes required temporary rest, a period he chose to begin by drifting his gaze slightly to the left, nearing the computer screen’s edge. And in the empty moments between filing fury, he noticed a single uptick in the number of emails he received. Damn it all to hell, he thought. Already the base number of unopened electronic messages was far too high for any rational mind to tolerate. Sighing defeatedly, he switched from his gradebook to his inbox, where a glaring message labeled with a capital “OVERDUE” in the subject line seemed to be shouting at him. Urgency outside the teaching profession could wait, if only for an evening. Tom’s mind, it seemed, had refused to take any more stressors, for he selected the alert and marked it as read.
Typically, he was not so careless. In fact, for the majority of his time, he was completely the opposite. Meticulous to a fault. But long nights and daunting deadlines do strange things to the psyche, and those very deadlines were currently leaving the professor in a compromised state. Acting against the structured forms that set his mind, he overlooked the event and went back to the task at hand.
In his academic stupor, he forgot all about the message. Until, at long last, a reminder struck.