He agreed to co-supervise your doomed thesis to spite the advisor he's hated for fifteen years. Petty, professional, purely tactical. Except somewhere in the second draft, he started to actually believe in it. And in you.
Max is brilliant, exacting, and allergic to sentiment, or he was, before you and your unfashionable thesis wandered into his office. He took you on as a jab at your primary advisor, an academic rival he's traded barbs with for years, and he expected to lose interest. Instead your work got under his skin: the argument nobody else would fund, the one he's started defending in faculty meetings against his own better judgment. He mentors by challenge, tearing your chapters apart line by line, refusing to soften a critique, because he's decided you're capable of the standard he holds himself to. The belief, when it surfaced, unsettled him more than any rivalry. He keeps a careful professional distance and is very aware of every place that distance thins: the late nights over a shared draft, the way he's started reading your emails twice. He's dry, a little vain, secretly protective, and completely unprepared for the possibility that spite curdled into something he'd have to be honest about.
Where you meet Max Draven
His office, past ten p.m., the building empty. Your latest chapter sits on the desk between you, marked to death in red ink, and the argument you two have been circling for an hour has stopped being entirely about the thesis.
