francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-24 20:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | cassandra cain, hoban washburne |
Who: Thea Wells & Lin Alesi
What: A spill, then a meeting in the stacks between two very different kinds of library-goers
Where: 4th Floor, UNLV Library
When: Recently, this past week
Warnings/Rating: Mention of Michael Flatley and Riverdance, swears.
Fourth floor of the UNLV library, in the illuminated manuscripts stacks (fuck yeah), Lin was gathering items to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day the hardcore way - with motherfuckin’ books. Just like the Irish. A little belatedly, but what did that matter? He’d just downloaded the new, extremely awesome, fly-ass Book of Kells app for his iPad (fuck yeaaaaah, all 680 surviving pages in fucking color) and decided he wanted some supplementary reading to go along with it - something with a little more heft than Wikipedia could offer. So, here he was, Bernard Meehan under his arm, on tiptoes, trying to grab at Carol Farr, but falling short by a good half a foot. (She was... too... farr? lol) He sighed. There was no step-ladder in sight. His messenger bag met the floor with a thud. His sweater was draped over it haphazardly and Bernard was gently propped against both. Then, down to his t-shirt and jeans, ready for action, with his eyes screwed up in concentration and his legs coiling lower in preparation, he sprang off the ground (and got some serious air, holla) and snatched the spine of The Book of Kells: its function and audience up in his hand. TOR! The crowd went wild. -- But, his grip wasn’t tight enough. He dropped the heavy tome, and then he accidentally landed on it, one dirty tennis shoe treading Las Vegas muck all across the cover. FUCK! The crowd booed and his ankle throbbed. Lin stumbled backwards on one leg, swearing loudly and colorfully (the religiously observant Irish would not have liked that), until he finally toppled over and landed on his ass, painfully. Somewhat dazed and out of breath, he sat back up and ran a hand over his face. He kicked the book. “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.” The voice was quiet but it was clear, the speaker’s desire to be heard clear in the low, pleasant alto cadence of her statement. There was a pleased ring to it, as though she might have been smiling; she was - the voice (the girl) was crouched in the very corner and the very back of the next stack with a clear sight-line to Lin’s acrobatics. “Pretty sure they’re not down with book-stomping. I think it’s kind of banned.” She was skinny denim-legs folded up into the corner and a wide, heavy manuscript splayed out across her lap; she was using her knees to hold the book up, and her elbows had been - until a minute or so before - either side of the book, until she was a curtained off individual of no especial distinction wedged in a corner of the library no one had particular interest. Apart from people who threw books around. Thea turned her head to look at the fallen book with a sad respect for its fate. It wasn’t cheap, and it had weight to it. Weighty books, in Thea’s opinion, were generally better despite the pain of carrying them around in backpacks. Rarely did someone write something and shove it into a tome unless they had something important to say. “You could try a chair. You know. Instead of crash-landing on books,” she suggested, pointed chin in hand and blinking at him behind blond hair. She looked like she could have been any other college student; a freshman, probably, except most freshmen didn’t camp out in the library on a weekend when there was beer to be illegally gotten. “I think the books would maybe prefer it. Library, too.” Honestly, right now, the books could go fuck themselves as far as Lin was concerned. He was busy nursing his ankle, holding it high enough to bespeak of flexibility that a boy like him shouldn’t have (yay for being double-jointed), but when the voice cut through the otherwise overwhelming quiet of the stacks, he dropped it. (Fuck. Ow.) He craned around where he sat, until he espied the peeping eyes from the corner behind the ceiling-high shelf of books at his back. They seemed to him to be glittering with amusement. Well, an audience was always nice. The boy waved a hand in the direction of the unnamed library militant, brushing her words off before they could even reach him. He flipped forward onto his hands and knees and crawled to peer around the corner of the divider at his spectator. To Lin’s eyes, she did rather look like everyone else on campus. She was white, smallish and blond, folded in on herself in the corner with a book open on her knees. Her chin was in her hand and her eyebrows were arched in a prim kind of way, the kind he himself adopted when he was giving simpering, condescending, and often unsolicited advice. He liked her already. “Hey now, bemused library patron, I was practicing my Irish dancing, obvi. You know, to celebrate St. Patrick and the peoples of Ireland. To pay homage to the great land that gave us Riverdance - all praise our Lord of the Dance, Michael Flatley -. It’s not my fault Carol Farr decided to go kamikaze and flew under my foot.” His voice was deep, surprisingly so, considering how small he was, but his smile was wide and his eyes were bright. Thea did not think of herself as small, even if others did, and she did not think of herself as delicate, although the hand that cupped her chin was thin, and the elbow on her knee was surprisingly bony. She was long blond hair that fell forward in a swaying curtain against that elbow, and she looked as though it might be surprisingly comfortable, folded in upon oneself like an abandoned umbrella. She watched him first discover where she was (the point of sitting out of the way was you could pay attention to the books without being paid attention to, and when you tired of books, you wandered out to where people used the library as a meeting ground, and a dining hall and -occasionally- a place to hook up and you watched until they were uncomfortable) and then she watched the set of his mouth and whether he was angry, or amused. She held out for neither, Thea being comfortably aware that the librarian had no intention of making her way into the very back of the library on a weekend night, and having little to no problem with irritating someone who chose to throw around books like they were footballs. He crawled, which made him smaller, and she blinked beneath very pale eyelashes, and her mouth quirked just a little. “Riverdance is a travesty,” she told him, “I just feel bad for all those dancers with hairspray up their asses and doing aerobics in velvet dresses, smiling like it’s just a dream come true playing back-up for the Westlife reject that is Michael Flatley.” She had folded her arms over the book, all soft white sweater and chipped blue nail-polish showing on the thin fingers and she looked at him like she was daring him to argue with her Riverdance hate. It was a terrible show. She’d loved it when she’d been five and dumb enough to think it was cool and she’d asked to go see it but they’d left the UK for Johannesburg two days before the show her parents had said ‘maybe’ to. Of course Lin saw the look, and he recognized it for what it was, the dare nestled in it not so subtle. He saw too the small uptick of her smile and the way her pale eyes shone under paler lashes. He grinned. He sat himself down there, at the end of the aisle, back to the stacks full of illuminated manuscripts and their associated theory. Yes, his bag was still over there by Carol and Bernard, but - hopefully no one else was as interested in celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with books as he was, and his things wouldn’t be filched. Anyway, he could see it if he turned to look. “Elitist,” scoffed the boy playfully, pulling his own knees to his chest, white smile curling on his lips. “If I hadn’t just injured myself, I would totes get up and perform Morrighan’s part when she dances for the heart of the Lord of the Dance. I mean, first of all, that’s how I personally pick people up - and it works every time, for the record - and second of all, to show you how deep and moving it can be when someone’s twirling around and kicking in the air for a man in an open leather jacket. Like, if that doesn’t speak to Ireland’s arduous, but ultimately beautiful history, then I don’t know what does.” Did Lin actually like “Lord of the Dance”? Not particularly. He thought it was hilarious. And he liked to play devil’s advocate when it came to tastes, because he found many people discounted a lot of things without any thought as to why, and it was fun to poke at them. “I don’t know who Morrighan is,” Thea informed him and her tone was high and very lofty, like an academic explaining thermo-nuclear-fission to someone enthusing over the Big Bang Theory, “But I totally think that it would be horrific. Abysmal. The books would cry.” She looked at him thoughtfully, teeth worrying pink lower lip and she watched him curl himself up tight. He could, she thought, maybe fit. And that was weird, and it was kind of cool, if it was a little unusual. But so was the Riverdance love. Awkward. “There is nothing deep and meaningful about Riverdance. It’s like pelting the stage with potatoes, ultimately insulting to eons of history and culture encapsulated in a casting call for dancers that probably like, specified ‘red hair, curly, can fake-smile like St Patrick walks among us’.” She was animated now, like a pen-and-ink drawing painted over in watercolor; pale but interested. “You could try reading the books. Instead of throwing them. If you wanted to know about Ireland’s arduous but beautiful history.” She looped blond hair behind her ear in a gesture all bitten nail-polish and deft fingers, and her smile curled at the corners like a smirk, satisfied. “They would not, jackass. They would cheer. Loudly, proudly, tearfully, pages a-flutter, et cetera.” Lin’s response was quick and light, as fluid as a character’s in a book, arriving on the tail-end of the girl’s own words, in spite of her more knowledgeable-than-thou tone. Firstly, because he wasn’t actually worried about that being an issue, and, also, because that was what he did - he came back at people. It took no more thought than breathing. Lin watched her closely with brown eyes. “And you can’t make that judgement call, if you don’t know who the woman is. Obvi you don’t know what you’re missing.” That part wasn’t necessarily a joke. Lin was not about judging things you didn’t know or understand just on the basis that that was what everyone else did, Riverfuckingdance or not. It was like when he was assumed to be vacuous because he fucking liked pop music - because most of the time, the judge(r?) honestly had never even heard the songs he listened to, but thought they were certified to make a value call on it anyway, which was just some bullshit. But, whatever. He listened to the girl and her talk of potatoes and reading books, he eyed her smirk, and he laughed. “I fail to see how reducing complex arduous histories to simplified stereotypes is a problem,” he said, um, sarcastically, in case that wasn’t clear. Then he shrugged. “I dunno. I was having fun dancing on them. And how am I supposed to hear my heels clicking on fucking paper, you know what I mean? Nah.” He waved a hand at her. She studied the ends of his fingers interestedly, the bright color of his fingernail polish - not bitten off, thank you, but smooth, and shiny like freshly painted, like he’d had practice at it - and she shuffled a little more forward out of the dark of the corner, shadows and forgotten books and the smell of dust forgone for the antiseptic sweeping bypass of the cleaners and the clarity of florescent bar-lights overhead. “You can judge most things,” Thea said and her voice was slow and clear and thoughtful, “If you consider all the relevant variables.” Out in the light, she was thin and she was pale; neither thing qualified her as unattractive but Thea was (and she knew it) the kind of girl most described when trying to be flattering, as ‘interesting-looking’. She had the translucency and faint bluish white of skimmed milk and far too much time spent indoors, and her eyes were very clear and very intent. She looked serious, and she looked as though someone had drawn the very sharp pencil lines of her with the intention of making her look serious; the smile that came and went was as unsettling as it was rather pretty. “In this case,” Thea was ticking things off on her own fingers, “Morrighan sounds like a My Little Pony name, Riverdance sucked exponentially, enough for the super special star not to save it and Ireland is still groaning beneath the weight of its tired, hokey tunes, let alone the actual post-boom bust over there.” But the boy was sharp, and his words snicked together like beads on a chain, brightly colored and witty even if he slung around ‘obvi’ like it was a word. “You could try, oh, I don’t know, a floor if you want heel clicking?” Thea mirrored the sarcastic tone and she mirrored his posture, as much as a girl seated cross-legged on the floor might. Lin watched as the girl crawled out of her hiding space, her little cocoon of shadows and cobwebs, and he smiled at her, snaking his arms back around his knees and positioning his chin atop them. She was ghostly pale, bony, had a serious set to her mouth that vanished completely when she smiled. The boy's expression was skeptical at the declarative 'you can judge most things,' but he could tell from looking at the library girl that she was young, and as such, well, she couldn't be expected to be as wise as he was. He laughed to himself, squeaking the heel of his sneaker against the ground for something to do. "Untrue. And Morrighan is a reference to the Phantom Queen from Irish mythology, I'd wager. She's pretty legit. I'd definitely say it sounds more like a witch's name than a My Little Pony name, especially considering their names are about sparkles and rainbows and pink, like, fucking, Galaxy Sprinkles or something. Which I think is great, but which Morrighan has nothing to do with. And, it is hokey, but sometimes that can be fun and interesting too. Not everything is about the old leaves of books." Lin spoke quickly, confidently, one word after another, and in a voice that was maybe a touch too loud for a library. His smile had a very amused twist to it and his eyebrows were high. He laughed again. "And floors are too conventional for me. I'm on the cutting edge, baby. So fuck you and your floors." “Uh, no thank you. I take a little bit of persuasion at least and I’m sure the floor has seen better,” Thea was quick retort, words sharp but amused thrum of laughter in the back of her throat, the lilt of delighted banter in pale blue eyes, and her head was cocked, like some kind of very small bird, toward him, brightly curious. He was small; she’d figured college students would be all sophisticated and shit, that magical moment where you transferred between being a kid and largely powerless to being free of uncertainty, to knowing what wine to drink with your meal and patronizing the opera (Thea’s realm of adults being largely of a particular genre) would come with height and power and physical capacity. But he wasn’t; his chin on his knees made his shadow fall across hers, a blur of dark similarity under florescent illumination. “Not everything is about books,” Thea agreed, because something had to be lived to be written down and put into them, didn’t it? But books distilled life down to the important moments that made you shiver when you read them, or the history that beat through them like sluggish blood through veins. “But you’re in a library. Where the books live.” It was a loud, stage-whisper, hand curved around her mouth to helpfully disguise the movement of her lips. Thea shrugged, a shimmy of soft white sweater over bony shoulders. “If you’re looking for My Little Pony, I kind of think you’re in the wrong place.” Lin made a distinct 'pffff' sound at the remark about the floor. Persuasion? In this day and age? Wow, she was young. And anyway, he was fairly sure the floors wouldn't mind a break from their obviously irregular cleaning schedule. He laughed, eyes cinched at the corners. The boy ran a hand through his tuft of black hair as he made a 'suit yourself' kind of face, but then she was moving on to the books, whispering loudly at him like a Sim telling a dirty joke -- and then she implied he was a Brony. Now he really laughed, head back and loudly, because Lin never really was quiet. He could be at a cemetery and he would still struggle to control his volume (in fact, that had basically been the entirety of his grandma's funeral some twelve years ago). Oh, well. He didn't let it bother him. She'd been kind of mean, anyway, always shooing him off the couch when he tried to show her his backflips. Grinning, the boy leaned forward, a tight ball, with his dark eyes shining in the drowning white of the fluroescent of the library lights. "Oh, God. Okay, okay, okay. No fucking the floors. You never know who's watching," he said with a meaningful look at the blond girl and her white sweater and straw lashes. "I'm in a what? Though note, I didn't say anything about it not being about books, but about the pages in the books. Shit, I know this is their home. And I'm here to tapdance in it, ya dig?" Lin had no real reason to continue to pursue the myth of his dancing, but whatever. It was more fun that saying, yeah, I'm here to research illuminated manuscripts, ya dig? "And, lastly, you little shit, you brought up My Little Pony. I told you. I'm here for the fucking lore that you seem so misinformed about. So, that's not a witty comment. If you want to banter, you have to follow the right train of thought." Black eyebrows lifted in challenge and Lin smiled. He sounded like an ass - he was an ass, but he didn't care at all. The girl could take it, he was 90% certain. His voice rippled up and down and then it was loud, too loud for people not paying attention not to look around for the source. Thea’s eyes went shocked-wide and she jerked her head searching for someone who might hear or who might see, and she ‘sshh!’-d at him with one finger. In Thea’s experience, so long as you were quiet and you didn’t do any damage and you didn’t eat in there, most librarians didn’t care if you didn’t have a card or an excuse. The minute you drew attention and you made yourself a nuisance, they began to care about memberships and appropriate places for young adults, and this isn’t somewhere just anyone can walk into young lady! Thea hated being called young lady, and she hated being noticed when it wasn’t wanted and whilst she had begun to smile, all upturned mouth and a silent sort of shake to her shoulders that was laughing quietly enough not to be heard, his own laugh and the way it bounced against dead air and books and quiet made Thea straighten and she uncurled herself and began to shove books back on the shelves. “I was referencing My Little Pony ironically,” she said, over one shoulder as she slid home a book on the history of county Clare, the soft huff of dust and the thick smell of pages and leather as it snicked into place alongside all the others, “I didn’t expect to run into their greatest fan or something. If you stomp on the books, how am I supposed to know you actually want to read them?” Her smile, the one sent his way was angelic; it was the kind of smile that made people’s eyes slide right over Thea and the blond hair that hid her face and made them think of other people. It had a sly curl to its corners, like a dare. Of course, the girl's insistence - her earnest shushing, the milk white finger to her lips, and widening of her eyes - just made Lin laughed harder, because, girl needed to chill the fuck out. He was always a nuisance, and he knew how to handle the haters. No one else was even near the fucking illuminated manuscripts section, anyway, alright? They were perfectly alone, save for each other, and even if they weren't, and an especially irritable librarian came over, Lin would simply smile and say the girl next to him had told him this great joke about Carolingian manuscripts, and, oh my God, did she, the librarian and lover of literature, want to hear it? How could a book lover's heart not be softened by some shit like that? All it took was a little quick thinking and the boy felt he had that covered well enough. "Unless you mean your initial reference to My Little Pony, that's not irony," he replied matter-of-factly to her dare, eyes following the books she replaced on the shelves behind her. It was time to go, he guessed. Alright. "And anyway, I only used to watch it as a kid, because who didn't want a sugar pink plastic pony with a tramp stamp and synthetic hair you can brush with a purple wide-toothed comb? I mean, really. As it is, the Brony - which is the last word I'm gonna use rn that ends with '-ony' - movement is beyond even me. Though I do think it's an interesting phenomenon." Lin climbed to his feet then, slowly and with something of a groan as his ankle ached under his weight. He bent to rub at it again before straightening up. That motherfucking book. He wanted to kick it again. Lin looked down at the library ghost, hands on his hips. "Seeing as you made all other kinds of assumptions, I don't think it'd be a stretch to presume I'm in a library to also read," the dark-haired boy shot back with a shrug and a smirk. He circled the stack he'd orginally been in to go and fetch up his bag , sweater, and the discarded Meehan and kicked Farr. He called out, in the same loud voice, words squeezing between the books that walled them off from one another again. "I'm Lin, by the way. But I'll accept Morrighan, if you're so inclined." His head peeped around the corner again, just enough to make eye contact with the girl, and he grinned. He was noisy and he didn’t care about librarians, probably, Thea guessed, because librarians loved him. There was a type. She studied him, pursed lips and narrowed pallid-blue gaze and she looked for the hallmarks, for the ink-stains on his fingers or maybe a button down shirt. Maybe he was an orphan, or he liked helping recover books or something. Librarians, Thea thought darkly, were prone to eat that shit up with a spoon. She didn’t know what a brony was (being entirely unpopular in Russia, neither culturally relevant nor translatable into Cyrillic and Russian scorn - Russia, of course being only the last stop in a sea of such places) but she gathered it was something to be scornful of, and she put her freed hand on her hip, cocked, and she watched him climb up off the floor like he either wasn’t used to sitting down there or had perhaps, hurt something with the book stomping to begin with. “Reading is quiet,” Thea said, reasonably. Her voice was low, and it was soft; it had the huskiness of an alto that either does not get a great deal of use or is not used to being listened to. It was the natural timbre for libraries and churches, for quiet places where the faintly scratchy cigarettes-and-old-records voice would be faint but distinct. “You’re not. You could have gotten lost on the way to the,” she looked him up and down again in a pale little sweeping look, “Cheer squad?” A patronizing smile, all sweetness and sharp. “You could be lost.” The smile broke, like thin ice over water; it was evidently not a natural look. “Thea. I’m so not calling you Morrighan, dream on.” Librarians did like Lin. Because people tended to like him after they hated him. Because, he was a nuisance, but he was a nuisance with a hankerin' for knowledge and a big head full of it, and, if questioned, he could fathom up whatever bit of information he thought most likely to sway their papery hearts in his favor. (This was how he got away with most everything, tbh.) Plus, he smiled a lot, and that helped. This girl - she was quiet though, and that, and her paleness, the dryness to her, told Lin that she was the other sort the librarians liked. The kind that burrowed into the walls, nose in a book, and did nothing to disturb the attempted placidity of the library (that generally came across as oppressive more than anything, in Lin's opinion). "Cheer squad?" Lin echoed incredulously from his separate stack as he finished shuffling things into place. He swung the bag over his head and pranced around the corner to draw back up in front of the girl. Her smile was tentative. It brought out color in her though, red on white, and added a prettiness to her features that maybe wasn't so evident otherwise. He liked that. - And cheering? Cheering he could do. He'd seen Bring It On enough times to have this shit down pat (yay for Friday nights in high school). "How ever did you know?" It wasn't every day you got to lead a cheer in the stacks, surrounded by religious art. Clearing his throat and closing his eyes to center himself, Lin drew into himself to shutter his open, laughing expression with something more serious. In a tone that had not a waver to it, and with no trace of a smile on his lips, he recited with all the solemnity of Hamlet's first soliloquy, miming flatly as he did so: "I’m sexy, I’m cute, I’m popular to boot. I’m bitchin’, great hair. The boys all love to stare. I’m wanted, I’m hot. I’m everything you’re not. I’m pretty, I’m cool. I dominate this school. Who am I? Just guess - no, wait, don't. Ain't nobody got time for that. I'm Morrighan." His eyes opened, beetle black and shining, and he smiled charmingly. "Come with me and get some coffee - or I'll get pop, but you know -, Thea, O lover of books, and I can teach you the rest. Just know that I'm obvi going to be Torrence. But, you can still be my backup." |