Who: Mak & Neil What: Mood alterations. Where: The Library When: Sunday afternoon, 9/17 Status: Complete
Neil never worked Sundays. If people needed a librarian they could come in on a weekday like responsible adults because he was not available that one day. Yet today he couldn't stay home so he ended up at the library anyway. It was home away from home - possibly even more home to him than his apartment. He felt restless and unsafe there and at least the library was a public place with other people around. That didn't mean he had to be working though it was hard to not meddle in the going-ons. He was in such a strange mood, it was hard to focus on the books he usually read and he ended up picking up a book he hated on sight, leafing through it with a scowl. It started with tacky poetry, because of course it did, and then there were so many bad sentences. He flipped a few more pages before a passage caught his attention and tugged on something in him.
There was a single paragraph describing the horrors the heroine had been through in her life, a life of darkness and fear infused with purpose. It rang true to his own life and his own experiences in a way and he kept reading as he strolled down between the stacks and ended up sitting down on the floor by one of the book cases. It was all drivel, aimed at dramatic teenagers, but he felt... moved by it - and disgusted by the fact. Maybe it was simply nice to get lost in somebody else's horrors instead of his own. After reading for a while the heroine he was trying so hard not to relate to met her soulmate - as if there was such a thing - and reading it made Neil feel lonelier than he had ever felt. His nose burned, his mouth felt dry and his throat felt tight as he took in word after word and sentence after sentence of fate and meant-to-bes, the realization he would never feel like this creeping in on him. Why did he suddenly care? It all felt wrong, the wobbly chin, the hot tears spilling down his cheeks. He wiped them away angrily, hating this stupid book and yet finding himself unable to stop reading. He had to make sure she was safe, that the love of her life could be rescued, that this stupid fucking book had a happy ending.
Mak’s night had been ... interesting. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of the Ouija board shenanigans, and she was trying not to think about it as she did her duties around the library. She liked Sundays there, it was usually nice and quiet, apart from the hour’s worth of storytime in the kid’s section. But Mak kind of liked watching little kids get all drawn into a story, so she didn’t mind their noise much. They still had a few hours to go until that time, anyway.
She was pushing a cart through the stacks, reshelving returned books, when she caught sight of a bent dark head over the top of her cart as she rounded a corner. Mak stopped short, the second of familiarity before recognition kicked in and she frowned. She had seen Mr. Wainscott come in, which was a little odd for the day, but Mak hadn’t paid it much mind. He was the librarian, he belonged here. What she didn’t expect to see was him sitting on the floor holding what looked like one of the romance novels and ... crying? Oh wow. Mak stepped around the cart, her brow furrowed. She wasn’t quite sure what to do -- she’d never dealt with a weeping adult on her own, but she liked Neil and it was instinctive to want to comfort him. “Um ... Mr. Wainscott? Are you okay?” she asked softly.
Neil jumped, instinctively hiding the book under his thigh and wiping at his cheeks with the back of his hand. "I am fine," he said sharply before peeking up to make sure it was Mak and not someone who sounded like her. He liked Mak, as much as he liked anyone, so snapping at her made him feel a little guilty but she should have known better than to ask. This was embarrassing and out of character for him and he wished she hadn't seen that. "I'm fine," he muttered, his voice a bit softer, but he wasn't fine at all. It was probably stress making him feel this weird but he'd more or less been stressed all his life so even that didn't ring true. He hadn't even heard her coming, despite her pushing along that cart that was hardly quiet on its best of days and that was alarming. It could have been anyone.
Mak pulled back a tiny bit when he snapped, but Neil could be sharp in general, so she didn’t think a lot of it. Getting caught crying was embarrassing for her, and she was a teenage girl. It was probably more humiliating for a grown man. But he just looked so sad, she couldn’t quite make herself walk away to give him privacy just yet. Mak’s fingers twined together in front of her for a second as she tried to think of something helpful to say. “I’ve got some kleenex in my backpack if you want some,” she offered quietly. “The toilet paper here’s super rough.” She let out a soft huff, then realized that was probably a really stupid thing to say. “Um ... sorry,” Mak murmured, turning to go back to her cart.
"No," Neil grumbled, then just as quickly added, "Yes please..." The last thing he needed was to walk around the library with tears and snot on his face looking for some awful paper to wipe with. She had already seen him and he hoped her whole nice-girl thing wasn't just an act and she really wouldn't go telling people about this. She'd never struck him as the kind of teenager who laughed about people behind their backs and that was one of the reasons he liked her but of course he could be wrong. "If you have some on you, that would be... much appreciated," he mumbled nasally, not looking up to face her.
Mak could be a brat to her friends, especially Hunter, but she was definitely not the sort to laugh at someone else’s pain. Especially someone she had respect for and looked up to in some ways. She could tell he was embarrassed -- she was a teenager, she knew all about embarrassment -- and she didn’t want to make him feel any worse. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Be right back.” Mak moved the cart a bit so it was blocking Neil from anybody’s view who might come moseying down the back aisle, then hurried off to where she’d stowed her backpack at the front desk. She pulled out the little travel pack of tissues, then went back to where Neil was, not jogging until she was safely within the stacks. Mak skirted around the cart and offered the pack down to him, her gaze sympathetic. It really looked like he was crying over a romance novel, which was really weird from what she knew of him, but who was she to judge?
Neil accepted the tissues and proceeded to blow his nose and blot at his eyes, shaking his head in slight frustration with himself. God what Mak had to be thinking right now, finding him like this, with that book. "It's been a very bad week," he said and that only made him want to cry more, damn it. "This book is atrocious." Why she needed to know that he wasn't sure, he shouldn't care what she thought of him, if she even thought of him at all when they weren't working together. Likely not, their lives were worlds apart despite them living in the same small town.
He wasn’t shooing her away immediately, so Mak settled herself down on her knees on the carpet. She left a little distance between them, but she didn’t want to just tower over Neil while he was feeling weepy. Everybody cried, she was pretty sure, so it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. Just probably uncomfortable to do in front of a teenager. “Yeah, bad books make me cry too,” she offered as a gentle joke, giving him a crooked smile. Mak thought she probably shouldn’t joke though, so she hurried to add, “Good ones too. I cried for like two days when Dobby died.” Did Neil Wainscott consider Harry Potter to be good books? Maybe not. “And this book I read about Cleopatra? I mean, it was fiction, like an autobiography, and I knew how it ended up historically, but ohmygod, still, with her and Marc Antony? Super sad.” And that had been a romance, so it was kind of similar, too. Was she rambling? She was rambling. Mak pressed her lips together. Then couldn’t help but quietly add, “Sorry you had a bad week.”
Neil quirked a little smile at her joke, lame as it was. They worked in a library and he had shared a moment or two with her where they agreed some book or another was horrible but it wasn't up to them to decide what people read or didn't read - unfortunately. Her rambling didn't bother him since it gave him time to get his breathing under control again and stop the sobbing from escaping his chest. "Bad books are a blight on the industry," he said stiffly. "And yet I feel like I need to know how this damn book ends." It was miserable and he picked up book up off the floor, and really looked at it this time. "Oh God, it's a series." There had to be spoilers online, he just had to find them and the thought of that was as embarrassing as reading the book was.
Mak managed to look amused and sympathetic at the same time at that news. She’d gotten sucked into crappy book series before, and it was hard to put them down and not finish. Never a hetero romance novel series though. Mak had tried reading a couple of individual ones and they were bad enough. She didn’t think she could stand it for like nine hundred pages. “Maybe we have the last one too? You can always find it and read the last chapter,” she suggested. “Might be better than like ... suffering through the whole thing.” She offered Neil another little smile, glad that he was still talking to her at least. He could be a nice guy sometimes. “Or, there’s almost definitely a synopsis somewhere online. And scathing Goodreads reviews, I’m sure.” Maybe laughing at some harsh criticism would make him feel better.
That did make him smile again and he nodded, huffing softly. "You're a good girl, Makayla," he mumbled, overcome with affection for her for how she had reacted to his meltdown. "Smart too. Don't let anyone tell you differently." It made him tear up again but not nearly as much as that dumb book had and it was a different kind of emotion too, a warmer one and not as desperately lonely. "You won't... tell anyone about this, will you? I'm so embarrassed." He wiped at his face again and leaned his head back against the bookshelf behind him, staring up at the books on the other side. Out of all the departments he could have broken down in, at least this one was familiar and comforting with its old books on history and facts. It was also the least popular one so he hadn't really expected anyone to find him there but it was still a public library and he'd been dumb not to do this in the bathroom.
Mak tried not to beam the way she wanted to at the unexpected praise -- compliments from cool adults were the best -- but she couldn’t help but smile at least some. She’d told Neil several times just to call her Mak, but he seemed to prefer her full name, so she’d more or less given up on moving into the informal. At least he’d taken care to say it right, a lot of people didn’t. People being teachers, mostly. Her smile faded at the rest of what he said, and she shook her head quickly. “Of course not,” she murmured. Mak was tempted to reach out and touch his arm or something else comforting, but she knew from accidents that he didn’t like to be touched much, so she tucked her hands under her thighs instead. “And it’s okay ...” she added very softly. “Everybody does it sometimes.”
Neil wanted to protest that everybody but him did it sometimes but it wasn't true. It certainly wasn't the first time he'd cried but it happened so rarely because he didn't let himself get to that place. For years now he'd mostly managed to keep himself cut off from what he considered his weaker emotions, fear and love and lust and all those too human things that made him feel disgusting. Fear was not a favorite either but that had become a near-constant, always buzzing in the back of his mind. Annoyance and anger were good ones, they helped keep the rest of it all at bay and he was currently lamenting their absence as he felt nothing but sappy and all too eager to share. He had this sudden urge to tell her to be safe but he didn't even know how to keep himself safe so what was the point of that. He just hoped she wasn't on Their radar. Mak deserved better than that. "Thank you, Makayla," he muttered before taking a deep breath, another attempt at calming his erratic mood.
Her natural awkwardness was starting to sink in through Mak’s impulses to help. Neil wasn’t saying much, and he was probably already sick of her sitting there and looking at him. Not everybody liked company when they were sad. ‘Thank you’ could be taken as a dismissal, too, and she probably ought to err on the side of caution. She wanted to stay on his good side, after all. “No problem,” she murmured back, then started to slowly get to her feet again. “Okay well ... I’ll leave you alone, Mr. Wainscott. I’m around if you need anything.” She didn’t know what she could possibly give him beyond tissues, it wasn’t like he’d ever confided in her or anything and probably wasn’t going to start now, but Mak had to offer anyway.
Neil had the weird impulse to hug her. She was so sweet, like the best friend in this intensely shitty book he'd been reading and he felt a little choked up again just thinking about it. "You can call me Neil," he muttered, fighting the weird emotions bubbling up in him. "If you want. Mr. Wainscott is fine too. I don't want you to feel uncomfortable." He started to get up too, slowly as if his feet might give out if he got up too fast. There were better places to sit and read and it was entirely unbecoming to sit on the floor.
“Okay,” Mak said again, feeling another one of those surges of pride that only taking baby steps into adulthood could bring. “And you can ... I’m just Mak, really. I mean, if you want to! But really only my mom calls me Makayla, when I’m in trouble.” She huffed a little at the admission, lifting her hands as if to say ‘what can you do?’ “But it’s okay either way ... Neil.” She smiled at him, a bit delighted to use a full-fledged adult’s first name in a friendly sort of way. Wanting to make an escape before she put her foot in her mouth somehow, Mak grabbed the cart again and started to back it up.
She looked so happy and chirpy, Neil felt a very strong affinity toward her and another strong surge of protective feelings. It was all pretty alien to him and he nodded softly at her as she started leaving, fighting off another wobble of his chin. This was getting ridiculous and as much as he hated public bathrooms he was fairly sure he was going to spend the next hour in one just for privacy.