etrayalogs | December Library Catch-All [ OPEN ]

WHO: John, Harold, and anyone who might find themselves at the Library
WHEN: December
WHERE: The Library!
WHAT: The Library is here and open to all! Come borrow books, find a comfy chair to relax in, or snoop around.
NOTES\WARNINGS: Will be added as they come up

The Library is a five-story neoclassical building of terra cotta, brick, and stone. And the inside is, in fact, a library! And rather clean and organized too. There's no dust, no muddy footprints (apart from your own), and all the shelves are organized by Dewey Decimal, subject, and author. All literature is something you might find in a 2010 New York City library: various forms of fiction, children's and teens' sections, history, science, cooking, gardening, the list goes on. There's even small sections of audiobooks on compact disks and of DVDs ranging from old classics to history shows. The first floor has a reading/study room, a comfortable space with deep armchairs and tables with chairs; the fifth floor has some smaller tables clustered under a skylight. Part of the second floor is abruptly closed off by a door with a biometric scanner that denies entry to anyone who isn't John Reese or Harold Finch; the walls surrounding this section are soundproofed, so even a keen listener won't hear anything from inside. Otherwise, it's a perfectly normal library!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It begs certain questions, doesn't it? Carver's seen his fair share of injuries before and after the world ended. The human body can take a lot of punishment. And after the end, there weren't so many doctors to be found. People learned how to drag themselves on or they got eaten. He wonders if Harold broke a bone bad. If he was in a car accident. If it was blast trauma, or a fall, or a thousand other things that people got tangled up with in that before time.

Not a war, probably. And that's a strange thought to sit with, isn't it?

He moves silently behind Harold, marking how he moves. The ways he places himself, deliberate but smooth enough it doesn't seem awkward. Like he's had time and practice to get him there. One day, that might matter. One day they'll be enemies and Carver supposes he'll put a knife through Harold Finch's skull, or push him down a flight of stairs.

Not these ones, he hopes. He's never killed anyone in a library before. A quiet, sentimental part of him doesn't care to start. But then, he's never been able to keep many of the lines he laid down. Over the years, more and more of them just washed away.

"It's funnier in Spanish," Carver agrees. "I can speak it just fine but the old language, it takes you longer to get through."

He likes that, quietly. It makes him spend time with the words.

Not a war but an injury Harold didn't want to recover from, so he hadn't, and now it's far too late to change his mind. Having begun his journey as a disabled person scorning medical treatment beyond what was necessary to keep functioning, it seems pointless to alter course now.

He still expects to die, on a day sooner than later. It doesn't seem worth the literal pain, or the figurative pain of being known. The pain he has now-- the constant, creaking companion, whispering that he's on borrowed time and this is all he has...

Harold finds it familiar, even a perverse comfort in its familiarity.

So he hobbles up the stairs with a hand on the railing and declines assistance and carries on talking, because this is the way he's chosen to live what days remain to him. For his part, he wonders what Carver is thinking, if he's calculating violence, but he doesn't truly understand that, either. It's an abstract consideration. Harold might defend himself if he can but he doesn't even remember the word to tell Bear to attack someone.

If there's going to be harm here, he won't be part of instigating it. That's a rule he still hasn't betrayed.

"A good mental exercise," Harold agrees. "It can be dreadfully dull here. I've taken on several pointless projects just to keep busy."

Edited 2024-12-12 01:38 (UTC)

“Like what?” Carver asks softly. Information’s close to God and his training was thorough. You gather information at every chance you have with in every way you have, then evaluate it. Sometimes things won’t become clear until later. Sometimes they never do. But the task remains, and he has so little else to cling to here but the old ways. The things the commander taught him.

People want to talk. The trick is just to find the right prompts and keep them going. And so he walks behind Harold Finch, taking care that his boots make no sound on the stairs, that he watches the corners and marks the places where an ambush could be sprung or a rotter might come shambling out in the dark. Do it or you’re dead, son, the commander warns.

Carver feels his fingers twitch.

Harold does not want to talk. He rarely shares anything without being aware of where it could lead, what it could implicate about him. He's been hiding his identity and his crimes for a very long time, and he's not even sure he'd know how to change that now. He has a response to this question already lined up, no thought required.

"There's a young woman here I've become acquainted with," he says calmly, finishing the stairs with rather more noise than Carver and making his way unerringly to the foreign language section. "And no shortage of electronics to scavenge. I'm cobbling together an old video game console for her, a Super Nintendo?"

If he knows an Earth reference like Cervantes, maybe he knows that as well. He could share more about his motives-- but he doesn't.

He follows. What else is there to do in this place?

"Idle hands," he agrees vaguely. "You're good with electronics, huh?"

Sometimes, he and the others tried to find things for Matthew. Games they could clean the blood off of, that they could teach him and try and pretend the world wasn't fraying at the seams. Nintendo's and shit like that made too much noise, though, and they couldn't spare the batteries.

"Electronics, mechanics," he says agreeably, since that's all easily confirmed public information on him in Etraya by now. Harold had established the thought early on that he'd need to be known to be capable and skilled in something, lest he be discarded as useless dead weight on missions.

Harold comes to a stop outside the appropriate row of stacks. It's a convenient excuse to move them off of talking about himself, which is always his least favorite topic.

"This should be classic Spanish language literature. Obviously we've no real borrowing system, but you're welcome to take volumes with you if you return them later."

It's been years since Carver stepped foot in a library to read. He realizes he can't remember the last time. He's passed through on base libraries, such as they were, a shelf or two of battered paperbacks with the pages stained by sweat and dip, smelling strongly of cigarette smoke. Nothing like this - not for years. And then he realizes the last time might've been before he enlisted, when he borrowed his grandma's truck to take his last bag of books back to the little basement library back in his hometown. He never did come back, except for her funeral.

It's an odd thought to have now, all these years later. He was a different person then. A child, in a lot of ways. He didn't know what he could survive.

He gives Harold a long, silent look. Then:

"Thanks," he says, very softly. This is what people do, isn't it? This is what it felt like back before the world ended.

It won't last, Carver knows. It can't. But for now -

Maybe it's okay, just for a moment.

Harold can recognize gratitude with meaning behind it, and although he can't know Carver's story or childhood associations, he can guess something from the comment he'd made earlier. He nods and answers in his own quiet tone, "You're welcome."

Whatever comes next, he'll always appreciate having small human moments like this. They help him remember why he keeps trying. And he won't insult him by reminding him of his promise; Harold takes it as given, that the library is a safe space until it isn't, but at least for now he doesn't need to worry.

"I'll leave you to it, then."

December Library Catch-All [ OPEN ]

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cw: passive suicidal ideation

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