fandomhigh | Library

Lee's mostly awake, head in his hand and propped up at the desk.

There were two choices laid out in front of Adah for today. It was a nice morning, a bit chill for her newly acquired tastes, but there was a whole preserve that was waiting for her to limp around and explore. However, she knew that today would be a good day to go to the library, to crack some things open and let the information pour out into her brain, entertainment, stories, contentment.

Oh, and she could get some books, too. But those, as she'd admit to only herself, were secondary. Adah limped in and leaned heavily on the desk when she reached it, leaning over half in expectation, half merely for balance. She looked at the Eel and smiled a light hello, blinked a what are you doing?

"Morning," he said, giving her a smile in return. He changed positions, standing up a little straighter. "I'm still waking up, I think. Couldn't sleep much last night. How are you? It's good to see you."

[*can totally read pings omg for realz* *facepalms*]

Adah's head bobbed, slightly jerkily, in a response. Good, well, fine and swell, although it was a little surreal, this set-up, reversal of roles. She realized it was her first time in the library at all when she wasn't the one sitting behind the desk. Her head tilted at him, a silent question for the restless night before her own restlessness had her scanning the titles of books set out on the desk.

"Not really sure," he said and shrugged a shoulder. "Just one of those nights, I guess. I'm still getting used to the new environment. The sounds are all different at night here then they were at home. Things confuse me sometimes."

He turned the selection (http://www.amazon.com/Great-Gatsby-Wordsworth-Classics/dp/185326041X/ref=sr_1_2/104-1846513-3516719?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190565797&sr=1-2) of (http://www.amazon.com/Catcher-Rye-J-D-Salinger/dp/0316769177/ref=sr_1_5/104-1846513-3516719?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190565797&sr=1-5) books (http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/dp/0345342968/ref=sr_1_6/104-1846513-3516719?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190565797&sr=1-6) towards (http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Flies-Penguin-Great-Century/dp/0140283331/ref=pd_rhf_f_t_cs_2/104-1846513-3516719) her.

As Adah tapped a finger on that last one, the corner of her mouth sharpened into a slight grin. She couldn't help but wonder if the Eel was just very attuned to the practice of being a better judge of covers than others, or if he was merely a product of luck. She found that, in most cases, it was almost alway...always...luck. After passing her own pleased judgment with that single tapping finger, she shifted her bag so that she might open it and pull out her notebook. It flopped carelessly open on the desk, still open to her last conversation before she flipped it to a new page, extracted a pen, and began to write.

"I miss," she told him, "having the world breath around me as I sleep; this place doesn't breath like the jungle does. I worry sometimes that it's being suffocated, and that is why."

He watched which book she tapped and nodded at the quiet judgment. "I'll read that one first," he told her.

After reading her words, he said, "Jungle sounds almost like another person. Someone who never sleeps and is always there as a companion. Maybe here, it's just...maybe there's just no one here?"

Smiling a little, Adah wrote back. "No one like that. The jungle breathes, lives, respirates, dominates, exasperates. Never sleeping; if the viruses don't get you, the snakes will. If not the snakes, then the lions. If not the lions, then the too-heavy weight of your own superstitions, crushing down on you like like a blade of grass underfoot. In the jungle, you are nothing; here, you become everything. You have to, just to fill in the empty space."

There was a lot of imagery, emotion in those words and for a moment Lee was quiet, staring down at those words and trying to imagine Caprica like that.

Finally, he looked back up at her and said, "How are you doing with that? The empty space filling, I mean. Is it...it doesn't hurt, does it? For you?"

The concern for her pain was sweet, really, but it made Adah smirk a bit more cynically than she would have liked. With her head tilted against her dead, dragging shoulder, she stretched out the good arm, the left arm to her side, as long as she could, her pen carefully balanced between two fingers as they, too, stretched, to stretch as much as they could. Then, with a soft sigh, she drew the arm back in, began to write again.

"I can stretch when I need to," she wrote, "and well enough; thankfully, I'm used to filling in space that other people aren't even aware is there, and plan to continue in this. It doesn't hurt, no. Not any more than I've already used to, anyway."

The concern on his face dissolved into a quiet grin and he shrugged a little sheepishly.

"I couldn't stop that question," he said. "About the pain. Caprica doesn't have places like jungles. Or maybe it does and I've just never been there. There are mountains, though, far in the distance. I've flown over them before and they make me feel so small. Just...I find myself staring at them sometimes, wondering how long it took them to form and how they'll still be there even when I'm not. If they were gone, there'd be so much empty space. You're very strong."

The majority of what the Eel had to say had Adah with her head down, allowing just a small curtain of hair to work toward shielding a bit of her soft smile, but that last part had her downright silent for a moment, the expression fading. She felt a slight twitch in her right shoulder; blinking, she thought to roll the twitching out, but the body, of course, didn't comply, so she focused harder until it jumped, an almost roll, the best she'd get, and she compensated for it by rolling her good shoulder and straightening her head, lifting her chin.

"Have to be," she wrote, wondering if she'd regret it. "So much space to try to fill. Not exactly mountains, but half a body can sometimes feel like that."

She left a blank for a pause. "Then again, everyone always finds their own burdens to be the heaviest."

He nodded quietly and ran one of his fingers in small circles on the desk.

"I think you're strong," he said, quiet and low. "And that's just my opinion. You've got burdens, I understand that. I just, you know, wanted you to know that. That I think that. Because I do. And I also think about mountains. And sometimes fish. And I'm rambling."

Adah found herself fixating on the movement of the Eel's fingers on the desk so that she wouldn't fixate on his words too much. It wasn't that she didn't want to hear them or didn't like hearing them, because she did. In fact, it was that she enjoyed hearing them so much that she felt the need to be skeptical and cautious. After a moment, she wanted her fingers to be drifting off into shapes on the surface of the desk, too, like in the grass, but this desk had a habit, she'd discovered, of getting things to touch.

For now, it was just safer to touch pen to paper yet again instead of flesh to flesh.

"I'm interested to know how fish work their way into all of this."

Fish seemed safe.

He rubbed a through his hair, making it stand on end to and laughed at the fact that he'd brought fish, of all things, into the conversation.

"You know, because fish are..." He couldn't even make something about fish. His fingers stopped moving and he splayed his palm flat on the desk. "Fish are...they swim and they have gills and I really don't know. I just think about a lot of things at the same time."

Even Adah's chuckle was quiet, just mere breaths of laughs as her slightly red face ducked behind her long hair again, resurfacing after the tucked it behind her ear and looked over at the Eel and tried to think of what to say. Or write. Or even what to think, although she certainly couldn't control that. She was thinking of his hair, and how she was tempted to reach out and smooth it back down. Of his hand, tempted to draw the crude symbol of a fish (pagan in origin, bastardized by Christians as they do everything to suddenly become all about Jesus) on top of it. Of his smile, tempted to...

Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak. Oh, she'd gotten that Verse more times that even she could count, and she could practically count to infinity in a heartbeat. Most of the time, she thought maybe it was just her father being bitter about his crippled daughter, but she doubted that Nathaniel Price could be intelligent enough to make the connection. She sighed slightly, picking up her pen; of all the times for the reverend to appear...

"I would pity a man who was so forward thinking that he did not think of many things all at once," she wrote. "I imagine he'd be lonely."

In fact, she knew he would be. Was. Is.

But she also added, "Fish...they're a good source of protein."

He huffed out a quiet laugh at her words, curling his fingers into his palm without really noticing but keeping it on the desk in front of him.

"I'd never really thought of fish that way," he confessed. "They always kind of smelled badly when my mother would cook them. My brother liked fish though so I put up with the smell. I always liked sweet things better. Candy and stuff. Candy dinners weren't allowed though."

It would be so much easier for Adah to avoid fixating on the Eel's hands if he would stop moving them. Subtle movements, but that only made it worse. It always was the little things that caught Adah's attention, rather than the big, vibrant ones that seemed to flag everyone else.

"Nutrition is difficult in the Congo," Adah wrote. "Fish, sweet things, meat...all hard to come by, and, usually, the parasites got to them first. We ate chicken, but even that had to be maintained so that we didn't run out of eggs. Mostly, we ate this awful stuff called fufu, that was just beaten mush. No taste, barely any nutrients, but it was plentiful and cost nothing but a few hours of time, so it sufficed."

Anakin was looking for books for the next few ethics classes.

Which was why he was in the library.

Not at all because he missed Rory.

Really.

...shut up.

"Morning," Lee said, nodding at Anakin. "How goes it?"

Anakin stopped.

And stared.

"...Lee?"

"Uh." He nodded. "Yeah, that's me. Have we met before?"

Anakin shook his head sharply, bringing himself back to the present. "Another lifetime," he said quietly. "Hello. I'm Master Skywalker, the ethics teacher."

"Oh, hello, sir," Lee said, straightening up. "You must've known the Lee that was here before. We weren't the same person."

"We were friends," Anakin said with a small smile. "He enjoyed toast. I never really asked why."

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