fandomhigh | Library

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."

"Fufu," he said, adding another word to the list of unfamiliar words he'd been learning. "It sounds tough out there. Very, very different."

Lee reached over, slid the unopened banana in front of them. "Want some? I've got enough to share."

At the appearance of a banana, Adah couldn't help tilting her head back a little with a sudden laugh; her hand, the pen between her fingers carefully pointed to not poke herself, went immediately to her mouth to cover it as it died as quickly as it had been brought up, into a light smile, pink cheeks. Her hand then waved a little in her face, as if either trying to brush away the sudden laugh or cool her amusement, most likely both.

And then she tried not to waste any more time before an explanation. "Bananas," she wrote. "We had plenty, plenty of those! But you had to shake them before you could eat one, to make sure there were no spiders hiding inside the bunches, and Leah was the only one who could climb the trees well enough to actually get them, so we didn't have them often. But, yes, if you don't mind, I think it would be nice to share. I actually haven't had one since I left Africa."

"I don't mind," he said, smiling at both her reaction and response to his question. "I had one the other day and kind of love them."

He found himself not hesitant but slow to open the banana mainly because he was enjoying her reaction too much, enjoying reading her words about a place he only knew from her. And he liked when she smiled.

And then his hands were opening the banana, careful not to squish the fruit before he tilted it towards her. "There you go."

[Woe! Don't work--wait, I said that already once. When you come back, I have cookies!]

Leaning in slightly with her head tilted against her shoulder, Adah tried to wait patiently, but it was difficult with the grin that was growing on her face. She knew she shouldn't be grinning for the reasons she was, but she really couldn't help it. It, help couldn't, really! Her cheeks were red, but not for the thoughts, as she knew they should be, but more from the effort of trying to keep unwelcome, uninvited thoughts like this out of her head. Not at all a surprise that she was the daughter who had the Verse distributed to her the most: with their Heavenly Father, not even silence could hide deviousness. The slowness of the Eel peeling away the banana's peel reminded her of a gagging incident on Rachel's part, which lead to Adah nearly gagging on her effort not to laugh. Leah looked confused; Rachel looked petrified and pink that the creepy, silent sister knew what she was thinking. After all, Adah didn't relate with those fast Bethlehem cheerleaders, how could she...? But Adah read books. Leah read books, too, but Leah read, mostly, the wrong books.

The grin failing to be contained, Adah reached out at the offered banana and carefully broke off a piece of it for herself. This time, the blush was for her thoughts, and, although she knew she wouldn't say anything stupid, she slipped it into her mouth quickly as if to stop anything that might try. Not...too quickly, though. The idea was ridiculous, but Adah had a curious nature and wondered if her thoughts were singular. Her eyes stayed carefully trained on the Eel to look for signs of his own deviousness.

He'd watched her quietly, smiled at the blush in her cheeks and failed to contain a blush of his own. He felt his cheeks get hot, felt that spread up to his ears and into his hair and didn't bother to look away. She'd seen him blush before and this was no...okay, it was kind of different but it was a good different.

When she reached out to take the banana, his eyes drifted to her hands and he watched those, found himself wondering and then found himself nearly staring.

To cover that, he broke off his own piece of the banana and ate it slowly. Still as good as the first time.

Blush, that in satisfaction was there. With her eyes quietly on the Eel, she couldn't prove that the reaction to her movements was what she thought they were, but that they would provide enough evidence to be what she thought they were was good enough for her. She chewed slowly, on one side of her mouth, and a bright smile surfaced over the long, tedious, necissary action. It did taste good...A little different from the bananas in the Congo, which were smaller and less sweet, but there wasn't a strong taste of pesticides like she found most fruit in America to have. No pesticides, and still no thread of....well, if there was a spider waiting, it had certainly already bitten.

"It's good," Lee mumbled, fumbling over the words a little and laughing at himself. They were small words, nothing complex or anything and he was fumbling over them. Hmm.

And maybe it was the banana or the library or something entirely different, but he couldn't contain next sentence if he'd taped his mouth shut.

"I like when you smile." And then there was more blushing.

Adah ducked her head, but the curtain of dark hair didn't seem enough this time; she had to bring up her hand to try to contain the next smile as she finished chewing the banana, swallowing it down as if it would be dangerous to handle a subject like this with food in one's mouth. Htu oms enoni. Interesting how that worked, how a comment like that only caused her smile more.

"I actually don't," she wrote after a moment of indecision and feeling more like her grinning and blushing had been contained enough that she could tuck her hair back, "usually smile this much..."

He nodded and, still holding the banana in one hand, wiggled the fingers on his other hand, tapped them on the desk lightly before moving them back and forth some.

"It's very..." He trailed off, trying to find the right words. "It makes me want to smile."

The Eel fidgeted his fingers a lot, Adah felt inclined to notice. Fidget fingers, smile lingers, and what exactly is this soft buzz in her ears that might feel like happiness?

And, of course, since he was doing so much for her confidence today, Adah had to ask, "Would you say that wanting to smile is something that happens often with you?"

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