fandomhigh | Library [Sunday]

"Yeah, I'm not sure why I missed out on the memory loss," Lee said and shrugged. "Someone else came in here earlier who wanted to look up the exact same stuff you're asking about."

He tapped his fingers against the desk without really noticing. "Doesn't hurt, does it?"

Smart person. Or else Adah was not as clever as she was feeling she was by coming up with that idea. However, because of that, she decided that, clearly, the other person just shared her certain intelligence.

Her head, however, tilted at the Eel's question. "What doesn't? Why should memory loss hurt? Besides, of course, the occasional pain in the head from all the thinking involved with trying to remember..."

"I'm --" He wasn't really sure what he was. "I don't know what memory loss feels like. I was concerned, I guess. Worried, maybe."

He turned the hand on the desk palm up, sheepish smile on his face. "I don't...know a lot about this world. I'm still learning. I ask a lot of dumb questions."

Adah's grin had a little sharp turn in it. "What kind of stupid questions? My world is currently built of jumbled, backwards sentences and a relentless jogger, so I don't imagine they could be any stupider than what I'm asking myself. Who am I? Where am I? What am I, but I'm slowly discovering that philosophers have actually been asking these questions for ages; maybe I am only just awakening..." The smile fell away slightly.

"Worried," she said, as if now just realizing that he had expressed that. "About what? I was feeling like I'm taking it in stride fairly well; I don't...feel like I should need to be worried about..."

In fact, she was feeling slightly like she really didn't want anyone worried about her, but she didn't quite know where that was coming from.

"Yeah. It's...yeah, never mind," he said and shook his head. "You've got a lot more questions than I do and they're more valid right now."

He shrugged a shoulder, looked down at his hands for a moment. "And worried about the whole situation, I think. About people--" and he was careful to use that word instead of just singling her out "--just randomly losing their memories. I'm not even from this planet and I've never seen that before. But, you're doing...you're smiling."

She certainly was. "It's exciting," Adah admitted to the Eel with a deep breath, as if trying to contain the buzz of that excitement inside of her, and then let it all out in a great rush, shaking her head lightly. "I don't know. An adventure, almost, not knowing, having to recreate myself. And I have something to live up to, too. I have a very strong feeling that the Adah of the Notebook was a very intelligent girl. I feel that she's carefully left a lot of hints for me to discover who she is, but, at the same time, becoming my own Adah, too."

Her smile turned a little meticulous. "You knew that Adah. She was intelligent, wasn't she?"

"She was," he said with a nod. "Very intelligent. And very perceptive. It was easy to talk to her. And it was easy to learn from her--you."

He stopped and shook his head. "It's still you. You're that person. So, that means you're smart and perceptive and..." He rubbed a hand through his hair and fell quiet for a moment.

"...Easy to talk to?" Adah filed in with a light smile. It was difficult not to feel too encouraged by the Eel's words, and, if she was so perceptive, how could he not anticipate her pointing out what she was about to say?

"You don't look as though it's that easy..."

"Oh?" He tapped his fingers against the desk again. "What don't I look like it's easy?"

"You don't make it seem like it's easy to talk to me at all," Adah reiterated, looking over at him intently. Her eyes drifted to the points she was making as she listed them. "You're tapping your fingers, you trail off your sentences, run a hand through your hair. You're nervous. You seemed nervous yesterday. Why?"

He stopped tapping his fingers, tucked them into the crook of his arm.

"I like to talk to you," he finally said, looking up. "It's the reason I keep coming to see you. I think they're just...maybe I'm nervous. But it's not a bad thing. I don't want to say the wrong thing."

Adah arched an eyebrow at the sudden halt of the finger tapping; her lip curved up slightly victoriously that her point had been made. "Well," she said, "what would be the wrong thing?"

"I don't know," he said and smiled a little. "I haven't said it yet, I don't think. But you pinpointed me pretty well just now. What do you think would be the wrong thing?"

"That isn't fair," Adah said with a light, laughing smile. "I can watch you, see you, and you give away much with what you say and how you say it. I can't do the same to myself; it's more difficult for me to know my own thoughts, especially when I do not know myself."

However, with a slight pause and a linger look, she added, "But I feel like you worrying about saying the wrong thing is a waste of worry. I can't imagine anything you could say that would seem wrong."

He blushed, grinned a little and brought his hand back out, put it on the desk. "Here's something you probably don't know," he said and twirled his fingers back and forth. "When I would come and see you, you'd watch my hands sometimes. In the grass, on the desk, against a book. What if I was doing things with my hands just to see if you'd watch?"

And, of course, Adah was watching his hands now, listening carefully as the Eel spoke and moved them. There was a moment, reserved for a wry grin, before she let her eyes drift back to him. This Adah of the Notebook, she was starting to feel, had many secrets, and she almost felt like it was unfair that she should get to unravel them all like this merely for sharing the same body with her.

Her eyes on him were speculative, accusing, but playfully so. "Were you?"

He tapped his fingers, splayed them before resuming the slow movement on the desk.

"Yes," he admitted. "Not all the time but yes, I did. And if you watched, I wanted to see if you'd react."

Adah's cheeks were a little pink but she was trying not to bring attention to the as, her eyes a little wide but admiring of the supposed game that the Eel had pulled out on her. "And the verdict?" she asked, feeling like this new information renewed her interest in this Eel even more than before.

He tapped one finger against the desk, looking thoughtful.

"It was either a distraction," he said quietly, "or...or maybe you liked it. And maybe I did it because I thought you liked it. And maybe I wanted to see if you'd do something more than watch."

He wasn't sure where the boldness came from but it was there and, if anything, he could go hide in the aisles.

Adah's smile had a devious slant to it, as she quietly looked at the Eel to see if his expression afterward would give away anything more than his words, eyes dancing over him with a small fluttering in her chest. A fluttering that was easy to place, because she could remember it from this morning. "Something more?" she asked. "Like what?"

Of course, she had an idea, but she also had to decide if that was wishful thinking or actual suggestion. She wondered, again, about the relationship the Adah of the Notebook had with this Eel, just like she wondered about the relationship that she had with that River. That could have been a fluke, though, a new River. This was the same Eel; he remembered.... Her smile softened slightly, lip tucking nervously under her teeth.

Making new memories for herself; would they be new memories for him?

"Something more," he repeated, fingers still moving against the desk. He moved them a little closer to her, slowly and said, "Like making me stop moving my fingers. Or...or giving me something else to hold onto. Maybe."

Initially, the answer was confusing, until Adah allowed her eyes to drop again to his hand and, watching it inch in, it hit her hard. Her eyes widened and the red on her face could not be contained. He had been...it was so much different than where her thoughts were lying that it caught her off guard, her calm and collected control slipping right out of her fingers. "Oh! You....you want..."

Blinking a few times, she drew in a breath to shake that all away. She was biting her lip again, looking at their hands. Her brain seemed to be calculating their distances. "I see," she said, much more demure. "You want me to stop them..." The thought of something else that (she hoped) would certainly stop them still hung in the back of her head, but she put all her focus in the slow creeping of her hands toward those tapping fingers, her own fingers stretched, one of them lifting up to lightly brush against his knuckle. Her eyes wanted to drift to him to see his reaction, but, instead, they stayed on their hands; she was feeling like she'd get all the reaction she needed there.

If she'd looked up, she'd catch the quiet smile on his face. He glanced down at his hand, stilled his movements and watched her finger brush over his.

It was a small thing but it was affecting, nonetheless. He looked back up, watched her watched their hands and sighed quietly.

Adah's single finger moved lightly for a bit longer; all her attention was going into the movement over his hand. When she stopped, there was a pause, a light hesitation, before her fingers slowly spread until her hand was flat over his, thumb curling slightly, a small nudge toward holding it.

Such a simple thing, a small connection, but it was affecting, and it confused her why it made her suddenly feel like she did, why it caused the Eel to sigh like that. It seemed to mean something, something she couldn't remember, and she hated that she couldn't.

"You are very intriguing, did you know that?" she asked softly. One beautiful enigma after the next.

"It's the first time anyone's ever used that word about me," Lee answered, voice just as quiet. There was soft warmth over his own hand and it made him smile at her. "I could say the same for you though even moreso than me, I think. An adventure, so to speak."

Library [Sunday]

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