fandomhigh | Library; Wednesday [ 10/02 ]

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Library; Wednesday [ 10/02 ]

Adah limped into the library this Wednesday, October the Second, supposedly the Year of Their Lord Two Thousand Seven without the usual armful of books; it was a sad moment for her, really, as she instead had to clutch to a thermos of hot tea to aid in soothing her throat, which was inexplicably sore these past few days. She felt unbalanced without the books. And she let out a soft sigh when she saw the stack of books that needed to be put away on the desk, waiting for her, as though her usual stack was displaced, leaning tower of literature.

She dropped into the chair, looking at them idly, and decided that she'd just read them instead of putting them away.

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Adah found her eyes fixating on that tapping finger. Tap, tap, tap. Pat, pat, pat. Was it a pat I saw? She tried calculating if there was a rhythm, and how many seconds between each tap there were, as if it were really some sort of secret subconscious morse code that she'd need to remember later.

She very reluctantly dragged her eyes away to write again.

"Why? What happened this weekend?"

Huh. He wasn't--

Frak, this place was weird.

--sure if that was a side effect of the memory loss or something else. And he couldn't exactly suppress the frown entirely at her words.

"What do you remember about last weekend?" he finally asked carefully.

The question, in turn, left Adah frowning right back up at the Eel. Having him ask a question brought sparks of life back to suspicions that had grown from the weekend relatively disappearing for her and the fact that her throat was bothering her so much. Couldn't be a cold, no other symptoms. And River acting strange this morning...Stranger than usual, at any rate. Now this...Adah blinked, drew in a breath before writing her response.

"Not a whole lot. I slept, dreamt, a lot.

He nodded and uncurled his hands, dropping them atop the desk quietly.

Curious, he asked, "What'd you dream about?"

Again, like brushrat that knows exactly where the predator is hiding in the foliage, Adah's eyes instantly went to the Eel's hands as they settled on the desk. Her body was feeling tense, guarded, as her doubts in her own thoughts started creeping in. There was just something about his behavior that made her feel like he knew something she didn't. It was absurdest theory, really. Paranoia, perhaps.

But even the smallest amount of caution could mean everything.

"It is not scientifically proven, but the popular theory regarding dreams is that they are merely your brain trying to put together various pieces of data, forcing them together to make logical sense out of them. Mostly, it fails, and dreams end up being nonsensical and confusing. Sometimes, it succeeds, and dreams serve the purpose of fulfilling the unfulfilled. One of the dreams involved you, and fulfilling the need to get you to stop fidgeting so much."

He'd never thought of dreams that. Mostly, he thought of them as stories he heard while sleeping and could never remember when he'd wake up.

He found himself smiling again, though. "Who says it's fidgeting?"

Deja vu, wow.

The suspicion that the Eel knew something that Adah didn't heightened again, and it was vaguely annoying how she was grinning despite herself. It was vaguely nervous, though. She didn't know what she'd do if it turned out that the Eel was adapting to a style of mind reading like River. Between constantly having to be conscious of herself between the two of them, she'd be quickly taking that sort dive into total insanity.

If she wasn't aware that work had been done to River's brain, she'd almost speculate that it had something to do with space, that seeing beyond the stars allowed you to see beyond the skull as well.

"Funny," she wrote, in as accusing a tone as one could manage with just ink and paper, although the lowered her, the wide, peeking eyes from behind the curtain of bangs, served to supply what tone the letters would miss, "I recall you said something very similar to that in my dream."

"Did I?" He half smiled, half smirked at her and wiggled his fingers just because. "Must've been a good dream. Did I tell you why I fidgeted...if that's what I'm doing?"

This was hardly fair; Adah wasn't used to not having the upper hand with the Eel, and here he was, flaunting it at her with a waggle of his fingers and an unrelenting balance between self-satisfaction of some sort and amusement. There had to be something she was missing that had him ahead at the moment; she told herself that to help keep from getting to worked up that there might be something more. She'd shown a weakness, and he was exploiting it, teasing her over it, nothing more.

"You told me that it wasn't fidgeting at all," she wrote after expressing to him with the position of her eyebrows that you were pushing it, Mister; she'd have to start planning out the Verse for the Eel, only, instead of 100 verses of the Bible, it would be 100 verses of poetry, but she'd find the heaviest, most burdensome poet she could. "That it was a ploy, a ruse, a clever strategy to see if I would do anything to stop it. That's how I knew it had to have been a dream. You couldn't possibly have thought up something like that all on your own, could you?"

He raised an eyebrow at that and tapped his fingers against the desk.

"You don't think I'm that clever?" He leaned forward just a bit and said, "That I wouldn't create something like that to see if you'd react?"

Tucking her lower lip under her teeth for a moment, Adah tried to restrain a grin as she settled her eyes carefully forward toward the Eel, reading his expression while also trying to work her way through this game.

"Not at first, no," she wrote, finally, when satisfied with an answer. "Can you honestly tell me that all of the fidgeting is purely to get a reaction out of me, and that none of it at all is just a reaction of your own?"

"All the fidgeting?" He grinned, shrugged a shoulder. "Nope, not all of it. Some of it's from reactions to certain things, distractions for others. The other part?"

His grin widened. "Did you react in your dream?"

Adah nodded her head, a very controlled and pointed action. "I did. Of course, I was a bit more able to react then than I am at the moment."

And now both eyebrows were raised both in amusement and in question.

"Do you...want to react right now?"

There was another small moment of consideration; it became evident that Adah had reached a conclusion with a sharp upturning of the corner of her moth.

"Technically speaking," she wrote, "I already am. You seem to have forgotten your hands for just a bit now, I see." She dragged her eyes up toward him, steadily on him; her smile was one of slightly victory.

He laughed quietly, looked down at his hands and started swirling his fingers around on the desk, occasionally spelling out words like 'touch' and 'clever.'

"But you haven't," he pointed just a bit smugly. "Have you? Forgotten about my hands even when I have?"

Adah had been feeling like she'd been doing pretty well of not letting anything slip so far, so, smiling slightly, she let herself do that, just a little.

"Of course I haven't." Drawing in a slight breath, she looked at him with a slight bit of nervousness. It would have been impossible to forget. True, Adah had a tendency to remember everything, but that touch before, the near-real REM ember this weekend...lead to something that lurked under the skin, itched to be remembered.

His own smile softened and he stopped moving his hands, turned one palm up.

"You haven't," he repeated with a small nod. "You remember my hands even when I don't. What kinds of things do you remember?"

A splash of pink heat across her cheeks, Adah's eyes fell into the Eel's open palm, straightening slightly, left shoulder leading, toward him. Her fingers slid slightly against the pencil in her hand, lips pressed together in thought.

"I believe you have me at checkmate," she wrote, eyes darting up from the paper as if to make sure his hand was still there. "I could take your hand right now, but then how would I answer your questions?"

"Here's a better question," Lee said quietly. "Do you want to take my hand?"

The Eel was rather clever today, wasn't he? Because now there was a question she could answer without even having to write anything. Of course, she could also still write something and let that knowledge hang in the air. The cynic, difficult side of her wanted to do just that, but, looking at him, his waiting hand, and taking into consideration the softness of his voice, REM emembers, everything. She smiled softly, lifted her hand, and very lightly placed it on top of his, fingers curled down to graze his palm.

And that just left her wondering: now what?

"There's my answer," he said, still quiet. He curled his fingers around her hand lightly, thumb brushing back and forth against her hand.

"Would you believe me if I said this has been the best part of my week?" His smile returned. "Because it is."

Lee must have had an absolutely terrible week, then, and Adah slid over to him a doubtful expression that tried to express as much.

Although a good part of that was just on account of needing to keep up her cynicism. It was holding hands, for Dog's sake. If it weren't for her ridiculous complexes, it would be so silly, childish even. It wouldn't mean anything.

But she did have those complexes. And she knew that it kind of meant everything. She thought back to her weekend dreams, soft presses of lips against knuckles, and smiled softly. Despite herself, she started to think that this wasn't so bad.

"It's been a bad week," he told her, rubbing a hand through his hair with his free hand. "If you trust me, trust that I'm telling the truth when I tell you that."

Another smile and he used his free hand, just one finger, to write invisible words on the top of her hand.

"Soft."

The curve of Adah's smile came with a light snort; he'd said that, or something similar to it, in the dream, and the wry response was just an effort to keep herself from shivering too much at the light tracing of the Eel's fingers sliding across her hand. Not that it mattered; he could probably feel the small tremble in her hand between his, and it took a moment before she could bring herself to find a word to respond with. She who was so good with words. Sdrow htiw doog os saw ohw ehs, and her mind was a complete blank except for endless little internal tremors and a single foreign word.

She lifted her fingers lightly and slowly, shakily, spelt out her own. Bangala, dragging out the last a with an excess of tail, and then going back to place the two dots of the umlaut above the first a, like eyes, like specks, like punctuation.

Library; Wednesday [ 10/02 ]

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