fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday [ 02/06 ]

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Library, Wednesday [ 02/06 ]

Adah came in for her day at the library with the distinct conviction that people just weren't worth the trouble it took to deal with them. She felt she could honestly say that, too, as she had been attempting to be social quite a lot this last week, and look where it got her. Waking up fresh from another bizarre dream of Africa and feeling horrible. Books, she figured, were a much better companion; usually, she knew if an author was going to throw a temper tantrum at her, and if she didn't like it, close the book, get a new one. Books were also very good at making barricades around the desk, hiding her from people...and kissing. People, on the other hand, would be much harder to get to cooperate, unless they were dead, and Adah doubted she could ever really kill anyone.

She did, behind her wall of books with just enough space so that if someone really did need help or Bob came around and did not approve, then she could depend on those to defend herself. And she was slowly nursing a warm mug of tea, toh, yerg lrae. Maybe that would make her feel better in not too long.

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"I haven't interrupted anything," he pointed out, "because I haven't said anything until now. You interrupted yourself by paying attention to me."

Lee didn't know if that made much sense but he felt it was true. He could've been just coming up to stand quietly and be innocuous.

Adah's eyes shifted to the side as she considered this, and, very quickly, her nose wrinkled over a slight sneer, her hand curling into a fist around her pen. Damn him; he was right. She'd initiated it. He didn't even say anything and there she was, going about and acknowledging him and completely contradicting her whole idiom as intended with the Wall. She figured that she could, at least, count that as double points against him. One, for distracting her just by being him, and two, for making it so evident that number one existed.

Just for that, Melville was getting stabbed by a pirate. A shirtless one. And Adah was going back to her manifesto without saying anything else, as if she could just get a restart on the whole encounter thus far.

"Are you ignoring me today?" he asked, leaning lightly against the counter. "Or something more interesting?"

Multiple stabs. While Hawthorne flailed around without knowing what to do before giving the shirtless pirate a punch straight into his kidney. This, of course, will not bode well for Hawthorne...

...and the Eel would have his answer in the form of the lack of an answer to his question.

"All right," he said, pushing away from the counter. "I'm not going to bother you if you don't want to be bothered. Can I just ask if everything's all right before I go?"

Adah blinked. Her pen paused. That was just it, then? He wasn't going to try to talk his way into staying around a bit longer? Then again, why would he? She wouldn't exactly want to bother dealing with her right now either. So, fine, let him be on his way to less difficult things, hope the door doesn't hit his very nice ass on the way out.

She laid the pen down flat on her notebook and straightened slightly, as well as she could. She frowned at him. "Of course it is," she lied, defensively. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Usually you don't ignore me," he pointed out. "Even if you don't want to talk, you tell me so in as many words. So, what's wrong?"

Adah lifted her eyebrows. "But I didn't ignore you," she stated. "If I'd have ignored you, you wouldn't have gotten to point out the fallacies of my interpretation of interruptions..."

She shifted slightly in her chair. "Even if something was wrong, when have I ever been one to want to talk about it?"

"You ignored me after that," he said, frowning. "I didn't ask if you wanted to talk about it, I was just asking if there was something wrong. Can I do anything?"

A deep intake of breath preluded Adah's forfeiting, sighing slump forward over her notebook. There was a dull buzz of frustration in her head, carried over from yesterday, from the weekend, from just being exhausted with everything. She lightly tried to shake it away. "No," she responded quietly, "there isn't." Nothing short of him just stopping being so...him. "I'm just...tired. Ready to just close myself off in my room for a while." She gave a stack of books in front of her a poke, frowning at it. "These only work so much."

"You sound tired," he said just as quietly. "Almost look it too. Exhausted. I can't help? Carry some books for you? Get you something to drink?"

Adah was quiet for a long moment, carefully considering. There really wasn't anything he could do to help that she could think of and that didn't make her want to sneer at herself, but she was kind of wishing that there was. One part of her wanted him to just go, the other part of her kind of desperately wanted him to stay, and it was driving her insane.

"I'm sure," she said finally, "that these books can wait for whoever works tomorrow, but if you wanted to help by putting some of them away early, I certainly won't stop you."

It was only until after she said it that she realized that this would mean a dismantling of the wall. It was too late now, though.

"I'm pretty good at shelving books," he said quietly. "Any specific ones you want me to take?"

There was a metaphor here, too, and Adah knew it and it left her looking vaguely irritated at the pages of the books she was looking at and considering. What the hell was wrong with him? He comes in and she's cranky, irritable, and difficult with him, and so what does he do? Offers to do her job for her. How did that make any sense? It didn't; she should just tell him to go and save him from making himself out to be a complete and utter fool...

"Those ones," she said, quietly avoiding his eyes as she pressed the tip of her finger against a stack on the left that she knew wouldn't disturb the construction of the rest of the wall too much when removed.

"Easy," Lee said, scooping up the books and disappearing into the aisles to shelve them.

"Want me to bring you back any?" he called. Shouted. Oh well.

Well, at least the Eel had gone away into the shelves so he wouldn't see how that managed to get a small smirk to slip out of Adah. She paused a moment, biting her lip, as she weighed the advantages and disadvantages of raising her voice. She already had been stubborn and difficult; she decided on staying on that slant and reserving her chastisement of him for when he returned. She'd only ever raised her voice above normal conversation once in her life; she didn't quite care for it, and he could take her silence as answer enough.

"Guess not," he muttered to himself and finished putting the books away. He reappeared a moment later, hands empty. "All done."

"You know," Adah told him as he reappeared, watching him quietly from the moment he'd emerged from the aisles and on his way to the desk, "you shouldn't shout in a library." She pursed her lips slightly, brought an index finger against it. In any other mood, it would have been playful. As it was, it appeared that Adah was trying to at least be a little bit so, but it just wasn't working today.

"I wasn't that loud," he said but lowered his voice anyway. "I could've been much, much louder and then you might have had to throw me out of the library."

"I could still throw you out, you know," Adah responded, her voice equally lowered, her eyes still on him as she leaned, slightly in and toward the new gap in the wall so that she could still see him. "Of course, that wouldn't be very smart of me, considering that if I did that, I'd lose my work mule."

"Ah, but now that I know that you're just using me for your work, what if I wenet on strike?" he asked. "Refused to do anything and just sat here and talked at you."

"I suppose I'd have to bravely face your yammering," Adah reasoned once she got over a touchy bit of annoyed marveling at him. How could he so easily just start breaking her down even at her most stubborn? Where the hell did he get it? "And then later perhaps compose a letter to management about uncooperative co-workers who prevent great works of literature from being made." She gave the manifesto, long since abandoned in her mind, a light, important tapping.

"So, write," he said and reached over to tap the manifesto himself. "And I'll just stand here quietly and take up space. Being quiet. You won't even know I'm here."

"Impossible," Adah declared. "Your mere presence is a distraction; we proved that when you first came in."

"I think you want to be distracted," Lee said boldly.

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