fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday [1/5]

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Library, Wednesday [1/5]

It was good to be back in the library today, even if it was a new shift day for her, and even if the quiet was a sharp contrast from everything that had characterized her break. Luckily, after class yesterday Gabrielle had gone right back up to her room and slept the rest of the day and night, so -- in between that and the coffee -- she wasn't in terrible danger of falling asleep on the job.

She was a little too preoccupied in attempting to research this "Green Dragon," Ming T'ien, to fall asleep anyhow; what information she could find didn't seem to match up to what she knew personally.

Gabrielle, carefully guarding a wrapped rectangular parcel on the desk beside her, was used to that by now.

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"I'm sure we have it," Henry said, wandering over to poke at the card catalogue. "What language do you want it in?"

"It might as well be English," Gabrielle decided after a moment of consideration. Said moment did not in the slightest address the question of how exactly she'd managed to be fluent in it, not to mention communicate effectively with people while in China. "That way, if I have questions on any of the passages, I can just ask people."

She fiddled with the discarded wrappings, rolling them up to stash away in a corner of the desk until later.

"Christmas with your family -- even if it wasn't nearly enough time, was it nice?"

"It made me realize how much I miss living here," Henry admitted as he frowned at the card catalogue. "Alba's talking in sentences now, and she knows her alphabet, and I'm -- I'm a guest in her world."

He shrugged and quirked half a smile at her. "Do you ever think abotu going home? Before you graduate, I mean."

"I do, sometimes," Gabrielle admitted. "I worry about Xena when I'm not around; she gets so . . . so caught up in these dark thoughts, and I feel like I should be with her. Like she needs me. But there's so much I can learn here that I can use back home. I'd never get a chance like this there. I do feel a little torn between two places, but I think . . . learning to make the most of what time I have in either place, while I can, that's important."

Someone stop her before she went ramblingly flowery and philosophical again.

Henry took pity on her and passed over the card for the English-language version of the book. He figured Gabrielle knew how to find it. "You have a whole life," he said. "Which is one of those cliches that is true. You can spare a couple more years in a place that's a little less exciting than where you're from."

It reminded her of the sort of thing Xena might say, and Gabrielle, halfway through taking the card, paused to frown at him.

"You say that as if you don't," she observed quietly, sounding as if she didn't quite understand, but she wasn't pushing.

"I'm 40," Henry answered, thinking for a moment before he decided to be more or less honest. "I have a medical condition that means I'm more than a bit past the midlife crisis stage. Nothing contagious, nothing painful" -- matter of opinion -- "but it's what I live with."

He'd aged a bit even in the year Gabrielle had known him. The island seemed to keep his traveling to a minimum, but it couldn't undo the damage of the last 35 years of it.

"By my standards, that's fairly impressive," Gabrielle carefully noted. It wasn't just that a lot of healthy people in her time could only hope for that long; she'd already seen too many people go to insane lengths to try and thwart the inevitability of death.

"And here you are, sacrificing time with your family to teach, and to keep this --" She gestured around them at the library. "This incredible store of stories and knowledge open for our benefit. That's an amazingly generous thing to do."

"Don't make me sound better than I am," Henry said firmly. She was making him feel guilty. "I'm not that kind of guy, Gabrielle. My wife and I were having problems, a hospital in Baltimore wanted their turn poking at me, the school gives me a ridiculous amount of money for taking care of this collection. The job made sense."

A pause. "But it sounds a lot nobler the way you said it."

Ah, but simple logic never interested Gabrielle if there was something else she could read into the situation, especially the challenge of finding the brightest possible side was there. (Somewhere, sometime, Xena was sympathizing, Henry.) "Maybe it made sense, but some good's come out of it," she insisted. "Even if the island is a little too strange to understand sometimes."

"Something good came of it," Henry agreed. "And I kind of like the more-things-on-heaven-and-earth aspect of the island. If nothing else, it gives me an entirely new perspective on what weird means."

He'd pretty much decided over break that this would be his last semester -- it was time to get back to Alba and Clare, especially since Hopkins was making no progress at all. He wasn't making any announcements yet, but conversations like this reminded him why it would be hard for him to go.

"See?" Gabrielle waved the catalog card in her hand and smiled; conversations like this always made it a little easier to get her mind off her own problems. "We've all gotten something out of it, even before we count new books."

. . . if he had made any announcements to that effect, she would have had an equally impassioned and flowery speech about family, too. So it was probably just as well.

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Library, Wednesday [1/5]

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