[ID: Screenshot of three paragraphs of text. Text reads: He’s tried, of course—trie

[ID: Screenshot of three paragraphs of text. Text reads: He’s tried, of course—tried to keep them talking, tried to make them stay. But the patrons, as he learned quickly, are rarely the talkative sort.Zola. The eyes. He looks away the moment he sees them.“Bee-eaters aren’t easy birds to photograph,” the Librarian tells him. “They’re small birds; they scare off easily. Go a little slower next time, and offer a little seed too. You won’t be lonely much longer if you’re patient.” /ID]ALWAYS THE BRIDESMAID | update #2Someday, I’ll have an actual graphic for this WIP, but today is not that day.Anyway, I’ve been putting off actually writing for a week for … reasons. Most of which are probably evident if you realize I’m American, this had been my first week back after a very long break, and my partner hadn’t stayed with me this week.It was just a teeny tiny depressive spell, in other words.But I’m fine and back onto writing, but I’m weirdly not really up for writing comedy (The Arcadia) or sci-fi (Anima) like I was hoping. So what happened this week was I spent almost every single day working and/or scrolling through Twitter and Tumblr, then went, “Oh crap,” and wrote something these past few days. Much of the excerpt below was actually written yesterday, with the skeleton concept popping up on Friday and all the italicized bits happening today. I’d written the non-italicized parts first because … I just needed a crapton of names, as a previous post said, and I knew myself well enough to realize that was going to be one hell of a rabbit hole.Also! I’m trying out present tense for this scene. I’m still not 100% sure if I’ll stick with it, so I’m 100% open to comments if it doesn’t quite work.Otherwise, please enjoy a depressed Librarian discussing his job. And doors. And teeth.TAGLIST: @ashen-crest, @isherwoodj, @aetherwrites, @stardustspiral, @girl-like-substance, @chazzawrites(Feel free to send an ask to be added/removed!)EXCERPT:(Behind the cut.)The Librarian knows the name of everyone who walks in through the door. Or, to be more accurate, he knows someone is in the Library when it tells him, when it shows him a book and scrawls a name across the checkout card. He commits their given names, their preferred names, their identities to memory, then smiles and sits down to meet them.He never uses their names unless they want him to. He thinks it’s polite.Kouta. He can see the Librarian’s hands and nothing more.The Librarian opens to a random page, and Kouta sits amazed at a book and a set of hands and a floating mess of color behind them.“Take the long way to school tomorrow,” the Librarian reads. “Across the bridge, not up the hill. This will make you late, but it will give you time to think.”He doesn’t know why it tells him these things. It doesn’t matter, in the long run. The Librarian never meets with the patrons for longer than five minutes.Amit. The hair. He plays with his own, and the Librarian looks from his book to the boy’s slender fingers.“Your grandmother has been wanting to teach you how to braid that for months,” the Librarian says. “She just hasn’t figured out how to tell you.”He’s tried, of course—tried to keep them talking, tried to make them stay. But the patrons, as he learned quickly, are rarely the talkative sort.Zola. The eyes. He looks away the moment he sees them.“Bee-eaters aren’t easy birds to photograph,” the Librarian tells him. “They’re small birds; they scare off easily. Go a little slower next time, and offer a little seed too. You won’t be lonely much longer if you’re patient.”One of them panicked. Begged him not to hurt them. They could only see his teeth, and that’s when the Librarian learned about the rules regarding him. No patron comes to the Library more than once; he knew about that one already. But no patron can see him—not really. He’s never questioned this. It’s probably for the best. They’re not here for him.Mireia. The mouth. She’s not one of the ones who scream.“Don’t forget where you put your keys,” the Librarian says. “This will be important for the audition. Just trust me.”The books tell him their problems. They can’t read them. He’s tried this too—giving them the books, that is. But if the patrons take them, the books always end up on the table minutes later, and if the patrons don’t take them, they sit there, staring unblinkingly at the pages. He doesn’t know what the books look like to them. To him, they’re, well. Readable. All of the books in the Library are like this: open to him, ready for him. Books written in his language, even if he knows they weren’t originally. He’s read most of them by the time the patrons started coming. He thinks that might be why the patrons started coming.Catarina. The mouth. She’s one of the ones who scream.“Don’t be afraid,” the Librarian says with a reassuring smile. “It says here everything will be fine in the end. Just trust them.”The books give him hints. They don’t tell him how to solve the patrons’ problems, and frankly, he doesn’t know whether or not the books tell the patrons how to solve their problems. But that’s none of his concern, at the end of the day. His job is to sit down and read what the books say to them.Sofia. The wrists. Just the wrists.“Add a little lemon to the honey in the next batch,” the Librarian tells her. “It’ll thin the syrup and cut the sweetness.”When the books and the patrons first appeared, it took ages for the Librarian to figure out what this place wanted him to do. To be fair to him, the Library never directly tells him to do anything. But the thing is about the Librarian is that he’s not stupid. No one’s ever told him to his face that he’s stupid, but he’s not stupid.Cameron. Tie, of all things. They refuse to focus on anything else. The Librarian tries to ignore this.“Your name is Cameron,” the Librarian says. “This is the most important thing you need to know right now, apparently.”There’s only one door to the Library. One door in and one door out. And it only opens when something clicks for the patron, when their subconscious minds figure something out, and when the Library decides it’s time for them to go. Or at least, that’s what the Librarian thinks. He reads every patron their book, and at some point, the door opens, and the patron leaves, and that’s that. He doesn’t know why the Library let them leave, back when he used to just hand them the books. He doesn’t know what the patrons did with the books after they left. The Library knows its own rules, he figures, but after a while, he stops questioning it. He stops questioning a lot of things. He knows he won’t get answers anyway.Frederik. The eyes. He stares transfixed. The Librarian looks down.“Tell your mother the truth. You don’t have much time,” he says.He’s tried opening the door before. He’s tried looking for other doors too. But there are no other doors, and the only one he can find is locked.Edita. Ears. She tugs at her own uncomfortably.“You left them on your dresser,” the Librarian tells her. “Next to your perfume. Look there, then maybe dab a little behind your ears today.”After the window incident, he stopped trying to open the door.Hakim. Skin. Or so he tells the Librarian. He’s the most talkative, but he’s also the one who wants to leave the fastest.The Librarian reads the first line of his book, then closes it and sighs. “Quit your job.”He doesn’t think about leaving anymore, either.Diya. Fingers. She folds her own over each other, but the Librarian notices the knuckles she’s trying to hide. This is the book he thinks he understands the most, but what does he know?“Pick your battles better,” he says. “There’s plenty more ahead, if you’re hoping to do anything about Yasmin.”There’s nothing for him outside of the Library, and he thinks about this every time he thinks about people.Fiona. The Librarian isn’t sure what she sees, but he thinks it’s his teeth. Just the teeth.“People are wrong about you,” the Librarian says. “The book thought you’d like to know.”Which is to say, he thinks about it every day. -- source link
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