Work Text:
Rain continued to assail the windows in successively larger sheets, and Paige's nose twitched from within the depths of her book. The downpour's petrichor scent only added to the general must of the patricularly dingy library she'd found herself perusing this late, winter's night, and, though one would be forgiven for not noticing given the wealth of dust that caked the time-stained glass, it appeared the storm was not going to be letting up any time soon.
Not to suggest that Paige was in any particular hurry to get home, and not that she would ever lament being trapped in a place as packed to the brim with tomes as this peculiar old bulding was, even in the worst of circumstances, but she hadn't exactly planned the extended visit. The orange haired bookworm stifled a sneeze and adjusted her glasses as she read, failed to stifle the next. It wasn't good form to make such a racket in a library of all places, even if said library was completely vacant this late in the evening—past closing time, even, and would have been closed if not for the fact the librarian was asleep at the front desk, having not had a single customer beyond Paige alone to entertain given the foul weather—but Paige was grateful for the quiet all the same.
Truth was, she'd needed the quiet; it had not been a good day. The library doubled as sanctuary on this evening, sanctuary from the same old family arguments, the same inevitable disappointments, and the same teary-eyed flights into darkness from the lack of answers she so yearned for. To say that she was in a gloomy mood was putting it lightly, and a gloomy mood only had one cure in Paige's estimation. So she read. Paige was comfortable in books. Stories you could get lost in and experience over and over again, where things didn't change, and the characters you knew acted as they should. She read to give herself some breathing room, and she read to block out the thoughts. Paige could find just about any reason and occasion to crack open a book as it stood, but just as the encroaching rain that presently pelted the windows had served to obscure her tears as she ran through the streets of the Cursed Apple, perhaps the comfort of the words in the book she clutched could do the same for her feelings.
But it wasn't working. Squirelled away in the corner, and propped up against one of the aged bookshelves in the half-light of the library's second floor—the incandescent bulbs of the room failing to fully penetrate the aisle she occupied—Paige read until the words blurred together in the murk of wistful fantasies that pulled at her focus and numbed her senses. Her thumb held the same page for far longer than she was accustomed to. She was tired, and her choice of book had failed to afford her the reprieve she desperately needed.
She couldn't fight it. She was upset, the kind of upset that distraction didn't solve. She loved her family, she really did, but she was tired of pretending things hadn't changed, of pretending that things were okay when they really, really weren't. Her eyes drifted from the book completely, and she found herself staring at the flaking plaster that betrayed the brickwork of the tired, old building. It looked like how she felt. She wondered if anybody was thinking about her at that moment. Her parents were probably already asleep in bed, and she very much doubted anyone from her studies thought to dwell on her, or how she might be. And as for her friends? She could force a laugh if she wasn't feeling so low: what friends? She let the book settle in her lap as she hugged herself against the chill of the room, nestled in what warmth her sweater could offer. It was another night alone, then, one not even the comfort of her own bed or a cat would be able to help. She mourned for how things had been, and she wished to the powers that be for many things. She missed how she'd always had someone to talk to when she felt this way. She missed her family. She missed . . .
Paige was startled awake by a dull thud. She wiped at her eyes and repositioned her glasses in an attempt to get her bearings. Where on earth was she? This wasn't her room . . . then she remembered. Had she really fallen asleep, here of all places? The rain outside was still audible against the windows, though muted, and the lights of the building were thankfully still on.
Her book had since fallen to the floor. She presumed that this was the cause of her awakening. She folded the cover of the book lackadaisically from her position against the bookshelf, blinking away sleep and closing the tome to spare the worn spine any further damage. The faded, yet still legible gold foil of the lettering glinted back at her: The Mill on the Floss, Second Volume. God, what was she thinking delving into that story of all things? Especially after the day she'd had, honestly. Apparently the heart's wants overrided those of the mind; it was a work she knew deeply, and one that seemed to know her just as well: the loyalty, the resentment, that constant ache of wanting a sibling's approval, even when one knows that one will never quite get it. Brother and sister—a lifelong bond that's not inherently sacrosanct, but heavy, tangled, and unavoidably layered . . .
Gosh, speaking of heavy, tangled and unavoidably layered, Paige brushed the hair from her forehead in an attempt to remedy the dishevelled mess being caught in the rain and an impromptu nap had made of her. She didn't know if she was feeling any better, but sleep tended to detoxify one's woes. Her eyes trailed back to the book that rested on the floor as she finished putting herself together with a stretch. The gold lettering was no longer glinting, and no light reached its spine. She turned toward the opening of the aisle.
"Oh, butterscotch," she choked, struggling to get up. "Excuse me!"
Like something out of a Hammer horror picture, the aisle's mouth was occupied by a startlingly tall stranger draped in a hooded raincoat, face obscured excepting a pair of hard, mismatched eyes. The figure's presence shadowed most of the aisle from their sheer, imposing height. The only thing missing from the arranagement was a flash of lightning and piano sting. Who knew how long they had been standing there?
"Sorry," came the voice from within the hood as the man shifted in place, the old floorboards under his person groaning ever so slightly from the heft of his physique, "looking for the medicine section."
The man's voice was more . . . listless than Paige had been expecting given his stature; he was probably the biggest person she had ever seen! A body that large suggested something of a gruff, machismatic tone, but the voice she heard was giving 'brooding teenager' more than anything—an affect Paige was very familiar with. The reply was also . . . not what she had been expecting. Certainly not an apology of all things, given she was the idiot taking a nap on the floor of a public institution! She looked around haphazardly, attempting to further get her bearings, her heart still reeling from the fright.
"Oh, right!" she stuttered as she dusted herself off, "medicine!" She had been curled up in the Mystery section, and Medicine was further down the aisle, on the opposing shelves. "Just down the end, sir, sorry about that!"
Paige suddenly realized that she was alone in a tight space with a man that looked like he could just about snap her in half if he wanted to, and blocking her only exit. She would have been more worried if not for the fact she was pretty sure she could defend herself against even the mightiest of foes—if it came to that—but this stranger, 'Goliath' didn't begin to describe it, and she doubted theological hubris was a tangible weakness for any person with ill intentions stalking the earth these days. However, for all her caution, she didn't sense any such danger from the man. One didn't usually find criminals in libraries, and if he'd had any desire to harm her, she was about as helpless a girl could be thirty seconds prior, but he hadn't acted.
He hadn't moved yet, either, eerily still. "You work here?" he asked finally, tone just as languid as before. Not unfriendly, just . . . aloof. The kind of vocal affect that said 'I'm not really listening, sorry,' an intonation one would proffer whilst lost in a story and being badgered by people who should know better!
"Who, me?" Paige laughed nervously in response, "oh, no, just browsing!" She realized she was still wearing her brooch, a symbol cast in gold that represented her accomplishments in the art of Bibliomancy, which, to any casual observer unlearned in such spheres really did just look like a librarian's name tag. She couldn't exactly fault the assumption, but it was that little symbol that represented her method of self-defence, and boy was it a powerful one.
She gathered up her book from the floor and clutched it in her arms, gesturing at it with a cock of her head and a smile she hoped to God wasn't as anxious as it felt. "It's a real page turner, promise," she swallowed, "and to think I once laughed at the idea that a book could put anyone to sleep! Sorry about that."
The man stood as monolithic and unmoving as the moment Paige first laid eyes on him, but then he stepped forward. "Yeah," he said, every other footfall causing the planks to creak underneath him.
Not much of a talker, then, she thought. Not that one typically sought casual conversation in a library, much less sleeping patrons! It wasn't until the man approached that she realized just how big the height difference between them really was: the lips of his dark, buckled boots came up to her knees, and her eyeline scarcely reached past the midbody clasp of the shabby coat that concealed his ginormous figure. Paige would be the first to admit that she wasn't the tallest bookworm out there, but the scale of this man was approaching fantasy.
She backed into the shelf behind her and craned her neck upwards as the man passed, catching her first proper glimpse of his shadowed face in the half-light of the aisle: a hard face, a hard brow, and those two recessed, heterochromatic eyes, looking straight ahead and not paying her any further attention. Perhaps it was just a trick of the light, but Paige could have sworn his complexion bordered on grey. But then he was beyond her, attending to whatever business had brought him to the Medicine section this late in the night.
Stopping at the very end of the aisle, the man had to lean down to deduce the words on the spines of the books, or note the subsections of the shelves, whichever it was he sought, and Paige began to thrum the cover of her book idly with her fingers. She didn't exactly know what to do with herself. She supposed she should leave and occupy herself in the reading room, or at least do something to stop awkwardly inhabiting the vicinity of an individual who was apparently not in the mood for a chat, but she was interested in what brought such a tall, dark stranger to the library on this night of all nights, particularly so given the weather. And, Paige thought, if she was honest to herself, she could really use the company.
"Never seen someone around here so late," she ventured then, more meekly than intended. She cleared her throat before probing further. "The place isn't exactly Astor or Lenox!" Her nervous laughter elicited a slow turning of the man's head, who perhaps hadn't realized she'd elected to remain in the aisle with him. "Sorry, I spend a lot of time here, so you get to know the regulars. They sure know me!" she continued with a laugh, trying her best to lighten the mood.
". . . that so?"
Not the most engaged of responses, Paige thought, but, not to be deterred, she pursued further. "So . . . medicine, huh? Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" she quipped.
No apparent reaction to that. The joke didn't seem to have landed as intended—they rarely did in Paige's experience; it wasn't her fault that people didn't enjoy reading—but one would have to have been dead for the past fifty years to have not understood that remark! "Sorry," she began, "Stanley on Livingstone. It's this autobiographical piece about explorer Henry Stanley discovering the long-thought dead Doctor Livingstone deep in uncharted Tanzania, though, it's unlikely Stanley ever actually said those words, of course!"
Her clarification was only met with further silence.
"What I mean to ask," she sighed in embarrassment, "I'm asking if you're a doctor."
"Something like that," the man said after a moment, sparing Paige from any further embarassment. He retrieved a quite daunting tome from within the depths of his coat. Paige spied the title: D. Lannik's third volume On the Metanatural Condition of the Revivified, Ultimyr Press edition.
"Revivification, now there's a word! So much for light reading!" Paige said, fully committed to cracking the outer shell of this walking, talking mystery in the face of that bombshell. Medical and Occult literature had become inseparably intertwined since the dawning of the magical age, and what would have passed for a basic physiological textbook a century prior now came with a whole slew of Theosophical and Enochian appendices explaining any given procedure's incorporeal consequences for the subtle body, but Ultimyr Press specifically dealt in technical Grimoires—even if it was hard to tell at a glance. Science was science, after all, be it within the spheres of black bile or the magnum opus' melanosis! Anyone in possession of such a tome simply had to have an interesting backstory.
"Lotta' big words," the man said of the book, opening it lethargically and flicking through its pages. He thumbed the paper on a random page before returning her gaze. "'Ontological dislocation,'" he quoted. He stayed like that for the space of a few breaths, hand in the book and staring directly at her before shrugging and returning the book to the shelf.
It was as he placed the book on the shelf that paige noticed it. The portion of the man's outstretched arm not hidden by his rain-stained coat was discolored, but not as his face was. His hand wasn't just pale, it was blue. It looked almost . . . Ixian, but the man's eyes were decisively not, of that much Paige was certain.
One might have considered it trite to have discovered one's own personal mystery in the Mystery section of a library late at night, and with a storm raging to boot—like something out of a second-rate imitation Poirot fan fiction novelette—but the intrigue! The amour! She'd been interested in the man's story the moment she set eyes upon him, but now she just had to hear it.
"Well if that book's not doing it for you, are you looking for something in particular? I may not work here, but I do happen to know this place like the back of my hand!" Nothing like the proverbial olive branch to ease things along, and for once in Paige's life, it actually was something she could do to help a stranger, and it wasn't a bluff! She'd spent more days amongst the piles of books scattered around this particular building than she could count, and knew some of the shelves volume to volume. "That is, if you don't mind the company," she added sheepishly.
"I don't think the help I need can be found in a book," the man said after some deliberation. "Sorry. Thanks for the offer," he remembered to add.
What might have passed as a dismissive comment from a person who wasn't interested in chatting instead betrayed an earnestness that rang genuine, a melancholy that shrouded the man's words and pervaded the room even as he began to turn back to the bookshelf. His statement was no doubt a call for help, Paige thought, like a narrative thread pulled straight out of a Romantic era drama! The hardy, instinctive disposition that veiled the long-endured isolation of a man who thought of himself beyond aid, and that no help existed to remedy his plight—the tragedy of it! Paige would not have dared to leave a forlorn soul to such a self-inflicted fate if she had the power to prevent it. At least, if said soul was amicable enough to entertain her probing, that was.
"Hey now, don't judge a book by its cover!" she replied, holding up her book with a smile to illustrate the point, which didn't get much of an intended response either. "Sorry," another nervous laugh left her mouth and she realized she was living in her own world again. "I forget few people are as interested in idiomological origins as me, which is to say nobody! But," she cooed, "that little turn of phrase about judging a book by its cover first finds its origin in on the Floss specifically! Though the subject matter involved is actually . . ." her voice trailed off in the face of the stranger's unerring gaze. "Sorry," she apologised a second time. "There I go again! You don't need to hear all that."
"It's alright," the man responded.
It was happening again. This always happened. She'd find an opportunity to actually converse with someone, only to talk up a storm all to herself and sink the relationship before it even left port. She'd done it again, even while trying to be considerate. She couldn't believe it. "Goodness, I must be such a bother," she began to back out of the aisle. "I'll just make myself scarce."
"Really, you're fine. Just got a lot on my mind."
Paige sighed. "Tell me about it."
". . . What's your name?" he asked then, surprising her with the question, his tone slightly less cold than it had been.
"Who, me?" Paige replied. "Not," she stuttered, "that there's anyone else here! My name's Paige. Nice to meet you . . . ?"
"Victor."
"Well, nice to meet you Victor. Sorry for being such a mess, I've had a day you wouldn't believe."
"Yeah, I know that one," Victor said. "Didn't mean to give you the cold shoulder."
The two stood there, and Paige was grateful for the acknowledgment, though still slightly uncertain of where to take the interaction. She really had been about to turn and leave, but the man had given her an opening—the allegorical gap in Gawain's gorget she'd been looking for—she couldn't just walk away now, surely?
"So . . . what is it that you're looking for?" she ventured a second time. "If you don't mind me asking. You don't need me to tell you how that tome's no run-of-the-mill Oracle city mystery!" She gestured toward the book Victor had returned to the shelf.
"It's a long story," Victor replied.
"Well, I don't know if you’ve noticed," she smiled, "long stories are kind of my thing."
The floorboards under Victor creaked as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, contemplating his next words carefully. "Just been trying to find out where I came from."
"Where you . . . came from?" Paige knew better than anyone that the Cursed Apple's residents had some interesting genealogies, but she somehow doubted a technical grimoire would double as an ethnographic piece for even the strangest among them, matching arms or not.
"Or who might have made me," Victor clarified.
Paige had no response to that. She didn't exactly have any instinctive thoughts about the words she'd just registered either. Had she heard him right? Before she could speak, and perhaps anticipating that precise reaction, Victor brought a large, scarred hand to the hood of his coat and pinched the fabric, hesitating a moment, but then proceeded in pulling it back, revealing a cadaverously pale, stitch-riddled visage. His long face was accented by longer, black hair that cascaded down his broad features and framed his brow, stiff and unmoving as it was in what appeared to be an eternal grimace—sadness seeming in permanent residence in the man's dark, recessed eyes, eyes that presently avoided Paige's own, out of self-consciousness or habit, Paige couldn't tell.
"Not what you were expecting," Victor said then, making a conscious effort to return her gaze.
"No!" Paige was quick to respond. "I mean, yes, it's just," she swallowed on a dry mouth as she spied the man's physique below the neckline, equally enraptured and intimidated by the sight, "a lot to take in." Paige put two and two together. Revivification. The pale skin, the stitches . . . the man before her must have been some kind of resurrected cadaver: a shellyesque creature brought back to the realm of the living by means of galvanism or gadgeteering—though, thinking on it, Paige judged any such allusions to the obscure author Mary Shelley might have been too niche a reference, even for her. Whatever the case, it was fascinating.
"It's okay. I'm used to it," Victor said of her reaction, his dour expression unfaltering in the face of her ogling.
"No, really, not like that! It just brings up," she smiled nervously, trying to stifle an unwelcome and inadvertent chill that scurried up her back like a rat, her mind going a mile a minute, "certain . . . questions."
Tugging at the right sleeve of his coat and rolling it upwards with his hand, Victor disclosed the mystery that was that strong, mismatched forearm. Ixian patterned, just as Paige thought. "Makes two of us," he said, clenching the scarred fist in an apparent attempt to test its strength, before bringing it up to the side of his head and dragging it through his hair, revealing a harsh, metallic bolt that penetrated his neck, just above the lattice of sutures that demarcated where torso ended and where head began.
Gawain got off easy, apparently, Paige thought grimly, but it wasn't at all a grim sight. Not to her. Just wholly . . . unexpected, in all facets. A medical marvel, yes, but more importantly, quite possibly the most interesting thing she'd ever seen. She simply had to know more.
"Can," she began meekly. "Can I ask . . ." her voice trailed off.
"What do you want to know?"
The buckles of Victor's suspenders clinked against his legs with each heavy step, and Paige had to angle herself to see his face beyond the sheer stack of books she'd saddled him with.
"And just like that, you left the lab, zero idea as to where you came from or who put you together, or more importantly, why?" she asked, reiterating in her own excited words what Victor had explained to her for what must have been the third time.
"That about covers it," Victor replied, no sign of strain arising in his evenly flat tone despite the fact he was carrying a set of volumes that, altogether must have weighed more than Paige did sopping wet.
"Goodness, just think of the possibilities!" Paige exclaimed. "When I was looking for a mystery to tide me over, I wasn't expecting to find a real one!" Though initially reticent, Victor had warmed up to the rhythm of conversation once he'd internalized Paige really was interested in who exactly he was, and that she wasn't going to turn and run as others presumably had in the past. The two had been speaking for some time, Paige having recruited him into helping tidy up the place to pass the rainy night whilst nudging him to expound on his mysterious backstory. She was loving every moment.
Victor set the stack of dusty books down on the edge of a table that doubled as Paige's desk away from home. She knew every tome on it, the works arranged in piles that approximated something of a system, ordered by historical period, theme, as well as the degree of likelihood that she would be wont to return to any of them—the particularly frayed edges and worn spines of a certain pile stood as testament to a particular set of fascinations she held, but she wasn't exactly going to go out of her way to highlight that little mystery.
"And so you haunt the dark places," she continued with a whisper, taking her seat at the table and truly lost to the Byronic flux of her borrowed fantasy, "the cloak-and-dagger alleys and forgotten archives of the underworld, chasing your own Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Gosh, I can't even begin to imagine!"
It wasn't the first literary reference that had fallen out of her mouth as she'd blathered on and on, but the eyebrow raise from Victor at the reference slowed her in her tracks enough to register that she probably owed him at least something approaching an explanation concerning that particular train of thought.
"Oh, sorry. Steppenwolf, the browbeaten and burdened protagonist of the story is gifted a book, Treatise on the Steppenwolf, that promises to answer every question he has about himself!"
"The way you say it," Victor said, "I take it it doesn't work out." He'd elected to remain standing, his looming presence beside her still a touch jarring despite the growing familiarity between them.
"You'd be right," Paige laughed nervously, suddenly realizing that such a narrative arc probably wasn't the best premise to invoke in present company, but she didn't think Victor would mind regardless. "But goodness, listen to me talk your head off—if you'll pardon the expression! I'm supposed to be helping you!"
"Why?" Victor asked then, taking a book from Paige's hand and relocating it to a teetering stack at the back of the desk.
"Why?"
"Why help me?"
Paige didn't quite have an answer for that question. Helping people was just . . . the right thing to do. It was natural! How could anyone do otherwise when they knew they had the means? Besides, sometimes the best way to solve one's own problems was to help somebody else, at least Paige thought so, and boy did she feel like her own life needed some work as of late.
"Well," she began, "that's what you're supposed to do! And besides, if it's knowledge that can help, you came to the right girl! I couldn't have written the crossing of our paths better myself!"
"You really think you can help me?" Victor asked. "You know much about science, or," he hesitated as he said the word, "magic?"
"Oh, it runs in the family! Magic, I mean, though it is hard to determine where magic ends and where science begins when you're talking necromancy. Grimoires bold enough to label themselves as such were always more my brother's thing, though. I, on the other hand, am a Bibliomancer," she said proudly, though with the whisper of a sting at the mention of her brother—an involuntary emphasis on that particular word, and with a lot of history to back it. She shook the thoughts from her head. She'd had enough of that topic for one day. Perhaps for a lifetime.
"Bibliomancer?" Victor asked, bringing her back to the present.
Paige pointed to her brooch with a smile.
"Oh right, books. Figures."
"Wanna see?"
". . . See?" Victor asked, taking a seat at Paige's insistence.
Paige beamed. It had been such a long time since she'd met someone that was interested in what she had to say, let alone what she could do. She practically clambered atop the table to reach the tale she spied, Victor noticing where she was reaching and helping to recover the book from his seated position. "Thanks," she said bashfully, continually astounded at the size of the man's arms.
The story she was after was one of her favorites: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, contained within her reliable anthology, Myth & Legend. She leafed through the pages, searching for the beginning of that little tale she knew so well. "Here," she said, pointing to the illustrated initial of the opening verse of the story. Victor leaned in for a closer look, the chair creaking under his person as he squinted his eyes.
"You can read this?" he asked with apparent incredulity.
"Oh, it's Middle English," she explained, "similar to what we read today, but different! But trust me, I can do more than just read it!" She cleared her throat and lowered her voice as she began her abridged version of the tale, using the same tone she used for the kids at story hour. "The story opens at King Arthur’s court during a New Year’s feast, a day where everything is supposed to be orderly and perfect." She paused and closed her eyes, committing to a deep breath as she called forth the power in the words written on the page, attuning her emotional resonance to the story—an important component of any bibliomantic evocation, the personal familiarity with the themes and imagery of the text being a cornerstone of the ability to manifest. Pulling her hand back from the text slowly, as though she were drawing a thread from her sweater, Paige flattened her palm of a sudden, causing an accretion disc of green energy to materialize around the book, before pulling her hand back again in one swift motion, dragging the energy with it and causing the glow of the magic to consolidate and crystallize within three-dimensional space, the form by which the magic manifested being one of her own shaping.
Narrowing his eyes further in the face of the glow, Victor began to realize exactly what it was he was looking at, and his eyes widened to a degree Paige didn't think was possible. Before him, settled on the pages of the book, was an iridescent diorama in miniature of King Arthur's court, characters and all, rendered as it was in the verdant green of Paige's magic, even down to the minute chalices that adorned the table. Paige watched Victor's reaction closely with a smile, seeing the light of her evocation playing across the unfettered curiosity of his features, the characters that milled about the page in their merriment causing the glow on his face to oscillate in time with their movements.
"But," she continued the story with a smile, "just as the night is coming to a close, in rides the fearsome and strong Green Knight, interrupting the festivities with a proposal!" With a motion of her hand, the Green Knight on horseback manifested before the crowd at the periphery of the book, galloping around the small table and rearing before a much-befuddled King Arthur. "He challenges the court to a game. One knight among them may strike him once with an axe, but in a year and one day, the Green Knight himself gets to return the blow dealt." Victor looked to her at the proposition, fully entranced by the story. "Everyone freezes," she continued, unable to contain her delight, "but Sir Gawain steps up. 'I will do it,' he says!" The miniature Gawain mimicked this intent, hands on his hips and puffing out his chest, a display that elicited a look of amusement in Victor's eyes—a detail that Paige certainly did not overlook.
"The Green Knight offers Gawain his chance, he stands motionless, defenceless, prepared for whatever Gawain is able to muster." She turned the page, the diorama dispersing into a green haze. She flicked her wrist, and Gawain and the Green Knight appeared on the new page, larger than before. "Determined to prove his worth in the presence of King Arthur and the knights of the round table, Gawain steels himself, and then, he strikes, lopping off the Knight's head In one blow." The figures reflected Paige's summation, with the Green Knight's head becoming decoupled from his body from Gawain's singular and decisive strike. Victor's hand moved to his neck at the sight.
Paige forgot herself as she saw the gesture, not having anticipated the parallel, and she quickly returned to her evocation, uneasy at the thought that she may have made her new friend uncomfortable. How could she have neglected to note that little detail? She waved her hands with some haste, and the Green Knight stood up silently, his headless body reaching down to recover the head that had rolled to the edge of the book and returning it to his shoulders. "Unfazed, and more importantly, completely unharmed, the Green Knight turns to the shocked crowd. 'In one year and one day,' he says, 'I will return what you have dealt,' and just like that, he's gone." The image of the Green Knight scattered like dust in the wind, and only Gawain remained on the page, uncertain and alone. Paige looked to Victor to gauge his investment.
". . . What happens next?" he asked.
"—and that's because the Green Knight isn't testing courage, he's testing identity!"
Victor mulled the thought over in his head. "So Gawain doesn't fail because he lies," he surmised, checking his comprehension with a glance at Paige with each word, "he fails because he thought he could be one thing all the time?"
The two had been talking for a long while after the story had ended, with Paige continually tracing invisible diagrams in the air with her hands in an attempt to illustrate the deeper elements of the tale in a way that Victor would understand, and to his credit—and much to Paige's delight—it was the most fun she'd had talking about her interests in years. Somebody was actually engaging with the topic, and taking her seriously!
"You've got it!" Paige turned toward him with a grin. "When Gawain accepts the girdle that will protect him from the Knight, he's choosing survival over honesty, and that's the choice that cracks the chivalry he's been trying to wear like armour. It's not that he becomes cowardly, he's still a good person at heart, and he wants to do the right thing, but his self is suddenly divided between ideal and instinct! And, and!" she hastened to add, "it's Gawain that condemns himself, far more harshly than anyone else!"
"He knows he failed," Victor gathered. "Inside. Even when others can't tell the difference."
"Exactly!" Paige chirped. "Isn't it tragic? The idea of failing to live up to your own ideals, of putting yourself out there, in front of the King Arthur, and all of his knights! Trying and failing at the one thing you hold yourself to, but only you know the truth, that you didn't succeed." She rested her chin on the back of her hand, her voice softening as she continued. "Gawain is only saved by his internal moral compass. He failed, as anyone in his sabatons might. But, he has a good enough head on his shoulders to recognize that failure. That alone is what saves him." If only some people had such a conscience, Paige thought, her mind drifting back to the person that had occupied her mind for the better part of the evening, before her chance meeting with Victor, and before her further attempts to distract her mind from the topic with her Bibliomantic display—her brother, Bryce.
Bryce had always been the black sheep of the household—well, not always, Paige was quick to correct herself, though it had now been long enough to truly feel like it—and it was his progressive withdrawing, and subsequent disappearance from the family that had served as the death knell of the better days. Bryce had fallen in with the wrong crowd, the wrong books, the wrong magic. Paige wasn't particularly convinced by the supposed dichotomy of the left-hand and right-hand paths of magic of the previous century; the universe wasn’t so black and white—in her opinion, it was all down to how one used the gift, help or harm, whatever the source, especially so once one factored Ixia into the equation: demonolatry and the Infernal arts that the Church had long warned of had been recontextualized in the span of a generation, the public perception of such notions shifting from the diabolical to the day-to-day practically overnight; some Ixians even used their powers as parlour tricks!—but what Bryce had been getting into was undoubtedly ill for the soul, however you defined the terms, and their parents had known it too.
She missed him, even if those few years prior to his parting had been fraught with metaphysically tinged animosity, the endless, tense conversations about just what it was he was getting himself into, and the constant reminders that he needed to be careful . . . He was a good soul, Paige knew it, despite it all. But he was gone, with no indication as to where, and their parents had been as frustratingly tight-lipped even up to today as they had been the night of his departure.
Most of all, she prayed for Bryce. She prayed that he would find his own Green Knight, that he would discover his own chance to prove himself, on that dark, lonely path he'd found himself walking, and that the Green Knight would be equally as just as in the stories. Bryce deserved that chance, a chance for atonement, a chance to come back to the family, to come back to her. He wouldn't fail if he just had the chance, she knew it.
"You think it works like that?" Victor asked, interrupting the silence to voice his own train of thought. "Who you are being," he hesitated as he found the words, "what you do. Or what you try to be?"
She hadn't intended to make any such observations on Victor's condition with the commentary they'd been exploring since finishing the story, but then, she hadn't intended to raise the spectre of Bryce, either. She realized the themes could probably serve as a valuable mental exercise for Victor's purposes, however. Books tended to do that in Paige's experience. Victor didn't even know who he was, it was the entire reason they'd got to talking in the first place, but Paige had gotten so wrapped up in herself that she'd forgotten. She wondered what it was Victor was wrestling with specifically. Was it merely the lack of a past to point to, as he supposed? Or could it be that, without that past acting as anchor, he was unsure of what, or who he should be? A distinction existed, there. She supposed that Victor could have been anyone before today, he could have been a bad person, though she doubted it—but if that were the case, and he discovered that fact, that wouldn't say anything about who he was today. He had the choice to be who he wanted to be regardless of such a past. In a way, that was a gift.
"It's possible," she said in reflection, the stillness that had settled over the room a catalyst for their joint contemplation. "But it depends on how you look at it. Take Steppenwolf," she continued, "the story I mentioned earlier. That book puts forth the idea that the singular, true self is an illusion. Like how we all have different selves, deep inside, even those we rarely show. You know, your prideful self, your angry self, your sad self. The selves that you pretend aren't representative of who you really are, but, by virtue of being part of you, they are. You can't pretend it away, you know," she laughed anxiously, "even if you wanted to . . . 'I am in truth the wolf that I often call myself, that beast that finds neither home nor joy in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to me,'" she paraphrased from memory, the smile that tugged at her lips given the accuracy of the recollection failing in the wake of the reflective dimension the words took on as they left her mouth. "Maybe, like Gawain, the knight from the story, who you are depends on which parts of yourself you try to prioritise, you know, the good ones. Even if you don't always succeed." she concluded.
"Considering I'm actually made up of multiple people, maybe that other one's onto something," Victor said, shaking her from her thoughts—whether he'd noticed the shift in her mood, Paige couldn't tell, but she felt the weight of her frown on her face.
"Well, maybe not so literal," she said with a laugh that sounded forced even to her own ears. "It's like Jekyll and Hyde, you know," the example she used was one anyone would be familiar with, and Victor acknowledged the comparison with a nod. "Like two sides of a coin, but at the end of the day it's all the same coin."
"You just hope it lands on the right side," Victor surmised.
"Yeah," Paige smiled pensively, and a further silence settled in the air between them as they thought on the topic. "Sorry, for being so . . . switched on," she said eventually. "It's not often I get to talk to people, especially about my interests!"
"It's alright," Victor replied. "The passion is," he searched for the word, "refreshing."
It wasn't the most graceful of compliments, but it may have been one of the nicest things Paige had heard said of herself in a very long time, and from someone she least expected, too. It made her smile again. She hoped she wasn't blushing.
"Thank you," Victor said then.
"Thank me?"
"Most people just see," Victor gestured at himself, "this. By then, talking is usually off the table."
"Oh, pshaw," Paige said, her mood boosted somewhat from the unexpected compliment, and forgetting Bryce for the moment. "I mean, you're big," her eyes tracked Victor's body, "very big . . ." She cleared her throat as she spied the size of his forearms. "But, you know, if size alone made a monster, every church would be on trial!"
". . . Yeah," Victor replied, the depths of his eyes betraying his skepticism.
"No, really!"
"You seemed frightened when you saw me."
"I mean, it was a shock, but, not in that way. It's just," she struggled to put her thoughts into words, "you're so interesting looking, I mean, not interesting, but, striking! Not in an intimidating way! And striking isn't bad, in fact, I like striking!" She could have facepalmed, what on God's green earth was she saying? What had happened to the brain that had been in her head ten minutes ago? "You're conspicuous, yes, but you're also, like," she said the first word that fell out of her mouth. "You're just, you're handsome, you know?"
Victor looked visibly confused.
"Oh my god, did I just say that out loud?"
"I'd say 'thank you', but I don't exactly know how much of this body is mine."
Paige practically had her head in her hands. She couldn't believe it. She hadn't remarked on someone's appearance to their face ever in her life, and yet she'd let that one slip in front of a stranger she'd only known for the space of a few hours? "Can we forget I said that?"
"Fine by me," Victor said, as reassuringly neutral as expected despite the raised eyebrow—she thanked the heavens for that.
"Thanks," she laughed nervously, "and sorry," she added, returning her attention to the book before them and flicking through the pages idly, face still hot from embarrassment and not at all registering the content of the words her eyes traced. What a mess.
". . . Yvain?" Victor said of a sudden, his ability to not dwell on her social mishaps apparently his greatest strength. His eyes were focused on the book. "Is he related to Gawain?"
Paige blinked the tome back into focus, realizing that she'd just turned the page to a new story. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "Yvain! Yes! They're cousins, well, at least in some stories. This one is actually one of my favorite Arthurian tragedies!"
Victor gave a slight nod, permitting her tangent. She smiled meekly, clearing her throat after a second once she realized she'd been staring up at Victor's face for a touch longer than was perhaps appropriate. It wasn't her fault his features were so . . . what was it she had said? Striking? Goodness, get a grip, woman, she thought to herself.
"So," she began, "this story is about the Knight of the Lion." She pointed to the illustration on the book's opening lithograph before motioning with her hand and drawing the figure from the page as before, the miniature knight manifesting in green upon the page and unsheathing his sword, raising it aloft. "This brave knight's name is Sir Yvain, also of the round table. He attains glory and love through his daring and gallant ventures, but then breaks the promise that binds him to his wife, and the moment that bond snaps, so does his selfhood." She flicked the page, the knight disappearing into a green, spectral haze as before as the paper settled over him, before reappearing again on the surface of the new page in a dishevelled and confused state. "He goes mad, forgets his identity, and becomes a nameless creature of the wild," she gestured with her hands, as though she too were a beast in the underbrush.
"Like the . . . steppenwolf you mentioned," Victor hazarded a contribution.
"Yes!" Paige beamed. She'd never had somebody pick up so quickly on her thought process before. "Only with Steppenwolf, both man and wolf are proposed to exist at the same time, we're all capable of both good and ill at any given moment. With Yvain, the idea is that, in failing to live up to the man, you inexorably become the wolf. Only by rebuilding himself through compassion and chivalrous deeds, feat by feat, does Yvain earn back not just his place in the world, but the right to remember who he is! The story isn't strictly about forgetting who you are, instead, just like with Gawain and the Green Knight, it's actually commentary on the nature of the self!" She dispersed the Knight with a flick of her wrist, before leafing through the pages until she found the next illustration. "It helps when such self-defining feats are hacking giant monsters to death with your sword, of course, but, you know," she mocked the strike of a blade, unable to contain her enthusiasm, "that's what knights do!"
"You really like knights, huh?" Victor asked.
"Who doesn't like knights?" she grinned. "Heroic champions of the realm, iron-clad and cloaked, taking up the mantle to do what's right! And don't get me started on the swords!"
"How about this one?" Victor had retrieved a second book from atop a pile as she was speaking.
"Oh, Woolf is amazing," she replied, taking the book from his hand, "this one isn't about knights, though. This is Orlando, it's all about how identity can come apart under the weight of time itself." She flicked through the pages. "Imagine living for centuries, outlasting eras, languages and even social norms! Orlando, the protagonist, starts life as an Elizabethan nobleman, but ends the novel a woman!"
"Very . . . bold," Victor replied with a raised eyebrow.
"It's more common than you might think," Paige smiled up at Victor before returning her attention to the book. "Again, what the story is exploring is whether a single, continuous self exists, and what that might be if everything else changes. You are who you are at any given moment, and who you are might be infinitely malleable! But, at the same time, it's hard to imagine that who you were when you were a teenager really reflects on who you are today!" Paige thought on the words as they left her mouth, and her mind couldn't help but be drawn back to Bryce, the ever-present shadow that haunted her psyche despite her efforts to exorcise him. "But," she continued, slightly less sure about the point she was trying to make in the wake of that particular thought, and readjusting her glasses as she did, "a lot of what constitutes that self is predicated on how other people see you. What they believe about you and who you are. That doesn't say anything about the real you, and there is a real you, even if everything else changes . . . It's just hard for people to see sometimes . . . you know?"
Victor was watching her closely, Paige could feel his eyes on her as she sat quietly, unsure of what to say next, but then his face took on a look of concentration. "And even if someone fails," he said, circling back to his earlier thought, "or if they don't know who they are at all, like with the knight," he tapped the previous book with a large, scarred finger, "what matters most is what they choose to do now."
It didn't take Paige's intellect to recognize that Victor was again grappling with his own lack of a past with that question, and she realized of a sudden that she'd gotten distracted from her aim in helping him once more. It was so easy to slip into her own little fantasy world with Victor's encouragement, but she was committed to making sure she did something to help ease his mind, if she could. "Yeah," she started, "so long as you have the opportunity to do the right thing, and be a good force in the world, who you were before doesn't matter. At least, that's what I believe. Take my brother, for example." She figured if Bryce was going to plague her mind throughout the discussion, she may as well get it out in the open.
"Your brother?"
"Bryce," she sighed. "I suppose you could say he fell in with the wrong crowd. But, you know, just because he's one thing now, that doesn't mean he can't be something else in the future . . ." Her hand caressed the book she held as she spoke. "Something good." She looked Victor in the eye, and was met with a softer gaze than she'd expected, a look of understanding. "But enough about me," she laughed bashfully, "what's on your mind, Victor?"
"I wonder," he hesitated in thought, "if every part of me belonged to someone else first, is there anything underneath that I can say is really me at all?"
It was a poignant question, and one that Paige realized she'd never had to confront herself. What Victor was asking wasn't a question of biology—she assumed that he knew that his conscious experience stemmed from his brain, just like anyone else—but instead, one of the metaphysical. She didn't quite know how to answer the query, and looked toward him with a finger on her lips as she thought. It was when her eyes drifted to his neck that her mind was drawn back to Gawain, and then, in a flash of insight, onto Loki's Wager—the Norse myth in which Loki, owing his head to a dwarf, escapes unharmed, as head and neck cannot be cleanly parted—and from that to Theseus! The flow of thoughts was rapid, the dots suspended in her head connecting like lightning, and it gave her the perfect idea in how she could help Victor with his question.
"Wait here!" she said, getting up of a sudden and darting into one of the aisles behind them, returning just as fast with a particularly weighty book. She set it down on the table, levered the cover open and then scanned the table of contents for the relevant chapter.
"Have you ever heard of the ship of Theseus?" she asked, pointing to the illustration on the page once she'd found it.
"A ship?"
"Yes, here, let me explain," she scooched over and allowed Victor a closer look. "It's not a real ship, it's a paradox, like 'how many grains of sand make a pile', you know, that sort of thing."
Victor looked at her, visibly confused. "Sand? A pile's a pile."
"Yes, but the question is when does it become a pile?"
"You can tell by looking at it, it's not that difficult."
"Well," Paige trilled, "perhaps it's true that one can get too granular about these things."
"Granular. Like sand. That's funny."
Paige failed to stifle her smile. She returned her gaze to the book, and gesticulated above it with her hands hastily, calling forth the prismatic immateriality of her magical imagery, rendering the illustration of the ship in three-dimensional space above the book for Victor to see.
"Look here, imagine you have a ship, sailing the vast oceans, going port to port and island to island, taking your hardy crew on all kinds of daring adventures. But over time, as the ship gets older and more damaged, every plank and sail begins to get replaced, one by one." The image of the ship suspended in the air reflected her commentary, each and every section of the boat being superseded by new parts that sparked into place with a flash of green light, the discarded fragments drifting off and dissapearing into nothingness like motes of dust escaping a shaft of light. "The question is, once every piece of the boat has been replaced, is it the same boat?" She nudged the book with her hand, prompting the now-renewed ship suspended above it to fall down and onto the paper, the pages underneath it reacting like tempestuous waves that curled and flattened in rhythmic undulations, causing the boat to bob up and down as though traversing a real sea.
". . . Huh." Victor simply vocalized after a moment, watching the boat closely and apparently bereft of an intuitive response. "Is there an answer? To the question."
"Well, it depends on your perspective. Not everything is so black and white, unfortunately. Some things just don't have a hard answer."
"What do you think?" he asked.
Paige thought on it for a moment. "I think it is the same boat. The same essence, at least. The spirit, soul, whatever you wanna' call it. There's something beyond the pieces that make up a thing, or person, something real, something important that resides there, whether that something changes, I don't know, but it's there."
The ship began to disperse before them as Victor leaned in, deep in thought, the light of the image fading from his face until only a reflected glint in his eyes remained. "Maybe," he said then, and nothing more.
Light was beginning to show against the wall; the two had managed to talk the night through, though the past few minutes had been spent in a shared silence. Victor was content to sit in the quiet, and Paige was happy for his presence, resting her chin on the back of her hand, thinking about the many things they had spoken about, as she sure Victor was, too.
She hoped that he'd taken something from their discussion, as amorphous and eclectic in topics as it had been. It had to have been a tough existence, not knowing where one came from, or why one existed. She didn't like to think of him as sad or alone on that journey.
"So what's that you're reading now?" he asked of a sudden, interrupting the lengthy quiet and gesturing toward the book at the edge of the table, the same book she'd been reading prior to her drifting off. She was surprised he'd remembered the particular volume among the stacks of books that littered the desk.
"Hm? Oh," she retrieved the book and showed him the cover. "This one? It's Mill on the Floss."
"What's it about?"
"Ah," Paige said, returning to her place in the book, "it's a story about a brother and sister, and the rifts that separate them. It," she thought of the most politic way of describing the book's themes, "let's just say that it explores . . . complex relationship dynamics. You know, siblings." She knew the book well, well enough that it took no effort at all to manifest an image for Victor's benefit. With a wave of her hand she pulled the protagonists Tom and Maggie from the text, the two appearing out of the green haze, sitting on opposite sides of the book's gutter, their feet almost touching between the dip in the pages, but irrevocably separated. "Mostly it's about consequences," she continued, looking directly at Victor "how people convince themselves they're doing the right thing, trying to help the situation, when really their presence is just making it worse." She returned her chin to the back of her hand at that, looking past Victor at nothing in particular.
"You relate to that?" Victor asked after a moment, the look in his eyes almost sympathetic despite the hardiness of his face.
"I suppose so . . ." Paige began, running a hand through her still-frizzy hair with a sigh, not particularly thrilled that her mind had drifted back once more to the inevitable topic. She looked back to the evocation as she prepared her response, but her heart skipped a beat once she realized why Victor had asked so personal a question. It wasn't the characters she knew that she'd conjured upon the face of the book. Dangling her legs over the paper valley before her sat a bespectacled bookworm, chattering away to the boy opposite who simply listened attentively. It was Bryce. Bryce and herself, whittling away the day in conversation as they once had, long ago. She could have cursed. She shut the book without further comment, the two figures disappearing between the pages with a whisper.
She didn't know what to say, and she felt the heat in her face.
"You're upset," Victor said, and not in the form of a question. When that didn't elicit a response, he continued. "Your brother, you've mentioned him a few times."
"Bryce," she reminded him, her tone sharper than she would've liked. Victor didn't deserve that, it wasn't his fault. "He's been gone a long time," she continued. "Sometimes I think it's something I said, or did. I don't know." When days had turned to weeks, and weeks to months, it had hurt, but nothing hurt more than the acknowledgment of just how much time had now passed since his disappearance. And it wasn't just the formative experiences missed that stung, like her graduation, but also the day-to-day minutia, the utter lack of presence for when Paige just wanted to talk about something as mundane as that week’s book, just like the magical figures had been doing. She began to tear up, sad, angry, and embarrassed all at once, that same hollow feeling arising in her, deep in the pit of her chest. She didn't understand why he'd had to go. People so rarely listened to her as Bryce had done. That was, until this night, the chance meeting with a stranger who'd afforded her more patience and kindness than anyone had in years.
And all it took was just to listen. To be there. Was that so hard? Was that too big an ask?
She looked up at Victor with wet eyes as he shifted in his seat to turn toward her, the most he'd moved in what must have been hours, eerily still as he had been for the night's duration. "Hey," he began, "maybe your brother is just trying to find himself, too. Or trying to fix whatever mistake he made, like the knights from your stories."
Paige's bottom lip began to tremble.
"And the fact you care about him is because of the past you shared," Victor said. "He won't forget that, the same way you can't. That means something, no matter where he is."
Tears began to flow all at once, and Paige had to nudge her glasses from her nose in order to try and dry her eyes. As it turned out, the best way to help oneself really was to help others; Paige hadn't considered that she might be the one being helped.
"Can I have a hug?" she stuttered. She didn't wait for an answer, lunging in with a sob and pressing her face up against Victor's cold frame, holding on tight. The man didn't know what to do with his arms, deciding finally to rest his large hands on her shoulders noncommittally as she closed her eyes and sniffled. It didn't matter to her, and she hugged all the tighter, glad that he was there at all.
The coming sunlight that peeked through the time-stained windows brightened Victor's face, and Paige pulled away slightly to look up at him. The light had added a depth to his complexion despite the deathly chill of his body, and for a moment she swore she saw the ghost of a smile threaten the stitches that bookended his lips. "Thank you," she said, returning her head to his chest. "I'm sorry I wasted your night, I got so wrapped up in my books, I didn't even get to help you."
"You helped plenty," Victor replied, coaxing her off his body and helping her back into her seat with a hand on her waist. Paige was suddenly self-conscious of her emotional outburst, but ultimately didn't mind if Victor didn't. She felt safe in his presence, safe to feel, safe to speak. It was maybe one of the most special nights of her life, and she well and truly hoped Victor could say the same. "I got to learn knights were pretty cool," he added.
The comment made her laugh despite the tears that wetted her cheeks. "Thank you Victor, really."
"Don't mention it." He looked to the window. "Where do we go from here?" he asked.
"Well . . . I've always wanted to start a book club," she smiled.