I turned over the map for the inside of my mind

[bearshermark]

Who: Elliott (Eleven) and OPEN
What: Elliott doin' a heckin' research
When: Feb 16th-28th
Where: New York Public Library
Rating/Warnings: Low-key anxious teenager


To think only a few weeks ago, he'd lamented the fact that all of his friends were growing up. Getting jobs or else bogged down by responsibility, increasingly short on time to hang out like they used to. And now here he was, holed up in the library every day after school and every weekend, more relieved than anything that he didn't have to explain himself to many of them. Sitting in relative peace with a stack of books to work through while he flipped between tabs of scattered information on his laptop.

It didn't make a great deal of practical sense, but the public space felt safer than attempting to study alone at home. The library had a productive atmosphere, he reasoned: an air of focus in the shuffle of papers and heavy thump of closed books while still maintaining a quiet sense of community.

In such a space, he didn't feel at all remarkable. To everyone there, he was just a perfectly ordinary high school student working on perfectly ordinary schoolwork. Though occasionally, he did quickly change tabs or shift in his seat to discretely obscure more esoteric texts- a guilty habit he had yet to break himself of. No one would care about what he was reading, he knew, yet still the sense of self-consciousness persisted.

And then there were times he zoned out while he read or scrolled down a page, either intensely focused or not at all, and jumped back to reality whenever someone brushed by his seat. Always offering a nervous greeting and silently praying no one decided to sit next to him. His materials were spread about a bit rudely to that effect, scattered to take up more table space than strictly necessary to make sitting elsewhere an easier choice for most.

Unfortunately, it didn't always work.

"Oh, uh, sorry, let me move that.."

Comments

why are you making me pick a day, I don't know when

[temptationaccomplished]

Aziraphale loved libraries. There was just something about old books and the smell of paper and dust and ink that was simply soothing. He supposed anyone who enjoyed books felt the same, and he was always incredibly pleased to find other people milling about, using the resources that the city had provided, even if some could be downright brutal to the books. (Sadly, rescuing them from sticky child fingers was out of the question)

Libraries: the great monuments to human creativity and knowledge. (Computers, though... Nightmare, those. Brilliant as they were, he sort of missed the whole business of accessing information on microfiche, if paper wasn't available.)

Aziraphale wouldn't have disrupted the young man if there were other places to sit, but the cool February weather and Spring midterms made space difficult to come by.

"Norse mythology?" he murmured, noting the covers and pages open in the boy's research. He put down his own stack: a book on Pre-Romanesque art and architecture on loan from another library, and several self-indulgent choices of mystery novels. "Funny, someone recently asked me about that."

~sometime~ is fine!

[bearshermark]

"Really?" he asked, removing his backpack from the chair to finally let the man sit. His planned excuse that it was 'just a school project' withered in the face of curiosity. "Are you some sort of expert in it?"

What kind of weird luck would that be?

Elliott pulled the last of his books out of the way and shuffled them to the other side of the table, then resumed his seat. "What were they asking about?"

[temptationaccomplished]

"Hardly an expert." He arranged his books on the table, trying not to encroach upon the young man's space. "I specialize in antique art restoration, so one does encounter the odd mythological reference from time to time. More often it's biblical, however."

He enjoyed reading about mythology but Norse wasn't something he found himself very well versed in.

"They were asking about the tree, Yggdrasil. What sort of research are you doing? Ah, if you don't mind me asking."

[bearshermark]

Elliott paused in reaching for his laptop, fingers falling short of its slim edge.

"Oh. Uh, the same, actually.."

He turned his full attention to the stranger beside him. World Wide Web. Only an older person would have said it like that.

"What uh- can I ask what sort of information you gave them?"

[temptationaccomplished]

"Well, I believe I suggested they try the library," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "Other than that, if I recall, I mentioned that the tree was incredibly important to the Norse cosmology, being the connecting point of the Nine Worlds."

It had been a while since he had that conversation, and Aziraphale, good as his memory was, couldn't recall word-for-word what else had been said.

"Oh!" He looked pleased as anything to have recalled, "and we had a brief discussion on Hamlet. Or at the very least, Horatio and the failings of the American school-system for not properly teaching one of Shakespeare's best."

[bearshermark]

Elliott felt his ears warm.

"They do teach it. I guessed right, didn't I?"

Well, at least he could feel a bit comfortable with sharing his research and findings with his table partner. He offered him a timid hand.

"My name is Elliott."

[temptationaccomplished]

"You did indeed."

Aziraphale returned with a far more confident, but friendly and hopefully not intimidating offer of his own hand for a warm handshake.

"My name is Aziraphale. Or Mr. Fell. So, how does your search go, Elliott? Make any headway with your mystery? You know, I'm rather envious of your having a clear lead to explore. My memory was not nearly so forthcoming."

[bearshermark]

Elliott shook on it, surprised but relieved to put a name and face to another Different.

Mr. Fell it was.

"Not really," he said, then hesitated. "I mean, sort of? But I think I'm just finding more questions for every answer I think I have. In a way, it feels more like a wild goose chase than a lead. I mean, who can really make sense of mythology and something as mysterious as life and death? There's people that study this stuff as a career and debate everything in academic papers with dozens of sources that may or may not be credible."

Elliott's head fell into his hands, fingers threading through strands of his hair as he stared dully at the grains in the table.

"But it's for sure, if that was really a memory of a past life, then it almost definitely wasn't on this planet. And that kind of.. that's really weird to think about too hard."