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If Jurgen was honest with himself, it began with the fact that Gertrude Robinson made him feel something he’d not felt in more years than he could count. With her, living in the caves beneath one of the most secure and most dangerous places in the world, Jurgen felt safe. Well perhaps safer was more accurate as he knew that safety was truly an illusen and the ability to protect oneself was only possible from one moment to the next.
Yet when she proved herself to be open minded to the truth, and moreso to helping him try and fix things, Jurgen had found safety in being able to rely on another. To a degree.
Rely on one another to keep secrets, certainly. Rely on another to gather the most dangerous of the books and destroy them, even gathering up the ashes and mixing them with salt and rosemary, adding a pinch of holy water and iron shavings. Processing what could be used to destroy lives and turning it into something that can be used to bind the abilities of the tunnels, to bind what powered the books the best they could.
The books were Jurgen’s purvey and with the library destroyed it was hard to gather what he could to put things to right before his time was up. It wasn’t enough though, and they both knew it.
It had been Gertrude’s idea to start rearranging the Archives, and Jurgen couldn’t argue the usefulness of it. He could stop the books, use the tunnels, and work from his end, but his work was limited within the Institute. If they would work around the gaze of the Eye to try and protect others, protect the secrets the Archive held, then changes could begin.
She arranged the new system, one that they could trace later if was needed but not easily untangled. They couldn’t destroy statements, couldn’t toss them into the rubbish to be burned, but so long as they stayed within the Archives then they certainly could be “lost”. Inaccurate filing systems. Misfilings. Misplacement.
It had been in that vein that Gertrude had asked Jurgen how much of the tunnels were part of the Institute. They couldn’t move everything, and each item they chose had to be very specific, but if they could even relocate the most dangerous of files, then perhaps they could get a leg up on what was coming.
They had begun with the tapes, if only that they both well knew the power that words had, and the statements themselves held knowledge and strength, but when added to the voice of the Archivist, it seemed only logical.
Gertrude had been shocked when she entered the “room”, finding more than an empty room to store things in. The chair she knew had been “borrowed” from storage, and despite being underground it left her with a light and airy feeling. Jurgen had stayed by the doorway opening, looking the most unsettled Gertrude had ever seen from him. It was there, in that tunnel room, that he had asked her to dinner.
Their days were not easy from that point on, but certainly they were lighter on their souls. Neither believed they had the ability to stop what was coming, but they had to do what they could. In the time they have. That was how Jurgen worded it, and Gertrude would just nod. Often before taking his hand in hers. Not saying a word, merely squeezing calloused fingers against her own.
It was how he took her hand in that moment after he had settled her body lifeless body into the chair in their room. Kneeling down beside her form, knowing that her soul is long gone. Had he been there, maybe perhaps, Jurgen could have seen the silvery last gasp as it left her body but Elias had played his cards well. Timing had always been his long suit.
Kissing the back of her hand, Jurgen laid her hands folded in her lap. By the time he might return to this place, other beings will have taken over his tunnels as they had often feared. The boy upstairs that Gertrude had already told him was earmarked for her job would be the Archivist, and it would be Jurgen’s time as well. Until then though, there were things to do.
“In the time we have.”
He whispers the words, both as a goodbye, a term of love for the words he might never find in himself, and as a call to himself and others that they not let go of what had been started. There was a war ahead of them, and what time they had wasn’t long.