Chapter Text
When Ash opened his eyes, it was to find himself sat in his usual chair in the Rose Room.
He’d been slumped over the polished wood table, the rays of the setting sun warming his back from the high windows. That made sense, he guessed; that was the place he had chosen to go to lay down and die in, after all. But if that was the case, why was he still here?
A quick glance around revealed that he was in the library completely alone. How odd.
Weirder still, the stab wound in his side was gone. There wasn’t even a scar or a smear of blood - nothing at all to indicate recent trauma of any type.
And distressingly, his letter from Eiji was missing also.
“Shit!” he swore, hunting around for it in case it had dropped on the floor. Hopefully the librarians hadn’t thrown it away… But the library was empty apart from the books and the dust motes dancing in the dying sunbeams. “No…” he moaned, feeling distraught with a crushing feeling of loss.
The one bastard thing he wanted to take to the afterlife with him if he could, and he’d already lost it!
Was this the afterlife though? It could just be a dream as he lay dying. How long before things turned dark permanently? Was his brain already shutting down from blood-loss related hypoxia as he sat here? It wasn’t like there was anyone around to ask.
Or was there?
The Rose Room was eerily empty, but that didn’t mean the whole library was.
With nothing better to do, he left his favourite spot and went exploring. While spacious, the Rose Room was only a small part of the library as a whole, and there are no end of rooms blocked to public access full of archived stacks of books, parchment, and microfilm. For the first time, Ash found he could gain access to these valuable mines of knowledge, all the doors unlocked for him, and he ventured deeper into the bowels of the library than he had ever done before. He found himself in a long corridor, stacks of books piled up from floor to ceiling on either side of him, that got narrower and more overcrowded and claustrophobic as he made his way down it. It was long, and just kept going in a seemingly endless straight line. Just as he was beginning to wonder if he was even still inside the NYPL, it came to a crossroads. Several corridors met together in a chaotic star-shape, with a small area of open space linking them all. There was a rickety wooden table with two chairs sat in the space, and sat in one of the chairs…
“Blanca?”
The Kazakh assassin was lounging in one of the chairs, his long legs elegantly crossed, a copy of ‘Islands in the Stream’ open in his hand. He was wearing a pristine white pressed suit, his hair in a loose ponytail, and his usual small smile that gave nothing away graced his masculine features.
“Good evening, Ash,” he said pleasantly. “But I am afraid you are mistaken.”
“Huh?”
“You called me Blanca, you see,” he said, as he pulled out a bookmark tucked into the back pages of the book he was reading. He placed it carefully back between the pages to mark his place, before putting the book down on the table with the title side up. “And I am sorry to disappoint you, but you’re wrong. While I may look like someone you know, I am not him. Although, if it makes it easier for you, feel free to continue to call me after him, if you like.”
“The hell you on about?” Ash frowned.
“I am The Librarian,” Blanca said, as if that make perfect sense. “I look after this place and everything in it.”
“Stop pissing around!” Ash hissed. “You never make much sense even at the best of times, but this is really pushing it, even for you!”
“As I said, I am not this Blanca character. I have merely taken his form, probably due to the nature of your relationship with him. You are currently at a crossroads, and I am here to help you find the answers.”
“Are you being literal or metaphorical here, because…” Ash gestured to the literal crossroads of bookshelves they were stood in. “Not funny.”
“Metaphorical, of course,” Blanca said, still smiling that infuriating smile.
“Of course.” Ash rolled his eyes.
“Please, take a seat, and I’ll try to explain this place as simply as I can.”
Blanca gestured at the table in front of him with a wave of his hand. Frowning, Ash perched himself in the chair opposite Blanca, glaring at him with a moody stare.
“Between life and death, there is the Library,” Blanca said. “And in that Library, the shelves go on forever. Every book on every shelf is a life you could have lived. It is a life where you made different choices or decisions. Imagine, if you would, that you can go back and change things and live your life differently, or that you could erase any regrets – the Library allows you to do that.”
“That’s impossible,” Ash said, shaking his head defiantly.
“What you first need to realise is that this place… It is both real and not real. It exists outside of time, and only under certain conditions. The Library is yours and yours alone – it holds the answers and provides the key, but by its very nature it is unstable. You are not supposed to be here. However, as long as it stands, you will be preserved from dying.”
“Fuck me, my head hurts…” Ash mumbled, rubbing at the bridge of his nose as he tried to make some semblance of sense in Blanca’s words.
“To put it bluntly, Ash… You’re dying. You currently lie slumped over a table in the Rose Room, slowly bleeding out from a puncture wound in your lower abdomen.”
“I know that much,” he said. “Hang on… Shit. Is this that phenomena people mean when they say life flashes before their eyes? Only because I’m some sort of weird genius it’s going to taunt me with what could have been?”
“No.”
“Okay…”
“This place is the decision point as to whether you live or die. You have to make a choice.”
“I already did.”
“Did you though?” Blanca tapped the table, gesturing to a couple of sheets of paper that had somehow appeared there without Ash even noticing. They were slightly crumpled and smeared with blood, and the handwriting on them was horribly familiar.
“Where did you get that?” Ash snapped, recognising Eiji’s letter.
“It exists in the Library, same as all things,” Blanca said. Ash reached out for it, but Blanca got hold of it first.
“Give it back!” Ash hissed, demanding its return.
“No. You chose to shun it, and thus I shall hold onto it,” Blanca said, folding it up, sliding it back into its envelope, and tucking it inside his jacket. “I think you should really consider the other options available. The Library can provide you any number of lives, within reason. You can travel to any point in your lifespan with it, and with a few alterations you can relive your life with new conditions. There are a few exceptions, however. Certain life events are unavoidable. We refer to them as flags. However, while the flag is inevitable, the outcomes may differ.”
“Explain.”
“Strictly speaking, I’m not supposed to, but I’ll make an exception in order to clarify,” Blanca said, leaning back in his chair and switching his legs over to cross the other one instead. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, you decide to live a life where you quit Little League after your brother leaves for Vietnam. You only joined because Griffin liked baseball, after all, and it was something you knew he’d be proud of you for doing. You’ve never really been that keen on sports personally, although watching pole vault seems to make your heart skip a beat or two now.”
“How do you-?”
“I know all, Aslan Jade Callenreese. I am the Librarian. But that’s irrelevant. Imagine you could live that life. The function of the Library is to transport you into that life at a select point, and let you live it to erase regret or trauma. If you enjoy your experience, your memories of your previous existence and of this place will gradually fade. The new life will become yours and you will continue on as if this never happened on your new timeline, happy and content, hopefully, in the best life for you. So, you would go back to being a child, and you would quit the team, and live your life from that point onwards. But a flag is an unavoidable fate, and happiness can be shallow and fickle.”
“So, it’s like a do-over?”
“Essentially.”
“Then yeah – let me quit the League!”
“I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“But you said-“
“Usually, I wouldn’t intervene in your choices, but in this case… A flag for you is your encounter with the Bluebeard of Cape Cod. You cannot escape that. He will be there in every timeline, and several of your books of fate… End abruptly.”
“Are you saying that it doesn’t matter what I do, I was always going to be fucking ass-raped as a child?” Ash hissed, irritated.
“Unfortunately… yes.”
“Son of a bitch!”
“Quitting Little League baseball is a bad choice for you, because it is doomed to end in tragedy.”
“More so than my current fucked up life?”
“His eyes were always upon you. You were a pretty child in a broken household who was often alone. Easy prey. While you were a child, he would be complacent and naïve – children are weak, they tell lies, they can be easily bought off with bribes and pure terror to keep them silent, and they are obedient. But a teenager is harder to manage. You can’t always keep a teenager silent with candy and threats. A teenager, as you well know yourself, is rebellious. Which is why, when they dug up his garden after you murdered him with your father’s gun…”
“His victims were all teenage boys…” Ash murmured, realising something horrific.
“Precisely,” Blanca nodded. “If you quit the League, your run-in with him would be later, when you are a young teen. He will act friendly, maybe ask you to help him with some chores, and you are an amenable child only too willing to please. Once in his house, he will satiate his lust, and then to prevent you from telling anyone…”
“He’d dispose of me, and I’d end up just another skeleton in his yard.”
“Raped and murdered at thirteen, and nobody would know or care. You would become another photo of a missing person on the board in the Barnstable police office.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t quit baseball. And be aware that there is always going to be trauma in your past, no matter what. However, there are other options.”
“If I have to be sexually abused at least once then… Having someone there in my life who cares would make a real difference,” Ash mused out loud to himself, mulling over options. “My Old Man took me to the police, yeah, but… nobody believed me, and then he basically told me to whore myself and shut up. I couldn’t go to anyone else. But what about…?”
“Hmm?”
“You say the Bluebeard was watching me because I was from a broken home, right?” Ash said. “What if he fucked up. What if… Is there a life where Griffin came back from Vietnam? Where he didn’t get drugged?”
“There is,” Blanca nodded.
“If Griff was there, I think things might have gone differently.”
“Is that your choice?”
“Yes.”
Blanca nodded and rose from his seat. He walked to one of the bookshelves, browsed the spines briefly with one of his hands cupping his chin thoughtfully, then pulled a book from the shelf.
“Here is the best option,” he said, holding the book up. “Once I open this, you’ll be transported into that existence. Your memories of this place and your previous life will remain with you for a while, but if you find this fate to be more palatable then they will gradually fade away and you will live and die in the usual fashion with no memories of the past. If you want to come back, however, you only have to will yourself back here with enough force and it will happen. It’s not quite Wizard of Oz, but much like Dorothy saying ‘there’s no place like home’, you just have to feel unsatisfied with the life you’re leading and request to come back and try again. Provided you still have memory of this place, you’ll return. It’s quite a nifty system!”
“It’ll be nice to see Griff again,” Ash murmured, smiling sadly. He stood up and warily took a few steps towards Blanca.
“I hope everything works out for you,” Blanca responded with a nod of his head. “Best of luck, Ash.”
Blanca opened the book and dropped it on the ground at their feet. There came a strong gust of wind and a flash of bright light. Ash screwed his eyes up to prevent himself being blinded, his hair and clothes buffeted by the air currents. He cried out once, sharply, as the sensation of being pitched forwards violently jerked his body, and he sensed himself falling…