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Turning the doorknob to the lab always reminded him of when he was younger- the many types of people who could come through the entranceway or, most of the time, the ones who would stand right at the threshold between two worlds while Donella spoke to them from her side of that perpetual barrier. He hesitated to call this place a home but maybe that’s why he always found himself called back there, the same way all the roads lead to Rome or whatever saying his mentor would mutter under her breath with a shrug- as if her words made perfect sense.
Regardless of what that little building in the Iron Kingdom was, was to him- to her, Hugo knew he could tell you everything about this door. It was a heavy wood that Donella took the time to maintain, the metal hardware- a brandished iron material- scratched from the years and various attacks or threats. When she first brought him back he remembered how distant that doorknob seemed, how he stood on his toes to reach it and told himself that one day it and her would be within reach. The sense of familiarity was comforting, almost like a hazy heavy layer of nostalgia- sickeningly sweet like honey that burned the back of his throat with sugar on the way down.
Things were- tense now, tenser than before, than they ever had been. To his recollection at least, Donella always reminded him that memory was a faulty unreliable narrator. So perhaps it was just the same as before. Before his teens, before she took a pause, before he finally started to feel like his mentor was getting better from a past wound he never knew the details of for he arrived when it was already a peeling irritated scar. But she was getting better, he chose to believe so. She was getting better until she wasn’t. Until this- Library thing started.
And Hugo didn’t know how or why, Varian and Yong also didn’t provide many answers the more he tried to probe about this strange and mysterious alternate dimension. All he knew was this. After he stole that first totem she felt far away again. And he felt small, like a child looking up at her- too powerless to do anything about it. For, after all, knowledge was power. And he didn’t know anything. Not about her.
His hand rested on the metal, it was cold as he turned it and felt the internal mechanisms unlatch. Donella was jumpy so she gave her doorknob a heavy click, alerting her to anyone who would enter.
He stepped inside, past the line carved from the jarring transition between stone brick and wooden floors. Blinking, he wasn’t used to the darkness. It wasn’t late enough anyways- not with his mentor’s feverish yet controlled work schedule that often pushed into the distal hours of the night.
“Don?” Hugo shut the door behind him, his mentor’s sharp voice would have been in his ear by now- probably telling him to do just that lest he let in a draft. But there was nothing.
And then his eyes drifted to the kitchen where, partially hidden by a wall and structural beams, he caught her silhouette. Suddenly he was a kid again, old enough to steal but enough to take, walking in on those bad days. He referred to them as such. When he’d find her with an antique-looking bottle at the dining table, pouring over an old handwritten journal she never gave him the details about. She stopped doing this, getting into this state, as he got older, as they talked more- as the air around her stopped feeling so heavy- so thick with what he didn’t know or understand to be grief.
“Hey uh- Don? You alright?” He tried to keep his voice light as his vision adjusted and he took a look around the lab. He probably grew up in the cleanest location in the Iron Kingdom, borderline sterile. She enjoyed the neatness of it all and he appreciated the structure it gave to his otherwise turbulent and shaky world.
This was not the case tonight. The shelves were messy- not messy by any normal person’s standards but messy for Donella who seemed to entertain herself by organizing her things in alphabetical order. You know, fun stuff. A few were stacked up outside of their rows, others were still flipped open mid-page as if suspended in time.
It left him feeling uneasy, seeing this. That, coupled with the no response, made his stomach churn like he had a stomach ache from eating too much ice cream too quickly that one time. Oh, she scolded him for that before picking him up and putting him on her lap, a hand on his stomach as if her cool touch could heal his pains. And maybe it did. Or that could have just been his sugar-coated crystalline memory but he truly believed that it did. Donella would probably roll her eyes and call it placebo. But he could sense that she liked that notion.
His boots were soft on the floor as he made his way into the kitchen, already mentally prepared for the scene but also somehow shocked at the same time. In the faint light from the outside world, pollution from the streetlamps and maybe even the distant silvery shine of the moon, he saw a damp layer of sweat on her brow. Her knuckles were white, her hand gripping a heavy-bottomed glass filled about a quarter of the way with a dark brown liquid. The bottle it came from sitting to the side, nearly empty.
Usually, when she got like this she was reading. She wasn’t even reading this time. He didn’t know if that was worse. It felt worse.
She stared straight ahead, as if deadly focused, her jaw clenched and locked- but Hugo knew something was wrong- or just not the same. He could tell that the usually sharp and alert spark in her eyes was flickering or even completely extinguished, replaced by a hazy film. This always put him off even when he was young, even when many wouldn’t even be able to notice something was strange about her, for Donella was always so perceptive- and maybe he felt like he didn’t have to understand everything because she could- because she could protect him from the things beyond his cognition until he was older and could do the same for her. Well, here he was- older and just as clueless. And here she was, needing something- someone- that he couldn’t provide.
“Don,” He tried again, his voice softened. And she did this thing where she almost blinked in surprise- like hearing her name with such kindness was foreign to her.
“Is Cyrus around?” He reached over, gently pulling at her elbow which could usually get her to stand and follow him to bed. But she was like a rock this time, carved from stone and trapped in this position of contemplation for the rest of eternity until the elements eroded her features away and returned her to the earth. Maybe then she’d find peace but he highly doubted that.
The idea of her in eternal limbo, imprisonment if you would, sickened him in this strange way for he was still uncertain why and if and how he cared about her. All he knew was that there was something, a voice, a force, that called him here- that made him long for home when he was out in the woods with the other boys, and that ache was only silenced when he stepped foot past the barrier into the lab.
He was more worried than anything though not in the position to admit it. Part of him even considered asking her about the Library in this state, just to get a reaction out of her. Usually, she’d just stalk off when he mentioned it, once he pushed and she got a little cross with him. It felt wrong to take advantage of her right now though, so he simply pulled another chair out and sat down.
It slid across the wood smoothly. Donella glued pieces of fabric to the four leg bases to prevent scratches on the floor, though that didn’t mean there weren’t some- as was expected with time. Maybe it healed all wounds, but only the ones that it created.
They sat in silence for a while until she started to lift her glass, to which he gently reached over and placed a hand on her wrist. She paused, the heavy sound as her drink rested back on the tabletop. And she turned to look at him.
“I just thought-” Her voice was soft, like she wasn’t even speaking to him, like she didn’t even see him for if she did she wouldn't have been talking in this painfully hurting desperate sort of manner that flickered between the line of disappointment and mourning. “I just thought it would be a given.”
He saw something different in her eyes when she drank to this point. Something he had known about his entire life but couldn’t quite name.
She turned away, staring down into the brown liquid like she could drown in it. “She’d understand where I’m coming from.” A small shrug, almost bitter, almost unsurprised.
Her speech was slightly slurred, just a little bit. Like he could make out the woman he knew- was starting to know, always with a silver tongue, always quick to the retort, always present, under the film of substance-driven muttering.
“But maybe I’m taking things for granted,” Donella spoke as if addressing someone- something that had already happened but also never did, stuck in a warped space where time folded up on itself and the future was just as familiar as the past. He wondered if she’d agree that memories were oftentimes sweeter than reality. From the way she was speaking, he wasn’t quite sure.
Hugo looked as if he were about to try and get her attention again, perhaps coax her to bed. But she interjected. “It’s me who didn’t trust her.”
Her. She said that pronoun as if it was a name. As if the Her in question was specific and real and maybe just a character of her recollections. For some reason, though it made logical sense, he never imagined that Donella ever really- existed with anyone else. She was always so strong by herself, always alone, the mountain who would not bow to the howling winds.
Once when he was younger, sitting at this exact table through a different chair, she remarked that her parents were rarely around during her childhood. And that mental image made him ache- somehow made him wish that he had been there to befriend her on the playground or walk her home or provide her some of the comforts he also couldn’t conceptualize. He guessed it just never really occurred to him that she could have known it, had it, and lost it. Maybe that was him projecting onto her. How funny was that? A kid who never knew what it meant to be with something and a woman grappling with how to be without it.
“And I just,” For the first time her voice wavered and she seemed like she was begging some unknown entity. “I just didn’t want things to change.”
Her fingers, which had previously been gripping her drink, reached up and started to scratch at the jagged damaged skin of her right cheek. She dragged her nail over the area, at first just itching at them until the movements became a little more- deliberate. And it was almost as if she was doing it absentmindedly, like muscle memory, like it was practiced.
He reached his hand over before she tutted her tongue at herself and sat up a little straighter, her eyes narrowing. Even in the darkness, he knew the skin was raw and irritated. “Embarrassing.”
She snapped, scolded herself, and lifted her glass, tilting her head back and downing the last of her drink. The liquid burned on the way down, sharp and maybe serrated against the walls of her throat. And for a second it warmed her up inside, and for a second it was comforting before the ache returned.
Donella reached for the bottle, distant foggy remnants that she tried to drown or pick away pulling at the edges of her memory. A giggle, a smile, a scream, a death.
Hugo took the bottle before she could, getting up to put it back on the shelf she got it from. She didn’t even protest, didn’t even wrinkle her nose at him in annoyance. He sat down. She looked at him like a soldier returning from war.
“Some friend I am, huh?”
Those five syllables glued him to his chair. Donella never dumped her stuff on him, her words. He knew she was hurting and she told him bits and pieces of her past but this was something more- not filtered through years of hindsight and rationalization. This was raw. And it frightened him.
He swallowed thickly.
She wasn’t crying, it would have been preferable to cry. Because crying meant feeling- and she felt nothing except the slow burn in her throat and the already dull sting of her cheek.
Hugo stood, he tugged on her arm again and, to his relief, she followed him- down the hallway and to her room. He got her to lie down, took out her hair ties, and placed the elastics carefully on the bedside table. Once she had fallen asleep, which didn’t take long, he shut the door and walked out of her room.
Lingering in the lab, he glanced around before quietly washing out her glass and turning it over on the counter to drain and dry for the next morning. And then he stood in the doorway, on the barrier between the cool night draft and the lab air- dense with memories he couldn’t even decipher. And he debated whether he should go, for it felt wrong to leave her- but these days she seemed to hate when he stayed. Maybe she just didn’t understand why he did. And maybe that frightened her more than she knew.