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It’s every Guardian’s worst nightmare to watch their Librarian be hurt.
The first time it happened to Nicole, she’d been furious with herself. It hadn’t been her fault, really—it was during her first year on the job, when Edward was fresh and clever and thought he was invincible. She had warned him about the trap he was about to walk into, and he had done it anyway, winding up with a nasty gash across his bicep before she knocked him out of the way. There was nothing she could have done to stop him short of physically restraining him, but she still felt the bloom of guilt.
“I guess I really need to listen to you from now on,” he laughed, letting her bandage his arm with only a modicum of wincing.
Nicole huffed. “You certainly do.”
They hadn’t started a relationship for another few months. It hadn’t been long enough. Nicole had really believed they would break the trend. Edward would survive. He’d survive the job along with her, get to retire. Neither of them were the marrying type, something they both knew without having to say it aloud. But they had loved each other, and that seemed like enough.
Naturally, that only lasted until he let her think he was decapitated in front of her.
(Edward failed her; Edward failed the Library. At the time those were the same thing, but not anymore.)
She hadn’t wanted to care about Flynn after that. Caring about Edward had gotten her nothing but a dead Librarian. This one was sure to be just as expendable as all the others. If Edward hadn’t made it—Edward, who was stronger and more capable in every way—then neither would Flynn, and she would be left with a dead body and another portrait to hang.
Except Flynn didn’t die. Somehow.
And Edward hadn’t died. Somehow.
It was never going to be permanent, between her and Flynn. It isn’t the dark cast of hindsight and her knowledge of his betrayal. It’s a simple fact. Nicole didn’t really… She never really liked him, not enough to be in a long-term emotional relationship. She grew to respect him, yes. She knew he could be a good Librarian one day. But she doesn’t think she ever liked him. She had liked Edward quite a bit, so it wasn’t about him being a Librarian, it was about him being Flynn. For once, she’s not saying that to be cruel. It’s just the honest truth.
That didn’t mean they weren’t still Guardian and Librarian. They were a team. They operated together, romantic compatibility be damned. There were plenty of their predecessors who worked just fine that way. They would be no exception.
Of course, Nicole had still thought Flynn loved her. Their relationship had ended when he had a panic attack so intense he threw up after she doubled back to his apartment to surprise him and found him staring at himself in the mirror wearing a bra she hadn’t realized she’d forgotten. But she still saw how he looked at her. He loved her.
Obviously, she was wrong about that.
Five hundred years is a long time for hate to fester, and a long time to plan.
It was… To this day, Nicole isn’t sure that it was a surprise that Flynn’s not Flynn anymore when the despicable coward who has been left as Caretaker finally shows his hand by bringing his new Librarians to her cell.
She’s spent centuries picking over every minute detail of his time with her. Deciphering to the best of her ability whether it was shame or fear or weakness that led to him sabotaging and then abandoning her. In that time, she came to some realizations about him. About what she’d first judged him as.
It doesn’t matter. Whether she’s Alexandria or Flynn, Nicole has been planning to destroy her and her precious Library for longer than anyone except Galahad suspects. A change like this won’t get her to back off, even if it does explain some things she’s wondered about for quite some time.
None of it matters. Nicole sees her face and thinks longingly of breaking it until she finally has the chance to do so.
Her original prison of choice for Alexandria was her former cell, but that ran the risk of her potentially being discovered. No one went down into that level of the Library, which Nicole knew from bitter experience, but there was always a chance that Galahad would come to fantasize about her being removed back to the place that had been home for the past century, and he would notice if Alexandria was there yelling for help. It wasn’t worth the risk.
Instead, Nicole smothers her with magic.
Alexandria begs, of course. Begs and bargains. Initially, she insists that the others will come for her, that her new Guardian will realize what’s happened and come to save her. Nicole knows that to be patently untrue. Baird is a good Guardian. But she has three spare Librarians now, and despite an emotional attachment to Alexandria in particular… Nicole has been in the mindset of a Guardian. She knows that Eve will know when to cut her losses. She’ll think Alexandria left of her own free will, and she’ll pour her remaining time and energy into the ones that remain until Nicole is able to split them off from her, too.
Nicole has observed a lot of Guardians and Librarians over the years. Crossed paths with some, avoided others like the plague—literally, although she missed the worst of that by several hundred years. Ones that loved each other, ones that didn’t. Once, a pair of siblings, a Guardian for a younger sister and a Librarian for an older one. None of them have ever been able to change their fates, and none of them ever listened to reason when she tried to explain why the Library needed to be destroyed for everyone’s sake.
“She’s never going to find you, because she isn’t even going to look,” Nicole says, patient and condescending.
“She will,” Alexandria insists. She presses her palms to the membrane that separates the real world—Nicole’s world, soon—from the place she’s contained in. “You don’t know Eve like I do.”
She says it with fierce, furious pride. Did she ever have that kind of pride in Nicole? She doesn’t envy Eve’s place as the Library’s pawn or as the latest person Alexandria looks at as though she hung the stars. But she still knows she’ll enjoy proving that loyalty wrong.
After the first week, Alexandria’s protests that Eve will find her start to slow. After two weeks, she only says it to herself. After three weeks, she stops saying it at all.
Four weeks in, she tries a new tactic. “Nicole,” she says, cajoling, sitting on the floor. She’s worn holes in her sleeves and her pants from worrying the fabric through her fingers at a frantic pace. “If you ever—if we were ever anything to each other, if you were ever my Guardian, if you ever loved me—”
Nicole is on her in two seconds, fingers around her throat. Alexandria scrabbles weakly, but she has barely any strength left. The spell makes it so she doesn’t technically require food or water, so she hasn’t eaten since Nicole last took pity on her.
“Never tell me how to be a Guardian,” she snaps, face inches from Alexandria’s. Nicole feels her body go lax underneath her, although it’s difficult to say whether it’s out of genuine fear or as a tactic to make Nicole think she’s lowering her guard. “Don’t tell me how to love, but never tell me how to be a Guardian. Do you understand me, Flynn?”
She watches her eyes go wide. Her face can’t pale, not when Nicole is choking her like this. She stays like that for another heartbeat, just long enough to see the panic truly set in. The fear that Nicole isn’t going to let go, and she’s going to die down here in this hole where none of the people who so stupidly follow her Library’s doctrines will ever see her again. Nicole could snap her neck if she wanted, and Alexandria knows it.
Nicole has killed a lot of things over the centuries she’s now been alive. Livestock. Game. People. With swords, with guns, with knives, with snares, with her hands. She knows every way to take someone’s body apart, and not just because most of them have been done to her when she didn’t fake her death soon enough and someone caught on to the fact that she never aged or caught her with a magical artifact and decided to make her pay for it. She could do that to Alexandria now. With her thumb, she can feel her pulse. She digs her nail into the side of her neck just to hear her squeak as she imagines how Nicole could gouge out her trachea.
It’s every Guardian’s worst nightmare to watch their Librarian be hurt. Nicole almost wishes she was wrong, and that Alexandria’s colonel was looking, because then she could be here to see this.
Nicole’s world isn’t quite perfect. If it was perfect, her pristine little prisons wouldn’t need to exist, and everything could operate smoothly under her thumb. But it’s as close to it as it can get, with one major exception.
“I’m sorry,” the orderly says, exasperated. That’s one of the few emotions Nicole allows people to display here. “He kept dislocating his thumbs so we added the extra restraints and he still got out.”
Flynn squirms on the floor under the knee pressed into his back. He cranes his neck and tries to look up at her, body wrenching as he struggles. “Nicole?”
“That’s right.” She kneels down on the floor next to him, smiling. “You know who I am. You know I’m in charge.”
“Judson is in charge,” he insists, eyes so wide she can see a perfect ring of sclera around them. Everything here is muted and grey, but the whites of people’s eyes stand out so strongly it makes Nicole feel like she’s back in the forests of Russia.
“He keeps saying that.” The orderly rolls his own eyes. “Won’t elaborate.”
Nicole bends down so she can cup his face. Sometimes he bites people, but he’s never bitten her. He relaxes under her touch, neck softening until his head rests on the floor. “It’s alright, 642. You just need another reset, don’t you?”
“No,” he insists. “I need—I need—” He can’t make his mouth form the words. “I need—no, no, no, I had it, I had it—”
“Those are the bad thoughts, 642,” Nicole reminds him. “You need to forget those. You need to let go. That’s why you’re here. You remember that they’re the ones who sent you here, don’t you?”
“No,” Flynn repeats, but he doesn’t struggle any more as they drag him to the other room. She follows, arms crossed, secure in the knowledge that she can overpower the urge she has to stop them. Something sharp jabs her from the inside of her stomach as she watches them strap him in. “Nicole? Nicole?”
“This is for your own good,” she says. “Bite down.”
She believes him the first few times, of course. When he struggles in the restraints and looks at her with fear—“I’ll be good.” She can’t stop herself; five hundred years, and she hasn’t crushed the last of her sentimentality. Embarrassing, really.
She stops believing him when he uses her lenience to nearly escape, holing up in the room they keep all the medication in and threatening to abscond into the vents with a scalpel and fight his way out. That’s the first time a lobotomy is suggested and subsequently denied.
(A lobotomy will take away the one thing Nicole really did love about him. The thing she can’t wave away as simply being an effect of adrenaline and forced proximity and residual love for Edward. She doesn’t quite want to see it gone yet. Someday. Someday soon. But not yet.)
She’s the only one who has any success at controlling him, really. The orderlies and doctors can do it by force, but all Nicole needs is a few words.
It’s a—
Weakness. It’s a moment of weakness.
She holds him only after he initiates by crawling into her lap. They tried a lower voltage this time, in combination with an oral medication Nicole was assured represented the only new advancement in decades. She allows it. Curiosity is to be punished, except when it allows her a better grip on her… subjects may be the right word for it. Property is another.
“Guardian,” he whispers, which is how she knows this reset was unsuccessful. There are paper cuts on his hands. He made himself a tiny paper flower, and she plucks it from his pocket with a sigh. He makes a sad noise as she crumples it in her fist. “Guardian…”
“She isn’t coming for you,” Nicole says, although she knows Eve is certainly going to try. It’s been a long time since she’s seen Eve, but it’s getting closer to the day when their realities will merge again. She’ll end up here with Flynn, obviously, although they won’t be allowed to see each other. A lobotomy may be worth pursuing right away with Eve; scrape all that nasty aggression and all those bad thoughts out, changing her from a tin soldier with a brain to one that’s perfectly hollow.
“Who?” Flynn blinks at her.
Without thinking, Nicole shakes her head. “No one.”
He touches her name tag. There are no visitors to the facility, she’s made sure of that, but she requires staff to be labeled. She’s the only one that doesn’t simply say “doctor” or “nurse.” He tries smiling at her. “No one. Trust no one.”
She shoves him away from her, backhands him across the face, and discards her name tag. She doesn’t wear it again. She never needed it in the first place. They know who she is.
“Don’t make this difficult, 642,” Nicole says harshly, and snaps her fingers so they’ll do up the straps faster. He got out again, made it into the general population area because someone forgot that he can pick locks as long as his hands aren’t shaking too hard. “Stop struggling.”
“I know it’s there,” he says, trying to duck away. “I know it’s there. I know it is. I have all the pieces of the words, they’re just shuffled around. I know it’s there. Don’t you feel it, like it’s hammering on the inside of your head—all those things opening, what are they called? I feel it, I feel it—”
“Alexandria,” Nicole says, and Flynn’s head snaps up as he goes completely still.
That was a last resort. This is… Nicole’s world as a whole is not the kind of place where… Flynn—Alexandria—642—he shouldn’t—she shouldn’t know that name. She shouldn’t respond to it. She shouldn’t recognize it. None of this is…
“My friends call me Alex,” Alexandria says, voice so thick with hope Nicole’s teeth feel like they’re locked. “My Guardian—”
“Bite down,” Nicole demands over the pain in her chest, and Alexandria does.
It’s every Guardian’s worst nightmare to watch their Librarian be hurt. Alexandria and Eve deserve this. Nicole deserves this—this. What is this? Revenge. Justice. Satisfaction.
(Where’s the satisfaction in watching this?)
It makes her lungs feel constricted. She’s sure it must be with pleasure.
The resets become more frequent. Alexandria is remembering more every time. They keep taking away pens and pencils that she steals from the orderlies and she just keeps finding more. She’s been stealing paper plates, too. Nicole has them destroy everything they can find, all the possible ways she could be reminding herself of a place that does not exist and people who equally shouldn’t, but she knows she has to prepare for Eve’s eventual arrival. This world wasn’t built with any Guardian in mind except Nicole herself. It won’t imprison her automatically the way it did for her friends—those other Librarians Nicole was able to neatly trisect.
(They’ve never once looked for Alexandria, but Nicole didn’t expect them to. The only one with a duty to find her is a Guardian. And if they were ever really friends with her, which Nicole strongly doubts, this world doesn’t have room for that kind of thing anyway.)
A Guardian’s job is to protect the Librarian. Eve will look for all four of hers. It’s what…
It’s what Nicole would do. Would have done, for Flynn. For Alexandria. If their roles had been reversed. That’s always been the problem, hasn’t it? He’d loved her, and he hadn’t come back for her. She didn’t love him, and she would have stopped at absolutely nothing to recover him from back in time. She would have done it. She was a good Guardian. She—
“I’ll be good,” Alexandria promises, words slurred. She had a seizure today. The latest of many. Her head lolls as she tries to focus on Nicole.
“No, you won’t,” Nicole says, frustrated. “You’ll do the same thing you always do.” She takes a deep breath. Two of the doctors are exchanging looks behind her back, she knows they are. Questioning her authority. Whether she’s fit for leadership or not. She can’t allow that. “But it will work. You just need a few more, don’t you? You need me to make everything go away.”
“Please don’t,” Alexandria says. It’s not the first time she’s begged. It won’t be the last, unless this is the final shock where it takes. Nicole feels absolutely nothing at all. “I don’t want to—I don’t want to, it’s almost back, I can feel it, I can feel it—please don’t take it away again, please don’t—”
“That’s exactly why we have to do this,” Nicole tells her. She cups her face again, brushing her thumb along her jaw. They don’t allow her to shave unsupervised anymore, of course, not since the last incident with the razor where she threatened to cut her throat if she wasn’t allowed to leave. That had nearly gotten her fixed permanently, but Nicole had decided against it at the last minute. “You know you need this, 642.”
She swallows. “Nicole. Please. Don’t take it away again.”
Nicole sighs. The constriction in her lungs has long since faded. Now she only has a dull ache somewhere in her side, down below her heart. “Bite down.”
Alexandria almost makes it out this time. Lapse in security, Nicole is assured. It won’t happen again.
That’s the first time they find her drawings. They’re subsequently shredded, of course. All but one.
“Who is this?” She demands, holding it up to Alexandria’s face. She already knows the answer, but she wants to hear it from her. She needs to know how much she remembers.
“I don’t know,” Alexandria says after looking at it for a moment. She wrings her hands, picking at her ID bracelet. “Did I draw that?”
She’s telling the truth. She doesn’t remember. Nicole is sure Alexandria has become a more convincing liar since she destroyed Nicole’s life, but this version of her hasn’t. She’s genuinely confused.
“Of course you didn’t draw it,” Nicole says, and puts the drawing of herself in front of a temple in the Amazon in her pocket. She’ll personally shred it, or perhaps burn it, later. Yes, burning it sounds good. This is the only show of artistic expression in her world. It can’t be allowed to stay. “Take your medication, 642.”
“No,” Alexandria says weakly, trying to pull her head away, but there is no world where she’s strong enough to free herself from the iron grip around her arms.
Some days she feels like she can’t breathe. Her office makes her feel like she’s back in that cell, stone older than the concept of written language pressing in on all sides. She had wanted Alexandria to feel that. Where she’d kept her had been too soft. Maybe that’s why she still clung to the memories of her life before Nicole fixed things. If she had just been harsher, or worse to her, she would gladly allow Nicole to make her forget.
It would be mercy. It still is mercy. It still is better than what they all deserve. She didn’t even kill them. Of course, she will if they ever seem like they’re remembering, but she doubts it. She even edited a brain tumor out of existence so one of them wouldn’t be dead by this time in their life. The Library couldn’t even do that.
The resets continue. Nicole knows Alexandria is starting to… fray. It won’t be long until the last threads snap. That will fix it. It will. It has to.
Nicole goes through the motions with her damn near every time.
“Bite down.” Grit her teeth, lift her chin. Watch.
“Breathe deep.” Inhale through her nose. Watch.
“Let us do what we have to do.” Stand back and allow them to fit the wires onto Alexandria’s head. Watch.
“Don’t you want to get better?” Tell her that this will help, even though none of the other resets have. Watch.
“Don’t you want us to take away all those frightening thoughts?” Sometimes when they have to put Alexandria in heavy restraints all she can think of is the chains she used to wear in that cell before she broke her wrist enough times to free its mangled remnants from the cuff, and then done it again to her other arm. Watch.
It will work. It has to work. She has to fix her. She has to make her see how much better this world is without the Library, not that Nicole even gets to see much of it despite ostensibly being in charge. She has to make her see.
She can’t even explain why. It doesn’t matter anymore. She won. She did. All that will be clear when Eve finally arrives and Nicole can gouge out everything that makes her a Guardian, too. She’s counting down the days. She knows when the world changed. She knows when Eve will catch up.
But until then, she’ll be here keeping an eye on things. Making sure Alexandria doesn’t escape.
A Guardian’s worst nightmare is watching their Librarian get hurt. Nicole watches, over and over, and tells herself she’s punishing Eve.