Work Text:
There is a quiet that comes before the city stirs. Not the quiet of true darkness and its calling, but the pause before motion - an idling, like a held breath. Without the treachery of the sun, morning remains what it has always truly been, a construct, marked only by activity and by labor. By the changing of shifts. By the distant rumble of machinery beginning again.
It is to that rhythm that January rises, as she once did long ago with the sun. The city moves, and so she does. Hands washed. Water poured, first over one, then the other. The kettle set to boil. A few steady minutes secured, before the day makes its demands.
When she steps outside, mask in hand, the city is only just beginning to stir.
There is work to do. There is always work.
Steam rises from the chimneys of nearby houses, evidence of fires stoked to bat away the cold. A distant rumble can be felt beneath her feet, be it the thunder of railway pistons and the hiss of pressure valves, or the subtle shake of the ground from the tremors beneath. The whole of the city pulses in rhythmic order, in and out, the will of a steady breath.
January had not been certain of the city’s making, for all she had advised in one way or another. But as new buildings rise and scaffolding is set in place, she finds a measure of pride in its organization. It is a form of stability. And stability is a thing one learns to crave, when planning always for what comes next.
She watches where light might try to break through the city’s solidifying dark - watching for fault lines. Growth, she knows, hides danger. It would not do for the city to grow faster than its supports could uphold.
She keeps a considering eye on the city as she walks; Some scaffolding remains where proper supports should stand. some districts are held together by improvised efforts rather than any careful accounting of the future. A city is a structure, yes, but more than that, it is a process. It must withstand misuse. It is always the least prepared who suffer first when the strain comes.
Builders work away at the new construcstions, while those who organize ponder over plans, while others come new to gawk at the city in its cradle. Organization is not the enemy, but every location brings its risks when organizations and hierarchys grow out from within.
A city needs a leader, an organizer, and though she does not aim for defference- someone must hold the shape long enough for it to set . Someday her place here will be uneccesary, her plans far outgrowing is confines. The Great Work, afterall, requires scaffolding too.
It is with a sudden reverbation of a train whistle that shakes January from her thoughts- evidently the morning arrival has set to leave again. She has yet to determine whether the connection of track helps or hinders, but it is here, nontheless.
There is always a stagger to new arrivals. Workers from London, seeking opportunity or merely distance, step forward with hopefulness or trepidation. Others linger at the threshold, uncertain where to place their feet. In time, their places will be found, the city good at absorbing what is given to it.
The group that turns the corner is neither of those sorts.
They move in loose knots, speaking back and forth, pausing where the street opens. They crane their necks to take in the buildings, - gesturing, speculating, occasionally scribbling a note. None of them carry tools.
January recognizes the young, those who have not yet learned the balance between curiosity and caution.
She watches them a moment longer than she ought. She has seen this posture before, over many, many years, the way they look at a place as if it alone is meant to instruct them. As if understanding will be offered, if only the right questions are asked.
It is not their clothes, precisely, though those do little to recommend them to the city. It is the assumption, unspoken but unmistakable, that notebooks and pens will suffice.
Students, then.
Youthful. Untested.
Youth. A funny notion. People spoke of it as if it were liberation, as though a childhood unscarred were anything but a luxury granted to the protected. But youth was never the freedom people pretended it was. January knew it simply meant operating with incomplete information, and fewer tools.
She had been young, once. That was indictment enough.
Though in that youth she had known how to survive inside structures not built for her, even she had once mistaken access for leverage, knowledge for power. When one grows accustomed to toleration, access can feel indistinguishable from progress.
She had acted under the belief that understanding could compel change- that if injustice were exposed with sufficient clarity, it would be corrected. Knowledge still mattered; it always would. But she had learned that information alone does not shake foundations.
January had been little more than a girl when her family came to London. Before the Fall, and long before she understood the greater structures at play. She was old enough to remember the place they had fled. For all that it had rejected her and her family, there was still grief in leaving it behind. Survival had required flight. Safety, she learned early, was conditional and revocable, and it was often one’s neighbours who decided when it had expired.
London was less dangerous. Which was not the same as safe. Threats and restrictions were everywhere still, the Church’s authority ambient and unquestioned. There was a difference between being permitted to exist in a place, and being allowed to belong.
Naive she was, in the fullness of that distinction, when she too found her way to the university’s doors. Even before the Fall, University College - Benthic, as it would later be renamed - purported an openness that had always been carefully rationed. Its secularity was no small thing, even then, and for men of her faith it had offered a rare foothold.
Even now, Benthic likes to call itself radical. To be congratulated on its breadth of vision, on the narrow doors it has already opened. It never did care to be reminded of the many that remained closed.
When the city fell, rules fell with it. In the confusion, doors opened all at once. January mistook motion for progress - or rather, she mistook that progress for something more durable than it was. When one takes a step forward, one may forget to notice who is being left behind.
But in that chaos, the shifting tides, the ruthless pressure, the unknowns hounding at every corner, she had found her place. Among the books, the studies, the political learnings that fell into her hands.
The institution had been forced to make room among the stones cracked in the falling of the land, and she had found a slot within them. It was there she stayed.
A degree turned into a masters, turned into teaching others instead of being taught. Lectures and debates, corrected, argued. She learned which arguments were welcomed, and which were merely tolerated - and which were noted, and quietly set aside.
There was work to be done, and she did it. That, at least, the institution understood.
Titles accumulated gradually. Responsibilities first, authority later. Committees became councils; councils became offices. She was consulted, then relied upon, then deferred to. She was entrusted with outcomes, though never with direction.
She grew older then, too. In a wiser eye, shifting patterns became clearer. The reality of the world around became a shrouded knoweledge. She learned there was more to the cold then one could first assune.
She met very, very interesting people. Some who's ideals she agreed with. Some less so. Many inbetween. People who spoke fluently about progress. People who believed in change - so long as it arrived slowly, and harmed no one who mattered.
Her aims became more precise.
When she taught, it was with a sharper edge than before, a more deliberate use of the position she had been granted. She believed, then, that position might accomplish what access alone could not. That from within the structure, she could widen its vision, sharpen its conscience. That knowledge, properly distributed, could still compel change.
For a time, this was partially true. She could reach her students , some of them, in ways she had not before. Those who cared to listen sought her out. She spoke where she was permitted to speak, and wrote where her words would circulate. All the while, she worked.
So to did she collect. Evidence. Records. Accounts and items that did not belong in lecture halls, but would one day require their own space. In time, these would one day make way to the Museum of Injustice. Loss, exploitation, erasure - all that had been would be remembered.
The limits of the university did not announce themselves all at once.
Institutions rarely do. Proposals went unanswered. Courses were deferred. Funding narrowed. Meetings were held and adjourned without her presence. Authority receded, quietly, while responsibility remained.
For all its claims of tolerance, an institution remains an institution. And its masters , visible or otherwise, decide which truths may circulate, and which must be stalled until they wither.
It was of no real surprise when the day came she would leave the universities doors but it was with no small bitterness within her. The ivory tower of academia would reign over any progress, seperate from the reality of the world, secluded away in its privlige.
Let them expel the truth of it. Let academia continue its trials in privlige and might. She worked elsewhere to the prevalence of the truth now.
She was Not someone else. She had learned. And she will continue to teach.
The sound of footsteps fading pulled January back into the present, a laugh echoing off stone as the group she had been watching continued on their way.
Perhaps this group will learn from this new, radical city, in all of its limits. As ever, some would learn. Some would not.
The city will teach them either way.
It was a structure - inefficient, yes, compared to the Great Work to come. But structures could educate. And here, there was more freedom to teach than there had ever been before.
She adjusted the mask in her hand, settling it into place with practiced ease.
The city stirred around her. January stepped back into the shadows, and went where she was needed.