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There’s a question burning in Alexandria’s mind. These days, she normally goes to Eve about that, even if there’s not much of a chance of her knowing the answer—just listening to her talk her through it is helpful enough. And she’s not above admitting that sometimes she asks just to hear herself talk, although she’d like to think it has more to do with the tried-and-true scientific method of being her own rubber duck than vanity.
This time she wants to—needs to ask someone else.
“Did Judson know?” As soon as she asks it, Alexandria knows the question is ridiculous and adolescent, pure wishful thinking. Very little, if anything at all, happened in the Library without Judson’s knowledge. A woman being stored in a secret dungeon for one hundred years was no small thing. Alexandria scrubs a hand down her face, suddenly impossibly tired. “What am I saying? Of course he knew. Charlene, too.”
Jenkins doesn’t need to confirm it, but he does anyway. “Yes, ma’am.”
Alexandria’s voice shakes, but she still has to say it out loud. “And they let me believe I killed her.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Alexandria slowly backs up until she hits the wall, then lets herself sink bonelessly to the floor. She’s barely aware of the world around her, everything fuzzing in and out of focus, but she can vaguely hear Jenkins asking if she wants him to find Eve for her and has enough strength left to shake her head helplessly.
It would be fair to say that she had not taken Nicole’s death well.
Part of being a Librarian, maybe even the most important part, was becoming acquainted with death. Not the Reaper (Alexandria had never met the real deal and had no desire to rectify that fact by getting on the wrong side of his knife hands) but accepting the possibility that any day could be your last. Some people got it from the jump, and some people never did, not even when the axe or the aforementioned knife hands came down on their heads.
Always ahead of the curve, Alex had come to terms with the high probability of her own demise on her first day on the job, somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand feet over the floor of the Amazon rainforest without a parachute. Come to terms with taking lives, too, though that realization had come with a wave of overwhelming nausea about two hours after pushing Edward Wilde into the path of a collapsing pyramid.
But knowing that she could die at any second in this new world full of mystery and magic hadn’t translated to thinking that Nicole could die, too. Losing her had been like watching someone shoot a star out of the sky. It was scientifically impossible.
Prior to that moment, Nicole had been indestructible in Alexandria’s mind. Sure, Wilde had threatened to kill her in the jungle, white-throated toucans shrieking above their heads in a language Alexandria had only just unraveled, and that had been a prescient enough danger that she felt like she should get between Nicole and the gun with newfound bravery. Sure, Nicole had gotten kidnapped by the Serpent Brotherhood for nefarious purposes. Sure, they had nearly gotten blown up with Shangri-La. But! Importantly! Nicole survived a whole other Librarian before Alexandria came along. He only died because he faked his death—
Oh. Oh god. Wilde faked his death.
“Dr. Carsen,” Jenkins says. He sounds concerned, likely due to the fact that she just started dry heaving. Alexandria can’t even wave him away. Because. Because.
Wilde faked his death. Nicole thought he was dead. That he died right in front of her. Nicole told her how it happened. The Serpent Brotherhood cut his head off (Alexandria can’t help that her first startled thought upon learning that the previous Librarian was actually alive was “that must have been such a difficult cause of death to fake!”). She left the body there because what else could she do? She blamed herself for not seeing his turn, and taking him and his cronies down during Alexandria’s first week on the job wasn’t much of a comfort.
Nicole died. Nicole died, but she was alive just like Wilde was, and Alex didn’t look, as if she was some kind of cosmic punishment for Nicole making an honest mistake, and she feels so dizzy and all she can think about is all the dirt under Nicole’s fingernails from a century underground with only enchanted torchlight to illuminate her and the look on Charlene and Judson’s faces when they found out what happened to Nicole and yes she’s aware this is the most violent panic attack she’s had since killing herself to stop Apep didn’t pan out, thank you very much.
She always thinks fast. Usually that’s helpful. Right now it feels like she’s just strapped to the front of a bullet train.
“Dr. Carsen. Alexandria,” Jenkins says firmly. She looks up at him, aware her eyes must look utterly crazed, and finds an expression of acute distress on his face. “Listen to me. Ms. Noone—”
Alexandria gets angry all the time. Maybe more than the average person, but in her opinion it’s an appropriate amount for a Librarian. Anyone who ends up in the frankly ludicrous situations they find themself facing on a daily basis would feel the same. She gets angry when people try to kill her and her friends, or when a maniac with a magic weapon of mass destruction tries to destroy the world, or when the love of her life kisses a smarmy British super-criminal. Perfectly reasonable.
What she’s feeling now isn’t anger—it must have started out that way, but now it’s moved far past that, honed to a very fine edge where it sits in her chest like a knife and makes her cold all the way down to her fingertips.
Rage doesn’t make her any more capable of being articulate, nor does the icy shock bring her thundering heartrate down to a lower tempo. “They—I—they knew.”
“So did I,” Jenkins says. He doesn’t get it. She’s not letting him off the hook, she’s just tackling bigger fish.
She likes Jenkins. Liked, past tense, maybe. But she’s only known him for four years. They’re friends, and he’s admittedly a closer one than the other Librarians are. He’s still a man of secrets. She expects that from him the way the others expect it from her. If someone had lined him, Charlene, and Judson up—hell, throw Eve, Stone, Jones, and Cassie in there too—and told her to point to the one who would be hiding a secret about Nicole? She would have pointed at Jenkins with no further questions asked.
It isn’t that Alexandria thought she knew everything about Judson and Charlene. They had both been alive for thousands of years before she met them. Ten years was the longest any Librarian had survived save for Judson himself, and it was still only a blip in their lifespans. But they knew about Nicole. They knew that watching her die and knowing that she had been responsible had almost made Alexandria walk away for good, only staying due to the selfish love she had for being the Librarian outweighing her own guilt. Which it only did because she was and is a terrible person who ruins the lives of the people around her.
They saw her spiraling and they did nothing. They didn’t say Nicole was alive. They didn’t say Alex had a chance to go back and save her with one of the time machines in storage. They didn’t tell her that she had a way to stop Nicole from turning against the Library at her fingertips for ten years. She can only think in repetitive patterns now, flashing the same synapses in her brain over and over again.
“My father,” she says hollowly, pressing her thumbs into her eyelids. There are still floaters from the column of light and lightning that Nicole nearly disappeared inside of dancing across her eyelids. She’ll take those over looking at Jenkins. “He died when I was young. I never knew him. Barely remember him. But there was a friend of the family who stepped up. He wasn’t my dad, but he was… there for me, mostly.”
Jerry had always wanted to toughen her up. He said it was what her dad would have wanted. That she was only making herself an easier target for kids at school by being so herself. (“You’re being a little too Flynn,” Jerry said once when she was telling him about Noah’s Ark: Found At Last! while he was over for dinner. He’d smiled at her after he said it, and she had pretended that dulled the sting.) If she was more like him, she wouldn’t have to deal with that. Less fey. Less autistic. Less Flynn.
She’s sure as hell less Flynn now, just not in the way he would have ever wanted her to be.
“Yes?” Jenkins says when the silence stretches on too long.
Alexandria knows the smell of the Library. It’s her favorite smell in the world. Old books and paper fresh off the printer and the faintest hint of ozone. She can’t help but wrinkle her nose now as her senses tell her there’s the scent of cooked meat wafting down the hallway, tangled together with the sound of a man screaming as he plunges to his death chasing a treasure he was willing to kill her over. She knows she never really processed it. She had only just made the decision that she wouldn’t help Jerry if he was on fire when he decided to literally go up in flames in a bunch of lava.
“He killed my dad,” she says. “Shot him. Everything he ever said to me was a lie.”
(“You know, in the hospital after you were born, your dad made me swear that I would take care of you if anything ever happened to him,” the Jerry in Alexandria’s mind says, choking up. She tries to beat that memory back with a stick. Everything about Jerry is something she tries to cram into a little box so she doesn’t have to spend time fighting with herself for grieving someone who killed her dad and tried to kill her, too.
“I never had a daughter,” Judson says, just after telling her that he was only moving on because she was ready for him to leave her. Alexandria imagines smashing his mirror into pieces and then, idly, as second nature, pictures cutting her own throat with one of the shards. The Judson in her memory smiles kindly and makes no implications of how ten years ago he watched her grieve someone he knew the whole time wasn’t dead. Someone he had information Alexandria could have used to save. “Now we’re both liars.”)
“Everything he ever said was. A. Lie,” she repeats.
“Ms. Noone is dangerous,” Jenkins insists. “An enemy of the Library. They did what they thought was right. If you had been in their situation, you would have done the same.”
“No,” Alexandria says. She’s not aware her body is going through the motions of standing until she’s on her feet, finger jabbing at Jenkins’ chest with every syllable. “No, I wouldn’t have. The others wouldn’t, either. We would have tried to help her. And if we couldn’t—if we couldn’t go back for her, we would have made sure the Library never sent her a Guardian letter so none of this ever happened.”
“If you believed it was the wrong choice, you would have already taken one of the time machines,” Jenkins says. There’s an awful note of pity in his voice. It’s awful because it’s not pity directed at Nicole, the person who actually deserves it. It’s pity for her.
Alexandria makes a hoarse noise that sounds a bit like tearing metal, poking turning into an attempt at a punch on the next hit. It never connects, of course. Jenkins catches her wrist easily.
Despite the impression standing next to Eve gives other people of her, Alexandria isn’t actually all that weak, physically speaking. Most of her muscle is in her shoulders from constant swordfighting practice with Cal at least once a day for over a decade, with some in her legs from all the running for her life she does. Yes, she’s… a bit more out of shape now, considering the pounds she lost between Charlene’s second disappearance and Apep’s defeat, but she’s slowly gaining that back.
All that to say, while Jenkins is no slouch, she could break his grip. Instead, her muscles make the executive decision that it’s time to collapse again, and her face smacks into Jenkins’ chest as he physically holds her up. Her other arm flops weakly by her side. She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe and she’s so angry she wants to break every mirror in the world. She wants Eve. It’s always easier to think when Eve is around.
“They knew,” Alexandria repeats miserably, all snotty and muffled by Jenkins’ suit. “They knew. They could have told me.”
Jenkins’ hand briefly brushes through her hair before whisking away again, embarrassed. “I think we should cancel the ceremony practice for today,” he says carefully. “And I will tell Colonel Baird to move Excalibur somewhere safe for the evening.”
Judson—unlike Charlene—never gave orders. He made suggestions. Prompts, even. Allusions, when he was feeling particularly persnickety. After a while, Alexandria got pretty good at interpreting what his half-sentences and riddles meant, enough that she figured out he did it simply for fun and to appear mysterious to young Librarians. Jenkins isn’t going that far, but she can hear the echo of someone else. “You shouldn’t try to sound like him.”
Jenkins bristles. “I’m speaking my mind,” he says crossly. “You aren’t going to be able to focus on anything—”
“Except killing myself, according to you,” Alexandria snips back. It’s undignified to argue with him when she’s currently plastering his tie with her tears. Maybe it’s not fair to pull the “how dare you accuse me of being about to commit suicide” card when it’s been eighty-seven days since her heroic sacrifice to save the entire world from pure evil was thwarted and she had to talk them out of sectioning her. She can’t say the anguish rattling around in her head isn’t making her strongly consider it. But this is partially his fault.
She knew Judson for ten years. Charlene for thirteen. Jenkins for nearly four. Any one of them could have told her. Jenkins knew Nicole was her Guardian, even if she never knew him during the span they actually worked together. They all knew. She should hate them. She should go back to trying to hit him. Her breathing starts coming faster again.
“With all due respect, ma’am, when you’ve proven you can be trusted with an enchanted weapon, I’m sure the Colonel would be more than happy to give you your keys back,” Jenkins says crispy. He starts forcing her along like she’s a whiny toddler and not a grown woman. She wants to be angry at that, but redirecting the fury at Nicole’s situation is difficult to say the least.
Jenkins deposits her outside her room and knocks until Eve opens the door. She looks as beautiful as ever, even with her perfect face chiseled into the thoughtful frown it’s had since Jenkins first led them down to the secret dungeon level of the Library. Alexandria is pretty sure it first appeared because one of them walked face-first into a cobweb, and the day had only deteriorated from there.
That’s… There’s a whole crisis for another day in what had happened down there beyond finding out Nicole was alive and everyone in her life had been lying to her. Last time Alexandria saw Nicole, it had been… She doesn’t even want to think about it, but it had been while she was still taking nervous sideways steps toward being herself. Nicole had noticed one of those steps (it would have been pretty hard not to, considering that bra had been Nicole’s) and been shocked, baffled, and disgusted. That had been the end of their non-professional relationship. And then Nicole had died—except she hadn’t.
So it’s not. A surprise. What she said. When they were down there. It’s not. She doesn’t have a right to be upset about it. It doesn’t matter. Alexandria can spiral over Nicole calling her “Flynn” in front of all the people in her life who have only known her by her real name at a later date. It doesn’t matter.
(A few times she’s wondered just how much being with Nicole affected her. In both good and bad ways. Nicole was her first girlfriend. Partner; Nicole always thought girlfriend sounded too juvenile and that “partner” summed up their Librarian-and-Guardian relationship better. She was her first everything, pretty much, except kiss. Nicole was who made her aware of just how much she liked—ahem—certain activities involving the locked box shoved under her bed.
However, every time they did anything together in the privacy of her new apartment, or Nicole’s place, or around a random corner in the Library, or in a hotel room, and so on and so forth, there was always a second where Alexandria would remember what Nicole said right before the first time they had sex. “You’re not the incredible pansy I thought you were.” Every tryst was an opportunity to prove that statement. How many steps did that set her back by?
But that wasn’t the kind of thing you could think about your supposedly dead partner whose supposed death you were responsible for. Every time it popped into her head she had the overwhelming desire to bash her skull into the closest wall to banish it.)
“Jenkins? I thought we were supposed to meet you for the…” Eve winces. Alexandria wonders if she’s having the same second thoughts about this whole Tethering thing.
“We’ll practice again tomorrow. Dr. Carsen needs to rest.” Jenkins says it with enough emphasis that Eve appears to immediately catch his meaning. That, or Alex looks like she’s about two seconds away from grabbing a pen and jabbing it into her own throat. It could go either way. She probably looks even more pathetic than normal.
“They knew,” she says pitifully. Without Jenkins to hold her upright she falls to the floor again, Excalibur yipping with concern before Eve is able to take it by the hilt and gently toss it out of the room. Are her teeth chattering? Is the cold in her chest still that intense? “All of them knew she was down there. Did they just assume I’d die before I found out?”
From the look on Eve’s face, Alexandria can tell she already figured out that Judson and Charlene must have known about it and had been internally struggling to figure out how to broach the topic with her. “I don’t know,” she says. She sits down on the edge of Alexandria’s bed. “I can’t imagine lying for that long about something like that.”
“I…” Alexandria hates being speechless. She knows other people savor the opportunity to get a second of silence around her, but it only happens when she feels completely wrong-footed or is too lost in thought for any of it to come out. Now is a combination of both. “I still want them back.”
“I know,” Eve says. “Come lay down.”
Alexandria doesn’t say that she can’t. Instead she conveys it by half-crawling, half-squirming forward until her head is in Eve’s lap, her face pressed to her thigh. It’ll take longer for her tears to soak through the denim of Eve’s jeans than it did for Jenkins’ Italian wool. Eve’s fingers automatically start tracing through her hair, tucking it behind her ear in a repetitive motion. “I would have looked for her. Why haven’t I gone back to save her?”
Eve sighs but doesn’t say anything. She just keeps stroking her hair so gently it makes Alex feel like her skin is about to crawl off her body. She doesn’t move or ask her to stop, though. She deserves the discomfort.
They shouldn’t be worried. She really isn’t going to kill herself. That’s too good for her.
Nicole had to live in hell. That means she does, too.