Work Text:
The library was quiet.
This was, in Rupert Giles's experience, a temporary condition. Quiet in this library was not the natural state of things; it was a brief atmospheric anomaly, like the stillness before a weather event, or the moment between dropping something and hearing it break. But for now, 7:14 on a Tuesday morning with the school not yet properly awake, it held.
He had the returns trolley.
This was not, strictly speaking, Watcher's work. He was aware of that. There were texts to cross-reference, astronomical charts to update, an index of demonic taxonomy that had been irritatingly misfiled under Folklore: Cautionary rather than Demonology: Confirmed and had been bothering him for three weeks. There were, at all times, more urgent things.
And yet.
He took the first book from the trolley. Huckleberry Finn. 813.4. He walked to the shelf, found its gap, slid it home. The small compression of air he heard as it fit snugly in place was extremely satisfying in a way he would never have admitted to another person.
The Outsiders. 813.54. A longer walk. He made it without hurrying.
The work required just enough attention to crowd out the other things. That was the virtue of it. He was not, while reshelving, thinking about the Harvest, which had been averted, or about the Master, who had not been. He was not calculating whether a sixteen-year-old girl was developing her skills at a sufficient rate to survive what was coming, and feeling the particular guilt of a man who was both responsible for that question and unable to answer it. He was not thinking about the Council, or about his predecessor, or about what it meant that the fate of a Hellmouth rested on the social calendar of an American teenager.
He was thinking about the Dewey Decimal System, which was robust, logical, and did not demand anything of him except precision.
Lord of the Flies. 823.914. He found the shelf. He found the gap. He was about to slide it into place when he noticed that its neighbour was Brave New World, which was 823.912, and that between them there was a book that had clearly been shelved by someone who believed that close enough was an acceptable standard.
He removed the interloper. To Kill a Mockingbird. 813.54. American. It should not have been anywhere near here. He held it for a moment and felt a mild, uncomplicated irritation that was almost pleasurable in its smallness.
He put both books on the trolley. He would deal with them properly.
He continued down the shelf.
In England, he had reshelved books in a library that was four hundred years old, where the cases were dark oak and the brass fittings had gone green and the smell was of leather and time and a particular kind of institutional damp that he had always found, inexplicably, comforting. This library smelled of industrial carpet cleaner and a faint suggestion of someone's lunch. The shelves were laminate. The trolley had a wheel that pulled slightly to the left.
He had made his peace with it. More or less.
The Pigman. He had not read The Pigman. He turned it over. A boy and a girl befriend a lonely old man, and things go badly. He considered the spine for a moment, then shelved it at 813.54 and moved on without quite meeting its implied accusation.
By the time Buffy arrived, 8:52, which was either impressively early or suspiciously late depending on one's expectations, the trolley was nearly empty and the 800s were in better order than they had been in several months. He was standing on the small stepladder, returning an oversized collection of Norse mythology to the top shelf, when she dropped her bag on the table with a bang that suggested the immediate future would involve a problem.
"Morning," she said. "We've got a thing."
"Of course we do," he said, and climbed down.
He smoothed his jacket. He took off his glasses, polished them, and put them back on. The library was already less quiet. He could feel the shape of his morning rearranging itself around whatever she was about to tell him.
But the 800s were in order. The trolley was empty. For fourteen minutes he had thought about nothing except where things belonged.
It would, he suspected, have to do.