Title: Name
Rating: PG
Content: Angst
Genre: Angst
Summary: What it means to be a Bookman. Lavicentric.
Author's Note: Revision!
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"Bookman"
A title which means one's purpose in life is to gain knowledge. To read books, acquire intelligence. History, philosophy, languages, everything. Only to write on long strips of parchment what was learned and observed. Written with quill and ink in a room too dark with cramped hands. The records filed away for future Bookmen, should they ever be needed again.
Bookmen are human too. They get old and die, like everyone else. When this happens, another Bookman will take his place. And when he dies, another Bookman will fill his vacancy. This goes on and on, Bookman to Bookman. Generation after generation that reads print so tiny and small by candlelight in those dark rooms smelling like books and dust. So, in the life of a Bookman, when he can see that the twilight of his life is upon him, he chooses a successor to train in order to fill his place when he's gone.
A boy who had been abandoned, left to fend for himself in the dark, cold alleyways. A boy who tried his hardest to smile beneath a messy mop of hair too red while standing out in the rain with nowhere to go. A boy who loved to tell stories to anyone who would listen, smiling behind dark bruises and bandaged hands. A boy who could remember everything and forget nothing.
A perfect candidate for a Bookman's apprentice. Someone with nowhere to go and no one to miss him. His name never asked and never told. Training for a position in which a name has no meaning and is therefore left unused. It binds him and takes his identity. He becomes someone else. Something else. Something else until the day he becomes known simply as the Bookman.
Lavi.
His need for a name, an identity is mandatory. Unable to use his own, he creates one. Then another. Then forty or so more. The one he becomes most attached to is the current one: Lavi. A name with no surname. A simple name, but in truth not really a name, since it has no power and no meaning. It's just something to call him by until he becomes the Bookman. And even now he still smiles, like he did before. Smiling beneath that hair still too red and now behind an eye patch and black uniform. But it's different now, just like it was forty-eight times before. Because now he's somebody else entirely again.
He is not the same person-the same child-he was before, back in the days when he was alone and cold in those winding alleyways, where people would scorn and berate him. Now he is a grown man, no longer huddling in those alleyways and beneath the floorboards of somebody's kitchen to keep warm. He is important now, in his eye patch and black uniform and a new name that holds fake power in its simplicity.
But to pass by somebody he once knew, from one name or another—that time before he became number forty-nine-—and have that person recognize him in return, greets him with a kind of isolation. To have that person call out to him, using a name now forgotten to him, makes him feel even more distant than before. If such a case were to occur, he would turn his head and smile apologetically, saying: "I'm sorry, but I think you've mistaken me for someone else." And when that person walks away, his smile becomes sad and lonely again.
Because the names he used to have belong to no one now. It's almost as if he-they-never existed in the first place. Everything tied to those names reminds him of looking into one of the books he cherishes so much: something distant that he can close up and shelve away at will. But that smile comes back, it always does. And even though he's not supposed to, he starts wishing for those memories to be one solid memory under one definite name. But they flood back to him in fragments from one name or another and it's always that feeling like he's a stranger looking in—a life under a different name and memories that belong to someone else entirely.
He doesn't find it strange that no one notices his forced smile. And that's all right with him, since no one had ever noticed it the forty-eight times before.
But behind the quill and ink and the parchment and the books stacked in high towers in that dark room, the smile fades. And along with it, the shadow of all those names and the people he used to be.
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Dhampir72