Disclaimer: I do not own the original canon nor am I making any profit from writing this piece. All works are accredited to their original authors, performers, and producers while this piece is mine. No copyright infringement is intended. I acknowledge that all views and opinions expressed herein are merely my interpretations of the characters and situations found within the original canon and may not reflect the views and opinions of the original author(s), producer(s), and/or other people.
Warnings: This story may contain material that is not suitable for all audiences and may offend some readers. Please utilize understanding of personal sensitivities before and while reading.
Author's Note(s): This is just a little character study piece. It's designed more for Tumblr than FFN or AO3. It came about because of a conversation I had on the AceFest2K18 server.
Competition/Challenge Block:
Fill Number: 02
Representation(s): Library Contentment; Asexuality; Librarians; Library Staff
Bonus Challenge(s): Second Verse (Unicorn – Asexuality); Second Verse (Tomorrow's Shade); Second Verse (Non-Traditional); Second Verse (Found Family); Second Verse (Wabi Sabi – Synesthesia); Second Verse (Clio's Conclusion)
Stacked with: Seriously Important (Not); Sky's the Limit; Terms of Service; By Any Other Name
Word Count: 1062
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What the Library Shelters
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It started with Galahad.
They called him the Pure. They called him the Chaste. In their darker moments, the epithets turned crueler, more mocking, but Galahad was a knight, a Brother-in-Arms to King Arthur himself. What did the petty jealousy of others matter?
He watched as chasing sex destroyed the court he loved, as his own father betrayed wife, friend, and king for something so inconsequential as physical love. He watched as the woman he loved chose another, someone willing to pursue her in the fashion she wanted. He never blamed her for that, not once over their very long life. He loved her too well to ever deny her even an iota of happiness.
The Library sheltered him as surely as it did its artifacts. It loved him as surely as he loved Charlene. Galahad allowed the pain (of living so long, of watching everyone else be happy) to make him bitter, and the Library still loved him. He was not a Librarian. He was not a Guardian. He was not an artifact or book. None of that mattered in the Annex, where the Library loved him.
He had quiet. No one mocked his inability to feel the carnal side of love. He had peace with his books and failure. He needed no bed partner to remind him of such things, not when the Library provided both comfort and companionship in ways that didn't make him want to flay himself.
It was a simple thing, the book that appeared one day in the late 1940s. It still held magical knowledge—information on the mating habits of sentient non-humans and the influence of various magical artifacts on sex and romance—but it was a very mundane section to which the Library had left the book opened. The section discussed a group of individuals, recurring to various degrees among all sentient races, who felt no sexual attraction or felt it only under non-biological conditions, despite nothing being wrong biologically.
Shedding fifteen hundred years' worth of tears at once was unsurprisingly exhausting. Moving forward afterwards, armored in the knowledge that what he felt was normal, was not a failure or flaw, was more energizing than any magic.
Galahad shed his old name with its burdensome epithet. He did so gladly, almost giddily. It was false, and he had once sworn to speak only truth.
Jenkins had a better understanding of himself than a misapplied label of pure.
Then came Flynn Carsen, so willingly seduced by his inherited Guardian and then any woman who tickled his curiosity and his senses. It took longer than it should have for Jenkins to recognize one of his own (kind? type? did it matter?). Maybe if he wasn't doing it through shadows and mirrors, through the Library's borrowed perspective, he would have seen it sooner. It took Flynn so easily swearing off the pursuit of relations to finally open Jenkins' eyes to the obvious.
The Library twittered with anticipation of something. Jenkins knew his companion too well by then not to recognize the way its moods shifted. It still shared no details, and no amount of discontented grumbling seemed to change its mind.
Then Judson untethered the Library, stealing away both the loves of Jenkins' life. Carsen and his merry band of misfits barely made it Portland, and then they barely managed to stop the Serpent Brotherhood. With the Library still sealed away from the plane, Jenkins had to deal with the ruckus of people underfoot.
Truth be told, he had feared more than the noise of their presence. Less than eighty years of self-acceptance was a poor balance for a millennium and a half of belief in one's own abnormality. He fretted about dealing with jibs about his inability once the super-observant Librarians noticed. Hypervigilant as he was, it took mere weeks to realize that not only had none of them noticed his asexuality, but they had all failed to recognize their own.
Flynn's attraction always started with curiosity, and then reciprocated what was shown him. He was shockingly well-matched with Eve Baird in that regard. The pair would make good Anchors for the Library once they've had the chance to grow into their attachment to each other a bit more.
Jacob Stone put on a far better masquerade of normalcy than Jenkins had, probably because it was clear that sex was actually enjoyable to the man. It was clearly another way of indulging his appreciation of sensual pleasures, on par with his enjoyment of all other forms of art. Jenkins had no doubt that the man's female partners appreciated the gentle shift in approach from the usual crudeness of men.
Ezekiel Jones was so similar to himself that it made his teeth hurt occasionally. If not for his thievery, he would have made a good knight back when he would have also been labeled as Jenkins had once been. Even muted by the untethering, Jenkins could tell that the Library held great affection for the boy—er, young man. He would have been jealous, maybe worried about being replaced by a less grumpy version, except for the obvious parental bent to that affection.
Cassandra Cillian was also similar to himself except in one very important regard: she lacked the knee-jerk revulsion of intimate activities. That was not to say that he failed to observe that she had her own set of challenges to overcome in that area. He had helped her recover from an unexpected cross display of her senses too many times to not come to that conclusion. He still appreciated when she had finally shifted her romantic inclination towards her lady vampire, happy to assist her abuse of the Door for visits.
Somehow, Jenkins had gone from being alone to being surrounded by others just like him. Judging by the amusement he felt from the place inside where the Library held him tight, that had been the plan for a while. The Library loved him, not as a Librarian or Guardian or artifact but as his very human self. It had always accepted him as he was, since its creation.
Jenkins looked around the makeshift family it had provided to ease his loneliness, idly stroking a hand down a nearby column. For what felt like the first time in his life, he felt completely at peace, content in the shelter of the Library he loved.
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The End
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