What it comes down to, after a while, is that when all is said and done, they'll still leave. The facts of the war don't change this. The facts of the last forty-eight didn't. So now, despite all that's happened, despite the Noah, despite the heart, Lavi knows what's next.
He never expected to face a time where being a Bookman wasn't the best, most fascinating thing in the world. Imagine, encountering the chance to know all the secrets of the world? That in the same ten years, forty years, a hundred years, and the thousands behind, what events transpired in this world? How could anything be better? No worrying about mysteries, about what if's of time—it was all there for his consumption, for his hungry mind. Lovers go away, or die, and children grow up. In fact being Bookman doesn't limit that he can have these things, only that he can't stay.
Sometimes he was worn out: from the writing, the observation, or the random tests bookman would push him through to make sure he was still keeping up with the task. Sometimes he wanted to rub his eyes clean of ink and paper and enjoy blissful silence and stillness in his head. It never stopped running, and while that was often a good thing, he didn't go without wanting a break.
Then in his readings he'd come across something new, something that would spark questions, and he'd get lost inside the history once more.
So why was now different, he wondered. Why, despite the thousands of questions of when and how and why, he wondered why this time was different. Lavi was no less than the forty-eight names before him, because Lavi was always, at heart, Himself. The flesh, the bone, the eyes, they were the same, so the name of it hardly mattered. "A rose by any other name" but his was not sweet, only alive, and that mattered because without life and living he could never know the secrets of the world.
So why was now different.
Asking himself the question was more a point of empirical order, not of necessity. He knew the answer.
What boggled him was that Lavi had seen desperation before. He'd seen hope in the face of adversity. He'd seen people die and others carry on in spite of it, because what was life but constant movement onward? His world was caught in the pages of time but he had to move or be left behind. History was recorded, fine, but history was also made before his eyes and that, that is what Lavi really wanted to see. Now history turned to autobiography, to diary, as he spent more time in the Order and the eyewitnesses began to be more than their names and then finally Yu and Beansprout and Lenalady and Miranda and Krorykins and soon Lavi was falling behind in the logs but had never written more for himself.
And his words had never been more full of light and laughter, because maybe he had recorded the funny stories for Himself. Maybe he had put down moments that were strange for all their simplicity for Himself. Like the time he helped a farmer birth a calf or when he was stuck in a barn at age 13 and watched Bookman help deliver a fellow traveler's baby. Or when he'd had his first kiss when he was ten—just a simple meeting of lips but he hadn't been able to look at the girl again without blushing or at Bookman without feeling guilty. The time he'd been chased by chickens in Bulgaria, or when he'd wrapped Bookman's hands against frostbite in the Himalayas and Bookman had told him funny stories from his own times as apprentice while they waited out a snowstorm. He recorded them later because he wasn't sure Bookman had, but he had seen the look in the old man's eyes as he recounted tales with a warmth Lavi could barely believe. And it made him remember the day he'd met Bookman, this old man telling him stories of the world and the places he'd been and the things he'd witnessed.
It had lit a fire in him. And then Bookman had revealed that he was special, that he too could come and witness the world firsthand. He'd never once regretted it.
Even after his first battle, because Bookman had done something very rare then and had held him tight as he cried through the night. Or when he first saw a man hanged for robbery. Or when the woman who Bookman helped deliver her baby had to bury the child three months later because of fever. Even after his twentieth walk-around of an army medical tent, seeing limbs sawed off and watching civilians caught in the crossfire die of their wounds because the medicine wasn't good enough or the supply trains were late. He helped the record keepers list names and ranks, and helped farmers and merchants get lists of lost stock. Because while not as heart-pounding as battle, these too were events that mattered. Because people not being able to feed their families created history too.
Because if anything those times had taught him about life, and why it was so important to get everything he could while he was here. To record it for the future and to see all of the world he could. Bookman showed him the horrors and the wonders in almost equal turns, but for some reason he changed names with war. Like to change his name would close the chapter of each battle on its own. Sometimes he carried a name for weeks, or months; or like now, he carried the name for years. Lavi was the longest he'd carried a name since he left home. How else do you fit forty-nine into nineteen?
He'd seen so much and all of it had created in him a sense of People and Place and the World, and defined ever further his own place of trying to be outside of it. It had honed a contrariness he enjoyed. For he Himself was good at getting to people, to working them out, because the facts were fine but history was built of stories, and he got honesty and perspective from many different folks to build his best composite of What Really Happened. He had an easy smile to build trust, a calculating mind to craft together what he needed to say and all that he saw, and so far it had been enough. He had walked away with memories but never regrets.
So why was now different.