Title: Tangent to Our Own
Author: kenzimone
Disclaimer: Don't own
Fandom: The Librarians
Pairing: Stone/Baird
Rating: PG
Word count: 2,200
Summary: She dreams of dying.
Note: An And the Loom of Fate coda. Unbeta'd because I am an impatient person. This is what happens when you spend half a season sailing on a lonely ship doomed for Davey Jones' Locker, and then the showrunners decide to throw you a surprising lifeline in the form of a tragic-but-canon alternative timeline romance. Title taken from Dick Allen's poem Theory of the Alternate Universe.
She dreams of dying.
They step out into a Japanese garden, and Flynn grabs her by the hand and drags her down a wide dirt path leading into the trees. It's beautiful, this garden, the perfect spot for a date, and she allows herself to be pulled along, past the brightly colored beds of flowers and the perfectly trimmed bushes, into the shadows beneath the canopy, where it's darker, cooler, trails of cold running down her spine, shivers and chills and she's freezing and then, somehow—
Somehow she always ends up back by the stream. Just by the edge of it, the stones cutting into her back and the soft, gurgling sound of the water as it ripples past, staring up at the clouds and her own bloodstained fingers, only it's not— it's a mere moment, because it's Stone she sees.
Stone, and the tree tops swaying gently against a pale blue sky behind him, and they went through a door. They went through together, and the Library is gone but they escaped through a door, and she's dying.
"It's alright," he tells her. "It'll be alright, Eve."
It's Stone who holds her, who cradles the back of her head in one hand as he pushes down on her wound with the other, blood seeping from between his fingers.
"Please," he says, voice nothing but a painful rasp. "Eve. Don't— Eve, please."
She's never heard him say her name that way before.
'How did I die?' she'd asked him, back in the forest, and he'd turned away from her at first. He'd turned away, refused to answer, and the look on his face—
'You were my Guardian' and 'You bled out in my arms' and— the look on his face.
She dreams of dying, and it's always the same. Always Flynn in the garden and the stream and always this, the mud and the blood and Stone.
Always Stone.
He presses his lips to her forehead and she leans into the touch despite the pain, and when the hand that's been pressing down on her wound – uselessly trying to stem the flow of blood, her skin split open by magic foul and deadly – when that hand comes up to cradle the side of her face she draws comfort from it. When he leans down to kiss her she returns the gesture, because this isn't her. This isn't Stone and this isn't her, and this happened once before but not anymore, the timeline broken, erased like it was never there in the first place because no one else remembers – not even her – and this is all in her mind.
She breathes him in, touches the side of his face, fingertips leaving smears of red from his temple down along his jaw, and he pulls away and hides his face against her shoulder. She can feel the violent shudder that runs the length of his body, has seen enough of death and war to know heartsickness, to know the way grief and horror can manifest itself physically.
"I can't watch you die," he says, his breath a gasped hitch against the side of her neck, and she wishes he didn't have to but knows that he already did.
You bled out in my arms.
She's dying. It'll be over soon.
I missed you, Eve.
...
She finds him in the Library. She hadn't gone looking for him. Hadn't meant to get out of bed at all, but when she closes her eyes she can still taste it; the blood in her mouth, bitter like copper, pooling in the back of her throat. The hitched gasps and his mouth on hers. The way he said her name.
It's impossible to go back to sleep.
Making the rounds helps. It's mostly for her own sake; something as large as the Library can't be patrolled, and whatever she chooses to call it – rounds or patrols or checks – it's more an aimless wandering through the stacks than anything else, barefoot in nothing but her pajamas, with row after row of ancient books and priceless mythical artifacts to take her mind off... things.
She finds him in the Library, tucked away between the stacks, and she's a bit surprised to see him there at this late an hour. She knows she shouldn't be, because she might have handed her three former charges their books and watched them rush headfirst out into the world of magic, but wherever it is they go they always return – always seem to gravitate back to the Library.
Stone in particular can, at any given time, usually be found somewhere among the shelves, poring over ancient tomes and scrolls and parchments. He's a fast reader, soaking up myths and legends like a sponge, like his thirst for information is unquenchable.
She wonders how starved for knowledge he must've been before coming here, wonders if perhaps that is what makes the difference between this Stone and the man she met in the forests of Ukraine: ten years a Librarian, all of history's secrets available at whim, contrasted against a life working the Oklahoman oil rigs and late nights spent trawling the depths of the Internet in search of whatever scraps of history might be left to discover.
Or maybe it had been her? Her presence. Her influence. Her difference. 'Our ten years' he'd called it, every single one of them spent within arm's reach of one another, a decade's worth of—
She banishes that thought as best she can.
It's night at the point where the Annex tethers the Library to the physical world, and the lights in the building are dimmed. Stone hasn't bothered to adjust their brightness – that, or he doesn't know how to. Instead he's managed to uncover a handful of candles, and when Eve finds him he's sitting on the floor, cross-legged, reading in the light from half a dozen tiny, dancing flames. The warmth of the glow softens his features and draws her closer, the flickering brightness a beacon in the deep shadows of the stacks.
She's almost on top of him before he senses her presence, and he jerks in surprise as she steps out of the dark and settles down on the floor in front of him. A sea of open books and papers litter the space between them, hemmed in by the towering bookshelves, information no doubt carefully arranged in a pattern or system that completely escapes Eve's notice.
"Spatial awareness," she says. "We'll have to work on that."
Stone carefully lowers the parchment he'd been reading and rubs at his eyes.
"More drills?" he asks, though he doesn't sound too adverse to the idea.
"More drills," Eve confirms.
As expected he doesn't protest, not like Cassandra or Ezekiel would've done, and she suspects it's because he knows that he needs it. He can hold his own in a fight but his form is bad, and he leads with his fists when he should use his head. It's fixable. Won't take her long to whip him into shape, and she knows he's capable of more than he's giving her – has seen it, even if no one else remembers; a lone Librarian against a dozen gunmen, movements smooth and efficient and precise. He'd been good, whoever he was, the man who stepped back into the sure promise of bullets and death, arms spread wide, as he sent her and Flynn on their way.
But it doesn't matter. That man's gone. She knows this, though it doesn't seem to make things easier. Of all the things she saw – the bewildered lack of recognition on Flynn's face, the trust and respect in Ezekiel's gaze, the wistful regret in Cassandra's smile – the absence of what had once graced another Stone's features – love and grief and disbelief and finally surrender – is the strangest one to accept now that she's back.
'We're friends,' she'd told him, and it's true, even though he'd smiled and called himself – his other self, that is, her Stone, if he could count as such – an ass for it.
"You alright?" Stone asks, bringing her out of her head, and he's not an ass. Far from it. He's a friend, a trustworthy one at that, and she tells herself that the concern on his face is made better by the absence of what once played across another's.
"Just tired," she says, suppressing a shiver. Compared to Stone, who's wearing jeans and a sweater, she's underdressed in her T-shirt and thin cotton pants. She can feel the cold of the floor seeping through her clothes as she unfolds her legs and swings around, scooting back to rest against one of the library stacks. Sighing, she adds, "It's been a long day."
Stone hums in agreement and turns, reaching for his jacket where it lies on the the floor behind him, in the spot where he must've let it drop when he settled down for his studies.
"Here," he says as he passes it to her over the mess of documents covering the floor between them. "Look like you need it. Should be dry by now."
She receives the jacket with a sincere thank you and drapes it across her shoulders, grateful for the extra warmth. The lining's thick, more so than is required by the current west coast weather, and still a bit damp in places.
"My book sent me to Lapland," Stone explains as he reaches for a nearby volume. "Something's going on over there. I just gotta... figure out what."
The tome he grabbed is an old one, the cover slightly warped with age and the pages a yellow brown color, whisper-thin and brittle, dark ink of the title page faded. Stone runs his fingers over the foreign lettering, an almost reverent gesture, before he turns the page to reveal a hand drawn map, its colors still surprisingly vibrant in the warm candlelight.
"Looks old," Eve murmurs, shifting against the bookshelf and trying get as comfortable as she can.
Stone tears his gaze away from the illustrations, and there's a smile playing on his lips when he looks at her, a glint in his eye that almost reminds her of—
"Almost 500 years," he says, interrupting whatever connection her mind had been about to make, and there's no mistaking the awe in his voice. "It's the twenty third volume of Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus. It doesn't officially exist."
Eve tips her head back to rest against the spines of the books behind her, closing her eyes as she pulls the jacket closer around her. It smells faintly of smoke, over a layer of musty earth and fresh evergreen, beneath which lingers the slightest whiff of something else, a scent of sweat and aftershave clinging to the lining. Stone.
"Tell me more," she says.
"What," Stone huffs, and she can hear the amusement in his voice. "And have my dronin' put you to sleep? Floor don't look too comfortable."
"I've slept in worse places under worse circumstances." She doesn't have the energy to open her eyes, but that's alright. There's no need to look his way when she can easily picture the smile that must be pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Of course, if I told you about it, I'd have to kill you."
"Well, ma'am, we don't want that," Stone drawls.
"No, we don't. Go on."
Stone does as he's told.
"Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus," he says, his voice low, hushed. "History of the Northern Peoples. Written by Olaus Magnus and published in twenty two volumes in 1555. This here, this is the twenty third one. Like I said, not even supposed to exist. It's old, but not the first written work on the subject. Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus both wrote about Lapland in the 11th century, but they based their facts on already existing texts and popular folk lore. Now, Olaus Magnus, he's believed to have been the first narrator to actually visi—"
...
"—onna be alright. You'll be alright."
There's a smudge of black across Stone's right cheekbone. She doesn't know whether it's dust from the books in the stacks, or soot from the candles, or mud from when they came tumbling through the door, and when she tries to wipe it off she leaves smears of red behind.
She's dying.
"Eve," Stone breathes and pulls her closer, hands cradling her face as he touches his forehead to hers, his words ghosting over her lips: "Eve, please don't—"
She kisses him. Wraps her fingers around the collar of his shirt and yanks him down, crushing his mouth against hers, and it's not like before – the other kiss in the other forest, six thousand miles away, the one that hasn't happened yet and never will again, a place and time as erased as this one – but it's close, and she's shuddering, exhaling her pain into him, groaning against the pressure she's putting on her side; still bleeding, still killing her, still—
She's dying, but it'll be over soon.
And in the meantime? There's Stone.
There's always Stone.