Many thanks for your patience. I've finally got round to fixing the poetry and spelling issues in chapter 1 of this episode.


Episode 3: Annoying and Cryptic, Chapter 3

Jacob Stone was seated at a desk in the reading room, complete with attached desk lamp, table lectern and adjustable chair. Everyone had their own study area in the reading room, and this was his. Behind him the sofa and two overstuffed armchairs sat quiet and uninhabited. He heard the door open and close, but kept his eyes on his book. He wasn't really reading it, of course. If anything, he was scanning it, looking for the name of the mythological personage they had all been searching for.

The teacup and saucer clinked down onto the coffee table amidst the comfortable chairs. "Staring at a page isn't going to change her mind, you know," murmured Jenkins. He watched the younger man's head rise slightly. "Come on. I may not be the Colonel, or one of your usual drinking buddies back in Oklahoma, but you need to talk this through with someone and I'm all that is available."

"No offence, Jenkins," growled Stone, " but I think I'll pass. I'm good. I'll survive."

"And your relationship with Miss Cillian?" Jenkins pressed. "Will that?"

Stone still didn't look round. "I get that you're concerned, Jenkins, but it ain't any of your business, so if you don't mind..."

"Isn't it?" Jenkins cut in, verbally steepling his fingers. "Well, on a personal level, perhaps not. But whatever has just happened between you, and I am reasonably certain I know precisely what that was, it is not just affecting you on a personal level. It is affecting you on a professional one also. That, in the absence of Mr and Mrs Carsen, makes it my business."

"I can do my job," growled Stone, and this time the growl was lower.

"Not from where I'm sitting," persisted the old man, ignoring the warnings. "From my viewpoint you are barely scratching the surface. Your conversation is constantly replaying itself, your questions are lining up in your brain, your hands can barely hold a book steady, and your knee hasn't stopped moving in the entire space of time that I have been here. You need to talk, so talk. Come sit with me, or just stay there staring at the wall: I don't care. Just talk."

"I wouldn't know where to start," Stone sighed, running a hand through his hair.

"You proposed, am I right?" Jenkins asked, sitting back in the armchair. "She said no, I take it. Start there. Did she say why?"

"I... She said she didn't want to get married. To anyone, not just to me," he replied, resting his head in his hands, his elbows still on the reading desk. "She said she didn't see the point."

"The point in what? Marriage?" Jenkins queried.

"The point in a piece of paper saying we're a couple," Stone elucidated. "She said we already are a couple. She asked me to move in with her instead."

"And that is not what you want," continued the old man, with a wave of his hand. "Nor is it, I assume, an acceptable compromise?"

"I don't want to compromise!" Stone snapped back, his voice rising. "I don't want to be her 'partner', I want to be her husband. I want to introduce her to everyone as my wife. I want the entire world to know that she is the one person in this world who means more to me than everyone else. I want her to know I will always feel this way about her. I want everyone else to know it. I want our kids to know it!"

"Have you told her that?"

Stone sighed and hung his head backwards over the chair, staring up at the plaster work on the ceiling. "No," he admitted. "Not in so many words. I told her I love her, that I want to spend the rest of my life with her. Build a home, family, all that stuff. That was before she said 'no' though."

"What did you say after she turned you down?" Jenkins asked, picking up the teacup and sipping thoughtfully.

"I said," he began, then stopped, closing his eyes against the memory. "I said I didn't understand. Then, when she tried to explain, I just... I just left. I think I said something. Can't remember what. Something along the needing time lines. It's a bit of a blur."

"Because you were expecting her to say 'yes'?" Jenkins replaced the cup. "Had you actually thought about what she might say before you asked, or did you just assume she felt the same way about the process as you?"

"You knew she'd say no," Stone look up and round, the accusation clear in his face.

"I had an inkling," Jenkins admitted.

"Why?"

"She's a scientist, Mr Stone," began the old man calmly. "A logician. Moreover, she is one who has spent most of her adult life believing she may die at any moment. She has not had space in her life for 'happily ever after' and dreams of the future. Not since she was a child, anyway, and it seems to me that the only dreams the juvenile Miss Cillian was allowed to have involved intellectual, rather than romantic, triumphs. The world is still new to her in many ways. Magic, yes, but that's new to all of you. So many things you take for granted, like relationships, and the prospect of having children, and faith: all are as new to her as magic is to you all. I don't know what her parents taught her about the matter, but I cannot imagine it would be much given the young age at which her tumour was discovered. After that, with one's very own sword of Damocles hanging over one's head, it is difficult to envisage any sort of future, let alone one that your neighbours and co-workers all seem to achieve quite easily. Better perhaps to decide against such a future. Rule it out by your own choice and it cannot be the tumour making the decision for you. Give yourself reasons that have nothing to do with the tumour. Reasons based purely in cold, clear logic. Such reasons, once accepted and ingrained, are difficult to dissuade. We are all broken, Mr Stone. We are all damaged in our own way. We build up our defences to help us cope with that damage. You may not be the only person in your relationship that has to spend some time recognising those defences for what they are before you can move forward."

"So you think she'll change her mind?" Jacob looked back round to the book again.

"Given time, perhaps," shrugged Jenkins. "You have that now, remember. You can afford to take things slowly."

"Yeah, with the end of the world breathing down our necks!" Jacob sighed. "What if we lose? How much time will we have then? We've been looking for one damn story for two days already. Not even the story: the pictures from it! How are we supposed to stop an organisation that has been planning this thing for years, gathering dozens of artefacts for years, if we can't even find an accurate picture of just one of them?"

"We'll find it," Jenkins nodded, getting up from his armchair. "Then we'll find the artefact itself, all of it, then we'll find the next one, and the next one, and so on until we have secured everything we need to make our stand, and take down theirs. We have done it before and we'll do it again. You have time."

XXXX

"You've been married, haven't you Charlene?" Cassandra asked, setting aside yet another pile of books. "What was it like?"

"What marriage?" Charlene glanced over at the younger woman and looked back to the scroll she was carefully unrolling and re-rolling, section by section. "Oh, I hardly think I'm the best example in the room."

"Why?" Cassandra pressed.

"Why?" Charlene paused in her work and looked up. "Honey, I've had two marriages in my lifetime. One of them ended in tragedy, the other in divorce. Neither of them lasted more than a decade."

"Do you think you'll ever get married again?"

"At my age? Who're you kidding? Even my cats have given up and started bringing home strays for me! Besides: I'm Catholic. I don't have the option. My last husband might have the luxury of divorcing me and running off with his latest muse - he was an artist, by the way - but I'm still technically stuck as his wife until death do us part. I'm no angel, but there are some rules I won't break."

"But that makes no sense," frowned the redhead. "He left you. He broke the rule, not you. Why should you have to suffer?"

"Because I made a promise," shrugged Charlene. "A promise before God that I would be his wife until I, or he, died. He made that promise too. Maybe he didn't take it as seriously as I did, but that doesn't change the fact that he made it. It doesn't change the fact that, by the laws of my own faith, my beliefs, I am still bound by that promise. Now yes, I grant you, the laws of the land don't bind me to it. Legally speaking, I'm a free woman. But I choose to follow my faith, and a choice like that doesn't mean just for the easy bits, it means for everything, just like marriage itself. So if I choose to remain Catholic, albeit possibly the worst Catholic in the western hemisphere, then I choose to remain a wife. An abandoned wife, but a wife all the same. But hey, look on the bright side: the jerk has a penchant for aggressive women, gambling, drinking and fast cars. He can't have that long left by now. You never know: I might already be a widow again!"

"You don't know?"

Charlene sobered. "Part of me doesn't really want to, kiddo. Really doesn't want to."

Cassandra looked back down to her work. She knew she was prying. She knew the memories she was prying into were painful. She had been about to ask why Charlene had married the man in the first place, and if she knew then what he was like, but the answer to that was written all over the older woman's face. Even now, a part of her still cared for him. If she still cared for the man who had left her in such callous circumstances, what must she feel for the man who hadn't been given the choice?

"Go ahead, I know you're dying to ask," sighed the receptionist.

Cassandra looked over and studied her face. It was looking down at the scroll again and difficult to read. "What was your first husband like?"

"His name was Robert," she began, keeping her gaze fixedly downward. "He was a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières. We met out in Cambodia, during the refugee crisis of seventy five. He tracked me down back home, some six months later, which was not an easy thing to do, I might add. We started seeing each other, as far as was possible with our respective jobs at the time, on a more regular basis. He proposed on our one year anniversary, before heading back out to Lebanon for three months. By the time he got back I had most of the details already sorted out. We met with the priest, jumped through the usual hoops, sent out the invites and got married in the fall of seventy seven. We were together for four years, five months and seventeen days. Then, during an early morning bombing of the hospital he was working in, out in Afghanistan, he was hit on the head by flying rubble. He never regained consciousness. He was a good man. It took me along time to get over him."

"Were you there?" Cassandra asked, watching Charlene carefully. "When he died, I mean. Did you get to say goodbye?"

"No," she shook her head. "No, I was elsewhere. This was before I became entangled with the Library and Librarians. My job then took me all over the world at a moment's notice, rather like his, but we were rarely deployed to the same area."

"That must have made things difficult."

"It did," she nodded, her eyes focussing on the table itself and the corner of her lips curling up into a smile. "But we managed. We made the most of the time we had, when we had it. We knew the jobs we were doing were dangerous. We understood them, both of them, and the risks they entailed. I think that made those times when we were together even more precious. Neither one of us could have left those jobs, not then. I don't think he ever could have left his. We were needed. The jobs were more important than our personal lives. Neither one of us would have asked the other to give that up. It wasn't who we were. And so we made it work. If I could go be with him on site, then I did. If he could be with me, at home at least, if not at work, then he was. Even when we were apart, he was always with me. In my thoughts, my heart. I would play out conversations with him in my head when I was troubled, or bored, or just missing him. Imagine what advice he would give me, what stories he might tell me. And he had some funny stories. He stayed with me like that for a long time, even after he died."

"I'm sorry," murmured Cassandra, as Charlene's eyes fell to the scroll once more.

"Don't be," the older woman shook her head. "It's good to remember the people we've loved and lost. Even if it hurts to do so."