characters(c)Hoshino Katsura
this story(c)Shruika

It IS lonely.

At the beginning of our journey, my journey with Jiji, I never would have thought that I could become lonely. Because I had him, I wasn't alone, not some nine-year old boy travelling around the world by himself but instead following closely the lap of a serious (almost grumpy) looking, short, wrinkly old man in wide robes with black shadows around his exceptionally sharp eyes.
I would always be following him around, no matter where Bookman went. And I will continue to follow him wherever he decides to go still, no matter the passed time.

Because that was what I had decided.
With all the earnesty and fervour a child could gather, I had so badly wanted him to make me his apprentice so that I could become a true Bookman someday. So that I could get away from where I had existed the nine years of my life until then. It was all I had been able to think about until just recently. It was all that made sense of my existence, this single purpose.
But it is recently that I notice a strange, uncomfortable feeling of loneliness creeping up on me from time to time. Usually, it's when the oh-so accurate memories of losing a member of the Exorcists' fighting unit, to which I had been assigned about two years ago, floods my mind in a surprise attack.

Until recently, I can't remember to have ever felt lonely. I never was, not since meeting Jiji.
My mind was hungering for more knowledge, craving to dive into bits and pieces of informationen that my brain could tie together to a net of past and present history, hinting at what the future would hold. For humankind and anything else wandering the earth.
My only purpose and aim was to become the Bookman and in order to do that I had to excel in my studies, had to excecute the tasks given to me by Jiji without fail, and internalise the Bookman Clan's teachings.
It had never really been easy, but I had enjoyed it most of the time. I still do.

Despite the bloody fingers holding a sticky, smeared quill that I direct over uncountable pages and scrolls of paper and parchment. Despite my left green eye hurting from reading uncountable pages and scrolls, books, newspapers, accounts, logs, records. Despite the gut-wrenching smell of dead bodies, slashed open, beaten to a pulp, slowly burning down into some hardly definable, sickening mass, soaking my clothes, my hair, my skin.

I've always had a strong stomach.
Raw skin and injuries can easily be ignored when something interesting keeps my mind busied.
And getting used to things is something everyone must do at one point or another.

So yeah, I still enjoy the work of a Bookman.

It's challenging.
Deciphering dead languages carved into withered stones or trying for the fiftieth time to get the guttoral sound of some widely unknown dialect right strains both your nerves and patience. Yet, challenges are designed to be difficult, to get you thinking and trying, failing and eventually mastering. And I've always loved a good challenge.

It's rewarding.
Finding the one word, sentence or passage in a foreign text that finally enables you to see the big picture of that particular part of history, enables you to connect all the facts and numbers you've gathered by reading hundreds of books, reports, logs... To be able to finally UNDERSTAND... is worth it all over again. Every single time.

It's not frustrating. Not the work itself.
It's the humans who have begun to frustrate and unnerve me, for all the centuries, even millenia have not been enough to stop them from repeating the same dumb mistakes yet again.
History itself is an account of happenings. Knowing and understanding history enables us to evolve.

And now, it's also become lonely.
For all the names I went by, for all the aliases Jiji gave me to blend in with the crowds, to make myself seem part of human's society, I've been indifferent yet never lonely.
Alone in the masses yet filled with purpose.
Satisfied with walking along humans for some time yet never forming anything that would've tied me to them on any level.

Bookmen are spectators.
Impartial and just in their decisions to leave not the slightest influence on the flow of history.
Let things develop as if we didn't exist, as if we stood behind impenetrable glass, carefully watching the rest of the world live their lives, die their deaths, and fill the gap between with things they deem worthwile.

We don't touch them, they don't touch us.
Don't ever let the glass break.
It keeps you from falling into that snake pit, into that rabbit hole of madness, into the chains of senseless, illogical, dangerous emotions.
But for my current persona, for the me wearing the name 'Lavi', it's already too late.
There's a big hole broken in the glass that kept me seperate and on the safe side.
It is big enough that I could fall through head over heels any moment, and the edges are ragged and razor-sharp and cutting deeper and deeper into my flesh as I try to stop the inevitable.

I hate this feeling.
That some scratches on paper, some lines of ink on parchment, have dragged me down and won't let me go. It's suffocating.
Still, whenever I might lose them for good, I feel loneliness closing in on me, winding itself round my neck and slowly but surely forcing the air out of my lungs. It becomes hard to breathe. It becomes painful. It becomes lonely and that feeling alone is frightening me.

I never wanted to know or have something that eventually I could lose.
And whilst it doesn't matter that it's not really ME who would lose something – or someone – and thus has come to fear the loneliness, because it's 'Lavi' who does, 'Lavi' who would want to mourn over their deaths despite not being allowed to – it still leaves ME with an opening, a vulnerability.
And I can't afford to be vulnerable.

I'm the Bookman's apprentice, allowing and giving in to strong human emotions is not an option.
I'm not a friend, not a lover, not a life-saver.
I'm not even just me anymore.

Fighting a battle with mere ideas, with mere shallow projections of human masks. How ridiculous. How tiring. Disgusting. Needless. Weak. Dangerous. Unstable.
Dangerous.
I thought I had got rid of them after they had fulfilled their purpose of letting me collect information and insight. But some things linger on inside of my mind, unwilling to be ignored, unwilling to be erased completely. For as long as I can remember (and I do remember), masks have been a part of me. Part of life, part of surviving, of growing, and of learning. But although they've been a rather natural part of me, recently, it seems their fight to be acknowledged, continue existing and take over has grown too intense. I am me. I am the one, the first, the original, the nine-years old, red-haired boy leaving for the world, the only one whose name has indeed been got rid of forever. It is unretrievable, yet, here I am. I am the nameless one.
So the fight with mere projections of human masks, of adjustable aliases, seems even more ridiculous. They are tools of my mind, created by Jiji's and my intellect for a certain time-span and a specific goal. That should be all there is to them.

I'm not even just the nameless me anymore who is working hard to become the Bookman.

Maybe I'm lonely.
Maybe I'm not.
Maybe I'm just lost.
Lost amongst personas, aliases, false friends, false constructs, lies and more lies, looking so hard for the bits and pieces of factual truth for records... The work of a (future) Bookman, in the end, is a lonely one. It ought to be.
So, maybe I am not lost.
Maybe I (and whoever else lingers on in my head and the suffocated yet still hurting organ in my chest) am on the right track to succeed Jiji, the Bookman.

Maybe, I have already succeeded.