Open RP in the Library
((OOC, introspection ahoy! Feel free to skip to the bottom if you don't want to slog through it all. XD))
Aziraphale was lonely.
He'd been avoiding going out of his rooms since he'd returned to the castle, mostly. The few times he'd ventured out, it seemed something inevitably went wrong. The first time, he'd unwittingly transformed himself into an infant, and not more than a few days later he'd attended the sorting of God, seen Crowley cruelly unexpectedly hurt by Her rejection, and later the same day, whisked them both out of the castle for a brawl the likes of which they hadn't seen since before the Arrangement had been declared--and which had ended with himself nearly discorporated by accident and Crowley's arm in a full-length cast.
No, his own room had seemed a very good place to be, at least until the signs of the battle had healed sufficiently that no one would be alarmed by them. Both he and Crowley had been drained by the fight, and as their strength had returned, most of their efforts had gone into repairing the worst of their respective injuries and into trying (unsuccessfully) to mend Crowley's arm. Lesser hurts had been left to heal at their own rate.
Aziraphale had walked with a cane for several days until the lingering soreness in his right calf and thigh had faded, and he still favored that leg slightly, but it wasn't too noticeable now. The deep bruises along his left cheekbone and jaw, caused by Crowley's wing slamming into his face repeatedly, were nearly invisible as long as that side of his face wasn't in direct sunlight. His much-abused left wing was still bothering him a bit, having been used as a blunt weapon and then stomped on savagely. It had taken delicate and extremely awkward repair work to get it more or less fixed, and he wasn't sure he'd got it quite right, so he'd decided to keep it tucked safely away until Crowley returned from his unexpected holiday and then ask the demon to have a look at it. Presuming, of course, that Crowley was in any sort of mood to talk to him by then.
He wished he knew what had prompted his friend to flee the castle so abruptly (and there was no question that was precisely what Crowley had done; Aziraphale knew him too well after six thousand years' acquaintance to mistake it.) He worried that it might have been the encounter with the Lord or the fight, but if that were the case then Crowley would surely have gone as soon as he'd recovered the strength to do so, not nearly a fortnight later and after returning to work. Had he run into Her again, or had something else happened?
A discreet inquiry to John indicated that Crowley either hadn't told the sorcerer why he was going, or else he'd asked him to keep it to himself. The thought of approaching Lily also crossed his mind, but his lingering misgivings about the girl make him hesitate. Even after three perfectly pleasant encounters with Lily, somehow he still wasn't quite sure what to make of her.
There was, of course, always Her. But given Her actions at Her Sorting, and the fact that he had already demanded far more of Her attention recently than was usually considered appropriate for a mere Principality, Aziraphale really didn't want to push his luck.
A few days of puttering around alone in his room, fretting quietly about the whole sad state of affairs, eventually resulted in an intolerable case of cabin fever. When he finally felt driven to leave his sanctuary, Aziraphale headed with the instinctive surety of a migratory bird for the one place in Hogwarts familiar and comfortable enough to bring some peace to his restless mind: the library.
It didn't matter that the books here were all about strange, esoteric Wizarding subjects and written by authors Aziraphale had never heard of (apart from the small section of Muggle literature, where the sole resident Bible sat keeping company with a worn copy of I, Robot on one side and a dog-eared paperback romance on the other.) They were books, and some of them were very old, and there was nothing like the feel and smell of old leather, parchment and glue, with a judicious amount of dust over all, to make him feel at home.
Breathing in the familiar scent with relish, he wandered among the stacks looking every inch the proverbial absent-minded professor with his dated tweed suit and spectacles. Here and there he took down a volume with a title that looked interesting and flipped through it carefully, occasionally adding one to the small stack he was collecting, utterly absorbed in what he was doing.