FOTD + Carrot Cake
Title: Books
Prompt: FOTD: Ellipsis; Carrot Cake 27: Stir
Extra: Milkshake
Rating: G
Word Count: 546
Summary: Clara has a quiet conversation with her favorite librarian.
Note: Comes around the time of Gotterdammerung. AKA, no Jacob. D: Also, dear God, I haven’t written about Julius in forever D| BUT SO MUCH AWKWARD AND ADORABLE AND *flails*
“So…” She looked around with her hands behind her back, trying to find something, anything, that might inspire her, that might spark a conversation. “How’s everything going on here? It’s… rather quiet…” And her sentence trailed off into nothing. Again. That always seemed to happen between them. She’d say something and trail off, or she’d say something that unintentionally made him blush, which would in turn make her blush as well.
Needless to say, a gratuitous amount of ellipses were used by them both.
“It’s… It’s going well, Clara. And you?” He, too, was looking around, with verdant eyes that matched her own almost perfectly. Over at the bookshelves, over at the desks, over at the chairs and the people who were sitting in them. He was always like that. Friendly but shy. Amiable but a little awkward. But she supposed she contributed to that as well. She, too, was slightly awkward around him. But she had her reasons. She did hold him in high esteem after all. Not as much as she loved Jacob (a small smile played on her lips), but a little more than she loved Amadé and Marcus (a warm feeling rose up in her chest). She couldn’t quite explain it.
“Clara…?”
“What?” She stirred a bit, gave a start. He was staring at her-politely, of course-a small smile on his face. The kind of smile that made a different sort of warm feeling rise up in her chest. Different from the feeling she got when she thought of Amadé and Marcus. “What…?” she managed to stammer out this time. It didn’t sound so abrupt, so harsh.
“I… asked how you were doing.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, moving around the front desk and beginning to walk toward a few nearby bookshelves. It was as if he could organize them without even looking at the labels, or at least by only looking at them for a split second.
“Oh.” She kept her hands behind her back, following him around the library with a soft smile on her face. He didn’t seem to mind that she was following him around, watching him while he did his work. Which made her feel somewhat better, somewhat happier. “I’m doing well, too. School’s going nicely, and actually, I was just about to go visit Amadé.”
He looked over to her at that moment, a strange, new glint in his eyes. As if he, too, had stirred from some sort of torpor. “Amadé?”
She blinked. “Yes… Amadé… The man you talk to… the one who comes and visits you, too. You know.” She smiled. “Amadé.”
“I know who he is…” He gained the same sort of smile on his face. “I was just surprised that you mentioned him.”
A shrug. He always seemed to like Amadé’s attention. Not that he didn’t like hers… he just seemed to like Amadé’s… better. It was like there was something he wasn’t telling her. Something involving Amadé. Something he didn’t want her to know, like the texts of this library. Sometimes they hid words, too. Sometimes they hid meanings from their readers. And sometimes, those readers wanted that text. They wanted more.
She smiled to herself. She was the reader. Julius was the book.