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[niceofyoutoask]

Carwood Lipton was unsettled.
He eyed the bookshelf, and the variety of titles displayed, and his mouth set in a thin line of irritation.

It wasn’t so much that the bookcase was eager to provide him with titles like United States Army Logistics: The Normandy Invasion, 1944 and Manufacturing Systems Engineering: A Unified Approach to Manufacturing

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[soldier_singled]

"Hey, Lip," says Joe, quietly, coming to stand beside him. Pretty much all of the guys might think that Joe's a loudmouth and nothing but, but he's got his quiet times, just like anybody else. Today's one of them, with flour clinging to his nails and the scent of fresh bread following him around.

"What's eatin' ya? Furniture not playin' fair?"

[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton looked beside him, arms still crossed, as Joe appeared. He smelled like his mother's kitchen when she'd taken to baking - a hobby his wife had never favoured. It was a welcome change from the remembered smell of the blizzard and the Ardennes.

He turned he gaze back to the bookshelf, irritated by the fact the titles hadn't changed. "It's a magical bookshelf." Lipton thought he might have been attempting to go for an amused tone, but it came out surprisingly peevish. "It probably could play fair, but is choosing not to." And now he just sounded like a pouting child, which he really wasn't all that impressed with.

[soldier_singled]

"Where would be the fun in playin' fair?" says Joe, with a bit of a wan smile. He ain't quite gotten over Helen weeping in his arms like that. There's an ache that he ain't quite gotten to go away yet.

"What're you after, anyway?"

[niceofyoutoask]

"Something that isn't this." Lipton reached out and selected a book at random, flipping it open and thumbing through the pages. His gaze settled on a map of Europe, coloured lines converging and swerving away, meant to summarize the movements of hundreds of thousands of men in uniform. He snapped the book closed and shoved it back into the bookshelf.

"It wouldn't even matter what it gave me." Lipton said after a moment. "I was just looking for something not already on my mind. Naturally, it provided me with just that."

[aintthatbad]

It ain't right spending all that time by yourself. The guys'll get suspicious. Skinny isn't harming anyone, if everyone just lets him be, but he's got to keep up appearances. He's got to mingle a little.

Anyway, people'll ask less questions if they think you're off being all bookwormy. That's much more acceptable than drinking by yourself most of the day.

His clever plan is clever inasmuch as it gets him off the hook for a little while by planting a Skinny sighting. It's not so clever in that there's Lipton, and now Skinny has to talk to him.

He sort of sidles up behind his shoulder and looks over the titles. "You know, I think they got some Westerns on the bottom shelf."

[niceofyoutoask]

Despite Lipton's efforts to check in on the boys, Skinny's always a tricky one. He's more evasive than anything else to Lipton's questioning of how he's holding up, but he knows that it's not that easy. Seeing as how Lipton himself wasn't letting on that he wasn't getting on perfectly, it would be hypocritical to think he had any right to press Skinny for something he didn't want to share.

He looks where Skinny's suggesting, and sure enough there they are.

"Huh," Lipton was absolutely sure that they hadn't been there a minute ago. "So they do." He reached down and grabbed a few off the shelf, bringing them up for a closer look. He held one out to Skinny. "Want one yourself?"

[aintthatbad]

He accepts the battered paperback and glances at the cover. "Don't think I've read this one." He offers up a quick smile. "Thanks very much."

At that point, he should be ready to go. He's put in his appearance, nothing more necessary... but hell, who's he fooling? He just got here.

He shifts his weight on his feet. "You, uh. Had your mind on something else? Book, I mean," he adds, belatedly.

Shit. Smooth, Skinny, real smooth.

[niceofyoutoask]

Despite the fact that Lipton was vaguely preoccupied with his own difficultites, he couldn't help but notice that Skinny was ill at ease. It almost unsettled him more, that after everything, talking to a Toccoa man like Skinny would be this awkward. It made him feel like he'd done something wrong, somehow. Failed them. He'd tried to keep them together, keep them sane, but evidently he hadn't done his job well enough.

"I guess I was thinking about what I didn't want to read about, instead of what I did." Lipton rubbed the back of his head, knowing he wasn't being entirely truthful. "Hard to know how these things work, huh?"

[bennet_beauty]

Jane watched Carwood very carefully as she adjusted Lydia's grip of her hair and her stance at her hip. It seemed as though he were quite deeply in thought, or perhaps silent conversation, and she did not wish to intrude. However, her curiosity was deeply riled and she did so often enjoy his company. "Shall it respond?" she gently remarked. "Or shall you stare some more?"

[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton turned slightly as he heard Miss Bennet's soft voice, and some of the tension drained from his shoulders. She had a way of sweeping in, calm and eternally maternal, and it was somehow always faintly soothing. He offered her a somewhat strained smile, and uncrossed his arms to reach out and gently shake one of Lydia's small hands in greeting.

"Did this thing come with an instruction manual, do you think?" Lipton asked in answer, frowning at the still unappealing book options. "Because otherwise all I can think of is to either keep staring or give it a few firm whacks."

[bennet_beauty]

"I do not believe I have ever seen a tome as such, no," Jane said with deep sympathy at the same time as bemusement trickled through her voice. She smiled pleasantly and shifted Lydia in her arms. "Would you like to take her? She is quite sleepy," she noted, as Lydia still sucked softly upon her thumb and peered up at Carwood with half-lidded eyes.

[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton looked at the contented, sleepy face of the beautiful little girl, and found that yes, he really did want to hold her. He gave Miss Bennet a half-smile, and nodded. He reached out for her, and gently took her into his arms, easily balancing her little form in his arms. Who would have thought that his Toccoa training would come in handy for the holding of babies?

"Hey there, little Miss Lydia." Lipton said softly as she settled in. He looked up at Miss Bennet. "Is she sleeping alright at night?"

[remnantofjoseph]

It isn't unusual to come across people staring at the shelves like that, though Joe tries to take everything they give him in stride. Half the time, what the shelf probably finds ironic or stinging turns out to be useful (articles on the future of prosthesis), or disturbing enough that all he can do is laugh (articles from the future on amputee fetishists). Mostly, he's learned not to be picky about what he reads, pulling books on everything from origami to oceanography just to pass the time.

Coming up beside Lipton with more of a limp than a walk, today, Joe eyes the current shuffle of spines with muted interest, muttering a rough greeting. "I've got some books back at the house, if people picking apart everything we did ain't what you're into."

[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton turned slightly to give Joe a welcoming nod as he came to stand beside him. "Yeah," He said after a moment of further perusal of the offered booktitles. "That'd be good, thanks."

There was something about the idea of reading a book about the war that made Lipton's skin crawl. It might be that he never finished living through it (as he was assured that he did), or just that he was far too involved in the subject to be able to read about it objectively. He knew that they had won, and that was enough for now. He didn't want to know what historians sixty years in the future had deemed right or wrong, didn't want to know what retrospective opinion was.

As for reading the industry books, well... He'd been a machinest's apprentice before the war, and of all the things at home he wanted to be reminded about, work wasn't particularly one of them.

"How'd you manage to find some actually worth reading?"

[remnantofjoseph]

"Combination of not giving a shit and not having hangups about my job," he shoots back, giving Lipton a cursory amount of shit.

Under his own hands and gaze, the shelf likes to shuffle in plenty about the Bulge, with auspicious and inviting titles about roads to Hell; but it's just as likely weave in journals on polio or questionable magazines full of barely dressed men. Better, then, that he not stick around and end up with one in his hands. Pivoting on his good leg, he rolls one shoulder and jerks his head toward the door, walking toward it. "Honestly, half the things are shit Gene found. He likes this place and it likes him right back, I guess."

[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton shook his head good-naturedly, amused and expecting nothing less from Joe Toye. He'd had it coming.

It wasn't hard to turn his back on the bookshelf, having had enough of it for one day, if not a month. Besides, it wasn't as if going without something to read was the biggest sacrifice he'd ever made.

He followed Joe towards the door, starting to get used to the other man's uneven gait. "How's it like you?"

[realnicetrip]

"Bookcase playing up again?" Harry said, coming into the rec room and finding Lipton giving the shelving a stare he was starting to know all too well. "It's got a nasty sense of humour; guy I knew had a total breakdown when it wouldn't give him anything but those self-help books."

He leaned past Lipton and grabbed one off the shelf, flicking through. All technical crap, nothing he could make head or tail of, but he could guess what the bookcase's game was. "Let me guess. Trying to make you homesick, right?"

[niceofyoutoask]

"It really is a malicious son of a bitch of a magical bookshelf, Sir." He knew he should start calling Lieutenant Welsh 'Harry', but it still seemed too damn weird. Honestly, Lipton was a straightforward man. He liked facts, and honesty, and knowing why. The island in general, and the bookshelf in particular really jarred with his nature.

Lipton picked up one of the books on industrial manufacturing, and flipped through the pages. Diagrams, explanations, comparisons, most of it fairly familiar.

"It's a reminder all right." And not really a welcome one, and not only the books about the war. There were aspects of home that he liked, but his time at International Nickel hadn't exactly been his fondest memory. "I used to work in a factory back home, but don't tell the draft board, huh?" He added by way of explanation. He knew it wasn't really common knowledge that he had done more than work at his family's boarding house.

[realnicetrip]

"Don't you worry, your secret's safe with me," Harry said, tapping the side of his nose. It was still a little weird to him how formal Lipton acted around him; he'd got the impression that not everyone he knew on the island had arrived from quite the same point in their shared past. It was the only explanation for why Lip here was still acting like he was First Sergeant. He wondered if he ought to tell him he got promoted, or if it'd jinx it. Harry decided to just shrug it off instead.

"Staring at it won't make it behave better, I've tried that," he said, putting the book back. "Neither does swearing at it, kicking it, or talking nice. C'mon, let's go someplace else. It's easy to get all morbid about these things, but that's what it wants you to do."

[niceofyoutoask]

And it was when you had to start deducting what bookshelves wanted you to do that Lipton just felt tired.

"Good to know, Sir." And really, Harry Welsh going off on a bookshelf was far too easy to picture. Especially if he'd done all of above in close proximity.

Just before Lipton had fallen asleep in the Rachamps convent and woken up on the beach, Speirs had told him that his battlefield comission had gone through and it would be official in a few days. Moving from a noncom to an officer would be difficult enough, but it still seemed vaguely unreal to him. That whole conversation, with the Belgian girls choir singing in the background, the candlelight flickering away, and the long-sought-after warmth finally seeping into his bones, had been entirely surreal. It seemed almost presumptive to act like he'd been promoted, when it hadn't happened for him, hadn't been made real. So he continued with the Sir, even if they were no longer in the army, and even if the officers thought he shouldn't.

"Where'd you have in mind?"