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The Jenkins/Galahad, Lancelot/Dulaque, Lucinda McCabe/Morgan Le Fay thing is obviously still in my head, and I'm still kind of in the mood for Jenkins!whump. So. Um. Yes. You get something dark and horrible drawing on Arthurian myth?
Title: Old Blood and New
Rating: R
Fandom: The Librarians (2014), Arthurian Myth
Characters/Pairings: Jenkins, Morgan le Fay, Eve, Flynn, Ezekiel, Cassandra, Jake, mention of Lancelot. Jenkins & Team (especially Ezekiel & Eve), unrequited Morgan/Lancelot, implied Eve/Flynn
Summary: Morgan Le Fay had waited a long time to find Galeas again. A long time, for old debts and old vengeances to come due. She knows where he is, now. There is still a price to be paid for a parent's sin. Whether his little Librarians can pick up the pieces once it's paid is another story altogether.
Wordcount: 7952
Warnings/Notes: Past rape, present coerced kissing, angst, vengeance, hurt/comfort, protectiveness, anger, families of choice, hope
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Old Blood and New
Rating: R
Fandom: The Librarians (2014), Arthurian Myth
Characters/Pairings: Jenkins, Morgan le Fay, Eve, Flynn, Ezekiel, Cassandra, Jake, mention of Lancelot. Jenkins & Team (especially Ezekiel & Eve), unrequited Morgan/Lancelot, implied Eve/Flynn
Summary: Morgan Le Fay had waited a long time to find Galeas again. A long time, for old debts and old vengeances to come due. She knows where he is, now. There is still a price to be paid for a parent's sin. Whether his little Librarians can pick up the pieces once it's paid is another story altogether.
Wordcount: 7952
Warnings/Notes: Past rape, present coerced kissing, angst, vengeance, hurt/comfort, protectiveness, anger, families of choice, hope
Disclaimer: Not mine
Old Blood and New
Eve Baird: "If she's so terrible, why are you two so cozy?"
Jenkins/Galahad: "We've both lived a long time. Paths crossed."
Eve Baird: "In my experience? You don't hate strangers quite that much."
--- Rule of Three
It was amazing, truly amazing, how quickly things could go from blissful silence to utter chaos around here. It hadn't always been like this. No, until a few months ago, the blissful silence had been the blissful norm. But throw in not one but four Librarians, plus Guardian, and the whole thing had gone to hell in a hand-basket before he could so much as blink.
Jenkins really was going to have to have a word with Judson about that. There was no reason whatsoever for them to still be camped out in his space. The Library was back where it belonged now. They had the whole thing up and ready to go, an archive, repository and command base all in one, and yet somehow, it was just sitting there instead. It was idling away on the other side of his door, while everybody for some godforsaken reason insisted on perpetually running amok through his Annex.
Admittedly, the Library was actually now anchored through the Annex instead of the Metropolitan Library, dimensional linkages being what they were, but that was still no excuse. It would take Judson fifteen minutes to fix that, tops. Ten if Charlene weighed in. Honestly, they were only doing this to torment him. He was sure of it.
"Jenkins!" a voice hollered from the main room, the full weight of several years of command behind it. "Jenkins, we need you. Now!"
Jenkins sighed heavily. It looked like Colonel Baird was in fine form this evening.
"Alright, alright," he muttered, tossing his tools onto the bench and shoving through the doors. "What on Earth is going on--"
He trailed to a stop, freezing in the doorway at a scene of pure deja vu. A blood trail led from the back door to the work table, and several Librarians were scattered around the room searching frantically for medical supplies while Colonel Baird tore open a jacket to reveal a wounded torso and pressed a hand down to stem the blood flow. It was the day they'd lost the Library all over again, the day this whole thing had started, except for a few crucial differences.
The Library wasn't lost. There was one extra Librarian in the room than there had been before. And the body on the worktable wasn't Flynn's.
It was Ezekiel's.
"What on Earth happened?" Jenkins demanded, breaking his paralysis and stalking forward to check the boy's pulse at the neck, cushioning Ezekiel's head against the wood when it tossed in his direction. "You went out to investigate a spate of dancing fever, not do battle with a platoon of spearmen!"
"I don't know!" Eve snapped, grabbing gauze and sterile wipes from Jake with one hand while keeping pressure on the wound with the other. "It was a trap. We barely even got through the door before it happened. Flynn!"
"Coming!" the Librarian bellowed, thundering down the stairs and throwing himself over the rail part-way down rather than waste time. "I've got it, I've got it. It's not going to help, but I've got it."
He shoved the vial of healing oil they'd taken to keeping here into Jenkins' hands, barely even looking at him in favour of arguing with Eve. Jenkins blinked, but obligingly tipped Ezekiel's head up to give him a draught. The thief attempted a smile for him, his hand shaking violently around Jenkins' wrist. Jenkins winced, not entirely sure what he was feeling about that.
"What do you mean?" Cassandra asked, coming over to the other side of the table and looking pleadingly at Flynn. "Why won't it help?"
"Because this is a magical wound," Flynn said grimly, and immediately, as though to prove him right, the oil started taking effect, slowing the blood flow almost to nothing, but not, unfortunately, stopping it completely. Colonel Baird raised her hand for a second, wiping the blood clear to check, but the wound remained stubbornly open in Ezekiel's side, oozing sullenly as if in protest for the attempt to remove it.
Magical. Yes indeed.
"Trap, you said," Jenkins prodded grimly, looking up from Ezekiel to meet Eve's eyes. "An effective one, if so. What made you think that?"
"No, she's right," Flynn said, shaking his head and turning so he could look at all of them. "We'd barely even started the investigation when we were attacked by a floating sword. It came out of nowhere, and there was no sign of a wielder. I didn't get the best look, but I think it might have been either Durendal or, worst case scenario, Fragarach."
Jenkins stared at him. "Oh, well," he managed. "No problem at all, then. Either a mystical slayer of evil men that's supposed to be buried in a cliff wall in France, or the sword of a trickster god that carries the lovely epithet of 'Retaliator'. That should pose us no difficulties whatsoever!"
"Yes, thank you, Jenkins," Flynn snapped back. "Great pep talk. Are you always this cheerful?"
"Pretty much," Stone interjected, waving a hand across Ezekiel's torso to draw their attention. Ezekiel coughed pointedly as well, glaring up at the lot of them, and Jenkins' realised with a start that he was still cradling the young man's head in his hands. He blinked, staring down in some mild confusion, while the younger Librarians attempted to get things back on track.
"Okay, so you think you know what we're dealing with," Cassandra started, pragmatically. "And, right, neither of them are good, but we've got it narrowed down to two. Can we get it down further?"
"It's not Durendal," Stone said firmly. "You said it's in France, you'd have heard if it moved. And you said it kills evil people. Jones ain't evil. Not so good, but he ain't evil."
"Thanks, I think," Ezekiel managed, squinting curiously up at him. "Not sure I agree. Worked hard for that bad reputation. But thank you."
"Shut up and keep breathin'," Jake growled, squeezing Ezekiel's knee gently.
"Actually, in this case 'evil' is more of a cultural judgement than a necessarily moral one ..." Jenkins started, mostly on autopilot, and promptly shut up again when every other person in the room proceeded to glare at him. "Never mind. I think you're right. Fragarach does seem more likely. It fits the wound pattern. Durendal usually kills outright. Fragarach's wounds, like Excalibur's, simply don't heal. And Fragarach's owners are historically a little more likely to loan it out for, shall we say, questionable goals."
"Goals like what?" Cassandra asked, with some trepidation that was, in Jenkins' opinion, wholly justified. He grimaced at her in perfect time with Flynn.
"It's a weapon from Irish mythology. It belonged first to a sea god who guarded the boundaries between worlds, and then to the champion of the gods, and then to a berserker hero who slaughtered thousands in the midst of a war, including almost everyone he loved." Flynn winced a little. "Fragarach forces people to tell the truth, and wounds from it don't heal. It's a weapon of truth and of death, so it has a special tendency to end up in the middle of civil wars and blood feuds. Hence 'Retaliator'."
Entirely unbidden, Jenkins felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Blood feud. Blood feud and ...
"You said this was a trap," he said, slowly and carefully. He looked around at them, five confused faces looking back, none of them with any obvious idea where this was going. "A trap for you, specifically? For the Librarians? Or just a trap for whoever showed up in the vicinity first?"
That didn't do much to enlighten the younger trio. Or Flynn either, from the looks of things, though he looked more grimly contemplative than they did. Working for Judson, having survived several betrayals of the Library, he had a better idea of the import of that question.
It was Colonel Baird, though, who looked at him with an expression of slowly dawning comprehension. Of course, she'd been there. She had a bit more information than most.
"... Could have been for us," Flynn answered slowly, looking between the two of them curiously. "There had been a couple of mundane inquiries. Health officials, that sort of thing. None of them ended up bleeding to death, as far as I know." He paused, his hands flitting uneasily. "Is there a reason the idea of retaliation leads you to think it was pointed at us? A specific one, I mean? I understand a certain amount of general paranoia, given the past few months, but you're looking a bit too grim for that. So ...?"
Eve didn't answer him. She kept her eyes locked on Jenkins instead, her hands pressing down on the slowly renewing blood flow from Ezekiel's wound. She didn't look happy. Well, Jenkins wasn't feeling particularly cheerful himself.
"Blood feud," she echoed softly, watching him. Sounding it out thoughtfully. He stared back impassively. His stomach was swimming gently around about level with his ankles, but he hadn't spent a lifetime of trials without learning how to keep them from his face. "You think it's ... You think this is about Camelot again, don't you? You think this is Dulaque?"
Jenkins snorted, a sharp little exhalation that might pass for humour provided you didn't examine it even remotely closely. He looked away, let his eyes slide outwards past the boy bleeding gently under his hands, past the Librarian looking grim and curious, out across the Annex that had used to be so blissfully, blissfully quiet. He looked away, and he snorted faintly.
"Could be," he agreed, gently easing Ezekiel's head back down onto the table and stepping back out of the way of their staring. Ezekiel reached after him automatically, snagging his sleeve with rapidly paling fingers. Circulation was becoming a problem for him, apparently. That was only going to get worse from here. Jenkins shook his head, clenching his hands into fists. "I was thinking more ... Dulaque was on a mission. Maybe he'd want revenge for its failure, retaliation, but this ... This is something else, I think. This is a different kind of familiar."
She stared at him, her mouth twisting with grief, with knowledge, and he saw by the edge of guilt in her eyes that she'd understood him. She'd followed that logic perfectly.
Which, unfortunately, probably meant that it was the right logic after all. If Baird's instincts aligned with his on this one, then that meant ...
"A trail of blood a thousand years long?" she asked quietly, and right on cue, right at that moment, the doors of the Annex opened, and an oh-so-familiar figure stepped through them into the light.
"Hello dears," Morgan Le Fay chirped, her teeth pearly white through her smile as she looked around, taking in the bloody scene with cheerful satisfaction. "Did you miss me?"
Oh yes, Jenkins thought distantly. This was not going to be a good day. Not at all.
"... Okay," Ezekiel managed, after a second of stunned silence in which Eve had armed herself, Jake and Cassandra had skittered protectively in front of him, Flynn had spun to blink in confusion at the intruder, and Morgan had simply stood and preened. "Bleeding to death because the evil sorceress lady told a magic sword to stab me. This day just keeps getting better."
"Ezekiel?" Colonel Baird warned, her gun trained on Morgan's head despite knowing for a fact that it would do sweet bugger all. "Shush. Okay? Commentary later."
Ezekiel huffed gamely at her. "Oh, sure. I'm the one bleeding, and I still get shushed. Thanks, Baird. Thanks for that."
"Ezekiel," Eve, Jake and Cassandra growled in unison. Flynn twitched a little, startled. Jenkins was too busy watching the elephant in the room. Or should he say, the viper.
"Now now," Morgan purred, prowling around them on a circuitous path deeper into the room, away from the still-open doors. The entire party shifted to follow her, making sure to never let her out of their sight. It wouldn't do them much good, Jenkins thought absently, though he'd been doing the same himself. More avidly than any of them, and with better reason, as he noticed her particular path was taking her in his general direction. He highly doubted that was accidental. "You should let the boy talk. He's right, you know. It's his wound. Surely that entitles him to some consideration?"
"What do you want?" someone growled, and after a confused second Jenkins realised it had been him. "How did you get in here, Morgan? What are you after?"
She stopped, turning in place with a click of her very elegant heels to smile at him. She'd skirted the rest of them altogether, moving to his end of the table, so that he was facing her head-on and only Flynn was really in a position to back him up directly. Eve, and her gun, were blocked by the Librarian, and everyone else would have to dodge the table. She'd wanted him. He'd realised that, he thought, before she'd ever even arrived. This was blood feud. She'd either wanted Eve or him, and the blood was deeper with him. More suitable to Fragarach's cause.
He might not know precisely what she wanted, but he had an idea that it wasn't Library related. Not directly. This was ... a far older cause.
"You know," she mused, smirking softly at him. "I always wondered what had happened to you, Galeas. You just ... disappeared one day. Huddled yourself away somewhere, all out of sight. Like a ... snail, wrinkling back into its shell. I even wondered if you were dead for a while."
Jenkins looked away. He caught Ezekiel's eyes accidentally, the injured Librarian's head twisted uncomfortably to keep an eye on them without jostling his wound, a clear of sight between him and the sorceress who'd stabbed him. Jenkins twitched faintly, and moved to block that line instinctively, without letting himself think about it too strongly. When he looked back at her, he found Morgan smiling knowingly at them both.
"I'm sure the thought grieved you," he said at last. He'd meant to growl it, meant it to be hard and cold. Instead, it had come out almost as a sigh. "Heartbroken, were you?"
"Absolutely stricken," she agreed, peeling her lips back from her teeth. There were vampires less vulpine-looking than Le Fay in a temper. He'd always thought that. "The idea that someone else might have killed you? I was utterly distraught, old friend."
"... Jenkins?" Flynn asked from beside him, slowly and warily. "Anything you guys want to share with the rest of the class?"
Morgan glanced at him, running her eyes up and down Flynn's body with visceral intent, and Flynn stepped instinctively backwards at exactly the same moment Eve stepped instinctively, furiously, forward. Morgan's grin spread, slick and terrible, and Eve shoved Flynn behind her.
"Librarian," she murmured, watching them. "The Librarian, I presume? I'd wondered where you'd got to. It's not like a Librarian to leave their Guardian unattended." She sneered. "And certainly not one of this calibre. She's a little slow up top, but physically she's quite the specimen. Don't you think?"
"Colonel Baird!" Jenkins interrupted, snapping an arm out to check a lunge if necessary. Eve didn't budge, though. Her expression was closer to a snarl than anything, her body covering Flynn's, but she wasn't as slow as Morgan thought she was. She stood her ground and kept herself admirably controlled.
Flynn, behind her, was slightly less so. But then, Librarians were always a little flighty.
"She does the job," Flynn agreed, temper simmering under the words and snapping in brown eyes. "More than well enough for me. I trust her."
Jenkins closed his eyes, old horror and old grief clawing to the surface, and when he opened them he saw that Morgan recognised it. He saw her smile, and the memories it held slick and dark as old blood. He flinched, and if it weren't for the fact that it would have left Ezekiel undefended, he'd have moved protectively in front of Eve instead. That fact was there, though, and it would have been useless besides. He stayed put.
"Trust," Morgan echoed softly. He heard the resonance in it, sadness and fury, pain and ancient hatred. He heard her vengeance, even now. "Such a terrible thing that is. I wonder if you've learned that yet. What do you think, Galeas?"
"Leave them alone," he answered softly. "You've already done enough. This isn't about them. This is about us. Tell me what you want, Morgan. And, if you could hurry up about it? Only we do have a pressing mortality issue behind us."
It was a risk, to remind her of it. To remind her of Ezekiel, bleeding gently behind them, and slightly worse now that Eve was too busy guarding Flynn to keep her hands on the wound. From the corner of his eye, Jenkins saw Jake realise that at the same time, jolting in place and moving around the table to stem the flow once more. Jenkins moved a hand, tapping gently at the healing oil on the table behind him, without ever daring to look away from Le Fay. Jake, not being as dim as he sometimes looked, grabbed for it immediately.
They were good people. They were young, and stupid sometimes, but they were good people. Damn Dulaque anyway for getting them into this. Dying for the Library was one thing. It was the fate of every Librarian, sooner or later. Dying for Dulaque's mistakes, for Jenkins' mistakes, was another matter altogether.
It was something he couldn't allow, and Morgan knew it. There was no hatred in her eyes when she looked at the boy she'd had stabbed. He was nothing more than a tool to her, and Jenkins knew exactly in what cause she planned to use it. Not the specifics, not the nature of the immediate prize, but he knew the overall shape of her desires.
Their feud was not a subtle endeavour. It never really had been.
"Alright," she said at last, that odd, static smile on her face. "Straight to business then. You do have a point." She tilted her head, peering around Jenkins' shoulder at Ezekiel. At the blood on Jake's hands, and Eve's. She looked back at him, fey and darkly satisfied. "I can heal him. You've figured that out, of course. The cause was mine, and that gives me a way around Fragarach's powers. But there will be a price. And you'll have realised, given the weapon that I used, that you're the one who'll have to pay it, Galeas. You have figured that out, I trust?"
"... It wasn't difficult," he said shortly. Eve growled beside him, quietly furious and perhaps mostly with herself, and Jenkins did his best to ignore it. Morgan was his problem now. She was all that mattered for the moment. "Though I have to admit, there isn't a lot I still have that I'd imagine you'd want to take from me. And if all you wanted was to kill me, you could have done that the last time you broke in here."
Every Librarian in the room jolted forward at that. 'Kill me' was, apparently, a magic phrase where they were concerned. Even Ezekiel, as pale and as immobile as he was, tried to heave himself upwards at the words. If it hadn't been so clearly playing into Morgan's hands, Jenkins might almost have been flattered.
As annoying as they were, it was rather nice to know they cared. It had been a while since the last people who'd done that.
"Nobody is killing anybody!" Ezekiel snapped out, grunting at the effort of it but grabbing at Jenkins' sleeve nonetheless. "I'm the one bleeding here. That means my vote is the one that matters, and I'm saying now. Nobody is killing anybody. No way."
"Damn straight," Flynn agreed, moving angrily forward around Eve. "We know what caused the wound now. We'll find another way. We kick the evil sorceress lady out, we dial up the Library, we go find that way. No ... no bargains, no deals, no nothing. Right? I mean, we're not exactly the US government here, but I'm pretty sure the Library doesn't negotiate with terrorists either."
Oddly, Jenkins felt a tiny bubble of humour at that. A rueful, absurd recognition of truth. He chuckled faintly. "Charlene certainly doesn't," he noted, and saw the look on Flynn's face while he pictured it. Morgan Le Fay, the most feared sorceress the world had ever seen, faced with Charlene at her most immovably bureaucratic. 'I'm sorry, the Library can't afford to entertain your demands right now, Ms Le Fay. Please come back next quarter.'
Now that would be a clash of titans he'd almost pay to see.
"Can we not joke about impending death over here?" Stone interrupted testily, glaring at them both. "If we want nobody to die, now would be a good time to come up with something. The oil isn't working so good no more."
"Indeed," Morgan cut in. "And as touching as this little show of loyalty is? There's only one thing that can heal that wound, and your Library doesn't have it. I know, of course, because I do. So if we could get back to the negotiations? That would be lovely."
The humour died. It hadn't been all that strong to start with, really. As horrible as it was to admit it, Jenkins agreed with her. Nice as it was to be defended, there was nothing they could do, and he, at least, had known it from the moment she walked in. Morgan Le Fay didn't get caught off guard. They'd been lucky once, they weren't going to get away with it again. She wouldn't have bothered to come if she hadn't been absolutely certain that things would go her way. It was time, he thought, to pay the piper.
Which, now that he thought about it, might have something to do with the outbreak of dancing sickness. He should make a note of that, provided she didn't kill him ...
"You don't have to worry, Galeas," she said sweetly, as if she'd heard the thought. "It's not as bad as all that. I don't want to kill you. The price for the boy's life is something ... much smaller than that. Don't worry."
He raised an eyebrow at her, idly incredulous. He felt strangely calm, for some reason, that sort of blank willingness that came from necessity. There was no point in struggling. From this point on, everything had been decided. It was soothing, in its way. Inevitability always was.
"You'll forgive me," he answered lightly, "if I don't find that very reassuring. There are no small prices with you, Morgan. You don't tend towards anything less than the ruin of everything your victims loved."
"Victims?" she asked, that flash of darkness showing clearly again. "Are you really sure that's the word you want to use, Galeas? Don't forget what weapon brought us here. Fragarach is an answer, not a question. There has to be a first blow before it strikes."
"Maybe," he said, light and floating on that lake of old hatred. He met her eyes. He didn't flinch. "Maybe there was. But it wasn't me who struck it. I may be the one to pay for it, but I wasn't the one who struck it. You know that, too. It doesn't matter to you. But you do know it."
She smiled, crookedly, and with something that might even have been sympathy. It was a hideous thing. It was worse than any hatred.
"I do," she said gently, moving forward to stand in front of him, to touch his cheek. Beside him, Eve twitched furiously, but she didn't move. Jenkins was rather grateful for that. Morgan ignored her, looking up at him sadly instead, her fingers gentle and terrible against his cheek. "We all pay for our parents' sins, Galeas. It's just your turn, that's all. It's just that time again, I'm afraid."
He closed his eyes. The calm cracked, a horror building beneath it. He reached up, very carefully, and pulled her hand away from his face. Her fingers curled in the process, claws against his cheek, but she let him do it. She let him pull it away.
"What do you want?" he asked quietly, as he opened his eyes. His hatred churned in his gut, a sickness that ate away at him. He'd always hated her. He'd never been able to help it. "Tell me. And do it fast."
"A kiss," she answered back, cold and quick and quiet. Her lip curled as he stared at her, stricken dumb in response. She saw the blank, white flinch inside him, and she smiled. "Give me a kiss, Galeas, and I'll cure the boy. I give you my word."
"... What?" he managed. He shook his head. The thought wouldn't fit. It wouldn't go inside his head. It wouldn't. "What are you ... What?"
"Okay," Ezekiel murmured behind him, his voice faint from loss of blood, and something else as well. "Okay, the creep factor here? Has just gone through the roof. I just thought you all should know."
... You have no idea, Jenkins thought distantly. She was looking at him, still. She wouldn't let him go. Creepiness was not the word for what was happening right now. Not even close.
"I'm not ..." he started, struggling blindly with it. "Morgan. I'm not my father. I'm not--"
"I know exactly who you're not," she hissed, low and savage. There was fury writhing under her surface. There was a deep and personal loathing in her when she looked at him. He saw it. He knew it for what it was. "Don't you even dare, Galeas. I know who you're not, and trust me. What's between him and me will be settled at a later date. I know he isn't dead. You wouldn't have had the balls to kill him. That vengeance I'll save for later. This? This is between you and me. This is about you and me. An ... experiment, if you will. I had thought you were dead, but since you're not ... there are things I've always wanted to know about you. Sir Galahad, so pure and so sad. I'll take my answer now, if you don't mind. And you might want to give it quickly. I don't think that boy will last much longer."
Jenkins shook his head. To clear it, not to answer her. It didn't work. It wouldn't work. His mind was a blind, blank wall of fear, of revulsion, of memory. It shouldn't be. What she asked was ... God, it was nothing. Against Ezekiel's life? It was nothing at all. But the thought still horrified him, and he only partly understood why.
She'd loved his father. She'd wanted him. And when he'd refused her for love of someone else, a married woman he could never hope to have, the wife of the half-brother Morgan already hated, her vengeance had been ... It had destroyed everything. It had left a trail of blood a thousand years long. It had driven his father mad, it had led them here. Everything Lancelot had done as Dulaque. Every price he'd wrung from the people in this room. It had started with her. It had started a thousand years ago. And now she ... now she wanted ...
"Say no," someone whispered behind him, so softly he thought for a second that he'd imagined it. That it had been a voice inside his head. But it wasn't. He looked down and to the side, to the hand suddenly tangled in his sleeve once more, and Ezekiel looked back at him calmly. There was something in his face, something that reminded Jenkins oddly of Collins Falls. Anger. Ezekiel didn't get angry very often. It was odd to see it here.
"Ezekiel ..." he started, shaking his head, and the thief cut him off impatiently, gripping angrily at Jenkins' wrist.
"No," he said, rough and hurried. The others were staring at them. Jenkins didn't think either of them really cared. "Look. I don't know what this is. I don't know where it's coming from. But I can tell that it's old, and it's bad, and you don't want to do this. You really, really don't want to do it. Say no. We'll find another way. Just say no."
And, oddly, that made things very simple. That made all the fear and the pain go away, or at least retreat to the point where he could control them. Ezekiel glared up at him, the way he'd done at a Conclave that felt honestly a hundred years ago, and as it had then, it made things once again so very, very simple.
"I can't," he said, very gently. He smiled, reaching down to gently detach Ezekiel's fingers, squeezing back when they grabbed at his hand instead. He stepped away, so that Ezekiel couldn't follow, and Colonel Baird, bless her, stepped in from the side to pull the thief back against her instead. Ezekiel struggled, a terribly mulish expression on his face, and Jenkins smiled at him. "I'm sorry, Ezekiel, but the lady's right. I can't say no."
"Don't be stupid," Ezekiel snapped, elbowing Eve solidly in the ribs. Impressive, given how much blood he'd lost so far. "She's doing this for a reason. She's going to hurt you. Tell her to go away, and do it quickly. Otherwise you're just playing into her hands!"
"Of course he is," Morgan offered, stepping up behind Jenkins and curling her arm around his waist. Jenkins shuddered involuntarily, and gritted his teeth, but he didn't step away. Too late for that now. "They always do, in the end. But ... just for you, just to say sorry for the sword, I'll make you some promises. How about that, hmm? There'll be no magic. There'll be no tricks, no spells or curses tied into it. It'll be just a kiss. Just some old-fashioned mouth-to-mouth between old friends. I promise."
"... That really doesn't help," Jenkins managed, thin and quiet while he steeled himself and grabbed what courage he had left. And then, while he still had the nerve, while he could still say it with an even tone, he turned to her, and he said it. "Alright. Alright. Do it. Take what you want, heal him, and get out. Please. Right now. Take what you want, and get the hell away from my Annex."
She blinked, somehow taken aback despite it all, and then she beamed at him. Bright and wide and viciously satisfied, and something slammed into the back of his knee. He toppled, dropping onto one knee with a crack and a grunt of shock, and she seized his face between her hands. He froze, imprisoned between them, and stared up at her in blank, white shock.
Ezekiel was right, he thought. He didn't want to do this. He really, really didn't. Her hands on his skin were more than he could bear, before they ever started. The thought of her mouth ...
"I can make it easier, if you like," she offered softly, her nails digging marks into his cheeks, like crescent moons across his skin. There was something wild and terrible in her eyes, hatred and a triumph like poison, a sympathy that was real and sickly-sweet. "I know I said no magic, but maybe you'd want just a little bit? Just to make me look like someone else. Someone you loved, maybe? I know the spell. Your mother gave it to me."
His vision greyed out, horror clawing all the way up his throat and into his mouth, and she laughed at him, wild and giddy and joyous. He understood, now. He knew what vengeance she was taking. Our parents' sins. Just not the parent he'd thought. She cradled his face between her palms, and she laughed at him.
"Oh, poor Galeas," she sang, leaning down to rest her forehead against his, a mockery of benediction. "But it wouldn't work for you, would it? You're not your father. You've never loved. There's no face in all the world I could wear. I had wondered. No-one's that virtuous, I thought. But you are, aren't you? Chaste Galahad, who's never known desire. Her magic wouldn't help you at all."
"Shut up and do the deed," another voice cut in, savage and shining with a much newer, much brighter sort of hatred. "Kiss him and be done, or I swear to God I will find a way to kill you where you stand."
Eve Baird. There was a world of fury in her voice, he thought, pressed flat and lethally controlled, and he had an inkling, then, that Morgan might have made herself a very dangerous enemy doing this. The Guardian had fought a battle across the threads of time itself, she'd stood beside her Librarian and denied the very unravelling of fate. She'd spilled Le Fay's blood once before. This time, Morgan might just have bitten off that little bit more than she could chew.
But not yet. Not just now. For now, there was a bargain to be fulfilled, no matter who wanted what or why. She knew it, and so did he.
There was magic in her mouth, when she kissed him. It wasn't active. She'd promised that, and Morgan Le Fay never lied. It wasn't doing anything. It was just there. It was part of her, woven through her, power leeched and bought at the cost of lives, and he gagged around it. She tasted like blood. Old blood, black and clotting. And flowers. Something sickly sweet. It seeped into him, knotted his stomach with heaving nausea. His hands shook, knotted into fists down at his sides, but he didn't strike her. He couldn't. Ezekiel's life depended on it, so he couldn't shove her away. No matter how desperately he wanted to.
He crumpled when she stopped. He dropped sideways off his knees, sitting in a sprawled and sudden heap on the floor. She let him go, one hand raised delicately into the air, like a maid who'd just dropped something nasty. He couldn't even bring himself to care. Someone touched him, gentle hands at his shoulders, and he all but threw himself away from them, raising a warding hand and trying not to flinch at the furious compassion in Flynn's eyes. He couldn't ... He couldn't. Not now. No.
"It is there," Morgan murmured, looking down at him. Something in her expression, something ... He didn't know. Strange. Wrong. She looked almost sad. "I can taste it. Underneath all that ... that sanctity. She used magic. She lied to him, she stole from him, she made life from his blood, and she used magic to do it. You were born in it, just like Arthur. I can taste it, Galeas. You were born in sin. A taint like that doesn't ever go away."
He closed his eyes. His hand dropped, trembling, to the floor.
"That's why you hated me," he managed, after a moment. "I thought it was just ... that she'd cheated you. Guinevere won his love, and my mother won his child, and you ... you got nothing. I thought that was why. But you ... you ..."
"I loved him," she said, and she had never looked more terrible. "I hunted him, I hurt him, I wreaked vengeance upon him. I'll do it again. But I never lied to him. I never wore her face to lure him into my bed. I wanted him to love me." She turned away, and she was as furious as he was. She had loathed him too, and vengeance was the only pleasure that kiss had brought her. "He would have killed her, if not for you. He would have made her pay for what she did. But he wouldn't kill you. His son, who so happily betrayed him. The woman who raped him lived for your sake. I've waited a long time to hurt you for that. I'll have to thank Lancelot when I meet him next. And your Librarians, of course. I wonder how long more it would have taken if they hadn't lured you back out of your little shell."
"Lady," Jake Stone said quietly. He'd come around beside Eve, Cassandra beside him, the both of them standing in front of Ezekiel. "You better leave, right now, and you better not come back. You hear me? You better not come near any one of us again, because if you do, I promise you, we will find a way to kill you very, very dead."
"We work for the Library," Flynn agreed. He stood up, wiping his hands down the front of his jacket carefully, trying to hide how badly they shook in his anger. He'd lasted longer than any other Librarian, Jenkins remembered. Flynn Carsen had killed Dracula, survived Excalibur, restrung the Loom of Fate. He was as bad an enemy as Colonel Baird. Maybe worse. "The Library has a lot of things in its collections. How much do you want to bet there's something there that will hurt even you?"
Morgan laughed. Her chest heaved, the tail end of a thousand-year rage, and she shook her head in pure denial in the face of them. She was past caring, Jenkins thought. She'd passed that point a long, long time ago.
"Such loyalty," she said, wiping her mouth as she looked at them. Wiping away a bad taste. He wasn't sorry. It was her fault, not his. "Another Round Table, Galeas? A Librarian and his Knights, this time? How long to make this one fall, hmm?"
"... Get out," he rasped. "Give Ezekiel his cure, and get out. You promised me. You hurt, but you never lie. You promised me, Le Fay."
She nodded. Calmed, a little. "So I did," she said, and shrugged at him. Something appeared in her hand, a leather water bottle capped in silver, and she tossed it idly to Colonel Baird.
Eve caught it one-handed, the other arm still wrapped around Ezekiel, and looked automatically at Jenkins for a clue. There was pain in her face. All the guilt in the world. He did his best to ignore it, for both their sakes.
"I can't see from here," he apologised, glancing up at Flynn instead. "Librarian?"
Flynn shook himself. It took some effort, from all appearances, but he shook away the anger for the moment, and focused in on the item in question. He blinked for a second, brain struggling to kick back into gear, and then he was back. Librarian more than Guardian once again.
"The, ah. The Flask of Tuireann?" he tried, tilting his head curiously. "Lugh had it. Fragarach's owner. That makes sense. Ah. It heals all wounds. Yes. That should ... It should work. Drink from it, it should work."
"Of course it will work," Morgan sneered, shaking her head. "I gave my word, and I don't do that lightly. You can even keep it for that collection of yours. A thank you, like I said. I might never have found him without you."
"Okay, we have the cure, we can kill her now, right?" someone snapped, genuinely snapped, and Jenkins found himself staring at Cassandra in some shock. He wasn't alone, either. She hadn't really spoken up since this started, but it was apparent that that control was starting to fray. Or, rather, that it had just snapped altogether.
"I'm okay with that," Ezekiel growled, in between the gulps of whatever-it-was that Eve was all but pouring down his throat. "I'm ... I am one hundred percent on board with that."
"Feisty," Morgan noted, but it didn't have her usual cheer. She looked ... oddly exhausted. Tired, and angry, and in no mood for them anymore. Jenkins clapped his hand across his mouth, stifling the urge to giggle. He knew the feeling, and he did not want to have to be sharing it with her. Maybe she felt the same. She gifted them with one last sneer, and turned away. "Some other time, maybe. Don't you have work to do? There was that dancing plague, if I remember correctly. I'm sure it'll keep you busy."
"Why, you goddamn--" Stone started, surging forward, but she was gone before he'd taken a step. Between one second and the next, vanishing like a long and extremely horrible nightmare. She left a hole in the air, and it dragged a breath from all of them after it. In the wake, Jenkins lay down very quietly, right there on the floor, and tried to pretend he didn't exist.
"Well," he murmured, mostly to himself, pressing his hands over his eyes. "That was ... fun. Let's never do that again, hmm?"
"If we'd listened to me, we wouldn't have done it the first time," Ezekiel said, somewhere rather closer than Jenkins had expected, and he yanked his hands down to blink up at the thief in startlement. Ezekiel crouched down beside him, pretty fluidly for a young man who'd had a hole in his side a few seconds ago, and shook his head in a very familiar, pained frustration. "That was stupid. I told you. She just wanted to hurt you. That was stupid."
Jenkins stared up at him. This strange young man who'd argued with him from the first, who'd bullied him out of his hole, who'd really listened to him for the first time in ... god, decades. Centuries, maybe. He looked up at Ezekiel, who'd made him face his father, who argued with a hole in his side not to be saved, who pretended not to give a damn but at the first sign of real hurt would step up to the plate. Jenkins looked at him and again, yet again, suddenly the world was very simple.
"... It was," he agreed, and there must have been something very odd in his expression, because Ezekiel leaned back from him in some alarm. He smiled, reaching up to grab Ezekiel's sleeve instead of the other way around for a change. "It was stupid. But it was worth it. After all the work I've put in getting you up to scratch, it would have been terrible having to replace you. No, no. It's better this way. Really."
Ezekiel blinked down at him, an incredulous expression on his face, and then, slowly, he started shaking his head from side to side. He started smiling, incredulous and amazed, and reached up to rub his hand across his eyes.
"One of these days," Ezekiel said, "I am going to figure you out. You are very strange. I say that as a Librarian. You know how weird you are, right?"
"I do," Jenkins nodded, grinning faintly up at the man from the floor. "I work for the Library too, you know. It tends to come with the territory. Just look at Judson. Look at Flynn."
"Don't bring me into this," the Librarian cut in, ambling over to look down at them curiously, something soft and very warm in his eyes. "I'm not weird. Not even remotely. You are all weird. I'm normal. Library normal. Some kind of normal. Which you all are not, and especially not you, Mr Knight of the Round Table."
"Yeah, well," Eve interrupted, stepping up beside him and scrubbing some of the blood from her hands so that she could hand one down to Jenkins. Who blinked at it for a second, before taking it carefully and allowing her and Flynn to heave him to his feet between them. "Weird or not," she said quietly, looking up at him. "He's our Knight, and that bitch is never touching him again."
Jenkins dipped his head, avoiding her eyes. "Don't make promises you can't keep," he warned softly, glancing around at them. All five of them, since they were all apparently trying to glue themselves to his side. He tried to shoulder back, out of range, and Ezekiel grabbed his wrist again. Not hard. Not enough to hold him. Just enough to make him pause, and listen to what they had to say.
"... Okay," Eve said, acknowledging the hit. "Okay. I won't promise she won't touch you. I get that I can't guarantee that. But I will promise this. I promise that she will go through me to get to you. And that no matter what happens, she will pay for trying. I've lost people before. I am not losing you. Not now. Not after everything."
He stared at her, a strange, quivery feeling in his gut. Not fear. Not like Morgan created. Something much more strange, much more unfamiliar than that. Something he hadn't felt in a very, very long time.
Hope. He thought it felt like hope.
"... You're not the first to offer that," he said quietly. "She was right. They didn't last long, the last time. They all ... It didn't end well."
"Yeah," Ezekiel said, leaning against him from the side, wearing that cocky, determined look he had sometimes. "But they were just knights, weren't they? We're Librarians. I reckon that might make a difference, don't you?"
... Possibly. Maybe it just might. But right now, even if it was going to, he really couldn't deal with it. Terror, horror and hope, all in quick succession, and about ten times too many people for one day. He needed a drink. He needed something vile and burning and incredibly alcoholic, to wash the taste of Morgan Le Fay out of his mouth. He needed ... somewhere to sit, and think, and be alone, for a long, long time. Right now. He'd hit his limits. He needed that right now.
"Perhaps," he managed, pulling back and this time managing to disentangle himself successfully. He moved away from them, one hand moving automatically to smooth his jacket front, straighten his tie. Flynn and Eve, at least, recognised that for the dismissal it was, before he ever said anything. They both flinched a little bit, grieved, but he couldn't help that for now. He just wasn't able. "If you all don't mind, though, perhaps it could ... make a difference somewhere else? Just for a little while. I have ... I'm sure I have work to do. I'm sure you have work to do. If you all wouldn't mind."
"... Okay?" Stone started, confused, and Ezekiel's face fell in damning disappointment, but then Cassandra moved. She took them both by the hands, tugging them away from him by her own momentum. They blinked at her, Jenkins blinked at her, but she remained unperturbed. She smiled over to him in plain, startling sympathy, and tugged them out behind her.
"Alone time," she agreed, nodding gently at him. "We can do that. We'll go for coffee?" A look at his expression, she nodded again. "Okay, no. We'll go for a day off? Research dancing plagues for a while. That works, right?"
"I..." he started, and then surrendered. He nodded gratefully. "That would be good. Thank you."
"No problem," she said, with a look that was very old for so young a face. Though he supposed a perpetual impending mortality would do that to someone. "I know the feeling. We'll see you tomorrow, okay? Take care of yourself."
Jenkins closed his eyes briefly, a mildly hysterical surge of humour running through him. He cut off the laugh, looking away from them instead.
"I always do," he said, and while it was lie, even still, maybe it wasn't quite so much of a lie as it would have been not so long ago. "Take care. All of you. I'll see you ... I'll see you tomorrow."
Blissful silence, interspersed with utter chaos, only a day apart. His retreat was a retreat no longer.
But then, he thought, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Sequel: Sins of the Father (Jenkins & Dulaque, Dulaque/Lancelot's reaction to what happened)
A/N: Sorry about that. I'm drawing on the version of the myths where Morgan le Fay nurses a violent unrequited love for Lancelot, and it partly motivated in her vengeance against Camelot by hatred and jealousy for Guinevere because of it. Galahad, being the product of Lancelot's rape-by-deception by yet another woman, in an echo of what was done to Morgan's mother Igraine by Uther to produce Arthur, catches the fallout from that here. The, ah. The legends apparently contain an awful lot of rape, deception, murder and vengeance. When Jenkins says Camelot was not quite the Shining City Lancelot remembered, he really, really wasn't kidding?
Fragarach is a real mythical sword, held by Manannán Mac Lir, then Lugh Lamfhada, then Cuchulainn in Irish Myth, though I'm tweaking the details of both it and Durendal here. The Flask of Tuireann is based off the magic pigskin flask Lugh took from the sons of Tuireann in vengeance for their slaying of his father. It heals all wounds. He refused to heal theirs. I'm ... in a mood here, yes? Heh. My apologies.
Eve Baird: "If she's so terrible, why are you two so cozy?"
Jenkins/Galahad: "We've both lived a long time. Paths crossed."
Eve Baird: "In my experience? You don't hate strangers quite that much."
--- Rule of Three
It was amazing, truly amazing, how quickly things could go from blissful silence to utter chaos around here. It hadn't always been like this. No, until a few months ago, the blissful silence had been the blissful norm. But throw in not one but four Librarians, plus Guardian, and the whole thing had gone to hell in a hand-basket before he could so much as blink.
Jenkins really was going to have to have a word with Judson about that. There was no reason whatsoever for them to still be camped out in his space. The Library was back where it belonged now. They had the whole thing up and ready to go, an archive, repository and command base all in one, and yet somehow, it was just sitting there instead. It was idling away on the other side of his door, while everybody for some godforsaken reason insisted on perpetually running amok through his Annex.
Admittedly, the Library was actually now anchored through the Annex instead of the Metropolitan Library, dimensional linkages being what they were, but that was still no excuse. It would take Judson fifteen minutes to fix that, tops. Ten if Charlene weighed in. Honestly, they were only doing this to torment him. He was sure of it.
"Jenkins!" a voice hollered from the main room, the full weight of several years of command behind it. "Jenkins, we need you. Now!"
Jenkins sighed heavily. It looked like Colonel Baird was in fine form this evening.
"Alright, alright," he muttered, tossing his tools onto the bench and shoving through the doors. "What on Earth is going on--"
He trailed to a stop, freezing in the doorway at a scene of pure deja vu. A blood trail led from the back door to the work table, and several Librarians were scattered around the room searching frantically for medical supplies while Colonel Baird tore open a jacket to reveal a wounded torso and pressed a hand down to stem the blood flow. It was the day they'd lost the Library all over again, the day this whole thing had started, except for a few crucial differences.
The Library wasn't lost. There was one extra Librarian in the room than there had been before. And the body on the worktable wasn't Flynn's.
It was Ezekiel's.
"What on Earth happened?" Jenkins demanded, breaking his paralysis and stalking forward to check the boy's pulse at the neck, cushioning Ezekiel's head against the wood when it tossed in his direction. "You went out to investigate a spate of dancing fever, not do battle with a platoon of spearmen!"
"I don't know!" Eve snapped, grabbing gauze and sterile wipes from Jake with one hand while keeping pressure on the wound with the other. "It was a trap. We barely even got through the door before it happened. Flynn!"
"Coming!" the Librarian bellowed, thundering down the stairs and throwing himself over the rail part-way down rather than waste time. "I've got it, I've got it. It's not going to help, but I've got it."
He shoved the vial of healing oil they'd taken to keeping here into Jenkins' hands, barely even looking at him in favour of arguing with Eve. Jenkins blinked, but obligingly tipped Ezekiel's head up to give him a draught. The thief attempted a smile for him, his hand shaking violently around Jenkins' wrist. Jenkins winced, not entirely sure what he was feeling about that.
"What do you mean?" Cassandra asked, coming over to the other side of the table and looking pleadingly at Flynn. "Why won't it help?"
"Because this is a magical wound," Flynn said grimly, and immediately, as though to prove him right, the oil started taking effect, slowing the blood flow almost to nothing, but not, unfortunately, stopping it completely. Colonel Baird raised her hand for a second, wiping the blood clear to check, but the wound remained stubbornly open in Ezekiel's side, oozing sullenly as if in protest for the attempt to remove it.
Magical. Yes indeed.
"Trap, you said," Jenkins prodded grimly, looking up from Ezekiel to meet Eve's eyes. "An effective one, if so. What made you think that?"
"No, she's right," Flynn said, shaking his head and turning so he could look at all of them. "We'd barely even started the investigation when we were attacked by a floating sword. It came out of nowhere, and there was no sign of a wielder. I didn't get the best look, but I think it might have been either Durendal or, worst case scenario, Fragarach."
Jenkins stared at him. "Oh, well," he managed. "No problem at all, then. Either a mystical slayer of evil men that's supposed to be buried in a cliff wall in France, or the sword of a trickster god that carries the lovely epithet of 'Retaliator'. That should pose us no difficulties whatsoever!"
"Yes, thank you, Jenkins," Flynn snapped back. "Great pep talk. Are you always this cheerful?"
"Pretty much," Stone interjected, waving a hand across Ezekiel's torso to draw their attention. Ezekiel coughed pointedly as well, glaring up at the lot of them, and Jenkins' realised with a start that he was still cradling the young man's head in his hands. He blinked, staring down in some mild confusion, while the younger Librarians attempted to get things back on track.
"Okay, so you think you know what we're dealing with," Cassandra started, pragmatically. "And, right, neither of them are good, but we've got it narrowed down to two. Can we get it down further?"
"It's not Durendal," Stone said firmly. "You said it's in France, you'd have heard if it moved. And you said it kills evil people. Jones ain't evil. Not so good, but he ain't evil."
"Thanks, I think," Ezekiel managed, squinting curiously up at him. "Not sure I agree. Worked hard for that bad reputation. But thank you."
"Shut up and keep breathin'," Jake growled, squeezing Ezekiel's knee gently.
"Actually, in this case 'evil' is more of a cultural judgement than a necessarily moral one ..." Jenkins started, mostly on autopilot, and promptly shut up again when every other person in the room proceeded to glare at him. "Never mind. I think you're right. Fragarach does seem more likely. It fits the wound pattern. Durendal usually kills outright. Fragarach's wounds, like Excalibur's, simply don't heal. And Fragarach's owners are historically a little more likely to loan it out for, shall we say, questionable goals."
"Goals like what?" Cassandra asked, with some trepidation that was, in Jenkins' opinion, wholly justified. He grimaced at her in perfect time with Flynn.
"It's a weapon from Irish mythology. It belonged first to a sea god who guarded the boundaries between worlds, and then to the champion of the gods, and then to a berserker hero who slaughtered thousands in the midst of a war, including almost everyone he loved." Flynn winced a little. "Fragarach forces people to tell the truth, and wounds from it don't heal. It's a weapon of truth and of death, so it has a special tendency to end up in the middle of civil wars and blood feuds. Hence 'Retaliator'."
Entirely unbidden, Jenkins felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Blood feud. Blood feud and ...
"You said this was a trap," he said, slowly and carefully. He looked around at them, five confused faces looking back, none of them with any obvious idea where this was going. "A trap for you, specifically? For the Librarians? Or just a trap for whoever showed up in the vicinity first?"
That didn't do much to enlighten the younger trio. Or Flynn either, from the looks of things, though he looked more grimly contemplative than they did. Working for Judson, having survived several betrayals of the Library, he had a better idea of the import of that question.
It was Colonel Baird, though, who looked at him with an expression of slowly dawning comprehension. Of course, she'd been there. She had a bit more information than most.
"... Could have been for us," Flynn answered slowly, looking between the two of them curiously. "There had been a couple of mundane inquiries. Health officials, that sort of thing. None of them ended up bleeding to death, as far as I know." He paused, his hands flitting uneasily. "Is there a reason the idea of retaliation leads you to think it was pointed at us? A specific one, I mean? I understand a certain amount of general paranoia, given the past few months, but you're looking a bit too grim for that. So ...?"
Eve didn't answer him. She kept her eyes locked on Jenkins instead, her hands pressing down on the slowly renewing blood flow from Ezekiel's wound. She didn't look happy. Well, Jenkins wasn't feeling particularly cheerful himself.
"Blood feud," she echoed softly, watching him. Sounding it out thoughtfully. He stared back impassively. His stomach was swimming gently around about level with his ankles, but he hadn't spent a lifetime of trials without learning how to keep them from his face. "You think it's ... You think this is about Camelot again, don't you? You think this is Dulaque?"
Jenkins snorted, a sharp little exhalation that might pass for humour provided you didn't examine it even remotely closely. He looked away, let his eyes slide outwards past the boy bleeding gently under his hands, past the Librarian looking grim and curious, out across the Annex that had used to be so blissfully, blissfully quiet. He looked away, and he snorted faintly.
"Could be," he agreed, gently easing Ezekiel's head back down onto the table and stepping back out of the way of their staring. Ezekiel reached after him automatically, snagging his sleeve with rapidly paling fingers. Circulation was becoming a problem for him, apparently. That was only going to get worse from here. Jenkins shook his head, clenching his hands into fists. "I was thinking more ... Dulaque was on a mission. Maybe he'd want revenge for its failure, retaliation, but this ... This is something else, I think. This is a different kind of familiar."
She stared at him, her mouth twisting with grief, with knowledge, and he saw by the edge of guilt in her eyes that she'd understood him. She'd followed that logic perfectly.
Which, unfortunately, probably meant that it was the right logic after all. If Baird's instincts aligned with his on this one, then that meant ...
"A trail of blood a thousand years long?" she asked quietly, and right on cue, right at that moment, the doors of the Annex opened, and an oh-so-familiar figure stepped through them into the light.
"Hello dears," Morgan Le Fay chirped, her teeth pearly white through her smile as she looked around, taking in the bloody scene with cheerful satisfaction. "Did you miss me?"
Oh yes, Jenkins thought distantly. This was not going to be a good day. Not at all.
"... Okay," Ezekiel managed, after a second of stunned silence in which Eve had armed herself, Jake and Cassandra had skittered protectively in front of him, Flynn had spun to blink in confusion at the intruder, and Morgan had simply stood and preened. "Bleeding to death because the evil sorceress lady told a magic sword to stab me. This day just keeps getting better."
"Ezekiel?" Colonel Baird warned, her gun trained on Morgan's head despite knowing for a fact that it would do sweet bugger all. "Shush. Okay? Commentary later."
Ezekiel huffed gamely at her. "Oh, sure. I'm the one bleeding, and I still get shushed. Thanks, Baird. Thanks for that."
"Ezekiel," Eve, Jake and Cassandra growled in unison. Flynn twitched a little, startled. Jenkins was too busy watching the elephant in the room. Or should he say, the viper.
"Now now," Morgan purred, prowling around them on a circuitous path deeper into the room, away from the still-open doors. The entire party shifted to follow her, making sure to never let her out of their sight. It wouldn't do them much good, Jenkins thought absently, though he'd been doing the same himself. More avidly than any of them, and with better reason, as he noticed her particular path was taking her in his general direction. He highly doubted that was accidental. "You should let the boy talk. He's right, you know. It's his wound. Surely that entitles him to some consideration?"
"What do you want?" someone growled, and after a confused second Jenkins realised it had been him. "How did you get in here, Morgan? What are you after?"
She stopped, turning in place with a click of her very elegant heels to smile at him. She'd skirted the rest of them altogether, moving to his end of the table, so that he was facing her head-on and only Flynn was really in a position to back him up directly. Eve, and her gun, were blocked by the Librarian, and everyone else would have to dodge the table. She'd wanted him. He'd realised that, he thought, before she'd ever even arrived. This was blood feud. She'd either wanted Eve or him, and the blood was deeper with him. More suitable to Fragarach's cause.
He might not know precisely what she wanted, but he had an idea that it wasn't Library related. Not directly. This was ... a far older cause.
"You know," she mused, smirking softly at him. "I always wondered what had happened to you, Galeas. You just ... disappeared one day. Huddled yourself away somewhere, all out of sight. Like a ... snail, wrinkling back into its shell. I even wondered if you were dead for a while."
Jenkins looked away. He caught Ezekiel's eyes accidentally, the injured Librarian's head twisted uncomfortably to keep an eye on them without jostling his wound, a clear of sight between him and the sorceress who'd stabbed him. Jenkins twitched faintly, and moved to block that line instinctively, without letting himself think about it too strongly. When he looked back at her, he found Morgan smiling knowingly at them both.
"I'm sure the thought grieved you," he said at last. He'd meant to growl it, meant it to be hard and cold. Instead, it had come out almost as a sigh. "Heartbroken, were you?"
"Absolutely stricken," she agreed, peeling her lips back from her teeth. There were vampires less vulpine-looking than Le Fay in a temper. He'd always thought that. "The idea that someone else might have killed you? I was utterly distraught, old friend."
"... Jenkins?" Flynn asked from beside him, slowly and warily. "Anything you guys want to share with the rest of the class?"
Morgan glanced at him, running her eyes up and down Flynn's body with visceral intent, and Flynn stepped instinctively backwards at exactly the same moment Eve stepped instinctively, furiously, forward. Morgan's grin spread, slick and terrible, and Eve shoved Flynn behind her.
"Librarian," she murmured, watching them. "The Librarian, I presume? I'd wondered where you'd got to. It's not like a Librarian to leave their Guardian unattended." She sneered. "And certainly not one of this calibre. She's a little slow up top, but physically she's quite the specimen. Don't you think?"
"Colonel Baird!" Jenkins interrupted, snapping an arm out to check a lunge if necessary. Eve didn't budge, though. Her expression was closer to a snarl than anything, her body covering Flynn's, but she wasn't as slow as Morgan thought she was. She stood her ground and kept herself admirably controlled.
Flynn, behind her, was slightly less so. But then, Librarians were always a little flighty.
"She does the job," Flynn agreed, temper simmering under the words and snapping in brown eyes. "More than well enough for me. I trust her."
Jenkins closed his eyes, old horror and old grief clawing to the surface, and when he opened them he saw that Morgan recognised it. He saw her smile, and the memories it held slick and dark as old blood. He flinched, and if it weren't for the fact that it would have left Ezekiel undefended, he'd have moved protectively in front of Eve instead. That fact was there, though, and it would have been useless besides. He stayed put.
"Trust," Morgan echoed softly. He heard the resonance in it, sadness and fury, pain and ancient hatred. He heard her vengeance, even now. "Such a terrible thing that is. I wonder if you've learned that yet. What do you think, Galeas?"
"Leave them alone," he answered softly. "You've already done enough. This isn't about them. This is about us. Tell me what you want, Morgan. And, if you could hurry up about it? Only we do have a pressing mortality issue behind us."
It was a risk, to remind her of it. To remind her of Ezekiel, bleeding gently behind them, and slightly worse now that Eve was too busy guarding Flynn to keep her hands on the wound. From the corner of his eye, Jenkins saw Jake realise that at the same time, jolting in place and moving around the table to stem the flow once more. Jenkins moved a hand, tapping gently at the healing oil on the table behind him, without ever daring to look away from Le Fay. Jake, not being as dim as he sometimes looked, grabbed for it immediately.
They were good people. They were young, and stupid sometimes, but they were good people. Damn Dulaque anyway for getting them into this. Dying for the Library was one thing. It was the fate of every Librarian, sooner or later. Dying for Dulaque's mistakes, for Jenkins' mistakes, was another matter altogether.
It was something he couldn't allow, and Morgan knew it. There was no hatred in her eyes when she looked at the boy she'd had stabbed. He was nothing more than a tool to her, and Jenkins knew exactly in what cause she planned to use it. Not the specifics, not the nature of the immediate prize, but he knew the overall shape of her desires.
Their feud was not a subtle endeavour. It never really had been.
"Alright," she said at last, that odd, static smile on her face. "Straight to business then. You do have a point." She tilted her head, peering around Jenkins' shoulder at Ezekiel. At the blood on Jake's hands, and Eve's. She looked back at him, fey and darkly satisfied. "I can heal him. You've figured that out, of course. The cause was mine, and that gives me a way around Fragarach's powers. But there will be a price. And you'll have realised, given the weapon that I used, that you're the one who'll have to pay it, Galeas. You have figured that out, I trust?"
"... It wasn't difficult," he said shortly. Eve growled beside him, quietly furious and perhaps mostly with herself, and Jenkins did his best to ignore it. Morgan was his problem now. She was all that mattered for the moment. "Though I have to admit, there isn't a lot I still have that I'd imagine you'd want to take from me. And if all you wanted was to kill me, you could have done that the last time you broke in here."
Every Librarian in the room jolted forward at that. 'Kill me' was, apparently, a magic phrase where they were concerned. Even Ezekiel, as pale and as immobile as he was, tried to heave himself upwards at the words. If it hadn't been so clearly playing into Morgan's hands, Jenkins might almost have been flattered.
As annoying as they were, it was rather nice to know they cared. It had been a while since the last people who'd done that.
"Nobody is killing anybody!" Ezekiel snapped out, grunting at the effort of it but grabbing at Jenkins' sleeve nonetheless. "I'm the one bleeding here. That means my vote is the one that matters, and I'm saying now. Nobody is killing anybody. No way."
"Damn straight," Flynn agreed, moving angrily forward around Eve. "We know what caused the wound now. We'll find another way. We kick the evil sorceress lady out, we dial up the Library, we go find that way. No ... no bargains, no deals, no nothing. Right? I mean, we're not exactly the US government here, but I'm pretty sure the Library doesn't negotiate with terrorists either."
Oddly, Jenkins felt a tiny bubble of humour at that. A rueful, absurd recognition of truth. He chuckled faintly. "Charlene certainly doesn't," he noted, and saw the look on Flynn's face while he pictured it. Morgan Le Fay, the most feared sorceress the world had ever seen, faced with Charlene at her most immovably bureaucratic. 'I'm sorry, the Library can't afford to entertain your demands right now, Ms Le Fay. Please come back next quarter.'
Now that would be a clash of titans he'd almost pay to see.
"Can we not joke about impending death over here?" Stone interrupted testily, glaring at them both. "If we want nobody to die, now would be a good time to come up with something. The oil isn't working so good no more."
"Indeed," Morgan cut in. "And as touching as this little show of loyalty is? There's only one thing that can heal that wound, and your Library doesn't have it. I know, of course, because I do. So if we could get back to the negotiations? That would be lovely."
The humour died. It hadn't been all that strong to start with, really. As horrible as it was to admit it, Jenkins agreed with her. Nice as it was to be defended, there was nothing they could do, and he, at least, had known it from the moment she walked in. Morgan Le Fay didn't get caught off guard. They'd been lucky once, they weren't going to get away with it again. She wouldn't have bothered to come if she hadn't been absolutely certain that things would go her way. It was time, he thought, to pay the piper.
Which, now that he thought about it, might have something to do with the outbreak of dancing sickness. He should make a note of that, provided she didn't kill him ...
"You don't have to worry, Galeas," she said sweetly, as if she'd heard the thought. "It's not as bad as all that. I don't want to kill you. The price for the boy's life is something ... much smaller than that. Don't worry."
He raised an eyebrow at her, idly incredulous. He felt strangely calm, for some reason, that sort of blank willingness that came from necessity. There was no point in struggling. From this point on, everything had been decided. It was soothing, in its way. Inevitability always was.
"You'll forgive me," he answered lightly, "if I don't find that very reassuring. There are no small prices with you, Morgan. You don't tend towards anything less than the ruin of everything your victims loved."
"Victims?" she asked, that flash of darkness showing clearly again. "Are you really sure that's the word you want to use, Galeas? Don't forget what weapon brought us here. Fragarach is an answer, not a question. There has to be a first blow before it strikes."
"Maybe," he said, light and floating on that lake of old hatred. He met her eyes. He didn't flinch. "Maybe there was. But it wasn't me who struck it. I may be the one to pay for it, but I wasn't the one who struck it. You know that, too. It doesn't matter to you. But you do know it."
She smiled, crookedly, and with something that might even have been sympathy. It was a hideous thing. It was worse than any hatred.
"I do," she said gently, moving forward to stand in front of him, to touch his cheek. Beside him, Eve twitched furiously, but she didn't move. Jenkins was rather grateful for that. Morgan ignored her, looking up at him sadly instead, her fingers gentle and terrible against his cheek. "We all pay for our parents' sins, Galeas. It's just your turn, that's all. It's just that time again, I'm afraid."
He closed his eyes. The calm cracked, a horror building beneath it. He reached up, very carefully, and pulled her hand away from his face. Her fingers curled in the process, claws against his cheek, but she let him do it. She let him pull it away.
"What do you want?" he asked quietly, as he opened his eyes. His hatred churned in his gut, a sickness that ate away at him. He'd always hated her. He'd never been able to help it. "Tell me. And do it fast."
"A kiss," she answered back, cold and quick and quiet. Her lip curled as he stared at her, stricken dumb in response. She saw the blank, white flinch inside him, and she smiled. "Give me a kiss, Galeas, and I'll cure the boy. I give you my word."
"... What?" he managed. He shook his head. The thought wouldn't fit. It wouldn't go inside his head. It wouldn't. "What are you ... What?"
"Okay," Ezekiel murmured behind him, his voice faint from loss of blood, and something else as well. "Okay, the creep factor here? Has just gone through the roof. I just thought you all should know."
... You have no idea, Jenkins thought distantly. She was looking at him, still. She wouldn't let him go. Creepiness was not the word for what was happening right now. Not even close.
"I'm not ..." he started, struggling blindly with it. "Morgan. I'm not my father. I'm not--"
"I know exactly who you're not," she hissed, low and savage. There was fury writhing under her surface. There was a deep and personal loathing in her when she looked at him. He saw it. He knew it for what it was. "Don't you even dare, Galeas. I know who you're not, and trust me. What's between him and me will be settled at a later date. I know he isn't dead. You wouldn't have had the balls to kill him. That vengeance I'll save for later. This? This is between you and me. This is about you and me. An ... experiment, if you will. I had thought you were dead, but since you're not ... there are things I've always wanted to know about you. Sir Galahad, so pure and so sad. I'll take my answer now, if you don't mind. And you might want to give it quickly. I don't think that boy will last much longer."
Jenkins shook his head. To clear it, not to answer her. It didn't work. It wouldn't work. His mind was a blind, blank wall of fear, of revulsion, of memory. It shouldn't be. What she asked was ... God, it was nothing. Against Ezekiel's life? It was nothing at all. But the thought still horrified him, and he only partly understood why.
She'd loved his father. She'd wanted him. And when he'd refused her for love of someone else, a married woman he could never hope to have, the wife of the half-brother Morgan already hated, her vengeance had been ... It had destroyed everything. It had left a trail of blood a thousand years long. It had driven his father mad, it had led them here. Everything Lancelot had done as Dulaque. Every price he'd wrung from the people in this room. It had started with her. It had started a thousand years ago. And now she ... now she wanted ...
"Say no," someone whispered behind him, so softly he thought for a second that he'd imagined it. That it had been a voice inside his head. But it wasn't. He looked down and to the side, to the hand suddenly tangled in his sleeve once more, and Ezekiel looked back at him calmly. There was something in his face, something that reminded Jenkins oddly of Collins Falls. Anger. Ezekiel didn't get angry very often. It was odd to see it here.
"Ezekiel ..." he started, shaking his head, and the thief cut him off impatiently, gripping angrily at Jenkins' wrist.
"No," he said, rough and hurried. The others were staring at them. Jenkins didn't think either of them really cared. "Look. I don't know what this is. I don't know where it's coming from. But I can tell that it's old, and it's bad, and you don't want to do this. You really, really don't want to do it. Say no. We'll find another way. Just say no."
And, oddly, that made things very simple. That made all the fear and the pain go away, or at least retreat to the point where he could control them. Ezekiel glared up at him, the way he'd done at a Conclave that felt honestly a hundred years ago, and as it had then, it made things once again so very, very simple.
"I can't," he said, very gently. He smiled, reaching down to gently detach Ezekiel's fingers, squeezing back when they grabbed at his hand instead. He stepped away, so that Ezekiel couldn't follow, and Colonel Baird, bless her, stepped in from the side to pull the thief back against her instead. Ezekiel struggled, a terribly mulish expression on his face, and Jenkins smiled at him. "I'm sorry, Ezekiel, but the lady's right. I can't say no."
"Don't be stupid," Ezekiel snapped, elbowing Eve solidly in the ribs. Impressive, given how much blood he'd lost so far. "She's doing this for a reason. She's going to hurt you. Tell her to go away, and do it quickly. Otherwise you're just playing into her hands!"
"Of course he is," Morgan offered, stepping up behind Jenkins and curling her arm around his waist. Jenkins shuddered involuntarily, and gritted his teeth, but he didn't step away. Too late for that now. "They always do, in the end. But ... just for you, just to say sorry for the sword, I'll make you some promises. How about that, hmm? There'll be no magic. There'll be no tricks, no spells or curses tied into it. It'll be just a kiss. Just some old-fashioned mouth-to-mouth between old friends. I promise."
"... That really doesn't help," Jenkins managed, thin and quiet while he steeled himself and grabbed what courage he had left. And then, while he still had the nerve, while he could still say it with an even tone, he turned to her, and he said it. "Alright. Alright. Do it. Take what you want, heal him, and get out. Please. Right now. Take what you want, and get the hell away from my Annex."
She blinked, somehow taken aback despite it all, and then she beamed at him. Bright and wide and viciously satisfied, and something slammed into the back of his knee. He toppled, dropping onto one knee with a crack and a grunt of shock, and she seized his face between her hands. He froze, imprisoned between them, and stared up at her in blank, white shock.
Ezekiel was right, he thought. He didn't want to do this. He really, really didn't. Her hands on his skin were more than he could bear, before they ever started. The thought of her mouth ...
"I can make it easier, if you like," she offered softly, her nails digging marks into his cheeks, like crescent moons across his skin. There was something wild and terrible in her eyes, hatred and a triumph like poison, a sympathy that was real and sickly-sweet. "I know I said no magic, but maybe you'd want just a little bit? Just to make me look like someone else. Someone you loved, maybe? I know the spell. Your mother gave it to me."
His vision greyed out, horror clawing all the way up his throat and into his mouth, and she laughed at him, wild and giddy and joyous. He understood, now. He knew what vengeance she was taking. Our parents' sins. Just not the parent he'd thought. She cradled his face between her palms, and she laughed at him.
"Oh, poor Galeas," she sang, leaning down to rest her forehead against his, a mockery of benediction. "But it wouldn't work for you, would it? You're not your father. You've never loved. There's no face in all the world I could wear. I had wondered. No-one's that virtuous, I thought. But you are, aren't you? Chaste Galahad, who's never known desire. Her magic wouldn't help you at all."
"Shut up and do the deed," another voice cut in, savage and shining with a much newer, much brighter sort of hatred. "Kiss him and be done, or I swear to God I will find a way to kill you where you stand."
Eve Baird. There was a world of fury in her voice, he thought, pressed flat and lethally controlled, and he had an inkling, then, that Morgan might have made herself a very dangerous enemy doing this. The Guardian had fought a battle across the threads of time itself, she'd stood beside her Librarian and denied the very unravelling of fate. She'd spilled Le Fay's blood once before. This time, Morgan might just have bitten off that little bit more than she could chew.
But not yet. Not just now. For now, there was a bargain to be fulfilled, no matter who wanted what or why. She knew it, and so did he.
There was magic in her mouth, when she kissed him. It wasn't active. She'd promised that, and Morgan Le Fay never lied. It wasn't doing anything. It was just there. It was part of her, woven through her, power leeched and bought at the cost of lives, and he gagged around it. She tasted like blood. Old blood, black and clotting. And flowers. Something sickly sweet. It seeped into him, knotted his stomach with heaving nausea. His hands shook, knotted into fists down at his sides, but he didn't strike her. He couldn't. Ezekiel's life depended on it, so he couldn't shove her away. No matter how desperately he wanted to.
He crumpled when she stopped. He dropped sideways off his knees, sitting in a sprawled and sudden heap on the floor. She let him go, one hand raised delicately into the air, like a maid who'd just dropped something nasty. He couldn't even bring himself to care. Someone touched him, gentle hands at his shoulders, and he all but threw himself away from them, raising a warding hand and trying not to flinch at the furious compassion in Flynn's eyes. He couldn't ... He couldn't. Not now. No.
"It is there," Morgan murmured, looking down at him. Something in her expression, something ... He didn't know. Strange. Wrong. She looked almost sad. "I can taste it. Underneath all that ... that sanctity. She used magic. She lied to him, she stole from him, she made life from his blood, and she used magic to do it. You were born in it, just like Arthur. I can taste it, Galeas. You were born in sin. A taint like that doesn't ever go away."
He closed his eyes. His hand dropped, trembling, to the floor.
"That's why you hated me," he managed, after a moment. "I thought it was just ... that she'd cheated you. Guinevere won his love, and my mother won his child, and you ... you got nothing. I thought that was why. But you ... you ..."
"I loved him," she said, and she had never looked more terrible. "I hunted him, I hurt him, I wreaked vengeance upon him. I'll do it again. But I never lied to him. I never wore her face to lure him into my bed. I wanted him to love me." She turned away, and she was as furious as he was. She had loathed him too, and vengeance was the only pleasure that kiss had brought her. "He would have killed her, if not for you. He would have made her pay for what she did. But he wouldn't kill you. His son, who so happily betrayed him. The woman who raped him lived for your sake. I've waited a long time to hurt you for that. I'll have to thank Lancelot when I meet him next. And your Librarians, of course. I wonder how long more it would have taken if they hadn't lured you back out of your little shell."
"Lady," Jake Stone said quietly. He'd come around beside Eve, Cassandra beside him, the both of them standing in front of Ezekiel. "You better leave, right now, and you better not come back. You hear me? You better not come near any one of us again, because if you do, I promise you, we will find a way to kill you very, very dead."
"We work for the Library," Flynn agreed. He stood up, wiping his hands down the front of his jacket carefully, trying to hide how badly they shook in his anger. He'd lasted longer than any other Librarian, Jenkins remembered. Flynn Carsen had killed Dracula, survived Excalibur, restrung the Loom of Fate. He was as bad an enemy as Colonel Baird. Maybe worse. "The Library has a lot of things in its collections. How much do you want to bet there's something there that will hurt even you?"
Morgan laughed. Her chest heaved, the tail end of a thousand-year rage, and she shook her head in pure denial in the face of them. She was past caring, Jenkins thought. She'd passed that point a long, long time ago.
"Such loyalty," she said, wiping her mouth as she looked at them. Wiping away a bad taste. He wasn't sorry. It was her fault, not his. "Another Round Table, Galeas? A Librarian and his Knights, this time? How long to make this one fall, hmm?"
"... Get out," he rasped. "Give Ezekiel his cure, and get out. You promised me. You hurt, but you never lie. You promised me, Le Fay."
She nodded. Calmed, a little. "So I did," she said, and shrugged at him. Something appeared in her hand, a leather water bottle capped in silver, and she tossed it idly to Colonel Baird.
Eve caught it one-handed, the other arm still wrapped around Ezekiel, and looked automatically at Jenkins for a clue. There was pain in her face. All the guilt in the world. He did his best to ignore it, for both their sakes.
"I can't see from here," he apologised, glancing up at Flynn instead. "Librarian?"
Flynn shook himself. It took some effort, from all appearances, but he shook away the anger for the moment, and focused in on the item in question. He blinked for a second, brain struggling to kick back into gear, and then he was back. Librarian more than Guardian once again.
"The, ah. The Flask of Tuireann?" he tried, tilting his head curiously. "Lugh had it. Fragarach's owner. That makes sense. Ah. It heals all wounds. Yes. That should ... It should work. Drink from it, it should work."
"Of course it will work," Morgan sneered, shaking her head. "I gave my word, and I don't do that lightly. You can even keep it for that collection of yours. A thank you, like I said. I might never have found him without you."
"Okay, we have the cure, we can kill her now, right?" someone snapped, genuinely snapped, and Jenkins found himself staring at Cassandra in some shock. He wasn't alone, either. She hadn't really spoken up since this started, but it was apparent that that control was starting to fray. Or, rather, that it had just snapped altogether.
"I'm okay with that," Ezekiel growled, in between the gulps of whatever-it-was that Eve was all but pouring down his throat. "I'm ... I am one hundred percent on board with that."
"Feisty," Morgan noted, but it didn't have her usual cheer. She looked ... oddly exhausted. Tired, and angry, and in no mood for them anymore. Jenkins clapped his hand across his mouth, stifling the urge to giggle. He knew the feeling, and he did not want to have to be sharing it with her. Maybe she felt the same. She gifted them with one last sneer, and turned away. "Some other time, maybe. Don't you have work to do? There was that dancing plague, if I remember correctly. I'm sure it'll keep you busy."
"Why, you goddamn--" Stone started, surging forward, but she was gone before he'd taken a step. Between one second and the next, vanishing like a long and extremely horrible nightmare. She left a hole in the air, and it dragged a breath from all of them after it. In the wake, Jenkins lay down very quietly, right there on the floor, and tried to pretend he didn't exist.
"Well," he murmured, mostly to himself, pressing his hands over his eyes. "That was ... fun. Let's never do that again, hmm?"
"If we'd listened to me, we wouldn't have done it the first time," Ezekiel said, somewhere rather closer than Jenkins had expected, and he yanked his hands down to blink up at the thief in startlement. Ezekiel crouched down beside him, pretty fluidly for a young man who'd had a hole in his side a few seconds ago, and shook his head in a very familiar, pained frustration. "That was stupid. I told you. She just wanted to hurt you. That was stupid."
Jenkins stared up at him. This strange young man who'd argued with him from the first, who'd bullied him out of his hole, who'd really listened to him for the first time in ... god, decades. Centuries, maybe. He looked up at Ezekiel, who'd made him face his father, who argued with a hole in his side not to be saved, who pretended not to give a damn but at the first sign of real hurt would step up to the plate. Jenkins looked at him and again, yet again, suddenly the world was very simple.
"... It was," he agreed, and there must have been something very odd in his expression, because Ezekiel leaned back from him in some alarm. He smiled, reaching up to grab Ezekiel's sleeve instead of the other way around for a change. "It was stupid. But it was worth it. After all the work I've put in getting you up to scratch, it would have been terrible having to replace you. No, no. It's better this way. Really."
Ezekiel blinked down at him, an incredulous expression on his face, and then, slowly, he started shaking his head from side to side. He started smiling, incredulous and amazed, and reached up to rub his hand across his eyes.
"One of these days," Ezekiel said, "I am going to figure you out. You are very strange. I say that as a Librarian. You know how weird you are, right?"
"I do," Jenkins nodded, grinning faintly up at the man from the floor. "I work for the Library too, you know. It tends to come with the territory. Just look at Judson. Look at Flynn."
"Don't bring me into this," the Librarian cut in, ambling over to look down at them curiously, something soft and very warm in his eyes. "I'm not weird. Not even remotely. You are all weird. I'm normal. Library normal. Some kind of normal. Which you all are not, and especially not you, Mr Knight of the Round Table."
"Yeah, well," Eve interrupted, stepping up beside him and scrubbing some of the blood from her hands so that she could hand one down to Jenkins. Who blinked at it for a second, before taking it carefully and allowing her and Flynn to heave him to his feet between them. "Weird or not," she said quietly, looking up at him. "He's our Knight, and that bitch is never touching him again."
Jenkins dipped his head, avoiding her eyes. "Don't make promises you can't keep," he warned softly, glancing around at them. All five of them, since they were all apparently trying to glue themselves to his side. He tried to shoulder back, out of range, and Ezekiel grabbed his wrist again. Not hard. Not enough to hold him. Just enough to make him pause, and listen to what they had to say.
"... Okay," Eve said, acknowledging the hit. "Okay. I won't promise she won't touch you. I get that I can't guarantee that. But I will promise this. I promise that she will go through me to get to you. And that no matter what happens, she will pay for trying. I've lost people before. I am not losing you. Not now. Not after everything."
He stared at her, a strange, quivery feeling in his gut. Not fear. Not like Morgan created. Something much more strange, much more unfamiliar than that. Something he hadn't felt in a very, very long time.
Hope. He thought it felt like hope.
"... You're not the first to offer that," he said quietly. "She was right. They didn't last long, the last time. They all ... It didn't end well."
"Yeah," Ezekiel said, leaning against him from the side, wearing that cocky, determined look he had sometimes. "But they were just knights, weren't they? We're Librarians. I reckon that might make a difference, don't you?"
... Possibly. Maybe it just might. But right now, even if it was going to, he really couldn't deal with it. Terror, horror and hope, all in quick succession, and about ten times too many people for one day. He needed a drink. He needed something vile and burning and incredibly alcoholic, to wash the taste of Morgan Le Fay out of his mouth. He needed ... somewhere to sit, and think, and be alone, for a long, long time. Right now. He'd hit his limits. He needed that right now.
"Perhaps," he managed, pulling back and this time managing to disentangle himself successfully. He moved away from them, one hand moving automatically to smooth his jacket front, straighten his tie. Flynn and Eve, at least, recognised that for the dismissal it was, before he ever said anything. They both flinched a little bit, grieved, but he couldn't help that for now. He just wasn't able. "If you all don't mind, though, perhaps it could ... make a difference somewhere else? Just for a little while. I have ... I'm sure I have work to do. I'm sure you have work to do. If you all wouldn't mind."
"... Okay?" Stone started, confused, and Ezekiel's face fell in damning disappointment, but then Cassandra moved. She took them both by the hands, tugging them away from him by her own momentum. They blinked at her, Jenkins blinked at her, but she remained unperturbed. She smiled over to him in plain, startling sympathy, and tugged them out behind her.
"Alone time," she agreed, nodding gently at him. "We can do that. We'll go for coffee?" A look at his expression, she nodded again. "Okay, no. We'll go for a day off? Research dancing plagues for a while. That works, right?"
"I..." he started, and then surrendered. He nodded gratefully. "That would be good. Thank you."
"No problem," she said, with a look that was very old for so young a face. Though he supposed a perpetual impending mortality would do that to someone. "I know the feeling. We'll see you tomorrow, okay? Take care of yourself."
Jenkins closed his eyes briefly, a mildly hysterical surge of humour running through him. He cut off the laugh, looking away from them instead.
"I always do," he said, and while it was lie, even still, maybe it wasn't quite so much of a lie as it would have been not so long ago. "Take care. All of you. I'll see you ... I'll see you tomorrow."
Blissful silence, interspersed with utter chaos, only a day apart. His retreat was a retreat no longer.
But then, he thought, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Sequel: Sins of the Father (Jenkins & Dulaque, Dulaque/Lancelot's reaction to what happened)
A/N: Sorry about that. I'm drawing on the version of the myths where Morgan le Fay nurses a violent unrequited love for Lancelot, and it partly motivated in her vengeance against Camelot by hatred and jealousy for Guinevere because of it. Galahad, being the product of Lancelot's rape-by-deception by yet another woman, in an echo of what was done to Morgan's mother Igraine by Uther to produce Arthur, catches the fallout from that here. The, ah. The legends apparently contain an awful lot of rape, deception, murder and vengeance. When Jenkins says Camelot was not quite the Shining City Lancelot remembered, he really, really wasn't kidding?
Fragarach is a real mythical sword, held by Manannán Mac Lir, then Lugh Lamfhada, then Cuchulainn in Irish Myth, though I'm tweaking the details of both it and Durendal here. The Flask of Tuireann is based off the magic pigskin flask Lugh took from the sons of Tuireann in vengeance for their slaying of his father. It heals all wounds. He refused to heal theirs. I'm ... in a mood here, yes? Heh. My apologies.
Tags:
- dark,
- fanfic,
- gen,
- librarians,
- mythology