Hanukkah 4: Take Five
Dec. 18th, 2006 06:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valmoraSo I'm posting this barely after dawn. So sue me. Actually, if you're Terry Pratchett or his lawyer, please don't. Or if you're Kubo Tite or his lawyer. Since I don't own these characters and whatnot.
The Library of the Gotei Thirteen is a greater thing than many know; it is connected not only to Seireitei and all of Soul Society but also to the human world, to all the places in the five worlds that are capable of creation.
It is, therefore, Jyuushirou’s duty to see that all the things meant for a Library stay there, protected from others or others protected from them, depending on their purposes – and that is why the Library sometimes stinks of old blood, the greater books remembering past exploitations of men.
But the human music, oh! The new sort – the old sort, recorded as sound on the thin thin whispering silver of memory and time, are hidden in the back – that comes from the human world, that gives him a strange sort of joy.
He takes the storage devices to Kyouraku and bids him listen, the two of them on the floor of Kyouraku’s office, Kyouraku spread across the wood-paneling of the floor and Jyuushirou seated neatly, as the sound pours into the air.
“I could dance to it if I had five feet,” Kyouraku says, whimsically, his fingers twitching, and Jyuushirou can almost hear his own heart beating in time with the music, one-two-three-four-five, uneven and ragged and swaying through the notes, giving itself up to the rhythm.
He returns the device to the Library the next morning, but not to the shelf – never to the shelf; he could not bear it. To his desk, to pull out sometimes, just to listen. To remember that this place is not just duty to Seireitei but also to the humans, and that to be master of the Library is to have the history of all the world.
The Library of the Gotei Thirteen is a greater thing than many know; it is connected not only to Seireitei and all of Soul Society but also to the human world, to all the places in the five worlds that are capable of creation.
It is, therefore, Jyuushirou’s duty to see that all the things meant for a Library stay there, protected from others or others protected from them, depending on their purposes – and that is why the Library sometimes stinks of old blood, the greater books remembering past exploitations of men.
But the human music, oh! The new sort – the old sort, recorded as sound on the thin thin whispering silver of memory and time, are hidden in the back – that comes from the human world, that gives him a strange sort of joy.
He takes the storage devices to Kyouraku and bids him listen, the two of them on the floor of Kyouraku’s office, Kyouraku spread across the wood-paneling of the floor and Jyuushirou seated neatly, as the sound pours into the air.
“I could dance to it if I had five feet,” Kyouraku says, whimsically, his fingers twitching, and Jyuushirou can almost hear his own heart beating in time with the music, one-two-three-four-five, uneven and ragged and swaying through the notes, giving itself up to the rhythm.
He returns the device to the Library the next morning, but not to the shelf – never to the shelf; he could not bear it. To his desk, to pull out sometimes, just to listen. To remember that this place is not just duty to Seireitei but also to the humans, and that to be master of the Library is to have the history of all the world.
