Intellectual Piracy

Sleep hangs heavy on her eyelids. Outside the wind roars, but she is warm, buried under three layers of duvet and blankets. The Sandman comes for her, and she waits for him in a half stupor. Any second now she will succumb.

On her bedside table, her phone chimes three times, loudly. The sound rings through the room, the vibrations reverberate through the wood. Ishita startles awake.

Her eyes fly open on refex. The display is dim, but in the dark its light assaults her pupils. She blinks rapidly, once, twice, thrice, and by then her screen has timed out, so she stretches a reluctant arm across her body and taps around blindly until her fingertips thud onto glass. 

She squints down at her notifications, propping herself up on an elbow, and opens up her messages. There are three unread, all from Gul, two photographs and the caption “Told you so.”

You don’t have to do this, Ishita thinks. Close your eyes, go back to sleep, reply at some reasonable time in the morning. It is, she leans in close, three in the morning, you do not have to deal with this right now.

Her exhale is closer to a sigh as she downloads the pictures. The first is a shot of the grey-green cover of ‘Clash of Kings’, taken in dim light against the background of a patterned carpet Ishita thinks she might recognise, but knows is not from the Khattak family home.

Something twists in her gut.

The second image is of a page from the book, and scanning the words briefly confirms what she had already suspected, that Gul is responding to a conversation about the Red Priestess that she’d thought they’d abandoned hours ago.

Gul had finished the fourth Game of Thrones book over a year ago, and never started the fifth. 

Leave it, the voice in her head says, the voice of logic and reason, the voice that knows she has to work in the morning, that she can’t afford any more late nights. He doesn’t know that you’ve read them already.

She types out: “Did u really break into a bookstore in the middle of the night just to prove a point?”

His response is almost immediate. “Duh,” followed by “Not a bookstore,” which is so obviously besides the point that she almost turns off her phone there and then.

She doesn’t. She sends back a single question mark and then collapses back on to her mattress, facing the ceiling and wondering why she ever thought becoming friends with Gul Khattak was a good idea.

Another notification chime. Another photo, this time an unmistakable hardwood door, viewed from the inside of the room it guards. “Library,” he says underneath, though the statement is unnecessary. “Couldn’t sleep.”

And now neither can I, she thinks, somewhat uncharitably. No one forced her to check her phone, to keep the ringer on. “Nightmares?”

Minutes of silence between messages is normal for a text conversation, but here and now, in the hours before dawn, they tell her more than if he’d responded in full paragraphs.

She purses her lips. Lets out a low, whistling breath. The sound is drowned out by the wind, which if anything has only grown louder now that her ears are not half-deafened with fatigue. She can hear the dull patter of rain, light on her windowsill.

Her bed is so warm.

“Be there in 10.”

****************************************************************************

She does not get there in ten.

For one thing, the library is not ten minutes from her house. She’s a fast walker, but it still takes her around twelve minutes on a good day and this - half awake and eyes stinging, icy gusts buffeting her to and fro, water slowly soaking into the hoodie and tracksuit bottoms she’d blindly plucked off her bedroom floor, the rain light but relentless - was far from one of those.

For another, even with the best intentions it had still taken a long few minutes before she could bring herself to pull free from her blanket cocoon. 

All in all, it’s nearly half past three before she finally finds herself outside the gothic facade of the central library, facing the locked hardwood doors without a clue as to how to get behind them. 

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She doesn’t take it out, not wanting to subject the screen to the rain, but looks up instead, to see light in an upstairs window that had been dark moments ago.

She keeps close to the wall and creeps around the corner into a narrow, deadended alleyway. Graffiti paints every inch of the brickwork, and a black, flaking, metal staircase runs up to the library’s upper fire exit. The door is slightly open, a slim, rectangular guidelight escaping through the gap, showing her the way.

She climbs, and slips inside, kicking aside a small wooden wedge as she does and letting the heavy door swing shut behind her.

Gul waits for her inside. He greets her with an arched eyebrow and a valiant attempt at nonchalance, but she can read him too well for that. His expression is one part shocked, some small part of him doubting she will come even after all this time, and two parts relieved.

It’s an expression of his that she’s become well acquainted with over the years. It’s an expression she hates to see him wear.

She shivers, theatrically, and only partly because she’d dragged herself out of her bed and through the cold into this old, unheated building in the dead of night.

Gul knows her as well as she knows him, and she’s sure he can see right through her act. Still, he follows her lead, throwing an arm around her shoulders under the guise of helping her warm up, muttering nonsense words about how cold it is and the importance of dressing weather-appropriately. He pretends to ignore how she tenses, just momentarily, as his hand lands on her shoulder, and she pretends to ignore the slight quavers and grace-notes in his voice, the tremors running down his spine, the way he relaxes into her as they walk, as if she’s the only thing keeping him upright.

****************************************************************************

If Ishita has one regret about her family moving so close to the central library, it’s that it didn’t happen when she was younger. 

She’d be happy in any library at any age, but the central library has a reading area in the children’s section that takes the form of a double decker pirate ship, and she thinks she can hardly be blamed for wishing she still looked small enough to blend in with the kids as they hung upside down from the upper deck, or read comic books in the tiny crow’s nest.

“There aren’t any kids in here now.”

Gul just grins back at her. His eyes are a little too bright, but the disbelief at least has faded from his face, so she doesn’t feel too guilty when she shrugs off his arm and races the last few metres to the hull. She ducks under a cannon, not because it’s in her way but because she thought she might as well, before heading ‘below deck’, through the wide open gap in the bright wood panelling. Behind her she hears Gul chuckle, and she smiles to herself as she collapses onto a purple cushioned block.

He follows her inside, and takes the red seat across from her. He fits here, with a familiarity that suggests this is perhaps not his first time commandeering a pirate ship. As she looks around, she sees small stacks of books littering the floor at either end, and though it is possible that the Orwell was smuggled in by the hands of some precocious child, she thinks it is likely the same cannot be said for the pile of Kafka, sat next to a discarded copy of the Communist Manifesto. She thinks she spies a blanket hidden within the prow.

Better to tackle the lighter issue first. She jerks her chin to the side. “A little light reading? How is The Metamorphosis? How many things have been metamorphosised?”

He just snorts, and shakes his head, and says nothing. 

“You know you’re gonna have to put those all back, right?”

He shrugs. “Photographic memory, right? It’s a lot easier to put stuff back when you remember exactly where you got the - goes a lot faster than you’d think.”

“Yeah. You do this often? Come here to unshelve and reshelve…” She stands, and leans over the nearest title. “Every Discworld book you can find?”

“I’ve maybe had a little practice.”

It’s an admission - maybe the only one she’s going to get. She sits back down next to Gul, and lets the silence hang.

The atmosphere sobers slightly, which she’s sure her past self would think sacrilegious, given their location. When it’s clear Gul isn’t planning on being any more forthcoming, she speaks again. 

“Why the books?”

He sighs, barely audible, but he does answer, eventually. “It helps fill the space. Don’t much like the empty.”

She nods. “And the reason you don’t just make a mess at home in your room?”

“Don’t much like being there either.”

“Don’t like feeling alone?”

He makes a sound that isn’t quite an agreement, but it’s something close. She shuffles a little closer, pressing their arms together, and he leans his head in towards her, curls just brushing her shoulder.

“I won’t lie, finding another empty building doesn’t seem like the best fix for that problem.” She turns slightly to look at him. “Just call me next time.”

He hums, and lets his head drop.

They sit in silence, respecting the sanctity of the library for the first time that night, at least since she’d arrived.

He mumbles into the fabric of her hoodie, “You never answer your phone,” and she elbows him, but lightly, not wanting to disrupt their position. 

He doesn’t react, already half asleep. His eyelids hang heavy, she can see gravity dragging them down. She can still hear the wind, though it’s muffled. She still feels cold, though her right side is warm, and she knows the Sandman will not be visiting her anytime soon, not while she’s like this.

But she’s calm, and at peace, and relaxed around someone she trusts. And she can’t remember the last time she saw Gul so at ease.

She can rest here, if she can’t sleep. Let her eyes close, though her mind is wide awake. She lets her head rest atop Gul’s, and let’s herself think of nothing, and simply be.

****************************************************************************

“Hey, Gul?”

“Hmm..?”

“How long does it take you to get those books back. We need to be gone before the library opens.”

“Mmmm.”

“Gul?”

.

“Gul?”

“Mmm.”

“You’re not awake are you.”

.

“Alright.”

It’s still only half five. She’ll figure it out. They have time.