Work Text:
A Curator’s hands are not the same as the hands of a human. Pages has never been of any other opinion on the matter, but it also hasn’t ever known that fact as intimately as it does after the fall of London.
British pens are too small for its grasp—nothing like the brushes it’s grown used to—and paper has never felt quite as delicate as it does underneath the tapered tip of a pen. Parchment rips even when it makes a concentrated effort to be delicate. Its gloves become tacky with spilled ink, and its paperwork quickly starts to smudge from the marred leather. It hardly takes a day before Pages is yanking its gloves off with a snarl, talons be damned.
It’s not that Pages minds having ink staining its clothes; rather, it’s used to the ink being unobtrusive.
It ends up sending out census folders slightly mutilated, though mostly stain free. When it gives Griz the first stack, she gives it a cursory scan. Her eyes snag over the tears and sloppy penmanship, but she quickly rights her gaze and, wisely, doesn’t comment on Pages’ lack of finesse.
Pages is grateful that its hood hides how ruffled it feels over the whole ordeal.
Griz tends to get caught up on intricacies of polite society that Pages neither understands nor cares to learn, but she’s professional and attentive, so it welcomes her as a fixture in the ministry. Her nagging goes (mostly) unappreciated, but it still listens when she says she has a friend in need of a job, and it still allows her to take an extra bundle of censuses home for that friend.
Pages is frazzled most days, rapidly running out of reading material in London, but it at least considers her a net positive in favor of the city.
Prior to London, most of Pages’ time spent not reading or working was time it took to write—when not pausing to do it in the midst of the other two activities—for no other reason than that writing was a hobby it took pleasure in. This is still the case, but its hobby ends up with an addendum after the fifth paper it tears to the point of unsalvageability. It lets itself write in excess, vying for its past elegance and the ease in which it held a brush. Its handwriting has suffered in the new medium, and the feeling of too large, too clumsy was one it thought it had soundly shed nearly a millennium ago. The bitter nostalgia leaves a foul taste in its mouth.
Pages is more than willing to lose itself in the looping grace of calligraphy, but it does think, for however briefly, of how hands like its felt more natural when holding a stone tablet. Stone doesn’t rip or tear. It’s unyielding in the hands of a human, but malleable underneath the talons of a Curator. Pages was well suited for chiseling words into a tablet.
Pages dashes the thought the moment it realizes what it is—it likes its ink, regardless of if it's in the form of a brush or an infuriatingly sharp pen nib—but it still thinks it. Even if it doesn’t want to.
Its poetry ends up dotted with enough holes that it could pass off as a constellation from the roof of the Neath, but it’s still more serviceable than its previous attempts. The holes are more akin to punctures than tears, for once, and its words are less stilted. It’s beginning to see itself in its writing again.
Pages sets its work to the side to keep, in a pile that’s far more measly than what it’s used to; hardly an inch high. It brushes away the failed attempts with a sigh, the folds of its robe catching on the torn paper littering the floor.
It thinks about cleaning up its mistakes. Then, it thinks about continuing with its work despite its cramping hands. Either way, it hardly matters—someone else will come to clean its mess if it doesn’t, and it’s only thinking of these things so it doesn’t think of the past; not of drowned cities, not of lacre, and certainly not of the different ways wax can smell as it melts.
Wearily, it pulls another inkwell from its stained robes.
It’s not good at not thinking. It never has been. It dwells incessantly on everything there is to dwell. The only trait of its that it’s bettered over the years is its ability to keep thoughts of this nature to itself. Its love is a dried flower trapped between the pages of a yellowing book, without rot. Time preserves it, but only in fragile, easy-to-break ways. A single misguided touch could fracture it beyond repair.
This, it is woefully aware of.
Perhaps, then, this is the only way it can cope: by drowning its love in romances, then novelizing the bloated corpse. Years pass (they always do), ink fades (it always does), and its appetite only grows (why is it so damnably hungry?). It will continue on as always, writing and devouring and spitting back up mangled love stories. It grapples for something more than a facsimile of romance. For something that once was but is no more. For something it can wrap in its wings and pin to its chest.
The parchment bleeds as Pages presses the nib further into deadened flesh. The ink pools as its thoughts stall, branching in dark hairline fractures. It will stain the finish on its desk if it doesn’t stop, but that hardly matters. Does any material really warrant preservation outside of the written word?
It will wring its memories until they’ve been desiccated and given new life on vellum. It will write of stars and a language that burns at the back of London’s tongue. It will write of the wells that cry and spit its name; the thing of its dreams that spends dark nights in weeping torment; the North that is always calling its name, and the fortunate—or, perhaps, unfortunate—silence the beckoning begets.
Pages could write until its hands bruise and calluses develop on calluses, but some things oughtn’t be written at all. It goes through lengths to keep what it writes to its eyes only, but there will always be prying eyes, especially so in the case of a love story that is at best sentimentality, and at its worst insubordination. That kind of romance can only live on under a pseudonym; within the guise of a new face and name, something tempered as weak and insignificant in scale. Barren and fleshy, without insulation from the cold.
Its sleeves are stained with ink once more, and its paper riddled in sloppy calligraphy. There are no tears.
All shall be well, eventually.
For now, it writes.