Work Text:
It had always, in Hank’s hyperbolic mind, been among the worst crimes possible to burn a book.
To consign human thought and interpretation to the flames, to discard a sum of time and experience to destruction simply because it was disagreeable or unfashionable, was to assert a unity of vision that he found both laughable and infuriating. Infamous books, horrible books, worthless books, they all had their uses.
Dracula had truly awful prose, but as a construction of Victorian masculinity, it was unparalleled, really. Much as he disliked it, he would never consign a copy to the flames, never let the words curl and die. It had worth, if not to him, then to others, and that made it worthwhile. And yet, he thought. And yet, as his fingers stroked at the curve of a hip that he’d kissed a thousand times. And yet, as he breathed in deeply the scent of the woman he gladly worshiped, and breathed out reverence.
And yet, slow fires.
Wood-based pulp in old books. Without its lignin removed, the paper turned yellow, then it turned brittle, then it would fracture and crisp. Old books were little ecosystems, chemical reactions - often biological, too. Certain fungal spores tended to inhabit the pages of a particular vintage of book, giving off an almost psychotropic haze if inhaled. Nothing quite like the smell of old books, people liked to say.
Nothing quite like the way they died.
He had never claimed to be anything less than melodramatic. Never claimed to be anything more than a clown, an actor, a thespian, a billion other metaphors for feeling a helplessness in life that demanded improvisational comedy. He’d never claimed to have control over anything that happened to him, over the slow fires that licked at every aching bone in his body, the slow degradation of age. The acid of time. He could even break it down into chemical formula.
Hank McCoy reality → a sad little furry freak who imbibed knowledge in a frantic quest to fix the problems of the world.
But he couldn’t fix the world, and he couldn’t fix acidification. There was no alkali for the simple fact that his friends were dead or old or changed, and he’d given less to others than they had given him. There was no clever metaphor that made the simple fact that he hated what he had become, eloquent. There was only melodrama, and beleaguered metaphor, and despair. But why should that stop him from indulging his little pity party any further? He could push this tired analogy further.
What was he . . . he was a rimestock. Why not? Sit there on the shelf, little almanac, sit pretty with your peeling leather back and your yellowing pages, and wait until your friends need you. A repository of knowledge, of ideas and facts arcane to less self-loathsome minds, a bound collection of old words and runes with an appendix that read, please god just stop me from feeling so old. Sit with your back on the ancient desk, splayed open for us all to see, trembling like a dying dog beneath the vivisectionist’s scalpel, forever afraid and forever wanting that that little appendix might be read.
And yet …
And yet, one day, he had been taken off the shelf, dusted down, and taken somewhere new. His back to cold stone, unforgiving at first. Like laying down on Greek marble, cheek pressed to veins that bore no warmth. Cold. Inhuman. Mechanistic.
Autocratic.
Autonomous.
Abominable.
Abigail.
He had been laid upon the sacrificial altar, along with his companions, the heroes that she had needed because the solution she had wanted had failed. All manner of books, just waiting to be consigned to the fires of the Breakworld.
Oh, lord, did it all sound so very dramatic. But hey, all the world’s a stage, and Hank McCoy had never been averse to melodrama. If he was going to ruminate on how he fell in love, you can be damned sure the metaphors will stretch to their breaking points.
Because that was, in the end, what ended up happening. Oh, not all at once. Not even in fits and starts. He might even argue with you on just how gradual it was. But it happened.
Sex.
Respect, then affection.
Then caring.
Fear.
And love.
She was a priestess of subterfuge and Hail Mary passes, enacting her dark craft on a bloody altar, and at first, all she had needed was the runes. The writings, the knowledge, the analytical mind. Oh, she admired the binding on the book, could find herself admiring it as an aesthetic object, but she would cheerfully consign it to the flames if she needed to.
But then she fell in love with the fact that every rune had a stupid little accent above it, or an umlaut, whatever those things were called. She fell in love with the doodles in the margins, the music of the words, the harmony of the thought. She fell in love with the way she stroked her hands down the splayed book’s spine and felt it quiver and tremble beneath her, never knowing a pleasure like her before.
She took its writings into herself, and intellectual intercourse became professional respect became affection became caring became fear became love.
She was a slow fire that Hank didn’t mind. She burned in the right ways. She ate through him in a way that made him feel alive. She was a degradation that felt like an elevation, an animalistic release, a confirmation to the world that he was a beast that didn’t make him feel like he was lesser for it. She was the woman he ended up loving. She was the reader he didn’t mind splaying open for, the reader who bothered with the appendix, who read him from cover to cover over and over. She was the preserver of ancient knowledge and old books.
She burned books, yes, but only in the best possible way.