Hellsfire

Chapter Twelve

Levi likes it in the library. It's quiet, and peaceful, and doesn't feel like depression like it does at home. Home is dark. Home is a fucking mess. And even when it's vaguely clean and the curtains are open, it still makes Levi feel trapped in himself. It's hard to explain how your own home can make you feel like that, but it does. Levi tries to get out of the house as much as possible to stop it from feeling like a cage of depression. The more he leaves his apartment, the more it feels like his living space instead of a box he's drowning in.

The library is the one place he can go to escape. It's similar to home in that nobody bothers him, and the chairs are comfortable, and he can do basically whatever he wants here. It doesn't cost him anything, and no one asks questions. It's got a bit of a gothic vibe to it, the windows are a funny shape and the building is made of wood which makes him think that maybe as the guy who can't control his very dangerous fire magic he shouldn't be here. It could end badly.

Curved wooden beams. Ornate pillars. A variety of rugs.

Sometimes the silence is broken by teenagers who think the nonfiction section of the library is abandoned and they hide between the shelves and make out. It's uncomfortable when that happens, because they don't notice Levi, and they keep making horrible wet noises with their mouths and Levi has to listen to it while he reads.

Of course, he could always do this all on a computer, he could be literally anywhere that isn't the local makeout spot but it isn't the same.

Books remind him of home more than computers do. You don't get nostalgia from hundreds of years ago by reading a webpage, but you can get something akin to it by finding an old book and leafing through that.

Though. This isn't great either. Books about demons range from 'horrifically inaccurate' to 'outright racist' and this one seems to be leaning more towards the racist end of the scale. Levi flips through a few more pages, looking at them, trying to find some sense of familiarity with them, before making a judgement about this book.

It's bad. It's, like, really bad.

That one can go on the bad books pile too.

Levi slams the book shut and places it with the rest of the bad books, which is a pile several times more plentiful than the good books pile, which consists of two books. One of them isn't even about demons or Hell. It's about cooking.

After a while of sitting in the library and skimming books, the 'good books' pile is four books tall and that's probably the highest it's gonna get. Levi's sure there's lots of good books in the library, but he's picky. And also 'good books' about demons are harder to find when you are a demon. Sure, any human could pick up a book about demons, or hell, even write one. But most humans can't tell the difference between made up bullshit and actual information.

Levi picks up the bad books pile and carries them back to the returns trolley. It hurts like hell, he has to stretch his arms afterward because he thinks he might have broken something in there. He really needs to use his arms more because as he is now finding out, these muscles are useful. He picks up the far less unwieldy good books pile and takes it to the front desk.

"You spent a lot of time here to have only found four books."

"I know," says Levi, and the librarian leaves it at that. Thank god. This is what he meant by 'no questions'.

He heads out with the good pile in his bag and the bad pile in that 'trash' folder in his brain.

Today was good. He found some books, he enjoyed himself...

It's just kind of been great in general. Someone called him a dude, he's barely felt dysphoric, he had a shower yesterday so he feels pretty clean as well and it's hard to understand how nice it is to feel clean if you function well enough to remember to shower.