#my 2020 self is so mad at me for this. wdym we're stanning the BELLKEEPER

[the-hilda-librarians-wife]

Fireflies Over The Wall - Chapter 1

Relationship: The Bell Keeper & Meiri (Original character)

Summary: "The troll brought with herself, every night without a fault, a baby.

Every night, she placed it upon the grass, and pointed upwards, showing her baby the stars and constellations. Showing her baby the fireflies.

Holding it tight. Cuddling with it. Making sure it saw the beauty the world had to offer. He had never considered himself a sentimental man. Yet this image, for some reason, never failed to make him return home feeling something gaping and void inside of himself.

Every one of his former coworkers must have returned to their families.

Who would Edmund return to when he could work no more?

What would give him a reason to get out of bed when the fireflies were no longer enough?"

An OC's origin story as well as a Bell Keeper character study, because this character is much more fascinating than I'd been giving him credit for.

Notes: So so happy to be able to share this with you guys!!! I'm afraid Meiri doesn't actually show up yet (this one is more of a prologue than anything), but my girl will be in the next chapter. And then every other one after that.

Chapter titles will all come from songs in my Meiri playlist, either because they represent her or her relationship to the Bell Keeper. Today's is from The Moon Will Sing, by the Crane Wives.

Also, this fic uses 'Edmund' as the Bell Keeper's name.

Hope you enjoy!

Chapter title: I could have been anyone, anyone else

Read it on ao3

They used to be an army of bell keepers. And how foolish they had been. He had been very young when the Patrol put out a drafting call to replace their keepers, who were now of advanced age and ready for their much deserved rest; naturally, like any young person, he had believed it when told that he, too, could be a hero. That he could be useful to his town. That he could do good, could make a change. But even the more well-seasoned people seemed to have believed in the Patrol’s point of view. They had believed it as they volunteered, they had believed during their training. But as soon as they were out to the field, the truth began slowly coming out. It always did, up close.

Many of them had quit as soon as the truth became evident: both the brutish ones who couldn’t stand not having anything to brag about and the ones who were far too ethical to continue working for a broken cause, contributing to a rotten system even if only in number.

But Edmund had remained.

He had remained because regardless of having been wrong about everything else, his parents had been right to say he had no idea what he wanted in life. He had remained because the bell keepers that remained were left to themselves without the Patrol bothering them and had a socially acceptable reason to live so far away from the bustle of the city centre.

He had remained because, at the end of the day, nothing had ever made him feel as alive as the midnight wind on his hair as he sat over the painfully obsolete stone wall and listened to the sound of each night critter. 

The fireflies that came out each night were his favourite part.

Most Trolbergians didn’t even know there were fireflies in the vicinity. For some reason, there weren’t any inside the city walls anymore. Maybe their habitat had been too heavily modified. Maybe they just couldn’t stand humans anymore. Either way, he felt a kinship with them and honoured that he was one of the few people in their surroundings who had the privilege of seeing them.

It probably sounded weird to any and everyone that ‘fireflies’ were what motivated him to keep doing his job. But lately he’d been grasping any reason he could find to get out of bed.

As a young man, it had been so easy to ignore what his job really was. He had been starting out in life, and needed a job to get away from a shitty home. The Safety Patrol had been recruiting and the gig had fit like a glove. He could get away from everything he hated and meet new people, make new friends all while being independent.

And it was like that for a long while. He had been happy. But rose coloured glasses never stay on for very long. The troll attacks they were supposed to warn about never came. Their superiors revealed themselves to be more biassed and paranoid each meeting. Library researches about the actual history of their city, not the sanitised version they learned at school but what had truly happened, at least as far as the serious historians were concerned, left him nauseous.

But he hadn’t felt like he was actively doing harm, so he remained. He even found out that he could do some good in there, turning lemons into lemonade and all of that stuff that was so much prettier in theory, even if his mind did tell him that willingly being part of a corrupt organisation necessarily meant being corrupt. But their numbers kept being cut. And cut. And cut.

Edmund lost friend after friend. Well, he didn’t lose them, per se, but it turns out he wasn’t that good at keeping contact with people he only moderately liked once they didn’t have to see each other every day anymore. Regardless of his feelings about them, though, they had been everything he had. Some of them had been too loud, some of them had been too inconvenient, but they had all been united by having similar experiences and routines, and it had been the first time in Ed’s life he had had that. Relating to people, he had found, was very powerful.

Not only that, but all of them were people who were now jobless, having to resort to gods-knew-what to make ends meet. And all because their Patrol, while growing more vigilant and overprotective each and every day, also controversially decided that patrolling the walls isn’t that important, actually.

Like they were waiting for a fight.

Like they were hoping for it.

Yet, for some reason, they didn’t send him away.

And so, once again, Edmund remained. And he sat to watch the fireflies for another night.

There had been something else, however, that had been catching his attention lately. Something so beautiful and mind boggling that it made him question all of his fine Trolbergian education. 

He’d seen trolls before. Many times, in fact. Both the inaccurate and frankly offensive caricatures they were shown during training and actual trolls, always walking near the wall picking a thing or another up from the ground, but never getting dangerously close. They’re like wild animals, their superior would tell them. And they were. In the sense that they were far more scared of the keepers than the keepers were of trolls.

One seemed to have gotten relatively comfortable around the area he patrolled, though. Because this big, strong troll had begun going to that spot more and more often, holding something so precious that surely she wouldn’t take it anywhere she didn’t feel safe.

The troll brought with herself, every night without a fault, a baby.

The baby troll was still very small. It fit in the palm of the mother’s (he was assuming it was a mother, at least) hand. Every night, she placed it upon the grass, and pointed upwards, showing her baby the stars and constellations. Showing her baby the fireflies.

Holding it tight. Cuddling with it. Making sure it saw the beauty the world had to offer. He had never considered himself a sentimental man. Yet this image, for some reason, never failed to make him return home feeling something gaping and void inside of himself. 

Every one of his former coworkers must have returned to their families.

Who would Edmund return to when he could work no more?

What would give him a reason to get out of bed when the fireflies were no longer enough?

He sighed impatiently, munching on the last bit of his cucumber sandwich. They were never as good as the ones he ate as a child, and he never stopped being annoyed at that.

And that, he thought as he groaned, deciding to keep walking around the monitored area so that he didn’t have to keep looking at the happy troll family, was why you should never reflect on your life after nine in the evening.

…......

He had met Kaisa when he had been studying during his training, and she’d been a trainee at the library. They hadn’t had much contact other than him asking where he could find the books he wanted, and being slightly terrified of how quickly she could find them, but for a while, that had been it. But whoever she’d been working for (or trying to earn a job from, at least) had clearly wanted a little more than someone who could find books with ease. He’d figured that much out when, during one of his first days as a keeper, he caught the young woman trying to sneak past the wall after the curfew.

She was five years younger than him, but neither that nor the position he’d caught her in had earned him the slightest bit of respect from her. Even as she was questioned about her intentions, she showed clear signs of believing <em>she</em> had the upper hand. That first night, he got no clue as to why, nor any answers to his questions. But it kept happening. She kept going past the wall and coming back with bundles of gods-knew-what, and he was tired and not paid enough to care. 

That seemed to have been the right course of action, because on one particular night, during which they’d made very obvious eye contact as she snuck out and he’d told her ‘have a nice trip, see ya later’, she sat down with him after coming back and actually talked. Not everything, of course, not all at once. But she’d returned in the small hours of the morning and sat by his side on the wall and explained that the someone who she was working for wanted herbs that could only be found on the other side of the wall, and that same someone always sent the younger recruits to get them. 

He couldn’t think of anything else to do other than to shrug it off. Sure, he supposed. That might as well happen.

The woman started doing that more and more, and their late night chats resulted in the forming of a bond and even a friendship over time. Kaisa was promoted (he hadn’t been sure what to, since to him she was still just the librarian at the time, but apparently there was promoting involved) and they decided to keep their weekly meetings, except elsewhere and some other time of the day that wasn’t the dead of night.

So, like the two gay people they were, they chose brunch.

The bell on top of the door of their preferred coffee shop jingled as Edmund walked in, seeing that Kaisa had already grabbed them a table in the back. Very helpfully, she seemed to have ordered them a pot of black coffee already as well, the type that came with infinite refills. Great. He was going to need it that day.

“You look like shit.” Was her lovely, kind greeting, sweetheart that she was. 

“Thanks, it’s the night shifts.” He draped his large yellow coat over the back of his chair before sitting down on it. It was hardly ever cold enough to justify wearing it, but it was comfortable and he liked the feeling of hiding underneath its volume. Kaisa had teased him for it before, but it wasn’t like Miss Cape had any ground to stand on. “They’re helping me cultivate this lovely dark shade under my eyes.”

“Have you coined a name for it yet?”

“I call it ‘The Void of No Return’, which is where someone is going if she doesn’t get her shit together in a year, hmm?”

The librarian flipped him off and didn’t even try to tell him she was working on it.

“I work during the nights too.” She said instead. “You don’t see me looking like a vampire with major depression, though.”

Out of all of the entertaining answers he could give to that, he surprisingly chose the least mean. “You’re a witch, aren’t you undead or something?”

She only rolled her eyes at him, knowing that at that point he knew very well how witches worked (tip: not like that).

They looked over the menu only to end up ordering the exact same combo they always did, sharing an amount of assorted foods that was meant to feed a party of at least three.

“Jokes aside, though.” Kaisa said halfway through the meal, spreading syrup on a waffle and using it as an excuse to not look at him as she went through the terrifying ordeal of expressing genuine affection. “Are you doing alright? Can I help you with something?”

Edmund shifted in his seat as he tried to deal with the even worse ordeal of Accepting The Care Being Offered. “I’m alright. Just going through my midlife crisis, I guess.”

“Please tell me you don’t plan on dying at fucking sixty, Edmund.”

“You never know, I lead a wild life.”

Kaisa glared at him with the combined lack of amusement of someone who knew his life consisted of an endless cycle of walking the wall and going to sleep, and of someone who didn’t want to even hear about the possibility of his early death. He sighed and sank back on his seat, toying with the eggs and bacon on his plate.

“I don’t know, I guess I feel lonely.”

She quirked an eyebrow, not having expected him to actually open up nor for this to be the issue. “Lonely?”

“Yeah. Guess it’s normal, I mean. The few coworkers I still have, well, we don’t cross paths all that much. And I don’t really <em>care</em>, you know? The only person I really talk to and go out with is you-”

Kaisa lifted her coffee cup up in a ‘cheers, I’ll drink to that’ gesture.

“- but other than that I don’t really have any ties in life. No one… no one to fall back into, I suppose. No one to catch. No one to think I’d like to do anything for. And it’s okay to live like this.”

He looked at her, now gesticulating in the rare way that he only ever did when he didn’t know how to word something. Which was probably the right situation, since Kaisa had no idea what the hell he was going on about, and it must have shown in her eyes.

“It’s okay to live like this.” He repeated, sounding like he was trying to win an argument. “But I’m wondering for the first time if it’s what I want. ‘Cause when I get to the end of my days, I don’t know what I will have done in life to be proud of.”

“You will have guarded a useless wall, duh.”

“Exactly!” He said energetically, startling the librarian who had only been trying to get in his nerves. “I just… see this one troll every night, she brings her baby to lie down near the ‘shrooms. And she looks so happy, and Kaisa, she’s a troll. But even then, I think she’s more at peace than I have ever felt!”

“Well, obviously, Edmund. She doesn’t pay rent.”

“You’re being thick on purpose!”

“No, I’m genuinely trying to understand.” She kind of was, too. She’d known this man for over a decade and he rarely let his guts spill like that. Unfortunately, his guts seemed to be in a foreign language she did not speak. “Be more direct and maybe I’ll get it: what do you wish you had that you don’t?”

Apparently he was caught by surprise, because he kept his gaze on her face but didn’t answer. His usually stern face looked crestfallen.

“I wish I knew that, Kaisa.”

Well, damn.

“Okay.” She tried again. “What would you feel better if you had?”

Somewhy the different wording seemed to have triggered his thinking. 

“Something to dedicate myself to that isn’t a job I don’t even see a point in.”

Kaisa nodded, finding that a perfectly reasonable answer, actually, but he rubbed his chin and then added:

“Someone. I don’t want a hobby or a new graduation or something. I want to want to be around someone else. Isn’t it kinda fucked that we don’t?”

Too reasonable, the alarm bells in Kaisa’s mind rang. Too reasonable and understandable. Let’s shift this away from us.

“And the troll baby makes you emotional?” She asked instead of looking further inside herself, like a closet full of old stuff she did not want to sort through and kept putting it off for a later date. Edmund shrugged.

“I guess so.”

“Well.” Kaisa lowered her voice and leaned forward conspiratorially. “That has a name, you know?”

Edmund didn’t fall for it, remaining right where he was and keeping his voice at a normal volume, even if he did expect her to say something even remotely related to the occult. “Does it, now?”

“Yeah. It’s an ancient curse called ‘baby fever’. Yikes.”

He rolled his eyes and huffed, crossing his arms as she smiled smugly at him. “Nah, I don’t think that’s it.”

“Because you know it is?”

“Because I know I can’t have a kid.”

“Congrats on coming out, king.”

He briefly entertained the idea of spilling his coffee on her, but quickly decided it was too mean even for him and that he didn’t want the cafe staff to cordially invite him out.

“I’m serious, Kaisa.” The words were taken as such for once, and she stood up straight as she heard him out sincerely. “I work a full time job, day and night sometimes. I’ve no one to go to for help should I need it-”

He held a hand up when it was clear she was going to interrupt with an offended interjection at that sentence, and was allowed to continue speaking. 

“I never really learned how to keep a relationship. Not platonic, not romantic, and certainly not with family members. My house is so small that sometimes people think it’s just a well kept storage cabin. The hell would living with me do to a kid? The best of parents will hurt their children in some way or other. I ain’t sure I should be trusted with myself, let alone a child!”

Unfortunately, Kaisa seemed to actually consider his concerns, instead of laughing them off. He would have been pissed, but at least that reaction would have made his troubles feel less real. Damn her misplaced consideration for his feelings.

“I think.” Kaisa began, looking down at the food spread on their table instead of at him, meaning she was giving real weight to what she was saying. “That not a single adult feels ready to be a parent, and not a single parent feels like they’re doing all they should. But in the end, they try, and they reflect on what they did right and wrong, and they choose what to keep and what to adapt. And I think that really, the only thing that makes you a truly bad parent is never being able to admit the possibility of being one. That, and not really wanting your kid. That would already mean you’re safe, wouldn’t it?”

Edmund remained silent. In an uncharacteristic move from her, Kaisa reached for his hand where it rested on the table, having found one of the only spots that wasn’t being occupied by food.

“I don’t know how much this is worth.” She smiled. “Since I don’t feel ready to be an adult, much less a mother either, but I’d trust you with a child, and you’d have me to help you with them should you ever choose to have one. I think the only part you’re missing is the one you’d actually have some trouble with.”

Edmund couldn’t help but smile in the face of the kind words, grateful he had someone who he could empathise with so deeply. She was a good woman. Had gotten him in some dangerous situations over the years, sure, but he couldn’t hope for a better friend.

“And what would that be?” He asked, hoping his moustache would hide his gentle smile. His answer came in a mockingly sweet singsong.

“Finding a boyfriend.”

“Oh, you mother-”