[P] ninety-nine problems

[Andras]

and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

Poachers. Crime. Investigation. It's all starting to feel like a dream, or a nightmare, one day running into the next into the next into the next with no definitive beginning or end. Though they turn the dirt it has surfaced nothing but more, bones, more bodies, more bullets to add to his growing list of things to do and people to tolerate. He has stopped counting days without sleep. It doesn't seem to matter, anymore.

('Go home,' someone had said, 'get some god damn sleep. You'll be no use at all if you die of exhaustion.'

Andras had sneered, 'Then let it be a swift death,' crackling with bolts of blue light. There was a pregnant pause, before Andras conceded (a word which, used here, means felt so tired, all the way down to his marrow, that he could not even conjure the strength to fight), brushing out of the room in a flurry of black feathers and an electric hum.)

The library is bustling, much to his chagrin, in the quiet way that libraries do - the tick of hooves on the worn wood floor coming and going, the voices that, though numerous, never rise to more than a quiet murmur in the background, and always, always the birds and the wind. It is the song of peace, the gentle chime of patience, and for a moment he can hear it and only it, over his electric hum, over the murmur in the halls, over his pounding heart singing hunt in the back of his head. Hunt. Fight. Bleed. He does not know why.

Andras floats past the crowd, gathered to read stories of war and strife and adventure, into a quieter hall that branches toward dark, even more silent study rooms where Andras will fall into his bed of pillows amid his cluttered paper and spilled pens and be asleep before he hits the ground.

Or, would, if there were not the moment where he passes a stranger, dressed in a fine, clean linen, hung here and there with elegant gold jewelry, and meets his eyes in passing, but the stranger does not look away. A static arc crashes down his back, popping like fireworks. He turns to the boy, expression ineffable behind the glare of his glasses.

He says, through clenched teeth, "What."
It does not sound so much like a question.

@Pilate