Fluffy WangXian Oneshots

There's a Book for That! Part 1

Lan WangJi liked order.

There was value to having things listed or categorised into clear and concise groups, making it easier to find what you were looking for. This was the prime reason why he was so good at his job.

Many people thought being a librarian was a boring job; the conversation pretty much fizzled out at social gatherings, but this was because nobody his age saw the attraction of doing what he did, not when Google was readily available on their phones.

And E-Books.

Don't let him even get started on that!

Why was it necessary to digitalise everything? How could text on an electronic device possibly compare to the earthy smell of pages that were once part of trees? That intrinsic connection to nature? What about the smell of the ink? And the coarse yet strangely smooth texture of each page as he turned them?

All of that was lost when one tried to read on their phone or on a tablet, or a computer screen.

Lan WangJi knew this.

He knew, because he tried it.

He had found the whole concept vaguely disturbing.

When Lan XiChen had come home one day waving a Kindle in his face, Lan Wangji had been interested in the way someone follows a trail of ants back to their nest and suddenly their feet are covered in the wretched things...

No.

He knew immediately that his love of books would stick to the original ones, the real books that he could hold in his hands and feel.

There was a connection between the reader and the writer, clear as day in the care and precision of the words used to create every sentence. In the love that every writer chose to bare to the world in exposing their craft. Whether a book was fictional or factual, that inherent love was visible through each letter written on every page, and that was magic.

Every morning and every evening, Lan Wangji had a routine. At nine o'clock every morning, he would unlock and open the doors of the Lan Institute of Wisdom and greet the line of people waiting to come inside. Greeting did not mean a cheery smile and a happy wave...no, rather it was a deep frown and an urge to tie their hands up so they would not mess up his carefully organised shelves. Still, the frown would have to do because the latter would wind him up in jail, but the temptation was real.

He hoped the frown would let the general public be aware of the constant attention to detail it took to maintain a place of such scholarly regard that experts on all fields across every curriculum came here to study.

The Lan Institute of Wisdom was exactly that.

It had once, long ago in the history of his ancestors, been a modest little shop in the middle of a village, and as the village grew, he could see in a time-lapse film running in his head, how the Institute grew alongside the area. Each heir to the legacy had built extentions to the original building until ripping up the old foundations and starting anew could no longer be avoided.

But in the basement, they had managed to keep the original wall intact, as part of a secret nook where he could go down and have some time to himself. All his favourite books were down there, everything from musical theory to practice, the historical accounts of the first practitioners of the guqin, every melody and song the institute could find on the instrument, preserved and intact.

Lan WangJi had a guqin down there too, in case of emergencies.

Emergencies were getting to be much more frequent nowadays, and Lan WangJi was at a loss to understand it.