Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by Fate

5

I read the line again, slower this time, savoring the correction.

Centuries dead and still wrong.

“Also, your handwriting is abhorrent."

God, I loved this.

Outside, thunder rolled over the Hudson. The sound vibrated faintly through the old building. In here, it felt distant and irrelevant.

Except my body didn’t get the memo.

The lights flickered once. My shoulders jumped before I could stop them. My pulse kicked up hard and fast, like I had been caught doing something wrong instead of reinforcing a manuscript older than most governments. The hum of the climate control sharpened. The seam in the parchment blurred for half a second as my focus tried to scatter in six directions at once.

Too loud. Too bright.

I adjusted the page weight and continued, deliberately slower. The ritual of it helped. Hand to linen. Linen to edge. Edge to margin. Order. Sequence. Most of all, control.

A familiar line rose in my head before I could stop it, and I spoke it out loud. “So I spoke, and the heart within me grew steady.”

The words settled into the room like an extra brace under a weak beam. Saying it felt like pressing a palm to my sternum. My hands stopped trembling, and my breathing evened out. The Odyssey never failed me.

Sometimes, the ancient Greeks understood nervous systems better than therapists.

Ancient words had always calmed me.

For a second, I let myself imagine writing something that carried even half the weight of the epics, the classics. A poem. A story. Anything. Then, the truth slammed into me with its usual force.

I would never finish anything. Not when I tore up every draft before it reached page two. Not when my own mind felt like a committee arguing over the right to use the same pen.

“And there it is,” I added softly. “That’s the point.”

Silence.

Then—

“Ms. Ripley?”

I turned.

Three interns stood frozen in the doorway. They had clearly been there long enough to witness me correcting a fourteenth-century scholar in another language.

Intern One blinked. “Were you… speaking Greek?”

“Yes,” I said.

They stared at me like I had just levitated.

Intern Two whispered, not quietly enough, “She does that?”

Intern Three whispered back, “That’s terrifying.”

I pressed my lips together to prevent either a smile or a sigh. Both would have been misinterpreted.

“What do you need?” I asked.

Intern One swallowed. “The lights flickered.”

As if summoned, thunder cracked again. The lights dimmed for half a second, then steadied. I stared up at them. “Don’t you f*****g dare.”

My brain immediately did the math.

Electrical surge. Humidity fluctuation. Temperature variance. Paper expansion risk.

I moved before finishing the thought, crossing to the environmental panel.

“Building surge protocol compensates automatically,” I said, checking the readings. “We’re stable.”

The interns continued staring.

Intern Two leaned forward. “Should we… evacuate?”

“For a thunderstorm?”

Intern Three nodded.

“No,” I said. “If the building catches fire, we save the incunabula first.”

They went very still.

“Was that a joke?” Intern One asked.

I considered it. “Mostly.”

Their eyes widened.

I exhaled. “It’s fine. Storms stress old buildings. The structure complains. That’s all.”

Intern Two looked at the manuscript. “What is that?”

“Ancient ritual text,” I said. “It’s been mistranslated twice, and annotated by someone with confidence and no talent.”

They blinked.

“Cool,” Intern Three said faintly.

Thunder boomed again. The lights flickered harder this time.

Intern One jumped.

“You’re good?” I asked.

“Yes,” Intern One said quickly. “We just thought you’d… know what to do.”

“Oh,” I said, because I hadn’t expected that. “Yes.”

They nodded like that confirmed something mythic, then backed out of the room with the reverence of acolytes leaving a shrine.

Then Intern Two pivoted back, visibly bracing herself.

“Also,” she said, voice small, “when you have time, could you maybe come help us with the matcha machine?”

I stared at her.

Behind me, an ancient manuscript was open to a passage about cosmic order and structural harmony.

Outside, thunder cracked like a warning shot.

And here, a twenty-three-year-old was being defeated by powdered tea.

“Of course,” I said, because apparently I was fluent in both dead languages and appliance diplomacy.

All three of them exhaled at once. They backed out of the room again, this time with less reverence and more relief, like I’d agreed to disarm a small bomb.

The door sealed behind them.

I looked back down at the manuscript.

Matcha did sound good, though.

Of course you know what to do, my mother would have said. You’ve had plenty of practice cleaning up your own messes.

I adjusted the page weight with deliberate care.

“Different context,” I murmured to the parchment. “Different audience.”

Sighing, I stepped back from the parchment. Time to rejoin the land of the living. And historically, that was when everything went wrong.

I made my way through the library toward the break room, making a mental list of all the things I needed to do. Head Librarian meant everything fell on me—not excluding matcha machines.

I pushed open the break room door, already tasting the drink I planned to bribe myself with. In the corner, the new machine with its glossy buttons and unnecessary features hummed cheerfully. It had become the highlight of my entire week, which was a bleak statement I refused to unpack.

Interns One, Two, and Three hovered in a tight cluster around it, their wide eyes telling me that the small appliance had defeated them.

Their whispering stopped the moment I walked in. All three stared at me with the same expression patrons used when they realized the restricted section existed: reverence mixed with fear.

Which was a ridiculous way to look at someone.

Fantastic. I had accidentally become a cryptid.

I had not consented to this social role and did not want it. Attention came with rules, ones I’d learned but never made sense to me the way they seemed to make sense to other people. I had learned them young. Step one was always smile when someone was paying attention to you. Step two was wait for your turn to speak. Though I’d learned these rules, I rarely employed them.

Intern One raised a shaky hand. “Ms. Ripley. The machine made a noise.”

Intern Two nodded with grave seriousness. “A loud one.”

Intern Three swallowed. “We don’t want to break it.”

I approached them with the composure of someone defusing a minor diplomatic incident.

Calm was always safer than exposing my true feelings. Calm never invited commentary or judgment.

“It’s fine. It’s not broken. I’ll show you how to use it.”

Intern One leaned toward the others and whispered, “She sounds confident.”

Intern Two whispered back, “She always does. It’s terrifying.”