“They’re all dead,” Stephen says, as cleanly as he can, with the same kind of brutal matter-of-factness that Gwenaëlle employs so often.
This, too, is a thing they have in common: the steady loss across their family tree. And she’s clever; she’d already deduced the shape of it. He’s always very clinical and purposeful with his choice of words.
There’s another exhaled sigh. His next lead-in is a vague aim at flippancy and faint gallow’s humour, but it’s a thin attempt. “Also nothing extraordinary. No tragic murders, no supervillains seeking vengeance; it happened while I was in training for neurosurgery, years before I became a sorcerer. Our parents were elderly, so it was just inevitable, those run-of-the-mill incurable diseases like cancers and kidney failures. Victor was hit by a car.”
Banal, everyday, horrible.
The worst one comes last, and there’s another palpable hesitation here; he’s so very unaccustomed to speaking about this, to baring this part of himself, like prying open the cover to a pocketwatch and seeing all his cogs and moving gears open and vulnerable to view. The last person he said this to was in fact himself—
“Donna was just a kid,” he says, and that’s the real sorrow in it. “Ten years old. I was twelve. We were playing at a lake nearby, which we often did. She was a good swimmer but she got a cramp and drowned. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know CPR at the time. Water in the lungs, such a goddamned fixable— It’s what made me decide to be a doctor.”
Which hadn’t, however, helped at all with the other three either. But it does continue to flesh out the shape of him: the control issues, the urge to play god, the hand that wants to hold the knife.
no subject
This, too, is a thing they have in common: the steady loss across their family tree. And she’s clever; she’d already deduced the shape of it. He’s always very clinical and purposeful with his choice of words.
There’s another exhaled sigh. His next lead-in is a vague aim at flippancy and faint gallow’s humour, but it’s a thin attempt. “Also nothing extraordinary. No tragic murders, no supervillains seeking vengeance; it happened while I was in training for neurosurgery, years before I became a sorcerer. Our parents were elderly, so it was just inevitable, those run-of-the-mill incurable diseases like cancers and kidney failures. Victor was hit by a car.”
Banal, everyday, horrible.
The worst one comes last, and there’s another palpable hesitation here; he’s so very unaccustomed to speaking about this, to baring this part of himself, like prying open the cover to a pocketwatch and seeing all his cogs and moving gears open and vulnerable to view. The last person he said this to was in fact himself—
“Donna was just a kid,” he says, and that’s the real sorrow in it. “Ten years old. I was twelve. We were playing at a lake nearby, which we often did. She was a good swimmer but she got a cramp and drowned. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know CPR at the time. Water in the lungs, such a goddamned fixable— It’s what made me decide to be a doctor.”
Which hadn’t, however, helped at all with the other three either. But it does continue to flesh out the shape of him: the control issues, the urge to play god, the hand that wants to hold the knife.