It is so much better, with her touch and presence saying what her words can’t. Because even with Gwenaëlle, this person most precious to him in all of Thedas, he doesn’t want to see if there’s a ripple of pity or shared grief across her expression, or for her to see whatever his face is doing now (is it wounded? is it too cold and callous and not wounded enough?).

But all things considered, it’s the world’s most benign interrogation. Any innocent question to Gwenaëlle had always led to her giving him more than he’d expected, all her most gruesome details in a row; whereas she has to dig in a little harder, rattle it loose from him, until his history comes spilling loose in neat recitation. It’s like dislodging a stubborn boulder, slowly rolling it away.

These are things that matter, too, is such a simple statement and yet the simplicity of it almost undoes him. There’s a hollow ache in his chest, for a wound so old and worn and rarely-travelled. For how methodically Stephen Strange has excised this part of himself, carving it out like a tumour.

“They’re long-dead, and it happened in another universe, multiple lifetimes ago,” he says, which isn’t technically true but she gets the spirit.

Slowly, as he works through it aloud: “I know I can be habitually secretive; annoyingly so. I don’t mean to be, at least not with you. But it just… it’s like I buried that part of my life. It became irrelevant. Does that make any sense? The sorcerer is barely recognisable as the surgeon I was, and in turn he’s unrecognisable from the farmboy. I left it behind and then I consciously, purposefully, worked very hard to not be that person anymore. I haven’t spoken of them in years.”

It’s not that it’s Gwenaëlle he resisted speaking to, in short.