“Good,” he says, getting that promise and that reassurance. There’s another more complicated ache in his own chest too, hearing those uglier details parceled out: imagining them, picturing them, already pained for her.
It is true that Stephen’s been skittish of relationships because it is frightening to be cared for, to open yourself up, to let them see the vulnerable whole of you.
But it is also just as true that he’s been afraid of caring about someone else: to make them so inextricably precious to you, so that their pain is your pain, so that the loss of them would gouge you open. (To hand them that knife, capable of hurting you.)
Stephen’s hand moves from Gwenaëlle’s heart, up to brace against her cheek. I thought it would be better to be Tranquil, she says, rather than being this.
His mouth has set into a thin line, wheels spinning, still agonising over how much to describe. Whether it would be dangling yet another solution just out of reach, unactionable, therefore irrelevant. But in the end — Stephen values knowledge and he always wants to know, to understand why a brain ticks the way it does, to parse reality and make it make sense, it was the whole reason he became a neurosurgeon — so in the end, he decides to try. If it were him, he would want to know. So, trying to find the right vocabulary:
“I’m saying this not to suggest it as the fix, but to set context— sorry, just, bear with me. Back home, there’s— advanced medicine. To fix that brain chemistry I mentioned, to produce the right hormones, to get one’s system back into alignment; maybe someone’s brain makes them constantly too scared or angry, or not attentive enough, or it isn’t capable of generating enough of the emotions to make them happy.
“It’s a careful balancing act for doctors, ones different from me, who specialise in finding the right type of medication and the right dosage and the right effects. I don’t… I still think the Rite of Tranquility is monstrous, a crime, but it’s occurring to me that my world did have treatments to stabilise emotions. To give you a more even keel. It’s just not that permanent sledgehammer to your psyche; it’s more like small, incremental changes, and reversible. So maybe it’s not so alien. To have wanted some form of that. Another tool in the kit, just like medicine for anything else physical: a heart condition, an infection.”
no subject
It is true that Stephen’s been skittish of relationships because it is frightening to be cared for, to open yourself up, to let them see the vulnerable whole of you.
But it is also just as true that he’s been afraid of caring about someone else: to make them so inextricably precious to you, so that their pain is your pain, so that the loss of them would gouge you open. (To hand them that knife, capable of hurting you.)
Stephen’s hand moves from Gwenaëlle’s heart, up to brace against her cheek. I thought it would be better to be Tranquil, she says, rather than being this.
His mouth has set into a thin line, wheels spinning, still agonising over how much to describe. Whether it would be dangling yet another solution just out of reach, unactionable, therefore irrelevant. But in the end — Stephen values knowledge and he always wants to know, to understand why a brain ticks the way it does, to parse reality and make it make sense, it was the whole reason he became a neurosurgeon — so in the end, he decides to try. If it were him, he would want to know. So, trying to find the right vocabulary:
“I’m saying this not to suggest it as the fix, but to set context— sorry, just, bear with me. Back home, there’s— advanced medicine. To fix that brain chemistry I mentioned, to produce the right hormones, to get one’s system back into alignment; maybe someone’s brain makes them constantly too scared or angry, or not attentive enough, or it isn’t capable of generating enough of the emotions to make them happy.
“It’s a careful balancing act for doctors, ones different from me, who specialise in finding the right type of medication and the right dosage and the right effects. I don’t… I still think the Rite of Tranquility is monstrous, a crime, but it’s occurring to me that my world did have treatments to stabilise emotions. To give you a more even keel. It’s just not that permanent sledgehammer to your psyche; it’s more like small, incremental changes, and reversible. So maybe it’s not so alien. To have wanted some form of that. Another tool in the kit, just like medicine for anything else physical: a heart condition, an infection.”