“Okay,” Stephen says, and watches after Gwenaëlle as she leaves the bedroom.
He doesn’t like to sit motionless and helpless, however, so he gets moving shortly after her footsteps recede down those winding stairs. He slides out of bed and goes to splash some cold water in his face from the washbasin sitting out; he runs his fingers along the edge of his jaw, where his beard’s starting to grow in a little too thick. He pulls on some clothes over the braies he sleeps in, hobbling into clean comfortable trousers and a clean comfortable shirt.
He stews over it while she’s downstairs: tries to weigh the arguments for and against and measure it from the other angles. He values Gwenaëlle’s opinion enough that it brings hesitation, the innate knowledge that they agree so often, and that she is very likely right about parts of this. That the easier path would be to cave and give way and agree. That perhaps there’s something reckless and proud buried here in his instinct to be secretive, to hold his cards obsessively close to his chest until the theory’s confirmed. Until they know for sure what an amputation does, and if it actually accomplishes what it needs to.
But.
Where ordinarily he might have migrated to his study for the morning tea, Stephen stays put instead; the study means work, and work’s off the table for today. By the time Gwenaëlle returns she’ll find him sitting on the edge of the bed again, where he looks up and says, weary, “I don’t want to have a fight about it.”
no subject
He doesn’t like to sit motionless and helpless, however, so he gets moving shortly after her footsteps recede down those winding stairs. He slides out of bed and goes to splash some cold water in his face from the washbasin sitting out; he runs his fingers along the edge of his jaw, where his beard’s starting to grow in a little too thick. He pulls on some clothes over the braies he sleeps in, hobbling into clean comfortable trousers and a clean comfortable shirt.
He stews over it while she’s downstairs: tries to weigh the arguments for and against and measure it from the other angles. He values Gwenaëlle’s opinion enough that it brings hesitation, the innate knowledge that they agree so often, and that she is very likely right about parts of this. That the easier path would be to cave and give way and agree. That perhaps there’s something reckless and proud buried here in his instinct to be secretive, to hold his cards obsessively close to his chest until the theory’s confirmed. Until they know for sure what an amputation does, and if it actually accomplishes what it needs to.
But.
Where ordinarily he might have migrated to his study for the morning tea, Stephen stays put instead; the study means work, and work’s off the table for today. By the time Gwenaëlle returns she’ll find him sitting on the edge of the bed again, where he looks up and says, weary, “I don’t want to have a fight about it.”