[And in the lengthened silence that presages her response, in which he does not watch as carefully as he meant to do, Quentin gets in his gut the same feeling that shudders when in the darkness you overestimate how many stairs are left until the landing, and so your foot falls through nothingness where you were certain the last stair ought to be - but instead of seizing him at once it grows there slowly and only sharpens when at last she answers.]
Oh. Good Lord.
[On his countenance perches bemusement with a contemplative shadow as he calculates the unfathomable murky years beyond what he had reckoned to be his final day. Between them stretches more time than what separates him from the ancestor for whom he is named, that first Quentin who two hundred and twenty-two years ago had not yet raised his claymore against any English king, had not even raised his curled pink baby fist to his mother whose name had since been lost.]
2132, all right-- [He draws out each syllable of the count, still ticking off those years in his head.] Christ, what's it like then?
no subject
Oh. Good Lord.
[On his countenance perches bemusement with a contemplative shadow as he calculates the unfathomable murky years beyond what he had reckoned to be his final day. Between them stretches more time than what separates him from the ancestor for whom he is named, that first Quentin who two hundred and twenty-two years ago had not yet raised his claymore against any English king, had not even raised his curled pink baby fist to his mother whose name had since been lost.]
2132, all right-- [He draws out each syllable of the count, still ticking off those years in his head.] Christ, what's it like then?