Her lashes flicker, ever so, at his words. Mathilde had a knack for remembering simple things. She could tell you how to make the perfect recipe for lemonade, how to tie knots like a sailor. She could count to ten in seven languages and always measure the perfect amount of dark chocolate for a dozen buttercream cupcakes. But quotes, quotes were the solitary remembrance that would never leave her. Quotes made people; made their legacies. “The people I have cared for most and who have seemed most worth caring for, my December roses, have been very simple folk.” She finishes, the smile remaining on her cherries; he reminded her so much of her youth and more importantly of her brother. As quickly as that smile had ridden, it had receded back to a placid state, the very meaning of the words coming to her full force with a trolley of memories. “Courage, right?” She knew she was, but her contribution to the conversation was coming up shorter and shorter as the memories took over. “It’s how I learned English— books. I would spend summers in Virginia while my father worked, studying famous authors and theories on them. I was the realist of the family, while my brother was the theorist. So…” She holds up her copy of Peter Pan and Wendy, she knew all he had said about The Little White Bird, but it was refreshing to hear it for the second time. “My brother was a fanatic about conspiracies. He believed that Pan was the villain. He told me that Hook was nothing but a Lost Boy who once was under Peter’s false guidance.” The book had numerous lines that made his theory probable. How Peter would thin out the lost boys who decided to grow up. Oddrick related himself to them, he once told her that he was trying to grow up, to be better, but something was in the way of that. He said that there was a Neverland, and it was not a good place. He told her that Peter was not a boy, but a monster and that he was as subjected to his crimes as Michael or John. She never understood what he meant, relating so metaphorically to a children’s story. “I suppose I relate to Wendy.“ She didn’t allow herself to elaborate, her eyes fixated on the front cover as she gets stuck on the rose gold lining. She never understood Oddrick’s elaborate banter, or how he was a Lost Boy. She didn’t understand his theories or why he kept relaying back to the quote that made the novel more a nightmare than a fairy tale. And when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out. Maybe that was why he was dead.
Finn could hardly help but grin as the blonde recited the tail end of the quote, easily and succinctly with an expression that matched his own. It wasn’t often that his random outbursts of fact were met with such warmth, let alone ingested and continued. He was used to the occasional nod of acknowledgement -- even more accustomed to a roll of the eyes -- but it had never deterred him. Finn stood by his mind, clung to it like it was the only semblance of his being that he could make sense out of. His smile retreated once more, and he chalked it up to being caught off guard.
“Virginia. The states, then? American authors are fantastic to be brought up on. Such a fresh approach to prose with blatant disregard for all deemed traditional by virtue, and they’re better for it. So much progressive scientific literature comes from there as well - Watson and Crick’s academic papers on the double helix structure of DNA for a start. Though, if your first tastes of English were through Hemingway and Fitzgerald, I applaud you for having such an apt grasp on the language. Linguistically it’s one of the more challenging tongues to master colloquially.
He nodded slowly as she spoke, eyes trained on the wooden grain of the desk that separated them. More than anything, he wanted to interject and say that, no, her brother was right, that Peter was an antagonist dressed as a hero. But if there was one thing he knew about people, it was that tearing down what they loved never yielded favorable results. Not that he had even cared about the flimsy feelings of others in face of the truth. No, he would let her have this. At least in this moment.
“Wendy, huh?” he pressed, a confident gleam flitting across his eyes. He sat up straighter, words building at the back of his teeth like a blocked stream. “Imaginative, though pragmatic. Incredible storyteller. Respectful of authority, though not submissive. Brough up in a household that stresses integrity, duty, and restraint in the face of the madness of the world, and while complying, there is a part of you that yearns to stretch free. You pursue maturity though cling desperately to youth and the underlying innocence of it, even though the strains of adulthood are tugging at your sleeves and peering over your shoulder. Someone who perhaps realizes the constraints of her gender within a society that is predominantly patriarchal.”
He paused, flushed and mouth parted. “Not that I know you well enough to either refute or confirm any of these traits.”
