[For Flavia]

[adifferentlife]

Tutorial this week was much of the same, if only for one exception. This was the day Sybil has brought Flavia with her and their teacher seems determined to impress. Not that they wouldn't be studying biological oxidation-reduction reactions but it does make a few hours of carefully monitoring and recording all the reactions.

Once they're done, Sybil takes her time cleaning up their station, letting Flavia approach the unit leader with all the questions she might have. The girl's curiosity is only to be encouraged, she thinks, and she's glad to have had any part of it.

"Should we get lunch? I've work this afternoon, but I thought it might be nice," she says when Flavia eventually returns. "Or do you have to get back to your regular classes?"

Comments

[spirit_of_vitriol]

"In this city, I think everyone does," Flavia muses. "It's hard not to, popping out of nowhere."

They walk on in silence for some time, Flavia following Sybil's lead out the front doors of the science building and into the cold. "You were in Yorkshire before coming here, isn't that right?" she asks. "I remember you saying something about it, when we first met."

[adifferentlife]

"Yes," she says amidst slipping on her gloves, wondering how it was the one always managed to hide itself deep in her bag, even when she'd tucked them together. "My father was the Earl of Downton."

[spirit_of_vitriol]

"An earl?" Flavia echoes, suppressing the sudden urge to curtsy or do something equally ridiculous. Sybil was just another person, after all, and one who'd been so wonderfully kind. "I've never met an earl..ess?" she guesses, wishing she could magic Mrs. Mullet's copy of Inquire Within Upon Everything out of the ether, "before. Though I did write a letter to the King."

[adifferentlife]

"Countess, but only my mother and the heir. Which was not my lot in life, so I am merely Lady," she says with a gentle smile. "Here I'm just a nursing student and nothing more."

[spirit_of_vitriol]

"That seems quite a lot, to me," Flavia replies quietly.

[adifferentlife]

"Does it?" It's a serious question for Sybil. There are days when it seems like everything, and other days when it's not nearly enough. "I wonder sometimes."

[spirit_of_vitriol]

"You help people," she says. "You know what to do to make them better, if they're ill or hurting." The stricken face of Grace Ingleby floats up into her mind's eye, then, and Flavia recalls the panicked minutes in the dovecote, the woman's head cradled in her lap, waiting for Dr. Darby to come speeding up the lane.

"It's very noble."

[adifferentlife]

"Perhaps you're right," she says, considering Flavia's words the same way she would consider a peer. "It's hard to think about sometimes, when you're in the moment. I do love it, nursing, working as one. I feel as if it has meaning, even when I'm not sure it does."