Some very swift mental arithmetic starts happening on her other side, too.
Gigi, the use of the name familiar in a way she only affords with a few; the newcomer’s voice also warmly familiar, even if hers is the very opposite. An almost-jostling grumbling chiding contact, perhaps a colder version of how he’s seen her with Cedric.
And it comes back to him so, so quickly as a spark of memory — Donna with Victor in an earlock, the two of them squabbling, Stephen’s world-weary voice telling the two of them to lay it off, a warm Nebraskan summer — and he, suddenly, has a guess. Maybe a cousin. Certainly family.
“Doctor Stephen Strange,” he says. Not frosty, still in ambient grudging politicking mode, but his tone remains politely blandly neutral. Gwenaëlle’s spoken of her sisters and cousins at length; she has not mentioned a half-brother to him at all. (Maybe that, in and of itself, says something.)
no subject
Gigi, the use of the name familiar in a way she only affords with a few; the newcomer’s voice also warmly familiar, even if hers is the very opposite. An almost-jostling grumbling chiding contact, perhaps a colder version of how he’s seen her with Cedric.
And it comes back to him so, so quickly as a spark of memory — Donna with Victor in an earlock, the two of them squabbling, Stephen’s world-weary voice telling the two of them to lay it off, a warm Nebraskan summer — and he, suddenly, has a guess. Maybe a cousin. Certainly family.
“Doctor Stephen Strange,” he says. Not frosty, still in ambient grudging politicking mode, but his tone remains politely blandly neutral. Gwenaëlle’s spoken of her sisters and cousins at length; she has not mentioned a half-brother to him at all. (Maybe that, in and of itself, says something.)
“And you, monsieur?”
His Orlesian’s accent’s awful. Bless.