[open post -- winged and once-winged insects]

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad has collected every insect guide he could find in the mansion's library, and now he is camped out in a laboratory it seems to have created particularly for him and Susan -- the room has its own microscope, so that he can stop borrowing Claudius', and every single shelf is filled with glass habitats or mesh tents for keeping insects.

With his single-minded determination, he has filled many of them -- the tents house carefully potted foot-high milkweeds with tiny butterfly eggs affixed to their leaves, or potato plants he hopes will soon harbor potato beetles, or butterflies resting on the mesh. In the glass habitats there are millipedes, gleaming tenebrionid beetles, huge and bumbling scarabs, the dogbane leaf beetle Lancelot helped him capture, shiny blister beetles, leafhoppers in every shade of green, a pair of picasso bugs, an mantis he found in the greenhouse pretending to be an orchid flower.

Many of these insects stay only long enough to be identified and documented. Galahad and Susan between them take careful notes, make drawings, take pictures. When possible, they identify to species; more often, they identify genera or family, country of origin if they're lucky. Then they let their subjects go again. Neither of them has the time nor the inclination to feed and care for the immense diversity of insects living on the mansion's grounds. Potato beetles are one thing, but catching other tiny insects for the tiger beetles every morning is unsustainable. Galahad doesn't mind. Once he has a picture and the notes, the insect is saved, even if they don't see it again.

In the morning he trains with Lan Wangji, so it's an afternoon now when he's perched on a stool in front of the microscope, inspecting a chlaenius beetle to see whether it's possible to confirm a species. Unfortunately, these beetles are too fast and squirmy to put on a slide alive, so he's ethered it first. Now he's working diligently on his sketch, his pale head bowed as he studies the tiny body.

[Open especially to anyone who needs to be reassured that Galahad is back after the mod event and he's just fine now]

Comments

[onthewillowsthere]

The look he gives her is, in its subtle way, faintly bemused -- why should he pretend not to feel the things he's feeling -- but he does know why, he's loved Claudius long enough to know why.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan considers whether to make the conversation more personal, for a moment, weighing her options, and then decides that as she's committed to a friendship with Galahad and she appreciates the perspective he brings to the table, she might as well venture the information. He can politely disengage if he'd rather not delve into it. She confides, "I'm not always terrifically in touch with my emotions."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Why?" he asks -- just curious, not accusatory.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Ingrid - my friend Ingrid from home - would say that it's a classic example of repression, which is a way of protecting myself from the full brunt of reality."

[onthewillowsthere]

"If you chose not to feel anything, you wouldn't have to feel anything," he suggests.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, I oughtn't go that far." Susan is quiet for a long moment, worrying her lip between her teeth. "I didn't really, when I got here."

[onthewillowsthere]

He waits, watching her. She does so many things with her face and her hands that he would, he thinks, see greater meaning in if he were Claudius.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Have you ever chosen not to feel anything?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"When Claudius and I were apart, I felt nothing. I wanted to die and I felt nothing else. I closed myself off."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Ah," says Susan, and because Galahad is so matter-of-fact about that admission, she chooses to remain so, as well. "For months after my family died, the only thing I felt was cold, though I always did take it as rather a source of relief that I never once wished to follow them. Not with any real intent, anyway."

[onthewillowsthere]

"When Shen Yuan died, I felt like I wasn't in my body any more. Sometimes I feel that way. As if I'm just watching."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Her gaze flicks over his face. "A traumatic neurosis?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"What is that?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"They occur when there's been some sort of emotional shock and one's ego is trying to protect itself."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Does that mean the mind?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I suppose you could say that," Susan allows. "Freud said the ego is the part of our personality that exists largely in our conscious awareness, and it must balance the animal desires of our unconscious id, the moral imperatives of our superego, and the demands of reality."

[onthewillowsthere]

"It's a way of categorizing things," he realizes.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"It's a hypothesis of the structure of our inner selves," she says. "Freud says we've got defense mechanisms - tools of the ego, to help protect against knowledge that would hurt us in some way, and so we confine the knowledge to our unconscious. But we also must understand our unconscious in order to heal. With a traumatic neurosis, the protections around your ego have been breached, and so it must struggle to catch up. Some get trapped in a painful memory while the ego is overwhelmed. I imagine for those with a stronger ego, it might remove you from your self, so that you haven't got the risk of your unconscious overrunning things."

[onthewillowsthere]

His first thought is of Claudius, the way he sometimes seems to take out his own thoughts and feelings with the precision of a surgeon and put them in specimen jars, to be ignored or studied with scientific detachment. It's easier, Galahad thinks, for Claudius to blame himself for being hurt when he examines these bottled experiences, critiquing them as he would the choices of a character from a book.

But Susan doesn't love Claudius. She isn't thinking about him. Galahad's gaze, which has been on Susan's eyes all along, sharpens.

"Does Lancelot have traumatic neuroses?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan had been theorizing about Galahad's experience following Shen Yuan's death, and now she pauses. Borderline apologetic, but still mostly with her usual businesslike tone, she says, "I shan't be discussing that." Lancelot may elect to do so, if he so desires, but Susan shan't be making the choice on his behalf.

[onthewillowsthere]

He nods, businesslike in return. "I understand."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Galahad is eminently reasonable, and Susan rather appreciates him. "What I will say," she adds, "Is that my closest friend in London was studying to be a psychoanalyst and I find the subject fascinating and tremendously useful. Although," thoughtfully, "not as fascinating as ethology or insects."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Which do you like best?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Still ethology, I believe."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I would like you to teach me, if you will."