[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

[quote_gentle_unquote]

The sentiment warms Susan, and the edge of a smile plays at the corner of her mouth. "I rather think we often learn from each other," she says, thoughtfully..

[onthewillowsthere]

"What have you learned from me?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"In addition to the music you've introduced me to and the insects you've categorized first?" Susan asks. "And the fact that good science is an act of shared discovery and learning? You've got a unique perspective and I often find myself coming to new realizations after we've talked." She pauses for a moment, watching as Regina stretches sleepily and then curls up again, then decides to share, "I hadn't the faintest idea Lancelot might love me, or I him, until your experiment with the boxes."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad looks up at her, and although there's very little change to his expression he radiates pleasure. "Thank you."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

He does look rather like Regina at the moment. "Of course," she says, in that tellingly businesslike way. "It's only the truth."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I know," he says, because he hasn't found Susan to be a person who lies or says things she doesn't mean. He likes it about her; it makes her easy to understand. And then, thinking of what Claudius' other self had said to him, he adds, "I'm glad we're partners."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan still isn't given to the sort of expressiveness she had as a child, or even as an adolescent or the adult she was before she lost her family. Sometimes she wonders if it shall ever feel natural again, rather than a calculation that only sometimes comes easily.

So she's surprised by the reflexive smile that crosses her face at that. It's the small ugly one that typically only comes out around Janet and Lancelot - with greater frequency now, perhaps, than when she first arrived, but still only ever occasionally. The gaze she turns Galahad's way is, therefore, equally warm and startled. "Oh, likewise."