The Walls Have Ears

Your POV (Chapter 20)

Dr Murphy is over-indulged in explaining to me about how they grow chamomile in Japan, but I'm distracted by watching Gerard's adorable struggle to drink the boiling hot tea.

I'm staring straight at him pretty obviously, and he's sitting opposite me so it doesn't seem like I'm not paying attention to Dr Murphy.

He picks up the white mug by the tips of his spider fingers trying not burn himself, hunches over ever so slightly and blows lightly onto his hot beverage. An unconscious smile is growing on my face, Dr Murphy's voice just vague background noise to this entertaining scenario.

Gerard goes to take the smallest sip, puckering up his thin lips against the edge and taking the tiniest sip. He immediately jerks his head back, recoiling his lips, frowning at his failed attempt and burnt tongue.

I chuckle out loud and his eyes dart upwards at me. Seeing me laughing, his frown fades and he gives me a shy smirk. A little embarrassed that I'd witnessed all that.

"You know if you didn't want to pay attention you could've told me not to waste my breath" Dr Murphy says a little annoyed that I wasn't paying attention.

"Uh, sorry," I almost whisper.

We sit at the round white table in silence. I take a look up and to my empty sides. It's literally a giant white room with just a table and three chairs in it.

"So is this like, your aesthetic?" Gerard asks, a little more confident now.

"I guess you could say that. Simplicity on the eyes is simplicity on the mind." Then the doctor carried on over explaining again, and my focus moved onto his attire. I noticed that he was an incredibly neat person.

Obsessively neat.

The creases on his white pants were sharp and bold, his shoe laces done absolutely identical, as were his eyebrows apparently. The only thing not mathematically distanced were his freckles.

They were all different shades of auburn, sprinkled ever so lightly onto his cheeks and nose...

I was confused at his heritage, jet black hair, icy blue eyes, pale skin and freckles?

"Don't you think so Miss Y/N ?"

My ears regained focus but my brain was late to catch up, resulting in an awkwardly whispered: freckles...

I turned to see both men staring at me quite confused.

I decided to speak my mind.

"Say, Dr Murphy. You know everything about everything about us, but we don't know a thing about you" I leant over the table, crossing my arms infront of me, back arched and a cocky smirk plastered across my face.

My statement clearly didn't get through to Dr Murphy as a request for information, only after my exaggerated body language did his left eyebrow jump ever so slightly in recognition of the request.

"Well, I was born into an irish family. Hence the accent. Hard thing to get rid of, that. However I did attempt to research-"

My eye roll cut off his sentence.

"Yes, uh...Apologies. I do digress"

He pauses for a minute, trying to put words together into a sentence, clearly cautious of every letter to leave his mouth.

Wish he was like that with every other topic.

"I was quite a peculiar child, I will admit. I didn't play outside, was allergic to almost everything. I didn't get along with other kids, didn't dance, didn't like music, wasn't very artistic."

"Obviously my parents worried, my mother especially. She would force me into a room with my cousins and not let me out until she saw me having fun."

"And I told them time and time again that I found fun in other things, mathematics, physics, quantum mechanics. But I guess as a nine year old that wasn't classified 'normal'. Eventually I made a friend in middle school, he had learning disabilities and didn't do or say much which meant we had alot in common. I studied him, and that's how I came about the indigo children theory. Later that year I ran away, and built the wonderful home you see before you. The end."

He hastily finished clearly uncomfortable.

"Ran away to where?" Gerard piped up, making a good point. I gave him a discrete nod of approval.

Dr Murphy laughed, but not like before, this time it was more of a fill-the-silence forced exhalation of a sharp breath.

His eyes remained fixed somewhere behind the table,

"How would I know? I heard over the past few centuries they've changed the names to everything"