—blot and sand me, Daniel, this is very nearly the emotional climax of the fucking thing, can you not cross your legs and hold it in for a bit?
All right, very well. The extremely rudely interposed question, which is the only one I'll answer before I say "the end," was this: What did Gauthier Leblanc have to gain from visiting Jesson Desrosiers, if he was actually full of sparrowshit and going to die and not planning to visit Aimée at all?
And the answer is, I have absolutely no idea. The forensics says he did visit Desrosiers, and Desrosiers killed him, so he obviously thought he had something to gain. I also know that he had an entire life, career, and friendship involving Desrosiers, almost none of which made it into these you've got to admit rather navel-gazing letters the man wrote for the benefit of, not future nigglers with nothing better to do but scrutinize the motivation behind his every action, but rather his tiny baby girl, to whom he cared only about communicating love and comfort and maybe, maybe, a carefully managed impression of understanding. I don't have the full portrait, just a few crumbling flakes of paint. Just enough to get a sense for color, if I squint and think.
—Daniel, it isn't a script, and you couldn't direct it if you wanted to, so forgive me if I find it hard to care what you'd do if you found it on your desk. Which is, if I may remind you, presently a smear of char at the bottom of the smoke-belching hole that used to be the Antechamber. So, if you do make it through this alive, you're going to be sorely in need of new submissions.
In any case, if you'd just sat back and shut up, you'd have learned by now that I'd been wrong about Gauthier anyway.
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Dispatch from a Colored Room
Science FictionPel has a story to tell. There's the girl who grew up destitute, addicted, single mother to a son she can't protect; the father who left the family, then disappeared; the old family friend, angel and demon both; the Dandelion Knight. But why tell it...
