Page 3 of The Dragon's Stone Hearted Mate
“I think you know that, doctor. It’s probably why you went into your line of work. You know that it doesn’t matter what you do, we all die. We didn’t have a choice about being born and we’re going to die without a choice about it either. We’re going to leave each other and don’t give me that shit about the afterlife. Because everyone knows we change over and over again. It’s so fucked up. I just didn’t realize how fucked up until Teal killed Torvan.”
“Did he kill your brother?” she asked.
“He might as well have. Saving me killed him. He died alone on that street—”
“Alone?” Chole asked. “Morvan, I follow the news as much as anyone does in Moonscale London. Torvan wasn’t alone. Youand Teal were there with him. You held onto him. He wasn’t alone. I won’t debate his cause of death but –”
“We all die alone,” I stopped her before she assumed I had memory issues or was rewriting what happened to fit how much I loathed my ex-best friend.
“How so?” she asked, following my lead.
Chole always asked too many questions. I came to her looking for answers but talking to her was like talking to a preschooler hyped up on pixie sticks asking ‘why’ over and over again. I massaged the heel of my hand into my forehead.
“Because I couldn’t go with him. It’s not like I could up and decide to go with him. Even if I offed myself – I wouldn’t be with him. We leave our bodies alone and ---” I stopped because I didn’t know what happened after that. “I know reincarnation is real. It’s like science by now. True-mates prove reincarnation is real. I’ve been in the Other World but just because we know how something works doesn’t mean it’s fair. We know how cancer works but it’s not fair either.”
“Morvan, I’m not arguing with you. I’m trying to understand how you view your brother’s death and how that has changed your understanding of the world,” Chole said and scribbled something blindly on her clipboard.
“I didn’t ask to be born. Neither did Torvan. Look, I’m not going to kill myself. As much as I hate my friends, I don’t want to put them through that. Suicide contagion is real and—” I let out a long sigh.
“Morvan, you’re a good guy. You spend a lot of time thinking about how others might feel as a result of your actions. Not everyone does that. Deep thinking like that is a sign of empathy. I often find most of my clients are the sensitive sorts that—”
“How far does doctor-patient confidentiality go?” I asked her.
“Morvan, it’s the be all, end all here. Unless you’re going to kill yourself or off a kid or something. Look, I need to be honest. Last year a little girl named Berry was kidnapped by some guys who wanted money. Money that they believed her family to have. You had no contact with her mother, only her father. The Warehouse killed seven people to get my baby back. I know who you are. That’s part of the reason I agreed to take you on as a client despite my full caseload. As far as I’m concerned, we’re family.”
I remembered Berry. She was a strawberry headed little bear cub who managed to take a finger from her kidnapper before we got there. We hadn’t told the parents, but the guys wouldn’t have given her back either way. Money or not, they’d never see that kid again. She was a fighter, though, and gave them a hard time, making enough noise for us to find her.
“I don’t want Teal hurt,” I told her just to ensure she didn’t fangirl out in the wrong way. “Or Patrica.”
“I’m aware of that and I’m not prepared to take sides. I’m still a therapist. It’s the least I can do since I get to tuck my little girl into bed every night because of you and your then friends.”
“I’m not the golden retriever everyone accuses me of being,” I said. “Golden retrievers don’t kill assholes and feel little about it.”
“Do you feel little about it?” Chole asked.
“I feel relieved. Sometimes victorious if they’re hard to kill,” I shrugged.
“Why?”
There she went ‘toddler’ questioning me again.
“Because it stops them from fucking up the lives of other people. Tell me, is Berry still in therapy?” I asked her.
“Yeah. She is.”
“Are you trying to understand me because it bothers you that you couldn’t do what we did? Because it’s not about courage. It’s about resources and networking.”
“I know,” she nodded. “It’s why we contacted you when one of the guards recommended it. I’m not here because I need to dissect your head to understand anything. I understand the drive to protect the young and the innocent. I grew up in a family where that meant using the societal sanctioned routes. So, I became a therapist and a social worker. Most shifters have that drive. We’re born with it. What I’m here to do is to help you process your grief, Morvan. Though, today’s conversation makes me consider if you’re having an existential crisis in addition to grieving your brother. It’s not uncommon for the two to occur together.”
“Don’t you get it? None of it matters. It doesn’t matter what any of us do. It all ends the same way.”
“I hate to break it to you, but that’s what an existential crisis is. I may be overstepping but I think it matters a lot. The end may be inevitable. We all see that door sooner or later, yes, but what about all those moments in between?”
“The moments where you know you’ll have to die, and everything is for nothing? That nothing you hold onto is actually yours,” I laughed.
“Are the memories of your brother worthless?” Chole asked and I laughed again.
“Probably, doc,” I nodded. “He hired a hitman to kill me over a family business.”
