Webisode Based.
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"…females tend to produce much more stable somatic cells, so we use cells from female embryos for the therapy."
The smile she cast his was utterly dazzling, and he blinked after her as she moved around the stone-topped table with its collection of glass vessels in fantastical shapes and sizes and combinations, taffeta petticoats rustling like crisply starched bed linens under the rich, rose wool of her walking suit.
"But – I thought you said they were meant to be my cells. How can they be my cells if they come from a female embryo? I mean – unless I know myself a great deal less well than I've ever thought I do – "
Helen Magnus – Dr. Helen Magnus – laughed, those fabulously blue eyes dancing in the light of the kerosene lamps, but then the humour fell away and something like reticence replaced it under his surprised gaze.
And is that a hint of color pinking those high cheekbones? And all for that little sally of mine?
"Actually – when the embryo is young enough, these cells might be used to treat any person. You see – the cells themselves are neither male nor female, and – " she began.
"No, no, no! Spare yourself the explanation, Dr. Magnus. It will be wasted effort, I assure you. It's all too deep for me," he said, shaking his head with a grin, so that she chuckled and gave him another luminous, dimpled smile.
Montague John Druitt shifted on the ancient oak chest that doubled as both extra storage and… guest… seating in Dr. Magnus's laboratory. Usually, when he sat there, John Druitt found himself wondering if the medieval chest had come with these medieval cellars in which it currently rested, but this afternoon he found himself at some pains to find a position that would portray a nonchalance he most definitely wasn't feeling.
"Though, I must confess to some curiosity as to how one might utilize such a thing," he added, finally settling with one knee up, and his hands wrapped around it.
"'Such a thing'?" she repeated, glancing up from her careful measurements, her golden hair gleaming in the lamp light.
He knew that expression she cast at him – he'd seen it before when some trial produced results exceeding her expectations – and, of late, it had come his way, and more than once, too.
"An embryo," John explained to distract himself from those blue eyes, and wondering that she had need to wonder. "It's hardly stock in trade at one's local chemist. Nor do I recall anything regarding treating a patient with such a thing from my own medical studies. Though those might have been desultory enough to avoid entire realms of medicine."
"And thus you have your physician herself compounding your prescription for you, sir," she teased, moving from one exotic glass apparatus to the next. "And I confess myself most relieved that you didn't ask me whence the embryo came, sir."
"'Whence it - '" he stopped his repetition of her words. "I am quite old enough to know where babies come from, I believe!"
"Quite!" she laughed, giving yet another brilliant smile. "Or did you never think that all those tests and samples I specified might be more than the modern physician's equivalent of the witch doctor's mumbo jumbo?"
John Druitt hauled his brows down from his hairline with difficulty. By God – the woman was flirting with him! In very truth she was!
"I fear I thought something of the sort - if I thought anything at all on the subject," he confessed. "Though - that does not explain how any physician might - acquire - "
'Do not say 'come by',' he commanded himself.
"The... other half... of an embryo," John finished.
The woman blushed, rose and gold as a peach, and for a second he thought he'd overreached his conversational limits, until she spoke again, with laughter in her tone.
"You are not the first person with similar talents who I've met, John. One of my father's former patients has a related gift - if on a much smaller and more precise scale. And I am a woman - as I've noticed you noticing!" she teased.
And then he found himself blushing, most pleasantly – a woman entirely unnatural enough to make herself a physician, and yet…
He looked at those shining, golden curls, that slim figure, watched her hold up a flask to the lamplight, eyes an impossible sapphire blue as she considered some swift mental calculation. Such a brilliant physician – as intelligent as she was beautiful, and extraordinarily congenial to boot. She'd already done him a great deal of good. The preparations she had prescribed so far had given him a far greater command of himself in daily situations, and this latest treatment she'd devised and proposed – and was even now compounding – promised the possibility that the side effects of his gift might be permanently alleviated.
And then, with those mental aberrations that so dismayed him a thing of the past, the whole of the world would stretch before him – the whole splendid panorama and reality of it, his to see and know, if he would. His to command, if he would.
And her in it.
His to command, too, if he wished it...
Yes, a most pleasant blush indeed...