Hush
This was the last semester of their final year. So if not now, then when?
Every lesson was just a rehashing of what Victor already knew. He could have read these in books on his own at home. There was no exploration, no innovation.
Victor had been told he was impatient and impulsive.
His parents told him, Elizabeth told him, professors had written it in his assessments year after year.
But he had knowledge and experience his classmates didn’t; he had fears they had yet to realize.
He could only sit beside them with it unaddressed for so long before he snapped, regardless of what punishment accompanied it.
His classmates didn’t like him. They didn’t care about medicine or the mysteries of the flesh. But Victor could never feel shame for such a thing. Not even for Henry’s sake.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. The students he shared classes with were chemists, physicists, mathematicians, cosmologists, even some geologists who sought invention over practice.
Alchemy was a concentration for inventors, for people who wanted funding and support to study the very limits of their chosen field. Push those limits until they bent.
This was why Victor had gone to university years before he should have. It was the reason he would be leaving it long before the age the others had started. He knew he was born to create and refused to be embarrassed by it.
He was a physician’s son far from the surgery and medical students where he belonged. Sitting beside men who turned metals and acids into mystery and flame, men who had never once tried to hold the greedy hands of God at bay.
Those chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and cosmologists never stood in muck, elbows deep in blood. Breathed life into failing lungs with the sweet press of their own lips. Victor had saved ten men and fifteen women by his father’s side before his fourteenth birthday.
They didn’t understand, and Victor didn’t have time to force them.
But he needed to learn; he couldn’t leave this place without solutions, without illumination.
Trying the same thing over and over never got you anything but the same result.
He wasn’t supposed to be here; he was alone here because everyone else in his major always chose to practice medicine.
Why become a medical doctor if not to practice.
Invention was for people with the luxury of time or absolutely no time at all, his father had said.
The luxury of time was a gift wasted by the young. Enough people in his father’s office used their last breaths to share that wisdom, and Victor was not about to waste it.
Everything was fine, as long as he got what he came for.