Re: Study; watching the theatricals.
The doctor emerged from the haze of the drug's nausea. A sour stomach was to be expected and he could alleviate the symptom when obsessing on a fixed point, altogether an unpleasantness that he likened to something that the French called 'mal de mer.' Mina, in this moment, was his fixed point. Her beauty, the lighthouse that he watched with rapt interest. The fact that she was standing, as fair as every picture he'd seen of her while living, was a scientific marvel.
"Fascinating." His violaceous stare was shrewd, inspecting Mina with little to disguise the fact that he was doing so. Victor typically operated on the dead, there was never a need to be coy or pretentious with meaningless bedside manner. Socializing with those that lived and breathed proved, once again, to be unsettling. The fact that she was breathing at all was both perturbing and utterly fascinating. Standing before him in opulence and blushing splendor was the paragon of his life's work, a testament to what he'd always known to be true: Life could be recovered from beyond the call of Death. Victor raised an eyebrow, and his blood climbed out of morphine's brume, stirring his heartbeat toward excitement.
Mina seemed healthy, there was a definite color to the smooth palette of her skin. Dalliances with death surely could revoke such a flush, condemning capillaries far under the skin. Victor tilted his head in consideration of her neck, wondering if he might be able to spot a pulse thrumming victoriously from beneath. The lighting did not allow for such a discovery, and the doctor lamented not having a stethoscope or any of his other tools at his disposal on this evening. If a party was hardly the place for such an investigation, it did not occur to Victor, or simply did not dissuade him.
It was only when she spoke again that Victor drew upright. His surprise was pleasant this round. "Keats." And he considered her for a moment longer before his attention dispersed to the gathered as she spoke of them. "I doubt they have the stomach for it," he said of the shrinking women who fluttered fans and spoke in hushed fear(or arousal, he was not certain). But Mina did not threaten faint behind the lace brim of an opera fan, and she did not pale in the presence of gushing rubies. He didn't for a moment believe that she would.
"Victor Frankenstein," and he lowered his head in gentle greeting, respectful.