"Are you sure you want to go with--that one? Let's go through all the other, less awkward ones first. How is a baby made?" John knew he'd retreated to a defense mechanism. Tell a joke; defuse the situation. How do you explain what you've done, when you've done something so terrible?
"Sorry, sorry, sorry! I should not assume things." One great blessing of being God is you don't have to report to HR if your joke is in bad taste. He could probably wipe out the memory, but she had such a mess in there, he wasn't sure he could cleanly do it around all the changes someone had done.
"Not much," said John Gaius, retreating to the same defense mechanism. Luckily, he'd never taught the Houses about nuclear power, and confusion was clearly a better response than disgust.
He got to the end of his story, and decided that, for once, maybe the truth would help things. "I like to think that she would like you. You'd make a hell of a daughter, Harrowhark. I sometimes indulge the wish that you'd have been mine."
The shards of glass and blood seemed to suggest that perhaps he should have stuck with the off-color jokes. The truth never helps a bad situation, and ten thousand years hadn't convinced him otherwise. He tried apologizing, but then his youngest Lyctor claimed the impossible. "You did not," he responded to her nonsense in a firm tone.
She then described sights that he knew no one had ever seen. No one except him, and he'd only been there the once. Well, twice, he did have to set it all up that first time. She couldn't know the details that she was reciting like her morning prayers. It simply wasn't possible. A fraction of a lifetime, a mere child? At last, a question.
How in the hell did she know so much? He thought back to talking G-- into the basement of that mess of a lab. He needed calm words then, and this brilliant fractured child needed calm words now. "No, you didn't." If something is impossible, you can't transgress by doing that thing. Therefore, no matter what is wrong with her, she is not the monster she seems to think she is. QED.
Ok. This is panic. She doesn't respond well to contradiction. Noted. But still, how can she know so much? Maybe she'd found some new aspect of necromancy he hadn't considered, hadn't needed to consider? It never hurts to check. Huh. That's odd.
"Harrow, who the hell's been tampering with your temporal lobe?"
Not the first time someone had responded like that to a question, and not the first time someone had immediately bolted from the room he was in. It was the first time he'd felt someone actively repelling his necromancy like that, but if this literal baby could somehow scry through his wards, who knew what was possible.
"Damn it, John--damn it."
What if he didn't know what was possible?