#seward

1 getting called bitchless by his old college teacher in front of his crush (who rejected him)

2 sitting on his hat before confessing to said crush

3 playing with a bloodletting knife while confessing to appear cool. crush said the way he did that almost made her scream

4 referring to himself as 'your pet student' in front of his old college teacher and asking to become it once again

5 overestimating the strength needed to break down a door with a few others and falling headlong into the room

6 calling one of his patients his 'pet lunatic' (he uses a phonograph as a diary, which means he had to say that OUT LOUD)

7 when he used a ladder to cross a wall while a man 30 years older than him effortlessly climbed it

8 getting his ear pulled by his college teacher as if hes still a student

9 being absolutely BEWILDERED after one of his patients had a positive reaction to someone being nice to him

10:

Never really thought there was more to life than books.

There isn't.

But the bit there is is beautiful. And that was one of your chief lessons to me, Quincey P. Morris.

I record this –

*choking cough*

I record this with one primary purpose: and that is to celebrate your times, your life and your death. Congratulations on your death, Quincey. Congratulations on a death that has no doubt done you proud.

You died for something – for a woman's peace and a world's deliverance. That is decency, that is gallantry, that is you, friend.

When I think of your final moments, my mind never jumps to blood or snow or the madness that brought us there. No, I think of that grin, faint as it was, as death himself shook your hand and you looked him in the eye and called him "partner." You never hesitated; there was no philosophy to it. All you had was that dreadful clarity of purpose that both stung and made me admire you all the more. You died with the face a man packing up to go back to hearth and home.

And yet for the rest of us, the sun burns colder. The air is more oppressive.

You once told me that a man ought to live so that the world is smaller for his absence.

Well, it is.

*pause*

What am I now? I am lost, lost, lost. And you are not there to find me. You will never be there to find me, friend.

End of the Road, Seward, Alaska, 2025.