Sun Mote Copse the doctor tells me

She repeated her name, which seemed to wake him up a little bit. He looked at her.

’After those rainstorms—

—he recalled with vivid detail the feeling of being on fire, the feeling of the lightning coursing through his body. The hours he had spent with his face in the mud, lying on the side of a mountain while waiting, praying, for the paralysis in his limbs to go away. He was still looking at Niamh, but his eyes were glazed over, looking somewhere far away from where they were sitting.

’—we oughta have all sorts of fish swimmin’ up this way.’

Perdition forced himself to breathe, forced his mind to return to the present. “Yes,” he agreed, simply. She asked him if he was much of a fisherman. He gave a small smile, looking down at the water again. “I… hope to become one,” he told her. “I’m not sure I can… hunt other things anymore. Deer, moose, rabbit. I’m not as fast as I once was.” He did not mind admitting it to her, especially since she was a packmate, and one of the leaders. She needed to know what he was good at, and what he was not good at. 

“On my travels, in between my… accident… and now, I spent many hours fishing, or attempting to. Fish are swift, but I do not have to run to catch them. I can sit and wait, and it only takes one quick action to kill them.” As he had spoken, he had been watching the water. A fish had begun to swim lazily towards him, and he lunged for it, suddenly, but missed. He came up, head drenched in water, with nothing to show for it. He turned to Niamh with a small, self-deprecating smile. “I often went hungry,” he said.