The room was quiet enough to hear the clock breathe. Each tick was steady, deliberate, as if it were marking Gael's every motion—the turn of the doorknob, the soft shuffle of his shoes against the carpet, the way his eyes wandered but never rested. Astra's office wasn't what he expected. No white walls or glaring lights, no sterile smell of disinfectant. Instead, there were shelves lined with books, their spines worn from use, a low table with a bowl of smooth river stones, and a tall plant in the corner that bent toward the sunlight filtering through half-drawn blinds. The air held a faint trace of lavender, something meant to soothe. Gael stood just inside the doorway, tall for sixteen, with hair that fell a little into his eyes. He didn't move farther until Astra gestured to the chair across from her. Her voice was calm, like water slipping over stone.
"You can sit wherever you like, Gael." He lowered himself into the chair opposite her desk, posture straight, hands resting loosely on his knees. His eyes flicked across the surface between them: no clutter, just a notebook, a pen, and a glass of water. A mirror without glass. Nothing stood in the way of her seeing him, and somehow that felt heavier than if the room had been full of things. Astra studied him for a moment, not with the sharpness of judgment, but with the patience of someone waiting for a door to open. Her hair was dark, pulled back, her features soft but intent. She didn't rush, and in the silence, Gael felt the clock again, ticking like it wanted to remind him that he had nowhere else to be but here. Finally, she spoke. "You've told me before that you don't feel things the way other people do. That's where we'll start." Gael nodded, eyes settling on the window, where sunlight fractured into thin lines across the carpet. He thought of it as something distant, like a photograph of warmth rather than warmth itself.
The chair felt too soft beneath him, like it might swallow him whole if he leaned back. He didn't. His spine was straight, his shoulders squared, as if he were being measured and wanted to leave as few angles exposed as possible. The fabric scratched faintly against his palms where he rested them, and for a moment, that texture felt more real than anything else in the room. The clock ticked again. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound wasn't loud, but it was relentless, worming into the silence like an unwanted presence. He wondered if Astra could hear it too, or if her ears had learned to ignore it, trained by repetition. Astra didn't look down at her notebook. Her eyes stayed on him, steady and unhurried. She wasn't the kind of adult who filled quiet with noise, and Gael wasn't sure yet if that made her easier or harder to sit with. Most people seemed nervous around him, their words spilling out to plug the silence he carried with him like a shadow. She didn't. She let it stretch.
The office was warm, but not in a way that comforted him. The blinds let in slivers of sunlight that striped the floor, catching dust motes drifting lazily through the air. They looked like fragments suspended in amber, unmoving though the air should have carried them. He found himself watching them too long, almost forgetting Astra was watching him. Finally, her hand moved—not much, just the shift of her fingers against the pen lying on the desk. She didn't pick it up. She just rested her fingertips there, as though reminding him that she could write things down, that she was here to keep track. That this moment wouldn't vanish the way most things seemed to."Does the room feel comfortable to you?" she asked at last.
The question surprised him. Not why are you here or tell me about yourself. Just the room.Gael's eyes drifted again to the shelves, the plant, the smooth stones in the bowl. He thought of the way the carpet muffled his shoes, the way the lavender smell clung faintly to the air. He knew he was supposed to answer honestly, but honesty wasn't the same thing as truth. "It feels… full," he said finally, though his tone was flat, without weight. Astra tilted her head slightly, as though curious but not intruding. "Full of what?" He let his gaze slide back to the floating dust, caught in the sunlight, fragile and unmoving. "Things I don't need." The answer hung there. He didn't add to it, didn't explain. And Astra didn't push—not yet.
Astra's eyes didn't leave him. They had the kind of stillness that made most people squirm, but Gael didn't. If anything, he felt himself retreat further into the rhythm of the clock, into the neat lines of sunlight, into anything that wasn't her gaze. "Sometimes," Astra said softly, "the things we carry inside us feel like they fill the room. We sit across from someone, and all of it comes with us—memories, silences, even the things we can't name." She leaned back slightly, giving space, her voice deliberate but never sharp. "You've told me before that you don't feel things the way others do. Maybe we can start there. Tell me about the first time someone noticed."
The word first echoed in him, not like an invitation, but like a command that stretched back through years of emptiness. He sat straighter without realizing it, eyes dropping to his hands. His fingers curled against his knees, not in tension, but as though testing their own presence. "My parents noticed before I did," he said, the words coming slow, mechanical. "When I was very young. They said I didn't cry when other children cried. I didn't laugh when they laughed. I just… watched." Astra's pen shifted again under her fingertips, but she didn't write. She was waiting. Gael let his gaze settle on the glass of water beside her notebook, the way the light bent through it, distorting the world behind it. His voice was steady, detached, like he was reading from someone else's story. "They took me to a doctor. He gave it a name. Alexithymia."
The word fell into the room like a stone into still water. No ripple, just weight. Astra nodded gently, her expression unchanged. "And do you remember that moment? The doctor's office?" His eyes flicked to hers briefly, then away again. He thought of white walls, of a nurse's careful voice explaining to his parents what he was, and the way his father's jaw had tightened while his mother's hands twisted together. "Yes," he said. "I remember." He didn't say how he remembered it—like a painting etched into his mind, each detail preserved not by emotion, but by the stillness in which he'd observed it. Astra's voice softened. "Then maybe we start there. Show me what you saw." Gael's lips parted slightly, as if to protest, but no sound came. He realized he wasn't being asked for feelings. Just sights. Details. That he could do. So he leaned back at last, eyes unfocused, and the lavender-scented room began to fade, slipping backward into memory—into a smaller office, a smaller boy, and the first time someone told him what he lacked.
The lavender faded. The ticking clock softened until it was nothing. In its place, the smell of disinfectant returned, sharp and chemical, stinging his nose. The walls were pale, the kind of white that looked more like absence than color. The chairs were too big for him, swallowing his small body, his legs dangling without reaching the floor. "I was three," Gael said, his voice steady, almost clinical, as though reporting an event rather than reliving it. "The nurse sat across from us. She smiled, but it wasn't the kind of smile people give children. It was thinner. Practiced. Like she was trying not to show what she really thought." In the memory, the nurse leaned forward, her clipboard balanced on her knees. Her tone was gentle, but her words were heavy, strung together with a precision that his parents didn't yet understand. "Alexithymia," she explained carefully. "It means Gael has difficulty identifying and expressing emotions. It isn't that he doesn't experience them at all, but… the connection between feeling and understanding is fractured. He won't respond the way most children do." Gael's child-self had not moved. He remembered watching her lips form the words, the way her earrings trembled when she shifted her head, the soft click of her pen against the paper. The details had lodged themselves in his memory like pins on a board.
"My mother—Elara—her hands twisted together in her lap. She kept asking, 'But he's healthy? He's… he'll grow out of it?'" The nurse's smile softened. "It isn't something one grows out of. But with support, he can learn ways to understand the world around him." Gael's father—Dorian—had been quiet until then, but his jaw was tight, his voice low and sharp when he finally spoke. "So, you're saying my son's broken." Gael blinked at the word. Broken. He remembered the way it clung to the air, heavier than anything else in the room. He looked at Astra now, seated across from him, her stillness unbroken. "That's what my father called me first. Broken." For a moment, the office dissolved back into silence—the memory sealed, but the weight of it still in the air between them.
Astra didn't look away when he said the word broken. If anything, her gaze softened, the faintest trace of warmth blooming in her eyes. Most people shifted, stumbled for reassurance, but Astra stayed steady, her body angled toward him in a way that felt deliberate. "Gael," she said, her voice low, almost coaxing, "you are not broken. Alexithymia doesn't make you less. It means you process differently—your world has a different language. One that others may not understand." The words lingered between them, tender, as if she wasn't just a therapist explaining a condition but a woman speaking to the boy in front of her—the boy who had grown into a young man with striking features, eyes sharp and unreadable, posture too still for sixteen. Her lips curved, faint, unpracticed. "When you sit here, you think you give nothing away, but you do. You observe. You carry things in silence, and sometimes that tells me more than if you spilled every thought." Gael tilted his head, watching her without expression. His face, pale against the muted glow of the office, looked carved from still water—beautiful, unsettling in its lack of ripple.
Astra let the silence stretch, but not too far. She leaned forward slightly, her perfume faint—lavender with a thread of warmth that didn't come from the room's diffuser. "I know you think you can't feel what others feel," she said, softer now, "but that doesn't mean I can't feel for you." Her voice caught in its own weight, and she quickly tempered it, straightening a little, brushing her pen lightly against her notebook as though covering the slip. But the air between them carried something charged, quiet but undeniable—her attraction circling the impossibility of his condition. Gael didn't notice. Or if he did, he gave no sign. His gaze had shifted again, past her shoulder, to the clock ticking gently against the wall. "Do you want me to tell you more?" he asked flatly. Astra let out a slow breath, steadying herself. "Yes," she said. "Take me further. What came after the doctor's office?"