"Oh, I'm comfortable telling you anything," he answered automatically, though he had to reflect after the words left his mouth on whether or not that was true. It was true that Victor didn't care to keep many secrets these days, when it came to things like this. He had held on to so many secrets for the sake of other people — the most egregious case being how Beatrice had killed him — but he was mostly done with that, he thought. There was still some level of not wanting to tell people things that would make them uncomfortable or hurt them, but he thought even that impulse might be fading as he moved farther and farther from his days among the living.

But it was besides the point anyway, because he wanted to tell Leo this and he had no reason to suspect Leonid wouldn't want to hear it. "I came into her room and saw her dead on the bed," he said without preamble. "Not asleep, she was laying down as though she might have been asleep but her eyes were open and there was — you can tell, when there's nothing there, in someone's eyes. And then she drifted into the room — spectral, wearing the same thing her body was but translucent, you know. Like me. She looked just like me. And I talked to her, and she touched me —" She'd shoved his chest, actually, which wasn't a particularly good way to be touched, but in the moment his mind had latched onto that as proof that he had not hallucinated or imagined her appearance. He would not have dreamt up her having touched him. "— and then got angry and went back into her body and out through the floo." He paused for a second, hoping Leonid could understand how terribly disorienting that would have been from his perspective. "And I couldn't follow her through the floo and I had no idea what the hell had happened, and whether she was alive or dead, really."

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