#i just think it stinks that moreau is so overlooked

[irregularbillcipher]

was going through old files and found the start of a resident evil village fic... idk if i'll ever finish it, so here's the start for posterity. maybe i'll finish it someday if there's any interest warnings for descriptions of animal harm, gore and surgery, along with some emotional abuse also also, if anyone here speaks french and would be willing to tell me if the tiny bit of french in here sounds correct, i'd appreciate it! i went through a few channels that were more advanced than google translate, but i don't speak the language myself and didn't really have any way to verify

Salvatore Moreau was a very good doctor. At the very least, his mother had always said so.

                To be fair, she wasn’t the only one who said so, but she was always the one who was the most adamant about it, even before he could speak.

                Stories fed to him when he could barely hold his head up of his grandfather, his namesake, who had left Italy for France to study under the Louis Pasteur— or at his university, at least— and Salvatore had learned by age two and a half that he should always pretend that he understood why that was a big deal.

                By age four, he really did understand why that was such a big deal, and by age five, after lengthy stories from his mother of his grandfather’s most gruesome surgical endeavors and hints that his namesake had been prepping since he was half Salvatore’s age, he had started performing medical experiments of his own, shaking, pudgy hands rifling through his father’s tackle box, taking out the worms and insects, using a hook to open them up and see how they ticked.

                His father never liked it, seeing the boy tear his bait apart on the docks of the reservoir, but his mother was thrilled, and tutted away his father’s concerns.

                “It’s a surgeons instinct,” she would coo, pressing a kiss against the boy’s cheek and placing a needle and thread in tiny hands, so he could stitch everything back together. “I just want him to have a head start. He’ll need hands-on experience before he goes to Paris!”

                “Of course,” his father would say, never one for arguments, “but couldn’t we stick to creatures that are already dead?”

                “He’ll have plenty of time to work on cadavers in school,” she would retort, and sometimes the discussion would become a bit more tense, a back and forth babble of French and Italian that Salvatore could make out if he focused, but rarely bothered to focus on. The Italian always won, anyway.

                “Just…” he would finally hear in tired French, “nothing that feels. Nothing more than bait… Nothing with fur, or a real brain…”

                And Salvatore was happy to agree with that— bigger things would squirm or scream, and he didn’t like to feel like he was hurting anything. He was practicing being a doctor, he wasn’t trying to cause harm.

                But by age seven, his mother started handing her little surgeon field mice and toads from the lake, speaking breathlessly about how his grandfather had once amputated a leg in five minutes flat, and he knew she wanted him to try to do it in four.

                A mouse’s leg was so much thinner, after all.

                She was ecstatic when one of his tiny patients finally survived the night, and had gleefully told him that his father wouldn’t have to know they were expanding their medical practice.

                “He’s a sweet man, your father, a good man,” she would say, with genuine fondness, patting her son’s cheek, “just…not ambitious. We both want you to be the best you can be, tesoro, we just don’t agree on how to get you there…”

                And Salvatore wasn’t sure how he felt about her dismissing his father— he seemed happy with his life, after all— but it was hard to act as if he was living up to his potential.

                He was sure, after all, that when his father had told his mother he had a Lordship waiting for him if his family ever returned to Romania, she was not expecting the man to remain a fisherman after he had accepted it. A Lord usually made more of himself.  

                When he asked his father though, on one of the quiet, early morning boat trips he took his boy on so often, the man had simply laughed quietly.

                “A Lordship is just a title, Salvatore,” he’d said, wrapping another blanket around the boy’s shoulders— Salvatore always forgot how chilly the morning mist on the boat was, and his father always kept spare wool blankets by the tacklebox, so the boy wouldn’t have to remember. “I’m sure some old Moreau was great some hundred-odd years ago, or at least found a way to make some money somehow, but it doesn’t mean much nowadays. A bit of land, a crest…”

                “A boat,” the boy had giggled, kicking the bottom of the old thing, and his father had laughed.    

“No, no, the boat I built.”

                Salvatore had squirmed a little, confused, hands gripping his fishing rod. “We… we owned a reservoir, but not a boat?”

                And the man had chuckled again. “Your brains come from your mother’s side of the family, mon chou. Not the Moreau side, even if someone long ago managed to be great on a reservoir without a boat.”

                “Well. You were smart enough to build a boat.”

                The man had hummed softly and nodded in humble agreement, standing up to cast his line out again.

                “… So if we’re Lords here,” the boy continued, gnawing on dirty fingernails, “why did you ever live in France?”

                “Well, we have family there, of course,” his father had said, chewing on his cigarette, eyes glued to the lake, “but it was mostly the weather.”

                “… Your family gave up being Lords because of the weather?”

                “We’re cold-blooded creatures, us Moreaus,” his father had whispered conspiratorially, piling another blanket on the shivering boy and sticking out his tongue when he snorted. “We do better where it’s temperate.”

                “But it’s still cold here. It’d be nicer in France. Or Italy.”

                “Hm, it is, but your mother’s enough of a firecracker to keep anyone warm,” the man had said, half exhausted and half lovestruck, and Salvatore really couldn’t argue with that. “And besides. She liked the idea of being a Lady… found it romantic, you know.”

                The boy had nodded again, kicking his legs and reeling in experimentally, just to see if he could catch any fish’s attention. It didn’t work.

                “But there’s no expectation for you,” his father had said, tugging on his own line. “There’s no, ah… role you have to play, because of my family.”

                “Mama says being a doctor would be be-befitting of a Lord.”

                “And it would be if that’s what you’d like,” he’d said, patting his son’s shoulder. His jaw had set, just a little, and Salvatore regretting bringing it up. “We both want you to be happy, Salvatore, we just—”

                “Don’t agree on how to get me there,” he’d finished quietly.

                “No, we don’t,” the man was reeling his line in now, having felt a tug. “But nobody does, really, for anybody. Ready with the net now.”

                The boy had nearly dropped his own pole in the water in the rush to get the net for what ended up being a much smaller than average fish, but his father never chided him for that sort of thing.

                Despite his mother’s aspirations, stories of how his parents met never included the Lordship.

                “We met at the market,” his mother would say dreamily, whenever her son asked. “He tried to sell me a tiny trout for three francs…”

                “And?” Salvatore would always prompt giddily, despite knowing how the story went.

                “And I told him that for that price, I’d better get it fully cooked with wine and dessert… and he was happy to do it.”

                “The dinner,” his father would always add from his armchair, “was more than three francs—”

                “And the trout was very good,” she would concede, kissing him on the cheek and patting his arm as he blushed furiously.

                “Was it worth it?” Salvatore would ask his father, as if he didn’t already know the answer, as if he weren’t essentially reciting a script, and he was never surprised when mother would reply instead.

                “Was a wife worth three francs?”

                “I think I could have spent less on the dinner if I’d thought it through more,” his father would always say, smiling the whole time.  “But the date was well worth the seven francs I spent.”

                There were many stories like that, back and forth skits of things his mother had already told him— everything from his grandfather’s most harrowing surgical endeavors to the hectic day that he was born— but the day his parents met was always his favorite. It was the one they seemed the happiest to tell, the one they always remembered new details of.

                His mother would always tell him later, while tucking him in, that she would have insisted on dinner with his father even if he’d charged a single centime for the trout, because her demand for dinner and wine hadn’t really had anything to do with the trout itself, and his father would always tell him the next morning on the boat that he’d deliberately overcharged for the trout just to have an excuse to haggle with a pretty girl, which had worked out far better than he ever could have imagined.

                “So, it was love at first sight?” he would ask them both, without fail.

                “Of course it was, tesoro,” his mother would sigh, brushing his hair out of his eyes and taking off his glasses, setting them on his bedside table. “Why else would I have made him take me to dinner?”

                His father would always be asked the next morning, back on the boat, and he would breathe air out of his nose and smile softly, shaking his head.

                “I wouldn’t call it that, Salvatore… love takes time, work, you know? It’s a… process,” he would say, baiting his hook. “But I knew I wanted to know her better.”

                Salvatore decided from an early age that he liked his mother’s answer best, but he never said so, at least not to his father on those frigid, foggy mornings.

                “He changes the story, doesn’t he?” his mother would ask, needle and thread and a rabbit bundled into her arms, and he would relay the conversations on the lake, to drown out the rabbit’s screams. To stop his hands from shaking.

“No,” he would say, hoping to avoid the inevitable. This was another script, but one he liked much less, and it was hard to recite his lines when his hands were slick with viscera.

 “He doesn’t say it was love at first sight,” she would sigh, looking intently at her son’s handiwork.

                “He says love takes time,” he would say, wrist deep in gore, “and work.”

                “So it takes work to love me, does it?” and the teasing note in her voice would never be enough to stop his queasiness from building.

                “No,” he’d say over the rabbit’s screeches, or mouse’s, or the toad’s, “of course not.” And his voice would quaver even though he’d mean it.

                She never noticed the hesitancy, and he was glad, because the minute his patient was stitched up, that nervous note in his voice would wash over him in a wave of shame. He’d shake and snivel after every procedure, and he was convinced it had to be because of that hesitancy over the woman convincing him to tear apart the local fauna, and not the act of tearing them apart. He refused to entertain the idea it could be a little of both.

                Her son’s trembling was something she could not ignore, and she’d take his hands, still dripping from surgery, still pudgy with baby fat, and smile softly. “A surgeon’s hands,” she’d sigh, squeezing. “You’ve done such a good job, Salvatore, you have a surgeon’s hands.”

                It was almost enough to make him feel better.

                “Now, let’s get you cleaned up before your father sees.”

                That was what really made him feel better, at the end of the day, wiping off the gore. He tried not to think about it too much. There wasn’t much use for a squeamish surgeon.

                Even as he got older, as his hands started to shake less, as he learned how to quiet the animals’ screams and as he developed an appreciation—or at least a fascination—with the work his mother was pushing him towards, he was still relieved every time he got to clean his hands and be done with it.

                He was ten when his father found him, halfway between the makeshift surgical center and the lake, rushing to dip sopping red hands in murky water. His father had looked at him, hunched over and bloody and crying, and his face had gone gray, and he’d docked the boat and headed up to their house without a word.

                The din in the house started almost immediately and for once, the French overpowered the Italian.

                He tried not to listen, as he scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and tried to drown out the noise, washing until his hands were sore to try to feel clean, to avoid going into the house.

                The yelling carried, though, no matter how loudly he splashed, no matter how much he muttered to himself. The only sound he could hear was his father, angry like he’d never heard before, so angry Salvatore was sure he was sobbing, refusing to back down for once.

                Vous pensez que c’est ce qui est le mieux pour lui? Vous pensez que c’est ce qui le rendra heureux? Il est trempé de sang, il tremble! Mon Dieu, il n'a que dix ans!

                Dear God, he’s only ten!

                When he pulled his hands from the lake, they were still bloody, and it took a good few seconds to realize that this time, it was his own blood. From the state of his hands, raw and cracked and trembling—God, he wished he could stop the trembling-- scrubbing any more would only make things worse, so he just sat on the dock miserably, holding his fingers above the water and waiting for them to dry.