"Jus' gettin' started and you're already thinkin' 'bout that?"
If the infamous ghost were here, he would laugh, that loud and obnoxious, but beautiful way, and Louis would pretend he was not there at all, feigning little more than indifference. But there was no laughter and no pretending, only Armand and the vacancy that the Parisian apartment held without his truest companions in immortality.
He flicked at the cigarette that was held loosely between two fingers, the ash spiraling in the air before disappearing. Verdant eyes locked within the amber ones, finding only beauty within them rather than the void he had glimpsed into, fearful of his inability to fill that space - but it was not desperate for feeding, not yet.
Here he was, just evasive as he had always been. He never gave the assurance that, no, the room would never shrink, words of affirmation far from his lips. How could he? How could he silence something he worried after himself?
And how he could ensure that he had stopped the visits from the reoccurring character that threatened to purge him of all feeling within this choice?
Louis rested his elbows on the lip of the pink and satin lined coffin, the one made for his daughter; the reminder struck him before the sting suddenly left him again, draining from him as the blood from a human might. How curious that it was, that the melancholy never lingered anymore, only a brief shadow and then nothingness.
And now that he thought of it, how odd it was that Armand fit all too easily within the coffin that was across from his, meant to hold only a girl and yet suiting him every night. It was something that he would have never been able to endure once, his lover sleeping so far away from him. But then again, those were forgotten nights, filled with the blues, tobacco, and champagne so sweetly on those lips he once deemed his only place of worship. Once again, how queer that it was that he could withstand such distance in this and so easily, without so much of a morsel of struggle, joining in the emptiness of Claudia's absence and the detachment in it.
Louis' eyelashes fluttered as his lips adopted a coy smile, eyes purposefully brushing across the figure to distract from the declarations that had yet to fall from his lips, his chin moving to dramatically fall into his palm. "Don' think of it. Think of Paris, of all the music we'll 'ear tonight, all the places we could run off to." A moment of thought. "Could take a train 'fore few days, leave it all behind, make it seem like we're neva comin' back."
There was burst of joy in the thought, the train and running away, far far away, even if his stubbornness would never allow for it.
"Maybe the room gets bigger to you then, hmm?" What a terrible thing to tease, to hold on out as the thing to never be grasped but always longed for. As it always was with him, the crooked paramour who could never say as he truly thought or felt, the silent lover until the end of all things.
