With chilled air and the gentle creaks punctuating his step, the Plinius manor welcomed its unexpected visitor kinder than its lord would.

The place was the same it ever was. Exactly as Sam left it, so many moons ago.

Grotesque taxidermy fixed on the walls with pretty frames, shrub embellishments, lined bookshelves stuffed beyond maximum capacity with all kinds of junk. Sunlight projected onto wooden floors, sliced up by the grilles of the window it filtered through. Dust danced through it, giving an air of something… calm. Serene.

The sight dimmed the fury Sam had entered with, if just momentarily, and took him back to their college days with a wash of nostalgia. Times that were simpler, the men younger, and his biggest nuisance being his roommate’s clutter and test scores.

Joshua’s rebellious, unabashed eclecticism had always been respite from rigid school life. Calm, easy-going nature to Sam’s inflexible need for order and control. The kind that beat down on his back like the merciless sun, the weight of such bringing his posture to a permanent hunch. 

In the entryway, the chemist idled, shade soothing his body’s subtle acclimation to the temperature. To his left, hooks and a shoe rack, whose purpose would be ignored in the name of cursing the man who owned them. 

Let his muddied shoes bring dirt and debris onto clean, polished floorings. By any luck, his coat would catch on something expensive, a vase, then it’d go and clatter into a million pieces. Oh, what a sight to behold. Perhaps it’d even indebt Joshua! It would serve him right, the sleazy, uncaring-

A butler would cut through all his antagonistic ideation before anything would become of it with mannerisms jittery and pitch high. He approached with hurried steps, hesitant hands held out with fingers spread and bent.

“Mr. Bourbon!” Widened eyes scanned, doing panicked laps around Sam’s frame before eventually settling upon his face. “My apologies, the lord wasn’t expecting your visit. Please, could I get you something to drink? Pe- Perhaps I could retrieve your coat-”