Photo album spread out on my bedroom floor...

[almost_knightly]

There was nothing remarkable about the day when Break got up this morning. There was nothing remarkable lying in wait in his bathroom, and nothing remarkable between himself and the kitchen, and nothing remarkable between the kitchen and the library.

The library, however, held something new today. It was lurking on the bottom shelf, easily missed but for Break's habit of crawling around on the floor -- a large binder, sedate red leather and several inches wide.

Break knows that binder.

Fingers shaking, he snatches it up out of the shelf. He fumbles it, and it falls open, and the first thing he sees is Faneuil Hall at Christmas, covered in snow. Below that is a photograph of Shelly, his own Shelly, dressed in winter clothes and laughing with Sharon when she was still small, and there's his ponytail in the photograph next to it because no one could ever get him to look at the camera that first year and he's seen these pictures a thousand times --

He slams the book shut, suddenly unable to look. A cruel gift, in a way; there are days that he wonders if he'll ever see this place and these people again. But on the other hand, now -- now he can show people, he can let them see things he's only described. It's as precious as it is mean.

Gathering the photo album up close to his chest and clutching it as though he's afraid it'll vanish, Break leaves the library, in search of some of the people he trusts most.


[ooc: Locked to hadengineered, retraced, of_murder, standstilltime, smallkindnesses, info_barma]

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[almost_knightly]

[Break listens to him quietly, one hand pinching the bridge of his nose and the other tickling the cat to keep her from running off again. He does know how different that other world is; he knows that people are dead in that other world who are still alive and well in his. He knows his own counterparts are mass-murderers and that his own Vincent isn't nearly as bad off as most of the ones here seem to be. He's met the tiny Gilbert and he's seen how it started, and he's seen even Gilbertine -- who he considers the most level-headed of them all -- come close to having fits.

But he's also come to see his own world, his own people, as the way things could be for the others. He's seen potential in all of the Gilberts here, and the more time he spends with them, the more it hurts that his own Gilbert still feels too awkward around him to speak to him.]

...he told me, you know. About the day you met. That he'd just lost Oz and he was crying in the rain when you showed up and offered him -- whatever the hell, spy stuff and Pandora. I'd say you must have been a beacon of hope in the darkness to him but actually I fink you kind of freaked him out. But -- what was it he said? "There was somefing about his words I had to trust."