The story rolled through Alastor like wind, like shadow, like a warm crackle of energy. Her energy was in it, and he admired that she could tell the tale of herself with such power, a power normally reserved for the regurgitation of other's tales. It was always hard to speak about oneself so profoundly, with no boast, no contrivance. And she did it.

He settled back against the wall, letting her words wash over him, hanging on each one because it would be disrespectful not to. She was sharing a piece of her soul, when she didn't need to. She could have summarized it briefly, given him the major points of the plot, but she chose to gift him with this, instead: a recollection not just of facts, but of the feeling.

There was something intimate there.

Alastor wouldn't dwell too much on that. Of all the things he deserved, this wasn't one.

And still he reveled in it, his lips curling in a smile that remained etched on his face and just stretching the bounds of human, the longer she spoke. Each time she let him have the cigar back, he took a puff and held it in his lungs, letting the thing dangle from his fingertips loosely, so she could take it back with ease. It charmed him that she acclimated so fast; she would be a real sight in New Orleans, he would make certain she was.

He kept silent until Lotte finished speaking. And then he said, slowly, like waking from a dream, "And does the girl think it better? To have lived?"