fluttering your lashes like ashes and embers

"Well, I guess wouldn't know. Never lived a life that felt like a dream."

There was a snap and shift in the air, and Lotte could taste the sharp bitterness of unfinished business in the air, hear the telltale crunch of leather gloves as his fingers curled into a fist. Alastor's lip curled and he insisted that dreams were nonsense, that she knew it to be true just as he did - and she wouldn't correct him because as usual, he spoke the truth.

With each question and answer she learned a little more about him, not from his words, which are as contrariwise and vague as ever, but from things like this. Glimpses of what had been, what was left behind in the form that stood before her now. The notion that he'd been a murderer wasn't surprising, really. Murderers came in all shapes and sizes, and he'd had to do something to go to Hell anyway. What piqued her curiosity was the gnawing hunch that he wanted to remain in this world. Go back to where he'd come from. But why?

Surely not to murder! He could do that in this form, whenever and wherever he wanted no doubt. It made him oddly... human. No less strange, but just a little more real than the last time, and that humanity made him all the more alluring.

"But I'm certainly tired of dreaming of the life I'd like to have." Lotte looked up at him, "Are you forfeiting your question? I'll ask another, then."

A step forward, and then another turn on her heel and she was in front of him, emboldened still by the whiskey she'd been drinking since well before she'd gotten foolhardy enough to summon Alastor to her home for the second time.

"Why would you want to go back to New Orleans with little old me? Or is it that you need me to take you?"