Sinking. Disorienting. Just a self indulgent fantasy seeping into dreams, dreams he surely has while he'd been there that he forgot— and even in thinking that line of rationale, something tips. Had it then, but not then? Somehow it feels like a knife twist. It could have been ruinous and explosive, it could have killed the whole interview, isn't that what, isn't it—

"It was a dream," sounds uncertain. A plea. Let it be a dream. "That you'd look at a dying old man. Not something that would actually happen. And you said that, in the dream. And you told me, because I asked you."

And Louis had touched him, the scars he's still fascinated with, and come so close, even closer than they are right now.

A dream.