Re: second class smoking room
That burnt feather smell strikes a familiar chord in Charming, and something flat and angry flashes across his eye for the briefest of seconds. Then it's gone again, and he's just the well-dressed guy who stumbled into a barfight, innocent bystander and protector of the weak and vulnerable in one out of three parts of a three piece suit.
The question makes Charming grin. Someone else asked him that, not too long ago, and his answer hasn't really changed even if he does feel different. "I used to," he says. "I used to live just to keep living." His grin is set sharp, but genuine enough, all wry amusement. "Someone recently decided that I need to start living for more than that. Haven't figured out what to do it for, though." He shrugged. "I guess some people do it for love. I don't know. I don't really understand people very well. I'm learning, but I still think he's an idiot. You live to live. There doesn't need to be anything else."
A woman. Charming considered that. Once voice whispered that he did have someone, a shapely creature in modest retro skirts with white polka dots and sweet smiles who he rescued from her captor, locked high in an attic. Another voice whispered that he didn't, that he never had, that he'd been alone for too long to have a woman, that he didn't understand them. "I...don't know," he said, finally. "I don't think so. I think I remember a girl," he added, beginning again with renewed strength, "But I don't think she's real. I can't remember her name. Just that she needed me." He laughed, abruptly. "But that can't be right!" His whole person is fragmented. He is Charming - he should be whole, a knight in shining armor, completely assembled and neatly derived. But under the surface something is wrong, something is too much not Charming to make the costume work all the way. Who is Charming, after all, but the face the story writes about, the two-dimensional rescuer who is prescribed to fall in love and rescue the girl the whole story has been about? Who knows what lies under the veneer who commands the step-mother dance to death in shoes of hot iron? Who knows?