[Reaction]
Again, outside looking in. Caspar watched frozen, still on the wall like he was just another part of the architecture, a speck of roaming dust on the ceiling. Subject to being part of this, but also detached from it. He witnessed from the highest corner of each room and hall, in the forgotten shadow shroud. Him and the militant dust bunnies and a couple of detached moth wings, at the last stand in the way out of reach, almost invisible, ancient and dried up spider web just off-stage.
Caspar had siblings of his own, so he could recognize what this was. The affectionate games of children who had grown up in a house that let them play games, let them run wild in the halls, let them shriek and giggle. The memory was something very simple, something light as a feather. So delicate that after Caspar exhaled some breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding down deep in his lungs, the memory seemed to whisk away with it. Blown away from him like the gossamer fronds from a dandelion.
Jamie's, then. Something had given it away, although Caspar could not recall what after the breeze-like, gentle memory was gone from him. It was not the sort of thing that he should have felt guilty for witnessing, and yet he nearly did. He might have said something, or offered an apology for glimpsing something so tenderhearted, but he didn't. In his own estimation, Jamie did not care for him very much anyway.
So Caspar said nothing, and his hands were wonderfully steady as he poured another mimosa from the tall glass decanter. He cheered nobody in particular before drinking the entirety of the flute down in one go.