Re: Jack & Louis: registration
Had Jack the merest suspicion of beings from another plane taking up occupation in the body of his companion - let alone said companion being past-life friend - that would have been it. Quick discharge, absent without leave, no and no and done. For as much as Jack had begun (and had the paint stains to prove it) to believe in the permanency of a death that leached the dread of the supernatural, he wasn't entirely convinced it couldn't be reversed eventually.
And then there was the guilt.
But he saw a bright head over a bright jacket - taller, than he remembered but the planes of the face remained as they had been in late adolescence albeit sharpened with adulthood. Jack didn't know anything about fashion he hadn't deliberately unlearned (a wife who studied religiously at the false-altar of Vogue magazine and he'd picked up a few things, kicking and bloody screaming) but the blue made Louis easy to pick out of a crowd. He thought that might have been the point.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Jack's voice was movie-made neutral British most of the time, some of the region shaken out of it by years lodged in the States and before that, elsewhere. But hearing someone else sound like him - bloody cheering, actually, come to think about it you miserable git - the timbre took on a little more of the hills of home, the stone and wind of the moors north of the border.
"It's good to see you too. There's a few around who look like they'll take you out and lay you out if you're not taking it as seriously as the bloody Olympics." Jack's smile was the same this side of the better part of twenty years of raddled living, misery and a star-bright career burned out like a filament wire. Creased, greying (the scrub of stubble) but blue eyes steady on an old friend.