Re: log: jack/louis
Jack believed in dreams. Well, you did, didn't you? Until they all went tits up at once. It wasn't whim if you did it right. A good solid dream could balloon you up from the doldrums, when they were particularly dour and shouting loud enough downstairs to break china. It wasn't his dream, to run an antique store in a tiny town that was nearly a freckle on a map but if it was Louis's then ...well. Excellent fulfilment, carry on old chap, or something.
He studied Louis avidly, without shame. Everyone (except Newt) looked at him but for everyone (except Newt), they were new faces that he had to learn, instead of looking for the ways they'd changed. Louis looked longer, more sinewy, and of course impossibly adult even if it was only ten years or so between them... or something. Jack handwaved the mathematics of it. He was older. Lots older, he had gravitas and china teapots.
And the thing was, Jack didn't intend to display shyness. He tried not to in actual fact, school had been a chaotic breeze of pretending very quickly and in each moment that he knew exactly what it was he was doing. Stood in front of Louis, with a cabinet to his left that looked like his grandmother's living room he couldn't help it bubbling up his throat and swallowing his words. It was the kind of imprecise reaction his father had taken exception to, with fists, actually. He hadn't been shy without hating it for years, but he was shy now but he refused to side-step into ugly awkwardness with Louis of all people.
So he blinked beneath the thatch of fringe and spread his hands-in-his-pockets wide, so that the tails of his coat fanned outward. "Are they especially different? They all look old to me," he grinned, fragmented curiosity and a little hope and the defiance of being shy and aware of it all at the same time. After all, Louis couldn't hate him right out of the gate, could he? And Jack-the-boy was rather more tired of being disliked than Jack-the-man.