Re: log: david/aiden
He watched as the names of the dead men went up in smoke. "Who remembers these dead things?" he murmured. "Who mourns them?" They might have wives or husbands, they might have children who counted on the money that came from the girls, clipped-winged, who had flown. Deaths were necessary to end the misery, but his rage was not so blind that he saw nowhere beyond this blood-soaked floor, these filthy mattresses, this empty, wide-eyed building.
He saw the reaper, too, and saw something, a flicker of something, that made him want to know more. You'll know. How many had come before him, torn through the world like hurricanes and gone? How many had given up their ghost, or shrugged off life like a chain around their neck?
He moved out the front door, as if he owned the door, and the building, and the dead. If he was concerned about witnesses, it didn't show on his face. "One day," he said, with a sudden, dazzling, white-on-white smile, "I'm going to buy you a drink." Then he hopped down the steps with all the lightness of Fred Astaire, and was gone.