Pictures.
Page after page of carefully sketched images, in place of the words he'd anticipated. Flipping back to the beginning, he looked over several immediately recognizable objects, a blackbird, a butterfly.. Even a halferased scrawl of a house he didn't know.
After perhaps a dozen pages, he found himself staring at a figure he recognized all too well.
The Earl's wide smile and sinister manner were painstakingly reproduced on the page, his hat and ever present umbrella outlined exactly as he remembered them. Shivering, he moved onward, flipping past other unpleasant reminders. Skin Boric, Lulubelle, Jasdero and Devit.. And an oddly disturbing portrait of Rhode Camelot, her head lain atop folded arms as she slept surrounded by books and paper.
Swallowing heavily, he skipped to the end, prepared for yet another ghost of his lover's past. Instead, he blinked stupidly at a drawing of himself, his expression set in stubborn lines as he glared from the sheet as if to accuse himself of spying. Turning to the opposite side with a jerky movement, he found one final image, also of himself.
This one was sketched in a lighter pose, his eye wide with what seemed to be pleasure, the mouth curved into the same halfsmile that he could feel forming on his own as he closed the book.
Somehow, he thought that there might indeed be a chance for this to work.
