"Still overwhelmed?" Francis asked and snaked his arms around his lover. Arthur smiled, feeling the Frenchman breath against his back as they stood at the balcony overlooking Paris. "Yes, the lights are just beautiful," he said heartfelt, staring at the illuminated metropolis in the cool summer's night. "I'm glad you decided to come with me, Arthur." The Brit turned around laughing and they went back inside Francis' Parisian loft. "I was this close to not coming," he added, his index finger and thumb almost touching. He went to sit on the sofa, Francis quickly following him with two glasses of burgundy wine. "I know," he said as he put the glasses down, "and your excuse was a lousy one, too. "I won't be able to understand a word everyone is saying!" Really, cher?" "That didn't account for Paris," Arthur argued jokingly and waved his finger in the air. "Luckily the blokes here speak English when asked to, but I'm not so sure about all these other places with names I can't pronounce you're going to take me to. I feel... uncomfortable when I don't understand things fully." Francis chuckled, looking at the Brit gulp down his wine before standing up and walking to the glass walls to look at the glowing city again.
Smiling, he remembered the day they had had hours before. Ever since early morning they had been discovering the magnificence of Paris - strolling the boulevards, enjoying the Sun in the Luxembourg gardens, eating delicious French cuisine, visiting the Louvre, the Arc de Triumphe and the Eiffel tower and not to mention all the little places they went to and enjoyed themselves in. Francis couldn't hold back a grin when he remembered Arthur's little drabble in a small grocery store before. "Can I look even more French? I'll merge right in with the people here," he had said, wearing a red beret and holding a baguette and a bottle of wine - the wine they decided on buying later on -, a cigarette between his lips.
"I don't feel like the king of my castle and that's unsettling." "What, you mean you don't feel on top of things? Like not having control over everything?" Francis asked when Arthur was back on the couch, lazing and clicking through the channels. The Brit nodded and frustrated from not finding anything to watch, he turned off the television and threw the remote control back onto the coffee table. "It's because this is my castle, Arthur," the Frenchman chuckled and pulled his lover to his lap, the latter resting his head against Francis' chest. For a while they sat there in comforting and warm silence, until Francis fell asleep and Arthur had to beat him up to get loose from between his arms and go to bed himself.