"It's on the corner of Rue Malher and Rue Pavée, right at the border between 3rd and 4th," Claude specifies rather than outright asking Vincent his address. Leaves the man to determine by his own standards what's too close and what isn't. Heaven knows, if Claude lived with his family still, perhaps even just within the same city limits, the distance from Ganyméde's entrance to wherever the farthest French colonies are located might prove too close, the risks taken into consideration. Thus, there's no attempt from him at sugarcoating the situation, no feeble and inevitably futile comforts to grant. In this particular aspect, reality is shitty. Foul and bone-breaking like the gutter. He can't change it, so he won't try. What he can do is providing a place for Vincent to go that's -- well, if not safe, then safer. Sometimes you have to settle. You don't have to like it and God knows, Claude doesn't by principle, but if you don't just take it, you can't make anything better of it either. Looking at Vincent, at his down-cast gaze and his sharp profile, Claude likes to think himself smarter than that kind of pride. Even as Vincent shrugs, he doesn't let his arm drop.
Claude made that mistake once. Thinking himself raised above the politics and tendencies of general society, thinking a place in and by itself offered any sort of security. He thought the Opera really was as vast and all-embracing as the stories they tell there would lead you to believe and he was wrong. And much, much too late he realised that safety wasn't something any one place could guarantee you, it was something you'd have to claim for yourself and something you'd only find with another. Perhaps if he'd opened his eyes to that fact sooner, Pavel would still have been alive. Then again, if Pavel hadn't walked his own path, Vincent wouldn't have sat here now in this gentle April morning light and made Claude ponder the great mechanisms of it all, would he? He might not be religious, but you learn - maybe especially as an artist - than when one door closes, it's simply your cue to find the one that opened instead. Wherever it might be hidden.
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Claude made that mistake once. Thinking himself raised above the politics and tendencies of general society, thinking a place in and by itself offered any sort of security. He thought the Opera really was as vast and all-embracing as the stories they tell there would lead you to believe and he was wrong. And much, much too late he realised that safety wasn't something any one place could guarantee you, it was something you'd have to claim for yourself and something you'd only find with another. Perhaps if he'd opened his eyes to that fact sooner, Pavel would still have been alive. Then again, if Pavel hadn't walked his own path, Vincent wouldn't have sat here now in this gentle April morning light and made Claude ponder the great mechanisms of it all, would he? He might not be religious, but you learn - maybe especially as an artist - than when one door closes, it's simply your cue to find the one that opened instead. Wherever it might be hidden.