Rebuilding What Was Lost

"Hard?" Remi repeated with another of those dark and uncharacteristic laughs. He raised his head from his hands, giving Sam a look that was so unlike him, his face youthful but aged by the lines of weariness and despair. "That everyone knows I am.." He swallowed. "..gay aside...that is not it." Clenching his teeth together, Remi looked around the room, as if trying to latch onto something familiar. But of course there was nothing. With a weary sigh, Remi suddenly looking and feeling foolish, he glanced across at Sam and shook his head. Though he'd noticed the blue ( :| ) of Sam's eyes, without the prevalence of blue-eyed men in his life, it was simply another colour. Pretty enough, a nice contrast to his copper hair and freckles, but it drew no reaction from the alchemist now. "No, I am alright. You should not have to leave in your own shop." He replied with an apologetic smile. Running his hands through his hair, Remi leaned back against the chair though kept his knees upright, tracing patterns against them with the feather. "I...it is a shock to know that everyone knows something about me that I kept a closely guarded secret my whole life. It is perhaps one of only two things I have ever lied about, or tried to keep hidden." The other having to do with a man, and a very old friend. That he certainly still remembered. "But to know that..." Remi's head shook slightly and tears wanted to prickle against the back of his eyes, but he batted them away. "..that at some point that changed...that I acted on what I had always tried to hide.." Biting the inside of his lip, he glanced quickly and awkwardly towards Sam, before turning his attention back to the feather. "I had thought perhaps you were the first. But from what you have said, you...were not." Swallowing uncertainly, Remi continued to shake his head in a sort of slow and disbelieving metronome-like rhythm. "An entire lifetime of hiding it. Of fighting it. To know that at some point I stopped, that I gave in and presumably it was okay, and to not remember. The biggest moment of my life...and I do not remember it happening." At some point his voice had fallen to a whisper and his hands had begun to shake as he gently twirled the feather. REMI So come on, get higher, loosen my lips, faith and desire and the swing of your hips Just pull me down hard and drown me in love