Morse’s Thoughts on Ludo and Bix
Was he so very lonely? Was he so very desperate for someone to see him that he was willing to blink and look away?
Because Ludo had almost certainly never been to Oxford.
But, perhaps, it was nothing so very sinister. After all, the last person to have reached out to him, to have seemed to want to understand him, had lied about his pedigree, too.
“I’m a Harvard man, myself, old man.”
Morse tried to comfort himself with the thought, even though, it was also true, that Bixby had said such words quite differently—always with a trace of good-humor and light in the dark eyes, with a dazzle of a smile playing around his lips, as if to include him in the masquerade.
As if to say, “You and I both know that Bruce is right, that I am a fraud.”
“But it’s all good fun, isn’t it? As the fellow said: You only get one go around the board.”
With Bix, Morse had always felt as if his host was drawing him in, inviting him to be a part of the game. And it was a harmless game, a child’s game, really. A game of let’s pretend. Let’s turn back the clock, to the days before we wore the mask, to the days before we learned to bury ourselves behind layers and layers of wallpaper, to the days when we were young and believed that anything was possible.
Because now, he realized—and he tilted his weight further forward, scrubbing at the wallpaper harder, so that his heart was beating, not as bird, but even more arhythmically, like a cageful of battling rodents gnawing at the bars of his ribs, hell-bent on breaking free …
Because now, he realized, he was not a player in the game, but rather the object of it.
From This Is A Story About Wallpaper on AO3
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