♡ - friendship headcanon: What does it take to be considered their friend? How many friends do they have or have they had? Were or are any of them mortal?
I consider myself to be rich in friends. Listing them all, counting them? What an undertaking. Am I to discount family, as I have already talked of them aplenty? Yet Everard and Eugénie, they are dearest friends as well as family. Benedict, certainly familiar love comes first there but I do consider him a friend as well.
Armand, despite or because of it all, even though I do not speak to him much and truthfully never have. But having witnessed him after the founding of the theatre, having seen his struggles and qualms... A friend.
Gabrielle, who taught me more about freedom and what it could mean for a woman that first time I gazed upon her at Les Innocents than I could later glean from hours of lectures and volumes of books. She who's shown me what it means to be fearless, the glory and the pitfalls of it. A privilege to be her friend.
Nicolas, my sweet boy, who'd only see himself as bitter. Much as I struggled to find words to describe what Gabrielle caused within me, it might be even harder to describe what his music made me feel, how it felt when it made me dance, that first night when he played. How desperately he filled me with all I had oppressed. My friend.
Bianca, who embodies beauty as if she was Aphrodite herself, whose feminity is only ever a strength, not a weakness. A sweet veneer and so many layers underneath, how fortunate is anyone permitted to so much as glimpse beneath it? Hours spent talking to her would not feel like a waste, despite what a pleasure it would be to spend those same hours with my mouth too busy to talk. Blissfully, she is a friend.
There are more, some who are gone, some who endured. As I said, I am lucky. What it takes is simple enough. For me to be fond. For them to be fond. Need it be more complicated?
Mortal friends? I have none. The way my life's story went, it never happened. Perhaps one day.
