Though he seemed disinterested, Victor paid close attention to Mondai’s ramblings. In her moment of drunken chattiness, she had confessed a few truths that would have flattered the boy, had he not been placed in such an uncomfortable position already. The fact that Mondai, a brilliant mind that he secretly respected - only intellectually - thought of him so highly - ’you’re impossibly clever and you accomplish everything you set your mind to’ - was actually… well, very flattering. And not in the way his peers’ compliments fed his ego; their compliments weren’t flattering, they were just praise he expected and knew he deserved. Mondai’s positive review, on the other hand, was something he felt accomplished to have earned.

Still, Victor said nothing.
Instead, he brushed Mondai off with disinterest and denied her a verbal response. His attention shifted to her following story, which sounded even more absurd (and creative) than he’d expected.

“Gianluca was chasing after me, trying to eat my dress off…”
This hadn’t happened since the time Mondai had shown deep disturbance and horror over the rumours of her and Victor spending a night together - the boy was laughing. Laughing like a child who’d just heard a joke for the first time, the sound of it echoing bright and lively throughout the mostly empty room. Leave it up to Mondai to have nightmares that involve Gianluca’s insatiable appetite.

And, just when Victor Vincenzi seemed like he could finally summon a patronus based off Airlia’s dream alone, she continued - “…you were there, laughing down at me from a throne of naked women.” Victor couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard in his seventeen years of life. Actually, he had probably never laughed this hard. Whether it was triggered entirely by Mondai’s dream, or if the firewhiskey had anything to do with it, he wasn’t sure. But he couldn’t stop, and Victor Vincenzi seemed childlike as he laughed himself to the point of tears, which clouded his usually cold crystal blue eyes. His lightly tanned complexion had turned an unusual shade of pink, and no matter how hard the boy tried to force the laughter away by pressing a fist to his curved lips, he simply found himself falling into a new fit of laughter.

An hour had passed and Victor was still laughing.