Carmine wanted strawberries. Vines and things. Seeds and things. They were sweet and burst open in mush all over your tongue and teeth. He wanted it enough to crawl of his blanket nest, unwedge himself from the burning metal of the radiator. He wanted them enough to leave Charlie’s apartment to suffer the cold and wet.

That’s what was nice about holing up in the hovel of a man with a steady income. Warm corners to sleep in, porcelain tubs to drown in, post beds to crawl under. Just so long as he’d keep doing his laundry and hiding away ragged scraps of skin, swathed beneath too-big sweaters and tight binds of gauze, all would be well. He’d keep getting nice things, like a roof and a bath and liquor and opium.

Through reedy needling and pistol nuzzling and the cleanest sink of dishes the golly had seen in months, he’d coaxed Charlie into buying the darkest bottle of whiskey he’d ever seen and a heavy silk pouch of chroven heart opium. It was gone in a heartbeat, maybe less. All sucked down and way, into lungs and bellies. His tongue was dry, stuffed with whorls of cotton.

It was times like this when Carmine got Very Good Ideas.

“Strawberries”, he’d insisted.

They weren’t in season, not at all. Not through all these oppressive clouds, where not a drop of sunlight could touch the ground. But somewhere in the hazy cogs of memory, snagged in a spider web, there was the recollection of Muffey, of fat red berries bursting up in bushels of rubies down near the river rocks, among the roots of the scrubby bushes that hunkered down in the soil like angry chickens. One large body of water was the same as any other. Rivers all dumped into oceans, didn’t they? Perhaps the Arova carried a lush deposit of strawberry seeds in silt.

“Perfectly reasonable, really,” he’d growled through whorls of smoke and sticky dark golly hair.

Armed with a shovel and an ancient bottle of cooking sherry, he stumbled out into the damp Loshis night on a quest for deliciousness. The rain wasn’t as bad as it could have been – soft drizzling rolling in from the sea, coating everyone and everything in a cool mist. There was more smoke still when they got out of the apartment: faint white fog coiled around the harbor. The air looked thick with ghosts tonight.

The pale sand under the boardwalk of Haverton Pier was rich with standing water and broken glass. The air was thick with blasted cackling, floating up through the interstices in the dock wood. Keeping his boots steady on the craggy rocks and not drowning was clearly very funny. Carmine was crouched down on the slick stones, a small black lump on the backdrop of the ocean, fingers prodding and digging furrows in the sand, seeking out a hint of a green tendril or scarlet berry. All he’d found so far was a broken bottle and the lacey strap of what could have been lady’s dress. These were clenched in his free hand, the shattered glass wrapped in lace.

He’d been so hungry and hopeful for those little berries, too. It was really quite depressing.

“Ye found anythin’ yet?” He called over the heavy breathing of the waves, decibels too loud and twinged with remorse.

“All I keep gettin’ is glass! And eatin’ glass ent the same. Do you wanna eat some glass?” He’d slid down off his rock and crumbled in the surf, peeking over the hills of his knees. His tongue flickered across his lips, anxious. “I don’t wanna eat no glass!”

The pound of the surf was impossibly loud, far too loud for thinking or doing anything but following Carmine on this strange, ridiculous quest for strawberries. Strawberries, in the Rose! Charlie was fairly certain that they didn't grow in the sand the way Carmine seemed to think they did, but there was whiskey and opium singing to him in his blood, songs of negligence and of going with whatever happened.

Not that he wanted to be out in the cold and the wet, the salty wind pressing his clothes tight to his body and the water level could rise at any second. If they got caught in the tide while Carmine dug for-- for edible scraps of glass? Could one even eat glass? He supposed it was entirely possible, really. What was in glass, anyway?

"What's in glass, anyway?"

Teenagers coming into their own and deciding to indulge in a spot of trouble late at night dressed in black on black, sleek leathers, new boots meant to be quieter. They didn't realize that black would stand out against the faded whites of relatively clean walls, that leathers would catch what light there was to show the movement of a shape in the dark, that new boots were tight and creaked and all those grappling hooks or metal or tools would jingle or shine or just get in the way.

Reese had been at these things long enough to know better. Grey on grey, the kind of simple and worn-thin clothes that felt soft to the touch, that caught light and swallowed it and made him disappear into the background was a much better choice. His boots were old and battered and people frequently asked why he didn't indulge in a new pair, not realizing that the soles were cat-quiet, the old leather turned rough, clinging like a second skin to his feet.

If he were indulging in a little breaking-and-entering, he might have had a tool kit with him. Something to jimmy door latches open, perhaps enhanced with a careful dose of Push or Pull, felted chunks of wood to hold escape routes open through windows or cracked doors -- it was important to be prepared. Tonight, however, was just reconnaissance.

A week of rumors, of whispered stories, of laughing bar jokes, had left Reese less-than-happy about the prospect of approaching Cilius about the purchase of a set of professional-grade papers to get into Vienda. Five more days had left him with a handful of other leads, possible sources. 'Lower quality, but it could might get ye in the city', and a quietly muttered address that was immediately set in memory, and when he arrived on the doorstep, nothing there.

So he was here. Padding the pier in an almost silent way, looking for where Cilius or his men might hole up or do business, and maybe examining a couple of the warehouses along the waterfront in the hopes that he could refill his rapidly-dwindling savings.

And he wasn't alone.

Most people had the sense to keep their mouths shut when they ran along the beach at midnight. The sound distracted him from a task he didn't really want to be doing, drew him quietly padding to the edge of the beach to squint out through the rain, mostly invisible in the dark.

Boys? Kids? Couldn't be. He crept along the sand in his old boots, the pale shape of his hands hidden down into the pockets of his pants.

“I don’t know. Never thought ‘bout it afore.”

His face felt a bit numb, other than the warm haze blazing on his cheeks. The muscles tried their best to arrange themselves into a frown. Who ate glass, after all? It would get in your mouth, you’d bleed from your mouth. It’d get into your belly, and then you’d just bleed from everywhere else.

“I remember this...this...this ol’ shop. It had candy in it,” he called, a broad cat’s smile curlicueing his lips. His disappointment was washed away like a sand dollar to the tides. The disposition ebbed and flowed like water, conforming to the shape of every new whimsy.

“They had sugar glass. I always wanted to eat it but I was scared it’d break an' cut up my mouth. I dunno what harbor glass is made out of. But I guess ye could try it. Ye can swallow lots o’ blood afore gettin’ sick.”

His anxious knot of limbs unfurled full flower, so that he was sprawled belly up on the shore, coated in a crust of salt-white sand like a fish ready for the oven. Blood leaked, sticky and sluggish as a sloe-thick river, from a crescent slice on his palm. All that liquid warmth felt good, as the sand and rain were getting much too cold. He twined the salvaged scrap of lace in his fingers.

“Do you think there’s a dress buried ‘round here somewheres? I think I found a bit of it.”

Charlie laughed, the sound broken and strange coming from such an addled mind. He sat down in the sand, mindless of how the beach was wet and the sand was surely, surely going to ruin his trousers and he was rather fond of the pair. It was alright, he reasoned, they were looking for a dress anyway. Perhaps somewhere it would balance out.

"I don't think--" He snorted, still smiling though the expression was hard to hold, kept running off his face like water. It was true, he very rarely took the time to think. Ha ha ha. "Don't think I want to swallow any blood. Even if I won't get sick."

He gave Carmine's hands as they wrapped through the lace some appraisal. Hands for manual labour, those. See, see-- that's what humans were for, even their hands knew it. There you go. Obvious. Logical.

"Dresses for fishes," he said very seriously. It sounded insane when he said it but between mouth and air it had been a much better idea.

Reese lingered just far enough back that his face wouldn't catch the light of the moon off the water, but close enough to listen to their nonsensical conversation. Most people might have reacted with a classic 'what the clock?' but Reese himself had lingered with more than one mood-altering drug in his day, and the giggling over the bizarre choice of conversation left the tension draining away. High out of their minds. Well, so be it; he dragged off his hat, working fingers through his hair, and came out of his skulk with a flash of a too-easy smile.

It wasn't quite a shark's smile. It was too carefully charming for a shark. It was more like a wolf, perhaps, not quite cunning but -- he inched up an them with a curious lift of his eyebrows, and a lilt of his voice before he got to the point of scaring the hell out of them and taking the risk of an attack.

"This ent Vienda, boys..." Another step, a nudge in search of fields, fumbling to read the pair, except he didn't quite have the range and control to figure them out from here. "Not swimming season, either, I don't think. What do you think you're doing?"

“Vienda is fer cocksuckers!” Crowed and jagged with laughter before the slimmest tendril of thought would worm its way into his head. A few more hazy seconds past, consisting of squirming uselessly in the sand to crane his head up to catch a glimpse of wherever that damn voice was coming from.

It was a nice voice. And he usually didn’t like unfamiliar voices creeping up on him in the dark. His vision was all fuzzy, like the wispy edges of clouds. Nothing seemed quite there or quite not there. So the grey-black smudge of a specter of a man could have been there the whole time. Or, on an off chance, not there at all.

This whole ‘sitting up in the sand’ business was proving to be a little too exhausting, so he settled for lolling supine in the sand again. He wriggled a foot out of the gaping mouth of his boot, the old leather soft and warped as an ancient maternity sweater. His stocking clad foot was wrapped in dust and stripes; his leg unfolded like a sail, toes curling to paint the stars in connect-the-dots.

“We are...we are looking for strawberries.”

He licked his lips, brittle smile stretching wide and showing a bristle of teeth. The gesture wasn’t nearly as tantalizing as the idea. His tongue was sandpaper and his mouth was frosted with dead skin.

“And a dress. Ya see,” he called out to the faceless voice, “ya see – I found this lacey...thing.” He limply waved the scrap of fabric in the air. “And it was attached to a dress so maybe there’s a dress ‘round here somewhere. The whore won’t mind me borrowin’ it, ‘cause I don’t think she’s usin’ it much anymore.”

Swift, fumbling words growled up from a throat pickled in salt, smoke, and brine. Coupled by a donkey’s haw of a laugh, the sound clouding the last few syllables. Fumbling hand groped in the sand until it found the damp flap of Charlie’s pant leg. Carmine settled for fiddling with the golly’s bootstrings, humming tunelessly through the tight lips of his smile.

Vienda? Charlie frowned. He hated Vienda. Entirely too much high society there for Charlie's liking. If this were Vienda, he probably would be getting very stern lectures from his mother about Priopriety and how We Just Do Not Do These Things, Charlton. But the expression melted away with Carmine's loud declaration, and with the rambling talk of dresses and whores and strawberries. Good things, all of those, though he wasn't quite sure how they all fit together.

He couldn't actually see the source of the voice, which he didn't like, but it seemed far enough away to be unimportant. Whoever, whatever, the voice was, it hadn't hurt him yet. So that was good. He shook his foot a little-- Carmine was tugging at his bootstrings, but he needed them on. The sand was damp, and he was wearing socks. If you took your shoes off and wandered about the beach in just your socks, the results would be less than satisfactory.

"We could go swimming," he suggested, jiggling his foot. "Do you want to go swimming?" He blinked owlishly down at Carmine, then at the vague figure in the darkness. "You too."

The vague figure was coming closer, his hat shoved into the waist of his pants and hands freed to slowly work his hair back into a tail against the nape of his neck. It meant his face showed in the moonlight -- a somewhat ordinary face, not unattractive but easy to forget, except for the chilling blue of his eyes. He shot a look out over the water, dubious, and crept in close enough to snatch the scrap of lace out of Carmine's hands.

He was sober. They were obviously not. The way Reese saw it, he was definitely safer than either of them, even if the one was a golly. Kind of. Sad excuse for one, really, but he wasn't about to comment just yet. He could save that kind of friendly [or not so] banter for later.

"Strawberry hunting? Swimming? I expected t'be stumbling onto some kind of tryst, but it seems the two of ye are just loony." His eyes drew downward again, head tipped to the side. "Only reason ye ent be mugged yet is because no one'd waste their time, I'd wager."

The soft curl of a pitiful moan, fading into the gravelly growl of a disgruntled cat. Under any other circumstance, this might have irritated him immensely. He clawed the air in the strange man's general direction, a needy little pawing gesture. Lace was hard to come by, especially anointed on beaches. A young brothel girl taking a tumble in the sand, or maybe, just maybe it had been ripped from the bodice of some noble whore plundered by pirates, washed on the tides for leagues. A tattered gown on a beach can have a real history.

“Oi~” stretched out like twine, perhaps even giddy lilting sweet if it had come from any other mouth. “Give 'at to me. I wanna...I wanna...” he trailed off, then. He really had no idea what he wanted to do with a bloodied scrap of lace. Then again, he didn't think this other bloke had any real use for it either. If he found that dress, he could sew the strap back on. Something like that. He'd just have to remember how to sew, first. And after he held a whole mess of elegantly assembled cotton and lace in his hands? Well. He hadn’t really thought what he’d do with it then, either.

The mention of violence tilted his grimace on its ear. Brittle white teeth winking under the curve of lips.

“Muggin'? I ent been roughed up proper in a long time now.” Saying that, he looked like he’d already found a great gleaming bushel of strawberries. He was beaming like a little boy with a mouthful of sugar. “Ent nothin’ to take from me, an’ I ent got nothin’ to give, neither. At least not no more.” An easy smile lid over his lips, lewd as a goat. He looked up to Charlie and couldn’t hold back a snort of laughter, cracking up over some clandestine joke that had no humor beyond the walls of his skull.

Long, ropy arms stretched out across the expanse of white sand above his head, bony fingers meshing and knuckles popping. He was pickled in salt and sand like a fish, but his confidence was peaking. Carmine felt damn pretty. Rosy, tousled, clothes clinging to him like batter on a ripe piece of chicken -- he should be hating this. But he was hazy and soaked. All the little impulses and old anxieties that plagued him felt as abstract now as steam clouding glass.

Trysts, huh? Trysts on the beach weren't really as nice as they seemed. Sand got all sorts of places where sand really had no business being, and it stayed there for quite a long time. Not to mention the friction. Which wasn't, of course, to say that Charlie had never done such a thing, or that he'd be entirely opposed to doing so again in the future, but it wasn't high on his list of Favourite Things.

Charlie didn't often think about getting mugged. For him, his field was a lovely sort of shield that kept people out. There were just as many people who were drawn to a field like his, of course, the kinds of people who assumed that where there was aristocratic breeding there was money, but the idea wouldn't leave his mind and so he walked about with some sort of absurd sense of security.

"There could be trysting," he offered, looking down at Carmine plastering himself to the sand. Rolling around in the sand didn't seem so bad, not today. He sank to his knees, unmindful of the wet sand and the fact that when he was sober again he was very much going to regret the ruination of one of his better pairs of trousers. Looming, leering he stretched over Carmine, burying his fingers in the sand on the other side of him. "Should there be?"

Gods help him. Why had Reese even wasted his time? It was likely just because a small part of him really, desperately wanted to avoid meeting up with a man who kept slave girls. Reese's morals were loose, but he couldn't help imagining them, putting bits and pieces from what were certainly exaggerated stories together and coming up with a rather macabre and disturbing scene. Thinking about it now turned his eyes a little fuzzy, and he dropped the lace from between his fingers, let it drift down to settle against Carmine's damp chest.

"In the sand? In the cold? And the two of ye broke and useless?" He made a sharp, dismissive noise, but didn't run off. Distractions. Lingering. He claimed to want out of Old Rose, but for all that he did a lot of sticking around and making excuses. The toe of one boot dug into the sand under Carmine's ribs, as if to lever him up, squinting down at Charlie in the dark and the moonlight. "An odd pair, though, ne? Loaded cannon here, with the chaperon...slumming it, are you?"

“Nah, I dun want no trystin’ with you, ye greenie fuck!” he snorted, brittle laugh walking the razor-thin line between teasing and cruelty. He gave Charlie a hard shove on the shoulder before collapsing back onto the beach. Carmine was smiling, couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Something was very funny about this. He just wasn’t sure what.

Trystin’. Tristaan. He snorted and turned his face away from Charlie’s, nestling down in the sweep of the sand. It was cold and gritty and coated his mouth in a thin rime of salt. Soft things bubbled up in his head, somewhere, hazily remembering bad liquor and dark hair and mumbled secrets. Tenuous things like shame pricked around his ears. Where was he now? Probably curled up in a nice bed with a reformed hooker. Not sprawling out on some freezing beach getting poked at by some galdor. Carmine was alone in his gutter again. Well – Charlie was there, at least. But he didn’t think that counted for much.

He twisted in the surf, arching his back over the curve of Reese’s boot. Well. That was nice, at least. Enough to poke his mind off its less-than-fun track. They were all having fun, weren’t they? He blinked up at the strange man, trying to pin in his focus on those pale slits. Brittle eyes. Cat’s eyes. Nah. They probably weren’t having fun, at least not anymore.

Boney fingers crept up the man’s boot, knuckles raking the laces like a cat’s arching spine.

“Ne, yeah…” With his other hand, he clutched the scrap of lace reverently. His smile was broad and hazy, the dead bits of his lips stretching, breaking, and burning a bit under the sting of salt. Carmine cocked his head in the sand, damp swirls of curls sticking on his cheeks and eyelashes.

“You seen a dress anywhere? I found one once. It was in an alley. Blood the bodice, blood on the skirt, blood all over it. It had lace an’ flowers stitched all in it. It was decent, real decent…” he trailed off, gaze flickering past Reese’s face to look instead at the moon-stars-fog. Still smiling a bit, still talking a bit. It didn’t seem to be directed at anyone in particular.

A slow, drugged annoyance stirred somewhere in his breast. That wasn't what he'd said before, but he could hear the truth in it and it pricked him all through with irritation. A stinging nettle thought, that someone who'd had him before wouldn't want to have him again. He was the one who made that decision, not other people. Not Carmine, not this whoever he was, not anyone but him never ever again. He bit his tongue, could taste himself spilling on himself. Snorted.

"Slumming it, yeah," he pushed himself backwards, the force of it propelling him into the sand. The breath left his lungs in a whoosh. Stars stretched out all above him, dispassionate and far away. "Yeah yeah." This he said softly, mind a thousand miles away, tangled up in stars.

"I want a smoke," came his sudden declaration. "Oi, oi, I wanna smoke. You've-- you-- you got 'em all." The nearest limb nudged Carmine sharply. "Have you-- did I tell you I'm an inventor?"

"Useless is what y'are." It seemed decisive, And disappointed, and a touch bitter; Reese gave Carmine another slow nudge under the ribs looking him over in a considering way, debating the state of his clothing, and then giving Charlie the same treatment before he looked back to buildings along the docks. Quiet, at this hour.

"...unless you've got family in Vienda. Ye ent got family in Vienda, do you, golly?" It was an alternative to dealing with slavers and creeps. Always good in his book.