Hamis mornings were hardly mornings at all. No sunrise, no sunsets. Just a slow, slow lightening of the clouds. The sun edged the clouds in muzzy yellow. Weak, tired light seeped through the streets. Havek stood on sagging front porch the abandoned house -- or her house, he guessed -- quietly smoking, watching the Harbor slowly awake, and looking Muggishly pensive in general. Hauled down smoke, huffed it out his nostrils.

Maybe she thought it was polite, maybe she thought it was unfathomably rude that he was tiptoeing around the house like a bitten cat.

Polite, he hoped.

He had nowhere to go, she didn't either. He was in the house, though it would have been hard to tell if not for the bits of his clothes and his flowering window boxes. Havek sightings were like hatcher sightings. It's not that he didn't like her. She was okay, really, it was politeness that kept him scuttling well out of her way. Establishing a stretch of chill distance that blood and healing had forfeited on their first night together.

He'd dropped that strange pretense of 'we' and 'us'; he equated the entirety of Hamis the Fourth touched by temporary insanity. Hava Alu didn't rob Bad Brothers apothecaries, he didn't let girls cling around his shoulders like a necklace, and he certainly didn't squish himself and somebody together into a pronoun like 'we'.

Hava Alu muttered about philosophy, smoked, grew poppies, very occasionally smiled and braided hair and asked about her arm.

Somewhere in the recesses of the abandoned house, he could hear her snuffling around in the dim half-dark, a tiny yelped curse when she hit her foot on some loose board or jutting nail.

Hava turned and shuffled to a broken front window. The previous occupants had been good enough to surgically remove the glass for whatever purpose, instead of just smashing a whole in it. He leaned in, all neck and shoulders through the window, rolled apah cigarillo held politely in his fingers outside. The morning mist was making it smolder a bit, but he could ignore that.

"Sana'hulali and good morning, miss," he said quietly to the gloom.

The first time Murmur had ever lived alone, it was in Old Rosie, squatting in that old man’s house and wallowing in her grief for months. She’d missed her family, missed the chaos of the mornings- her brothers coming and going at all hours, Mal coming back with the day’s catch- sometimes lucky, sometimes not, Morris sneaking in from a night with Bess the grocer’s daughter- sometimes lucky, sometimes not and Murmur would be awoken by the howls as Muriel gave him a clip around the ear. Now that she was back in Old Rosie, Murmur might as well have been on her own again, Havek was like some melancholy ghost- a faint puff of apah smoke. It was strange, after her brothers who had done nothing but make their presence known to her at every opportunity, they were loud and they wrestled despite the oldest being years past thirty and were totally and utterly conspicuous.

She was much the same, Murmur had noticed. For a little thing, a thieving little thing to boot around Havek she was aware of just how much noise she could make. Her voice always seemed too loud, her laugh too coarse and she could not take a step without wincing at just how loudly her boots might hit the floorboards, at how her whistling and dirty sailor songs carried around the house while Havek slipped around, quiet, polite. If something needed to be done, he would do it, if she asked a favor he would oblige but aside from that…he was no Muck man and she missed having rows of gumboots dripping on the kitchen table and the sounds of raucous laughter and immoderate levels of swearing.

They were both early risers, but she had taken to staying the bundle of sheets in her room for longer, simply out of boredom. These days, Murmur filled her time with little things- the holes in her dress and coat were darned with far less attention than the hole in her arm had been by Havek and the blood had been washed as best as it could, though the faint brown stain was still apparent around the shoulder area of both. It still made her wince to look down at it, made her miss her sister Alva who was a dab hand with the needle, far better than Murmur who could only sew patches into patches who could have stitched something together for her. There were a few dusty curtains still in piles left in the house, not all of them soiled, they might have made something. It didn’t have to be pretty, it just had to be not soaked in her blood.

Padding through the house that morning, Murmur stretched her arm a little and rubbed sleepy dust from her eye, wishing she had a trade again. What was a morning without the smell of fresh fish, without the slick sound of eels transported in barrels and the feeling of guts between her fingers? All this talk made her hungry, and not notice where she was going.

“Fffuck, ow!” She squeaked as her toe stubbed itself on a loose board. Hopping on one leg to check if the nail was still intact she heard Havek, saw him poking through the window.

“Mornin,” she nodded wincing ever so slightly from her toe, but really not in the mood to have alcohol slathered all over her foot to ward off 'infection' so hiding it best she could. She smoothed over the awkwardness that she was feeling by leaning on the window ledge and nodding to the Apah he was smoking, “Any of tha’ goin.”

"Ent no food left, not since las’ night" It was a Muck trick to make sure that everything that could be cooked was cooked, there’d been one Hamis when she was a girl when the floods had been high and it hadn’t been safe to go on the river when they’d lived on nothing but bone marrow soup, cat meat and boiled nettles so when Murmur said there was no food, there really was no food. “Reckon ye oughta try an’ shift a bit more saffron if that fuckin lockbox…” Murmur shuddered, she did not like to talk about the lockbox.

“Any hows, I were gonna head up te the water front soon…we’ll afta get somethin’ on the cheap, last week’s cockles aint gonna kill ya and I ent got no plans te starve te death just yet. ‘Ere, move yer erse a minute.”

Shooing Havek’s head back out the window, she gripped side of the wall and climbed onto the window ledge in an unladylike fashion, one leg raised to her chest, the other dangling inside the house. Sat comfortably and wiggling her bare toes in the fresh sea air Murmur looked at at Old Rose and let out a sigh. A minute or two passed of apparent scenery admiration and inner philosophical musing before Murmur suddenly bashed her own head against the window and huffed out, “Shitting fuck whiskers, I’m bored.”