The flat was under assault from a slow invasion of boxes. Some were filled and sealed, stacked one atop the other in unsteady towers that threatened to flatten anyone who got too close. Others were open still, half crammed with Charlie's many and primarily worthless possessions. The sofa and shelves he had already sold-- Alioe only knew why the buyer of that sofa had seemed so eager. Charlie tried not to think about it. It was sold and that's what mattered. The bed frame was next, and the mattress. Those he was trying to hold onto for a few more nights, at least. No sense in sleeping on the floor when he didn't even have a proper moving date.

Finally, to be rid of the cancerous waste that was the Rose. Charlie was tired of living in squalor, wallowing in and hiding from his own infamy. Tired of wicks and humans too far gone from a swift Seventen kicking to remember their place. Namely, below Charlie Ewing. He was many despicable things, but he was galdor still. More than his disgrace back home, becoming a permanent resident of this utterly filthy hole made his stomach turn. It was all very well and good for what's-his-name, the one with the nice house, but Charlie? He didn't want to ge that old, not here. He'd rather go back to Vienda and face his reputation and all that'd come with it like a man.

And perhaps, if he acted contrite enough, Mother would give him more money.

The best, most important part? There was just no way a scrap, even an impossibly thick one like Carmine, would come to Vienda with him. Finally, no more broken dishes-- no more being locked out of his own bathroom, either. Just Charlie and Tippy, nobody else ever, the way it should be. Charlie couldn't wait. So long, Old Rose! Never shall I think of you again!

Dusty sunlight woke him first. That, and the sudden pang in his bladder. Carmine sat up shakily from his nest of blankets and bowed his head against his knees. A ladder of pink scalds climbed his back where it had been pressed flush against the radiator. Car blinked muzzily up at Charlie's bedroom windows, squinting at all the sun pouring in. All was bright and damp -- mid-afternoon, maybe later. A faint drizzle tippy-tapped on the windows.

He staggered up from his blankets, naked save for a pair of rumpled trousers, and stretched cat-like. All while quietly ignore the throbbing ache between his temples and the bottle of gin, abandoned and empty, at his feet. The whole place was looking abandoned and empty.

Things around kept disappearing. The dishes and silverware secreted away in boxes, sheets of scrap metal here one day, gone the next. Maybe Charlie was getting around to some much needed cleaning -- the place was awfully crowded with junk. (But that didn't explain the dishes, really. Carmine was left eating out at various greasy spoons because he was always too drunk or too neurotic (or both) to ever ask where they all went.

Carmine shuffled through the dank apartment, unnerved by all the empty. He could hear Charlie making noise moving things around again, but he didn't bother looking. He nudged open the washroom door with his foot. Toddled over to the chamber pot, fussed open his buttons with much bumbling, and pissed abundantly.

"Oi!" Carmine shouted to the rest of the tiny flat. "Wha' th'fuck is with all these damn boxes, anyhow?"

Charlie grit his teeth. Alioe preserve-- he was still here. Stupid gingerscrap, probably sleeping with his back against the radiator all morning. Lazy bastard, not waking until this hour. Granted, Carmine supposedly had a proper job that didn't involve leeching money and living spaces off of better citizens, and it was very often that Charlie himself did not get up until quite a later hour, but he would not consider these things. Carmine was-- he was just annoying, and that's all there was to it. Obnoxious bastard, Charlie couldn't conceal his little swell of glee when he thought about being rid of him finally.

How long had it even been, anyway? A month or something, a month since that stupid scrap followed him home like some sort of drowned, drunk puppy and just-- never left again? Tippy didn't like him, and Charlie didn't either. Not at all.

"Moving," he announced triumphantly. Take that, you ginger fuckup!

Well – Carmine guessed that made sense. Admittedly, he’d never once seen anyone move before. All this bizarre ritual of stuffing life and possessions into little boxes and picking them up and setting them down someplace else. How peculiar all of this was.

He mused over such things -- mind stumbling over thoughts of a true home, the idea of permanence, the foreign concept of owning enough things to fit into a bunch of boxes -- as he shook off and stuffed himself away. Dutiful, he shuffled out into the main room of the flat, one hand clasped modestly over the marring ink on his arm. Carmine seemed to be hunkering into himself, shrinking away from thick sunlight .

His feet didn’t seem keen on staying flat or steady – Car flopped bonelessly against the wall.

“Where ‘re ya movin’...to? I ent never moved no place.”

What was with the questions, anyway? What did Carmine care where he was moving to? Was it really any of his business?

Perhaps it was, in the sense that Carmine had taken up residence in Charlie's flat and would have no residence at all when Charlie was gone from it. Still, he could just cat about and find some other poor sucker to take him in, couldn't he? Beaten up and horrible as he was, the standards in the Rose were not particularly high. He could find someone.

Probably.

"Vienda," he said, crossing the room to get more bric-a-brac to pack or toss. He wasn't looking at Carmine much at all, almost staunchly determined to pretend he wasn't there, despite their conversation. "Not that it's any of your business." It was a lie, obviously, that Carmine had never moved anywhere. He'd not just sprung up magically from the Rose out of nowhere, could he have? No, of course not. Cast off child of a respectable family, that's what Carmine was. Respectable families simply did not live here.

“Why th’fuck would ye wanna go t’Vienda?” Carmine growled, cobwebs of sleep evaporating as his face set into stone. Oh, he wanted to choke Charlie more than ever, right then and there. Carmine had made himself a promise, submerged in perfumed bathwater, that by the end of rains he’d be gone. Slink back and prod around, see if the Yellow Lantern was still running – and, more importantly, see if any of his girls still worked there. Maybe Dolly had become a brothel matron by now. (That was impossible, he knew, she could only be what – twenty, twenty-one by now?) Maybe she’d saved up for a cute flat out in the Painted Ladies.

His toes curled reflexively in her stockings; he willed down the flicker of softness that overtook him.

“Don’t your ma live there?” he prodded again, too much like some back alley doctor stabbing for tender bits. “I thought ye hated ‘er. Is she dead? She leave ye money or summat?”

Shakily, he peeled off the wall and tottered to the kitchen to snuffle through the cupboards. If there was one drop of alcohol left outside of a box, Carmine would find it. And he did find it, after precariously levering one knee on the lip of the sink and blindly pawing through the tiny cupboard above it. His hands found the dust-encrusted curve of a glass bottle and hauled it down. It was, blessedly, cooking sherry.

“At least yer ma left ye summat. I heard mine ‘pparently went plum moony. Dunno if’n she offed ‘erself or not.” His tone was entirely conversational, as if he couldn’t summon up an ounce of concern. Estelle Lisette was a thirteen year old ghost these days. He twisted off the sherry cork with his teeth, spit it into the sink, and drank deep. He tasted brine and nearly choked, but so much more of him was hungry for the fortified wine.

“The girl who gimme these stockins lives there,” he added.

Charlie honestly didn't know how to properly answer that question. He didn't actually want to go to Vienda, not really. It wasn't so much a want as a need-- he couldn't stay here in the Rose. The unparalleled freedom he had here from his own kind was-- liberating, to say the least. Liberating wasn't enough, though. Charlie needed money and he wanted the nice things to which he was accustomed. While he knew he couldn't just settle right back in where he left off before the whole mess with... with Will, it was a lot clocking better than he was right now. He was reasonably confident he wouldn't be shot in Vienda.

Maybe, he mused, if he became famous and successful enough, people would look on this time he spent in the harbour as a delightfully youthful whim and he could tell funny stories about the heater breaking in the dead of winter and how he'd been shot at in a fish market. It tended to work for artists, but Charlie wasn't sure the same liberties were awarded to engineers. Inventors were allowed eccentricities, expected to have them even, but they tended not to be the same...

It was the question about his mother that interrupted that particular train of thought. Yes, his mother did, in fact, live in Vienda. This was one of the chief drawbacks of the city, in fact. "She did not die," he said sharply, slamming a metal something-or-other so hard into its box that it shattered. A string of filthy, particularly inventive curses followed, as well as more shuffling around.

"Does she now?" It was clear from Charlie's tone that he thought this was possibly the most useless bit of information Carmine had ever given him. "Good for her, then."

The crash, the cursing, coaxed Carmine to wince around his new gulp from the sherry. He choked around the mouthful, Spittle and salty wine bubbling past his lips. He blinked away the spring of wet in his eyes, sniffed up the sting in his nose. He swiped his arm over his lips and scowled.

"Um...mmh,..yeah," Carmine plowed on, undeterred by Charlie's callous indifference. "Dolly, y'know, she was so sweet t'me. 'cause...I been thinkin'..." He squinted in the noon-ish sunlight for a moment, but he abandoned the venture and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. "She gave me these stockings 'n' stuff. I used to...used to live with 'er and stuff. Sweetest girl livin'. I...liked 'er a lot an' stuff. She was real cute fer a tumble girl," he meandered off into mumbling, feet dragging him away towards Charlie.

Carmine shuffled out into the living room, where he flopped against the opposite wall from Chuck, gaze flicking muzzily from box to box. The sherry was balanced at his bare hip. His free hand curled protectively around his tattoo, kneading the tracks of scar tissue. They both knew it was there, Charlie had known since always -- but something in him still balked at the idea of showing it plain.

"If she ent dead why would ya even ... " he blinked slowly, face still pinched pink and eyes rheumy with sleep. All this standing business was terribly exhausting, so he slipped down the wall like melting wax. "They're gonna smell it on ye, y'know. That you been skulkin' about. You ent never gonna be able to wash the Harbor of ya no matter how hard ye try."

And Carmine had tried, boiling away his troubles in hot baths and perfuming his stink with pretty smelling oil. Like Dolly had. It never went away; he scrubbed so hard it hurt sometimes.

He took another long draw of the sherry, warming under the faint ache welling in his muscles and behind his eyes. Charlie was feeling light, distant.

"D'ya...like...need help 'r' anythin'?"

Ha! Well that was rich, Carmine offering to help. Never would Charlie be so pleased as when he was finally rid of Carmine and any form of "help" he might have to offer.

"I like my dishes intact," snapping and snarling bander-thing pacing around his flat. Nerves held him again, made him stretched taut and thin and liable to lash out. It was true, Cerise was in no way dead. She was very much alive and he could only pray that by the grace of some god he would manage to avoid her in that damnable city. Charlie knew, knew they could smell the rotten fish and rotten heart in him, but he couldn't take it any more.

If you were going to die in a gutter, make it a gutter you like.

"Why don't you go piss off and fuck Dolly, then, if you like her." Didn't even make sense, but he was tired.

"I don't wanna fuck Dolly. If'n I wanted t', I coulda done it ages an' ages ago."

Carmine was so easy to set off. Firecracker, the hint of a spark and he was off exploding, painting hands with burns. Dolly was plenty of a spark.

"An' don't go talkin' about 'er like tha'. Ye didn't even know her. 'sides. I wish I could live with Dolly!" he growled. "Wouldn't hafta clean another dish or fold another godsdamn shirt. Wouldn't hafta fuck nobody, neither." The last bit of the sentence was drowned in another long draw from the sherry bottle. Carmine rolled the bottleneck in his hands, scowling at the floor.

The bottle had been full, when he'd fished down from the cupboard only a few minutes back. Before Chuck, he had to cut and ration and control himself whenever he got a new bottle of booze. Even small dry spells made him want to heave. But Chuck's booze wasn't Carmine's. He drank all of it he could, whenever he could. There'd been more around since Carmine had insinuated himself in the flat. Charlie was buying for two, so Car couldn't drink all he had. Or, a deeply guttered Carmine was a warm, needy, pliable Carmine. He could see the merits of both reasons.

"Alioe, I mean. Not like I couldn't turn a coin 'r' two on that there," he ventured on, drawling to the floorboards. "I guess I must be worth a bit in Vi-en-da. This is one prime cut, top quality, gold star, high shelf erse for sale, in V." His gaze flickered up to Charlie, digging in like fish hooks.

"Scrap tail innit really legal there, is it now?"

"You don't have to fuck anyone here, either. No one's making you stay," Charlie spat, throwing something delicate viciously into a box. In fact, there was nothing Charlie would like more than for godsdamn Carmine to leave, permanently, and never fuck him again. Charlie wasn't desperate, it was just... Carmine was already there, if it was such a clocking trial maybe prostitution wasn't the right line of work.

"No one ever said to you," he continued, "'Oh Carmine you have to move in with me and fuck me and do my dishes', did they?" The packing had paused, for now, Charlie's attentions focused more fully on being pissed. He knew that! He knew he could never be-- never be a part of real society, he'd known that for years. Why would he even be here if he didn't know that? Clocking--

"Fucking scrap whore, who asked you, anyway?"

"Nobody axed me a godsdamn thing."

The response was far too vicious for such a stupid insult. Who was he to say anything about anybody being a whore? Charlie was -- well, Charlie was an irredeemable skank, a selfish bastard, and an overall cunt...but Charlie wasn't now nor had he ever been a whore. He had that over Carmine. How could Charlie know? He couldn't know.

"Don't you fuckin'...! I ent a whore. I ent. I jus' --" Do what I can, because I must. The 'must' bit was funny to him. Why he had to. He had a job, though a shitty and terrible one, which was more than most could say. Even in his little shoebox at the Wharf Rat, Carmine could never keep up with coin. It would slip straight through his fingers, into a bottle down his throat, pissed into a bucket.

It was a stupid way to live, he had to admit.

"Fucking...fuck...don't call me scrap, ye golly shit-kicker." The words burst up unbidden, an edge of a snarl creeping into his voice. "If I'mma scrap, what th'fuck does that make you? The foreman fucker sweepin' up them scrappy bits off the floor of one o' them cloth factories, ah?"

Carmine tottered up from the floor, spine sliding up the wall. Calloused fingers clenched around the throat of the sherry bottle. Fists akimbo, eyes narrowed to blue glass splinters.

"Jus'...ye shut yer mouth about whores..."

...before I have to hurt you, he silently omitted.

"Makes me better than you."

He said it with such utter disdain, like it was true. Like he really believed he was better than anyone. Carmine was a guttersnipe and a whore, telling himself 'I had to' or 'I'm not' like it would change anything. Stupid, pathetic.

"I'll call you whatever I want. Scrap," said like 'shit', said like 'fucking dumb bastard'. Charlie had abandoned his pretenses of packing now, settling instead on levelling a disdainful glance at Carmine. What was he threatening, anyway? Just because he was bigger, just because he might be stronger-- he couldn't do anything. Charlie took comfort in that small cling of field around him. Charlie, stupid and unloved by the world as he was, he still had that. The mona still listened to him. Sometimes. Usually. The shiny, newly-healed skin on the pads of his fingers and the sides of Carmine's face reminded him of it.

“We ent in Brunnhold no more, ye fuckin’ cocksucker.”

A slow, warning growl. He twisted the slick bottle neck in his hand, working it around and around. Anxious hands. It was hard, tamping down all those vulnerable little feelings that bucked in him. Carmine's face, all brittle eyes and bared teeth, showed no trace.

Carmine Apollinaire Lisette, second and most beloved son of Lysander and Estelle Lisette, was not a whore. Not for awhile, at least.

That whole bit of him was stuffed away in the cramped jewlery box at the very core of him, where every splintery little thought was locked. Charlie Ewing, all pawing at his locks. Not even knowing what was inside, but rattling the box anyway.

"I might be a fuckin' scrap but I ent a whore. I ent. Ye can't call me a -- I ent gonna let ye call me --" Words swirled round and round in Carmine's mouth, like thistledown. "Jus'...jus' 'cause I needed -- "

I needed a place to stay.
I still need a place to stay.
I can't hold a coin for two seconds.
I swallow all those coins, and I don't really know how not to.

"...I don't....It's jus'..." Faltering. Retreating into himself, going all doe-eyed and hunch shouldered. Old habits were hard to kill.

For a moment there, he could've lost himself to all the writhe-y tendrils of meekness threatening to seize him. Carmine free hand drifted up to his cheek, traced the shiny white welts arcing down his jaw. His brows pinched deeper, spindly teeth grinding lip. My face, quailed a voice, muffled by the jewlery box. Fuck my face, Carmine Now thought.

“You ent better than shit," he snarled suddenly. Good save, fucktoy something in him sneered. (He really did hate that box.) "Goin’ ‘round shovin’ yerself all up in a fuckin’ scrap on your dirty fuckin’ floor in this ugly fuckin’ harbor. Jest who the fuck d'ya think ye are?”

The sherry bottle twirled in his hands, swishing like a dinner bell.

"You wouldn't know nothin' about havin' t' --"

Having to what was lost. Carmine's hurtled the sherry bottle at Charlie's head, arm snapping fingers releasing with all the force and speed of a pistol.

Charlie Ewing was not a man of lightening reflexes, to the best he could do to protect himself from the oncoming sherry bottle was put up his arm, duck, and hope it didn't hit his face. It didn't, but it did slam bruisingly hard into his shoulder. Charlie yelped.

"You fuck--!"

Anger, he knew that one really well now, the pressure of it building behind his breastbone and he knew what to do with it. Throw it back, cast a spell, do something violent and horrible just like he'd done before. In a way this was happiness, perhaps, that swell of satisfaction he got whenever he left a mark. Forget him then, eh? Just try.

His field buzzed around him, Charlie prepared to do as he wanted and-- No. No, that wasn't what he'd do at all. His hands came to rest from their half-started movements, a hint of recrimination from the mona clinging to him (he'd barely begun, really, not even enough to count). Boney fingers spread wide as the insincere grin on his face.

"Fuck you, dumb shit." He was laughing, almost genuine but not quite there. Just one more thing he'd never have to think about again! He could move out of the Rose and never have to think about the uglier bits of himself again. He could bury them and forget, just like he'd done before. That was just the best way to do it, really. What did he care if Carmine strutted about throwing bottles and pretending like he was something more than Charlie'd pinned him to be? He was going to Vienda.

"Not a whole lot of people," Charlie added, "have ever complained about my a 'cocksucker' as you so delicately put it before."

"I don't -- I don't fuckin' --" Carmine spluttered. He was so angry, he was dizzy. When was the last time that happened? The sherry bottle should've been some exploding thing, bursting open on bony nub of Charlie's nose, spraying his eyes with salt and glass.

It wouldn't have achieved anything, but at least he would have felt vindicated. Instead, the bottle clattered to the floorboards, impotent. A froth of sherry splattered the floor. All over the ground, and none of it in his throat. And his hands wouldn't being so shaky. It was going to be a bright, beautiful day.

"I don't give a...fuckin'...motherfuck..." Words jagged in his throat, jagged in his teeth. Stumbling over teeth, loose ends of things that could've been sentences dribbling away from him. Staggering across the slim scrap of space dividing them. What was there to say? Charlie had made a joke of...it wasn't funny, it wasn't joke, because he wasn't a --

"You." Carmine growled, the sound grating and physical. He hoped Charlie could smell the bile on his breath, see the blood vessels in his eyes, the welts on his throat. Oh he best be able to, so close their noses could brush. "...wouldn't know a godsdamn thing 'bout having to work for anything, ye cunt, And Vienda -- it innit gonna be no better there. Not if ye can't go hidin' under yer ma's skirts. Vienda will fuckin' eat you."

The jagged display of teeth seemed to say Charlie had a high chance of being chewed up by Carmine, too.

Revulsion washed over him, making his face pinch. Sherry clung heavy to Carmine, sherry and Alioe only knew what else. Charlie had reflected often in the last month that what Carmine was, the thing he quite primarily resembled was nothing so much as an utter waste. He'd had ample opportunity to observe and to notice that somewhere under that layer of harbour there had been a pretty little thing, once. Charlie really neither knew nor cared when or why that had changed-- it wasn't any of his business, and the knowledge would do him no good besides. What a waste and a shame, though he supposed that had been true from birth, hadn't it?

"Get out of my face." Shitfaced, mona-cursed bastard but his words rang true. True enough to make Charlie flinch and prickle around the barb. "You won't be there, so you'll just have to-- to speculate, won't you?" There it was, reaffirmation of the best part of this whole venture. He could avoid his family, yeah, could avoid galdori society entirely. He'd done it before, was doing it right now. Doing it in Vienda would just be a... a challenge of sorts. The big bonus was no Carmine, and he just had to remind himself of that over and over.

"Who says I ent?" Carmine spat. Quick as a shot, gnarled fingers gripped Charlie's shoulders. He didn't know if he meant it or not. Harsh words just for harsh words. Pussy, he thought. All flinching and squirming around some sloppy strung up insult. You don't tell people to get out of your face, he wanted to say. You push them out of your face.

"Always thinkin' only about yer own damn self, never once even thinkin' if --" Hands sliding down, riveting into the meat of his upper arms. Holding tight. Up so close he could see the pores on the bastard's face, see the way his eyelashes lay on his cheeks. Could bite him, if he wanted. The fact that Charlie had to tilt his head up, just the miniscule little bit, to look at him was not lost on Carmine.

"I cook fuckin' yer food, I clean yer fuckin' apartment, I wash yer fuckin' sheets, ye fuckin' ignorant li'l --. I know ye never axed me to 'cause ye never had to. Shit," he snarled. "ye need your ma, don't ye? Well..." and there, Carmine's gaze darkened and slid away. He could remember how golly mamas worked, faint and distant. "...not yer ma, 'course not. Yer li'l human nanny, maybe? Was she the one cleanin' up after ye, ah? Well I ent gonna be yer fuckin' nanny no more. Not yer little cuntrag maid, neither."

Shook him, shook him like a ragdoll. Carmine wished there was no daylight pouring in through the windows, illuminating them like this. Angry clutches and words were things exchanged in the dark, where they couldn't see themselves. Not by dust motes and noon day sunlight.

"I ain't been nobody's anythin' like tha' since...since ages, an' I don't wanna be," Carmine growled, hot rage cooling too fast, too fast. It wouldn't take much to flare it up again.

"I --" and there he faltered. "I'm comin' too." It was one of those finality things. His eyes fluttered closed, resigned to fate as a martyr." I -- jus'...jus' so long as the ferry. I don't fuckin' like this place." A gap of silence reigned, and he peered down at Charlie, almost pensive.

"Ye ever felt like been stuck inna bear trap? Like. You'd chew off yer own leg to get the fuck out? It was -- it is -- it's kinda like that," he said, voice rasping like sandpaper. His fingers ached a bit from gripping Charlie so hard.

"I wanna stay with Dolly. I wanna go home."

There he went again, clocking scrap bastard, clinging to that excuse of "I cleaned up after you" like it meant anything, like Charlie had ever asked. He didn't even like it very much, for fuckssake. Shaking him around like the fucking barbarian he was-- briefly, so briefly, Charlie though of reporting his passive self to the Seventen. There were no Seventen here in Old Rose, however, and Charlie wasn't sure he wanted to be implicated in any sort of criminal activity that might come up.

Though... And here an idea occurred to Charlie Ewing. There were Seventen in Vienda. Charlie could lie-- after all, who would they believe, an escaped scrape whore or a galdori citizen, albeit one a little tarnished around the edges? Charlie was upstanding enough for them, he was sure.

"Fine," he said and oh didn't he sound just moved. Charlie thought he was an excellent actor. Did he add that proper hint of begrudgement around edges? Sure he did. "Just don't fucking--" the shove here was entirely sincere, he had to admit "--touch me."