The rainy season, thankfully, was slowly lifting its dominance over the Viendan skyline, patches of sky daring to poke through thick clouds, sunlight catching in the puddles, a wispy rainbow arching over the sky, its colours dull like a bright quilt caught up in so many washes. It was the nicest day for a very long time, enough to make a man feel like the disasters of the rainy season may soon slip behind him, like the clouds that were slowly, bit by bit, ebbing away.

Even the dives did not look so gloomy and wretched when reflecting pockets of sunlight, soiled cobblestones glittered like bricks of gold, the rain droplets that settled on damp trash and abandoned junk shone like a frosting of fine jewels. For the first time in a long time, the washing lines had been hung from windows above the narrow alley, sheets and shirts billowed on the light breeze, softening the whole appearance of the street, as though it were cushioned and pillowed.

Campion sat on the step up to the doorway of his building, one leg pressed against the doorway, that wonderful mother’s ruin at his side in a jam jar. The woman he’d bought it from had gotten creative and enterprising since the human ban, brewing potato vodka and bathtub gin, loading it into various non suspicious containers. He’d seen humans on this street surreptitiously sipping from jam jars, saucepans, even hollowed out eggshells. Campion of course could openly drink from a wine bottle should he wish, but somehow clutching at his jam jar he felt more a part of something. In his hand was a crumpled newspaper trying to navigate the crossword puzzle. It was a pleasant enough way to spend a lazy afternoon, out in the fresh air away from his musty room, even if the air was slightly tainted with smoke and filth, the children from one of the flats providing a tolerable soundtrack as they rushed around chasing each other and play fighting over a game of marbles.

The young golly was lucky in that his presence in this neighborhood was, however slowly, starting to become tolerated. Of course, no one was about to start a conversation or ever even consider inviting him for tea, but they let him go about his day without directing a revolt on his head, let him set out on the steps of his home, drinking jam jar gin without caring much to look his way.

‘Oh, that’s just the golly ‘o lives next door. Don’t pay him no mind, ent no ‘arm in ‘im.’ He was no less odd, but no more dangerous than the homeless woman wearing a coat made of dead rats, pushing a perambulator full of pigeons through the street come dusk, than the elderly hessean fellow who smoked a strange pipe all twisted up like a ram’s horn and puffed out strange thick orange smoke. Campion was now just a commodity, a quirk and a foible nonetheless stitched into the fabric of the neighborhood.

It was certainly nice not having to bother about all the business of looking presentable to other people, those oversized suits now abandoned completely as Campion rolled his loose, no longer white shirts over his elbows, collar unbuttoned and no tie around his neck- the sort of appearance that would have made Hyzenthlay claw at the wallpaper like a rabid mother cat.

Enjoying his virtual invisibility, Campion stretched on the step like a lazy, scraggly alley cat scratching his bristly chin as he leaned back trying to think what on earth eight across could be. Two words, four letters each meaning misfortune.

"You look fuckin' dead, can you move?"

Charlie's voice was rendered slightly less intelligible as he tried to speak around the spur jammed between his lips. He'd been practicing the art of it, these last few weeks. The smoking started when he left Vienda, but it only increased to near-constant levels after he had acquired Carmine. Thus it had become necessary to learn to speak around the things. His arms were laden with boxes-- mostly full of junk, anything important had been sent ahead and was sitting unopened on the floor already.

It was a small mercy that the day he arrived in Vienda, the rainy season showed signs of tapering off. At least he didn't have to contend with Carmine, moving and the rain as well. He didn't know what Carmine was even doing, following him this far. He supposed if there was some brothel he was off to inhabit like some sort of rat returning to his hole it would more than likely be in the Dives. Which is where Charlie lived, now. Still, he had intended to leave Carmine behind, or turn him in to the Seventen, not...

"Oi! Are you helping with these or what?" Something of the Rose still clung to him, indeed. He'd have to remember not to talk like that, not here. Not in front of people. It'd become habit, after two years, that low and easy speech-- though he still kept it polished around the edges. No sense in ruining Estuan entirely just to sound like the kind of guttersnipe lower races that lived in the Rose, after all.

Charlie objected, morally, to the walk to his new flat being impeded by a slovenly-- Alioe, the drunk bastard was galdori, wasn't he? Charlie felt some part of him recoil, turn to pudding. He ignored it. It was bad enough that the half-starved, sickly looking bastard was blocking his way up the stairs, he wouldn't let himself turn soft so soon. He'd win this time, not... Whatever it was he was fighting against.

"Nah, he couldn't of been dead," another voice added, rasping but ultimately helpful. Really. Just trying to clarify the not-deadness of things. If anyone would know about varying levels of deadness, it would be Carmine.

"I seen this dead cat once," Carmine extrapolated for the sake of no one, "an' it was all ate up with maggots. Poor thing up an' died on th' porch at the Yeller Lantern or somethin'. Well...more like I think somebody hit it with somethin', but whatever. An' the girls all cried an' cried an' cried. But, y'know, I told 'em it was jus' some dumb fuckin' c--"

One parcel balanced, balanced on top of the many, spat ferociously and thrashed about so hard it nearly pitched the tower of boxes (glassware, silverware, some bits of clock pieces, some clothes) out of his arms and into the slick shine street. At the tippity top, a damp shirt swathed what could have been grotesque antique birdcage from view.

"I didn't mean you," Carmine gently admonished, tipping his forehead against the cage. There was almost, almost a tone of motherly sweetness there. Nevertheless, whatever lurked beyond the shirt veil yowled in unadulterated hatred and clawed at the bridge of Carmine's nose. He winced sharply, teetering back on already muzzy legs. "Fuckin'...if this rain starts up again this cat is gonna pitch a fuckin' bitchfit. Poor thing is spooked outta is mind."

There was far more genuine concern for the consumptive, eyeless wretch of his cat than for either the man who paid for this whole moving excursion or for the one unfolded so unbecomingly on the stoop. He'd seen plenty of those, he had, littering every available surface back in Old Rosie.

(Some small part of him, he would never admit, ached for Old Rosie already. This whole place set every inch of his being on edge, even if it was burrowed deep the smog-choked heart of The Dives where no golly eyes but Charlie's would see him.)

The acerbic edge of gutrot wafted up from the raggedy tangle of Mister Bumfuck Skeleton, whoever he was. That? That was far the more soothing, far more interesting to Carmine than any cat could ever hope to be. He stooped down to get a closer glimpse of the jelly jar, adjusting the tower of boxes all haphazard on his hip (this rattled the cage and Wink mrowed and hissed for his terrified life), and Carmine couldn't help but smile at the harsh scent. One of those desperate, toothy kind of smiles, but it was still a smile. His liver was doing back flips for joy. Gollies, seventen, prohibition -- these words made him squirm, left him too hollow and neurotic to even ask Charlie to buy him something to drink. Buy him some candy.

But the discovery of bathtub gin sparked other, less exciting discoveries.

"Ffff--- what the fuck. What the fuck! Is there greenie cocksuckers crawlin' outta every orifice in this place?" he spat, and there was the faint trill of pins-and-needles anxiety in his voice.

Carmine titled his head back to peer up at the mulling smoke pall of clouds, up the wooden sides of the building all swollen black with wet. Eyes narrowed to pinpricks, scraping for any sign of other burned out galdori losers lurking in the gloom beyond oil paper screens.

The sounds of two men pierced the easy atmosphere, coarse and harsh and almost like the onset of rain all over again, discussing his classification, living lay about or just some corpse left out on the street. He was the former and not quite prepared to be the latter, so he folded up the newspaper and unfurled his limbs standing up to let them pass through an easy enough task since Campion looked as though he could, lying down, slide under the door without too much difficulty.

“Sorry,” he said, slightly weary but conciliatory all the same. Not drawing too much attention to himself, not making eye contact, wary not to give anyone any reason to start a fight.

That was that little diversion finished with, crossword all done, not like he owned this step anyway and Campion was more than willing to oblige the two gentlemen if it meant he wasn’t about to get his head kicked in. Not that these two he noted, standing up, were the largest of men. In fact, they were positively slight when held up against factory workers and roof tillers, shorter than him, lean muscle sitting on bones all threaded prettily together- not like humans, their bones slapped into the shape of a skeleton on some assembly line coated in a layer of thick cement. It was unusual. Scars and battered clothing were not so much; skin colored and freckled by sun, calluses and reddened fingers all screamed hard living but a mask over something delicate underneath.

And there was the shorter one, black hair, long galdori nose and golly mouth all wrapped up around what he was smoking. Familiar face, familiar field, very similar to Campion’s own squashed in field which was weak, the mona around him moving from anxious to bored on a regular occurrence- an elderly little aunt that complained about never being visited, this galdor- and, yes, he was so a galdor, had a weak field too. The kind of field that bristled in the back of a remedial class. So of course, there was a high chance Campion would know him.

Because he wasn’t the land lord, the only golly Campion had ever seen in the building and who he actively avoided at all costs. It was the gin mostly that decided Campion’s next course of action, but because he knew that face and that field the fearful awkwardness melted away and Campion spread his arms out wide and grinned.

“Charlton bloody Almond. You brave, brave bugger what the clocks are you doing in Vienda?” Campion laughed into his jam jar, gin getting all soaked into his mustache.

“You’re not…” his eyes skated over the boxes, “Tell me you aren’t moving in here?!” It made more than a lick of sense though, because really if Campion had been disinherited then of course Charlton Almond had been. Terrible, terrible business, his mother had said. But it wasn’t Campion’s place to judge, not when his place reeked of gin and was all laid out on the steps of some dive crapshack. And it would be nice to have a neighbor that really was unlikely to rob him and kick his teeth in.

Campion grinned again, though Charlie would be able to see that tired dimness in them, “Well bloody Alioe, look at you old chap, look at you!” But Campion couldn’t really look at Charlie because he had pulled him in to a bony hug, akin to having one’s face pushed into a very tall coat rack.

An "oomph" escaped Charlie as he found himself crushed to a bony torso in some sort of horrible hug contraption. Something in him seized up, trying to claw its way out of his stomach. This layabout knew him, said-- he was talking to someone long dead, of course. A ghost. Just one that happened to have Charlie's face. It took him a moment to place the sound of that voice, but it hadn't been that long since remedial classes.

"Luccullis?" Disbelief laced his voice. Campion had never been popular, or much of a scholar, so Charlie had privately always wondered if he'd make anything of himself. The Dives, though? That was a bit of a surprise. The Luccullis family was so... Affluent. What on Vita was one of their children doing here?

So, then, could the Almonds be considered, on the other hand. The surprise had begun to wear off, to be replaced with annoyance and apprehension. "Ewing, actually." He gave Campion a none-too-gentle shove. Alioe, though, he smelled awful. Like he'd crawled into a vat of gin to die.

Carmine hovered in a bubble of perplexed silence. His mouth gaped open a few times as if to say ‘what the fuck’ or ‘what is this shit’, but nothing came. He settled for blinking owlishly at the spectacle. What was this? An underground network of royally fucked gollies?

He was thankful he wasn’t Charlie, at least. That hug must have felt like getting a damp birdsnest enwrapped about you.

“Charlton?” he echoed. “Charlton Almond?” His face pinched into sharp disdain, lips curling back from splintery teeth. “I read it afore, but I didn’t know it’d sound so godsdamn...godsdamn fuckin’ toffin-y, y’know? Fer fuck’s sake....” a bark of laughter, the sound hollow and anxious even to his own ears. “It’s Ewing now, though, yeah.” Carmine tacked on. “It up an’ got married, it did.”

Hated this place. Something about the smog, or the people, or the tall black buildings made him regress by years and years. Stupid tiny tumbleboy standing on the steps of some tenement house waiting for so-and-so to toss down his boots, his shirt, whatever. Here again, damp and awkward and shaking with nervous laughter again. He just very much wanted to be inside, very much locked in the washroom, very much dunked in a tub of scalding water. Catamite soup.

Wanted to slip away, silent, before he was somehow impossibly, inexplicably recognized too.

(“And you! You’re the scrap scriff my brother and I tossled in the Stacks some Clock’s Eve! Glad to see you’re using what you learned at uni!”)

“Yeah, so,” he drawled. “Ah. Gonna...go take these to...wherever the fuck. There’s more in the cart once you two are done beatin’ each other off ‘r whatever.” He growled, and stalked past Campion beyond the threshold.

“If....ye’d fuckin’ tell me which flat it was, again,” he huffed, collapsing against the wall -- Wink yowled and spat -- tipping his forehead against the boxes. Carmine cast a glazy blue eye on Campion, gaze sharp and dissecting as a scalpel over a cadaver.

“Pass me tha’ jelly jar, yeah?”

Taking the hint of the shove and breaking away from the hug Campion found that the ash from Charlie’s fag end had all rubbed against his chest, the lit end broken off on the floor. But he kept smiling, an intense, weird smile as though his face was determined to keep it up, fighting everything it had not to break into a dim frown like the sun fighting its way through all those thick grey storm clouds.

“Yes it’s me!” he smiled, gripping Charlie by both arms, “and it’s you too! Down here! I can’t believe that! You’ll have to come in for a drink...if we’re to be neighbors.” Chuckling he shook his head, “Charlton Almond in my building….sorry Ewing.”

Of course, it wasn’t great for Charlie presumably if he was in some dive flat, because the ceilings in the building leaked, and everybody was broke and the baby on the second floor had colic and he did get spat on a lot. Like, a lot. But then again, with Charlie here, they might start spitting on him. Campion looked at the ginger one, the gruff one. Human, was it, maybe-Campion couldn’t tell.

“You got…married?” he said, looking between the two, skepticism moving to that puzzled expression he used to get when someone told him to recite the monite for a spell other than push. It was no secret that Charlton Almond took his tea differently to Campion, the only similarity being that they were often sneaked at moments that were definitely not tea time, but he was sure that these sort of arrangements were never ever made official. Maybe marriage was just what they called it. Like the way he often heard that girl with the fluffy hair down the street refer to every man that stopped the night as her ‘husband’ even though none of them ever looked like the same man.

He didn’t dwell on it, though, just looked at the jam jar and then at Carmine with sheepish smile. “It’s not very good….I don’t know if you…” he shrugged, since well, what was trash to a golly was treasure to someone else, “The woman makes it in a bathtub, a bath tub she washes in regularly if the taste is anything to go by. But it’s your funeral…and mine too I suppose,” he said, taking a deep sip before passing it over to Carmine.

“I haven’t gone blind yet,” he said, waving a hand in front of his face. The ginger one made him feel uneasy, with those wet blue eyes. Him being friendly with Charlie, apparently- he wasn’t sold on the notion of marriage just yet, though lovers was hardly a stretch- him being friendly with Charlie might have reassured him, but it didn’t. “Campion Luccullis,” he ducked a quick bow to the human because old habits die hard.

“I was in a few classes with your Charlie over here,” he grinned, “Do you remember…remdial static? Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless, the whole bunch of us. The professor said we’d never amount to anything. Well look at us now,” he gesticulated wildly at himself and the crappy step. “Showed him didn’t we? Showed them all. ” He didn’t like the fact that the ginger had his gin jar.

“Here, let me help you…” said Campion, “and I wouldn’t leave the cart unattended. The neighbourhood kids will take everything but one spoke of your wheel.”

"More's the pity," Charlie mumbled to himself as Campion waved a hand in front of his face. Blindness would have been a blessing, here. Of all the scummy flats in Vienda, he had to pick the one inhabited by the only other galdori layabout who could possibly be more worthless than him. Was he born under an ill-portending star? Must have been, there was simply no other explanation for the string of poor coincidences in his life.

He was mum on the marriage. Let him believe what he wanted, Charlie didn't care. He fully intended to avoid him from here on out, regardless, and that sort of personal information was strictly need to know. There was no one, to Charlie's mind, who actually needed to know.

"It's 13, flat 13." He seriously had his doubts about Carmine's intelligence-- even for a scrap he was stupid. If Campion didn't like that Carmine had the jelly jar full of gin, Charlie didn't like that Campion was offering to help them move in. "I wouldn't want to trouble you," his tone saying no such thing, "I think we can handle it..."

Carmine wasn’t even sure he could scowl any harder -- but amazingly, he could. He shot Charlie a scathing look on the stupid vague no comment. They were most certainly not married. The thought was enough to make him heave.

“Not. Not married t’me, ye dippy twat. I ent....that says I could even stomach t’fuck a sumbitch like that. An’ trust me, I couldn’t.” All jagged and harsh. His eyes didn’t know where to glare more. More at Charlie, he decided. Charlie wasn’t giving him gin. ...and Carmine took the gin, snatched it like one of those mangy dogs snapping over a chicken bone, cradled it secreted it away in one of the top boxes.

Campion, clearly, was not getting it back.

With the mention of the word ‘bathtub’, Carmine brightened. A bit. A little bit. “Oh, fuck. Fuck, really, I...I really really wanna take a bath. Ffffuck I could use a bath.” His voice was shivery, like his trembly legs and arms. Like the funny corners of his smile that refused to stay up. Every bit of him was funny these days. Felt hollow and dry, like a wrung out sponge. He wanted that bathtub gin. Wanted to soak in a whole bathtub of bathtub gin, soak it all up.

He guessed he should stop smiling. That might encourage that....other fellow....to stop smiling. For Alioe’s sake. He couldn’t wait to be upstairs and behind a locked door and away from this golly-thing, too.

“I‘d really really hate to go blind,” Carmine told Campion’s smile, “’cause, y’know, I’d have t’miss out on all this beauty.”

“This city,” he went on, “really really really has a way of gutting people from neck to belly, I swear. I mean...shit. I was somebody else, once. I wasn’t...it wasn’t so big as like. Almond to Ewing or something or....Luccullis to Mista Bumfuck Skeleton. Or whatever. But it was. He was...” Carmine blinked up at the milling clouds, squinting. “Different, I guess. Charlton...isn’t the same as a Charlie, is he...?”

“I really wish it would just fuckin’ rain,” he spat. “Not all of this looming bullshit. If you’re gonna do it, jus’ do it. Don’t fuck --” he said to Campion: “You, right, get some shit from the cart, yeah?” And then: “Don’t fuck around, just...just rain. I ent seen the sun in awhile. Some sun would nice. Y‘know?” he asked no one in particular.

Campion opened his mouth and shut it again like a guppy swallowing a thick gulp of plankton and seawater as a tirade of fucks erupted from Carmine’s mouth like a filthy geyser. Nobody had ever called him Mr. Bumfuck Skeleton either, he hoped it wasn’t a nickname that stuck. And the rest of the expletive soaked conversation Campion had not quite picked up on, hatefully slurred as it was, nails and glass driven down into the words.

But he was able to discern that he was being ordered to grab some ‘shit’ from the cart, if he wasn’t being ordered to somehow make the sun erupt from behind a cloud. Happy to oblige, not quite reading the mood of the situation accurately, Campion grinned again and clicked his heels together like some Seventen receiving orders.

He was the gallant hero on a white steed again, the friendly neighbor, not the social pariah which was nice. Usually in this part of town there was as much community spirit as there was in a jar of scorpions, made him homesick for the Luccullis estate of all things. Beatrice’s ghost and that creepy tomb of a room, the portraits of old family, a million and one heirlooms he was always petrified of knocking over and every single member of his family aside, it was sometimes nice to look out onto the lands, the farms the human’s rented from his father and see whole families working the land. Neighbours exchanging packed lunches, villagers sitting down to picnics in whole groups.

The humans in this part of town didn’t seem to get that. Not outwardly at any road. They were more like this ginger chap. Vulgar and quite obviously broken beyond repair. Some little wind up toy all missing eyes and fur and stuffing, just the mechanical bones underneath visible. It was an uncomfortable thing to watch, broken down windup toy still moving with all its might, jerky desperate movements that would more frighten a child than scare it.

“Right…any particular shit you want carrying? Or just general shit?” he said, peering into the cart, into the crates of battered old metal. He wasn’t kidding when he said shit, was he? Campion picked up a strange twisting of metal wire. “You uhh…you planning on decorating the flat like a rag and bone man’s cart or a junk yard?” he asked, putting it back in the crate and pulling it up. It really was surprisingly heavy and he felt his heart do a little uncomfortable skip in protestation.

“Number thirteen? That’s not so very far from me…or from the baby in room eleven, I’m afraid. Apparently she has colic. I’m not sure what colic is but she cries at all hours.” Campion winced at the thought, before all of this he’d been indifferent to babies, maybe even fond of Maggie’s despite everything but after so many nights of hearing nothing but room 11’s baby wailing in her horrible croaky scream like a dying fox cub caught out at night he was thoroughly done with them.

“You’ll need to come round for tea or a drink at some point,” said Campion, walking up the steps with the crate to Charlie. “You too, sir, if you’re moving in…I’m not sure I got the right end of the stick with the…eh…” he trailed off a little lost before continuing, nonplussed, “presumably we both have some quite interesting things to talk about over the last five years. Unpicking the rumors from the truth over a cuppa might be pleasant.”

Charlie grinned wickedly at Carmine. Couldn't stomach to fuck him, could he? Charlie almost said something snappy about just how well he'd seemed to stomach it before they'd come to Vienda. Almost. Until the sobering thought of just how poorly Vienda looked on galdori having sexual relationships, or any relationships at all, with passives. He shut his mouth and stopped smiling.

"It's for my work," Charlie explained, a touch irritated already. He didn't like Vienda, didn't like it all, the looming grey buildings and the potential brush of fields, real fields not like a wick's and not like his or Campion's. Made him feel like drawing his shoulders deep around himself, snapping and snarling at every little thing. No, but it wasn't supposed to be like that. Remember? You're Charlie Ewing, not Charlton Almond, and Charlie Ewing is discomfited by nothing and no one. Cool and unflappable, that was Charlie Ewing.

So to prove that, he accepted Campion's invitation with an undue amount of enthusiasm. Especially undue for just how much he didn't want to discuss any rumors-- not about himself, at any rate. They were mostly true, anyway.

"I could think of nothing that would give me greater pleasure." See how easy it was? He could just slip back into this way of speaking, this way of acting, as if he had never left it at all. No one needed know. Carmine had been wrong. You can wash the Harbour out of you, after all.

"Don't mind him," he added with a degree of true cheerfulness, "he's just the hired help."

"I heard somebody say colic was ghosts, once," Carmine interjected. "Flittin' about in corners and all around the crib what with their ghost-teeth an' all. When you get bigger, it gets harder to see 'em. Babies can, though. All lil scared an' vulnerable things can. Y'know, all cryin' and curlin' up into themselves like they's scared to pieces? Fuckin' ghosts," he insisted to Campion with utmost seriousness. Those flinty blue eyes were narrowed to slivers.

Oh, so we're back on that again, are we -- ? a voice in him, somewhere, sneered. It could have been his, or His, or somebody else's entirely. Carmine was never quite certain who was what and what was who these days. He was far too small to house this crowd.

He shot Charlie a look that could have been venomous, once, but now it just looked tired. He spat on the stair where Campion had been only minutes before instead. All this bristling and snarling was getting exhausting already.

"The help is gonna take these ugly fuckin' boxes upstairs," he growled weakly. "And yeah. If by drink you mean more of that gutrot you was soakin' yer 'stache in? Yeah. I'd be totally charmed. Got me knickers in a twist an' everything."

With that, he roughly shouldered past Charlie to shuffle his way down the hall. The whole rotten building made him uneasy. Peeling sheets of wallpaper, wood swollen black with water, crumbling at the foundations. The honesty was embarrassing.

He scaled a rickety staircase, and was assailed with the smells of last weeks stewed cabbages and the yowls of that colicy baby. At least that clear enough indication he had the right floor. He teetered down the hall -- and was quite sure he heard the jelly jar tip over in one of the boxes -- until he was blinking balefully up at Charlie's flat number. 13. Three twisted over on its side a bit, drunkenly leaning on the one for support.

"Chuck!" he snarled down the stairs, down the hall. "Git up 'ere with the fuckin' key already!" Wink hissed and spat right along with him.

“Work?” grinned Campion, staggering forward under the weight of the box, “you’re…a welder? Or…I don’t know, a sculptor? If you’re an artist or you’re trying to be bohemian by living here….just…I wouldn’t. Honestly.”

Listening to Carmine, which he was beginning to grasp wasn’t necessarily a good thing, Campion shivered at the mention of ghosts. All locked up in Beatrice’s room, Chervil having propped a chair up against the door, listening to the creak of floorboards, the ominous ticking of her clock and having nothing to stare at but her sad gaunt portrait. He pictured that ghost of a woman, her face always so very clear in his mind, leaning over the crib of that wretched human child, peering at it with a hungry need. Poor barren dead Beatrice. Of course she’d want the baby to see her, but she wouldn’t want it frightened.

What a ridiculous line of thought, Campion chided himself, coughing wetly. A splat of sputum landed in the box in his arms, glistening and flecked with black blood onto a piece of sheet metal. Hands full, he couldn’t mop it clean with an inky handkerchief stashed in his pocket so he just stared at it in a faintly horrified manner. It stared back. Some otherworldly goop sent specifically to humiliate Campion, like some higher power was reminding him that there was always a way one could sink lower.

“I…” he tried, and if he’d had enough color in his pale drawn face to achieve a blush he would have done so, as it was, his ears just turned a faint shade of pink.

“I…alioe, I am so sorry, look let me…” he dropped the box to the floor and, crouched down beside it, dabbing at it pathetically with the cloth “I don’t know what that was…it…alioe…I don’t usually…look, I’ll get it clean,” he fussed, totally unable to look the other man in the eye, scrabbling around on the floor as he was.

Like a fucking fishwife, that one, shouting at him from the top of the stairs and down the hallway. Charlie couldn't wait to call the Seventen, have them haul him off to Brunnhold where he fucking belonged. Charlie wasn't sure how much more of Carmine he could really stomach without punching him in the face. Again. Not that it seemed to bother Carmine much, which was almost worse.

"I'm an enginee--" He'd almost gotten the sentence out when Campion started his hacking. Charlie stared in horrified fascination as not only was he coughing, but he was getting globs of-- oh Alioe, that was just clocking revolting. Charlie felt faintly ill himself, looking at it.


"Are you-- are you actually dying?" The tremulous quality his voice took on then wasn't concern for Campion's health, but rather his own. It was absolutely imperitive that Campion didn't touch any more things of Charlie's, ever again if possible. Who knows what horrible plowfoot disease he'd caught, living here? Whatever it was, Charlie didn't want it to spread to him. For one thing, he didn't have the coin to see a healer, and for another who even knew if it wasn't fatal? Gods forbid he had the Mugrobi plague or something horrible like that.

"That's-- I think you've helped quite enough, really." Horror threaded its way through his tone. He'd seen someone die of some sort of horrible sickness like this-- some aunt or cousin he never really knew very well. It was disgusting, and pathetic, and took what was really a very overly long amount of time. He didn't know Campion very well and didn't want to, but he wanted even less association with the man if he was dying of some wasting disease.

He would not be taking that box into his flat.

"Char-lie!" he shouted. "What th'fuck are ya doin' down there, suckin' 'im off?! Come the fuck on! This hall fuckin' reeks! An' it's cold as a dead twat!"

Did he sound petulant? Oh yes. Immensely. And he was. Carmine felt like a sick cat, too much like Wink bristling in his little cage. He just wanted to soak himself to nothing in a scalding tub, wrap himself under a blanket, curl up next to the radiator and sleep the afternoon away. Go poke around for the Yellow Lantern tonight, maybe. He wasn't spending the night here, not with all these ghosts prowling. Not with those hatcher smile golly neighbors being too friendly.

Carmine heavily set the crates down on the floorboards, and sagged against the door. Not until digging about in the box for that jelly jar, of course. Mercifully, it was unspilled. He huddled against the door, huddled down in his potato sack sweater, huddled down into stink of the gin. It made his mouth sweat.

Carmine looked very, very small. Smaller than a human his age; or, if a human at all, a disturbingly young one.

"Charlie!" he called again, the sound raspy and desperate. Not unlike the yowling of a stray cat clawing at a door. "Charl-ton Lawr-ence! Come the fuck ooon!"

“No, of course not,” said Campion with a wave of his hand, fairly sure of that fact. Well, not entirely sure, having never actually died before. Of course, between all the whores and the damp, there could be something lurking in his system, slowly rotting him from the inside out like a browning apple core. But Campion felt sure if he were dying then he would know, not that there was coin for a doctor. But he was here, standing, capable for the most part of getting on with life. Nope, not dying, surely not.

“The air…”he said pleasantly, “can get quite smoggy on windy days when it all comes over from the factories. I think it’s given me a bit of a cough is all.”

The yowls of the cat and the man sailed down the stairs and Campion grinned, albeit shakily, the coppery taste of blood and the sick, foul taste of sputum lingering on his tongue. He did very much want to throw up again, but not in company pleasant or otherwise (massively otherwise) he thought of his father, collapsing head first into that jelly- that would have annoyed his mother no end, collapsing in public like that, if you had to be sick you had to do it in private obviously.

“I think you’re wanted upstairs,” he said, looking past Charlie. There was no way hired help and master crowed to one another like that. “Shall we?” Campion stood up again with the box and into the familiar dilapidated hall. Up to the flat. And glanced at Carmine nervously.

He looked like…no, well he couldn’t be. He had to be a human, had to be.

There was clawing at Campion’s throat, and he had to put the box down as soon as possible, dropping it at his feet with a metallic clang, leaning against the door and breathing heavily. Fuck, he wanted to whimper, like some gutter snipe, like Charlie and Carmine but he refrained instead skimming his head along the wall like some lopsided puppet on a string, eyes too wide as the flesh around them had wasted away to nothing, eaten up hungrily by the rest of his body. “How did you…” he feigned nonchalance, “how did you come to meet Charlie?”

Charlie's eyes narrowed for a second, chips of glacier ice. Caterwauling upstairs like-- like-- some sort of horrible little animal. Exactly like the terrible little thing he kept as a pet. Twink? Mink? Fink? Whatever its name was. Charlie didn't care. The thing was disease ridden and probably needed to be put down. Perhaps that's why Carmine liked him so much-- they had a lot of things in common.

It was with sullen expression and dragging feet that Charlie ascended the stairs to the new flat. The smell was worse than the old flat, and the atmosphere, too. He'd thought his accomodations at the Rose very poor indeed, but he was starting to think that perhaps he had not been as poorly off as he'd thought. At least there had been a bath and a radiator in the old flat. By the looks of this place, it had neither. He doubted it even had a working sink.

He stood at the top of the stairs and stared down the hall. Being here, being in Vienda, just reminded him of how things were when he was last in Vienda. A lot of shouting, of course, and that heavy feeling beneath his breastbone he was better at forgetting now. And oh Alioe, he had cried like some great girl-- never do that again, he wouldn't. Charlie wasn't remembering that, though. No, not the shame or the shouting or the loneliness, those weren't important. Charlie was remembering the house, and the socializing, the money he'd always had to buy nice, new things when he was tired of the old ones. Charlie Ewing was by no means a poor mechanic, and even quite good at being an engineer, but he didn't make any money in it. So here he was, in the hallway with the cabbage smell and the baby that he could hear, already, and already he hated it here.

"F-- Clocking stupid sc-- Carmine." The name sounded strange tripping off his tongue, he said it so very rarely. It was always 'stupid bastard', 'fucking scrap', never ever 'Carmine'. Sometimes he thought Carmine almost preferred it that way. His annoyance propelled him to cross the last bit of the hallway to come stand outside the door.

"We're here, alright? Shut your clockin' mouth." Clocking, he had to remember, was still terrible, but not as low as fucking. Had to get out of that habit. He could do it, he knew he could. He balanced the box in his hands on his hip and dug through his pocket for his keys. Godsdamn scrap, he almost wanted to ask Carmine to get his keys for him, but something told him that wasn't the best of ideas. "Bells and-- fuck." He dropped the keys on the floor and had to set everything down to retrieve them. Hated this flat, hated it already. The wobbly three made it worse.

"Well, there we go," he said when the door was finally open. Home sweet home, he supposed. "It's not a very interesting story," he added. Not at all.

Before Charlie alighted the staircase, Carmine's eyes shot up to Campion sharp as razors. They'd make him bleed, if eyes alone could do such a thing. Not cutting, just dragging hard metal over every miserable inch of him. Coldly taking stock of Campion in one look, and telling him that he didn't find much worth in what he saw the next. "Suck my dick," he growled in response. That didn't answer the question at all -- or maybe it did. Carmine didn't care. "And shave yer godsdamn horse face," he tacked on.

He tried to look like he hadn't said a word, though, once Charlie was in the hall. Clammed up awfully quick. Carmine squirmed against the door before Charlie opened it. When he opened it, however, the mood shifted entirely. "What the..." he mumbled, staggering to his feet.

He could feel himself sway a little in the doorway, like some fine golly lady in a too-tight corset fixing to swoon. "What the fuck is this?!" he growled, bristling like some spitting cat thing. Bright blue eyes wide as dinner plates, bouncing around the flat. What little there was of it. "Where's the...it don't have a r-radiator? It don't have a...a..." the look of revulsion and horror on his face was so stark, he looked more like some had just gotten gutshot. "...it don't have a tub?" His gaze flickered to Charlie, stricken. "Why...?"

Why this? Why anything? Why you, why me? There were lots of question that hissing breath could have encompassed. This hole in the wall looked like his old flat, his little shoebox in the Wharf Rat. But he'd loved that, because at least it was his. His sink, his damp mattress, his whiskey bottles bristling with dead flowers in the windowsill. He ached for it terribly, all of a sudden.

Carmine delicately moved Wink's cage inside. Then he took up the rest of the crates, and heaved them onto the dust-choked floorboards with much less delicacy. They clattered angrily, glass and metal things clinking all over themselves. At least that one didn't have the gramophone in it. He'd jump off the top of the building right now if he didn't at least have Charlie's gramophone.

Carmine sagged against the wall, wilting like some sort of flower. Dead or dying.

"I...I want a bath," he weakly declared to the dust motes.

Ignoring the little ‘suck my dick’ interjection Campion could not help but feel slightly hurt at the shaving comment- he liked his mustache, it was a very important symbolic mustache, even if the bristly chin really was just incidental of not actually owning a razor. The ginger little thing hardly looked like he could grow facial hair at all, and scars aside Campion found it difficult to place his age. Certainly younger than Campion if he was a human with those girlish bones and big, piercing enough to break flesh eyes, put him in a dress and he’d be like the youngest girl at the mutton.

“I suppose it is none of my business,” said Campion measurably.

When the door was opened, the lanky galdor took it upon himself to peek into Charlie’s new home. It wasn’t shocking, not by the buildings standards, but that was hardly saying much when the building’s standards were oh so low. The wall paper was peeling like Campion’s flat, but there was a smug sense of satisfaction as Campion assessed that his home was slightly, very slightly mind, better.

“That ceiling is going to leak something terrible,” said Campion looking up at the damp stained top of the flat, cracks running through it like blue veins beneath papery white skin. “Thank Alioe the rainy season is almost over.”

And then as Carmine was fuming over the lack of a bath Campion chimed, “I have a bath.” Not entirely sure why he said that, he back peddled quickly, “Well, I mean, I bought one. It didn’t come with the flat. But there’s a bric a brac and junk shop that sells of cheap tin washtubs. I could…bring it up to you, If you’d like.”

Though of course, having just coughed up blood during the simple act of carrying a small box, the likelihood of Campion making it up with a large, not altogether lightweight tin bath seemed fairly unlikely.

“And I get by on hot bricks, without the radiator…there’s a lot of debris around here, you take a brick and heat it in the stove before wrapping it in a cloth. It works a treat if you put it in your bed,” said Campion with a smile, pleased at his money saving tip, he didn’t have many. Hot bricks and not eating ever were about all he had to go on.

Internally, Charlie's thoughts rather much mirrored Carmine's yowling. Charlie, however, had far too much good breeding and sense to spend his time whinging about it. This too, he decided, would only be temporary. Eventually he'd start getting work here, and he could move, and maybe sell his patents and have the money to keep himself in the fashion to which he was accustomed.

Or he could marry someone with more money than him, if there was anyone stupid enough to not know or care who he was.

"Thank you for the... advice. As you can see, we have quite a bit of unpacking to do, and I would hate to make you assist us any further, so if you could just...?" There, see, if he shuffled Campion out fast enough, he wouldn't have time to ask any awkward questions.

"Ye...ye've got a tub?" Carmine ventured. His voice was so small, his eyes were so big and beseeching, in that moment he revoked every comment he'd made about Campion sucking his dick, about Campion's mustache. He ignored Charlie's terse attempt to make the other golly boy get the hell out. For all intents and purposes, he could stay. For a bit. For a little bit.

"Yeah...you should...bring it up. An'...an'..." those eyes went so bright, must have, Carmine felt them going wide like a dog leering all achey empty stomach over a rabbit. Licked the splintery jags of his teeth, even. "...s'more gin? If ye've got it? A...anything, really. Jus' bring some booze an' you two can...can..." he gestured weakly between Charlie and Campion. "...talk. 'r whatever. I'm not even here. I'm gone."

The whole of him was quavery, hesitant like a drop of water clinging to a faucet. Carmine folded his limbs around himself, rubbing at the tops of his arms. The tattoo ached. His fingers squirmed over the furrowed rivers of scar scraped into it, just beneath the fraying wool. Carmine tried to smile. Displayed his bristly fish teeth in a weak, watery attempt at a grin.

And his heavy doll eyes flickered off of Campion quick as they'd pinned him. They blinked flatly at Charlie instead.

"He's got booze, Chuck. Innit tha'. Innit tha' nice? Do we got a sink in this bitch? We best, we better..." and he trailed off mumbling to himself, unseathing the shirt strewn over Wink's bird cage. The one eyed tomcat furrowed and hummed deep down in its bony chest, flinching away from Carmine. When he opened the cage door, Wink sprang out and streaked across the flat into the darkness of a tiny closet.

"G'bye," Carmine said.

Campion looked to Charlie for the final say, because liberal or not force of habit meant that the decision always deferred to the galdor. It could be fun, maybe, to drink with new company since Dom wasn’t coming around so often and well, mostly he’d been drinking alone in the dank tip of his flat. Could be like being seventeen all over again, sneaking booze into the dorms at Brunnhold- all the ridiculous dares and demands to become a performing monkey aside.

But there was also the potential, and this seemed far more likely, that the whole thing would be just awful. Uncomfortable talking about Charlie’s misfortune and Campion’s misfortune, so much reputation crushed easily underfoot like some glass trinket, grinding the shards into nothing but dust with each sip of bath tub brewed gin.

“Alright,” he shrugged obligingly. “But I might need some help.” Here the person of lowest race, rank and file was deferred to as he addressed Carmine.

Down a few steps, down the hall, Campion opened his door- where Charlie’s room smelt of damp, a sort of sorrowful neglect that came from empty rooms, Campion’s smelt too of damp but also screamed of inhabitancy from the smell of booze and sweat and spunk. Ink paintings and half heartedly washed underwear hang from criss crossing washing lines, the drying sheets making it look like the fort a child might construct to hide in, like a comfort blanket draped over a few chairs.

He hummed to himself idly as he went about collecting the mismatch of booze that was assembled in the room, jam jar gin, a stew pot of rum and some faded old bottles of vodka.

The battered tub was in a corner, filed with tepid water that reeked significantly of urine which Campion quickly disposed of, out of the window, splashing onto the street below which was thankfully deserted in the spot the water hit.

Charlie wanted to protest-- what was Carmine planning on doing with a washtub, now, in the middle of this flat which, if he wasn't mistaken, only had one room? Take a bath in front of the both of them? But before he could open his mouth, Campion was out the door and down the stairs and so Charlie had very little choice but to follow obligingly. Besides, perhaps they would drop it and hurt themselves and he could laugh at them.

"Lovely decor," he commented as he stepped over the threshold and inside uninvited. His eyes scanned the little room with distaste. His flat in Old Rose had been squalid, to be sure, but it hadn't been quite like... this. He felt a sudden longing for that little place. Even if he'd never wanted to stay in the Rose, he well and truly didn't feel so transparent as he did here.

Charlie shook off the thought, instead distracting himself with inspecting Campion's things. Worse off than Charlie, then. The idea gave him some strange sense of satisfaction. At least there was one galdor in Vienda he was less pathetic than. Cheered a bit by this, he started to wander around, peering at the ink paintings. Luccullis wasn't that bad, even Charlie could see that. Certainly better than he was himself, though that meant next to nothing as Charlie couldn't draw his way out of a wet paper bag, technical drawings aside.

"Not bad." It was sincere, but coming from his lips the compliment felt flat and sounded derisive.

A hiss huffed through his teeth at that little look shot to Charlie. But he just chewed his lip and huddled down deeper into that ugly sweater, tugging up the too-big collar drooping down his shoulder. He was supposed to be obsequious. Right, that.

At the other golly boy's dingy flat, he blinked at the number nailed onto the door. "Does this mean we're like...neighbors? Upside down neighbors, I mean. Not sideways neighbors." Upside down, off the walls. Talk of neighbors of any kind, any thoughts of pride all evaporated when he caught sight of those tired bottles of booze. Something like a laugh bubbled up from his throat. Something like -- mostly a sick, anxious pop of sound. He looked a bit like he'd just fallen in love with the contents of Campion's hands.

That glazed, almost shy look he was giving the booze warped fast when he glanced up to Campion himself. Sharp and distant again, dissecting-like. There were so many things he wanted to spit over the piss stink, but he said nothing. Just grabbed the edge of heavy tin wash basin and heaved it out of Campion hands. It clattered against the floorboards and Carmine was content just to drag it away, scraping and banging all the way down the hall and up the stairs.

He only got half-way across the flat before he was quite distracted by all the inky things on hanging from the washline. Peaking over Charlie's shoulder, an unexpected smile burst up on his lips.

"Oi! I know her!" The poor wash tub clattered uproariously to the floor again, and Carmine's hands shot up to the washing line. Some ink drawing of some girl with her freckled tits all falling out of her dress and...and, well, there were probably lots of things like suggested symbolism in her pose, or her expression, but all Carmine noticed were the familiarity and the nakedness. He jerked the scrap of parchment down to examine it closer.

"Fuck!" he crowed in shaky delight. "..'at's Annie Clapp, that is. I'd recognize that fluffy head an' them beaver teeth anywheres." He shot a look to Campion. "The fuck are you doin' drawin' plowfoot titties, greenie?" Not hateful, not yet. Just curious and a bit derisive. He squinted down at Charlie, too. "What the fuck is it with you golly boys an' puttin' yer dicks where yer not supposed to? Shit..."

“I’m not,” Campion turned flustered, and grabbed an ink sketch from the line, crumpling it between his fingers- stupid thing, it was worthless anyway.

“It’s an artistic nude,” he stressed, trying to sound superior and affronted instead just sounding angry and frightened like a cornered rat. “I’m trying something new…artistically…I’m not...” he pulled a few more from their lines, dry as they were now anyhow and shuffled them together in a pile, face down.

“They aren’t finished,” he muttered. “I don’t stick my…dick…anywhere” he started awkwardly, the guttural sentence sounding so weird and alien coming from, lets face it, a voice still very much the picture of golly high class. “I mean…I could…and I do, when I want to. But I don’t mess around with lower races. I can do better than that. What do you take me for?” A pair of Campion’s still wet underpants fell off the washing line and hit the ground with a damp, splatting noise behind his head.

“And Annie’s beaver teeth aren’t that bad,” he said petulantly, seriously beginning to rethink giving Carmine his bath and his booze.