The first thing was the headache, more intense than usual, pulsing behind his eyes and making his thoughts slow and thick.

The second thing was the welt (welts?) at his neck, though he rather more liked that one. Still, shit. And bruises, and where the hell had they all come from? This lack of remembering was becoming a bit too regular.

The third thing, the thing that started to make the first two things go together, was how he was lying stretched out in nothing but his socks on his couch, his pants-- where were his pants?

And then he remembered that if he was here, he'd invited someone home which he usually didn't like to do unless he was fairly certain he'd caught someone of the same species of flighty tart as himself. The night before was a blur of alcohol and discomfort and threats, soft and subtle insanity. He remembered some ginger plowfoot in a bar --which bar? ah Alioe he couldn't fucking remember-- looking like he'd been smashed up rather recently and all over dangerous.

He remembered he had a very poorly honed sense of self-preservation if there was a chance he could get a tumble.

He remembered that he'd blown all his money on that godsdamn ginger, but then... Then... His mind groped around. Then what? He kneaded his eyes with a fingertip, trying to recall just what exactly had gone on the previous evening. He was drinking too much if this was the second time in a week he'd woken up not being able to remember anything. His mouth was ashen and fuzzy at once, his lips dry and split open.

"Wha--?" Voice cracked, throat too dry to support it.

Fuzzy warmth and cloying tongues woke him first. Eyelids pried free of the gum of sleep, then, peering out into the grey morning leaking through the casements. Dusty striations of light, barely light at all, first fighting through clouds, then window slats, then through the interstices of his eyelashes. All that, and still illuminating nothing.

Warmth from somewhere. He heard the asthmatic rattle of a coil radiator somewhere far right of his head. The hard, dry scrape of wooden floors against his back, the smell of dust and something so distinct as old sweat tickling his nose. Gooseflesh stippled his skin, drawing it up to little pinpoints—

His skin. His skin and bones, the naked awareness of himself is what jolted him awake in those weak hours of the morning. A rush, then, recollecting his thoughts. They flowed slow like molasses between his ears, stickier and more pungent. Shivery fingers scraping on hardwood, seeking purchase, peeling sweat sticky skin off all the dust and screws.

Scrambling like a rat caught in the corner – he didn’t need to crawl out of a storm drain, or squirm his crushed belly out of a steel trap, but it felt like that. All blind panic and mindless scrambling, until his hands fell on the nearby curl of old crochet yarn. Safety only came when he was snug away the too-long folds of Eoin’s old sweater, nibbled by moths and burns. He flopped down among his blanket nest, too sour and sore to move. Moving made the contents of his belly slosh up into his throat.

In earlier hours, shortly after the golly had passed out on the couch, he’d been up and about, stalking the apartment for his gun, his knives. They were found abandoned in a corner with his trousers, sitting quietly there among all the dust. All the wrinkles had peered up at him with an accusatory glower, quite disgraced. Once all was found, he went about tearing through the cupboards, stuffing his mouth with stolen bread by moonlight, like any good rat. He found a half-drained bottle of whiskey there, too, though it was green and sour. It was quick to sedate his nerves, to coax sleep back into his tired body.

He curled up on the floor beside the couch if only for want of hearing another person breathing, stealing a blanket from the golly’s bed and a sagging couch cushion to build a nest of plush stains and warmth, where he fast drifted back to sleep. And so he had awoken, drained bottle and pistol muzzle nestled against his ribcage. Every inch of him like the last kitten at the bottom of a cardboard box, drowsy-soft yet bristling with teeth.

Carmine nosed out from under the warm clutch of the quilt. It was too wet and cold to be moving just yet. He spoke up, voice a sandpaper rasp, pale eyes slit to the unwelcome dawn.

“Ent...ent dead, then? I thought ye mighta swallowed yer own vomit an’ choked or somethin’.”

Dead? No not dead, not yet anyway. Though he wondered how close he'd come, having this guy in his house. There was a sharp pulse through his temple and he groaned. Certainly not dead. How much of a good thing this was, well, that was anyone's guess really.

His eyes hurt, too; he blinked slowly trying to clear the fog from his sight and his memory. It hurt, his head and the attempt to prod himself into some sort of state of awareness.

The grey light filtered in from his small window making everything seem stark and cozy at once. Softened some features, sharpened others. Charlie could see all those freckles now where he couldn't before through the murk of the bar and the alcohol clinging to him like a cloud. The smudges under his eyes, the straight set of a nose and a face with features that were once, he guessed, nicer, but had seen better days. Ugly-pretty, he thought, that's what this guy was.

Not that it mattered what he looked like, or the way the light caught the color of his hair to be rather striking. There was no staying, not here, not ever. Honestly, what had he been thinking, bringing someone back here? This broken battered-up guy folded in his nest of the softer of Charlie's things-- he had to go.

"You should--" His voice came out a croak. He frowned, swallowed, tried agan. "Should leave."

Shifting in the sheets. He wasn’t focused on the quiet rasp of the golly’s – Chuck’s, he remembered – voice, or the faint ebb and flow of a field. Just the coolness of the floor, the softness of the quilt, the stiffness of the cushion. Drool and something like bile had dribbled onto the garish floral print in his sleep. Carmine rolled over to the other end of the cushion, his sweater clad back to Charlie. He hitched the blanket up over his bared shoulders, going pink with cold.

“Mmh.” Incoherant mumbling, stifled by limb and fabric. “...’s too cold. I ent wanna go.”

Correction:

“I ent gonna.”

The warmth from all these soft things was so persistent, so clinging. Whiskey glass and gun metal warmed by body heat. The pitter-patter of rain on the window panes promised nothing but chill damp if he left. His aching limbs, head, everything were in love with the idea of staying curled up here until it was just a salad of bleached bones and tattered fabric. An abandoned bird’s nest.

Charlie frowned. Of course he was going to go, Charlie didn't even know his name and he wanted to keep it that way. No one stayed, that wasn't how this worked.

He tried again, speaking very slowly as if maybe this guy on the floor hadn't heard him the first time. "You really should go."

Gods it was cold. Why didn't he have any blankets? A few blinking moments later and he realized it might have something to do with this guy curled up in the middle of the only ones he had. It really was just dreadfully unpleasant. All the more reason for him to leave, Charlie told himself firmly. Leave and abandon the blankets so Charlie could have them back and be warm again.

"'S cold," he said reasonably, "so you should leave and gimme back my blankets."

A weak groan, knees curling into his chest.

"Uh-uh," he shook his head emphatically. muttering quiet curses. Hazy fingers worked their way under the worn yarn of his sweater, kneading the pale gutters of scars criss-crossing his tattoo. Had he seen? If he'd glimpsed it all, did he care?

Perhaps, perhaps. The splintery attitude come the morning light was nothing he hadn't dealt with before. There was usually more of an urgency to his movements, the looming cloud of a protective father lingering somewhere in the house, or the threat of hard knuckled hands. But the golly didn't seem to have any of those things.

“If'n yer cold, come down here. I ent movin'.”

Something tiny and passive in him wailed at the thought of magic. The boy wasn't very big – if it came down to violence, he didn't think it'd take much to make him call on the mona.

Resolute. That's what he was. Carmine's thoughts, his insides, felt fuzzy and barely tangible. No lick of magic could touch him where he was buried, underneath all these soft layers of blanket and flesh.

He felt a bit like one of those cats that just crawl off under a porch and die.

This was becoming tiresome and annoying, far too much for a naked man with a hangover to contend with. (Some small part of his mind insisted he wasn't naked, he had socks on! You're never naked with socks. He ignored this part for being silly.) That stray cat in the nest on the floor wasn't moving, and it wasn't getting any warmer. It was time for a decision.

Charlie shifted his weight so he rolled off the couch and onto the floor, landing somewhat painfully in a jumble of elbows and knees on top of his definitely temporary guest. He'd try and force him out later. For now, he was cold and sleeping, the rain-drummed tattoo on his window lulling him to complacency. Besides, trying to make anything bend to his will had gone distinctly wrong these last few weeks. Best not to push it, for now.

"Gimme those," he growled, yanking the blankets as best he could off of Carmine and over himself. It was entirely possible, he reasoned, that if he made it vastly uncomfortable to stay here, then leaving would become an ever-more desirable option.

A yelp, a growl – plaintive little noises he was too tired to bite back. Carmine recoiled upon himself like an upended ladybug. He hated the damp chill that washed over his legs when Chuck snatched the quilt away from him. Who cared if it belonged to him? He'd been using it, godsdamn it.

So. Scuffling on the floorboards. He crawled across the slim space to the golly. Roughly jerking at the quilt, peeling open an entry in the clam clamp Charlie had made between the blanket and the floorboards. His head was shrouded. Nothing to see but darkness diffused by fuzzy colored light, faint impressions of tint. The warmth and firmness of another body. The sound of limbs shifting amongst themselves in irritation.

He didn't want to come up for air in the meek, watery daylight. Stay in here, beneath the tent of that smoke-reeking old quilt, where the whole world as small and dark and warm. It was like the inside of an egg. He squirmed close to Charlie, moving more out of visceral need for heat and solidity than any prurient impulse. Stocking feet criss-crossed; his crochet-fuzzy arm flopped bonelessly over the other man's side. Carmine's face insinuated itself somewhere in what he believed to be the chest or neck.

He was barely awake. His skull was throbbing. His mouth was wet and hot with the insides of his stomach. Infantile things moved him, for he couldn't be bothered to grasp at a higher plane of thought. Not now, and not in any time after. Just be quiet and pliant and pretend you didn't end up here in the way you ended up here. Be driftwood. Lie where you lay. Don't struggle or question. Float.

“I think ye might be layin' on me gun.” Soft mumblings. A wide cat's yawn, stifled against skin. “So. Be careful or wha'ever.”

The head buried against his flesh seemed an oddly intimate gesture from someone without a name that he just wanted to leave as quickly as possible. It made his skin crawl at the same time he relaxed into it, letting body heat spread warm and comfortable over his entirety.

He remembered this guy a little more clearly, now. Some human insisting on calling himself Ginger, he'd looked more like a drowned rat than the arching, pathetic cat he seemed now. He seemed small, despite being so much larger than Charlie was himself, all wrapped up in that sweater and huddled as he was. Harmless, even, compared to the threat he bristled with at the bar. Charlie was tempted to just drift off to sleep and deal with his irritating presence later.

That was until he heard mention of a gun.

A strangled little noise came from Charlie's throat. Guns, in addition to being deadly and highly illegal, were not something he enjoyed having in his apartment. He didn't know how to use one and he didn't know how to make them, so really the only reason one would be in his living area would be to be pointed at him. There was a sudden burst of violent movement from his small frame, a sharp shove to Carmine's shoulders.

"Out! Out out out!" He insisted, trying not to shout in case Carmine could, you know, get to his gun and use it as leverage to stay. "Really I'm sure you have something better to be doing."

Vienda had taught him lots of things. Like how to lie, and cheat, and kiss like a real professional. It also taught him, through anxious whispers, that no golly worth the ear the mona gave him couldn’t handle a pistol. Apparently, the one he was curled up against was never enlightened to this fact.

Panicky little prick.

“Calm the fuck down.” A guttural elucidation, growled quiet through the clenched teeth of a wicked headache. The shrill pins of nerves in the other man’s voice were like lances through his ears. He only curled deeper into himself at the shoving, a broken turtle. A hazy hand clenched around flailing wrist, fingers lacing tight across the bone.

“An’ stop movin’. I godsdamn told ye to be careful, not t’ flail around like a fish.”

His other hand slipped into the cramped space between them, shoving hindering flesh out of the way and rooting through the peaks of blankets. In a moments, he met cold stiffness wedged between the floorboards and the low ladder of Charlie’s ribs. Squirming underneath him, bumbling fingers wrested the pistol free. It had been swathed from the golly’s skin by a mere fold of the quilt. Carmine peeked his hand out from under the blanket and lay it snug on his side of the nest, in both arm’s reach and clear view.

He huddled close to the other man again, not relinquishing the grip on his wrist, nose seeking out hot places.

“I jus’ wanna keep warm. Go back t’sleep,” he forced himself to grunt, the words coming up slow on his chilled and weary tongue. Heavy lids and heavier limbs.

It seemed that Charlie was reminded of his own adequacies in the galdori-mona relations department more in Old Rose than he ever was back in the field-filled hive of Brunnhold. There, he'd been a piss-poor student and not particularly well liked after he'd reached a certain age, but he'd never actually really had to use his supposed magical ability outside of a classroom setting. So this whole "get better at magic or be physically assualted and/or shot Charlie Ewing" thing wasn't sitting to well with him. Hadn't that been what he'd come here for, to get away from the pressure to be any better at dealing with invisible sentient particles that clearly thought he was a tosser?

With Carmine's hand clamped over his wrist all hot and heavy, the pistol out from under his ribs but not just where he could see it, Charlie did endeavour to settle down. He hadn't been threatened (yet, today). Keeping warm wasn't such a bad idea, either. He certainly was doing that.

Gods he had to get this man out of his house. Possibly followed by a change of address.

"Fine," he muttered, the sulk in his tone quite clear. Charlie was dumb but he wasn't stupid; he knew better than to argue with a man with a pistol who had spent large chunks of the night before scaring the piss out of him. If this clocking plowfoot wanted to sleep, he could. Charlie sure as hell wasn't going to, but at least it was warmer here than it had been on the couch.

Besides, it was just some dirty human. What, gun aside, could he really do? Charlie was mostly positive that as thick as he'd proven to be in school, he was still smarter than this guy. That had to count for something.