Simon's chin is buried in his coat as he descends the little flight of stairs to his room. The November air has just begun to bite and the chill of the early dark has crept in through his windows - he shuts the door behind himself quickly and does not loosen his scarf. Christophe at his place on the mattress in the corner has surrounded himself with several blankets.
"You're home. It's so late," Simon hears him say as he places a small package on the table. In his voice there are traces of reproach, no more, but the complaint is quite tangible. Christophe is set up against his pillows and the wall, reading, as is his custom, by a candle by now melted sturdily onto the floor, but he has been progressing through his books more and more slowly in recent days. The lines of his face cast into relief by the sickbed lighting are more keen, his fingers tend to tremble when he turns pages.
Simon has not become accustomed yet to the complaints, but so many things have changed that on some nights he finds them soothing. On this night he draws a chair up beside the mattress and sits, and leaning down fondly touches his fingers to Christophe's forehead. "I know. I am sorry." He sits back and retrieves the package from the table. "You're feeling cooler, though."
Christophe's irritation under these minor affections is apparent. He seems always on the verge of refusing them, and only shrugs in reply.
Simon pulls the bottle out of its paper, and pours its contents into a glass with a measure of water from the basin sitting at his feet. Christophe takes it with a steady hand, proof that he can control the tremors.
Simon refrains from watching him, as usual. "Do you need a fire?"
"I do not." Christophe sets his glass firmly upon the floor, his eyes sharper now with an edge that Simon knows has nothing to do with the drug. "Nor these blankets, nor your incessant attentions."
"You said yourself it was cold," Simon says in his own defense, but quietly and without very much heart. The conversation is familiar, and he does not wish to continue it. There are things Christophe can say that bring the cold into his chest as though it were the hardest night of winter, that make his face and eyes burn as though beneath a sharp wind, and sober as he is this evening the omens are clear to him.
But Christophe, brooding all day under the light of two small panes and nothing but a candle in the dark, seems rarely able to resist the possibility of a conflagration. Simon blames himself for this: in drink he can never refrain from granting it to him. There is almost always some attempt at provocation: some flaring of the soul must be preferable to none at all. "And if I were cold? The only thing I need it takes you a day at the least to procure, and then nothing but the most vile stuff that you can find. Any child could do what you take it upon yourself to do for me. If it weren't for your cowardice I wouldn't need anyone at all - because of you there isn't anything that I can do."
Simon lowers his eyes to the blankets covering Christophe's crushed and crooked legs, healing awkwardly and splinted hopelessly. "You might beg," he suggests simply, resigned to the flood of regret, "at the churches with the other invalids." He knows well the empty expression that Christophe forces at times like these, and does not look up, staring instead at the tangled covers and loathing his own spite, the new bitterness that revels in that inadequate disguise, a sure indication that he has struck a painful nerve.
Christophe, he knows, is helpless in so many ways - lost entirely, it seems, within his pain. He himself is too weak to help to guide him out. Love is worthless, he reflects, when coupled with weakness: at the slightest sting he shoves the object of his adoration deeper into his own dark thoughts, and someday they both must surely lose sight of the disappearing sun.