He feels rather than sees the smirk, a momentary ghost of exhaled breath. Feathery hair tickles the corner of his mouth.
"Can't even stick with the present tense," the other muses, teasing. "What a fucking stupid place to put an anchor." – and then Schuldig doesn't kiss him, changes direction an inch away and slides under the threads of probability again, brushing his cheek against Brad's. Schuldig bites Brad's earlobe, almost too hard.
He hooks Schuldig's knees out from under him for that, catching him before he can panic or fall, and kisses Schuldig properly, mouth twisting into a rival smirk.
Received emotion spikes through him and he curls around and slumps against the wall. He retches a few times; closes his eyes and shudders as warm bile suddenly fills his throat. Too much, all at once. He keeps his eyes clenched shut as the shuddering turns to empty, near-hysterical giggles. Like throwing stones into water, you know. He remembers telling Crawford that once. And it makes ripples too, metaphorically, so the analogy holds true.
Maybe it's the thought of Crawford that sobers him. He looks at the mess. His vomit is studded with greasy, brownish lumps. Someone else was sick here last night, someone that wasn't him. It's been mostly cleared up with old magazine pages. There are dirty plates on the floor. The thick blood clotting on the headboard seems hardly incongruous.
Schuldig addresses the corpse: "It's no good." He chokes back a laugh, and it's a laugh and not a sob; he has bile on his socks and he's standing here talking to a cadaver as if this stinking room were some kind of a confessional. "I have to go back to him."
Schuldig rinses his hands and mouth with metallic tasting tap water. His hair is greasy and gets in his eyes, so he scrapes as much of it as he can into a ponytail and digs out a hat to cover the rest. Black and woolen, made of wool that's actually acrylic. There are cockroaches, huge reddish-brownish ones skittering across the walls and over the dishes in the sink. Crawling sweaty chitinous footprints up his back. The sound is the worst, scritch-scratch bat-pitched crumpling foil; it pricks at the corners of his eyes. Cockroaches disgust him more than dead bodies. He considers torching the place, just for the bugs, he just wants to get rid of the bugs. In the end, though, he leaves without doing anything.