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Malikai Dorran Olera was intimately familiar with the unfortunate minutiae of hangovers. But, on top of all the other distinctly unpleasant features that came with them, it seemed only to add insult to injury that they tended to come wedded with morning, a time already miserable enough since it tended to dictate waking, facing another day, and leaving the warm confines of bed for far less favorable locale and activities. Such was the case now.

Practiced at doing so, Malikai warred with the process. When his mind began drifting towards much-dreaded consciousness, he fought it, mentally dragging back like a bat shrinking back from dawn and attempting to bury itself deeper in the shadowy confines of its cave. He wanted nothing to do with sunlight. Nothing to do with movement. Nothing to do with his body which felt as though someone had come in the night and surreptitiously replaced all blood in his veins with sand and all moisture in his mouth with dry muck.

His head hurt without even moving it, and his gut—oh, goddess. Squeezing his eyes tighter shut and making what was possibly the most truly pathetic whine of a sound ever to have escaped his lips, Malik spared a flutter of a thought to take solace in the fact that at least no one would hear it, and tucked his face forward into…

…soft…

…hair…?

Attempting to rouse his mind enough for coherent thought felt akin to shaking a half-empty pail of murky water, sloshing it about messily to stir up the contents thoroughly, and then attempting to find the thing you’d hid in it the night prior. Why was he in bed with someone. Who was he in bed with. Where was he? A whorehouse was the most likely answer to all of these in one form or another, based purely on past experience and without necessitating actually opening his eyes. Even though he didn’t recall having employed the services of anyone the night prior, he…couldn’t verily recall anything at all after any point following the hours just before sundown.

He breathed out.

The hair was soft, not unpleasant, and beyond the overall musk of sex that permeated the entire space as a whole, this particular head of hair smelled of floral bathing oils, and Malik decided that was pleasant in its own right, and soothing in a way. When he shifted his lead-weighted fingers a half fraction, he noted that the body of his company was, unsurprisingly, nude, and the fact that he was still in bed with them suggested that, regardless of however much he currently felt like a corpse dragged from Soudana’s hell, the previous evening was more than likely fairly enjoyable.

There was someone at his back.

Malikai’s brow furrowed with puzzlement. It seemed, in retrospect, like something that he ought rightly to have noticed already — all but immediately, at that — and his only real excuse for not having done so, other than the glass-half-empty state of his mind’s functionality, was that this was by far the most unusual turn of events so far. While he regularly employed the services of working women, he couldn’t recall ever having called on more than one at once. The thought was not unpleasant — rather the opposite, though he had not honestly considered it prior — but it did make the fact of his complete memory lapse seem more regrettable.

Eventually, curiosity won out over the dread of opening his eyes, and Malikai took the process one step at a time. A bleary squint with one eye, then the other. Deep, forest green hair, thickly waved. A smooth swathe of only barely-less-dark, moss green skin over the span of shoulders that were — while not broad per se — broader than he was accustomed to, and—

Malikai pinched his eyes back shut, brow furrowing because although his mind felt like it was hiccupping on something obvious, he knew these colors and that back, but the logical conclusion that followed couldn’t possibly be true because that would mean he was in bed with—

No, his eyes told him when he forced them back open. He was definitely in bed with a very lithe, very sleeping, very absolutely nude Naarhiji.

Had Malikai’s muscles been in better functioning order — and had he not been sandwiched, his spinning mind reminded him, between two people — his recoil would likely have been far more rapid and dramatic. As it was, it functioned as more of a startled whine-grunting sound accompanied by a lethargic twitch and shift and with great effort, he managed to shuffle to shift and face—thank the goddess—Sytherina and all of the beautiful familiarities that came with her.

The building knot of petrified confusion in his chest jostled loose and eased slightly, because surely — though he couldn’t remember or even imagine how — Sytherina’s presence must indicate that there was, contrary to all indications suggesting otherwise, a perfectly normal and non-concerning explanation for all of this. He hid his face against her and managed a small, tentatively rousing shake at her waist. Little as he liked to wake her — if she wasn’t already awake — he desperately needed reassurance in some fashion.

“Syth.” Her name sounded worse on his tongue than he could possibly have imagined. Something of a scratching, croaked, and pathetic keen of a word. It would have to do for now. “There’s…hnnh.” Malikai shut his eyes, fumbling at her waist because that was comforting. “Naarhiji ‘s in—wha’ is ‘e…? ‘E’s…in bed, an’ next t’ me, an’…does ‘e normally come t’ y’r bed…? Even after…?” Something about the entire situation also seemed to dictate that he at least try to whisper — not that his voice felt in any state to accomplish much else, currently — as though speaking louder and actually rousing Naarhiji would make reality topple down around them.

It certainly seemed plausible.

“An’ ‘e’s…”

Naked seemed to be a terrible and terrifying word.

“Doesn’ even ‘ave th’ usual bit o’ stuff tha’ ‘e generally…why is ‘e in bed with us?”

Nothing that Malikai could come up with made any sense. Clearly, he was not thinking creatively enough yet.

For an extended, dragging moment, Malikai stared, bestowing on Sytherina the blankest, most anticipatory stare that two barely functioning eyes could manage as he awaited further explanation because what he’d received simply…wasn’t. It explained nothing. If anything, it made even less sense than the things his own mind was coming up with.

“I,” he repeated. This was the first confusing point of the assertion. “I…? Wha’ d’y’ mean ‘invited’?” This was the second confusing point. And finally: “Him? Like…after we…? Why would I invite ‘im in for anythin’ an’…” The final portion of his wonderings was simply so pressing he couldn’t bear it any longer not to ask. “Why is ‘e naked? Surely, even if ‘e really wanted t’ sleep ‘ere with you, he coulda had the…decency…t’…”

And then, with all the terrifying, gradually encroaching ominousness of a distant boom of cannonfire or rolling thunderclap, a new possibility occurred to him. Hazy. Unmanageable. Vague. But gradually gaining clarity by the moment.

Except that it wasn’t really possible, either. It was ridiculous. Absolutely and entirely unfathomable—

While still, unfortunately — Malikai realized with impending dread — wildly more sensical than literally anything else that he had come up with. After having squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment and forcing a deep breath with new oxygen into his lungs to hopefully supply his reeling and clearly malfunctioning brain, he ventured another squint in Syth’s direction, studying her features.

“I invited him,” he repeated. “I invited…him…? Before we…an’ he was, we actually…?” Malikai shook his head slowly and minutely as he asked these ‘questions’ as though begging her by visual signal to stop him at any point, coo gently and correct him and assure him that, ‘No, no, no, sweetheart, it wasn’t anything like that.’ And she would laugh prettily and look altogether amused and then give him the actual explanation.

Except that she didn’t.

He waited. Hoped. Prayed. But she didn’t, and at length, a flinty groan that may have been a whimper crawled up his throat. He shut his eyes, swallowing and shaking his head again as he drew a hand up to rub his aching eyelids.

“Tha’s not really possible…” he mumbled. “This doesn’ make any sense, I don’—I ‘aven’t—’m not…hnnnnnh. Oh, goddess. ‘M too old. An’ ‘e’s too young, an’ I—did I…touch…?” Any of him? All of him? All but immediately, Malikai realized he didn’t want to know and rapidly shook his head. “No, don’—don’ answer tha’. ********, is ‘e alright? I didn’ hurt ‘im at all, did I? An’ ‘e came in—he let—he doesn’ like me all so much, why would ‘e—” Malikai frowned, a new thought occurring to him, and he dropped his hand from his eyes long enough to squint around the room. Familiar, and yes, definitely Syth’s. “But why’d I invite ‘im t’ your room…? An’…”

Nothing made sense.

Absolutely nothing in all the world made sense, and his head hurt, and thinking made it hurt more, and when he shifted, his shoulder brushed back against—

With a startled grunt of sound, as though he had somehow forgotten that the topic of all his fretting was still right next to him, Malikai jerked and pushed to a sit—except that that was a terrible idea. The room lurched, his brain bashed itself against the front of his skull and— <******** dropped back to the bed, squeezing his eyes shut, gritting his teeth and gripping a hand to his own throat as though to discourage anything from actually coming up. Much practice and failed experiences had given him a fairly solid background in eventually learning how not to lose lunch after a night of five or ten or more too many, and while he wasn’t always successful, Malik was relieved to find that, after several long moments of horizontal stillness and careful breathing, his stomach calmed enough that he was no longer in grave danger of making the situation somehow even worse than it already was.

“‘M’sorry. ‘M really…really, really—I don’ know wha’ th’ livin’ ******** I did, but I feel wha’ever it was…probably should be apologizin’.”

Malikai, despite all, did relax under Sytherina’s fingers, breathing a touch easier and shutting his eyes again for a moment when her touch moved along his ear. These were familiar things. And no one was hurt, she said—so that was a great relief. Though he couldn’t imagine what exactly he had done, he struggled to think he had been any good at…anything if he had worked himself to blackout before even arriving at the brothel. So the concept of attempting, while mind-numbingly completely beyond his senses, to sleep with a narrow-hipped and obviously delicate boy when he hadn’t the faintest idea sober how to safely or properly do anything with a man was unsettling at best. He was heavy and clumsy and it simply—

But no one had been hurt.

“Enjoying…” Malikai repeated. In his initial overwhelming sea of confusion, it hadn’t actually occurred to him that yes, this was actually possible, too, strange as the concept seemed. But wait. He squinted. “From…where you were…?” Which begged the question where had she been, since it seemed to suggest that not only had he ‘invited’ Naarhiji to join them, but the boy had played a significant, if not leading role in the proceedings. Piecing together his mental conceptions of what might possibly have happened seemed to grow only more confusing the more information he had to work with.

Then, after the staggering in between, the source of his confusion was jerking away, kicking, rolling off the bed and collapsing to the floor with an uncomfortable sounding plop. Malikai temporarily forgot his headache, winced and shifted across the mattress.

“Goddess, you don’ have to…nnnh.” ********. And the headache was back. “Please don’ hurt yourself,” he managed. “I wasn’ meanin’ to upset you, an’ if you’d rather, you can…” It seemed a little silly, Malik realized halfway into that sentence, to offer to a whore who lived in the brothel ‘permission’ to get back onto a bed therein when not only was the bed not his, but also, by all rights, he ought not have even been in it still. So, instead of finishing that sentence, Malikai drew his hand down over his face, rubbing, chancing a squint over the mattress’s edge at the boy below, and then rolling back onto it himself. “Know you didn’ make me,” he mumbled off-handedly. “Goddess knows I see no reason why you’d want to…” After exhaling a heavy breath, he drew another and shifted his line of thinking. “Where’re my clothes…? Is my blade in ‘ere…?”

Asking was so vastly much easier than lifting himself again to look, so for the moment, Malik stayed horizontal on the bed, one hand over his face and the rest of his focus on gradually slowing down all the buzzing in his head, each nagging, spinning thought competing for dominance over the next. Eventually, things would sort themselves out. Somehow. Clothes were a good first step.

Malikai almost relaxed. Sytherina had such a practiced and perfected way of making things seem less chaotic and worry-worthy than they did otherwise. She came ever stocked with comforting, sensible words. A soothing voice. Slow, careful, non-jarring movements—

Then, Naarhiji began talking again, and Malik winced.

Working only with blind guesses as to what had actually occurred, combined with shreds and crumbs of largely unhelpful or unspecific information from the two other inhabitants in the room with him, Malikai felt at an extreme disadvantage overall, in no small part due to the fact that he had no idea what ‘it’ was that Naarhiji was ‘complaining about now.’ He couldn’t possibly know. No one was actually telling him. It could have been any number of things. Anything. Everything. Obviously, from the pitch and tone and nature of the boy’s words, it must have been truly dreadful.

That, or the perpetually whiny and petulant teenager was being his usual impossible-to-please and upset-for-the-sake-of-upset self, and Malik would be better off tuning him out and pouring his focus into calming his buzzing head instead. Given no basis upon which to judge his own behavior — which must have been erratic if he had wound up sleeping with a teenaged boy to begin with — he gave Naarhiji the benefit of the doubt and assumed he had at least some valid basis for his complaints.

Whatever he might have anticipated next, flying objects were not among them.

Malik jerked, recoiling a half fraction on the bed and squinting blankly at the—feathered collar?—and corset combination that had struck Syth before being set aside. More objects followed. A bottle. A spoon. Dismissing concerns about what a spoon was even doing under the woman’s bed to begin with, Malik sank deeper to the sheets and pillow, leaded fingers fumbling to drag the bedding back up over him in a matter stupidly akin to a flustered tortoise attempting to retract into a protective shell and escape the outside world.

Naarhiji was a child. A fussing, tantrum throwing, item-tossing twelve year old child.

‘And I slept with him.’

Surely, nothing about this morning was actually meant to be dealt with. Not now. Not by him.

When Syth procured his garments, dropping them onto the mattress, Malikai reached all but blindly, finding and dragging them to him without retreating from the bed or covers. He made it into his undershirt, and undergarments. Pants proved more difficult. Between his sluggish limbs, the complication of tangled sheets, his horizontal positioning, and the perpetually ungainly nature of his mechanical leg, he was eventually forced to cede victory to them and shift his body to the edge of the bed instead. There, as carefully as he could manage so as to not jostle his gut and lose anything onto the floor in an unattractive manner, he pulled into his pants, buttoned, fastened, and belted them.

There was something ridiculously comforting about being dressed. Hands propped on his knees and weight still firmly sat on the mattress’ edge, he peered down at…the bundled heap of green limbs and sheets that was Naarhiji.

“Mornin’ t’ you, too.”

Malikai blinked at the contact, glancing to the side and—he shut his eyes, relaxing another half fraction at Sytherina’s trail of touches. Her suggestions did sound appealing. It certainly would be easy, considering he already had forgotten everything in relation to the incident other than this morning’s aftermath, and imaging that the night had been filled with her—familiar, proven-to-be-enjoyable territory—was a great deal simpler than trying to fill in blanks on something he had never tried before.

On the other hand, however, Naarhiji looked so upset for some reason that it seemed wrong not to say something.

But what, Malik couldn’t begin to guess. And he had already long overstayed his welcome, surely, by most any standard. Sytherina had never once allowed him to stay long beyond the strict window of their actual activities, let alone the entire night, which suggested that either he had so wildly drunk and heavy that she hadn’t bothered to shove him out of the bed. Or that exceptions were made under the peculiar set of circumstances that involved Naarhiji partaking. Regardless, he knew better than to press his luck to the breaking point, and — rather than dig his hole deeper — he opted for a wordless nod, and with great effort, stood.

He finished his dressing, donned his boots, and fished through his coin purse after strapping on his blade. It seemed, since in the end he had apparently engaged the services of two whores and a room for the night, that he was in greater debt than usual, and after some debate, he laid out double Sytherina’s rate with ten extra silvers to cover the added time spent occupying the room overnight.

Walking was a chore. The marketplace was far too loud, and the sun ridiculously bright. By some miracle, however, Malikai made it to his stationed quarters, and ‘began’ his day.

It was not until hours later, past the break of midday and into the early evening that it occurred to him that Naarhiji’s final assertion was that the morning could have been good, if he had let it. Which suggested that, at least in Naarhiji’s mind, there had been nothing wrong with the night. Only the morning to follow. It was a strange thing to consider, since the morning’s train of events had seemed to suggest great upset, except that — well — the upset had started with himself, had it not? And perhaps it was not ridiculous to think that the boy’s upset in turn, was a reflection of that rather than whatever it was Malikai couldn’t remember?

He let that thought sit, in any case, along with a great many others stirred up in the aftermath. He considered Sytherina’s suggestion, too — that he simply put it well behind him and imagine whatever sort of evening pleased him most — but the more time he had to set between the shock of the aftermath and his thoughts, the more he felt resolved that this wasn’t his preference. Easy and appealing as it might be on its face, he was curious, and while he had never before considered the possibility, now that it had been laid in his lap, he could not let the thought go.

After re-evaluating his opinion of each of the members in his squadron that he came across and determining — with some degree of relief — that no, he was not attracted in the least to any of the men, he shifted that evaluation process to the market when he went, with similar results. He didn’t suppose he necessarily expected anything different. He had managed to go thirty-seven years of his life without noticing an attraction to men. It seemed rather ridiculous to suppose that waking up one morning with a naked one tucked against him would suddenly inspire in him a burning interest in broad shoulders, deep voices, and square jawlines.

Except that the truth of the matter was that Naarhiji was none of those things at all. While undeniably male, he didn’t fit into hardly any of the boxes of traits that Malikai had zero interest in. Quite the opposite. He dressed like a woman, smelled like a woman, moved like a woman — with his hair flicks and hip shifts and heel turns — and in the most stereotypical sense, he even engaged in a number of personal mannerisms typically associated with the fairer sex. His pouting and his whining and his vanity, need for attention, skittishness, and general girlishness.

Altogether, if Malikai were completely honest with himself, it wasn’t actually as shocking as it had initially seemed that he may have, in a state of great inebriation, come onto the boy. He was, in a half-Malikai’s-age-and-therefore-far-too-young way, for lack of a better word: cute. Attractive, even, when he wasn’t busy making himself seem even younger than his age with his fussing or tantrums.

Which left Malikai with several options. He could ignore his passing attraction to the willowy, narrow-hipped whore boy, dismiss it as a fluke, and carry on with his life without ever getting quite as drunk as he had again in the presence of that particular brothel. Or, he could speak with Naarhiji, find out what precisely had gone on in the window of his lost memory, and evaluate how to proceed from there.

For a grand two and a half days, Malikai avoided both options, hydrated himself on nothing but water and juice despite instinctive pangs of want for harder drinks, and in general avoided any activity that might chance an accidental repeat.