Oh this is a FUN one considering the circumstances
So. Charcoal sleepwalks. A lot. As if powered by something else, even. Cherry pit will sometimes try to get him back to bed, but usually Charcoal is just getting a glass of water, or walking in circles. Sometimes he just… stands in the corner of the room and stares at Cherry pit while sleeping.
Cherry has recounted that his eyes are open, but there’s not the same light, but some sort of dark, dusty sternness in them. Nothing but purpose. Cherry pit swears he can see white fire lap at Charcoal’s feet as he walk— but never more than just a glimpse.
On the OTHER side of things:
Charcoal notices a Lot of things Cherry doesn’t about himself. Or he notices things Cherry likes to try to hide. Sometimes when they touch, Charcoal gets this strange vision fully of color and rapid moving imagery, nothing he can quite put a finger on or recount.
Perhaps a rose blooming, bloody thorns upon the snow, an impossible mixture of black and red filling his vision, eyes in walls, a thin fuzzy red veneer. A carnival tent, a mechanical man, a screaming angel, a young boy who appears quite frequently. Different things seem to happen every time, but have quite a few similarities. Always lots of red, of course.
He knows the phantom man can’t look in mirrors anymore, but won’t bring it up, especially after catching him using his eye out of socket to check himself. He takes spot baths, because the soda water burns in his open areas. He scratches in his arms and hands when he’s anxious subconsciously, sometimes at his face or in his hair. Sensing heat takes a long time for him now, so he often burns himself cooking unattended (Charcoal will often notice when he visits After the fact, and will scold him before offering to cook for him. Knowing Charcoal’s ability to cook, Cherry pit immediately declines.)
But most importantly… he’s noticed something not even Cherry Pit has the capacity to notice himself. Sometimes the house moves for him too. If he’s particularly angry, charcoal listens quietly for something, somewhere to fall over and crash to clean up later. If he’s cold (another symptom, he gets cold unfathomably easily), the whole house seems to creak and shudder. If he’s being stubborn and putting up a metaphorical wall, half of the house pipes won’t even work. Sometimes he can see eyes on the walls out of the corner of his own. A blink and they disappear, of course, but he knows the air of the space he’s in enough to know it was real, in a sense.
The worst time he could recount, thank god no one noticed, was the night he was framed. The latest masquerade ball. Before the guests had arrived, they had to reset the fuses he was so excited. Of course, cherry pit had just assumed they were old, or perhaps they had a few too many thing plugged in, but there were a couple bulbs to be changed that the undertaker took upon himself to clean as they went.
Escargot’s claim that night had him fuming. No one was to treat his name in such a way. She would regret this. She WOULD Regret This. The crashing of a grandiose chandelier, one of his favorites, crashed neigh a full yard away from her that night. Thank god no one had thought much of it after investigation made it known there were no strings, contraptions, or such things attached to it, so no one pressed, but Charcoal had seen the look on his face. It was unequivocally a charged attack, even if from his subconscious. Charcoal needs to figure out how to tell him, or at least find a way to put a curb on it for now, before his house kills someone.
On a lighter note, Cherry Pit gets nauseous often, and Charcoal giggles at the thought of how easy it is to tell. Every toilet within a couple hallways flush simultaneously.
