He came back to himself slowly, the dark of the gap between the crates thinning by degrees rather than lifting all at once, and for a while he simply lay there without moving, uncertain whether he'd actually woken or only drifted into some lighter, dumber version of the same unconsciousness.
His body ached in the way a body aches after being left too long in one position on cold stone, a stiffness gone all the way to the joints, and beneath that ache sat the same heavy tiredness that had put him down here in the first place, thinner now but not gone, a debt only partly paid off by however many hours he'd spent unconscious in the gap. He didn't know how many. The light hadn't changed enough to tell him — still dark, still deep night, the particular black that sat over the city in the hours even the desperate had gone somewhere indoors to be desperate.
He pushed himself upright slowly, one hand against the cold brick, and waited out the swimming that came with the movement before trying to stand properly. When he did, his legs held, unsteady but sufficient, and he leaned against the wall a moment longer, breathing slow, taking stock of himself the way he took stock of most things — briefly, without alarm, cataloguing what still worked and setting aside what didn't seem worth further attention.
He was late. He understood that much without needing to check anything, the shift long since handed over to whoever had been sent to cover it, and something in him noted the fact and set it down again just as quickly, because there wasn't a version of tonight he could undo now by worrying over it. What was done tomorrow would depend on tomorrow, and tomorrow hadn't arrived yet.
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He made his way back toward the tin panel, slower than usual, his legs still not entirely convinced of their own reliability, and when he reached it he didn't bother changing out of the coat he'd fallen asleep in. He simply lowered himself down against the wall in the spot that had become, through nothing but repetition, something close to his, and sat there in the dark listening to the city's late, thin noise drift past — a car somewhere distant, a dog, the ever-present murmur of the brothel's business carrying faintly over the rooftops from a few streets away.
He didn't think about the tiredness beyond the obvious, the same explanation he always reached for first because it required nothing further of him. He was working too much. Eating too little. The cold got into a person eventually, wore down what it could wear down, and he'd been standing in it for longer than most people's bodies were built to manage without complaint. It made sense to him, the way most explanations made sense to him — not because he'd examined the alternatives and ruled them out, but because looking any further than the first available answer had never once seemed worth the cost of the looking.
He closed his eyes again, not to sleep exactly, just to rest them, and let the ache in his limbs settle into something more bearable, unaware, in the same flat unbothered way he was unaware of most things happening to him, that the tiredness pulling at him wasn't cold or hunger or overwork at all, but something already moving through him with a great deal more patience than any winter ever had.