There was a brown sock upon his bed.

Not really brown, brown was far too simple a word to define the actual color of that article of clothing; it was a sort of grayish dark beige, like one of those weird strings your grandma buys to make crochet rugs that will never ever be used, and it had some details in different shades of the same unpleasant color.

Oh, and details here actually mean argyle. Who the hell has argyle socks? Besides substitute teachers in vintage novels, of course.

The more Alfred stared at the sock, the more inconceivable it became. It was only one foot, sprawled on top of his bed amongst all the clean clothes, looking terribly out of place in the middle of the blue and white profusion. There was, in fact, a brown jacket somewhere, but it was a pretty brown, sort of chocolate-y, and therefore matched nothing at all with that stupid sock.

Sighing, he picked up the sock with all the care of someone designated to hold a cup containing samples of blood infected with some sort of flesh-eating virus, and went down the stairs of his building to the laundry area. Out of all eighty apartments in the building, the odds that the owner of that abomination would decide to show up before his entire closet was infected by the grandma's crochet colored argyle pattern seemed to be very low.

His flip flops clapped against the stairs, which was a good thing, because the silence that took over the building in working hours was almost suffocating. He lived in the seventeenth out of twenty floors, and the elevator had been shut down due to energy rationing reasons – which made him lower drastically the number of times he ever left the apartment in general. He yawned, rubbing lazily one of his eyes beneath the glasses, and pushed open the laundry's door with his shoulder, almost toppling over the person who was trying to open the door from the other side.

"Oi, watch where you're going!"

Alfred's brain decided to ignore the message and focus on more important things, such as the cool accent that pronounced it. A lazy synapse told him to open his eyes, and he partially obeyed it.

"Mm?"

Really green eyes looked at him in annoyance. A thin mouth twisted to the side completed the expression, that other equally lazy synapse noted to match the features of the guy in from of him quite well.

"I do think it'd be highly impractical trying to expose the fact you almost—why d'you have my sock?"

Sock? He looked at his own hand and remembered the reason he was there in the first place. Oh, yeah. He looked back at the guy, wearing a vest on top of a T-shirt and Oxford shoes, and from him back to the sock. Indeed, the images matched. He turned back to him and smiled.

"You have odd clothes."

The thin lips twisted even more towards the left, and some color rose to the pale face. The lazy synapse from before decided this expression suited even more the face of that poorly dressed stranger.

"Be that as it may, I'd like to be in possession of all my odd articles of clothing, so if you don't mind…"

Alfred laughed a bit, offering him the sock still held only by his the tips of his forefinger and thumb.

"You speak in an odd way, as well."

The man sighed and closed his very green eyes, taking the sock brutally to himself while anger started painting his face red. Frankly, there was a maximum of stupidity he could tolerate at ten in the morning of a Saturday, without a single cup of tea in his organism.

"Well, if you excuse me, I and my oddities have more to do than talking to rude strangers. Good day."

He made to leave, a pile of clean clothes dangling in his arms while he tried to squeeze himself between the small doorway and the obtusely large American.

"Alfred."

He looked over his shoulder, frowning slightly. He adjusted the weight of the pile and straightened up his column, turning more properly towards the other.

"I think you're mistaking me for someone. My name is Arthur."

"Good to know!" He smiled and stopped his glasses from sliding down his nose. "Mine is Alfred, and now I'm no longer a rude stranger, right? At the very least, I'm a rude acquaintance. Would you and your oddities have time for one of those?"

"You'll always be strange, don't fool yourself." Said Arthur laughing and shaking his head. "Unfortunately, I and my oddities must still conjure up a way of taking all this" and he pointed at the clothes in his arms with his chin "up sixteen flights of stairs."

"Sixteen? You're the guy who moved last week to 174?" Arthur nodded slowly in agreement, wondering whether he really should be giving out details of his whereabouts to that person. At last, he surmised he would eventually figure it out anyway, cleaned his throat and said a very unconvincing 'yes'.

If Alfred noticed the distrust and distress that were shouting at him from those green eyes, he promptly ignored them and smiled from one ear to the other. In his defense, he probably didn't notice them.

"Awesome! I live right across the hall, at 171. Lucky, huh?"

Luck never seemed quite as relative a concept to Arthur as it did right then.

"I mean, I can help you and all. After kidnapping you… sock… it's kinda the least I can do." He said while cleaning his glasses, for he had just noticed a fingerprint on the lens that was very much distracting him from the very green eyes previously mentioned, and that just wouldn't do.

And when he put the glasses back on his face, the frames hanging slightly low on the left side, and smiled kind of awkwardly with a hand scratching the back of his neck, Arthur decided the luck was, in fact, a perfectly adequate word to define that situation.