This has probably been said.
The major symptom of entering the last stages of hypothermia - the symptom that should really scare the shit out of you if you are ever cold - is . . . feeling warm again.
Charles hasn't previously done the paradoxical undressing that can come from this (he's actually done a very smart thing, it just wasn't enough, in that he has removed the soaking wet outer layers he was in and replaced them with a dry outer layer - the blanket - it's just that as he was already hypothermic when he got to his refuge it isn't going to be enough, because his body isn't generating enough heat to be worth it); but that's where that comes from.
At the end of death from cold, you feel warm, and you feel tired. At the end of death from blood loss, you just feel weak and tired. At a guess, I would honestly expect the hypothermia to have been the decisive kicker - the ME wouldn't be able to determine that, as after the fact it's just clear that both were a factor, but mostly, if you're already dangerously cold, losing any blood volume is going to make that much worse, since your circulatory system is also a core component of your heating and/or cooling system - so much so that while not a core treatment, body-temperature saline is a significant supportive treatment for hypothermia in hospital, and chilled saline is a major effective treatment for hyperthermia.
So losing any blood volume out of that system - where it keeps getting pulled through your veins and distributed properly - is just . . . gonna make you die of hypothermia even faster.
Charles starts his interaction with Edwin probably feeling the worst he has ever felt. This boy steps out of the darkness with a lantern when he feels the pain, and the cold, and the way that the cold is just another pain, and on top of that the betrayal and the anger and the fear and everything else, are their worst.
His reassurance is maybe a bit awkward, but it's still . . . light, and reassurance, and someone else, and a distraction from how much he hurts and how nauseated he probably feels (abdominal bleeding tends to make you feel sick), and then it's a whole new world to think about, ghosts and afterlife and the differences between now and 1916, and all of it is a great distraction and eventually it clearly reaches a point where Charles is having difficulty focusing and just feels very tired, because we see him curled up in as much of a nest as he could make and Edwin reading to him.
That's the point, at the very least, that he would have started feeling warm again. Maybe it was even before that - maybe that's why he figured maybe he could sleep, because the pain had faded (hard to actually sense it when you're dying/dissociating that much) and he felt a bit warmer and Edwin discovered the old magazine and offered to read.
I am extremely sure, among other things, that nobody had read to Charles, for years. That's the kind of thing parents do with very small boys, if they're lucky. It would become baby-ish very quickly after the age of five or so; the implications are his mum was pretty great, but given his dad and the implication that the things that were supposed to make his dad happy were things like "good at sports" (aka a properly masculine pursuit), I doubt she would have been allowed to keep reading to him much after that even if he liked it.
What this means is that Charles experienced dying, his actual moment of death, was of feeling better, and finally being warm, and someone reading him a story - an act of care and affection, and one it's plausible to imagine hadn't been his since he was a kid, and his mum could make the entire world safe.
Over the course of their first meeting Edwin, and what Edwin did, and Edwin's choices, took Charles from the absolutely torturous worst part of his life . . . to closing sleepy eyes in what felt like warmth and the comfort of someone reading a story.
Which Edwin did for a stranger, at both huge effort and, Charles discovers shortly, risk to himself, just . . . because he couldn't leave someone alone in that misery.
Charles remembers his death as a moment of comfort and of the beginning of love, whatever kind it may be, because of what Edwin did. And that is a pretty fucking neat trick.
(It's also not inconsistent with even the angriest-hissiest-wet-scared-cat!Edwin we see in S1 - the thing that Edwin is always very rigid about is that the cases must be ones that only they can solve. There's just flatly too much misery in the world otherwise, too many things that need fixing - but there also exist these things where if they don't do it, nobody will.
This is why he's fine with taking Crystal's case initially, but also - beyond his other discomforts - why he insists she is not their problem anymore once the demon is gone: while there are limited resources out there to get a demon out of a psychic, there are all kinds of resources comparatively whose job it is to deal with Living Teenage Girls Who Are Lost. This is no longer their problem! This is someone else's problem.
It's also why he switches from dubious/resentful about the little girl's case to fixated on it the moment they know what Esther is - the police don't know how to deal with a fucking witch. Now he knows that if they don't fix it, it will never get fixed.
But it's very easy to get fooled by the hostile boundaries he has up for self protection; indeed, they're honestly supposed to fool you, because if you know how deeply he cares about shit you'll be able to use it to manipulate him exactly like Charles does so successfully†, and then he's fucked.)
[†I'm not saying it's BAD manipulation. To some extent all human social interaction is manipulation. I'm just saying it gives a massive opening.]
vaporwave
2087
stormborns
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romaincrisis
