Archive of Our Own

Between the thunderstorm and his own heartbeat, Noé couldn’t hear a thing.

It was pure misfortune that had coaxed the sky into falling all around them. Although it seemed trivial when more pressing matters were actively happening, there had been a sense of morbid humor that overcame him because of it; with his hands wrapped around Vanitas’ throat—breaking the only oath he had managed to keep so far—it felt like the weather was mourning with him, like the sky understood. Which was why his mind tried to elicit a frantic, bubbling laughter. No one could understand.

Laying below him with eyes half lidded from the oxygen deprivation that was sure to have set in by now, the entire surface of Vanitas’ body glowed with blue spiderweb cracks all spreading from one accursed source. The Mark of the Blue Moon.

It was a rather pretty (if not tragic) sight. He was destroying the remnants of what the Mark hadn’t rewritten and hated himself for it; that might be a mercy, a kind of salvation, almost—and it cost everything Noé could give and some more, as it did for Vanitas. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. A petulant voice inside of him said that’s terribly unfair , and he consoled it and said nothing ever is fair.

Amidst the whipping winds and bullets of water ricocheting off of every surface, everything felt both alive and eerily dead. Moving, of course, but who knew if it was haunted or a true life? If Noé had died along with what he had killed? It was why it took too long for Noé to realize that Vanitas had gone completely still; even longer to know that was it.

He had done what was asked of him.

And even if he wanted to (and he so badly wanted to) reverse what he had just done, he couldn’t; just like the sky couldn’t stop crying for him. Or perhaps it was with him. Noé knew his cheeks were wet, but couldn’t parse if it was because of the rain or his own tears.

He was stuck. Even though he was the one to live between the two of them, he felt like a part of him had gone with Vanitas where he couldn’t follow, trapped in the horrifying moment of after Vanitas and before anyone else . Noé needed to reach out and close his eyes. But those irises, what Noé could see of them, looked as alive as they were before and Noé didn’t want them to go away; perhaps he would just let it stay so he could gaze into them one last time. A kind of selfish desire that Noé couldn’t quell fast enough. Even barely visible, death could not rob Vanitas of his beauty.

Far too late, Noé realized how dark it was even with flashes of lightning in the background. He could still see certain things where the light of the Mark hit it, but even as a vampire he could barely see anything in the low visibility weather, other than the reality of taking a life that he had sworn he would never take. He wasn’t an aggressive person, yet such an act of mercy felt more violent than any fight he had ever gotten into.

And his eyes had finally started playing tricks on him—the torrential downpour didn’t help matters, but it was just cruel to think that maybe there was another way, maybe he hadn’t choked the life out of the person he swore he’d never set free, but it was all futile and the movements Noé was seeing was his—shock. His mind was merely trying to make it all make sense, which he knew it never will.

He did what he had to, what he couldn’t last time, what he should’ve done last time. He had atoned for his sins and paid for it in another’s blood.

Noé reached out with a hand and shut Vanitas’ eyes all the way. There was no need for him to witness the ugliness of the world anymore, no need for him to live for the sake of another. He had peace, he had what he wanted most, and Noé was left behind to pick up the pieces.

It almost looked like he was sleeping like this, serene the way he never seemed to be in his waking hours. To witness it seemed like both an honor and a curse. As if he was peeking into the most private parts of Vanitas’ life, but how much more privacy could one maintain after one’s pulse faded under the hands of another?

“Let’s get you back,” Noé murmured, and braced himself to move and get off of Vanitas’ body.

Again his eyes were playing tricks on him, though, making him think those closed eyelids were fluttering. 

He hadn’t moved his other hand. It was still wrapped around Vanitas’ neck in a macabre reminder of everything, and he almost didn’t want to take it away lest he lost even Vanitas’ body the second he ceases all physical contact—

No, his eyelids were definitely moving.

“Wh—”

Vanitas choked on a wet, gasping breath, and the air was so completely and utterly saturated with rain and sorrow, the sorrow that was trying to force its way out, that it must’ve felt like breathing in water. His bare fingers—fingernails—scrambling at Noé’s hand had successfully snapped him out of his reverie. He reacted far too late. When he took away his hand, he could see that the glow was gone, but Vanitas wasn’t—he was alive, alive, like nothing had happened.

Noé could smell his own blood mingling with the electric scent of a storm, and Vanitas’ injuries, but it was dull and muddy and unclear.

A hand was hovering near Vanitas’ empty gun holster, but evidently he was prepared for that because in a split second there were twin glints of knives in the opportunistic flash of lightning allowing Noé to see Vanitas. His skin was unmarred and he looked terrified, blades aimed at Noé—

“Who the hell are you?” screamed Vanitas, and he sounded utterly lost .

And Noé thought, I failed. “I could ask you the same thing,” he yelled back, and felt the violent urge to laugh overtake him again because they were under the brutal weather and Noé was still kneeling and there was an indent in the muddy ground where Noé had held Vanitas down, though the water was quickly filling it up.

He was drenched to the bone. Probably cold and shivering, although numb, barely even able to feel the sting from Vanitas’ clawing.

But he had never felt so alive.

Somehow Vanitas had not left; despite Noé’s hands having been clamped tightly around his neck just seconds ago, Vanitas hadn’t tried to return the favor after their brief exchange of words. Though still clearly vigilant, he lowered his blades. He had retrieved his revolver from where it was lying in the mud a few meters away and kept his back away from Noé’s line of sight, maintaining a strange flickering gaze—whether that was the rain playing more tricks on Noé or if it truly happened, there were questions heavy and unanswered like the fog on the mountaintops or perhaps the suffocating heat of a Parisian summer afternoon. Noé would’ve been happy to answer any of them. But he was still crying (and he was crying, it was not nature to blame) and Vanitas hadn’t raised anything, looking at Noé with an unreadable expression. All traces of emotion, gone.

“It’s storming,” Vanitas said with his voice hoarse—or rather shouted, to be heard over the downpour—and shielded his eye with a hand. The other was gripping his gun like a lifeline. “I’m getting the hell out of here.”

Perhaps it was shock or adrenaline that had led to such an invitation, because of course it was an invitation, and that it was unsaid that Noé could follow; and he did, practically crawling after him. Past the mud and muck back to civilization and Vanitas hadn’t stopped him, weaving through alleyways, little roads Noé had no idea even existed. They were tracing the history of Paris the same way Noé was going to have to redraw their own; that is, if Vanitas would allow it. So far he hadn’t killed Noé, so that must count for something…

Not once did Vanitas let go of his weapon, even when they ended up under the awning of a closed patisserie. They were shivering like stray cats caught up in woefully unfortunate weather.

“I’m sorry,” murmured Noé, but he was audible still.

Vanitas looked at him quizzically and shifted where he stood. It was a temporary slip of the façade that had allowed him to show that flash of emotion, the fear, and now the mask was back in place even more securely than it had been for—a year. “What for?”

“Everything.”

“I don’t even know you.” Vanitas laughed harshly, and it was something piercing that Noé felt in his chest, something he couldn’t name, but somehow he knew it was those words that elicited it. “Are you a curse-bearer? I couldn’t handle you, was that it?”

Of sorts. “No. I’m not a curse-bearer.” A sense of pained melancholy overcame Noé in a tidal wave of emotion that he was usually quite good at keeping at bay; he had no real space for them in his head when Vanitas could pull out a weapon anytime he felt like it. Ironically, that was something he had learnt from Vanitas. Though he couldn’t kill Noé last time, there was no telling what might happen now with a complete reset—not when Noé wasn’t even sure what had happened. “How’d you… figure out the vampirism?”

“Your eyes flashed red.”

“Oh. Right.”

Vanitas raised an eyebrow and drew his coat tighter around him, muddy as it was. They were going to get sick waiting for the tempest to die down.

“What year is it?” he asked.

Noé blinked and forgot to respond for a second, but a scathing glare was enough to shock him back into his right mind. There was an underlying smell of something nice and sweet and he chalked it up to the baked goods kept warm inside, away from the rain. “It’s—it’s 1890. You’re nineteen.”

“And what are you, if not a curse-bearer, then?” Vanitas said, ignoring the slip of his age. The unspoken part was clear: why are you following me? Why do you know me? Who are you? You killed me—and why did I let you?

“Your—” Noé’s voice failed him for a split second, but then he forced it to cooperate— “partner. I’m your partner. You heal—save—vampires and I help.”

He looked skeptical at the halting, stuttering explanation Noé managed, but surely there were dredges of a memory that Vanitas could feel. Surely there was still something there. The attempts at offense were typical Vanitas, early on when Noé got to know him, acerbic and hostile as a kind of defense mechanism. He wanted salvation more than anybody else, but couldn’t let anyone offer it to him. He was more of a penance kind of man. Noé wondered if he was also partial to penance.

And Vanitas kept his silence, too. “Ask me anything. I—I know you, I’m—you don’t even know my name,” Noé realized. “My name is Noé. Noé Archiviste.”

“I assume you know mine?” Vanitas replied evenly, but there were no signs of recognition in his face.

“I do.”

Vanitas looked away, his jaw tense, and Noé needed to do something. He had done enough, broke enough, but he had to try and fix it, so:

“The Book of Vanitas,” Noé blurted out. “I’ve seen it save countless lives. I’ve seen—you—I’ve seen—” He stumbled over his words and felt something like shame rise in his chest, and stared at the rain in hopes of being able to say what he wanted to. He couldn’t. He had failed again.

“Alright,” replied Vanitas eventually, and nothing else.

This was hopeless. He might as well just leave now and—where would he go? There was no way Vanitas would let Noé stick around after he shook off the initial shock of waking up with a stranger’s hands around his throat, crying above him. But when Noé picked up the umbrella conveniently leaning against the patisserie’s entrance, Vanitas stepped closer. 

Just once.

“Come with me,” Noé said. Again his voice threatened to lodge itself in his throat and never leave. “I don’t think you remember the— way back.”

The demanding violence had settled down into a light mist by the time they returned back to the hotel. Even without a verbal confirmation, the hesitant step was enough for Noé to close the distance and shield Vanitas from the worst of the rain, though with that came its own consequences—Noé could smell blood, close as they were under the umbrella. Vanitas must be injured. That must be what he had smelled at the patisserie’s front steps. He tried to ignore it, which was easier in the cold, but now they were back at Hôtel Chouchou with clothes starting to turn damp and hair still dripping on the floor and he was starting to regain his sense of smell.

Thankfully Mlle. Amelia (bless her heart) remained completely clueless to what happened and assumed they had gotten caught up in the weather while out on an excursion, and greeted them with all the concern one would have for a friend—something flashed in Vanitas’ eyes, blue as ever, and he smiled politely.

It took a while for Noé to realize that it was recognition.

Vanitas extricated himself from the conversation quite easily and then Noé was running after him. They were tracking mud all over the place and Vanitas seemed almost unsure of the destination; he looked like he was in a haze with none of his usual bravado, like he didn’t even notice the absolute scene they were both making, trudging up the stairs with an uncertainty in his steps. As if he was retracing the path to the hometown he hadn’t visited in eighteen years.

Was it then truly a hometown, or just a city that he’d heard of? Would he know the elders and the graves, or was he on those very tombstones he was there to visit?

“You’re standing in front of it,” Noé said softly when he reached the top of the stairs. He swallowed and tasted dirt. “Our room. It’s—to the left.”

“Our?”

“I could get a second room. If you’d—if you’d prefer.”

“...Don’t bother.”

Right. He wouldn’t want the wasted effort. Sometimes, during the early days, Vanitas would return from various places he preferred over the interior of the hotel, like the roof, and then slipped back into the room where he kept the least of his things; he didn’t touch his bed and if he did Noé hadn’t noticed it being remade by anyone other than Mlle. Amelia. When they were in the times of familiarity, Noé at least had a safeguard against Vanitas leaving, even if he had regressed back to rooftops after a fight, but his bed was at least remade and slept in. And then there were lapses in judgment where the places he preferred were in Noé’s arms, in Noé’s bed—

Now they were standing in the hallway, far apart, and Vanitas looked about ready to dart out the window.

They had gone so far. Noé had to believe that the remnants of that journey were not completely washed away by the rain, or the blood, or the cloudy mixture of both that they had both become so acquainted with over the months that they had become acquainted with each other. Pink on the floor was hardly a stranger next to the other places it had gone.

So Noé was still on the staircase just ever so slightly lower than the second floor, as if saying that he won’t approach without confirmation that he could. He couldn’t lose Vanitas after everything. His brain was saying the man in front of him wouldn’t do that, but he still had to ask:

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” Vanitas gave him that look again, the one that was puzzling because Noé knew it had meaning but could not parse what it meant, and pushed his soaked hair out of his face. “Show me where the bathroom is.”

He was pale and shivering and again Noé realized it far too late. The blood. It hit him with the force of a flood and Vanitas must’ve seen it—the tell-tale flash of red—before Noé could get it under control, raising a hand to his nose hurriedly and smelling damp earth rather than the sanguine sweetness that he—

“End of the hall,” Noé choked out, feigning a cough, and realized that the water dripping on the floor from Vanitas’ coat was pink. He didn’t look up. “You’re injured—there’s bandages in my suitcase. I won’t—I won’t touch your things.”

For a few seconds there was silence.

And then Vanitas’ footsteps echoed in the hall as he walked into their room. The door closed gently behind him. 

Noé turned around and left, hoping Vanitas wouldn’t do the same. He needed to find another place to weather the storm.

Misery craved company, it seemed. He must’ve stood out like a complete oddity out here; in waterlogged, yet tailored clothes, soiled with mud around the edges, wandering around Paris listlessly. All Noé wanted to do was be with people, whether he looked insane while doing it or not—he had to be reminded that he was alive (most people were) and that the whiplash from the thunder to water on cobblestone roads with a finally-pleasant weather was real, not a figment of his imagination.

Really, as alive as he was, Noé felt more like a ghost haunting the streets and trying to find his way back home.

It was chilly—the air, that is—and the sun was starting to set, painting beautiful swaths of color on the sky, spilling over into the puddles that people and horses alike were walking across. Constantly turbulent. He would catch rippling glances at the sunset on the ground and then tear his gaze away, just in time to avoid running into someone, thank non-existent God for his vampire senses. Although, they seem duller than usual. He could hardly realize what he was feeling or seeing, in a haze, desperate for something he couldn’t name.

And then he did run into someone, got cursed out, and realized that he had strayed so far from Hôtel Chouchou that he was clueless as to where he even was. Paris was big compared to what he was used to, with its alleyways and winding streets that led to nowhere and everywhere. It was quite beautiful. Noé didn’t want to find his way back yet.

He dipped a hand into his pocket and found enough money to buy him a few hours’ shelter in a café. Looking at himself at a nearby shop window, he looked frazzled but not horrid; considering he was drenched in rainwater and had been only left out to dry. Noé ran a hand through his hair. His glove was tacky and he tugged them both off.

Haphazardly stuffing them in his coat, wherever it would go into, he felt the cool air on his bare palms. This is nice. It was his understanding that fashion etiquette asked for gloves—everybody adhered to it, agreed to it, and he had just done it. Now staring at his hands, he thought it would be nice to have the tactile feeling of things right under his fingers. He reached out and felt the glass, cold, and walked into the establishment beside it.

The smell of baked goods and coffee instantly greeted him; he walked up to the counter, ordered whatever sounded the sweetest, and no one asked why he looked like a dried wet rat. Perhaps they had—correctly—assumed that he was caught under the deluge and was looking for something warm to have, or perhaps they were not paid enough to care. He tipped generously.

It was pleasant to curl his fingers around the porcelain mug as he waited for the drink to settle enough, so that he wouldn’t burn his tongue, but so that he could feel his fingers again. Noé hadn’t realized how cold he had been. It felt like a horrible move, to leave when Vanitas could do the same, but he had learnt that the more he stayed close, the further he pushed Vanitas away. A hard lesson to learn, but a mistake he was not willing to make especially now that Vanitas was back at square zero and he wasn’t. He had the advantage of knowledge and would use it to the best of his abilities.

…Such a Vanitas way of thinking. He lifted the cup to his lips and let it burn.

Calling it scalding would be an overreaction—but it did sting, a sharp pain on his tongue that pierced through the thick cover of confusion that lingered around his mind and prevented any kind of thinking, which was really quite rude of it. He needed to be able to feel what he had done.

It was, Noé realized idly, not enough to sit here as if nothing had happened.

Eventually he found his way out of the café. He didn’t stay for longer than he should, and yet the sky had darkened considerably. So it was late at night and he should go back. But Vanitas was—injured, and vulnerable, and he wanted more than anything to go back and help him wrap bandages around every wound Noé had inflicted and then tell him he was sorry, and that he needed to rest, and that he would carry him up to the roof later. But he couldn’t.

He was out in Paris, a lost wanderer, with no clear destination. And he had to stay that way until he was certain he could go back. It was—guesswork, at best, but he knew how long Vanitas needed to recuperate and he just—it was—easier for the both of them this way—

Almost running into a person in a rush was enough to snap him out of it, though. He started paying attention to where he was going, which seemed to be nowhere, as long as it wasn’t a road that would lead him back. 

Eventually Noé approached a nearby bridge, wondered which arrondissement he was in, and sat on a bench by the water; if the metal was damp from the rain, Noé didn’t notice. His mind was elsewhere entirely (had been for the entirety of the traveling stupor) and there was a point in the pitch-black, dead sky, that he was dead set on burning into his memory.

Something had to be real today, and it wasn’t going to be him.

“How dramatic,” a voice to his left said.

Noé whipped his head so quickly that he might've strained his neck—it was a voice he had not heard in almost a decade, or perhaps over a decade, he couldn’t quite remember.

There he was. Sitting on the bench, feet barely grazing the cobblestone beneath, looking clean, nothing like the way he did the day he had dug his fangs into Noé’s shoulder; crying in the throes of desperation, begging for death, a plea that Noé still heard in his sleep every now and then.

“Louis,” he greeted tersely, trying out the word to see how the syllables felt on his tongue. It was heavy.

He looked at Noé with that signature unreadable expression of his. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“You haven’t, either.” Noé tried to come up for air and felt nothing but the cold, frozen feeling in his chest cavity slowly constricting his lungs. “You look just like you did the day—the day—”

“—I died,” completed Louis calmly. “It’s been far too long for you to still stumble over your words like this.”

If people were staring, Noé wasn’t noticing. He was too preoccupied with how real this spectre sitting beside him was; and surely he must be a spectre because he remembered the bloody mist in the air, how it smelt, how Louis’ body sounded when it hit the ground. If anything, they should be staring at Louis, to immortalize him, his brilliance and all. If he couldn’t live forever, then Noé would give him second best.

“No need for that. I’m not here because I want to be remembered—you’d choke if the topic of myself came up in conversation.” There was no malice in those words, but Noé felt the sting in his chest and didn’t say a thing. Somehow Louis had always had the skill to state the truth with a perfect detachment; perhaps to help him cope with his own truth, but that, Louis had never mastered. Noé remembered his outburst all too well. You can’t save her.

You can’t save me, was what he was saying.

“So why are you here?” Noé asked. His throat had gone dry, and he only realized when his voice threatened to falter mid-sentence.

“The same reason you’re here.” Louis tilted his head (Noé swore he had never done that before) and yet his expression was impassive, stoic as ever. “And I suspect, the same reason your Vanitas is here.”

“Mine?”

His voice really did give out then. The word came out as nothing more than a hoarse whisper.

“I can’t give you answers,” continued Louis, ignoring Noé. “I think you’re well aware that I am not the type of person to do so. I’m not here to grant you clarity.”

“You keep telling me what you’re not here for.” Why don’t you ever tell me anything?

“Noé,” he said, “it is kinder to spare you the knowledge until you find it, until you’re ready.”

At that, Noé wanted to laugh. “You think it was kind to shove all those wooden stakes at me? Tell me to kill you?” It was a vicious sentence that passed his lips and he was shocked at his own cruelty, because he was not cruel—where did those words come from? Why was he angry?

“I know,” Louis replied calmly. “It wasn’t fair.”

He should be guilty. Asking for forgiveness.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

Was he? The apology flooded Noé’s mouth with a bitterness that tasted like bile. His lips moved, the words came out, but—

“Don’t talk to me,” and then “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and then the bile really did force its way out of him and he awoke with his stomach trying to expel whatever was in it, which was barely anything. Now people were definitely staring, though Noé couldn’t see anyone in his position, bent over to the side, coughing up whatever he had to cough out.

There were a pair of black boots in his blurry vision, and it wasn’t until he reached up and wiped away the tears that he realized he had probably vomited on somebody’s shoes. Shit. Not only had he fallen asleep in public, apparently, and hallucinated Louis, he was going to have to buy someone new boots.

He looked up, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

“You look like hell,” Vanitas said.

It took far too long for Noé to form a coherent response, but he managed. “So do you.”

That wasn’t a lie. There was a barely-concealed wince in Vanitas’ otherwise unimpressed expression, bandages snaking up his neck, and his shirt was half-undone; just like how he had looked, the sun softly shining down, on the rooftop after Noé had taken that leap of faith. 

Except this rift was too wide for Noé to jump across. Too wide for any of them to do anything about it. How could Noé explain anything, and how would Vanitas even react? Should they go there? Was it better to start from nothing? Was it better for Noé to, indeed, set him free?

Why is __ here? (Louis) (Vanitas)

There were dark circles under Vanitas’ eyes that made Noé wonder how he was even standing. Why would he forgo the rest that Noé had explicitly left to provide?

“People think you’re drunk. Are you?”

At least this time Noé answered quickly: “No.” Only on memories. “How long has it been?”

“A day.”

“Right.”

Vanitas looked at him for a few seconds, then shoved both his hands into his pockets and took a step away from the puddle of sick on the ground. “I know the way back now.”

I know the way back now.

That, like everything, felt like an offer. For forgiveness? For a second try? This was surely their tenth, fifteenth, twentieth try— second sounded far too small to Noé—but here Vanitas was, a complete stranger in his own right, looking for Noé in the busiest place possible and healing wounds still on his body. Fresh. The person inflicting them sitting on a park bench and completely disoriented. It wasn’t an olive branch, it was bigger, it was—it was something Noé had to grab onto and cling onto for dear life.

And so Noé rose clumsily from his seat, feeling his numb limbs regain sensation with electric shocks that he tried to ignore, and stumbled after Vanitas against the crowd.

“Hold on,” Noé muttered, and felt Vanitas’ arms hastily wrap around his neck. The warm breath on his jaw disappeared only to be replaced by the tiniest sliver of bare skin; enough to make him want more, and only that. Unfortunately for the both of them, on their walk to return to the hotel, Vanitas had gone pale and shaky—and so Noé had picked him up, and now he was carrying Vanitas like nothing happened. Standing on a rooftop and wishing the sun wouldn’t be so bright. He wasn’t sure if any remnant of their routine remained in Vanitas’s mind; but it was seared into Noé’s, which was unfortunate enough. He recalled far too many things.

The nature of his injuries were such that the usual method of carrying Vanitas like a bag (under the arm) would aggravate them, and so Noé had opted for the safest option. There was no one to see them. They were above the city where even airships seemed reluctant to pass by, which Noé suspected was a large part of why Vanitas didn’t complain about the bridal carry.

It was just dangerous in the sense that he could slip out of Noé’s arms far too easily. Too dangerous in the sense that Noé was playing with fire, having Vanitas this close, hearing his heartbeat (the heartbeat he had stopped), and a wrist near his throat rather than a blade. He had let go of far too many people. Vanitas couldn’t be another.

“Drop me and I’ll kill you,” Vanitas had threatened, but there was no way in hell Noé would ever let the both of them unravel.

He shifted so that he could hold Vanitas with just one hand, and then leapt into their room through the window. Thud. It was routine. Though his ankles complained, his main priority seemed to be completely safe and sound.

“I’m going to put you down,” warned Noé, and slowly lowered Vanitas onto the nearest bed and pulled away as quickly as possible; they were strangers again, and strangers did not linger. He tried his hardest not to, anyway; most things in his life left easily and left behind the painful impressions of who they were behind.

Vanitas righted himself on the mattress and looked Noé up and down.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you made me comb through the entirety of Paris to look for you.”

Made me look for you.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

Splayed out on the bed like this, injured as he was, there was something about the way his ink black hair spilled over his shoulders that made Vanitas look so tantalizing. Without the Mark, Noé could see his features clearly again—a light dusting of pink on the nose, cheeks, and lips, pale against the dark hues of Vanitas’ choice of clothing, and it was so unlike the mud-smeared bloody sight of (yesterday?) that Noé could almost believe it was a curse-bearer that had left the marks and not his own hands. The coruscating blue of his eyes said a million things in a million languages Noé did not speak.

“You don’t have to stare, either.”

Shit. Noé practically jumped backwards and crossed the room that way, trying to act like he wasn’t desperate to do something that wasn’t so terribly unfamiliar and restrained. Anything but this careful tip toeing on eggshells.

“You’re still here,” He wanted nothing more but to close the distance, but he was tempting the Devil already. “Why?”

Vanitas raised an eyebrow and leaned back on the perfectly placed pillow. “I thought we were partners.”

“We—” are? were? “Yes, but… I assumed you wouldn’t…”

“If you want to get rid of me, you missed your chance,” he said, and the ghost of a sardonic smirk danced on his lips. “I’ll do as I please. And you’ve proven to be useful, so why would I get rid of you?”

“I didn’t—”

Vanitas flicked his left hand and a blade jumped to his palm. It was small and Noé blinked and all he heard was the wind, and then a sting on his ear—the aroma of his own blood burst into the air. He looked at the wall behind him and saw the knife embedded in it.

“I’m quick on my feet,” he added casually, a threat that only comforted Noé.

Would he be able to kill me this time?

I hope so.

Somebody has to fulfill their promise for once.

“Right,” Noé muttered, looking at the ground. He was tracking dried mud all over the room and felt a tinge of guilt for the work he was creating for Mlle. Amelia; though at least he wasn’t bleeding on the floor. What was it about him that made oaths so eager to violate themselves? “I’m sorry.”

“...Grab me the knife, and all is forgiven.”

Awkward was an understatement. Awkward was such a small word that could hardly fit. Vanitas had not left—that much was true—but he hadn’t stayed , either, and that stunt Noé’s own mind had pulled with Louis dropping into his dreams was enough to leave him feeling quite unsettled. He itched for a semblance of familiarity, and then cursed himself for wanting so much when Vanitas was already willing to give anything at all.

(“Hi,” Noé would say sometimes, when he caught a glimpse of him. Vanitas would say it back. And then they wouldn’t speak until next time.)

He found it lonely. He hated that he had driven Vanitas away again, no matter how much he clung on.

The slow drawl of days gone by ever since Vanitas regained himself was just droning enough to have an effect, but not enough to justify Noé’s growing restlessness; it was summer and if the air wasn’t thick with heat, it was raining and providing none of the relief that the first storm of the season had brought.

Even the Mark had seemed to dissolve under it, wiped away by the water.

At the very least, it had disappeared from view. There were no more poor attempts at concealing the thin lines crawling up Vanitas’ neck or the irritation that had come with such a drastic shift—Noé had no idea whether or not it had completely vanished, but he would take a little over nothing at all.

While their second-first meeting was a large-scale disaster on multiple levels, somehow Vanitas had agreed to return with Noé. They had evolved beyond mere roommates or partners out of necessity into something Noé didn’t know the name for; so that must have remained, even as the Mark did its magic. Wiped off every single memory Vanitas had from their fateful airship meeting up until that death Noé had

(inflicted upon)  (granted to)

Vanitas.

Between the sweltering Paris summer that Vanitas was at least well-acquainted with (he had forgotten Noé and nothing else), and the mess of everything, a kind of pressure had started accumulating within Noé. To be precise: a headache.

It was building in his temples and it wasn’t a sharp, throbbing pain, but something that reminded him that he had a head and that he was being punished for it. He hadn’t made any effort to recognize it. It was a constant, a state of being, a persistent something that Noé was learning how to ignore more effectively. He couldn’t name it, but it existed, and he knew it would fade into the background eventually and become static like most things were to Noé, at least after a while. Even Louis had started down that well-worn path. Desperate as he may be to retain it, he didn’t want to, not really. Only physical marks could stay at the forefront of his thoughts—but the bruises followed suit, and the scratch marks, too.

Vanitas almost never spent his time in their room after Noé had carried him back; though he had caught glimpses of his existence, like a shirt thrown on the desk or a bed remade, Noé was sordidly convinced that Vanitas slept on the roof. Avoiding him. If he had other places to stay at, Noé didn’t know of them—nor would he seek it out. As selfish and wrong as the desire to have Vanitas close was, it was kept, in his mind, as background noise to Noé.

It was only when Noé woke up on the floor with a vague wetness on his cheeks and a violent, thundering headache that he knew the dam had broken, and he had no chance of ignoring that predicament again.

Just like Vanitas. He had no chance of ignoring his mind, the mind screaming for him to keep Vanitas in this room and never away.

Again the day was sweltering and Noé thought he had simply woken up drenched in sweat before realizing his breath was ragged the way a normal rough night wouldn’t’ve done; but he was still trying to recollect his thoughts when Vanitas walked in, and so did not compose himself quite quickly enough. Or at least Noé recognized the whisper-quiet steps that his current hypervigilant state had let him sense. He didn’t react. Just closed his eyes and tried to ignore the burn in his muscles and the tension in his jaw.

Surprisingly, it was Vanitas who broke the silence.

“You’re nursing a headache.”

It sounded far too soft, gentle. Noé hadn’t heard Vanitas’ voice ever since Vanitas said he wasn’t leaving, not even in passing; he opened his eyes and looked at Vanitas with equal parts disbelief and another thing that felt strangely like hunger. Vanitas was hovering near the door, as if he didn’t know whether to stay or go, a hand on the doorknob.

Stay, Noé thought desperately, stay. 

“Hello,” was what he said instead, blinking to clear his vision; “I’ve… been missing you.”

“I’m rarely here.” Vanitas smiled tightly. “When I do drop by, you’re asleep.”

“Yeah. Guess so.” He had realized that Vanitas shifted from being an early riser and late sleeper to not resting at all; at least from the times he heard the curtains shifting from not wind but motion, he gathered as much. They could’ve met. Noé was just good at pretending to be asleep.

“Are you…” Vanitas paused, presumably trying to find a topic enough for where Noé sat in the people Vanitas knew hierarchy, one not so private that it was a faux pas, or so dull that it insulted the both of them with meaningless drivel. “The headache.”

“The headache,” Noé repeated, and it took a few seconds for it to register and he finally managed a small nod. Vanitas shut the door behind him; it seemed like he had traded his old gloves for new ones, dark still but shorter, and opted to let his sleeves cover his forearms. Perhaps the Mark was still there. He caught himself staring and tore his gaze away, busying himself with sitting up as Vanitas approached.

“I can examine you,” offered Vanitas, “if you’d like.”

Again, he gave a nod.

He heard fabric shift as Vanitas knelt beside him, then felt cool leather on his damp, sticky skin, the touch light on the bare skin of his neck, like a violent reminder of how it felt to have his palm touch Vanitas’ own.

The tension was palpable in the air even with the supercharged atmosphere of a day threatening to rain down on the world again; it was as electric as the sky, the precise movements of Vanitas’ fingers. Tracing Noé’s jaw and up to the temple.

He wanted nothing more than to lean into the touch.

There was a spot that Vanitas kept coming back to, the base of Noé’s skull, and for a split second Noé thought this is it —as Vanitas applied pressure there, clinical and intentional. Noé looked up at Vanitas. His face was impassive and his eyes betrayed nothing.

But there was a tenderness to the technique; how could there not be, when he was practically being cradled? Noé felt the tension drain out of him as if he had been held by a lover, or perhaps a dear friend, and felt the comfort of another’s arms. It was not an attempt on his life. Quite the contrary, in fact.

“How’d you do that?” rasped Noé.

Vanitas stayed quiet, but didn’t take his hands away.

Noé couldn’t come up with another thing to say. He simply relished in the touch traveling up to the hinges of his jaw. Again the pressure came and went, and he felt that relief again; had it been this easy to be rid of it the entire time? A light touch? His skin thrummed with something alive for once. He felt like he existed for the first time in a while.

Somehow, he realized, he wanted Vanitas to continue his ministrations. To find an excuse to keep on being touched, to feel the presence of another human being tactile and real on his skin, leather-covered as they were, still warm. He could feel the heat through the material.

His eyes shut of their own accord and Vanitas’ fingers traveled down to where Noé’s neck melded into his torso.

Vanitas could break me, Noé thought. 

Then Noé thought he might just let him.

It did work. Noé felt his shoulders relax, and the anxiety he had been lugging around unraveled a little as Vanitas found the exact spots that had been bothering Noé—unbeknownst to Noé himself—and then started to work up on the neck again, so very close to the jugular. Close enough that he could probably slice through and Noé wouldn’t have the time to react.

“You’re tense,” Vanitas noted quietly. “This is why you’ve got the headache. You’re sleeping wrong.”

I’m sleeping wrong because it’s not with you.

“What’s the cure for it?”

“Staying on the mattress.”

Noé laughed, though it came out more bitter than it should've been, and raised a hand up to Vanitas’ own. He couldn’t say stop . He couldn’t take another second of it because he wanted more .

More, more, more.

“Vanitas,” he said, looking up, “why are you here?”

It was a genuine question. Why come into the room and suddenly start offering a treatment for a sickness Noé didn’t even know he had? Why give when all Noé had done was take?

“You brought me back,” was the instinctive reply Vanitas gave him. He blinked then—shocked by his own words—and the motion was so noticeable that Noé realized how close they were to one another, any closer and they would be sitting on top of each other. They hadn’t been in such a proximity in a long time and it ached—what was the flood that had pushed Vanitas to follow its current?

“I meant… the headache thing.”

Vanitas withdrew his hand from Noé’s tenuous grasp, but stayed on his knees. He’s taller like this somehow and there was an urge that crossed through Noé’s mind, to close his eyes and silently implore Vanitas to lean down, yet he didn't do anything other than revel in the presence of Vanitas; the way his eyelashes fluttered, the fraying edge of his bandage, the clinical gaze Noé felt on his features and saw in those brilliant blue eyes. They hadn’t lost the artificial hue.

Everything in front of Noé was nothing short of alive.

He watched Vanitas cross his arms, movements stiff, and there was displeasure in his tone of voice though merely subtly. “I am a doctor. It’s not just the vampires I can treat.”

How much did I hurt him? “Oh.”

“Are you usually this much of an idiot?”

Noé blinked, snapped out of his reverie, and unthinkingly said, “that’s rude.”

“My question still stands.”

“You like to call me one,” he managed, “yes.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

It didn’t because there was nothing to answer him with—so Noé stayed quiet and closed his eyes, letting the back of his skull hit the mattress. Though the room was flooded with the summertime sunshine that only helped to further exacerbate his headache, the silhouette of Vanitas’ figure blocked the worst of it. He could only see the light leaking in from the peripheries of his vision.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer you.

Gradually, Vanitas returned, like a bird that was fed every day but never caged. Of course Noé wanted to turn the key and keep him safe. But every time Vanitas went into their room using the door—or slipped through the window, and stayed , it was a reminder that he had been granted… it wasn’t forgiveness, but it felt awfully similar. Noé took what he was given and never asked for more. It was not his place.

The third time Vanitas pulled out another one of Noé’s shirts from where it most decidedly did not belong (stuck between the desk and the wall, for some indiscernible reason), he didn’t toss it onto Noé’s bed haphazardly. Instead he folded it, turned to observe the reactions that the gesture coaxed, then with a half-smirk, placed it on the seat.

“How did we end up being roommates if you’re this cluttered?” Vanitas asked, gathering the trinkets on the desk into a neat cluster.

“Free lodgings,” replied Noé quietly. He marked the page on the book he was reading with a scrap of paper and swung his legs over the bed’s edge, bare toes grazing a pleasantly cool floor before he stepped fully and crossed the room to grab his clothing. “Count Orlok arranged for us to stay here throughout our mission and employed Mlle. Amelia to watch for a recurrence of her malnomen. We were only provided with one room. Considering we destroyed an airship, and even more public property after that...”

“Hmm,” hummed Vanitas. He picked up a porcelain figurine and placed it next to more of its kind. “Has there been a recurrence?”

“Of course not,” Noé said, immediate, unthinking. It was instinctual. “What you did was incredible. You cured her. I don’t think she’ll ever entertain Naenia ever again.”

Vanitas put down the last figurine and looked up at Noé, the slightest hint of amusement lazily revealing itself in his expression. “Well, I can see why I picked you for a partnership.”

Picked me? Noé thought for a split second. Then he blinked and all such questions evaporated with the reminder that Vanitas had—forgotten him. Entirely. “Why?”

“No one’s ever talked about the Book of Vanitas like that; with sparkles in their eyes.” Vanitas tilted his head and his ponytail shifted, cascading down his back in rippling waves like a waterfall, and Noé swore he was doing this all on purpose. How could somebody be so close and so far away?

It’s you, it’s you I’m talking about, Noé wanted to scream, because stolen glances in the night were not enough and nor were casual conversations over an enormous platter of oysters and nor were moments like now. Somebody had to pull away and Noé didn’t have the strength. Screw that book.

“Yeah. You—” his voice caught again, and he pushed through. “You said something like that when we first met.”

Something shone in Vanitas’ eyes, but Noé had lost the ability to decipher him. “Did I,” he said.

Noé ignored the building desire to yell in his lungs. At least something had changed, from the barely-there presences to now. “Seems like you still have that sentiment.”

“Hm. What else did I say when we first met?"

“A lot,” Noé managed evenly, “but mostly you were trying to take Mlle. Amelia from me. I believed she was in danger.”

“You’re not afraid,” Vanitas said. Whether he was referring to their first meeting or something else, Noé wasn’t sure. “Are you?”

And yet he had an answer: Only that I might have you slip through my fingers again.

“No.”

“Not at all?” The Book was somewhere under Vanitas’ coat, Noé knew, hidden under fabric and falsehoods, both of which he had seen Vanitas without. And he wasn’t afraid of what it could do to him. It had—almost—well, there were secrets that were his to keep, but he knew Vanitas couldn’t inflict malnomen on anyone, as much as he couldn’t plunge a knife into Noé’s throat.

“No. Should I be?”

“Maybe,” and then Vanitas broke the overwhelming intensity that meeting each other’s eyes brought on, suffocating and yet precious and Noé wanted nothing more than to stare into the endless pools of blue in Vanitas’ irises, at least, if he couldn’t have anything more. “But I doubt it’ll come to that.”

Noé had taken to wandering Paris again. He had never seemed to really explore it all, the bridges and ever-changing street vendors, though he had memorized the ones near Hôtel Chouchou. Some of them even recognized him and waved back every time he went out; and if they were still there at sundown, would tell Noé good night before packing up. That was pleasant. Everything had changed, but at the same time nothing had, really—the world kept on turning and Noé was left to observe it from his frozen podium.

How awfully pathetic. He thought he wasn’t the type to wallow.

At least he wasn’t passed out on benches anymore.

Perhaps it was a kind of… an attempt to run. Their room had gotten boring and suffocating. So it was insanity that had knocked on his door, asking for help with opening it, waltzing in with a massive gift basket from... reading the card precariously perched on a peach, it was Vanitas’ previous patient. Noé’s too, perhaps? He needed a reprieve. He needed something other than this precarious partnership. The peaches were making everything worse.

“What is that ?”

“Your problem,” was the answer, and instead of doing something about the pile of peaches sitting in their room, Noé had left, too, shortly after Vanitas slipped back outside. He wanted no part in any kind of insanity or sorrow.

Though—as much as he did want to just escape, he had vaguely told Mlle. Amelia on the way out, that they had a problem in their room. If ripe peaches were a problem, that is. He was too busy drowning in self-pity—there had to be a place in this accursed city free of peaches and the lingering scent of Vanitas.

So far, no such luck.

Noé couldn’t tell if it was his nose that was playing tricks on him or if it was just how the City of Flowers smelled, and that Vanitas smelled like it , but he hated whichever truth it was and wished that his senses were more of a liar.

There had been no rain in well over a week and Noé was starting to see the return of fashionable lace umbrellas in the hands of ladies (mostly upper class, working women had no such privileges), and wished that the clouds would return; the air thrummed with the tension of the heat and it was unbearable. His coat was, more often than not, abandoned, slung over the backrest of the chair in their room and he had taken to roaming in a state of slight undress. If people stared at his rolled-up sleeves, that was no fault of his own.

Even every novelty store selling trinkets that he would’ve bought in a heartbeat had lost its charm. Somehow, the vibrancy of life had leaked out and now Noé was seeing everything in tepid, sardonic sepia tones—was this how Vanitas saw the world? He could not begin to understand the mind behind that face, but he so wanted to. Or perhaps he wanted an excuse to see that face scrunched up in annoyance, he mused, making his way into the first store he saw.

Vaguely, he registered its goods, but only after he fully stepped inside did Noé realize he had wandered into a delicatessen.

What the hell am I going to buy?

“ Bonjour, ” Noé greeted automatically.

He flashed a charming smile and leaned over the counter, ensuring she had no one else to tend to. Sepia tones, huh .

Your problem. He could have a solution.

“ Madame, if you please, I’ve got a question. What goes well with ripe yellow peaches?”

And he walked out with at least ten different cheeses in a basket.

It wasn’t even that he had planned to buy so much, or that the hotel didn’t have everything he had bought, but that he just wanted to bring something back and perhaps lure out a conversation from Vanitas. Noé needed excuses to talk to him now; he had never needed excuses before, even after he had gotten the two of them arrested. This was sickening and suffocating and yet Noé was more than willing to play the game if it meant Vanitas would pay him any mind. Again he wandered, this time hoping to wander right back into the eye of the storm. The blue eye of the storm. The brilliant, beautiful blue eye of the—

“What the hell are you doing?” a familiar voice snapped, and then Noé felt his sleeve being tugged back at the elbow. He stopped walking immediately and stepped backwards to follow the direction he was being pulled towards. “I’ve been looking for you all over. There was a curse-bearer who showed up at Hôtel Chouchou’s lobby—if only a certain someone had been there and had helped me restrain the damn thing! It was too damn lucky that no one was in the building.”

Noé stopped in his tracks in the middle of the road and took a look at Vanitas’ face, ignoring the complaints and curses from every other person trying to get to their destination. 

There was a bruise blooming around his right eye; stark against his pale skin, all tender purples and reds. Vanitas’ iris was brilliant as ever, but his sclera was pinker than usual and the near-translucent membrane around the organ was swollen. Whatever caused the injury, it was fresh. The size of a child’s fist.

After the worry, came the wonder:

“You got punched by a kid?” and the indignation in Vanitas’ expression told Noé everything he needed to know.

He laughed, freely, with the cheese basket around his arm and Vanitas dragging him away from the crowd while fuming—excuses were thrown around, ranging from “ My handsome face is forever marred! ” to “ Why the hell do you think I need you around, you’re the brawns to my brain, ” and finally “ Fuck you. ”

The laughter persisted. It wasn’t hysterical anymore, so the tears had mostly found their way out, but Vanitas still looked irritated and Noé was still half-giggling, half-gasping for breath, so people stared. That was fine.

“How did a child get close enough to punch you?” grinned Noé. Somehow all morose thoughts of coaxing pleasantries were gone—replaced with much pleasant ones—like his partner being decked by a child and the tiny fists children usually possessed.

Vanitas glared at him. “She ricocheted off a pillar.”

“ She ricocheted off a pillar, ” Noé repeated, and Vanitas dragged him into an alley so he could finish his laughing fits without making an even bigger scene.

“Stop that,” Vanitas chided, crossing his arms as Noé leaned against the brick wall and bent over in an attempt to catch his breath. “This is no laughing matter.”

Somehow, Noé straightened up and fixed the way his cheeses had been stacked together. “The bruise is a laughing matter, though,” muttered Noé, stealing a chunk of Brie and furtively draping the white cloth over the basket again.

Vanitas looked at him as if he couldn’t believe Noé and then sighed, outstretched a hand with his palm up, and looked up expectantly.

Noé placed another chunk of Brie on the expectant hand and blinked to clear his vision. “But the girl is alright,” he said tentatively, half-statement and half-question; where had his over-worrying sympathy gone?

This was nice. They were talking without the room being a necessary force behind it, and there was nothing to suffocate Noé (or Vanitas) to exchange pleasantries. He couldn’t bear to see the bed that they had shared. It was a revelation that Noé didn’t like and had tried to ignore; but it was almost painful to have Vanitas there with him and yet not in his entirety; he wanted nothing to do with the peaches. Or dreams. Or benches.

He was usually the first to fuss. Vanitas was the one to flippantly regard most harrowing events. But Noé had been so—he had been so frayed, tired, that the mundanity of a curse-bearer fight gone mildly wrong had been like a lifeline. A flotsam that he could cling onto in the choppy waters after the shipwreck of that storm. A nod from Vanitas and he was satisfied.

They started walking again, in silence this time.

“How’s your problem?” Vanitas eventually said.

“Not mine anymore. I expect Mlle. Amelia will start feeding us peaches tomorrow,” Noé replied, and only then did he realize that the weather had let up its heat and granted them some coolness; Vanitas was still wearing that balloon-like coat of his and Noé wanted to ask how he wasn’t melting from the heat, but he probably was. He looked up and saw the clouds crowding in and patches of the sky turning dark.

“The girl wasn’t the curse-bearer,” volunteered Vanitas, and the laughter returned.

“So how did she ricochet off a pillar?” Noé asked, careful not to bump into Vanitas and other passerby even as everybody rushed to take cover.

“I… can’t explain it,” Vanitas frowned. “There’s a crack on the pillar in the shape of a five-year-old’s shoes, though.”

Noé ushered Vanitas under the canopy of the nearest bistro and pulled a chair out for him. “You didn’t ask the girl?”

He sat, and so did Noé, just in time to avoid the shift from a light mist to an earnest rain; the air cooled with the water and the pleasant pitter-patter on cobblestone streets was a relaxing backdrop to their conversation. For once the weather wasn’t hostile to life and Vanitas hadn’t even noticed that they were seated and ready for a lunch—Noé discreetly ordered the specialty stew they were offering today, and tuned back into their conversation just in time to catch Vanitas’ explanation: “She ran off crying, and I don’t incur the wrath of mothers for no good reason.”

“I can remember at least two times that you’ve incurred the wrath of mothers for no good reason,” Noé pointed out, ignoring whatever overthinking path his mind had taken, and this time Vanitas laughed, too, elbow on the table and the heel of his palm pressed to his cheek.

“I’m tired,” Vanitas declared, and threw himself into the tall grass. They had resumed their true partnership, almost, though with a strain that Noé was grateful still allowed them to work together. It was as if Vanitas didn’t remember what he had asked of Noé, or that Noé had done exactly it, and they had fallen back into a rhythm that was more similar to the first few weeks they had bound themselves into this dynamic than anything else. Strangers with a common goal. He never did stop gazing at the Book with wonder every time Vanitas took it out, no matter how many times Vanitas used it; he glowed with the light and the power of the Blue Moon and it was as beautiful as the first time Noé saw it.

He was, too.

Noé walked over to Vanitas—wading through the greenery of the meadow, which was looking more golden than anything under the sun, and stood over him, wondering if he could join him on the ground, when Vanitas opened an eye and said, “yeah, don’t move. You’re a good parasol,” Noé laughed and did join him in laying down. Vanitas grumbled at the loss of the shade and Noé wanted to pick him up and drape them both over the branch of a leafy tree.

“It’s been summer for far too long,” Noé said. He was sweating after the battle with a curse-bearer, but his blood was settling down; his limbs were cooling. The heat pooled around him and not on him. A kind of barrier prevented him from overheating, coat off and sleeves rolled up, and Vanitas had only shed his outermost layer. “Aren’t you hot?”

“I run cold.”

He had been so warm in Noé’s arms, though. “Is that why you can never get a tan?”

“I look good as is. The contrast is striking.” He might’ve struck an actual pose had this been any other day, but Noé saw the hit Vanitas took to his shoulder, heard no rustling of the grass, and knew it must’ve hurt.

“You do look good in black.”

Vanitas laughed and the conversation trailed off into nothingness. Silence had been particular between them, ever since then, not uncomfortable but not the comfort it once had been, and Noé wanted not to miss it. He wanted to quench the thirst for more and tend to the ache, but he took what he got and Vanitas was generous enough.

Too generous, in fact. Noé would’ve flipped out, and he was who he was, and though the growing list of wants never seemed to find an end, he ignored them all because he knew sticking around was already too much. Surely they couldn’t have returned to themselves in such a short amount of time.

“You know,” started Vanitas, and Noé could hear him talk forever, but he heard something else first—a branch, cracking. Somewhere to his left. He had acted entirely on instinct and rolled out of the way (just in time for a tree to deposit a large chunk of itself right onto the spot where Noé was), and the gust of wind it came down with was not unwelcome.

Until he realized that he was running hotter than usual, and looked down to gaze directly into Vanitas’ eyes. They were barely apart; Noé had somehow managed to roll right on top of him and—

He hadn’t been shoved off. Instead, Vanitas seemed to be blushing. Or was that the heat?

“You were saying?” Noé said conversationally.

“Get off of me.” There was no venom in those words and Noé almost refused; but he remembered that this wasn’t the Vanitas he knew, no matter how achingly identical he was to the one Noé didn’t kill. So he obliged, and spotted a microexpression flit through Vanitas’ face that looked too similar to disappointment for it to really be disappointment.

He was on the other side of Vanitas now, the sun shining directly in his eyes, blinding for a moment and then he looked away—to a more reasonable spot in the sky—and tried to banish the spots in his vision via blinking rapidly.

“What kind of person looks directly at the sun?” Vanitas said out loud, and Noé faced whichever direction the voice came from (his left) and tried to look indignant. It must've failed, because all he got was laughter.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Noé complained half-heartedly, because his universe was a Vanitas-centric one.

With the easy (new, and still,) easy rhythm they had found again, came the underlying tension. It was like a calm sea threatening to suck Noé into its depth with a hidden tidal wave or the sky saying it could drown him, it was just kind enough not to, and that he had to live in fear of the clouds deciding to abandon that particular mercy.

That was how they ended up here. Vanitas was twirling a white pawn like a toy while Noé stared in dismay at his dwindling amount of chess pieces; they were equals up until a mistake on Noé’s part, and now black had the upper hand. He was trying to regain it.

“I can see at least three ways you could lose,” Vanitas taunted.

Noé reached out and stabbed his slice of tarte tatin vindictively. Instead of taunting back like he could’ve—wanted to—he glared at his knight like that would fix his near-zero chances at a win, and thought about conceding defeat by making a random move.

Hah. That had been most of his life decisions. Move first, think on his feet, be as calculating as needed; but recently he had given up on the act of thinking and simply let the current take him wherever it went. When he thought, he ruminated, and only ever about Vanitas. Noé moved a pawn randomly and waited for Vanitas to come in with a gloating checkmate.

Instead: Vanitas moved his rook and chewed on his lip thoughtfully.

“I thought you said—” oh. He had accidentally found the only way out of that check.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Noé replied, and picked up another piece. It was coming easily to him again; like battle that left his blood rushing and the thrill buzzing in his head, he was alive and did not want it to end. Finally. Weeks of drowsy heat-laden stagnancy and now he got to use his brain again.

“Where did you learn chess?” Vanitas said conversationally, no longer twirling Noé’s fallen pawn.

“My teacher.” Noé paused and considered a move. “What about you?”

“Oh, here and there, I picked it up,” was the flippant answer from Vanitas, accentuated by a carefree wave of the hand—that’s not fair. Noé wanted to hear about Vanitas as much as he wanted to drink from him, which was a great deal, and he was starting to think that it had always been Vanitas as a whole that Noé wanted.

“Hmm.” Noé hummed, cutting off a piece of his tarte tatin less aggressively this time. He was starting to forget why he loved it so much; but Vanitas had ordered it for him and who was he to say no? That it had stuck out enough for Vanitas to remember amidst everything else he had to relearn to recall was something. It said something. “Are you going to move something?”

“So impatient,” Vanitas murmured, but he did make a move. It was perhaps clumsy of him to bump his gloved hand against Noé’s bare palm—he had forgone his own in favor of touching things and feeling them, real, under his palm. Perhaps it was bad fashion etiquette. He had bigger things to worry about, like how Vanitas had lingered, like he was scared to break the contact and risk whatever may come—or perhaps that was wishful thinking. They were, after all, trapped in a cage of Noé’s own making, the tempest within threatening to overwhelm the both of them.

It was Noé’s turn to sit in silence then. He wondered if Vanitas would ever concede defeat, and then nudged his rook forward.

“That’s a stupid move,” grinned Vanitas, slightly sharp canines catching the sunlight. He took the piece that Noé had sacrificed and waved it around triumphantly. “You’re losing. You know you are.”

“I’m not reckless,” Noé retorted.

“You are, however, foolish.” Check.

“Selfish.” Rook to E5.

“Naïve.” Pawn to C6.

“Rude.” 

“Simpleton.”

“Childish!”

“Irritating!”

“ Checkmate! ”

Vanitas blinked. In their heated, juvenile back and forth, Noé had risen from his seat and so had Vanitas; their faces were so close to each other’s that Noé could see every eyelash on Vanitas’ face and the slight parting of his lips. He looked down to the chessboard, but Noé was too transfixed to follow—they had been moving pieces rapid-fire and Noé wasn’t even looking. He was too preoccupied with the way Vanitas’ hair fell into his face.

“I see,” he said, sitting back down slowly. “White wins.”

“You need a haircut,” Noé blurted out. Then he shunted his gaze down to the chessboard and blinked, too. “Oh, white wins.”

“I don’t need a haircut,” replied Vanitas absently, and then he paused as if realizing who that statement had come from; “Are you trying to distract me from the pain of losing?”

“No.” Noé coughed into his hand to hide his embarrassment. “It just came to mind.”

“Maybe I’ll ask Mlle. Amelia to take garden shears to my bangs.”

“She’d make it work,” Noé agreed, and then reached out instinctively to pick out a crumb stuck to Vanitas’ hair—he didn’t even realize he had done it until it was too late and he could feel Vanitas’ iron grip around his wrist. It should hurt.

Vanitas’ eyes glimmered coldly. Gone was all trace of the previous playfulness that had found its way back out. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry,” mumbled Noé, “there’s food in your hair.”

“Right.” Vanitas dropped Noé’s hand. As if shutters were closing behind Vanitas’ eyes, when Noé reclaimed his seat, his expression was unreadable save for the glint in his eyes that was sending a call out for challenge—there had been a breakthrough and Noé had to ruin it. Back to square one. 

But he picked up Noé’s queen and offered it to him, saying, “Another game?”

Normal was good. It was a rhythm Noé didn’t have to get used to. Normal was also an impossibility now that he was facing off against an aggressive ballerina with murder in her eyes.

“What the fuck,” Vanitas whispered, the Book splayed open on his left hand, cold and dead. So unlike the light show that usually accompanied a healing. “How did she progress that quickly—”

“Didn’t you say—” Noé wrapped an arm around Vanitas’ waist and tugged him back, away from the reach of the curse-bearer, “that there were malnomen that didn’t get worse until they fully manifested?”

He still didn’t understand how it all worked. (He didn’t understand how Vanitas worked, either, but that was a train of thought for later.)

Vanitas extricated himself from Noé’s hold and scrutinized the woman; she still looked human, just slightly off as she started twirling without care for anything in her path. A trash can flung out of her way and she continued, unflinching, and Noé was grateful they had chosen a secluded meeting spot even without truly anticipating everything going terribly.

“Plan,” Vanitas said, in his normal voice, “make her stop dancing.”

There was no other explanation offered before she approached and Noé had to dodge, circling her to look for a weak spot. A constant pirouette that didn’t seem to make her dizzy in the slightest was—hard to break—but she wasn’t actually making an effort to injure people. It was more like she was destroying everything in her path, and soon enough Noé and Vanitas both would end up being in her path.

A calm settled upon him, though not true peace, something that forced his brain to kick into gear and tune out all other distractions. He knew Vanitas was waiting for his move. He knew that eventually, she would falter.

Falter she did, and Noé leaped from his safe distance at her back (a dirty move he couldn’t even regret). His fingers made contact with her spine and she whipped around—too fast for Noé to even see it, what the hell , he was a vampire—and aimed a kick right at him. She had added a fouetté and it should be physically impossible to land a hit with that kind of force, yet she did . Noé felt himself getting thrown back and only barely managed to land on his feet.

She did not want to be stopped, apparently.

He tried other approaches. From the top, the bottom, the other side, sneak attacks, brute force, and there were ballet moves for every single one of his attempts. Vanitas was—truthfully, Noé had no idea what Vanitas was doing, and he was much too preoccupied with trying to stop the current demolition of a public park to try and figure it out.

At least there was one hit to her shoulder that he had managed. It didn’t stop her, much like the quickly forming bruise on his abdomen didn’t, but he could see the stiffness in her arm motions now. If only he could restrain the legs next…

The woman approached a remnant of a metal structure and only when she enacted her plan, did Noé realize it. The pieces flew around the field.

No longer in a haze, the smell of Vanitas’ blood hit Noé much faster compared to the last occurrence of bloodshed. It was instantaneous. The curse-bearer had successfully shot what was practically shrapnel at Vanitas, hitting nothing fatal, but a gash down the arm was sufficient to send the Book flying out of Vanitas’ grip and a burst of sweet-smelling iron embraced the air like a lover—it distracted Noé enough that he felt the hit to his jaw from a blunt piece of debris a second too late.

“Damn it! Noé, focus!” snapped Vanitas from where he was crouching, uninjured arm steadying his stance, eyes looking for a way to enter the foray.

This was... not good , but better than bad. “Sorry.”

“Distract her!” Vanitas yelled, and it only snapped her attention to him. Noé kicked the nearest piece of debris into the air automatically—it made a noise—she looked at him, aggressive still, but probably confused. He could work with confusion if he wasn’t so deep in it himself.

“Let us help you,” was what Noé settled on, hoping his voice would carry over the chaos. The piece he kicked flew and hit a lamppost with a loud clang —his mistake—it left his right ear ringing and the curse-bearer completely disoriented. At least there was that. He got closer in the brief period of time that she was trying to clear her head and moved to grab her—but she had recovered, and aimed a kick of some sort at Noé’s head that forced him to awkwardly dodge with an undignified jump. “Mademoiselle, remember that you asked for us!”

“Distract her better !” snapped Vanitas. He was still staring at the Book, laying behind her, and blood was pooling on the ground. It was perhaps a miracle that he could only smell the faintest bit of it and was therefore not drawn enough to be quite so preoccupied, or to be so explicit in his preoccupation that it was obscene.

He blinked and noticed that their patient was returning to her complicated ballet routine. It wasn’t what she had done before, more intricate, and infinitely beautiful.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vanitas move to say more—and stepped closer just to tell him he’s doing something. They used to be better at this. More in sync. 

Noé watched her erratic movements again, trying to ignore Vanitas’ glare, and her tell struck him after a beat or two passed; it was breathtaking in its simplicity and Noé would’ve thought it obvious had he actually had the time to think—but he didn’t. Nevertheless, the pattern repeated itself. Every time she poised herself to attack, she would take a deep breath, and there was no other way to tell if she was going to jump back into her ballet routine or if her pirouette was deadly except for that slight inhale—right there—and Noé launched himself into the hurricane again, hoping his harebrained half-plan wouldn’t get Vanitas killed. But Vanitas knew him in a fight, and better than to interfere in the middle of a Noé-brand idea.

“ Excusez-moi, mademoiselle, ” he muttered, wrapping his hands around her waist and lifted .

He had only seen this technique once in a bona fide ballet performance and was sure that he was clumsy, but it stopped the loop that she had been stuck in; redoing the same routine over and over again, and she paused, just long enough for Noé to put her back down hastily and evade a lethargic kick. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vanitas reclaim his Book.

Great. Now he had the job of—what, convincing her to come down from her malnomen fear-induced high? She wasn’t listening to anyone, and continued on with her twirling movements and the devastation her disease was trailing behind her, just less frantic this time. He kept her out of harm’s way and looked back at Vanitas every so often—no, not yet, and then just a little more, and then no way in hell, and then—something almost miraculous descended upon them, and the book glowed brightly, and she collapsed right onto Noé. His arms jerked upwards to catch her unconscious figure and he looked at Vanitas with sudden alarm at the far more potent smell of blood. It was so sweet, and he thought about how delicious it would be until he got his head out of the clouds and focused on the person collapsed against him.

Vanitas had aggravated his injury, and it was evident from the barely-held back wince in his expression. And there Noé was thinking about indulgences of the flesh. Vanitas was nothing if not a master of lies and deception, and he rarely expressed real discomfort—but it went off the charts when pain had pierced through that mask—oh, and he was staring, wasn’t he?

“What?” Vanitas groused.

“You need that arm,” Noé replied, dumbly, picking up the woman in his embrace. He should offer to patch Vanitas up. “Don’t lose it.”

“Where the hell are you going?”

Noé didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his mouth. He walked far enough away—from the blood and carnage, and corpse of the demolished part of the park—to deposit her on a bench.

Don’t lose it. Advice that applied to him, too, now that he thought about it. There was a shake to his hands that most definitely shouldn’t be there, and a horrible haze that his mind was descending into. He was so thirsty all of a sudden.

Beside the unconscious woman, Noé collapsed onto the bench. That their appointment had escalated to an entire scene in a public park was embarrassing enough, but now people were crowding in despite the damage control attempts from Parisian officials trying to mitigate the absolute havoc they’ve just wreaked, and he was bent over with his head between his knees in his own attempt at damage control. A faint voice in the back of his mind—probably his conscience—was telling him to get it together, help Vanitas bandage that nasty gash and get the both of them back to their room, be a good partner.

He thought he might faint from the vertigo that was making his vision spin until someone , bringing the enticing smell of blood with him, landed a slap on the back of his head and said “let’s get the hell out of here before they make us do clean up duty.”

“A moment,” Noé said. It didn’t sound like him; it was weak and watery, and he felt bile rising to his throat. Had he eaten today? Blood shouldn’t be affecting him like this. Nothing should be affecting him like this. He had been reacting—more extremely than usual to it, too—

“Don’t ruin my shoes again.”

That, too, sounded weak and watery. Noé found the strength to look up and Vanitas looked… he was indecipherable as per usual. But there was something like concern in his eyes, and perhaps Noé was just delusional, but he felt a kind of happiness deep within that he was slowly rebuilding whatever he had with Vanitas. Brick by brick.

“Sit down,” Noé told him, and felt the vertigo lighten up around the edges. “You’re not walking around with an open wound.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a kid,” complained Vanitas. He sat down anyway and Noé took a few more seconds to regain his bearings before grabbing the bandages in his coat and slowly wrapping it around Vanitas’ arm; it was a clean cut, with no debris in it, so they could deal with it more thoroughly later. Thank goodness. Noé was starting to react to the blood—he could feel the gums near his fangs ache a little. It wasn’t helping with his unsteadiness.

He placed a hand under Vanitas’ wrist to lift his whole arm—just so he wouldn’t aggravate the injury—and felt, on top of his fingers, the steady pulse of a living human being. Alive. Alive. He was covered in blood and still it had taken this long for Noé to look at Vanitas and see a living man.

Suddenly he wasn’t quite so thirsty.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Noé replied quietly. Beside him, their curse-bearer slept on.

This time, it was Vanitas’ turn to take them out to lunch.

Noé would be a liar if he said he wasn’t still feeling guilty about their last patient. The bandages peeked out from under Vanitas’ sleeve like a taunt—and that was insane to think about, that he was feeling such a way because of bandages, but he did and it lingered on the peripheries of today like a spectre haunting him.

He put his head down on the table in a silent plea for Vanitas to order whatever it is the restaurant offered. It was a hot day as always, but he was less resistant to the temperature today even with his coat slung over the backrest of his seat. It was announced loud and clear; Vanitas picked the food for the both of them, and the drinks. Noé didn’t hear what his choices were. He wasn’t listening.

“What’s the matter with you?” Vanitas asked somewhat brusquely, although he waited until after the waiter took his order.

“I think I might be sick,” Noé said quietly.

“Right,” replied Vanitas, cautious, “if this is your way of saying I need a third pair of boots—”

“No. I won’t ruin any more shoes.” He blinked up at Vanitas from his position on the table, head nestled in his arms atop the marble top, and felt the coolness of the smooth stone soothe his overheated skin; “I… may have a fever of some sort.”

Vanitas tugged off his left glove and pressed the back of his hand to Noé’s neck. It was done with such casualness that Noé didn’t think to look at the pale skin—and when the thought did cross his mind, the glove was back on and there was a slight furrow between Vanitas’ brows. “You do. Any more symptoms?”

“I’m thirsty,” Noé mumbled into his arm. "All the time. It makes me nauseous.”

“Hm. I’ll ask for water, then. When did this start?”

When you died. “I don’t know, honestly.”

Disapprovingly, Vanitas made a noise and crossed his arms. “Did you eat breakfast? Your business is none of mine, but Mlle. Amelia has started pestering me about your meals. You need more than this one lunch.”

Noé wished he could sink through the solid stone top of this table. Instead he settled for the next best thing, folding in on himself like a toddler in public, entirely undignified, but he felt like he couldn’t keep his head up. “I’m hardly ever hungry…”

“Well, the body conveys hunger as thirst when you ignore it,” said Vanitas, and he trailed off as if his sentence had more to it—but instead of continuing, he looked at Noé with an odd intensity to his gaze. “It’s blood you want.”

“No.” Yes. Oh, God, yes.

It perhaps felt a little wrong to use such an exclamation in his head considering Vanitas’ history, but there was no other way to convey how Noé felt, looking up at him. There was a halo around his head from the sunlight and he looked like stained glass pieces that Noé had caught glimpses of during his reckless stints, collaborating with Roland, though they usually stayed in the catacombs. He still savored every time he got to see the windows. There was beauty in the hideous if one knew where to look.

“You’re a shit liar,” Vanitas replied bluntly.

“Blood’s not food,” Noé muttered. He did only have an appetite for it, truth be told, but it wasn’t filling . It was a delicacy. The fact that meals had largely been bland and intolerable no matter how grandiose they were was his own problem completely unrelated to his craving for blood, both Vanitas’ and other people’s, so.

“There’s places where people pay to get sucked dry,” and Noé couldn’t tell if that meant something else, but that wasn’t what he wanted —he didn’t want to drink from people looking for a high. He didn’t want to delve into random people’s traumas.

Noé tilted his head to press his other cheek to the table and let his eyelids flutter closed. “Forget I said anything, Vanitas.”

There was a few moments of silence against the backdrop of Parisian life before Vanitas’ voice cuts through the feverish haze that was slowly starting to drip over Noé, indolent like molasses, working to coat his entire head eventually. Like ginger taking away the mawkish aftertastes of the syrup.

“If you want to sleep outside under the summer rain,” he groused, “I won't stop you. But I’m prescribing a proper meal and you really ought to listen.”

“Doctors,” Noé muttered, pushing his head up. His hair stuck to his forehead with sweat and he swiped it out of the way, feeling sure he looked haggard and sickly, but then Vanitas picked up a fork and started using it to comb through his strands and that was enough to snap him out of it. “What are you doing, Vanitas?”

“Gouging your eyes out,” came the immediate dry reply, but he placed down the fork far away from the rest of the clean cutlery and leaned back in his seat with a kind of self-satisfied smirk. “Come on, make yourself presentable before our food arrives.”

Noé pondered that, but decided not to mess with whatever Vanitas had done to his hair, now that the style he put it in was most definitely gone. He felt less like he was boiling alive—that was nice. A gentle breeze had found its way into Paris in the middle of hellfire season and he could feel it on his face.

“What did you order?” asked Noé.

“You’ll see.” Vanitas waved his hand—dismissively, Noé first thought, but then a waiter came to their table with a tray and apologies on his lips, apparently he had forgotten their location, which made some sense as the place was packed with people; it didn’t help with the heat at all. Nothing really did, if he thought about it for long enough.

He slid a plate of what looked like a sandwich across the table, and all Noé could think was that he had no desire to take a bite out of it. Between the two of them, Vanitas had always been the one to indulge less and take smaller portions, and so it was present in the back of Noé’s mind; the thought that it should be rather concerning that Vanitas was eating more than he was. Or perhaps this Vanitas didn’t just forget, he had also changed.

Reluctantly, Noé took a bite out of the dish. It tasted like nothing.

“This is nice,” he said.

If Vanitas had a sarcastic comment to make, he didn’t make it. Instead he thoughtfully pondered his beverage—wine of some sort, which Noé had never actually seen him drink—and swirled it around in its glass. “Yeah. It is.”

They settled into a silence that was neither awkward nor pleasant. It seemed to be a good description of the divot in time that their relationship had dipped into, neither here nor there; just stagnant as Noé caught moments in time where he felt normal again, before the memories—or the lack thereof.

He chewed his sandwich and thought he could taste tomatoes in it, but not much else, still. “How’s your arm?”

Vanitas looked up from his plate and flicked his fork, not exactly irritably, but close. “Fine. Stopped bleeding yesterday. How’s your fever?”

“Hasn’t gone away since five minutes ago. You can check again.”

“Try this.” He handed Noé the aforementioned glass of wine and went back to his lunch, which Noé wasn’t even sure what it was, but he was eating more than he ever did at the beginnings of their partnership; so that was a good omen. Perhaps they hadn’t regressed entirely back.

Thoughts of poison crossed his mind as he raised the drink to his lips. “Sweet,” Noé remarked after a tentative sip. It tasted familiar, somehow… as if he was the one with nothing to remember. A familiar tinge of warmth spread throughout his chest. How was this supposed to help with the creeping flush that made him feel like his brain was melting inside of his skull? If anything, it made everything worse.

And then the crushing pressure of the heat left and he could breathe.

“Still thirsty?” Vanitas asked, with a piece of lettuce speared on his fork.

“No.” Less, at least. He picked up his sandwich again and managed to eat at least half of it before giving up. It really did look like it was supposed to taste good; it was just that he had no real desire for it, not with how weighed down he had been feeling for no real reason. It was like his mind was working overtime on a project he wasn’t privy to. “Is this medicinal?”

“Is it working?”

Cryptic answers seemed to be a favorite pastime of his, but once upon a time he had loved explaining things to Noé. Perhaps it made him feel smart. Perhaps it was just part of his act. He missed those spiels.

“Only if you say it is,” was what Noé settled on, and he touched neither the wine nor the plate that he should be touching. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be feeling. Happy, perhaps, but confusion ranked higher than most others and he was—tired. 

“So, tell me,” Vanitas said conversationally. “Are you on a diet? Pining? Got a blood addiction? What is it?”

It took Noé a few seconds for the question to register, but he choked on the wine that had found its way back into his hand; it was a delayed reaction and he faintly thought it was rather stupid, the entire concept, but the coughing and spluttering was less stupid and more unpleasant to him at the moment. Vanitas pressed a cup of water to Noé’s hand and took the wine glass away.

“I’m just not hungry,” he rasped once he regained function of his lungs.

“Must be one of those, but perhaps it’s a moral issue— Archiviste ,” continued Vanitas, ignoring Noé’s weak objections. “That’s your last name.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you never asked?” Vanitas dropped his arm to the table and turned to look at Noé, and a sudden blushing heat found its way to Noé’s face—or perhaps it was the weather—”I know how you react to my blood. You’ve never even licked it off your fingers once, and there have been plenty of opportunities.”

“Do you want me to?” Noé shot back unthinkingly, because his answer was too hard to explain in terms that Vanitas would understand; he was there, and now he wasn’t, and Noé was left the only holder of those memories.

Looking at him still, eyes intense but expression perfectly unreadable, Vanitas tilted his head and exposed his neck and the pale, near-translucent skin there—that had to be on purpose. He offered no answer, rather a question: “Have you done it before?”

Noé short-circuited.

He had. Hadn’t he? Would his abilities recognize Vanitas’ blood or would he be forced down that rabbit hole again, with flashes of grimy surgery tables and a happier, younger, saner Mikhail laughing, and then back again to that morose hidden chamber right under the chasseurs’ noses, giving Noé emotional whiplash with how rapid the changes were.

“I—Yeah, yes, I have,” and he was half-hoping for something to be granted to him, foolishly selfish as that was.

“Hm.” Vanitas turned back to consider the window showcasing diners inside, sheltered from the sunrays. “Then it isn’t cruel to deny you. You’ve had a taste.”

“Curiosity is a rather horrible alternative to longing.”

A pensive expression settled on Vanitas’ features, not out of place, just jarring because of how often it was left smug. It just reminded Noé of the genuine laughter he had been able to coax out once upon a time—the way his eyes lit up and gained a new kind of intensity that didn’t look so weighed down with unshed sorrow, anything that wasn’t unreadable.

That was in the past. He had to live with what he had killed, and be at peace with it.

Thoughts of fish crossed Noé’s overheating mind as the waiter broke their terse quietude with plates of seafood.

Murr had been, decidedly, unhappy with Noé. He couldn’t blame the poor cat. He had barely been paying attention to him, only feeding and grooming methodically, and though he knew Murr was quite the independent pet, he must’ve felt rather… neglected. It was evident by the fact that he had jumped on top of Noé’s bed and started walking all over him.

“Hey,” Noé said softly, wincing internally at how rough his voice was. He hadn’t had a sip of water the entire time he had spent languishing in bed, from a fever that wasn’t even the most horrible fever he had experienced. Pathetic. “Did Vanitas forget to feed you?”

He made an unhappy meow, but didn’t sound hungry, so Noé propped himself up on one of his elbows and outstretched a hand. Murr only hesitated for a second before walking across Noé’s body into his arms, then started purring—though he kept his face away. Still mad, then. Noé looked at his bedside and saw a glass of water that he drank gratefully, immediately, reveling in how cold it was against the neverending heat of the day and his own body temperature. “I’m sorry, Murr.”

The cat didn’t respond, but Noé could feel it stop radiating such hostility. The body heat of another living being against his chest was simultaneously too much for the temperatures of this room and a comforting weight, as much as it was nearing suffocation.

Noé felt something akin to peace settle in the room. It lasted for longer than it usually ever did before Vanitas’ voice shattered it, a loud inquiry: “ Where the hell is that infernal cat? Noé’s going to kill me… well, he’ll probably just look disappointed instead— ” the door flung open and Vanitas stopped in his tracks. His monologue died on his lips and Noé just stared, not really processing what had been said, watching a blush creep up to color Vanitas’ cheeks and his ears. His side bangs had been tucked away and his hair was up in a bun, courtesy to the weather. At the shift in attention, Murr jumped off of Noé’s lap and started sulking near his ankles instead.

“He’s here,” Noé said.

Vanitas cleared his throat. “Yes. I can see that.”

There wasn’t anything to say in response to that, so Noé let himself fall against the pillow propped up on the wall and felt the weak attempts made by a gust of wind to enter the room, though it did nothing for him.

“You’ve been—” Vanitas paused, as if he was… unsure . That was a peculiar expression to see on his face again. “Everyone’s told me that you don’t usually act like this. You’re withdrawing from society . It’s been days since you talked to anyone , and your visitors came crying to me. Fuck’s your deal?”

“Nothing,” Noé said, which he was starting to think might be the problem.

“Is that all you have to say?”

“I’m just sick, Vanitas.”

“When are you ever sick? And don’t say I wouldn’t know—no one else seems to be able to remember, either.”

Noé blinked up at Vanitas. His eyes felt hot from either fever or tears, and neither of those were pleasant, so he settled on ignoring it. He wasn’t—he wasn’t prone to illness. Being lucid enough and having a low enough temperature was a blessing, especially considering he was already boiling alive without the sickness, but he knew what made him ill. He knew. Vanitas couldn’t.

“Oh, fuck, you’re crying,” said Vanitas, dismayed. He stepped into the room entirely and uncrossed his arms.

He raised a hand to his face and felt wetness on his fingers; that was involuntary. Nothing warranted it, either. Noé wiped it away with his sleeve and blinked to clear his vision. “I’m not sad. I think my eyes are just dry from the fever.”

“I’ve read that it happens… somewhere,” Vanitas responded, seemingly relieved that he wouldn’t have to deal with attempting emotional consolations. He switched back to his sarcastic self immediately. “Listen, if you starve to death alone in here, I’m not responsible. That fever won’t go away by fasting.” He held his palms out, facing upwards, leaving them hanging in the air. The gesture didn’t mean anything, did it?

“I know.” Noé tried a smile.

Something must’ve been wrong in his expression, though, because Vanitas immediately donned a pinched expression with a frown between his eyebrows—and then walked closer, close enough for Noé’s mattress to hit his knees.

“Why are you still crying?”

“I’m—” Again, Noé raised a hand to his face, and again it came away wet; he was just leaking tears without the theatrics of it. “I don’t know. I don’t feel anything.”

“You don’t feel anything?” Vanitas repeated, latching onto the unusual phrasing like a hawk.

“I meant—I don’t feel bad.” The heat was nauseating. He was both numb and feeling far too much, from the sweat on his forehead to the sound that Vanitas’ breathing was making; he wanted to crawl out of his skin. It wouldn’t even hurt. A low grade fever was hardly an excuse to become a complete recluse, but it felt infinitely worse. “Step back, please—”

The bile rising in his throat cut him off before he could finish that sentence, and he doubled over the side of his bed. Lucky he had asked for a basin, out of an overabundance of caution, and did not leave a puddle of sick on the floor of his room to be cleaned up by someone else—that was undignified work and he would like to spare people of it as much as he could. There were fingers in his hair tucking back the longest parts. After they left, he felt his covers shift as if somebody was trying to prevent them from pooling on the ground.

“Thanks for sparing my shoes,” Vanitas said dryly, offering Noé a handkerchief and a glass of water. His throat was on fire and the bitter taste remained on his tongue, so he spat out the first sip before gratefully drinking the rest; noticing, faintly, that Vanitas didn’t seem disgusted.

Curious.

“Sorry,” Noé managed. He didn’t have the wherewithal for much else.

“I’m coming back with food,” Vanitas replied. If his sentence had a tone to it, Noé couldn’t hear a thing. “Try not to throw up again.”

There was really nothing else in his stomach to expel—but he nodded, laid down, stared at the ceiling, and wished he was dead. It wasn’t a thought that he ever entertained, or really ever had. But he already felt as if he was, so devoid of anything that he might as well be a ghost (or a walking corpse) as if everything had been drained out of him drop by drop and he hadn’t even realized until the entirety of his supply was gone; a slow death by exsanguination, a fitting punishment for his crimes. A bloodletting gone wrong. There was a disease inside of him and he needed to be rid of it.

He was still crying, he realized faintly. But there was nothing to mourn anymore.

“I’m going to force this down your throat,” Vanitas threatened, waving a spoonful of soup blithely. Somehow, it didn’t spill. It smelled vaguely fruity and sweet—not a kind of food that Noé would expect being offered to his lips whilst half-delirious.

“What… what is that?” asked Noé. He hadn’t talked in a while and his voice kept coming out hoarse whenever he did; it should perhaps be a little embarrassing, but he was barely lucid enough to realize.

“Food. Come on, open up.”

The thought of eating anything, let alone something hot, made his stomach roll. Judging from Vanitas’ hazy expression, it was evident; Noé could’ve sworn that his lips were pursed together. “It’s chilled. A peach soup of some sort. Guess your problem came back.”

Still, Noé didn’t want to eat it. He felt terrible and too tired to maintain even this level of wakefulness, and wanted to just fall back into the blissful nothingness of non-existence, or at the very least slumber. 

Vanitas sighed and placed the bowl on the bed—that seemed dangerous—but at least it looked like he wasn’t going to pursue the feeding Noé task any further. Not that Noé’s field of vision was particularly clear. His eyes must be half-lidded with how muddy everything seemed; the room was far too bright and he could hear his heartbeat in his ears. There was something against his lower lip and he opened his mouth against the pressure automatically—and then almost choked when a cold, sweet liquid made its way past feverish flesh.

“Got you,” Vanitas murmured, far too close to Noé’s face, a kind of absently focused expression dancing in his eyes. He took away his hand and only then did Noé realize it was a thumb, almost slipping in past his lips, that had coaxed his jaw to open. Had Noé even wanted to say something, he wasn’t sure his brain could formulate any coherent thought.

Emboldened by the lack of protests, or something like that, though Noé was never sure what Vanitas’ thought processes consisted of, he continued spoon feeding Noé like he—like he—

cared (?)

The thought made him nauseous, and the feeling must've again found a home in Noé’s expression because Vanitas stopped abruptly with his hand mid-air and the peachy concoction dripping down the bottom of the spoon into the bowl; he slowly placed it back inside and offered him a glass of water instead. “Too much?” he asked.

Not nearly enough. Noé drowned out that thought with the water and then the easily practiced blind eye.

Vanitas sighed—whatever Noé had done was apparently unsatisfactory, or perhaps that was his flair for the dramatics making itself known, and something strange coiled in his gut, burning cold like the bite of wintertime air, a sensation he disliked; but frostbite would have been more pleasant compared to the syrupy dense atmosphere that was hell-bent on keeping Noé in this helpless state.

“You managed to finish half of the soup,” said Vanitas abruptly, like he simply needed to fill the silence; there were crowds outside and they were loud as per usual, but the quiet held a palpable tension to it that Noé was doing nothing to alleviate. “I’m not above pouring the rest down your throat.”

Noé, with strength that he should not have, lowered himself onto the bed and turned his head to look at the wall beside him.

“I’m tired.”

Vanitas was quiet for a while, but then he must’ve set down the dish because Noé could hear porcelain against wood. “Fine. What are you feeling? Headache? Nausea?”

“Nothing,” Noé said quietly.

He wasn’t a liar. Something had crawled inside his heart and took away whatever terrible things he had been carrying around ever since Louis, and then Vanitas, and Noé was completely empty because of it.

“You look…”

“Like shit?” Noé finished. The word slipped past his lips easily and with a certain quality of reckless abandon to it, which seemed to take Vanitas somewhat by surprise judging by the fact that he took a momentary pause in his motions before resuming his prior task, which was to peel the bed sheets off of Noé. 

“Who taught you that word?” Vanitas replied, smirking. The ghost of a tease danced on the syllables and Noé shouldn’t know that, should be feeling something, but all he felt was hot and cold and then not much else.

“You did.”

“I must be a bad influence,” he said, bundling up the white fabric stained and soaked with various incidents as if he did it all the time. Cooking, cleaning. It came naturally to Vanitas for no clear reason and he seemed in his element just as he seemed in his element on the battlefield. The difference was that this need not involve the bravado he affected while his knives found their home in his hands, that he seemed unaware of the loosened lines of his shoulders. “Get up.”

Noé blinked up at him, processing the command, but apparently Vanitas was still impatient as ever—he dropped the bedsheets and grabbed Noé’s legs and hooked them over the side of the bed. “Can’t believe I keep you around only for you to be the one I have to carry.”

You can’t carry me, was the first thought that Noé had. Then: I can’t seem to carry you, either.

At least not when it mattered. 

“I can get up,” Noé protested. It came out weak and Vanitas heard it, the insipid way the syllables formed, and leveled a skeptical look at him.

“Then do it.”

Noé felt his bare feet touch the ground, pushed himself up, and promptly collapsed. The desk across the room was close enough for him to break his fall and not break his nose, since he was far too close to the surface for comfort, and Vanitas—didn’t laugh. He made an amused noise before helping Noé up and sitting him back on the mattress, now stripped bare.

“I can’t get up,” conceded Noé, and he brushed his hair out of his face. It felt sticky the way it had when he had run like a coward, from Vanitas into Paris, its embrace comforting for a while before it turned cold and Noé had to leave again. He couldn’t do half the things he wanted to do. Whatever this illness was, it had rendered him weak and useless and it had hit him faster than anything else ever had.

“Fine,” Vanitas said, crossing his arms, “guess it’s plan B for us. Stay here, and try not to injure yourself.”

He left the room and Noé sat on the bed with a strangely unsteady feeling—like the room was shaking—or perhaps only he was shaking, off-kilter, vertigo overstaying its welcome and joining forces with the fever. His shirt stuck to his back and it felt disgusting against his skin, cold and damp, and he couldn’t feel anything beyond whatever surface-level sensory experiences his brain managed to process; he was usually, at least, at a baseline of happy . The baseline was gone. It had dropped off the face of the Earth and Noé wasn’t keen on following it down that path.

What is plan B? he found himself wondering. He did feel compelled to try and stand again, and the restlessness grew until the door swung open with a loud noise as it hit the wall—revealing Vanitas, carrying a basin, with steam rising from the surface.

“You’ll die of pneumonia if I make you bathe in cold water,” Vanitas said before Noé could complain. He set down the basin near the foot of Noé’s bed and placed his free hands on his hips; Noé, curiously, noticed that his sleeves were rolled up. The smooth, pale skin hiding underneath all that fabric was unblemished save for a scar or two.

Wait .

“Don’t drown,” he added, then sauntered out of the room to allow Noé some kind of privacy. The door shut behind him (much more quiet compared to his grandiose entrance) and Noé sat there, staring at the basin and the washcloth slung over the lip and thought.

And thought. And thought.

The Mark is gone.

Which was a thought that should mean something, but as he forced his limbs to move to strip off all his clothes and then position himself nearer to the washbasin, it was—not meaningless, not exactly, but dull against his hazy mind that simply refused to work at its normal pace. The Mark is gone. The Mark is gone.

He scrubbed at his skin as if he had his own mark to wash off.

Perhaps there was, if only in a metaphorical sense. The blood on his hands was as invisible as they were real, as alive as he was dead, and the water wasn’t scalding but it felt as if he was being burned alive; remade, reincarnated, or just exterminated in a way that would ensure imminent death.

From his hair, water dripped back into the basin, and he hoped it wasn’t yet another bout of crying because he wasn’t sad , there was nothing in his head or his heart to justify it, and he had never been empty before and maybe this was the right reaction to it—but he was putting Vanitas off. Noé should be the one taking care of Vanitas, not the other way around. He shouldn’t be the one bedridden and plagued by nothingness; there shouldn’t be anyone at all staring at the ceiling with a fireplace roaring in their head in the middle of summer. Noé wished for the storm to return and wash everything away, himself included, because he wanted nothing more than to crawl out of his skin.

Noé blinked once. And then twice. His hand was raw with the force he had exerted while cleaning them, pink around the edges and stinging if Noé focused, so he thought he ought to put the washcloth down and dry himself off. The water was lukewarm now. It wouldn’t get any colder with this weather.

He dressed, went through the motions, and then sat at a dry part of his bed while he waited.

For what? There was no one coming in to babysit him. He had learnt independence—it was demanded of him to an extent—he tried not to want, had never truly wanted before Vanitas, and the realization that struck him as he stared at the flesh he had tried to scrub off was anticlimactic. He knew this. He had known this and had simply hidden it away. It was not a want that he should be wanting nor was it a want that he could ever fulfill, so why was he sitting here as if it was a possibility? Sick with a sham of a fever. It was—he was pathetic.

A knock on the door rang out at the worst possible time; Vanitas, from the weight of it, from the pattern, too. “Are you done in there?”

“Yes,” Noé said, wishing he could say no. He wanted to run. He needed to stay and wait and see if he had completely ruined the one relationship he—not cared about, that was harsh, he cared about a great deal of people—but it was close. The feeling fluttered around him like a butterfly begging to be caught and he didn’t have a net, just his bare hands, and he didn’t want to crush it.

The door opened again, and at first Vanitas peeked in with one blue eye. Then the other. Then when he was sure that Noé was fully clothed, he walked in quietly (extremely uncharacteristic of him; he was all bravado and bluster), as if Noé was made of glass and could shatter, and all Noé wanted was for Vanitas to return. Like nothing had happened. He wanted to go back to normal most of all.

“You’re seeing a doctor,” Vanitas told him, as if it was an irrefutable command.

Noé blinked at him. Not what he had expected. “Why?”

Matter-of-factly, Vanitas said, “It’s been two weeks. You’re still ill. If you’re going to die, I’d rather not be the one to tell you.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” slipped out of Noé’s mouth before he could think. He had never been one to entertain death as a solution; that wasn’t the kind of person he was. To hold a blade to his own throat felt like a violation of everything he stood for, everything he agreed with, and he had a fervor for life that was seemingly inextinguishable—and yet now, when asked do you want to die? he would have no answer.

He had only been going through the motions and something stopped him in the middle of it. Something he didn’t want to go around.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Vanitas asked suspiciously.

Noé looked up to meet his eye. It was—it should be hard, but there was absolutely nothing and it—he was—perhaps in killing Vanitas, he had died instead; a soul for a soul, a life for a life. He would certainly have deserved it. It made sense.

“I mean,” Noé started slowly, like he was savoring how wrong the words felt, “why do you do it?” Why did I do it? Why didn’t I?

“Surprisingly, Noé, I don’t like it when people die,” replied Vanitas, the edges of something harsh creeping into his tone. He crossed his arms. “This is the shit people were pestering me about. You don’t act like this. I do, maybe, but not you.”

“You don’t have to do all this. Putting up with people bothering you. Letting me tag along like a lost puppy. You don’t—I don’t—it’s not—if it’s bothering you—”

“Are you trying to tell me to fuck off in a nice way?” Vanitas asked incredulously.

Stay. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want to leave. No.

“This was a mistake,” Noé murmured. “I’m sorry.”

Vanitas stood there in silence, for seconds that felt like eternities, before turning on his heels and storming out.

Whatever he had said, he had certainly said the wrong thing. Did that, then, make it the right thing? Noé held the shattered pieces of himself in his hands and fought the urge both to piece it together and fling it to the furthest corners of the room, and curled his fingers in just so he could pretend he was grasping something. He wanted to go after Vanitas and tell him he couldn’t leave. But it was just in Vanitas’ nature to go when he was asked to stay, wasn’t it? Noé had tried sticking by him ‘til the bitter end and he had earnestly tried to let Vanitas be his own person when his first approach didn’t work. It was all falling apart.

Perhaps Noé wasn’t as honest as he thought himself to be.

He looked out the window—it was raining again, the mist of the water spraying inside and speckling his pillow with moisture in abstract dots. How had Noé not realized that the heat had abated? Too occupied with selfish matters, apparently, much too occupied to be able to miss the one time his fever was incongruent with the temperature of the day. The sky was dark outside and there were flashes of lightning in the clouds.

Judging by the wind, it was building up to be a storm. It was cool on his face and he didn’t feel quite so feverish anymore, even amidst the flurry of panicking tourists trying to seek cover and the rising puddles on the cobblestone streets; it pooled faster than it drained, and it would spill inside buildings if the water continued at this rate.

Noé hadn’t even realized that he had inched closer to the window. The tempest captivated him in its chaos, wild and free, totally unrestrained and unbound by what people may expect of it; what a storm did was exist, and the masses reaped benefits or cut their losses as was appropriate. It seemed so thoroughly uncomplicated and Noé felt the itch, in his limbs, to walk right into the middle of the chaos only to try and mimic that calm.

A flash of long black hair caught his eye, and then his limbs completely disregarded their weaknesses in favor of movement. Unsteady as he was on his feet, he rose—it had been far too long since he walked properly—and managed to make it to the door without losing consciousness or whatever meagre meals he had been spoon-fed, which induced another twinge of guilt in his gut. He had really tried. He wanted to catch Vanitas’ wrist and told him that he was here to stay, except that Noé had been untethered himself and as flighty as a bird, and had used Vanitas as a scapegoat. Peculiar. He didn’t often blame other people for his problems.

He made it downstairs. Someone yelled out his name in a voice tinged with concern and Noé heard it, forgot it, scanning the crowd of people filtering into the lobby for the one person he had inadvertently pushed away in his attempts at getting him to stay—came up empty, and made his way against the incoming onslaught of panicking people to the doors, then outside, where he was greeted with who he was looking for.

“ Vanitas! ” Noé screamed—it was a scream, one that the rain drowned out with terrifying ease, and pushed past even more people rushing into the Hotel; he needed to get to him. There was a sense of impending doom swirling around in his gut and he followed where his instinct went.

“What do you want?” snapped Vanitas, who seemed to be disinterested in taking shelter or doing much else than standing under the rain. He focused his eyes on Noé and shock overcame his expression. “How the hell are you out of—”

“What are you doing? ”

“Fulfilling the scientific method,” Vanitas replied blithely, which was a complete and total non-answer. Noé should know better than to try and get Vanitas to talk. He was too good a liar sometimes. “Didn’t you want to get rid of me?”

“No!” Noé protested. He felt dizzy, but powered through. There were so many things he wanted to say. There were so many things he couldn’t yell out under the deluge. “I thought you wanted your peace; I hadn’t given it to you the first time and look where it got us. I learn from my mistakes.”

“Evidently not well enough.”

Noé paused and blinked the water out of his eyes.

“No, evidently not well enough.”

Vanitas held Noé’s gaze for what felt like forever before he decided on words to shout over the rain, and even then he sounded faint and distorted—”So, why are you here?”

“It’s going to flood,” Noé replied faintly, the dread and his instincts colliding all at once at the worst (and best) moment possible. He saw it a second before it actually happened and Vanitas would only see it a second too late. Disaster usually hit that way; he was far too frantic to consider that life was placed in his hands more often than it should be.

Without waiting for an answer, Noé hoisted Vanitas up just in time for the flood to hit the cobblestone streets with a force that made him stumble; they were both soaked to the bone under the torrent, but somehow Noé knew that the water would slam Vanitas to the ground. He couldn’t bear to have Vanitas hurt again.

The water thundered around them and nobody was looking at the two people standing in the middle of the chaos—the blood in the air was faint, mingling with the smell of the river overflowing, but it wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t Vanitas. Noé pressed his cheek to Vanitas’ sternum and wrapped his arms tighter.

“—Don’t fucking drop me,” Vanitas yelled. He, too, had been barely audible under the storm (even now), but Noé looked up and saw his expression under the flash of a lightning strike and thought he’s just as beautiful as ever. It was perhaps an inappropriate thought to have; but he had it, and he couldn’t instantly formulate the words to say whatever he wanted to say. It took him a while.

And when Noé moved to answer, he felt palms pressing to the sides of his face and lips crashing into his own.

It was cold, wet, and miserable. And yet so warm and alive and he could feel it, the heartbeat pressed up against his own. The heat in the open-mouthed kiss. Vanitas was alive now. Mark-less, in his arms, the force of it all hitting him like a tidal wave that only lent Noé the strength to stand there against the violence of the flood.

He was steady. He was surer than ever.

Vanitas was going nowhere.