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It wasn’t the first time Vanitas had awoken Noè from the vague uneasiness of dreams by tripping over him.
The first week Vanitas had dared to settle within the shared space of their hotel room, it had happened each morning like clockwork; always at the same perfect hour, when the sky was a pale half-lit gray and the constant clamor of the city muffled by fog, with cold dewy air that seeped easily through the cracks in the walls, never mind blew through the open window. Noè’s blanket didn’t usually make it to the floor with him, so it was only natural the next thing he always did was to pull the soft, spluttering thing that had just tried to cave in his ribs close. For warmth.
Eventually, Vanitas had learned to proceed with extreme caution on Noè’s side of the room in the early hours, but now and then when he was distracted or delirious he’d fall back into the old routine, unless he did it on purpose because he wanted the warmth too and if that was the reason Noè really didn’t understand why he couldn’t just ask. Whatever the case, Noè didn’t open his eyes to the breathless thump next to him, just rolled over and groped blindly for Vanitas’s arm before he could even get on with the requisite cursing.
Noè reeled Vanitas in, tight against his chest, and he was warm. Soft and damp and human, smelling like antiseptic and that special sanguine sweetness Noè would never be permitted. This was the part where he slipped back into unconsciousness, and those uneasy dreams. Except.
It wasn’t the heat or the smell that set Noè off. It wasn’t even the absence of gray light against the agitated flutter of his eyelids. This was the part where Vanitas gave in, begrudgingly resigned to his fate, or else woke Noè a second time by removing him from his person with pointed brutality. Except, Vanitas was stiff, as wound up as a wounded animal, and he had frozen perfectly still the same way a doe did to blend in with the colors of the forest. Like he wanted Noè to fall back asleep.
Noè shifted, squinting his eyes open; the body next to him gasped. “Vani?”
“‘S nothing.” Gently, Vanitas tested Noè’s hold. “Go back to sleep, Noè. You’re sleep-talking.”
Noè released Vanitas, who didn’t roll away quite as fast as expected, moving like his limbs had been coated in syrup. Sure enough, the room was shrouded in dense pitch, visible only in abstract outlines. No moon in the sky outside, no pale illumination, blue or red. What kind of fortune did that signify?
“I’m not sleep-talking,” Noè said, and struggled mightily to focus his eyes so that Vanitas would believe him. "What are you…"
Noè trailed off. The haze over his vision was clearing, all the dancing magic Vanitas insisted was math coming into focus; the numbers swirled and swarmed and reordered themselves, lightening the room to a soft sepia, an adjustment to their own formula so simple most vampires did it by instinct. His other senses were catching up, grasping at the smell of sweat under bloody temptation, the sound of breaths running wet and ragged.
Vanitas was trying to inch away, reach the safety of the window before Noè noticed the wet shimmer of his skin or heave of his chest, the glaze that shielded his darting eyes. The dizzy scent of his blood heated to a boil.
Try to bite me, Noè, and I'll—
"—ou!" Cloth-capped claws were digging into Noè's bicep, pools of his own blood dragged out to slide hot and red down his arm. He was thinking for the second time, like a wounded animal, except that wasn’t right—it wasn’t wounded, it was cornered, because without realizing Noè had gotten in close, nose to nose, hands on fever-flushed skin. He was looming in the crosshairs of an astermite glare, that swallowed so much into its ruthless blue one could almost miss the terror.
With great intention, Noè eased. Vanitas, still in his grasp, did not.
Noè could hear the rushing beat of Vanitas's pulse, concussive drumbeat like fireworks or a factory accident; sputtering ventricles filling arteries to bursting, bloomed capillaries painting crimson flowers across skin. It made the room smell like an apple orchard at autumn's height, like fresh cut grass or beach salt or Domi's favorite perfume, overwhelming and heady and blowing on the wind, untouched by the bitter miasma that usually accompanied human infection. The further the remnants of sleep retreated, the less Noè could ignore it, an oozing crave like bad medicine.
He breathed around the water in his mouth and forced himself to focus—on the heat of Vanitas's flesh, slick with exertion, discolored a cooked venison red. On his thundering heartbeat, alive with illness, and fear.
Sick. Vanitas was sick.
It all still smelled like sugar, but the reminder turned Noè's stomach to it like an emetic. Reality reformed—no more sweet dreams—leaving him with the aftershocks of addiction and, "Vanitas. You have a fever."
"No shit," Vanitas snorted, and like magic his demeanor had softened; still animal, still digging holes into Noè's arm, but less like something caught in a trap and more like Murr, habitually irritable, and Noè knew how to deal with Murr.
"Why didn't you say anything?" Noè knew, even as he asked it, what a useless question it was; this was Vanitas, who never said anything, and snuck out windows in the dark to lick his wounds unobserved. "Nevermind. You need a doctor."
Vanitas was losing heat faster than an overloaded astermite converter, so warm and damp in the frigid night air that Noè half-expected him to start steaming. Vampires fell sick and ran fevers just the same as humans, but the mechanics varied, the math all wrong. Their threshold when it came to extremes of temperature was simply higher. Noè had nursed Louis through smoking childhood illnesses, held Domi in the throes of her lunar dip until the skin of his arms burned up red and angry. He didn’t know where Vanitas fell in relation to that, how to draw in the shapes of human limitation. He could only assume a line had already been crossed.
Vanitas, unsurprisingly, disagreed. "I am a doctor."
Fabulously annoyed, but his words were smearing into each other, colored by undue effort like just sitting up talking was beginning to wear. Noè couldn't help himself. "Do you even have a medical license?"
In lieu of answering, Vanitas pushed himself off Noè and made an unsteady lurch for the window. He swayed on his feet like a floundering airship, rising to his full height only to stumble and collapse, shoulder banging hard against the window frame he’d hoped to climb out of.
Noè caught him before he could hit the floor. Of course he did.
"Vani,” he tried again, endlessly patient. “We're calling a doctor."
"I said, I am a—"
"Shut up,” Noè said, and his own voice echoed flat in his ears. There was a stillwater calm rising around him, lapping his lips and making him gentle—the same one that always seemed to appear when Vanitas most needed it, though Noè couldn’t fathom where inside him it lived. It drenched him in the cool clarity of an ice bath, backed his words with a power more useful than patience. "You can't examine yourself."
A vibration of displeasure against him, as Vanitas muttered, "There’s only one other doctor who would even know what to do with me."
An odd little offhand, acid-laced, but Noè didn’t have time to parse whatever shadows lay behind it. Vanitas was liquid in his arms, fading like dawnlight or a memory, alive only in shoulders that shivered despite the brimstone of his skin. He needed to have his fever brought down, at least, and once that was settled, it would be nice if someone could tell Noè what the cause of the whole thing was in the first place. As far as he was concerned, Vanitas’s characteristic self-sabotaging stubbornness was irrelevant to how things preceded, except for the fact that if Noè let him go long enough to wake Amelia and phone a doctor, he’d be out the window and stumbling from the roof before their room door could even click shut. Persuasion was, unfortunately, the only recourse.
He tried, very softly, “You can’t walk, Vanitas, you can’t even fight me. You’re shaking. I’m worried, you need medicine, or something to—”
“I said no,” and there were the claws again, tearing lacerations into the front of Noè’s shirt. “I’m not letting someone else touch me for your peace of mind.”
Touch. In his mouth, the word was a cursed epithet, signifying something both vile and violating, meaning something more than it meant.Vanitas’s whole body was wound with it, hackles raised, even as he clung to Noè like he needed to breathe the contact. Feral, and terrified, and still waiting for the bite. Or the operating table.
Oh, Noè thought.
“Fine,” he said.
“Huhn?” Jerky look upwards and Vanitas’s foggy eyes seemed like they were seeing something else, something they couldn’t reconcile. Medical labs or churchyards or a curse-bearer’s fangs. He had never learned to expect mercy.
“You say you’re a doctor, so prove it.” Vanitas just blinked, dripping a stray bead of saltwater down his cheek. Noè reached down, took his wrists, held them tight as steel manacles because he needed Vanitas to listen. “By every moon so help me, you are not dying on me this way, and you can tell me what I need to do to make you better or I will knock you unconscious and carry you the nearest hospital on my back. Help me help you. Please.”
Vanitas tensed, prickling like he always did when Noè took his strength for granted, but he must’ve seen something past the blurring pitch, sincerity or rationality or whatever it was that always made him give to Noè on the rare occasions it actually mattered, because instead of spitting poison he dipped his head to Noè’s chest. He eased. “Since you asked so nicely.”
“It’s because unlike you, I have manners,” Noè huffed, which made Vanitas laugh, just a little, and he was lucky Noè was too nice to retaliate against a sick person.
On Vanitas’s direction, they made it to the bathroom, or Noè did with Vanitas dragging like dead weight against him. His eyes faded in and out of clarity with the rapidity of a malfunctioning camera shutter, but he kept himself tied together long enough to get out a mostly coherent string of commands—”Water, since you don’t want me to die, and a bath to bring down the fever. Tepid, Noè, not cold, I could go into shock.”
Noè gave Vanitas his water and drew a bath with as much paranoid attention to temperature as Vanitas desired—it’s very important, don’t be stupid—lighting the wax candle on the counter to fill the room with a soft honey-yellow glow. Every room in the hotel was kitted with astermite lamps, unobtrusive and safe and efficient, but something about their blinding illumination struck Noè as wrong, violating. Better the shadows and silhouettes of partial light, backed by the quiet danger of flame.
Over the gush of the pipes, Noè could hear the labored rasp of Vanitas’s breathing. He could still smell his sweetness, too, the fragrance of his blood rising with the heat the same as melted butter or freshly baked bread. This lull in urgency was dangerous, Noè’s nausea fraying away by the minute, but he didn’t want to turn around and face what came next.
Vanitas’s voice, again. Scared and bitter. Touch.
Noè turned around.
By whatever small mercy, Vanitas had already started on his clothes. His fingers were slow on the buttons, fumbling, none of their usual dexterity as he opened up his shirt to reveal the gruesome canvas of his skin, layered criss-cross with old scars under fresh bruises scattered like kiss marks. A body so narrow under the billow of his doctor’s costume, sketch lines of ribs and protruding hips.
“Well?” Vanitas glared at him, cutting as a butter knife. “Didn’t you want to help me, Noè?”
It was an admission of his own need, however sardonic, and Noè eased into the rare privilege of being invited. His skin was still crawling with concern, his own back cool with sweat despite the chill of the room, but Vanitas didn’t bolt when Noè’s hands touched his shoulders and nudged the shirt down to the bathroom tiles. His muscles were drawn tight, tendons standing on end, but he let Noè touch and if they both closed their eyes they could pretend his shivering was just from the fever.
“Gloves too,” Noè murmured, and his eyes were not closed, and neither were Vanitas’s. It was impossible not to stare at the person in front of him, frizzled sweat-stuck hair and a body like a star map, years of injuries linking together to form constellations, charting them both a one-way course to nowhere. The skin at his neck and chest was flushed so crimson that Jeanne's mark almost didn't stand out like a cattle brand, and when Noè brushed it with his fingertips—it stabbed him with invisible thorns—Vanitas shuddered. His thighs glimmered wet.
Noè didn't let himself think about that.
Breathing hard, Vanitas fumbled at the ends of his gloves, while Noè braced his shoulders with both hands so he wouldn't waver. Of course he would do this part himself.
The fabric peeled off slowly, reminding Noè of old bandages. The first glove fell away to show skin that had been air-starved and abraded, visibly paler than the rest of him even through the full-body flush. His fingers were crooked and shaky and soft at the ends. They slipped across the fabric of the second glove, like he didn't remember how to gain purchase without using his claws.
Eventually he got his nails under the smothering seal of the hem enough to drag it down, and if the first glove came off like a bandage then this one tore away like lacerated skin. The flesh underneath was discolored a swollen bruise-blue, calcified and lined with spiderweb cracks; a creeping cobalt necrosis that swallowed up his forearm, up his bicep and back down, to twitching fingers. Along the edges, veins stood on end, azure and angry. The center blazed, a corona of overlapping rings atop the pulse point of his wrist, not oozing but somehow vaguely sticky. The cursed blue moon itself, sewn directly into his skin.
The bath was full, which was a relief, because it gave Noè a reason to stop staring. Purposefully, he turned his back to Vanitas as he shut the taps, and pretended not hear the thready little exhale of—disappointment? Relief? Or something else entirely, which, like all things Vanitas, couldn’t be summed up in one pithy little word? It didn’t matter. Noè gestured him over to the tub, and Vanitas took a shaky step forward, back into Noè’s line of vision, eyeing the water suspiciously.
“Is it tepid?” Noè raised an eyebrow, prompting Vanitas to shoot him a particularly poisonous glare. “Don’t give me that look, I can’t tell temperature right now!”
Noè nudged him towards the bath and said, deadpan, “Vanitas, I swear on the light of the crimson moon, when I put you into shock, it won’t be with freezing bathwater.”
“Wha—” Vanitas jerked around sharply, wobbling on his feet, and he’d never get the explanation he was demanding because before he could string together a single word he was pitching forward, center of gravity gone up into the aether. Noè caught him and that much, at least, felt right, keeping Vanitas from breaking his neck on slick bathroom tiles, holding him gently as he sputtered and spat. Noè hooked one arm under his knees and lifted him, and that was where things went wrong, again, because Vanitas jumped and then shuddered in Noè's grip, indecipherable whine like a strangled cat, eyes wide and reeling like Noè's touch was a burn and also everything he needed; except, Noè was hardly paying attention to that, because suddenly Vanitas's pulse was thundering through his loose open veins, a full concert orchestra, and Noè dropped him like he was the one being burned, clumsily into the tub, water sloshing onto the floor.
The water had a blessed dampening effect, on the noise as well as the smell of Vanitas's blood, which had been affecting Noè so much more than he realized—like someone kicked up on opium, or maybe he was closer to one of those rare human junkies who snorted raw astermite, though Noè never had read a coherent account on what the substance even did for them. Right now, Noè didn't feel all that coherent either.
Vanitas was still shuddering in the tub, knees to chest, eyes squeezed shut. Clench of impotent human teeth. He was oozing into the water, literally, metaphorically, and this wasn’t a fever, not like Noè thought. Unsoured by the rot of infection, soft around the edges like honey, about to be feasted on by ants. Burning on something sweeter than illness. Only that wasn’t how any of this worked.
"Vani." He said it so gently it could’ve ended up swallowed by all that wet bathroom tile, but Vanitas jolted as if it was electricity striking the water. "What did you mean, when you said there was only one other doctor who would know what to do with you?"
Vanitas watched Noè, wide-eyed, sinking in inches back towards the floor of the tub. The ripples were kissing his shoulders by the time he whispered, "You're asking that now?"
"Yes."
Simple implacability was what came naturally to Noè; it was only good luck that it also happened to be Vanitas’s greatest weakness. He ran into it like a bluebird hitting a window, oblivious, before flying away in a frustrated daze. Only, with Noè, there was nowhere to fly away to. "You know I really hate you,” he mumbled.
"I know."
"Do you?" Vanitas sighed, and then didn’t say anything for a long time. He was submerged in the water up to his chin, and his shoulders still shook with some desperate, unspoken ache. Noè would’ve waited with him through the night, or the month, if he had to. "You’re familiar with lunar cycles, of course.”
It wasn’t a question, and even if it had been, Vanitas wouldn’t have given Noè the chance to answer; he was in motion now, spitting facts, flinging droplets of tepid bathwater up to stick in Noè’s eyelashes. Outrunning whatever monster was behind him by talking, talking, talking. “All of a vampire's biological rhythms run in sync with the moon, with a critical period every third month, three to five days. Temperature rises, senses dull, and there are intense cravings for physical contact. It's a bit like estrus in other mammals, and medical literature cites it as a reproductive process, but it's really more of a socialone. It's about the, the intimacy, not the sex or the blood. Sometimes it makes the affected mellow and needy, sometimes aggressive—”
"You're stalling," Noè said, cutting the explanation off just as it was gaining momentum. Vanitas glared. "I'm a vampire, Vani, I know how cycling works."
"And?" Vanitas snapped, debilitatingly off-balance. "You’re stupid, you don’t know lots of things."
Because Noè was a generous and forgiving person, he let that one pass. "Just stop stalling."
And Noè’s strategy worked, because Vanitas, in a rush of fever and agitation, did. “It's a lunar dip, alright, Noè? I'm reacting to the new moon tonight, that's it."
"But humans don't have lunar cycles," Noè pointed out, and it was the wrong thing to say. "You're human, Vanitas."
Vanitas made a sound; had it been any less strangled, Noè might’ve called it laughter.
“You’re right,” he said, breathing heavy, “I’m a freak of nature.”
They both knew that wasn’t fair. “That’s not—”
“That’s why,” Vanitas went on, “it hurts so much, because it was something that was put in me. My body isn’t meant to get so warm, or follow the moon, or whatever. It won’t even last three days.I’m just sick and then it’ll be gone, tomorrow morning. Some cycles it doesn’t happen at all.”
He kept going, kept rambling, but the words were looping and cutting together because Noè had stopped listening at it hurts. “Do you want—”
“No,” Vanitas didn’t let him finish, and that was good, because Noè hadn’t known what he was going to offer. Sometimes vampires in the dip of their cycle craved sex, sometimes just affection, almost always blood. The only one thinking about blood here was Noè. “I need skin-to-skin contact, but it’s like being flayed alive every time I get it. Freak of nature, remember?”
Noè should’ve stopped, but he couldn’t help but keep peeling at the scars. “Who did this to you?”
"Moreau,” Vanitas said, and it was an explanation the way closing a door was an explanation. By now, he’d slid so deep into the water it was a wonder his voice could be heard above the surface. "Don't ask."
Please, he didn't say, but Noè heard it echoing clear as cathedral bells off the bathroom tiles anyway.
Noè let it go.
In increments, he settled back, slumped against the wall and the tub as Vanitas soaked, listening to voices performing orchestras in his head: It hurts and touch and whimpering like a beesting. Only one doctor, and didn’t that just make too much sense? Every nerve in the body sparking like an exposed wire, needing electricity, thrashing when they got it. Was it worse to want something, or to have it?
Vanitas must’ve made up his mind on that, or at least settled on a compromise, because he drifted gradually towards the outer edge of the tub to rest his head on Noè’s shoulder, and Noè, of course, leaned in to give him room. He fit perfectly into the curve of Noè’s neck, uneven breaths washing down collarbones, and it was all just too easy. Too dangerous.
By the time the drag of minutes had chilled the bathwater from tepid to cold, Noè was the one shivering, bare toes gone frigid. Against him, Vanitas was delirious or asleep or somewhere in between, disappearing into the water, neck at an awkward angle to keep cheek and lips pressed into Noè’s skin. Noè nudged him. No response.
So Noè got to his feet, repositioning Vanitas’s head against the rim of the tub, and that got him to stir, a heartbroken whimper that definitely wasn’t aware of where he was or whose hands were on him. Noè hurried through the perfunctory motions of draining the tub before carefully lifting him, dripping and naked, and that wasn’t the dangerous part, though icy water soaked Noè’s shirt and rolled in creeping droplets down his forearms. The smell blew over him again, stronger for its absence, rendering him dizzy and dead on his feet. Other vampires didn’t scent like this, not at any point in their cycles. He’d been right about one thing from the start; this was all just Vanitas.
He stumbled back into their freezing room and bundled Vanitas into blankets on his bed, shook him until he woke up enough to drink more water. Vanitas obeyed Noè’s manipulations mechanically, exhaustedly, nobody home. His blue moon eyes stared blank and uncomprehending at formulas Noè couldn’t see, much less read. Noè held onto his shoulders until he finished his water and then pushed him to lay down, and just like that, he was gone again, something worse than asleep.
Noè retrieved his own blankets from his bed, and stripped off his wet shirt before making solitary camp at the foot of Vanitas’s bed. It wasn’t a comfortable place to sleep, the baseboard unforgiving against his back and the wind from the open window—he wouldn’t have dared close it, even if Vanitas hadn’t been running a temperature—rushing directly into him like snow. It was a clarifying sort of a chill though, wisdom gained through arthritic ache, and Noè needed that to think through the scent of Vanitas’s blood and the overwhelming urge to crawl with him into bed, enfold him with his body and protect all that soft vulnerable humanity until morning light.
~~
Noè had been sure he wouldn't be able to fall back asleep, but he must've, because this time he woke up to the sound of Vanitas screaming.
Like a murder victim in a bad play, and Noè was on the bed with him in an instant, moving before he was awake. Entangling, and pinning down the thrashing, howling thing, hands over a toothless mouth, and this wasn’t right. Too cruel, too close, all raw animal instinct, and yet. Vanitas settled, calmed, wrapped sweaty arms around Noè’s shoulders and squeezed.
His eyes in the dark were wide and rolling, pupils popped like off-track shooting stars. Whatever he was seeing wasn’t their chilled bedroom, and whoever he was clinging to like he needed the touch to keep breathing wasn’t Noè. "There's something, he put something inside me. It's inside, he's inside, he's eating me."
And he was lapsing into prayer, cathedral hymns. It was a flashbang reminder Vanitas’s past, trained in a church cloister, breathing in incense and blind faith. Of course he knew all the songs. And there was only one person he could be scared of, here, one person who was eating him.
And to think Moreau had told them all Vanitas had never cried.
There were tears now, holy water fresh and burning into Noè’s shoulder as Vanitas rocked, mumbled, “I’m broken, I’m broken, I’m broken.”
“You’re not broken,” Noè whispered into the dark, and that was wrong, lying; only he didn’t know how to fix the shattered thing under him, and the right words, I don’t care, didn’t seem to apply.
They stayed like that too long, caught in some lucid nightmare, and it was almost like rest. It certainly seemed peaceful in retrospect, when Vanitas reached the end of whatever thread he was spinning. Seized under Noè, gasped.
“Vani…” Noè tried.
Vanitas shook his head, answering a different question than the one Noè wanted to ask. “I need.”
Period, full stop. A complete sentence, no modifiers required, and was it because Noè already knew what Vanitas needed or because he didn’t need anything at all? It was something deeper than that, something in the blood, which Noè could still smell and crave and this wasn’t a fever anymore. Wasn’t a cycle. Just them and all the things they’d left unfulfilled.
Noè’s jaw ached, and Vanitas wasn’t done. Lucidity was gaining—still far away from here, but his sentences were coagulating, constructing coherent requests. “Something inside me is burning,” he choked. “I need you to touch me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Please,” Vanitas tried next, and Noè didn’t like how much he liked the sound of Vanitas begging.
Noè's sanity was holding itself together with a wire worn thread-thin, and it stretched between them, taut, as Noè pried Vanitas from his chest. He was searching Vanitas's face, anxious and sweat-smeared, he didn't know for what. Clarity, or confirmation of madness? He found neither. Only blue moon eyes blown wide, and entreating, and meeting his own.
“Noè, please.”
The wire snapped.
That strangled almost-laughter again, as Noè pressed Vanitas into the mattress with force enough to make something in the wooden bedframe crack. The bedsheets were already gone, lost in all of Vanitas’s fever dream thrashing, leaving his body bare and shimmering in the absence of moonlight. If Noè had been human, the darkness would've swallowed the sight.
Noè wasn't human, and Vanitas was beautiful. Scratched open every which way by scar tissue, bones pushing through skin wrapped up in the royal blue ribbon of a million veins. His back was arching, his thighs were open, cunt dripping onto the mattress, and Noè wanted to be the one eating him.
Noè ran his hands from Vanitas's shoulders to his thighs like he was performing a glissando, and Vanitas rewarded him with a rising scale of musical notes. He squeezed, and knew it would bruise, not because he was being anything but gentle but because Vanitas was just so fragile right now. Caressed, and needing it, and singing with pain.
Noè wanted to tear open his femoral artery, spill blood on the sheets and still those kicking feet. He licked into him instead. Vanitas tasted like medicine, bitter, necessary, addictive, with a choking layer of sweetness on top of the acid promising, promising, promising.
Underneath him, Vanitas jerked and whimpered, and there were hands slapping down on his shoulders, blunt human nails digging—not gouging—bloodless half-moons into his back.
When Vanitas came it was with a scream like being stabbed, and Noè didn't want to stop. Didn't want to take his tongue out of Vanitas, him and his sweet-acid flavors, because inside his raw fluttering walls were almost stripped down enough that Noè could taste the blood filling capillaries beneath. No teeth required, no harm, except that wasn't true. Vanitas was beginning to twitch like he might die, and the two of them needed to keep moving.
Noè pulled away, and they both wrenched like the removal was surgical. Vanitas was a wreck beneath him, twisted and gurgling, Noè really had eaten him, except the word wasn’t eaten, the word was ruined. And the job still wasn’t done.
There was arousal, somewhere, but inside Noè's head it was all just a muddled fog, physical signals misfiring within the melting metalwork of his flesh. It was all backwards; he'd always wanted Vanitas, even wanted him like this in those rare moments he had dared to face it, like this but not likethis. Having something and wanting something and which, which was worse, or were they really just the same thing? Noè wondered. Vanitas's hips rolled, writhing bone, and with one hand Noè held them down.
Deep breath. He flipped Vanitas over.
Vanitas came down on his stomach with a rush of dead air, and his back was just as beautiful, just as scarred. Noè wasn't stopping to admire it, bearing down, lifting Vanitas's hips, pressing inside.
There was physical relief as their bodies slotted together but the only thing Noè could really feel were his teeth. Itching. Vanitas was keening beneath him, shuddering as if in seizure, and his neck was craned back and exposed and red with flushing blood. Noè made a noise a step away from human and swept down, latching his lips to Vanitas’s damp nape. Like a queen with her kitten, or a predator with its prey.
Underneath him, Vanitas snapped and folded, and somehow Noè’s hand had ended up over his mouth, swallowing the noises he made before they could leave the room. Teeth scraped at the skin of Noè’s fingers, harmless and human save that one stray incisor that snagged Vanitas's upper lip when he smiled, biting, and Noè didn't want to be the only one getting bitten. He was tasting somewhere vital, and it wasn’t just blood he craved. He wanted to eat his way inside, through skin and muscle to the tangle of Vanitas’s central nervous system, latch his teeth there and make a home and never, ever let go.
Vanitas would’ve let him. The knowledge wasn’t so much a realization as an undercurrent, the steady beat of a healthy pulse or electricity thrumming within a brain. Vanitas would’ve let him. It wouldn’t last, not the night, not even minutes, and maybe Vanitas would kill Noè afterwards, just as he had promised, but here now, this second—in the dark of the new moon, Vanitas had surrendered himself utterly. Noè could've bitten his neck and he wouldn't have done anything to stop it. Noè could've broken his neck and he wouldn't have done anything to stop it.
When it was over, it was all at once, like a bucket of tepid bathwater. One of them came, or maybe they both did, and it was wet and uncomfortable and Vanitas was crying.
Noè's teeth ached; the skin he was kissing was clear and unwounded. His lips tingled when they left it, and he turned them both over, gingerly.
Between them, the heat settled. All Noè could see were the tears on Vanitas’s cheeks, tinted pink atop the blush-red stain of exertion, but there was nothing of fear or distress in the way he pushed his body into Noè’s. As if Noè was in any danger of letting him go.
Under the new moon, Vanitas slept willingly, and all Noè could do laying next to him was wait for the sun to rise.
~~
Noè could've asked Amelia to bring them breakfast, but he didn't think he'd be able to handle it if she asked any questions.
He took the scenic route to a nearby patisserie he'd worked a handful of shifts at and was quietly grateful to find it busy. Long lines, and no one idle enough to notice the forced slant of his small talk. The place was situated on a rise that gave it a long view of adjacent rooftops, the hotel included, which was why Noè chose it—if Vanitas woke up and absconded from the window, never to be seen again, Noè would know. Not that he was sure what that would accomplish, from this distance, aside from an advance warning that he'd be returning to a cold and empty room. Maybe that was all he wanted.
He'd left the hotel in the cold gray mists of pre-dawn, and by the time he emerged with his prize—two bulging paper bags—in tow, the streets had transitioned into full Parisian morning, crowds shouting and jostling under a clear blue sky. Something in the sunlight made Noè's eyes water, and the nagging, unfulfilled ache in the pit of his throat griped, reminding him how tired he was. He didn't bother taking the scenic route back.
Contrary to all expectation, the room he came back to—pushing the door open hesitantly, like a mouse that knew it was walking into a trap—wasn't empty, nor were its occupants asleep and delirious with fever. Vanitas was sitting up in bed, deep shadows under his eyes but otherwise looking quite sober. Next to him, Murr purred, returned from whatever more pleasant adventure he had been on the previous night.
"Oh, there you are," Vanitas said when the door opened, and he sounded too happy, too normal. "Whatcha got there?"
He gestured impatiently for Noè to bring the bags over, and Noè reluctantly obeyed. He'd been so wrapped up in himself he'd only remembered Vanitas's absurd distaste for sweets once he was at the shop counter, so he'd bought a little of the entire menu to compensate; even so, Vanitas sorted through the pickings with exaggerated noises of disgust before finally resigning himself to a few rolls of plain brioche.
Noè watched him eat. Even now, he was painfully fastidious, seemingly working some kind of magic to catch crumbs with his fingers before they dirtied the bed. His bare fingers. He hadn't retrieved any of his clothes from the bathroom, evidently, wrapped insufficiently in blankets, and even facing miles of naked skin it was the ungloved hands that felt most painfully intimate. Declawed, vulnerable and human. The mark, ugly as it may have been, was only another scar.
By now, the smell of his blood had cooled back to almost-normal, but for Noè, that didn't make it any less tempting.
A roll and a half later, Vanitas noticed Noè staring, still stood a foot from the bed. "What are you doing? Sit down, would you?"
And just in case there'd been any doubt as to where he meant, he pushed Murr off the bed (by some miracle, without getting scratched). He glared at Noè with that same intensive obsession he'd had in his eyes on the night they met, wild and alive with adrenaline, chasing Noè through crowds and dead streets like he'd never once heard no and taken it for an answer. Noè sat down.
Vanitas didn't make it easy for him, pressing in close. Warmth still hummed under his skin, fading autumn traces. "So," he said, "it's funny how you haven't started fussing over me yet."
The mockery was almost enough to make Noè forget the guilt. "Why would I fuss over you?"
"And the moping," Vanitas moaned, ignoring him utterly. "You know how much I hate it when you mope."
"It's not moping, I'm just—"
"This is your whole problem,” Vanitas babbled on, and Noè finally took note of the manic jitter staining his tone, saturating every broken off sentence. It wasn’t just Noè’s anxieties filling the air, choking the room. “You think too much and get caught up in things that don't matter and you don't ask how I feel—"
"Exactly," Noè snapped, and whatever chance they had of forgetting flew off along with the broken note in his voice. The thing in his head was irritation and it was guilt and more than either of those things it was uncertainty, and he needed to explain it but the words that kept rising to his lips were I raped you and he didn't want to say that because it would've made the whole thing true. "You were in pain and you weren't thinking straight and I almost—" He choked.
Vanitas contemplated him, eerily calm, wearing the stillwater expression he sometimes sank into just before he attacked. Except when he opened his mouth now, it was only to ask a question, deceptively direct.
"Did you bite me, Noè?"
"Obviously you'd know if—"
"Are you going to bite me?"
"No," Noè said, and damn it, why did Vanitas have to be so good at killing his guilt? "Of course not. Not unless you say it's okay."
He pretended not to notice the pitying strain in the corners of Vanitas's smile that gently told him I never will. "Then we don't have a problem."
And before Noè could argue with his decree, he upended one of still mostly full bags with his foot. "Now cheer up and eat your sugared abominations."
With the array of fresh pastries released from their confines and scattered across the bed for Noè’s observation, it was impossible to do anything but obey. They were warm but not hot, flaking crusts, congealing butter, and sweet enough to sate Noè against his hunger for the one beside him. Gradually, the knots in his shoulders unwound, Vanitas relaxing further against him, with blinks having grown long and lazy as he ate.
"Oh, and Noè?" He said, after an eternity of uneasy peace. "I don't mind it."
Noè regarded him sideways. "Mind what?"
"Being touched by you. Just now and again."
And he left it there and Noè was almost too awestruck to reply with the obligatory, "Why would I want to touch you?"
And just like that, they fell back into rhythm, as naturally as if there had never been anything but this candyfloss banter between them. Too easy, too dangerous, but if there was one thing Noè was coming to realize it was that they both liked danger and maybe that was alright.
Sunlight streamed down on them from the window, staining them yellow and happy. Vanitas pinched Noè’s arm and Noè flicked powdered sugar back at him. It stuck in his hair like snowflakes that didn’t melt as the room finally began to warm.