Chapter Text
One day, Noé turned to him and asked him where he’d learned all he knew about the vampires’ malnomina, and Vanitas could only stop and stare at him like he was an idiot.
“It’s one thing to know what they do,” his companion stated, never one to be defeated even when faced with his own buffoonery, “but you know what they’re called. Is that… I didn’t assume it to be in one of your medical textbooks, that’s all.”
Vanitas needed to stop assuming that Noé was taking the piss. “It’s in the book,” he drawled, and unclipped the Book of Vanitas from its holster for emphasis. He lifted it up with one hand. “It’s more of a textbook, really, or an anthology, but nobody calls it that.”
Noé wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think ‘anthology of Vanitas’ really has the right ring to it,” he muttered, then reached out a hand towards the book before suddenly aborting the motion as if he’d been burned. All the while, Vanitas watched him like a hawk. “Can I— can I read it?”
“Why?”
Noé immediately pulled back. “No, sorry, that’s—”
Vanitas rolled his eyes. “Have at it,” he said, voice thick with sarcasm, and unlatched the book before placing it on the desk in their hotel room, absently thumbing through the pages for lack of anything better to do. The print was clear and legible to his eyes, but— “I’m not sure you’ll get very far, though.”
He had to hand it to Luna: whatever magic they’d packed into those tomes, they’d made sure that no one but their kin could get into them. Case in point: even if they were left open— like Vanitas had done— they were completely illegible to the unfamiliar eye, as Noé was demonstrating so perfectly.
“I can’t read that,” Noé stated, ever observant, and Vanitas rolled his eyes.
“Of course you can’t,” he replied, then snapped the book shut and put it back in its holster. “I wish I couldn’t.” He chanced a glance at the clock on the wall and cursed. “Come on, this curse only activates at night and it’s half-eight already.”
Noé quickly grabbed his coat and followed him out the door, pausing to pat Murr’s head— there was always a fifty-fifty chance of that cat trying to bite him; Vanitas wasn’t sure why Noé bothered half the time— before carrying on.
Their meandering path led them further into Paris proper, towards the slums of the city, and Vanitas was vaguely aware of Noé pressing closer to him as the buildings seemed to loom higher, dilapidated and falling apart, boxing them in against whatever meagre light the stars could provide.
Vanitas, for one, didn’t really care one way or another. In and out, that was how he’d prefer to do things— and besides, he had better things to do than battle his own discomfort when faced with Paris’ slums. He’d faced worser conditions, after all.
“So, this curse-bearer,” Noé muttered, navigating around a puddle of Unidentifiable Liquid. Vanitas briefly considered how unfortunate it was that his partner preferred to wear white in their line of work, especially considering where their work had taken them today. “What… exactly are we up against?”
Vanitas hummed a note. “Eyewitnesses are scarce,” he admitted, delicately picking his way across ruptured cobblestones. He made a mental note not to trip over them if things went pear-shaped. “Either because the curse-bearer killed them, or because they just… disappeared.”
Noé made a sort of nervous bleating noise. “Disappeared?”
Vanitas raised an eyebrow at him. “Yes?” he replied, then his lip curled. “Oh, Noé, don’t tell me you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared!” Noé said immediately— you know, like a liar. Vanitas snickered.
“This is what gets you?” he asked, amused despite himself. “I’m not sure whether to be impressed or concerned.”
Noé pouted to himself. “It’s just… disappearing, ” he muttered, then peered at Vanitas from under his bangs. “Vanishing without a trace, no one knowing what happened to you… doesn’t that bother you? You’re just— just like that, you’re gone, practically blotted out from history. Erased from the register.”
Vanitas was suddenly intensely uncomfortable, and he wondered if Noé knew precisely what he had just hit upon. “Well,” he blustered, desperate to hide exactly how unnerved he had become. Damn you, Noé. “You’ve certainly got a knack for flowery prose. Perhaps you should write books.”
Noé scowled at him. Vanitas pretended not to notice.
“She does sing, though, from what I’ve heard,” he stated. “Hauntingly beautiful, or so I’ve been told.”
Honestly, that tidbit bothered him more than he wanted to let on. Luna hadn’t been shy when creating malnomina; that vampire had been crafty and clever, and creative to boot, but there weren’t many malnomina that sang. The ones that were there, all few of them, were ones Vanitas had dearly hoped to never have to deal with in his life.
Still, nothing he couldn’t solve with a bit of elbow grease. Nothing worth doing was easily done, after all, and Vanitas was no stranger to elbow grease.
“Hey, Vanitas,” Noé said suddenly. “Do you… isn’t it strange that we haven’t seen anyone yet? Or heard anyone? I know there’s a curse-bearer on the loose,” he elaborated when Vanitas stared at him like he was stupid, “but people live here. I don’t like that we haven’t seen any signs of life, even muted ones.”
Fuck, Noé really had a way of making Vanitas feel all warm and fuzzy inside. “It’s just people having self-preservation,” he muttered. “Not everyone is as foolhardy as you or I, you know.”
Noé’s frown deepened. “But—”
“Shh,” Vanitas suddenly hissed, and stopped dead, straining his hearing. “Did you hear that?”
Noé stopped as well. “No? I didn’t—”
The sound came again, a sort of scraping sound, as if someone were dragging a lead piping across the floor, and Vanitas automatically went for the knives in his belt as Noé shifted to a fighting stance.
“Remind me, whose genius idea was it to come to the slums after dark?” he muttered, and Vanitas scowled.
“Ferme-la,” he responded, and then both of their attentions shifted back to the mouth of the alley as a person staggered out.
She was obviously a vampire; that much Vanitas could gather just by looking at her, but what surprised him was her expression when she caught sight of them:
Relieved. Hopeful.
Vanitas took an automatic half-step back. Something was wrong.
“Please, you have to help me!” she cried, and that lead piping she had been carrying— the source of the sound earlier— dropped with a clatter as she ran forward, practically launching herself into Noé’s arms. The piping had dried blood on it— self-defense, Vanitas wondered? “It’s— I didn’t mean to, I was just so hungry, but then she— she’s gone mad, she’s cursed, please, you have to help me get out of here—!”
She was bleeding, Vanitas realized distantly. From the leg, her skirt torn right down the middle, and there was a nasty cut above her right eyebrow, and then there came this awful gurgling noise from the alley the woman had just left, and he quickly realized that he had better things to be worried about.
“Noé—” he began, and was cut off when something shot out of the darkness, rotted and grotesque— was that a hand?— and sent Noé crashing headfirst into one of the adjacent walls. The woman hadn’t fared as well, and Vanitas stared at her caved-in skull with something akin to revulsion as he tried to figure out what the hell to do next.
“Noé!” he shouted, and whirled around just in time to dodge another projectile— ok, yes, there were arms attached to those hands; that helped narrow down the malnomen, much as Vanitas hated the sight regardless— before darting over to where his partner sat crumbled against the wall. “Noé, Christ— get up, get up—!”
On the other side of the alley, the curse-bearer lumbered out, and Vanitas got his first good look at her since the ordeal had begun. Her neck was bent at an unnatural 90 degree angle, snaking around a good two feet further than what was natural, and her arms and legs were both horribly disproportionate, cracking and bending and stretching in ways the human body wasn’t supposed to.
Then, she opened her mouth, and began singing, and Vanitas realized he had fucked up, big time.
“Get up,” he hissed, pulling at Noé harder. The vampire just lolled to the side and muttered something incomprehensible, and Vanitas resisted the urge to kick him. “Get up, you big oaf, putain de merde— come on, Noé—”
The curse-bearer advanced closer to them, and Vanitas cursed his luck. There were maybe 10 malnomina of the hundreds that Luna had created which could not be undone by the book alone, and in the past month, he’d run into two of them.
Noé’s eyes fluttered open, and he shook his head. “Vanitas? What—”
“No time, run!” Vanitas hissed, and took off down the street, Noé hot on his heels. He wondered how well a vampire would fare with a concussion; Noé’s pupils did not look evenly-sized— “We need a new plan; the book alone isn’t enough to fix this; we need to get her out of the city—”
Behind them, the song reached a fever pitch, singing about binary star systems and a false god and a sky like a painted dome, and Vanitas’s heart leaped into his throat when he realized they weren’t going to be able to get out of her range in time.
“Listen, listen— Noé, find me again, ok?” he said hurriedly. “Find me again, and we’ll— fuck, putain, just find me again, and don’t do anything stupid—!”
The ground fell out from under them, and they fell into the abyss with a scream.