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It had all started, for Noé, when his best friend Dominique bought him tickets for a birthday cruise. Originally, she and her brother Louis were meant to accompany him, but Louis, as he had done for the past half a decade, had canceled through Noé’s teacher, Louis’s and Domi’s grandfather, as soon as the invitation had made its way to him, and two days before the cruise Domi had been called away on urgent business involving her job, so Noé boarded alone, and went to the cabin he was supposed to share with Domi and Louis alone, and took pictures and sent them to Domi, so that, when she got a break, she’d be able to see that he’d arrived safely.
Noé did not mind solitude as a rule. It had been his usual state ever since Louis had stopped speaking to him some five years prior, after Noé had refused to kill him and then, when Louis had taken matters and a kitchen knife into his own hands and then into his torso, Noé had sat on him and held a towel to the wounds as Domi called an ambulance, and had refused to move no matter how much Louis had screamed at him. And this solitude was infinitely better than the one that would have come had Louis really died, so Noé tried to relish in it.
Domi’s bags were on her bed, sent ahead and not yet called back, and Noé, after a moment, put his own down by his bunk, let Murr out, and prepared for his first-ever cruise. His teacher had given him some instructions, so he wasn’t flying totally blind. He was to locate the Book of Vanitas, a rumored document that supposedly held proof of the corruption of all the richest and oldest families in the world, from d’Apchier to de Sade to Ruthven, and formulate an opinion on each of the people involved with it. He wasn’t required to share these opinions—he needed only hold them and act on them.
So Noé, after putting his bags on his bunk, scooped up Murr and made his way onto the deck of the ship, keeping an eye out for anyone who looked like they might be carrying a book of extremely incendiary documents. He didn’t really see anyone like that as they cast off, though he did make friends with a lovely young woman named Amelia Ruth, who worked as a maid under Count Orlok. They had dinner together, and afterwards she played with Murr while Noé kept an eye out for any odd books, and all in all the evening was both very enjoyable and reasonably normal, though slightly marred by an antagonistic encounter with a black-haired, blue-eyed dick who had chased Amelia and Noé through three levels of the cruise ship for whatever reason.
That night, he called Domi and left her a message, detailing everything that he thought was important that had happened that day, and then went to bed. The next day was much the same, and so was the evening, but the second night of the cruise, Noé was awoken by the ship rocking violently from side to side. Within moments, he had been thrown from his bed; he scrambled to his feet as Murr clawed his way up Noé’s leg to perch on his shoulder, presumably guessing that that was one of the more stable surfaces in the room.
Noé stood, gripping the wall for balance, as his and Domi’s things crashed and mingled on the floor; after a single shocked moment he made his shaky way to the door, and then down the hallway, and then up on deck, where a massive storm was raging. Wind and rain and flashes of blue lightning lashed the ship, and Noé could only see two other people standing out here. One of them was, he was pretty sure, a waiter on the ship; the other had long black hair and piercing blue eyes, and he and Noé had gotten into three separate petty arguments over the past two days without introducing themselves.
“What’s going on?” Noé shouted, struggling towards them. “Is everything safe?!”
The two men turned towards him; one of them said, “Fuck,” and the other said, “Go back inside and forget you ever saw this. If you don’t…you’re in for a world of hurt.”
Noé frowned. “What do you mea—” he started, and then the deck pitched wildly and the black-haired young man was thrown off of it, and Noé hurled himself forward to catch him, snatching a lifeboat from the side of the deck as he threw himself over it and fell towards the waves, his free hand wrapping around the wrist of the black-haired young man just as they hit the wild, icy sea.
The lifeboat floated, which was their only saving grace; Noé was able to yank himself up into it and pull the strange young man in after him, and then he gripped the sides as the waves tossed the boat around, and only then did he realize he’d forgotten Murr on the deck of the ship.
Noé immediately grabbed the paddles on the sides of the lifeboat and started trying to paddle them back to the cruise ship; within moments, the paddles were yanked away and lost in the swirling water.
I hope Murr is okay, Noé thought, I hope someone feeds him until I can get back, and then he focused on not capsizing the lifeboat until the sea calmed and the sun began to rise, no cruise ship in sight, and he thought, Oh, my God, Domi is going to kill me.
On the floor of the lifeboat, the young man he’d tried to rescue started laughing hysterically, his first sign of life since he’d been thrown from the ship.
“What the heck?” he said. “This is insane—I really didn’t think I’d survive that one!” He popped up from the bottom of the lifeboat and looked around. “Where are we?”
“The Atlantic Ocean, I think,” Noé said, looking around as well. “Who are you? What happened last night?”
“None of your business and none of your fucking business,” said the young man.
“Well, that’s rude,” said Noé. “My name is Noé Archiviste. I just saved your life.”
The young man rolled his eyes. “You can call me—Vanitas,” he said. “Heir to Vanitas of the Blue Moon. I inherited the name and the book, but I’m a completely normal human. You don’t need to know anything else.”
—So jumping off the ship after Vanitas was probably what Noé’s teacher had wanted him to do, then, but honestly Vanitas seemed kind of like a dick, and Noé couldn’t exactly say he wanted to spend much time at all around him.
Currently, though, he didn’t seem to have too much of a choice: as the morning wore on, they came no closer to being found and rescued, and Vanitas continued to make a nuisance of himself, and Noé began to grow hungry. Luckily for him, though, when they were all little Louis had drilled him and Domi on what to do if you ever got caught in a disaster, and so he kept an eye on the side of the boat for any nice big fish to grab, and, when one such specimen appeared—surrounded by a school of other big fish—Noé, drawing on years of practice in the forests of Averoigne, reached into the ocean and pulled out a thrashing fish.
“What are you doing?!” said Vanitas, staring in undisguised shock.
“It’s lunchtime,” Noé explained. “It’s important to keep our strength up so we don’t starve to death—”
“That is a living fish—”
“All fish are living until we eat them,” Noé pointed out, reasonably, he thought. “And fish blood is pretty tasty. Other types are more tasty, but—”
“Why do you know this?!”
“My friends and I played black bears one fall,” explained Noé, “and black bears eat a lot of raw salmon. L—my old best friend said that it was an important life skill to have.”
“Your old best friend is fucking insane,” said Vanitas.
“He was just really into survivalist stuff for a while,” said Noé, “and he was right that I might need to know how to eat raw fish if I’d ever get shipwrecked one day. Would you like one?”
“I would rather die.”
Noé shrugged at this—Louis had given him a very long lecture about how people usually changed their minds about eating nasty things once the starvation set in, and how it was better to get a head start and eat the nasty things before you started starving—and picked his fish up off the floor of the boat. It was saltier than the salmon he’d had as a child, probably because of the ocean water, and it thrashed unhappily once or twice before he got to the organs, leaving him with a couple nasty scratches across one cheek. Murr could definitely have done better, but Murr was also still on the cruise ship—hopefully—and so there was nobody really to compete with.
“You’re fucking insane,” said Vanitas, but something had changed in his voice now, and there was an odd glint in his eyes as he stared at Noé’s blood-covered mouth.
“Well, I’m not going to be starving anytime soon,” said Noé.
“We have been in this lifeboat,” said Vanitas, “for less than twelve hours. Nobody starves in twelve hours!”
“No, but we missed breakfast,” said Noé, “and I did want some lunch. Also, I don’t want to starve at all so I decided to keep eating regularly.”
“That was not regular, that was unhinged.”
“I meant on time,” said Noé, rolling his eyes. “It’s important, so you don’t starve to death.”
“Well, yeah, obviously, but you don’t have to eat nasty fish and shit,” said Vanitas.
“We’re in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean,” Noé argued. “What else should we be eating?”
“I don’t know! Maybe seaweed or something?!”
“That’s more likely to be poisonous, though? I can identify what plants are safe in a forest, not an ocean. ”
“Why the fuck can you do that.”
“I grew up in a forest, and sometimes would forget my way home,” said Noé. “I learned through a lot of trial and error.”
“Trial and—”
“But I really don’t want to try that in the ocean, so—”
“Are you insane!” shouted Vanitas.
“No?” said Noé. “I just don’t like starving to death when I don’t have to.”
“We might get rescued,” said Vanitas.
“It’s been almost a full day, though?”
“Well, maybe I already arranged a rescue before I went overboard, idiot!”
Noé frowned. “Why would you do that? Did you want to fall overboard?”
“Obviously I did. Why else would I be on deck during a storm?”
“To get a good view of the storm,” said Noé. “My friend really likes pretty pictures, she has a whole social media page full of them. Or to find out what was going on out there. It was a massive storm.”
“So you didn’t want to stay safe in your cabin?”
Noé shrugged. The idea hadn’t actually occurred to him at all—he had moved entirely on instinct, to get out of the small dark box and hopefully to somewhere safer or more comfortable. It was only once he was on the lifeboat that he’d started assigning motive to his actions; last night, everything had happened far too fast for him to think.
“You’re insane,” Vanitas said again, leaning back and staring at the hot blue sky. “Absolutely fucking insane…”
It was two days later that Vanitas’s planned rescue arrived. Noé had not stopped eating the fish, and Vanitas had not stopped mocking him for it, though they had bickered over several other things as well, such as whether or not Noé should assist Vanitas in his use of his Book to take down the cruel secret organization Charlatan that he swore until he was blue in the face was responsible for half the unexplained deaths of the past two decades.
Noé wasn’t sure how he felt about this, but he was glad to be able to take a bath and reunite with Murr on the deck of Count Orlok’s personal yacht, because apparently Vanitas was striking a deal with him about the Book of Vanitas just a few rooms away.
For his part, Noé brushed sand off his sleeves, and thought about his teacher’s request, and thought about how deeply he disliked Vanitas—
And by the time he thought about how one of the words out of Louis’s mouth the last time they spoke was Charlatan, he was already agreeing to bodyguard Vanitas part-time in exchange for room, board, and answers for any questions he came across.