Inks
Member
Word Count - [2,004]
It was half-past midnight when Tuvius Acer arrived, pale and shaking, on the doorstep of Perseus Artifex Vanitas’s studio apartment.
Long-limbed, tall, with a narrow jaw and shrewd, amber-brown eyes, Acer usually cut an impressive, professional figure in tailored suits and polished dress shoes. Now, however, his short brown hair stuck up in sleep-messed tufts on one side of his head. He wore no tie, and he’d missed a button on his shirt, which was only half-tucked into his slacks.
Only yesterday – and barely that – the Nocte Nils celebrations had been at their height. And only yesterday, Magister Eximium had been assassinated in front of hundreds of citizens. Acer hadn’t been there, had just heard the full story from one of his neighbors not an hour ago. But…
A pair of round-framed glasses sat crooked on Acer’s nose, and he straightened them as he reached out. Bathed in warm lantern-light that did little to chase away the cold of Terminus nights, he quietly knocked on his charge’s door. He waited, feeling uncomfortable and out of place on the darkened street. No respectable man went running out of his house in the middle of the night and woke half the neighborhood knocking at the door of a man who was surely…most likely…possibly asleep. He should go back. Try again in the morning. Even Vanitas—
But there was no mistaking the light shining through the gaps in the ground floor window shutters, faint though it may have been, and Acer knew Vanitas kept odd (beyond odd) hours. He knocked again, louder, rapping his knuckles against the door’s thick grain until they ached.
“Vanitas!” he hissed. “Vanitas, open the door!”
The silence that followed felt oppressively loud. Acer bit back a curse. He glanced up and down the empty street, hesitated a moment, and then tried the door.
The latch gave under his hand, and the door eased open without so much as a creak.
Of course it wasn’t locked, Acer reassured himself. Did Vanitas ever properly latch his door? It only felt ominous now because of the late hour and the weight of the news already on his mind.
“Vanitas?” Acer tried again. One hand pressed flat against the wood and the other clutching at the doorframe, he leaned in and peered through the gap in the door.
There stood Vanitas, leaning over one of the many, many workbenches cluttering every corner of the ground floor. Several hanging lanterns, boxed in glass and framed in intricately-carved wood, bathed the workshop’s ledgestone walls and the slate floor in a warm, steady light.
Vanitas’s face was downturned, focused on something in his hands, but Acer was all-too-familiar with that head of unkempt black curls (and those unpleasant, self-tailored clothes) to mistake him for anyone but the Artifex family’s youngest, wayward son.
Relief hit Acer hard enough to force out a shaky sigh. If any harm had come to Vanitas under his watch…
And yet, his relief was short-lived.
“Vanitas,” he breathed, stepping inside the workshop and closing the door before too much cold could seep in. A fire burned in a hearth near the back, and the workshop’s forge was still smoldering, but the workshop felt chilled regardless. “Why didn’t you…What are you doing?”
“Working,” Vanitas replied promptly, in his usual soft, distracted tone; his head remained downturned, his eyes on his…‘work’.
Well at least he’s not gone deaf…again. The thought came to Acer as if from a great distance, the bulk of his attention fixed on the objects scattered across Vanitas’s work area. …Are those…?
Something brushed Acer’s shoulder.
“Gah!” He flung out a hand as he whirled, striking away some sort of small…metal…sphere that had, presumably, been hovering overhead. It drifted to one side, and Acer stared after it.
At a second look, it seemed to be some sort of floating robotic eye – comprised of a smooth metal casing, and an array of sensors that cast a blue glow over Acer’s face as they surveyed him from behind a shield of glass material. Three individual little…prongs of cone-shaped overlapping metal segments hovered in the space below it. The main sphere couldn’t have been much bigger than an apple; Acer could have held it in his hand.
As he watched, the little eye robot drifted across the room – the three prongs trailing in its wake.
…How…?
Acer remembered himself. He wheeled about and fixed Vanitas – or the top of his head, rather – with a sharp look. “Vanitas, are those pens?”
They were. Scattered across the youngest Artifex’s tables lay dozens of pens, some half-assembled, some broken down into their base components, some seemingly complete – all of a similar model.
“They are, yes,” said Vanitas in his distant way. “I assume you were speaking…rhetorically, though.”
Acer shook his head dumbly, in denial or disbelief or something like it. Not like Vanitas could see him. The only gaze on him was that damn robot’s, hovering silently over Vanitas’s shoulder now.
A pen, he thought with a burgeoning sense of panic. The Magister was assassinated with a pen. It exploded. That’s what they said. That the Magister went to sign some new treaty and his pen exploded.
“...Why…?” Acer asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.
“‘Why?’” Vanitas parroted. “Curiosity, I guess?” He nodded faintly, to himself. “I was…curious.” He’d yet to look up, yet to catch Acer’s eye even once. As Acer crept closer, he realized Vanitas was in the middle of assembling another gods-damned pen.
Acer sputtered, caught between horror and indignation. “You – you can’t be—Vanitas, do you have any idea what this looks like?! After what happened today…! If someone were to walk in here now, what would they think? And…and why didn’t you answer your door?”
The dark-haired young man murmured something, too low for Tuvius to make out. Probably talking to himself.
“I must have been knocking for at least a few minutes,” Acer pressed. Squinting in the stark, uncompromising lantern light, he let his gaze drift from one half-assembled pen to the next. “Surely you heard me?”
“Mm.” Perseus stared down at the pen part – some sort of cylinder filled with deep green liquid – in his hands. “Yes. I…” He paused as he eased it into place – calmly, carefully, with an artisan’s steady hands. “I heard you. I would have opened the door, but…”
And then he trailed off entirely, intent on his work.
Acer waited, shoulders tense. Vanitas wouldn’t… He’d said it was just curiosity. Surely, surely, he hadn’t…didn’t have anything to do with…
“But?” Tuvius pressed, when it became clear Vanitas had forgotten about him.
“…but…I think…if I jostle this ink right now…” Vanitas glanced up at Tuvius for a fraction of a second, and Acer’s gaze was drawn, in that moment, to the blue glow of his right eye, “it might explode.”
“E-Explode?!”
I knew it! cried some semi-hysterical part of Acer’s brain. He jumped back from Vanitas’s workbench and nearly stumbled into another one.
“Careful,” said Vanitas vaguely, without a change in expression, “the stuff over there might…might also. Explode. The materials I’m using are volatile.” A pause. “…Very…volatile,” he added, in afterthought.
Then he muttered something under his breath. It sounded a lot like ‘vitatium’.
“Vitatium? You…bought…surely you didn’t get manage to get hold of this much vitatium.” Acer felt sick as he looked around again. Vanitas didn’t even have access to that much of his family money. Acer knew – Vanitas’s expenses always went through him.
“I didn’t. Couldn’t, of course.” Vanitas’s hands stilled, and there was a hint of something in his voice. Annoyance? “Replicating the, the effects, of the vitatium volantis, that was part of the…challenge.”
“The ‘challenge.’” Acer edged away from the youngest Vanitas’s work space, towards the door. “The…the… Vanitas. Tell me. Tell me you didn’t – you weren’t – you aren’t involved with those Astra Non Obligant people, are you? With that man, that –” he fumbled for the name, “that Orator man?”
“Orator?” Vanitas said, lingering over the syllables. He slotted the pen’s nib assembly over the cylinder of green ink. “Astra…? Oh. Them. I don’t recognize ‘Orator’ but you must mean…Of course…I suppose it’s only fitting, as a placeholder…or a title…”
Vanitas’s voice trailed away into nothing. Acer swallowed. Cleared his throat. “What?”
“No,” Vanitas answered. “No, I am not involved with the Astra Non Obligant. Group. Or the man who appeared on the grandis speculum today. …I saw him,” he offered, thoughtfully. “Heard his speech. But…I’m not…entirely sure…why you’d think I was. Involved. With them.”
Acer stared pointedly at the bloody pen factory surrounding them, and although he didn’t look up as he sheathed the pen’s core components within a simple metal holder, Vanitas chuffed in response.
“The pen used to kill the magister – if it…was…the pen that killed the magister – was most likely a singular weapon, for a singular opportunity, at a…singular…event.” Vanitas capped his newly-made pen and gently set it to one side – next to several others just like it.
This time when he met Acer’s gaze, he locked on, and Acer was instantly reminded that he preferred it when Vanitas’s focus was on something else. The way Vanitas stared was uncomfortable. Acer wasn’t sure which was worse: the dead, flat color of Vanitas’s natural eye or the glow of the robotic device he’d used to replace his right.
“I don’t imagine they have any interest in…mass-production of the murder weapon.”
“Right,” Acer said, talking to himself as much as Vanitas. “Okay. You’re right. That…actually makes sense.” He smoothed at his shirt, frowned when he noticed the button he’d missed. “I had feared…after what happened... But this is just,” he gestured, “you being you, I suppose. And…the door…”
“This isn’t the first time,” Vanitas commented. “The first time I’ve failed to answer my door. That aspect of my…personality…has not changed since we last saw each other, no.”
“Yes. Yes. Well. You should work on that,” Acer said, promptly, as a second wave of relief washed over him. He combed his fingers through his hair (vis above, he’d gone out in public in this state?), gave it up as the futile task it was, and focused on setting his shirt buttons to rights instead.
Vanitas was alive, well, and not making weapons for an organization of wanted terrorists. He was, however, trying to recreate weapons made by wanted terrorists. It was a very…Vanitas…thing to do.
Acer was genuinely too exhausted to be interacting with the youngest Artifex right now. Abruptly, he wanted nothing more than to be back home, in bed. Sleeping. Forgetting this night entirely.
He could feel Vanitas’s gaze still on him, watching. That robot was staring too, its sensors casting the same blue glow as Vanitas’s right eye.
“And about these pens.” Acer straightened to the best of his ability and gave Vanitas a look. “Curiosity or not, this is unacceptable. What I said before still stands – if anyone else were to walk in here, you’d probably be arrested. Or…brought in for questioning, at the very least.” Shirt properly buttoned and properly tucked, Acer adjusted his glasses and turned towards the door. “You should dispose of all this mess, before someone gets hurt…or worse. I know your family’s reputation matters very little to you but – please consider that, at least.”
“Mm. I’ll consider it,” Vanitas said. Again, there was…something…in his tone. But it was beyond Acer to put a name to it. “…Good night, Tuvius.”
Acer took the dismissal as the stroke of good luck it was. Social cues weren’t exactly Vanitas’s strong point. “Yes,” he said, “good night, Vanitas.”
He pulled the door open and stopped, one foot already outside. He glanced back at Vanitas’s workshop, opened his mouth – but Vanitas had already turned away, attention somewhere else, and Acer wasn’t sure what he would’ve said, anyway.
A draft was pouring in through the open door. Acer took his leave. He realized, as he strode off into the night, that he was going to have to write to Vanitas’s mother.
But what to tell her?
.