No one had bothered to wake you up.

By now, the night stretched on enough to get to where the sun was perched on the east, rising slowly and smudging the sky orange and purple.

With the faint webs across the sky, credited to Babel, it was still clearly Altus. Despite the aftermath of the masked ball, you had yet to be extracted from the realm of vampires out of shame. It was a wonder, really. Vampires loved nothing more than acting like the apex of evolution when pitted against humans.

The bed you were places in was vast, and ornate enough to make it clear someone of high standing had provided it. With your memory hazing too soon after the end of all the chaos of the masked ball, after Ruthven's arrival, you were unable to think of a logical candidate.

Especially with no one being particularly thrilled to see Vanitas: kin of the blue moon, and a human, among them in the ballroom. They said he had 'the stench of a human' clinging to his very essence.

That sunrise... It sent broad tendrils of light into the room, through a window with the curtains bound up either side with goldish rope. From such a point, it was clear the room was high up. Very high. The only place anywhere near that high was that colossal castle at the heart of Altus' Paris.

When you stepped close, everything became clearer: stretched out, like the castle were reaching out an arm and keeping such an arm's length away from it, was a turret containing a bell. From where you were, it was hard to tell exactly its function, but anyone with imagination could guess it was a clocktower. The face of the mechanism likeely faced the city at its feet.

And there.

There he was. Vanitas. The black-robed, procelin-skinned human you'd made an effort to shadow. He was hard to read and impossible to charm, but you could tell well enough that he was drawn to heights. Half from times since meeting, half because he was kicking his legs over the edge of the clocktower, and his black clad silhouette was leisurely draped over the edge like the drop couldn't kill him thrice over.

There, in his mind, he was simply conflicted.

And whenever he was conflicted, or threatened, his brows would furrow, he would avert his eyes, and his mouth would be glued shut— Moreso, always in his annoying, ugly pout that made anyone want to wail and punch him hard in the jaw! ...And he still looked ravishing.

That disaster was one that hadn't fazed him in the moment. Not the clashing, not the argument with you over ethics like you had the right— Not even when he offered his body to Jeanne in a move of pity.

But clarity always came over him like a cold wave, maybe even an avalanche of snow, a while after. Maybe it was when he saw her Mark of Possession on his neck like he was something from the butcher's, maybe it was that you'd had to jump and protect him which went against his very beliefs, or maybe even something as simple as... You hadn't been happy. When that was paired with the reminder you stood between him and Ruthven... It was too much! And it made him mad. Humiliated. Unwilling to walk.

But when had that ever stopped you? You'd come this far, and accompanying him was akin to climbing up an eighty foot ice wall slathered in oil while barefoot.

Besides, he looked painfully lonely.