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Babet is twenty-two when he dies.
*
Babet comes to Paris after his mother dies, when Babet is thirteen. Thirteen is a very unlucky year for him in the most horrendously common of ways, starting with the death of his mother. She was German, and lovely, and far too soft for her husband or her son.
Babet’s father is French, and much more intense than seems reasonable. After the death of his wife he leaves Berlin and moves back to his hometown of Paris. He takes two suitcases of clothes, one suitcase of books, and a grieving thirteen-year-old boy.
This is the year that Babet becomes Monsieur instead of Herr. This is the year that his mother’s German slips out from under his tongue and is replaced with his father’s French. This is the year that Babet learns about magic.
*
He cannot use magic. He cannot feel it coursing through his veins or burning at his fingertips or resting, heavy, on his lower teeth. His father does not speak of it. He is a law-abiding citizen and an upright man, and in his heart he believes that magic is the work of the devil– he was very careful to keep his son away from the areas of Berlin where such things were practiced freely. But no longer. He has all but given up on caring for the dark, sullen child.
Babet does not believe the first time he sees magic (a girl, floating beneath the stained glass windows in Notre Dame on a blistering summer day, when the cathedral is full of tourists, their upturned faces magnificent in shades of purple and blue and orange). He believes it to be a ruse, or a trick; if he were religious, he would have called it a miracle. He is thirteen and so full of anger that he wants to take up stones and cast them at the girl’s head. Instead he stares and stares until the girl finally leaves the window and alights gracefully on the cathedral floor.
*
The second time, Babet cannot explain the magic, and it makes him angrier. There is a man playing the violin on a corner in Montmartre, and the violin is bleeding bright red color into the air like a pair of wings, fashioned from light.
Am I going insane? But he is not– he can see others reacting to the light. They lift their hands to run their fingers across it, as though it is a bolt of scarlet silk. Babet is fourteen, and his father does not come home in the evenings anymore. He grabs a passing woman by the arm and demands, “How is he doing that?”
The woman pulls her arm away but attempts to smile at him, because he is skinny and pale and has bruise-like shadows beneath his eyes. “It’s just a spell on the violin strings,” she tells him. “This man is good, but you should go to one of the theaters. Imagine a whole orchestra of color.”
Then she is gone, and Babet is left staring at the busker with distrust.
*
He sees magic for the third time barely a week later, when he walks into the Bibliothèque Richelieu. Even as an adult, he will never be able to describe the pure, unfiltered awe that he feels when he first steps through the large wooden doors.
The very air seems to glow gold. And the books are flying.
Babet stands in the middle of the atrium and stares for hours and hours.
*
Once Babet’s eyes are open, Paris becomes a wonderland. He forgets about Berlin. He loses the last traces of his German drawl. At midnight, on the métro platforms underground, he finds magicians and necromancers and devils, illegal and full of more power than Babet has ever seen in his life. They filter through the tunnels like rats and fill the darkness with sharp, sparkling stars. The underground is organized in loose gangs and alliances, but Babet moves through them all freely, too young to be a threat and far too easily impressed– the older boys love to show off to him, because hungry wonder is so plain on his pale face.
When Babet is taken into the catacombs for the first time, it nearly kills him. The catacombs are full of blackness and corruption. Necromancy is casual and bloody. The catacombs are home to a whole new class of outlaws, ones with curses and magical quirks that make them dangerous.
When Babet emerges his palms are cut open and he is missing two of his back teeth. But he’s alive, still, and hopped up on excitement, clutching a silver knife that he’s claimed for his own. He is fifteen years old.
*
Babet’s father dies when Babet is sixteen. Babet does not know this, because he has already run away from home for good.
He sleeps in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, a twenty-minute walk from the entrance to the catacombs. Sleeping in the catacombs themselves would be an invitation for death. He runs through them most nights with his magical cohorts, then dozes in the library during the day. It’s quiet– the place is full of students who are usually busy with their work. All Babet has to do is look like a fellow student who has nodded off over a book and no one will bother him.
He reads, too, when he can’t sleep. The Sainte-Geneviève is full of magical literature, in German as well as French. He reads about witches. He reads about magical persecution. He reads articles about Paris as an emerging haven for the open practice of all types of magic. It makes him ache. After a day of reading, he can hardly wait to flee into the city at night.
*
He gravitates towards theaters, too, constantly. He sneaks into the Philharmonie de Paris, all the way on the edge of the 19th arrondissement, to watch the orchestra play. After the performance, it takes several minutes for him to unfreeze.
It’s beautiful. Both the music, and the color it produces. Warm amber and gold from the lower strings, brighter red from the trumpets. Bronze from the trombones. The silver, the blue, the daring points of bright white. Crimson sparks fly out over it all with every beat on the various drums. It’s a cacophony of hues and Babet is transfixed. He understands art. He understands the universe. Every secret of world must surely be contained within this wondrous explosion of color.
He goes to every performance he can, both of the Orchestre de Paris and of every other group of repute. He always gives his spare coins to buskers on the street, who fill the air with wondrous rainbows.
He likes musicals. He likes plays. The actors fascinate him– the way they mimic emotion strikes chord after chord in his heart. He’s jealous of them, in an ill-defined way. He wants the expressive gestures that the men make with their hands, and the loft of the women’s voices as they fill the theater with lovely words. He wants to capture the moments and keep them in a jar, to be taken out and shaken whenever he misses the memory.
He hangs around the various cabarets enough that they recruit him to paint faces and haul up curtains, when stagehands are missing or out on smoke breaks, because he looks like he should be someone’s kid. One of the actresses gives him a kiss on his cheek at the end of her last performance and it’s impossible to get the lipstick off for at least a day. Babet starts looking closer at the various backstage cosmetics after that, and decides that most (if not all) of them have been spelled to last longer.
Magic is everywhere in the theater. He loves it, but it ends up being the thing that drives him out. He can’t feel the golden buzz of power and it hurts to be around so many people who can, and who use it to create such beauty.
Beauty seems unattainable. He starts spending even more time underground, where the magic is dark and gritty.
The catacombs have their own precarious theater, in a way. Babet finds himself entrenched in the strange games played with white masks, where the audience is the prey. “Don’t get caught,” someone says to Babet, the first time he joins in the game. He almost does, and almost dies for the second time in the span of a year.
It’s the most fun he’s ever had in his life. The next time he plays the game, he joins the actors. He prefers it that way.
He kisses a girl for the first time during one of these games, on a bitter cold night when he is seventeen. He wears his mask and he keeps a knife in his left hand for the entire evening– when the girl catches him and kisses him, he holds it out of the way, so he doesn’t slide it underneath her ribs by accident.
She’s drunk on something, or maybe high. Babet has to lift his mask out of the way after the first awkward moment, and she laughs a little. “It isn’t Valentine’s day,” he manages to say, past the bright burn of something like surprise in his stomach.
She just kisses him harder. He drops the knife and gets his hands in her hair. He doesn’t know how long they stay pressed against the cold section of wall– all he knows is that at some point, she pulls back, drops a last kiss on his forehead, and disappears into the dark passages without a word.
Babet goes to pick up the knife and then frowns and checks his pockets. “Jesus,” he mutters.
She stole his fucking wallet.
Babet pulls his mask back down and heads deeper into the catacombs with a smile on his face.
*
Babet is no student. He has no professors standing over him to guide his eyes towards classic literature or philosophy or science. He reads indiscriminately in the libraries he frequents and gains a vast and scattered amount of knowledge of a few very specific subjects. He loves reading about the American Revolution. He spends an entire week reading his way through the books on German poets, and then spends a week on the French ones. He swallows economics whole but manages to miss most of the math that goes along with it. His understanding of biology is vast; his understand of geography is nonexistent. Certain periods of history simply do not exist to him. Greek myth passes him by entirely, but Egyptian is frightfully alive. He thinks those gods must be the ones that haunt the underground.
The poetry, however, is his favorite. Rilke makes him feel like he’s dying. Baudelaire is like being brought back alive. He reads until he is drunk with it and whispering poems to the skulls that line the catacombs. ‘I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone,’ becomes a mantra that pulses through his head as he watches sparks and colors fly from the hands of the magicians.
*
He kisses a boy for the first time at age eighteen. It’s Halloween, and he has an elaborate mask that makes his face look like a skull (he has worn this mask many times throughout the years, and he does not see the irony until later).
Halloween on the surface is noisy and bright. It’s fun for everyone involved. Fear is a delight, a party favor. People swallow it like candy and scream with delight.
In the catacombs, it’s an all-out war. Babet usually stays away, but this year his curiosity gets the better of him, and he plunges down into the Parisian underground and follows the first familiar faces he sees. It’s a dangerous night– he should stick with the people he knows.
The covens have staked their territories and handed out curses like treats. “It the most terrible time of the year,” one of them says. Every one of his teeth is made of steel. “It’s a witching night.”
He offers Babet a flask of some black potion that makes his head spin as soon as he drinks. He regrets taking it immediately, but it’s too late. The man with the steel teeth has him by the wrist and is pulling him along with the witches, like their pale familiar. Babet swallows down the nausea and tries to keep up as they drag him along, filling the passages with sparks as they go.
That night, they venture deeper underground than Babet has ever travelled, seeking each other out in the dark and trying to catch each other unawares. The stakes are impossibly high and terrifying, especially because Babet’s head is swimming and his vision full of false flashes of light. Someone gets killed right in front of him and resurrected less than three minutes later. Babet bites his lip so hard he breaks through the skin, trying to stay silent.
He can’t fight with magic like most of the subterranean dwellers can, but he’s gotten by well enough with his knife and his own cleverness. He has no chance against necromancers, though, and he knows it. As soon as the players have moved on from the bloody spot he starts making his way to the surface, keeping his knife out to dissuade anyone from giving him trouble.
The one thing he still doesn’t have a defense against is people who try to kiss him. It’s a boy this time, looming out of the darkness, and this kiss lasts longer and goes deeper. It ends with Babet leaning against the wall at his back, knees weak, while the boy– a stranger, a redhead– grins at him. The upper half of his face is obscured by a black mask.
“You’re heartless, Babet,” he says, and kisses him again. Babet’s head is spinning. He doesn’t have the will to push the boy away. His mouth is so hot, and everything else is freezing.
It doesn’t occur to Babet until much, much later to wonder how this stranger knew his name. He sleeps in a doorway that night, curled in on himself to keep out the cold and wishing he had just a scrap of magic to keep him warm. His tongue tastes awful and his head is pulsing with spikes of pain. It takes him a long time to fall asleep.
When he wakes up in the morning, he can no longer see color. It’s his first curse. Babet leans against a wall and cries and cries– how will be able to see the orchestras now?
*
He doesn’t go back to the catacombs the next night. He clumsily breaks into a theater and sleeps backstage among the costumes while the actors rush around him. No one disturbs him. The next day, he travels even further across Paris, as far away as he can get from every catacomb entrance that he knows.
The colors don’t come back. Babet feels numb. After that first night, he starts avoiding theaters, too.
*
He works in a restaurant for a little while, until he gets in a fistfight in the middle of a shift and is thrown out into the street. He’s a little too old now for charity. His pale face is menacing, not pitiful. No one wants to employ a man who looks like a criminal, and Babet’s black eyes are a touch too deadly for polite company.
He does what he can. Existence is a chore. He wants to feel alive, but he wants to do it in a way that won’t get him killed. The catacombs did not teach him restraint, but they did teach him caution. There’s no point in jumping off buildings if he doesn’t have a plan for getting his feet to land safely on the pavement.
He gets in more fistfights, in alleyways and back rooms. The money in his hands is almost as satisfying as the blood on his face. He’s faster that people expect and stronger than he looks. He’s also desperate. They call him Le Fauve, the wildcat, and La Hyène for the way he laughs when he gets hit.
He wins a second knife in a bet. From that point on, he never leaves his various hidey holes without both blades strapped to his body. Balance and symmetry is something he learns from the twin points of silver. Loneliness is something he learns from other people, who are too wary of his sharp points and edges to venture near.
He sleeps on rooftops when the weather permits and in libraries again when it does not. He falls asleep holding poetry to his chest like a lover and wakes up with his head full of words.
*
There is one librarian who tries to intervene in his life– a kindly woman at the Bibliothèque Richelieu, who comes upon him one day dozing in a chair to tell him that the library is closing.
Babet straightens up, cursing internally. Usually he finds a place to hide away while the library shuts down so he can sleep there throughout the night, but he’s been so weary lately that sleep stole upon him without his consent. He mutters his apologies and tries to leave, but the older woman stops him with a hand on his arm.
“I see you in here often,” she says, “and I know you’re not a student.”
Babet freezes. He doesn’t look at her; he fixes his eyes on the bookshelves.
“It seems very strange,” she says. “You love reading and learning more than any of the students who pass through here. Why not try to go to school?” He opens his mouth to respond, but she cuts him off. “Poverty is no excuse for lack of education.”
Babet pulls away from her. “Excuse me,” he says coldly. “I need to return home.” He leaves her standing among the bookshelves and heads out into the freezing city.
He sleeps on a rooftop that night, curled against a chimney for warmth.
He never returns to the Bibliothèque Richelieu, after that day.
*
Just after spring returns to the city, he sees the man with the steel teeth in the middle of a crowded warehouse arena. For two minutes he is frozen. Then he challenges the man to a fight and knocks his feet out from under him within forty-five seconds. The crowd explodes. Babet is hardly winded, but triumph has his heart going like mad.
“You’re a quick bastard,” the man says as he hauls himself to his feet. He gives Babet a metallic grin and a handshake. “Brujon. Pleased to meet you.”
Babet shakes his hand with a grin. “Babet,” he says. He’s glad that Brujon doesn’t remember him. He wishes he could forget the boy who first went into the catacombs. He likes to think that he drowned that boy in the Seine, the day he lost his colors.
“I could use someone as quick as you,” Brujon tells him later. “I’ve got a boss who could use you, too.” He toasts Babet with an improbably large glass of clear alcohol. “Keep your ears to the wall. If you find us, you’ll know.”
Babet doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t drink anymore, but he does smoke, and he lights a cigarette instead of responding to Brujon’s over-confidence.
“Hopefully I’ll see you soon,” Brujon finishes. He drains his glass in one impressive go and claps Babet on the shoulder before he disappears into the shadowy corners of the warehouse.
Babet leaves with his money and Brujon’s wallet tucked into the pocket of his coat.
*
He keeps his ears to the wall. He keeps his eyes open.
*
They say there is a magician haunting the Gare de Montparnasse who will not refuse any request. Babet is nineteen and still too curious for his own good– a yearning has taken up residence between his skin. He’s sick of fighting, and he’s sick of monotony. He wants new excitement. He wants magic.
There is plenty of it at the train station, of course. People levitate their luggage and spell their tickets so they won’t be lost. They navigate with the most wondrous maps. The workers even use magic to keep the trains running smoothly. It’s intriguing, but it’s all so mundane.
Babet waits. He wants to see something extraordinary.
Finally, one day, he sees a handprint upon a wall where there had not been a handprint the day before. He meanders over to inspect it. He cannot see how unnaturally bright it shines against the gray wall, nor does he know to call it red. He inspects it carefully before placing his own fingers over it.
When he draws his hand away, there is writing on his palm. Babet makes a fist to hide the words and leaves the Gare de Montparnasse as quickly as he can. Only once he has made it to the Place de Catalogne does he unfurl his fingers to reveal the perfect black letters.
« La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas. »
He wants to laugh. He wants to yell. Instead he closes his hand again and leans against the fountain railing. The sky is overcast and threatening, but he does not move, even when the first few raindrops begin to fall upon the surface of the water before him.
He knows that quote. The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist. How does he know it? Where is it from? Babet kicks his feet moodily against the edge of the fountain. He is a devil; he should know the scripture that other have penned for him. The answer is floating on the edge of his awareness, vague and irritating.
After several minutes of frustrated thinking, he puts his hands in his pockets and leaves the Place. The rain is falling harder now, drenching Babet’s black hair and soaking down into the collar of his shirt. It bothers him immensely. He despises rain. What was it that Baudelaire said? ‘When close as prison-bars, from overhead, the clouds let fall the curtain of the rains…’
He stops in the middle of the street. Baudelaire. The devil quote is from Baudelaire. The magician from Montparnasse is trying to make him think of Baudelaire.
And then Babet does laugh out loud, because the puzzle pieces have slotted together so gloriously. In the Gare de Montparnasse, he found a clue about Baudelaire. And he knows, from his time in the library, that Baudelaire is buried in the Cimetière de Montparnasse.
He changes directions and keeps walking through the rain. It doesn’t bother him anymore. He’s a hero now, off on his own magical quest. Off to find a devil in a graveyard.
*
The devil is lounging on Baudelaire’s monument like it’s a fine couch upon which he has just swooned. His eyes are closed when Babet approaches through the rain, but something tells Babet that this man would be impossible to take by surprise. “I take it you’re a fan of Baudelaire?” he asks, once he’s close enough.
The man’s eyes open slowly. “No more than any other self-respecting Frenchman.” The corner of his mouth curls at some private joke.
Babet shoves his hands in his pockets. “I was told you could be found in the train station,” he says. “No one said anything about a treasure hunt.”
“What can I say? I like to be prized.” The man gives him an easy grin. “I will admit to being curious. I wanted to see if you are as clever as I’ve heard.”
The rain is still falling gently around them, but Babet’s man looks completely dry. He’s still sitting on the monument. Babet had checked the tomb first– how inconvenient for him, that Baudelaire was commemorated in two separate places in the same cemetery! – but now he has found what he was seeking. Knight, treasure.
The treasure is a skinny boy with a round black hat and perfect dark skin, who looks barely older than Babet himself. He’s also the prettiest boy Babet has ever seen in his life, and he feels personally attacked.
“You know me,” he says.
“I know about you,” the magician corrects. “And I want to know more. Street fighter, pickpocket… And not an ounce of magic. Tell me, can you truly not see color?”
“Not at all,” Babet says honestly.
“Fascinating.” The man holds out a gloved hand. After a moment, Babet shakes it.
“My name is Babet,” he says.
The magician sighs. “You’re going to think I’m a dreary cliché,” he complains. At Babet’s questioning look, he says, “My name is Montparnasse.”
Babet laughs, and laughs, and laughs. He tips his head back and lets his elation cut right through the rain.
*
Montparnasse leaves a single handprint on Babet’s thigh. He tells Babet that it is bright red, like blood. Like paint. “So I can always find you,” he says. He leaves red handprints on everything he touches– he’s cursed, like Babet. That shouldn’t be so intriguing.
“And how will I be able to find you?” Babet murmurs. He presses his own palm to the handprint and looks up at Montparnasse.
The magician is perched in the windowsill. He has a small, dark Parisian apartment in a building on the Rue de Sèvres that looks abandoned. On the inside, it’s a thieves’ hideaway. Babet is drunk on magic, warm and happy and in awe of this strange man from the cemetery who is blowing smoke out the window.
“You found me today, didn’t you?”
The windows of Montparnasse’s room face La Tour Montparnasse. Babet falls asleep thinking that he has never met a more pretentious or fascinating person in his entire life.
*
Montparnasse has a gang. Babet laughs himself silly over it. “You couldn’t be more of a cliché if you tried,” he gasps. Montparnasse just rolls his eyes. He’s cutting up an apple with one of Babet’s knives and handing over the slices one by one.
“It’s natural for magicians and witches to band together,” he says. “I just happen to accept non-magical folk as well. Not a coven, but a gang.”
They’re sitting on the floor of Montparnasse’s little room. In the daylight, everything looks different. Montparnasse has clothes strewn everywhere– heaped on chairs, spread over the foot of the bed, hanging off the edge of the dresser. None of the clothes are on the ground, though; Babet feels like that says a lot about who Montparnasse is as a person.
“Am I in the gang, then?” Babet asks, accepting another apple slice and grinning. “Do we get matching jackets?”
Montparnasse huffs and pulls his jean jacket closer around his shoulders. “Mockery will get you nowhere,” he says severely. Babet can’t stop looking at him. At his gloved fingers, deftly moving the knife into the white flesh of the apple. At his bare feet and the sharp bones of his ankles. He’s woken up in a strange new world, where people as lovely and interesting as Montparnasse will mark him up with handprints and feed him apple slices. Magic, he thinks. And then, Mine.
“There’s no initiation into the gang,” Montparnasse sniffs. “There are things that are mine, and things that are not. You belong to me now.”
“Oh, do I?”
Montparnasse holds out an apple slice and raises an eyebrow. When Babet reaches out to take it, Montparnasse moves it away. His eyebrow inches even higher.
After a moment, during which their eyes stay locked on each other, Babet lowers his head and eats the apple slice out of Montparnasse’s hand.
“Mine,” Montparnasse murmurs. “As surely as I am yours. You want magic. You’ve been searching for it your entire life.” He holds up the knife and lets go. Babet flinches, but the bright silver blade stays suspended above Montparnasse’s palm, turning over and over in midair. “You found it,” he says. “Welcome home.”
*
Montparnasse’s gang is wide and varied. None of them sleep in Montparnasse’s bed, but most of them spend at least most of their nights in the building on the Rue de Sèvres. Babet meets two of them that very day, when he and Montparnasse descend onto the ground floor of the building with the intention of going out for the evening. Two of Montparnasse’s lackeys are lounging by the door, presumably guarding it. One of them is very familiar.
“Hey, you found us!” Brujon says, as soon as he lays eyes on Babet. Then his expression sharpens. “What the fuck did you do with my wallet, you little bastard?”
Babet tosses it to him. He’s a petty bitch, and he wants Brujon to know it. “I needed to make sure we’d meet again,” he says.
Brujon flips open the wallet and scowls. “You took all the money.”
“What can I say?” Babet shrugs. “I’m expensive.”
Montparnasse laughs. Brujon glares. A third man is leaning against the bannister who looks exactly like Brujon, except without the steel teeth. Babet won’t find out until later that his name is Gueulemer, that he’s Brujon’s twin, and that he’s cursed to never speak.
“I think you’ll do very well here,” Montparnasse says. He buries his hand in Babet’s dark hair and gives him a kiss on the center of his forehead.
*
Babet’s status shifts more firmly from runaway to criminal. Suddenly he’s staking out buildings and picking pockets, running cons with Montparnasse and keeping his knives in his hands every time he goes out.
He is very, very good with knives.
He’s also the best liar, which Montparnasse finds out within a week. All that time in theaters, Babet thinks privately, made him a passable actor. He becomes the distraction. The decoy. The victim– until the moment when the others loom out of the shadows and their target realizes what a fool he’s been.
Babet stops sleeping in libraries and sleeps in Montparnasse’s bed instead, usually by himself. The magician is usually up and about in the early morning hours, which is Babet’s prime sleeping time these days. His nocturnal teenage years are an asset to him now, but since he has the luxury of a bed he makes sure to use it as much as he can.
Montparnasse is the first person to tell him that he talks in his sleep. “I didn’t know you spoke German,” he says one day.
Babet blinks at him sleepily. It’s noon, and he’s just woken up– the sunlight coming through the window is far too harsh for him. “I haven’t had to in a while,” he grumbles. “But I was born in Berlin.”
“I was born in Prague.”
Babet laughs. “And you call yourself a proper Frenchman? You bastard.”
*
Montparnasse is touchy and dramatic. He’s constantly flinging his arm over Babet’s shoulders and dropping razor-sharp kisses on his cheeks. Babet bears it well. He isn’t used to the contact– most physicality in his life has been brutal– but he trusts Montparnasse. Already. God help him, but he trusts this skinny thief king.
He doesn’t reciprocate very often. He doesn’t get jealous, either. Montparnasse is the only person he likes to kiss, but he doesn’t mind if Montparnasse kisses other people.
Babet does, however, get into the habit of wrapping his hands around Montparnasse’s wrists right before he falls asleep. Only if they’re falling asleep at the same time, which is rare. He sleeps better when Montparnasse is there. He thinks Montparnasse does, too.
*
“You’re quite the reader,” Montparnasse says one day. Babet looks up from his book, hazy and unfocused– his head is in another world.
“I love to read,” he says. “It’s almost all I did as a teenager.”
“Really?” Montparnasse looks at him curiously.
So Babet tells him about the Bibliothèque Richelieu and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. The story of his adolescence is full of holes– he isn’t ready to talk about the theaters, or the catacombs– but Montparnasse listens attentively nonetheless. “I’ve never told this story to anyone,” Babet finds himself saying, more than once. It makes him feel pathetic. He thinks of his mother for the first time in years, and how she would ask about his day every evening. He talks himself into silence and then remains in a stupor for the rest of the evening. He reads, without seeing the words on the page, and remembers.
The next day, Montparnasse steals him a copy of Rimbaud’s poetry, first edition. After that it’s Proust. Rilke. Apollinaire. Hesse. Camus. Priceless books with beautiful endpapers and battered covers. He steals several copies of Baudelaire, and Babet laughs every time he finds a new one tucked in the bedsheets next to him when he wakes up in the afternoon.
*
“Baudelaire went bankrupt because of the money he spent on clothes,” Babet says one day. “That reminds me of someone. Someone I know. I can’t put my finger on who…”
He gets a Valentino jacket thrown right in his face.
*
They rob museums. They steal magical items. Babet is drowning in the Parisian underworld– he never expected it to be so full of light. He thought all criminals would be like those in the catacombs, bloody and ruthless and thrice-dead.
He never knew to expect a gentleman thief like Montparnasse. The prettiest boy Babet has ever seen, with all of the prettiest clothes.
Babet loves his life right now. He loves the spells that Montparnasse puts on his silver knives, and the spoils of war they keep in the apartment on the Rue de Sèvres, and the way Montparnasse looks when he pulls his gloves off with his teeth. Babet begins to feel immortal– a terrible feeling to cultivate, especially in one who is doomed.
He gets complacent. That is also very dangerous. He does not know how precarious his balance is until he falls.
*
Babet has been arrested many, many times by the age of twenty. This time, it’s different. This time, it’s a knife fight that he doesn’t start in an alley that has always been safe. It ends with a shiv in someone else’s ribs and Babet being slammed against a cop car with his hands pinned behind his back.
This time, he appears before the Tribunal Correctionnel. This time, he is sent to jail. When he emerges, both his eyes are blackened and he cannot speak– his second curse.
It’s a clumsy curse. It doesn’t fit on him; that’s what Montparnasse says, right before he breaks it. Babet takes a breath and begins to scream. He screams and screams and does not stop until his voice gives out again and Montparnasse is holding him fiercely in his arms. Then Montparnasse takes him home.
“Tell me what I can do to fix you,” Montparnasse whispers. They are lying in bed the in the Rue de Sèvres apartment, curled against each other like a pair of stolen silver spoons.
Babet doesn’t know how to articulate his fear or acknowledge his memories. In the end, all he manages to whisper is, “Don’t let them hurt me.”
*
He doesn’t ask about the curses until over a month later. It comes up on a gray, rainy day, when Montparnasse looks out the rain-streaked window and says, “Sometimes I forget that this is how you view the entire world. Colorless.”
Babet is sitting on the floor, reading one of his stolen Baudelaires. He looks up and says, quietly, “You broke one of my curses.”
He doesn’t get a response at first.
It takes a moment for him to steel himself and ask, “Could you break this one?”
Montparnasse lights a cigarette and sits down next to him on the floor. “I don’t think I can,” he says. He takes a drag from the cigarette before he sets it between Babet’s lips.
Babet closes the book so he doesn’t drop ash on the pages. “Why not”
“There are two types of curses, for all intents and purposes,” Montparnasse says. “I usually call them addition and subtraction curses. An addition curse is like painting a wall. It’s possible to chip that paint away again, you follow?” Then he sighs. “With a subtraction curse it’s more like someone knocks the wall out completely, and makes it so you can’t build a new one.”
Babet drags deeply on the cigarette. He didn’t realize he was hoping for an eventual cure to his curse until this moment, when he learned that a cure was impossible. “Oh,” he says quietly. He imagines crimson and scarlet and gold being drained out of his eyes and disappearing into the Parisian air, never to be seen again. He remembers what colors looked like, which is perhaps the worst part. He hasn’t been back to the orchestra since.
“I’m sorry,” Montparnasse says. He leans over and presses a kiss to Babet’s temple. “The person who tried to steal your voice– that was another subtraction curse. If he had done it right, there would be almost nothing I or anyone else could do. You would have been voiceless for the rest of your life.” He leans away and holds his hand out for the cigarette. “Like Gueulemer. That’s what happened to him. Luckily, your attacker didn’t have a fucking clue what he was doing.”
It’s a chilling thought. Babet lays a hand on his throat and thinks about it. “Is there anything I can do?” he asks. “I don’t like being the eternal victim.”
“Spelled jewelry,” Montparnasse says slowly. “Usually that kind of stuff acts as an amplifier for someone who already has magic, but we could get them custom made, maybe.”
Babet wrinkles his nose. “Is that all?”
“Tattoos, too.” Montparnasse grins suddenly. “Oh, excellent.”
*
Babet gets his first magical tattoo at the age of twenty-one and accumulates five more over the course of the year. “It would have been a good idea to get seven,” Montparnasse notes, after the last string of charms has healed around Babet’s wrist. “Seven is a very magical number.”
“Your handprint is the seventh,” Babet says simply.
Montparnasse grins.
*
He still gets cursed a third time, in the middle of the summer when the shadows are long. Montparnasse has to point out that Babet’s shadow has somehow disappeared.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Babet groans. “I thought I was safe from curses now.”
“You seem to gather the most interestingly harmless ones,” Montparnasse says thoughtfully. “They aren’t life-threatening, so they slip through.”
“Who stole my shadow? How? Why?”
Montparnasse shrugs. “That’s pure malicious trickery,” he says. “Superstition, really. People without shadows used to get burned at the stake. Someone is trying to tell you that they have their eye on you.” He tucks his arm in Babet’s and continues walking down the street. “We can get your shadow back, if you think you need it.”
“I’ll let him stay free for now,” Babet mutters. “He could probably use a break.” Inside, he wonders if his shadow is truly gone or if sunlight is just streaming directly through his bones. He wonders why the subtraction of a shadow isn’t like the tearing down of a wall, and how Montparnasse plans on getting it back.
*
They do manage to retrieve his shadow. Apparently the magic around it is special. “There are a thousand exceptions to everything,” Montparnasse says with a sigh. “It’s worse than learning a new language.”
Babet tells himself he’s imaging the lag between his movements and those of the restored shadow. “Did you find out who took it?”
“Nope.” Montparnasse pulls his hat down to keep the amber evening sun out of his eyes. “I just called it home.”
Babet shakes his head. Magic, he thinks, sounds like a dreadfully unorganized mess.
*
Magic is also unbearably beautiful.
He doesn’t know how the sheet music ended up in Montparnasse’s apartment, but it’s there, and Babet is idly flipping through it one day while he waits for the others to return from a scouting job. He doesn’t hear Montparnasse come in– he can’t read music, but he’s lost in a memory of soaring melodies and bright strains of color– but he does notice when the magician pulls the pages right out of his hands. “Hey!” he protests.
“Are you a musician?”
Babet glowers at him. “No.”
“That’s a shame.” Montparnasse takes the pages over to the table and starts writing all over them with one of his sharp black pens. Babet rolls his eyes and ignores him– until the first sweet notes begin to fill the air.
He turns around in shock.
Montparnasse is holding the pages down with his eyes closed in concentration, and music is filling the room– music with no source, music that fills the space with harmony and sound.
There is no light, and no colorless color, but there is sound. Babet closes his eyes and listens. It feels like the music is streaming directly through his blood and filling his body. He remembers hiding in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to listen to this very piece when he was younger. He can still remember the sweeping blue and the hints of crimson that hung, shimmering, in the air.
His chest is aching.
Montparnasse comes to him as the last notes of the song fall gently around them and kisses Babet on each of his temples, very gently. Babet wraps his fingers around Montparnasse’s wrists and tries to breathe.
They never talk about it.
*
Babet’s circle grows. When he was a catacomb teenager he followed his idols, who liked to show him magic tricks but did not like to offer warmth. Comradeship was rare. It still is, but now Babet has a few people he can claim for his own. He is closer to Montparnasse than he ever was to anyone, including his parents. He is close to the twins, Gueulemer and Brujon. He is close to the Thenardier siblings, especially Gavroche, who follows Montparnasse around the way Babet followed the underground covens.
Gavroche is like a firework. He burns with magic. Watching him makes Babet’s head spin– the kid’s feet never touch the ground, and strange bursts of light seem to appear in the air around him whenever he speaks.
They’re perched on a rooftop together, Montparnasse and Gavroche and Babet, eating cherries and spitting the pits over the edge of the building. (Babet can’t tell how scarlet his mouth is, but Montparnasse can. What a beautiful day it’s turning out to be, he thinks.)
The sun is shining. It’s warm on the top of Babet’s head. He’s tired– he was up all the night, skulking around a particular house and waiting for the tenants to leave. Montparnasse is much more well-rested and flush with the victory of a robbery well-conducted. He keeps prodding Babet to keep him awake and throwing more cherries at him.
Gavroche starts levitating the cherries in careful lines. Montparnasse deliberately ruins his work by reaching forward and plucking them out of the air– before Gavroche can even protest he pops them in his mouth and grins. “You’re a bastard,” Gavroche says.
Montparnasse raises his eyebrows. “Watch your mouth.”
Babet just leans his head back and sighs. “That’s extremely rich, coming from you,” he mutters.
He’s happy. God, he’s happy. Tired, of course, but nothing can beat the warmth of the sun and the sweet taste of cherries on his tongue. Nothing can replace the way Montparnasse looks sprawled out across the rooftop, keeping a lazy eye on the Parisian skyline. Babet closes his eyes again. Magic, he thinks absently. Maybe this is where it starts.
*
Less than a week later, Babet dies.
*
Poison. In his teacup. A magical person would have sensed the small, painful burn the liquid gave off. Babet doesn’t notice. He is sitting in Montparnasse’s apartment alone in the early morning, trying to wake up.
Instead, he dies. It is very gentle; it does not hurt at all.
*
(Babet does not get to witness the aftermath. He does not see the teacup shatter on the ground, or the way the dark liquid inside disappears in a haze of thick smoke. He does not hear the way Montparnasse screams when they find his body.
He is limp for the entire trip across Paris, bundled in Gueulemer’s arms as though he is a child. He does not look dead– he was already so pale, in life.
They haul him to the Latin Quarter, to an apartment that Babet has never visited. Montparnasse bursts through the door, calling out an unfamiliar name. Gueulemer lays Babet on the hardwood floor.
“What’s going on?” A man is standing on the other end of the room in his bare feet. He does not open his eyes when he speaks.
“We need your necromancer,” Montparnasse says. “Now, now!” He is holding Babet’s wrist so tightly that it would form bruises, if the blood could move to create them.
Babet does not feel it.)
*
His awareness starts underwater.
“I can’t tell you what it’s like to be dead,” he will say later. “I don’t remember it. I wasn’t there. There was no me to think or see or feel.”
But the space in between feels like water. It is cool. It is dark. Babet is being drawn up from the bottom of a black lake. His body does not exist, and then it does. Numb. Sore. The tips of his fingers are buzzing. The back of his throat is burning. That is the first bite of pain he feels, and it grows to such a pitch that he thinks he cannot bear it. He thrashes within himself, for he cannot get his body to move– it is thick and heavy and it is not his anymore.
His head breaks the surface. His eyes snap open and he sucks in a breath of air.
“Babet!”
That’s him. That’s his name. He is Babet. Once the name belongs to him, memories follow. He remembers his mother’s hands. His father’s voice. Berlin, Paris. The métro lines and the catacombs. Color, and its absence. The magician in the cemetery. The poison in the cup.
The first word that Babet utters in his second life is “Fuck!”
“He’s back,” someone says dryly.
Babet’s head is pounding. The fire in his throat has not abated, and his simple exclamation sends him into a fit of coughing that tears his poor throat to shreds. There are hands on him, holding him to the ground. His vision is blurry and wavering– a bad picture on an old television. “Drink this,” someone says.
He takes a grateful gulp of water, and then another and another, until he has drained the cool glass container. Breathing is still an ordeal. The tips of his fingers are still buzzing.
Someone is leaning over him. They take him by the jaw and tilt his face up so they can glare directly into his eyes. Babet knows this face. He tries to smile against the fingers digging into his cheeks.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” Montparnasse snarls at him. Behind him, Babet can see the vague shapes of the other men in the room. Gueulemer. The necromancer. The man whose eyes are closed.
“You’ll never be able to doubt me from now on,” Babet murmurs. “I came back from the dead for you.”
Then he passes out.
*
Babet is twenty-two when he dies, and twenty-two when he comes back to life.
His savior is a man he’s never met, named Bahorel. An illegal necromancer– but not like the ones in the catacombs. A good, honest man. A friend of Montparnasse’s friend, who now holds Babet’s life in his black-stained hands.
Babet doesn’t know these people, the necromancer or the strange witchboy who never opens his eyes. They don’t stay in the apartment where he comes back alive, because Montparnasse is afraid that they’ve been followed. They can’t go back to the Rude de Sèvres, either. “We’ll be fine,” Montparnasse says. He kisses the witchboy on the forehead right before they leave.
Everything seems to have darkened by several shades in Babet’s vision. White has tipped into gray; gray into black. Later he will weep bitter tears over the fact that not even death could give him color again– for now he doesn’t feel anything.
His life is still coming back to him in fragments. He relives each moment painfully, as though the wounds they tear in him are new. “Remembering is only a new form of suffering,” he says to Montparnasse hazily. Baudelaire, for some reason, jumps into his head whenever he looks at the wicked magician.
“We’ll be somewhere safe soon,” Montparnasse says tightly.
Cemetery. Train station. Red handprints, and a bed with clean white sheets. Babet closes his eyes and tries to pretend like he isn’t shaking. Gueulemer can probably feel it; he has one arm wrapped around Babet to keep him from stumbling as they walk. Babet wants to sit in the middle of the road and stay there. He can’t imagine bearing the agony of this journey for another moment, but he bears it.
*
They hole up in a building not far from La Tour Eiffel and stay there through the days as Babet pulls his body and his memories back under his control, piece by piece. Not everything is bad. Certain memories make him cry with laughter as he remembers them for the first time– he spends most of his time heckling Montparnasse. It’s a wonderful distraction from the unsavory parts of the process.
He gets his strength back. With it comes all of his bitterness and cleverness and ruthlessness. They return to the old apartment to get his knives and his books– the only objects he treasures. “I missed you,” he croons to the silver blades, and kisses each one. He uses them to rob a man that same night, against Montparnasse’s wishes.
“I need to prove to you that I’m still here,” Babet says. Montparnasse goes silent. Things are easier after that, when Babet can get out into the city again. Stretch his legs, rob a mansion, taste the cold Parisian air on his tongue. Some things never change, no matter how different he is now.
Some of the changes are difficult to get used to. Every once in a while, he needs to find Bahorel and follow him around like a child for a while before he can return to Montparnasse. The compulsion is annoying, but Bahorel is a decent fellow, so Babet doesn’t mind as much as he otherwise might.
He’s always cold. He has to be reminded to eat. The irises of his eyes are silver. His tears are grey. According to Montparnasse, the handprint on his thigh has changed to dark maroon, which Babet likes better– it makes him feel special. Unique. Prized, among Montparnasse’s many followers.
“Of course you’re special to me,” Montparnasse says, when Babet mentions it. “You’re my grayscale demon.” He hands Babet a shard of a shattered teacup and tugs his gloves more firmly on his wrists. “Come along, we have work to do.”