Truly incredible, that Armand still doesn't feel any guilt at all for keeping Louis sedated and wrapped in cotton. But he was happy, and safe. Louis was always crushed by self-loathing and remorse the nights after his temper got the better of him, miserable in his suicidal, Catholic guilt, and so Armand took his anger away. Took his ability to harm himself away. Looked at the declaration that Armand would never make up for his part in the trial, accepted it, and decided to protect him and stay with him anyway.
Childish to look back at it and be bitter. On the inside, Louis was safe. Because Armand protected him, and his happiness.
The anger catches him, white-hot and somehow unexpected.
Louis keeps telling himself he can move past what's been done to him. Reasons his way to the idea that it couldn't have been always, and often, that he doesn't truly have seventy-seven years of missing pieces. But maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't know, because Daniel wasn't there to unravel all of them and the seams are invisible. Louis will never know what's gone.
Waits out the white-hot flashfire of his anger. Makes himself focus on the quality of their connection, the intensity of Armand's focus. A sensation not unlike fingers running along the contours of hand and palm, an idle little game Louis had played sometimes, in public and in private while they were in the midst of some task. A little tic of intimacy, following in the wake of this infuriating declaration.
The rage is wrestled into something manageable. Louis is trying. (Not unaware that the power here still lies with Armand, who will vanish into the air when he pleases. Louis can't hold him.)
Did I ask you then, in San Francisco? Did I ask you to take it away?
Does the question matter? Would Armand ever tell him something true, even when they are so far past the point where he is Armand's to keep?
Somewhere (not too far away), a slow breath, in and out.
Fine.
'I told you so even after you began to remember.'
Self-evident. It would explain Armand's brittle confusion, his uneven strangeness in the face of Louis' anger at the reveal of altered memories. If Armand believed that he remembered all of it, then he believed Louis remembered asking to be spared further torment, and it was incongruous with the way he was blaming Armand as though he'd done something sinister.
'You described the pain of leaving the boy there as worse than your physical suffering. You were torturing yourself over it, even though it was the best path forward either of us could determine. Killing him was not an option, nor was transforming him.'
To call Daniel the boy again is a little strange, but Armand brushes past it. (The, that's the problem, isn't it, the boy, because he cannot bring himself to say our boy anymore, because Daniel isn't, he isn't Louis', not even partially, he belongs to Armand. His.) Instead he lays this out— and Louis should be able to follow the logic with ease, no matter how emotionally stunted he likes to pretend to be. Louis would not permit young Daniel's death, and Armand did not try and force it. Giving him the Dark Gift was also untenable, for a twenty-year-old whose still-forming mind was warped and damaged already from excessive drug use. It would have been hell for him. Even Louis, sentimental and dismayed, would not see someone else too young (even if he was barely too young this time) turned.
This is what Armand is asking him to believe, anyway.
'But you could not move past it. You would not speak to me about the things you said to me, or about Lestat, or about Claudia calling to you, or anything. It devoured your mind. And you could not bear it.'
Weeks ago, Daniel kneeling in front of him, saying "You didn't." Lestat, murmuring, "You would not wish to forget the boy you saved. You would not want to forget me, even this little bit of me." All that they'd said, things that had made sense in the moment. Louis had let their certainty act as a tether, a reassurance.
But neither of them had been in the room with him then. Lestat, miles away in New Orleans. Daniel, abandoned on a dirty cot with Louis' words as a buoy to pull him out of the dark place they'd left him.
And then it had been the two of them. Louis has nothing for it, no structure apart from the one Armand gave him.
I don't remember any of that.
But the trap is in the aspects of it that ring true. The parts that Louis turns over in his hands, knowing them to be reasonable. To be likely.
I don't remember, Armand.
Frustrated. Louis winding closer, as if proximity will provide clarity. As if he could see into Armand the way Armand sees into him. (Never, he has never been permitted and Louis knows that now, knows it was always a question of what Armand permitted him.) The suggestion of contact, attention narrowed down to what Armand lays out for Louis to examine. Weigh. Test against Daniel's certainty, Lestat's reassurance.
Louis winds closer. Easy for him to do so, because of his familiarity with Armand— he'll probably always be able to find him among the Many, when Armand isn't consciously obscuring himself. He isn't, now, and so there he is, held in his usual mental fortress but available, and faint glimpses can be caught. Frustration. And - even fainter - hurt?
'How convenient.'
(Is it.)
'Perhaps because no third party carried part of the weight. He was—'
Uncharacteristic faltering, trying to describe his now-fledgling. An insignificant mortal, some worthless drug addicted hustler, and yet Armand struggled to get his mind into compliance. Louis remembers that, surely, remembers stuffing more drugs into the boy, and hypnotizing him. Long hours. Over and over. Of course he was the thing that managed to disrupt the calm seal on Louis' mind. Aggravating, frustrating, fascinating.
'Challenging.' There. That word. 'Unlike your own relieved slide into forgetfulness. It wasn't easy for me. I didn't want to go on thinking of that argument alone, my temper shattered, your self-brutality, forever unresolved. I wasn't even sure it would take on you, a vampire, my.'
An awful pause.
'My companion. ... I left you with some memory of him. A mirror to his, as best I could. I could have taken it all away, Louis. I could have taken it all away and gone back to that house and gotten rid of a loose end of a boy, but I knew you cared for him. Even if you didn't remember, I would remember. I would know I did that to you. So I left what I did and I left him alone.'
Louis, leaning into him, reaching after the flicker of emotion in Armand. After that distant flicker of hurt in him. Is it so impossible to understand?
Is it enough for Louis, to feel this in him? To hear that faltering over the choice of word challenging and breathe a laugh into the empty room. (To feel some sickening swoop of uncertainty in his chest; had he been relieved? Had he wanted the brutality of their fight gone badly enough to have sought this from Armand?) As close as he's drawn into the familiar landscape of Armand's mind, the bristling uncertainly as he wavers.
Do you regret it?
A question asked more quietly than it might have been otherwise.
Does Armand regret anything he's done? Any of the ways he's harmed Louis? Louis remembers now, burning on that bed in filtered sunlight, gritting out Sorry as Armand turned from him.
Frustrating to have all the work he does brushed off. Hurtful to have the worst assumed of him, every time. Either he is stupid, or he is sinister. He must beg to be loved. He must beg for everything. He must endure resentment and anger and violence and exploitation. And when he doesn't, when he stands up for himself and says No more and vanishes anger, vanishes violence, makes things serene, there's no appreciation at all.
Regret? Does he regret it? Taking the best road, the best option, silencing Louis, preserving an interesting mortal, sticking a knife into Lestat?
Sometimes—
When Armand draws close, are the whites of his eyes like the flash of a predator before the fangs follow, like a wolf, like a tiger. Or is it the orange, bloody and unnatural, a monster's, a reminder that he's not human in a way beyond how Louis isn't human. A fossil painted to look like a person. Beneath rich skin and soft hair there is a coiled thing that predates all the artwork in the museum Louis was attacked at. A terrible extinct insect trapped in amber.
Blank. True blankness, in a way only someone who doesn't remember what food tastes like can posses.
There you are whispers between them. Recognition of a thing Louis can remember now, caught glimpses of in that room through a haze of pain as Armand looked down at Louis's scorched body.
Not fear. Maybe there should be fear. But no, it is something closer to How good to see you, at last. Louis' fingers, dipped into the ephemeral flicker of Armand's hurt, reach for this too. Knowing. Armand, looking out from behind the facade.
Seventy-seven years together. Seventy-seven years. How much had Armand kept from him, hidden beneath the surface?
Armand is quiet. Louis is quiet. Waiting. Watchful. Connection maintained in comfortable silence.
Is not surprised by the answer, when it comes. Unlike what preceded it, Louis can hold this in both hands. Trust it without uncertainty. (It strengthens what comes before, this unflattering answer, blunt and unsparing.)
Louis lets it settle between them. Tends to his anger, simmering deep in his body. Anger at what's been done to him. Years lost. Memories lost. The trial. Madeleine.
And Claudia. Claudia.
It takes some time for Louis to speak again. To find his way past the first five things, too hot with hurt and anger for a conversation held in this manner. Louis has to do better than he did before. Cannot indulge himself as he might if they were standing in this room together.
I'm sorry you carried that alone for so long.
Hates himself a little (so much more than a little) for offering this up. An apology for this transgression, this hurt, these things Armand has done that have left deep marks in Louis that will never fade. An apology that may well be meaningless. Armand had dismissed Louis' broken attempts as such in San Francisco. Louis remembers, says it anyway in place of all else swirling formlessly deep in his mind.
It doesn't sound like a dismissal. It sounds like an observation; a truthful offering of his opinion, without any irritating emotion attached to it. Armand is frustrated, and hurt, and Armand can look at those emotions from outside of them like they're diagrams of feelings.
'I don't think you've ever been able to feel empathy for me. And you've always tried to use me to forget something, since the start. That you've decided to be angry about the time it finally worked is ... some kind of comedy, I suppose.'
Are you companions? Yes. No.
Or is it more like rebound of my life, with you two.
Frustrated. Conflicted. (It would be easier to be angry, angry, angry, and he is, but there is this too. This part of Louis that cannot be carved out that belongs to Armand, that always will.) Saying these things as if they are not also speaking of a violation, of transgression upon transgression. Of a lie so great it takes Louis' breath to think of it, to consider the full scope of it, and know how long Armand let him believe it to be true.
To be back-footed into this, contemplation of what they were to each other. Of the sum of seventy-seven years.
Still, Louis' voice dips softer over, Arun.
Invoking nothing other than his name. The name he gave to Louis once, standing in front of a painting. A name tied back to the thing behind the blankness, stripped clean of humanity. The boy he'd been, once.
You think I had nothing for you? No empathy? Nothing?
Perhaps he will lash out. Bite viciously at the nearest soft part, hit all the things he knows will cause Louis the most pain. Really argue, be it genuine or just perceived over all the injustices, all the split hairs, the hopes he had and the foolishness of having them, admit finally how shattered he'd been when he gave Louis that vulnerability only to have it used to try and get him to cross a boundary, and how that continued to happen, that he let it happen, that he hoped, and hoped, and... what. And what.
There's no point in such squabbling. Fighting over their sham of a companionship. Imagine the indignity.
'I'm not in the mood.'
A quiet thing. An honest take, an uncomfortable callback. Armand and his seismic lie. But it was a lie that couldn't have held without Lestat. Lestat, who looked at the lie and decided to play along, and ship Louis off with the liar. But Lestat (Lestat, Lestat, Lestat) is of course forgiven, and Armand, Arun, is where he is, even though he's the only one who put in any work to make up for it.
Selfish hypocrites.
Oh, well. A way to pass seventy-seven years, at least.
'I do not know what I would feel if you were to perish in this unrest. But it would not be pleasure. Goodnight, Louis.'
It feels like being choked, in a way. Armand is finished with their conversation, so Louis is obliged to swallow all the things that have risen to the surface. Louis, who wants to say, I saw you, then.
Wants to say, I see you now. All of you.
Wants to say, Was any of it true? Was it true then?
(Standing over Claudia's coffin, asking: When did you start lying to me?)
Wants to say, Don't go.
Wants to say, Go, go away, get out, get out—
But he has this. Armand, deciding they have said enough to each other, and Louis, knowing how thoroughly Armand will shield himself in a few moments.
Alright, Louis says, and hates himself, hates himself, hates himself. All this anger and nowhere to put it. Something else beneath it that he can't look at. The things Armand has told him that Louis now has to turn over, alone. Test these answers and try to find the truth in them.
A tremoring pause. Louis holding tighter, winding closer, the familiar storm of emotion in his body and in his mind leaning into him. Tired. Quietly conflicted, unhappy in it. These faint notes muted in the sigh of their parting, the deliberate way Louis peels himself back, away, letting the connection between them thin and stretch.
Good night, Armand.
The connection snaps. The scent of incense, cigarettes, gone from the room. Louis left alone in the space, breathing hard as if he had been running. Alone but for the coming and going of staff beyond his closed door, alone in his head but for the things Armand left there for him to contemplate.
Edited (i reserve the right to add more to this after i reappear from work) 2024-11-13 21:46 (UTC)
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no subject
Truly incredible, that Armand still doesn't feel any guilt at all for keeping Louis sedated and wrapped in cotton. But he was happy, and safe. Louis was always crushed by self-loathing and remorse the nights after his temper got the better of him, miserable in his suicidal, Catholic guilt, and so Armand took his anger away. Took his ability to harm himself away. Looked at the declaration that Armand would never make up for his part in the trial, accepted it, and decided to protect him and stay with him anyway.
Childish to look back at it and be bitter. On the inside, Louis was safe. Because Armand protected him, and his happiness.
And Louis isn't even his fledgling.
no subject
Louis keeps telling himself he can move past what's been done to him. Reasons his way to the idea that it couldn't have been always, and often, that he doesn't truly have seventy-seven years of missing pieces. But maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't know, because Daniel wasn't there to unravel all of them and the seams are invisible. Louis will never know what's gone.
Waits out the white-hot flashfire of his anger. Makes himself focus on the quality of their connection, the intensity of Armand's focus. A sensation not unlike fingers running along the contours of hand and palm, an idle little game Louis had played sometimes, in public and in private while they were in the midst of some task. A little tic of intimacy, following in the wake of this infuriating declaration.
The rage is wrestled into something manageable. Louis is trying. (Not unaware that the power here still lies with Armand, who will vanish into the air when he pleases. Louis can't hold him.)
Did I ask you then, in San Francisco? Did I ask you to take it away?
Does the question matter? Would Armand ever tell him something true, even when they are so far past the point where he is Armand's to keep?
no subject
Fine.
'I told you so even after you began to remember.'
Self-evident. It would explain Armand's brittle confusion, his uneven strangeness in the face of Louis' anger at the reveal of altered memories. If Armand believed that he remembered all of it, then he believed Louis remembered asking to be spared further torment, and it was incongruous with the way he was blaming Armand as though he'd done something sinister.
'You described the pain of leaving the boy there as worse than your physical suffering. You were torturing yourself over it, even though it was the best path forward either of us could determine. Killing him was not an option, nor was transforming him.'
To call Daniel the boy again is a little strange, but Armand brushes past it. (The, that's the problem, isn't it, the boy, because he cannot bring himself to say our boy anymore, because Daniel isn't, he isn't Louis', not even partially, he belongs to Armand. His.) Instead he lays this out— and Louis should be able to follow the logic with ease, no matter how emotionally stunted he likes to pretend to be. Louis would not permit young Daniel's death, and Armand did not try and force it. Giving him the Dark Gift was also untenable, for a twenty-year-old whose still-forming mind was warped and damaged already from excessive drug use. It would have been hell for him. Even Louis, sentimental and dismayed, would not see someone else too young (even if he was barely too young this time) turned.
This is what Armand is asking him to believe, anyway.
'But you could not move past it. You would not speak to me about the things you said to me, or about Lestat, or about Claudia calling to you, or anything. It devoured your mind. And you could not bear it.'
no subject
But neither of them had been in the room with him then. Lestat, miles away in New Orleans. Daniel, abandoned on a dirty cot with Louis' words as a buoy to pull him out of the dark place they'd left him.
And then it had been the two of them. Louis has nothing for it, no structure apart from the one Armand gave him.
I don't remember any of that.
But the trap is in the aspects of it that ring true. The parts that Louis turns over in his hands, knowing them to be reasonable. To be likely.
I don't remember, Armand.
Frustrated. Louis winding closer, as if proximity will provide clarity. As if he could see into Armand the way Armand sees into him. (Never, he has never been permitted and Louis knows that now, knows it was always a question of what Armand permitted him.) The suggestion of contact, attention narrowed down to what Armand lays out for Louis to examine. Weigh. Test against Daniel's certainty, Lestat's reassurance.
no subject
'How convenient.'
(Is it.)
'Perhaps because no third party carried part of the weight. He was—'
Uncharacteristic faltering, trying to describe his now-fledgling. An insignificant mortal, some worthless drug addicted hustler, and yet Armand struggled to get his mind into compliance. Louis remembers that, surely, remembers stuffing more drugs into the boy, and hypnotizing him. Long hours. Over and over. Of course he was the thing that managed to disrupt the calm seal on Louis' mind. Aggravating, frustrating, fascinating.
'Challenging.' There. That word. 'Unlike your own relieved slide into forgetfulness. It wasn't easy for me. I didn't want to go on thinking of that argument alone, my temper shattered, your self-brutality, forever unresolved. I wasn't even sure it would take on you, a vampire, my.'
An awful pause.
'My companion. ... I left you with some memory of him. A mirror to his, as best I could. I could have taken it all away, Louis. I could have taken it all away and gone back to that house and gotten rid of a loose end of a boy, but I knew you cared for him. Even if you didn't remember, I would remember. I would know I did that to you. So I left what I did and I left him alone.'
no subject
Louis, leaning into him, reaching after the flicker of emotion in Armand. After that distant flicker of hurt in him. Is it so impossible to understand?
Is it enough for Louis, to feel this in him? To hear that faltering over the choice of word challenging and breathe a laugh into the empty room. (To feel some sickening swoop of uncertainty in his chest; had he been relieved? Had he wanted the brutality of their fight gone badly enough to have sought this from Armand?) As close as he's drawn into the familiar landscape of Armand's mind, the bristling uncertainly as he wavers.
Do you regret it?
A question asked more quietly than it might have been otherwise.
Does Armand regret anything he's done? Any of the ways he's harmed Louis? Louis remembers now, burning on that bed in filtered sunlight, gritting out Sorry as Armand turned from him.
no subject
Regret? Does he regret it? Taking the best road, the best option, silencing Louis, preserving an interesting mortal, sticking a knife into Lestat?
Sometimes—
When Armand draws close, are the whites of his eyes like the flash of a predator before the fangs follow, like a wolf, like a tiger. Or is it the orange, bloody and unnatural, a monster's, a reminder that he's not human in a way beyond how Louis isn't human. A fossil painted to look like a person. Beneath rich skin and soft hair there is a coiled thing that predates all the artwork in the museum Louis was attacked at. A terrible extinct insect trapped in amber.
Blank. True blankness, in a way only someone who doesn't remember what food tastes like can posses.
Does he regret it.
Armand is quiet for some time.
'Not really.'
no subject
Not fear. Maybe there should be fear. But no, it is something closer to How good to see you, at last. Louis' fingers, dipped into the ephemeral flicker of Armand's hurt, reach for this too. Knowing. Armand, looking out from behind the facade.
Seventy-seven years together. Seventy-seven years. How much had Armand kept from him, hidden beneath the surface?
Armand is quiet. Louis is quiet. Waiting. Watchful. Connection maintained in comfortable silence.
Is not surprised by the answer, when it comes. Unlike what preceded it, Louis can hold this in both hands. Trust it without uncertainty. (It strengthens what comes before, this unflattering answer, blunt and unsparing.)
Louis lets it settle between them. Tends to his anger, simmering deep in his body. Anger at what's been done to him. Years lost. Memories lost. The trial. Madeleine.
And Claudia. Claudia.
It takes some time for Louis to speak again. To find his way past the first five things, too hot with hurt and anger for a conversation held in this manner. Louis has to do better than he did before. Cannot indulge himself as he might if they were standing in this room together.
I'm sorry you carried that alone for so long.
Hates himself a little (so much more than a little) for offering this up. An apology for this transgression, this hurt, these things Armand has done that have left deep marks in Louis that will never fade. An apology that may well be meaningless. Armand had dismissed Louis' broken attempts as such in San Francisco. Louis remembers, says it anyway in place of all else swirling formlessly deep in his mind.
no subject
It doesn't sound like a dismissal. It sounds like an observation; a truthful offering of his opinion, without any irritating emotion attached to it. Armand is frustrated, and hurt, and Armand can look at those emotions from outside of them like they're diagrams of feelings.
'I don't think you've ever been able to feel empathy for me. And you've always tried to use me to forget something, since the start. That you've decided to be angry about the time it finally worked is ... some kind of comedy, I suppose.'
Are you companions? Yes. No.
Or is it more like rebound of my life, with you two.
no subject
Frustrated. Conflicted. (It would be easier to be angry, angry, angry, and he is, but there is this too. This part of Louis that cannot be carved out that belongs to Armand, that always will.) Saying these things as if they are not also speaking of a violation, of transgression upon transgression. Of a lie so great it takes Louis' breath to think of it, to consider the full scope of it, and know how long Armand let him believe it to be true.
To be back-footed into this, contemplation of what they were to each other. Of the sum of seventy-seven years.
Still, Louis' voice dips softer over, Arun.
Invoking nothing other than his name. The name he gave to Louis once, standing in front of a painting. A name tied back to the thing behind the blankness, stripped clean of humanity. The boy he'd been, once.
You think I had nothing for you? No empathy? Nothing?
no subject
For a moment—
Perhaps he will lash out. Bite viciously at the nearest soft part, hit all the things he knows will cause Louis the most pain. Really argue, be it genuine or just perceived over all the injustices, all the split hairs, the hopes he had and the foolishness of having them, admit finally how shattered he'd been when he gave Louis that vulnerability only to have it used to try and get him to cross a boundary, and how that continued to happen, that he let it happen, that he hoped, and hoped, and... what. And what.
There's no point in such squabbling. Fighting over their sham of a companionship. Imagine the indignity.
'I'm not in the mood.'
A quiet thing. An honest take, an uncomfortable callback. Armand and his seismic lie. But it was a lie that couldn't have held without Lestat. Lestat, who looked at the lie and decided to play along, and ship Louis off with the liar. But Lestat (Lestat, Lestat, Lestat) is of course forgiven, and Armand, Arun, is where he is, even though he's the only one who put in any work to make up for it.
Selfish hypocrites.
Oh, well. A way to pass seventy-seven years, at least.
'I do not know what I would feel if you were to perish in this unrest. But it would not be pleasure. Goodnight, Louis.'
cut scene unlocked
Wants to say, I see you now. All of you.
Wants to say, Was any of it true? Was it true then?
(Standing over Claudia's coffin, asking: When did you start lying to me?)
Wants to say, Don't go.
Wants to say, Go, go away, get out, get out—
But he has this. Armand, deciding they have said enough to each other, and Louis, knowing how thoroughly Armand will shield himself in a few moments.
Alright, Louis says, and hates himself, hates himself, hates himself. All this anger and nowhere to put it. Something else beneath it that he can't look at. The things Armand has told him that Louis now has to turn over, alone. Test these answers and try to find the truth in them.
A tremoring pause. Louis holding tighter, winding closer, the familiar storm of emotion in his body and in his mind leaning into him. Tired. Quietly conflicted, unhappy in it. These faint notes muted in the sigh of their parting, the deliberate way Louis peels himself back, away, letting the connection between them thin and stretch.
Good night, Armand.
The connection snaps. The scent of incense, cigarettes, gone from the room. Louis left alone in the space, breathing hard as if he had been running. Alone but for the coming and going of staff beyond his closed door, alone in his head but for the things Armand left there for him to contemplate.