His hope had been to pin Armand just so that he might strike him, but long arms wind around him, trapping them both, and Lestat finds himself tangled. On guard against little whispered voices in his mind, but not from what they have to say, not when they are whispered near his ear.
Teeth bared. A lashing of anger through him, hot enough for Armand to feel with even this barest touch to Lestat's mind.
"Don't," growled, all snarl and spittle. Sharp nails and fingers clawing with the intent to wrench Armand's grip back off around his shoulders, to pin him to the asphalt. Shifts his own sense of gravity, not to fly, but to pull back. Surprisingly strong, when Armand must consider he is matched against a vampire half his age.
That has always been so, but Lestat is no longer the fledging he was the last time they tested respective strength. As they all used to say, this was the virtue of the blood of Magnus. Something mocking, when he'd repeated it that one time in Paris. A little joke, just for them. And then, himself.
If he can bounce Armand's skull off the cracked pavement in this process, he will. "You don't say his name."
Becomes more dazed, when his head hits concrete. His hands slide down, forward, against Lestat's face. He looks up at him with near-glowing eyes, his vision blurry. It won't last long, he heals so fast, all of his insides swimming in his own miraculous ancient blood, regenerating the damage without needing to be prompted. Doing physical harm to Armand is often unreal and dreamy— so much just doesn't seem to take.
Another parallel. Telepathic images wash over the younger vampire. Louis in Paris, in the park, killing a man. Another. Beating their head against a garden wall just like this.
Ah, how romantic, the two of them.
No longer speaking aloud,
'I've said it so many times. You gave him to me. Of course I kept him.'
It's been some time since Lestat's been near a vampire with enough casual power that he can transmit thought into his mind. A long habit of keeping his mind barred from intrusion. But he remembers how easily Armand had spoken to him in the seventies, like a scalpel slipping into flesh as he'd slept in his coffin. Reminded now, on the level of nerves, as this unwanted image plays out in his mind.
From Armand, who has had so much of Louis. All these decades.
'And he hated every moment,' has reflexive, dog-bite energy, snapping after reaching hand. Outside of this, Lestat's hands find Armand's throat, and lay into it with an oppressive pressure that would make a human panic, leave its bruises.
Holds him there. "You've been avoiding me," through long fangs, ignoring wandering hands at his face for the moment. "So I've come to say something to you."
More images tempt his mind. Tangled hands. Tangled further. Louis' smile. A rattlesnake whisper, that even if Louis hated it, he hated being with Lestat more. That Armand was ash in his mouth, like choking down mortal food, but at least he wasn't beating the shit out of him. At least he let Louis fuck him. At least, at least, at least. Keyword, the l-one.
A blank-eyed glowing smile. His hands wrap around Lestat's wrists. So light, like a caress. There is something there in the impossible space between them, like barely-there static electricity. Armand sliding telekinetic strands around him in case he does something displeasing.
Something about being near Armand had always felt, to Lestat, like being near a creature that was barely contained to its corporeal form. His mind and his senses and his powers reaching out invisibly, filling a room, sliding under his skin, lurking in the dark. Lestat did not miss the sensation, shuddering through it now as he bears down.
Probably, it should indicate to him that hurting the body isn't all that effective. But he can't help himself. Hands squeeze tighter, as if he could choke out the glimmering impressions of Louis that don't belong to him. Guards himself with his own memories slipping beneath the surface: Louis sleeping on a New Orleans hotel bed, Lestat watching him from inches away. Louis' smile at an airport carpark, a blur of roses. No sight of Louis in the next, just a series of sensations: his scent, his heart beat, the sense of his arms drawing Lestat in tightly.
A slip into French. "I'm done with you," his voice shivering with his anger. "Whatever punishment you feel I deserve, I've lived it a thousand times, as have those dear to me. You will stay away from my fledgling. You will renounce your own. You will, as you have always been capable, seek out your own happiness away from me."
Does he believe Armand will agree, here and now? No. But it will give context to the shit show that it will trigger. Reason.
He is too old. He has never rested beneath the earth. Every atom in his mind has been touched, worked over, grey matter using too much processing power simply by virtue of being awake for five centuries. It has not expanded his intellect. It was just made him untethered. All of his parts melting out of him, uncontained. A return to the sludge that first produced creatures, before man, before dinosaurs, before fish.
Nothing.
Lestat gives his speech, and Armand stares up at him.
"Your fledgling."
The notion that he might renounce his own is so absurd and far away it barely touches him. He knows it barely touches Lestat, too, for that matter; if Daniel were not in proximity to Louis, Lestat would not know the man's name. Lestat, Armand wholeheartedly believes, only cares about Lestat. Sometimes the things Lestat owns are given this care by extension. It is a familiar pattern. It was Marius' pattern, too.
Something sinks into Lestat. Those scalpel-like knives of psychic intent.
Fledgling. Fledgling?
In Lestat's mind:
Nicki.
Poor, mad, abandoned Nicki. Left to Armand. He has tried to walk into the sun again, and Armand is attempting to make him take his blood so he can be healed, but of course the young man is being as difficult as possible. It is in his nature to be difficult. The allure that drew Lestat to him has become the thing that repulsed him, and now, in this little memory, nested into Lestat's mind here in the parking lot of an overlook on the edge of a lake, he is curling up with wretched, hateful despair in Armand's lap.
'Where are all of your fledglings, Lestat? Where have they each gone? How many more will you make, and send to me?'
Fast, clipping beyond the limits of human perception—
Armand's throat released in what feels like the same moment as the back of Lestat's hand striking him across the face. A swift and unhesitating punishment, which would shatter the porcelain bones of less well made monsters. Lestat learned quickly that Armand is not so delicate as he seems.
He knows where they have all gone. Nicki is dead. (He had struck him just this way, during one of Nicki's more hateful tirades. A flash of blood on pale skin, and a flash of vindication in orange eyes.) Claudia is dead. (By the throat, a small moment, but one he as returned to again and again.) Louis—
'You had your chance with him. To love, to be loved. You've had so many fucking chances. No more, none from me.'
Fledglings, chances, same thing.
Beyond language, thought transmitted in a blinding hot flash on his way to striking him a second time, fist cocked back to land a closed fisted blow.
'What do you know about love, Lestat de Lioncourt?'
Crunch. Right into Armand's face. Front teeth jam loose of gums, his nose crumples, blood rushes out of splits in his skin, out of gored cuts inside of his mouth, it forces red up and out of one eye, the pressure is so great. The back of his skull cracks where it's smashed so solidly into the asphalt beneath it.
His eyes stay open.
Armand yanks the blond vampire away from him. Up, a hundred invisible iron hands, heaving him into the air and then flinging him. Where, who knows. Aimless. Armand will heal, he is fine, technically, and he pushes the mangled ruins of his tongue up against misplaced teeth to help them back into place, lifts shaking hands to guide his nose back together. He'll need to sleep to to fix it entirely. Unpleasant, but interesting. It is so difficult to feel, sometimes.
'Love is devotion. No one has been more devoted to Louis than I have. You can chase after him for the next century, and the century after that, and you won't match it. You won't know him like I've known him. You never will. I can call him right now. He won't turn me away.'
Sharp nails fly by just past the end of Armand's nose in one last attempted swipe as Lestat is seized, flung upwards and away.
Lands without grace, tumbles across concrete, only half-catching himself with his own ability to stay in the air. It is out loud and in English that he barks, "You stay away from him," a crack of baritone volume and snarl that is so different to slithering thought, wolf fangs in his mouth. Lies, Armand lying, Armand a liar.
Armand's blood on his knuckles, leaking from broken nose and mouth and eye socket. It taints the air, the smell of it, like static electricity.
'He used you to punish himself,' a faster thing, silkier, as Lestat gets to his feet. 'That is what you are. The lash wielded by whoever can stand to touch you, and he needs you no longer. Take your slave-love and go.'
He has already fed, but saliva gathers in his mouth. Hunger, a tangling, liminal sensation for a vampire.
The images are different this time. Ephemeral, just impressions of things. Armand-but-not standing in the common area of their hotel back in New York, and Louis, wearing an outfit Lestat will have seen later that night. They are speaking. Armand, in an apartment, looking into the dark glass of a window and seeing Louis' reflection, speaking.
Chatty Cathys. (Doesn't matter about what. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter that Armand has been desperate, and lonely, and resentful, and these have mostly been arguments about Daniel. Daniel is not Lestat's business.)
'Slaves. We understood each other. You will treat him like that again. You will beat him again. It is your way.'
Nails on glass. An unpleasant twist of a nerve. Armand doesn't love exposing this, his own pathetic stalking. Willing to endure it if it's a knife that cuts both of them.
Unbidden, a memory shuffles itself neatly into place by the one Armand offers him: Louis, silent and defensive and wary, as Lestat says some bullshit, yells it. Daniel, placating.
But Louis has forgiven him. Small kisses felt through the curtain of his hair while a hurricane rages outside. Louis looking down at him where he perches on the edge of the bathtub, touching his face. Turning in his arms to a corny karaoke performance. His hand in Lestat's as they look at a painting (and the sound of Daniel's footsteps as he moves away through the gallery, and it is quite frequent, these little careless fragments of Armand's fledgling, not a constant, but often there).
It's with intent that Lestat summons these thoughts, a layering of armor, insulating, protecting himself from psychic claws getting at the cracks. Look how soft and gentle and affectionate Louis is, even if he is mom ami, not mon cher.
That all happens as fast as thought. In the real world, Lestat charges.
Paris again, fangs long and heavy cloak flaring. The city is different. The clothing is different. But there are certain constants. One is this, a bestial manner towards handling conflict. He is faster, however, trying to move quicker than invisible iron hands, intent on getting his teeth in Armand's neck.
Armand is sat up a little in his homely crater. He sees these visions, and some of them are other perspectives on encounters he's already seen from his own, creeping angles. Some of them are things he would like to see more of. A kaleidoscope of reasons, some of which make no sense to him. He and Louis are done. Severed. He no longer has to convince himself night after night, he no longer has to keep him safe and calm, he no longer—
He misses him. Acid bile in his throat to think of it. He is jealous of the way they are all together. Safety in numbers. Comfort in numbers.
They are all his, in their ways. Lestat, not his fledgling, but his student and protege anyway. Louis, his would-be savior, his companion. And Daniel. The infuriating Mr Molloy whose presence in those flashes he runs a psychic finger over. His. The truest of it. His.
He should stop Lestat. This will hurt and Armand is tired of being hurt, even if he's used to it. But Lestat is mon ami, not mon cher, and Daniel is haunting every edge of his new platonic friendship with Louis. That's funny. Armand will show him how funny. He gets a grip but it falters; half on purpose, half because Lestat is stronger than he expects. Collision, then fangs.
As expected:
Ow.
But this makes connection so much easier. Through his blood. He can grab the back of Lestat's hair in the physical realm, and the vicious grab follows through to the psychic realm. A grab, a shove, slamming him face-first into it through their minds, through his blood. See, feel, experience. It is 1973 in San Fransisco and Armand is following an unsettled feeling to a shitty gay bar. Something is different about tonight. Louis often hunts this way and Armand despises it, but he allows it, because Louis can't control himself otherwise. Different. He can feel it before he opens the door. He can feel it as he gets closer, and sees his companion, his lover, sitting beside a mortal, with a smile on his face that's so genuine it takes Armand's breath away.
Colorless, an echo of Louis' voice, unkind. Armand tries to put it away. Boring. Daniel, barely twenty years old, smiles back at Louis. They're practically giggling with each other. Chemistry so immediate and genuine that it makes Armand sick. Because he knows he won't be able to ask Louis to come home with him instead. The boy is a foregone conclusion. The boy is in fact still here, in Vermont.
It's a messy, unkind bite, sinking into flesh and muscle, taking in a mouthful of blood that he allows to spill out between his teeth, almost as much as he swallows down. Armand's blood, heady and rich, and if he can draw a good amount of it out of him—
A cost to that. For a moment, Lestat loses sense of the physical realm after feeling Armand's fingers close in his hair, and he is then somewhere else.
Knows that the young man he is observing is Daniel, intrinsically, almost a double-visioned layering over. Louis and Daniel, smiling, laughing. Some magical, sparkling thing. Armand's ill-feeling is Lestat's despair, something he has already felt. His own brain, producing memory unbidden, Louis' expression soft and fond, a silence between he and the boy grown up that Lestat knows without any doubt is being filled with psychic chatter. Or here, Daniel kneeling at Louis' feet, and Louis holding his face like a treasured thing.
'You made a mistake,' fast as electricity. 'Your stealing the boy' (the fascinating boy, says an echo) 'from him. Now they talk and whisper in each others minds. They touch each others scars, the ones you have left on them. Now they are inseparable.'
Colourless. Flavourless. A distractable turn of attention.
In Burlington, fifty years on, another deep draw of blood, allowing rich life to pool on the cracked asphalt. Lestat placing a hand on Armand's shoulder, keeping him pinned with steely strength, and ready to wrench free.
The floor slants slightly north. The boy's blood flowed that way. Armand tells Louis this; he does so dispassionately, frankly, and he endeavors to smell the char of Louis' flesh instead of the boy's rancid, drug-adulterated blood, with its bizarre allure beneath. It will be over soon. Louis' breathing is labored, horrible, pieces of himself flaking off within. Louis of course does not need to breathe to live, but he needs to breathe to speak. Lestat can hear it. Flinching all inside of him. He had been screaming. There was sunlight in his mouth, down his throat.
Now they are inseparable. He's alive? Like Louis and Claudia, Lestat thinks. Silly. Armand can still hear Louis. The boy? The fascinating boy? To this day, Armand's immediate, blind fury at Louis managing to give a fuck about the junkie in the midst of all that surprises him. He looks back at himself and wonders how tightly wound his own trigger was. What else might have finally pulled it.
Armand digs his nails into Lestat's head. Nicks the bone of his skull. Worse if he struggles.
The swirling chaos of Armand's memories. His best ones of his fledgling, when he was still mortal. A little rabbit of a boy, heart pounding frantically, frozen and trying to squirm away at once. Louis is there. Burned. Suffering. He begs Armand to stop. He calls Armand a little bitch. Shuffled like cards.
'Why am I going away, and leaving you with them?' He feels a little lightheaded. Lestat was always such a greedy drinker. 'So you can cry over Louis loving someone else all alone? At least you'd have company with me, child.'
This is not actually deliberate manipulation. Louis might. Armand feared it for some time, and it's perfectly reasonable Lestat does as well. Louis and Daniel, in a bar in San Fransisco. Louis, screaming through his scorched injuries, for the boy, the boy, Armand, stop, Armand, please. Louis and Daniel again, in Dubai.
It had wound his anxiety higher, and higher, like—
Louis was just having some fun. This is boring. You're boring. You are so boring. Dull nights, dull weeks, dull months, dull as fuck. He hears it in his head louder and louder, sitting in their living room, in their dining room, even in their bedroom, as Louis stares at Daniel, and tells him things he'd never told Armand.
Distantly, he feels piercing nails. The rush of blood, over-active, streaking through his hair, down his neck. Goes still beneath it. Feels, oddly, like Armand is not underneath him at all, but standing over him, leaning down to hold him so. Drowning him in a pool of memory, while he bleeds his own into it.
Louis bending over Daniel, an embrace, saying, 'I chose you', and the way it was like ice water washed through Lestat.
But no, Armand is right here, his throat in Lestat's jaws. Absurdly, some part of him that feels entirely disconnected to the fight and warms to this offer, feels their configuration as an embrace. If there were no claws or fangs involved, their monstrous parts, that's what it would be. He could be here, cry in company. He has, of course, spoken to no one of his hideous jealousy, but it seems that Armand has felt it too.
There is no God, he's known all along, but he has asked oblivion plenty of times: why is he, Lestat, so difficult to love? When he loves so easily, so violently?
But they are fighting.
Fighting while all this sentiment spills out of him in a rush. This is no way for a predator to behave, to collapse under simple truths. That hand pinning his shoulder pushes, hard enough that the bone is liable to slip out from its joint. A physical pulling back as he psychically tries to retreat from the kaleidoscope. Louis, burned beyond recognition, crying out. The pain, the pain. Louis, cackling, I'm sorry, he doesn't mean it, meaningless words.
Another flicker. A big ol' butcher knife, eyes wild, fangs in a grin, blood on their faces. Yes, Louis can be quite cruel. The first thing Lestat knew about him. He thought: this would make a good vampire.
Continues to reach, trying to wade out from this swamp.
Lestat does not need to tell Armand that he's jealous, or that he still desires possession of Louis desperately. It is evident. It has been evident, for all the years between the three of them. And it fits as the perfect, warped mirror to the way Louis has been yearning for him all this time. Yearning, but not trusting. Moving on, but never healing. Lestat like a splinter inside of him, preventing the wounds from closing.
(Even the wounds Armand made. Just a bit clever, once in a while.)
They have ruined so much. They are alike in the worst ways. Armand could cradle him like this, and comfort him, and they could both mourn their mistakes. They are both too much. Lestat too passionate, Armand too cold. For a short time, those things made them successful partners. Intensity is alluring, no matter the type.
A short short time. A transformative time. A time that left Armand's heart shattered. He put the pieces back together, even colder, even harder. He cut himself on the shards but did his duty. He even did his duty to Nicki, the first lover-fledgling Lestat left to him. What a fool. Stupid, naive Armand, who despite his age, fell for it again. Another of Lestat's toys.
Lestat, Lestat, Lestat. Trying to get away from him. Thinking about Louis, and his cruelty.
If that's what Lestat likes, then he will oblige him. He'll let him have his fill. More than. Did they tell him? The details weren't all in the book. No, they didn't. A quick check, barely-there, as he pulls Lestat deeper, deeper, deeper. Into himself. Into a memory burned into him. Into an apartment in San Fransisco, where Louis is in the bedroom and Daniel is on the floor. The door is shut, Louis is screaming, and Daniel is nearly dead.
Armand lets Lestat have the table to sit at, a gracious host, while he picks up the puddles of shiny ribbon, to spool around his fingers, and run through the points of his nails like a needle scratching a record.
Louis' voice. It fills both their heads, loud and clear. It booms over other-Louis' begging, over Daniel's terrified wheezes, it plays, and plays, and plays.
The night time lake overlook in Burlington is gone, save for the way Lestat can taste Armand's blood in his mouth.
Sitting here at the table, daylight pressing in against papered over windows. Lestat slides a look down at Daniel, who is an old man in between blinks, and then the youthful version of himself, flickering. Looks to the door, Louis' bellows. Up at Armand, as Louis' voice plays out, tinny, between his claws.
"I know the type," Molloy's voice, commiserating.
"If you stripped away his superficial charms, beneath his flimsy gentleman's veneer, Lestat was trivial, vapid, vulgar, maniacal, blind and sterile and contemptible—"
"Big time asshole."
The chair scrapes and bumps along the ground as Lestat stands. Moving, then, to the door that Louis is behind, still crying out in pain. There is no opening it, even as he tries, a hand on the handle, then the surface, then claws digging into wood. Armand did not open it then, and it doesn't open now.
"He appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dry twigs with a thin, carping voice."
Splinters coming up under his nails. His back is to Armand, but his upset is clear, existing as he is now in this little prison, a sharp and thorough wounding, fresh blood. No, they avoided saying all of this. Of course they did. It would be indulgent to just fold up and listen to the rest, why not, confirm all his jealousies, all his suspicions, and never mind whatever is happening outside of him, outside of Armand.
Something in him, detached of these feelings, that asks: what are you trying to accomplish? Escape, surrender? Decide and let it be done. And the feeling of claws in soft wood is like metal hooks gently finding weakened spots in Armand's mind, no panicky scrabbling, only calm evaluation.
In Burlington, it might feel a little like static electricity in the air.
Louis goes on. He yells, gleeful and cathartic in his skewering. Daniel chimes in, now and then. Armand lets other things echo. Years, decades, worth of Louis' unpacking. Even if they did not speak Lestat's name for half their time together, he was still him, and there was of course the second half. Every time Lestat made a racial fumble. Every time Lestat was bad in bed. Each grievance, dissected, inflamed, remembered.
What is he doing?
Does it matter?
Daniel is on the floor, old and young between Lestat's blinks of perception. Armand observes this, and he walks slowly across the small living room space. He crouches down, and cradles the shivering mortal's face. Are you going to kill me, queries the amalgam of memory and imagination.
Armand tells him yes. Just not right now.
"I've been avoiding you," Armand says, this time to Lestat. "So you say. Is this the kind of attention you've been hoping for? Would you like something different?"
What if he slides to the floor and cries and cries?
He sort of does. He isn't real, here, none of this is, so there is a version where Lestat's desire to do that is that, fitful keening that Louis could say such things about him, to this mortal, to Armand, to himself. He also stops trying to break down the door. There is nothing on the other side. Void.
Lestat looks over, where Armand crouches over his fledgling. Here, a funny little undercurrent of misgiving. Yes, Lestat would like Armand to renounce his claim to best sever remaining ties between him and Louis. But also, a vaguely animal impulse. He has been travelling with Daniel, hunting with Daniel, teaching Daniel things in his own haphazard way. The mortal word for it would be 'friends'. Maybe it's the vampire word too.
But the instinct feels a little less complicated. Possessive. Stop touching that one, it's his. Or Louis', which is like being also his.
"I wanted you to listen to me," comes out both in a creaky little voice as well as a serene, level one. The former left behind, as he adds, "Must I repeat myself, Amadeo?"
In the real world, Armand's shoulder dislocates under the press of Lestat's hand. And in here—
No mad dash to escape. No, here he is, already, in Armand's mind. How best to make his point known and understood? Hooks tear, a sound like wood shattering as the little apartment is rent asunder. Lestat, wolfish, moving to tackle Armand off of Daniel, to tumble into the darkness.
Reaching within. He should leave, because he already left, already abandoned his fledgling. Maybe Armand needs to recall what it was like. They both know.
Armand has been physically brutalized countless before. Lestat's treatment is unpleasant, but it is also nothing. So routine and familiar as to fade into the background. Layers of horror that have grown into him like tree rings. A part of the fossilized material that makes him.
Cradling his fledgling's face, he sees something in between; watching him age in blinks, in dust jacket portraits, in lurking visits. Black curls become striped with silver, then it overtakes it, skin sags and stretches and develops cutting character. Daniel continues to shiver and sniffle, eyes wet with clear, watery tears.
Listen.
Since when does Lestat listen to anyone? Why should Armand give him such grace, when Lestat has never given an inch of his own?
But that change. Barely any words. Armand turns his head over his shoulder to look at the other vampire, his expression one that Louis struggled to name, but still managed to sketchily describe; blank and apocalyptic. Is he angry? He must be. Nothing else qualifies. No amount of breaking his shoulder, his arm, any part of him, compares to the feeling of this mongrel anglo impostor daring to utter Amadeo to him, of Lestat trying to mimic a man who was a god, and to hold it over him.
Lestat slams into him. Daniel is ripped away. Falling into the dark like a brick dropped off of a ledge. There's nothing graceful about the plunge into the cold, black ocean within Armand. Does Lestat want a slave after all? Does it all boil down to this? The same brutal balance that Armand first learned when he was still Arun?
Must I repeat myself, Amadeo?
Marius speaks in Latin. He holds his Amadeo by his chin, explains to him again, how the transformation works. He will be drained again, and again, and he will be drowned so he can save himself, so Marius knows it's taken with proper strength. Amadeo has been ill, his body has not fully recovered thanks to the Gift; Marius is disgusted and angry that he managed to get himself so sick (doing the work Marius sent him to do), and he laments losing the stunning gold chip of the boy from the continent, who he can no longer send out for fear of burning in the sun.
They continue to fall.
Tell him again.
He was only ever Amadeo because he was Arun. (Maybe. It could have been Arjun, or Iren, or a dozen other things.) He could only please his god, his Marius, because of Arun. Arun's horror, Arun's suffering, over and over, choking, bleeding, violated, again and again. He is taught by repetition, he is taught by being drugged, he is taught by violence, and penetration, and suffocation, and use. His body hasn't finished growing. He doesn't understand Italian. He begins to romanticize the taste of his own blood in his mouth, because it means it isn't full of anything else, and the beatings are better than the rapes, and even food, which he throws up too often to find relieving.
Lestat has seen Marius disgusted and angry before. He had felt wild at the time, blood burning in his lips, down his throat. Here, a flesh of it, a double-visioned blur tilted up from the floor. You are the damnedest creature, in the French tongue, a most elegant snarl, but later Lestat would reflect: maybe it was fond, too.
Marble white hands pulling him from the dirt, pressing his fang-filled mouth to a throat full of blue veins. Marius or Magnus, it doesn't matter. Lestat bites, hopelessly hungry, powerless in powerful arms.
And then Amadeo drags him further down, the infinite void. Like Lestat had tackled Armand into a ditch, not realising they were cliffs above a cold, rocky ocean.
There are terrible truths to what lies in wait. That there is no God, for no God would allow a child to suffer these things before it even has the capacity to understand them. Lestat had been old enough, the second time, to know better than to cry out in prayer, or to hope someone would come along and shield him. So he'd showed his teeth (just the blunt, omnivorous kind then) and cursed them and lashed out. The sting of the cane, the moment it breaks the skin and slings fine misting droplets of blood into the air.
Which is what Lestat feels when, senselessly, he makes this attempt. To intervene, to curl around the flickering little flame that is Arun or Arjun or Iren, which survives in spite of it. He can give this: the lash, an insult, the lonely cold after. Here, take these instead. They are bearable. He was alright, after.
There's no God, there are no gods; not at home, wherever that was, and not here, on wooden planks showing through plaster, where Armand-Arun reaches for Lestat when he's drawn closer. Lestat has always understood more about the world than Armand, whose growth and education have been stunted over and over. Maybe he understands this, and he can just bury his face in the younger vampire's shoulder, and it'll go away.
(Of course—)
Cold inside of him, colder than freezing, enough that the snow is a relief. Hidden away somewhere in a part of France he's never seen except through stories told to him. He doesn't think Lestat deserves to be beaten, but he understands why. God demands much, because God's emptiness allows him to be filled with humanity's resentment. God's falseness allows him to be shaped into anything, wielded by anyone, and with an ever-changing force.
He wants to stay in the snow, holding Lestat, trying to shelter each other. If it's cold, they don't have to move on to the fire.
Because of course Lestat has known Marius, and Marius loved him. Better than Armand, instantly, immediately, and with enough force to bring him to life. It shatters in more effectively than breaking all of his bones; in Vermont, on the edge of the lake, Armand gasps in a breath that sounds ragged, but quiet, like glass breaking slowly under a steady footstep.
"I love you," Amadeo told his maker. Loved by God, and Marius was God, wasn't he? Marius didn't look up; he never looked up. "I'm sure you do, Amadeo."
If he feeds himself to the wolves, he'll just reform after. There's nowhere to go.
Perhaps Marius loved him. Little glimmering images suffused with the feeling, of French accented in Italian talking patiently and endlessly everything, his story, all leading towards an explanation of something, something, Marius leading through a dark tunnel, an an altar covered in lilies, and walls of Italian fresco with gold leaf depicting Egyptian palm trees—
My love goes with you, Marius had said, holding him, because Marius was sending him away, and Lestat receives these words utterly sick with—not regret, exactly, but near enough. He has made mistakes again, and he is being abandoned again, driven away again.
These things feel as brittle as winter leaves in the howling wind at the centre of the place he is tangled up with Armand in. Snow melting under their knees, and the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air. The cries of a horse, the snapping of jaws.
Magnus had called him Wolfkiller. He had called him Lelio. He had grabbed at pale golden hair with clawed fingers, admiring, picking locks up to let them fall, showing a grin bearing only two sharp canines left in his mouth. How afraid that smile had made Lestat first, and then how sad he thought it looked as he clung to Magnus' rotting garments and begged him not to leave him here, after everything, after changing him so completely.
(And here, at the periphery of things: he had told Daniel that he thought he loved his maker, in spite of everything. The context is easy to find. They'd been talking about the monsters that made them. How fucked up it all is.)
He is meant to be leaving him here, he thinks. He'd dragged Armand to the bottom of everything, so he could escape. In the nighttime countryside of Auvergne or this little stone dungeon, standing where the gremlin once stood, where piles of dirty blondes once decorated the place.
Why, though? They hate each other, but why? He can't recall. They loved each other too, once. Things change.
In the real world, his bite has loosened. Stops taking the blood. It drools out of his parted mouth.
He has known that Marius is alive. An instinct, a dampening but not a total severing of the bond in his mind. To look at it would be confronting his greatest fear. He looked sideways at it, just for a moment, when he created Daniel, but this is bigger. A monolith of a thing. Reckoning with his existence being truly meaningless except to be a thing to house pain for others.
Armand shows this to Lestat, a confession held in his hands like a crippled bird. He has known, but he has not wanted to see. For centuries he has known, and now that he sees it, he wants to die. In this moment, for the first time, he truly wants to die.
But he can't, can he?
They are in Magnus' lair, they are in a dark room that the Children of Satan have put them in; Magnus will come to leave more corpses, Santino will come to beat them, and burn between their thighs, and make them recite scripture while starving, and Magnus will return and try to drag them apart, and Marius won't ever be there, because Marius burned, except he didn't, and Armand has always known that. Marius left him to this, left him to this for centuries, left him to become Armand, and now Armand—
What will he do? Will he pull Lestat from it, out of this dungeon?
In the real world, he curls his arms over the other vampire. He strokes his blond hair, and he kisses his temple.
Lestat was the first person he ever chose. The first person he gave his body to without being ordered, or instructed, or gifted. Lestat rewrote so much pain in Armand, some of which he didn't even know had been there. And then he left. This is what happens. Armand is left, or sold, or simply forgotten about. He left Armand, he abandoned Nicki, he ruined Louis, and Armand still holds him, because he still deserves thanks for having treated Armand tenderly, even if it was only one time, even if it wasn't genuine.
It's fine if it wasn't genuine. Lestat cannot justly be expected to give him anything genuine when his own maker wouldn't.
Armand le Rien. Armand l'Erreur.
'You want me to go away.'
Spare Louis further paranoia and pain. Set Daniel free. Take the cold ocean inside of him, take his ancient blood, his attention, his protection, his bored threats, and go away. His maker, happier with Lestat. His companion, happier with Lestat. His fledgling, happier with Lestat. Armand feels cold. Colder than that. More. Deeper. Darker. Ice on ice, to the marrow. He holds Lestat so closely.
And drifts in it for a moment. Suppose he stay. Suppose they go away into their respective miseries, unshackle their fledglings from themselves. Suppose Lestat do as he did not two centuries ago, and ask Armand to come with him, and allow himself to drown in this cold ocean, freeze in this ice. Who knows? Perhaps he is capable of thawing it. (But Nicki went mad. But Louis killed him and left him and now loves others, chooses others.)
He isn't sure when he had begun crying, but becomes more aware of it, choking sounds and little quakes at the centre of his chest with each gasp, buried there into a bloodied throat as he is held, petted, kissed.
No. This cannot go on.
An inverse of old times. When before, there had only been an inkling that perhaps leaving Louis and Claudia to their life together would be the better thing, drowned out in his ardent desire to return to his family, now there is an inkling that perhaps Louis would not want him to go away, a speck of burning selfishness in this equally indulgent misery. Here, he can summon them, these little fragments: Louis holding his hands or touching his face or sharing a coffin and saying that he wants him here, he is glad he is here, he has missed his voice.
And they have made promises. They will go on walks in the park again, he will teach him how to dance in this era, Louis will take silly photographs and Lestat will play the piano after fifty years of silence.
Magnus had held him this way as well. How unlike and like him Armand had seemed back then, and still does. Beautiful and fragile in a way his maker was not, but also terrible and powerful and consuming, and both of them with their own dark pull. Here is this memory, the brink of death, and impossibly strong arms hold him close, stroke his hair, coax his mouth to the laceration carved into a cold white throat. Lestat had wondered, later, what separated him from the bloated corpses in the dungeon, and he thinks it is this: struggling, cursing, every atom of his being in rebellion until finally he is near death and can do nothing but allow ancient blood to trickle down his throat.
Because Magnus had decided this quality would make him a good vampire. Later, Louis would call him a brat. He supposes both things can be true. Something in him that recalls the sound of violins approves, reaches out.
Blunt psychic force, nothing that should belong to a two and a half century year old child, even one of Magnus. It feels like a hand in the centre of Armand's chest, or maybe a little to the left, and pushes forcefully. Down, back into the ice, and by extension, Lestat away from it. (A street lamp bursts. A stray cat lurking by the gutters convulses, dies. Someone in a small apartment has a seizure in their sleep, will wake up to a bloodied pillowcase.)
'I want you to go away,' quavering, this voice. 'I want you to leave me alone, Armand. Louis is mine. Daniel is Louis'. None of us are yours.'
A conviction in this. Flawed, perhaps, but believed. They are a trio of kinds. There is no place for the ghoulish monster lurking in the shadows.
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His hope had been to pin Armand just so that he might strike him, but long arms wind around him, trapping them both, and Lestat finds himself tangled. On guard against little whispered voices in his mind, but not from what they have to say, not when they are whispered near his ear.
Teeth bared. A lashing of anger through him, hot enough for Armand to feel with even this barest touch to Lestat's mind.
"Don't," growled, all snarl and spittle. Sharp nails and fingers clawing with the intent to wrench Armand's grip back off around his shoulders, to pin him to the asphalt. Shifts his own sense of gravity, not to fly, but to pull back. Surprisingly strong, when Armand must consider he is matched against a vampire half his age.
That has always been so, but Lestat is no longer the fledging he was the last time they tested respective strength. As they all used to say, this was the virtue of the blood of Magnus. Something mocking, when he'd repeated it that one time in Paris. A little joke, just for them. And then, himself.
If he can bounce Armand's skull off the cracked pavement in this process, he will. "You don't say his name."
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French. A habit, while he's dazed—
Becomes more dazed, when his head hits concrete. His hands slide down, forward, against Lestat's face. He looks up at him with near-glowing eyes, his vision blurry. It won't last long, he heals so fast, all of his insides swimming in his own miraculous ancient blood, regenerating the damage without needing to be prompted. Doing physical harm to Armand is often unreal and dreamy— so much just doesn't seem to take.
Another parallel. Telepathic images wash over the younger vampire. Louis in Paris, in the park, killing a man. Another. Beating their head against a garden wall just like this.
Ah, how romantic, the two of them.
No longer speaking aloud,
'I've said it so many times. You gave him to me. Of course I kept him.'
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From Armand, who has had so much of Louis. All these decades.
'And he hated every moment,' has reflexive, dog-bite energy, snapping after reaching hand. Outside of this, Lestat's hands find Armand's throat, and lay into it with an oppressive pressure that would make a human panic, leave its bruises.
Holds him there. "You've been avoiding me," through long fangs, ignoring wandering hands at his face for the moment. "So I've come to say something to you."
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More images tempt his mind. Tangled hands. Tangled further. Louis' smile. A rattlesnake whisper, that even if Louis hated it, he hated being with Lestat more. That Armand was ash in his mouth, like choking down mortal food, but at least he wasn't beating the shit out of him. At least he let Louis fuck him. At least, at least, at least. Keyword, the l-one.
A blank-eyed glowing smile. His hands wrap around Lestat's wrists. So light, like a caress. There is something there in the impossible space between them, like barely-there static electricity. Armand sliding telekinetic strands around him in case he does something displeasing.
Scratchy and suffocating,
"Tell me."
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Probably, it should indicate to him that hurting the body isn't all that effective. But he can't help himself. Hands squeeze tighter, as if he could choke out the glimmering impressions of Louis that don't belong to him. Guards himself with his own memories slipping beneath the surface: Louis sleeping on a New Orleans hotel bed, Lestat watching him from inches away. Louis' smile at an airport carpark, a blur of roses. No sight of Louis in the next, just a series of sensations: his scent, his heart beat, the sense of his arms drawing Lestat in tightly.
A slip into French. "I'm done with you," his voice shivering with his anger. "Whatever punishment you feel I deserve, I've lived it a thousand times, as have those dear to me. You will stay away from my fledgling. You will renounce your own. You will, as you have always been capable, seek out your own happiness away from me."
Does he believe Armand will agree, here and now? No. But it will give context to the shit show that it will trigger. Reason.
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Nothing.
Lestat gives his speech, and Armand stares up at him.
"Your fledgling."
The notion that he might renounce his own is so absurd and far away it barely touches him. He knows it barely touches Lestat, too, for that matter; if Daniel were not in proximity to Louis, Lestat would not know the man's name. Lestat, Armand wholeheartedly believes, only cares about Lestat. Sometimes the things Lestat owns are given this care by extension. It is a familiar pattern. It was Marius' pattern, too.
Something sinks into Lestat. Those scalpel-like knives of psychic intent.
Fledgling. Fledgling?
In Lestat's mind:
Nicki.
Poor, mad, abandoned Nicki. Left to Armand. He has tried to walk into the sun again, and Armand is attempting to make him take his blood so he can be healed, but of course the young man is being as difficult as possible. It is in his nature to be difficult. The allure that drew Lestat to him has become the thing that repulsed him, and now, in this little memory, nested into Lestat's mind here in the parking lot of an overlook on the edge of a lake, he is curling up with wretched, hateful despair in Armand's lap.
'Where are all of your fledglings, Lestat? Where have they each gone? How many more will you make, and send to me?'
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Armand's throat released in what feels like the same moment as the back of Lestat's hand striking him across the face. A swift and unhesitating punishment, which would shatter the porcelain bones of less well made monsters. Lestat learned quickly that Armand is not so delicate as he seems.
He knows where they have all gone. Nicki is dead. (He had struck him just this way, during one of Nicki's more hateful tirades. A flash of blood on pale skin, and a flash of vindication in orange eyes.) Claudia is dead. (By the throat, a small moment, but one he as returned to again and again.) Louis—
'You had your chance with him. To love, to be loved. You've had so many fucking chances. No more, none from me.'
Fledglings, chances, same thing.
Beyond language, thought transmitted in a blinding hot flash on his way to striking him a second time, fist cocked back to land a closed fisted blow.
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Crunch. Right into Armand's face. Front teeth jam loose of gums, his nose crumples, blood rushes out of splits in his skin, out of gored cuts inside of his mouth, it forces red up and out of one eye, the pressure is so great. The back of his skull cracks where it's smashed so solidly into the asphalt beneath it.
His eyes stay open.
Armand yanks the blond vampire away from him. Up, a hundred invisible iron hands, heaving him into the air and then flinging him. Where, who knows. Aimless. Armand will heal, he is fine, technically, and he pushes the mangled ruins of his tongue up against misplaced teeth to help them back into place, lifts shaking hands to guide his nose back together. He'll need to sleep to to fix it entirely. Unpleasant, but interesting. It is so difficult to feel, sometimes.
'Love is devotion. No one has been more devoted to Louis than I have. You can chase after him for the next century, and the century after that, and you won't match it. You won't know him like I've known him. You never will. I can call him right now. He won't turn me away.'
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Lands without grace, tumbles across concrete, only half-catching himself with his own ability to stay in the air. It is out loud and in English that he barks, "You stay away from him," a crack of baritone volume and snarl that is so different to slithering thought, wolf fangs in his mouth. Lies, Armand lying, Armand a liar.
Armand's blood on his knuckles, leaking from broken nose and mouth and eye socket. It taints the air, the smell of it, like static electricity.
'He used you to punish himself,' a faster thing, silkier, as Lestat gets to his feet. 'That is what you are. The lash wielded by whoever can stand to touch you, and he needs you no longer. Take your slave-love and go.'
He has already fed, but saliva gathers in his mouth. Hunger, a tangling, liminal sensation for a vampire.
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The images are different this time. Ephemeral, just impressions of things. Armand-but-not standing in the common area of their hotel back in New York, and Louis, wearing an outfit Lestat will have seen later that night. They are speaking. Armand, in an apartment, looking into the dark glass of a window and seeing Louis' reflection, speaking.
Chatty Cathys. (Doesn't matter about what. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter that Armand has been desperate, and lonely, and resentful, and these have mostly been arguments about Daniel. Daniel is not Lestat's business.)
'Slaves. We understood each other. You will treat him like that again. You will beat him again. It is your way.'
Nails on glass. An unpleasant twist of a nerve. Armand doesn't love exposing this, his own pathetic stalking. Willing to endure it if it's a knife that cuts both of them.
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But Louis has forgiven him. Small kisses felt through the curtain of his hair while a hurricane rages outside. Louis looking down at him where he perches on the edge of the bathtub, touching his face. Turning in his arms to a corny karaoke performance. His hand in Lestat's as they look at a painting (and the sound of Daniel's footsteps as he moves away through the gallery, and it is quite frequent, these little careless fragments of Armand's fledgling, not a constant, but often there).
It's with intent that Lestat summons these thoughts, a layering of armor, insulating, protecting himself from psychic claws getting at the cracks. Look how soft and gentle and affectionate Louis is, even if he is mom ami, not mon cher.
That all happens as fast as thought. In the real world, Lestat charges.
Paris again, fangs long and heavy cloak flaring. The city is different. The clothing is different. But there are certain constants. One is this, a bestial manner towards handling conflict. He is faster, however, trying to move quicker than invisible iron hands, intent on getting his teeth in Armand's neck.
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He misses him. Acid bile in his throat to think of it. He is jealous of the way they are all together. Safety in numbers. Comfort in numbers.
They are all his, in their ways. Lestat, not his fledgling, but his student and protege anyway. Louis, his would-be savior, his companion. And Daniel. The infuriating Mr Molloy whose presence in those flashes he runs a psychic finger over. His. The truest of it. His.
He should stop Lestat. This will hurt and Armand is tired of being hurt, even if he's used to it. But Lestat is mon ami, not mon cher, and Daniel is haunting every edge of his new platonic friendship with Louis. That's funny. Armand will show him how funny. He gets a grip but it falters; half on purpose, half because Lestat is stronger than he expects. Collision, then fangs.
As expected:
Ow.
But this makes connection so much easier. Through his blood. He can grab the back of Lestat's hair in the physical realm, and the vicious grab follows through to the psychic realm. A grab, a shove, slamming him face-first into it through their minds, through his blood. See, feel, experience. It is 1973 in San Fransisco and Armand is following an unsettled feeling to a shitty gay bar. Something is different about tonight. Louis often hunts this way and Armand despises it, but he allows it, because Louis can't control himself otherwise. Different. He can feel it before he opens the door. He can feel it as he gets closer, and sees his companion, his lover, sitting beside a mortal, with a smile on his face that's so genuine it takes Armand's breath away.
Colorless, an echo of Louis' voice, unkind. Armand tries to put it away. Boring. Daniel, barely twenty years old, smiles back at Louis. They're practically giggling with each other. Chemistry so immediate and genuine that it makes Armand sick. Because he knows he won't be able to ask Louis to come home with him instead. The boy is a foregone conclusion. The boy is in fact still here, in Vermont.
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A cost to that. For a moment, Lestat loses sense of the physical realm after feeling Armand's fingers close in his hair, and he is then somewhere else.
Knows that the young man he is observing is Daniel, intrinsically, almost a double-visioned layering over. Louis and Daniel, smiling, laughing. Some magical, sparkling thing. Armand's ill-feeling is Lestat's despair, something he has already felt. His own brain, producing memory unbidden, Louis' expression soft and fond, a silence between he and the boy grown up that Lestat knows without any doubt is being filled with psychic chatter. Or here, Daniel kneeling at Louis' feet, and Louis holding his face like a treasured thing.
'You made a mistake,' fast as electricity. 'Your stealing the boy' (the fascinating boy, says an echo) 'from him. Now they talk and whisper in each others minds. They touch each others scars, the ones you have left on them. Now they are inseparable.'
Colourless. Flavourless. A distractable turn of attention.
In Burlington, fifty years on, another deep draw of blood, allowing rich life to pool on the cracked asphalt. Lestat placing a hand on Armand's shoulder, keeping him pinned with steely strength, and ready to wrench free.
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The floor slants slightly north. The boy's blood flowed that way. Armand tells Louis this; he does so dispassionately, frankly, and he endeavors to smell the char of Louis' flesh instead of the boy's rancid, drug-adulterated blood, with its bizarre allure beneath. It will be over soon. Louis' breathing is labored, horrible, pieces of himself flaking off within. Louis of course does not need to breathe to live, but he needs to breathe to speak. Lestat can hear it. Flinching all inside of him. He had been screaming. There was sunlight in his mouth, down his throat.
Now they are inseparable. He's alive? Like Louis and Claudia, Lestat thinks. Silly. Armand can still hear Louis. The boy? The fascinating boy? To this day, Armand's immediate, blind fury at Louis managing to give a fuck about the junkie in the midst of all that surprises him. He looks back at himself and wonders how tightly wound his own trigger was. What else might have finally pulled it.
Armand digs his nails into Lestat's head. Nicks the bone of his skull. Worse if he struggles.
The swirling chaos of Armand's memories. His best ones of his fledgling, when he was still mortal. A little rabbit of a boy, heart pounding frantically, frozen and trying to squirm away at once. Louis is there. Burned. Suffering. He begs Armand to stop. He calls Armand a little bitch. Shuffled like cards.
'Why am I going away, and leaving you with them?' He feels a little lightheaded. Lestat was always such a greedy drinker. 'So you can cry over Louis loving someone else all alone? At least you'd have company with me, child.'
This is not actually deliberate manipulation. Louis might. Armand feared it for some time, and it's perfectly reasonable Lestat does as well. Louis and Daniel, in a bar in San Fransisco. Louis, screaming through his scorched injuries, for the boy, the boy, Armand, stop, Armand, please. Louis and Daniel again, in Dubai.
It had wound his anxiety higher, and higher, like—
Louis was just having some fun. This is boring. You're boring. You are so boring. Dull nights, dull weeks, dull months, dull as fuck. He hears it in his head louder and louder, sitting in their living room, in their dining room, even in their bedroom, as Louis stares at Daniel, and tells him things he'd never told Armand.
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Louis bending over Daniel, an embrace, saying, 'I chose you', and the way it was like ice water washed through Lestat.
But no, Armand is right here, his throat in Lestat's jaws. Absurdly, some part of him that feels entirely disconnected to the fight and warms to this offer, feels their configuration as an embrace. If there were no claws or fangs involved, their monstrous parts, that's what it would be. He could be here, cry in company. He has, of course, spoken to no one of his hideous jealousy, but it seems that Armand has felt it too.
There is no God, he's known all along, but he has asked oblivion plenty of times: why is he, Lestat, so difficult to love? When he loves so easily, so violently?
But they are fighting.
Fighting while all this sentiment spills out of him in a rush. This is no way for a predator to behave, to collapse under simple truths. That hand pinning his shoulder pushes, hard enough that the bone is liable to slip out from its joint. A physical pulling back as he psychically tries to retreat from the kaleidoscope. Louis, burned beyond recognition, crying out. The pain, the pain. Louis, cackling, I'm sorry, he doesn't mean it, meaningless words.
Another flicker. A big ol' butcher knife, eyes wild, fangs in a grin, blood on their faces. Yes, Louis can be quite cruel. The first thing Lestat knew about him. He thought: this would make a good vampire.
Continues to reach, trying to wade out from this swamp.
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(Even the wounds Armand made. Just a bit clever, once in a while.)
They have ruined so much. They are alike in the worst ways. Armand could cradle him like this, and comfort him, and they could both mourn their mistakes. They are both too much. Lestat too passionate, Armand too cold. For a short time, those things made them successful partners. Intensity is alluring, no matter the type.
A short short time. A transformative time. A time that left Armand's heart shattered. He put the pieces back together, even colder, even harder. He cut himself on the shards but did his duty. He even did his duty to Nicki, the first lover-fledgling Lestat left to him. What a fool. Stupid, naive Armand, who despite his age, fell for it again. Another of Lestat's toys.
Lestat, Lestat, Lestat. Trying to get away from him. Thinking about Louis, and his cruelty.
If that's what Lestat likes, then he will oblige him. He'll let him have his fill. More than. Did they tell him? The details weren't all in the book. No, they didn't. A quick check, barely-there, as he pulls Lestat deeper, deeper, deeper. Into himself. Into a memory burned into him. Into an apartment in San Fransisco, where Louis is in the bedroom and Daniel is on the floor. The door is shut, Louis is screaming, and Daniel is nearly dead.
Armand lets Lestat have the table to sit at, a gracious host, while he picks up the puddles of shiny ribbon, to spool around his fingers, and run through the points of his nails like a needle scratching a record.
Louis' voice. It fills both their heads, loud and clear. It booms over other-Louis' begging, over Daniel's terrified wheezes, it plays, and plays, and plays.
"He had a dark pull."
The tape begins.
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Sitting here at the table, daylight pressing in against papered over windows. Lestat slides a look down at Daniel, who is an old man in between blinks, and then the youthful version of himself, flickering. Looks to the door, Louis' bellows. Up at Armand, as Louis' voice plays out, tinny, between his claws.
"I know the type," Molloy's voice, commiserating.
"If you stripped away his superficial charms, beneath his flimsy gentleman's veneer, Lestat was trivial, vapid, vulgar, maniacal, blind and sterile and contemptible—"
"Big time asshole."
The chair scrapes and bumps along the ground as Lestat stands. Moving, then, to the door that Louis is behind, still crying out in pain. There is no opening it, even as he tries, a hand on the handle, then the surface, then claws digging into wood. Armand did not open it then, and it doesn't open now.
"He appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dry twigs with a thin, carping voice."
Splinters coming up under his nails. His back is to Armand, but his upset is clear, existing as he is now in this little prison, a sharp and thorough wounding, fresh blood. No, they avoided saying all of this. Of course they did. It would be indulgent to just fold up and listen to the rest, why not, confirm all his jealousies, all his suspicions, and never mind whatever is happening outside of him, outside of Armand.
Something in him, detached of these feelings, that asks: what are you trying to accomplish? Escape, surrender? Decide and let it be done. And the feeling of claws in soft wood is like metal hooks gently finding weakened spots in Armand's mind, no panicky scrabbling, only calm evaluation.
In Burlington, it might feel a little like static electricity in the air.
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What is he doing?
Does it matter?
Daniel is on the floor, old and young between Lestat's blinks of perception. Armand observes this, and he walks slowly across the small living room space. He crouches down, and cradles the shivering mortal's face. Are you going to kill me, queries the amalgam of memory and imagination.
Armand tells him yes. Just not right now.
"I've been avoiding you," Armand says, this time to Lestat. "So you say. Is this the kind of attention you've been hoping for? Would you like something different?"
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He sort of does. He isn't real, here, none of this is, so there is a version where Lestat's desire to do that is that, fitful keening that Louis could say such things about him, to this mortal, to Armand, to himself. He also stops trying to break down the door. There is nothing on the other side. Void.
Lestat looks over, where Armand crouches over his fledgling. Here, a funny little undercurrent of misgiving. Yes, Lestat would like Armand to renounce his claim to best sever remaining ties between him and Louis. But also, a vaguely animal impulse. He has been travelling with Daniel, hunting with Daniel, teaching Daniel things in his own haphazard way. The mortal word for it would be 'friends'. Maybe it's the vampire word too.
But the instinct feels a little less complicated. Possessive. Stop touching that one, it's his. Or Louis', which is like being also his.
"I wanted you to listen to me," comes out both in a creaky little voice as well as a serene, level one. The former left behind, as he adds, "Must I repeat myself, Amadeo?"
In the real world, Armand's shoulder dislocates under the press of Lestat's hand. And in here—
No mad dash to escape. No, here he is, already, in Armand's mind. How best to make his point known and understood? Hooks tear, a sound like wood shattering as the little apartment is rent asunder. Lestat, wolfish, moving to tackle Armand off of Daniel, to tumble into the darkness.
Reaching within. He should leave, because he already left, already abandoned his fledgling. Maybe Armand needs to recall what it was like. They both know.
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Cradling his fledgling's face, he sees something in between; watching him age in blinks, in dust jacket portraits, in lurking visits. Black curls become striped with silver, then it overtakes it, skin sags and stretches and develops cutting character. Daniel continues to shiver and sniffle, eyes wet with clear, watery tears.
Listen.
Since when does Lestat listen to anyone? Why should Armand give him such grace, when Lestat has never given an inch of his own?
But that change. Barely any words. Armand turns his head over his shoulder to look at the other vampire, his expression one that Louis struggled to name, but still managed to sketchily describe; blank and apocalyptic. Is he angry? He must be. Nothing else qualifies. No amount of breaking his shoulder, his arm, any part of him, compares to the feeling of this mongrel anglo impostor daring to utter Amadeo to him, of Lestat trying to mimic a man who was a god, and to hold it over him.
Lestat slams into him. Daniel is ripped away. Falling into the dark like a brick dropped off of a ledge. There's nothing graceful about the plunge into the cold, black ocean within Armand. Does Lestat want a slave after all? Does it all boil down to this? The same brutal balance that Armand first learned when he was still Arun?
Must I repeat myself, Amadeo?
Marius speaks in Latin. He holds his Amadeo by his chin, explains to him again, how the transformation works. He will be drained again, and again, and he will be drowned so he can save himself, so Marius knows it's taken with proper strength. Amadeo has been ill, his body has not fully recovered thanks to the Gift; Marius is disgusted and angry that he managed to get himself so sick (doing the work Marius sent him to do), and he laments losing the stunning gold chip of the boy from the continent, who he can no longer send out for fear of burning in the sun.
They continue to fall.
Tell him again.
He was only ever Amadeo because he was Arun. (Maybe. It could have been Arjun, or Iren, or a dozen other things.) He could only please his god, his Marius, because of Arun. Arun's horror, Arun's suffering, over and over, choking, bleeding, violated, again and again. He is taught by repetition, he is taught by being drugged, he is taught by violence, and penetration, and suffocation, and use. His body hasn't finished growing. He doesn't understand Italian. He begins to romanticize the taste of his own blood in his mouth, because it means it isn't full of anything else, and the beatings are better than the rapes, and even food, which he throws up too often to find relieving.
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Marble white hands pulling him from the dirt, pressing his fang-filled mouth to a throat full of blue veins. Marius or Magnus, it doesn't matter. Lestat bites, hopelessly hungry, powerless in powerful arms.
And then Amadeo drags him further down, the infinite void. Like Lestat had tackled Armand into a ditch, not realising they were cliffs above a cold, rocky ocean.
There are terrible truths to what lies in wait. That there is no God, for no God would allow a child to suffer these things before it even has the capacity to understand them. Lestat had been old enough, the second time, to know better than to cry out in prayer, or to hope someone would come along and shield him. So he'd showed his teeth (just the blunt, omnivorous kind then) and cursed them and lashed out. The sting of the cane, the moment it breaks the skin and slings fine misting droplets of blood into the air.
Which is what Lestat feels when, senselessly, he makes this attempt. To intervene, to curl around the flickering little flame that is Arun or Arjun or Iren, which survives in spite of it. He can give this: the lash, an insult, the lonely cold after. Here, take these instead. They are bearable. He was alright, after.
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There's no God, there are no gods; not at home, wherever that was, and not here, on wooden planks showing through plaster, where Armand-Arun reaches for Lestat when he's drawn closer. Lestat has always understood more about the world than Armand, whose growth and education have been stunted over and over. Maybe he understands this, and he can just bury his face in the younger vampire's shoulder, and it'll go away.
(Of course—)
Cold inside of him, colder than freezing, enough that the snow is a relief. Hidden away somewhere in a part of France he's never seen except through stories told to him. He doesn't think Lestat deserves to be beaten, but he understands why. God demands much, because God's emptiness allows him to be filled with humanity's resentment. God's falseness allows him to be shaped into anything, wielded by anyone, and with an ever-changing force.
He wants to stay in the snow, holding Lestat, trying to shelter each other. If it's cold, they don't have to move on to the fire.
Because of course Lestat has known Marius, and Marius loved him. Better than Armand, instantly, immediately, and with enough force to bring him to life. It shatters in more effectively than breaking all of his bones; in Vermont, on the edge of the lake, Armand gasps in a breath that sounds ragged, but quiet, like glass breaking slowly under a steady footstep.
"I love you," Amadeo told his maker. Loved by God, and Marius was God, wasn't he? Marius didn't look up; he never looked up. "I'm sure you do, Amadeo."
If he feeds himself to the wolves, he'll just reform after. There's nowhere to go.
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My love goes with you, Marius had said, holding him, because Marius was sending him away, and Lestat receives these words utterly sick with—not regret, exactly, but near enough. He has made mistakes again, and he is being abandoned again, driven away again.
These things feel as brittle as winter leaves in the howling wind at the centre of the place he is tangled up with Armand in. Snow melting under their knees, and the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air. The cries of a horse, the snapping of jaws.
Magnus had called him Wolfkiller. He had called him Lelio. He had grabbed at pale golden hair with clawed fingers, admiring, picking locks up to let them fall, showing a grin bearing only two sharp canines left in his mouth. How afraid that smile had made Lestat first, and then how sad he thought it looked as he clung to Magnus' rotting garments and begged him not to leave him here, after everything, after changing him so completely.
(And here, at the periphery of things: he had told Daniel that he thought he loved his maker, in spite of everything. The context is easy to find. They'd been talking about the monsters that made them. How fucked up it all is.)
He is meant to be leaving him here, he thinks. He'd dragged Armand to the bottom of everything, so he could escape. In the nighttime countryside of Auvergne or this little stone dungeon, standing where the gremlin once stood, where piles of dirty blondes once decorated the place.
Why, though? They hate each other, but why? He can't recall. They loved each other too, once. Things change.
In the real world, his bite has loosened. Stops taking the blood. It drools out of his parted mouth.
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Armand shows this to Lestat, a confession held in his hands like a crippled bird. He has known, but he has not wanted to see. For centuries he has known, and now that he sees it, he wants to die. In this moment, for the first time, he truly wants to die.
But he can't, can he?
They are in Magnus' lair, they are in a dark room that the Children of Satan have put them in; Magnus will come to leave more corpses, Santino will come to beat them, and burn between their thighs, and make them recite scripture while starving, and Magnus will return and try to drag them apart, and Marius won't ever be there, because Marius burned, except he didn't, and Armand has always known that. Marius left him to this, left him to this for centuries, left him to become Armand, and now Armand—
What will he do? Will he pull Lestat from it, out of this dungeon?
In the real world, he curls his arms over the other vampire. He strokes his blond hair, and he kisses his temple.
Lestat was the first person he ever chose. The first person he gave his body to without being ordered, or instructed, or gifted. Lestat rewrote so much pain in Armand, some of which he didn't even know had been there. And then he left. This is what happens. Armand is left, or sold, or simply forgotten about. He left Armand, he abandoned Nicki, he ruined Louis, and Armand still holds him, because he still deserves thanks for having treated Armand tenderly, even if it was only one time, even if it wasn't genuine.
It's fine if it wasn't genuine. Lestat cannot justly be expected to give him anything genuine when his own maker wouldn't.
Armand le Rien. Armand l'Erreur.
'You want me to go away.'
Spare Louis further paranoia and pain. Set Daniel free. Take the cold ocean inside of him, take his ancient blood, his attention, his protection, his bored threats, and go away. His maker, happier with Lestat. His companion, happier with Lestat. His fledgling, happier with Lestat. Armand feels cold. Colder than that. More. Deeper. Darker. Ice on ice, to the marrow. He holds Lestat so closely.
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And drifts in it for a moment. Suppose he stay. Suppose they go away into their respective miseries, unshackle their fledglings from themselves. Suppose Lestat do as he did not two centuries ago, and ask Armand to come with him, and allow himself to drown in this cold ocean, freeze in this ice. Who knows? Perhaps he is capable of thawing it. (But Nicki went mad. But Louis killed him and left him and now loves others, chooses others.)
He isn't sure when he had begun crying, but becomes more aware of it, choking sounds and little quakes at the centre of his chest with each gasp, buried there into a bloodied throat as he is held, petted, kissed.
No. This cannot go on.
An inverse of old times. When before, there had only been an inkling that perhaps leaving Louis and Claudia to their life together would be the better thing, drowned out in his ardent desire to return to his family, now there is an inkling that perhaps Louis would not want him to go away, a speck of burning selfishness in this equally indulgent misery. Here, he can summon them, these little fragments: Louis holding his hands or touching his face or sharing a coffin and saying that he wants him here, he is glad he is here, he has missed his voice.
And they have made promises. They will go on walks in the park again, he will teach him how to dance in this era, Louis will take silly photographs and Lestat will play the piano after fifty years of silence.
Magnus had held him this way as well. How unlike and like him Armand had seemed back then, and still does. Beautiful and fragile in a way his maker was not, but also terrible and powerful and consuming, and both of them with their own dark pull. Here is this memory, the brink of death, and impossibly strong arms hold him close, stroke his hair, coax his mouth to the laceration carved into a cold white throat. Lestat had wondered, later, what separated him from the bloated corpses in the dungeon, and he thinks it is this: struggling, cursing, every atom of his being in rebellion until finally he is near death and can do nothing but allow ancient blood to trickle down his throat.
Because Magnus had decided this quality would make him a good vampire. Later, Louis would call him a brat. He supposes both things can be true. Something in him that recalls the sound of violins approves, reaches out.
Blunt psychic force, nothing that should belong to a two and a half century year old child, even one of Magnus. It feels like a hand in the centre of Armand's chest, or maybe a little to the left, and pushes forcefully. Down, back into the ice, and by extension, Lestat away from it. (A street lamp bursts. A stray cat lurking by the gutters convulses, dies. Someone in a small apartment has a seizure in their sleep, will wake up to a bloodied pillowcase.)
'I want you to go away,' quavering, this voice. 'I want you to leave me alone, Armand. Louis is mine. Daniel is Louis'. None of us are yours.'
A conviction in this. Flawed, perhaps, but believed. They are a trio of kinds. There is no place for the ghoulish monster lurking in the shadows.
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