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.
Slow. Ice moving across the sea. Blunt force that Armand feels atom by atom. He watches them pass. He feels his chest begin to collapse; the weight of it lists towards his damaged shoulder, where structural integrity is already compromised. He hears the deafening change of electric power, he feels the death of a little creature. Heartbeats, far and wide. A radio in a houseboat. A phone playing an ASMR video of hair brushing and indistinct murmurs.
Lestat.
Lestat, Lestat, Lestat...
He watches more atoms move. Atmosphere, then fibrous material, and biological matter. His nails rend clothes and pierce flesh and grasp a fistful of internal meat. Aiming for the mass of the lungs, colliding with curved ribs, grazing the liver, finally stabbing diamond-razor points in. Slow, to Armand, who feels it like his hand sinking into something warm and familiar, but outside, it is instantaneous.
He did such a nice job at karaoke. Armand heard every note.
Charcoal sticks and bottles of perfumed oil. Silk hair ribbons, black to match Armand's hair and his disposition. Nicki's hands, cleanly severed off, kept in a box with plush lining and oiled every day to keep them from drying out too badly. The whip Louis favored when he was in his most intense moods. Daniel's second best-seller, and the forty-something portrait of him on the back of the dust jacket. Totems that Armand thinks of. Other things he has held so lovingly. A flower. A phone. The colored glass keychain in his coat pocket.
His shaking is like sobbing, it is like laughter. Frayed completely. Armand is five hundred years old. There is starlight touching them now that is younger than him, visiting from dead cosmic bodies. And yet it means nothing. He is pointless, and yet he must exist. He is. He is chained to his master-maker for eternity, lives in Lestat's memory like a curse, he is written on the inside of Louis' skull, he shares a heart with Daniel. Look how he persists, despite being nothing.
"No."
Bright like a bell. A pleasant sound. His face is still half-mangled, but there is a curved flash of teeth, little fangs and all. His nose is bleeding. His mind feels strange.
'Put yourself into the sun before it's too late, child. We will do this forever.'
A hoarse bellow escapes Lestat's throat before he can quite register its meaning, and a useless, drowning gasp following it quickly. He heaves himself off and away, a clawed grasp at Armand's arm to unhook his clawed fingers from the edge of his ribcage. He will snap that wrist if he can, if needs be, or just because, or without even thinking about it: Armand's choice for interpretation.
Coming back to the moment, dizzyingly cognizant of time and place, of concrete beneath his knees. The snow is waterier, here, than the thick frozen stuff of the deep wilderness he knew so well, once. No snapping wolves. No flintlock. He knows not what time it is to the hour. And oh yes, he does hate Armand.
And did he expect him to say 'yes'? Come on now.
But Lestat is clawing for distance, a scrambling motion while his hand clutches at his wound. Is he healing? He has Armand's blood in his veins. He has Akasha's blood in his veins, which he feels like fire, flushing through him on each heartbeat. Of both, he has taken a great deal. Still, motion tears at the delicate fibres trying to stitch him back together. Not quite breathing. He must remember he doesn't need to.
What air comes in comes out as a wheeze, a laugh. As if what Armand has said is funny.
'Do all those who grow weary of your company will themselves to ash? Or pretend to.'
Perhaps he can tear his throat out. Throw him into the lake, the icy cold he tastes of. Perhaps that would work. Get his point across. His own blood gathers and seeps between his fingers.
Armand's own laughter continues. Through the outburst, through the breaking of his wrist which makes his voice twist, wounded, but uncaring. His clawing is so firm that the removal of his hand leaves behind further damage, and a torn-out nail. Stolen blood will mend Lestat, but only as quick as his system can distribute it to where the damaged tissue is.
He feels strange. Pain on a delay. Lestat's efforts are impacting him more than they should, lingering longer than he expects, pushing him harder, disorienting him further. He can't think of why; his mind is a downward spiral. Why shouldn't Lestat be good at everything, for no reason at all? Doesn't have to wait, doesn't have to learn, just gets to be Lestat, a perfect, beautiful, anglo vision of every talent, so desired he must run across the globe here and there, crying as though everything is so hard for him.
Who cares. They've all fucking suffered.
'Not enough to have it given once honestly?'
Armand has told him before. Meant it before, and was so desperate he accepted an anemic return. He doesn't learn. Lestat, saying I love you, an obvious lie. Louis, saying I love you, an obvious lie. At least Marius didn't pretend. He would never say it. He accepted Amadeo's devotion but never returned it.
'Did Louis ever say it? Has he ever given it to you, trusted you enough, even to placate you? Or have you just watched him love Claudia, and his mortal family, and Daniel?'
Splinters of it. Louis refusing to send the girl away, agonizing over her despite her endless horrid behavior; sitting with Daniel in Dubai, smiling at him, holding one of his books. Always someone else. Always looking away. (Claudia, Daniel, a fucking hallucination of Lestat.)
Broken and bleeding, Armand lifts himself up like a creature far behind the simple dead nature of a vampire. He looms towards the younger monster, the elegance of his drifting at odds with the horrible menace radiating off of him. He collects all the venom he has into something to offer up with hands so used to worship.
'Here, then, maybe you'll be the first person to try to get away from me and have it stick: I love you, Lestat.'
No, of course, no, Louis has never said it, and Armand knows this. Loathsome, that he knows this. Humiliating that this one should see firsthand his failures, to know its details, to have been the only one to say it. Daniel had said something about the sympathetic villain of a story, but it is not what he wants. He doesn't want a story at all. He wants Louis to love him, and that is all.
Armand, drifting closer. Lestat, listing his head back to watch him, holding his wound and his ground. Closer to human in this way, twitching muscle and wet panting and wariness, closer than Armand's broken doll oddness, no need for an operable body to move himself so.
'I did love you,' spoken as a thought, because he can't catch his breath. 'Though you are miserable and hateful and will punish me for it until the end of all things, I loved you.'
But he left, yes. And so what?
'You say you are devoted, but you're the grabbing child, not me. Finding fledglings to save your life with and unwilling to make your own. To find someone of your own, to love them, to choose them. To risk the disaster that could come of it.'
Clearly, this cannot be Daniel. Armand only made Daniel to stay tethered to Louis, to stay tethered to Lestat. He doesn't even dignify the possibility with a mention, an exception, not when Armand abandoned the man to his fate. Getting to his feet, a scrape of boots on damp asphalt. Broken feathers, blood staining corduroy, curls wild and blood streaked. A different creature from the preening fledgling two centuries and more ago, the same one.
'I'm not one of those who will die at your pleasure. You will need to get your hands dirty for once, pute.'
Tempting to turn it into a mental shouting match. He could. He could snap No you didn't at Lestat's assertion of love, he could shout over him that he's spent the whole of his existence dedicated to cleaning up problems made by other people, no small number among them Lestat's own doing, if he's grabbing for anything it's putting away the toys that the likes of Lestat and Louis have knocked over while having tantrums because life hasn't gone their way.
But he's too angry. Past the point of arguing.
"You look ridiculous."
Offered aloud. He looks like a Mardi Gras float that's been run off a bridge.
Fitting.
Armand's head tilts (looks like it hurts to do) (it does), then, and he says nothing else, out loud or through their minds, but there is an implication all the same. Will I?
All of his compacted anger slams down onto Lestat. Compressed and hardened into a wall of power and force. He will crush him back down onto the ground without moving his hands, without touching him at all. No hand movements to illustrate his point or help focus him; he no longer needs the guidance to visualize it, these centuries since he accosted Lestat on the streets of Paris, and he doesn't feel the need to show off to that degree. He's not a performer. He's wearing dark neutral colors and a boring coat. Not a single feather.
Maybe Armand didn't choose Daniel. Heavily maybe; perhaps he knows he didn't. He lashed out. He wanted to take something from Louis. He wanted to shut Daniel up. But night by night he grows more certain that he likes it better this way. It's not how anyone else was made.
There will probably be an argument about this encounter. Armand wonders how it will go, and with all the energy he has, grinds his proverbial, telekinetic heel into Lestat.
Rude. And Lestat has said nothing unkind about Armand's ugly, dull clothing.
And then he is on the ground.
A shock, despite all he knows of Armand. What air has gathered in his lungs is expelled on impact, speckling the nearby ground in crimson, and staying that way as telekinetic force pins him harder. Like he could crack the concrete with his body. An acute pain where a rib dislodges. Bared teeth, a moment of wild animal panic and fury, claws scratching at the ground and drawing up dust, loose sediment.
Not quite his talent, turning the empty air into a fist. Little things instead, turning locks and breaking electronics. He wants to throw Armand into the lake, and maybe this desire tugs at Armand, feels like a sharp wind that rustles hair and coat tails, but that is all.
Here, then: an unbidden little ribbon of fear in the static haze of their psychic outpourings and minglings.
The great, invisible hand that slammed Lestat to the pavement now wraps harshly around him. It raises him into the air, and then throws him back down again. Armand's eyes shake. Pupils fixed, bigger than usual but not fully blown out, trembling, shimmering.
Again.
He feels blood leak from his nose. Not the way it should be, from Lestat's violence. Something is a little bit wrong, though he's not sure what. Lestat, too, should be different. He should be in pieces. Armand's blood is potent, but Lestat has a strong heart and his own dominant bloodline. It should have run out of steam already in the frantic effort to reconstruct his lungs.
(I have the blood of Akasha in me, and he fed from Marius, or was given something by Marius, Marius who knows everything of them, of their origins, who decided his Amadeo was sweet but too stupid, not worthy, never worthy. Pieces of a puzzle. He can't quite, he can't quite—)
'You think you're going to take my fledgling from me? You think giving him months of space is abandonment? What then, of how you have treated yours?'
Like a knife, he delves into Lestat's mind. Flips through quickly, finds all the pages about Gabrielle, her reckless making and utterly unknown fate, about Nicki, who Lestat gave to Armand, about Louis, who Lestat also fucking gave to Armand, and Claudia who Lestat ran out, tried to murder, Antoinette who he used like a shoe, and what's this? What's this? Another? Does Lestat even remember that one's name?
Again.
Armand finds that ribbon, and winds it around his fingers. His internal voice is cold, and cruel.
'Do you want to die, like I want to die? Or do you fear it, the end you've carelessly sent so many to?'
A knife goes in, twists, a rush of memory flowing out. Lestat, gathering it defensively in his fingers. Offended on Louis' behalf to be compared to the rest, even tragic Nicki whom he loved, even Gabrielle, his first companion. No, Louis was chosen. Chosen for love, to love him, to love the life Lestat imagined would make them both happy. Gifted, not tricked.
Momentary, this clawing, before the next slam of his body into the ground scatters his thoughts again. Bleeding too fast to heal, a steady stream from his nose, his side, something ruptured.
He should be breaking apart, and he isn't. Injured, yes, breaking, but whole, stubbornly held together. The rhythm of it like a beating, and he had survived that, has survived being hopelessly overpowered. Another memory, perhaps called to the surface from Armand's rifling around, maybe Lestat reaching for it in desperation: that quiet place, the fresco, the flames, and the sound of a violin, echoing. The bow shivering in his fingers, the strings on the verge of snapping, some of them fraying. He is not a violinist but it doesn't matter, he is a vampire, a vampire with a knack.
The music shrieks, like a dying thing, like an electric guitar, piercing, too much for a human to enjoy, too loud and shrill, mirror-cracking, but something else liked it very much.
It echoes in his ears when he presses his mouth to an elegant wrist that feels like cold, unyielding marble, but his fangs sink in anyway, and the blood that pours forth is heavy on his tongue, and seems to chase down his throat without his needing to swallow. Gifted. And then someone is yelling, and pain, fire across his scalp from a grip to his hair with the strength of an angel, but none of that matters. Just the blood.
Lestat stops being flung about, a fixed point in the air. Maybe it hurts Armand, easy power meeting a brick wall when Lestat resists. Almost like some other ancient has walked on scene and decided to reach out, to take over, but there is none, just them.
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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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Lestat.
Lestat, Lestat, Lestat...
He watches more atoms move. Atmosphere, then fibrous material, and biological matter. His nails rend clothes and pierce flesh and grasp a fistful of internal meat. Aiming for the mass of the lungs, colliding with curved ribs, grazing the liver, finally stabbing diamond-razor points in. Slow, to Armand, who feels it like his hand sinking into something warm and familiar, but outside, it is instantaneous.
He did such a nice job at karaoke. Armand heard every note.
Charcoal sticks and bottles of perfumed oil. Silk hair ribbons, black to match Armand's hair and his disposition. Nicki's hands, cleanly severed off, kept in a box with plush lining and oiled every day to keep them from drying out too badly. The whip Louis favored when he was in his most intense moods. Daniel's second best-seller, and the forty-something portrait of him on the back of the dust jacket. Totems that Armand thinks of. Other things he has held so lovingly. A flower. A phone. The colored glass keychain in his coat pocket.
His shaking is like sobbing, it is like laughter. Frayed completely. Armand is five hundred years old. There is starlight touching them now that is younger than him, visiting from dead cosmic bodies. And yet it means nothing. He is pointless, and yet he must exist. He is. He is chained to his master-maker for eternity, lives in Lestat's memory like a curse, he is written on the inside of Louis' skull, he shares a heart with Daniel. Look how he persists, despite being nothing.
"No."
Bright like a bell. A pleasant sound. His face is still half-mangled, but there is a curved flash of teeth, little fangs and all. His nose is bleeding. His mind feels strange.
'Put yourself into the sun before it's too late, child. We will do this forever.'
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Coming back to the moment, dizzyingly cognizant of time and place, of concrete beneath his knees. The snow is waterier, here, than the thick frozen stuff of the deep wilderness he knew so well, once. No snapping wolves. No flintlock. He knows not what time it is to the hour. And oh yes, he does hate Armand.
And did he expect him to say 'yes'? Come on now.
But Lestat is clawing for distance, a scrambling motion while his hand clutches at his wound. Is he healing? He has Armand's blood in his veins. He has Akasha's blood in his veins, which he feels like fire, flushing through him on each heartbeat. Of both, he has taken a great deal. Still, motion tears at the delicate fibres trying to stitch him back together. Not quite breathing. He must remember he doesn't need to.
What air comes in comes out as a wheeze, a laugh. As if what Armand has said is funny.
'Do all those who grow weary of your company will themselves to ash? Or pretend to.'
Perhaps he can tear his throat out. Throw him into the lake, the icy cold he tastes of. Perhaps that would work. Get his point across. His own blood gathers and seeps between his fingers.
'Say you love me, I'll consider it.'
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He feels strange. Pain on a delay. Lestat's efforts are impacting him more than they should, lingering longer than he expects, pushing him harder, disorienting him further. He can't think of why; his mind is a downward spiral. Why shouldn't Lestat be good at everything, for no reason at all? Doesn't have to wait, doesn't have to learn, just gets to be Lestat, a perfect, beautiful, anglo vision of every talent, so desired he must run across the globe here and there, crying as though everything is so hard for him.
Who cares. They've all fucking suffered.
'Not enough to have it given once honestly?'
Armand has told him before. Meant it before, and was so desperate he accepted an anemic return. He doesn't learn. Lestat, saying I love you, an obvious lie. Louis, saying I love you, an obvious lie. At least Marius didn't pretend. He would never say it. He accepted Amadeo's devotion but never returned it.
'Did Louis ever say it? Has he ever given it to you, trusted you enough, even to placate you? Or have you just watched him love Claudia, and his mortal family, and Daniel?'
Splinters of it. Louis refusing to send the girl away, agonizing over her despite her endless horrid behavior; sitting with Daniel in Dubai, smiling at him, holding one of his books. Always someone else. Always looking away. (Claudia, Daniel, a fucking hallucination of Lestat.)
Broken and bleeding, Armand lifts himself up like a creature far behind the simple dead nature of a vampire. He looms towards the younger monster, the elegance of his drifting at odds with the horrible menace radiating off of him. He collects all the venom he has into something to offer up with hands so used to worship.
'Here, then, maybe you'll be the first person to try to get away from me and have it stick: I love you, Lestat.'
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Armand, drifting closer. Lestat, listing his head back to watch him, holding his wound and his ground. Closer to human in this way, twitching muscle and wet panting and wariness, closer than Armand's broken doll oddness, no need for an operable body to move himself so.
'I did love you,' spoken as a thought, because he can't catch his breath. 'Though you are miserable and hateful and will punish me for it until the end of all things, I loved you.'
But he left, yes. And so what?
'You say you are devoted, but you're the grabbing child, not me. Finding fledglings to save your life with and unwilling to make your own. To find someone of your own, to love them, to choose them. To risk the disaster that could come of it.'
Clearly, this cannot be Daniel. Armand only made Daniel to stay tethered to Louis, to stay tethered to Lestat. He doesn't even dignify the possibility with a mention, an exception, not when Armand abandoned the man to his fate. Getting to his feet, a scrape of boots on damp asphalt. Broken feathers, blood staining corduroy, curls wild and blood streaked. A different creature from the preening fledgling two centuries and more ago, the same one.
'I'm not one of those who will die at your pleasure. You will need to get your hands dirty for once, pute.'
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But he's too angry. Past the point of arguing.
"You look ridiculous."
Offered aloud. He looks like a Mardi Gras float that's been run off a bridge.
Fitting.
Armand's head tilts (looks like it hurts to do) (it does), then, and he says nothing else, out loud or through their minds, but there is an implication all the same. Will I?
All of his compacted anger slams down onto Lestat. Compressed and hardened into a wall of power and force. He will crush him back down onto the ground without moving his hands, without touching him at all. No hand movements to illustrate his point or help focus him; he no longer needs the guidance to visualize it, these centuries since he accosted Lestat on the streets of Paris, and he doesn't feel the need to show off to that degree. He's not a performer. He's wearing dark neutral colors and a boring coat. Not a single feather.
Maybe Armand didn't choose Daniel. Heavily maybe; perhaps he knows he didn't. He lashed out. He wanted to take something from Louis. He wanted to shut Daniel up. But night by night he grows more certain that he likes it better this way. It's not how anyone else was made.
There will probably be an argument about this encounter. Armand wonders how it will go, and with all the energy he has, grinds his proverbial, telekinetic heel into Lestat.
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And then he is on the ground.
A shock, despite all he knows of Armand. What air has gathered in his lungs is expelled on impact, speckling the nearby ground in crimson, and staying that way as telekinetic force pins him harder. Like he could crack the concrete with his body. An acute pain where a rib dislodges. Bared teeth, a moment of wild animal panic and fury, claws scratching at the ground and drawing up dust, loose sediment.
Not quite his talent, turning the empty air into a fist. Little things instead, turning locks and breaking electronics. He wants to throw Armand into the lake, and maybe this desire tugs at Armand, feels like a sharp wind that rustles hair and coat tails, but that is all.
Here, then: an unbidden little ribbon of fear in the static haze of their psychic outpourings and minglings.
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Again.
He feels blood leak from his nose. Not the way it should be, from Lestat's violence. Something is a little bit wrong, though he's not sure what. Lestat, too, should be different. He should be in pieces. Armand's blood is potent, but Lestat has a strong heart and his own dominant bloodline. It should have run out of steam already in the frantic effort to reconstruct his lungs.
(I have the blood of Akasha in me, and he fed from Marius, or was given something by Marius, Marius who knows everything of them, of their origins, who decided his Amadeo was sweet but too stupid, not worthy, never worthy. Pieces of a puzzle. He can't quite, he can't quite—)
'You think you're going to take my fledgling from me? You think giving him months of space is abandonment? What then, of how you have treated yours?'
Like a knife, he delves into Lestat's mind. Flips through quickly, finds all the pages about Gabrielle, her reckless making and utterly unknown fate, about Nicki, who Lestat gave to Armand, about Louis, who Lestat also fucking gave to Armand, and Claudia who Lestat ran out, tried to murder, Antoinette who he used like a shoe, and what's this? What's this? Another? Does Lestat even remember that one's name?
Again.
Armand finds that ribbon, and winds it around his fingers. His internal voice is cold, and cruel.
'Do you want to die, like I want to die? Or do you fear it, the end you've carelessly sent so many to?'
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Momentary, this clawing, before the next slam of his body into the ground scatters his thoughts again. Bleeding too fast to heal, a steady stream from his nose, his side, something ruptured.
He should be breaking apart, and he isn't. Injured, yes, breaking, but whole, stubbornly held together. The rhythm of it like a beating, and he had survived that, has survived being hopelessly overpowered. Another memory, perhaps called to the surface from Armand's rifling around, maybe Lestat reaching for it in desperation: that quiet place, the fresco, the flames, and the sound of a violin, echoing. The bow shivering in his fingers, the strings on the verge of snapping, some of them fraying. He is not a violinist but it doesn't matter, he is a vampire, a vampire with a knack.
The music shrieks, like a dying thing, like an electric guitar, piercing, too much for a human to enjoy, too loud and shrill, mirror-cracking, but something else liked it very much.
It echoes in his ears when he presses his mouth to an elegant wrist that feels like cold, unyielding marble, but his fangs sink in anyway, and the blood that pours forth is heavy on his tongue, and seems to chase down his throat without his needing to swallow. Gifted. And then someone is yelling, and pain, fire across his scalp from a grip to his hair with the strength of an angel, but none of that matters. Just the blood.
Lestat stops being flung about, a fixed point in the air. Maybe it hurts Armand, easy power meeting a brick wall when Lestat resists. Almost like some other ancient has walked on scene and decided to reach out, to take over, but there is none, just them.
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