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.
He will make Lestat hear every insult. Every complaint. Make him see every unspoken flinch, every quirk that Louis' ever had that Armand knows is was bred into him by his maker. He will make Lestat hear every time Nicki begged to be killed, feel the pressure and release of removing his hands, of sealing him away into the wall, and Nicki went quiet, Nicki went quiet centuries ago, not like Louis, who Armand brought back, and lived beside even though it was skinning himself. Hours, weeks, years. These horrors live in Armand because they have nowhere else to live, and because Armand has nothing else to fill himself with.
Lestat stops.
It's not supposed to be this way. Armand pauses, pulls. Feels himself be pulled.
But no one else is here.
When he pulls next it's like pulling on razor wire. Something bites into him, into his mind, makes him falter.
Lestat is better than him, has been since the start, and this plain truth is written there in all the things he makes the younger vampire see. On the walls, on the floor, and in each memory, Armand is there, Amadeo is there, Arun is there, sitting in a corner with his head covered. And he pulls and he thinks—
Is he so wrong? Will Lestat kill him?
A freezing rush. He could hold still. He could let it happen.
It's not perfect, Louis had told his early fumble.
How searing, these words, never mind that they were told to this soldier as a kind of casus belli for extramarital cocksucking. It's not perfect, when Lestat knew it could be. If only Louis allowed it to be. If only he understood how hard won their home was, how perfect, how perfectly fragile. How it only broke apart because Lestat had held it so tightly.
A belief he'd had, anyway, for a while. And then there's this: the bedrock knowledge that Lestat is innately impossible to love. Stupid and vain, spoiled and selfish, violent and weak, retreating to his worst instincts at every sign of conflict, of uncertainty. In the midst of it all, the swift knifing of memory and knowledge, overlapping until it's Louis with a violin in his hands, playing Satanic things, and Nicki sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, considering the sunrise, other memories come up like blood spray.
New details. Daniel standing over Louis in the karaoke bar, pretending to inspect his bruises. Here, a hotel room, the one in New York, a short but telling stretch of silence of psychic conversation he cannot hear, held eye contact. These little witnessed intimacies are ordinary, dull, but painted in bright jealous colours, twisting hurt held barely quiet in Lestat's chest, a kind of sustained flagellation. He deserves this. Louis, who only came back to America when Daniel was in danger, who would like him to hang around anyway. Perhaps in the same way Daniel is entertaining Armand's cries for attention. Perhaps they are the same.
Currently frozen suspended in the air. Too stunned to express outward feeling beyond the trickle of blood from his mouth. But then—it's only half a blink, but he detects anyway, head tipping to look at Armand through a non-bloodied eye.
Like Armand is holding a snake, but with a grip on the tail by accident, the psychic assault is fast, biting, designed to stun.
Dirt. Dense around him. He is starving. He is barely cognizant, drifting in and out of a half-dreamed daze, a permanent sun-stupor. He has never gone into the ground, but this is what it's like. So cold it doesn't feel like anything, so well embraced that there is no up and down, that one can imagine that the universe entire is just an infinity of tightly-packed earth. A death's sleep. What rouses a vampire out of one?
'Purpose,' is not quite delivered in language, transmitted too intimately for that. But imagine it is, as if Lestat could speak in a soft and patient cadence in this moment, he might try to. 'A reason for rising. A person who wants you to.'
Disruption. Something above, but different to the way sometimes things are above. A presence.
'This is why you never slept.'
Dirt shifting. Strong hands that push through the earth as though it were formed of glitter and packing peanuts.
Daniel and Louis. But Armand knew that already, has known that. Since the start. Louis asked him to join them, but didn't actually want him to come; an offer made because he was expected to, the social contract. He had imagined it briefly— sitting across the room while Louis drained the boy. And later, he imagined it again, and again, until he knew it hadn't happened, until he went listening, and looking.
What would it have been like? Really been like? Armand would have worked himself into an implosion having to share Louis with someone else while they were all in the same bed. Now? Which one would he be driven mad over? Daniel, giving him pajamas, letting him stay, inviting him in. If he turned his head and saw Louis in the doorway, dressed for bed, intent on—
Who is he killing, in San Fransisco? Today? What part of himself does he destroy, at which act of the play?
Dirt.
Cold, outside matching his insides. Where he belongs. The death he can't actually achieve. His body will wither then begin to turn to stone, lost forever. Lestat asks who would come for him and the answer is, of course, no one. Not Marius, not the vampires of the Children who reshaped him, certainly not Lestat, nor Louis. Not even Daniel. Daniel has been trying (Daniel in his apartment, looking at Armand, Daniel at a book signing with hair that's still half black, looking at Armand), but Daniel is doing so carefully. There will be nothing careful about chasing after him and digging him up. Over.
Armand lays there and stares up at Lestat as grave dirt is packed in around him. No coffin. Why should he have one? There is no need to preserve him. He will heal if he ever comes back up. But why would he. There is more purpose to feeding worms with his flesh than to anything he's ever done above ground, in all his centuries.
It happened so quick he hasn't even noticed. Standing upright without a psychic grip on Lestat any longer, orange eyes blank, looking straight ahead. Oozing blood, radiating pain and misery. Something builds between them. A pressure change. Air that's too hot slipping in against air that's too cold.
A block away, a teenage girl wakes up, choking and heaving, the taste of dirt in her mouth, the sense of it crumbling down her throat slow to fade. The alarms of three parked cars go off all at once, scattered in a half a mile radius. Down the street, a dog barks and barks at shadows on the walls. A man fumbles a bedside lamp on, both he and his wife bleeding from the nose, staining the linens.
Earth, packed heavy. Compressing. Lestat remembers wondering if he could even rise again if he tried. If the earth will turn to stone, and forget him there.
The sense of hands buried in the dirt withdrawing. Of fresh rain barely pressing through to where Armand lays beneath. Of snowfall above. It melts. Seasons and seasons. Decades of seasons. No one builds over him. No roads are drawn, no tunnels dug through to disturb him. He must have chosen well. Now there are roots, tangling. Growing rapidly. Through his hair, between his fingers, between his teeth, looped around his throat, his limbs, his chest. Soon, maybe they'll insist themselves, and bore through the flesh, seek out the soft parts. See who gains sustenance from who.
Hidden too well. If anyone had a flicker of an urge to dig him up after all, perhaps with a list of sins for atonement, or for some other amusement, it would die before they could begin to search.
Lestat has dropped out of the air, staggering, catching his weight on a palm and managing to stay on his feet through a wild swing of balance. He feels both stronger than he has ever felt but also as weak as a kitten, unable to contain his own power, bleeding from him, an oil spill of prehistoric matter into previously untainted waters. A wild glance aside towards the street lamp over Armand sees the glass shatter as the fixture explodes, too eager to obey a directive he didn't give.
He must go. Tell himself he's made his point and go. Armand standing still and blank makes him want to go to him, collect him close, whisper something like: it isn't all that bad, stop being so dramatic.
And then he'd get gutted some more, probably. Lestat scrapes a step back, tries to reel in his powers. Fly. He can do that much.
Armand did a few things. He collected Lestat, whether Lestat liked it or not; he spun a web and let the fair-haired spider have it, so he could jangle threads to pull him this way and that. He thought he was very clever, forgetting he had let himself be stuck in the web in the first place. But he had done a few things out of kindness, in the midst of all the rest of it. He had warned Lestat away from digging too deep into him.
Lestat didn't listen. Lestat never listens. And it really isn't all so bad, is it.
Armand is a black pool that grows out from where he stands. An abyss. Roots growing into him, small insects eating him, and all his atoms pull apart to float into the water of the lake. The cold ocean waits for him to come home, and reform as an unrecognizable creature way down in the dark where no light has ever touched.
A shadow hand reaches out and slides slim fingers around Lestat's ankle. He can fly, he can do that much. Armand can do so much more. Nothing explodes, nothing shakes. His power is his to control. Armand doesn't move, but reality moves, and a nearby sleeping human dies in a shiver, and a bench catches fire then begins to fade, immediately starved for oxygen. Lestat feels fangs at his throat, kittenish, shallow, scalpel-sharp. Lestat feels sinking.
Arun killed a fellow whore once. Amadeo poisoned another boy who was prettier than him. Armand has collapsed to the crumbled asphalt, but he has taken hold of Lestat, and that is where they will stay until the sun comes up. Paralyzed by memories. They are in a parlor, and Lestat is fixing a silk ribbon in his hair.
Not oblivious, exactly, to all that Armand could be, but easily distracted by the things he wanted him to be. A doll, sometimes, to dress in silks and powders and velvets, unearthing him, polishing him, cherishing his beauty. A wise elder, other times, if a little misguided. A lover. Coaxing Armand into a dance, their boots muffled on the rug as they took turns around each other in Lestat's cluttered parlour. Whispered kisses against his cheek, his ear, blood smeared. Coaxing crystal cups of liquor to Armand's lips, bidding him to try it, see how it tastes.
Making love, too, and memories bleed together and Armand can remember Lestat remembering how it felt to see that particular expression in Armand's face, like he was beholding the sun, like Lestat was the sun. How that pleased him. How it, after a time, frightened him. Too much. He had made too much of himself. Promised too much.
In the winter night of Burlington, Lestat struggles in Armand's grasp before going still and stunned. Fangs pierce his neck, and it doesn't feel like blood is escaping him, but cold saltwater leaking in.
He had informed Armand he was leaving. He had given him the deeds to the theatre. He had not done what Armand might feel now, as vivid as a memory: a young vampire, touching his face. Let me go, Lestat says. His thumbs sweeping affectionate but frantic touches across Armand's cheeks in short little arcs. Please.
Armand had looked up at Lestat the way Amadeo had looked up at Marius. He did not know how else to look upon someone he loved, someone so fair and confident, someone who pulled him out of the dark. Marius saved him from the horror of the brothel and taught him to be a new person. Lestat saved him from two and a half centuries of horror even worse than of his mortal life. Not on purpose, not like buying a slave to use as a toy, but he had still used Armand like a doll in the end anyway, and it was alright, it was good, because it was what Armand knew. He felt like Amadeo again. He felt like who he had been constructed to be.
A fool. Not just for trusting Lestat, but for putting so much onto a child. But what else was Armand, then? Old, but not in a way that had anything to do with the development that comes with aging. A strange creature grow in the dark. A fungus, luminescent, alive, but not anything worth interacting with. Of course he tried to grow into Lestat, too. Save me from this hell. This pit inside of me, this void that makes me up. Please, please.
Like Lestat says please. Like he says let me go.
'Why would I let you go, child?'
He hadn't looked up at Louis this way. He had known better, after Lestat, and it wasn't in him anymore to lose himself so thoroughly. But he'd tried. Sincerely, he tried. He wanted to still have a part that could be made new again. He pretended, and isn't that close enough?
The sounds of truck engines, of skittering rats, of cawing scavenger birds. The sense of impending morning. Armand is holding him here in the dark of the trunk that locks from the inside, and it all smells potently of stale human blood, but more powerfully, of Lestat's own. Scratchy lace and cotton stiff with it. A tearing slash in his throat, split open esophagus, arteries, sliced vocal chords, a drooling grin of a wound.
He spent longer than he should, here, as city garbage piled around him. Days, perhaps weeks. A slow healing, a slow dying, like he couldn't decide which thing he should be doing. But here, Armand is welcomed into this place. He had told Louis that he was glad it was him, there, in the end, but then Louis spared him and went away, and he was alone.
So what was the fucking point.
'I don't want to die,' shared like a whisper in an intimate space. A confession. A plea. If he opens the lid of the trunk, either sunlight or the killing depths of an ink-void ocean will flood in. Maybe he'll survive it, if he simply refuses. 'Not yet.'
Surely he didn't actually think he was going to be able to kill Armand. Even if there is something different in his veins, something old and sharp like an ancient glass knife, even if he can best Armand. Even if all of that, Armand cannot actually be killed. And even if all the insults they've been hurling are true, Armand doesn't think Lestat is that foolish.
Louis, who has known Armand for so much longer, who Armand knelt for and called maitre, maitre, maitre, cannot command him any longer. Was Lestat going to appear in his ugly outfit and shining hair and say Be gone, and then Armand would be gone?
Maybe. He supposes, he has always been a slave. He stayed in Paris, he ran the theater, he cared for Nicki. It's just Lestat's poor luck that over the course of the past fifty years, Armand has grown bored with obedience. Perhaps if he had come before San Fransisco. (Does Lestat see it, as Armand thinks of it? Some imagined world, where he touches Daniel's hand on the top of the bar, and leaves with him, vanishing into the night and abandoning Louis? When it should be a haunted vision of Louis running away with the boy?)
He sighs. It is a rattling, sucking sound. His body is very damaged.
'Why have you always come to me?'
They will let the mortal police come. It will be interesting. Armand has never done this before.
Simple things. He wanted to hurt Armand, of course. How strangely exhilarating it had been (moments ago? hours? days? he isn't certain) to start a fight. Something blasphemous about it, like throwing a brick through a stained glass window. Maybe this is how it feels for a child to fight an elder, and he wonders if Louis had felt it once, if Claudia had. Or maybe it's just because it is Armand.
More little fragments of memory. Roy Travis shivering in Lestat's hands that one night while Daniel and Louis clung to each other. Standing over the two younger vampires once Lestat had gotten them inside, himself unscathed, untouched. And between these moments, that odd feeling of rejection when Armand had unhooked his psychic claws and sent him away.
A contradiction: Lestat who believes that these entanglements are all about him, the sin of having walked away from Armand long ago, and Lestat who is bothered to not be the subject of Armand's focus. They may coexist safely, because—
'I wanted you to leave him alone,' and he means Louis, but maybe he means Daniel, now, but this feels like it amounts to the same thing. Louis and Daniel, entangled together. 'He deserves to be left alone now.'
Lestat cannot quite feel his body, down here.
'You can hurt me instead,' has the promise that he would hurt Armand right back, of course. But wouldn't that be alright? Maybe worth keeping him alive for.
Perhaps it is that the universe revolves around Lestat. That he dared to make this mistake, tangle himself up in an ancient, pretty creature. It's more flattering than the opposite. That everything, everyone, that comes into contact with Armand becomes cursed with Armand. He is contagious. The coldness that makes him up inside spreads like spilled ink. Lestat has long been marked, and will carry it forever.
But perhaps the sun will purge it from him.
'Because you don't want to be left alone.'
Shared hurts. Selfish little grains of sand. Armand finds them, and holds then close, sifted up from the rest. As if to show Lestat: yes, I see, I understand. Lestat has been feeling left out, like Armand has been feeling left out. Neither of them have a reason to be involved in what they're each envious of, but here they are. Matching character flaws.
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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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He will make Lestat hear every insult. Every complaint. Make him see every unspoken flinch, every quirk that Louis' ever had that Armand knows is was bred into him by his maker. He will make Lestat hear every time Nicki begged to be killed, feel the pressure and release of removing his hands, of sealing him away into the wall, and Nicki went quiet, Nicki went quiet centuries ago, not like Louis, who Armand brought back, and lived beside even though it was skinning himself. Hours, weeks, years. These horrors live in Armand because they have nowhere else to live, and because Armand has nothing else to fill himself with.
Lestat stops.
It's not supposed to be this way. Armand pauses, pulls. Feels himself be pulled.
But no one else is here.
When he pulls next it's like pulling on razor wire. Something bites into him, into his mind, makes him falter.
Lestat is better than him, has been since the start, and this plain truth is written there in all the things he makes the younger vampire see. On the walls, on the floor, and in each memory, Armand is there, Amadeo is there, Arun is there, sitting in a corner with his head covered. And he pulls and he thinks—
Is he so wrong? Will Lestat kill him?
A freezing rush. He could hold still. He could let it happen.
—twice. Half a blink.
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How searing, these words, never mind that they were told to this soldier as a kind of casus belli for extramarital cocksucking. It's not perfect, when Lestat knew it could be. If only Louis allowed it to be. If only he understood how hard won their home was, how perfect, how perfectly fragile. How it only broke apart because Lestat had held it so tightly.
A belief he'd had, anyway, for a while. And then there's this: the bedrock knowledge that Lestat is innately impossible to love. Stupid and vain, spoiled and selfish, violent and weak, retreating to his worst instincts at every sign of conflict, of uncertainty. In the midst of it all, the swift knifing of memory and knowledge, overlapping until it's Louis with a violin in his hands, playing Satanic things, and Nicki sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, considering the sunrise, other memories come up like blood spray.
New details. Daniel standing over Louis in the karaoke bar, pretending to inspect his bruises. Here, a hotel room, the one in New York, a short but telling stretch of silence of psychic conversation he cannot hear, held eye contact. These little witnessed intimacies are ordinary, dull, but painted in bright jealous colours, twisting hurt held barely quiet in Lestat's chest, a kind of sustained flagellation. He deserves this. Louis, who only came back to America when Daniel was in danger, who would like him to hang around anyway. Perhaps in the same way Daniel is entertaining Armand's cries for attention. Perhaps they are the same.
Currently frozen suspended in the air. Too stunned to express outward feeling beyond the trickle of blood from his mouth. But then—it's only half a blink, but he detects anyway, head tipping to look at Armand through a non-bloodied eye.
Like Armand is holding a snake, but with a grip on the tail by accident, the psychic assault is fast, biting, designed to stun.
Dirt. Dense around him. He is starving. He is barely cognizant, drifting in and out of a half-dreamed daze, a permanent sun-stupor. He has never gone into the ground, but this is what it's like. So cold it doesn't feel like anything, so well embraced that there is no up and down, that one can imagine that the universe entire is just an infinity of tightly-packed earth. A death's sleep. What rouses a vampire out of one?
'Purpose,' is not quite delivered in language, transmitted too intimately for that. But imagine it is, as if Lestat could speak in a soft and patient cadence in this moment, he might try to. 'A reason for rising. A person who wants you to.'
Disruption. Something above, but different to the way sometimes things are above. A presence.
'This is why you never slept.'
Dirt shifting. Strong hands that push through the earth as though it were formed of glitter and packing peanuts.
'Who would come for you?'
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What would it have been like? Really been like? Armand would have worked himself into an implosion having to share Louis with someone else while they were all in the same bed. Now? Which one would he be driven mad over? Daniel, giving him pajamas, letting him stay, inviting him in. If he turned his head and saw Louis in the doorway, dressed for bed, intent on—
Who is he killing, in San Fransisco? Today? What part of himself does he destroy, at which act of the play?
Dirt.
Cold, outside matching his insides. Where he belongs. The death he can't actually achieve. His body will wither then begin to turn to stone, lost forever. Lestat asks who would come for him and the answer is, of course, no one. Not Marius, not the vampires of the Children who reshaped him, certainly not Lestat, nor Louis. Not even Daniel. Daniel has been trying (Daniel in his apartment, looking at Armand, Daniel at a book signing with hair that's still half black, looking at Armand), but Daniel is doing so carefully. There will be nothing careful about chasing after him and digging him up. Over.
Armand lays there and stares up at Lestat as grave dirt is packed in around him. No coffin. Why should he have one? There is no need to preserve him. He will heal if he ever comes back up. But why would he. There is more purpose to feeding worms with his flesh than to anything he's ever done above ground, in all his centuries.
It happened so quick he hasn't even noticed. Standing upright without a psychic grip on Lestat any longer, orange eyes blank, looking straight ahead. Oozing blood, radiating pain and misery. Something builds between them. A pressure change. Air that's too hot slipping in against air that's too cold.
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Earth, packed heavy. Compressing. Lestat remembers wondering if he could even rise again if he tried. If the earth will turn to stone, and forget him there.
The sense of hands buried in the dirt withdrawing. Of fresh rain barely pressing through to where Armand lays beneath. Of snowfall above. It melts. Seasons and seasons. Decades of seasons. No one builds over him. No roads are drawn, no tunnels dug through to disturb him. He must have chosen well. Now there are roots, tangling. Growing rapidly. Through his hair, between his fingers, between his teeth, looped around his throat, his limbs, his chest. Soon, maybe they'll insist themselves, and bore through the flesh, seek out the soft parts. See who gains sustenance from who.
Hidden too well. If anyone had a flicker of an urge to dig him up after all, perhaps with a list of sins for atonement, or for some other amusement, it would die before they could begin to search.
Lestat has dropped out of the air, staggering, catching his weight on a palm and managing to stay on his feet through a wild swing of balance. He feels both stronger than he has ever felt but also as weak as a kitten, unable to contain his own power, bleeding from him, an oil spill of prehistoric matter into previously untainted waters. A wild glance aside towards the street lamp over Armand sees the glass shatter as the fixture explodes, too eager to obey a directive he didn't give.
He must go. Tell himself he's made his point and go. Armand standing still and blank makes him want to go to him, collect him close, whisper something like: it isn't all that bad, stop being so dramatic.
And then he'd get gutted some more, probably. Lestat scrapes a step back, tries to reel in his powers. Fly. He can do that much.
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Armand did a few things. He collected Lestat, whether Lestat liked it or not; he spun a web and let the fair-haired spider have it, so he could jangle threads to pull him this way and that. He thought he was very clever, forgetting he had let himself be stuck in the web in the first place. But he had done a few things out of kindness, in the midst of all the rest of it. He had warned Lestat away from digging too deep into him.
Lestat didn't listen. Lestat never listens. And it really isn't all so bad, is it.
Armand is a black pool that grows out from where he stands. An abyss. Roots growing into him, small insects eating him, and all his atoms pull apart to float into the water of the lake. The cold ocean waits for him to come home, and reform as an unrecognizable creature way down in the dark where no light has ever touched.
A shadow hand reaches out and slides slim fingers around Lestat's ankle. He can fly, he can do that much. Armand can do so much more. Nothing explodes, nothing shakes. His power is his to control. Armand doesn't move, but reality moves, and a nearby sleeping human dies in a shiver, and a bench catches fire then begins to fade, immediately starved for oxygen. Lestat feels fangs at his throat, kittenish, shallow, scalpel-sharp. Lestat feels sinking.
Arun killed a fellow whore once. Amadeo poisoned another boy who was prettier than him. Armand has collapsed to the crumbled asphalt, but he has taken hold of Lestat, and that is where they will stay until the sun comes up. Paralyzed by memories. They are in a parlor, and Lestat is fixing a silk ribbon in his hair.
Dangerous, little hunter.
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Not oblivious, exactly, to all that Armand could be, but easily distracted by the things he wanted him to be. A doll, sometimes, to dress in silks and powders and velvets, unearthing him, polishing him, cherishing his beauty. A wise elder, other times, if a little misguided. A lover. Coaxing Armand into a dance, their boots muffled on the rug as they took turns around each other in Lestat's cluttered parlour. Whispered kisses against his cheek, his ear, blood smeared. Coaxing crystal cups of liquor to Armand's lips, bidding him to try it, see how it tastes.
Making love, too, and memories bleed together and Armand can remember Lestat remembering how it felt to see that particular expression in Armand's face, like he was beholding the sun, like Lestat was the sun. How that pleased him. How it, after a time, frightened him. Too much. He had made too much of himself. Promised too much.
In the winter night of Burlington, Lestat struggles in Armand's grasp before going still and stunned. Fangs pierce his neck, and it doesn't feel like blood is escaping him, but cold saltwater leaking in.
He had informed Armand he was leaving. He had given him the deeds to the theatre. He had not done what Armand might feel now, as vivid as a memory: a young vampire, touching his face. Let me go, Lestat says. His thumbs sweeping affectionate but frantic touches across Armand's cheeks in short little arcs. Please.
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A fool. Not just for trusting Lestat, but for putting so much onto a child. But what else was Armand, then? Old, but not in a way that had anything to do with the development that comes with aging. A strange creature grow in the dark. A fungus, luminescent, alive, but not anything worth interacting with. Of course he tried to grow into Lestat, too. Save me from this hell. This pit inside of me, this void that makes me up. Please, please.
Like Lestat says please. Like he says let me go.
'Why would I let you go, child?'
He hadn't looked up at Louis this way. He had known better, after Lestat, and it wasn't in him anymore to lose himself so thoroughly. But he'd tried. Sincerely, he tried. He wanted to still have a part that could be made new again. He pretended, and isn't that close enough?
'No one is coming. There's only you.'
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The sounds of truck engines, of skittering rats, of cawing scavenger birds. The sense of impending morning. Armand is holding him here in the dark of the trunk that locks from the inside, and it all smells potently of stale human blood, but more powerfully, of Lestat's own. Scratchy lace and cotton stiff with it. A tearing slash in his throat, split open esophagus, arteries, sliced vocal chords, a drooling grin of a wound.
He spent longer than he should, here, as city garbage piled around him. Days, perhaps weeks. A slow healing, a slow dying, like he couldn't decide which thing he should be doing. But here, Armand is welcomed into this place. He had told Louis that he was glad it was him, there, in the end, but then Louis spared him and went away, and he was alone.
So what was the fucking point.
'I don't want to die,' shared like a whisper in an intimate space. A confession. A plea. If he opens the lid of the trunk, either sunlight or the killing depths of an ink-void ocean will flood in. Maybe he'll survive it, if he simply refuses. 'Not yet.'
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Surely he didn't actually think he was going to be able to kill Armand. Even if there is something different in his veins, something old and sharp like an ancient glass knife, even if he can best Armand. Even if all of that, Armand cannot actually be killed. And even if all the insults they've been hurling are true, Armand doesn't think Lestat is that foolish.
Louis, who has known Armand for so much longer, who Armand knelt for and called maitre, maitre, maitre, cannot command him any longer. Was Lestat going to appear in his ugly outfit and shining hair and say Be gone, and then Armand would be gone?
Maybe. He supposes, he has always been a slave. He stayed in Paris, he ran the theater, he cared for Nicki. It's just Lestat's poor luck that over the course of the past fifty years, Armand has grown bored with obedience. Perhaps if he had come before San Fransisco. (Does Lestat see it, as Armand thinks of it? Some imagined world, where he touches Daniel's hand on the top of the bar, and leaves with him, vanishing into the night and abandoning Louis? When it should be a haunted vision of Louis running away with the boy?)
He sighs. It is a rattling, sucking sound. His body is very damaged.
'Why have you always come to me?'
They will let the mortal police come. It will be interesting. Armand has never done this before.
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Simple things. He wanted to hurt Armand, of course. How strangely exhilarating it had been (moments ago? hours? days? he isn't certain) to start a fight. Something blasphemous about it, like throwing a brick through a stained glass window. Maybe this is how it feels for a child to fight an elder, and he wonders if Louis had felt it once, if Claudia had. Or maybe it's just because it is Armand.
More little fragments of memory. Roy Travis shivering in Lestat's hands that one night while Daniel and Louis clung to each other. Standing over the two younger vampires once Lestat had gotten them inside, himself unscathed, untouched. And between these moments, that odd feeling of rejection when Armand had unhooked his psychic claws and sent him away.
A contradiction: Lestat who believes that these entanglements are all about him, the sin of having walked away from Armand long ago, and Lestat who is bothered to not be the subject of Armand's focus. They may coexist safely, because—
'I wanted you to leave him alone,' and he means Louis, but maybe he means Daniel, now, but this feels like it amounts to the same thing. Louis and Daniel, entangled together. 'He deserves to be left alone now.'
Lestat cannot quite feel his body, down here.
'You can hurt me instead,' has the promise that he would hurt Armand right back, of course. But wouldn't that be alright? Maybe worth keeping him alive for.
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But perhaps the sun will purge it from him.
'Because you don't want to be left alone.'
Shared hurts. Selfish little grains of sand. Armand finds them, and holds then close, sifted up from the rest. As if to show Lestat: yes, I see, I understand. Lestat has been feeling left out, like Armand has been feeling left out. Neither of them have a reason to be involved in what they're each envious of, but here they are. Matching character flaws.
'Maybe you'll be fine.'
He's older. He's different.
Only one way to find out.
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