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.
A seabird overhead flies, veers, drops into the lake. A block or so south, an early morning jogger trips over his feet, blood flowing from his nose, capillaries in his eyes bursting. A brown-out makes bathroom lights flicker, forces alarm clocks to reset, to burn out laptop chargers.
Because Lestat is trying to escape, for all that he is still and limply clinging to Armand in his arms. He has made his appeals, so he could capitulate into begging. Of course, he does not. The roiling of feeling is more akin to a tantrum, and internal throwing about of objects, of memories and thoughts and epithets, clawing in at soft tissue. These truths, the things that make them the same, feel like shackles. No better than Armand. No better than Magnus. Than Marius.
Still. No matter how much older, how different he believes and knows himself to be, he is still more animal than whatever vampires are eventually meant to become. Still driven by impulse, instinct. Survival at any cost.
The sun breaks. Humans feel it as a gradual thing. Vampires do not. Though the air is teased, first, with a kind of hair raising discomfort in those last grey hours, the actual emergence of the day itself is as immediate as a gunshot.
It would take a little time for Lestat to dissolve into ash, but not long. Maybe a minute, maybe a couple, but it should take no time for skin to blister, to smoke, for eyes to go blind, for pain. None of this happens, but he reacts anyway. He can feel it, exposure to the daylight, and it's almost the stuff of nerve endings that compel a person to react faster and stronger than otherwise physically capable that sees his body suddenly come alive again. A wild bite to Armand's arm like a wolf snapping to rend flesh more than drink blood, and loosened again.
He has to get away. It was one of the few lessons his maker shared with him, was it not? Escape the sun, stay in the shadows, rise at night. Here, a tomb. Lay in it.
Come, child. Lay your head down. Armand's body is ravaged further but he continues to cling, like smoke, like vines, like quicksand. A tar pit seeping its black ichor into Lestat's wounds and pores. It has already been long centuries, and he has spent so much of that time running away and crying and hiding beneath the earth or in the swamp and crying more. Always a production, with Lestat de Lioncourt. Isn't he tired? Wouldn't he like to rest?
The sun will be warm, and comforting. He can be a cat curled up in a slice of soothing yellow. It is so close, a cracked egg waiting to be pulled apart and show the golden interior.
Honey and softness and comfort. Armand blankets it onto him. The seams show through, his emptiness, bitterness, despair. But it's still like fly paper.
'Rest. I'll hold you.'
Rest. (Rest.) Rest.
Rest, every time he's told a mortal to stay in place indefinitely. Rest, every time he's had to shove a coven member into behaving. Rest, when he kept Daniel captive. Rest, when he rewired Louis' mind.
Rest. It would be easy. He wants to. His legs could give out, should give it out. Exhausted. Frigid air in his lungs. His horse is dying. Only two wolves left. Two wolves are enough. A wolf only needs one other wolf to take something larger than itself down. They go in circles, and they lunge bites at the air and they dart away from the swing of the flail, the flash of the sword. Bites (rest) designed only to exhaust him (rest), but if he ignores them, the next will be his throat (rest).
There is so much of him he didn't tell Louis. How any times did they embrace, did Louis tip his head to kiss the scar next to his mouth, never asking how he came about it?
Rest. Yes, he is tired. He would like to rest. Senseless, this fight. Didn't he come out here to feed them?
Well. They should have been the bigger, better monsters, if that was so.
Armand is a clinging thing, all around him, down his throat, in the wound in his side, adhered and stubborn and impossible to strike. Yes, he fends off the wolves, he feels the shock of impact on the flail when he breaks one across its maw, the strain in his shoulder when he digs his sword into the muscle and hide of the other. The villagers said, there are wolves in this forest, and they're killing us. His blood said, it's his job to go out there, kill the wolves, come home, or don't.
A cold forest. An over-warm dust trap of a theatre. He is here because he must be. He had looked across the odd shadows, the gleaming teeth from smiles in the audience, flickering eye gleams, and he had said
banishment
and it had taken all his strength, just as it does now.
Lestat has grown stronger, but so has Armand. The same trick, forceful as it may have been, should not work on him twice, a century later. Later he will wonder if he had not been worn down, brutalized and miserable, if it wouldn't have landed. But it does land. His psyche attempts to cushion the blow and lessen the impact by putting in layers and layers for Lestat to strike through—
Dubai, your bedroom. You share the bedroom with your companion, who is looking at you with a desperate, begging expression. Louis is as beautiful as he was the day you first saw him from afar in Paris. Even more beautiful, really. He looks sad, right now, but he looks healthier, too. You think about this as he continues to explain to you how devastating it will be if the journalist dies. It's almost too late, he didn't realize how late, he's going to die, he's sick.
You find it irritating. You have given Louis so much leeway, and he still asks for more. Every chance he gets, every little bit of slack on the leash, and he does something like this. You have made everything perfect for him but at every opportunity he grabs past you for more, like a child upset that there weren't enough gifts on Christmas. He wants Daniel as his fledgling. Memories of him after Madeleine's turning roil through your mind, Louis shell-shocked and bleeding, revolted by feeling her. And he wants to do this again? You touch his face. It's been a long session, it's time for him to rest. Louis resists, but you are so sick of him. You reassert, it is time to rest, now. There. His expression slacks, and you stroke his cheek, and he looks content. Yes. He'll get ready for bed. He hopes you join him in the shower.
Maybe you will. You go to check on the journalist first. He is in the kitchen and contending with trying to open a bottle of mineral water while his hands shake; he flinches away from your offered assistance. His thought process is too irritating to sift through, a thousand little twists and turns, and you're still slightly aggravated at Louis. You grab Mr Molloy by his hair and yank his head back. The bottle breaks on the kitchen floor. It'll hurt him, but you'll fix it and he won't remember this at all. Louis doesn't notice. All he's thinking of is what music he might play in the bathroom, like a good boy.
—only succeeding in creating more shattered debris. Visions of Marius. Daniel, black-and-white hair, a coat jacket with shoulderpads. Louis in a night club.
The air warms in the way only vampires can detect. Armand is lifeless on the ground, no more tension, no more clinging.
Lestat is already moving when he resurfaces. Not very helpfully. A lurch to the side on his hands and knees, a heaving breath to inflate one uncollapsed lung. A bleary glance to where Armand is laying limp, a dead baby bird half-squashed on the pavement. The golden morning light making blood shine.
He wants to kill him. Considering the damage he has already inflicted, the way he began this encounter, this should not be a new feeling, but it is. An ice cold impulse towards murder, towards ending a person for the things he has just seen, sears through him so suddenly and it slams into the brick wall of knowledge that this is impossible, and will always be impossible, no matter how strong he gets.
Senseless, he gives an animal's deep and rageful bellow, fangs long, and the noise of it chokes out quickly as he loses his breath.
And he is in the sun. He isn't burning.
But he cannot shake the idea that he is about to, at any moment. With a wet, sucking breath in of air and blood, he scrambles to his feet. Limps. His leg had dislodged and snapped back into his hip at some point, but feels both loose and swollen now. He clutches at his wounds and goes, leaving behind a trail of feathers and blood spatters.
A blur. Stop start super speed and more human stumbles. No thoughts left, save that he feels an urge to try to make it all the way back to the hotel before this is knocked aside. No, not there. Can't face them, not today, perhaps never again, who knows.
Finally, sanctuary. The rotting dark and a metal lid slamming closed over him. As good a place as any to bleed, which is all he feels capable of, all he feels good for.
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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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Because Lestat is trying to escape, for all that he is still and limply clinging to Armand in his arms. He has made his appeals, so he could capitulate into begging. Of course, he does not. The roiling of feeling is more akin to a tantrum, and internal throwing about of objects, of memories and thoughts and epithets, clawing in at soft tissue. These truths, the things that make them the same, feel like shackles. No better than Armand. No better than Magnus. Than Marius.
Still. No matter how much older, how different he believes and knows himself to be, he is still more animal than whatever vampires are eventually meant to become. Still driven by impulse, instinct. Survival at any cost.
The sun breaks. Humans feel it as a gradual thing. Vampires do not. Though the air is teased, first, with a kind of hair raising discomfort in those last grey hours, the actual emergence of the day itself is as immediate as a gunshot.
It would take a little time for Lestat to dissolve into ash, but not long. Maybe a minute, maybe a couple, but it should take no time for skin to blister, to smoke, for eyes to go blind, for pain. None of this happens, but he reacts anyway. He can feel it, exposure to the daylight, and it's almost the stuff of nerve endings that compel a person to react faster and stronger than otherwise physically capable that sees his body suddenly come alive again. A wild bite to Armand's arm like a wolf snapping to rend flesh more than drink blood, and loosened again.
He has to get away. It was one of the few lessons his maker shared with him, was it not? Escape the sun, stay in the shadows, rise at night. Here, a tomb. Lay in it.
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Come, child. Lay your head down. Armand's body is ravaged further but he continues to cling, like smoke, like vines, like quicksand. A tar pit seeping its black ichor into Lestat's wounds and pores. It has already been long centuries, and he has spent so much of that time running away and crying and hiding beneath the earth or in the swamp and crying more. Always a production, with Lestat de Lioncourt. Isn't he tired? Wouldn't he like to rest?
The sun will be warm, and comforting. He can be a cat curled up in a slice of soothing yellow. It is so close, a cracked egg waiting to be pulled apart and show the golden interior.
Honey and softness and comfort. Armand blankets it onto him. The seams show through, his emptiness, bitterness, despair. But it's still like fly paper.
'Rest. I'll hold you.'
Rest. (Rest.) Rest.
Rest, every time he's told a mortal to stay in place indefinitely. Rest, every time he's had to shove a coven member into behaving. Rest, when he kept Daniel captive. Rest, when he rewired Louis' mind.
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Rest. It would be easy. He wants to. His legs could give out, should give it out. Exhausted. Frigid air in his lungs. His horse is dying. Only two wolves left. Two wolves are enough. A wolf only needs one other wolf to take something larger than itself down. They go in circles, and they lunge bites at the air and they dart away from the swing of the flail, the flash of the sword. Bites (rest) designed only to exhaust him (rest), but if he ignores them, the next will be his throat (rest).
There is so much of him he didn't tell Louis. How any times did they embrace, did Louis tip his head to kiss the scar next to his mouth, never asking how he came about it?
Rest. Yes, he is tired. He would like to rest. Senseless, this fight. Didn't he come out here to feed them?
Well. They should have been the bigger, better monsters, if that was so.
Armand is a clinging thing, all around him, down his throat, in the wound in his side, adhered and stubborn and impossible to strike. Yes, he fends off the wolves, he feels the shock of impact on the flail when he breaks one across its maw, the strain in his shoulder when he digs his sword into the muscle and hide of the other. The villagers said, there are wolves in this forest, and they're killing us. His blood said, it's his job to go out there, kill the wolves, come home, or don't.
A cold forest. An over-warm dust trap of a theatre. He is here because he must be. He had looked across the odd shadows, the gleaming teeth from smiles in the audience, flickering eye gleams, and he had said
banishment
and it had taken all his strength, just as it does now.
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Lestat has grown stronger, but so has Armand. The same trick, forceful as it may have been, should not work on him twice, a century later. Later he will wonder if he had not been worn down, brutalized and miserable, if it wouldn't have landed. But it does land. His psyche attempts to cushion the blow and lessen the impact by putting in layers and layers for Lestat to strike through—
Dubai, your bedroom. You share the bedroom with your companion, who is looking at you with a desperate, begging expression. Louis is as beautiful as he was the day you first saw him from afar in Paris. Even more beautiful, really. He looks sad, right now, but he looks healthier, too. You think about this as he continues to explain to you how devastating it will be if the journalist dies. It's almost too late, he didn't realize how late, he's going to die, he's sick.
You find it irritating. You have given Louis so much leeway, and he still asks for more. Every chance he gets, every little bit of slack on the leash, and he does something like this. You have made everything perfect for him but at every opportunity he grabs past you for more, like a child upset that there weren't enough gifts on Christmas. He wants Daniel as his fledgling. Memories of him after Madeleine's turning roil through your mind, Louis shell-shocked and bleeding, revolted by feeling her. And he wants to do this again? You touch his face. It's been a long session, it's time for him to rest. Louis resists, but you are so sick of him. You reassert, it is time to rest, now. There. His expression slacks, and you stroke his cheek, and he looks content. Yes. He'll get ready for bed. He hopes you join him in the shower.
Maybe you will. You go to check on the journalist first. He is in the kitchen and contending with trying to open a bottle of mineral water while his hands shake; he flinches away from your offered assistance. His thought process is too irritating to sift through, a thousand little twists and turns, and you're still slightly aggravated at Louis. You grab Mr Molloy by his hair and yank his head back. The bottle breaks on the kitchen floor. It'll hurt him, but you'll fix it and he won't remember this at all. Louis doesn't notice. All he's thinking of is what music he might play in the bathroom, like a good boy.
—only succeeding in creating more shattered debris. Visions of Marius. Daniel, black-and-white hair, a coat jacket with shoulderpads. Louis in a night club.
The air warms in the way only vampires can detect. Armand is lifeless on the ground, no more tension, no more clinging.
Freedom, for Lestat.
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He wants to kill him. Considering the damage he has already inflicted, the way he began this encounter, this should not be a new feeling, but it is. An ice cold impulse towards murder, towards ending a person for the things he has just seen, sears through him so suddenly and it slams into the brick wall of knowledge that this is impossible, and will always be impossible, no matter how strong he gets.
Senseless, he gives an animal's deep and rageful bellow, fangs long, and the noise of it chokes out quickly as he loses his breath.
And he is in the sun. He isn't burning.
But he cannot shake the idea that he is about to, at any moment. With a wet, sucking breath in of air and blood, he scrambles to his feet. Limps. His leg had dislodged and snapped back into his hip at some point, but feels both loose and swollen now. He clutches at his wounds and goes, leaving behind a trail of feathers and blood spatters.
A blur. Stop start super speed and more human stumbles. No thoughts left, save that he feels an urge to try to make it all the way back to the hotel before this is knocked aside. No, not there. Can't face them, not today, perhaps never again, who knows.
Finally, sanctuary. The rotting dark and a metal lid slamming closed over him. As good a place as any to bleed, which is all he feels capable of, all he feels good for.