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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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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.'
no subject
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.'
no subject
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.
no subject
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.