He turns the cup around in his hands. Despite a characteristic stillness, Armand had always fidgeted a little during conversation. Louis had been, in some ways, even more contained, more controlled, while Armand toyed with his own glass chalice of warmed up bagged blood that he never actually drank from.
Focus unwavering, though. No fidgeting there. He doesn't ask if Daniel has taken to the killing, not when it's been obvious: he's been doing just fine in that department.
"You returned my gift," has some character to it, eyebrows raising.
Here we go. (Not incredulous. Bracing. Fortifying.)
"I wasn't sure that's what it was."
It'd be easy to be angry at Armand, here. And Daniel is. Angry. For San Fransisco, for Paris, for fucking with Louis for so long. Louis wasn't an innocent, in that arrangement - staying with Armand to spite Lestat, staying with Armand to force him into eternal labor to make up for Claudia's death, of course it was all wrong - but Daniel is strongly biased towards him.
He could make it about anger. He's got grievances. It'd make sense.
"I don't presume to think I understand you," he begins, watching Armand. The most terrifying predator on Earth. "But I'm pretty sure I see you. And my instinct is that you really don't like what you gave me."
Hopefully he doesn't have to spell it out, sitting here in relative public. What a thing for a waitress to overhear. Hey, so, now that I remember, I seem to recall you really not having any fun dealing with Louis' drug use by proxy. When did the resentment really get bad? After he fucked and drained fifty boys? A hundred? How many times did you clean up for him while he was out of his mind?
A subtle thing in Armand's expression that indicates: no, Daniel doesn't have to spell it out.
But it does seem to take a moment to sink in, this specific angle. Re-calibration, happening fast beneath the mostly-still surface, and he doesn't get much of a chance to do so when Daniel pivots to a question, and a one-worded one at that. Maybe Armand had been expecting something more along the lines of because you need to fuck off forever.
Which doesn't neatly align with Daniel having already accepted a gift before, with a gift in return, with a written letter delivered to his people inviting some sort of beginning, but it's been a disorienting time.
So. Why? An instinct to start with 'perhaps,' as though his own motives are a fun mystery they can solve together, just like old times. He bites it back.
"I wanted to give you something I didn't think you would seek for yourself," finally. "But that you would like. And I wanted to provoke you."
Both things can be true.
"Given your response, I don't know that I was successful on either front."
"Okay," is a fine reaction from someone that Armand spent a week torturing, once. And who has no real excuse for his own gift-murder. Something that he would like. Something that would provoke him.
But really, why—
Not an acceptable question. Bad interrogation technique.
"You kind of." How to phrase this. "Hit things in reverse. I would seek that out on my own, if I wanted. Whether I have or not already, even, is my own business. And I do like it. Just not like that, not risking putting us in a pattern of you cleaning up after it and hating me more than you already do. If you want to—"
Don't, some aghast instinct says in his head, Who cares if he gets mad, what the fuck are you going to do if he says YES?
"—try it sometime, it'd have to be even. Equal. Participation-wise, I mean. There are a multitude of things I'm only just learning about, and might benefit from a tutor over, but not that. I'm an expert in that, and anyway, it's recreational. You know. Fun."
Whatever. No comment on the success of provocation, because whether he likes the result or not, Armand did provoke something. Here they are. Hey, Armand, want to do drugs sometime? Please say no. (Or say yes? Help.)
Strange, the sweep of hot and cold, internal and private, in response to how he had not quite missed the mark. Only that he'd done it, in the manner that he'd done it in. Something shaken out from between the lines. Remembering the happy gallop through the decades towards the end of the interview, no lingering on the circumstances that drove Daniel Molloy into their lives.
The boys, the drugs sparkling in their blood, whether Louis put them there himself or found them like that. Armand, chasing after him. Armand, keeping their lives in a semblance of order, trying to measure the leash before the creature on the end of it snaps back, breaks it entirely.
An offer. A real offer? He is calculating more of what Daniel might do or say if Armand says yes or no, more so than whether he wants to say yes or no.
"I didn't hunt for Louis," finally, after too long of a silence. He doesn't have to glance to ensure no humans are near, letting his voice go quieter, almost too quiet, if not for the way they could whisper across a crowded street and hear one another if they wished. "I never brought him anyone. I was there at the other side of it, yes, but not the beginning."
His gaze dips down, into the near-black contents of his coffee cup. Never together. Had it occurred to Louis, to ask him along? Had it occurred to Armand, to ask if he could? He doesn't remember.
The question is tabled, for now.
"You said in your letter to me about starting. Are you looking for tutorship?"
Daniel isn't sure when, exactly, he decided that he knew Armand had never participated. Maybe in San Fransisco, on day three or four slowly bleeding on the north-slanting floor of the Zodiac Killer pad; he forgot he knew, and did not remember the act of remembering, merely folded it into his consciousness. But he does feel confident that Armand never took part. That anger was too genuine and too familiar. Someone in the blast radius of an addict finally snapping.
But maybe a shitload of magic mushrooms would lighten him up.
He notes the way Armand seems to look at the offer and slide it to one side. Obvious about is awareness. Daniel watches too close, too intently, sees too many details. Is a journalist a predator? Armand seemed to think something like it. Claudia's kill list. How is it any different.
(How fucking stupid of him to have said that, by the way, back in Dubai while the tree was burning. I'd just be Claudia, boo hoo. Embarrassing. Daniel wishes he'd shut up, sometimes, but he never seems capable.)
"You got that." Good to know? Yes. Good to know. He thinks. Something itches to ask his opinion on the booklet, but he refrains. "... I'm not sure. Practically there's merit, but I'm used to being on my own, you know?"
Armand ditched him, anyway. Whatever game they're playing here is not about a maker's compassionate mentorship of a fledgling.
"How are you?"
Speaking of being on one's own. Daniel has been his own companion for a while now, lucky to have settled into peace with loneliness. But how long has it been, for Armand? Has he ever had a stretch of time without company? Owners (ugh), the coven, Louis?
It certainly is not about a maker's compassionate mentorship of his fledgling. A joke, the very concept. If impulse drove him to create Daniel, then it was something more deliberate that kicked him from the nest. Armand recalls how the struggle had been not to immediately cast his creation, the shameful act, into the sun.
No plans (at all) to cultivate it further, but then, here they are.
I see you. Is that true?
"I'm sure you can imagine," he says, chin lifting. "Free of my obligations, wandering the world, finding myself. What a wonderful gift you've bestowed upon me, Mr. Molloy, that my partner of seventy-seven years despises me, and the airless few seconds granted me for my response to your dramatic revelations. What a rush that must have been for you."
Anger? Maybe. His voice is hard, edged. His focus, intent. But there is something to it that better resembles parries and ripostes in a penthouse in Dubai than the levels of potential fallout that had permeated a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco.
"Why don't you tell me how I am instead? Or is the going rate still in the millions."
He is aware that it will sound scathing. Even in a muted voice, he is still grating and loudly unkind. The earnest charm of he and Louis at that gay bar, I want to interview you, the tether of it that continued to stitch them together over the years as Louis read his work and looked for evidence of himself. Louis was interesting. Daniel was, in return, interesting. While Armand picked lint off the sofa, alone.
But liars deserve to get their bruises poked at. Daniel has not accepted his apology for any of it, even though he's great, even though this rules. Armand doesn't get to be thanked.
"What I meant," no time to stabilize after Daniel implies he's boring, even though Daniel doesn't actually think that, "is that we can't start this life, with a permanent fishing line strung between our consciousnesses, doing shit we know goes bad on purpose. There's so much out there that can go bad as a surprise. Why sabotage? And like I said. I'm pretty sure you hate that shit. Let's do something else. You like philosophy. You like creativity. What else do you like?"
If he says Louis, Daniel is going to kick him in the shin.
"Don't— don't interview question response that. We're just talking. Ignore that I'm bad at talking when it's not an interview."
My second memory, he had begun, and never finished.
He has read Daniel's book. He has sat through Louis' interview, this thing that had begun so deliberate and constructed that if Daniel had wanted to, he could have and then what'd his way to his bestseller. He has entertained the idea of it, the outpouring, and remembers something like it, standing in a museum, speaking to the wall.
It doesn't appeal, but the strike hits true anyway, finds a tender bruise. Contemplates the phrasing that implies a life is being started. His life feels over, had felt over. But here he is. Here Daniel is.
"I don't really know," he says, in a kind of hard tone, like, isn't that what Daniel is getting at? He doesn't say Louis, and he doesn't say, again, our conversations, because the former is too strange and large to fit into 'like', and the latter—
Well, Daniel might ask why. On the topic of unhealthy patterns of behaviour, he probably shouldn't tell him that the pain is pleasing. That the scalpel-edge of his attention, his ability to cut to the heart of a person, is intriguing. (Let's not bring out the f-word again.)
"I don't know that I hate that shit either. I hated rescuing him from it. Are you intending on becoming out of your mind and a danger to yourself any time soon?"
Good intel, that Armand doesn't know if he hates being blasted out of his mind on cocaine. Interesting that he says so, instead of asserting something uppity like, I don't need to know to hate it. Offering just a hint of something that looks like curiosity about new experiences. Daniel underlines it in his mental notes, even though this is not an interview.
"It's fun. It feels good. I haven't felt good in so long, and now I don't have to worry about having a stroke or a heart attack doing it, so why not?" He shrugs. "I'm not a sad junkie."
A hard stop to that statement.
As you'll recall. High as a kite, traumatized, and hypnotized, Daniel wanted to live. He had no profound reasoning to try and sway Armand with. But he had still wanted to walk out of that place intact and breathing, whether or not he deserved it. He resisted until his mortal mind simply couldn't. But he never asked for it, not even down to the wire. Louis ran into the sun, and Daniel, sitting at that shitty card table, said he had a thing in the city tomorrow. He didn't. His plans - pre-shit going sideways - were Star Trek reruns, and a hangover burrito from the diner down the street, and maybe jerking off thinking about Louis then convincing himself it wasn't gay.
Worth living for.
"What'd you think of the poetry booklet? Not quite Sartre, I know."
Armand, sitting back in his chair, attentive to the rest. Calculating. There is no effort at all to reach for memory, as they arise naturally—Louis, laughing hysterically, or Louis, strangely comatose, or Louis, beyond weeping. Louis, who perhaps wanted to die the whole time, chasing it down, and where does that urge end, and the compounding chemical alterations of heavy drug use begin?
Something to consider. He doesn't know, truly. Vampire physiology is as varied as there are vampires. The look on Armand's face doesn't disbelieve. His hands spread from his cup, an agreement: indeed, why not? Neither of them could fathom any answers if they tried, surely.
And then, the poetry. Half a smile.
"I thought, why did he give me this?" This isn't an interview. He doesn't have to be impressive. (He always has to be impressive.) "I thought it was," and a pause, considering, scraping around for what he did, in fact, think of it, "youthful. Familiar. There is no long history of middle-class youths with a university degree and the adequate literacy to express themselves, but if there were, you might read something like it two hundred years ago. In spirit, if not form."
He turns the cup around in his hands again. "And I enjoyed the one about the tiger on the bus."
Daniel lets him think. He interacts with his coffee cup a bit, but not in a way that suggests fidgeting; little engagements, as he listens. A thumb running over the edge of the rim. Still feeling the bond, and wondering at it.
"Tiger tiger burning bright, how many metaphors can we fit into this bus before the driver gets eaten."
A writer, but not a poet himself. Some of his turns if phrases can be artful, and very insightful, but Daniel Molloy prefers throwing bricks to make a point over seduction. Still he can't help but smile, thinking about Armand enjoying that particular piece. Armand, stuck with his own decisions, contending with them. Armand, a predatory animal who eats people.
"I liked the kid who was glad their dad died."
It was a funny one. Brutal, but funny. And a little more conversational, so of course it spoke (haha) to Daniel.
The tip of Armand's head says—yes, that's the poem—and he doesn't disagree with the summary. Of course he would choose the poem that is aware it's a poem, something a little clever and meta nestled in between some of the more raw scribbles of youthful angst.
He had put hard work into the theatre too, influencing its artform, dictating its aesthetic. In the beginning, the half-improvised horror-comedies, powered by the force of vampiric charm, of the audience's familiarity with the form, everything a little different every night. Times change, of course. Taste changes. Technologies emerge. New vampires, brought into the coven, with new talents.
The plays were weird, Louis had said. The plays were an autopsy of a play. A diagram. The layers of reference made clear through rigid scripting, the projections dictating exactly how each performer had to move so as not to throw them off-sync, the light of the film like a glamour, the modernity and artifice pulling audiences into the joke of a human playing a vampire playing an actor playing a character. The ones who kept returning, delighted at trying to find the truth behind the lies.
He had liked that.
But he has a question, first giving a 'hm' of amusement for the choice, yes, very good, and then asking, "Do you know that you're dead yet?"
It would have been interesting to see one of the weird plays. Not a trial, not Claudia's mockery of Paul's death. One of the ones Louis called weird, and made that delighted laughing face over, while Armand carefully crafted his own expression. It reminded Daniel of a face Kate used to make, whenever he said he'd be out of town for a job. She had become so used to the pain of disappointment that she'd made a mask for it. Understanding and fond. Looking at her own upset, and the oblivious source of it, as though it was charming.
How many bad husbands does it take to change a light bulb.
"That's almost nuts enough to be a me-style question," he says. "Could really throw somebody off balance. But given context, maybe not so nuts."
His mouth just goes. Talks. An annoying thing for someone who is also an artful listener; most have the decency to be men of few words. But Daniel falls quiet to actually contemplate it for real, taking it on good faith (or taking it hostage) that Armand means it as a philosophical question and not a morbid one meant to dump cold water over their meeting.
"I don't know." Layers to not knowing. Unsure if he is or isn't, but sure that it's different. "I was entering negotiations with myself, before. Getting ready. 'You're going to die, you have to start making preparations.' I hadn't gotten to the preparations yet, but I had a list of things I would have to look into by the end of the year. My will, insurance policies, right-to-die laws. The shape of death wasn't formed in my head, but there were sketches of it. None of it looked like this, or you."
Philosophical is a safe bet. A cold bucket of water is, perhaps, more in the eye of the beholder. Daniel could let it be a bummer, if he really wanted. Armand could press the point.
Armand had shifted his posture by subtle degrees. Less stiff through the leg and spine as though he were in an interview (as in, like for a job, not whatever they were all doing in Dubai at any given time), more comfortable in all the subtle ways. Daniel can interpret that however, but what it is is that he has not had cause or motivation to exist in these spaces very much over the past several months. Vampires of a certain age and detachment have a way of moving. Existing.
Sometimes, it takes a minute. And, to elaborate, "Unless you intend to reveal your immortal nature to your next of kin in the next decade or so. Or the world at large."
Alternatively: Daniel could not care. But he's a public figure. He's buying a house. Mortal connections persist.
Armand looks fractionally more relaxed compared to when he first sat down, but Armand still looks like a fucking alien, to Daniel. His perspective is definitely skewed, biased thanks to the whole of it all, but here we are.
"If you've got any good hookups for repurposing identities, I'm very happy to take business recommendations," he says, and means it. Something he's spoken to Louis about, just a little, but he's been busy with too much else to worry about it. Maniel Dolloy, rejected, Elvis Presley, rejected. He'll think of something. "Writing is one thing. I'll let somebody else fall on the paperwork grenade for being the first publicly out vampire who wants to sue Social Security for retirement money."
It does not really occur to him to think of his ex-wives or his daughters. They were collectively, and individually, uninterested in engaging with his illness; the youngest girl offered to make plans to come stay with him 'in a year or two, or three?' in a voice that sounded like she had a gun to her own head. We'll see, kiddo, and they both knew he was never going to let her, and she was a little sad, but mostly relieved. He gets to 'leave' everyone a shitload of money, and it will be the happiest he's ever made them.
"I like New York, I like the idea of having a house in New York. I really like the idea of having a house in New York ready to go in a hundred years whenever I feel like coming back."
Temporary, his plans. He doesn't have the grace of another forty years of plausible deniability— he'll have to move around more often than the others, and keep an even lower profile. Indulging in what he can now feels a little bit desperate, and he recognizes that, even while he focuses on it being a celebration of a huge change.
Well, of course Armand has hook ups. This, mentally filed away somewhere. Habit. What does Daniel need? What can Armand provide?
Which doesn't mean he will. Daniel's induction into the vampiric world has been something of a free fall, regardless of what faith or thought Armand might have put into that decision, if it even was one. Just a recording, a note taken. He doesn't interrupt, remembers to blink.
"Something to look forward to."
But,
"Setting aside the logistics for the moment. There is a different sort of realisation that, I believe, awaits us. You've been made privy to the detailed account of a relatively unconventional vampire. His ties to his human life and his continued unwillingness to embrace his own nature have, in a sense, spared him of this."
Armand has yet to get the memo about the self-actualisation, it seems. No one owns the night.
"A different sort of suffering. His, the more uncommon kind."
Is it ease? Difficult to tell, with him. Daniel can get under his skin, he's proven that, he can find cracks to peer into. If this was completely good faith he'd stop and simply be here, simply listen and talk and not try and x-ray him. But sometimes as he's nodding off he thinks of a voice telling him to rest, and so.
Philosophical. Being kept on topic. Fair enough, after Daniel went through all that trouble to steer him away from the sacrifice of a drug-addled twenty-something cranked on E.
"Is it a realization that I need to realize on my own time, or one that you want to enlighten me of early?"
He's not in a huge hurry to embrace suffering.
"Actually—"
Hm.
"Pretend you're me. What would I be doing, if you were?"
Their coffee is cooling in their cups. Armand can no longer sift through Daniel's thoughts—no comment, please, on how poorly he managed that before. There is nothing in him, not a single molecule, that has forgotten that week spent in San Francisco, nothing in him that is compartmentalising it away from this chat they are having now. He had offered verbal apologies back in Dubai, but what's an itemised list of belated sorries? What is the worth?
The book itself leaves that one as something of an open ended question. No need to spell it out to the readers.
In good faith, Daniel can interpret the flutter in Armand's expression as interest in the question, the way his eyes dart down to the surface of the table. Giving it thought, in good faith.
"Finding the bearable thing," finally. "Doing it, now, while your humanity clings to you. Before the bodies stack up, and the world becomes disfigured with time."
A tik of his nail against the cup.
"Preservation. Cultivation. Will you throw yourself on the fire in a century, or will you live to see the new millennium? What do you take with you, in either scenario? Perhaps," he cedes, "it's a lot to ask. But it's worthy of consideration."
Preservation. Has Armand ever gone to sleep in earth, casting off decades, rest? Cultivation. Does Armand regret burning the tree? Has he found another plant to nurture?
Maybe Daniel doesn't quite grasp this answer because he hasn't realized yet, but he contemplates it anyway. Takes notes (he can't help himself) about Armand, if not the concept of being a vampire. Being dead. Being, as perhaps his maker still believes, under the authority of the Devil.
"What is a bearable thing, for you?"
It doesn't sound like an interview question. Too quiet. They can't read each other's minds, and it's—
Better.
No second-guessing. Daniel isn't paranoid about what Armand might be sifting from him. He wonders if there's a relief of anxiety on Armand's side, free of needing to monitor.
"Louis," Armand says, and then, "I had thought so."
Past tense, and it's the kind of past tense that isn't laced with the bitterness of having a thing taken away from him. More like a change in paradigm.
"Perhaps 'bearable' shouldn't be an aspiration for vampire companionship," has some low-grade humour to it. "Or perhaps it never was that to begin with, and it was the story I'd told myself and told him. You find the person you can tolerate and that's enough. You find the methods of that tolerance, and it's enough."
It always comes back to a person, doesn't it? Or so some vampires would have you believe. The quest for the eternal companion. But—
"I've always had a fondness for innovation," is less dicey territory. "Even in the advent of economic collapse, plague, warfare, there will always be that."
Always fun to be reminded that he's locked in a cage with a tiger (aha), hearing him process Louis this way. Oh, well, I suppose I loved the idea of him, in the end. In hindsight, after writing, Daniel has been able to go through his own processing, and accept that Armand was not the only person making bad, harmful choices in that relationship. But Armand's disproportionate, devastating choices remain the standouts, far beyond the pale even for centuries old supernatural creatures who have lost touch with humanity.
And yet. He finds himself curious about the psychology behind Armand's ability to frame things, sitting directly across the table from someone he once spent a week torture, as wistful look back. Jesus fucking Christ.
"Keeping up with the times. And seeing how our first, parent species is holding together the world we live on. Maybe getting some cool stuff out of it."
Semi-relatable. Daniel no longer lugs around a typewriter. Why weasel away from the topic, though? We're here. We're looking forward. We're in a shitty diner and there are only so many hours left to work with before Daniel has to go back to his extremely medium hotel and draw the curtains as densely as he can.
"I told my second wife 'of course I can stand you' in an argument, once. In the moment, I thought I was making a great point. It seemed kinder than what she was accusing me of. I'm not sure I'd classify that setup as 'bearable', in retrospect. We had this awful therapist who kept making us do team building hypotheticals, where our mission was to stay together to set a standard of family mettle, and we had to strategize like a spy team. It was excruciating. That therapist is the closest I came to murder in my life life. ... Bearable? I dunno. I think I'll just have to keep writing."
not so much like watching a bug under a jar, really, even if that's just a little how his face behaves. Receptive, and a softer amusement for the portrait being sketched: the failing marriage, the struggle, the well-intentioned and possibly overpaid therapist. 'Amusement' is probably a little off, sure, but what's some reminiscing on the nightmare that is the human condition, constantly under pressure by the ravages of time to find happiness, between immortals?
And he can see, he can feel, the way he understands it. He finds himself desperately uncurious about how Louis thinks of their time together, in this new light. Armand can guess.
"In between waging war against vampire nests with the two lovers, I assume."
Time as anxiety. His second marriage, her first. A child. Daniel was jaded, she was increasingly frantic. What does marriage counseling look like when time isn't a factor? Or is it just a different factor, when the misery can be eternal?
Did Armand think they'd just carry on, after Daniel went home? Was he a togetherness worksheet? Louis, too, said they were going to offer it to him, at dinner. And Daniel still struggles to believe it. He might never.
Thoughts swirling around like coffee, which he agitates now and again with a turn of the mug.
"How do you know that's not what I'm writing about?" a quick riposte, reminiscent of a longer table in between them. "They aren't, anyway. 'Yet', probably, but nobody ran back into bed immediately. They're both extremely fucked up about everything, and I'm a cut-throat career guy exploiting their willingness to tread carefully around the weird old man baby to facilitate my own investigations and prolonged safety."
Is that the update Armand wanted? Daniel just looks at him.
Something about 'they aren't', more bothersome than the news they've flown back into each others arms like they've learned nothing, regardless of the 'yet'. Perhaps, then, not everything has finished processing. Armand would prefer not to care either way, of course, but there is a slightly deeper drift to his next breath in, one that fortifies on its way out as the rest of this update is rattled out.
"Treading carefully does so sound like them," blisteringly dry. Skeptical. Not with each other, not with anyone around them, no matter how mild mannered Louis can pretend to behave.
And does he want to speak of Louis and Lestat as a unit, truly, regardless of his raising the topic? It's like a splinter beneath the skin, and made aggravating for Daniel's insistent proximity.
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He turns the cup around in his hands. Despite a characteristic stillness, Armand had always fidgeted a little during conversation. Louis had been, in some ways, even more contained, more controlled, while Armand toyed with his own glass chalice of warmed up bagged blood that he never actually drank from.
Focus unwavering, though. No fidgeting there. He doesn't ask if Daniel has taken to the killing, not when it's been obvious: he's been doing just fine in that department.
"You returned my gift," has some character to it, eyebrows raising.
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"I wasn't sure that's what it was."
It'd be easy to be angry at Armand, here. And Daniel is. Angry. For San Fransisco, for Paris, for fucking with Louis for so long. Louis wasn't an innocent, in that arrangement - staying with Armand to spite Lestat, staying with Armand to force him into eternal labor to make up for Claudia's death, of course it was all wrong - but Daniel is strongly biased towards him.
He could make it about anger. He's got grievances. It'd make sense.
"I don't presume to think I understand you," he begins, watching Armand. The most terrifying predator on Earth. "But I'm pretty sure I see you. And my instinct is that you really don't like what you gave me."
Hopefully he doesn't have to spell it out, sitting here in relative public. What a thing for a waitress to overhear. Hey, so, now that I remember, I seem to recall you really not having any fun dealing with Louis' drug use by proxy. When did the resentment really get bad? After he fucked and drained fifty boys? A hundred? How many times did you clean up for him while he was out of his mind?
"So—"
A shrug.
"Why?"
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But it does seem to take a moment to sink in, this specific angle. Re-calibration, happening fast beneath the mostly-still surface, and he doesn't get much of a chance to do so when Daniel pivots to a question, and a one-worded one at that. Maybe Armand had been expecting something more along the lines of because you need to fuck off forever.
Which doesn't neatly align with Daniel having already accepted a gift before, with a gift in return, with a written letter delivered to his people inviting some sort of beginning, but it's been a disorienting time.
So. Why? An instinct to start with 'perhaps,' as though his own motives are a fun mystery they can solve together, just like old times. He bites it back.
"I wanted to give you something I didn't think you would seek for yourself," finally. "But that you would like. And I wanted to provoke you."
Both things can be true.
"Given your response, I don't know that I was successful on either front."
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But really, why—
Not an acceptable question. Bad interrogation technique.
"You kind of." How to phrase this. "Hit things in reverse. I would seek that out on my own, if I wanted. Whether I have or not already, even, is my own business. And I do like it. Just not like that, not risking putting us in a pattern of you cleaning up after it and hating me more than you already do. If you want to—"
Don't, some aghast instinct says in his head, Who cares if he gets mad, what the fuck are you going to do if he says YES?
"—try it sometime, it'd have to be even. Equal. Participation-wise, I mean. There are a multitude of things I'm only just learning about, and might benefit from a tutor over, but not that. I'm an expert in that, and anyway, it's recreational. You know. Fun."
Whatever. No comment on the success of provocation, because whether he likes the result or not, Armand did provoke something. Here they are. Hey, Armand, want to do drugs sometime? Please say no. (Or say yes? Help.)
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The boys, the drugs sparkling in their blood, whether Louis put them there himself or found them like that. Armand, chasing after him. Armand, keeping their lives in a semblance of order, trying to measure the leash before the creature on the end of it snaps back, breaks it entirely.
An offer. A real offer? He is calculating more of what Daniel might do or say if Armand says yes or no, more so than whether he wants to say yes or no.
"I didn't hunt for Louis," finally, after too long of a silence. He doesn't have to glance to ensure no humans are near, letting his voice go quieter, almost too quiet, if not for the way they could whisper across a crowded street and hear one another if they wished. "I never brought him anyone. I was there at the other side of it, yes, but not the beginning."
His gaze dips down, into the near-black contents of his coffee cup. Never together. Had it occurred to Louis, to ask him along? Had it occurred to Armand, to ask if he could? He doesn't remember.
The question is tabled, for now.
"You said in your letter to me about starting. Are you looking for tutorship?"
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But maybe a shitload of magic mushrooms would lighten him up.
He notes the way Armand seems to look at the offer and slide it to one side. Obvious about is awareness. Daniel watches too close, too intently, sees too many details. Is a journalist a predator? Armand seemed to think something like it. Claudia's kill list. How is it any different.
(How fucking stupid of him to have said that, by the way, back in Dubai while the tree was burning. I'd just be Claudia, boo hoo. Embarrassing. Daniel wishes he'd shut up, sometimes, but he never seems capable.)
"You got that." Good to know? Yes. Good to know. He thinks. Something itches to ask his opinion on the booklet, but he refrains. "... I'm not sure. Practically there's merit, but I'm used to being on my own, you know?"
Armand ditched him, anyway. Whatever game they're playing here is not about a maker's compassionate mentorship of a fledgling.
"How are you?"
Speaking of being on one's own. Daniel has been his own companion for a while now, lucky to have settled into peace with loneliness. But how long has it been, for Armand? Has he ever had a stretch of time without company? Owners (ugh), the coven, Louis?
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No plans (at all) to cultivate it further, but then, here they are.
I see you. Is that true?
"I'm sure you can imagine," he says, chin lifting. "Free of my obligations, wandering the world, finding myself. What a wonderful gift you've bestowed upon me, Mr. Molloy, that my partner of seventy-seven years despises me, and the airless few seconds granted me for my response to your dramatic revelations. What a rush that must have been for you."
Anger? Maybe. His voice is hard, edged. His focus, intent. But there is something to it that better resembles parries and ripostes in a penthouse in Dubai than the levels of potential fallout that had permeated a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco.
"Why don't you tell me how I am instead? Or is the going rate still in the millions."
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He is aware that it will sound scathing. Even in a muted voice, he is still grating and loudly unkind. The earnest charm of he and Louis at that gay bar, I want to interview you, the tether of it that continued to stitch them together over the years as Louis read his work and looked for evidence of himself. Louis was interesting. Daniel was, in return, interesting. While Armand picked lint off the sofa, alone.
But liars deserve to get their bruises poked at. Daniel has not accepted his apology for any of it, even though he's great, even though this rules. Armand doesn't get to be thanked.
"What I meant," no time to stabilize after Daniel implies he's boring, even though Daniel doesn't actually think that, "is that we can't start this life, with a permanent fishing line strung between our consciousnesses, doing shit we know goes bad on purpose. There's so much out there that can go bad as a surprise. Why sabotage? And like I said. I'm pretty sure you hate that shit. Let's do something else. You like philosophy. You like creativity. What else do you like?"
If he says Louis, Daniel is going to kick him in the shin.
"Don't— don't interview question response that. We're just talking. Ignore that I'm bad at talking when it's not an interview."
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He has read Daniel's book. He has sat through Louis' interview, this thing that had begun so deliberate and constructed that if Daniel had wanted to, he could have and then what'd his way to his bestseller. He has entertained the idea of it, the outpouring, and remembers something like it, standing in a museum, speaking to the wall.
It doesn't appeal, but the strike hits true anyway, finds a tender bruise. Contemplates the phrasing that implies a life is being started. His life feels over, had felt over. But here he is. Here Daniel is.
"I don't really know," he says, in a kind of hard tone, like, isn't that what Daniel is getting at? He doesn't say Louis, and he doesn't say, again, our conversations, because the former is too strange and large to fit into 'like', and the latter—
Well, Daniel might ask why. On the topic of unhealthy patterns of behaviour, he probably shouldn't tell him that the pain is pleasing. That the scalpel-edge of his attention, his ability to cut to the heart of a person, is intriguing. (Let's not bring out the f-word again.)
"I don't know that I hate that shit either. I hated rescuing him from it. Are you intending on becoming out of your mind and a danger to yourself any time soon?"
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Good intel, that Armand doesn't know if he hates being blasted out of his mind on cocaine. Interesting that he says so, instead of asserting something uppity like, I don't need to know to hate it. Offering just a hint of something that looks like curiosity about new experiences. Daniel underlines it in his mental notes, even though this is not an interview.
"It's fun. It feels good. I haven't felt good in so long, and now I don't have to worry about having a stroke or a heart attack doing it, so why not?" He shrugs. "I'm not a sad junkie."
A hard stop to that statement.
As you'll recall. High as a kite, traumatized, and hypnotized, Daniel wanted to live. He had no profound reasoning to try and sway Armand with. But he had still wanted to walk out of that place intact and breathing, whether or not he deserved it. He resisted until his mortal mind simply couldn't. But he never asked for it, not even down to the wire. Louis ran into the sun, and Daniel, sitting at that shitty card table, said he had a thing in the city tomorrow. He didn't. His plans - pre-shit going sideways - were Star Trek reruns, and a hangover burrito from the diner down the street, and maybe jerking off thinking about Louis then convincing himself it wasn't gay.
Worth living for.
"What'd you think of the poetry booklet? Not quite Sartre, I know."
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Armand, sitting back in his chair, attentive to the rest. Calculating. There is no effort at all to reach for memory, as they arise naturally—Louis, laughing hysterically, or Louis, strangely comatose, or Louis, beyond weeping. Louis, who perhaps wanted to die the whole time, chasing it down, and where does that urge end, and the compounding chemical alterations of heavy drug use begin?
Something to consider. He doesn't know, truly. Vampire physiology is as varied as there are vampires. The look on Armand's face doesn't disbelieve. His hands spread from his cup, an agreement: indeed, why not? Neither of them could fathom any answers if they tried, surely.
And then, the poetry. Half a smile.
"I thought, why did he give me this?" This isn't an interview. He doesn't have to be impressive. (He always has to be impressive.) "I thought it was," and a pause, considering, scraping around for what he did, in fact, think of it, "youthful. Familiar. There is no long history of middle-class youths with a university degree and the adequate literacy to express themselves, but if there were, you might read something like it two hundred years ago. In spirit, if not form."
He turns the cup around in his hands again. "And I enjoyed the one about the tiger on the bus."
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"Tiger tiger burning bright, how many metaphors can we fit into this bus before the driver gets eaten."
A writer, but not a poet himself. Some of his turns if phrases can be artful, and very insightful, but Daniel Molloy prefers throwing bricks to make a point over seduction. Still he can't help but smile, thinking about Armand enjoying that particular piece. Armand, stuck with his own decisions, contending with them. Armand, a predatory animal who eats people.
"I liked the kid who was glad their dad died."
It was a funny one. Brutal, but funny. And a little more conversational, so of course it spoke (haha) to Daniel.
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He had put hard work into the theatre too, influencing its artform, dictating its aesthetic. In the beginning, the half-improvised horror-comedies, powered by the force of vampiric charm, of the audience's familiarity with the form, everything a little different every night. Times change, of course. Taste changes. Technologies emerge. New vampires, brought into the coven, with new talents.
The plays were weird, Louis had said. The plays were an autopsy of a play. A diagram. The layers of reference made clear through rigid scripting, the projections dictating exactly how each performer had to move so as not to throw them off-sync, the light of the film like a glamour, the modernity and artifice pulling audiences into the joke of a human playing a vampire playing an actor playing a character. The ones who kept returning, delighted at trying to find the truth behind the lies.
He had liked that.
But he has a question, first giving a 'hm' of amusement for the choice, yes, very good, and then asking, "Do you know that you're dead yet?"
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How many bad husbands does it take to change a light bulb.
"That's almost nuts enough to be a me-style question," he says. "Could really throw somebody off balance. But given context, maybe not so nuts."
His mouth just goes. Talks. An annoying thing for someone who is also an artful listener; most have the decency to be men of few words. But Daniel falls quiet to actually contemplate it for real, taking it on good faith (or taking it hostage) that Armand means it as a philosophical question and not a morbid one meant to dump cold water over their meeting.
"I don't know." Layers to not knowing. Unsure if he is or isn't, but sure that it's different. "I was entering negotiations with myself, before. Getting ready. 'You're going to die, you have to start making preparations.' I hadn't gotten to the preparations yet, but I had a list of things I would have to look into by the end of the year. My will, insurance policies, right-to-die laws. The shape of death wasn't formed in my head, but there were sketches of it. None of it looked like this, or you."
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Philosophical is a safe bet. A cold bucket of water is, perhaps, more in the eye of the beholder. Daniel could let it be a bummer, if he really wanted. Armand could press the point.
Armand had shifted his posture by subtle degrees. Less stiff through the leg and spine as though he were in an interview (as in, like for a job, not whatever they were all doing in Dubai at any given time), more comfortable in all the subtle ways. Daniel can interpret that however, but what it is is that he has not had cause or motivation to exist in these spaces very much over the past several months. Vampires of a certain age and detachment have a way of moving. Existing.
Sometimes, it takes a minute. And, to elaborate, "Unless you intend to reveal your immortal nature to your next of kin in the next decade or so. Or the world at large."
Alternatively: Daniel could not care. But he's a public figure. He's buying a house. Mortal connections persist.
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"If you've got any good hookups for repurposing identities, I'm very happy to take business recommendations," he says, and means it. Something he's spoken to Louis about, just a little, but he's been busy with too much else to worry about it. Maniel Dolloy, rejected, Elvis Presley, rejected. He'll think of something. "Writing is one thing. I'll let somebody else fall on the paperwork grenade for being the first publicly out vampire who wants to sue Social Security for retirement money."
It does not really occur to him to think of his ex-wives or his daughters. They were collectively, and individually, uninterested in engaging with his illness; the youngest girl offered to make plans to come stay with him 'in a year or two, or three?' in a voice that sounded like she had a gun to her own head. We'll see, kiddo, and they both knew he was never going to let her, and she was a little sad, but mostly relieved. He gets to 'leave' everyone a shitload of money, and it will be the happiest he's ever made them.
"I like New York, I like the idea of having a house in New York. I really like the idea of having a house in New York ready to go in a hundred years whenever I feel like coming back."
Temporary, his plans. He doesn't have the grace of another forty years of plausible deniability— he'll have to move around more often than the others, and keep an even lower profile. Indulging in what he can now feels a little bit desperate, and he recognizes that, even while he focuses on it being a celebration of a huge change.
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Which doesn't mean he will. Daniel's induction into the vampiric world has been something of a free fall, regardless of what faith or thought Armand might have put into that decision, if it even was one. Just a recording, a note taken. He doesn't interrupt, remembers to blink.
"Something to look forward to."
But,
"Setting aside the logistics for the moment. There is a different sort of realisation that, I believe, awaits us. You've been made privy to the detailed account of a relatively unconventional vampire. His ties to his human life and his continued unwillingness to embrace his own nature have, in a sense, spared him of this."
Armand has yet to get the memo about the self-actualisation, it seems. No one owns the night.
"A different sort of suffering. His, the more uncommon kind."
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Is it ease? Difficult to tell, with him. Daniel can get under his skin, he's proven that, he can find cracks to peer into. If this was completely good faith he'd stop and simply be here, simply listen and talk and not try and x-ray him. But sometimes as he's nodding off he thinks of a voice telling him to rest, and so.
Philosophical. Being kept on topic. Fair enough, after Daniel went through all that trouble to steer him away from the sacrifice of a drug-addled twenty-something cranked on E.
"Is it a realization that I need to realize on my own time, or one that you want to enlighten me of early?"
He's not in a huge hurry to embrace suffering.
"Actually—"
Hm.
"Pretend you're me. What would I be doing, if you were?"
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The book itself leaves that one as something of an open ended question. No need to spell it out to the readers.
In good faith, Daniel can interpret the flutter in Armand's expression as interest in the question, the way his eyes dart down to the surface of the table. Giving it thought, in good faith.
"Finding the bearable thing," finally. "Doing it, now, while your humanity clings to you. Before the bodies stack up, and the world becomes disfigured with time."
A tik of his nail against the cup.
"Preservation. Cultivation. Will you throw yourself on the fire in a century, or will you live to see the new millennium? What do you take with you, in either scenario? Perhaps," he cedes, "it's a lot to ask. But it's worthy of consideration."
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Maybe Daniel doesn't quite grasp this answer because he hasn't realized yet, but he contemplates it anyway. Takes notes (he can't help himself) about Armand, if not the concept of being a vampire. Being dead. Being, as perhaps his maker still believes, under the authority of the Devil.
"What is a bearable thing, for you?"
It doesn't sound like an interview question. Too quiet. They can't read each other's minds, and it's—
Better.
No second-guessing. Daniel isn't paranoid about what Armand might be sifting from him. He wonders if there's a relief of anxiety on Armand's side, free of needing to monitor.
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Past tense, and it's the kind of past tense that isn't laced with the bitterness of having a thing taken away from him. More like a change in paradigm.
"Perhaps 'bearable' shouldn't be an aspiration for vampire companionship," has some low-grade humour to it. "Or perhaps it never was that to begin with, and it was the story I'd told myself and told him. You find the person you can tolerate and that's enough. You find the methods of that tolerance, and it's enough."
It always comes back to a person, doesn't it? Or so some vampires would have you believe. The quest for the eternal companion. But—
"I've always had a fondness for innovation," is less dicey territory. "Even in the advent of economic collapse, plague, warfare, there will always be that."
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And yet. He finds himself curious about the psychology behind Armand's ability to frame things, sitting directly across the table from someone he once spent a week torture, as wistful look back. Jesus fucking Christ.
"Keeping up with the times. And seeing how our first, parent species is holding together the world we live on. Maybe getting some cool stuff out of it."
Semi-relatable. Daniel no longer lugs around a typewriter. Why weasel away from the topic, though? We're here. We're looking forward. We're in a shitty diner and there are only so many hours left to work with before Daniel has to go back to his extremely medium hotel and draw the curtains as densely as he can.
"I told my second wife 'of course I can stand you' in an argument, once. In the moment, I thought I was making a great point. It seemed kinder than what she was accusing me of. I'm not sure I'd classify that setup as 'bearable', in retrospect. We had this awful therapist who kept making us do team building hypotheticals, where our mission was to stay together to set a standard of family mettle, and we had to strategize like a spy team. It was excruciating. That therapist is the closest I came to murder in my life life. ... Bearable? I dunno. I think I'll just have to keep writing."
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not so much like watching a bug under a jar, really, even if that's just a little how his face behaves. Receptive, and a softer amusement for the portrait being sketched: the failing marriage, the struggle, the well-intentioned and possibly overpaid therapist. 'Amusement' is probably a little off, sure, but what's some reminiscing on the nightmare that is the human condition, constantly under pressure by the ravages of time to find happiness, between immortals?
And he can see, he can feel, the way he understands it. He finds himself desperately uncurious about how Louis thinks of their time together, in this new light. Armand can guess.
"In between waging war against vampire nests with the two lovers, I assume."
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Did Armand think they'd just carry on, after Daniel went home? Was he a togetherness worksheet? Louis, too, said they were going to offer it to him, at dinner. And Daniel still struggles to believe it. He might never.
Thoughts swirling around like coffee, which he agitates now and again with a turn of the mug.
"How do you know that's not what I'm writing about?" a quick riposte, reminiscent of a longer table in between them. "They aren't, anyway. 'Yet', probably, but nobody ran back into bed immediately. They're both extremely fucked up about everything, and I'm a cut-throat career guy exploiting their willingness to tread carefully around the weird old man baby to facilitate my own investigations and prolonged safety."
Is that the update Armand wanted? Daniel just looks at him.
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"Treading carefully does so sound like them," blisteringly dry. Skeptical. Not with each other, not with anyone around them, no matter how mild mannered Louis can pretend to behave.
And does he want to speak of Louis and Lestat as a unit, truly, regardless of his raising the topic? It's like a splinter beneath the skin, and made aggravating for Daniel's insistent proximity.
"Tell me of your investigations."
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