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.
'Willingness', about the situation, is possibly overselling it. Awareness of mutually assured destruction over annihilating another of Louis' friends, more like. Daniel can feel Lestat's restlessness radiating off of him, and he can tell Louis is spoiling for a fight. It was a good time for a break, when it happened. Maybe yet has even caught up with the pair, but honestly—
And this is really honest. Too bad, for the first time, that Armand can't see into his head. But honestly, Daniel just isn't interested in it at all. Louis can make his own choices. It'll go well for him or it'll blow up in his face. Daniel will still be there for him, still be his friend, none of that shit matters.
Lestat is a zoo animal.
Daniel continues to look at him for a moment, but he's not studying him. Not silently reprimanding him. Just letting a moment sit there, giving Armand space, and a moment to inhabit it. Alright, alright. They can move on into less dicey territory after all.
"The vampires who've made their moves, so far, haven't been any of the voices we've heard talking shit on Fang Radio," look, if there is a name for the global psychic chat network, no one has told him, "but, they've been talking to each other privately. Mostly idiots just using phone texting, but this guy in South America had an encrypted phone with a Telegram account."
The server from earlier does a quick scan to see if they'll be taking any coffee refills, and Armand, sensing the pull of her attention from somewhere behind him, times a shallow sip of his cup to dissuade her. See, they're still working on it. No need to flex godlike psychic power for no good reason when something simpler will do, and they're left alone.
"It's never been like this that I remember," he says. "The noise. Risking their own identities to establish themselves in the chorus. It reminds me of a coven and those within it clamouring for status, not simply a dozen disparate ones."
Of course, to tell of the Paris coven would have portrayed it as an orderly affair. Yes, mutiny, yes, upheaval, but those were two incidents in even more centuries. Armand would pride himself on the fact that it did run reasonably well under his control, but it was never as simple as Louis made it to be, or himself.
Lestat and Louis again, unrivaled arrogance in their own ways. See how it's done, Armand? It's so simple. Let me change it all for you. His fault for believing them.
"My sense is that your book has thrown certain visions into question. Proving the existence of the vampire before the vampire was ready for it. They'll want the skepticism to hold while they can get rid of you and Louis."
Of course, he was also interviewed. Spoke of some of the deeper histories than Louis had knowledge or care about, and it made its way in. He wouldn't be surprised if most of those performing offense were too young to even comprehend the implications of it, going after instead of sympathetic figure, the man who penned it.
"You know how difficult change is," he points out. "Even when someone wants it very badly."
The vampires who've actually tried something aren't the vampires doing the most 'public' talking. What does that mean? Mostly that vampires are still people, for the most part, and people are prone to being 90% talking about it with 10% doing it, particularly when the it is tricky. But it could also mean that there are vampires out there who wouldn't mind a change.
And whether this is the first step to a steady overhaul of the world, or a prominent stumble before everything is shut down back to the way it was, who knows. But it's a change.
"We know my preference is to avoid finding myself rid of. What do you think about all of it? You weren't happy, on the micro level. Do you still hate it on a macro level?"
Considering the honest answer. That he wouldn't mind seeing the vampires tear each other apart in their attempts to survive the millennium as a global unit. He has the bleak sense that he will survive it regardless—the growing army of fledglings reminds him more of infestation than invasion, and the blood has become dilute, weak, over the past century.
"My feelings are that the vampire is the anathema to order. We are, in all ways that matter, in opposition to all that matters to humanity. The coven, however flawed its foundations, its grasping superstitions, is a design to prevent us from over-making, over-feeding, over-stepping. Part of my duty as coven leader was cleaning up the weakest new ones within my territory, and sometimes beyond it. They were more common than the story we told you would have you imagine."
A splay of his hand. "Hatred, dissatisfaction. I find myself these days contemplating the reality that we shouldn't exist."
Daniel meant the book. Armand's seething resentment over a suicide, as he put it. But it's a microcosm of vampiric existence anyway, and so he listens, and wonders about—
too much. So he puts a stop to it, and only listens.
Dire.
The tiniest bubble of anxiety. Not out of fear of himself. What if Armand decides to end it all? Can he, without a vulnerability to the sun? Daniel realizes in a strange moment in which he witnesses this scene from outside of himself, that he does not want Armand to die. The immediate thought is that, of course he doesn't, the bond between them has been a point of stability to navigate this new life through. He cannot explain the contrary twinge of something that follows.
He could rules lawyer. Humans are a virus, plenty shouldn't exist. But life isn't actually about order, or they'd all still be single celled organisms.
"I'm not a hopeful optimist," he says eventually. "I'm just stubborn. I'm not sure where I stand yet on our existence."
Probably won't be that, though. I like my life. Daniel wants to stay. He would like it, for some fucking reason, if Armand stayed too.
"Do you feel like this most times, when there's not a bearable thing to distract you?"
Do you feel like this, and if there was any wander of his focus, anything less than precise in the alignment of his regard, it sharpens.
Has he made an error?
Actually, that's a deeply funny question to ponder, to feel as a reflex. Armand is aware he has made nothing but errors. Blunder after blunder. The idea that he is operating in a sustained mode of control is a fiction, a performance. As if he cannot see the odd repetition of it, of the coven invading the palazzo, of Lestat's effortless words in the catacombs and Lestat twirling on a stage, of Louis' lifting a camera to take, not his picture, but that of the empty space beside him, and Louis in the soft light of an empty gallery, and Louis in the rain on a bench, and of Daniel in their living room. And Daniel here, in front of him. Asking him what he feels, and how often.
The shame is immediate and overwhelming, eyes dropping to the table between them. He is the outcasted figure in Daniel's latest work and he has irrevocably and irresponsibly bound them together to a shared eternity, too weak to pull back the curtain and clean up his own mess. Half-blank, half-apocalyptic, and he lets his hands fall loose from the cup on either side of it.
"I didn't come to you to discuss how I feel," he says.
Okay well, yes you did, is not the thing to say right now, and it's a kind miracle of the universe that Armand is looking at the table instead of Daniel, and misses his brief, comical look of incredulity. A hell of an assertion from the guy who came here very specifically to discuss how he feels.
But alright. Let's look at this. Armand has changed his mind, or he is not being honest with himself. Maybe a messy mix of those options— Hello, I am feeling slighted by your rejection of the club kid loaded on MDMA is pretty different than Here are my deep feelings about depression. Too close, too personal. And yet Armand isn't angry or defensive, in fact, his body language screams a need for comfort.
Daniel does not trust it. A cat exposing a soft belly for petting before goring the hand. He holds still anyway, once more giving his maker a moment to inhabit quiet, proverbial space.
"Would you like to anyway?"
As noted (back then), he is not a psychologist. As noted (a minute ago) he's not interviewing him. They're just... hanging out. Having some coffee, out here where the leaves and whatever are going on.
But no. Armand knows better. Nothing that Daniel takes in vanishes. Nothing is destroyed in there, not in the drug-addled, concussed mind of an idiot twenty-something, or decades later, a sick old man who had become too lonely. Not even memory that one week in San Francisco after Armand's formidable talents permanently erased them had gone to waste, in the end. A crushing gravitational pull, yes, but transformation in place of annihilation.
A sharp a mind as any human, now a vampire. His fledgling. His.
Armand lifts his eyes again. They're just hanging out. "Yes," finally. "Without distraction, it seems like a logical conclusion to draw."
He's never known a vampire to innovate. To create, not really, nothing that lasts. Louis' failures at photography ceding to a mercenary approach to art flipping, Armand's continued dissatisfaction with his coven's engagement in the theatre, Lestat's pretentious ideas about clowning, and even Marius de Romanus' not-quite-beautiful enough paintings that never set their claws into history the way his contemporaries did.
And then they kill people to live, feeling nothing, and for what. Just because he alone can see it doesn't make it untrue. Him, holding his prey, murmuring to them the thing he believes so well. Horns honking, you don't move.
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no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
"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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And this is really honest. Too bad, for the first time, that Armand can't see into his head. But honestly, Daniel just isn't interested in it at all. Louis can make his own choices. It'll go well for him or it'll blow up in his face. Daniel will still be there for him, still be his friend, none of that shit matters.
Lestat is a zoo animal.
Daniel continues to look at him for a moment, but he's not studying him. Not silently reprimanding him. Just letting a moment sit there, giving Armand space, and a moment to inhabit it. Alright, alright. They can move on into less dicey territory after all.
"The vampires who've made their moves, so far, haven't been any of the voices we've heard talking shit on Fang Radio," look, if there is a name for the global psychic chat network, no one has told him, "but, they've been talking to each other privately. Mostly idiots just using phone texting, but this guy in South America had an encrypted phone with a Telegram account."
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The server from earlier does a quick scan to see if they'll be taking any coffee refills, and Armand, sensing the pull of her attention from somewhere behind him, times a shallow sip of his cup to dissuade her. See, they're still working on it. No need to flex godlike psychic power for no good reason when something simpler will do, and they're left alone.
"It's never been like this that I remember," he says. "The noise. Risking their own identities to establish themselves in the chorus. It reminds me of a coven and those within it clamouring for status, not simply a dozen disparate ones."
Of course, to tell of the Paris coven would have portrayed it as an orderly affair. Yes, mutiny, yes, upheaval, but those were two incidents in even more centuries. Armand would pride himself on the fact that it did run reasonably well under his control, but it was never as simple as Louis made it to be, or himself.
Lestat and Louis again, unrivaled arrogance in their own ways. See how it's done, Armand? It's so simple. Let me change it all for you. His fault for believing them.
"My sense is that your book has thrown certain visions into question. Proving the existence of the vampire before the vampire was ready for it. They'll want the skepticism to hold while they can get rid of you and Louis."
Of course, he was also interviewed. Spoke of some of the deeper histories than Louis had knowledge or care about, and it made its way in. He wouldn't be surprised if most of those performing offense were too young to even comprehend the implications of it, going after instead of sympathetic figure, the man who penned it.
Things to think about in the void.
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The vampires who've actually tried something aren't the vampires doing the most 'public' talking. What does that mean? Mostly that vampires are still people, for the most part, and people are prone to being 90% talking about it with 10% doing it, particularly when the it is tricky. But it could also mean that there are vampires out there who wouldn't mind a change.
And whether this is the first step to a steady overhaul of the world, or a prominent stumble before everything is shut down back to the way it was, who knows. But it's a change.
"We know my preference is to avoid finding myself rid of. What do you think about all of it? You weren't happy, on the micro level. Do you still hate it on a macro level?"
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Considering the honest answer. That he wouldn't mind seeing the vampires tear each other apart in their attempts to survive the millennium as a global unit. He has the bleak sense that he will survive it regardless—the growing army of fledglings reminds him more of infestation than invasion, and the blood has become dilute, weak, over the past century.
"My feelings are that the vampire is the anathema to order. We are, in all ways that matter, in opposition to all that matters to humanity. The coven, however flawed its foundations, its grasping superstitions, is a design to prevent us from over-making, over-feeding, over-stepping. Part of my duty as coven leader was cleaning up the weakest new ones within my territory, and sometimes beyond it. They were more common than the story we told you would have you imagine."
A splay of his hand. "Hatred, dissatisfaction. I find myself these days contemplating the reality that we shouldn't exist."
He still speaks calmly.
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too much. So he puts a stop to it, and only listens.
Dire.
The tiniest bubble of anxiety. Not out of fear of himself. What if Armand decides to end it all? Can he, without a vulnerability to the sun? Daniel realizes in a strange moment in which he witnesses this scene from outside of himself, that he does not want Armand to die. The immediate thought is that, of course he doesn't, the bond between them has been a point of stability to navigate this new life through. He cannot explain the contrary twinge of something that follows.
He could rules lawyer. Humans are a virus, plenty shouldn't exist. But life isn't actually about order, or they'd all still be single celled organisms.
"I'm not a hopeful optimist," he says eventually. "I'm just stubborn. I'm not sure where I stand yet on our existence."
Probably won't be that, though. I like my life. Daniel wants to stay. He would like it, for some fucking reason, if Armand stayed too.
"Do you feel like this most times, when there's not a bearable thing to distract you?"
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Has he made an error?
Actually, that's a deeply funny question to ponder, to feel as a reflex. Armand is aware he has made nothing but errors. Blunder after blunder. The idea that he is operating in a sustained mode of control is a fiction, a performance. As if he cannot see the odd repetition of it, of the coven invading the palazzo, of Lestat's effortless words in the catacombs and Lestat twirling on a stage, of Louis' lifting a camera to take, not his picture, but that of the empty space beside him, and Louis in the soft light of an empty gallery, and Louis in the rain on a bench, and of Daniel in their living room. And Daniel here, in front of him. Asking him what he feels, and how often.
The shame is immediate and overwhelming, eyes dropping to the table between them. He is the outcasted figure in Daniel's latest work and he has irrevocably and irresponsibly bound them together to a shared eternity, too weak to pull back the curtain and clean up his own mess. Half-blank, half-apocalyptic, and he lets his hands fall loose from the cup on either side of it.
"I didn't come to you to discuss how I feel," he says.
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But alright. Let's look at this. Armand has changed his mind, or he is not being honest with himself. Maybe a messy mix of those options— Hello, I am feeling slighted by your rejection of the club kid loaded on MDMA is pretty different than Here are my deep feelings about depression. Too close, too personal. And yet Armand isn't angry or defensive, in fact, his body language screams a need for comfort.
Daniel does not trust it. A cat exposing a soft belly for petting before goring the hand. He holds still anyway, once more giving his maker a moment to inhabit quiet, proverbial space.
"Would you like to anyway?"
As noted (back then), he is not a psychologist. As noted (a minute ago) he's not interviewing him. They're just... hanging out. Having some coffee, out here where the leaves and whatever are going on.
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But no. Armand knows better. Nothing that Daniel takes in vanishes. Nothing is destroyed in there, not in the drug-addled, concussed mind of an idiot twenty-something, or decades later, a sick old man who had become too lonely. Not even memory that one week in San Francisco after Armand's formidable talents permanently erased them had gone to waste, in the end. A crushing gravitational pull, yes, but transformation in place of annihilation.
A sharp a mind as any human, now a vampire. His fledgling. His.
Armand lifts his eyes again. They're just hanging out. "Yes," finally. "Without distraction, it seems like a logical conclusion to draw."
He's never known a vampire to innovate. To create, not really, nothing that lasts. Louis' failures at photography ceding to a mercenary approach to art flipping, Armand's continued dissatisfaction with his coven's engagement in the theatre, Lestat's pretentious ideas about clowning, and even Marius de Romanus' not-quite-beautiful enough paintings that never set their claws into history the way his contemporaries did.
And then they kill people to live, feeling nothing, and for what. Just because he alone can see it doesn't make it untrue. Him, holding his prey, murmuring to them the thing he believes so well. Horns honking, you don't move.
"I was angry when I turned you."
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