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.
It is infinitely more frightening when Armand plays ball. It is infinitely more interesting. And it is still fucking crazy to know Armand thinks there's no spark in him worth preserving, when Daniel is here fixed on his every word.
"I picked up on that, yeah," is kind of funny, if you think Daniel Molloy's rainbow of dry tones are funny.
"You had a reason to be. I handed you an unpinned grenade and stared at you as it went off."
A ruinous action that, in turn, Daniel had a reason for. The reason mostly boiling down to fuck you, which, funnily enough, remains his impression of why Armand made him. Fuck you. Armand could only dismantle Daniel temporarily. Daniel could only checkmate him through subterfuge.
Good at being narrative foils.
"Are you still angry? In general, I mean. You can be angry at me forever, if you have to, it'd be reasonable."
An easy memory to summon, the brazen look angled at him across the table. So cutting, compared to the watery transfixing fear he recalled so well. A breath out of Armand, a kind of yes, well, at metaphors of grenades. Apt.
He should say, Yes, or, Sometimes, and not the freakish truth. But, you know. In for a penny.
"Not really." Maybe it's the depression, but that doesn't feel right. Whatever he feels towards Daniel, it isn't that specific kind of numbness. "Are you at me?"
For the turning, sure, but then: everything else. All he discovered. All Armand did.
"San Fransisco happened a few months ago, for me. It's still shaking loose from my brain in little parts. Sometimes I have dreams about details, angles, words, and I don't know if it's a memory, or just regular dream bullshit playing tricks on me."
Daniel explains this calmly, which bucks against the idea of being angry, but lends itself to the ambiguity of sort of. Perhaps it's just that Daniel has grown out of being angry about things for any longer than the emotion serves a purpose.
"I'm processing it. I'm processing a few things. I'm not mad at this though." He gestures to... them, sitting here. "I'm alive. Pretty cool. You say we shouldn't exist but I'd like to get some mileage first. I wouldn't hate you being around, if you've got the patience to deal with processing."
The anger is easy to recall, festooning the interview with barbed wire. Louis', a cold thing, and Daniel's, the occasional spark flying from the furnace. But they had an interview to continue, and neither of them banished him from the room. Armand, carrying too much story to be left on the curb. More than they knew, until they did.
Weird, but not surprising, given where Armand stands in kind. It feels a little like a very important and meticulous project has been taken from him, torn apart, and leaving him with nothing at all, slipping.
It's also not untrue that Louis was a stressful fucking project. Pity to waste the work.
"Around?"
Edited (illegal to repeat squares) 2024-08-06 21:59 (UTC)
Are they even? Parts of each other's lives, ruined? Armand's torture, his psychic surgery, Daniel's detonation of his enmeshed relationship? Daniel thinks he should be angry about other things, too, like the trial and those poor girls (Louis' daughters, two of them, that Louis fucked up), like how he treated Louis. And he is, sometimes. No matter Armand's probable dysthymia, Daniel imagines that he, too, is sometimes angry.
Where do they go from here.
Not back to nanny and addict, at least. Not that. Somewhere else.
He takes a breath—
"You know. Like this. Whatever you're comfortable with, whatever works for us. I know this is all fucked, but we can't actually get in trouble for culturally appropriating normalcy."
Anger tends to have minorly apocalyptic implications.
After a century or two, one needs to have a measure of care. Maybe he is angry at Daniel and doesn't want to be. Maybe angry at Daniel looks ugly on them both. Maybe it's harder to feel entitled to it when Daniel is now sitting across from him with his unusual vampire eyes and a certain amount of strength and existing as the manifestation of anger already spent.
But Daniel has allowed this claim to slide, and says something that makes Armand kind-of laugh. He lifts the cup of near-undrunk coffee as if to indicate it, their appropriation of human culture, and sets it aside.
Anger teaches. They've learned things about each other.
The kind-of-laugh. He's seen it before; despite himself, he likes it, liked it even in Dubai. It's always gratifying to make someone laugh when it's clear they aren't used to it. He would look away sometimes, jaw tense, and Daniel would wonder if he was trying not to kill him, or trying not to laugh.
I sometimes enjoyed our conversation, through the boy Daniel sent back.
Maybe Armand is just normal-intrigued, the kind of response he might feel the need to paper over, justify, and so on—but something else, too. Like holding your hand to a candle flame, nearer than before. No, he had hated it when Louis was out of his mind in that way. It had been undignified, sloppy, a little pathetic, if he's being honest.
But Louis had never asked him along, and if he had, he hadn't ever meant it.
Daniel would like to play it cool (who doesn't want to be cool?) but he's surprised. Sparks of success, curiosity, and then, tempered: What the fuck is Armand doing, exactly? Lulling him somehow? It's such a waste to be paranoid, though. And it's not like he can do anything worse to him.
"I'll start thinking about menu, then."
Which is another kind of funny thing. What to pick. What can he source. What is the best showcase for the virtues of illegal drugs. He'd had an answer ready to go when asked about the best high he'd ever had— badly processed heroin, the kind that risks necrosis at injection sites, unfiltered, half-contaminated. It's been in his head for decades more firmly than being attacked by a vampire, and yet—
And yet.
Drinking Armand's blood was better.
An unidentifiable feeling slithers up his spine when he thinks it. He's been trying not to, he realizes. Putting it away, out of sight on a shelf, refusing to so much as look at it. Telling himself he'd have to wade through fuzzy, maddening memories anyway, disoriented and crazed as he was. Denial. The thought sits shining front and center, as though it's between them and their room temperature coffee cups.
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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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"I picked up on that, yeah," is kind of funny, if you think Daniel Molloy's rainbow of dry tones are funny.
"You had a reason to be. I handed you an unpinned grenade and stared at you as it went off."
A ruinous action that, in turn, Daniel had a reason for. The reason mostly boiling down to fuck you, which, funnily enough, remains his impression of why Armand made him. Fuck you. Armand could only dismantle Daniel temporarily. Daniel could only checkmate him through subterfuge.
Good at being narrative foils.
"Are you still angry? In general, I mean. You can be angry at me forever, if you have to, it'd be reasonable."
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He should say, Yes, or, Sometimes, and not the freakish truth. But, you know. In for a penny.
"Not really." Maybe it's the depression, but that doesn't feel right. Whatever he feels towards Daniel, it isn't that specific kind of numbness. "Are you at me?"
For the turning, sure, but then: everything else. All he discovered. All Armand did.
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"Sort of."
Since we're being honest.
"San Fransisco happened a few months ago, for me. It's still shaking loose from my brain in little parts. Sometimes I have dreams about details, angles, words, and I don't know if it's a memory, or just regular dream bullshit playing tricks on me."
Daniel explains this calmly, which bucks against the idea of being angry, but lends itself to the ambiguity of sort of. Perhaps it's just that Daniel has grown out of being angry about things for any longer than the emotion serves a purpose.
"I'm processing it. I'm processing a few things. I'm not mad at this though." He gestures to... them, sitting here. "I'm alive. Pretty cool. You say we shouldn't exist but I'd like to get some mileage first. I wouldn't hate you being around, if you've got the patience to deal with processing."
Why. Why say this. Help.
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The anger is easy to recall, festooning the interview with barbed wire. Louis', a cold thing, and Daniel's, the occasional spark flying from the furnace. But they had an interview to continue, and neither of them banished him from the room. Armand, carrying too much story to be left on the curb. More than they knew, until they did.
Weird, but not surprising, given where Armand stands in kind. It feels a little like a very important and meticulous project has been taken from him, torn apart, and leaving him with nothing at all, slipping.
It's also not untrue that Louis was a stressful fucking project. Pity to waste the work.
"Around?"
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Where do they go from here.
Not back to nanny and addict, at least. Not that. Somewhere else.
He takes a breath—
"You know. Like this. Whatever you're comfortable with, whatever works for us. I know this is all fucked, but we can't actually get in trouble for culturally appropriating normalcy."
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After a century or two, one needs to have a measure of care. Maybe he is angry at Daniel and doesn't want to be. Maybe angry at Daniel looks ugly on them both. Maybe it's harder to feel entitled to it when Daniel is now sitting across from him with his unusual vampire eyes and a certain amount of strength and existing as the manifestation of anger already spent.
But Daniel has allowed this claim to slide, and says something that makes Armand kind-of laugh. He lifts the cup of near-undrunk coffee as if to indicate it, their appropriation of human culture, and sets it aside.
"Does normalcy encompass drinking drug-spiked humans?"
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The kind-of-laugh. He's seen it before; despite himself, he likes it, liked it even in Dubai. It's always gratifying to make someone laugh when it's clear they aren't used to it. He would look away sometimes, jaw tense, and Daniel would wonder if he was trying not to kill him, or trying not to laugh.
I sometimes enjoyed our conversation, through the boy Daniel sent back.
Eyebrows go up.
"If we say it does."
Thinking about it after all, Armand?
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Maybe Armand is just normal-intrigued, the kind of response he might feel the need to paper over, justify, and so on—but something else, too. Like holding your hand to a candle flame, nearer than before. No, he had hated it when Louis was out of his mind in that way. It had been undignified, sloppy, a little pathetic, if he's being honest.
But Louis had never asked him along, and if he had, he hadn't ever meant it.
"What else?"
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"I'll start thinking about menu, then."
Which is another kind of funny thing. What to pick. What can he source. What is the best showcase for the virtues of illegal drugs. He'd had an answer ready to go when asked about the best high he'd ever had— badly processed heroin, the kind that risks necrosis at injection sites, unfiltered, half-contaminated. It's been in his head for decades more firmly than being attacked by a vampire, and yet—
And yet.
Drinking Armand's blood was better.
An unidentifiable feeling slithers up his spine when he thinks it. He's been trying not to, he realizes. Putting it away, out of sight on a shelf, refusing to so much as look at it. Telling himself he'd have to wade through fuzzy, maddening memories anyway, disoriented and crazed as he was. Denial. The thought sits shining front and center, as though it's between them and their room temperature coffee cups.
"Mm. Your turn to pick."
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