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.
That doesn't seem fair. Armand has picked already, even if it was Daniel's offering.
But let's not quibble. It's pleasing to have already surprised Daniel. And a valid response, to be uncertain as to his intentions. Even Armand doesn't know what he's doing.
"I like driving. And I've heard the leaves in this area are to be recommended."
Maybe a little recursive, picking up the things Daniel has already mentioned, but perhaps, some warming up is necessary. And there is a still a look in eye, a level of analysis, that feels removed from the conversation.
Some figure of himself standing at the back of his mind, taking notes.
All kinds of new territory for the both of them. No context for any of this, from either angle— not just whatever prolonged, psychological ceasefire talk this is, but their lives. Daniel has never been a vampire before. Armand has never been a maker before.
(Gossamer, silver, warm, elastic but unbreakable.)
Daniel smiles. Turnabout, etc. It's a charming little move, if not a revolutionary one. Though as noted, new territory. Who the fuck knows, it could be groundbreaking for Armand. And it is very normal to go see the leaves in New England, driving around scenic highways and toll roads just to behold the changing environment.
"Would you like to go look at the leaves, and whatever?"
The FBI has probably given up watching them by now.
A scenic drive in the depths of night, but their eyes are well adapted to seeing darkness in its infinite beauty, or however more romantic vampires than Armand might describe it. Armand considers the offer, his response to the offer.
What had he imagined, coming here? Some sniping over the table, maybe. Scratching an itch in that way. Confirmation that Daniel wants more distance, which Armand may or may not have granted him. Not this, anyway. It's nice to feel surprise, to be surprising.
Let's observe some scenery.
"Perhaps there will be room for further revelation," he says, as he stands, "when we're not trapped in a room."
Though there have been revelations in every room they've been in together.
Armand likes driving, he says. Armand also probably likes pulling wings off of songbirds and slowly peeling tech bros like over-ripe mangoes (difficult, slippery, rewarding; the kind of fiddly thing detail-oriented Armand would excel at, in Daniel's mind). A few bucks for the coffee and outside, Daniel tosses his car keys at
his maker
without warning.
"US and UAE licenses are co-valid, but I'm sure you know that. Don't run us into a tree if it turns out you've been chauffeured since the invention of the automobile, please."
This is real stupid. He gets into the passenger seat (always weird, in your own car), hitches it back a little further since he had it cranked up to move a body in the back (don't ask). It smells like car cleaner and faint cigarette smoke (he always has the windows down if he has one in here), blood, his cologne. Daniel can afford a better car by now, but it's such a pain in the ass and this one's perfectly fine.
Is this where Armand finds a bridge to drive them off?
"The drive back from Vancouver was nice," he says, as the diner vanishes behind them. (Vancouver, where he murdered someone to please Armand.) "I hadn't done anything cross-country since the 80s."
This is a shitty car is his prevailing thought, climbing into the driver's seat, but he's being a snob and knows it. It's perfectly serviceable and clearly runs fine and isn't dirty, inside or out, but some of us are more used to being filthy rich than others, and maybe someone who made millions on the dismantling of someone else's house of lies should get himself a more suitable vehicle. This doesn't preclude Armand from knowing how to drive, it seems.
He does. No trees are harmed, as he directs them out of the parking lot, onto the road, into the late night. He only has vague notions of the area, a sense of geography and direction rather than specific routes, but Daniel can course correct as needed.
"Why not?" he asks. Doesn't go for the radio. Lets the window down a touch. But also, "They won't understand your keeping willing contact with me, you realise."
Windows can be cracked; it's nice out, and the cold doesn't bother Daniel as much, it's all just pleasant, with no chills and no insulting geriatric joint pain protesting temperature changes. The console blips a little blip, pairing with his phone in case he'd like to engage Spotify, but Daniel leaves it alone.
"Busy," he says, of why not, because he is fully swerving away from that and into—
"Do you?"
He stares at Armand, while hitching one knee up with a foot pressed to the glove compartment so he can fix the tongue of his shoe.
"Yeah, any conversation with either of them is going to fucking suck, but it's way worse that we don't even know what we're doing."
"That line of reasoning won't work on them either."
Slowly, Armand relaxes. Getting used to the space he is in, the feel of the vehicle he is driving. His life has been stranger than this, but, he will grant, not by much.
It doesn't matter, anyway. He made Daniel. What are they going to do, fire him?
And it is an active problem, because Daniel is a bad liar, and he hates putting things on timers. This will be a timer, a fucking bomb ticking down, and so he's going to tell Louis. Soon. If he doesn't at least have a conversation with him about the bond in his head and how it occasionally feels like he's being warped by it, he's reasonably (hah) confident he'll go insane.
There's a high chance Louis will be angry. Daniel should be angry. Armand has put them both through too much, put fucking everybody he's ever come into contact with through too much. What more can Daniel do about it, though, besides imploding his life? Probably not this, probably not hanging out with him.
A glance, to check in on whether Daniel is shocked to hear this or not.
And yes, reasoning with them isn't Armand's problem at all. No need to tend to Louis' feelings, in constant need of pruning and encouragement, and no need to monitor the state of Lestat in the world like an imminent natural disaster, and no need to respect the absolutes they would levy at him if they could. It would be freeing if he didn't feel a little like he was falling down a flight of infinite stairs without a chance of grabbing the banister.
Well. There's Daniel, who potentially wishes to go bowling.
"I think we have the potential to reach for normalcy and find ourselves on the other side."
When does it just become deeply weird again?
"Do you believe there is a normal suited to vampires? I'm not sure make believing being human is the answer."
Daniel is not shocked. Armand, in fact, does not seem like the type of person to have ever gone bowling, no matter that he's had over 500 years to give it a shot.
Decisively: "Bowling." For his other activity. Bowling actually kind of sucks, like most things do (Daniel is fun) (this is why he likes drugs so much), but there's a pretty good chance that watching Armand bowl is going to be the funniest fucking thing he's ever seen.
"I don't yet have enough personal experience to draw from to answer that," he muses. "My hypothesis is that normal is extremely difficult for a culture that is born exclusively from humanity while being incompatible with it. It's an extreme shock. Like moving to a new country where you don't speak the language or understand anything about the social norms, plus you want to eat all your neighbors. It's going to feel weird to go bowling with them, even if you have a nice time."
The leaves (and whatever) look nice. In the dark, there's a dayglo quality about the foliage, in its yellows and tans. On an aimless path, just driving. Nice of Armand to have not found a bridge yet.
"But we still live here. This is still our planet, 'our', chatty bipedal freaks making weird art and bad politics and screwed up relationships, dead or alive. In that way, just being around is normal. Exploring and making mistakes and causing problems."
Well, as far as non-sexual punishment goes, bowling isn't the worst thing Armand can think of.
He hasn't found a bridge that. In fact, Armand is obedient to speed limits, to traffic lights, to the invisible rules that govern the roads, even though it's quite late, even though he can acknowledge some buried urge to start going faster, to wreck the ugly car he is in, test the absolutes of Daniel's patience in him. One of those urges he feels in high abstract. He can cut loose in perfect moderation instead.
Otherwise, things tend to go to shit, and he does in fact wish to have a conversation with Daniel. The discourse veers philosophical, which is always nice. "The theatre used to have such debates," he says. "Our relationship to the art, to the things produced by humans, the things we produced. Not very often," granted. Perhaps Louis would have liked it more if they had.
"The usual consensus being that the thing we are is a mockery of the human, rather than a transcended version. It appealed to their sense of humour better, I think, to participate in limited fragments of human existence as a means to make fun of them for it. We'll go bowling," apparently, "and take pleasure in the performance of doing it."
There are probably some ordinary reasons why Louis liked him and Lestat yeeted himself off a cliff to get away from him, in retrospect.
"It sounded to me, in between all the disastrous shit, was that you had a community at the theater. Which is always the insidious beginning of equilibrium, and normalcy."
Armand scoffed at the concept of a vampire with hobbies, and yet Armand ran a theater company. If it hadn't been born as a reskin of a cult, if they'd done something besides produce work that mocked their own existence, what would that have looked like?
Normal?
Anyway, Daniel is just teasing him a little (dangerous, tempting), because Armand, to his eye, is fucking obsessed with trying to achieve normalcy. Tidy domesticity and perfectly oiled business machines with schedules, routines. He suspects that if he could look through that iPad, he'd find a few hours (too generous?) a week on a spreadsheet for mandatory fun. Scheduled sex with predetermined position notes. Weird euphemisms for hunting. The works.
"What's the difference between performing and trying something out for the hell of it?"
"I suppose the appeal of novelty might rescue us from parody."
Armand has his doubts that the bowling can be rescued, but perhaps it will make for a decent hunting ground.
Normalcy is, potentially, another word adjacent to boring, but then, much of the clockwork structure of his life had entered in after. They were making an inordinate amount of money and taking on grander responsibilities, and although Louis was not a wild animal in need of caging, there was less room for mistakes. And when he was considered boring, wasn't he not at his most forgiving?
Ah. Yes, maybe a little angry, still. Maybe less for the exposure in itself, the thing uncovered, but the way it was done. A grenade, as Daniel said, in his hand. Justifications, reason, context, an explosion of shrapnel.
"Figure drawing." There, he thought of one. "Now that your hands are steady again."
Appeal of novelty. Daniel wonders what counts as novelty, for Armand. If he had enough of a mortal life to remember it, if it wouldn't matter anyway because the world has changed so much since he was born that it's an alien planet. How real does the world feel when you've done nothing but dissociate from it?
He can put quite a bit together by now. A first memory, running from slavers in Dubai. Pulled from a brothel at fifteen. The kind of origin that destroys people and doesn't let them rebuild, even if they want to. Even if they try. Daniel thinks about it in context of the things Armand has done, and he thinks about people he's interviewed and lived alongside, who suffered similar horrors, who never tortured anyone or had their kids executed.
But is he being naive? Over two centuries of cult abuse and programming. Near two more of 'recovery', in a time before things like therapy even existed. Does the time make it worse? Is he right, does every decade bring them further from humanity and towards an unearthly creature hovering down from a suspended bookshelf, eyes glowing?
Figure drawing, because his hands are steady. A funny thing happens, multiple internal reactions. Eyebrows go up and Daniel swivels his gaze over, head tipped back on the rest.
"Everyone always wanted in on those in Berkley, just to see who'd show up under the modesty cloth."
There's a memory Armand has, one that's persisted. Like finding a notable, half-shattered shell on a beach, where the mollusk that slowly produced it is long dead, irrelevant. The sensation, more so than the vision, of dragging charcoal across a page. Of the immediate feeling of inadequacy, confronting the mark he has made.
Wishing he could start again, but unwilling to waste the paper.
And that's all. No looming presences at the periphery, no pain or pleasure, no sense of what was being drawn, just a surface at a hard tilt, and his hand, which was—small? The same size it is now? He's not even sure if he was a vampire or not. He feels he has always been a vampire.
"Some of them might have been artists, not just perverts. Stranger things have happened."
They turn a corner.
"You're hesitating over an earnest suggestion. Which suggests you're looking for parody after all."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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?"
no subject
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?"
no subject
"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."
no subject
But let's not quibble. It's pleasing to have already surprised Daniel. And a valid response, to be uncertain as to his intentions. Even Armand doesn't know what he's doing.
"I like driving. And I've heard the leaves in this area are to be recommended."
Maybe a little recursive, picking up the things Daniel has already mentioned, but perhaps, some warming up is necessary. And there is a still a look in eye, a level of analysis, that feels removed from the conversation.
Some figure of himself standing at the back of his mind, taking notes.
no subject
(Gossamer, silver, warm, elastic but unbreakable.)
Daniel smiles. Turnabout, etc. It's a charming little move, if not a revolutionary one. Though as noted, new territory. Who the fuck knows, it could be groundbreaking for Armand. And it is very normal to go see the leaves in New England, driving around scenic highways and toll roads just to behold the changing environment.
"Would you like to go look at the leaves, and whatever?"
The FBI has probably given up watching them by now.
no subject
What had he imagined, coming here? Some sniping over the table, maybe. Scratching an itch in that way. Confirmation that Daniel wants more distance, which Armand may or may not have granted him. Not this, anyway. It's nice to feel surprise, to be surprising.
Let's observe some scenery.
"Perhaps there will be room for further revelation," he says, as he stands, "when we're not trapped in a room."
He does mean a penthouse in Dubai, but, you know.
no subject
Though there have been revelations in every room they've been in together.
Armand likes driving, he says. Armand also probably likes pulling wings off of songbirds and slowly peeling tech bros like over-ripe mangoes (difficult, slippery, rewarding; the kind of fiddly thing detail-oriented Armand would excel at, in Daniel's mind). A few bucks for the coffee and outside, Daniel tosses his car keys at
his maker
without warning.
"US and UAE licenses are co-valid, but I'm sure you know that. Don't run us into a tree if it turns out you've been chauffeured since the invention of the automobile, please."
This is real stupid. He gets into the passenger seat (always weird, in your own car), hitches it back a little further since he had it cranked up to move a body in the back (don't ask). It smells like car cleaner and faint cigarette smoke (he always has the windows down if he has one in here), blood, his cologne. Daniel can afford a better car by now, but it's such a pain in the ass and this one's perfectly fine.
Is this where Armand finds a bridge to drive them off?
"The drive back from Vancouver was nice," he says, as the diner vanishes behind them. (Vancouver, where he murdered someone to please Armand.) "I hadn't done anything cross-country since the 80s."
no subject
He does. No trees are harmed, as he directs them out of the parking lot, onto the road, into the late night. He only has vague notions of the area, a sense of geography and direction rather than specific routes, but Daniel can course correct as needed.
"Why not?" he asks. Doesn't go for the radio. Lets the window down a touch. But also, "They won't understand your keeping willing contact with me, you realise."
no subject
"Busy," he says, of why not, because he is fully swerving away from that and into—
"Do you?"
He stares at Armand, while hitching one knee up with a foot pressed to the glove compartment so he can fix the tongue of his shoe.
"Yeah, any conversation with either of them is going to fucking suck, but it's way worse that we don't even know what we're doing."
no subject
Slowly, Armand relaxes. Getting used to the space he is in, the feel of the vehicle he is driving. His life has been stranger than this, but, he will grant, not by much.
It doesn't matter, anyway. He made Daniel. What are they going to do, fire him?
"Pick another activity."
no subject
"Reasoning with them is my problem."
And it is an active problem, because Daniel is a bad liar, and he hates putting things on timers. This will be a timer, a fucking bomb ticking down, and so he's going to tell Louis. Soon. If he doesn't at least have a conversation with him about the bond in his head and how it occasionally feels like he's being warped by it, he's reasonably (hah) confident he'll go insane.
There's a high chance Louis will be angry. Daniel should be angry. Armand has put them both through too much, put fucking everybody he's ever come into contact with through too much. What more can Daniel do about it, though, besides imploding his life? Probably not this, probably not hanging out with him.
But.
"Have you ever been bowling?"
no subject
A glance, to check in on whether Daniel is shocked to hear this or not.
And yes, reasoning with them isn't Armand's problem at all. No need to tend to Louis' feelings, in constant need of pruning and encouragement, and no need to monitor the state of Lestat in the world like an imminent natural disaster, and no need to respect the absolutes they would levy at him if they could. It would be freeing if he didn't feel a little like he was falling down a flight of infinite stairs without a chance of grabbing the banister.
Well. There's Daniel, who potentially wishes to go bowling.
"I think we have the potential to reach for normalcy and find ourselves on the other side."
When does it just become deeply weird again?
"Do you believe there is a normal suited to vampires? I'm not sure make believing being human is the answer."
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Decisively: "Bowling." For his other activity. Bowling actually kind of sucks, like most things do (Daniel is fun) (this is why he likes drugs so much), but there's a pretty good chance that watching Armand bowl is going to be the funniest fucking thing he's ever seen.
"I don't yet have enough personal experience to draw from to answer that," he muses. "My hypothesis is that normal is extremely difficult for a culture that is born exclusively from humanity while being incompatible with it. It's an extreme shock. Like moving to a new country where you don't speak the language or understand anything about the social norms, plus you want to eat all your neighbors. It's going to feel weird to go bowling with them, even if you have a nice time."
The leaves (and whatever) look nice. In the dark, there's a dayglo quality about the foliage, in its yellows and tans. On an aimless path, just driving. Nice of Armand to have not found a bridge yet.
"But we still live here. This is still our planet, 'our', chatty bipedal freaks making weird art and bad politics and screwed up relationships, dead or alive. In that way, just being around is normal. Exploring and making mistakes and causing problems."
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He hasn't found a bridge that. In fact, Armand is obedient to speed limits, to traffic lights, to the invisible rules that govern the roads, even though it's quite late, even though he can acknowledge some buried urge to start going faster, to wreck the ugly car he is in, test the absolutes of Daniel's patience in him. One of those urges he feels in high abstract. He can cut loose in perfect moderation instead.
Otherwise, things tend to go to shit, and he does in fact wish to have a conversation with Daniel. The discourse veers philosophical, which is always nice. "The theatre used to have such debates," he says. "Our relationship to the art, to the things produced by humans, the things we produced. Not very often," granted. Perhaps Louis would have liked it more if they had.
"The usual consensus being that the thing we are is a mockery of the human, rather than a transcended version. It appealed to their sense of humour better, I think, to participate in limited fragments of human existence as a means to make fun of them for it. We'll go bowling," apparently, "and take pleasure in the performance of doing it."
There are probably some ordinary reasons why Louis liked him and Lestat yeeted himself off a cliff to get away from him, in retrospect.
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Armand scoffed at the concept of a vampire with hobbies, and yet Armand ran a theater company. If it hadn't been born as a reskin of a cult, if they'd done something besides produce work that mocked their own existence, what would that have looked like?
Normal?
Anyway, Daniel is just teasing him a little (dangerous, tempting), because Armand, to his eye, is fucking obsessed with trying to achieve normalcy. Tidy domesticity and perfectly oiled business machines with schedules, routines. He suspects that if he could look through that iPad, he'd find a few hours (too generous?) a week on a spreadsheet for mandatory fun. Scheduled sex with predetermined position notes. Weird euphemisms for hunting. The works.
"What's the difference between performing and trying something out for the hell of it?"
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Armand has his doubts that the bowling can be rescued, but perhaps it will make for a decent hunting ground.
Normalcy is, potentially, another word adjacent to boring, but then, much of the clockwork structure of his life had entered in after. They were making an inordinate amount of money and taking on grander responsibilities, and although Louis was not a wild animal in need of caging, there was less room for mistakes. And when he was considered boring, wasn't he not at his most forgiving?
Ah. Yes, maybe a little angry, still. Maybe less for the exposure in itself, the thing uncovered, but the way it was done. A grenade, as Daniel said, in his hand. Justifications, reason, context, an explosion of shrapnel.
"Figure drawing." There, he thought of one. "Now that your hands are steady again."
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He can put quite a bit together by now. A first memory, running from slavers in Dubai. Pulled from a brothel at fifteen. The kind of origin that destroys people and doesn't let them rebuild, even if they want to. Even if they try. Daniel thinks about it in context of the things Armand has done, and he thinks about people he's interviewed and lived alongside, who suffered similar horrors, who never tortured anyone or had their kids executed.
But is he being naive? Over two centuries of cult abuse and programming. Near two more of 'recovery', in a time before things like therapy even existed. Does the time make it worse? Is he right, does every decade bring them further from humanity and towards an unearthly creature hovering down from a suspended bookshelf, eyes glowing?
Figure drawing, because his hands are steady. A funny thing happens, multiple internal reactions. Eyebrows go up and Daniel swivels his gaze over, head tipped back on the rest.
"Everyone always wanted in on those in Berkley, just to see who'd show up under the modesty cloth."
Something about remembering his hands. Is it—
Just a dig, probably.
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Wishing he could start again, but unwilling to waste the paper.
And that's all. No looming presences at the periphery, no pain or pleasure, no sense of what was being drawn, just a surface at a hard tilt, and his hand, which was—small? The same size it is now? He's not even sure if he was a vampire or not. He feels he has always been a vampire.
"Some of them might have been artists, not just perverts. Stranger things have happened."
They turn a corner.
"You're hesitating over an earnest suggestion. Which suggests you're looking for parody after all."
Maybe there's a bridge nearby.
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