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."
*Delhi. tfw u microaggression. tumblr was right about daniel molloy
Alright.
What can we learn from this.
Quiet, minimally expressed histrionics are not unheard of, and Daniel has encountered it before. Had he thought about it around more than just himself for a minute, he could have figured out that Armand might be putting some serious weight on art. All the creepy religious paintings and the way he spoke of the man who painted them, his maker.
At the same time: Armand does not get to learn that he can just shut down and throw himself out of proverbial window if there's a slight misstep. Daniel gives it a moment, somehow sensing the bridge without any telepathy between them.
"You said you were sick, before you were turned," he says eventually. Glancing at him through the mirror, in between observing the signs for the next rest stop. Maybe there's an awful gift shop. "Did you ever feel sick after? Did you recover the whole way?"
They can both do an exercise here, about thinking past themselves. Daniel worries sometimes, mostly when he's unlocking a door, or writing something down. He startles when he misses a keyhole, like maybe it happened for some deeper reason; he stares too long at his own handwriting, trying to decide if it looks more like it did before.
Dizzying, like waking up to oneself. He can remind himself of some things: he turned Daniel against his will, and although he is enjoying his honeymoon phase, it seems likely that the instinct that might pull them together is matched only by the latent resentment. He has been depicted as harming Louis grievously, some kind of lengthy extension from the sins he committed in Paris, the obscuration of exactly when and where he saved Louis' life. Daniel considers Louis a close friend, and both men have taken to Lestat's company, after a week of slow evisceration.
All of these things are true and lean a great weight against the likelihood that Daniel wishes to talk to him of his feelings, and do normal activities. Managing him, perhaps. Having fun in private while he does so.
It feels a little like a neat domino waterfall, where the dominos are the size of skyscrapers. He probably won't crash the car, or drive it off a bridge, but there is an odd kind of despairing pull where Armand is not exactly sure of where they are going.
It is all as dramatic as that while also not at all. No particular outward change. Even a shift in paradigm doesn't inspire a great swell of feeling. He thinks. Maybe?
Anyway.
A glance.
Thoughtful silence. Reaching so far back. Here, on this stretch of road, the clouded over sky is rendered in textures of grey from the reflection of distant city light, and so the outlines of the leaves, which they can see in an unusual kind of vibrancy, make dark, craggy edges, as if they were driving through a ravine. Here, he's looking at the leaves and whatever.
"The hunger," eventually. "I would confuse it with the nausea I no longer had. And I was more afraid of that feeling than I was concerned about the morality, sometimes. I rarely enjoyed my food as a human. I don't recall having that feeling again, as time went on."
Of course, he doesn't eat very often now either, because he doesn't need to.
"You look to me like you've made a full recovery."
Easy to conceptualize New Orleans at the turn of the century. Surreal, almost unnerving, to fully engage with the reality that the man driving his car is recalling events in his life from five hundred years ago. Is it smart to ask him to go back there, when he, apparently, might actually humor him and answer?
Daniel holds his hand out between them, flat over the center console. It does not tremor.
Tempting to stare at it for an eternity. Does he move because the car moves? Or because he doesn't have control over it? But after a long moment he drops it, because at some point he has to stop watching. Or he will stare at it for an eternity. A recovery is never full until it never comes back, and finality is gone from him now.
Armand was more afraid of the sickness coming back than he was about being a monster. Something about that is powerfully comforting, even though it roils in him, too. Could be that this is too soon to try to make peace, even secretly.
Too late now, they're in the fucking car. There are bodies between them like—
Whatever they were doing.
"Hey."
He points at the turnoff. Let's go look at the stupid leaves.
Armand looks to that hand, a lingering kind of study while the road is empty and straight. Draws his attention up from it after a while, to Daniel's face. Here, he would normally part the flimsy curtains that separate him from the minds of others, and judge what the correct thing might be to say.
He remembers Daniel's heightened distress as Louis twisted a knife. He had been moved to grip the hilt and ease the strain, and collecting the necessary information to do so.
No ability to do so now.
"Our power, by its nature, only strengthens over time. Comprehensible, I think, but I can imagine it will take longer to trust it, the longer you've lived."
He was in his twenties, somewhere, when he was turned. His experience with age, health, development is not applicable to most. But he says a thing that sounds true to him, observable in others.
He looks back out at the road, and ponders whether he is really experiencing a change in paradigm or if his feelings are hurt. Daniel points out the turnoff, and Armand obeys.
Why did Armand save him, in San Francisco? Why didn't Armand just kill him at any point those times when Louis couldn't get up? Why did Armand restrain Louis from fucking with his Parkinson's, why didn't Armand kill him after Louis left?
Why did you make me?
He can't get the question out. He's tried to talk himself into it. Been trying for some time now, awkwardly gathering up courage like a passive system running in the background. It fails to manifest now, as the car is parked in a dirt 'lot' in front of a small farm store. No Gas Here, reads a sign propped on the patio. 20 Miles South.
The cloudy night sky is like a silver blanket that bright colors of foliage decorate; the gentle illumination of the older-than-Daniel store is like a beacon, pouring light out over this corner of woods. Footpaths between dormant apple trees suggest frequent stops from roadtrippers who check in for kitsch and fresh eggs and the ability to wander and pick some fruit, should the season permit. Maples tower over those, some already red, bright like fireworks.
Sleeping birds. A distant raccoon. Cricket nightsongs.
It can be nice, departing from deep urban centres. Not that living in the middle of Dubai, San Francisco, New York, Paris had been some kind of punishment in that way—just background noise, the cacophony of a dense populace, sometimes soothing, most times unnoticed.
But the absence is not unpleasant. The anxiety of the world replaced with rustling leaves, chittering nocturnal things, and—a bit of a trick, to hone in on it—the subtle and constant deep bass hum of the atmosphere itself. Armand lifts his chin as he absorbs the auditory information of the environment they're in.
Perhaps he ought to have said hiking. Night time hiking. No fear of mistakes, from an overwound attunement to perfection or shaky hands or otherwise.
And then—loud, to overtuned ears, and therefore startling—Daniel says that, and Armand looks over at him. Vampire eyes in the dark, a subtle reflection of light, cattish. Despite his best efforts, he feels relief. Despite his best efforts, he longs to go to him. At least this second thing is actionable restraint, and Armand stays in place.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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?
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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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Alright.
What can we learn from this.
Quiet, minimally expressed histrionics are not unheard of, and Daniel has encountered it before. Had he thought about it around more than just himself for a minute, he could have figured out that Armand might be putting some serious weight on art. All the creepy religious paintings and the way he spoke of the man who painted them, his maker.
At the same time: Armand does not get to learn that he can just shut down and throw himself out of proverbial window if there's a slight misstep. Daniel gives it a moment, somehow sensing the bridge without any telepathy between them.
"You said you were sick, before you were turned," he says eventually. Glancing at him through the mirror, in between observing the signs for the next rest stop. Maybe there's an awful gift shop. "Did you ever feel sick after? Did you recover the whole way?"
They can both do an exercise here, about thinking past themselves. Daniel worries sometimes, mostly when he's unlocking a door, or writing something down. He startles when he misses a keyhole, like maybe it happened for some deeper reason; he stares too long at his own handwriting, trying to decide if it looks more like it did before.
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All of these things are true and lean a great weight against the likelihood that Daniel wishes to talk to him of his feelings, and do normal activities. Managing him, perhaps. Having fun in private while he does so.
It feels a little like a neat domino waterfall, where the dominos are the size of skyscrapers. He probably won't crash the car, or drive it off a bridge, but there is an odd kind of despairing pull where Armand is not exactly sure of where they are going.
It is all as dramatic as that while also not at all. No particular outward change. Even a shift in paradigm doesn't inspire a great swell of feeling. He thinks. Maybe?
Anyway.
A glance.
Thoughtful silence. Reaching so far back. Here, on this stretch of road, the clouded over sky is rendered in textures of grey from the reflection of distant city light, and so the outlines of the leaves, which they can see in an unusual kind of vibrancy, make dark, craggy edges, as if they were driving through a ravine. Here, he's looking at the leaves and whatever.
"The hunger," eventually. "I would confuse it with the nausea I no longer had. And I was more afraid of that feeling than I was concerned about the morality, sometimes. I rarely enjoyed my food as a human. I don't recall having that feeling again, as time went on."
Of course, he doesn't eat very often now either, because he doesn't need to.
"You look to me like you've made a full recovery."
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Daniel holds his hand out between them, flat over the center console. It does not tremor.
Tempting to stare at it for an eternity. Does he move because the car moves? Or because he doesn't have control over it? But after a long moment he drops it, because at some point he has to stop watching. Or he will stare at it for an eternity. A recovery is never full until it never comes back, and finality is gone from him now.
Armand was more afraid of the sickness coming back than he was about being a monster. Something about that is powerfully comforting, even though it roils in him, too. Could be that this is too soon to try to make peace, even secretly.
Too late now, they're in the fucking car. There are bodies between them like—
Whatever they were doing.
"Hey."
He points at the turnoff. Let's go look at the stupid leaves.
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He remembers Daniel's heightened distress as Louis twisted a knife. He had been moved to grip the hilt and ease the strain, and collecting the necessary information to do so.
No ability to do so now.
"Our power, by its nature, only strengthens over time. Comprehensible, I think, but I can imagine it will take longer to trust it, the longer you've lived."
He was in his twenties, somewhere, when he was turned. His experience with age, health, development is not applicable to most. But he says a thing that sounds true to him, observable in others.
He looks back out at the road, and ponders whether he is really experiencing a change in paradigm or if his feelings are hurt. Daniel points out the turnoff, and Armand obeys.
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Why did you make me?
He can't get the question out. He's tried to talk himself into it. Been trying for some time now, awkwardly gathering up courage like a passive system running in the background. It fails to manifest now, as the car is parked in a dirt 'lot' in front of a small farm store. No Gas Here, reads a sign propped on the patio. 20 Miles South.
The cloudy night sky is like a silver blanket that bright colors of foliage decorate; the gentle illumination of the older-than-Daniel store is like a beacon, pouring light out over this corner of woods. Footpaths between dormant apple trees suggest frequent stops from roadtrippers who check in for kitsch and fresh eggs and the ability to wander and pick some fruit, should the season permit. Maples tower over those, some already red, bright like fireworks.
Sleeping birds. A distant raccoon. Cricket nightsongs.
"Figure drawing."
It fucking scares him. And yet: agreed.
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But the absence is not unpleasant. The anxiety of the world replaced with rustling leaves, chittering nocturnal things, and—a bit of a trick, to hone in on it—the subtle and constant deep bass hum of the atmosphere itself. Armand lifts his chin as he absorbs the auditory information of the environment they're in.
Perhaps he ought to have said hiking. Night time hiking. No fear of mistakes, from an overwound attunement to perfection or shaky hands or otherwise.
And then—loud, to overtuned ears, and therefore startling—Daniel says that, and Armand looks over at him. Vampire eyes in the dark, a subtle reflection of light, cattish. Despite his best efforts, he feels relief. Despite his best efforts, he longs to go to him. At least this second thing is actionable restraint, and Armand stays in place.
"Okay," he says.
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