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.
There can be hiking. They don't have to plan everything. They don't have to do anything, at all. There are compelling reasons why they shouldn't— more than reasons encouraging connection. And yet, the kills, the notes, the diner, and here, leaves.
Difficult to feel anger over his initial assumption — that Armand did what he did to tether Louis, to make their agreement over his survival past that apartment in San Francisco eternal, a symbol of their relationship — when Armand is here and seems so lost at sea. He supposes there could still be time. A long con.
But Daniel likes figuring shit out. He's good at getting angles.
"Okay."
Confirmation. They have said it, thus it shall be so. And all that. Bracing himself. Not just for staring at his own hands but the undertaking of trying to meaningfully connect with someone who tortured him. Daniel looks at him, those blood-moon eyes shimmering with the barest bits of light picked up from the store far behind them. Horror movie features he's seen in his dreams for fifty years. The lenses he wore for his costume seem so unconvincing in retrospect. Armand looks more alive when he's a vampire.
More forest to wander through, for a little while at least. Daniel has cigarettes in his pocket but he doesn't pull them out, not wanting to disturb the area. Content to exist quietly in this world he can see and hear correctly now, before the turning of the Earth asks him to return to the car, and head back to a hotel, and darkness.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
Difficult to feel anger over his initial assumption — that Armand did what he did to tether Louis, to make their agreement over his survival past that apartment in San Francisco eternal, a symbol of their relationship — when Armand is here and seems so lost at sea. He supposes there could still be time. A long con.
But Daniel likes figuring shit out. He's good at getting angles.
"Okay."
Confirmation. They have said it, thus it shall be so. And all that. Bracing himself. Not just for staring at his own hands but the undertaking of trying to meaningfully connect with someone who tortured him. Daniel looks at him, those blood-moon eyes shimmering with the barest bits of light picked up from the store far behind them. Horror movie features he's seen in his dreams for fifty years. The lenses he wore for his costume seem so unconvincing in retrospect. Armand looks more alive when he's a vampire.
More forest to wander through, for a little while at least. Daniel has cigarettes in his pocket but he doesn't pull them out, not wanting to disturb the area. Content to exist quietly in this world he can see and hear correctly now, before the turning of the Earth asks him to return to the car, and head back to a hotel, and darkness.