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It is 1973, and there is a streak of orange-gold sunlight stretching across the room when Armand wakes. He stares down the dust floating inside the light as he sits up and tilts to the side, leaning his head over the other coffin. Louis is still asleep. He’s in the thick of a formless dream, circling through hazy images of water. Armand waits, but the dream remains placid and unfocused.
He adjusts the blinds to snuff out the sunlight in the room and leaves Louis to his dreaming. In the kitchen, one of Louis’s denim jackets hangs precariously from the back of a dining chair, severely wrinkled and smelling faintly of stale beer, stale blood, and Louis. Armand puts it on after a beat of hesitation, rummaging through the pockets and finding an unlit cigarette as he slips into his shoes. Stepping outside, he lights the cigarette and does a last check on Louis: still dreaming of being at the bayou, the river, the lake. He locks the door behind him.
He heads to the beach. That the beach is only a few minute’s walk away was the main draw of their Sausalito home. That, and its proximity to San Francisco (for Louis) and its active ferry services (for Armand). That Louis doesn’t see the appeal in the ferry and Armand doesn’t see the appeal in San Francisco is a minor and mostly inconsequential detail.
When Armand gets to the beach, the grapefruit-pink sun hasn’t quite set. He’s stopped a safe kilometer away from the pier. He can see the passengers mulling around the pier, slowly loading themselves onto the day’s last ferry. At this distance, he can get a general read of their thoughts (exhaustion, anxiety, some dread about inevitable sea sickness) and can make out their aimless chatter and the scrape of their shoes against the boardwalk.
His first memory is just as he had told Louis’s fascinating boy only days earlier: running through Delhi, chased by slavers, his heart hammering too-loud and too-fast in his chest. His second memory, which had not been relayed to Louis’s fascinating boy but had been relayed to Louis himself back in 1948, is an extension to the first: him, now caught by the slavers, squinting up at the ship while he was being dragged onto it, his head pounding from the endless shoe-stomping and screaming. There’s an endless quality to his second memory, with the ship, from his perspective on the ground, not seeming to have an endpoint. The ear-splitting noise didn’t stop when the ship set sail or even after it docked, but it did stop, eventually, and after some jagged jumps of light and sound, the memory ended with the start of his newer, quieter routine of serving his eventual maker.
The passengers finish boarding. With an extended low note of its horn, the ferry sets off. The sun sets completely and an abrupt chill settles. Armand stamps out his cigarette and tugs at the sleeves of Louis’s jacket as the slow-moving ferry becomes smaller, and smaller still, before fading to a dot on the horizon, enroute for Louis’s beloved San Francisco.
They had hijacked the ferry, once, him and Louis. One month into their Sausalito home, before Louis took to abandoning him every night in favor of running through San Francisco’s grimy gay bars. It had been annoyingly difficult, unmooring the boat in the dead of the night without raising suspicions, and then they argued at length over who was better equipped to try driving the boat. Once the boat did begin moving, though, their arguments had fizzled out and it had been nice, leaning over the railing and letting the wind whip through his hair. Louis, next to him, had rambled on about fishing at Caddo Lake with his brother as a child, smiling more widely than Armand had seen him do so in years. It had been nice. Very nice.
Armand inhales the slime of the beach air, wrinkling his nose at the blend of salt-brined garbage, rotting fish, and the lingering smoke smell from his cigarette. He stands there, breathing and taking in the still waters, running his thumb over the hem of Louis’s jacket and the stiff bumps of various stains from beer, blood, and— probably, considering Louis— semen.
It’s close to midnight when he finally leaves the beach and heads home, where he finds Louis’s coffin propped open, Louis neither inside the coffin, their home, or anywhere in the vicinity.
It was 1951, they were renting an apartment at the edge of Athens, and Louis was reading Claudia’s diaries. It was a new development: since Paris, Louis had carted the diaries around in a locked box but had refused to flip through any of their pages. “It’s a violation of her privacy,” he continually told Armand, tight-lipped and annoyed, and Armand gloomily did not press it further.
He wasn’t sure what changed Louis’s mind. One night, Louis was content to sneak around the Parthenon with him, and the next, Louis canceled their plans to wander through the Acropolis in favor of chomping down on a pigeon, curling inside the coffin, and cracking open one of the diaries.
Armand read them, too. Either over Louis’s shoulder during the sporadic nights they shared a coffin or during the restless afternoons when Louis was asleep. The majority of Claudia’s entries were tame, detailing a spoiled childhood in New Orleans, Louis starring as a doting but ultimately impotent father, or the tired whirlwind of their trek through war-torn Europe, Louis starring as a dull brother who held her back from greatness. Toward the end of one of her earlier diaries, there was an impressive collection of last words that made him pause, the corner of the yellowed page twisted between his fingers. From the Paris diaries, before they were consumed with coven gossip that Armand had long forgotten, there was an entry about one of the hunts Claudia had attended before she became a coven member: I feel so at home with them all, truly, it’s like the two-dimensional paper heart I’ve carried all my life, this flat red thing you could spot on any old Valentine, is finally getting revived. It’s getting pumped with this new Parisian oxygen, it’s getting carved out with new chambers for the blood and it’s getting cleaved through with brand new blueberry-blue veins. My heart’s a working organ now, and after so many years of just enduring with Louis’s glum face and his shit attitude, I think I’m finally going to be able to fully live and maybe even thrive without having to worry about him.
“Funny,” Louis said. He frowned down at that entry, raising the diary closer to his face. Armand, seated next to him on the couch, watched with polite interest. “I don’t remember it like this. It’s so black and white, with her. She doesn’t capture all the nuances I remember there being then.”
“Or perhaps,” Armand suggested, plucking the diary from Louis’s hands. “She, having written in the moment, provides a more accurate perspective compared to your retrospective jadedness? Or your rose-colored lenses? Whichever.”
Louis snatched the diary back. “So you’re saying there’s something wrong with how I remember it.”
“No. Merely that she wrote down her memories hours after the fact and you didn’t, so her words will inevitably seem to carry more truth to them.” Louis scowled. Armand leaned back. In a flash of meanness he didn’t have the generosity to tamp down as he usually did, he continued in a mild tone, “It’s a pity. I believe she stopped writing shortly before you asked me to imagine what you would be like without the burden of her?” Louis looked away, his jaw tensed. “I wonder what she would have said of that night, when you told me how happy you would be once your sister was no longer your companion.”
Louis, brittle with hunger and sentimentality, said, “She was my daughter.”
Armand hummed. He pressed the pad of his thumb against the grain of the sofa’s wooden arm, dragging his skin just enough so that it would catch on a splinter. “She rejected that relationship model early on, it seems. According to her own writings.”
“Fine,” Louis said. “Do you remember when you picked the coven over all of us? Over me? When you told me you loved me, that you’d do anything to keep me, and then you did nothing when they took us? Do you remember that?”
It was not often that Louis brought this up.
“Louis,” Armand said. Louis was still looking away from him. Armand sighed, pressing his thumb further into the splinter so that it would bleed. “I apologized. I still apologize. I told you I regret my— my role, in all of it, and I meant it. You know that I meant it. You said you believed me, remember?”
“Did I? Who knows. My memory’s not— how did you say it? The best. I’m too jaded.” Louis laughed, short and hollow. “I didn’t write it down, so how accurate could it be?”
Armand frowned. “Now you’re only being cruel.”
“Yes,” Louis said. He turned, finally, and looked at Armand. His expression now was close to the one he had had back in Paris, when they had met with Lestat just before heading off. Louis said, “That’s all I’m being,” with no warmth.
Louis stood, clutching the diary to his chest. He walked away, and moments later, as Armand watched blood bead atop his thumb, there was the exaggerated slam of Louis committing himself to coffin.
It is 1973, and he finds Louis in San Jose. In the nice, upscale suburbs just at the edge of Almaden Valley, to be precise. In a decently-sized house expelling meat-smelling silver smoke from its chimney, to be even more precise.
There are two bodies burning inside the fireplace. Armand watches their skin melt as he opens a window to help let out the smoke. He walks around the house, passing a decently-sized library room, a well-used office space littered with crumpled memos, and a glittering indoor pool.
The attached garage is brightly lit. It contains a sleek black Cadillac, idle and vibrating softly, its headlights shining two white circles onto the closed garage door. Armand walks around to the driver’s side of the car and sees, through the window, Louis, his hands loosely gripping the steering wheel, his posture straight, his eyes closed. The burns on his skin haven’t healed completely, but they are a less bright shade of red than they were last night.
Armand walks to the passenger’s side and pulls open the door. Gravel spills out as soon as he does, and he surveys that there’s gravel all over the floor of the car in an even, inch-high layer. The rocks nearly cover Louis’s feet completely on the driver’s side. Instead of commenting, Armand enters cautiously and props his feet up on the dashboard as he closes the door, taking care to avoid spilling anything more. Inside, the car smells of artificial cherries and hairspray. Louis, his eyes still closed, hasn’t done anything to acknowledge him. From this angle, Louis looks mostly normal, the burns are only at the edge of his silhouette, curled scars like the whorls of a cresting wave.
When three minutes pass, Armand carefully reaches over and twists the key in the ignition. The car powers off with a dull whine.
At the five-minute mark when the car has fully cooled down, Louis says, “They were in the middle of getting engaged.”
Armand runs his finger over the hem of Louis’s jacket, scraping his nail against a bloodstain. He waits.
“I could taste the champagne in both of them. She wasn’t all that excited about it, though.”
“No?” Louis opens his eyes, though he only looks ahead, through the windshield and at the blank expanse of the closed garage door. “Why not?”
“She was going to break up with him,” Louis says, his voice soft. “She had it all planned out. She loved him, I could see it, taste it in her memories of going out to brunch with him every Friday afternoon, but.”
“But?”
“She was afraid.”
Armand nods, even though Louis still hasn’t deigned to turn his head toward Armand. “And him?”
“He loved her. All he could think of as he died was the time he went to the beach with her, her hand in his as they walked along the shore, kicking the jellyfish back into the water, her laughing as she dragged him deeper into the sea to swim.”
“Well,” Armand says. “They sound charming.”
At this, Louis finally turns to look at him, one of his eyes still stuck in a squint. “And I cleaned up,” Louis says. “This time.”
“It’s September, Louis. No one lights their fireplace in September. The smoking chimney will be a cause for suspicion.”
Louis shifts his gaze to the steering wheel, drumming the rim with his blistered fingers. Finally, he says, “Maybe no one will notice.” Then with more conviction, he adds, “Or they will, but they won’t care.”
Not unkindly, Armand says, “I see you’ve thought this through.”
“Stop,” Louis says, more tired than angry. “We could just leave again.”
“Leave?”
“Get out of town like we always do. Move to, I don’t know, Dallas.”
“Dallas,” Armand repeats, tasting it.
“It’s in Texas.”
“Close to home, isn’t it.”
Louis shoots him a look. Armand senses the dread in him but by face alone, Louis only looks irritated. “Not really. If not there, we could do Denver, Colorado. Seattle. I’ll even take Vancouver.”
“You should tell me about it,” Armand says, keeping his tone light. “Your home back in New Orleans, Louis. What was it like? What about it was so comfortable, so majestic that even now, it is all that you yearn for?”
Louis’s expression hardens. “Should I ask you about Delhi? Should I ask about your maker? Should I ask if you yearn for any of that, Arun?”
Armand keeps his voice level. Sweet, even. “I’m an open book for you, Maitre.”
“Are you?”
“Do you honestly believe I am not?” Louis looks away with a short laugh. Armand sighs. He shifts in his seat, knocking his feet against the rearview mirror. “They had a beautiful home here, don’t you think?”
Louis’s voice is still taut with tension, but he plays along. “He inherited it from his aunt.”
“Ah.” Armand tilts his head back, his hair squeaking as it presses against the leather of the seat. “The acoustics of their home are quite nice, with the high ceilings and brick walls. I liked their living room.”
“It’s sunken. The living room, I mean. It’s a style.”
“I liked it.” Louis shrugs, completely neutral. “And the size of their indoor pool was astonishing. An architectural feat.”
Louis sniffs. “It’s not that impressive. We’ve seen ‘em before.”
“Have we?” Armand raises an eyebrow. “Remind me, love.”
“It was last… two years ago.” Louis frowns. “Somewhere up north, in the suburbs. Inside the home of a couple who just came back from dropping their son off to college.”
“That was three years ago,” Armand says. “And it was a jacuzzi, not a pool.”
“Oh.” Louis swallows. “Okay.”
There’s a lull. Armand watches Louis breathe in and out and thinks of Louis in Paris, how alive he had looked while dragging Armand around avant-garde art spaces, how he had talked Armand into dancing in jazz cafes together, how they smoked on the balcony of Louis’s apartment together until Armand had to cut it short to arrive back to the theater in time before curfew.
And now there is no curfew for him, only a Louis who hardly ever smiles at him. Armand flicks at a semen stain on Louis’s jacket. He exhales. “Are you going to wait until I ask?”
“Ask about what,” Louis says, flatly enough that it’s clear he already knows.
Pressing a knife against the throat of a lamb would be less tedious. “Why you’ve poured gravel onto the floor.”
Louis is slow to answer. He’s trying and failing to close his mind off, and it would be terrifically easy to peel the haphazardly-applied layers back and look in, but it’s better to wait. Louis never took it well when Armand dove into him.
“It was like this already,” Louis says. “He wanted to try remodeling the garden himself, for fun. As a hobby, as stress relief. She suggested it. He got the rocks and they spilled over everything on the drive home.” There’s a crunch of shifting gravel as Louis adjusts his feet. “He was going to clean up later.” There’s a note of sorrow in his voice. Regret. Grief, really. Grief over the garden that would never be remodeled and the wedding that would never occur.
“Is sitting with your feet covered in this gravel part of the remodeling?”
“I’m still wearing shoes,” Louis says, sounding as though this was a near thing, Louis not wearing shoes. “And it’s… helpful.”
“Helpful?”
“It helps me focus.”
“Should I find more rocks for you once your skin heals completely?” Armand keeps his tone butter-soft and soothing. It makes Louis flinch, and then Louis stiffens to pretend the flinch didn’t happen. “Is that what you want? To bury yourself in them nightly in some strange act of, what is this, penance? Guilt?”
“Stop it,” Louis snaps. “I’m trying to— remember. Every detail, everything, I don’t want to forget, and the gravel, it— helps.”
Speaking very slowly, Armand says, “You are hurting yourself,” just Louis repeats at the same time, over him, “I’m trying to remember.”
Armand clicks his tongue. Louis picks at the steering wheel. It’s petulance, Louis refusing to look at him. It’s defeat, Armand resigning himself to the intimate press of blade against woolen neck.
“Would you like me to take this pain away from you?”
Louis’s hand stops moving. “What?”
“As I took it away from the boy,” Armans says calmly. “I could do the same for you.”
The silence that follows stretches out like taffy: thinner and thinner, until Louis repeats, with more incredulity, “What?”
“Only the past few days, Louis, not all of it. Only the sun. Only to help you heal.”
“I’m healing just fine!”
“Slowly, and bogged down by your insistence on committing this entire incident to memory.”
Louis’s breath hitches. “You want to erase days— days! Days of my life, to— you think this would be fucking healing?”
“You speak as though this would be more of a violation than—”
“Because it would be! I was there when you did this to the boy. I know what it would be like. You’d hypnotize me and feed me lines until I couldn’t make sense of shit—”
“Just as it was for the boy,” Armand cuts in. “The drug-addled blood you insist on feeding upon so frequently will scramble your brain far more than I ever could.”
Louis laughs again. It’s a drawn-out wheeze, a hysterical grab for air more than anything else. “Is that your goal? To scramble me, until I’m nothing?”
Armand folds his arms, the denim of Louis’s jacket scratching faintly as he does. “That isn’t what I said. You know that. You always do this, assuming cruelty when nothing I have done—”
“That’s not true,” Louis interrupts. “That’s not fucking true, you judge me, you— you rage, you wish you could control—”
“All I wish is to take care of you and to prevent you from getting more lost than you already are.”
“You think I’m lost?”
“Do you even know of some of the locations I’ve found you in?” He can hear Louis grind his teeth as he speaks. “In the apartments, of course, you in the kitchens, hardly conscious, turning the knobs of the stove and poking at the fire with your fingers. In the hallways of dilapidated homes with the fuzz of moldy carpet in your mouth. In junkyards, hidden under broken cars, just scant minutes— minutes, Louis! Minutes away from the sun shining down on you! You are sick,” he says, as Louis’s breathing slows. “To speak nothing of what you did to yourself just days ago! If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t even be here right now, your feet covered in gravel, sitting in an idle car, in the garage of the couple you fed from just moments after their engagement! I am trying to keep you safe and alive, despite your intent—”
“You want,” Louis says, slowly, harrowingly. “To lobotomize me.”
Armand scoffs. “That is not what I would be doing, you don’t even—”
“You want to go inside of my head—”
“Alright,” Armand says, and Louis’s jaw clicks shut. “I was only offering, there was no need for such a reaction.”
Louis leans back in his seat. His expression is pinched and unreadable, but Armand can feel it plainly, the pain in him. “You want to make me forget.”
“I want,” Armand says. “To make you better. To make you unbroken.”
“Like you’re so unbroken, in comparison? Like you’re completely whole? Like these past three decades haven’t just been you pretending to be a person instead of actually being one.” Louis shakes his head. “Acting, not living. You don’t— you can’t even put on a good show. You hate the sex as much as I do.”
Armand waits. When two minutes pass with Louis only curling and uncurling his palms over the steering wheel, Armand says, softly, “You can just leave, Louis. As you suggested. If all you have toward me is resentment for trying to help, then leave. Isn’t that why you’re sitting here?” Louis’s hands clutch the wheel in a tight grip. “Why else would you be sitting in a car with the engine running, if not to drive away and leave me? Why else?”
“Stop that.”
Armand turns the key in the ignition. The engine thrums back to life, rumbling under them and making the gravel shake. “I will go,” Armand says magnanimously. “I will go, and you can leave, is that what you want, to break—”
Louis shuts off the car. The engine dies. For five minutes they sit in the ensuing quiet, Louis’s face running through a variety of different emotions before settling on the same frown Louis had worn back when they went to see Lestat in Paris, in 1949. It’s spiteful, the frown. Spiteful and exhausted.
Louis says, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Switch with me.” Louis pulls out the keys, tosses them into Armand’s lap, and like that, Armand knows that Louis has agreed to everything. “Drive us home.”
It was 1948, Sam had written and placed a play about a trial on his desk, and Claudia was knocking at the door to his office.
He flipped the script over and opened the door. “Yes?”
“Maitre,” Claudia said. The ribbons in her hair were sloppily tied. “If I could request an audience with you?”
He glanced at his watch in an exaggerated show of impatience. “I have an appointment soon.”
“With my brother.”
“You are eating up valuable seconds of your own time.”
Her eyes narrowed. Her mind remained a steel trap, sealed off from him so thoroughly that he would have had to pry his way into it while taking extra precautions to go unnoticed. She was unlike Louis, in this way. Louis gave away everything carelessly at the front of his mind if it was not already projected from his facial expressions. From Claudia, there was only the thick fog of exhaustion typical of new coven members.
Armand matched her narrowed eyes with a thin smile.
“Yes,” Claudia said, curt. “Well. I’d like to ask for a reconsideration of your earlier order.”
“Which would be?”
“That. That I’m to live as my character on and off stage, Maitre.”
“Ah.” Armand leaned back in his chair. Claudia, in his doorway, stood ramrod straight without even the slightest fidgeting. When she had started out in the coven, her movements had been erratic with joy, always jumpy with excitement for what to come. In the months since her debut on stage, she had adopted the elegance of a predator’s stillness typical of vampires much older than her. It was, admittedly, an impressive demonstration of control.
Armand tapped at the script with his knuckles, not breaking his gaze with Claudia. “Yet,” he said. “Over the past month, I have yet to witness any improvement in your onstage performance. In fact, if Sam is to be believed, you have taken to openly glowering at our esteemed audiences during the show.”
“They think it’s funny. They think it’s part of the show.”
Armand continued on as though she hadn’t spoken. “It is inappropriate and, moreover, unprofessional. Why, then, must I rescind the order that I had made in the hopes of resolving these issues with your performance?”
“Maitre,” Claudia said. Her tone was respectful enough, but there was an edge of impatience to it, clipping the edges of her vowels. Armand raised an eyebrow. “I once again state that my passion for acting has gone and that I request— humbly so— that I be moved to the wet room. Please.”
“Yet unfortunately, we do not always get what we wish for.” Armand waved his hand dismissively. “No, your request is denied again, Lulu—”
“That’s not my name,” Claudia snapped, almost a shout. In the corner of his eye, Armand saw Santiago and Estelle through the waxed edges of his office window. Their faces were blurred, but Armand could feel their stunned glee, the anticipation any coven member gained when he imposed discipline and punishment onto members other than themselves.
Claudia blinked. Her hand flew to her mouth, a gesture so similar to Louis’s that Armand was momentarily thrown. “I. I apologize, Maitre, for my outburst.”
“Are you?”
“Maitre—”
Armand pushed himself off his chair and stood, looming over her. “Your request is denied. You will handle Sam’s role of cleaning the theater after the shows this month in addition to your regular wet room duties. You will continue on in this costume without change until your performance improves. Is that understood?”
There was a pause. Claudia stared down at her feet, her cheeks puffed out in anger, a visible crack in her armor.
“Yes,” she stated, voice hardly above a whisper. He could feel her slow-simmering annoyance and resentment toward him, and waited for it to come to a boil. It did not. Claudia swallowed and tilted her head back to resume eye contact, expression wiped clean. “I understand, Maitre. Thank you for your time.”
“I hope to hear better reviews of your performance from this evening,” Armand said. Claudia stepped back from the doorway just as he stepped out of it. Santiago and Estelle made a show of resuming their recently developed pre-show practice of applying makeup onto each other. “And re-tie the bows in your hair before you tarnish our reputation further, yes?”
Later, after he and Louis spent the evening attempting to get a good photograph of the moon hanging over Notre-Dame, Armand returned to the theater. He examined the stage: the final woodcutter sequence had been messier than usual tonight, as per Santiago’s confession and as evidenced by the lumps of flesh left speckled over the stage. Armand stared down at the meat as Sam and Tuan stood at his elbow, explaining some issue or other with the projector. He was unfocused on them.
Instead, Armand, nodding and giving the appearance of listening, watched as Louis approached the disgruntled, bloodstained Claudia, the bows in her hair tied even worse than before. Louis paused in front of her, frowning, before his face brightened. With a grin, he held out a hand to Claudia. When she only glared at it, he laughed. It was a nice laugh, not overly loud, with a pleasant timber to it that echoed inside the theater. He grabbed Claudia’s hand, ignoring her grumbled protests, and pulled her into a basic ballroom dance position, something that appeared close to the tango but was not quite it. Guiding her, Louis dragged Claudia into a dance that she, gradually and reluctantly, went along with.
They talked through each other. Armand caught snatches of it as they whirled around: Everything’s fine. This is what you wanted, this is why we left.
He keeps doing it, keeps cutting me down to a stump and leaving me to bleed out over the floor before going out and listening to jazz with you in some seedy alleyway.
Louis dipped her. Okay.
Okay? Is that all you have to say?
What did you think it would be like for you here?
Whose side are you on? Louis nearly slipped, but Claudia caught and righted him at the last second.
On yours. Always on yours, sis.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Well, it doesn’t fucking feel like it!
Their dancing was far too silly to actually mean anything. Before Armand turned away to give the other coven members his full attention, he saw it: Claudia’s rage calcified and Louis, faltering, his smile gone.
Louis’s emotions were so frequently fickle. His love lacked the total level of sublime consumption that Armand expected and it was foolish, he knew, to extend this much patience for a man who flitted away from the label of companionship. So very deeply foolish. The coven would mock him of this for centuries to come, his short-lived dalliance with the strange vampire from America who preferred to subsist on ducks than humans.
Yet: Armand chanced another glance at Louis. The smile was back on his face, ingenuine and strained. Claudia, her dress fluttering as they continued to dance, was still talking to him, the subject changed and her tone considerably more mild: You can’t give up on your photography because of one hateful comment, Louis, that’s stupid.
S’not stupid, it’s just me managing my time—
It’s you being stupid again, all there is. What’d you do with the red room if you actually ended it? We spent too much time getting the lights just right for you in there. Really. What happened to finding yourself out here?
Louis snorted. He lifted his head, and he caught Armand’s eye before Armand could fully look away. Louis’s smile shifted and turned a shade warmer.
Armand shot him a smile back. There was still time for their love to deepen. There was still time to shove Sam’s new play into the box for the rats to chew on.
It is 1973, and they are sitting together on the kitchen counter, Louis at the edge with his toes swishing against the floor, Armand cross-legged with his back against the wall. From this angle, Armand has a full view of Louis’s side profile and he watches Louis lean forward as his hair, still wet from his shower, drips water. Louis smells of the honey from his shampoo and the mint from his toothpaste. He smells of Armand’s blood, too, an afterscent from when he drank from Armand after they both woke up. Armand’s wrist, in turn, aches where Louis drank from him and where Louis gripped him tightly while fucking him as he always did, with the enthusiasm of completing a chore.
The burns are healing. His hair is still singed to a fuzz on his scalp and there are patches of red skin that shine under the yellowed lighting of their kitchen, but Louis looks better. So much better.
“Do you remember what your first words to me were?”
Louis speaks quietly and carefully, as though each word is being properly weighed out before shipping. Armand can feel a dull thrum of anxiety in Louis’s mind, skittish like the heartbeat of a lamb cornered inside a slaughterhouse.
Armand drags the flat of his fingernail against the denim of Louis’s jacket. He wore it again while Louis was showering, dragged it tightly over him while he waited for Louis to come out. Armand asks, matching Louis’s soft cadence in equal measure, “Do you believe me to have broken that vow to you, Louis?”
Louis does not answer.
Armand sighs. “You envision a scalpel and an operating table, me as an overzealous surgeon, cutting at your nerves until you are incoherent. You know that to be untrue. You saw what we did to the boy, Louis.”
“Don’t.”
“It is not,” Armand says. He runs his thumb over the now-unblemished spot on his wrist where Louis had bit and held him. “A violent procedure. Have I not earned your trust, after all these years?”
“Will you stop?” Louis’s voice comes out steady and loud enough, even, to project anger. “I’m asking for you to remember. I’m asking you to— to recommit to that promise. Your first promise.”
“The surgeon is only required to swear by the Hippocratic Oath once, at the start of their career. Every action they take afterward is done under the assumption and trust that they only ever act in accordance to this promise.”
“Armand,” Louis grits out, and Armand replies smoothly, “Louis.”
Armand moves himself forward, until he’s crowded into Louis’s space. He pulls Louis gently, and Louis allows himself to be dragged closer, until Louis, too, sits cross-legged on the counter, across from Armand. Their knees bump into each other as Armand leans in, pressing their foreheads together, the damp ends of Louis’s hair a cold brush against his skin. Armand can smell the tang of his own blood on Louis’s breath and can see himself reflected in Louis’s blue eyes.
Louis closes his eyes. Armand raises his hand to cup the side of Louis’s face, careful not to touch the burned areas. He says, calmly, “No pain.”
“I was there when you—”
“Shh.” Armand strokes Louis’s face. Louis does not open his eyes. There are a dozen protests in Louis’s mind. More than a dozen. There are boilerplate plans to scoot backwards and to go away, anywhere, everywhere. Yet Louis doesn’t voice any of these and doesn’t move at all when Armand’s hand drifts down so that he can crook two fingers under Louis’s chin.
Armand whispers, gently, “Do you not wish to experience the pleasure of annihilation in someone other than yourself?”
It will be a much needed dosage of chamomile to Louis’s system. It will happen slowly, like veal fat melting under low heat, the acidic burn of the sun fading to an inexplicable worry rather than a memory. It will be a balm on his raw skin. It will be kindness, the same kindness Armand’s maker had bestowed when he removed Armand from the brothel. Nothing his maker did to him afterward could ever outweigh the love and gratitude Armand carried for being saved. In the narrative stitched to Louis’s mind, it’s the same, he knows: no amount of harm can supersede the fact that Armand saved Louis. It’s all that matters, in the end.
Not that this is harm. Not that Armand broke his first promise. What need was there to recommit?
Armand presses a kiss to Louis’s temple. “Rest.”
It was 1971, and the television was on. It was set to the news channel, broadcasting a blonde head whose image fuzzed and flipped from the poor connection. The sound was distorted into harsh vocal clips and the colors were sickeningly, searingly bright on the eyes.
Armand turned it off. In the silence that followed, the steady drip-drop of Louis’s blood was all the louder. The sound grated his ears. It took centuries of honed patience to not kick at the body Louis had drained and disposed of in front of the television.
“This is just like Paris,” Armand said. He watched Louis breathe, his cheeks hollowing out with every breath, and was reminded, sudden and visceral, of watching himself in the mirrors of his maker’s home, training himself to sit in adoring silence at the benevolent feet of his maker, waiting and waiting for a look, a comment, a command. Anything that could be construed as an invitation for Amadeo to express his gratitude.
Armand bit at the inside of his cheek, careful to avoid actually tearing flesh. “Louis,” he said, forcing himself out of the memory and into the present where he was moving to kneel down in front of Louis. “Could you tell me how this is any different from what you did to yourself in Paris?”
Louis blinked at him. “It’s,” he started, but then did not continue. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. Armand could answer his own question: when Louis cut open his arm and choked up his fledgling’s blood from his system back in Paris, Louis had been singularly focused on exorcizing himself of the blood to the point where he didn’t care about anything else. Tonight, however, Louis did not act with singular focus when he forced the blood out of himself. If anything, Louis’s problem was that, since Paris, he lacked any sort of focus at all.
Armand took Louis’s still-bleeding arm and gripped it gingerly. “I’ll clean up,” Armand said, healing the cut. When Louis shivered, Armand tightened his grip. “And then I’ll dispose of the body. And then we can go home.”
“I can clean up,” Louis said, wobbly. “I can handle this.”
Armand sighed. He pressed a kiss to the corner of Louis’s mouth. The gesture visibly puzzled Louis, who raised a hand to his mouth with a frown.
“I will handle it,” Armand said. He kept his tone forceful, but gentle. Always gentle, with Louis. “You should rest.”
Louis blinked again. With a new level of lucidity, he began to say, “But I don’t—”
“You’re tired,” Armand dismissed. “And you didn’t drain yourself of this recent blood completely. You’re still drunk.”
“I’ve been worse.”
“Just rest.”
He left Louis against the wall to rummage through the sparsely stocked kitchen. He returned with a neon orange dishrag and a bucket, and set himself to work mopping the blood, his movements neater under Louis’s (albeit distracted) gaze.
Three minutes and slim progress into cleaning, Louis said, speaking slowly as though his tongue was too heavy for his mouth, “Do you remember the catacombs?”
Armand didn’t pause. “Of course I remember them. Awfully convenient for us, having that labyrinth underneath Paris, already teeming with bones.”
“Right,” Louis said, in a tone that meant he had only partially listened to Armand. “The guy. The one—”
“The one you drained?”
Louis winced. “Yeah,” he continued. “Him. He’s studying— was studying— them. The catacombs. He planned to go to Paris in a month, explore them. He practiced his French with me.”
Armand, wringing the dishrag, wondered if it was the plans for Paris or the French practice that led Louis to engage so deeply with his most recent victim. “There’s much to study about them,” he said neutrally, and Louis hummed in vague agreement. “I remem—”
“Claudia wrote about them. Once.”
Oh. Of course. “Louis, love. You mustn’t dwell.”
“I can’t remember the date,” Louis said, ignoring him. “It was maybe 1947. A little after her debut.” Louis’s frown deepened. “Before you had her wear her costume all the time.”
Armand remembered that era. It was around the time they trained Claudia for their once-a-week French performances. Claudia certainly did take to it, but not with grace. The French tutorials, the rehearsals, the hours of vocal training Armand imposed— all of it, she complied with a clenched jaw and an aura of bitterness that was unbecoming of the Theatre de Vampire.
“I remember what she wrote.”
“Don’t strain yourself.”
“‘Maitre’s taken to denying me participation in the hunt,’” Louis said. Armand looked. Louis was staring at the blood at the floor, his brows furrowed. “‘Said I couldn’t hunt with the coven until I pulled off a better performance. He wouldn’t listen to me when I said I was fucking done with it all, he just looked me over with a raised brow and told me to stand in the wet room and sing that song until my throat went hoarse, and he wouldn’t let me leave, wouldn’t even let me find my own dinner while everyone else went.’”
Armand stilled.
Louis continued, “‘So I ate the rats in the rat box, what else was there to do? These things don’t even have that much to begin with and what they do have is awful, tasting of hunger itself, which sounds stupid to say about a taste, diary, I know, but that’s what it tasted like. Something empty, gnawing at you. When you’re just eating rats for hours on end while leaning over the body box and trying not to get blood on your dumb fucking babydoll dress, that hunger never gets sated, only gets more intense until you’re worse off than before.’”
Armand said, calmly, “Louis.”
“‘It was just rats, but it ticked Armand off. He sent me into the catacombs. Said he was locking me into them until I replaced every rat that I ate from the body box, and when I said I wasn’t a rat catcher, he told me that this would be a good opportunity to practice singing in French, to a test group of French rats—‘”
“Is that what she wrote, verbatim?”
Louis nodded. He wouldn’t look at Armand, who was still sopping up and wringing Louis’s blood into a bucket. “She never told me any of that. She said the coven was brutal, that they had a limitless capacity for cruelty.” Louis winced. “I didn’t— didn’t take her seriously.”
“You should know she exaggerates,” Armand said. He looked away to wipe more of the blood and felt, finally, Louis gaze on him: cautious, doubtful, brimming with uncertainty. There was anger, too, on Claudia’s behalf. There was always anger on her behalf within Louis. “I remember the night.”
“Nights. She said it happened multiple times.”
“Nights. She was not the only member excluded from the hunt at times, and I never locked her in the catacombs. I sent her into them with Sam as a guide to fetch more rats for the wet room, not because she ate them, but because we were always in need of more rats.” At Louis’s silence, Armand sighed. “You doubt me.”
“Didn’t say that.”
“I sense it from you,” Armand said, banging his wrists against the rim of the bucket in his haste to wring out the dishrag. “Disbelief in anything I say, even after all of this time.”
“I’m just trying to remember,” Louis said. “Something, anything about that time, that’s all.”
“For what, Louis,” Armand said, suddenly exhausted. “Your inability to remember changes absolutely nothing about the present. What good has it done you to memorize her words aside from furthering your stubborn refusal to heal?”
“It’s not a refusal.”
“Tell me what this is, then.”
Louis was quiet. Then, “I can’t find myself, if I don’t know this history. Her history, my history. I need to know, to remember. I need to not forget.”
Armand glanced at him. Louis was looking at him, and when they made eye contact, Louis’s eyes were bright with desperation.
Only an hour ago while Louis chatted up a man about the catacombs, Armand had drained a housewife whose eyes had glittered underneath the lights of her kitchen just as Louis’s did now. She had immigrated to California more than a decade ago from Delhi, as it were, and she had asked Armand where in India he was from. When Armand said he didn’t remember, she had looked at him with pity, an emotion that only deepened when Armand said he was content with the home he had now, in the present day. When Armand asked her why she had spent the evening at her windowsill calling out for death, she had told him about how her son died a year earlier and how her husband had drifted apart from her in grief. She had said that she was tired and that the guilt of living with her son having been buried before her was all-defining, all-crushing. When Armand bit into her neck, she sighed with relief before asking Armand to please, if he could, close the stove before he left so that the rice for her husband’s dinner wouldn’t burn.
He could give Louis what he gave to her. Not death, but a sense of peace only possible through a full rewrite of the brain. Cull the diaries, cull Claudia, cull the mass of grief inside Louis that refused to ever shrink or soothe. He thought of Paris and of the first time he saw Louis bled out in an apartment. Louis, his arm soaked in blood, his eyes vacant, his love openly expressed and frequently given but too insufficient and too ingenuine for Armand to choose over the coven. And now Louis was all he had left of anything, and it would be so easy to dig into Louis’s mind and fix all his deficiencies so that he could perfectly slot into Armand’s heart.
It would be so easy. It would be so thoroughly unromantic. It would be so much better to wait for Louis to return to himself and to then change himself, willingly, for Armand. It could still happen. They had the time to wait.
“She was exaggerating in this entry,” Armand said. “Abuse in the coven was doled out with the specific care and intention to instruct, to guide. We were not so sadistic to punish needlessly.”
For a moment, this seemed to be enough. Armand dropped the dishrag into the bucket and stood, brushing his knees.
Then Louis spoke, tone lofty as he delivered the barb that he always found a way to squeeze in once every five years, no matter what, “What was the trial? Needful punishment?”
Armand closed his eyes. “Louis,” he said. “Please. You’re tired. Just rest, for now.”
It is 1973, and Louis says nothing as Armand pauses to check on the magnolia before they leave. Armand pours the water atop the dirt clumped in the pot, prodding the flowers with gentle fingers, and in the corner of his eye, he sees Louis stand near the door, waiting. Louis is wearing Armand’s trenchcoat this evening, the one Louis bought for Armand back in 1970, in Lisbon, and he’s fidgeting with the sleeves. He stops once Armand returns to his side.
They share a cigarette between each other as they walk, trading drags in between light conversation about the weather. Louis thinks the cold isn’t enough to bundle up for yet. Armand disagrees.
Once they reach the beach, Louis buries his feet in the sand, shoes and all. Armand, monopolizing the cigarette, raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.
Louis is still too young for them to risk a sunset trip to watch the ferry, so there are no boats to scan for as they stand on the beach, inhaling cigarette smoke and listening to the soft cries of passing seagulls. Armand tells Louis about his second memory anyway, tells him about being captured and dragged onto the looming ship.
Louis, in a flat voice, says, “You’ve told me this before.” He takes the cigarette from Armand, who, thrown but amused by the interruption, lets him.
“Have I?”
“Yeah. Back in Paris, ‘48, Cairo, ‘51, Bangkok, ‘68—”
“Oh, Thailand was in 1967, not 68. Recall we celebrated the new year there before moving up north?”
“Okay,” Louis says. “Bangkok, ‘67. You’ve told me this before.”
“I suppose I have,” Armand agrees. “Well. You’ll have to forgive me, Louis, for the repetition.”
“It’s,” Louis starts, then falters. He frowns and shakes his head. “It’s fine. It happens.”
“Yes,” Armand says. He watches Louis, the way his expression pinches into a scowl. He’s staring out into the sea unblinkingly. Instead of reading his mind, Armand asks, “And what are you thinking, Louis?”
“Right now?” Louis tilts his head upward, squinting up at the crescent moon, which is bent like an eyelash above them. “I’m thinking about the time I went fishing with Paul at Caddo Lake. How we caught nothing but catfish, the small kind that weren’t even worth keeping around for bait, and—”
“You’ve told me about it. In Paris, ‘48, in Dublin, ‘53, in Syd—”
“Okay,” Louis says. “I get it.” His lip quirks to the right. It’s not a smile, not a smirk, just a small gesture of acknowledgment. It’s nothing. It’s still enough to send a shot of relief coursing through Armand, cool enough that it feels like a sting. “You made your point.” Louis closes his eyes as he takes a drag of the cigarette, sighing and looking so similar to how he had looked in Paris, back when Armand first met him at the park.
It’s necessary, what he’s done. Good for Louis, in helping him heal. Good for Armand, in keeping Louis close, because Louis will not, in the end, succumb to the deep, loving companionship Armand wants. Not on his own. If Armand wants the ritual pleasure of serving a god with all of his heart again, he’ll have to guide Louis by the hand into that mold.
Louis, really, should be like how he was with his own maker: simply grateful that it wasn't as worse as it was before.
“I still like you,” Armand says. “Even when you bore me.”
“Yeah?” Louis glances at Armand warily. “Well.”
Armand takes the cigarette back, his fingers brushing against the soft hinge of Louis’s wrist. “We should set out for a hunt now,” he says, taking a long drag.
“We? I can go alone.”
“I’ll go with you, Louis,” Armand says. He stamps out the cigarette and sighs. Louis is frowning at him, his hands bunched inside Armand’s trenchcoat, his eyes focused on Armand and reflecting Armand’s own irises. “We’ll go together.”