Work Text:
01. modern/ancient (128 words)
Armand deploys the past in deliberate ways. His eyes wide and tragic, the hot-coal shine of them making a much older part of Louis think devil eyes; the part that died in the confessional, that has his mother’s voice. Armand does not need Louis to bring him into the modern world so it’s easy to forget sometimes how far back he goes, and goes, and goes. It’s only sometimes — in the reading room, their backs on a polished oak table and heads pillowed by old musty books, that Armand will close his eyes and tell Louis about the way paint smells when you’re grinding the pigment into oil; how much quieter it was before there was anything. And like that Louis can imagine his eyes are still brown.
02. stars/moon (514 words)
The stars above the Sausalito house phase in and out of seeing. Fat and yellow. Matisse’s Icarus is what Louis would put on the wall of the house they own but mostly do not live in: himself, pinned against the vastness of the night, and the stars bursting yellow at the periphery of his vision. Yellow, and he is dragged from the stage. Yellow, and his vision explodes; he starts to disintegrate, lost on the wind as long desired. What happens to the particles, he wonders? Where do they go, and if he tried, could he still feel them?
“Louis.”
Naissance d’une Galaxie, they were still after that one. Louis has an eye for art but Armand knows how it’s made, or he did, and pretends to sometimes still but occasionally his language fails him and Louis can feel his embarrassment in the blood they share. A mistake, to let so much of someone into yourself; it turns you into particles. He never had Claudia’s blood.
“Are you troubled, Louis?”
He’s damp and sitting on the deck in his robe, a sad old man. His skin is still pitted and rough in places like the landscape of the moon. Every dose of Armand’s blood smoothes him out a little more and a little more, but Louis still gets a nail under the scabs sometimes and worries at ’em.
“Louis. Can you hear me?”
Armand’s hand is on his shoulder. He is cloying now, compassionate. At night his mouth finds Louis’ throat with soft kisses that don’t break the skin.
“I can take it away, Louis, you know. If you wanted. It’s a burden you need not bear.”
Matisse made the work with cutouts. He called it drawing with scissors. A snip here, a slice there, and from the expanse a form is revealed, pinned in place to create a story. “How many cuts can you make? How many burdens can be lifted? How many are enough for me to remember and still be me? If you go back all the way to —”
Armand hushes him with a kiss to his temple. His fingertip tilts Louis’ chin up and back so the full frame of his vision is taken up by Armand’s face, his wounded and loving gaze. “No one could take you from yourself, least of all me. I only want to make it a little easier for you.”
The water here doesn’t smell like the water back home. Louis can’t put his finger on what makes the difference, but if he closes his eyes the sound is almost the same, the gentle and lazy lapping like a cat after a dish of cream. The air is warm and dense. Louis wonders if there’s something to return to, some point in time from which the deviation could determine the course of his entire life. He wonders if Claudia thought that too.
“Alright,” Louis says. “Alright. Take it. Do your precise surgery like you did to the boy and take it away.”
Louis has an eye for it but Armand knows how it’s made.
03. recognition/misunderstanding (101 words)
They keep their voices low — not for their hearing, but for Daniel’s. “You would reprimand me in front of the boy?” Armand demands, and Louis replies cool-blooded, “You work for me, don’t you, Rashid?”
In Armand’s expression: affront, arousal. “Yes, Maître,” he says, and Louis does feel a way about being recognized as such after hours spent detailing his weaknesses, his cringing and crushed bones, his despair.
“That’s right. That’s right, Arun.” He thinks of what’s between them like the whip itself, handle and tip; power and impact, whose hand and whose back. Easy to misunderstand, way it curls around itself.
04. blooming/wilting (150 words)
Marrakech, 1968.
Sunlight divides them, a clean line cut through from the courtyard where Armand stands to the bed where Louis lounges. Armand has a teasing smile on his face, lush curls blooming against a backdrop of light; light can touch Louis safely through Armand, flirting at the edges of his body, sensation transported from one mind to another. Louis feels its warmth, different from the way it dissolves desiccated flesh — more like playing long past noon in the street, kicking a ball around with your brother.
Is that how it was? Armand asks inside Louis’ skull; the meat of his brain. He fills that space. He knows how it was because he can see whatever he wants to see inside Louis, but he still likes to ask. He likes to be told, confided in.
Louis, in bed, smiles. “My night-blooming jasmine,” Armand calls him, and Louis languishes in shadow.
05. boat/harbor (77 words)
They leave the high-rise and go downtown. Off the burn of city lights and onto the docks, long since abandoned; no boats looming menacingly out of the dark, only the smell of brine and sweat. Men in the shadows. Louis arranges himself against corrugated metal and lights up, a brief orange beacon. Armand comes towards him as though pulled, no hand on him but desire’s. Men draw in. They’ll take some home — three, four — who’ll never leave.
06. teeth/mouth (138 words)
Louis’ mouth opens for the blood, which spills from the split in Armand’s lip like a red silk ribbon. There’s blood also in the sweat at his temples and on his collarbones; in the saliva that gives each kiss an iron tang; in the tears that leak from the corners of his eyes and roll onto the pillowcase; blood when he comes that tastes subtly different, stranger. All of it mixed together like they are now, rolling in bed with the sheets fucked up; the best of it because like this Louis doesn’t have to think about the rest. Don’t think, just want. Just eat, the tender stem of Armand’s throat available for Louis’ snapping teeth. But sometimes —
“Give me your teeth,” Louis demands, “give me your teeth, c’mon, Arun, give me your —"
But Armand won’t bite.
07. altar/sacrifice (42 words)
Armand lays Louis back on the bed they half-share, above the coffin they don’t in the Paris apartment that is so idyllically theirs; his hand moves up the center of Louis’s body, shirt unraveled and falling to either side. Tomorrow, Claudia returns.
08. mirror/stranger (180 words)
Louis is cool, collected. Nothing betrayed, nothing promised. “Hello, Armand,” he says, and his voice is measured, musical. Eyebrow not cocked but arching ever so, his expression one of faint, smug amusement.
Armand, blood on his face. Blood in his eyes. Here are the little things about seventy-seven years: Louis has seen Armand in tailored suits with his hair waved, which he did carefully himself in the mirror that Claudia used for her eyeliner; he has seen Armand with the dust of those years on his face, wall cracked behind him. Armand is different everywhere and also the same, which is the great irony of their kind. The only thing that ever reflects the time is each other.
He hasn’t seen Armand like this: down low, begrimed. Only the hint of it in his eyes, the hungry thing, the part that craved; the part that loved, maybe, thought it could pour enough of itself into Louis to get it back.
I don’t know who you are, Louis could say. I know exactly who you are.
“Did you ever?” Armand asks.