#[Armand probably: Nah I'm going full trauma-response.]

[prescitia]

@tomedesvampires asked: “ i was broken, again and again, melted down, remade, reforged, until nothing remained of who i’d been before. “ -Armand

The quiet which follows is encompassing, oppressive. Something which should fill it, absent, and in its absence hums an incessant tune in the hollows of his ears.

Silence can be as cruel as any spoken word and cruelty is not what Armand deserves as reward yet what forms on his tongue is as maddeningly insufficient.

Apologies will not heal the broken thing, and pity is a spit in the face.

He takes a delicate hand in his to raise it above them, stretched out along the long reach of his own fingers against the high ceiling's backdrop and even in the flickering firelight the difference is apparent. One so deceptively young and fragile, bones like those crafted in the orient yet decades older. Wiser. Worse crimes for which he could hold no dreams for even in his darkest hour had written their seamless tragedies in the ancient soul.

"Yet you endured. And endure still. And always will... What is it, Armand? That gives you this strength? It can not be your love of life, you deprived yourself of it willingly. Centuries removed from the world which moved and changed above you." Lestat shifts onto his side now, legs stretching beneath the thin sheet that covers them so that no fold separates the silken brush of their skin.

"You confound me. Terrify me. Excite me. This mystery that you are. Never alone and yet hauntingly so."