#and ofc. it’s armand who sees him. who knows. who will force him to confront it.

[dykesynthezoid]

There’s this potential in vampire Daniel of embracing his own monstrousness only to get tripped up over the fact that there are other parts of him he’s still got buried. And not just memories (although I’m all for that).

Daniel as an old man is presenting this very specific curmudgeonly identity, and it’s a very armored acerbic one. There’s already something hunter-predatory about him in the way he navigates extracting a story. The transition to vampire does not seem so difficult from there.

And yet.

In embracing that monstrousness he might eventually realize there are things within him that didn’t die with his humanity. Things he thought he killed years ago, long before Dubai. But they’re still there. It’s harder to keep them at bay amidst all that new freedom, that wild hedonistic abandon.

And it’s the sweetness. The sweetness! The boy who ordered cocktails that taste like after-dinner mints, who was full of bubbly, bumbling energy, who had faltering romantic ideas and so little ability to execute them, who secretly dreamed of being special, who leaned into Armand’s hand on his cheek. “He’s still in there.”

And— all of these things are tethered to his sexuality as well. “I did what I had to,” he defends, and then the reality is that he could not have been more eager, more expressive, more hungry.

If vampirism is about having to come to terms with oneself, to cast off whatever human shames you still cling to, it’s not his monstrousness that Daniel is going to struggle with. It’s his sweetness. Daniel always speaks with so much contempt for that boy he used to be. How the cynic loathes those parts of him that could not be more genuine. Too much sincerity, too much feeling. He doesn’t want to believe any of that is still inside him. But it is, it is.