#silhouettesemerging

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: prologue

the vampire isabelle de la rue, upon realizing that she has been erased from history, decides on a whim to set the record straight.

iwtv oc, prologue ~500 words (short n sweet)

welcome to our framing device! my girl is a study of the messy morals of iwtv, deceptive artistic communities through the tdv, the purple-prose-ish-yet-strikingly-earnest storytelling style, and being hopelessly in love with assad zaman. WOOT WOOT

i am not sure how many chapters this'll wind up being but A Lot Is Going To Happen, I Can Promise You That

enjoyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

fic masterlist chapter i

Twenty Twenty-Three, Chicago, United States of America

��...That motherfucker.”

Instinctually, she did a double-take, despite knowing that what the page held wasn’t truly a surprise at all.

She’d been intrigued upon seeing the book in a shop window-something told her that this one was different from the thousands of fictions regarding her kind. That something had proven to be right when she glimpsed the familiar name of Louis de Pointe du Lac on the back cover’s summary; heart pounding in her ears with a somewhat delicious anticipation of decades-held secrets being blown open, she bought the book without another thought. Along with every other possibility, a teenage hope of seeing her name somewhere in this illegal chronicle thrummed in the back of her mind.

But, Isabelle realized, of course it would make sense that her maker would erase her from any history he told these days. The one that quite literally got away did not fit within the life that Armand was trying to fabricate for himself and his apparently-no-longer lover, and keeping up the lie that he had never thrown the Dark Gift upon anyone probably made him a more alluring character to whomever this Daniel Molloy was.

The author was witty, that was certain. She could practically hear the snark in every narrating line that wasn’t Louis’ pensive recollection, and she’d laughed to think of how those three personalities must have meshed and exploded throughout that interview.

She also knew that she needed to set a few things straight.

I’ve been wanting to go back to New York anyway.

~

Twenty Twenty-Three (One Week Later), New York City, United States of America

“Frankly, given the amount of telepathic ‘fuck-you’s from around the world I’ve had the pleasure of receiving, someone else wanting their story told was the last thing I expected.”

“Well, not all of us revere the Great Laws above all else.”

“Glad to hear it.”

They sat at an outdoor restaurant in Brooklyn, appearing to all the world like a pretentious, nighttime-sunglass-wearing, book-toting father and daughter. In truth, each was sizing up the other; trust was not a thing easily earned to the slightly jaded vampiress nor the world-weary journalist.

The former was beginning to wonder, though, at it seeming more possible with every second that she wasn’t the only supernatural one at the table.

She glanced at his nails, then back up to meet his eyes.

“You too?”

“Yeah.”

A beat.

“Armand?”

“Yeah.”

Another beat. This time, it was Daniel who spoke first.

“...You too?”

She almost laughed.

“Yeah.”

Apparently by habit, he lifted an incredulous hand as if to remove his glasses, then remembered himself and lowered it with a sigh.

“That motherfucker.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“So that’s why you wanted to meet.”

“I have a lot to tell,” Isabelle said, “if you haven’t heard enough already about the toxic-theatre-kid subsection of vampirism.”

Daniel considered for a moment, then-

“You’re okay if my main intention with your story is to throw it back in his face?”

Despite herself, she nearly smiled.

“Absolutely.”

[inthiseverymoment]

Silhouettes Emerging,

an Interview with Another Vampire,

Chronicling the Entrapment and Escape of The Vampire Isabelle de la Rue.

work in progress!

prologue

chapter i: “a wide-eyed melancholic, knowing and unknown”

chapter ii: “the promised land blurred awash in dancing footlights”

chapter iii: “ever-soaring melodies on unstable chords”

chapter iv: “dried cranberries and upswept guilt”

chapter v: “a catharsis always challenged, always shown”

chapter vi: “don’t you want a lark whose every blood cell sings your name?”

chapter vii: “the moth, frozen in amber”

chapter viii: “she flies with no fanfare but the voice of her own”

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter viii

"she Flies with No Fanfare but the Voice of Her Own"

and softly found, now fully realized, finally her mind was free.

iwtv oc, this chapter ~1.8k

reynaldo hahn fans rise

there'll probably be about one or two more chapters left of this. pretty please like reblog lmk what yall think etc etc

enjoyyyyyy

chapter vii fic masterlist

“So. When was enough enough?”

He’d waited to ask this, having studied her face for more than a few moments in the hanging silence of Isabelle’s confession. Blood tears stained her cheeks, and a very tired sort of fury had set itself behind her eyes, as if disappointed that the memories could still elicit this much emotion from her after so many years.

“Enough had been enough for a long, long time, if I’m being entirely honest.”

She collected her thoughts for a moment, then-

“Daniel?”

“...Yeah?”

It was not the first time she had called him by his name, but it certainly felt like it.

“You know how, by human standards-some human standards, at least-you’re supposed to have full mastery over yourself by a certain point? How, these days, if someone you’re with says something awful, all attraction to them is supposed to disappear if you’re a good enough person to simply stop desiring something once you learn it’s wrong? How it’s easy to feel like an awful person for needing to try in order to keep yourself strong?”

He blinked.

“You and I have led very different lives, Ms…Isabelle.”

“Yes, I certainly know that. I never had the space or privilege-or even the opportunity-to go wild and have my fun before learning all my ‘lessons’. From a very young age, I always told myself that I’d be better than those who let jealousy or lust or anything else cloud their souls, and even as I settled into a life of killing to survive among friends who killed for fun, that deeper knowledge-that judgement born of youthful idealism-weighed on me, a lingering burn at the back of my mind. I never had that messy teenage love, never got to get the hormones out of the way while it was still socially acceptable, and then I became eternally stuck at a perpetually guilty, emotionally intelligent but worldly naive, constantly wondering twenty-two.

“I listened night after night as Santiago promised our audiences that the darkest parts of themselves were encouraged here-and, though the audience knew it was all to gain their dollar, I could still feel the relief and release coming from just about every one of them. We were monsters, and so were they; the blemishes on every soul were celebrated for once. That is why the Théâtre des Vampires endured for so long.

“It is not a moral failing to yearn to be seen, but I was…I was not myself. Armand did so much to make me stay, because I think I was the closest thing to healthy he’d ever had-and I was another in his line of those who challenged his structures, who shattered what he’d started growing tired of. A new piece was written for me, everything he thought I wanted: a more earnest meditation on grief and life, a deep burgundy velvet gown and long opera gloves, and a French artsong to boot. And the audiences…”

“Didn’t love it?”

“Not as much as I’d hoped. Édith and I exchanged letters secretly and often, and she said she wished she could have seen it live, but she was one of very, very few. The occasional patch of audience members appreciated it, but most just wanted to get back to the mockery and killing. They all thought I was talented, though.”

She rolled her bottom lip for a moment, as if chewing it in thought without the act itself.

“Talented, but pretentious. It took a remarkable amount of self-control to keep from reading their minds too often; upon first being turned, I loved the opportunity to know what people were truly thinking about my performances, my appearance, me-”

A small twist came into her face here, as if cursing herself for self-centeredness once more, then she almost relaxed out of it-

“But that unlimited bombardment of others’ opinions…we’re not meant to live like that.”

“There’s a hell of a lot about the way we live that I’ll take a guess no one was ‘meant’ to experience,” Daniel said.

“That was another thing I loved about Louis’ perspective. I had so many of those same questions-is our nature inherently evil? How did this all begin in the first place? Are vampires creatures of God if there is one, of the universe, part of the food chain as anything else? Every intricacy of human development-the stages of grief, the growing and decaying of the mind, changing relationships, all that was supposedly meant-what’s the effect of eternity on humanity? So many of our kind have lost it, and I’ve tried, tried to hold on. But something about what Claudia said stuck with me; I’d always known the coven had a sense of ‘vampire pride’, but the way she put it made it seem like any other societally put-down identity, like something to truly celebrate. That’s one way it’s often been looked at in fiction, with the other being the curse that Armand had found it to be before Lestat…Lestated his way into things. I am proud of my power, but I cannot call myself proud of all I did to gain it.”

“And all of this inner turmoil got to be too much after about how long?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it too much exactly, the leaving was…something more noble than that, I’d hope. But this lasted a few years. I made a survival tactic of pushing away all of this questioning, of seeing only what was put in front of me; after a lifetime of trying to stick to a certain sense of morality, I needed some way to let go, so I suppose I just went entirely in the opposite direction. We had our motorcycle hunts, like the one Louis described, and those were heaven: the open sky, the glimpses of the centuries-old buildings we whipped past, our shouts and songs ricocheting through the streets, the half-righteous glory of bleeding dry those wealth-hoarding motherfuckers who turned a thousand blind eyes to the mounting political horror. I had a family. And a few members of that family resented me, a few outright hated me, but I had a wild kind of freedom that I had never felt at home. This was new, deliciously new, and I tried to focus on that feeling because I…frankly, Daniel, although my power grew as the ancient blood simmered and perhaps I could have escaped, part of me didn’t want to give up the intoxication of what I had.”

He nodded.

“Until?”

~

Nineteen Thirty-Eight, Paris, France

This was it.

The horrid and powerful theatre folk of Paris had been slowly extinguished, spaced out enough that suspicion would not find the Théâtre des Vampires, and tonight was the last. Their offense wasn’t quite as unforgivable as a few of the rest, but being condescending towards young artists was being condescending towards young artists, and she and her coven needed to eat.

Tonight would be the downfall of the company owners who had told Isabelle with a smile that she didn’t have herself quite figured out yet.

This one was petty, something in her said, just as petty as her lack of grief upon watching that privileged young bully meet her death all that time ago. It was that, she knew, that had likely been one of the first things to alert Armand to her vampiric potential. And for these years, she had dreamt of what it would be like to witness those vapid, fake-deep hypocrites finally realize that Isabelle de la Rue knew who she was.

What she had not expected was that their haunted gaze from the stage right wing, held in place by Gustave and Estelle, would be the only thing she could think of, boring through flowing masses of perfect auburn curls straight to the ever-present and oft-dismissed burn at the back of her mind.

The artsong that she and Sam had chosen was one praising the inherent beauty of night, fitting for a theater filled with creatures of darkness; and the auditorium, usually restless throughout its duration and eager to return to its crudely mocking laughter, was stiller tonight.

“La lune blanche luit dans les bois; de chaque branche part une voix sous la ramée…”

The white moon shines in the woods; from each branch, a voice emerges under the foliage.

Behind her, projections of trees swayed eerily as animations of glowing eyes between their branches appeared and then disappeared, gone with a breath to leave the audience wondering whether they were truly there at all. The haunting nature of the context gave a striking and oddly beautiful contrast to the peace of the song, and despite herself, Isabelle smiled, relishing one of the few nights that her audience seemed to get it.

It was nights like these that almost let her think she was just another young singer, living her human life’s dream.

Breathing deeply to fuel an upcoming high note, she looked up towards Armand, whose fingers absentmindedly tapped the piano accompaniment on the balcony as he gazed down at her with something close to true admiration.

“Ô, bien aimée,” she floated.

Oh, beloved.

There was love there, that was certain.

So why did this moment of peace feel like a respite, not like the usual course of her days?

She glanced over to the company owners, their faces hollow after their capture with hardly an ounce of the arrogance they had once held. As the piano continued, Isabelle took a moment to search their thoughts-

“L’étang reflète, profond miroir…”

The pond reflects, the deep mirror,-

They barely recognized her.

“...la silhouette du saule noir…”

-the silhouette of the black willow-

They did not recognize her.

“...où le vent pleure…”

…where the wind weeps.

Looking back out to the audience, she halted for a moment, then poured her sigh into her major sixth.

“Rêvons…”

As her vibrato bloomed, there was then a spark that came from one of the minds, that they suddenly had put a name to the face, but Isabelle was beginning to realize…

This is not the triumph I had thought it would be.

“...c’est l’heure.”

It is the hour.

Her face painted even more pale, her finger bound by a lover’s blood that seemed to weigh her hand down more with every passing month, standing cold in the spotlight while hundreds upon hundreds of bodies lay under her feet-

This is not proof that I know who I am.

This is…

This is quite the opposite.

“Un vaste et tendre apaisement semble descendre du firmament que l’astre irise…”

A vast and tender calm seems to descend from the sky of the iridescent star.

She had fancied the idea of leaving many times, but it had always come with a tinge of desperation or loss, of knowledge that that willpower would fade at one smell of rust and makeup backstage or one sound of Armand’s voice.

But as her rich soprano climbed through Hahn’s softly wondrous buildup, she breathed into the beautiful certainty that this time was different.

A liberating bittersweetness filled the air as Isabelle promised through her final notes that they would be her last upon this stage.

“C’est l’heure exquise.”

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter vii

"the Moth, Frozen in Amber"

a hunt, an exchange, a continuation, and an outburst

iwtv oc x armand, this chapter ~1.8k

as the kids say, WE'RE SO BACK

can you tell that i'm already having A Time this semester

and yes she was besties with edith piaf bc It's My Historical Reader Insert and I Can Do What I Want

anyway WHOO this one was very cathartic to write. hope yall enjoy, lmk what you think

chapter vi fic masterlist chapter viii

“Getting lunch”, as suggested, was not as fantastical a concept to this unlikely pair as it would be to many others of their kind. Being fledglings of an ancient vampire, they stalked the gloomy New York afternoon-with Daniel staying more in the shade, his inherited powers having had less time to mature than Isabelle’s-and searched.

This search came to a delightfully obvious end when they passed a thoroughly isolated alleyway, graced with the vape-flavored sight of a posse of college-age boys in polo shirts and unfortunately lettered red baseball caps.

Isabelle bit the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning and turned to Daniel, finding a wicked glint under his dark sunglasses. With a nod and a saunter, the actress and the journalist shared a feast and cleaned up the evidence, keeping leftovers to last long past the interview.

Twenty Twenty-Three (The Next Hour), New York City, United States of America

Satisfied with their meal, sickened by the memories of privilege and unearned arrogance they’d taken in through the blood of the young men, and both now a little bit high on flavored nicotine, they wound through the streets back to Daniel’s apartment. As they walked, he told her the parts of his story not granted to human eyes, as well as what had happened after; Armand’s machinations, the now-grown “fascinating boy”’s own turning, and most of what he’d learned to have happened decades earlier (though not all, she could tell, and fully understood why). Isabelle had had no idea upon first reading the book that her existence would have so many similarities to that of this entirely jaded man, who had of course felt exactly the same about this conscientiously skewed “young” woman; they realized now that their experiences held so much in common that the differences in those placed demeanors faded, leaving an odd sort of knowing despite their very short acquaintance.

“I guess I just thought,” Daniel was half-laughing in a last shot at nonchalant bitterness, “I thought I was the first. That’s all.”

“No, I get it,” she responded. Turning to study his face, her voice took on a bit of teasing incredulity: “Is that…could it possibly be…a bit of vulnerability from the great Daniel Molloy?”

“Don’t start,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “I’m the one interviewing you, not the other way around. This just changes a lot.”

She nodded solemnly, and he dug into his jacket pocket for his phone, pressing record despite every bell and whistle being back at the apartment.

“We’re back post-midday-draining with the vampire-”

“Isabelle de la Rue.”

“-and I want to know whether things felt the same for you as they did for me. You’re a vampire now, you’re part of the coven, he doesn’t have dominion over your mind anymore but you’ve essentially given into that life. How did things go after that turning point?”

“...Turning point?”

“Let it be stated on the record that I did not attempt a pun.”

“Let it be stated on the record that it was definitely received as such,” she replied. “But, yeah, it was…as you said, it was a sense of letting oneself be swept up in a new life. I had been so focused on the fact that Armand couldn’t physically get into my mind anymore that I forgot about every other-more human-emotional tie.”

“That fucked-up blur between supernatural manipulation and genuine…”

He stopped, fiddling with his key and pretending that was the reason he’d trailed off.

“Love,” she finished, looking at Daniel as they reentered his apartment. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

“Sure,” he coughed, a thousand recently-revealed memories passing across his eyes.

“And, yeah, precisely. I found that I just…well, after being turned, I felt that I needed him more than ever. After a lifetime of being tossed to the side and swearing that I’d wait for the right person, a lifetime of scrambling for control over my own life, this sudden onslaught of being entirely and straightforwardly wanted for the first time knocked me out; I fully let go after that first taste of his blood, and everything rational was just…gone. Honestly, nearly everything before I had stepped into the Théâtre was gone; not by the work of the Mind Gift, just by the overwhelming newness of vampiric existence-of vampiric existence as his companion. Now, whenever there was somewhere to go, there was somebody beautiful waiting for me just outside the door. Now, when I absentmindedly hummed a bit of an old duet, someone would complete the phrase. Now there was finally someone who wanted to understand all of my depths and flaws, who didn’t shun them away or pretend not to see them but instead viewed them as natural and even admirable. We had both come from this sort of rigidity and exploitative background-his far, far worse than mine, of course-and we each found this wonderful sort of release in the other. We’d stay up hours into the night and day, and talk and talk and talk-”

“And only talk?” came the interruption of her near-rapturous repetition.

“Oh, of course not,” Isabelle said once she’d recovered from the memory, “but you didn’t want to hear about that.”

She was quiet for a moment, one finger circling a small threadbare spot in the armchair she’d now grown quite familiar with.

“‘For the first time in my life, I was seen.’ That’s what Louis told you, and that is how it was for me. When I read that phrase in your book…I lost my breath all over again.”

The journalist nodded as he finished connecting his phone back to the laptop and microphone.

Nothing more needed explanation.

Daniel already knew.

“So,” he said after a while, “when did things change? When did you come to the thought that you needed to go?”

“Part of it was because of Édith. Armand always seemed to come up with more rehearsals and group hunts during the times when we’d try to get together; eventually, I confronted him about it. He said that, since I had chosen this life, asked to become his despite his doubts, that I needed to give up every outward tie to humanity. I pointed out that that humanity was what drew him to me in the first place-the same way it was with you-and by the way he reacted, it seemed that he simply wanted it all to himself. I missed her. The last time I managed to see her, it was even more difficult to do so, because she was becoming truly famous.”

“Wait,” Daniel said, “...that Édith?”

Slowly, Isabelle nodded, looking to him with a slight smile.

“That Édith. My Édith. You know how the nightclub owner who discovered her died, the mobsters she had some associations with, the accusations that almost destroyed her career?”

“I have to say I’m not as brushed up on the history of French popular song as I guess I should have been, but I’ve heard of that, yes.”

“The murder was Armand’s doing. A warning, I think, that he could make my friends suffer if they kept me from him for too long.”

“Red flag number…we’ve lost count now.”

“You’re one to talk, Mr. Molloy.”

“But Mademoiselle Piaf clearly got back on her feet.”

“At least we got a proper goodbye.”

“When you left?”

“When I…tried. That was the first time. Captain of the ship got ‘rest’-ed into never leaving the dock. I think, on some level, Armand knew that playing any power card wouldn’t get me to want to stay, so he ran up that ramp in a billowing trench coat like some hero of an old film, wrapped me up into his arms, and said that he’d heard the waters that week were far too treacherous for a ‘visit home’. I knew I didn’t believe him, but he held me so tightly, so-so tenderly, whispering over and over that he couldn’t lose me…”

“So his tears worked better than the Mind Gift ever could.”

“...Yes.”

“Christ, Isabelle, he was never afraid of losing his power over you because he knew he already had it. Armand didn’t even need access to your memories-”

“I know-”

“-you were just so in love that he could easily,” Daniel bulldozed, “like any mortal, play your heartstrings like that fucking violin you always talked about-”

“I know!”

After the days of quips and tearful recollections, this was indeed a shout. She slammed her hands onto the arms of the chair, and every light in the room flickered.

Daniel was silent.

“I’m not proud of it,” Isabelle eventually said, cold and hard and finally loud. “I am fully aware that I spent my whole life terrified of being controlled only to wind up under the spell of the first dark-curled, smooth-voiced soul to actually look my way for once. I am fully aware that I saw everything and allowed love to blind me anyway. I thought we could figure it all out and grow together-it had truly seemed, for a while, like we were. I was young, I was tired of waiting, and I felt that those twenty-two years spent waiting were longer than any possible eternity. I wanted to be desired, chased, caught, cherished, held-I wanted him. Surrounded by this mockery of the life I have always longed for, this place where self-titled artists postured in their little cliques and prided themselves on their shallow works while ignoring the hundreds of bodies being dragged across the floor, I thought that that was all I was ever going to get.”

Her ragged breath had climaxed into sobs now, without a single speck of the demure camera-worthiness of her previous tears. These last words hanging in the air, Isabelle stared daggers at Daniel, the golden circles at the center of her glowing hazel eyes now alight with the same fire that Louis had burned the Théâtre with only a few years after she’d gone.

This was the desperation of the vampire Isabelle de la Rue,

and the desperation of the young mortal Bella Ditell,

all wrapped up into one bleeding watercolor quilt of a woman.

“I was swept away again,” she choked out, catching her breath. “I let him take me back to the Théâtre, swooned into him when he put La Bohème on his phonograph, and relished in every physical reminder that this glorious, terrible, deeply complex and surely divine being could not bear the thought that I would leave him. I committed it all to memory-the dizzying warmth of Armand’s bare chest against mine, my hand moving up his thigh and his tangling in my hair as he ripped out every bobby pin I’d placed for easy travel, the way the taste of his blood was now tinged with something like bitter wine. His grip was rougher now, but I didn’t care…”

Her breath having nearly returned to steadiness, Isabelle winced at one more admission.

“I didn’t notice the pain, because it fit so well with the music.”

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter vi

“Don’t You Want a Lark Whose Every Blood Cell Sings Your Name?”

🎶turning time! every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end🎶

iwtv oc x armand, this chapter ~2.2k

sing it with me now I KNOW WHO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME (the vampire armand) I KNOW WHO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME (armand de whatever) I KNOW WHO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME (armanddd) TAKE ME HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOME

chapter v fic masterlist chapter vii

Twenty Twenty-Three (The Next Day), New York City, United States of America

“We’re back with the vampire Isabelle de la Rue, who last left us in Paris with her hope to be turned by the vampire Armand in order to ensure he could never supernaturally manipulate her again. Which, it should be noted, does not rule out your garden variety gaslighting.”

They were back in Daniel’s living room, equipped with the same recording gear, new wine glasses of blood, and a day’s worth of reflection before getting back to the story at hand. Isabelle let out half a scoff and took her seat once more; clearly, today’s conversation would not be any easier.

“You’re right, it doesn’t, made very clear by the crux remaining the same even when I had to shift my stories a hell of a lot in order to safely tell them to a human therapist. I eventually realized that was futile; our emotional experiences as vampires can be so caught up in our nature that it’s hard not to feel alone in how to deal with it.”

“Starting off cheerily, I see.”

“Hey, man, you started it.”

“I want to know,” Daniel began, “how it worked-if it did work that time. You weren’t turned yet, so he could still read your intentions; why wouldn’t that stop him?”

She was quiet for a moment, a small smile blooming up from the longing part of her that still existed somewhere. It was time to tell this part of the story.

“Because none of what I told him was a lie.”

~

Nineteen Thirty-Six, Paris, France

Through all her years of performing, Isabelle was not used to spending much time at a mirror after a show. The placing of each curl and ribbon came beforehand, when she gave herself the almost ritualistic escape of becoming something else for a night. But now, here she was, after a performance that had rid the world this time of an abusive factory supervisor, standing in front of her dressing room mirror.

The usual post-show hum of muted audience chatter as they left, castmates’ lipsticked voices in her ear, and laughter from all the coven regarding that night’s slip-ups and audience reactions was a comfort to her intermittently sparking heartbeat. Her makeup had just started to fade into her skin, her jewelry was glittering hopelessly askew, and she basked in the post-performance glow that tended to be carried long into the morning.

She always felt her most beautiful like this.

Despite her certainty in all that had passed over the preceding months, a small part of her still felt anxious in the need to be so, tonight.

Then there was the sudden, melting warmth of a hand on her back.

“Something is on your mind, love,” came Armand’s whisper as she looked into the eyes of his reflection. “Tell me.”

“Not here,” she murmured, and no sooner had she than Armand nodded and turned away with clear intent and hope for her to follow. They ascended the stairs, but not before Isabelle caught Eglee’s gaze, widened her eyes in wordless communication, and received an encouraging wink. More time had passed since their conversation, with the addition that the romantic nature of the newcomer’s relationship with the maître was no longer denied, and the house manager-having guessed her human friend’s plan-seemed to be delighted at its finally coming to pass.

Maybe.

Depending.

As she and Armand made it to the top of the stairs and went down a hallway to his room, Isabelle absentmindedly twisted the ring that her character wore. It had been a gift; the jewel itself was no ordinary burgundy stone, but rather a small glass circle filled with Armand’s blood and embedded into the golden band.

“So that,” he’d smiled, “when you’re swooning in your false lover’s arms, you will not forget how it all began.”

She and Gustave had had a laugh about the melodramatics of it when she’d told him at rehearsal one day, but she secretly cherished it, this constant reminder that her attention was valued. As she had learned more and more about Armand and his past, her deeper understanding of all that lay behind his wistful eyes and measured words made her quite adept at reading him; her heart went out to him more and more, and she now could hold a constant drop of this person she adored.

“The gossip of the coven,” Armand said as he closed his door behind them, “is growing with every week you are not one of them. I still cannot think of any situation here worthy of you, but time is passing quickly and the Great Laws still hold. Is this the source of your pensiveness? Do you have a preference as to who becomes your maker?”

Although this was asked quite intently, he was also shuffling through a few papers and putting them into a drawer. After taking a steadying breath, Isabelle placed her hand over his on the desk, waiting until he looked up to meet her gaze.

“Indeed I do.”

A thousand thoughts widened Armand’s amber eyes, and he lifted a hand to her face in something like incredulity.

“Truly?”

She nodded, and a moment passed before he feverishly turned away.

“I cannot. I will not. You have heard, I am sure, every reason that I have sworn never to make another, never to doom someone-especially someone like you-to this eternity.”

“I’m going to be doomed anyway,” Isabelle said, fully levelheaded. “You said it yourself on that very second night-my being turned is the only way to survive, and I’m not going to give up on life now, not after finally experiencing so many reasons to stay, reasons that I always knew existed and have been working for all my life. Those reasons-a community, a dream career, a true romance, and a real impact that I’m still figuring out-they have their many thorns here; all the rest were willing to kill me to preserve the status quo, but you alone broke that, you alone were there from the beginning. Someone in this building will have to be my maker, and I truly, truly want it to be you.”

Having looked out the window through this monologue, unable to face her but watching her in the reflection of the glass, he now turned around as he processed this last statement.

“You were turned without a say in the matter,” she said slowly. “The horror that happened to you…that is not how things should be, and it’s not how things have to be. I have some odd, stubborn hope that this-that this doesn’t have to be a curse. So if there’s going to be one moment that changes the state of my existence forever…”

She had tentatively approached him throughout this, every word of her planned seduction having been forgotten the second she stepped into the room, and all that was left was earnest compassion and an irrevocable longing to be close to him. Breathing intently, Armand allowed her to take his hand.

“...If everything comes down to that moment, I want it to be one of love.”

His chest hitched. She didn’t know how much she’d expected her entreaty to truly affect him, and how much he’d let it show if she did, but she saw it all plainly now. Isabelle knew for certain that they shared a yearning to be seen fully and loved wholly, and this was the core from which every word lifted.

“I could die now, or I could spend an eternity reckoning with all that happens here…I never thought I’d be comfortable with the idea of immortality, but-”

His hand came to her waist, almost trembling, almost as if holding onto her would mean holding on forever to the words she spoke-

“I’d gladly take forever if it was here with you.”

He let out a breath, so close to her that she could nearly taste a warm, metallic, somewhat sweet combination of blood and cigarette smoke.

“A companion?”

This proposal was softer than she had ever, ever heard him speak before, and she nodded, hazel eyes almost glowing with pure emotion.

“Entirely, my love,” she answered. “Intertwined in every cell and every breath.”

Armand slowly kissed her jawline, drawing a breath of anticipation, then pulled away to look her in the eye. The intensity there told her that something in him had wanted this too, had been waiting for her to ask, had been longing for the chance to give himself permission.

Shoulders finally relaxing, she nodded again, each of them finally letting themselves somehow smile in wondrous disbelief. The grip both his hands now had on her waist grew more certain as he pulled her in, kissing her soundly as one arm looped around to pull her ever and ever closer. She tangled her hand into his hair, eagerly massaging those dark curls free from the gel that held them; each was an arpeggio that she had longed to play from the very first moment. The blood ring was still cold on her hand, and when Armand realized that it was this ring currently twisting itself further into his hair, he let out a sigh that made any remaining worry in Isabelle completely melt away.

Slowly, deftly, Armand’s kisses worked their way down to the base of her neck, and a thrill went through her every nerve. This was the top of the sky, and there was no chance of stopping her freefall now; it was the most untethered, most intoxicated, most free she had ever felt, and she didn’t know how it could possibly become any-

Then there was the gleam of his fangs, and the shock of a sting, and the pulse of her every burden and beauty flowing into him, breath by breath. She gasped again and again as she felt the blood leave her, head cradled by Armand’s hand as her forgotten black lace veil fell from her hair, leaving them both tangled within. The office was small and didn’t necessarily lend itself to the  most luxurious of turning conditions, and Isabelle soon became aware that she was sitting on top of Armand’s coffin, head spinning both with the loss of blood and the need of him near her again. He was looking down at her as he sliced a nail through his forearm, eyes heavily lidded in reaction to however it was she appeared at the moment, and Isabelle blinked in the vague sensation of her own blood trickling down her chest and into her gown. They’ll have to clean this, said some faraway voice in her head, soon blown quite away by the second phase of the turning.

Armand had sat beside her, solemnly presenting his wrist, which she gingerly took into her hands before pressing her lips to the wound. The moment that the blood hit her tongue produced a high, musical cry in the back of her throat; this was the headiest of wines, this was strawberry and melted chocolate and four fateful pomegranate seeds, this was honeysweet and indigodark and Armand, Armand, Armand. She gasped it in, drinking with her eyes rolling back, and kissed along his wrist every few slurps in complete devotion.

All this time, while it still could, Armand’s voice caressed itself into the contours of her mind. That’s it, my own, my everything. That’s it, my belovéd, my one; I know you deeply, I love you madly, I am yours alone. And you, you my lark, you my precious songbird…you shall be entirely mine.

With this last thought, he pressed his wrist further into her mouth for the final push, nearly gagging her on the warm sweetness of his blood. She replied telepathically as much as she could with a rhythmically repeating I love you, I love you, I know you, I see you, I love you that kept in time with their now-synced heartbeats; he would no longer have that access to her mind after this glorious night, and she made certain that the last he’d hear of her thoughts would be everything he’d ever wanted.

Her eyes, still hazel but truly glowing now, opened with a vision that was suddenly sharper and more clear than she had ever had before. She laughed in joyful surprise, entirely high on blood and lust and newfound power. Armand, with a wicked and utterly fulfilled grin, swept her up into his arms and kissed her deeply, lifting up her flowing dress and hooking her leg around him until they were-

Twenty Twenty-Three, New York City, United States of America

“Aaaaaaaaaaand fade to black,” Daniel interrupted into his microphone, pressing his spacebar with a strong and barely-contained clack.

“...Sorry, what?”

Isabelle blinked and realized that she had been near tears this whole time, thoroughly lost in the memory.

“Why would you-”

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said, a bit shaken. “The story should come first, I know, and I can tell you that it always does with me. But this is…I don’t know. Our memory lanes are crossing, Isabelle, only with a few key differences.”

She was quiet for a moment, still coming back into reality, and then it dawned on her what he really meant.

“Wait-”

“Yeah.”

“You two were-”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. There’s a story there too.”

“Oh!!”

“Right,” he said, moving to his door and grabbing a jacket before turning back to her. “You wanna get lunch?”

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter v

“a Catharsis Always Challenged, Always Shown”

the slow initiation, the thousand reckonings, and the formation of a hope.

iwtv oc x armand, this chapter ~1.4k

oh the tdv coven...oh the concept of People Containing Multitudes...oh theatre cliques...oh bisexuality...oh aesthetics...oh the constant wonder whether beautiful moments are lies...oh the question of what fulfillment truly means...

LETSGOOOOOOOOO

chapter iv fic masterlist chapter vi

Twenty Twenty-Three, New York City, United States of America

“...Have to admit, I did not see that coming.”

“How do you mean?”

“Understandably throwing up after the backstage brutality was revealed to you, then, two minutes later, volunteering to be the one to pick and choose who’s on the other end of that brutality? I’ve gotta say, it’s unlikely. Not that their mocking, performative violence was any more morally correct, but that’s not something any of us can really call ourselves, can we?”

Daniel’s “can we” was delivered as something of a challenge, to which Isabelle pursed her lips, about to answer before he summed it up for her.

“But you were trying.”

“I was really fucking trying.”

“You were trying.”

“I also know that that was a memory which Armand had tainted. In his version, I didn’t see the mangled body at all, didn’t throw up, it just skipped straight to the joyful planning stage. The illusion started to fade when I was turned, but I didn’t give myself the space to fully believe it and unravel it all until I left.”

“So how did things go after the agreement?”

“Quite a few weeks went by during which I was the only human, to my current knowledge, ever employed at the Théâtre des Vampires. Armand kept postponing the task of assigning someone to turn me, which was entirely fine by me. I did become the Bride of Death each night, black lace veil and all, and that fateful improvised scene was pretty much duplicated-only, Gustave played the rescuer now, while Armand stayed at his artistic-director perch in the rafters.”

“I’ll take a shot in the dark and say that your famously possessive maître was less than thrilled with that development.”

“He did seem jealous, but joining the rest of them onstage would have meant losing some of their respect. We hadn’t truly labeled things then, anyway, it was far too soon; honestly, to keep from getting my hopes up, I often told myself that our bond was entirely platonic, that this sense of being courted was simply the straightforward affection of an artist. He gave me a major hand in writing my character, letting her be as close to fully fleshed out as any could be in skits like these. We’d go on long, long walks after shows, my hair newly freed from its nightly coiled updo and our makeup just starting to fade, and anyone else out strolling at night would greet us as a couple. I learned some of his demons and he learned mine. We had a similar way of speech-speckled with references, thoroughly sentimental; I was advertised on the posters as the “Lady in Black, with the Voice of a Meadowlark”, and I became bolder over time in letting him know my adoration too. I loved the way he took everything seriously in the Théâtre, that each rehearsal was somewhat sacred and every moment of every play was so intentionally thought out-at least, that’s how things were then, that clearly changed later on. I had never met someone before who everything mattered to as much as it did to me. We…we were happy.”

“What kind of person shouts to the world that their entirely platonic buddy has the voice of a meadowlark?”

“Theatre kids, Daniel, we’ve been over this.”

“What about your friend from the audience?”

“Edith. Dear girl. The very little time I spent away from the Théâtre-I lived there by that point, a room of my own, which a solid amount of the coven objected to-was time that I always spent with her. Looking back, Armand did try to keep me in the building or around him as much as he could, but I didn’t let myself think anything of it then-it was the first time I felt truly wanted, and I wanted to believe that it was okay, that I could let myself enjoy it. But as I got drawn further into the coven, Edith remained my connection to humanity. She was a singer too, and a phenomenal one at that. I went to a lot of her gigs, and she came to the Théâtre even more when I joined the cast.”

“And your side job, playing God?”

“...That. Yes. Gustave and I would whisk each other offstage, then stand in the wings as the spurned reaper ‘found’ his next charge. The racist producers, the sexist directors, and the classist theater owners were spaced out by other bigots and tyrants so that the theatre community wouldn’t get suspicious. Our audiences didn’t frequent their places much, anyway, so there wasn’t much chance of getting caught. It was gratifying to think that the long-suffering young artists whose spirits they tried to break were being avenged and hopefully gaining another chance, but I admit it certainly wasn’t entirely selfless-that horrid man who’d abused his dancers, the one who’d said I was ugly and too opinionated, was held in the other wing and saw me presented as a strong-willed beauty, draped in lace and taffeta while being celebrated for not once shutting my mouth. When I became something of a fan favorite, everyone who’d doubted me had to watch all that they could have had. It was a lot of half-catharsis and a lot of reckoning, but life at the Théâtre was such a whirlwind that I didn’t have much time for true self-reflection.”

“And I suppose that this quelled the coven’s doubts of your vampiric potential.”

“It did. Gradually, that ‘she’s smart, for a human’ perception of me they’d had at the start became something almost like belonging. They appeared intoxicating from the outside, a found family like what I’d dreamed of all my life. I still wasn’t fully part of the fold-there was, naturally, a lot of gossip regarding the way that Armand was when he was with me and that they resented my coming in so quickly-but some of them almost became true friends, even showing me the ropes of vampirism.”

~

Nineteen Thirty-Six, Paris, France

“So, tell me,” Eglee said as the women shared Isabelle’s dressing room mirror for their usual makeup, “when are you becoming one of us officially?”

“Not a clue,” Isabelle replied. “He keeps saying he’s going to get one of you to turn me, and then the ceremony, but it just never happens.”

“Oh, he surely doesn’t want any of us lowly coven members sullying his lark,” came a joking singsong as the vampire nudged her shoulder.

“I’m sure it’s not like that.”

A moment passed, and the dark-haired woman regarded her intently.

“Ah, but it is,” she murmured, suddenly unable to look at Isabelle as she returned her focus to her eyeliner. “More than you know.”

“...Then why doesn’t he just do it himself?”

Eglee was quiet for a second, a wicked grin soon lighting her face.

“You’ve longed for that, haven’t you?”

They dissolved into giggles, and as Isabelle struggled to hide her blush, she realized that she was living a glimpse of the teenagehood that it felt everyone else in her hometown had the chance to experience. It was simple, it was silly, it was glorious.

“To be quite serious,” recovered Eglee from her laugh, “Maître vowed a long time ago to never make another vampire, and he never has. And I’d advise you to be careful. He’s quite good for a fling-wonderful, in fact-but you, songbird, seem to be much more aflutter than only lust can cause. Don’t let him get too much entry into that pretty head of yours.”

Isabelle nodded. It was a sobering reminder, Armand’s abilities; she wanted this relationship, she wanted this role, she wanted this community, but she still wanted to believe that her agency over her own mind and soul mattered much more.

“As for the turning,” Eglee went on, “that bond is certainly a strong one. You will be bitten, drained near the point of death, then fed the blood of your maker. From then on, though, you will not be able to read each other’s minds.”

A small breath escaped Isabelle, and she nearly smeared her lipstick.

…This was new.

“Really?”

“Mhm.”

“Does that…” she paused, believing it too good to be true, “does that apply to the rest of the Mind Gift?”

“I believe it does.”

Here was a chance. Here was a way to have her gothic romance cake and eat it too, to finally build something on more equal footing, to allow herself to be swept up without the danger of truly losing her identity.

All she had to do was convince an ancient vampire to break a centuries-held promise.

…Lord help me.

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter iv

“Dried Cranberries and Upswept Guilt”

some musings on and continuation of those really really weird twenty-five-ish hours.

iwtv oc x armand, this chapter ~2k

welcome, one and all, to Daniel Molloy Criticizes My Writing. also we're REALLY GETTIN INTO THE PLOT NOW WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. that one bit of 2x02 sure was a ride huh

the last two lines are indeed a tuck everlasting reference bc who am i if not a ride or die for the third most perfect book/musical adaptation of book of all time (third only to les mis, bc obviously, and great comet, which also has something close to a reference in this chapter) (oh i forgot there’s a poto reference here too)

enjoy! like rb comment share all that jazz

chapter iii fic masterlist chapter v

Twenty Twenty-Three, New York City, United States of America

“Perhaps it was everything I’ve feared wrapped up in everything I’d hoped, or perhaps it was the opposite. But then, at least, at last, I had the chance to find that out for myself.”

Her long and prose-abundant recollection having reached a solid stopping point, a somewhat winded Isabelle nodded to herself and drank from her wine glass of the blood that Daniel had poured for them both.

Incidentally, she wasn’t quite sure of its origin, and wasn’t quite sure whether she wanted to know. Dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, kale-a health nut. Poor thing, all that work just to-

“Okay,” came the interruption of her mental sommelier practice. “A lot clearly happened in those twenty-five-some hours, beautifully told, if you were ever to meet Louis I’m entirely certain you’d just turn-of-phrase each other to second death, yadda yadda. Question. About how much of that, looking back, do you think was utter bullshit?”

This was not a question she was expecting.

Knowing Armand, it should have been, but it was a stab in the moral compass to admit that part of her wanted to keep that memory as romanticized as it currently appeared.

“I mean,” he went on, “gaining the respect of all-powerful vampires by completing a few Shakespeare quotes, the one leading them all protecting you specifically for unknown reasons, the whole tied-to-a-chair cliché, the ‘soaring violins’, the singing?”

“...To be fair, those all-powerful vampires are also trademark annoying, semipretentious theatre kids. As am I.”

“There was someone, you know, who was also of entertainment value to them and it still didn’t save her.”

Silence.

A very, very long silence.

“I’ve thought about her every day since the papers came out,” Isabelle eventually said, “and nearly every hour since reading your book. Some combination of genuine heartbreak with white guilt with relating to her struggle to be seen as all she knows she is with hating myself for having ever associated with those that allowed that to happen, let alone those who orchestrated it, I-I do. I think about Claudia constantly, and I never even knew her, so I can barely imagine how the loss must feel to Louis. Madeline, too-the mentions of her in your book had me wishing to know her as well. There’s your typical vampires-killing-to-survive horrific, and then there’s…truly, unfathomably, unforgivably horrific.”

Daniel nodded solemnly.

“Madame de la Book of Morals reconciles with having loved the man who, decades later, directed the slaughter of-”

“I never told you that I loved him.”

This she said soft, quick, low, and received a magnificently executed eyeroll in reply.

“The fucking Orpheus and Eurydice reference? The kiss that apparently had an audience captivated? That whole trust schtick?”

“All staged. Improvised, and yes, felt in the moment, but staged. No, Mr. Molloy, I did not immediately start a committed relationship with an ancient vampire in the twenty-five hours since meeting him directly after his coven tried to kill me.”

“Good for you. Now, tell me again how much of all of that was even true.”

“I…it’s a rough discernment process, for sure. You were there with Louis, helping each other remember things that Armand had made you forget. There’s a certain haze to memories that had been tampered with, but it’s hard to tell with that day specifically, because all of those heightened circumstances put things in a different kind of haze anyway.”

Isabelle remembered sitting in her new and empty apartment once she had finally gotten away from the coven years later, combing through every journal and every memory of every moment of her life in search of that off feeling and making herself sit with each of those memories until the truth of them finally came back. It had taken months-or longer, she had lost track of time-but she’d rather have wasted the rest of her eternity doing that than lived a lie.

“There was also a certain way that it seemed Louis had acted,” she continued, “when what he was telling you had been planted-did you notice that in me at all, just now?”

“Not really. And as for storytelling demeanor, there’s a lot of reasons it seems different this time,” Daniel considered, “because the Louis that I met in Dubai was a far cry from the Louis he described himself as in New Orleans, Paris, even San Francisco. You, though…as you tell your story, I can see the naïve, outspoken, bright young actress with a point of view materialize again. Is it the self-actualized vampiress or the anxious girl that’s the facade here?”

She blinked, clicked her tongue, and took another long sip of blood.

“You’re very good at your job. Neither of them is a facade, though. I am one hundred and eight years old, Daniel, going on one hundred and nine this December, and if there is one thing I despise it is inauthenticity and the expectation of it in others; everything that I have been was real and still exists in me. I have not changed from one type of person to another, I don’t even like to think about people as types of people-I’ve never really entirely transformed, we just react to our surroundings. And if we’re lucky, and intentional about it, sometimes we grow. I hold just enough compassion for my younger self to still call her my own.”

In response to this, he just looked at her for a while, clearly on the edge of laughter.

“What?”

“If there’s one thing you despise it’s inauthenticity, and yet-”

“Okay, look-”

~

Nineteen Thirty-Six, Paris, France

“Interesting,” Armand murmured against her lips, which still burned in the glow of the contact and the spotlight. “I suppose a few folks do enjoy something similar to a happy ending.”

“Give them just one per show, perhaps. We don’t want to let them get too comfortable,” Isabelle joked. She was floating. She was falling. She was-

“‘We’?”

She pulled ever so slightly away to look him in the eye for a moment, and, remembering themselves, they ran hand in hand offstage and ducked into an alcove.

“Well,” she said, half out of breath, “what exactly were you planning on doing with me after this ‘grand rescue’?”

Asking this, she started to come down from her stage-lights-and-dark-curls-induced high, now realizing that she was somewhat stuck and yet somewhat thrilled about it, but Armand took her hands and started to whisper-

“The Great Laws still stand. In order to remain alive, you’d have to keep remaining alive-that is, one of us would eventually have to turn you. There’s usually a hierarchy that new members must work their way through, but if I must justify your staying to the coven as a catalyst for ticket sales, we will not have to wait to write you a role of your own-this Death and the Maiden concept is something that I am sure Sam could run with-”

Then there was a scream.

On instinct, Isabelle broke away from Armand and went to the wings to see what had-

…Oh.

To her horror, in those few seconds, the vampires had taken some other poor soul for their sacrifice-she sickened to wonder whether they kept ‘extras’ downstairs-who was now being dragged onstage, soon to be devoured by Santiago in her place.

I was supposed to die, but because I had to go and be a big ham about it, some other innocent person will be killed.

She began to scream and moved to run back onstage, but Armand came from behind, held one hand over her mouth, and secured her waist with the other arm. He whispered to her again, more urgent now:

“This is what we are. This is what we must do. If this is not how you wish to live, I will bring you to rest with not a single ounce of pain, but it would pain me to do it.”

“It would pain you…” came her hand-muffled, dazed reply. “What makes that any different than that person out there, or any of the rest you’ve overseen the killing of? You’ve known me for one day-”

Then the vampires were taking their bow, to a cheering audience surely wondering where their pair of ‘young lovers’ were in the lineup, but Isabelle could see behind them now.

And behind them was a body, mangled beyond recognition, motionless on the stage just long enough for the image to be burned into her mind forever before a trapdoor opened and it fell through with a large clunk. The audience roared with oblivious excitement, the coven members smiled more brightly than ever, and the trapdoor closed again, having claimed another entire life of quirks and memories and flaws and dreams.

Isabelle screamed, truly screamed this time, drowned out by the crowd.

She then pushed Armand aside, bolted from the wings, and vomited.

In what could not have been a physically possible amount of time, he was suddenly near her again, holding her hair back as if it was a bad batch of seafood and not an act of his coven’s that she was sickened by. With a flick of his hand, the door to the room they were now in closed and locked as she wiped her mouth and sobbed.

When she stumbled backwards, his were the only arms to fall into.

“I have, in fact,” Armand said with shocking tenderness, “known you for longer than a day. Those of us with the Dark Gift cannot deny our ability to hear thoughts-it is something like your mortal people-watching. And, night after recent night, I have heard the melodic strain of a soul calling out to be seen. I have heard musings, wishes, and arguments such that I could barely believe they all came from one source. The Théâtre des Vampires has been greatly in need of something lately-this position I hold was not necessarily my choice, and I often find myself longing. So, I searched through the newly arrived voices of Paris…and I found a lark.”

She could only wipe away a leftover tear, considering him with every remnant of mental alertness she had left after such an endless night. Try as she might to keep the victim’s mangled body in her mind, her heartbeat was indeed slowing; she was comforted without consciously wanting to be.

“It is not typically in my nature to bring this curse of eternity onto others. If it is not in yours to join, that is-”

“What if I added a condition?”

She nearly surprised herself with these words, and very clearly surprised him as well.

“A condition?”

What Isabelle had seen the past two nights was horrid beyond comprehension, but it was undeniable that she had, at times, found it beautiful beyond imagination. Her options were to give up entirely and die without ever getting a chance to build her own life, or to try to ease the harm done by this coven from the inside while allowing herself to enjoy being apparently beloved in some way or another.

And if she needed to go, there was a whole world waiting, and eternity to find herself in.

And the only way to secure that that she could think of in this moment was-

“Let me choose the victims.”

Armand’s eyebrows raised, and he tilted his head back as if to say, “explain.”

“I have met some lovely people since I first arrived in Paris,” Isabelle began, regaining a bit of composure, “and some absolutely awful people, people in power who use it only to cause hurt. Yes, it would be shitty to play God like this, but as long as your species-which-well-our species, soon, I suppose-must drain others to survive, we may as well be intentional about it.”

As he listened to the end of this monologue, Armand seemed through a flicker of the eye to become relieved-it is in her, she’d take to this better than we all thought-and an almost boyish glee cracked through his expression. He kissed her birthmark once more, then her palm, then her wrist.

Unconventional as it may be, Isabelle thought with a smile, this could be the new beginning I’ve always hoped for.

Although she did not want to live forever,

She wanted to live.

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter iii

“Ever-Soaring Melodies on Unstable Chords”

having theatre-kid-ed her way into this mess, isabelle realizes she needs to theatre-kid her way out. or, as the case may be, theatre-kid her way in even deeper.

iwtv oc x armand, this chapter ~2.8k

this one takes place entirely in flashback and prose for Melodramatic Anne Rice Reasons. don't worry, we'll get daniel's thoughts (spoiler alert: our boy is Less Than Convinced) and some good good analysis in the next chapter

...currently realizing that, if last chapter was "y/n gets noticed at a concert", this chapter is the fight song by rachel platten moment. but, again, IT'S IWTV SO IT'S DEEPER THAN THAT

ok it is three forty eight am enjoy

chapter ii fic masterlist chapter iv

“I’m not sure why he insisted on keeping her in here. It’s not like she’s different from any other once-fresh meat.”

“Did you hear what they were saying before we caught her? She wanted a job.”

“A job! Here! Mon Dieu, the humans are getting bolder and bolder these days.”

Liquid voices were beginning to work their way into Isabelle’s consciousness as she awoke, her eyes eventually opening to reveal a few members of the last night’s cast and crew.

Last night?

Last week?

Last hour?

She didn’t know.

Suddenly feeling as if she hadn’t breathed in too long, she gasped in a lungful of air and was overwhelmed by a tantalizing smell combining rust, hair gel, potpourri, and…night itself, if that could even be said to have a smell.

Backstage.

Despite being in grave danger, just knowing she was in a dressing room environment sent a shiver of comfort through her that she tried to ignore.

Isabelle’s breath alerted the others to her presence, and as her vision gained focus, she began to recognize them one by one as they looked over her. Given her condition, all she could do was string the occasional tired word together.

“So. I take it…you are…real.”

A moment’s silence, and the vampires burst into debatably-natured laughter.

“That’s a new one,” tittered a slim woman with dark, perfectly rolled curls.

“And I realized that, and now you’re going to kill me? That’s how it is?”

“She’s a quick young thing,” a woman with hair like her own said between drags of her cigarette. “Almost wish we didn’t have to drain her.”

“I mean, you really don’t-”

“I’m afraid we do,” came a familiar drawl, and Santiago seemed to dramatically part his Red Sea of castmates. “Our Great Laws state that no vampire can allow a mortal to live who has had the vampire’s true nature revealed to them. Being that you now know the true nature of the entire Théâtre des Vampires…ah, well. The Laws must be followed. Too bad, my sweet, really. It’s what they say: so full of artless jealousy is guilt-”

“It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”

However much terror was running through her veins at the thought of imminent death, the second half of her favorite Hamlet quote had come through her lips low, calm, and controlled. She breathed in something like relief; here was one thing to hold onto. Santiago, who’d clearly been expecting to continue grandstanding, regarded her with something like a challenge flashing through his cold eyes.

“Stars, hide your fires-”

“Let not light see my black and deep desires.”

“Anger’s my meat: I sup upon myself-”

“And so shall starve with feeding.”

Her adrenaline turning from fear to the high of competition, she would have stood to face Santiago if it were not for her realization that she was tied to her chair. He was advancing on her, an attempt at intimidation, but she matched him play for play and quote for quote; these words were her comfort, her lifeline, her blood.

“Run when you will. The story shall be changed:”

“Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase.”

“Or if I live, is it not very like-”

“-the horrible conceit of death and night-”

“-together with the terror of the place,” they finished in unison before Santiago started up again-

“No, sure, my lord-”

“My mother cried,” they said together, reaching the crest of their increase in volume to the point where they were both shouting-

“But then there was a star danced,” she concluded on her own,  more conviction in her voice than she had ever felt before, “and under that was I born.”

A long, long, long silence seemed to pass as the other cast members stared at them both with endless amusement. Eventually, Santiago allowed himself the smallest of chuckles.

“Yes, we’ll have to fog this one’s mind quite a bit for the next performance. Otherwise, she’ll get the audience on her side, and we can’t have that.”

…What?

No.

Nononononononono-

Eventually, she realized she was saying this repetition out loud-

“Someone get Armand,” she cried out. “You can’t do that to me. He wouldn’t allow it-at least I thought-what happened to the sympathy you had for me? That speech, to that girl? She was always entirely an act-I didn’t know all of you were-I-Armand!-please, please don’t-merde, I’m begging now-I’m saying-”

“Do not take her mind,” a measured yet half-flippant voice came from the staircase, and she turned to see him there.

Was he watching this whole exchange?

An ember of shame threatened to burn within her for wielding power through words that weren’t truly hers and then, at the threat of losing what she valued most, crumbling and calling out desperately to someone she’d met only hours ago; but it was soon swallowed up by more pressing matters-namely, the fate of her agency and life.

“People come to the Théâtre to be entertained,” Armand was saying as he descended the staircase. “It is not often that one of our victims puts up a true intellectual fight, and our audience will appreciate the chance to see it.”

“Maître, it won’t work otherwise, she wouldn’t fall for the-”

“Not too fast, Santiago,” came the interruption, and the maître in question silenced his leading man with only the lift of a hand. “We don’t want to spoil the surprise for her.”

“I-”

A blush painting her wearied face, she had to search for words for a moment as the vampires turned their piercing eyes to her. It took quite a bit of willpower to regain her composure, but regain it she did.

“I was there for the last performance. It will not be a surprise. You-you read their minds, I suppose, point out their flaws, and make them wish for the death you provide. Is that it?”

A beat, and then an outburst-

“Fog! Her! Mind!” Santiago said in the verbal equivalent of an exasperated eyeroll.

“I will not,” Armand held firm, “and neither shall any of you.”

He stepped behind Isabelle’s chair and touched two fingers to her temple, and an odd wave of something seemed to wash over her as the rest of the cast dispersed to their coffins, whispering all the way.

“That is a protection,” came Armand’s whisper to her. “I’ve stopped them from getting into your thoughts-”

“What, so that you can turn around and do it yourself?”

She ripped herself away from him as much as she could in her current position, her breath finally falling into tears, and he somehow seemed genuinely wounded.

“You do not trust me, then.”

“Why on earth,” she choked out a laugh, “would I trust you? It was your voice in my head last night, you who took me where I could see the bloodstain, you with so much power-apparently both hierarchical and supernatural-over everyone else here.”

“My promise regarding the audience was simply so that they would spare you. I have a plan, Isabelle-”

“And, whether that’s true or not, I suppose you could make me believe it somehow? How-”

Isabelle broke off, trying to keep from heaving a sob. The sudden longing for her tiny apartment with dripping ceilings and creaking tables overwhelmed her, if only for a return to when she was hers, when she was safe.

“How can I trust anything about you?”

After a moment, he swallowed hard but silently, then looked her in the eye for the first time since their last night’s conversation.

How she ever could have seen those eyes for even a moment and not realized that this man was something more than human was quite a mystery now. The deciphering of him that Isabelle had delighted in as an audience member with a crush had turned into a full-throated attempt to read his every flicker of the eyebrow, with her life now on the line. And all this time, the man in question had been silent.

“I’ll prove it,” he said simply.

Finding nothing more that he could do, Armand turned and retreated, going back up the staircase with every quiet footstep ringing.

He’d saved her last night. He’d claimed to have saved her now. And he was apparently planning to save her tomorrow from the death that his cast-his coven-hoped to carry out.

She was left alone with many questions, above them all being:

Why?

~

Isabelle’s day on the chair as the vampires slept had been spent half in silent contemplation, half in fruitless attempts to escape from her surely-supernaturally-assisted bonds. There was, needless to say, a lot to grapple with, but one thought nearly as alarming as losing her memories was the knowledge that-

If these people-people?-weren’t trying to kill or otherwise disarm me, I’d…

I’d adore them.

She’d never felt anything like this before. Immersive theatre that delved into grief and every facet of humanity, both beautifully artistic and unapologetically messy, was an idea she could only dream of for most of her life. The thrill of finding herself a little bit infatuated with half the cast throughout each play, then seeing all of those same bright eyes turned towards her; the offbeat adrenaline rush of a Shakespeare-off; the fact that she was no longer the most dramatic one in the room, not by a mile; so much about this group was intoxicating.

And the short conversation she’d had with Armand before everything fell open, as well as the restless dreams she’d had of him that she was sure he’d somehow placed there, still took the forefront of her musings.

Why is it that the first time I have genuine reason to feel wanted, it’s under…

Her leftover makeup had started to flake, and the rope was near biting into her wrists after the hours it had spent there.

…these circumstances?

Last night, she’d thought that a performance gig here would be her last chance, and this now seemed to be true in a whole new fashion. It took quite a lot of figuring, hoping, and crying to come to terms with the extremely high likelihood that there were only two ways that this night would finish:

Either Isabelle de la Rue, once Bella Ditell, would be killed…

…or she would be embraced.

It was clear that, for a few fleeting moments, in even the slightest way, these vampires respected her a little bit. They clearly thought she was dangerous enough to necessitate intervention, that she had enough presence of mind and will to live to stop her from falling for Santiago’s beckon to death. They now knew, too, that she was clearly a performer by trade and by passion. Armand had mentioned her possibly being of entertainment value, and that had sparked something of an idea; as little as she wanted to be valued only for that, if this was the only way to survive, she would show them that they wanted to keep her around.

The audition of a lifetime.

~

Hours later, she was behind the very same curtain that she’d been on the other side of only a day before. In any other circumstance, this would be a dream-to see a show at a theatre company one night and be part of said company the next.

Apparently, manifestations need to be more specific.

The redheaded woman who’d expressed not wanting to kill her held one of Isabelle’s arms, and the other was taken by a pretty-boy type who had played a woodcutter in an earlier skit. They both seemed surprised at her silence, but didn’t address it.

Probably makes it easier for them. It’s simpler not to see their victims as people, and all that.

But when they dragged her onstage after a very long monologue for Santiago-as-Death, Isabelle did not stay silent, and she also did not scream.

She sang.

It was an aria of a mythical queen awaiting her death, one that she’d known for years. She felt an odd sensation of multiple telepathic attempts to shut her mouth being ricocheted away by whatever spell Armand had placed, and with the knowledge that this might be the last aria of her life, she poured her entire being into it. Santiago played along in character, partly amused and partly furious, and the sound of his half-chaotic French made her head spin even further, and everything whirled around at once-

All of a sudden, Isabelle was a capella no longer.

She glanced into the wings and made eye contact with the pianist, who grinned at her.

I won’t let myself imagine that anything comes out of real sympathy, that’s too dangerous-they’re playing with their food, is all.

Still…

What a moment!

Roughly half the audience was laughing in disbelief, but the other half seemed genuinely tuned in to what she was doing. She reached out to them, to her fellow humans, every trace of desperation and brazen hope sparking up in her eyes. She even managed to find and share a moment with the girl she’d met the previous night, who had seemed greatly worried upon recognizing her but now smiled at her and leaned forward to take her hands-

-until Santiago grabbed hold of her waist from behind and dragged her upstage.

A few audience members gasped, but Isabelle continued singing, looking between them and her reaper with more fire than she had ever trusted herself to possess.

Unable to stop her voice by supernatural means, Santiago skipped to the end of his usual blocking, straight to the part where he held the victim by the throat. This nearly choked her, and the tears that had started during her frenzied aria threatened to break loose.

A cold shiver ran through her every bone.

This is it.

It didn’t work.

She tried to turn her head, intending for her friend in the front row-her first friend-to be the last face she’d see.

If I go out, I’ll go out singing.

Santiago’s grip tightened, and-

“Arrêt!”

Out of pure surprise, the bony grip around her neck released, and she looked over Santiago’s shoulder to find the source of the voice she already knew.

Armand, now in full makeshift costume, was holding a very real prop sword to his leading man’s throat.

He began to speak in French, with every dramatic inflection of the rest of his coven, but broadcasted a more earnestly spoken translation to her as he did so:

You will not harm her.

Apparently greatly enjoying the improvisatory nature of how tonight was shaping up, the offstage orchestra struck up a soaring, string-soaked theme.

As Orpheus meant to save Eurydice, I mean to claim my love from the hands of Death. Only I, I will not falter. I will not doubt.

He now lowered his sword and looked straight to her, directly, intently.

I will give her reason to trust.

Whether it was the torrent of Purcell-assisted emotion and the promise of certain death that preceded this, her go-with-the-moment theatrical training, the single curl falling in front of Armand’s face, or some overwhelming combination of all three, Isabelle slowly moved to take his hand, deeply affected by the way he seemed to have genuinely expected her not to.

He kissed her birthmark again, and she started to cry.

Never one to miss a chance at upstaging a scene, Santiago swooped in once more, but was repelled. By the way each vampire looked at the other, she knew this was a battle being fought with eyes and telepathy alone, one which the maître would undoubtedly win.

Mighty Reaper, Armand’s speech and translation continued, cliché as it may seem, my love-my lark-is too strong in her soul and in her love to fall to you this early. With the two of us fighting against you, life will…

These words seemed almost to stick in his throat; understandable, she thought, after years-possibly centuries-of existing by the opposite mantra.

This time, life will prevail.

She shook her head, looking to Armand in total bewilderment. Why was he doing this? Why was he saying all of this?

Why me?

This he heard, and this he answered.

She of the ever-winding, ever-sparking mind, she of the soaring and unafraid voice-both of which you, Death, wish to silence-is the only one I ever wish to hear.

What followed was a kiss so tentative, then so tender, then so deep, that the sound of the violins seemed to be circling around the pair in swooping whirls that caught in each contour of their breath.

For the first time in her life, Bella Ditell allowed her guard to fall.

The audience, caught off guard by something resembling a ‘happy ending’ and having quite a lot of fun with the dramatics of it all, roared their appreciation. Above every sound was the delighted, encouraging wolf whistle of the young woman in the front row.

Perhaps it was wrong. Perhaps it was horrid. Perhaps it was everything she’d feared wrapped up in everything she’d hoped, or perhaps it was the opposite.

But now, at least, at last, Isabelle had the chance to find that out for herself.

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter ii

“the Promised Land Blurred Awash in Dancing Footlights”

a very eventful first visit to the théâtre des vampires

iwtv oc x armand, this chapter ~2.9k

a few hours ago i thought this chapter wouldn't have much to it and might have to be merged into another. lollll

my apologies for the ever-so-slightly true idea that this is, just a little bit, the vampire equivalent of "y/n goes to a concert and is discovered bc she's Different"

but hey it's iwtv so it's gonna be deeper than that

also, i was not expecting how much FUN it would be to write santiago omg. also also, there’s an interview where mara said they put a ton of work into the ceiling and it turned out gorgeous only to never be used in a s2 shot, so i made sure to mention it so that this hypothetical episode would be sure to feature it

enjoy! like comment share etc!

chapter i fic masterlist chapter iii

Nineteen Thirty-Six, Paris, France

This could have been one of the nights she’d dreamed about.

That was the mantra that would not leave her mind as she took her time with each step down each cobblestone road. A curtain of stars, the smell of fruit-tinged alcohol, and French murmurs made it all too clear that, if there was someone beside her or if the destination of this walk was her own stage, she couldn’t ask for anything more.

Despite all she’d gone through in the city so far, Isabelle vowed to let herself enjoy this act of taking herself on a date to the theatre. This was the last performance opportunity in her area that she hadn’t auditioned for yet, and waitressing at a cafe near her tiny apartment didn’t give her even a fraction of the money to travel elsewhere in search of other gigs, so-try as she might to let the worry melt away-she was very much aware that this night was something of a last chance.

She was greeted at the box office by a man in powdered makeup who smiled at her with impressively realistic costume fangs. The others that filed in appeared to be half already-devoted fans of the company, with painted faces of their own, and half eye-rolling skeptics who scoffed at being dragged along with their friends or partners. With her slightly nervous eagerness, she felt somewhat in between the categories as, one by one, they all spilled through the door into the Théâtre des Vampires.

…My God.

She had seen stunningly intricate and opulent performance halls before, as a rejected hopeful, but something about this one took her breath more than all the rest put together. A massive chandelier hung from the ceiling, which itself was covered in murals that made her head spin to decipher. There were large, swooping statues of angels doing decidedly un-angelic things. Staircases were beautifully formed yet falling slightly apart; chairs were squeaking with age yet divinely comfortable; it was a perfect mix of well-worn and splendid.

Isabelle took her seat among the buzz of anticipatory audience members that never failed to make her heart glow. When the theater darkened with a booming clank and the spotlight sparked to life, standing in it quite suddenly was a caped man who seemed almost to have been born with “stage presence” written across his chest by the Fates themselves.

“Welcome-to the displacement of reason, and the excretion of pathetic desires,” he began, calculatedly gesturing. “By that I mean-”

And as he bowed, the devotees joined in in rapturous chorus-

“Good evening!”

“Good evening,” she echoed softly, a schoolgirl’s giggle fluttering into her chest. The powder-faced young woman in the adjoining seat grinned and nudged her shoulder.

“First time?”

She nodded, attention torn between the first person to speak kindly to her since she’d arrived and the leading man who had now begun to fly on a wire above the audience.

“Oh, you’re going to love it. Santiago up there-he’s one of the greats, you’ll never forget this performance as long as you live.”

This Santiago was making quite the show of his speech. As the lights and chandelier flickered, he floated straight above them, and Isabelle could have sworn she saw the rope detach from his jacket for a moment-she gasped-

“Look,” she said to her seatmate, and pointed up.

“Hm?”

“Didn’t you see?-”

But by now, Santiago’s course had taken him past them and up to the rafters, and the other girl shrugged, turning back to the performance.

As the leading man proclaimed that his audience was about to see “the highest form of art in the lowest of ways,” the crowd laughed in delight, and the spotlight followed him all the way, its large beam eventually half-illuminating the most beautiful person Isabelle had ever seen.

“Have you repressions that need airing?” the speech continued.

…Apparently, yes.

She was dumbstruck. It would be shallow to say that Bella Ditell-no, Isabelle de la Rue now-cared too much for appearances, and she did not want to be shallow. No, there was something else that had her incredibly curious about this stranger. It was something like the way he carried himself, something like the thousands of thoughts she could nearly see passing across his eyes as they glinted amber in the spotlight. The sound of Santiago’s speech blurred to nothing in her mind as she watched this young man scan the audience, tired, bored, generally disregarding.

I must be the only one looking back at him.

She figured this because, when his gaze went over her as it did all the others, he stopped-then blinked-and looked back. For a moment, Isabelle felt a strange sense of being read, deciphered in the same way she was trying to decipher him.

Whether it was the newness of anyone putting in the effort to decipher her at all, or the supernatural nature of the story being played out, there was either way an unfamiliar, undeniable rush of something.

The stranger smirked, and the spotlight followed its target away from the rafters and back towards the stage.

Near the end of his monologue, Santiago seemed to rally the previously coughing and chattering audience into a captivated silence with his declaration that everything about to happen was entirely real and that they would one and all be held accountable.

“Complicit…”

-that was her worst fear in one word-

“...repugnant…and appalling!”

She was, apparently, not the only one who was slightly bothered-

“And…”

Despite every instinct, she found herself leaning forward, awaiting a judgement she had never consented to be under-

What on Earth have I walked into?

“I love you for it.”

Stunned, she took in a breath.

Having given a wink to Isabelle’s blushing seatmate, Santiago was then looking straight at her, a certain yet intrigued tilt to his head, before turning back to the rest of the audience.

“And I welcome you…even as you disgust me.”

~

Twenty Twenty-Three, New York City, United States of America

“So that must have been new for you too,” Daniel probed, “being from such a strict moral background.”

“Indeed,” said Isabelle, half-breathless with memory. “That idea of being celebrated for the wrong or messy parts of yourself was entirely foreign to me.”

“And you said the plays were different back then. Different how?”

“When Louis talked about the Théâtre,” she began, “he said the plays always either ended in death or ‘some kind of cruel, barely motivated violence’. In the mid-thirties, most of them were the former. The stories were a little bit deeper, everything was more motivated, it was really more about the horror of grief and the unknown rather than laughed-off brutality-”

“Is that the truth?”

She blinked.

Is it?

“The plays…changed gradually. At the time when I was turned, they were as I describe, and a maker cannot get into the mind of their fledgling. So…a tentative yes on that.”

But she was shaken. No matter how hard and fast many of the vampiric powers and limitations were, there was always a possibility from the moment she stepped into that building that any given thought might not have been her own. If it weren’t for the many, many years she had spent coming to know her true self, free of both her emotionally repressive hometown and supernaturally oppressive coven, if it weren’t for the way she had come to recognize what a memory felt like when one of them had gotten into her mind, if it weren’t for that, she would have been living in a state of constant terror.

“Though the Théâtre was better than it eventually became, there was still a sense of horror to it,” Isabelle continued as Daniel scribbled away. “I found it so…so, so beautiful. And I hated that I found it beautiful, because it was so deeply unsettling-each contrasting thought only bolstered its opposite. Like I said, the final play, the one with the human victim, was done with more intimacy and less shock value, and had the whole audience breathless.”

She almost smiled in remembrance, and Daniel set his pen down to shoot her a look.

“So the small-town girl enjoyed seeing her first slaughter?”

For a moment, the shame returned, and she was sure he could see it flicker in her face.

“That night’s victim,” she confessed slowly, “was the girl that had ruined my reputation only one week before.”

“Ah,” was Daniel’s only reply, a bit delayed but with plenty of thought.

“Of course, I had thought at the start that it was yet another place she’d gotten a role, that she was playing the ‘scared woman’ remarkably well despite my surprise that she’d perform in a venue like this. But as the play went on, it seemed more and more real, as the introduction had promised. There truly was something supernatural in the air, and besides, I had never seen her act that well before. For some combination of a thousand reasons, my drunk-with-stage-lights mind started to believe.

“This was the one whose doting and shallow parents owned an opera company, who had dug her nails in hard during our first handshake, who had handed me a camera and sugar-sweetly asked me to take a photo of the rest of our dance class that only I would be excluded from, who had mocked every single girl who didn’t fit into her shiny, plastic norm over and over as it flew completely under the radar of everyone in power.

“And I saw her tremble in Santiago’s arms. The deeply privileged girl who had everything in life handed directly to her was suddenly at the mercy of a group of misfits that had been cast into the shadows all their lives. It was…”

She was quiet for a moment.

“It’s okay,” Daniel said.

“It was the most incredible thing I have ever seen.”

The journalist nodded and gave half of a smile, as if this was the confirmation that he was indeed in the presence of a fellow vampire.

 “Santiago offered someone else’s life in exchange, as he did when Louis and Claudia first went, but this time, instead of picking someone in whichever front row seat was most convenient…”

She trailed off, heartbeat picking up as she once more became lost in the memory.

“Yeah?”

“He gave her the choice.”

~

Nineteen Thirty-Six, Paris, France

“If you were to trade your life for one of these,” Santiago was whispering, every syllable ringing through the deathly quiet auditorium, “who?”

For the first time since they’d met, Isabelle saw the girl’s face in something other than triumphant composure, now streaked in mascara and worry. She was squinting in the light to get her bearings, and, with shaking breath, began looking through the audience.

It did not take long for her eyes to find her and widen with relieved malice.

“Her,” she choked out, pointing decisively. “Her, take her. She is nothing. I’ve wanted her gone for weeks. You know-”

-here the audience began to gasp as she started to laugh through her tears, and Isabelle’s blood ran cold-

“-you know, this near-death may actually be the best thing that’s ever happened to me, because once she’s gone, I’m safe again, I’ll know I’m the best again, I’m-”

Remembering that she was indeed in front of an audience, the young woman collected herself for a moment and nodded at Santiago as if he would join the rest of the world in doing her every bidding.

Santiago, for his part, regarded her for a long while, then looked at Isabelle for what felt like an eternity before his gaze traveled back to the rafters. Isabelle followed it up toward the stranger, who apparently held some sort of sway over the whole thing-the director, perhaps-and she awaited judgement with far higher stakes than what could not have been only an hour before.

Somehow, though, she felt…safe.

Something told her that she would not die that night.

The stranger almost, almost smiled, then gave a slight shake of his head.

This the girl saw, and she started shaking far worse than before as Santiago turned back to her with a positively villainous smile.

“Dearest,” he drawled, “I usually tell the forsaken audience member to remember this moment, to remember that they cannot trust their fellow mortals. But this one in particular does not need to be reminded of that after all she has endured.”

The young woman in the seat next to Isabelle was looking at her with eyes like full moons, and she herself was near tears.

How does he know?

“Half out of flippant disregard for all you view as below you, half out of jealousy of the many who possess a thousand times your emotional and vocal range,” Santiago continued, “you have subtly tortured oceans of young artists like yourself-like what you think you are. You believe that, because you do not allow yourself to think or feel deeply, you are more mature. And do you know where that will lead you, darling? Straight to an empty, vacuous, golden cage of a life. Anything you shall accomplish-sorry, anything Mommy and Daddy’s money shall accomplish-will not matter a single bit, not with that kind of a conscience, miniscule as it may be, gnawing endlessly at you. Perhaps, though, not endlessly; because, no matter the accolades, no matter the societal power, one thing still awaits us all.”

He smiled slowly, basking in the rich girl’s terror and entirely silent auditorium.

“You know what it means to be loved by your sycophants and those audiences filled with shallow old donors who believe screamed, flat high notes and deeply false tears equate to art. But I ask you this, my sweet: do you know what it means to be loved by death?”

The violin soared to a climax.

The vampire bit.

The young tyrant screamed.

Then the curtain fell in front of them, and the audience’s complete silence continued, interrupted only by muffled hisses from behind that curtain which seemed to have far more than one source.

Isabelle was snapped out of her reverie by her new acquaintance’s hand on her wrist and French-accented whisper.

“It is captivating, no?”

Slowly, silently, she nodded.

“They’re great actors,” the girl continued under her breath.

“Are you positively sure it’s not real?” Isabelle whispered back.

Then the curtain rose to reveal the cast, now heavily bloodstained as if they had all devoured their victim, and they bowed to the audience’s few stray claps which slowly but surely grew into a roaring applause.

“Oh, surely not,” the powder-faced girl said as she began the standing ovation. “But it is such fun to believe.”

The next few minutes were a complete blur of wonder, catharsis, and guilt.

Not guilt for what she thought she may have witnessed, but guilt for not feeling as guilty as she should have.

Feeling more feeling than she had felt in quite a long time-

Viens à moi.

-she pushed through the crowds to find someone to talk to about being hired-

Viens à moi.

-unsettling or not, this was still her last potential job, and selfishly or not, she had on some level adored what she’d seen-

Viens à moi.

-and all this time, amongst the chatter of the audience as they all left, she heard an occasional maddening whisper without an origin.

Some thought told her to duck into a hallway behind a pillar, which she did, and was confronted-as she had hoped-by the unfairly beautiful stranger from the rafters.

“Bonsoir,” she greeted, and found herself taking in a breath and starting to ramble before the man could reply. “Tonight…tonight was the most stunning theatre experience I have ever had. I’m not sure if you’re hiring, it feels odd to say that I’m not sure if you’d hire a human, but I think I could be something here. I can sing opera and jazz and popular song, I can play the piano and clarinet, I’ve done Shakespeare and a few horror plays back home, I can scream like the best of them, I know enough French to get by and am willing to learn more-”

“I figured as much,” the stranger interrupted gently, and they started to walk back through the hallway and the now-empty auditorium. “You are one of very few who seemed to enjoy our show for something greater than the novelty.”

“You’re the director, then?”

“Maître of the company,” he replied. “Armand.”

He then kissed her left hand in greeting-not only kissed her hand, but the birthmark on it, the birthmark her grandmother had tried in vain to scrub away, the birthmark which she had secretly cherished since childhood.

Through this flood of memory, she could have sworn she saw him smile.

“Isabelle de la Rue,” she said with a valiant attempt at matching his lilting accent. This Armand-Armand-tilted his head thoughtfully as they continued to walk.

“Is that a stage name?”

“It is. You’re the first to call that out. They called me Bella back home, which I always found somewhat infantilizing, because that was the way it was intended-and as for my last name, I wanted to separate myself from my past as much as possible.”

“You want freedom.”

“I do.”

The only thing that could draw her focus from Armand’s disarmingly earnest expression was that, from this angle at which there were no seats, her line of sight could go straight behind the curtain to a large splatter of blood at the center of the stage floor. Noticing that her eyes had gone wide, Armand turned to follow her gaze, then took her hand and briskly began to lead her away, continuing to look over his shoulder and urgently signal as if telling whoever was behind them to stop, stop, not this time.

That was the last thing she remembered before her world, having just been rocketed into glowing chandelieric light, went black.

[inthiseverymoment]

silhouettes emerging: chapter i

“a Wide-Eyed Melancholic, Knowing and Unknown”

the interview begins.

iwtv oc, this chapter ~1.4k

backstory time babyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

i always found the typical formatting of multi-paragraph monologues to be a bit odd, but there def won't be as many of those once we dive into the flashbacks in proper. next chapter, i promise-for now, gotta set this story up

enjoy!!

prologue fic masterlist chapter ii

Twenty Twenty-Three (The Next Day), New York City, United States of America

“You okay?”

She didn’t hear him. Unblinking, she found herself staring at the journalist’s laptop. The book surely didn’t include everything; there must be so much more in there, and the desire to know overwhelmed her-

“Earth to the soprano?”

“...Right.”

“Louis burned my laptop after what happened in Dubai. So the one in front of us isn’t ‘the’ one, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

They were in his apartment for the full interview, away from the prying ears of the city, and Isabelle was beginning to wonder whether the impulse to tell her story was indeed as good as she’d thought. It was a remnant of her human life, the self-righteousness that many called naive, the instinct to always get the truth out no matter the cost, to be included.

But her time at the Théâtre des Vampires was something she largely looked back on with shame, a shame that had grown even darker when she’d learned everything behind the horrors that had happened there once she had disappeared.

Do I really want my name on this?

I saved myself, I got out, but didn’t do anything to actually stop them once I was gone.

Despite the near-century of vampirism under her belt, her frozen state of early-twenties idealism still perpetually burned in constant guilt.

“I’ve thought a lot about Louis since your book, actually,” she said, remembering the conversation at hand. “Calling himself the ‘reticent vampire’, refusing to drain humans at the beginning, every grasp to hang onto humanity. I know how that feels.”

Daniel only nodded as he set up the microphone, and after a moment of semi-awkward silence Isabelle spoke again.

“I did like the part where Lestat killed the tenor.”

“I’ll tell him for you.”

She wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

It must have been easier for Louis and Armand-they always had the upper hand.

Being around so few vampires for so long, as she had generally isolated herself from them after leaving the Théâtre in a desperate attempt to live as human a life as possible, it was easy to almost forget the depth of her powers. Although she and Daniel had the same ancient blood within them, she had been around for quite a while longer, and she swore to herself to remember all that she held.

Daniel sat across from her and, on her nod, hit his space bar.

“I’m here with the vampire Isabelle de la Rue, who has a few corrections against the increasingly unreliable account of the vampire Armand. Namely, that he had, indeed, made another vampire prior to our last years’ interview, who now…sits in front of me.”

He blinked, as if still getting used to that idea himself.

“Ms. de la Rue, how long have you been dead?”

“Nice opening question,” she smiled.

“Hasn’t failed me yet.”

Then, with a polite laugh and something of a hum-

If I can face myself enough to say it all out loud, I suppose that’s the first step.

She took a breath.

Here we go.

“I was born in 1914. A typical story: small-town girl, only child, cloying upbringing, the arts as escapism. I was one of very, very few kids in my area growing up, and those who were there never liked me much. Too sensitive, they said, which of course only made me even more so. I liked school, because it was the one place I could be absolutely certain I was doing the right thing and no one could tell me otherwise. To be the only one who solved an equation or understood Shakespeare almost made up for watching them make plans with each other right in front of me. I didn’t know what I had done wrong there, and no one bothered to tell me; looking back, it probably had to do with wanting it too much. My parents and the adults in the neighborhood saw my struggle as being above my peers, especially when I started to sing and play the piano. But I didn’t want their ‘isolated gifted girl’ pity. I wanted to find people like me.”

“A desire for community so great that it left you vulnerable to a murder coven.”

“We’ll get to that,” came her half-shaking laugh. “I grew up, and grew extremely tired of the labels. Besides my writing, I didn’t have much of a chance to figure things out beyond what my family and the town put on me; I was only seen for what I could do, not who I was.

“And, contrary to popular belief, I always knew who I was.

“I needed to get out.”

“And Paris was ‘out’?”

“Eventually. Once my parents realized that no ‘polite young man’ from our town would look at me long enough to take me off their hands, they allowed me to go off and try my fortune as a performer, and I was gone before I could finish the word goodbye.

“In all that loneliness of childhood, my hope lay in tales of the great salons of 1920s Paris, where artists and thinkers would come together to create. That idea of a room draped in burgundy and pearls, wine and quotes flowing, relationships forming and breaking and healing all within a few hours, perfume and jazz in the air mingling with the light of endless stars-that romanticized ideal was all I had. A place where I could imagine not having to worry about what was right, a place to live in each moment. That was what I wanted.

“I wasn’t entirely surprised at the disillusionment that followed. At each theater or music club where I did manage to get an audition, I would come at it with the utmost hope, ready to make a home out of each dusty chair and creaky floorboard, but there was always something keeping me from it. Too tall, too eager, couldn’t kick high enough-that’s all par for the industry-but there was often a lot more going on. A leading lady that I had taken a few dance classes with spread rumors that I was an escaped thief, got her manager and her many friends to believe it, and there went my hope of artistic community. One director-clearly abusive, judging by the haunted eyes of the chorus girls I saw in passing-said he didn’t hire uglies with a mouth on them so he wouldn’t hire me, that people paid to see the girls shut up and look pretty. The most powerful theatre producing team of the time told me they couldn't figure out what to do with me-which is fine-but what stuck with me for decades was being told that they thought I hadn't figured myself out either.

"Racist producers I refused to work with, places steeped in favoritism where an outsider couldn’t even get a foot in the door, one place that apparently just didn't want redheads on their stage-simply put, I could not find a job.”

“You were a starving artist.”

“Precisely. And without even the friend group to make a La Bohème.”

“So your very last option…”

She nodded.

“And back then, the Théâtre wasn’t exactly the way it had become by the time Louis and Claudia got there. When the victim was killed, the other vampires didn’t immediately appear all at once and swarm, they’d have their fill offstage; for the initial draining, it was going for more of an intimate moment, just Santiago and whoever it was and a single violin. The stories got kitschier over time-audiences didn’t want to think at the theater quite as much during the war, but beforehand, most of the plays were actually quite lovely.”

“Lovely save for the nightly murder,” Daniel deadpanned. “A wonder that someone so caught up in morals, so desperate to be ‘absolutely certain of doing the right thing’, would wind up there of all places.”

She wasn’t sure how she looked at him then, something between a glare and a plea, but it must have had some kind of effect.

“And I’m about to hear the real story?” he continued after a moment.

Near-solemnly, she let out a breath.

Isabelle was aware that both she and Daniel knew what it was to be frozen in amber, to be caught in an entrancing web of both fabricated deceit and real sympathy. She wanted him to know that she would tell the truth.

She wanted him to know that she was not the same as her maker.

She also wanted to prove that to herself.

“I promise.”

[inthiseverymoment]

promise that there shall be more of the fic coming soon, just gotta move back to school rq

in the meantime, keep reading and lmk what you think!!