#trying to wrangle armand into being honest in a way that still feels in character is like trying to climb mt everest in stillettos

[unfinishedslurs]

LOUMAND EPIC DIVORCE FIGHT PT.3

if loumand has 1 million fans I am one of them if loumand has 5 fans I am one of them if loumand has 1 fan it is me if loumand has 0 fans I have been removed from this mortal plane if the world is against loumand I am against the world. failmarriage enjoyers come get y’all’s juice

“What happened to those ‘Great Laws,’ Armand?” He asked, fury rising in him again. “You know, the ones you killed my daughter for?”

“What do you want me to say? Would you have me apologize again so you can refuse it? To tell you that if I could go back and change it, I would? To turn back the wheel of time itself and undo it all? I cannot.”

Louis wanted to strangle him. Would, if he didn’t know that Armand would just sit there and let him, not feeling a damn thing. “I want you to feel fucking sorry!”

Armand rolled his eyes, but Louis had spent over seventy years sleeping next to the monster under the bed. Had decades to learn his tricks and tells. Not all of them, like he might have thought once, but enough to spot the minuscule shift in his expression. The brief twitch of his mouth and the shuttered blink before his face flattened.

There he is, he thought triumphantly. A reaction, a real one. Something that alluded to the man beneath the mask he always wore, not nearly as impenetrable as he thought it was.

“‘Sorry,’” he scoffed, lifting his chin haughtily. “Sorrow is for mortals. We are vampires, Louis. We do not have the time to waste on regrets and what-if’s.”

As if he hadn’t seen into Armand’s mind countless times. As if he had not held him through a thousand nights of wishing he could go back and save his Maker, save Riccardo, save his brothers. As if he had not once confessed to Louis that he sometimes wished he could go back and die a human death in Marius’ arms. The audacity of the lie was almost like a slap in the face of their entire companionship. Or was Armand telling the truth, and those memories the lie? How much did Louis know him, really?

He couldn’t be sure anymore, but he was confident that it was better than any living being on this earth. Enough to get through the lies and rip into the man underneath, the fragile heart in the photograph. If Armand owed him anything, it was this.

“No time? We got nothing but time! You really expect me to believe that when your fledgling is flaunting himself in front of millions with no Maker in sight? You telling me you’re a deadbeat ‘cuz you don’t feel regret?”

Armand’s mouth pursed before he stepped back. “Don’t speak of things you don’t understand,” he warned, eyes darting back and forth. Settling on the closest window like he was thinking about an escape.

Louis didn’t give him one. “Oh, I understand plenty,” he scoffed. “I probably understand better than you. What, you thought you’d make our ‘symbol of love’ immortal for shits and giggles?”

That finally got a visible reaction out of him, swiveling his head back to look at Louis with wide eyes. “I didn’t—“

“You let your coven fucking lynch me because of my fledgling, but eight decades later you’re doing the same damn thing! To the ill and infirmed, no less.”

“What do you want from me?” Armand finally burst out, whirling around on him in an incandescent rage. Louis felt himself smile, could feel his lip splitting as his fangs dropped. “I have apologized time and time again—“

“Only ‘cuz you thought it would fix things!”

“—spent years throwing myself at your feet for your mercy—“

“Mercy? Did you show my daughter—“

“Will it ever be enough? Over seventy years devoted to you—“

“A drop in a bucket compared to the fact that it was over half my life—“

“I don’t know what else I can do!”

“Say sorry and fucking mean it this time!” He roared. “Feel fucking sorry for lying to me throughout our entire companionship! Say something real for once!”

They both fell silent at that, chests heaving through some faded muscle memory. Puppets just going through the motions yet again. What was it that Armand said? Mark it on the calendar, align it with Ursa Major. Louis and Armand’s tri-annual blow-up fight to kingdom come.

Louis’ voice trembled as he said, “I want to know why. None of that ‘I could not prevent it’ shit. I want you to tell me why you let them kill my daughter.”

Armand sank down on the couch, shoulders slumping. Submission and acceptance coloring every inch of him. “Why?” He murmured, staring at his knees. “It will not change anything.”

Louis sat on the other end, keeping as much distance between them as he could. “Humor me.”

“…it is true, that it was because of Madeleine,” he finally admitted. “She was somewhat of a last straw. I had told you before, the creation of more creatures like us was something I could not condone. If you did not love me enough to understand and accept that, how could I trust you over the people in my coven? How could I believe you would not leave me to whatever caught your fancy next?”

“And saving me?”

“Lestat—“

“I don’t mean on stage. Why didn’t you let me die in the coffin? I was almost gone. It would have been over, and then you would have had your coven and spent the rest of eternity directing plays, fooling an audience, listening to Santiago blabbering on…”

“So you’d submit me to a punishment worse than death,” Armand said dryly.

He almost cracked a smile before he remembered himself. “I’m not in the mood to be funny right now.”

Armand sighed, as if Louis was some insufferable child he was humoring. It pissed him off, but yelling wouldn’t get him what he wanted right now. Even if it would be cathartic and incredibly deserved. “The coven wasn’t the same, after,” he said. “They had lost respect for me. In part, I suspect, because they could sense the regret you seem so insistent on. Santiago had never liked me much—“

“He wanted to fuck you.”

“He got off on forcing me to submit. He knew the name I had told you. I don’t know how, whether he heard you say it or if he plucked it out of your head through the appalling shields Lestat had not trained you on—“

“Don’t talk about him. This is about us.”

He looked briefly incensed at that, and he could almost hear the retort, “But you can speak about Daniel?” He didn’t say it, though, because Daniel was different. Daniel had been theirs, in a way that Louis couldn’t put to words.

Armand must have known that too, because he moved on without comment. “The coven could sense my guilt, my regret, and they closed in on me. Is that what you wished to hear? That I saved you to save my own skin?”

“Okay.”

Armand looked at him in surprise, frowning. “Okay?” He echoed.

“That was about what I expected to hear.” He learned back against the couch, letting the cushion swallow him and his regrets. It stung, but he was still too angry to really feel it. What was one more betrayal? What was one more petty grievance eighty years in the past?

Armand considered him for a moment. “It was also because I love you,” he said softly. “I do not want you to doubt that. The coven was only part of it. I found I could not bear the thought of your death.”

Found out too late, but hindsight is 20/20. What did it matter that Louis still had stones rattling around in his ankles? The constant reminder weighing him down, never as badly as the memories that came with them. If Armand had decided to wipe the trial from his mind, would he have removed them as well, or left them? Would Louis know why his footsteps felt so strange, what the aching in his heels heart meant when it echoed in his heart? He wished they were back in Dubai, so he could feel the comfort of his rock garden beneath his feet.

“Okay,” he said again. “Now pause the bullshit for a minute.”

Pause. Blink. Head tilt. He could see the cogs turning in Armand’s head like clockwork. For a master manipulator, he was always incredibly predictable. Or maybe Louis had spent too much time with him. “I’m not lying to you.”

“No,” he agreed, “but we’re going around the real problem. You said Madeleine was the last straw, but that was me. Let’s go back to that. Why did you kill my daughter?”

“The Great Laws—“

“I didn’t ask about them.”

Armand fell silent, studiously not looking at him. Louis settled back and waited him out.

Finally he spoke, very quietly. If they weren’t vampires he wouldn’t even have heard him. “I fear that if I tell you the truth, I will forsake the last bit of affection you may still hold for me.”

“If you don’t tell me, you’re gonna get the exact same result,” he said. “So I don’t think it matters.”

The blow struck. Armand swayed as if taking a physical hit, taking a deep breath he didn’t need. When he looked at Louis, his eyes were lined red with tears he didn’t let fall. Truth, or another tactic for sympathy? It didn’t matter. He had plenty of experience ignoring Armand’s tears in the bedroom, he couldn’t let himself falter when it mattered most.

“She reminded me of myself. Of the youth I once had.” It came out of him in a rush, as if he’d been holding the words back for centuries. “Amadeo begged his master to turn him for over a decade, and each refusal battered his very soul. As he grew older, taller, as hair began to grow on his face and chest and between his legs, as his master took him to his bed less and less. Amadeo was loved, yes, yet it was not until I was nearly thirty and dying that my master saw fit to give me the gift. I was jealous, Louis, is that what you wanted to hear? She had everything Amadeo had ever wanted, yet she cursed her own fortune with every breath she took. I forced her to reckon with it, quietly delighted in watching her perform a song that made her more miserable with every note. I thought she was a spoiled, inconsequential flea who would not make it another fifty years. I believed her to be the reason you refused my companionship. A hundred reasons, each of them more petty than the last. What does it matter? You will hate me no matter what.”

Louis thought he might be sick.

Armand closed his eyes, drawing back into himself. “If that was the only reason,” he said almost gently, “I would not have done it. But I had seen dozens like her over the centuries. Children are not meant for the gift. Either madness takes them, or they cannot bear the constant infantilization, or something else, it doesn’t matter. One by one they walk into the sun. The absence of choice can be a mercy.”

He clearly believed what he was saying, which just made it even worse. How much “mercy” had Armand offered over the years?

Even deeper down, Louis wondered if he was right. The first vampire they ever met in Europe had cast herself into the flames before their eyes. Louis himself had run headfirst into the sun and nearly succeeded. How many others had destroyed themselves because they could not bear the Gift they were given?

“Not Claudia. She was strong.” Stronger than Louis had ever been, certainly.

“They all say that, and yet they all succumb eventually.”

“She wouldn’t have”

Armand sighed. “I supposed we’ll never know,” he acquiesced. Louis could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

He let it slide this time. At least the words were true. “No, we won’t.”

They sat in silence for a time, not looking at each other. The only sound from the cars driving outside. They did not need to breathe, to blink, to move at all. As still as the pictures Louis used to take, back when things seemed like they might turn out okay.

Finally, Louis exhaled slowly. Armand turned toward him, but said nothing.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I don’t forgive you.”

Armand didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. Just stared at him motionless, as if he was waiting for something.

“I don’t forgive you,” he repeated pointedly. “But I’m not going to kill you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Of course he didn’t. Hadn’t that been what he was aiming for when he turned Daniel? If you touch him, Louis had said, and Armand had given his fascinating boy the worst curse he could imagine as soon as his back was turned. 500 years passively yearning for an end no one would provide. Louis wouldn’t be the one to grant him mercy.

His final gift to Armand, or maybe his final “fuck you.” A long life. An eternity at his fingertips, exactly as Amadeo had once begged for. The chance to grow even more powerful until little Arun could never be hurt again. A chance to torture himself for the rest of time in a hell of his own making. A chance to better himself, if Louis was feeling generous.

He wasn’t sure, but after seventy-seven years of standing hand in hand with this man, this monster, this little boy trembling in the midst of all the power he held, he thought it was a kind of salvation. For both of them.

Besides, Daniel was thriving better than either of them in the throes of the Gift. Armand had to have known he would.

“I don’t either,” he said. “You’d deserve it. But I’m tired, Armand, and I loved you once. I think that counts for something.”

Armand’s eyes widened. He stood quickly, putting distance between them, but not before Louis saw a bloody tear slip down his cheek. “Don’t say that to me when you don’t mean it. I cannot bear it.”

He looked as pained as Louis had ever seen him, despair twisting his features at the words Louis had never afforded him when they were together. He was beautiful in his misery, as beautiful as he was in anything. He hated him for it as much as he’d loved him once. The Temptation of Amadeo, rendered in flesh and blood and the viscera of honesty.

“I do. I did,” he said, twisting the knife just to be cruel. “Guess it doesn’t matter now.”

Armand shook his head. Opened his mouth, then froze, caught between words. Still as a painting in the low lamplight. Louis could see the brush strokes on his face, see every piece of art he had shown him overlaid with the real man in front of him.

“Right,” Louis said, when enough time had passed that he was certain Armand wouldn’t say anything. “Glad we had this talk.”

“Are you?”

Louis surprised himself when he answered, “Yeah, actually. I am. You?”

“I don’t know.” He looked frail, sad, tired, but no closer to walking into the fire than he had been when Louis had cornered him.

He thought that deep down, he was probably relieved by it. The confirmation that Louis wouldn’t kill him, that the love between them hadn’t been a complete lie. Still, how would he know? His lack of understanding of Armand’s innermost thoughts had been made abruptly clear to him with a script marked in red ink.

“Anything else we should talk about?” He asked. “Any other lies? Any other Danny’s knocking around in my brain, waiting for me to remember them?”

“No. No, there was only one. Daniel Malloy is not an experience you can replicate, I suspect.”

“Thank God for that.”

He almost smiled at that. “Indeed.”

“Speaking of Daniel Malloy,” Louis said, standing up. “For fucks sake, pick up the damn phone. Give our boy a call.”

Our boy. A slip he hated himself for instantly. It was too easy to fall into their old patterns, something that was probably by design. Shock flashed over Armand’s face before it was replaced by humor. “He hates it when you call him that,” he pointed out.

“I’ve had to deal with that shit for a century, he can handle it.”

“He finds it arousing.”

“You’re not the only one who can read minds around here, you know.”

“Are you going to do anything about it?”

As if Armand still had any right to know who was in his bed. “Are you? Don’t think I didn’t pick up on his thoughts about ‘Rashid.’ You feeding him your blood was probably a dream come true for him. Did you get to pick his brain about it before it was closed to you forever? What did he think of the taste?”

Armand’s lips thinned, and he turned away.

Louis didn’t let him leave without a final blow. “You gonna tell him about the other memories you erased?”

He stiffened. “You have no right—“

“I have every right, and you know it.”

“If you must know, the answer is no. What difference would it make?”

A pretty damn big one, if you asked Louis. He felt it every time he talked to Daniel, the yawning cavern of curiosity surrounding the blank afterimages in his memory, the way he could clearly sense something wasn’t right. Searching the globe for Armand, chasing him in some kind of fucked up role reversal only one of them was aware of. And then Armand, clearly punishing himself with every echoed heartbeat, every kill Daniel took to like a shark in a reef. Only making them both miserable as he hid in solitude.

“Honesty, Arun,” Louis snapped.

They both froze. Fuck. Fuck. Falling into old habits indeed, the world's most ill-timed Freudian Slip. He’d tried so hard to stay away from it, to wrangle Armand’s honesty from him in a way that didn’t depend on the command of his submission. He’d finally gotten what he wanted, and then he had to go and screw it up.

“I am not Arun to you, anymore.” Armand’s voice trembled. “I would prefer you did not use it.”

Louis nodded, even though Armand couldn’t see him. Bit back the instinctive apology on his tongue.

“I do not see the use in continuing this pointless conversation. Is there anything else you want of me, anything else you require?”

Yes. He wanted to shake him, tell him that they weren’t done here. He still had questions. He wanted to strip Armand down to the bone, rip his flesh off piece by piece and expose the skeleton underneath. Would that finally reveal the truth, or would he have to go deeper? Into bone marrow, the stem cells, his DNA. Would that allow Louis to know him?

It didn’t matter. The mask had gone up, and Louis didn’t have the energy to pull it back down again.

“No.”

Armand nodded once, his back still to Louis, before walking to the door. He paused with his hand on the knob. “I have always been a coward, Louis,” he confessed, still staring straight ahead. Louis could see the set of his shoulders, the clench of his fist, but not his face. “There is your truth.” He twisted the knob, opened the door. “You will not see me again, if you do not wish.”

Before Louis could reply, he was gone.