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It’s strange: the semantics of an immortal with a fatal flaw. Mistakes won’t kill a vampire. Fire will, and so will silver when it’s utilized properly. Fire and silver can of course be deployed by accident— or as the result of a long series of accidents that end in the smell of burnt hair and centuries-old blood sinking lazily into the floorboards, but that isn’t hubris. It’s just blood.
And yet, Armand stands before his reflection like Oedipus before Creon, Hamlet before his father’s ghost, and he knows what’s going to kill him. Regardless of the method, or the murderer, he will be done in by an unending inclination towards recklessness.
Which isn’t to say that Armand is reckless. Far from it. Any sense of spontaneity he may have once possessed was beaten out of him in a brothel in Venice; atrophied away over years of servitude. Sometimes, in the privacy of a back row theater seat or a sleeping man’s arms, he’s ashamed of it. What good is a domesticated predator? A leader who can only do as he’s told?
He’s careful. He calculates. He keeps those around him on a short leash, and he reserves the shortest one for himself. There are laws; he will follow them to the letter. And the nights where every man on the street is a man who could break him, and every hand on him is a hand meant to bruise— those nights only serve to strengthen his resolve. He repeats it to himself like a mantra, like a rosary: no one will leave him for dead again. No one else will be his undoing. He will not be undone.
(He is grateful that cigarette smoke smells different now than it did four hundred years ago.)
Maybe his dedication to composure and order is precisely the reason that Armand finds himself so helpless in the face of men like Lestat, or Louis, or Daniel. Each of them a funeral pyre of short tempers, snap judgements and ostentation. Each of them a bottomless pit, so hungry that they would eat him whole without thinking, without realizing their mistake until it’s too late to spit him out.
He loves them in spite of it. Or he loves them because of it. But he loves them nonetheless. He’s drawn to them like an insect to glue, or a stone to the bottom of the ocean. That is what will be the end of him: not his own impulsiveness, but his habitual obsession with the most impulsive thing in the room.
He remembers Lestat, somehow both a force of nature and a manmade masterpiece, grinning through his grease paint on the stage. Impulse. Carelessness. He couldn’t get enough. It was too easy to step aside and let the hurricane pass through, tearing through the coven he’d worked so hard to build and replacing it with a theater troupe he did not recognize. He let his defenses fall, his world dissolve into ash that settled in alleys and sewers and turned Paris into a catacomb. Soon the only thing left for Lestat to burn through was Armand himself; a need they were both happy to accommodate.
The process of being broken down to nothing, raw materials to be reconstructed as something more useful and attractive, was not new. In fact it was the only thing Armand had ever known. It was a process that, when enacted on him, he understood as affection. And Lestat could make breaking seem like the most beautiful thing in the world.
Well, the second most beautiful. Nothing would ever come close to the man himself: tall and inhuman, blue-eyed and sharp-edged, a silver tongue and a set of fangs. Armand remembers lying on his back on the theater floor, blood pooling around him, Lestat pacing above him, blind with fury; he remembers that the adoration felt far stronger than the pain.
(It is around this time that he forgets the name his mother gave him.)
Lestat grew bored easily. Bored of places, bored of people. As soon as Armand had finally found his footing, grown used to sleeping in another man’s coffin every night, Lestat was drifting away. His eyes wandered. His affections dwindled, his thirst didn’t. Then he was gone, and Armand was left to wonder whether he’d ever really expected something permanent, or if he just knew that believing in all of Lestat’s grand plans and gestures was the surest way to avoid his rage.
Decades passed. The Theatre des Vampires grit its teeth and weathered the wars. Armand was grateful that the other vampires were afraid to touch him. He did his best to maintain that fear. Each day he wrapped it carefully around himself, above the skin but below the tailored suits. It fit him well; it kept his corpse-cold body warm. He shrouded himself in tradition, in bloodlust, in spidery notes in the margins of every script in their repertoire.
Then Louis du Lac arrived in Paris, and he could feel himself unravel all over again.
Years slip by like minutes for a vampire; in those days Louis carried Lestat with him as though he had just killed him moments ago. As though he were still trapped in that empty house, still looking down at the body and waiting for rigor mortis to set in, or for the ice cold eyes to open again. Armand could feel Lestat between them on their walks through the darkened streets of Paris, on their nights in an apartment strewn with photographs. He couldn’t say that he disliked the feeling.
Louis was, is, like him: broken and better for it. But he was also a liability, an exposed nerve with a short fuse, a cornered animal watching his young be picked off by poachers. The only thing that scared him more than what he’d left in New Orleans was the idea that he was capable of the same kind of cruelty that Lestat loved so much.
Louis— grinning, heedless Louis, with his Southern charm and prying camera lens— was a danger to the coven. Outsiders had a habit of turning into enemies. He was a danger to the security that Armand had carved out for himself in France. The first time Louis touched him, a casual hand braced on the chest as he doubled over in laughter, Armand spent the rest of the night trembling. The first time Louis laid him out and loved him, he didn’t sleep for days. He was waiting for the knife in the gut, all the closed fists and cutting remarks he’d come to expect, but none of it came. Or, when it did, it carried with it an unspoken invitation, a request that the favor be returned.
Armand discovered that there are favors he doesn’t mind returning. Gradually, they began to pry each other open and dig around inside. There are still times where he touches his companion and his hands come back covered in viscera. He licks it from his fingertips, savors it, goes back for more.
Paris fell to pieces around them. It cracked and eroded until it was held together by nothing but the sewer tunnels that connected the theater to Louis’ apartment. Armand was supposed to care. It was supposed to break his heart. He learned, as the tensions rose, that for a heart to break it must be beating. The politics of undead actors, once his entire world, seemed unimportant when they lay next to someone so electric and excited and alive .
Louis didn’t save him. He didn’t carry Armand’s forgetful body out of a brothel cellar, didn’t pull him up headfirst from the sewers into the Age of Enlightenment. He was the one who needed saving: a city pigeon with a broken wing. It was new for Armand to have the upper hand: to be the one holding the matches instead of the one engulfed in flame. He learned that, when the hungers for blood and safety and companionship were sated, what was left was a yearning for control, for an upper hand in the endless chess game he’s playing.
Now, seated at a sixty-thousand-dollar dining table in Dubai watching Daniel Molloy squint to read a newspaper clipping, he feels satisfied. He was satisfied, too, in a cramped townhouse in seventy-three, with that strung-out reporter determined to score something, anything , so long as he could say that he was the one who scored it. Armand wondered— still wonders— how his maker would respond if he saw them. All the traditions that once kept the vampires hidden lie dead in the face of a new century. These days, when Armand wants security, he buys it. When he wants Louis, he’s there. And when he wants a sparring partner, someone to roll his eyes and say cut the bullshit and wrestle him back down to the ground with all the nobodies, he has Daniel.
Not that Daniel knows he’s being had. Not that he remembers all the times he’s been had before.
Oblivious, reckless , he turns the microphone on. The action doesn’t have the same weight as pressing the red button on a tape recorder seemed to. Louis’ hand rests on Armand’s thigh, Armand’s arm on the back of Louis’ chair, keeping each other company, keeping each other from lunging across the table. Daniel’s hands are shaking. He wears his age well, despite the toll it’s taking on him. There’s something more believable about a bitter, jaded old man than a bitter, jaded boy. He’s grown into his mean streak— something the immortals never get the chance to do.
He looks up, the first question of the night forming in his mouth, caught briefly in his teeth. His eyes lock on Armand’s. For a moment they’re lost in the space between Dubai and San Francisco— and what a deadly place to be lost in.
Fire. Silver. Stupidity. Daniel asks a question. Armand, to the best of his ability, answers.