Chapter Text
Armand
I lay gazing at the lid of my coffin as the sun rose. I quietly contemplated the situation I had found myself in. Two weeks worth of Lestat in a mood. I’ve suffered worse for longer I suppose.
Lestat had always been a hard subject to think of. The amount of time I’ve yearned and pinned for him embarresses me. He has spurned, denied and abandoned me, and yet I am always drawn. A moth to a flickering candle of disaster.
You may believe Louis is a representation of my jealousies, my vengeance, my resentments. I’d be lying if I said that has never been the effect of our love, but it’s always unintentional. Our relationship has never been about Lestat. Maybe that’s what frustrated him about it.
If Lestat is my flaming burning passion of desire then Louis is the cooling balm of tenderness. I have been jealous of many of Lestat’s other paramours in the past, but Louis hadn’t been Lestat’s when I had met him. I didn’t know his backstory. I didn’t know his maker. He was just a dark-haired beauty who evoked in me a quiet desire, a feeling of safety. Louis felt like home, although I didn’t realize that then.
I should have realized Lestat could even ruin this.
I felt a shock of excitement all those years ago. Opening the door and Lestat standing before me, even looking wretched as he did my heart pounded. The ridiculous things I had thought before I realized the reality of it. That he could ever be here for me. That I could introduce him to Louis and we might enter the new age together. I even had a spare thought for Claudia. Surely Lestat would love and pity a creature made like her.
How foolish. Of course this would be Lestat’s childe. Of course he would make a little girl into a vampire. Of course she would then try to murder him.
I’ve explained myself in other places.I will speak no more of Claudia.
When he stood at the door he came not for me, but for my blood and his own selfish desire.
Let him rot and I will go with Louis I had decided.
If he had only wanted to see me perhaps it could have been all of us together I bitterly thought in my guiltier moments when he was moldering reading cheap detective novels.
Seducing Louis had nothing to do with Lestat. It never has. When I met Louis he evoked a tenderness and stability that I had no right to. He looked at me how I had always wanted to be looked at. He spoke to me in a way I had always wanted to be spoken to. And there was no baggage in the beautiful time before Lestat had shown up at my door. We were just… compatible.
I don’t know why after learning the truth I didn’t resent him for being able to catch Lestat’s eye. Maybe it’s because I understand loving Louis. How easy it is. Just like how it’s easy to fall for Lestat. I don’t resent Lestat for his relationship to Louis either which I’m sure is a surprise as well to anyone that thinks they know me. Lestat has long been a source of sourness in my heart. But loving Louis, I think that’s the one aspect of Lestat that always made sense to me.
Louis has mentioned that Lestat and I have similarities. This was before the Court. When Benji and Sybelle and Louis and I formed a little family for ten years. The two of us had spoken a lot. We defined our relationship then.
“The bad aspects,” I said in reply to the off hand comparison. That was not the first time the two of us were put side by side. The egotism, the impulsiveness, the controlling, the immaturity, the goddamn neediness.
“A few,” He conceded. “But many of the good. When you fall in love you love wholly. When you find something to protect you do so with all your heart.”
“And we both care for you a great deal.” I say. I didn’t say love out loud because those days it would have hurt too much if he didn’t return the sentiment. I couldn’t read his mind as clearly as I used to with the ancient blood in his veins after his suicide attempt.
He gave me one of his contented smiles, but I said, because I have to try and ruin every relationship I have:
“But it makes sense why you come back to me, if I’m so much like him.”
He lost that cherished smile, concern in his eyes.
I have never been jealous of Louis and Lestat. I only envied that I could not be what they are to each other. I had always accepted that Louis wasn’t really mine. From the moment the name Louis touched Lestat’s lips I knew that.
“I come to you because you are Armand. Not because you remind me of Lestat,” Louis said firmly. “Lestat doesn’t have any bearing on my feelings towards you.”
“I was your rebound, wasn’t I?” I self-mocked.
“Armand, do you really think this?” He asked me.
“I did read your book you know.”
“Daniel’s book about a conversation I had when I was depressed and bitter and alone? That book?”
I shrugged. “You could have killed Daniel.” But I don’t really mean it and he knows I don’t.
“Armand. Count the years. It’s true we weren’t always happy together, but I have lived with you almost as long as I have lived with Lestat. If you were a pale copy of him do you really think I could stand it? You were my first…”
I looked at him unsure what he could possibly say.
“My first real friend in this life,” He finally said, his voice soft, achingly soft. “Lestat and I had been too intense in those days to be friends. He was maker and lover and tormentor and salvation. Claudia was my heart and family. But with you it was just… easy companionship for a long time. And it’s like that again now. I don’t have to wonder and worry if you care about me. I’m sorry if you wondered if I cared about you. I do. Deeply. I love you. Even in life I never had such a close friend as I do in you.”
You might think his use of friend here just confirmed my fears. That I had just been ‘friendzoned’ as Lestat might say. But consider the amount of lovers in this web of blood. Romance creates the vampire. Marius turned me for that kind of love, I turned Daniel for it. Lestat turned Louis for it. How rare genuine friendship is for us. We don’t turn our friends, most of us never even had friends in life to begin with. That’s why we were such good victims. Romantic lonely vampires all of us.
So that Louis declared that our relationship was based on a deep friendship that developed and also became romantic, and realizing he was right eased me and I finally understood our feelings. There were more conversations, but that was the important one.
I laughed at myself. Thinking these things. A long winding mess of complex lingering feelings to say that I love them both. That Louis and I love each other. That I understand that just because he loves Lestat it doesn’t mean he loves me less. And that I am willing to let him go to Lestat when they both need it, but that I still feel a pain for Lestat’s rejections of me and a longing when Louis leaves my side.
How would the children say that now? TL;DR?
TL;DR: I’m not the one keeping Lestat from Louis, but as usual I am being blamed when Lestat has no one to blame but himself.
“This is ridiculous!”
Speak of the devil.