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The ship that takes Arun from the Bay of Bengal to a market in Venice has a few private bedrooms below deck, some of which lock from the outside.
He learns this on the night that they bring him up from the hold, half starved and out of his mind with fear. At first he thinks he might have died, and that Heaven is a small room with soft sheets and a writing desk nailed to the floor. One of the men feeds him bread and citrus, a rare commodity, and tucks him into bed. He tells him to rest. Obediently, Arun sleeps for the first time in days, coaxed out of consciousness by the gentle rocking of the boat.
Then the bad dreams start. Arun finds it strange and a little cruel that there would still be nightmares in Heaven. He dreams of calloused fingers in his mouth, teeth against his collarbones, hot breath in his ear. There’s blood on the sheets but he doesn’t know where it came from, can’t tell if it’s his or not. All he knows is that he’s asleep, he has to be, and soon the dream will be over and he’ll fall back into the pillows and everything will go dark again.
It isn’t until there’s a hand wrapped around his throat and his lungs are burning that he realizes it isn’t a dream at all. By the time it sinks in he doesn’t have enough breath left to scream, nor enough strength to push the sailors off of him. All he can do is stare at the cracks in the ceiling, the mildew on the walls, and wait.
It could be hours or seconds or years or days later, but eventually he can breathe again. He hadn’t realized there was someone pinning his wrists to the mattress until the weight is gone.
He’s alone. It’s the first time he’s been alone in a very long time. It dawns on him that if he doesn’t escape now, he might never get the chance again. They might keep him here forever, swallowed whole by a beast disguised as a cargo ship.
Arun can barely walk, but somehow he runs from the bed to the door. He turns the handle and it opens .
There’s a part of him that understands it wasn’t supposed to open. This was the moment he discovered they’d locked him in, that it was already too late. He knows that the captain came in hours later to find him crumpled on the warped floorboards just inside, his fists bloodied and covered in splinters from pounding on the door. He remembers a joke about how it was fortunate that Arun was already on his knees.
But this time he’s allowed out of the room, and he can’t risk the precious seconds to wonder why. He sprints down a dark hallway on bloody, unstable legs; stumbles down a flight of stairs and looks around frantically for a place to hide. There’s something strange about this place, something wrong— the stairs should have gone up, the floor should still be shifting with the waves under his feet. There are pictures hung up on the walls. Portraits. Arun starts to study them, but then he hears voices from somewhere above him and he has to keep running. Another hallway. Another door, mercifully unlocked, that opens on a closet with just enough space to curl up and wait.
So Arun waits. He takes silent gulps of air, as if he could store the excess inside his lungs for the next time someone chokes him. He watches the gap at the bottom of the door with owlish eyes. The hallway on the other side grows brighter as a pair of bare feet pass by one way and then the other, looking for him. He listens to the voices of men speaking in a language he doesn’t know but somehow understands, all rhotics and hard consonants.
“We would have heard the door if he went outside.”
“I’ll check the kitchen.”
Arun pulls his knees closer to his chest, making himself as small as possible. To his horror, the motion dislodges something unstable stashed in the dark, sends it crashing down with a noise that feels like a gunshot. The feet return to the space under the door and stay there.
“ Mon cher , I think I have found him.”
His heart pounds against his ribcage.
Another set of footsteps in the hallway. Arun closes his eyes and lifts his arms up to protect his face.
“Armand?”
Why does that name sound so familiar? And why, when Arun tries to picture the man it belongs to, can he only seem to conjure a strange, monstrous version of himself?
“Armand, it’s Louis. I’m gonna open the door. Don’t pounce or anything. It’s just me.”
He keeps his eyes closed, his head down, but he still notices the thin shaft of light that cuts through the closet as he’s exposed. Fabric shifts as someone crouches in front of him— ready, no doubt, to drag the boy by the hair back to the captain’s quarters and take him against the desk. Arun is exhausted, muscles aching from being so tense for so long; but the man paid for the hour, whoever he is.
No, he didn’t. People didn’t start paying until he got off the ship. How does he know that?
“Can you look at me?”
There’s that language again. Something’s not right. Arun cracks his eyes open; raises his head just enough to see a man with dark skin and strange clothes sitting in front of him. Wide green eyes with a hard, piercing look to them. Eyes he knows , somehow, but doesn’t recognize. Too familiar and too alien all at once.
“Do you know where you are?”
Too familiar. Too alien. Green wallpaper and framed photos behind him. Arun shakes his head, moving as little as possible.
“We’re in America. New Orleans. It’s the twenty-first century. You’re alright. It’s just me and Lestat here, and we ain’t gonna touch you.” None of those words should mean anything to Arun, but he hears them and feels his limbs start to uncurl; his eyes start to focus. He thinks of streetlamps reflected on a river, vodka on a wide front porch. Another name given to him by someone else: one that feels less and less like an insult each time it comes from the mouth of the man in front of him.
Louis.
“New Orleans,” Arun repeats slowly, too lost to form any words of his own. His voice sounds far deeper than it’s supposed to. He speaks with an accent he doesn’t recognize.
“Right.”
Suddenly he realizes that Louis— the name, the eyes, the hand sitting palm-up on the ground between them— has blocked his only exit. The only way to leave is to pay some kind of toll, and he doesn’t know what will be asked of him but he knows that it will probably hurt.
But then, as if he can read his thoughts, Louis slides backwards along the hardwood, and the door is open. Arun doesn’t move but he breathes a little easier.
“Whatever you saw— whatever you’re seeing, it’s just a bad dream hanging around, is all.”
“Bad dream.” Tentative. Drawing out the syllables. He’s learning a new language.
There’s another voice from behind the door. Arun had almost forgotten there was another person with them. “I will get us all a drink. Don’t let him run into traffic.”
Don’t let him run . He’s heard that before, on the outskirts of Delhi, a knee between his shoulder blades keeping him pinned to the dirt. “ I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry ,” he says, endless repetition, shaking with the effort. He balls them into fists, bears down until he feels blood on his palms. When did his nails get so sharp?
“Whoa, hey. It’s alright, honey. Nothing to be sorry for.”
It’s the blood and claws that finally start to pull the present closer than the past. He finally manages to process the assurances Louis has been giving him. New Orleans. The twenty-first century. A bad dream. Armand.
If someone tries to touch Armand, he can have them dead on the floor in a second. Neck snapped, chest caved in, jaw torn off. Or he can sink his teeth into their veins, draw it out, make it last even longer than the hour they paid for.
He stops apologizing. Sits up, crossing his legs in front of him, folding his hands in his lap. He feels like an image rendered for a 3-D movie: the same body layered on top of itself several different times, its position changing ever so slightly in the frame. Red and blue pencil over black ink. He’s a boy hiding in a closet, temporarily safe from the men who will inevitably tie his ankles to the bedframe until they pull into harbor somewhere at the bottom of Africa. He’s a monster who killed a paralegal in cold blood eight hours ago. He’s five hundred years old. He’s fourteen, maybe— they guess his age instead of asking at the auction. It doesn’t take long for Arun to forget all the things he used to know about himself, to be reliant upon the slavers’ incomplete records for his last name, his birthday, the name of his village.
They don’t pass this information on to the brothel owner. The next time he loses it, he can’t get it back.
Louis watches Armand as he tries to put the boy back to sleep, to take his body back from the terrified speechless animal that grabbed ahold of it sometime in the early afternoon. They’ve been here before: Louis finds him in the shower in New York City, the water gone cold and his skin scrubbed raw and bloody. Finds him lying still as a corpse under the bed in San Francisco. There was nowhere to hide in the Dubai penthouse but occasionally he would give up on sleeping and spend all day in the dining room scouring the internet for a de Romanus listing, for any art dealer or collector who had finally grown tired of looking at him.
Recently Louis has started reminding him that it’s not a transaction. That love— at least the kind of love that the three of them have in this house— isn’t something Armand has to earn through prayer and sex and prostration. But he’s still relieved every time the scales are balanced between his nightmares and Louis’ more demanding hallucinations. He tries to feel this relief in private. Now, as his lover waits patiently for him to remember what his name is, he tries not to feel a debt stacking up in front of him.
“Blood? Or something stronger?” Lestat calls from the kitchen.
“Armand, what do you want?”
Please don’t ask me that , he thinks. Too far away from his body to talk; too tired to keep his thoughts closed off. He hopes he’s not sharing too much with the other vampires— hopes the saltwater smell and the phantom bruises on his neck aren’t bleeding over to them. Less for their sake, more for Arun’s. The boy deserves to keep some things for himself, even if those things are fear and hunger.
“Bourbon,” Louis says, speaking for both of them. He’s right, as usual: Armand isn’t hungry, and on nights like this wine always carries a nauseating aftertaste of sugar and poppyseed.
“I’m getting up now,” Armand whispers, unblinking. He says it mostly to himself, hoping that saying it will spur his body into motion. Cautiously, unsteadily, he crawls out from the coats and boxes of photographs and climbs to his feet. The ground does not rock underneath him. They’re miles away from the ocean.
He walks like a phantom towards the living room, barely aware of the hall around him. He’s followed closely— too closely— by a boy who’s begging him to run: to turn around and run through the front door before the men in this house get the chance to lead him back to the bedroom. Armand wants to feel protective, but all he can manage is mild annoyance. He knows that there isn’t any reason to be afraid of Louis, at least not right now; and he knows that if there were, running wouldn’t do anything. He wants to grab the boy and shake him, say: You can run faster but you can’t run farther, and they won’t stop until they’re satisfied. If you want it to be over, satisfy them. That’s all you have to do.
But Arun didn’t learn that lesson until his first year in Venice. There’s no point in telling him now.
Louis follows him through the house and it feels like he’s being monitored. Stalked. The only thing worse than being treated like you’re breakable is to know that if they treated you differently, you’d break. He hates it but he understands: he’s not out of the woods yet. He sucks in a breath and smells bilgewater.
“We could go back to bed if you—”
“ No .”
Louis just nods at that, settles into a chair far away from Armand’s usual spot on the sofa. Lets him get settled. Silently notes the intensity with which he’s staring into nothing, the way he’s picking at the fresh scabs on his palms.
Everything takes time. He asks his body to move and the body has to think about it first, decide whether it wants to obey. There are nights when it doesn’t; when he sits statue-still for hours while Louis reads or watches TV beside him, waiting for the storm to pass. Tonight, his hands are shaking, but when he wants the remote he can reach for it. When Lestat comes in and hands him a glass, he can tilt his head back and drain the contents in one long swallow. It burns on the way down, sits in his stomach like tinder. He holds onto the feeling with a vice grip; it’s real, far more real than the fingers on his throat or the drunken footsteps and laughter approaching from the hall.
Lestat retreats back to the doorway, yawning, his robe hanging low on his bare shoulders. The more Armand becomes aware of his surroundings, the more it starts to dawn on him that the nightmare— and the waking from it— must have been loud. Violent, perhaps. “Do you still need me? I have a rehearsal early tomorrow.”
Armand shakes his head mutely. He doesn’t turn around to face him, afraid that if he takes his eyes off of the PlayStation loading screen he’ll suddenly find himself in the ocean again, crouched in the galley cleaning other people’s sweat and seed off his chest.
“Try not to kill yourselves before I wake up,” he says, already nearly asleep again. Then, just before he climbs the stairs, a little more gently: “And try to get some rest.”
By the time he hears the bedroom door click closed again, Armand is hard at work in his sprawling farm in Minecraft, humming softly along with the music. He’s not entirely sure how he lived through nights like this in the days before mortals had perfected the art of distraction.
Across the room, Louis cracks a book open and settles in for a long afternoon. Neither of them can stomach being alone; when there isn’t another body in the room they both have a tendency to conjure one up for themselves, and it’s never something kind. So they keep watch over each other. Long hours of parallel nothingness until the sun sets.
Armand is too engrossed in the game to notice movement until Louis is standing right there , leaning over the arm of the couch, twenty feet tall. He flinches, shoulders rising up to his chin.
It’s Arun who mumbles a string of pleas and apologies in novice Italian, but somehow Louis hears them, too.
“Hey, don’t be like that. It’s just me. I brought you a blanket. You’ve been shivering since we woke up.” He sets it on the cushions and backs up a step, hands up and open.
Armand waits until he sits back down to take it. Is it helping? Was he cold? It was cold in Venice, in the winter months. And on the ship in the long hours watching the door, praying it would never open again and they’d leave him there to starve to death.
He pulls the blanket over his head and around his shoulders. It smells like Louis: rye and cinnamon and coconut oil.
Do you wanna talk about it? Louis thinks in his direction.
It surprises both of them when he turns down the volume and nods. This is how it goes: Armand breaks. Louis puts him back together again. And when he’s done, Armand snaps one of the pieces off again and offers it up as payment. In a few centuries he’ll have nothing left to give, and Louis will have all of him. He doesn’t know what happens then. Nobody has ever stayed to see the end.
Uh-uh. Don’t go there. There’s Louis’ voice in his head again, taking him by the arm and guiding him away from that train of thought; from all the rooms that lock from the outside.
I want to.
This starts Arun shouting again; but he’s far easier to ignore than he was half an hour ago.
“Was it Venice?” Louis asks aloud, mercifully breaking his connection to Armand’s thoughts.
“No.”
“Those cult fucks in Rome?”
“No. The boat out from Delhi. I don’t know who. I don’t know how many. It was new to me. In a few hours it might be gone again.”
“Well.” Louis thumbs absently through the pages of his novel. “It sure didn’t seem like something worth holding onto.” Righteous anger rolls off of him in hot waves: at the slavers, at the patrons in Venice. At Armand, for twisting the truth so often and easily that even moments like these are suspect. But he knows it’s not the time for vengeance, and that sitting in it won’t do anything except bring the next foundation-cracking fight a few hours closer. He clenches his free hand into a fist. Open and shut. Open and shut.
Armand’s focus drifts back to the game. An hour passes, then another. Eventually he realizes that he’s thinking in English and French again, and the nagging sense that someone else is watching what he’s doing over his shoulder has subsided. Arun, stubborn as he can be, finally crawled back to the shadows. Armand wishes he felt sympathy, instead of just relief that he’s finally alone again.
“Thank you for staying awake with me,” Armand says quietly.
“You’ve got me until it’s gone again.” Louis stretches his legs out in front of him, Keats resting cover-up on his chest. “And if it never leaves, you’ve got me anyway.”