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It had been his practice for so long that Armand was certain that he could perform it without a mirror, or even with his eyes closed. But yet the mirror, too, was part of it. The rite: to rise with the setting of the sun. To sit in front of the mirror. To watch his own unchanging face, precisely unperturbed, as he used tweezers to pluck out each silvered strand of hair from his head.
There were twenty-three of them. Not quite one for every year of his mortal existence. If there was a metaphor to be discerned in that fact, Armand had not yet discovered it. It was not for want of trying.
Armand knew that Louis thought this practice a mild, comic vanity on his part: the kind of act that was more folly than sin, an aspiration toward mere veniality. It wasn't as if Louis cared about these hoary hairs of his; not even a proper hank for Louis to pull on during one of their bouts of something like lovemaking, and it wasn't as if there would ever be any more of them. "Why bother?" Louis would say, with one of the many shrugs he used to convey this isn't my business and I don't care for it to be, neither.
And yet there they were. Twenty-three silver hairs in 1535, and in 1795, and in 1950; and every evening in 1535, and 1795, and 1950, and beyond, Armand woke and blinked and sat and pulled each one out at the root.
"Like a boy trying to hide what he's been up to under the covers," Louis joked once, seeing Armand arrange each plucked hair on a piece of tissue that he folded into neat quarters and placed in the bin.
What Armand never pointed out was that the issue was not that he was a boy given to onanism; the issue was that he was not a boy. Marius had made that clear in how carefully he had prepared Armand before his turning, wiping the fever-sweat from his face and limbs before shaving him so very closely. Gracious enough to let him play the beardless youth for all eternity, even if he could no longer satisfy as one. Did Armand not have a duty to maintain this illusion? To collude in his seeming almost enough?
Armand continued his practice through the long years of his intermittent vigil over his Daniel. He watched Daniel struggle his way to an improbable age, his hair whitening in a way that had not been possible for so many of his contemporaries who had been lost to powders and viruses, and Armand found Daniel to be all the lovelier with each greying lock, each deepening line on his face. Watching him get older was no hardship.
And Armand plucked twenty-three hairs from his head each evening, and after more than a decade had passed, after he had trailed Daniel along yet another street and watched him in yet another bed, he had once allowed himself the heresy of thinking but what if I do not?
He sat there and looked at himself in the mirror and thought what if...
But were the rites for him to abandon? No one had ever told him so. And Armand had walked away from so much when he took his bag and his tree cutting and trailed his Louis out of Paris. Surely there were limits?
There were limits. And yet still, even after Armand pushed beyond them, there was Daniel—a boy who had become a man; who was older than Armand and younger than him at the same time; who loathed Armand for killing him and who was grateful to him for the Gift that Armand so disdained. Daniel, who waved a dismissive hand at all of Armand's apologies, and who laughed and laughed when Armand explained to him his full understanding of the Twelve Steps, and who fucked him and fed from him and fell asleep on him afterwards, immovable. Armand had seen many movies which promised that such a gesture was indistinguishable from romance. Perhaps it was. Mostly Armand found that he did not know what to do with his hands. He lay there and stared, enraptured, at the silver-gilt crown of Daniel's head. His Daniel.
Daniel woke with the moonrise, stirred, and said with no other preamble, "So, uh, should I apologise for calling you a friendless bottom twink sociopath?"
Armand shrugged and said, "I have been called worse," which was the truth.
"What do you know?" Daniel said, stretching and sitting up. "Already off to a better start than my last marriage."
Armand rose, and turned on the light, and rummaged through the drawers in the bathroom, looking for a pair of tweezers. He was, as Americans said, travelling light these days and did not have one of his own to hand. But he could not find any, and the apartment's owner, slumped pale and purged in the bathtub, could no longer be of any help in locating one. A nuisance.
"Why do you need tweezers?" Daniel asked, watching him from the bed.
"A minor requirement," Armand said, "of my condition."
Daniel cocked his head. "Huh. One that's required of me?"
"No, never," Armand said, and startled himself with the instinctive vehemence of his refusal. No; not one hair from his fledgling's head.
"Okay," Daniel drawled out, and his eyes were no longer blue but they were as keen as ever when he looked at Armand and said, "So when you say requirement?"
"A... a practice," Armand said, standing there in the bathroom doorway. He was more aware of the twenty-three grey hairs on his head than he was conscious of his own nudity. He still did not know what to do with his hands. "An observance."
"We gonna go through a whole thesaurus here? Because I must have left my trusty Roget's back on ye olde vampiric tour bus."
Armand stared at him. "No," he said eventually. "It is merely that it has been my personal custom."
"Call me a Californian Boomer cliché," Daniel said, flopping back against the mattress, "but customs? Fuck 'em. Who cares?"
Marius had.
Armand turned and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Twenty-three strands of silver amid the black. What if he did not remove them? What if he left them there, a testament to the fact that he would never grow as old as he wished to, but that he had grown older than some had wanted? What if?
He had no answer, but he let them stay.