Chapter Text
"We didn't talk about it much."
They didn't talk about it much. A few times. Countable. Countable incidents spread over seventy-seven years of companionship.
Armand remembers not talking about it like it was yesterday, and truly, in the span of his life, it wasn't that long ago.
Whatever it takes, I know I can make it through
If I hold out, if I do,
I know I can make it through.
The theme song playing means Armand has missed the cold open. They're always terrible, some scene outside Degrassi High, almost always unrelated to the actual plot, just enough quickly cut scenes to show the characters of the too-big cast so that the weekly viewer can try to remember who is who.
But it is Louis' routine. Every week, when the season is on, Louis turns on the television for another weekly installment in the desperate lives of the unreasonably troubled teens of Degrassi Junior High, or Degrassi High, or whatever college they fucked off to only to return to be guest stars.
The franchise had been airing since 1979. This had been their routine, save for the gaps between seasons, for the last thirty years. Teen drama. Melodrama.
Boring, you're boring!
In 1973, Louis was screaming, accusing Armand of being terribly boring. Now, in 2009, Louis expected him to sit down every week for another half hour of the petty problems of the Canadian teenager with a cast list that rivaled every Russian novel.
Whatever it takes, I know I can make it through!
Maybe, Armand thinks, these kids might know something about enduring. The actors, at least. They had made it through years of pretending to be in something more artful than an after-school special. He could survive the thirty minutes this week, and then the next, and then the next. For Louis.
And Louis did seem to like it.
Armand folds himself into his spot on the couch. Louis passes a bowl of popcorn his way without turning away from the screen. There were three smaller dishes, old, tired Tupperware, sitting on top of Armand's bowl. Louis' bowl was for eating, for his habit of trying to remember what being human felt like. Popcorn has been the weekly choice for months now, soaked in salt and butter.
Armand, in Louis' head, can taste the popcorn. It is, at best, non-offensive. A method by which one can consume salt and the luxurious texture he associates with fatty blood. A weekly meal to play at humanity.
It is mostly air.
Armand unstacks his set of Tupperware. His popcorn is not for eating, but for sorting. He has developed a sort of topology for them. The kernels that popped into little octopi, the ones that exploded out like flowers, the ones with split curling legs. It is a bit like classifying clouds.
It makes the episodes more bearable.
This episode, it seemed, was focused on the minor relationship squabbles between Danny and Leia and Sav and the little friend group of relatively new cast members and the family drama surrounding Jane. It has not been Armand's favorite season. He misses the height of it all. He misses Ellie and the treat of seeing blood on the screen. He misses Paige's passions and her pains. He misses the love triangle between Dylan and Marco and Ellie.
But the show must go on, and on, and on, and there are always eager actors to cast.
Armand likes Jane, at least. She's on the football team, the only girl on the football team. She dates Spinner, who has been around since Season One of The Next Generation. They've styled her a little like Ellie, but not as cool, in Armand's opinion.
The theme song has finished and the show plays on. Armand picks up a piece of popcorn and places it in the first Tupperware. He has been developing a theory of topology for them. The shapes are all so different. The unilateral explosions that yielded a little mushroom shaped popcorn went into one little container. The ones that seemed to have wings in another and the big explosions, with too many soft cloudy tendrils in another. This, the sorting of his own dry popcorn while Louis watched and suffered through the taste of salted and buttered Styrofoam, had been his favorite part of Louis' preoccupation with Degrassi and the weekly popcorn.
He sorts while they suffer through the plot of Danny trying to get his friends to like his girlfriend and the concerns about Jane's unemployed, dead-beat dad brother. It was a dry start to an episode.
The plot turns to Jane's family. Armand does not care for Jane's brother, Lucas, in particular but Jane is the closest character to Ellie he's seen in recent seasons. Her dad, Carlos, is back in town in this episode. The family dynamics are challenged. Jane is adjusting poorly.
"Spin, what's your earliest memory?" Jane asks on the television.
"I was four, I didn't invite Jimmy to my birthday party and he didn't talk to me for a year. What about you?" Spinner replies. This episode has Spinner, which is nice. He misses the old cast.
"Anything before eight is kind of foggy."
"Eight's kind of old, isn't it?"
"Um, yea...anyway. I need to celebrate getting my license! You in?"
Armand watches Jane drink. Her question echoes in his head as he sorts the popcorn.
"Spin, what's your earliest memory?"
He's answered the question plenty. He'd answered it in 1973 on that terrible day.
My first memory.
I'm being run down by slavers in Delhi.
My second.
Hmm.
Louis doesn't remember this detail. It is gone with the other memories of that night, the fight and his skin on fire.
Louis does, Armand knows, remember the better version. He had been more careful at the Louvre.
All fragments. Shackled on the boat.
It isn't the question that bothers him. It is Spinner's response and the way Jane drinks and drinks and drinks on the television. The way her sturdy tomboy persona is gone.
"Eight's kind of old, isn't it?"
Is it? It's hard to tell. Vampires don't talk about it much.
Maybe, he thinks, watching Jane stumble home, humans don't either.
The show goes on. A girl lies about knowing some guy from Fall Out Boy. Jane's mom wants their father, estranged, to be welcome back. The family will be fuller. The girl promises to never lie again.
Louis leans over. "Would you want to go see them?"
Armand blinks. "Who?"
"Fall Out Boy," Louis scowls, pointing his buttery fingers at the screen. Jane is back home, her father in the doorway. "Like in the show."
"If you like, my love." Armand doesn't care. He hadn't even been sure it was a real band or if this group had only existed in the universe of Degrassi. Louis seems certain it is a real band. They'll go to every concert if it keeps Louis happy.
On the television, Jane is terse. Her father, in the doorway, is playing poorly at being contrite, Armand thinks. That is, if the actor is good. If the actor is bad and the contrition is just poorly acted, it might be a happy accident.
"Night, Janie-bear," says the television dad.
And then the screen is like a fun house mirror, as if the film has been recorded with a warp in it. It's blurry and over exposed. The contrast has been cranked almost all the way up.
Armand watches Jane, but portrayed now but a child actor, maybe five, maybe six. The same dad actor looms over her. Child Jane lays in her bed, in her pajamas. The child actress puts on a face of trepidation, as if being put to bed by her father is something to fear.
"Be a good girl, Janie-bear."
The popcorn that was in his hand, already categorized by its shape and ready to stop, drops from his fingers. It lands in the wrong Tupperware.
Armand knows what this is meant to convey. The language of film has become more subtle over the years, but the directors are more creative. Cameras capture clearer images and he has watched actors deliver finer and finer microexpressions. More takes can be afforded.
But this is Degrassi. Still formulaic, churned out quickly for long seasons. Distorted film, fuzzed and burnt in exposure. He knows what it's meant to portray, what it means to imply.
And it feels too right. The memories in Venice are too bright, overexposed in sunlight. They're fuzzy with time. There might be a warp in the film. Some frames, he thinks, might have melted into each other. The celluloid could ignite at any moment.
He wonders if that is how the memories really are, or if he can't remember what they were like. Does the language of film dictate the memory? If the medium of the day were oil paintings, would the memories be blurred with turpentine, or unfinished underpaintings in his mind? If the medium of the day were the old theatre, would the memories become exaggerated, the villains of his memory all pantomime and stage makeup?
He wishes he could remember.
He can't. But on screen, Grown-Up Jane can. He knows she does. He watches her gather bedding and crawl into a closet to sleep, safe away from her own bed.
Text fades into the frame of her curled up on the floor.
To be continued.
The closing theme plays.
Next to him, Louis' mind is quiet. Maybe just quiet. It wasn't a real punchy episode, after all. Maybe his mind is closed.
Louis stands and tucks his own popcorn bowl under one elbow. It is mostly empty. He has managed to suffer through most of it, thanks to a heavy-handed pour with the salt. He reaches out with his clean hand for Armand's own popcorn bowl, and sorting Tupperwares. This is part of the routine. Louis eats the popcorn, Armand sorts it. Some of it always goes to waste.
Sometimes, Louis will offer commentary. They talk about the show. The melodrama of it. Louis never acts like it's boring.
You're boring! You are so boring!
But am I as boring as the blather committed onto the ferric tapes of your fascinating boy?
Am I as boring as the heavy-handed teen melodrama churned out in endless seasons?
Would he be worth paying attention to if he wallowed in it? Have they not had enough melodrama? He almost wants to ask, to start the fight again, but the argument is over three decades old and Louis doesn't remember.
Instead, Armand hands over his bowl.
"I'll look into tickets," Louis says, as he collects it, "For Fall Out Boy."
Armand nods.
Louis' mind is open again. Armand reaches for the edge of it. Maybe he will learn what makes the show not so boring, or how he should wallow best. But Louis' thoughts are not on the melodrama or the warped footage with the sad music. Louis is letting his thoughts run wild and loud. Visions of a concert floor, and loud, modern music. The anticipation of something new, even if it's just the band of the hour. He's thinking about eyeliner messily applied, shopping for new outfits to fit in, and the way Armand might look surrounded by easy prey.
He isn't thinking about the episode at all anymore.
He isn't thinking about Jane.
Janie-bear.