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Louis wakes with sunset, immobilized.

So it's tonight. So it's this. It's been coming a while. Nights out, dead boys in grimy apartments, mornings of narrowly avoiding the sun. Doesn't stop him from panicking, opening his mouth to scream, now that it's here. The scream, of course, doesn't come out. He didn't expect it to. He's not that stupid.

Armand lets him speak, once he lines the words up in his mind nicely, nice and calm, normal volume. "Are you here?" he asks. He can't move his head. Can't look at anything other than the ceiling.

A cool hand on his forehead. Armand sitting down on the mattress beside him. "Of course. Always."

Sometimes, begging works. He's not ashamed of being reduced to it within a minute of consciousness. He has no more shame left, when it comes to Armand. Nothing of anything else left, either, nothing useful anyway, here or anywhere, just a yawning chasm of despair and wanting it to end. And yet, he cannot. Too cowardly? What could be so difficult about just walking into the sun? It cannot possibly require any particular mental fortitude. Why has he never tried it before? He must have, it's so obvious--

"Please," Louis says. "Please, please, nothing that hurts too much, I can't stand it, I'll do anything..."

Armand runs a thumb gently down his forehead. Louis can move his eyes to watch his face. He looks thoughtful. Conflicted.

Here is the problem with Armand-- well, one of the many problems, an entry on a list so long and complex that it wouldn't do Louis much good even if he could write it all down for future reference-- he does, almost always, follow the golden rule. He has never done anything to anyone that he would not accept being done to himself. These days, it's less accept and more beg.

"Beloved," Armand says, quietly, regretfully, "it doesn't work if it doesn't hurt."

That's you, that's you, that's not how it is for me, but it would do no good to say, Louis can see that look on his face and he knows it. Maybe he's right, he's right.

"What are you going to do."

"What I should have done a long time ago," Armand says gently. "I'm sorry, Louis. I should not have let you carry on like this for so long. I should have done it as early as possible, should have stayed with you, should have removed the stones from your body at the same moment I removed your body from the stones. It was my carelessness that has landed you here, unable to move past it. So, your feet. Just for a few days. And when they return, they will heal cleanly, smoothly, finally."

The box. Armand had brought home a box a little larger than a hat box, about a week ago. A beautiful thing, leather on the outside and velvet on the inside, like a little coffin, but empty. He hadn't asked what it was for. Maybe he should have. Would Armand have told him? Said this box is for my Maître's feet, during the period for which he is relieved of them. And then what?

His feet. The gravel trapped in his ankles. The only thing, some days, that makes him sure it really happened, that Claudia was real. "No," he gasps.

Armand just pats at his head. All is ready on the bedside table, when Louis strains his eyes to look to the side. A clean sharp knife. A bone saw. The beautiful luxurious box.

Pure, blind panic. So blind that he's not even sure what he's thinking, what logic leads him to it; which is perhaps why it works, why Armand does not see the ruse. There isn't one. "My hands," he says. "Please, please, take my hands instead. You're right about the pain, I need it, I need it so bad, to not be able to do anything, for everything about me to depend on you, to watch them knit back onto me right where I can see it and know for sure that everything heals. Everything. I'll heal. I promise. I'm begging, please, Arun, take my hands instead."

Armand pauses. The magic word is far from magic. When he obeys, it is because it pleases him to. Armand can cast off their little game whenever he wants.

"All right," Armand says finally. "Of course, my love. Anything you need."

Anything he needs. He needs there to not be a knife slicing through the flesh of his wrist. He needs Armand to not be so goddamn careful, snipping the tendons with little scissors so they'll find each other cleanly when he decides Louis can have them back. He needs to not be able to smell the strange salt-rich stink of the inside of his radius and ulna, or hear the whine of the bone saw slicing through them. He needs the pain to stop so badly. He needs Armand to finish the job when he slips out of consciousness. Instead Armand carefully prods at Louis' mind until he is awake and alert, and then he takes the other hand.

And then, in the haze of a pain so monstrous that he's sure he's never felt anything like it before (he would remember-- he would) he needs other things. Armand's wrist on his mouth, the strong rich blood flowing into him. Armand's tongue on his cheeks, lapping up his tears, kissing his eyelids. Armand's voice in his head, telling him to rest. Armand can take away the pain. Why would he not want the pain gone? Why would he choose to live with it when he could let it slip away from him, memory like a rushing river, already so far behind he can barely see it in the distance?

When Louis is ready to have them back Armand has to peel a layer of new skin away from the stumps of Louis' wrists, more agony. But it had taken that long, for him to be ready, so it is a necessary agony, exquisite.

And of course he was right, they heal, it all heals. Soon he is good as new. There is nothing that can injure him, not really, nothing that can't be endured or gotten over. He caresses Armand's face with his hands, the feeling newly ecstatic. It is so good to be whole, so good to be alive, so good to be loved and to love.