oh, for a desolation that is a desolation

Daniel knocks on Armand’s door at quarter to six in the morning, thirteen minutes to sunrise and just when Armand had been about to nervously call Louis to confirm that the windows on the car really were tinted enough. “Moving crew,” he calls from the hallway, and then stumbles in as soon as Armand opens the door, looking exhausted. He throws a package down on top of a stack of boxes. “For you,” he says, “from Lestat. From Marius. Through Lestat. He seemed worried it might contain something you shouldn’t send over the border by mail. Then he strongly implied that I should open it myself and decide whether or not you should have it, since I’m family. If he thinks I’m going to censor your mail, he’s even stupider than I thought. Open it or throw it out, I don’t care. Hope it’s not kiddie porn.” Then he collapses into his coffin, dead to the world.

Armand stands, staring between the coffin with his own blood slumbering in it, and the package. It is not very large. It is sitting on top of three boxes of clothing. Lestat was right, of course, as he usually is about things that Daniel doesn’t understand: he is family. Armand takes it and puts it on the table instead, as if that might somehow be a more favourable location for safekeeping while Daniel sleeps. It sits there, covering up the stack of paperwork that had been the room's previous most intimidating feature.

Armand has, technically, owned property before. He and Louis tended to set forward whoever got more respect from lawyers in a given culture as owner of their properties, and Armand's name was on a few. But the actual ownership of them, the decisions, the moving— all of those memories are to do with the companionship, not with the ownership. He owned the theatre, too, in a manner of speaking, for all the good it did him.

But that manner is not this: the title deed to a townhouse with his name and signature on it. Not an investment, not a symbol of devotion. A place to live, because the one-bedroom apartment he'd crawled into to lick his wounds after Louis' interview is now full of furniture, and books, and servers with large fans, and radio equipment, and a coffin that Daniel sleeps in when he visits, and kitchen tools that human friends are reassured by and Louis uses on him in ways that would certainly unassure them, and perfectly tailored clothes that Lestat sends him that are good for no other occasion besides going out with Lestat, and he thinks he would like to grow plants, but there is no room, he has outgrown this place in a way he never had any of his previous dwellings.

So, he is moving. Only a few blocks, but into a piece of building that he now owns. The paperwork piled underneath the package is signed Armand Maurius.

He had used du Lac for a while, during their companionship, when and where local custom allowed. And he had others, of course, names that mean nothing or are nothing more than little jokes, populating passports, drivers' licenses, birth and death certificates, the detritus of an unnaturally long life in a world that forgets less and less. But they are not his. And nobody else is ashamed to use the name of his father; not Louis, when du Lac père had built his wealth on the backs of slaves, nor Lestat, when Lioncourt père had beat him bloody, nor Daniel, when Molloy père had left for no better reason than boredom. Once a name is given it cannot be taken back. This one is his.

Lestat is usually right, about family matters. Well, he is usually spectacularly wrong about how to actually carry out family matters, but he knows a family when he sees one. He knows which pieces can fit where, and when they can't; that all the goodwill and delusion in the world can't take a daughter and turn her into a sister. And Lestat would have them open Marius' gift as a family.

Daniel had not exactly given Armand permission to sleep in his coffin, but then, it is really Armand's coffin, and Armand's bed currently has an enormous pile of stuff on it, not even categorizable items, just stuff, cables and mugs and extra blankets and makeup and plastic bins and electrical outlet adaptors and anyway, there is room, just barely, if he slips down sideways and slots himself in neatly with his back to the side of the box and his chest pressing against his fledgling's shoulder. Daniel turns a bit, asleep, making room anyway, which is like permission. As good as. He can sleep like this, even with the chaos outside the box, even with the package on the table.

---

Armand had not consulted any authority but himself, when he had decided on the new versions of the great laws that set the rhythm of his current life. He is not solipsistic enough to believe he was the first or only vampire to think to offer namaz on a vampirically reasonable schedule; and indeed, the modest but steady traffic on his servers testifies that there are other creatures out there who see fit to do as he does, whether for his reasons or their own. And at the time, it had felt good to decide something only by and for himself. No coven, no companion, the gates of ijtihad open as to the prisoner whose cage has been nothing but shadow all along, only one will set above his own and none set below.

And yet— had he had someone to ask, perhaps he would have consulted on this. As the sun sinks beneath the horizon, the new day begins, and mortals offer the second-last prayer before sleep. Only when twilight has disappeared and complete darkness reigns do they offer the last. So it seems obvious, the perfect symbolism which is the hallmark of divinity, for the mortal's last farewell to the light— their transition from predator of the earth's creatures to prey of vampires— to mark the vampire's first prayer after waking.

But it seems a little bit indulgent, doesn't it. Armand could rise from his coffin— well, any time, but even Louis can usually manage it in the early twilight if roused. Daniel, too, if he sets a loud enough alarm, though he is currently still sleeping soundly, his chest rising and falling against Armand's palm. But here is Armand in the liminal space of twilight, sleeping in as perhaps a mortal would say, though he isn't sleeping, he's awake, just watching and waiting. It's a difficulty, an act of devotion, for a human to leave off sleeping and rise with the sun. There is no parallel difficulty, for a vampire to rise with dusk. It simply happens.

He had explained this problem to Louis once, when he asked about the calculations, and Louis just laughed and said your life isn't difficult enough, huh? Need someone to make things harder for you? and then done it, which is nice enough, but not really a solution, no. Louis is a solutions man for certain kinds of problems and not others.

Whereas Daniel—

Daniel wakes up all at once, like a dead body snapped back to life by a bolt of lightning. They do that to mortals now, actually, exactly that, with the voltage provided by chest paddles instead of the inconstant sky. He told Armand once that for the first year, it had felt like that, too; every night a rebirth, panic, the sudden jolt of realization that he is still here and is here for good. Now, he isn't panicked, merely present. Suddenly.

"Yes, Armand, you may sleep in my coffin with me," he says, as if reciting. Also as if holding back laughter. "Feel free to climb right in and stare at me creepily for as long as you like." Then he twists himself around a little and gets his arms around Armand, pulling him in tight, more on top of him that crushed against his side.

Armand tucks his chin over Daniel's shoulder, burying his face in the pillow. "Thank you," he says. "I appreciate it."

"You finally gonna fuck your little boy, then?" Daniel murmurs into his collarbone. Daniel likes to say these things to him because— Armand isn't sure why. Because it makes Armand squirm, perhaps, in a way Daniel likes. And because it started as a joke, yes, but every time Daniel suggests it it becomes less of a joke, simply by dint of the fact that Armand, well, doesn't. Every time it gives him the opportunity to refuse, and this time he says "No, sweet thing, you're too little," voice muffled a bit, and Daniel chuckles, the refusal well-worn and comfortable.

"You need to pray first," Daniel sighs. "Well, perhaps you'll be divinely inspired, and see fit to fuck your little—"

Armand manages to get a hand up and cover Daniel's mouth with it. "Silence, fledgling," he says. Daniel forces his tongue through his lips and licks Armand's palm, like an actual child.

"I ought to beat you more," Armand informs him, pushing himself up and climbing out. "Get up, Louis will be here soon."

"Louis has seen me in much worse states of disarray than this," Daniel says, "and he'll be late anyway, he's useless for punctuality without you."

Daniel is wrong; Louis isn't late, he arrives an hour after dusk just as he said he would, which actually is pretty impressive since Daniel is kind of right; Armand had spent several decades gently herding Louis to put down the book or turn off the radio or pick a shirt or a pair of shoes and get out the door. The decades they actually went out the door relatively often, that is.

Louis brought the supplies, in a rental truck now parked outside of Armand's building. Drop cloths for the furniture, rollers, trays, cans of paint. All the paint is white.

It's in Armand's rental agreement on this place, that he has to return it at the end of his lease with the white walls it came with. He had read the agreement carefully, not when he first signed it— he doesn't remember signing it at all— but months later, as he started sketching out the patterns that now vault the ceilings of each room. You may create, if you also destroy. A kind of permission.

Now, he stands in the centre of the prism of light he created and wishes for more moments with it. Not infinite ones, no, just more. Louis and Daniel are here to help, to tidy up, to carry boxes into the truck, but neither of them has picked up a paint roller. They've filled the trays and set one in the centre of the room by Armand and then busied themselves doing other things. Tucking the corners of cloths, puttering. Waiting for him to start.

Armand is tabulating all of the things he has destroyed in this world, or feels as though he has. Perhaps a continuous function fits better than a mental spreadsheet, yes. One variable, true culpability; another, perceived culpability. How are you supposed to separate them, when it's your own perception? And yet, perhaps after five hundred years, you can. Because item one, the palazzo. Real culpability zero, perceived— well, why not go all the way, really, call it imaginary, give it the vertical axis, add everything destroyed vectorially, with an angle and a magnitude, the palazzo an entire quarter rotation of the unit circle. The Paris coven, perhaps an eigth turn, a real part and an imaginary, it was him, yes, but it was Lestat also. His flock, all the vampires who went to the fire, well, he did that, he even enjoyed it, more than he really needed to, probably: real, real, real, the numbers everyone knows, you don't need complex arithmetic to count up bodies piled on a pyre. Claudia: some rotation, a little. Yes, some, even if he wouldn't say so to Louis. If it happened again now, it would be different, if his back was up against a wall, but—

"Maybe we could maybe take pictures of it?" Daniel says. Misinterpreting, doing his best, he is always doing his best, which is sometimes quite bad. "So you—"

Armand picks up the paint roller and flings it towards the wall. It splatters, a huge glob of the stuff hitting the centre of the p6m section (pattern: an Assyrian bronze from Nimrud). Some hits Daniel, little flecks splattering over his glasses. Louis gets a large stain on his shoe. Only Louis would wear Italian leather shoes to paint walls.

Of all the things Armand has ever destroyed, nothing but this was ever his. All real part, but the creation and destruction are of the same magnitude, cancelling out and staying right at the origin. Paint in great heaving spasms, dripping down from the ceiling, running down the walls. Long careless arcs of it. Louis is the first to get to it with him, Louis is good at taking what he's offered. He grabs a paintbrush and paints a broad stripe, not as profligate as Armand's wild flailing but still somehow decadent, the strange enjoyment of drawing out wild nothing where orderly beautiful something once reigned.

And then Daniel joins in, too. Armand can no longer see into his mind. Once, Armand had flipped through it like a book, seen the paltry little matters that had been occupying his time until his fateful encounter with Louis. A year and a half at UC Berkley, which had ended with a failing grade on a paper on Derrida's Différance which would have by no means been fatal to his academic career had be not marched into the Dean's office, high out of his mind, and slammed the red-marked sheets down on the man's desk announcing that he was done deconstructing things until he'd gone out into the world and actually constructed something. Which had seemed, Armand surmised, like a bon mot très-suffisant at the time, for a couple hours at least. But perhaps Daniel had been on to something, because he had constructed something, hadn't he. He still doesn't seem quite as enthusiastic about the long-awaited deconstruction as Louis.

The thing about destruction is that it's so easy. It had taken a month and a half, from planning to completion, to paint the apartment walls in colour. It takes half an hour for the three of them to render the entire place completely blank, and it would have been quicker if Armand had started out neater about it.

It is not enough time to get tired of the work. He could destroy more, after, but there's nothing else to ruin, everything else he's attached to, and the rest of the night is for the three of them to pack the rest of it up and carry it down the stairs, box by box, into a truck, which Armand insists on driving himself the five minutes to the house, Louis in the passenger seat and Daniel perched awkwardly in between them. The same actions in reverse, boxes lining the walls, furniture stacked haphazardly. The sun will be coming up soon.

The bed is in pieces, still. The coffin is here, usable if you pick your way around to it carefully. There is toothpaste in one of the boxes, probably. And pyjamas. He is tired. Perhaps he ought to just sleep naked. No, that wouldn't really be fair, would it, when—

"You could both sleep at my place," Louis says hesitantly, surveying the scene. "If you like."

Armand has been to Louis' place now perhaps a dozen times since it became Louis'. He has been carted back soused, he has flown him up to the balcony. Then Louis had texted him one night, feel like kneeling on my floor for a bit? Which turned out to be a euphemism for nothing at all, sometimes Louis just likes keeping something smaller and more docile than himself around. Armand had spent a few hours kneeling on the floor of the living room, a familiar position in an eerily unfamiliar space, which turned out to be perfect, not what he would have chosen but exactly what he needed. They fit together like puzzle pieces, when they aren’t busy fitting together like a knife in a wound. So Louis asks him over for that, sometimes, when he’s fuming over some spat with Lestat or when he looked up into the night sky and got too close to falling into its uncaring emptiness, and sometimes he lets Armand suck his cock and sometimes he just says thank you, Arun and sends him home, feeling warm and useful and something like relieved, to be able to go away and come back, a reliable return, solidifying from hypothesis into natural law.

Daniel is looking at him, a kid waiting for permission. “That would be very nice, thank you,” he says, and then takes a deep breath and continues, because there is still one item that remains to be done tonight. “There is one more task I’d like my fledgling for here. We’ll be over shortly.”

Louis blinks. He is not used to being dismissed, but then, this is Armand’s house. “Alright,” he shrugs. He swoops in to kiss Daniel on the cheek and Armand just on the tip of his nose, and then he is gone.

Silence. The townhouse is better insulated than the apartment, and the street quieter. “What’s the task?” Daniel asks, in a tone of voice that makes it clear he knows exactly what the task is.

A family matter. Daniel is not a gentle man, in some ways he is much crueller than Louis, but he knows how to watch and listen, and he and Armand have not had much time to be cruel to each other. He and Daniel have never had a screaming fight about where to put a painting, never called each other by words so true they loop back towards being a lie. It’s a strange kind of distance to share. Good for beginnings, for uncertainties, for opening paper-wrapped packages that he will perhaps decide to dump in the garbage and never speak of again.

The couch is facing the wrong way, into the wall of what will eventually be the living room instead of away from it. Armand climbs over the back and sits on it anyway, tucking his knees into his chest. “It’s in the blue plastic bin near the door,” he says. A bin full of remnants, things that had been in use until the very last moment and things with no obvious use.

He hears Daniel snap open the lid and rummage around inside. Then he clambers over the back of the couch, ungainly, Armand is never sure whether he deliberately exaggerated the mannerisms of old age or is simply too used to them, and settles himself beside Armand. Places Marius’ gift in his waiting hands. The tearing sound loud in the blank-walled room. Paper. Bubble wrap. More paper.

It's a painting, naturally. It takes a moment for the eye to resolve it into one, though, because it has nothing in common with the Romanus that Louis has stored for him. It is both photorealistic and photo-sized, a card easy to pinch between thumb and forefinger. In the photo— the painting: the canal and the front entrance to the villa. Climbing out of a gondola are Amadeo and Riccardo. Riccardo has one hand half-raised, balancing, the other extended a little behind him, as if to put it around Amadeo's shoulders. Face upturned, heart-stoppingly rendered in miniature.

From the angle, only the top of Amadeo's head and a sliver of his profile are visible. Still, enough to see the joyful glimmer of a smile at the corner of his month. He is a little hunched over, leaning into Riccardo— still drunk— and they are both absolutely soaked with canal water. The flat bottom of the boat beneath their feet is dark with it, and their clothes hang on them heavily. Riccardo is holding both Amadeo's overshirt and his own slung over his arm, because he'd pulled them off when he'd fished him out of the canal. The scene is painted from an odd angle: above and to the left, rather far away, not a very good vantage to observe its principal characters from at all. A mystifying artistic choice.

Except not to Armand, of course, because he knows it. It is the view from Marius' bedroom, when you slip off the long edge of the grand canopied bed and edge around in bare feet and a sheet or nothing at all to stand in front of the glass and watch the water. There are, then, three characters implied in the painting: the two adventuresome boys on the threshold of home, and their protector, their chastener, watching for their return.

Armand remembers the feeling of it: hose, shirt, hair full of water, his little body suddenly weighed down by so much gravity. Much heavier than the previous time he had fallen in a river, when his threadbare clothes had hardly done anything to pull him down. And this time he hadn't even wanted to be pulled down, but his clothes did it for him, until Riccardo's hands grabbing his arms, pulling him up, limping onto a gondola with his feet making squelching noises in his—

Amadeo's shoes. They are wrong. Armand is certain of it, he can feel them on his feet under the rising Venetian sun, now that he is seeing it again as if Louis were there to take a picture. what's in front of his eyes makes no sense: these shoes, the ones Marius has put him in in the picture, he bought for Amadeo after this incident, precisely because the old ones had been ruined by this little escapade, the red-and-white pattern of the dye seeping out of the leather and staining him up to the ankle— and it had been the ruined shoes, more than anything, that Amadeo felt badly about, after all they were the only true harm done. But Marius had bought him new shoes almost as if pleased by the need to do so, and he had whipped Riccardo for Amadeo having fallen in the canal, though he had been the one to save him.

The new shoes are on Amadeo's feet in the picture, as glaring as a stray splash of paint. Blue, not red and white, and a little thinner and daintier, soft against his feet. Everything else about the scene is perfect, photographic, a memory so obvious it can only have been pulled from the fabric of reality itself. The pinhole tear of an aged mind verging on senility? A coded message of some kind? Or just a joke, a little game to keep him on edge? Is the object of the game to keep him away, or to goad him into asking Lestat for a phone number, which he surely has, Marius likes to keep up with the times, and dial him up just to say how could you have made it so nearly perfect?

"Okay," says Daniel slowly, and Armand feels his fingers soft on the back of his neck. "How we feeling?"

He doesn't know how to explain it, how it's the perfect gift. It is impossible to dispose of or forget about. He will keep it until the end of the Earth, until the end of him, any number of homes, and not just his home but his mind. In an instant, every hazy memory of Riccardo has coalesced into certainty, this one crystal-clear memory. All the more clear for that one flaw, the thing that makes him truly certain that he remembers. Either that he remembers, or that he is insane. It is a stroke of genius of both kindness and cruelty. Not in conflict, not one after the other. Both at the same time.

Oh, he misses.

To the exact extent that Armand and Daniel fall intentionally short in carrying out the customary sexual relations between maker and fledgling, they are superlative in this, geniuses maybe: tangling their bodies up together so closely that it seems as if the wall that separates their minds is porous after all. Perhaps it is, and it's just that no other vampires have ever discovered so, if the minds of creator and created can be joined only by an abstinence, just the minor abstinence of mortal carnality, one final barrier between them left unbroken providing the thread of connection that they can reach across. Daniel gathers him up like he's liquid, like he can cup Armand in the soft curve of his hip and belly and elbow like water in his palm, and whispers I know into his hair to the litany of missing spilling from his mind.

"I don't know where to put it," Armand says shakily, out loud. He cannot hang it on the wall, like art, like something anyone with eyes can see and interpret. But neither can he hide it away, the back of the closet, or whatever storage Louis arranged for the other painting of Marius', it needs to be here, close enough to hear the heartbeat of the tiny figures and arrythmia of the wrong shoes.

Daniel waves his hand. "I think that's the least of your problems," he says, "tidying-wise."

Armand chuckles a tiny bit, just a tiny expulsion of air into Daniel's now blood-soaked t-shirt. Then he stops, and Daniel holds him impossibly tighter, sobers. "Put it on a bookshelf," he suggests. "Not displayed. Just slipped in on the end next to a book. Where you'll see the little gap, and know."

Next to which book?

"I don't know," says Daniel. "You'll figure it out while you're unpacking, I bet. One will feel right."