Work Text:
The desire to approach obliteration
Preexists each metaphysic justifying it. Watch him
Fucked want to get fucked hard. Christianity
Allowed the flagellants
Light, for even Jesus found release from flesh requires
Mortification of the flesh. From the ends of
The earth the song is, Grind me into dust.
–
At the end of every visit-stay-interlude they would go to the library and Armand would select a book for Louis. Sometimes he selected two, which could mean any number of things, and once he hadn’t taken a single one off of the shelves, which had meant something quite specific indeed. Louis had let it get to him, as he was meant to, and spent somewhere along the lines of three months watching the intermittent tinting and untinting of the living room windows and drinking pigeon blood. He had been glad as always for Armand to return, but when Armand had extended a thin, threadbare volume of Millay, Louis had wept. Armand had waited patiently, book in hand, until the tears had stopped, so that Louis did not stain the pages with blood. And that had been a kindness, and that too had been a lesson.
–
Armand would sometimes remind Louis that the apartment was exactly what he had asked for - what he had, in fact, begged Armand for at the dawn of the new millennium. Hours earlier, Louis had drained a man with long blond hair and blue eyes under the fireworks, cradling his head in one hand and tearing him away from the world like it meant nothing. Surrounded by the anticipation and fear of a million minds as the clock struck midnight, the way love and lust and the familiar tang of disappointment rose in the air as couples kissed, caught up for half a second in the march of time the way he had not been in decades - yes, the man’s life had been nothing compared to that. Louis had chosen him in a flight of fancy, he’d killed him for someone else’s crimes. And then he’d wasted his blood in a fit of hatred and ingratitude, vomiting it onto the scuffed wooden floors in the entryway of an apartment he and Armand would soon abandon without regret.
He’d begged Armand to take the memory of that night. Armand had refused. And so he’d begged again later, closer to dawn, face streaked with bloody tears that Armand traced, untouching, with his eyes. The second time he’d begged for Armand to take it away instead, to teach Louis to live like Armand could, like Claudia had, just a stone skipping eternally and touching the water no more than physics demanded. He wanted to shed life like an unloved, bloodstained coat; he wanted to never feel anything again. He wanted to be free. He wanted to never be touched. He was so tired, he told Armand. He was so very tired.
There was some part of that barely coherent pleading to which Armand had agreed. Gently, he’d dried the tears and made Louis take the blood back, cleaning it off of his fingers. The gesture was a vow of sorts, marriage, fealty, or otherwise. Armand’s eyes had been very, very bright, and his face had been very, very still. Louis felt that same perfect stillness reflected in himself. Blood in the air, on his tongue. A perfect peace.
The next evening, they left for Dubai.
–
Louis had known from the outset - from that very first night in the cemetery, from the moment of his death and transformation - that he would have trouble leaving life behind. Even amid the overwhelming ecstatic high of death, even as the light shattered and reformed, his mind riding long, sticky waves of awe, behind the face of his maker he’d glimpsed his own father’s gravestone. It was a sign, he’d known then, that the separation would be lengthy, painful, and perhaps forever ongoing. The flaw had been in him from the start.
Armand accepted this weakness, but spared no effort in curbing it. He knew that for Louis, indulgence had to be so occasional as to become incidental and unlonged for. To the extent that the apartment in Dubai was not purely a box of concrete and steel, it contained just enough to keep Louis thinking, watching, enduring. The trick was not to forget, Armand said, the trick was to become utterly self-disciplined. At that point, Louis could be trusted with the world again, because he would not want nor need it, and thus it could not hurt him. More importantly, most importantly, he would not be able to hurt it in return.
Finding the balance took time. The tree, the paintings, the windows darkening enough for him to approach them and peer out at the city, these were concessions granted only because at first, shut away in the dark, Louis had gone a little mad. He had seen processions of the dead, heard Grace and Paul singing hymns as children, tasted sweet, familiar blood. He’d smelled a cologne not produced since its maker died of the Spanish flu in 1920, and when Armand had come back he’d greeted him by a name neither of them desired to hear. Armand, seeing the results of Louis getting everything he wanted, had drawn a line. And so: the tree and the paintings. And so the sight of the city at night, and the patches of shadowed floor along the windows, and the unlocked door to the balcony, although Louis never opened it. And so, eventually, Daniel - but that would come later.
By contrast, the books were not a concession, nor were they entirely a tether to sensation. The height of the shelves, the process of receiving each book, the books themselves - this was all part of the education. Armand filled the shelves with poetry, essays, fiction lean in size and prose, all of the sharpest and most beautiful words for Louis to harden himself against. That was the task: to develop the ability to feel or not feel at will rather than dropping into the lack of feeling from a great height. Not to read emotionlessly, but to read without succumbing - to pray without ceasing, to ingrain distance in himself. Fundamentally, it was a test of will - could he read Morrison, Millay, or Milosz and settle his feelings as easily as they came, letting even the strongest slip quickly below still, deep water? Could he learn to exist only in himself? Could he master his instinct to relate to the tangled mess of humanity?
He could. With Armand’s help, his complete knowledge of every moment that Louis failed in his task, and his patience with each failure, it would be possible to change. It would take time, but Louis had nothing but time. If he knew anything, it was how to suffer time in the service of something greater.
For two decades, Louis did as he had always done: he suffered for love.
–
Thoughts heard four miles from a 82nd floor apartment in Dubai:
It’s possible to get twisted up so bad by someone that even getting out their grasp doesn’t untwist anything at all. It’s possible to get twisted up so bad that you think up is down and right is left, that the sky is green and the sun, when it sets, disappears from existence until morning. The thing you never understood, because I didn’t want you to understand it, is that when that happens, someone else has to untwist you. Because left to your own devices you just thrash and crumble and break. It takes great care and patience for you to be returned to yourself. It takes time, time, an unbearable amount of time. It’s painful. But it will be done. It will be done. It will be done.
If you want it.
–
After twenty years of coming and going, Armand knows the exact amount of distance needed for Louis to be unable to read his mind. Despite Armand’s reach being much greater, he often closes himself off at the same moment that Louis loses him, finding unbearable relief in not being what Louis requires him to be.
He begrudges Louis nothing and he complains not at all, for there is no one who could adequately appreciate his turmoil. But it pains him to see Louis like this, it pains him to be this for Louis, perhaps most of all it pains him that Louis has never noticed any of this, too full of the sedating relief of isolation. The apartment smells almost unbearable these days, thick with two decades of animal blood, hunger, loneliness, and the dull certainty of redemption.
Armand makes a note on his phone to have the vents checked before Molloy arrives. He doubts the old man could smell the hunger, but he would certainly smell the blood.
–
There are good moments in his visits. Armand always feeds to excess beforehand in the hopes that Louis will be tempted by the blood, and he often is. Sometimes Armand barely makes it through the door before Louis is on him, pressing him against the wall, hands gripping his wrists, muttering unimportant greetings and grazing his neck once, twice with his teeth before abandoning everything to drink. The sense of intimacy this provokes in Armand is its own ecstatic abandonment, and he shares the sensation with Louis so that it loops between them, building on itself. There are many things Louis feels guilty about, rightly or wrongly, but Armand would not stand for him to regret this. There is nothing to regret. It is a beautiful thing to be in love.
Armand makes another note - re-acclimate Louis to drinking human blood in a slightly more restrained manner. It wouldn’t do if he ate the journalist in the first five minutes, and it would do even less if he fucked him.
–
There are often difficult moments. A scene oft repeated in the early 2000s: the two of them on some deliberately unpleasant couch, Louis lying with his head in Armand’s lap. The particular development of this little ritual is lost to memory, but Armand suspects it was a stray hope he’d seen in Louis’ thoughts and brought to life - it had the form of penance, but served the purpose of reducing a little of the desperate hunger in him, a mess of skin-touch-know me-love me-forgive me that Armand accepted as he accepted all of Louis, but which he sometimes categorized, in the deep recesses of his mind, as something a little pitiful, a little unpleasant. Of course that had been then - with the edges of both their feelings worn away by time and steady effort, it was now an unremarkable intimacy.
There was something Lestat had called Louis once or twice, something that had stuck in Armand’s mind despite his best efforts to ignore Lestat’s existence beyond acknowledging the vast extent of the mess he’d created in New Orleans. Saint Louis, he’d murmured, and even now the words made something in Louis twist a little. Just a very little, barely more than a twitch, but that was more than enough. Saint Louis, and decades of hard work were undone. Of course Armand never said it, nor did he think it, but he privately agreed with Lestat. Louis the Stylite, he would think instead, and this was acceptable to both of them. Louis, divine sufferer on a pillar, sheltered by faith and some very thick window tinting.
Louis was never more nor less of a saint than during that mimicry of confession. He would keep his eyes closed, pushing every supposed transgression from the moment Armand had left the apartment last time to the moment Louis sensed him in the city again. Often what he sent was nothing more than fragments of books and memories, things that had touched him more than he’d wanted. The description of a river, a brother, a daughter, the sun. Anything that was more than he could bear.
Armand’s role in this was to understand - a sometimes impossible task, despite all of his power - and to encourage. Louis did not ask for absolution, nor did he want it from Armand. He wanted Armand’s fingers to rest lightly on his temple, and he wanted to be better. If fulfilling those wants required Armand to pretend he knew why Louis had been set adrift by something so simple as a phrase, as all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was, as more than a hundred great blue herons riveted by the light of dawn, as the dry sands crackled, then he would do so. He forgave nothing, absolved nothing, indulged almost everything. Sometimes he left the apartment feeling deeply troubled, but most of the time he put his faith in Louis, as Louis put his faith in Armand. Together they were crossbeams to the other’s belief that Louis could change.
–
A third note in his phone - a request from Louis to bring him a copy of Molloy’s memoir. Troublesome, but he will acquiesce.
He casts his mind out one last time as his car speeds silently out of the city. Louis is standing at the window, looking out as best he can in the early dawn. He is imagining that if he focuses, he will see Armand’s car in the street. He is dreaming that he can pick it out from all the other masses of metal and light. He is already writing his latest list of transgressions.