Whatever you do, do not imagine Armand finally reading the book and seeing the level of detail and care that Daniel put into describing him, and realising that though he wiped his memories of their time together in the 70s, there’s still an echo of how it felt inside Daniel somewhere. Daniel describes him with such a deep layer of understanding that really shouldn’t be possible for someone who only knew him for the duration of both interviews, which is all Daniel should have knowledge of. Armand leaps off the page compared to the other characters, equal parts beautiful and monstrous. Armand realises right there, with the book in his hands, that his boy still loves him, and that he’s out there right now, alone and completely new to vampirism. No one to teach him properly. Yet he stays away anyway.
And you certainly shouldn’t imagine that Daniel’s vampiric loneliness is way more extreme than the typical vampire loneliness because he also misses someone he doesn’t know he misses. The love of his life was ripped right out of his mind and now there’s a hollowness in him that he hadn’t quite noticed before but he realises it’s been there for the majority of his life. It’s impossible to pinpoint the source though. He thinks that it’s just the vampire bond, that he has a strange attachment to his maker. But he has no idea just how attached to his maker he really is. This emptiness he carries really began about fifty years ago, something Daniel has been attributing solely to his drug abuse at the time. But it’s not just the drugs. There’s something else, and the only person who can help him make sense of it is hiding from him even though he never really wanted to stay away in the first place.
