#fandom rambling

in the deafening polar province called You

Pairing: Armand/Daniel Molloy

Length: 150k

Rating: E

Summary: Daniel is sprawled out across the bed, loose-limbed and lazy, somehow filling all the open space it has to offer and leaving Armand to nestle into the gaps. His cheeks are flushed, blood pooling like it knows what comes next. Maybe it does. Armand was reading about classical conditioning the other day. About dogs who become accustomed to getting food when their handler rings a bell.

Perhaps Daniel is the dog, Armand’s teeth sharp bells reverberating in his veins. Or perhaps Armand is the dog, Daniel’s blood a song rattling in his ears. He has been a dog before. He runs his tongue along the bow of Daniel’s collarbone, gathers the salt-sweat there and imagines what it tastes like because Daniel does.

Armand remembers he loved Daniel, once, and that Daniel loved him. Or a version of them did, at least. It isn't his intention to go back to that, but it's not not his intention, either. Such is the prerogative of an immortal: to hold two contradicting desires simultaneously. If nothing else, it passes the time while he waits for this miserable interview to end.

You might like this fic if: You're looking for a vague mixture of book canon and show speculation, You like Armand POV, You enjoy flashbacks and memory fuckery, you like when character's are imperfect but also love each other

Excerpt:

Daniel wakes sometime past four in the morning. Armand has enough warning before his eyes open that he could look away. Hears the change in his breathing, the shifting of his weight, and could pretend he hasn’t spent the better part of the night with his head on his arm, watching Daniel sleep. He doesn’t bother.

“Creepy,” Daniel croaks when he sees him, clearing his throat with a cough into the closed fist of his left hand. He stretches, spine arching, neck rolling with a loud crack. Armand can’t bring himself to blink, let alone turn his head. Daniel eyes the blanket on his lap with a strange expression, picking at the fabric between thumb and finger as if it will tell him how it got there.

“Apologies,” Armand says, a dry and transparent lie. “I did not mean to frighten you.”

They both know Daniel isn’t afraid, not really. Not the way he should be. If he ever had been he would probably have been dead long before now. He rubs at his temple and Armand wants–

He stands, makes his way to the kitchen and returns to Daniel with a palm full of pills and a glass of water. Daniel doesn’t immediately reach out to take either, instead looking from them to Armand with transparent suspicion.

Armand breathes an annoyed sigh. “I’m not going to poison you, Daniel.”

“I know that,” Daniel snaps. His fingers brush Armand’s palm when he takes the pills, little shocks bringing Armand’s nerves to attention as if they have been waiting for a sign to wake. No use telling them not to bother. “Poison is too detached for you. You’d probably go for strangling or something.”

He waits for Daniel to drink, to swallow the pills, to lift the glass to take another sip, and then says, “I’d simply drain you, Daniel.”

Daniel chokes, coughs into his elbow while Armand pries the glass from his fingers to set it on the coffee table. When Daniel recovers he looks up with a scowl and a sharp, “fuck you,” and it’s almost convincing but now he smells like desire. A short journey, always. Shorter now that Daniel can remember how good it felt to get what he wanted.

“You could, if you wanted. Would that help, do you think?” Armand cocks his head to the side, curious. Hungry, too. He should have eaten but it’s nothing he has not supressed a thousand times before. “You don’t know what you want, but your body does. It always does.”

“It doesn’t know shit. It’s seventy years old,” Daniel huffs, folding arms across his chest as if they can muffle the sound of his heartbeat.

Armand sinks to his knees, crowded into the narrow space between the coffee table and Daniel’s legs, careful not to touch him. Not now, not yet. The edge of the coffee table bites into his spine. “I can smell it on you. How much you want to say yes, how badly you’d like to be close, how you wish you could taste again. Say the word and–”

“No,” Daniel chews out. A half-beat of pause, enough space to ache but not quite enough to truly wound before he adds, “I don’t think it would help.”

Heat radiates from Daniel and Armand wants to feel it. His hands press hard to his own thighs and Daniel looks at him with that sharklike curiosity, circling and circling and circling.

“You’re not fucking with me,” Daniel finally says.

“No. Why would I?”

“Because that’s pretty much all you do with people?” Daniel asks it like a question, like he’s not sure of the answer. “Fuck these memories, I can’t keep track of what I know and what–”

“It’s all what you know.” It comes out gentler than he means it to. It’s not that he wants to be harsh with Daniel, though he often is. It’s more the look Daniel gives him when he’s anything but the purely violent creature Daniel wants to imagine he is. Like he’s caught up somewhere between pain and anger and his own tucked away tenderness. Betrayal too, like Armand is trying to complicate things further.

Daniel exhales, long and loud. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”

Reaching out to Daniel’s mind is careful work, in this moment. It’s not closed to him now, less because he’s welcome there and more because Daniel is too tired to keep it shut forever. Armand feels tired just brushing up against it, feels the mess of uncertainty, the never-ending spiral in and in and in.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m not fucking with you now. In this moment. Stay there.”

This earns him a glare, “Yeah. Easy for you to say. You’re not–”

My first Vampire Diaries hot take is that Tyler and Caroline were never going to work long term, even if Klaus had never shown up. but honestly I think they would have broken up eventually anyway. Tyler spent so much of his storyline trying to understand what it meant to be a werewolf. He wanted to learn about that side of himself, connect with other wolves, and eventually become part of a pack. Caroline never really seemed interested in any of that. She cared about Tyler because he was Tyler, but she never seemed to care much about werewolves themselves or what being a wolf meant to him. If Tyler had eventually wanted to travel and spend more time exploring that side of himself, I don't think Caroline would have wanted that life, and I think that difference alone would have eventually broken them apart.

My second hot take is that Jeremy Gilbert was not even close to being the worst character on this show. Honestly, Jeremy is one of the few characters whose reactions felt completely normal to me. His parents died, Vicki died, Anna died, and every five minutes somebody else in his life was getting killed, possessed, turned into a vampire, or dragged into some supernatural disaster. People criticize him for doing drugs and spiraling, but if my parents died, my girlfriend died, and my entire life became a supernatural nightmare, I would probably lose it too. Even his depression and suicidal thoughts made sense to me. I don't think Jeremy was weak. I think he reacted like an actual traumatized teenager would react.

My third hot take is that morality arguments in this fandom are mostly pointless. At some point you have to accept that this is a show full of terrible people doing terrible things to each other. Everybody manipulates people. Everybody lies. Everybody kills people. Everybody crosses lines. You can absolutely dislike a character because of something they did, but I don't understand when people act like their favorite character is somehow morally superior. People will hate Klaus because of how controlling he was with his siblings and then turn around and love Damon, even though Damon abused the sire bond with Elena, manipulated people constantly, and sexually abused Caroline. At that point we're not talking about morality anymore. We're talking about which character you personally enjoy more, and that's completely fine.

My fourth hot take is that neither Stelena nor Delena were ever going to work forever. Stefan and Elena were already struggling once Elena became a vampire because Stefan spent so much time focused on getting her back to being human. I honestly don't think Stefan wanted the cure for himself. I think he wanted Elena to have the human life he thought she deserved. The problem is that Elena was no longer human. There was a disconnect there that never really went away. On the other hand, I don't think Damon would have been happy as a human forever either. Damon loved being a vampire. He loved the freedom, the immortality, the thrill, and everything that came with it. Looking at his character throughout the entire series, I have a hard time believing he would truly be happy giving all of that up forever. That's why I don't think either ship was built to last long term. Stefan wanted Elena human, and Damon was never really built for humanity.

My fifth hot take is that Esther Mikaelson was a bad mother. Before anybody gets mad, yes, I understand that she thought she was doing the right thing. Yes, I understand that she loved her children. Yes, I understand that a lot of her decisions came from wanting to protect them. I still think she was a bad mother. Doing the wrong thing for the right reason does not magically make the wrong thing okay. Children don't grow up experiencing your intentions. They experience your actions. They experience the hurt, the fear, the consequences, and the damage. Years later, you can explain why you did something, but that doesn't undo what happened. Maybe this one hits differently for me because I've seen what happens when parents make harmful choices while insisting it's for your own good. The explanation doesn't erase the damage. It doesn't suddenly make everything okay. That's why I've never bought the argument that Esther's intentions excuse what she did. Her children still had to live with the consequences of her choices, and good intentions don't change that.

My Top 5 The Originals Hot Takes

Oh boy. Okay. This is going to be a doozy.

1. Davina Claire is not nearly as good of a character as people hype her up to be.

Every time I see somebody talking about how amazing Davina is, the conversation always comes back to the same thing: she was badass and she stood up to the Mikaelsons. Okay, and? What else? Seriously, what else? Because after a certain point, it felt like her entire character revolved around Kol. She had storylines before Kol, motivations before Kol, and conflicts before Kol, but eventually it felt like everything came back to him. And listen, if you love them together, that's completely fine, but I never got into it. I couldn't. The relationship always felt weird to me. I know the show explains Kol's age, and I know all the technical vampire lore arguments people use, but Davina looked incredibly young and every time they had a romantic scene together it pulled me right out of it. The sex scene especially freaked me out. I know what the show was trying to do and I know what they wanted me to feel, but it did not work on me at all. It just made me uncomfortable. So when people talk about Davina being one of the best characters in the entire franchise, I honestly don't see it.

2. Marcel and Rebekah were not going to work out long term.

I know people love calling them one of the healthiest relationships in the franchise. I know people call them soulmates and true love, but I honestly don't buy it. One thing that has always bothered me is that people talk about Rebekah as though wanting love automatically means she understood what healthy love looked like. She didn't. Rebekah spent over a thousand years trapped in one of the most dysfunctional family dynamics imaginable. She spent centuries being manipulated, controlled, threatened, daggered, isolated, and having every meaningful relationship in her life sabotaged. She desperately wanted love, but wanting love and understanding healthy love are not the same thing. People who grow up around dysfunction often normalize dysfunction because it's all they've ever known. That's just reality. And honestly, I don't even know if I believe she still wanted the cure by the end of The Originals. Maybe she wanted it back during TVD, but by the end of The Originals I just don't see it as being this huge priority anymore. One thing both shows make clear is that the Mikaelsons are terrified of change. Rebekah in season one of TVD and Rebekah by the end of The Originals are two completely different people. She grew, she evolved, and she matured. I think becoming human became less of a life goal and more of a vague possibility somewhere down the road. That's why I never really bought into the idea that her and Marcel had everything figured out.

3. Camille's season one storyline barely had anything to do with Klaus.

This one drives me insane because people rewrite Camille's character all the time. Camille did not enter the story because she was fascinated by Klaus Mikaelson. She did not become involved in the supernatural because she wanted to fix him. She did not spend season one obsessing over him. She got involved because of Sean. Sean was the reason. Sean's death was the reason. Her desire to understand what happened to somebody she loved was the reason. That's what pulled her into the story. Then Klaus compelled her. Then Klaus inserted himself into her life. Then Marcel inserted himself into her life. Then the supernatural world kept dragging her deeper into things whether she wanted it or not. People act like Camille spent season one running after Klaus with heart eyes, and that's just not what happened. Half the time she was angry at him. She hated the compulsion. She hated having her choices taken away from her. She hated somebody deciding what she was allowed to know and remember. The reason she eventually became interested in understanding Klaus is because Klaus literally took part of her life away from her. Once he removed Sean's death from her memory, of course she wanted answers. Of course she wanted to understand him. But that's completely different from acting like she entered the story because she was obsessed with Klaus from day one.

4. Jackson and Hayley were better than Hayley and Elijah.

And yes, I know this one is unpopular. The thing that always stood out to me about Jackson is that he loved Hayley without all the extra stuff. Without Klaus. Without Hope. Without the Mikaelson family drama. Without all the politics and expectations. He loved her because she was Hayley. He also loved Hope, and people overlook that all the time. Jackson accepted Hope, protected Hope, and cared about Hope. He stepped into that situation knowing exactly what it involved and still chose to stay. Meanwhile, Elijah's love for Hayley often felt conditional to me. Especially once she became a hybrid, there were multiple moments where it felt like Elijah loved the version of Hayley he imagined more than the version standing in front of him. The second she started changing, the second she became something different, you could feel that tension. Jackson, on the other hand, accepted her exactly as she was. The tragic part is that Hayley never loved Jackson as much as Jackson loved her. That's what makes the relationship so sad to me. In my opinion, Jackson gave far more than he ever got back, and I honestly think he deserved better.

5. Hope Mikaelson should have come before absolutely everything else in The Originals.