#sanfranseptember

Memory is a monster || Interview with the Vampire

Dialogue credit to @lesbiansidney thanks for working on this with me!

This is a snippet from a work in progress for @sanfranseptember week 1: Memory

For @sanfranseptember

Prompt: Ursa Major

How much I’ve hated you, and envied you that in the ghastly void you can with such determination plot your dogged course. -The Vampire Armand

I like to think Loumand tried to put the spark back in their relationship with stargazing, only for that, too, to invoke memories of their childhoods.

For Louis, it would make him think of fishing with his father one night along the bayou. A quiet night with no demands or worries, back when he trusted his father completely and assumed their family would always remain happy and together.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Interview with the Vampire (TV 2022) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Armand/Daniel Molloy, Alice/Daniel Molloy Characters: Daniel Molloy, Armand (Vampire Chronicles), Alice (Interview with the Vampire TV 2022) Additional Tags: Devil's Minion Era Happened (Interview with the Vampire TV 2022), Armand is Alice (Interview with the Vampire TV 2022), Dreams vs. Reality, Memory Alteration, Vampire Daniel Molloy Summary:

For the first time in many insomnia plagued years, Daniel dreams.

He dreams of his first apartment in New York, of sunlight streaming through the windows, through the mustard yellow curtains that he had picked out with Alice, illuminating the bronze crescent of her shoulder peeking out from white linen sheets, her dark curls splayed out on the pillows, her youthful face lost to the haze of faulty memory.

Is something wrong? she asks without speaking.

As he searches for the truth buried deep in his dreams, Daniel's odyssey of recollection takes him back through his memories of Alice, and he finds more than he bargained for.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Interview with the Vampire (TV 2022) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Armand/Daniel Molloy, Armand & Daniel Molloy Characters: Armand (Vampire Chronicles), Daniel Molloy, Louis de Pointe du Lac Additional Tags: Pet Play, Sub Daniel Molloy, Bottom Armand (Vampire Chronicles), Top Daniel Molloy, Breeding Kink, Bathing/Washing, Old Daniel Molloy, Vampire Daniel Molloy, dom armand Summary:

Daniel barely had time to protest before Louis and Armand had him cornered in the bathroom, sleeves rolled up like two determined nannies. Maybe he got a little dirty, a little careless with his hunt, but this truly seemed excessive. He wasn’t that messy of an eater.

Daniel gets a bath and a treat.

@sanfranseptember week 1 - memory

–

It’s September when the days finally seem to grow shorter from top to bottom and then sideways, shoulder to shoulder, the thinning ghost of a hot summer closing in on wet leaves on the sidewalks and potholes turned into puddles to puncture the tyres of passing cars speeding through the streets. Cursing drivers inspecting the damage and Armand smoking out the window, Louis putting his hands on the back of his neck and sinking his claws into the skin just enough to make his knees buckle. The nights pass like this. Sausalito with its boardwalk and the streets with its people.

Louis walks out of the shower on the third night of the month and finds Armand on the couch wearing only a long shirt and underwear, looking soft and warm the way he sometimes does. It makes him imagine a different place, a different time: Alexandria full of spite, Armand on his knees looking down at the floor with furrowed brows, leaning into the blows like he was thinking there it is. Like Louis was proving him right about something. Something uneasy and something guilt-shaped. Sometimes something knocks at the back of his mind: burnt skin and chunks of flesh-shaped ash on the floors, a journalist high on cocaine and opiates nodding off in the corner half-drained, the latter of which he can place, the first of which is a recurring nightmare that Armand scoffs at in the early evenings. Louis pushes it down and goes back to Alexandria instead. Alexandria can come to Sausalito whenever he feels like it ought to, so it does. Armand on his knees. Eyes trembling with tears, uncooked rice under the knees, eager mouth around Louis’s cock. Much better.

”Do you ever get a feeling of déjà-vu?” he asks, afterwards. After something at least. A different day, maybe. A different hour. He’s out of the shower again. He’s scrubbed and slick. Soft dead skin, on the surface at least. Something knocks at the back of his mind. Pale yellow towel, pale yellow tile. Rubber duck with the saturation turned all the way down. The neighbors here don’t mind that their lights stay on all night long. Long curtains shut tight with only the smallest of slivers of light escaping onto the streets with the streetlight glow. One can excuse this.

“Sure,” Armand agrees. “Time moves in circular patterns. Almost everything repeats. The longer you live the more things repeat.”

He’s playing with his hands now. Slow tap of finger to finger. The wind moves from windowsill to windowsill. Slow heartbeat, slow breath, everything so still and unhurried. Those fatless fingers, thick at the knuckles and narrowing into skin over bone in between, the tapered points of sharp fingernails. Louis imagines himself at the ends of them, impaled and scratched, the way he does to Armand, claws and knives and pins and needles. This, too, is a kind of intimacy. Watching someone bleed for no reason but for his own amusement. That counts for something.

“Sometimes,” he starts, and then he stops again. He’s not really sure what he was going to say. Something about the shower and the hardwood floor of the hallway. The feeling of water running down his back. Some kind of sickness pulling him right down into the coffin. Shame and shame and shame, all the way to the throat. Soft rug under bare feet as he tiptoed into the bedroom, defeated and small. Everything in this house dreamlike and distant, the taste of his own blood, the taste of Armand’s blood. The walls growing fuzzy and then closing in, hard and solid.

”It’s hard,” he settles on. “To not know if things really did happen. Or if I dreamt it.”

“Dreams can feel real,” Armand offers. “Especially when you spend so much time asleep.”

It could be mean, but he half-smiles as he says it. One corner of his mouth lifts and the other stays down.

”Hey,” Louis protests. “It’s a normal amount for a vampire my age.”

Coffin or bed or any other surface one can think of. Armand in his arms, or him in Armand’s. It feels like so long ago that he said it: or maybe Armand is mine. He said it to no one in particular. Nobody else was in the room. He tells these things to himself so he doesn’t explode. He was right, when he spoke to himself with nobody else around. Armand is his. There’s the distinction again. Semantics and specifications. Possession and the intimacy thereof. It matters, and it’s good that it matters, and things mean more, are clearer, mean business and are nobody else’s business, but he can say some of it out loud now because Armand is his. Doesn’t step a toe out of line, or if he does Louis can put him back behind it again. Alexandria and Sausalito, the same place if one thinks of the physical presence as irrelevant. There are streetlights everywhere. It doesn’t matter which of them one pulls someone’s hair underneath. Which streetlight to choose as the one to kill underneath. Déjà-vu for years on end. Nothing special about the shower.

They sleep together until Armand wakes and then Louis sleeps alone. Armand does other things in the meantime. Curl up at the end of the bed and count the seconds. He’d asked this of him once, just to see if he would do this, and when he’d woken up Armand had been there, orange eyes glowing bright and intense, count in the tens of thousands. He hadn’t kissed him. It’d felt wrong to interrupt. Eye contact of green to orange. Dew-drop grass to wildfire. Put each other out. Fire burns through grass and until the wet grass puts out the fire. Does this mean anything? To some other pair of people somewhere else in this world it might.

Sleep and shower and bare feet on the bathroom tile. Some day their bathroom will be outdated and ugly to the average viewer. They will sell the house and someone will gut it down to the frames. Louis will sleep and dream about their life in the place they slept uneasy and unsure, stepping on each other’s eggshells, calcium carbonate cracking as they went.