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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 22, 2008 20:38:26 GMT -5
Nicolas had not given any thought to Lestat's damned tower in years - and certainly not since his reconstitution - but now that Armand had mentioned it, he had began to see, in the middle of the night, or while he dreamed during the day (which he did only rarely), its image. He had forgotten it. Another generosity of Armand to remind him; and Armand wouldn't mind Nicolas' dropping by to see it. After all, it wasn't really his. And it hadn't really been Lestat's, except that who gave it to Lestat was dead as far as anybody knew. And really, it was no literal disrespect on Nicki's part: he did not have the same acquisitive, materialistic impulse that other vampires had. His clothes were ruined and he didn't care; he smashed his own violin and only grumbled at trying to find a new one. That Armand should feel possessiveness for the expanse of a tower that had been given to him by someone he rather hated - although Nicolas suspected Armand's loathing of Lestat was complicated by other feelings he would never explicitly state, particularly not to Nicolas - was beyond Nicolas' comprehension.
And so, the next time he was out, strolling along as men did, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, he took a turn along the street in its direction and managed the barely-remembered but very familiar journey into the core of it, dropping into the room with a great deal of personal ease and mild intrigue as he glanced around at the stones.
For some reason, he expected Armand to be out. When Armand had told him he lived there, he had gotten the impression Armand reluctantly slept there, in the tower only because he was shaken up and had nowhere else to go. He thought he had all the time in the world before Armand was back.
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Post by Armand on Nov 23, 2008 10:32:11 GMT -5
Nicolas was wrong. Armand was not out that night- he had spent the last two nights in the tower, leaving only for an hour or two at a time, in case of this happening. It wasn't that he believed he could predict Nicolas or his whims, but he'd known when he'd told the younger vampire where he was staying that there was a chance of Nicolas dropping by. It would be like him to do something so crass. Armand was beginning to suspect Nicolas did many things simply to annoy him, or that his reactions occasionally had a factor in what Nicolas decided. Surely, when he had been in the theatre under Armand, he couldn't have just forgotten all those careful little rules and regulations placed down to protect them- as he hunted and killed carelessly, leaving splatters of blood and broken bodies and live witnesses, or played, hands blurring and teeth flashing, in public crowds- surely he could not have ever forgotten that Armand would have an interest in what he did. It was difficult for Armand to tell with Nicolas whether his impetuous nature and reckless actions were born of madness or a quick ruthless wit, but were it the latter he would suspect Nicolas found amusement in such things.
But he was getting distracted in his own thoughts, old stirrings of authority rankling when really he had no right to such things any more. Nicolas was in his house, and Armand was aware of it the instant the other vampire had begun to ascend the tower.
He did not believe in asking pointless questions, nor ones to which he already knew the answer, unless it was for the look of things. So as Nicolas etnered, Armand was not on his feet and demanding to know why he was there; rather he laid aside the book he'd been reading and prepared to wait the musician out. There was no graceful way of making Nicolas leave, unless it was to push him out of the window, and that lacked a certain composure that Armand did not think he would resort to unless he was very, very angry.
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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 23, 2008 11:55:12 GMT -5
(( *dies laughing*))
Nicolas had only a little glancing to do before his eyes fell on the little figure, meeting, to his surprise, the large, glassy eyes with their fringe of lashes looking like a doll's eyes in an unpainted porcelain face, and for a moment he himself was very still, as though he had a sense of his own intrusion. But that sort of empathy could only be expected to last a brief while, and Nicolas' ease returned to him in a matter of moments. With a little apathy, he considered him, wondering that he might have been exceedingly pretty if not for being so ghastly at the same time. He looked like a mannequin that was being operated on strings. But the sense of stillness only lasted a moment, and in another Nicolas was striding towards him with his preternatural speed and seating himself calmly on Armand's desk, leaning towards him to gaze into his eyes up close, a hand lifting to gently cup his face as though to hold it still enough for Nicolas to search his eyes for...something.
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Post by Armand on Nov 23, 2008 13:33:53 GMT -5
Armand pressed Nicolas’s hand away, his eyes flickering through varied emotions and finally settling on distaste. He felt it was pointless to try and impress upon Nicolas the violation he’d made, of the rules of hospitality and other such things that Armand did indeed put stock in, or at least when it came to his own things. The way he had now, of striding up to Armand to take his face in his hands and to gaze into his eyes, so close- no, clearly Nicolas cared not one whit for such polite pleasantries. His bold gestures showed that.
It was, of course, for his own safety. To have a young vampire encroach so candidly on another’s territory without observing the proper respect was offensive- and look at Armand, comparing them to animals. But they were, weren’t they, vicious predators, and there would be a day when Armand would destroy stragglers who strayed into Paris and acted as Nicolas did. Destroying Nicolas would make things so much easier, but if Armand truly thought that…why, he’d have scattered the ashes.
He would say something to shame him, but Armand truly didn’t think it could be done. Instead, because Nicolas was still very close and sitting at his desk, and because Armand believed there was a reason behind everything even if Nicolas wouldn’t tell him, he asked:
“Can I help you, Nicolas?”
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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 23, 2008 16:02:33 GMT -5
The question almost made him smile, and the corner of Nicolas' mouth lifted as though he were about to, and he glanced away from Armand in manner that approached shyness. But when he glanced back at him, he had returned to his usual listlessness, and with it, his usual lack of respect. It was not that Nicolas was not actually disrespectful - for he certainly could be extremely deliberately rude, and had been the other night, on occasion - but that he often did not go out of his way to be so. His usual state of being was only heedless.
He glanced down at Armand, lifting an eyebrow. As usual, he did not regard this as idiomatic, but considered whether or not he could help him. Nicolas considered the question fleetingly and then gave a little shrug. "No," he said. After a short pause, he spoke again, glancing around the room once more to return his eyes to Armand. "I didn't expect you'd be here. I had intended to come and go without your knowing."
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Post by Armand on Nov 23, 2008 21:51:54 GMT -5
"I would have known regardless had you touched anything," Armand said, but his voice was mild, not accusatory or sharp. He stood and took a few steps, towards the center of the room and away from where Nicolas sat on his desk. His hands were clasped loosely behind his back, the fingers curled and limp. "What were you looking for? Or did you simply come...to remember?"
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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 23, 2008 22:04:23 GMT -5
After Armand left, Nicolas readjusted position so that it was more comfortable. Although normally he did not care, he had not wanted to lie back against the desk with Armand there - something about draping himself over it right before him seemed unappealing to him. Perhaps it was the excessive vulnerability, but that did not usually bother him, and he could not understand why Armand made things different. Perhaps the other night had affected him more than he realized.
Resting on his elbow with his legs bent over the edge at the knees, he looked like a wayward child without a care in the word. It was largely true, although his poor feeding habits made him decidedly more threatening to some. He had only been there a matter of days and had already earned a nickname. The Slasher of the Rue de B-----, or something like it. Had Armand picked up the paper at any time recently he'd certainly have recognized Nicolas' handiwork. How many times had Armand chid him for that very subject, staring at him with those dead, pretty eyes, trying to make him see the sense of it? And he had known even then that Nicolas wouldn't listen, that he was doing it precisely because it was chaotic and disruptive - in short, all those things Armand told him it was. That must have been why he had been so preternaturally calm, even then.
"To remember, I suppose," said Nicolas, voice a little distant, which gave credence to the words. He looked around, more thoughtful and subdued than usual. It did have a lot to do with the enclosed space - and the fact that Armand was his only audience. In the Theatre, of course, he had had plenty of enclosed spaces, but with the other vampires. His stormy moodswings had earned him fear there. It would earn only mild distaste from Armand, which was occasionally a pleasure to provoke, but didn't seem it would be now. No memories, there. His past conversations with Armand had, at least half of them, been quiet in tone. They'd shifted, of course, from madness to a stillness, and it looked as though the pattern was self-perpetuating. "God," he said softly, mostly to himself.
After a pause, he glanced back to Armand. "When did Lestat leave it to you?" He shifted so that he rested on his back, both elbows keeping him up, then sat up and leaned against his knees. "Do you suppose he would have left it to me if I hadn't gone into the fire?" This made him wonder a great deal. How would Armand behave if he told him about it, had their places been switched? And how would Nicolas respond to being interrupted by the silent little mannekin slipped in, quietly as a ghost?
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Post by Armand on Nov 23, 2008 22:32:18 GMT -5
Armand had nothing to say to Nicolas's confession of remembrance. If that was what he was after, let him have it- Armand was annoyed by the intrusion, but if it would make him leave faster Nicolas could wander all throughout the tower and examine it down to the last stone. Perhaps he got some pleasure out of remembering the night he'd been turned. Armand remembered him having raved for it beforehand like a fool.
Armand turned a little to glance back, in faint surprise or curiosity, as Nicolas said the Lord's name, but it was barely a breath and felt private, like a plea. Armand turned his head again, eyes fixed on the empty stone fireplace and the broken furniture in front of it he'd cracked again and again for the wood. It was a shame that the night was not particularly cold. Armand had always liked to watch fire.
He took another step toward it, then knelt, one hand extending to sift at the ashes. They clung to his finger, little trembling flakes that shifted with his breath. "A while ago," he said, noncommitedly. And- "I couldn't say." Armand had always thought that Lestat had given it to him because he'd felt pity for Armand. The thought rankled, but it was an old hurt and the tower had been helpful.
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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 24, 2008 9:15:16 GMT -5
Nicolas had no such need to continue to gaze around the tower and inspect every stone. It wouldn't have brought back any memories for him to do so, anyway; he hadn't noticed every stone the first time he'd been in there, now, had he? And Nicolas was not nearly so sentimental. More than reminiscing about the time he had been turned it was more a sort of haven from the bustle of the outside world. Slipping in here was like a door to the past, a trapdoor into the 18th century.
The sudden wave of illness this thought provoked made Nicolas wonder if he was not nostalgic for it, if he wished to return, perhaps have done things differently? No, that wasn't it. It was not regret. But the strange desire that the world would be the one he'd been alive in when he left - that he couldn't shake. And suddenly the realization that it wouldn't be made him feel genuinely uncomfortable. He felt as though he were being compressed, as though time were going by too quickly for him to encompass everything before it passed.
And then he realized, quite an epiphany for him, that Armand surely felt this way himself, had before, had often. Armand was several hundred years old. How had he not tired of the world by now? Nicolas felt that same odd desperation to comprehend him again, even though Armand certainly was in no mood to give out the information. But Nicolas was back in the comfort of the place he had been born - it was like returning to the womb - and here was Armand, as though beckoning. Surely Armand had only been waiting for him. Nicolas looked over at him, looking troubled, the lines of a faint frown on his face and lips.
"How do you manage?" he said, voice almost the ghost of other words. He had a strong sense that it was the 18th century once more, and he was craving order and sensibility as he had in mortality, trying with a sense of futility to fend off the chaos encroached upon his mind. "How do you live? Everyone you know is gone. They don't come back to you. They use you up - " here it was recalled the whore metaphor of previous conversations, although with vastly less ridicule - "and then they vanish, to go mad or find someone else they love better, and yet you still stand here, untouched, as though the last four hundred years never happened."
And Nicolas did believe this rather simplistic view of Armand, that Armand alone, of all the immortals he had ever met, had not been affected by the ravages of time, and had always been this way - even though by the time Nicolas had met him, he had been already very old.
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Post by Armand on Nov 24, 2008 16:26:33 GMT -5
Armand turned, this for the final time, to tilt his head at Nicolas and wonder what had prompted this. Did he think that Armand would open up to him- honestly, did he think that? That Armand was in any way so starved for affection that he would give in to anyone who showed any sense of understanding? Or... Armand noted, as he finally took a seat, in one of the whole unbroken chairs, that Nicolas's tone had dropped. Had it not been so soft, it could have been more mockery such as the like Nicolas had greeted him with the other night. But he'd also drawn his knees up, perched on Armand's desk, and was watching him without any coyness or the like. Was this only...
Then Armand got it. How disappointingly mundane. Nicolas was going through a sort of crisis that every vampire went through at some point or another and was attempting to find Armand's secret, how he could stand it, this relentless passage of time. Armand despaired of this conversation. He had no secret to give to the desperate and the bleak.
He did not answer exactly what Nicolas had asked of him- he wasn't even certain of the answer, and to examine it now could be painful. And it wasn't like this absent summarization of his life didn't hurt, because however Nicolas meant it...it was true.
Instead he said, quite mildly, "I can't tell you how to live as a monster, Nicolas. You'll have to find a reason to continue on your own."
(( Sorry this post sucked. ))
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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 24, 2008 16:41:59 GMT -5
((I liked it. It didn't seem better or worse than any of your posts.))
Nicolas shook his head, a little frustrated, but not the sort that stayed like electricity under the skin, buzzing around for release; the emotion vanished shortly after arriving, and left Nicolas feeling empty - just as empty as he had felt before. No, that wasn't what he wanted to hear, even though had he thought about it from a logical standpoint
"I don't want you to give me a reason," he said, the only reason he did not sound very rudely disgusted being that his tone of voice betrayed him for a child who is trying to prove to an adult his adulthood. But that was only a surface perception. He remained, steadily, beneath it, constant, persistently interested, needing to know. "I asked your reason."
This was true enough; it occurred to him suddenly that he did not really need a reason, that when he left the tower he would be fine, if exhausted by the new century. At least...he did not feel the need for a reason. His own history told him he wasn't really capable of immortality, but at the same time it told him he wasn't really capable of escaping it. He'd tried that. His only reason now for existing was the simple but resolute fact that he had tried the way out and it hadn't done a damn thing. That was a good enough reason. He realized, in a moment of brilliance that was not likely to return, that this was what those covens had been about: the reason for existing discovered, one had to find a way to face the fatigue of continuing. Other vampires weren't reasons. They just made existing more tolerable. Yet Armand had lived with whatever his reason was with or without others. Nicolas could not understand that. He had pegged Armand, at different times, either desperately needy for others or coldly indifferent to even those closest to him. Yet this showed him to be something different from both, and Nicolas needed to know what he really was. It didn't occur to him that Armand would not tell him.
"You're abused by everyone," he said, repeating, more or less what he had said before. "I can't see how life has wounded or pleased you in any way. I change my mind, I don't care what reason you have for living, it's probably ridiculous anyway - " if his own was any indication. "I just want...I want..." I want. That was about it. "How can you not need others? Or detest them? You could see me a hundred years from now and I'm sure your expression will never change. How do you do that?"
Nicolas was firmly in the detesting category. At least, he thought. The fact that he felt very comfortable and intimate in this quiet setting suggested otherwise. Remnant of mortality, he brushed it off as, but it didn't change it. Maybe this was a substitute for those quiet evenings of philosophy with Lestat. He would have leaped off the tower himself if it had occurred to him consciously that he was substituting Armand for Lestat, but thankfully, it did not penetrate to that level of his cognition.
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Post by Armand on Nov 24, 2008 17:45:53 GMT -5
Nicolas's persistent psychoanalyzation was simultaneously irritating and amusing, so much so that Armand didn't know whether to smile or to scowl. Had his words been sharp or cruel, Armand would not have had any patience for them. As it were, the amusement was winning out. He felt the draw of being needed, of having something that Nicolas wanted and of deciding to deny it to him. It was a petty pleasure, but Armand so seldom had any pleasure that his had become unnecessarily vengeful.
But Nicolas's words, curling uncomfortably around his gut, stung him a little regardless. The answer developed fully formed in his mind, hovered on his tongue, so wanting, so ready to be shared, in a way that Armand would never allow. But he could have it to himself, all his, so in his mind it whispered with the assurance that it'd never be heard. Armand needed others, he needed them so desperately, but he'd learned to live without. He could deny himself anything and think it inevitable. And no matter how engaged he seemed in a person, he'd never expect them to stay. It was pessimistic, yes, and cynical, but it was a learned behavior.
As it was, this was not so terribly bad of him, nor if he were to ever speak would it prove hard to admit either. But it was still his, and his alone.
Abruptly, still without answering, Armand stood up and stretched. His fingers uncurled, the muscles in his legs tightening under his tights- a surprisingly open and private gesture. His jaw even flexed, as though he were holding back a yawn, a boy who was stiff and tired after sitting for a while. But Armand had not been sitting that long, and the light in the tower was not so much as to lend the flush to his cheeks that would let him have his illusion of a mortal boy. One foot slid behind the other as he laid one hand on the top of the chair he'd just vacated. His head turned to the side, brown eyes fixed on Nicolas, as his free hand extended in an languid, offering gesture towards the door. "Come, Nicolas. Didn't you want to look through the tower? You're not here for me."
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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 24, 2008 17:54:54 GMT -5
Nicolas tilted his head, gazing at him. And here he was being shown the door. The obvious answer for the unspoken question - that Armand simply did not want to reveal anything of himself to Nicolas, as well he wouldn't - was the only one that did not occur to him. His mind worked through odd bends and unnatural shapes as he attempted to understand Armand's behavior. Was the answer something obvious that he did not want to speak out loud, expecting Nicolas to get it? That would make the most sense, for it was true, and probably clear, that Nicolas did not understand many things he should have about Armand. And then his question. Nicolas had not expected him to be so helpful. It was as though he was attempting to be as good to him as he could. And Nicolas knew his generosity, but not that it could be good-natured, and this seemed highly suspect.
"No," he said, slowly unwrapping himself from his former position, though not moving to get down from Armand's reading desk. "Though I'm here because of you, and they're similar enough. I'm hardly such a tourist, you know."
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Post by Armand on Nov 24, 2008 18:03:42 GMT -5
"I'm not easily convinced of that when your intention was to look about without my knowing in the first place."
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Post by Nicolas de Lenfent on Nov 25, 2008 9:18:39 GMT -5
Nicolas tilted his head. He was in a rare thoughtful mood, and glanced at the ceiling as though needing inspiration from it for what he were about to say. "And yet, even now, I am not certain what I would have been looking at were I here without you," he said, honestly. This was a moment of clarity he had not had in a very long time, and it did not occur to him - as it rarely did - to conceal the workings of his mind. "It only takes a moment to look around at the tower and recall what it was to me a century before. But that century's passed. Instead I find I am looking at it as it is now. And it makes me wonder. Now, what do you think I wonder about?"
And this was not quite as polite as the rest of his words had seemed, but his voice had the same gentle quality to it.
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