He spent lifetimes being what everyone else needed him to be. But here, in the dim light of a quiet kitchen, he is allowed to be nothing at all. — armand x reader 🍁
💌 : masterlist
playlist: fix you (coldplay) , holocene (bon iver) , like real people do (hozier) , motion sickness (pheobe bridgers) , mystery of love (sufjan stevens) , liability (lorde) , landslide (fleetwood mac) , moon song (pheobe bridgers) , ceilings (lizzy mcalpine) , blackbird (beatles) , saturn (sleeping at last) , turning page (sleeping at last) , touch (sleeping at last) , you're gonna go far (noah kahan) , willing and able (noah kahan) , nothing's gonna hurt you baby (cas) , rearrange my world (daniel caesar & rex orange county) , mirrorball (taylor swift) , archer (taylor swift) , new year's day (taylor swift)
A/N: hi!! this piece is a bit of a deep dive into the quiet parts of loving someone the parts that aren't loud or performative, but just existing :) it's messy and unpolished and a little bit raw, just like the characters. hope you find a little piece of yourself in it. love you guys!
The thing about Armand is that he is a cactus.
I have never said this to him and I probably never will, at least not on a night when I want things to remain peaceful, but it is the truest thing I know about him and I think about it sometimes when he is mid-sentence about something devastating and beautiful and I am nodding along while internally just — looking at him.
All spikes. Completely spiked up. And underneath all of that, underneath the centuries and the precision and the way he holds himself like something that has never once been caught off guard, there is something that wants so badly to be held that it makes my chest hurt a little if I think about it too long. I don't think about it too long. I just love him and move on, which is the only sane way to do it. The only survivable way, I mean.
Because loving Armand is not a small thing to do and I knew that going in and I did it anyway, with my whole eyes open, which says something about me that I am still in the process of figuring out.
He is sitting on the stool at my kitchen counter in his pajamas.
I want to note that. I want to hold that detail up to the light for a moment because I think it deserves it — Armand, who leads a coven, who has centuries of darkness living in him like a comfortable tenant, who can make a room go quiet just by existing in it more completely than everyone else in the room, is sitting on my secondhand counter stool in soft gray pajama pants and a loose shirt with his hair slightly undone and his feet in the fuzzy slippers I told him he could use and he accepted without comment, which I counted as a win and still count as a win every single time I look at them.
He looks so much like a person tonight. He looks like someone who has been here long enough that the kitchen has quietly rearranged itself around his presence, the way a room does when it has gotten used to someone, when it has decided to include them. Which mine has. Which I let it. Which I try not to think about too carefully because if I think about it too carefully I will have to admit things about myself that I am not quite ready to put into words yet and the soup will burn.
The kitchen light is the warm yellow kind, the bulb I replaced three times before I finally found the right one, and it does something generous to the room at this hour, makes everything look softer than it is, makes the mismatched mugs on the shelf look intentional and the herbs on the windowsill look tended and the whole small space look like somewhere someone is genuinely loved.
The window above the sink has fogged at the corners from the steam off the pot. Outside the city is doing what it does — just continuing, just going, indifferent and enormous, unbothered by the fact that something several centuries old is sitting in my kitchen in fuzzy slippers with his chin in his hand, watching me.
The pipes make their sounds. The basil on the windowsill is losing its ongoing battle with existence and I respect it enormously for continuing to try. The rosemary is fine. The rosemary has always been fine. Some things in this kitchen are simply fine and reliable and I find that comforting in a way I would not be able to explain.
I am making soup. It is late — later than most people I know would be awake, but then most people I know are not spending their evenings with someone for whom lateness is not a concept, for whom the hours after midnight are simply hours, no different in quality from any others.
He does not eat. I know this. He told me early on in that careful way he has of delivering facts about himself, even and unhurried, watching my face the whole time for the specific expression that means he has said too much, given too much, that I am going to need a moment and he is going to have to manage that. I never need a moment. I just nod and file it away and keep going, and I think — I think at some point he stopped bracing for the reaction, or at least he stopped doing it visibly, which with him amounts to the same thing.
The soup is technically for me. I made enough for two and I put his in the bigger bowl and I am not going to explain that to anyone including myself.
He is watching me move around my kitchen. He does this — settles somewhere and watches, with that particular quality of attention he has that I have never found the right word for, that complete and unhurried thing, like whatever he has decided to look at receives the full weight of something very old and very awake.
Like he is not just seeing but cataloguing, not just watching but keeping. I used to find it faintly overwhelming. I don't anymore, or rather I do but I have made a different kind of peace with it, the kind where you stop fighting the feeling and just let it be a fact about your life. He watches me. I let him. The kitchen is warm. It is fine. It is better than fine and that is as far as I'm taking that thought tonight.
"We didn't look at the back section properly," I tell him, stirring the bigger pot with one hand, gesturing at nothing in particular with the other. "That Sunday. We got completely derailed before we even got to the back."
"By the copper pots," he says. He already knows.
"You stood in front of them for eleven minutes. I know because I timed it on my phone and sent a voice note about it to no one."
A pause. The dry kind, the one that means he's faintly amused and has decided not to let it all the way through. "I was appreciating craftsmanship."
"You were communing with them. There is a meaningful difference and I think we both know which one was happening."
He says nothing, which is how he confirms things he finds unproductive to argue. I can see him in my peripheral vision, elbow on the counter, chin resting on his hand, watching me with that expression that lives somewhere in the vicinity of comfortable — not warm, exactly, not the kind of warm that announces itself, but the quiet settled version of it, the kind that doesn't need to be performed because it is simply true.
He has a small collection of comfortable expressions and I have catalogued every one of them over time, privately, in the part of me that pays attention to him the way you pay attention to something you want to keep understanding. I do not tell him about this catalogue. Some things are mine.
"Anyway," I say, reaching for the smaller ladle, checking the broth, deciding it needs another minute. "I want to go back. Properly this time, all the way to the back. Because there was a whole blender section we didn't get to." I glance at him over my shoulder.
"Because you said — when we were walking past, you mentioned that you find them fascinating. The mechanism of it or something. How something can be that simple and move that fast." I turn back to the pot.
"So I want to know which kind you'd want."
The kitchen goes quiet in that slightly different way, the way that means something has shifted in the quality of the air rather than just the sound. I turn back to the stove and start telling him what I looked up this week, the blade configurations and the motor grades and the base weight question, because I did look it up, because I found myself thinking about it on a Tuesday for no particular reason I was going to investigate and so I just — looked it up. Read about it. Now I know considerably more about blenders than the average person needs to know and I'm choosing to deploy that knowledge in this moment like it's normal, like it's nothing, because to me it is nothing. It is just a thing I did because he mentioned a thing once and I was listening and I wanted to know more. That is just how I am. I have made my peace with how I am.
I am midway through explaining torque when I notice the bigger pot starting to roll, the soup moving with that restless almost-boiling energy, and without thinking, without any conscious gap between noticing and doing, I reach over and pick up the wooden spoon and stir his bowl. Slow circles. Making sure nothing is sitting wrong at the bottom, making sure the heat is distributing the way it should, making sure it is right for him even though it cannot hurt him and he doesn't need it and the practical reason for doing it does not exist.
He cannot be burned. He told me. I know.
My hand moved anyway. My hand moved because the soup was boiling and he was there and that is the only explanation I have, that is the entirety of it, and I set the spoon back down and keep talking about torque like nothing happened.
I don't notice I've gone quiet until I look up.
He is looking at his bowl.
Not at me. Not at the window or his hands or the middle distance he sometimes looks at when he is thinking something he hasn't decided to share yet. At the bowl. At the exact place where the spoon moved through it.
And his face — his face is doing something I have only seen it do a handful of times in all the months I have known him, something that happens when his management of himself slips for just a moment, when something gets through the careful architecture of his expression before he can redirect it. His jaw has gone very slightly loose.
The set of him, that particular composed gravity he carries like a coat he was born in, has softened at the edges in a way that makes him look — not young, exactly. Not inexperienced. Something else. Something that does not have a clean word but lives in the neighborhood of unheld. Like something receiving a warmth it has no existing framework for and is trying, very quietly, not to show that it doesn't know what to do with it.
I look away. I look back at the stove and I continue talking about blenders and I give him the privacy of not being watched having it, because some things a person needs to have alone even when they are having them in your kitchen, and I have learned that about him slowly and specifically, the places where the pressure needs to come off, and I just take it off. Without announcing it. Without making it a thing he has to respond to. I just turn back to the stove and let him have the moment and keep talking, and that is also a form of consideration, I think. The kind that doesn't ask to be seen.
"The base weight," I say, and my voice comes out even, "is really the main thing. You want it heavy enough that it doesn't move across the counter when you run it at full speed."
A long beat. Two. Three.
"You looked this up," he says.
It is not an accusation. It is not quite a question. It is something that lives between those two things, something careful and slow, something that is trying to figure out what it is holding and whether it is allowed to hold it.
"Yeah," I say. I shift the pot slightly off the direct heat. "You mentioned it once and I was curious."
"You were curious," he repeats, and his voice has gone quieter than it was, "about blenders."
"About what specifically you'd find interesting about them. Which led me to blenders generally." I shrug. He can see it from where he's sitting. "It wasn't a thing. I just wanted to know."
The silence that follows is different from the earlier ones. Thicker somehow. More present. I get two bowls from the cabinet — the good ones, the ones with the slightly uneven rims I found at a ceramics market last spring and carried home on the bus holding them in my lap because I didn't want them to break — and start ladling the soup into them. The sound of it fills the kitchen. Outside, a car passes. The pipes settle into themselves.
"You do that," he says.
"Do what." I bring both bowls to the counter and climb onto my stool, pulling my knees up to sit cross-legged the way I always do without thinking about it, the way I've always done in my own kitchen.
He looks at me. Actually looks, the way he does when he has stopped performing attention and is simply paying it, when the distance he usually keeps between observing and being affected has collapsed without his permission.
The kitchen light catches the edge of him in a way that makes him look almost painterly, almost unreal, and I think for the hundredth time that there is something genuinely absurd about how beautiful he is and how little he seems to register it, the way the very beautiful sometimes don't, the way it becomes just a fact of existence rather than a thing they carry.
His eyes are very dark tonight. Something is moving behind them that he hasn't decided what to do with yet.
I wait. I have learned how to wait for him, which sounds like a small thing and is not a small thing at all. Every instinct I have wants to fill the silence, wants to reach across and make it easier, wants to hand him the words before he has to find them himself.
With him I have had to learn to sit on that instinct. Not because he doesn't want the help but because he needs the space of finding it himself, because the finding is part of what makes it real for him, and so I just sit with my soup and I wait and I let the kitchen be quiet.
"You remember things," he says finally. His hands have come around his bowl, not to eat, just to hold it, and I notice that the way I notice everything about him — the way he sometimes holds warm things like he is reminding his hands of the sensation of warmth, like it is something he has to keep relearning.
"Small things. Things I say once, in passing, without meaning them as anything important. You keep them." He pauses. The thumb of his right hand moves along the rim of the bowl, slow and absent. "You account for me."
I look at him steadily. "Yes," I say.
"Why."
And it lands so plainly. So completely without performance or rhetoric or anything built around it. Just the word, set down between us on the counter like something he has been carrying for a while and has finally, in this warm small kitchen at this late hour, decided to put down. He is genuinely asking. He is sitting in his pajamas holding soup he doesn't need and asking me, with the most undefended face I have ever seen on him, why I account for him. Like the answer is something he has turned over and over on his own and could not find.
I set my spoon down. I give him the full weight of looking back at him.
"Because I consider you," I say. "That's the whole answer. That's all of it."
He is quiet. I watch his face.
"I consider you," I say again, slower, because I want him to actually receive it and not just hear it.
"That means I think about you when you're not here. I think about what you'd want, what you'd find interesting, what would make something easier or better or just — nicer for you. Not because I'm trying to be impressive at loving someone. Not because I want something back from it. Just because you are a person who exists in my life and that means you take up space in my thinking. Naturally. Without me deciding to do it. You're just — there. In my head. When I'm looking up blenders on a Tuesday. You're there."
Something crosses his face. Fast, like weather. A kind of pain that isn't new, isn't fresh, is the very specific pain of something that has been tender for a long time being touched in the place it keeps the tenderness. His jaw stays still but his eyes do something — go somewhere briefly and come back.
"People have —" he starts. Stops. His thumb is still moving on the bowl.
"People have what," I say softly.
He looks at the bowl for a long moment. I watch his face do the thing it does when he is deciding how far to go — that small internal negotiation, that measuring of distance, that question of whether this is a place it is safe to move through. I have watched him do this many times and I have learned not to move while he is doing it, not to lean in, not to make it feel like a performance he has to deliver on demand. I just stay here. I just stay.
"People have wanted things from me," he says finally, and his voice is quiet in the way of something that has been made quieter by intention, by the conscious lowering of a thing that would otherwise be too much. "For a very long time. In many forms. There have been people who loved me more than was good for them, who would have taken themselves apart for a word from me, who built their entire interior world with me at the center of it." He pauses.
"And every time, without exception, underneath the love, there was a shape they needed me to hold. Something they were asking me to be, or to keep being, or to confirm by continuing to exist in a particular way. Love has always been — conditional is not the right word, because I don't think they knew the condition was there. But there was always something. Something required. Something at the bottom of it that was about them and not about me." He is very still.
"I learned to find the thing. The thing being asked. I learned to manage around it. That is how I have moved through most of my relationships with people."
I don't say anything. I keep my face open and I let him keep going.
"What you do," he says, "I notice it. I notice all of it and then I —" He stops. His jaw tightens for just a moment. "I look for the thing. The thing underneath. The condition. And I cannot find it."
He looks up at me and there is something in his expression that I can only describe as the particular frustration of someone who is very intelligent being confronted with something their intelligence cannot resolve. "And I know — I know it's real. I know you. I know the difference. And something in me asks anyway. Something in me goes looking for the catch. Every time. Even now." A pause so brief it almost isn't one.
"Even right now, sitting here, I am asking myself what you want from this. And I know you don't want anything. And I ask anyway."
I feel something move in my chest.
"I know," I say, and I mean it completely, not as a comfort but as a fact. "I know you do that."
"That doesn't —" He stops. Looks at me in a way that is almost searching. "That doesn't frustrate you?"
"No."
"Why not."
I think about this for a moment. I think about all the ways I could answer it and I reach for the most honest one.
"Because I understand where it comes from. And understanding where something comes from doesn't make it not real, it doesn't make it disappear, but it means I don't take it personally. Your doubt isn't about me. It's about everything that taught you that love has a bottom to it, a place where the asking lives. That's not yours by choice. That's yours by what happened to you." I pause.
"I'm not going to punish you for it."
His face does something I don't have a word for. Something that happens deep behind his eyes, something that isn't quite pain and isn't quite relief but contains elements of both, the way something can hurt and ease at the same time when you have been holding it alone for too long and someone finally puts their hands on the other side of it.
"I don't understand why you do it," he says, and his voice has gone very quiet. Not wounded. Something more disoriented than wounded. "I have thought about it. I have — I watch you. I watch you do these small things, these things you don't even seem to notice you're doing, and I think — I try to find the logic of it. Why you would spend a Tuesday looking up blenders because of something I said once. Why you would stir soup for someone who cannot be burned. Why you would —" He pauses. Something flickers across his face.
"Why you would just. Keep making room. For me. Without being asked. Without requiring anything in return. I keep looking for the logic and I cannot find it and I cannot decide if that frightens me or —"
He stops.
"Or what," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. The kitchen hums. The pipes, the light, the small sounds of a building at night.
"Or if it is the first time in a very long time," he says slowly, "that something has not needed to be figured out."
I feel my eyes go warm and I blink once and look at the counter for a second because I need a moment and I am not going to make this about my feelings, this is not the moment for that. I look back at him.
"Can I tell you something," I say.
He nods. Very slightly.
"Consideration is not a complicated thing," I say. "I think we make it sound like one because we're not used to it, most of us, we're not used to being on the receiving end of it and so when it happens it feels like it must mean something enormous, must be the result of some extraordinary effort or feeling. But it's not. It's just — decency. It's the most ordinary form of love there is." I pause, gathering it, wanting to get this right.
"It's just the act of including someone in your thinking. Voluntarily. Without waiting to be asked. You exist, so I think of you. You're here, so I make room. That's all. That's every bit of it. The blender, the soup, the remembering — none of it is grand. None of it costs me anything I'd miss. I just think of you, and then I do something about it, and that's it. That is the full picture."
He is so still. The kind of still that is the opposite of absence.
"And here is the thing I need you to hear," I say, and my voice has gotten quieter without my meaning it to, the way voices get when they are carrying something they don't want to drop.
"You deserve that."
"Not because you've earned it. Not because you've been good or careful or managed yourself correctly around me. Just because you exist. Just because you're here. That's the whole qualification. You're here and you're you and that's enough, that has always been enough, and I know nobody has told you that in a way you were able to believe, I know the people who loved you before loved you for what you were to them and not just for what you are, and I'm —" I stop.
I feel it pressing at the back of my eyes again and I let it be there this time, I don't blink it away.
"I'm so sorry that that was what love looked like for you. For such a long time. I'm so sorry that love always had a job for you."
He is looking at me with an expression I have never seen on him before. Not in all the months of collecting them. It is open in a way that is almost alarming, almost too much, like a door in a wall you didn't know had a door — and behind it something that is very old and very tired and has been waiting, maybe without knowing it was waiting, for someone to just. Say that. To just say that you deserved better than what you were given. To say it plainly, without agenda, without asking for anything back.
His eyes are bright. Just slightly. In the warm kitchen light.
"You're going to tell me," he says, and his voice is very controlled, "that I do it too. That I consider you. That I move your glass when you set it too close to the edge."
"You do," I say. "You do it all the time."
"That's different."
"How."
He is quiet for a moment. "It doesn't feel the same from the inside."
"I know," I say. "That's because nobody ever counted it for you. Nobody ever pointed at the thing you were doing and said — that. That right there. That is you loving someone. You've been doing it this whole time and no one ever gave it back to you as something real." I look at him steadily.
"I'm counting it. I have been counting it."
Something in him gives. Not in the way of something breaking. More like the way a held breath releases, slow and almost involuntary, the way the body eventually stops being able to hold something even when the mind is still trying. His shoulders drop a fraction. His hands, still around the bowl, go very slightly loose.
"I don't know how to be loved like this," he says. Quietly. Just stating it. Not as an apology, not as a warning, just as the plainest truth he has said tonight.
"I don't have the — I wasn't given the architecture for it. The kind where there's no cost. The kind that's just — there. I keep waiting for the place where it ends or changes or shows me its real shape. I keep waiting for the version of you that wants something from this."
"I know," I say again, because I do, because I have known this about him from early on and I chose him anyway, chose this, chose the waiting he does and the doubt he carries and the spikes and all of it, chose it with my whole eyes open.
"And you stay anyway," he says.
"And I stay anyway."
He looks at me for a long moment. Something is happening in him that he is not managing, not redirecting, just — allowing, maybe for the first time in a long time, just letting something move through him without immediately figuring out what to do with it. I watch it happen on his face. I keep my own face open and I stay very still, the way you go still when something rare comes close.
"Why," he says again, and this time it is different from the earlier "why. This one is smaller. This one is not looking for a logical answer. This one is — almost a confession. Like asking why is the only way he knows to say I don't know what to do with this and I'm trying.
"Because I love you," I say simply.
And then, before he can manage his response or redirect the moment or find the ironic angle of it. "Not the version of you that's useful to me or the version that performs well or the version that fits a particular shape I needed. Just you. This you. The one in the fuzzy slippers holding soup he doesn't need. The one who communes with copper pots. The one who —" my voice does something here, wavers just slightly, just enough to be audible, and I let it.
"the one who is so used to love having a job for him that he doesn't know what to do when it just shows up and sits down and asks for nothing." I pause.
"That one. I love that one."
The silence that follows is not empty. It is so full it is almost a sound.
He reaches across the counter. Slowly. And puts his hand over mine. Not the other way around this time. His hand, finding mine, deliberate and careful, like something that has made a decision and is following through on it before it can think too much. His fingers settle over my knuckles and he doesn't say anything and I don't say anything and the kitchen holds us in its warm yellow light.
After a long moment he says, very quietly. "The basil is dying."
I laugh. I can't help it, it comes out soft and watery and slightly embarrassing, and I look at the windowsill where the basil is indeed at one of its lower moments, one large leaf gone completely yellow at the edge.
"It's been dying for three weeks," I say. "We've discussed it."
"You haven't moved it."
"I know."
"It needs the east light. In the morning." He is looking at it with the expression of someone who has made a decision and is not opening it back up for debate. "I'll move it tomorrow."
Something settles in my chest. Something warm and specific and enormous that I do not try to name.
"Okay," I say.
"I'll be here in the morning."
I look at him. He is looking at the basil. He has just told me, in the language he uses for things he cannot say directly, that he is staying. That he will be here when the morning comes through the east window. That he is choosing to be here, for the basil, for the light, for me — all of it the same thing wrapped in a plant he doesn't want to watch me accidentally kill.
"Okay, Armand," I say.
He looks at me. This new expression again, the one I found tonight that I don't have a word for yet. Open and careful and slightly undone and underneath all of it, underneath every layer of him, just — glad. Quietly, specifically, without agenda. Just glad to be in this kitchen at this hour with cold soup going cold between us and a dying basil on the windowsill and someone who looked up blenders on a Tuesday.
Just glad.
"The soup is cold," he says.
"It reheats fine."
"It doesn't."
"I'm going to heat it up."
"You don't have to."
But I am already off my stool, already reaching for the bowls, and he watches me do it with that complete attention of his, and the kitchen is warm, and outside the city is still going, and tomorrow he will move the basil to the east window, and tonight his hand was on mine across the counter, and I am not thinking about what any of this means or where it ends up or whether we are heading toward something or just living inside it already — I am just here, just in this, just in love with a cactus who is slowly, very slowly, learning that it is safe to be touched.
That is enough. That is so much more than enough.
I put the soup on low heat and I look over my shoulder at him and he is looking back at me and there is nothing else to say tonight and we both know it and neither of us minds.
The rosemary is fine.
The basil will be moved tomorrow.
The rest can wait.
— this was a good vision :)) if you have any more fic ideas, don't hesitate to send them under my asks! 🍂
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Produce 101 Stans need to remember the reason why all these Trainees go onto the show in the first place.
Sure its to get into the final group, but that group (b.o.i?) is only temporary - the only reason they go on the show is to get recognition and build a fanbase before they debut- or in case of Nu’est, Topp Dogg, Hotshot, East Light members, it is to gain fans for their respective groups.
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