is #wipwednesday still a thing? are we doing that? because i'm doing it.
this is part of what was meant to be a quickie piece about post-canon armand and daniel trying those dr. fareed drugs (you know the ones). and somehow it expanded out into them re-visiting venice, asking some really tough questions about change, and struggling with integrating your past and your present.
and i'm not gonna lie, i'm having a rough go with this one! i don't know if it's personal life stuff getting me but it's been slow progress. they keep asking things i don't have the answer to and figuring out how to get them from point A to point B has been a winding thing, but i'm determined to do it.
this is from their visit to the palazzo armand spent his youth in:
“What did you want to become?” Daniel asks, violet eyes earnest in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the room. Never before has Armand seen someone so clearly in this room at night. He’s never known anything but the flicker of candlelight on immortal marble skin. “Or what did you imagine yourself becoming, if he’d really sent you off on your own?”
Armand rubs at the bend of his own elbow and turns the question over his mind. His youth had been so brief. Never had Amadeo dreamed of setting out to create his own life with Riccardo, of settling down and having a wife and children of his own. Amadeo had been so blinded by red velvet and frozen blue eyes he’d never been able to see beyond the endless night.
“Nothing. Without him I thought I would die. But then so does every young man who believes himself to be in love, I suppose,” Armand says. “In truth it’s likely I’d have gotten a child on Bianca by accident and caused calamity for us both.”
Daniel huffs out a sound between an exhale and a laugh, unsure whether Armand had intended there to be humor in his statement or not. He pulls a package of cigarettes from his pocket, fumbles for his lighter, and as he inhales acrid smoke Armand uses his gifts to disarm the smoke detectors in the room. For all Daniel changes, he remains the same. He’s never seen a warning sign posted that he hasn’t disobeyed.
Armand wanders the room as lost as a ghost. He runs his fingers along the carved foot board of the bed and searches his mind for the details of his Master’s bed. But they’re distant, blurry. Distorted by time.
He’d read once that memory is not a fixed thing. Every time one remembers an event, what they are picturing is not the truth of the event itself but the last time they thought of it. And thus instead of being carved in stone it’s a malleable thing, prone to distortion. Armand attempts to conjure the image of embroidered pillows he’d once laid his head to rest on and then second guesses himself, uncertain whether the cherubs in his mind are real or the amalgamation of memory and museum artifacts he’s seen, blended with his own imagination.
The windows, though- those are unchanged and so he approaches one he’d leaned out of so many times to watch for a gondola and a man clad in a crimson cape floating down the canal. He rubs at his face and his hands come away scarlet.
“I wonder whether it would be more painful to be here were it the same as when I was young,” Armand says suddenly, voice echoing in the room. There’s no longer a single tapestry on the walls to absorb the sound. “I never meant for you to see me grieve in this way.”
Daniel’s smoke drifts across the room. As an immortal his footsteps are silent but Armand recognizes his approach by the strength of the scent. He wipes his palms on his jeans just before a warm arm drapes itself across his shoulders.
“After you went into the sun I made all sorts of rash decisions. One of those way to return to Philadelphia and to sneak into my parent’s home. Luckily they were gone- my father, I found out, had been sent to a hospice facility and my mother refused to leave his side,” Daniel says. The rumble of his voice vibrates in his ribs; a soothing sensation that travels along Armand’s side. “I went up to see what they had done with my old bedroom.”
“And what did you find?”
“It hadn’t changed since I’d left for college. The bed was still made, my posters were on the wall, faded but still hanging on. There wasn’t a speck of dust in the place. My mother must have gone up and cleaned it fairly often,” Daniel says. “They kept it like some monument to me. Like I might come home at any minute and apologize for taking so long to drop by.”
Armand licks his lips. Down in the canal a gondola floats by, empty of anyone but the man with his long oar pushing it along.
Never once has he gone to Daniel’s hometown. After they’d met he’d been so relentless Daniel hadn’t felt safe going home, and then once they became lovers they’d been so swept up in their exploration of the world he hadn’t the time to visit his family.
Daniel had always brushed it off with the excuse that bringing home another man would raise questions his parents would be unable to handle the answers to. Armand had taken his excuses at face value, but as he looks up to see the set of Daniel’s jaw, the tightness around his eyes, he has the stab of realization that perhaps he’d deprived this boy of something. That in the tight grasp of his love he’d deprived an entire family.
Armand fixes his gaze upon the wine dark waters of the canal. “Your absence left you ever present in their lives.”
