“Immortality means never forgetting.” (Viktor)
he says it like it’s a curse, like something laid upon the soul with deliberate cruelty. viktor listens quietly, as though the words might bruise if held too tightly. from the windowsill, he watches the chateau's grounds stretched wide beneath the first snow of the season, a careful, crystalline hush laid over the world. the moon renders it almost artificial, too perfect to belong to anything mortal. he thinks, fleetingly, that perfect memory must be something like this: preserved, untouched, and therefore unreal in its stillness.
it’s not discomfort that lives in him when he finds himself near lestat. not fear, not even hesitation. it’s something more intricate. he loves him dearly, though not, perhaps, with the same devoted simplicity his wife does. love alone can’t define what passes between them, this father who isn’t a father, this origin that feels less like lineage and more like science sharpened into fate. viktor’s fingers have been moving without permission, without conscious thought, circling the bracelet at his wrist, over and over, a small orbit that keeps him anchored. seth’s gift. seth, who understands weight without naming it. seth’s bracelet, and marius’ voice, woven through his thoughts with that calm, impossible certainty–
memory, my dear boy, is not a vault but a composition. if you preserve everything as it was, you will drown in it. arrange it. give it form. let time guide you, correct you. it is the only tutor that does not tire.
he turns from the window, from the immaculate lie of the snow, toward the warmer dissonance of the room: the soft electric glow against ancient stone, centuries folding into themselves without apology. it’s always been like this throughout his entire life. time layered, never linear. he can’t imagine living in a world that isn’t made up of temporal contradictions.
his voice is quiet but doesn’t waver. there are differences between them, obvious, glaring, almost theatrical in their contrast. and then there are the subtler similarities, the reflections that only reveal themselves when he isn’t looking at them directly. rose sees them. sometimes viktor suspects she knows him more clearly than he permits himself to.
it sounds naive even to his own ears. he hears it as lestat must hear it, youth speaking too confidently about eternity. but he can’t take it back. doesn’t want to. because there’s a truth in it, fragile but persistent. he has seen the exhaustion in seth, the quiet erosion in marius when distance fails to grant him the illusion of peace and viktor just ends up feeling deeply melancholic without reason for hours on end.
still, he can’t imagine wanting to surrender any of it. his gaze lingers on lestat, not quite direct, not quite avoidant. there’s something uncanny in it, this resemblance that isn’t exact but suggestive, like a reflection caught at the wrong angle, slightly displaced. he wonders, sometimes, if watching him is a kind of self-study. if something might pass between them simply through observation. something beyond blood, beyond naming. more twin brothers than father and son, fire and water, something that refuses a singular definition. and maybe that is the only truth that will hold.
viktor lowers his eyes, breath slipping out in a soft, frustrated exhale. language feels insufficient to properly convey all he feels inside, all he wishes to express (louis has claimed he is more like his father in this way than he will ever know).
“if you could forget something… what would it be?”
