Chapter Text
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...
Time to die.
Armand clings to the words like a life raft, slow-roasting his eyes and baking his brain in the blue light from the CRT television set. Over and over, Harrison Ford clings to the rain-soaked facade, over and over Rutger Hauer’s crucified hand descends, grips, and pulls him up. Alive, onto the roof to gasp in equal measures of fear and relief. A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure... New climate, recreational facilities... absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand -- the custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant designed especially for your needs. So come on America, let's put our team up there...
Over and over, rewind and rewatch, creating for himself a real world where all that changes are scenes, and the scenes are beautiful, and the chaos that threatens to obliterate his psyche cannot touch him, and he is not alone.
The twenty-four hour period after leaving Louis’s was a blur of shock, confusion, and pain. Getting himself back to his little apartment was muscle memory, running blind, like all those liquid nights back in Venice when he’d blundered back to the production house drunk and messy, anticipating being hurt, and so high on emotion he needed to be given the same in return just to fall asleep. In this era, he’d arrived home pulling on his own hair so he wouldn’t think to go find Louis just to beg him to hurt him more.
The scab on the back of his neck is nothing. He isn’t so ignorant as not to understand the depth of his betrayal- it confuses him, yes, but if nothing that confused or baffled him was real he might live in a world built entirely of smoke and mirrors- and what to do or where to go from here is lost to him. If only what he deserved might have been solidified, if only there were a proper punishment for the crime declared, and that he would have a way to think about all of this other than as a total dissolution of everything, no polarity, and nowhere to go but down.
He’d sat on the edge of the claw-foot tub while he made the call to his old contact at the publishing house in Daniel’s name, pressed his free hand to the cool porcelain to feel its hard realness, just to hold himself down. Closed his eyes, and did what he could. I’m not only asking a favor, I can promise you that. This is real talent. Someone has to know about it.
Oh, Daniel. Armand should hate him- does resent him terribly- but in maintaining the relationship with Louis, Armand had backed himself into a corner. Both he and Louis had been suffocating, and with no exit plan, it had taken Daniel to give them a way out. Oh, Daniel. Write about all of this in that goofy, sardonic way of yours. You’ll sort through the truths that matter and the ones that don’t. Erase the ugly parts if you want, and make Louis happy. That was all Armand had wanted to do, anyway. To make Louis happy.
It was in a hospital room in Paris that Armand had last really felt this chaos. He was still Amadeo then, and Amadeo had woken up from dreams filled with darkness and flames to a cool, white room and a cannula piping little streams of oxygen into his nostrils, yellowed gauze stuck to the blistered flesh on his legs and stomach and no one in the room he recognized. Terrible fire... That director, Marius DeRomanus... The only survivor... No ID...
Everything, everybody, his life, his loves, his sense of reality, gone.
When he hadn’t been able to find his words, they’d made assumptions and called a translator, and then, like putting salt on the stunning fear already engulfing him, there came that sick and particular shame, that little eternal wound that would never heal; Amadeo spoke four languages, but none of them were the language of his birth.
Amadeo had gone inside himself there, grieved as long as the circumstances allowed, and came out on the other side with a new name, his first real birth certificate, and a new life assigned to him. And in Paris, just as he’d done at the advent of his convalescence and sanctification in Venice, he had clung to this new life gratefully, and desperately.
But this time the proverbial hands on the wheel are his, and no one is going to pull him from the wreckage. He sees the same flames in his mind, smells the same smoke, and feels the same feeling of falling, but there will be no new name, no clean papers. No authority, no set of rules, no bibles to memorize, no body-warmed sheets in a penthouse bed to crawl between for comfort. There are only his mistakes, a mirror that reflects his own face, and his face is like that of a stranger now that all the context has fallen away. Armand makes a bed for his heart in front of the television and prays for forgiveness at the altar of Blade Runner .
There has always been very little line between his body and brain, and so his flesh becoming incongruous with its own existence while his mind scrambles for a foothold is only to be expected. Even so, it hits him hard.
He’d taken a shaky, vindictive, pitiful shower that first night alone, drank a cup of tea, and put on a soft pajama set, but by the second day the overwhelm of doing so much as boiling water feels insurmountable, and with each passing sunrise just getting up becomes a task in and of itself. He clings to the regularity and perfect, predictable, precisely-dosed stimulation of his movies. He sleeps. He tries to cry, but manages only dry sobs. He does everything at the same time, and all together it becomes a kind of normal that he can withstand.
When the knock finally comes, it shocks Armand into getting up. Someone at the door, come to save or destroy him, or both. His head spins as soon as he’s upright, black spots threatening to overtake his vision; He hasn’t eaten anything in days other than a box of dry tea biscuits, the empty plastic sleeves from which now lay discarded on the kitchen counter. He grips the back of the couch to keep himself from falling, flinches when a second knock comes. He can almost hear the shape of the hand hitting the other side of the door, and knows who it is before he opens up.
Daniel. Theres a flash of trepidation under his exhaustion- he realizes suddenly that he must be in a certain state, must look like a ghost - but there isn’t anything he can do about it. Besides, he’s so quietly desperate for somebody, anybody that he might have opened the door for anyone at all.
Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. The passionate documentarian of many creative escapades, totally un-serious yet entirely earnest and savvy at the same time. Not quite handsome, but precious in a way far beyond ‘cute’. An arm one might be glad to be on at a black-tie event, those curls gelled right, agate cufflinks to match his eyes... Armand’s mind has wanted to dress Daniel up- and down- for a long, long time.
Before Louis, consummating even platonic friendships with physical intimacy had been Armand’s normal; A lasting relationship without the presence of sex was an awkward, foreign sort of concept. With Louis, tending to the harmony of their relationship had meant that Armand abstained from side gigs, even though Louis had told him that he was welcome do otherwise if he desired. Yes, the harmony had been maintained, but this commitment had whittled his circle of friends down to those he shared with Louis, and no one else. Daniel had been one of those shared endeavors, but in their moments alone in the studio together, a certain tension between them had grown.
Now Daniel is at the door alone, looking afraid. Armand can smell the faintest bit of alcohol on him, under the warm amber scent of his aftershave, and the smell of the hallway, and the nighttime street. Daniel is anxious. Has he made him this way? The faint flickering from the hallway fluorescents scramble his head. He lets Daniel in and shuts the door just to get away from all that noise .
He wants to thank him for coming, to beg him to stay. He doesn’t hate Daniel, and he understands that Daniel was just doing his job. Trying to do right, regardless of the consequences. He can make it all easy for Daniel, he’ll bend over backwards for him- that phone call to the editor was only the beginning- if only Daniel promises to help. Help . Give him some direction, some delicious new perspective he knows must exist but which he cannot see. Help me, distract me, be my teacher, he wants to say, I can learn to love you just the way you need, I know you’re lonely, and I have as much devotion as you can take. But the words stick in his throat the way they tend to do at times like this, and his incapacity ashames him. So he just asks about the bag.
The bag is for him, of course. He recognizes it as one of Louis’s reusable bags from the farmer’s market, now full of unimportant things that he hadn’t missed and doesn’t want to think about. He can’t look inside, and as Daniel puts it on the arm of the couch, Armand retreats to his blanket sanctuary in front of the television in an unconscious effort to hide. The longer he stays up the more aware he is of the ugly thing he’s become, and he needs to remove himself from Daniel’s view before Daniel can turn away from him and enact the rejection he’s anticipating.
“Alright,” Daniel says predictably, “Guess I’ll go then.”
It hurts. He listens to sound of Daniel’s tennis-shoed feet moving back towards the door, thinking fragmented thoughts, mostly aching. Perhaps Daniel never comes back. Armand can only assume that he’s been spending time with Louis, and although Armand doesn’t think Louis a petty person, it isn’t unreasonable to imagine that he might have things to say. Armand prays that Daniel’s inner compass is as sticky and critical as it seems to be. He prays that Daniel is grateful for what he’s done for him, and understands that he cares. Because he does.
Daniel’s footsteps stop.
“Hey,” Daniel says, as if in reply, “Uh, I’m gonna come back tomorrow. I don’t know what you need, but you need something , so... let’s figure that out.”
Sometime in the night, bag slides from the arm of the couch and hits the hardwood floor with a crash that shocks Armand from his half-sleep and sends his heart racing in his chest. He can see the wreckage from where he lays, and one of the plates- from a lovely but impersonal set he’d found at a flea market during one of his biannual ‘vintage aficionado’ phases- has flown from the bag and broken into jagged pieces against the baseboard. That’s the end.
He gets up, fights the tunnel vision again, turns off the TV- the sound suddenly disgusts him- picks up the pieces, clears the counter, puts the pieces there. Broken.
Grief that he had not- until now- figured out how to feel is tightening his chest, making him hyperventilate. Grief, self-pity, confusion, humiliation, heartbreak, longing, loneliness, guilt. Fear. The fear is coming out now. He barely makes it back to the safety of his blanket nest before the tears come like a flash flood and he is overwhelmed.
And he cries. He cries until his ribs feel broken and then beyond that, incomprehensibly exhausted but unable to relax. He hasn’t cried like this in years, not since his earliest days in Paris, strange child in a stranger land, so long spent smoothing himself over and bottling everything up without knowing, just to try to fit in.
When his mind gives up, his body cries for him, until the sun comes up and the light seems to stab at his eyes and his head throbs and he feels like he’s being purged, born again with all the out-of-control terror that comes along with new beginnings.
And then Daniel comes back, and Daniel helps. It’s his presence, mostly, but the chocolate helps too, when Armand convinces himself to eat it. The sports drink helps, and the little plastic fan toy. Energy to think with, and a contained amount of new beauty to pacify his angry brain. Daniel is good at giving gifts. Daniel is generous. Daniel is kind. The list Daniel makes him is powerful beyond its twenty words. Direction again. He’s sure that Daniel does not know how much of a difference he’s making.
Armand sits on the couch long after Daniel leaves, sipping the sports drink and holding down the little button to watch the lights on the fan-blades flash and dance. Red, pink, purple, blue, like a tiny ferris wheel right there in his hand. Around and around, soothing the storm clouds, taking deep breaths, feeling himself come down, and come back.
When he finally sleeps, he sleeps hard, passing out on the couch face down with one arm hanging off the side. It is a dead reset, and he does not dream.
He wakes up in the quiet of the next day’s early evening feeling sticky, a wet patch of saliva on the cushion where his mouth has been hanging open. He gets up with ease, washes the sleep from his face, floats around in front of the kitchenette finding something he can imagine eating. Sits at the table eating frozen berries with his fingers, one by one. The storm seems to have passed over. The wreckage is still there to pick through, but the clouds have parted, and now he can see.
He stands in the shower with his eyes closed, letting the water rain down on him, and thinking about everything. He thinks about holding Louis outside of Claudia’s hospital room, staring blankly at an educational poster on the wall detailing the benefits of diabetes medication while he felt Louis shake, and listened to him cry.
It wasn’t a performance, Daniel had said, it was a glorified hazing. A disgusting way to consider it, Armand thinks bitterly, but in a world where the words didn’t have as much weight, it might as well be true.
A hazing.
There had not been a question of justification at the time; He’d had to participate in similar “rituals of passage” in his own early days in the art scene, adrenaline-pumped theatrical performance pieces caught on camera and circulated as short films. He had been proud to do it, too. He had been subjected to far more uncomfortable things on camera in his younger life. The fact that this ritual had been so much bigger and grander had only seemed like a gift to Claudia, a glorious chance for her to commit herself to art. He had not expected it to go south, for her to be hurt, or hurt so badly.
How relieved he had been when the camera had been destroyed along with everything else in the field. With it gone, he had been certain that the event, the fire-trap that the effigy had become with Claudia inside, would go down as nothing more than a terrible accident. He been against it all along, he’d told Louis in private. When the fires had been lit, he’d had flashbacks to Venice, and had run to vomit behind a tree. Half lie, half truth. Everyone involved became a partial victim, all sharing in the tragedy. No one else wanted to speak up, and no one else would be hurt.
But the film had evidently survived somehow, video of all of them with matches in hand, and he the ring leader of it all. It had been an accident, but undeniably an accident spurred on by choice.
He’d thought at the time that the only way he could make up for it was to make Louis happy, and happiness to Armand only looked one way. He had tried his hardest to be the companion Louis needed him to be, to smooth out his own edges so that Louis could take up the space he needed to, and in turn secured a love and a place for himself in a world that seemed increasingly intent on running him to the ground or devouring him whole. He had accompanied Louis to Claudia’s physical therapy appointments, all the while lying to Louis’s face that he had not stood and watched proudly until he realized that the fire had gotten out of hand.
The past is the past, Louis had said during the split, and I don’t want you to be punished. It wouldn’t do anything to help her. But here and now, I don’t want to see you again.
Past is past, and so what now? Armand watches the outline of himself in the foggy mirror as he dries off, all angles, lanky limbs. He seems to have only gotten thinner and thinner since Paris, his memories of the last dinners he really enjoyed now threatening to fade into obscurity.
The whole world had seemed to be at his fingertips then, when he had been- as Marius had said- raised from the dark into all that wealth. He had eaten and drank and romped with reckless abandon, trusting that he would be cared for even when his technicolor waves of emotion made him act younger and messier than he should. He had not felt so alone. He had known he was beautiful because he’d been told he was. He had not lived long enough to make mistakes. He wants that again, the discovery and the foolishness and the picking himself up after falling down without having to lick his wounds for so long afterwards. He wants to be free.
“...Are you up to go for a movie?” Daniel asks. Armand has his hesitations. Arthouse cinema was a go-to with Louis, and the idea of folding himself into one of the creaky seats in a claustrophobically intimate small-screen theater right now makes him regret getting dressed.
But Daniel presses. “Come on, man,” he says, “They’re playing Total Recall at the AMC...?”
This is entrapment, and Armand tells Daniel so. He loves sci fi, and while he’s hardly sick of Blade Runner yet, it’s begun to lose some of its rapture. It’s an offer he can’t refuse.
As they leave the apartment, Daniel seems smug. He’s still handling Armand with kid gloves, stealing sidelong glances as if to make sure that Armand’s head hasn’t yet toppled off his shoulders, but this Armand can’t mind. Being taken care of is all he wants right now, even if it’s by Daniel who, a month ago, would have been the one clipped to the safety leash. Daniel’s poorly-hidden smirk is positive affirmation enough for tonight.
The sky above them is a silky electric blue, the streetlights hum and twinkle and laugh. He feels every car that passes as if it drives its shadow through him, and as if the breeze might blow him away. It’s beautiful, this kaleidoscope, and it upsets him.
What a dizzying thing to try to keep up with, the world. How badly he wants to, how terrifying it is. How devoted he is to living and feeling even though he wishes that he wanted to truly give up. How much easier it would be then. He has been trying so hard his whole life, and it keeps hurting so terribly. He wants to run home, suddenly, back to the miserableness of the apartment, to be lonely on his own terms again, but he catches Daniel’s hopeful eye and puts on a tight little smile instead. He realizes that he’s holding his breath, and lets it out slowly though his nose.
“...When you were in school,” Daniel says, “Did they teach you about geology? Layers of the earth? Because my kids are learning things I’m pretty sure I was never taught.”
“You assume I went to school,” Armand replies. Forced conversation; Daniel is still anxious.
Daniel seems bemused. “Don’t you speak four languages?”
“...Five.”
Daniel laughs. “English, French, Italian, Spanish, and...”
“Greek.”
“Okay, what do the ancient greeks and their marble pillars have to say about geology?”
“Are you on a mission from Louis?” The question surprises him coming out of his own mouth.
Daniel frowns. “Uh, no ,” he says, squinting like the question is sour, “Pretty sure he’s busy living his own life. I’d like a little credit.”
Ouch, but at the same time, interesting. “...Then thank you,” Armand tells him after a pause in which he tries to sort his emotions into something linear. “I should tell you that. But why?”
“Why?” Daniel asks. “... It’s... the right thing to do?”
“You could hate me.”
“I know. And I... don’t.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. You want me to try?”
That makes Armand smile for real in spite of himself. “No,” he replies. They’ve stopped outside the theater, groups of other moviegoers parting to avoid them on the sidewalk. “I like it when you like me,” he says.
“Direct,” Daniel says, nodding, bright red ears betraying his cool, “...Okay, I can appreciate that.”