Armand

My father was a proud man, a strong man. He loved me, though he showed it in a way that is not popular in a century like this one. He was not soft and his love for me was not shown in soft manners.

For all that, I have no doubt that he loved me.

When he thought I was dead, it broke his spirit and turned him into a drunk. I left my family long ago, but I always hoped that he was comforted to know I was not gone - that he was comforted and that he left the drink and returned to my family to be the strong provider he had once been.

I have not spoken of him in centuries years.

Enough. Enough of him.

I will not.

Give the punishment now. I will not gorge for your diversion.

Deus Sol Invictus

The longest night has passed and the days will grow longer, giving those who walk in the light more time to bask in the sun's warmth.

In a few days, people will celebrate Dies Natalis Solis Invicti or Christmas or Yule or any number of other names. Some will celebrate with faith and open hearts. Some will celebrate from habit or even cupidity.

Most will truly be celebrating the return of the light. The days will not grow shorter and shorter until there is no life.

My season wanes with the longest night, but I long for the warmth of home. The Night Island does not see cold such as this.

I look back to my entry dated October 26th and I see that Epicurus' words are cold comfort in times of loss. Perhaps better ones are these:

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

To have is to know that we will lose with time, and time does not consult with creatures such as we to determine when we would allow loss.

My request of you, City, remains what it has been for the time I have been here, tell me of yourselves that I may warm myself in the lives of others.

No, I look nothing like this "Antonio Banderas" and if you continue in your insulting inquiries you may watch him from whatever afterlife may await you.

No! You may not inquire after the nature of my relations with my master.

[ooc: 4th Walling is all fine. Whatever is too much, he just won't remember post-curse.]

I will restrict my interviews to days when the City's influence is minimal and conduct them in public places. Cain, it would be my pleasure to hear another story from you at your convenience.

Would anyone else give me a story? Any story, though the personal ones are best.

Private to Blue
I offer my apologies again. I would not have been so rude if I had been in my right mind.

/Private to Blue

( Private )

[ooc: Yep, Armand has a new PB because more facial expressions are a good thing. Daniel, if you want to happen across Armand watching the video in question, feel free. He'll be watching it obsessively for a few days.]

Is this then another curse? This change of mood that came at midnight?

Tell me of your mood, City. Are you kindly or cruel?


( Private to Daniel )

( Private )

[ooc: Affected with the bitey side of the curse.]

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

-Epicurus

Thank you, Daniel, Lestat, Rosella, and Machi. My thanks to each of you for the dances last night.

( Private )

I am looking for a dance partner to join me at Lux tonight. I feel no compulsion or curse - I just feel like dancing.

( Private )

Is there anyone here who would like to meet to tell me their stories on camera? Any story, how you came here, what your life is like. It can be as inane as you would like, only satisfy my curiosity.

( Private )

Click for voice post

( After the translation function is found with claws )

I have not yet decided which camera I like best, but I have decided that I appreciate the freedom of the digital medium. I have much to learn, but I have time.

Artemis, thank you for your help with the cameras and the information. I still want to see what you achieve when you push yourself.

( Private )

The wonders I find here have yet to cease. The suddenly appearing coliseum is nothing compared to cherry blossoms in the snow, piano in the darkest hours, or a pegasus with a taste for irises.

I fell asleep this morning with my computer and woke to find that it had recorded me in my repose. Is there someone among you who makes video recordings and would help me choose a suitable camera? I think I will revisit a past interest.


( Private )

I am fascinated by the computer that I found in my possession when I awoke here. I have computers in my home, but they are nothing so cunning and compact as this. I can see that I will have to learn more about it and its capabilities. Am I correct in thinking that this tiny lens is a camera?

Takiko, when you are ready, I will await you in the square.

( Private )

( Private )

My name is Armand and I am newly arrived.

I have a message for someone who lives here: Lestat de Lioncourt.

Lestat, I have newly arrived and will be taking a house in the City. I believe you know better than I that I did not come with a wish to intrude, but I am alone here.

This is useful for my reference as well as a useful thing for anyone curious as to how quixotic Armand's behavior can be with regards to those he claims to care for. This is out of order and ahead of where Armand is in canon, but in most respects still accurate assessments of his opinions on most of the vampires. The least accurate at this time being the assessment of Daniel, since they have not had time (to Armand's timeline) to reach that point of being unable to abide each other's company.

( Daniel )

( Lestat )

( Louis )

( Gabrielle )

( Pandora )

( Santino )

( Marius )

[nick / name]: Jade
[personal LJ name]: dreadnot
[other characters currently played]:
Walter Dornez :: Hellsing :: dark_butler
Pup :: Hellsing OC :: wee_hellpuppy
Bob :: The Dresden Files :: intellectspirit
Crowley :: Good Omens :: itsjustafruit

[e-mail]: walter.todesengel gmail
[AIM / messenger]: waltertodesengel

[series]: The Vampire Chronicles
[character]: Armand
[character history / background]: Thankfully, I can and will take the Wikipedia way out: [Armand | His book]

[disclaimer:] I've been mainlining Anne Rice in book and audio book for pretty much 24/7 for days on end, refreshing myself on Armand. So the prose? I'm sorry. It's like ebola and AR sneezed on me.

[character abilities]: Ah so tricksy, the powers of Anne Rice's vampires. He is strong enough to bend iron without effort, fast enough to move faster than the human eye can see. Armand's true power lies in his mental powers - his ability to influence others, both human and vampire, from a distance, and even more powerfully in person. He is capable of telepathy - humans are easy, most vampires are not unknowable, other than Marius and Daniel (master and fledgling are always deaf to one another). He can find someone with whom he has shared his blood anywhere, unless he makes them a vampire. He can see another vampire's projected form. In The Vampire Armand he mentions that he has known for centuries how to fly. There are other powers, but they are touched on in barest mention and not ones he makes a habit of using.

[character personality]:
Armand is, to use that old chestnut, a creature of contradictions. He is selfish, self-centered, capricious, and childish at times. He is both immature and inhumanly mature - a creature half a millennium old in the body of a seventeen year old boy who looked even younger. He's a being of the moment - five hundred years of moment and it can be summed up by, his words: "I cannot tell you those things because I have no experience of them. You see, I have so little ability to synthesize knowledge; I deal in the immediate with a cool intensity. What was it like in Paris? Ask me if it rained on the night of Saturday, June 5, 1793. Perhaps I could tell you that."

In life and as a vampire, he is prone to speaking impulsively at times, hurting those who care for him because he can. Sometimes it is malice, sometimes it is carelessness, sometimes it is utterly accidental.

If he wants something important to him, he will do what he must to have it. He pursued Daniel Malloy in a manner that was terrifying and demanding and eventually indulgent and adoring. Stalker much? Oh yes, Armand can and will, and when he is bored or simply done, he will move on without looking back - or perhaps, more accurately, without allowing himself to look back. As he did when he allowed Louis to kill all the members of the Théâtre des Vampires. Letting them die freed him of three centuries of a lying existence and closed a chapter where they might have shared his secret of what he truly did to the child vampire, Claudia.

For all that, he is also accustomed to self-abnegation and denial. His human life started steeped in relgion and faith. He had an indulgent interlude in Venice, luxurious and offering almost anything he could want or need, but that ended all too quickly and he went once again into a life dedicated to twisted religion and denial. He is torn between his impulses to indulge himself and the habits of centuries to deny himself.

To be truthful, though, Armand is numb around the deepest core of who he is. He loved God with all his soul and that was brutally taken from him in rape and slavery. He loved Marius with all his heart and that was brutally taken from him in fire and torture. He gave himself wholly into the Paris coven under Les Innocents and that was taken from him in arrogantly-delivered truth. And when the time came to try to feel with the heart of the new century, to feel through Louis, that was taken from him by Louis' own numbness and withdrawal.

Is it any wonder that he does not leap to give himself wholly to anyone or anything anymore?

How can so much beauty hide such a bruised and steely heart, and why must I love him, why must I lean in my weariness upon his irresistible yet indomitable strength? Is he not the wizened funereal spirit of a dead man in a child's clothes?

[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Just after Queen of the Damned

[journal post]:
Lost, so lost. The web of our kind has been severed and I float free in the air like a spiderling blown to a new territory on a slip of of thread.

Computers are fascinating things, and the one I have been provided is a marvel. I could buy any computer I wanted at home, but I never saw offerings such as these. I would have one for every room where I might find a desire to have it.

Tell me, beautiful creatures of this new place. Tell me your stories. Tell me of your homes. Tell me of your lives. Tell me your secrets, my new friends. Give me yourselves and I will give you yourself back.

Private
I feel Lestat out there in this city of humanity and inhumanity and minds that are so new. I feel no others. Not Louis or Maharet, not Jesse or Khayman. The bounds of this world are so strait. It is as though there is only the City and the forest and the quiet murmurs of those out on the sea. Surely it cannot be just Lestat and I. Daniel and Marius are always hidden to me. Perhaps if I listen, I will hear them with my ears - those familiar and beloved voices. I will hate them and I will love them, but so long as they exist, I am real.

[third person / log sample]:
The Night Island drew Armand out of his villa despite himself. He had fed, he was warm and as sated as the hunger ever allowed any of his kind, which was to say that the hunger remained a constant reminder of the price of his immortality and power, but it was bearable.

It was more bearable than the silences and loudness of his villa this night. The silences of Marius and Daniel, the two closest to him in blood and heart; the two farthest from him in love and understanding. The loud thoughts of the others when they did not think to shield their minds. He wanted to know their secrets, but he did not wish to share his own.

They, the vampires, numbered so few now and had agreed to make no more, though he knew that none of them would hold to that forever. They could not. Loneliness would drive them to love, love would drive them to madness, and at last in that fury of mad love, they would give the Dark Gift to their human darlings and thus lose them forever.

Or perhaps not forever, but for long enough for the separation to go from a knife in the heart, to an ache, to an empty numbness, and perhaps from there back to anticipation and acceptance and even the potential to love again, as Armand himself felt about his master, Marius, despite centuries of abandonment and grief. Perhaps it was for the best that they had been long ago wrested apart before they could grow to hate each other for what they were.

Some would say they would not make others and they would mean it, but he did not believe that any of them could resist forever. Armand himself had kept that vow for over five hundred years, and then he had let himself grow fascinated by Daniel Malloy. He had let himself love, and he had allowed himself to begin letting go when he took Daniel's fading life and allowed him to be born again as an immortal.

He could make the lying argument that it had been selfless to give Daniel his wish, even knowing as he did that he and Daniel would lose each other. It had been purest selfishness - the same selfishness that had had Marius bring Amadeo over five hundred years ago - the selfishness that says, "You are mine and I adore you and I would rather see you hate me than see you die."

A flicker of thought broke through the vampire's reverie, louder than the background cacophony of countless human minds: I just want to die.

Armand searched the crowd for the originator of that thought, that clarion call to the hunter in him even though he had already fed. This supplicant who did not even know what he-- no, she-- this supplicant who did not even know what she was calling to herself in her wish for death.

There. Armand followed the entreaty to its source and was entranced. She was beautiful, sitting in the bustle of the Night Island's human traffic, trying to be part of them, but separate, radiating her pain so palpably that even humans gave her a wide berth.

She perched on a high stool in the street side patio of a bar, beautiful as so many people of this new age were beautiful - untouched by disease or serious injury, well-nourished, well-dressed, and in the luxury of the Night Island, wealthy beyond the dreams of most of human history.

Armand watched her from the balcony of an ostentatious jewelry store across the street, searching her face and mind with equal facility. Oh, this century had left her as near-empty as the pack of cigarettes by her hand, just a little bit left to rattle around in the empty container of her mind with no meaning, no pride, no destination but deeper into the evening, perhaps back to some anonymous hotel room for an hour of mindless coupling with a man who could no more touch her heart than she could thaw the ice around it.

He could go to her. He could take her pain. A whisper in her ear, in her mind, No pain. It would be simple enough. He could give her what she wanted and take what his own body wanted at the same time.

He could wait. The hunger could wait, but she might be gone from the Night Island by the time the sun set tomorrow. Could he let her and her wish to die leave unassuaged? The Night Island was a place for recognizing dreams, after all.

How self-serving his reasoning. He had fed and he had no need to kill her tonight, only the want. She could endure the pain another day; after all, he had endured centuries.

Armand turned away, leaving the jewelry store and walking to the quay. He would take a boat and leave the island for the night, sail out into the unlighted ocean where he could find some quiet for a time if he closed his mind.

If she was there tomorrow night, he would grant her wish.