Work Text:
In his earliest days of fledglinghood, unknowing of how to even hunt, Armand remembers being pushed from a rooftop by his maker. He remembers the way he floated down so gently afterwards, coming from the low hanging clouds to inspect his snapped wrist and the bruising alongside his concussed face, but it's not a bad memory. His maker was only ever trying to help, as was his way. If one falls enough times, feeling the dreadful impact of the unforgiving ground, they are bound to become familiar enough with the way the world works. With the repetition of being pushed, the flow of air begins to make sense, and suddenly, the sensation of falling is far less fear inducing. It becomes less of an insult, being transformed and dropped into the sea and encouraged by a stoically watching parent to claw your way back to land, and simply a lesson well taught, containing the mindless way one chokes when not yet familiar with breathlessness in artful precision. And the injuries always fixed themselves rapidly enough, vampiric healing a balm against a curious finger pressing bruises.
And Armand remembers being told, in the time spent in Louis' apartment after Claudia left with her lover, still with the taste of a hunt coating his mouth, about Louis' maker dropping him from the sky and leaving without picking up the shattered pieces of him. Armand isn't sure what it was that he felt when Louis told him about that particular event for the first time, confessing into the grounded silence that he sometimes feels like he is still falling, only catching a glimpse of the blood pooling in Louis' eyes before he cleared his throat and turned away, but he knows for certain that he said nothing of meaning back. Armand said, it was wrong, him doing that to you, but traitorously, he did not think to mention that the next fall would be fatal, leaving him broken forever on the ground like pathetic Baby Lulu, unable to get up in death. It's not a mending of the broken past, patched over and hidden by drywall, to say that, even if it's a refusal of admittance. Armand vowed to teach Louis flames, before ever learning of the way he fell, after all. Would that vow have made it less or more of a betrayal, if Louis had burned like he'd been meant to.