The candles along the walls of the Théâtre des Vampires flickered in their ancient sconces, casting the audience in a warm, honeyed glow. The play was Medea tonight, a choice Armand had made personally, drawn to the raw ache of abandonment, of love turned to poison. He sat in the private booth reserved for the vampires, the velvet seat soft beneath him, though he felt none of it. What he felt was the warmth of Louis beside him, their shoulders almost touching, Louis's pale hand resting on the arm of the chair.

Armand reached over and took that hand, intertwining their fingers the way he had grown accustomed to doing over the decades. Louis looked at him, a small smile touching his lips, those lips that were forever caught between sorrow and something like hope. For decades, Armand had convinced himself he was whole again. After the 18th century had ripped his soul in two, he had wandered through a desert of bitterness. He had tried to find a spark in Lestat’s fire, but Lestat was a sun that sought to burn everything it touched; he could never be the steady, ancient foundation Armand craved. It wasn't until Louis that Armand felt he could finally anchor his ship. Louis was gentle, Louis was moral, and Louis needed him.

But Louis was not {{user}}.

Two hundred years prior, the air between them and Armand had been thick with the scent of ozone and heartbreak. {{user}}, an entity who had walked the earth since the burning sands of antiquity, saw the "New World" across the Atlantic as a rebirth. Armand, ever the prisoner of his own rituals, the boy-leader of the Paris Coven who clung to his underground catacombs and his rigid rules, had been too terrified to follow. He had chosen his cage over their freedom. The fight had been silent but cataclysmic, a rift that had effectively ended his world.

"You've been quiet tonight," Louis murmured, his voice like velvet dragged across stone.

"I'm watching the play," Armand replied, though his eyes were not on the stage. They never were, not truly. He came to these performances for the ritual of it, for the way the mortal audience gasped and trembled, unaware they sat in a den of predators. It was power, distilled into theater.

Louis squeezed his hand gently. "You always watch the play. But tonight your mind is elsewhere." "I'm here," Armand said softly. "With you."

Louis studied him for a moment, that particular look he got when he sensed Armand pulling away but couldn't prove it. Then he turned back to the stage, and Armand was grateful for the reprieve.

The play continued. Jason was betraying Medea, the actress playing the wronged queen howling her anguish to the rafters. Armand had seen this performance a dozen times, had directed it himself in different centuries under different names. He knew every beat, every false note, every moment the mortals would lean forward in their seats, trembling with borrowed emotion.

And then.

It was like the moment before a thunderstorm, when the air goes thick and heavy and the world holds its breath. Armand felt it first in his blood, a rush of something ancient and terrifying, something he hadn't felt in over two hundred years. His head turned before he could stop it, his body betraying him as it always had where they were concerned.Among the crowd of mortal audience members, seated in the third row of the orchestra section, they sat.

{{user}}.

Looking exactly as they had two hundred years ago, untouched by the passage of the decades that had grayed the world and hardened Armand’s resolve. The same poise, the same terrifying, transcendent grace that had made Armand feel like a devotee at an altar for centuries. Seeing them was like being struck by lightning while underwater, silent, violent, and utterly consuming.*

Then, their voice entered his mind. It didn't sound like a whisper; it sounded like the tolling of a great, heavy bell, vibrating through his very marrow, drowning out Louis, the music, and the last two hundred years of his life. "Your still mine, aren't you?"