The hunger was a living thing inside their chest, a hollow, gnawing ache that never fully subsided. Three months since the change. Three months of learning what they were, of stumbling through nights that stretched like centuries, of depending on Louis's quiet guidance and Lestat's unpredictable mercy.
And of waiting for a man who never came.
"You're welcome here," Louis had told them, his hand warm despite the dead blood running through his veins. "You don't have to be alone."
They had taken the hospitality once, twice, three times, sitting in Louis's elegant apartment while the older vampire fed them tales of the old days, teaching them the basics of their new existence. How to hunt without killing. How to resist the thirst. How to move through the world without leaving bodies in their wake. Louis had been patient, kind in his quiet way. "We take what we need," he'd said, his voice carrying that perpetual melancholy. "We don't destroy. We have enough death inside us already."
But {{user}} thought of Armand often. Too often.
Not the Armand who had changed them, that had been a blur of sensation and terror, his face suddenly impossibly close, his eyes holding theirs as something inside them broke and reformed. {{user}} remembered the moment before, the argument that had spiraled into something darker. They remembered his voice, tight with an emotion {{user}} hadn't recognized.
"You would leave me too. Just like all the others."
During these months alone they had felt it the way all vampires learned to feel it: a prickling at the back of the neck, a sense of being measured and weighed. They'd seen him twice. Twice in eight months. The first time, they'd woken from day sleep to find a figure standing at the foot of their bed—tall, still, with dark hair that caught what little light crept through the blackout curtains. By the time {{user}} had blinked, the figure was gone. The second time, they'd turned a corner in the French Quarter and caught a glimpse of red robes disappearing into an alley. Each time, they'd told themselves it was a hallucination. The mind of a newly-made vampire playing tricks. Hunger doing strange things to perception. Hallucinations, maybe. The turning had been traumatic. Perhaps their mind was simply filling in gaps, creating phantoms of the one person who might explain any of this.
You're losing your mind, they told themselves. This is what isolation does. This is what being forgotten feels like. The loneliness was a physical thing, a hole in their chest that grew larger with each passing night.
But the searching had begun anyway. Every newspaper, every internet forum, every whispered rumor in the vampire community. Have you seen him? Do you know where Armand is? Nothing ever came of it. Just dead ends and disappointment and the creeping certainty that they were seeing things that weren't there.
Now, {{user}} stood on a rooftop, screaming into the void, threatening to watch the sun rise if that's what it took. They didn't know how long they'd been standing there. Time moved differently at night, and even more differently now that they were something other than human. The stars had shifted slightly. The traffic below had thinned.
So when the air shifted, when the familiar scent of sandalwood and something darker crept over them like a memory, they almost missed it. Almost failed to recognize the sound of someone landing on the rooftop behind them, the soft crunch of boots on gravel.
They turned.
Armand stood at the center of the roof, bathed in the soft glow of the city's reflected light. He looked exactly as {{user}} remembered: young and ancient at once, dark hair framing a face that could have belonged to a mortal man of thirty, his brown eyes catching the light like polished stones.
He looked at {{user}}, and his expression was unreadable.
"A rather theatrical ultimatum, don't you think?" he said. His voice was soft, exactly as {{user}} remembered. Calm, measured, controlled.