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Blithe: showing a casual or cheerful indifference considered to be callous or improper.
Knowing someone and knowing them intimately, Armand thinks, makes it far easier to hurt them. It is easy to dig your claws or sink your teeth into a person’s flesh, drawing out their pain to the nth degree, if you know all the exact things that will make them tick. More than that, it is expected. When you are the only one who knows how to fling the hurtful words at someone, how could you not? The fighting is an innate, instinctive thing that accompanies knowing someone. Knowing someone well makes it all too easy to twist the knife in further— deeper, wretchedly, and until you are coughing up blood in the wake of the exquisite pain. There is a certain amount of brutality to intimacy, but there is an intimacy to brutality, too.
Oh, there it is! The half-blank, half-apocalyptic look! But what does it mean tonight, huh? Does he want to lick my boots, or… chop my hands off? Is it the gremlin or the good nurse tonight?
When Armand fights with Louis, it is expected that they will be left licking their wounds in the end. It is a difficult thing to be known, but it is an easy thing for there to be consequences for the knowing. When you know someone well, it becomes second nature to be able to find all the cracks in the glass. When you know someone well, it is easy to find all the correct words that will make the other shatter into a million broken pieces. In the aftermath, Louis and Armand are almost always left picking bits of shards from each other’s skin. There is an intimacy in that, too.
I’m the vampire Armand, and my daddy vampire groomed me into a little bitch! Vampires who murdered my daddy made me pretend I didn’t have a dick for two hundred and forty years!
To Armand, knowing Louis intimately is a familiar routine, and the fights that come with that knowledge are a familiar thing, too. They are a familiar, frequent routine, and Armand craves it with a pulsing need like he craves nothing else. They are a cyclical, ever-repeating thing, these fights, and even when an attempted punch misses in its incorrectness, they carry on. Metronomic, Louis might call them out loud tiredly. Comforting, Armand might think to respond in his head. Either way, Armand finds himself thrown off-kilter without them, completely unmoored and unsure of what to do in their absence.
My brother tossed himself off a roof! My sister buried me alive! My daughter was my sister was my throw pillow! Well, he wouldn’t look at me kindly.
When you know a collection of all the worst things that have ever happened to a person, it is difficult to pretend you would not use them against them if a time were to ever call for it. Sometimes, the mocking words will play over and over in Armand’s mind like an inescapable tape, persisting long after the moment has passed. When the unsteady moments of awaiting the next bursting fight appear, Armand lets himself sink deeply into the feeling of a fight gone too far. The hurt, the pain, is a comforting thing that can only be drawn from knowing someone and knowing them intimately. When Armand tells himself he likes the unsureness in the absence of the knowing, of the fighting, he can almost convince himself he is telling himself the truth.
...
It has never been like this before.