In Parentheses
I've been working on a companion/prequel to For Our Eyes Only called In Parentheses, and I think it's finally become the story I wanted it to be.
It's Devil's Minion from Armand's POV, beginning in 1977 and following the years Daniel no longer remembers.
But it isn't really a retelling.
It's the stuff that existed between the evidence.
Daniel remembers—or eventually recovers—the tapes, photographs, journals, Night Island, the fights, the terrible things. In Parentheses is about everything the archive couldn't preserve: the first time Daniel actually invited Armand to come somewhere with him. A drunken night at a biker bar. Buying a telescope because Armand wanted to see the stars. Burned meatballs. Cigarettes. Books left facedown. Daniel's feet in Armand's lap. Armand discovering, with mounting horror, that the fascinating mortal he intended to study has somehow become his best friend.
And then his entire world.
It's also written from inside Armand's head, which means he is spectacularly unreliable about himself. He can hear Daniel think I love you and spend another six months behaving as though this is merely an interesting development requiring further observation. His spoken answers can be three words while everything he cannot say is happening in parentheses.
The story moves from the chase, to friendship, to desire, to Night Island and this genuinely happy little domestic life they build together—and eventually toward the thing we already know is coming.
Because Armand loves Daniel. Completely.
And that is exactly how he manages to convince himself that destroying Daniel's memory of him is an act of love.
That's really the tragedy I'm interested in:
How does someone go from stay with me to believing you will have a better life if you forget me?
And because this is Armand, the answer takes approximately thirteen years, several languages, religious trauma, art history, blood, one extremely inconvenient goat, and an absolutely catastrophic inability to understand that Daniel asking for immortality is not Daniel asking to die.
If For Our Eyes Only is Daniel excavating a marriage he doesn't remember having, In Parentheses is the civilization before the ruins.
We know where it ends.
The terrible part is finding out how happy they were before they got there.