Work Text:
The bathroom looked like a crime scene against Louis’s sensibilities.
There were beauty magazines stacked beside the sink, all of them folded open to pages featuring women with impossibly thin eyebrows, frosted blue eyeshadow stretched almost to the brow bone, glossy pink lips, and pin-straight hair that looked as though not a single strand had ever dared curl. Half the counter was occupied by products Louis had purchased with the grim determination of someone preparing for a military campaign. Hair serum. Heat protectant. Eyeshadow palettes. Tweezers. Lipsticks. Brushes.
Armand sat on the closed toilet lid with perfect composure while Louis stood over her with a pair of tweezers and the expression of a woman being forced to perform surgery on a loved one.
“I hate this.”
Armand’s mouth twitched.
“You’ve said that seventeen times.”
“I counted.”
“Of course you did.”
Louis narrowed her eyes before plucking another hair from Armand’s eyebrow.
Armand hissed.
“There.”
“You enjoy hurting me.”
“I enjoy trends.”
“That is far more concerning.”
Louis stepped back, scrutinizing her work. Armand’s eyebrows had once been thick and beautifully shaped, naturally expressive in a way Louis adored. The magazines insisted this was no longer acceptable. The magazines wanted arches so thin they seemed sketched onto the face afterward.
Louis hated the magazines.
Unfortunately she also loved them.
Or rather, she loved the challenge.
Loved watching decades reinvent beauty every few years.
Loved testing every ridiculous trend on Armand.
The contradiction irritated her endlessly.
“You know,” Louis muttered, leaning closer again, “people are gonna look back on this in ten years and wonder what the hell everyone was thinking.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Yet here I am.”
Another hair disappeared.
Armand’s brows now resembled elegant dark commas.
Louis stared.
Made a dissatisfied noise.
Plucked two more.
“There.”
“Worse?”
“Much worse.”
“You seem pleased.”
Louis looked offended.
“I am committed.”
Armand laughed.
The sound bounced off the bathroom tiles.
Louis tried not to smile.
Failed.
The tweezers were eventually abandoned in favor of makeup. Louis stood between Armand’s knees, one hand resting beneath her chin while she worked the pale blue shadow across her eyelids. The color should have looked absurd. It should have clashed horribly with Armand’s dark skin.
Instead it looked stunning.
Louis had expected it to be striking.
She had not expected it to be beautiful.
The icy blue shimmer caught the bathroom light every time Armand blinked, transforming into silver and then blue again.
“Damn it.”
“What?”
“It works.”
Armand opened one eye.
“What works?”
“This.”
Louis gestured vaguely at her face.
“The whole thing.”
Armand smiled.
“The magazines win.”
“They don’t win.”
“They clearly win.”
“They’re borrowing my brilliance.”
“Ah.”
Louis applied another layer of shadow.
“Exactly.”
The lipstick came next.
A glossy pale pink.
Louis had originally bought three different shades because she couldn’t decide which looked the most aggressively early-2000s.
Now she carefully dragged color across Armand’s mouth.
The effect was immediate.
The blue eyeshadow.
The thin brows.
The glossy lips.
Louis stared.
Then stared longer.
Armand’s smile widened.
“You like it.”
“I hate that I like it.”
“You like it.”
Louis sighed heavily.
“Shut up.”
The smile never left Armand’s face.
Then came the real problem.
The straightener.
Louis had delayed it for almost an hour.
The appliance sat on the counter like an accusation.
Armand followed her gaze.
“Oh.”
“Don’t.”
“Oh, no.”
“Armand.”
“You’ve reached the difficult part.”
Louis looked genuinely miserable.
Because makeup washed off.
Eyebrows grew back.
Hair, however—
Louis reached for one of Armand’s curls.
It sprang around her fingers immediately.
Dense.
Soft.
Beautiful.
She’d spent years running her hands through those curls.
Loved them.
The idea of flattening them felt vaguely criminal.
“I don’t want to.”
Armand tilted her head.
“Then don’t.”
“But it’s part of the look.”
“There are no laws.”
Louis looked offended by the suggestion.
“There are absolutely laws.”
Armand laughed again.
Louis groaned.
The straightener clicked as it heated.
“You know,” Louis said, staring at it with suspicion, “for most of history people damaged their hair trying to make it straighter.”
“Mm.”
“And then other people damaged their hair trying to make it curlier.”
“Mm.”
“And then both groups looked at each other and became jealous.”
“That sounds accurate.”
Louis shook her head.
“Human beings are exhausting.”
“Fortunately neither of us are human.”
Louis pointed at her.
“Exactly.”
Despite her complaints, she began sectioning Armand’s hair with painstaking care. Her hands were gentle. Almost reverent.
The curls spilled through her fingers like dark silk.
Every time she separated another section she hesitated.
Every single time.
Armand watched her through the mirror.
“You look physically distressed.”
“I am physically distressed.”
“Your face.”
“Don’t.”
“You look like someone is making you put down a beloved horse.”
Louis glared.
Armand grinned.
The first pass of the straightener transformed a curl into a sleek dark ribbon.
Louis made a horrified noise.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“Oh no.”
Armand looked down at the strand.
“It’s straight.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s what you wanted.”
“I know.”
Louis sounded miserable.
Another section.
Another pass.
Another curl gone.
Each one produced the same expression.
Like Louis was witnessing an irreversible tragedy.
Eventually half of Armand’s hair hung straight against her shoulders while the other half remained gloriously curly.
Louis paused.
Stared.
Then groaned.
“See? This is terrible.”
Armand studied their reflection.
“Actually that’s kind of incredible.”
By the time Louis finished the last section of Armand’s hair, the bathroom counter looked as though a cosmetics store had exploded across it. Tubes of lipstick lay uncapped beside brushes dusted blue with eyeshadow, magazines spread open to photographs of impossibly thin women with impossible hair. Armand sat beneath the bright vanity lights with one leg crossed over the other, watching Louis stare at her reflection with the exhausted satisfaction of an artist who had spent hours on a project she had complained about the entire time.
The thing was, Louis genuinely loved this. Not the trends themselves—most of them were ridiculous, and she knew they were ridiculous even while enthusiastically participating—but the process of it. The experimentation. The transformation. The challenge of taking whatever beauty standards a particular decade had dreamed up and seeing how they looked on Armand. Over the decades there had been dozens of versions of her. Dark lips and penciled brows. Heavy blush. Glitter. Frosted makeup. Thin brows. Thick brows. Hair curled, pinned, straightened, cut. Louis had approached every new trend with the same level of dedication she brought to business ventures and arguments and impossible plans. Once she decided to commit to something, she committed completely.
Perhaps because she never wanted any of it for herself.
At least, not anymore.
There had been a time when Louis had desperately wanted to want it.
A time when she had stood in front of mirrors trying to make herself fit into expectations that felt as natural as a suit of armor made from nails. Dresses she hated. Hairstyles she hated. Makeup she hated. Smiles she hated. Entire performances she hated.
The worst part wasn’t even the clothing itself.
It was the feeling that came with removing it.
Because whenever she tried to abandon those expectations, whenever she reached for something that actually felt comfortable, she had been overwhelmed by embarrassment so intense it felt physical. The shame wasn’t hers, not originally. It belonged to a world that had spent her entire human life informing her exactly what a woman should be and how she should look and how she should move through a room. Knowing those rules were stupid didn’t stop them from sinking their claws into her.
It had taken decades.
Literal decades.
Painful, frustrating decades.
Even after becoming a vampire.
Even after escaping death itself.
Even after becoming wealthy enough and powerful enough that no human opinion should have mattered.
The feeling remained.
Until slowly, stubbornly, Louis fought it.
The sixties had helped.
God, the sixties had helped.
Not just for her. For everyone.
The world had cracked open in a hundred different directions all at once, and for the first time Louis saw possibilities she’d never allowed herself to imagine. She remembered standing in front of a mirror one evening, staring at her reflection while her hair grew naturally from her head in a halo of dark curls she had spent years trying to suppress. An afro. Her real hair.
Just hers.
Armand had walked into the room and looked at her as though nothing unusual had happened.
As though Louis hadn’t spent three nights working up the courage to leave the house that way.
As though she had always looked beautiful.
Maybe she had.
Armand certainly seemed to think so.
By then Armand had already been wearing trousers whenever she felt like it for years. Since the forties, practically. Armand had always possessed a peculiar immunity to gender expectations. She could wear a suit one night and silk the next and somehow seem equally comfortable in both. Her relationship with presentation was fluid in a way Louis had always envied. There was no anxiety beneath it. No constant negotiation with herself.
Louis had to fight for every inch.
But she won.
Slowly.
One pair of pants.
One button-down shirt.
One discarded expectation at a time.
Until eventually she reached a point where she could walk through the world exactly as she wanted.
Short hair.
No makeup.
Tailored jackets.
Strong hands shoved into pockets.
Comfortable.
At ease.
Herself.
And God, she was beautiful.
Armand thought so anyway.
Armand thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Louis standing barefoot in an old white undershirt. Louis with sleep-creased cheeks. Louis with her hair cut short. Louis laughing. Louis angry. Louis existing.
Particularly Louis existing.
Which was why Armand found it endlessly amusing that Louis remained obsessed with beauty trends despite having absolutely no desire to wear them herself.
“You know,” Armand said now, examining her reflection, “normal people would simply try these looks on themselves.”
Louis immediately looked horrified.
“Why would I do that?”
“To experience them.”
“I am experiencing them.”
“You are looking at me.”
“Exactly.”
Armand laughed.
Louis folded her arms.
The straightened hair framed Armand’s face in glossy dark sheets now, the icy blue eyeshadow catching light whenever she blinked.
“You make a very convincing argument for abandoning my curls forever.”
Louis pointed dramatically.
“Don’t you dare.”
“But you worked so hard.”
“I did.”
“And yet—”
“I mean it.”
Armand grinned.
Louis groaned and dropped onto the edge of the bathtub.
The funny thing was that Louis remembered entire decades through Armand’s face.
Not wars. Not governments. Not stock markets.
Makeup.
She could identify years from memory the way other people recognized songs.
The fifties tasted like frustration.
The sixties looked like eyeliner.
The eighties smelled like hairspray.
The nineties glittered brown.
The problem, especially in the beginning, had always been finding products that actually worked.
People liked to romanticize the past. Louis certainly didn’t.
The past had been annoying.
Particularly if you were trying to find cosmetics for dark skin.
For years she hunted through department stores and beauty counters with the determination of a woman pursuing a blood feud. Lipsticks that looked beautiful in advertisements turned chalky and strange on actual skin. Powders left gray casts. Foundations seemed designed under the assumption that darker women simply didn’t exist. More than once Louis had marched out of a store muttering threats beneath her breath while Armand followed behind her trying not to laugh.
“I don’t understand,” Louis complained sometime in 1954 while standing in front of their bathroom mirror. “There are seventy-three shades of beige.”
“An impressive achievement.”
“There are fourteen shades of slightly different beige.”
“A marvel of modern science.”
Louis glared at her reflection.
“I am being serious.”
“So am I.”
Louis threw a lipstick into the sink.
Armand finally laughed.
The breakthrough eventually came through sheer stubbornness. Louis spent years learning color theory through trial and error, figuring out what complemented Armand’s skin instead of what magazines insisted should. Deep reds. Rich berries. Warm browns. Colors that glowed instead of disappearing. Once she found them, she became impossible.
Armand would sit down to read a book and Louis would appear beside her holding three lipstick tubes.
“Open your mouth.”
“Hello to you too.”
“This one’s new.”
Armand obediently opened her mouth.
Louis carefully applied the color.
Then immediately frowned.
“Wipe it off.”
“I thought you liked this one.”
“I was wrong.”
The lipstick disappeared.
Another appeared.
Armand sighed.
“Am I a woman or a paint sample?”
Louis considered.
“A paint sample.”
“Wonderful.”
The sixties were different.
The sixties were glorious.
If Louis had loved anything more than lipstick, it was eye makeup.
And the sixties belonged entirely to eye makeup.
She lost her mind over it.
Huge lashes. Graphic liner. Cut creases. White shadows. Bright colors.
Every magazine became a source of inspiration.
Every advertisement became a challenge.
And Armand, possessing the patience of a saint and the attention span of an immortal predator, would sit perfectly still through all of it.
Hours.
Literal hours.
Louis could spend an entire afternoon experimenting while Armand remained motionless except for the occasional blink.
“Most people would get bored.”
“I am over five hundred years old.”
“Fair.”
A brush swept across her eyelid.
A pencil sharpened another line.
A false lash appeared.
Another.
Another.
Louis leaned back to admire her work.
“Perfect.”
Armand looked at herself.
Her eyelids were covered in pale silver shadow. Thick black liner extended toward her temples. Her lashes looked physically impossible.
“You’ve made me resemble a space alien.”
“You look incredible.”
“I look ridiculous.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
The dresses got shorter too.
Absurdly shorter.
Louis would stare at fashion magazines and then at the garment in question and ask the same question every single time.
“Where’s the rest of it?”
Armand would put it on anyway.
The answer was always nowhere.
The rest of it simply didn’t exist.
Louis never quite embraced dresses herself, but she adored seeing Armand enjoy them. Tiny minidresses paired with enormous eyelashes and sleek hair. The confidence alone sold the look.
Then came the eighties.
God help them.
The eighties arrived like a natural disaster.
Even decades later Louis remembered opening a magazine and nearly dropping it.
Hair.
So much hair.
Hair reaching impossible heights.
Hair occupying its own zip code.
Hair that seemed less styled than engineered.
The amount of hairspray involved should probably have qualified as an environmental hazard.
“You cannot be serious.”
The model in the photograph appeared to have been attacked by an electrical storm.
Louis stared.
Then bought three cans of hairspray.
Because of course she did.
By the end of the week Armand was sitting in front of a mirror while Louis attempted to create volume previously thought impossible.
Clouds of aerosol filled the room.
Armand coughed.
Louis coughed.
Neither vampire technically needed to breathe.
They coughed anyway.
“This feels dangerous.”
“It probably is.”
Another blast.
Another.
Another.
The curls expanded.
Expanded again.
Soon Armand’s hair seemed to occupy half the room.
Louis stepped back.
Speechless.
Armand examined herself.
Then burst out laughing.
Louis followed immediately afterward.
Neither could stop.
The hairstyle lasted less than twenty-four hours before Louis declared it a crime against humanity.
The photographs remained forever.
Then came the nineties.
The warm brown lip liners.
The glossy lips.
The gold jewelry.
The tiny tinted sunglasses.
The sleek silhouettes.
Louis adored the nineties.
Absolutely adored them.
Especially because by then makeup companies had finally started catching up to reality.
Not perfectly.
Not even close.
But better.
Good enough that Louis could spend entire afternoons testing products without wanting to strangle somebody.
Brown eyeliner became an obsession.
She bought pencils in every conceivable shade.
Espresso.
Chocolate.
Mahogany.
Chestnut.
Cocoa.
Armand eventually discovered an entire drawer dedicated solely to brown eyeliner.
She opened it.
Stared.
Closed it again.
Then reopened it to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.
“Louis.”
“What?”
“There are forty-seven eyeliner pencils in here.”
“Forty-three.”
“That is not better.”
“It is technically better.”
The jewelry was another obsession.
Gold hoops.
Gold chains.
Chunky rings.
Tiny rings.
Delicate necklaces.
Heavy necklaces.
Louis loved layering them on Armand until she gleamed beneath apartment lights.
Then she would sit back and admire her work with the smug satisfaction of an artist unveiling a masterpiece.
And through every decade, every trend, every experiment, one thing remained exactly the same.
Armand sat still.
Patiently.
Endlessly.
While Louis fussed over her.
A century’s worth of lipstick shades.
A century’s worth of eyeshadow.
A century’s worth of hairstyles.
A century’s worth of beauty trends.
Armand endured all of it.
Not because she cared particularly about makeup.
Not because she was especially invested in fashion.
But because every time Louis leaned close with a brush in one hand and complete concentration written across her face, she looked happy.
And that, more than any trend, was something Armand never got tired of seeing.