Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

| PART I |

 

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At the tip of the needle.

In the eye of a virtual tornado.

In Pilsen, in San Francisco.

In the nervous nest, decaying
          in the poem, in the firing
          of neurons.

In a cobweb. In the field of vision.

In the deafening polar province
          called You.  

At the rim of a disc
          underneath which there’s only
          the spasmodic starry firmament
          and the mute nonsense
          known as Eternity

-- M.H.

Armand has been a thousand selves and he will be a million more.

It’s easy to compartmentalize. The histories of his life are a gallery; hall upon hall of frames, each of them binding a different person. A different life. Some ornate and beautiful. Some unfinished. Some small and ugly and tucked away. Some lasted moments, some lived a decade, but none of them live forever.

The monster he once was when he knew the boy Daniel used to be is as unfamiliar to him now as his centuries forgotten humanity. And Daniel is a new man, too. Certainly as interesting, assuredly as irritating. But not endearing. Not toothy and wide-eyed like a lamb studying his own slaughter.

That’s what makes it easy. Louis rambles on, all pretty words and wet eyes, and he is endearing. It’s an irrefutable fact, backed by over 70 years of neatly compiled evidence. Whether Armand is actually endeared as a result is of no consequence. Most things are of no consequence now, and he’s bored. A fact that he is gracious enough to refrain from sharing with Louis.

Every day, Louis sits and rambles, and his words are wet and pretty, and Daniel is endeared, and Armand is in a hotel room in San Francisco waiting for his world to upend again. Armand is also here, playing a role he knows well, wondering if he might actually want it to.

Daniel calls him Rashid so he is Rashid. Faithful, reserved, devoted. In the beginning Daniel’s eyes slide past him just as they should and Armand is not who he was before, so this does not bother him. They are strangers to one another. It gives him an excuse to skip pieces of a story he’s heard a thousand times and that he’s never heard before. Louis likes to change the narrative. What version of the story he tells on any given day depends on where he lands on the multi-factored scale of hating himself, pretending to hate Lestat, and pretending not to hate Armand.

Every version is boring.

Yes, it’s easy to compartmentalize, at first. Until Daniel’s eyes stop sliding past him. He used to want to touch them – to reach out and feel the iris, brush his fingers against the lens, dip his nail through it straight to the center of those wide wide pupils. He used to want to do many things that he could not do to Daniel.

Maybe that’s what makes him do it. The desire to prod, to touch without touching.

“This time I won’t save your life.”

And he won’t.

But it’s nice to see Daniel’s eyes change. To swim into them, to watch from the inside as Daniel tries to grasp for memories that don’t quite exist anymore. Not the way they used to. Daniel is a different man, Armand is a different creature entirely, the only person that still exists in this room now who did then is Louis.

He forgets why he wasn’t already crawling around in Daniel’s head. Forgetting is very very easy when it suits Armand, and it suits Armand often. Human minds are nothing like those of vampires. Lighting up constantly, new synapses firing, old neurons dying off. It’s impossible to compare one thing to another but it’s very human to try, and it used to be interesting to try to be human.

So he sits beside Louis (who says many pretty things with wet eyes and keeps on endearing Daniel) and he wanders through Daniel Molloy’s brain. He has walked here before a thousand times, but there’s more now. New pathways lit up with so many feelings.

It’s not structurally different than other brains he has been in, beyond the damage done by disease. That’s why he hadn’t understood, at first, in San Francisco. He doesn’t understand now, either. Just knows the facts. A list of carefully recorded details stored away where they cannot interfere with this life.

Daniel had asked him to describe it, once. The Daniel from before.

---

Daniel is sprawled out across the bed, loose-limbed and lazy, somehow filling all the open space it has to offer and leaving Armand to nestle into the gaps. His cheeks are flushed, blood pooling like it knows what comes next. Maybe it does. Armand was reading about classical conditioning the other day. About dogs who become accustomed to getting food when their handler rings a bell.

Perhaps Daniel is the dog, Armand’s teeth sharp bells reverberating in his veins. Or perhaps Armand is the dog, Daniel’s blood a song rattling in his ears. He has been a dog before. He runs his tongue along the bow of Daniel’s collarbone, gathers the salt-sweat there and imagines what it tastes like because Daniel does.

“Gross, man.”

“Is it?” Armand doesn’t really care what the answer is.

“Yeah. It is.” Daniel has been practicing lying. He’s still bad at it, his body still gives everything away. His mind always will. The truth of it is etched all over Daniel’s brain, all synapses firing at full attention, tumbling over one another for some small morsel. And Armand will give him that, too.

Not yet though. He wants to be hungrier for it first. Wants Daniel hungrier for it, too. He’s so beautiful hungry. Wild eyed and whining. “Not yet.”

“Hate when you do that.” He’s not loose-limbed anymore. He’s waiting for the bells.

“Try again,” Armand smiles against the dip of his clavicle. He would like to bury his tongue there, burrow right into his skin.

Sometimes Daniel likes to be told what to do. To be scolded and tutored and rewarded. Today he must not, because instead he says, “What is it like?”

Their thoughts get tangled when Armand is hungry, more and more often when he isn’t, too. For a moment he thinks Daniel is asking what it’s like to be inside someone’s skin. Instead, he’s asking about his own mind. It’s really not so different, mind and flesh. Intimate. An invasion, in some. A nesting, in others.

He says as much and Daniel shakes his head. Unsatisfied. “More,” he demands. “That’s too easy.”

Needy. Armand likes him needy, insisting.

It turns out there isn’t a structure that allows the human mind to comprehend itself comfortably in the literal sense. Daniel’s mind contracts, stutters, writhes; it does anything to twist itself away from a vampire’s image of it. And that’s interesting enough that he wants to know more, but to try might hurt Daniel in ways Armand cannot fix. He will find someone else to explore that way, force someone else to join him on an unrestrained journey to sate his curiosity.

Not Daniel. With Daniel, he pulls back. Tries again.

He finds something Daniel can comprehend, pulls together a portrait of the vast dark universe. His fingers in Daniel’s mouth, the image pouring from them onto Daniel’s waiting tongue. This is a metaphor of course, an impossibility. Daniel gasps around them anyways, swallows, eyes shut tight and Armand’s words burrowing inside his skull.

‘Here, Daniel, do you see? Here is the galaxy of your body’s needs. Your heart pumping blood, your nerves sending pain signals, your lungs which expand and contract and seize when I do not let you breathe.’ He doesn’t need to cover Daniel’s nose to achieve such purpose, could just… stop him with a coaxing thought. But there’s something to the tangible, to the use of his own hand. Daniel’s eyes stay closed, his brain lights up, stars turn supernova.

Armand almost switches tasks then. This conversation could wait until another time. The sound of Daniel’s choked whine, the relieved gasp of air when he moves his hand away, the way Daniel swallows around his fingers in protest, all of it offering ample temptation to lean into the desire Daniel feels.

‘And here is your hunger, Daniel. Here and everywhere because you’re so hungry, aren’t you? Starved for everything. For knowledge, for praise, for drugs – yes, for blood too, I know. Be patient.’

These are easy places to travel. There are harder ones. Ones where he goes to pick people apart. Memories that drip with shame and anger. His insecurities, his fear so big it could be its own universe. Somewhere along the way Armand cradles Daniel’s face with wet fingers, feels his tears where they fall down the curve of his jaw, into his hair, into his ears.

 It is beautiful to Armand. It is something else to Daniel. It’s hard to put name to what he’s feeling now, and some small piece of Armand wishes to take it back. They do this too often. Hold up mirrors in new and fearsome ways just to watch each other squirm at the reflections.

He wants, abruptly, to offer some small solace.

The pad of his thumb strokes once, twice, three times over Daniel’s cheekbone and he says, ‘And here is where your mind stores all my love for you. Do you see how much of it there is Daniel?’

Daniel huffs a shaky laugh, opens his eyes, makes a joke of it the way he does when everything is pressed too close to the glass. “You’re such a fucking sap.”

Sometimes Armand wonders what he would do if Daniel didn’t pull back. If he would just pour and pour and pour all those words into him forever, until his mind could hold no more. It is hard to put a stopper on an idea, a feeling. Restraint is a human thing.

“Hm. Well if you would prefer, I could have shown you where you store your irrational fear of fish but–”

“Shut up, I’m not–”

“Try again.”

Daniel tugs him forward into a kiss instead, tongue sweeter than it is when he’s talking, and Armand’s ears ring.

Later, Daniel will ask him what his own brain looks like, and Armand will tell him about the dying universe that is the vampire’s mind. The vast expanse of space that was once potential but is now riddled with the skeletons of dead stars. He will tell him that to be a vampire is to be ever closer to nothingness, trapped in entropy with no known end. The slow and perpetual journey from misery to decay to–

And Daniel will cut him off and say, “You’re fucking dramatic. And you’re not allowed to watch Star Trek anymore."

---

He drifts through, sifts through, wades through the inner workings that make up Daniel Molloy. Relearns old pathways, discovers new ones. Methodical and precise. There is a wall (or a net, or a boundary, perhaps) around much of it. He knows better than to pick at it, knows what it holds. Louis will be angry with him if Daniel dies before he’s finished this inane endeavour, and it would be a waste of all the effort Armand put into keeping him alive in the first place.

There is plenty to see regardless. Insecurity and hate and anger and fear. Louis rattles on, and Armand soothes him, and Daniel builds him into a new frenzy, and while all of that continues in perpetual monotony, Armand travels to pass the time.

It’s a short journey from anywhere to desire. It always has been in Daniel’s mind. That was much the problem then, and it’s much the problem now that Armand has laid eyes upon it again.

For the first time in a very long time, Armand misses it. Daniel’s desire. His own, when it was all tangled up with Daniel’s. He doesn’t feel it now, isn’t sure he can when the tangled desire was also knotted up in a love he doesn’t feel anymore either.

But he wants to, and that is a problem. An interesting one. One that might pass the time.

There is nothing to barter with but Daniel’s curiosity, and Louis is competing for that.

Daniel speaks aloud the things Armand has worked hard not to say. Daniel says Lestat’s name too easily. Daniel tugs loose the threads of memory in Louis’s mind until they are unspooling, a silver-black pouring from cracks in that dark wall Armand made so carefully. With that comes Daniel’s own slow unraveling. His wall is larger than Louis’s, is looming. Armand doesn’t like to go there. Perhaps that’s why he misses it at first – the increasingly persistent flashes of recognition lighting up across the sky, winking satellites of fear and dread and perverse curiosity.

Then there is Paris.

Daniel Molloy hates Paris because Armand made him hate it. There are some memories the mind does not want to lock away, things it resists forgetting. Human brains want, more than anything, to survive. They cling to that which might help them do so. This memory doesn’t live behind the wall, it lives beneath coats of paint.

What begins as just a game, an effort to shift the balance and set Daniel on the back foot, becomes too close to real. Armand doesn’t expect to mind that the memory hurts Daniel. And he doesn’t, really, until Louis is pushing. Until he’s threatening to search out thoughts in Alice’s mind, which simply would not be acceptable. Louis has always been good at this, skilled at twisting the knife and then convincing everyone that it wasn’t born of cruelty.

Endearing.

Daniel, for his part, certainly doesn’t look endeared now. He looks hollowed out.

And that wasn’t Louis at all. It was Armand who did the hollowing, and Louis who smiles now to take credit for it. As if pointing lazily at something is the same as creating it. But then, Louis always did struggle to make things; he’s far better at pointing.

Reminding him of that will be well worth the argument he can only assume will follow.

But first, Armand must mend. To keep Louis’s mind neat and tidy he must gently spool the threads Daniel is tossing in tangles onto the ground. He has learned how important that cleanliness is by now. How likely Louis is to leave when he can’t sift through all of it. The task is methodical and tedious. Picking lint off the sofa of their long, long lives.

“What’s wrong with you today?” Louis asks, gentle enough that Armand can pretend he asks because he really cares.

“I was unaware that there was anything wrong with me,” he answers, clipped. He turns down the bed covers and lowers the lights though he will not sleep today. This is for Louis. Everything for Louis, keeping it all neat and tidy.

Louis snorts, somewhere between fond humor and open derision. “You got more wrong with you than anyone else I know.” Even now, decades on, a faint spark of want lights up in Armand’s chest. A stupid childlike desire to be the most of something, no matter how horrid that something is.

“Then please dear, for both our sakes, be specific.” It comes out sharper than it needs to, like a barb. He softens, smiles. Their conversation shifts internally, the room falling silent.

If nothing else, Louis makes his curiosity clear. Wonders wordlessly about the unintended role reversal, the unexpected gentleness. And he does look gentle, in Louis’s recollection. He had not meant to be.

‘It was meant to unsettle him. He does not expect it from me.’

He never had. Even when the gentleness came more often, Daniel never trusted in it. It had been for the best, perhaps. Some latent prey instinct kicking in when most of Daniel had already submitted to the hunt.

Louis lays on the right side of the bed. Armand stretches out on the left. No part of them touches. A whole coven could join them and he thinks there might still be space to spare. He had thought it would be an improvement from two separate coffins, but all it does is give prominence to the divide.

‘Or it has to do with Paris, where you didn’t think I’d done enough to earn your trust.’ It’s not a question, it’s a statement delivered with certainty. Armand has spent years showing Louis how to think like that, how to understand why he chose what he did in Paris. But this does not belong to Louis.

“No. It has to do with getting this interview over with so that we might return to some semblance of normalcy.”

If Louis is surprised that he says it out loud, he doesn’t give any indication. He just nods his head as if this is an item they agree upon. Armand doesn’t believe Louis wants things to return to the way they were before Daniel invaded their home. He’s not entirely certain that’s what he wants, either. Perhaps in that regard, they truly are in agreement.

Louis falls asleep and Armand stays next to him for hours, wide awake, thinking about gentleness and a version of him only just learning to wield it.

---

It’s not been like this, before. Usually he simply decides to be in love and so he is. It was like that with Lestat, certainly. With Louis, perhaps even more so. It has not been that way with Daniel. He had been a nuisance. Then a game. Someone with which to pass the time while Louis wastes away in his self-misery and injury. The intention had never been to love him.

Louis’s world has narrowed down in that magical way that one can only experience when overwhelmed with pain. Armand does not exist outside of it – nothing does. All the time he would spend worrying, fixating, and studying Louis was now surplus. He had been adrift. So he had gone to Daniel, if only to taste his fear. Even then, after San Francisco, he had been curious. Terrified, yes, but curious.

Now it’s something else entirely. Perhaps still a game, but a larger one, opaque in its rules. The chase shifting into something else, and with it his predatory upper hand lost to Daniel’s humanity.

“You know, one day people are going to look back at all our roads and cement buildings and lightbulbs and… and whatever, and they’re going to think we were simple.” Daniel is midway through a slurring monologue, backstepping down the sidewalk with a half-empty bottle of wine. He’s speaking with the confidence only drunk men have, delivering his ideas as if they are revelations gifted from a god.

To Armand, everything Daniel says is a small revelation. He thinks that means he’s losing the game they’ve been playing. He does not care.

Daniel is beautiful.

“I already think you’re all simple.”

This earns him a snorted laugh, irreverent and unbelieving. “Sure. If we mere mortals are simple, prove it.”

A test, then. Armand humors him. “How would you have me prove it? Humans want simple things. To sleep, to eat, to fuck, to live. The invention of electricity serves that purpose, the buildings serve that purpose, the sidewalks serve that purpose.”

What Daniel thinks about is having sex on the sidewalk, but what he says is, “If that’s true then vampires are even simpler. You just want blood.”

Armand watches Daniel’s heel catch a gap between two paving stones, watches him turn his stumble into a spin and slump hard against the brick. The bottle hits the stone hard too, but it doesn’t break.

“Careful– Daniel.” Armand swallows a pet name and trades it for his given one. He wouldn’t have done that for a toy. For a piece in a game. Endearments are meaningless if one is only playing. He whispers them sweet and slow right before a kill, sometimes. Speaks with the language of a mother or lover as he leans in close.

“Don’t tell me you’re worried I’ll break the bottle. You ordered a fucking case to the hotel.” Correct. Daniel said he’d liked it. Armand doesn’t like the taste any more than anything else, but he likes the red of it. Staining Daniel’s shirt, staining his tongue. The last time Armand tasted his blood was in San Francisco. He had paid it too little attention to it then.

“I’m worried you’ll break yourself, Daniel.”

Daniel.

“Right. Because that’s your job.” It comes out bitter, but Armand feels it differently inside Daniel’s head. A genuine question or an entreaty or a request. Certainly not a complaint.

He could close the gap between them in less than a blink, but he moves slowly instead. Takes his time, comes to stand near but not touch. Perhaps Daniel misses the hunt – his body sings for it, hairs on end, a tremor in his hands. “Do you want me to break you?”

“No.” Yes.

“Then we are in agreement.” Armand can smell him, beneath the alcohol and the cigarette smoke. He wants to break him, and he doesn’t want to break him. Not to leave him that way, anyway. He thinks he might like to love him, thinks perhaps he already does.

His hand comes up to cradle Daniel’s cheek, and even as Armand feels Daniel hating himself for it he feels him lean into his palm. Rough stubble rubs against his skin, jaw muscle flexes then releases so Daniel can voice his protest. “Why do you do that? Treat me like– like that. Like I’m not just a thing you picked up off the street and decided to keep.”

“Could I not handle you gently if you were my thing? Does ownership negate care?”

This is not the sort of question Armand would like a real or honest answer to. In the company of others, the conversation might have steered towards ethics, philosophy, semantics even. Daniel, though, just opens his eyes to look at him with a mixture of pity and unconcealed distaste.

“Yes. Hasn’t anybody ever told you that before?”

Daniel doesn’t know, could not really know. Armand hasn’t told him. It’s too close to honest, cracking open something he usually keeps shut tight. Most days, Daniel is naïve, reckless, barely grown enough to be a man. Sometimes though, he looks at Armand as if he is the child who must be taught.

He doesn’t answer the question, but Daniel continues all the same. “You don’t even know what it means to be gentle. Not really. This, what you’re doing now? It’s playacting.”

It makes him want to learn how.

“Come. I want to shave your face,” Armand declares, hand slipping from his cheek and wrapping around the neck of the bottle instead. It’s as close as he’ll get to telling Daniel he’s won, but Daniel grins lopsided and wide open like he knows it all the same.

Rashid is overselling it today. It would be entertaining if Armand could muster the motivation to care at all. The idea that someone could live in this space, know as much as Rashid must by now about their abilities, and still believe they don’t know about Talamasca is objectively ridiculous, but he supposes it can be excused considering there is no indication that Louis does know.

It would be nothing to kill Rashid, but then he would have to find another, and no doubt Talamasca could get to the next just as easily. There’s a high reward placed on keeping this job, not the least of which is the continuation of said employee’s life. All that notwithstanding, Rashid is also an accessory to dozens of murders. He counts on both factors to keep the man at least moderately in check.  Dealing with him is an inevitability but not a priority.

Daniel’s impromptu meeting is of more immediate concern. His mind circles around it, his efforts to ignore it only highlighting for Armand that it is something he wants to hide. There’s some effectiveness in that, however. Armand is surprised to find that he can glean little more than a confirmation the meeting happened.

Trying harder would more than likely alert Daniel to his probing, and trying harder still would probably cause a degree of discomfort. He finds himself disinclined to do so for the time being.

He offers up a distraction instead and assumes that at some point, as human minds are wont to do, Daniel’s will wander away from what it is guarding. He tells a story. Not part of Louis’s for once, and something Daniel has not heard before – not this Daniel, and not the other Daniel who would have pretended not to care in an effort to disguise a soft-hearted and incredibly endearing sort of jealousy.

This Daniel isn’t jealous, but he is deeply curious.

He can see Daniel thinking about it. Spinning the story over in his head, trying to figure out why Armand has given it to him. What it is supposed to mean, as if everything they say has second, third, and fourth layers of meaning beneath it. An astute observation and a dangerous one to be making.

Daniel has a way of taking all the fragments he is presented with and holding them in mind’s eye without even beginning to try to weave them together. It’s an interesting approach to making sense of things – no conclusions reached, just information gathered and displayed in no particular order. Those events and words and even reactions that stand out to Daniel are gathered swiftly and by little more than gut instinct, stored until some moment of insight or understanding arrives upon him.

Right now, he picks out a significant fraction of what Armand has told him. Another version of Lestat to sit alongside the one he got from Louis years ago, the one he’s getting from Louis now, and the one he gleans from Claudia’s diaries. Observations about the relationship Armand had shared with Lestat that he supposes he should be offended by (he’ll make time for that later). Questions about vampire traditions and practices that Armand doesn’t think even Louis has ever bothered being curious about.

None of that is particularly surprising. This is what Daniel does all day long while they speak to him, when he isn’t making sharp remarks to test how they land or pretending to be utterly unphased by the vampires in his presence.

What does surprise him is a particular handful of words Daniel plucks from their interview. He even writes them down on paper in messy scrawl: “Led him there so he could destroy it.”

Not Armand’s words, even. But Armand’s impulses, his intent, spoken aloud and given form. A small thing, unimportant hundreds of years later. He’s not sure why Daniel picked it out, in part because Daniel isn’t sure either. It’s simply an instinct, something he’s clearly learned to take seriously. And he seems perfectly fine with that, comfortable waiting for the significance to reveal itself to him in time.

Armand is not fine with that and is not comfortable waiting. He wants to know why it seemed important now. He wants to grab Daniel’s head with both hands and squeeze some sort of explanation out of him, drag it from inside of his skull. As if it matters, as if anything Daniel could observe from that story is about him as he is today, and not the version of himself he was then.

He thinks about it long after Louis joins them, but he comes to no conclusions. Just more musings and questions and desires.

There are two versions of him in constant overlap now, colliding up against one another, making it hard to separate the motive of one from the other. One wants this to be over. Whatever this is, this interview, this life, this existence.

The other simply wants back that which it had years ago.

Just as he always does when met with opposing desires, he works to both ends. The first is simple – he must only wait, watch, see how time destroys and learn exactly what it will finish.

The second would require him to actually be that other, long-gone version of himself. Which he has no understanding of how to become again.

How is he to make Daniel desire him again? Love him again? How is Armand to love him in return? They are new. There is no returning to old paintings, no duplicating them like so many of the lazy reproductions he sifts through with Louis, searching dutifully for authenticity.

Daniel is as much a skeptic now as he was an idealist then. Perhaps back then he did not believe wholeheartedly in his own future, but he had believed in the world’s. Had thought there was a way to disrupt, tear down, rebuild it all into a better shape. Now he talks of the world with the same weary resignation that so many humans do.

Once, Armand captured his attention and interest by making Daniel his teacher of all things interesting. It served a twofold purpose then, though his intent had been only his own acquisition of knowledge for the purpose of fulfilling Louis’s wants. He came to understand, very early on, that it fed Daniel’s ego. His desire to be the person who knew things, understood things. The craving he had to shape things in his image, too.

Now Armand knows of the modern world. Perhaps not entire, but enough. He cannot offer him his own ignorance on a platter. He cannot and will not grant him perpetual life. He’s incapable of returning his bright youth.

But Armand does catch himself wanting something returned to them both, that desire, that love. He just isn’t sure what it’s worth sacrificing, and he isn’t sure how to find out.

So he roams around in Daniel’s mind, watching cracks form, watching all that endearing from Louis slip through and drag memory back out.

At least Armand isn’t bored, anymore.  

He wants Louis to remember San Francisco. It was a mistake to erase it, he can accept that now. He wanted to put the fight behind them, the pain behind them, the mess behind them. Wanted to trust in Louis’s declaration of love, his insistence than Daniel be made a symbol of it. He believed with some naivety that would be better, so long as he never let Louis stumble upon some other upstart reporter.

Eventually, like all vampires do, Louis would grow tired of this particular phase of destruction. Armand would spend more time helping him to move forward, would be more interesting, more exciting.

He began to think of those days as a gift. An opportunity to do differently. He had learned to better serve before, believed he could do it again.

Of course, it was months before Louis was well enough for Armand to see that nothing was changing. By then, he was so caught up in following Daniel around the world that he didn’t mind as much as he should have.

The boys and the drugs and the killing.

He left Louis to clean up his own mess. Let Louis be lonely, let him learn how much he should appreciate that steady love Armand was so willing to offer him. Sometimes, he entertained the idea of simply never going back. But he did. And things got better, have been better.

It just takes so much to keep them from going wrong again that even Armand has begun to reconsider the possible merits of this interview. Perhaps it’s what Louis needs – an opportunity to put things in order and leave them behind. And if he’s going to do so, he should know the consequences of not doing it properly, should understand how bad things got. This isn’t about publishing a book, it’s about solidifying one true narrative.

A delusional concept, but the semblance of achieving it might at last grant Louis some peace.

And Daniel should remember, too. Should know the truth of it. Perhaps then he will run as he should, leave them to their immortal lives and concern himself with the very human task of dying slowly. Or, perhaps he will remember all that followed San Francisco and know that he is no better than them. That he walked at Armand’s side for years, condoned the evil things he learned of.

He does neither, of course. He remembers just enough to stir up problems, to get Louis to remember, to break things. Armand comes back to a familiar brand of cold fury and for once he doesn’t want to explain. Does not want to grovel and tell Louis that he does what’s best for them, that he looks after them, that Louis is old for a man but young for a vampire and cannot possibly know how easy it is to lose himself to history.

His veins pulse with fresh blood, he can still taste life on his tongue, and in this moment he doesn’t wish to pretend not to be a monster. It’s been so long, this pretending. Rashid thinks them peaceful, Louis thinks him tame, and Daniel– well once Daniel knew him best, and now he only thinks of him as Louis’s slightly unhinged husband.

Whether he has ever been more than any of those things, he can’t quite be sure. But he has certainly been other than them. Been different.

Louis looks at him with those sharp eyes, beautiful and threatening, and he need not speak to Armand for Armand to know what he knows. All it takes is to feel the waves of wordless anger pouring off of him.  

He’s grateful, at least, that it’s projected into the privacy of his mind and not turned into words uttered out loud. Daniel would surely be insufferable about voicing his currently barely restrained glee. There’s anger in him too, of course. And fear and satisfaction and uncertainty. Beneath it, the curiosity that always threatens to be his undoing.

And, tucked away in spaces of the mind far darker, a sense of betrayal Daniel cannot explain.

Minds, human or otherwise, bear the marks of what they’ve been through. Memories can be erased, but they leave scars on the landscape.

---

Daniel is having a nightmare. His eyes dart back and forth behind his lids, soft whimpers of fear escape his lips, his hands ball into fists in the sheets. He stinks of fear, sweet and cloying.

It’s early for Daniel to be asleep, but Armand supposes he might not make a habit of staying awake into the small hours when they are not together. They’ve been apart for a few days. He needed to check up on Louis, if only from afar.

He left Daniel here at the hotel they’ve been occupying in Chicago, taking advantage of the relatively short trip to New York where Louis has made his new hunting grounds.

He is no better but he is no worse, and Armand has eternity to return to him. It is not so with Daniel, who does not sleep well when he is away for too long. Who now craves his blood almost enough to make Armand regret ever giving it. His boy, now. He’s been responsible for an entire coven. For the self-destructive whirlwind that is Louis. But it has never been like this.

This nightmare is one of his own creation, of course. It is the blurry remnant of the memory he had removed from San Francisco. If he had stayed clear of Daniel he thinks it would not still be surfacing, but it’s too late for that. If he showed Daniel the truth of it, he might in time get past the nightmares, but it’s too late for that, too.

He is not immune to guilt, he is simply not steered by it.

Still, he pauses with a hand hovering over Daniel’s hair, feels the brief sense of wrongness in being the one to provide comfort when he was the one to bring pain. When he often brings it still, if only in a different context.

“Daniel,” he speaks softly, fingers stroking from temple to jaw. “Daniel, wake up.”

He stirs, not in fear, not by some order delivered to his mind or his body. Just slow and drowsy and human, the nightmare receding as consciousness grows. His eyes meet Armand’s, heavy-lidded and warm.

There is a flood of fondness like a feedback loop – Daniel’s relief that he has returned, his own joy at seeing him, Daniel’s lazy affection, his tenderness in return. Love, taffied and sprawling between them, inexplicable even now.

He winds his hand through Daniel’s curls, pads of his fingers stroking carefully over his scalp. “Your hair has grown long.”

“You were only gone a week, it was already long,” Daniel mumbles in return, eyes falling shut. “I’m too tired to go out.”

“That’s alright.”

Daniel’s eyes crack open again, “Really?”

“I don’t wish to force you to lose sleep.” It’s a half-lie. He wants to see the city, to roam the streets until he has them all memorized, listen to the speech of all the people here to find what makes this place different from the last and the next. That’s his current focus. Accents, dialects, the sounds that make up words. He mimics them until Daniel insists he stop and return to his own, and when he points out that his own is a language Daniel cannot speak, Daniel only swats him on the arm and calls him pedantic.

He would love nothing more than to replay the same scene tonight. But he also wishes for Daniel to be well, and right now he is tired and quietly anxious and ill from Armand’s absence.

“Thought that was what you wanted. For me to follow you everywhere every day regardless of exhaustion, wait patiently when you leave.” His fingers wrap around Armand’s wrist to tug his hand from his hair. “Stop that, you make it hard to be pissed off.”

“Don’t be angry with me.” It comes out pleading. He shifts, stretches himself out along the line of Daniel’s side, chin resting on his chest.

Daniel rolls his eyes, “Don’t look at me like that.”

He says it’s unfair to do that. To look sad and sorry when he feels both sad and sorry (and unapologetic, and joyous, and indignant, and impatient, but that’s irrelevant). “You know it isn’t that way anymore Daniel. I care for your–”

“Wellbeing. Yes.” Daniel sighs, thumb stroking over the soft skin of Armand’s wrist. His touch is hot. It’s been a while since Armand fed. Then, an admission, a tiny offering of vulnerability given as an apology: “I have these nightmares.”

Daniel doesn’t protest when Armand returns to stroking his hair. “I know.”

He waits for Daniel to say he remembers something of them. To ask if he knows anything about them. Instead, his eyes fall shut again and he says, “Can you stay here and keep them away?”

“Yes Daniel,” he says. And he stays.

He is not immune to guilt.

---

Daniel hangs back this time, when they end the session. It should not surprise him that Louis is satisfied with his explanation of San Francisco and Daniel is not. They are similar in many ways, but not in this. Louis wants to believe things. It’s in his nature, it makes things easier. Daniel wants to believe nothing, not even the believable.

There’s little more truth for Louis to know of those days anyways. All the parts of San Francisco that belong to him have now been returned.

Not so, for Daniel. And not an option. “Do you require something Mr. Molloy?”   

Daniel’s eyes narrow at the formality, as they often do, but he only says, “there’s something I’m still trying to understand.”

“I would endeavour to provide any clarity within my power.”

“Yeah, I bet you would,” Daniel snorts. Armand would like to tell him that sarcasm is a poor look for him, but it isn’t. “Why didn’t I ever look for anything? You hop me up on hallucinations, send me on my way to some drug den, but leave me with the memory of the interview–”

“Louis wanted-”

“Nope. Try again.”

It’s lingering there. The answer. Armand can feel Daniel getting closer. His desires are in constant conflict now. He can have the perpetual upheaval of this interview end, or he can have some hope that Daniel–

He isn’t ready to choose, and there is no one here to make him do it. “What exactly is your question Mr. Molloy? Do you want to know why you never looked for us, or do you want to know why I let you keep the interview?”

“Yes.”

He thinks about leaving without answering him. It would be the best option. He can remember all of the reasons – explaining them to Daniel would entirely defeat the purpose of having identified them at all. Instead, he says, “Perhaps, Daniel, for once in your life you had a sense of self preservation.”

“That would be a first.”

It’s an answer Daniel expected, Armand can tell. But it isn’t an answer he believes.

Removing a memory leaves a scar. Daniel’s mind is riddled with them and he has begun to take notice.

Chapter Text

“What about your boyfriend?” Daniel asks the moment the door shuts behind him, his eyes landing on Armand where he sits in the corner of the hotel room in Prague. His tone is one Armand hasn’t heard outside of the tapes he still listens to each time he returns to San Francisco, a valiant effort to get the upper hand before they drift off course completely.

“My boyfriend.” It’s a strange thing, the smallness of a word like that. The weakness of it. The implication that Louis and himself are even friends at the moment also stings. He thinks of the empty townhouse – not one of their real estate investments, but their home. He thinks of the jotted note from Louis declaring that he is off to some other city to gorge himself on blood and–         

His jaw flexes. He takes a deep breath, one he does not need, a habit he’s been picking up from Daniel of late. The chase is hardly a chase anymore. Daniel doesn’t have enough money to keep it up in earnest, and he rarely puts up a fuss when his hotels and flights are inexplicably paid for.

There’s also the not insignificant want pouring off of him. The responding desire clinging to Armand’s gums. The hours they spend wandering and bickering. The time Armand spends following Daniel in the shadows while he drinks and snorts himself to the precipice of death.

“Yeah, you know. Handsome, charming, tried to fucking eat me?” Daniel prompts.

It’s not Daniel’s business and he must know as much. He’s still standing in the doorway, duffle bag on his shoulder, shuffling his weight from foot to foot. It’s sweet. Calls to mind some old nervousness Armand can’t remember feeling in many years.

“Louis is of no concern to you.”

“Yeah, I’m not really worried about him.” Daniel grins and Armand has the rare pleasure of being uncertain where the conversation is going. That happens more often with Daniel, if he doesn’t crawl into his mind. Perhaps he is fascinating, if only in his ability to remain foolish and brazen in the face of his own fear.

The room is dark, a strip of sunlight carving it in half where the curtains aren’t quite closed. Armand passes through it on his way to Daniel, hears the jolting gallop of Daniel’s heart picking up. “What are you worried about then, Daniel?”

There’s a flush spreading across Daniel’s cheeks, blood called to the surface by a bashfulness Armand hasn’t seen from him before. When he answers he does it with an attempt at flippancy, shrugging his shoulder and saying, “Just wondering if I can expect you to keep following me around.”

Armand’s fingers loop through the strap of Daniel’s bag, tugging it off his shoulder and letting it fall to the floor with a thud. “Do you want me to continue? Or do you want me to stop?”

Daniel snorts, loud and obnoxious in the heavy quiet of the room. “Yeah like you’d stop just because I asked.”

“That’s not what I asked you.” He wouldn’t stop. Doesn’t know that he can anymore. When he is near Daniel he has the vague impression that he is real, that he exists. When he leaves, things fragment into uncertainty again.

“I– I don’t–”

Proximity chews away at Daniel’s boldness, turns him pliant and shifting in a gentle sway towards Armand’s orbit. This is the design of his species of course. Even if Armand did not wish it to happen, it would. He always wishes it to happen with Daniel.

“It’s alright, you can tell me. What do you want?”

“I don’t want to go back to– to before. To– God it was so boring before.”

He should eat the boy now, all symbols and promises to Louis be damned and forgotten, before he winds up tangled in something he can’t unravel himself from.

“That’s what you don’t want,” Armand chides, stretching a hand out to brush knuckles against the sandpaper of Daniel’s jaw. He’s barely a man, but still more able to grow a beard than Armand ever will be. That aches somewhere Armand can really feel it, right in between the slots of his ribs. “What do you want?”

Daniel’s eyes are shut but his voice doesn’t shake. “You could stick around for a while.”

“I could,” Armand allows. This is a bit like a dance, their coy back and forth. His question becomes an offer before he gives it permission to. “Is that what you want?”

 “I’m a fucking idiot,” Daniel mutters. Then, louder, with a certainty Armand knows he does not feel; “Yeah.”

“Okay. I’ll stay for now.”

--- 

They’re so close to this being over with.

Having lived this long he continues to expect that time will one day solidify, and it continues to defy all of his attempts at forcing it to do so. There are years of his life that have passed swiftly enough that they felt like only days, so filled with monotony or so emptied of interest that they meant nothing. This is how he thinks time should be, the expanded life lending itself to a looser definition of its passage. Minutes more like seconds, hours more like minutes, days like hours. And so on, and so on, and so on.

It has not been like that, of late.

Quite the opposite.

The days have been dragging on. And on. And on.

It feels like they’ve been telling this story for years, and maybe they have. It’s certainly been in the room with them all this time. In bed. In Louis’s blood, even. Armand doesn’t expect it to ever truly be gone. He made his peace with that a long time ago.

Him. Her. Paris.

He’s not sorry for it. Maybe that’s why even with half the story, Louis has never quite been able to forgive him. He regrets the pain it has caused Louis, the ways in which it shattered already broken pieces of him into shards of glass that are embedded in the skin of their life together. He doesn’t regret the lives lost. Not that of the stranger fledgling, or of his own coven, or of Claudia.

This life is too long and too full of death to mourn the losses of strangers. His coven was never going to love him again. Claudia was going to go mad. He will never be able to make Louis believe the latter. Has considered, on rare occasion, finding some other youthful fledgling to lug around until he could prove it with visual evidence.

It wouldn’t make a difference, of course. Claudia was too special to Louis for that.

If he regrets anything, it’s only that he did not find some way to hold himself apart from the betrayal. But that was a part of the production of it, the conceit of it all. He’s a skilled director. He understands the emotional draw, knows why the coven insisted upon Louis seeing that he had been colluding with them. It achieved its intended effect.

Daniel picks at the old wound. Peels off the thick scab to reveal festering rot beneath it. Sticks his nosy little fingers into the flesh until it stings and aches and bleeds again. It’s his job of course, and it’s his nature too, but it’s also raw spite. The need for vindication and revenge. With his own wounds revealed to him, his understanding of his life and his work turned on its head, Armand can sense how hungry Daniel is for them to suffer too.

And they have, they do, they will. He would do anything to take the pain of it away from Louis, but there’s little else to try that they haven’t already.

That’s what has brought them here. To this skyscraper with all its safety nets, where Armand is nearly always present and where the world outside their door feels as distant as their history. He hadn’t realized he was unhappy. Not that it matters, not that he is owed any sort of happiness in this life, but it’s harder to resign himself to this when he has spent so much time lately remembering something else.

---

It isn’t that Armand cannot live alone. He can. He has before.

It’s that when he’s alone he can’t quite figure out why he bothers. What is the purpose of this long, long life if it is not witnessed? Alone he will be forgotten by time, like so many of the ancients are. Could burrow underground and sleep for all eternity with nobody to pay him any notice.

He does not like himself very much when he is alone. He knows that, is not unaware of his own failings, of his lack of self-worth. There have been enough kind hands and mouths in his years who have told him as much.

Most vampires, he thinks, do not like themselves much when they are alone. They are terrified of their faces in the mirror. That is the truth of it, loathe as he is to admit to sharing any kinship with Lestat that he has not already been forced to.

That is why, when Louis calls to him, he lets his voice drift over the miles and into his head.

‘I miss you, Armand.’

He resists the first call.

‘I don’t want to keep doing this. It’s not working anymore.’

He resists the second call.

‘I love you, come home.’

Louis is not home anymore. For years, home has been in the heart valves of a mortal boy who can no longer remember his name. Even now, Armand can feel the call of his own blood tracing through Daniel’s veins. Even now he hears the song, ringing and ringing and ringing.

But there is nowhere else to go. There is nobody else to love him, and he does love Louis. There is nothing for him but loneliness or this. So he answers the third call.

He packs up this version of himself. Within a frame he entraps all his love, his philosophizing, his awe with this human world. A perfect still of a person he will never be again, stored away where he will only ever see it if he chooses. By the time he returns to Louis he remembers the facts but none of the feeling. He is skilled at compartmentalizing. He can survive being alone, but he cannot survive the recollection of its opposite.  

---

Armand has been a fool, if perhaps a willful one. There was a time he had considered hunting Sam down, killing one of the last vampires who had known the whole of what happened before the trial.

The other, of course, he would not kill. Likely could not kill.

He had always assumed that should Lestat return with the truth, he would be able to deny it. Would be in possession of years of built trust and understanding to be held up against an infatuation he knows has never faded from Louis.

He did not account for evidence. As good as a confession, signed in his own hand.

It had been too easy to fall into habits, to let himself get lost in the temptation of Daniel Molloy’s frustrating, endlessly unfathomable brain. He had forgotten to pay attention to the important pieces, hadn’t even really bothered to look for them where surely they would have been readily apparent before now. Just as his thoughts had once been tangled up in Daniel’s, he let his view of past and present become enmeshed together.

The Daniel of all those years ago would not have betrayed him.

The Daniel of today could not even call this a betrayal.

If he had paid attention – if he had wanted to – he would have seen it, could have stopped it. They were so very close to the end. The hope of a lighter future dangling like a carrot before them. His long-awaited absolution sitting just around the corner.

Now Louis is vibrating with rage. Is incandescent with it, so consumed by it that for the first time in many years, Armand is certain of Louis’s love for him. That sort of anger is only born of love. Hatred would leave one of them dead.

Love is what leaves Armand on the cold floor, crumpled against the cement and dimly considering the good fortune of having left the wall blank.

There are a great many things he would agree to should Louis ask him in the moment, but pride does not allow him to agree to his singular demand. Daniel is not Louis’s to protect. Perhaps Louis, too, has been blinding himself to things as of late. If he was seeing clearly he would not think to make such a demand, nor would he leave Daniel behind in confidence that it would be followed.

A small thing to be grateful for, Armand supposes. Louis had never asked where Armand spent all those years that they were apart. There had been no reason to. Whatever he had filled his time with was of no concern because it was clearly no longer a factor.

Perhaps he could argue. Could follow Louis. Could endeavour to explain. It’s the past, after all. Nothing has changed. The same truth has always existed, whether Louis was aware of it or not. Somehow, Armand doubts this information would be well received at the moment.

He takes Louis’s anger. Drinks it down for the coming drought. Blood drips down his forehead and he gathers some on his fingers. He’s considering drinking that down too when Daniel comes in. Again.

Something is broken in Daniel. Not the same thing that is broken in Armand, but something all the same.  

---

The first time Armand kisses Daniel, the boy bursts into laughter. Initially, he is offended. Then wounded. Then mildly concerned.

He wonders if laughter can be a medical emergency. Reaches out gently to wind himself around Daniel’s mind and figure out why he has been reduced to a laughter so possessing that tears leak from his eyes and his breath comes in sharp gasps. It’s inconvenient – Armand would very much like to kiss him again, or at least catch the salt from Daniel’s tears on his tongue.

“This is incredibly rude, Daniel,” he tries. Daniel simply shakes his head weakly, forehead to Armand’s shoulder, hand fisting the fabric of Armand’s sweater at his back, his own shoulders shaking.

“Daniel– could you–”

The streets of Pilsen are quiet. Quieter, even, than Prague had been. He has attempted to drag Daniel out of the country twice now, but he cannot be convinced. There are opportunities here, he claims, stories desperately waiting to be written. Armand suspects he’s taking advantage of having a vampire trail him through communist Europe.  

 In the distance someone yells in Czech for them to shut up, and this only seems to make Daniel laugh harder.

He tugs hard on a handful of curls, eliciting a yelp from Daniel that breaks up his gasps for air. “Shit. Sorry. It’s just– fuck I can’t stop.”

“Clearly.” This is not how Armand has anticipated this moment going. It certainly doesn’t resemble any of the plays, or films, or television shows. “You are aware that they will call the authorities?”

“Sorry, sorry.” Daniel seems to pick up on his tone, attempts to arrange his face into an expression slightly more composed. It isn’t entirely convincing, but Armand appreciates the effort. “I was just thinking that like… this is the dumbest possible example of Darwinism.”

“I don’t think Darwin was taking vampires into consideration when he formulated his hypothesis,” Armand says. He wants to lick the wetness on Daniel’s cheeks. Wonders if that’s something he gets to do now that they’ve kissed.

Daniel lacks the access to Armand’s thoughts that Armand has to his, so he continues on in ignorance of Armand’s distraction. “Doesn’t matter. It’s generalizable.”

“Since when are you interested in science?”

“Maybe since it turns out I’m the poster boy for natural selection,” Daniel quips back. He’s still so close. Hasn’t attempted to move from where Armand pressed him up against the building but doesn’t seem particularly inclined to close the rest of the distance again, either. They’re caught up in between, held in limbo by his own hesitation and by Daniel’s inability to let a serious moment exist for too long without shattering it.

Armand cannot remember his first kiss. His tenth. His thousandth. If any of them felt quite so vulnerable as this, he could not say. He presses his mouth to Daniel’s cheekbone, gives in to the desire to taste, drags his lips along skin to gather the wetness there. Daniel lights up, a desire of his own mingling with bemusement. The hand at Armand’s back has relaxed, Daniel’s thumb now moving in unconscious circles at the base of his spine.

“If you want me to kiss you ever again after tonight, Daniel, you will not laugh this time.” He punctuates his point with another tug of curls, waits for Daniel to nod his agreement, then catches his mouth with his own.

Daniel’s mouth is wet and pliant and utterly open to Armand. He cannot taste sweetness, but he imagines he does. He imagines that if he could, Daniel’s mouth might be the sweetest thing he has tasted in this life and the last. He’d like to crawl inside, get close enough to curl up in the chamber of his mouth or the tunnel of his throat and cease to exist outside.

He can feel Daniel’s lips shape a smile, scolds him without pulling away. ‘Is all of this really so very funny to you?’

Daniel does pull back, eyebrows raised. “First, telling someone not to laugh is a surefire way to make them laugh more. Second, I wasn’t laughing.”

“You were about to–”

“No, I’m happy, Armand. I know it might be an unfamiliar emotion, but smiling is a natural side effect of happiness.”

Happiness. Foreign and far too soft. “Is there anything else or–”

“Yeah. Third, shut up.” Daniel’s hand is big and steady on his cheek and Armand lets himself be pulled close again. Smiles into the kiss, because he can. Because he’d like to. Because he doesn’t know much of happiness but he thinks if he practices enough he might actually begin to feel it.

~

“There’s something wrong with me,” Daniel says later, a few inches too far into the bottle of vodka he’s holding. His back is a burning stamp of heat against Armand’s chest.

“What do you mean?” Armand already knows what he means, but sometimes Daniel gets irritated when he pulls things from his mind. Besides, when he’s drunk the swirling mess of guilt and loneliness tends to interfere with whatever Armand can infer.

Daniel tips the bottle back again and Armand takes it from him and deposits it on the nightstand without ceremony. The bedsprings creak when Daniel lurches to try to get it back, but Armand’s fingers close around his wrist before he comes close. It’s almost funny, the human instinct to fight back physically when they cannot possibly win.

In Daniel, that instinct is always swiftly transferred to a verbal one. “I was drinking that.”

“You’ve had enough. You’re far too maudlin.”

The snort Daniel lets out is unattractive, but he relaxes against Armand again so it does not matter. Burning and burning, alcohol keeping him hot even when he’s pressed to the cold of Armand’s body. “Hypocrite.”

“I’m not maudlin, I’m–”

“Morose?” He can hear the smile in Daniel’s voice. “Sullen? Prone to prolonged bouts of brooding?”

“I’m not sure you like me very much.” Armand is fishing. Wants the reassurance that the warm fondness he gleaned from Daniel earlier (and yesterday, and last week, and last month) has not changed.

Daniel’s mind unfolds for him like a book or a flower or a great yawning valley glimpsed beyond the peak of a mountain. Like something so miniscule, like something so vast. When he’s like this – drunk and tired and coaxed into giving all his weight to Armand – all his edges are sanded down and softened. He’s too lazy to reassure him with words, so he gives him free reign over his thoughts.

It’s impossible to miss the love there, dripping from every image he has of Armand. The quiet affection, the irritation born of knowing and caring for him in spite of that, the insecurity that comes from not knowing how long this will last. And wrapped up in all of that, a near crippling self-disgust cemented to every good thing Daniel feels for him.

Daniel turns, sinks down, nestles deeper against Armand’s chest. His breath is a damp puff of air against the fabric of Armand’s t-shirt, his voice barely a whisper when he says, “Yeah. That’s what’s wrong with me.”

---

“Shouldn’t you be fleeing Dubai at the moment?” Armand hears himself say. His voice is distant, like cotton has been shoved in his ears. Decades swim inside his head, the result of a collapse of the thin membranes between now and then, and then, and then. Next looms larger still.

“Why? You wanna play cat and mouse for a little while before you eat me?”

So clever, this Daniel (his Daniel, once). Smarter than Louis. Smart enough to know that an order from Louis isn’t a guarantee of safety. Stupid enough to know that and still be here, staring down at Armand with a mixture of terror and satisfaction.

He considers standing, moving to close the 10-foot gap between them if only for the opportunity to see Daniel jump out of his skin. Everything feels like too much effort to bother with at the moment, so all he does is straighten out of his slump against the wall. He licks the blood from his fingers absently, watches Daniel watch him do it.

Daniel’s body is conditioned to want still, even now. Armand wonders if it disturbs him. If he thinks himself abnormal for it, incurably sick. This, at least, is not a part of Daniel’s nature. It’s something learned. It’s something now irreparable all the same.

“I prefer not to eat those I know,” he lies. He prefers not to kill those humans he has come to know. There is a difference. He has not fed on a human and let them live since Daniel, so he supposes by technicality it would be false to say he does not like to drink from those familiar to him.

It’s all semantics anyways.

“Didn’t seem to stop you in San Francisco,” Daniel’s voice is brittle.

“I did not know you in San Francisco,” Armand reminds him. Not yet.

There it is. The anger. The thing that’s keeping Daniel here when he must know that he should already be on his way to the airport. “You don’t know me now, either.”

“Are you making the case that I should eat you?” The familiarity of goading Daniel is grounding, somehow. Clears out some of the cobwebs in his mind, starts to place all the pieces back in neat and tidy order. “Is that what you want, Daniel?”

There is no purpose to maintaining the façade of formality now. It had done nothing to prevent Daniel from remembering, it had done nothing to keep Armand’s image of a young Daniel and this older one from a slow coalescence. Or maybe a swift one. It has been weeks, here. It has been years.

Daniel’s name feels good on his tongue. Sharp and musical.

If the change in address is noticed by Daniel, it is lost in the swamp of need that he is currently trying in vain to wade through. Armand doesn’t require access to his thoughts to know it – he is predator, Daniel is prey. He can hear his pulse quicken, can see the flex of his jaw where he tries to swallow the feeling down. It makes Armand’s mouth itch.

“Why are you still here?” He feels suddenly impatient and unexpectedly weary.

Daniel looks uncertain, then. Surprised, perhaps, by his own inability to answer the question. “Yeah good point. I’m just gonna pack up and head out. I’d say it’s been nice but–”

“Save me the attempt at humor.”

There is no attempt at false congeniality, either. No handshake or semblance of closure. Daniel simply turns to leave and Armand feels the reality of emptiness crowd around him. It’s overwhelming, it’s heavy, it would make it hard to breathe if he needed air. He finds himself sucking it in anyways, like some old reflex meant to provide comfort.

Daniel will leave, Louis has already gone, and life as Armand has known it has crumbled to dust on the floor around him. In a moment, he will be alone for the first time in decades.

“Stay, Daniel.” He hears himself say it, is grateful that at least if he is to make a plea it has come out cold and impassive.

“Why would I?”

“Your flight has no doubt not been arranged yet,” Armand offers pragmatism.

“Right, like you care. Try again.”

He’ll offer vulnerability, then. Not a lie, though he knows Daniel sees it as one. “I would appreciate the company.”

Daniel laughs outright at that, a barking thing. “Bullshit. That hangdog look doesn’t work on me. What you’re feeling right now? It’s called a fucking consequence.”

Something will work, however. It must, if Daniel is still standing here waiting to be given the right reason. At last, Armand offers Daniel’s drug of choice. “There are things you don’t know yet.”

 “What things?” Like the snap of a finger. Like the ringing of a bell. Daniel needs it.

“Stay, and I will tell you.”

“I’m a fucking idiot,” Daniel mutters. Then: “Okay. I’ll stay for now.”

Chapter Text

He changes his mind a hundred times over the course of the subsequent hour. Whatever plans he had entertained these past weeks, none of them included the current circumstance. Daniel has, by some small mercy or torment, made himself scarce for long enough that Armand can pull together his thoughts, survey the damage.

There is plenty. But he supposes this is not his house, anymore. Most of these records are meaningless to him. Archival pieces of Louis’s life, pertinent to him only where their lives have intersected. It amounts to remarkably little for 77 years.

He should begin the process of leaving, perhaps, but he knows Louis well enough to know that he has no intention of returning until he can be certain Armand is gone. Try as he might, he can’t quite seem to drum up the right emotion at the thought of it.

Their bedroom looks untouched. If Louis brought anything with him at all, it’s not clear to Armand. The staff has all gone. The only living heartbeat left in the apartment belongs to the man Armand keeps wishing he had sent away already. He still could. The idea repels him, like the wrong ends of two magnets forced together. It feels unnatural to turn away now, so very close to having the last of his lies unravelled. It’s the only one he might choose to reveal himself.

Perhaps as much as Daniel wants to gain information, Armand wants to give it. Or maybe he’s just tired, and lonely, and no longer knows how to make any sensible decisions at all.

This is the endless pendulum swing, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until he is almost dizzy with indecision.

He showers, dresses, drags himself out of the bedroom half expecting to find that Daniel has fallen asleep. That would be too easy, of course. Would give him time to think before diving headfirst into a history he had never intended to return to. Still, it’s too late. He’s already been swimming in it for weeks, wonders if this is a bit like what it would feel like if he could drown. He could crawl out but he wants it in his lungs.

Daniel is waiting for him in the dining room, leaning back against the table with his arms folded across his chest. He’s changed clothes. Armand wonders if he’s packed his bags just in case.  

“So what are these incredibly vital things I don’t know?” Daniel asks it in a careful drawl. So much effort put into sounding like none of this matters to him that it achieves the opposite.

“This will not be an interview,” Armand says. A decision again made in the moment. Enough of his story is to be made a commodity already.

“Off the record, then.” Daniel almost succeeds at sounding annoyed, but he does a poor job hiding his eagerness. That old curiosity, that inability to part with a story, will always be his downfall.

And suddenly, Armand is left with the hollow he made inside Daniel. That great wide pit of emptiness in Daniel’s memory, tucked behind a wall. Smaller darknesses scattered all across the remainder. He does not know where to begin, or even if he wants to begin. There are other stories he could tell. Ones compelling enough that he could perhaps keep Daniel interested for a day or two longer before he leaves to America to write his book of tragedies. And then Armand will still be alone.

“Well?” Daniel interrupts his line of thought, impatient. Probably exhausted, for that matter.

“I am not certain how to begin. It’s… difficult.”

“Right.” The doubt is clear. Armand used to tell Daniel that not everything he felt manipulated by was necessarily a falsehood. There is nothing dishonest about his uncertainty, even if it is in part intended to garner any sort of empathy. “Shouldn’t be hard, I’m sure whatever you’ve got hidden away in there is just more bullshit.”

He feels wrung out. Dried up. Too old for this, by a lifetime or three. “You could ask your friends at the Talamasca what they’ve kept hidden from you.”

“Why would they–”

“Shall I find Rashid for you? I could have him here in this room within the hour.” The thought is a pleasant one. He’s not above killing the messenger. “They don’t care about you, they just used you to get what they wanted.”

“As opposed to this incredibly selfless, all-expenses paid interactive horror show I’ve been so graciously presented with during my stay here.” There’s a glimpse beyond the mask, then. For a moment Armand sees through the bravado, and what looks back at him is a reflection of himself. Daniel is wrung out, too. He’s dried up, too.

For the first time he feels a fondness for this Daniel that he could not claim is borne of the time spent with him years ago. Daniel then had no concept of weariness. He does, now.

It’s this that softens Armand’s voice when he answers, “I never wanted you here, Daniel.”  

“Didn’t want me to pull off the scab on some seventy years of lies, yeah.”

“That isn’t the reason.”

For the first time since their conversation began Daniel looks apprehensive, and he should be. He looks as if he is considering whether or not sating his curiosity is worth it. Armand would tell him that it isn’t, if he thought he would listen. The decision was made long before now, though. Was made, perhaps, the moment Daniel got on the plane to Dubai. Before, even. By some part of him he does not know.

His arms unfold, hands hanging limp at his sides in defeat, and he says, “Then what’s the reason?”

Armand takes in the room for a moment. The overlarge table. The overpriced art. All the grey and grey and grey hanging over a whole life here. He’s had enough of talking in this room, in every room in this house. “Come, let’s take a walk in the city.”

“It’s 3:00 in the morning.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

---

“Daniel, where are we going?”

“Anywhere we want to,” Daniel says, grin wide and contagious. He’s got his fingers laced through Armand’s, tugs him along dark streets at a pace that implies purpose when there doesn’t appear to be one. Armand lets himself be led.

“What I want is to go back to the apartment and–”

“Anywhere but there.” Armand glimpses a flash of imagination that Daniel quickly supresses. “Come on, we’ve spent the whole week in there watching The Grapes of fucking Wrath.”

The novelty of the home video didn’t take all that long to wear off for Daniel. At first he had been excited to stay home rather than be dragged multiple times a night to the theatre. Now he says it’s a technology that should never have been invented and insists Armand’s obsession with stolen technology is ‘unhealthy’ and ‘concerning.’

“You told me you liked that one.”

Daniel snorts, fingers squeezing Armand’s. “Yeah, the first time. Maybe the second. 42 times was excessive.”

“It couldn’t have been 42 times.” It was 44. He would like to watch it a few more times.

This doesn’t seem to warrant a response. He settles into the silence, lets the sounds of cars and sirens wash over him, Daniel’s hand warming his skin.

New York is overwhelming, not for its size, but for their place within it. Somehow, despite staying in dozens of cities for weeks or months at a time with Daniel, living here with him is different. They don’t come home to a hotel each night. They come home to an apartment that has their (admittedly fake) names on its short-term lease paperwork. They’ve shopped for furniture. They’ve lined the walls with shelves of books. Sometimes they invite people over to make thinly-veiled invasive comments about their décor.

He and Louis had homes together, of course. They never invited anyone to see them who left afterwards.

Sometimes Armand wonders if he’s playing at humanity like it’s a role he’s trying on that he can’t possibly be right for. He mentioned this to Daniel once, who only said, ‘yeah. No shit. That’s how everybody feels.’

Armand knows that isn’t true – has roamed enough minds to confirm that plenty of people go about their lives with absolutely no sense that they are playing a role they will never quite believe is convincing. It was still comforting, to know that at least Daniel felt it too.

Silence isn’t Armand’s preferred state of being, as of late. He shakes Daniel’s hand in his, says, “I don’t want to wander around all night.”

 “Yeah well, we never do shit I wanna do,” Daniel argues.

“Fine, you go ahead then.”

Armand tugs his hand away to fold his arms around himself and lean up against the nearest building. A bank, he thinks. Or a supermarket. It’s inconsequential. He hears a scoff from Daniel, sees the way his face tips up to the sky as he keeps on walking.

The temptation to goad him into an argument has him reaching out with his mind in exactly one minute and forty-six seconds.

‘You shouldn’t walk alone.’

‘Then walk with me.’

‘I’m not going to encourage your– you could get killed on your own.’

‘Yeah, well. At least then I’ll know somebody actually wants to kill me.’

It’s a low blow punch to the gut, and it’s Daniel’s new favorite way to win their arguments. Armand pretends it doesn’t hurt, and Daniel pretends he’s only half serious when they make up later. ‘I’ll be here when you change your mind.’

Daniel makes it 32 city blocks before Armand hears the inevitable decision to turn around float through his head with a distinct air of exasperation. When he takes his time walking back, Armand knows it’s on purpose. Just to let him stew a little longer. And maybe also, if to a smaller degree, because he gets lost on the way.

“Was it everything you hoped for?” Armand says when Daniel returns to him.  

“No. I’ve got blisters.” Daniel sounds more defeated than angry. Armand still feels like he’s doing an excellent job proving his point, whatever that point actually is. Until Daniel is tugging at his wrist, unfolding his arms to tuck in close to his body with a hand settled heavy on the transition between neck and shoulder. “What’s actually wrong?”

He searches Daniel – eyes and mind – for a sign that he is anything but sincere in wanting to know, and he doesn’t find it. For all his external attitude, his brashness, his attempted apathy, Daniel is full of only love within, softer than a bruise.  

“Have you grown bored of me, Daniel?”

Daniel laughs but his hand snakes out to wrap an arm around Armand’s waist to keep him close. He’s stronger now than he was when Armand met him. Filling out in the shoulders, weight and bulk replacing the last of his boyishness. He’s still exponentially weaker than Armand, but it doesn’t feel that way like this.

“You must’ve needed a good running start to make a leap like that,” Daniel says, all exasperated humor but no judgement. “When did I say that?”

Armand replays the argument for both his and Daniel’s convenience. Points out all the little things that definitely absolutely most certainly indicate that he can no longer hold Daniel’s attention like he once did.

“Okay so. The sum total of your evidence is… that I didn’t want to go back to the apartment and fuck you right at that moment, and that I’m tired of rewatching a movie I’ve seen four dozen times.”

Armand is utterly sincere when he says, “Yes.”

Daniel’s eyes are wide with disbelief, “God you’re stupid.”

“I am not–”

“And you’re needy.”

“Is this supposed to reassure me?”

“No. Yes. Can’t you just read my mind and figure it out?” Daniel looks plaintive. He’s so pretty like this, under the streetlights. A lot of people are uglier in shadows and false light. Daniel always looks like he was made for it. Armand draws a nail along the line of his jaw, watches him shiver, watches his throat work.

“Explain it to me, beloved.”

Daniel won’t admit to the way the endearment softens him, but he won’t ever need to. Armand sees it in him, the need for sweetness. It calls to the very same need in Armand, lodged somewhere in the distant remnants of his soul.

“Me getting tired of watching a shitty movie isn’t some metaphor for me growing bored with you. You’re not a movie.” Daniel says the latter like he believes it wholeheartedly, like he’s trying to convince Armand. “I mean you’re a fucking vampire. There’s no way that would ever get old.”

“So it’s what I am that intrigues you.”

Daniel groans, forehead falling against Armand’s shoulder. “No, asshole. It’s who you are. Being with you is like… dating a dozen different people, and every last one of them is the most convoluted, contradictory, incomprehensible person to ever exist.”

Armand lets that idea settle for a minute, hand finding Daniel’s hair to stroke absently at his curls. Daniel lets him, settles some of his weight against Armand. “And you–”

“Love you? Yeah. Helplessly.” Daniel punctuates this by turning his head, pressing his mouth to the curve of Armand’s throat. “Next time you could just maybe... Ask, or something. Before I walk 3 miles in the worst fucking shoes.”

“You didn’t have to go so far.”

“I should have gone farther.” Daniel straightens, looks at Armand with an expression too raw for what he says next. “Piggyback me home?”

“Your feet are really that bad?”

“Worse, even,” Daniel says sagely.

“Foolish boy.”

“You’re alright to walk, Mr. Molloy?”

“We’re walking, aren’t we?” Daniel says.

And they are. Down the street in the bright lights of Dubai, so different from the streets they once wandered through. Armand tucks his hands into the pockets of his slacks and assesses Daniel. So much about him is still young. Even more would be if it weren’t for his illness.

“Returned to formalities again, have we? Should I be addressing you by a last name? Did you take Louis’s? Hyphenate?” Daniel is baiting him. Unfortunately, he’s good at it.

“I do not have a last name.”

“Right. I forgot, you barely have a first name.”

It stings in a way it wouldn’t have only a few days ago. Cracks in everything now, pain leaking out. “I gave you my names in confidence, and you use them against me.”

“Yeah, nothing says discretion like immortalizing personal information on a formal recording.”

There’s still time to not do this. He could walk Daniel down the block, call a car, send him back to America. Walk back to the penthouse alone. “That isn’t when I first gave them.”

“What do you mean?” Daniel sharpens. Not only his voice, but his body, his spine. That brain of his whirring and spinning and kicking up into a higher level of activity. A car drives past, a plane flies overhead, time trips forward in silence until Daniel says, more insistent, “Tell me what the fuck that means.”

“We spent a number of years together,” Armand says after a long pause.

“Yeah, you and Louis.”

He says what Daniel already knows. “I don’t mean Louis.”

“Lestat?” Such a strange thing, humans and their hope. No matter how unlikely, how impossible, they will cling to it until they have no other option.

“You’re smarter than this, Daniel.”

He sees the exact moment the hope dies. Sooner than it might in someone less pragmatic, less accustomed to stringing disparate facts into cohesive narratives. “Fuck off. This is just you trying to work another angle.”

“You know it isn’t.” Armand aims for matter of fact, comes up too short to sound anything but apologetic. It’s strange, really. He doesn’t think that he’s sorry at all, but he sounds it. Daniel has stopped walking. Armand turns heel to look at him, closes the gap until there is a foot of space hovering between them. “You feel it. You always have. Something missing, something hollowed out. All those dark voids you can’t account for, memories that don’t sit quite right, like they’re being played on antique film.”

Daniel is shaking his head. He takes a step backwards; Armand advances.

“That’s why you got the tests in the first place, isn’t it? How they found your illness so early? You thought they were going to tell you that you have dementia, but instead they found–”

“Stop.” A breath. Another. Then, “So what, you kidnapped me after San Francisco? Kept me locked up somewhere Louis couldn’t see.”

The idea is so ridiculous that it startles a laugh from Armand, which only serves to make Daniel look more alarmed. “No, Daniel. I loved you very dearly.”

“This is all bullshit.”

“And you loved me too.”

Daniel turns around and walks back the way they’ve come.

---

Armand carries Daniel on his back for the three blocks it takes to get to their apartment, complaining the whole way that he’s heavy, that this is impossibly hard work, that he had better not get used to it. Daniel just laughs each time he does, arms looped around him, a palm pressed flat to his chest, hot breath on his neck.

“Really, Daniel. I am centuries old, this is unbefitting.”

“You said you wanted to know what it was like to be human again,” Daniel says, too loud in his ear. “This is human.”

He had said that, in a dark and wide-open moment with Daniel’s blood warming him from the inside out, with Daniel still burrowed inside him.

Show me show me show me, he had said. Let me feel it through you, my love.

Maybe this had been what Louis wanted so badly all those times he brought boys home, fucked them, drank them dead. Wanted to feel their bright youth, consume their vitality. He had told Louis so many times, how pointless it was, how fruitless it would be to try to get closer to humanity again.

What he has with Daniel is nothing like Louis’s weak attempts at the same.

Their apartment is unlocked. Nothing that could be stopped by a lock could harm Armand, and the things that can harm Armand would laugh at the idea of a lock. It does not matter. He hasn’t seen a vampire older than a handful of years other than Louis in a very long time.

Daniel locks the door when Armand isn’t home. Armand doesn’t need a key to get in either, but he keeps it in his pocket anyways. Because it’s his and he can and it’s got a messy ‘A’ written on it in sharpie to match the ‘D’ on Daniel’s.

“Ah, fuck,” Daniel hisses when Armand lowers him to the ground.

Now that they’re home (technically, he won) and he’s no longer angry (he’s not sure anger is the right word for it anyways) Armand can spare some sympathy for the pain. “You’re bleeding.”

“Am I?”

“Sit.”

Daniel does as he’s told, sinking down onto the couch. Armand drops to a crouch at his feet, tugging off one shoe then the other, hooking fingers into the band of his socks and removing them too. There are blisters on his heels, his toes, the balls of his feet.

“Foolish boy,” he murmurs again. “Stay.”

“I’m not a dog, you know.”

“A well-trained dog would know not to run off without its master, so I would have to concur on that point.” Armand says it just to clock the reaction – that delicious mixture of indignance and curiosity – before he leaves to find supplies.

He returns with an overfull bowl of water and a cloth, sinking back down to his knees. While Daniel looks at him as if he’s grown another head and asks, “What are you doing?”

“Washing your feet.”

“You know they’ve got showers in the 20^th century, right?”

“It isn’t the same. It’s–”

“Feels like some religious shit.”

“It’s a service and a kindness, Daniel.” He doesn’t resist when Armand wraps a hand around his Achilles and lowers his foot into the bowl. He does, however, let out a sharp gasp of air when the water hits his skin. “Too hot?”

“Ah– no. It’s fine. It’s good.”

They’re quiet for a while, the sound of water trickling into the bowl louder for all the silence. He knows better than to let that silence drag for too long with Daniel. He will doubtless find a way to fill it that will make Armand wish he’d put on music instead.

“Did you… serve? Before?” It’s the closest to tactful Daniel ever really gets.

Armand focuses on what he’s doing. Draws the cloth over Daniel’s heel, down his arch, around the blistered ball of his foot. This moment could be another life, if he let it be. He won’t.

“Mm,” he hums, noncommittal.

“You don’t talk about your life before– well you don’t talk about your life before anything, really. I know next to nothing about you.” Daniel is curious with no idea what that curiosity will get him.

His other foot is bleeding, just on the outside of his biggest toe. Armand surveys it for a moment, pressing his closed mouth to the blister before he lowers it, too, into the water. His tongue catches what little blood is on his lips.

Daniel gazes at him agape, his brain at a stutter-stop, momentarily stuck. Armand’s thumb works into his arch and Daniel groans, recovers. “You’re good at this.”

“Thank you.” Armand isn’t sure how one tells someone the information that Daniel is looking for. He has told very few people, and he thinks it’s far easier for his kind to stomach. There are few pleasant routes to this life, and those that take a pleasant route tend to find a more gruesome destination, as if they are all beholden to some minimum threshold of karmic suffering. Nevertheless, he supposes he has told Daniel pieces before – they’re just not within his recollection. “I was… in service to many before I was given the dark gift.”

When Daniel doesn’t offer any interjection, Armand continues. “It’s very hard to remember now– no, not painful Daniel. Difficult. It was a very long time ago. I was another person then, with another name.”

“What was it?” Ever the journalist. Armand doesn’t look at Daniel, just focuses on the water, the cloth, the bowl. Service. It is also painful.

“Arun first, I think. My eventual maker… purchased me. From a brothel. He renamed me Amadeo and then I–”

“Was in his service,” Daniel finishes for him, simultaneously folding over to wrap his hands around Armand’s wrists. “You– fuck you’re always really weird, don’t get me wrong. But this shit– you don’t have to do this.”

“I want to.” He tugs his hands from Daniel, grips the edges of the bowl. This is why he hasn’t brought it up in the years they have spent together. It’s too complicated. Daniel is clever but young. How could he understand? “My maker was kind. A small fortune, that.”

Daniel’s curiosity and discomfort wage a short war. The former wins. “So, Armand is the name you chose for yourself?”

“No, but it was the one that I chose to keep.” He wants Daniel to understand. “Just as I choose now, whether or not I will serve.”

“I don’t want service” Daniel shakes his head. Perhaps he sees something on Armand’s face, some disappointment, because he adds, “But I guess I can take a little kindness. Every once in a while.”

Daniel has to work to lean close enough for a kiss, but Armand meets him halfway. When he returns to his task Daniel does not protest, but he does surprise Armand by insisting upon trading places afterwards.  

Chapter Text

Armand isn’t surprised that Daniel makes his way back to the penthouse. Of course, it isn’t his limited choices, or even his desire to know more that makes him do it. It’s that Daniel has a built-in autopilot stronger than anyone else he’s known, and it’s well-trained to get him to whatever his hindbrain considers to be home for the night even if the rest of his mind is occupied or offline.  

Borne, Armand always assumed, of many nights spent so drunk or high that his conscious mind could no longer be relied upon to guide him to any semblance of safety.

It was something just shy of magic to witness, really. No matter the city, the substance, or the number of wrong turns, left to his own devices Daniel would always end up in the last place he slept eventually.

It’s jarring to realize that hasn’t changed. Armand supposes a few weeks spent doing little but interviewing, eating, and sleeping don’t leave much room for being anything but a breathing tape recorder with attitude. He’s curious what other things might be the same about Daniel, now that he’s seen him out in the world again. Wants to ask him about books and films and places he has travelled to and what he has loved of them, just to determine where the overlap begins and ends.

He trails behind, takes his time walking back to the tower. When he gets there, Daniel is sitting on the steps, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. His forehead is pressed against them, head bowed, and if Armand did not know him he might think Daniel is praying. Perhaps he is, at long last, searching for a god he will never believe in.

The sun will rise soon. Armand’s ribs ache. He resists the temptation to do math, to run numbers and determine a list of all the places where Louis might be. He’s had time to leave Dubai, of course. They’ve always made sure to have safe ways to travel on short notice.

“I suppose he will go to seek Lestat now.”

Daniel looks up, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

“He’s only ever been waiting for an excuse to–”

“Five minutes, Armand,” Daniel says his thumbs pressing hard to the soft skin beneath his chin. “Five minutes without having to hear about the never-ending melodramatic saga.”

Armand would like to be offended, but an edge of desperation in Daniel’s voice keeps most of his indignation at bay. It’s not as if he is unable to relate to the sentiment. He doesn’t particularly want to talk about it either, isn’t sure why he said anything out loud in the first place. Everything is slanted and off-centre. One moment he feels nothing at all, the next he feels terror, and in the spaces between… something else. The throbbing pain in his head and the bruising over his ribs probably aren’t contributing any clarity.  

“You know. I think, for once, I’m not sure I know what to say,” Daniel cuts through his internal spiral neatly. It’s easier to slip into Daniel’s mind than to exist in his own, right now.

“You have questions.”

“No shit.”

“Ask, then.”

“And you’re going to answer them?”

“Sure, why not?” Armand gestures vaguely into the empty space between them, watches Daniel’s narrow-eyed skepticism.

“Honestly?”

Armand lets out an unnecessary puff of air in a sigh. “Daniel. Are these the questions?”

There’s a brief flicker of amusement, there and gone in the blink of an eye. “So you’re telling me that we were–”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

A flash of lighting, Armand wants to say. A whole lifetime. “Years, as I said. A small number relative to my life span and a more significant one relative to your own.”

Armand wonders if there is a maximum amount of shock the human mind can experience within a short window of time. Daniel certainly doesn’t muster much more than vague surprise so perhaps he has reached the threshold. “Did you–”

“Yes.”

“And did I–”

“Yes.” Armand chews his cheek to supress a smile he doesn’t think Daniel has the context to appreciate. Hundreds of images come to mind, memories of Armand’s own, more than a handful of imaginings from Daniel. The return of an old craving that Daniel has not had a name for in a very long time.

Then, like a door slamming shut, “Stop that shit. Stay out of my head.”

“My apologies.” He’s not sorry. “Do you have further questions?”

Daniel doesn’t answer for a long time. He keeps staring at a spot on the ground where a piece of gum has been flattened into the pavement. He’ll glance up every so often, like he’s forgetting that he’s avoiding looking Armand in the eye. Each time, Armand feels the new wave of revulsion wash over him. It doesn’t come as a surprise. It’s one thing to hear their stories, to be around them in their careful domesticity. Armand knows this is different. It had taken Daniel a very long time to stop minding quite so much, and there was never a time he believed he did not mind at all.

Five hundred years, and sometimes the feeling is still familiar to Armand.

“Yeah, uh,” Daniel scrubs a hand over his face, into his hair. “Can I get some sleep?”

“You don’t need my permission to sleep.” The wrong thing to say, Armand realizes.

“Don’t I?” Daniel asks bitterly. “Seems like–”

Armand is all tied up in Daniel’s mind, and he’s exhausted. The anger sparks easily to flame. “Don’t make accusations about something you know nothing about.”

“Oh yeah? And whose fault is it that I know nothing? Cause I sure don’t see Louis–” Daniel cuts off, new fear dawning on him. Armand should be offended that Daniel is more worried that Louis might have kept this from him, but– well, no, he is offended, he decides. “Did Louis know?”

“I don’t know.” Armand doesn’t think so, as wrapped up in his own misery as Louis has always been. It’s much the same thing that let him hide his betrayal from Louis in Paris – sadness, loss, love. They all make Louis selfish and blind. He doubts Louis would have invited Daniel here if he suspected it. He would have gone ahead with the interview, of course. Just elsewhere. With Armand carefully removed from access or involvement.

“Then where was he when–”

“Perhaps you should sleep.” He doesn’t know how to begin answering these questions, didn’t think this through. He does not want to summarize all those years, does not want to walk through them in strict detail as they have just done for most of Louis’s life these past weeks. It feels empty, a story told with no heart when there was so much there when it happened. “And we can return to this subject with more rest.”

It’s a testament to how tired he must really be that Daniel doesn’t snap back at him with a barb, a quip, or an argument. He simply pulls himself to his feet and trails Armand as they go inside.

---

“Daniel, you have to– you’re being a child.” And he is. Traipsing around the hotel room on unsteady legs, stuffing things into a duffle bag with an astounding level of strategy considering the alcohol and cocaine blanketing all of his thoughts. Armand hates when he’s like this. Intoxicated and inconsolable, mad with a craving none of his own drugs can fix, no matter how badly he wants them to.

“Oh, don’t worry Armand! I won’t be a child for long, soon I’ll be old–” he crams a pair of shoes into the bag, “and grey–” his journals, “and dead–” the cash Armand leaves for when he’s not home, “and then you won’t have to deal with me anymore.”

It’s best to leave him to his devices. Sometimes he does make it out the door, down the street. Sometimes he even makes it into next week, sleeping on a friend’s couch if they’re near someone they know, anywhere else he can find if they aren’t. Once he stayed nearly a month in Amsterdam. He always comes back, when he goes. Or asks Armand to bring him back.

Most times he simply loses steam and falls asleep.

Although, most times he doesn’t have quite this amount of shit in his system. He stinks of it, the drugs and the desperation. Armand still wants to taste him.

He perches on the very edge of the bed and watches Daniel buzz about the room they’ve been sharing in Budapest for the past two weeks. The room still smells of blood and sweat from before all this. Before they argued and Daniel left for hours on a hunt for some drug that wouldn’t talk back or point out his naivety.

Daniel disappears into the bathroom and a moment later Armand hears a loud crack, a soft whine. He makes it into the room before smell of fresh smell of blood has even had time to flood his nostrils.

He’s had the good sense to stay down, at least, clutching his head and hunched over. Blood drips through his fingers where he has his hand pressed to his nose, falling onto his jeans, onto the tile floor.

“What have you done to yourself? Let me see.” Armand sinks to his knees and reaches for Daniel’s wrist. Daniel resists and grumbles something entirely unintelligible, but Armand is gracious enough to ignore the words that take perfect shape in his thoughts. “Stop. I need to look at this and then you can go back to being horribly, irrationally angry with me for my refusal to sentence you to an eternity of hell.”

It must register as an order even through layers of pain and alcohol, because Daniel gives up his weak attempt at stopping Armand in favor of looking up at him, sullen and dog-eyed. His nose is most certainly broken.

The whole room smells sweet and spiced and hot. Armand reaches for a towel and presses it hard to Daniel’s face, ignoring his protesting whine of pain. “Why do you do this to yourself, beloved?”

“S’not like I fell on purpose,” Daniel mumbles, the words coming out thick and round.

“Did you not drink and snort your way to this point of your own volition?”

“M’only allowed drugs when they come from you.” Armand assumes it was meant as a question, but it comes out sounding like a statement of fact. Daniel squints at him a moment before a sloppy smile crinkles his eyes and he begins to laugh. “Should see yourself right now. All worried like a fuckin’ nurse, but your fangs are out just begging for it aren’t they, you weirdo.”

It would be inappropriate, Armand reminds himself, to smother Daniel into unconsciousness so as to help him sober up. Still, his patience is fraying. He’s hungry. He pulls the towel away, tossing it in the sink when the flow of blood has clotted and slowed to a crawl.

“This is your mess, Daniel. You should clean it up,” Armand murmurs, gentle. He holds his hand out, sticky with blood. Daniel’s eyes widen accordingly, surprised, uncomfortable, not unwilling but certainly mildly disgusted. “Go ahead. You want this life. Driven out of control, drinking human blood, cleaning up your own slaughters.”

And Daniel, sweet, stubborn, foolish boy that he is, sucks Armand’s fingers into his mouth. Braves his gag reflex with a mixture of disgust and dizzy arousal. He does his best.

His best, of course, is hardly more than forty-five seconds. He’s still bravely trying when Armand hears the unuttered, ‘Do I have to?’ and withdraws his hand to brush his knuckles across Daniel’s cheekbone instead.

“Of course not, Daniel,” he says. Because Daniel doesn’t have to. That’s the point. Daniel is likely far too drunk to realize it now, but later Armand will hear the moment he puts the pieces together. It won’t change what Daniel wants or what Armand is unwilling to give, but they each persevere regardless. “Do you want me to help you?”

Daniel nods his head, lets himself be coaxed to his feet, stripped of his bloody clothes, and guided to sit on the counter. Armand runs the water hot, rinses what he can from the ruined cloth before wringing it out and holding it up. “I’m not going to be gentle,” he warns. He waits for Daniel’s nod before he puts cloth to skin, scrubbing away the blood as it begins to dry.

“Your blood is no good to me when you’ve had this much,” Armand says brusquely, answering an unspoken question.

“Sorry,” Daniel shrugs.

“You aren’t. But you will be tomorrow when you look at your face.” Armand finishes, dropping the cloth into the bin to survey the damage. It’s already bruising, pretty blue and purple on his pale skin.

“That bad?”

“You’re beautiful.”

Daniel shakes his head, then winces. Pain does a good job taking the edge off of a high – he’s leveling out a bit now. “You’re a monster, you know that?”

He knows. He knows. But Daniel says it with so much affection that it doesn’t sting. “And you aren’t Daniel. You have to stop doing this to yourself.”

For a moment he sees Daniel gearing up for another argument, drawing his muscles up tense, searching through thick fog to find something to say. Then he slumps, deflates, defeated if only for the moment. “I can’t. If I could…”

“You wouldn’t still be here,” Armand finishes for him.

“What’s wrong with me?” It’s too plaintive, too raw. Armand knows Daniel will be embarrassed in the morning, will bottle it all back up and disguise it with anger again. This is what they do, what they have been doing.

Armand switches off the too-bright light and tugs at Daniel’s hands where they are worrying at each other in his lap. “Come, beloved. You should sleep.”

He’s docile now, all the fight gone out of him like a broken horse. He walks where Armand leads, crawls into bed and attempts to tug Armand in with him. “Stay.”

“I have to eat, I’ll be back soon.” He tries for reassuring, but his words are clipped and tight.

He thinks, for a moment, that Daniel will protest. Instead, he just rolls over to face away from Armand, blankets pulled tight around him, and says, “Right.”

“Daniel–”

“It’s fine. See you later.”

It’s passive aggressive; Armand is more than familiar with the tactic, uses it better than Daniel most days. He shouldn’t be rewarding behaviour like tonight’s, but he’s not eager to leave when Daniel is still filtering out the drugs. The comedown is always hard, and he’s still got another craving twisting away inside him. If Armand leaves now, he’s concerned Daniel will just go out again.

He climbs into bed, fits himself against Daniel’s back, fingers of one hand tangling into his hair. Daniel’s body rounds, shapes along his, legs making space for Armand’s knee to slot between them, head tilting into his hand.  

“I’ll stay until you fall asleep,” Armand concedes.

“What’s wrong with me?” Daniel asks, again.

 Armand sinks teeth into his own wrist, shallow punctures beading with blood, and offers it. “Drink,” he urges, mouth pressed to the clammy skin of his shoulder.

Daniel makes a wounded sound, a soft small thing Armand has memorized a hundred versions of, and presses his mouth hot to Armand’s skin. The blood works as it always does. Sends Daniel drifting on a haze of pleasure and warmth and exquisite horror.

“Nothing is wrong with you, Daniel.”

It’s a lie.

“Nothing is broken in you that you can’t yet fix in time.”

Armand doesn’t attempt sleep for a multitude of reasons. Among them, the penthouse feels suddenly unsafe. And so does the inside of his mind. And there’s an ache in the middle of his chest, like a rubber band snapping over and over and over again.

He’s not surprised when Rashid doesn’t return, but he spares a moment’s curiosity for the noticeable lack of any other staff as well. He can only assume Louis has either disposed of the staff himself, or wisely told them not to return.

He busies himself with anything but the things he should. There’s cement dust all over the floor. Books and paper too fragile to be left laying around. The remnants of Daniel’s burnt laptop still sitting like a mockery on one of many tables.

Armand ignores all of them, actively and with precision. The kitchen is relatively unscathed, so he busies himself with washing cutlery by hand. Reorganizing the cupboards. Taking stock of the abundance of food he should throw out – Louis had insisted upon stocking everything despite the catering service and now much of it has expired. The whole time Daniel has been here, Armand can’t recall him asking for anything but alcohol in addition to his offered meals.

Daniel emerges mid-morning, dark circles under his eyes but otherwise looking exponentially more composed than he had hours ago, when he had closed the bedroom door behind him with a pointedly loud click of the utterly useless lock.

“Coffee?” Armand pushes a mug across the counter while Daniel scans his surroundings in search of staff.

“Tell me you didn’t hunt down Rashid to make coffee and lock him up in a closet somewhere,” Daniel says, wary. He reaches for the mug regardless, sipping tentatively before he takes a drink in earnest.

“I know how to make coffee,” Armand says. It’s well worth the half choke of surprise he gets from Daniel. “I served your drinks when you got here, if you recall.”

“Yeah alcohol makes sense. A useful skill for luring victims, I’m sure–”

“I don’t need alcohol to find my–”

“–but what would you need to learn to make coffee for?”

“Is it good?” Armand reads Daniel’s silence as the admission it is, mouth curving into an anticipatory smile. “You taught me.”

He doesn’t see Daniel again for another hour. The remainder of the coffee sits cold on the counter until he dumps it down the drain.

When Daniel emerges again, it’s as if nothing ever happened. The blank slate of his face would be convincing if Armand hadn’t dipped in and out of his tangled thoughts more than once in the interim.

“Have you just been standing there this whole time?”

“You should eat something,” Armand says instead of answering the question. And he means it, too. Calculates when Daniel’s last meal is and remembers the strict medical guidelines they were given by Dr. Bhansali.

“Can you cook too?” Daniel deadpans.

“I never really mastered it. It’s difficult to cook what you can’t taste,” Armand shrugs. “I did bake for a little while, however. The measurements were much more manageable.”

Daniel stares at him for a long moment, blinking.

“Who the fuck are you?” It’s a short leap from incredulity to anger, and Armand does nothing to stop Daniel from taking it. “No seriously, what the fuck is this?”

“What do you–”

“Yeah whatever, fuck off.” Daniel sucks a breath in through his nose, out through his mouth. Armand remembers that, from before. Learned it in this weird cult I hung out around for a while. It’s supposed to calm you down, he would say. No, it’s probably even better when you don’t have to do it normally. And he would stand there, hand on Armand’s empty chest with a murmured, in… out… in. And it would work, if only because Daniel was so intent upon making sure it did. It was not so very different from the hypnosis he himself uses.

Armand doesn’t do it now, but he thinks about it. “What would you have me do?”

“A couple days ago I remembered a prolonged torture sequence starring you and I, and now you’re telling me that I should believe all that happened, and then I just happily shacked up with you for years?” Daniel is floundering. Flipping between an attempt at journalism for the sake of comfort, and the rational terror of the man beginning to wear thin beneath his persona.

“You didn’t know,” Armand offers, picking at a loose hem on his sleeve.

“Sorry?”

“The next time you saw me, you knew me only as the man Louis spoke with at Polynesian Mary’s. You never remembered San Francisco.”

This time, Daniel disappears for three hours.

Armand makes a point of being in the same spot, this time. Perhaps if he were kinder, he would not intentionally goad Daniel. He’s not in a particularly gregarious mood, however.

“I don’t believe you,” Daniel says this time. Armand almost buys it.

“What would you have me do?” He asks again.

“I don’t know, but I think the burden of proof lies with you here.” Daniel’s hand is shaking more than it should, today. Maybe he notices Armand’s glance because he folds his arms across his chest, tucking his hand away. “Tell me something that will make me believe you.”

“I can’t,” Armand says simply.

“Because you’re lying!”

Daniel sounds so hopeful, presented with this possible out. And wouldn’t that be easy, for him? To return to decades of ignorance while Armand sits here with the skeletons of two relationships disintegrating at his feet.

“No. I can’t because everything you know of yourself, I can simply pull from your mind– Eat–” He slides a protein bar across the counter. “And everything else I know of you, you do not yourself remember.”

Rather offensively, by Armand’s estimation, Daniel eyes the packaged rectangle as if it’s poisoned. If he doesn’t need alcohol to kill, he certainly doesn’t need poison. “Can you give them back?”

“What?”

“My memories,” Daniel says with exaggerated slowness, pointing first at Armand and then at his own temple. “Can you put them back in there?”

Armand gets the sense that Daniel is a little detached from reality at the moment. He’s trying to solve this like a math equation. Armand feels a little detached from reality right now too. He might prefer to remain that way. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t–”

“I’m not omnipotent, Daniel. What I took wasn’t meant to be put back.” Armand didn’t take anything, really. So much as cement it behind cognitive walls so thick they could survive an atom bomb. It’s probably best not to send Daniel wandering through his own brain looking for them right now, however.

“Okay. Fine.”

“Fine?”

“If you can’t give me proof and you can’t give me my memories, the only method is the slow, old-fashioned way. And I’m fucking tired of Q&A sessions.” Daniel picks up the bar and tosses it back to Armand. “I’m flying home today.”

It hadn’t dawned on him that Daniel would leave right this moment. Last night, sure. Before he knew anything was missing. Armand has been counting on his obsessiveness, his commitment to getting the full story about something. That rubber-band-snap tightness builds to a burn right at the very center of his sternum.

Alone in this sterile, ahistorical house with all of its ghosts.

“You are?”

“Unless you’re going to keep me here like Louis, then–”

“Do you think I forced him to be here? Locked him away and never let him see anything?”

“I mean…” Daniel raises his eyebrows, shrugs one shoulder.

“This was our home… and an archive of everything we would never move past.” It’s a little bit raw, clearly. Armand can’t remember the last time his emotions sat this near to the surface, were this insistent upon being exposed to air. “If this was a prison, it was as much mine as his.”

Daniel snorts, sharp and loud and unsympathetic. “Work a little harder, not sure you’ve got your eyes open big enough to curry sympathy.”

“Contrary to your belief, I don’t lie about everything I say.” That would be foolish. It’s poor practice to lie unnecessarily, though he thinks he could benefit from swallowing a few more words with Daniel at the moment. Maybe all of them.

“Right.” Daniel chews at the inside of his cheek, like he’s trying to decide something. Whatever that something is, he’s doing a commendable job keeping Armand out of his head at the moment. He was never this skilled when he was young, but Armand supposes he was never this motivated either. “If you want to keep telling your lies, you’ll have to do it in New York. My flight leaves in four hours.”

“You’re inviting me to your house?” Armand can’t quite make sense of that, and Daniel looks pleased with himself for successfully executing his planned sequence of reveals.

“I’m not inviting you to my house,” Daniel says, fingers of one hand spread out above his folded arm as if to stop his line of thinking. “I’m just assuming you’ll probably show up at some point anyways and I’d rather not open my closet at four in the morning to find you lurking there like a scrawny grim reaper.”

For someone who doesn’t remember anything, Daniel has a skill for presenting Armand with scenarios he can’t easily deny that he’s capable of. And there’s no reason to deny it. There’s no reason to supress his smile either, so he doesn’t.

“I could arrange for the private plane to–”

“No, if you want to come you can squeeze into economy class on a normal commercial plane just like the rest of us cattle.” Armand wrinkles his nose at the descriptor, and he’s fairly certain Daniel interprets it to be a distaste at travelling with humans. Dissuading him of that notion is likely to take as long now as it did years ago, so he doesn’t try.

Instead he says, “What of the pandemic?”

“Seems like it would be a satisfyingly ironic way to die at this juncture,” Daniel shrugs.

Satisfying for who? Armand wonders.

“Then at least let me upgrade your ticket.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

It’s ridiculous. Discomfort and suffering just for the sake of stubborn principle. Armand nods his head and doesn’t bother saying as much.

When Daniel boards the plane four hours later, he settles in next to Armand in business class with a full-chested, “I hate you,” and then asks hopefully, perhaps for good measure, if Armand thinks a vampire would be likely to die if there was a plane crash.

And they go back to New York.   

Chapter Text

It doesn’t take him long to get bored, nor does it take him long to regret not cancelling Daniel’s ticket and scheduling the private jet instead. There he could have a conversation. Or, at the minimum, could have made a more viable attempt at one.

Daniel doesn’t speak to him for the entirety of the fourteen-hour flight, but he does tolerate Armand’s encouragements that he eat at least one of the offered meals. Whether he does it just to shut Armand up without having to say anything is of no consequence. He’s not entirely sure what his goal is at the moment, but it certainly isn’t to have Daniel fainting from lack of nutrition.

That’s the issue, of course. He has fourteen very long hours with which to contemplate the purpose of this flight, of following Daniel across an ocean without hesitation as if it hasn’t been more than forty years since he last did. They’ve been many places together. Dubai had been comforting in that way, when he and Louis moved there. Brand new, untainted.

Having Daniel there was easier. A new place, a man who both was and was not the one he knew. It was one thing to contemplate memories while sealed in his own personal gallery, to imagine Daniel only as a temporary art installation to interact with for a time. It’s entirely another to be out in the world again. The street last night, tangible in its familiarity. This plane, bigger and shinier and sharper though it may be, still a replica of many before it.

And New York.

It was a foolish thing to imagine that he could so easily roam through his own memories and around the scars of them in Daniel’s mind, and not be affected. That he could entertain longing and desire as a pastime and not begin to feel the sore spots that love left behind.

New York.

New York is more than a sore spot, of course. It’s a gaping wound that never really did heal over. They had spent months there, had made a home there. He wonders if that’s why Daniel lives there still. If he feels it instinctively, the joy they found in the city. Before.

There’s no use asking, of course. Any parts of him that Daniel has managed to retain are there solely on the merit that he cannot be consciously aware of them. Armand was thorough. He did not make the same mistakes he had with San Francisco, and until now he has given Daniel no reason to look for his own motives or analyze his own instincts.

He watches Daniel drifting off into a surface level sleep and tries to figure out what he wants from him. To not be alone, yes. That’s obvious. But if that is all the wants then he’s done a poor job of telling Daniel things in such a way that he might be compelled to stay for anything beyond a temporary curiosity.

He wants nostalgia, perhaps. Wants to study how the old becomes new, grows truly old. He’s curious. He’s bored. He’s trying to find answers to uncertainty. Maybe it’s frustration, or it’s retaliation.

There is, Armand admits to himself, very little retaliation in coaxing the man to eat and sleep, nor is there any in upgrading his seat to a comfortable place in business class. The only one punished by their return to New York will be Armand.

They travelled so often together. More in those few years than he has in the last two decades with Louis. Dragging one another from place to place, on planes and trains, a few times a boat. They would go to museums and theatres and galleries. They would spend hours in cafes, bars, parks. None of that, of course, was technically any different from that which he shared with Louis.

It was the people that made it so.

As long as Armand had lived as a vampire, he had existed on the periphery of humanity. Moving among them but rarely growing to know them. Sometimes going so far as to form an acquaintanceship or frequent the same establishment enough times to grant familiarity, rarely building something of a friendship. Never anything he could not leave behind.

Louis, when he came along, was more social by nature. More eager to remain connected to his humanity via contact with the world. It was one of the things Armand humored him in, sometimes courted him with. But there was still, always, separateness. A neat divide between two worlds, overlapping but never blending in earnest.

Those years with Daniel, he existed in a sort of enmeshment with the world. Daniel pulled him along on his mission to know. Places, stories, people. He wasn’t particularly selective about what that knowledge was, just so long as he could take it. He would use it like an outstretched arm, reaching for connection wherever they went. Filling up all that lonely empty space for at least a little while.

Armand did not love the people, not really. But he did learn to see, again, why they were something worth being loved. Daniel used to tell him he’d probably gotten stuck, that because he never knew much good in humanity before he was turned, he must have never known how to learn it after. Daniel was a poor teacher and Armand was a poor student, but he did learn. He learned enough to know he never wanted Daniel to be separated from that world.

Thus, New York.

But before that, a hundred flights just like this one.

---

It’s the consequence of an unfortunate mixture of poor planning and unforeseen misfortune. That’s all. Too many connecting flights, too many weather delays, a red-eye missed, and a daylight flight to catch as a result. Too many days without food while he’s been nursing Daniel out of coke withdrawals. Too much misplaced faith in Daniel’s scheduling abilities, who has up until now had Armand trailing after him in a game of cat and mouse rather than joining him with stated intent.

Which is all, of course, meaningless at the moment.

He has found that a reduced appetite does not equate to more tolerable hunger or less agonizing thirst. There is no such thing as a purely positive gift in this life and this body. Not even age can relieve them of the curses which are thrust upon them in exchange for eternal life.

Now he is hungry. A bottomless pit in his stomach, a hollowing in his bones. The collapsing inward, the breaking down.

Now he is thirsty. An aching in the roots of his teeth, veins sandpaper dry and sticking. The exchanging of a meticulously painted man-mask for the monster beneath.

The woman on his right is enamored with him. He doesn’t have to read her mind to know it. She keeps trying to talk to him in soft Italian, touching his arm, shifting closer every time she adjusts in her seat though she has plenty of room. He stops Daniel before he has the chance to tell the woman that while his own Italian is poor, Armand’s is very good.

Small mercies.

Air circulates poorly on an airplane. It’s the opposite of mercy that though he doesn’t need it at all, instinct has him breathing in an effort to smell prey. Vampires are as poorly built for modern survival humans are. The flight isn’t that long. He will be fine.

Two hours in the woman gets a nosebleed and Armand wonders just how many people he can put to sleep at once. Fantasizes about slaughtering them all, drinking until he isn’t thirsty, perhaps drinking away the insistent, constant awareness of Daniel next to him. It wouldn’t be wise, if only because he’s not certain he’s in the right state of mind to carefully keep the pilots conscious, and he never wants to be privy to the look on Daniel’s face when he has seen the extent of the violence in him.

He will be fine.

He doesn’t know much about nosebleeds – Daniel doesn’t get them – but he’s fairly certain they aren’t meant to last this long. She’s apologizing, fumbling next to him for a tissue, both hands covered in blood. Daniel reaches past Armand to hand some over, and a drop of her blood is on Daniel’s index finger, and– He will be fine.

“Please excuse me, Daniel,” Armand murmurs. He doesn’t wait for Daniel to stand, just slides over him and into the aisle until he reaches the little cabin washroom.

The door shuts behind him and he is fine. Were he younger, it would present a genuine problem. But he isn’t, and he has been far hungrier. This is the sort of inconvenience that makes a bad day, a miserable mood. Nothing to warrant the thoughts of concern Daniel is lobbing haphazardly in his general direction.

The mirror is scratched and streaky, his reflection just a touch distorted. Sallow and tired and too wild-eyed to look like anything but the monster he is, even with his mouth closed.

He can wait out the last hour or so of the flight in here, he thinks. Save himself the unnecessary suffering, send away anyone who knocks with a little bit of firm encouragement.

No more than five minutes pass before Daniel is at the door. He slips in without hesitation when Armand unclicks the lock, pressing up close in the cramped space.  

“You good?”

“I’m fine.”

Daniel looks at him with his head cocked to one side and Armand waits for the disgust. It’s one thing to be a monster, it’s another to be an ugly one. “You’re hungry.”

So matter-of-fact. Armand supposes it shouldn’t surprise him as much as it does. Daniel has a tendency to vacillate between unphased resignation and unmitigated disbelief with astounding frequency.

“Yes.”

The disgust is there, but a certain fascination, too. The moment stretches out long and quiet. Armand focuses on the sound of Daniel’s breath, the slow climb of his heartrate. The heat of him where their bodies touch.

Daniel lifts a hand to his face, thumb coming to rest below the curve of his bottom lip, and says, “I want to–”

The words are aborted but the intent is clear. Armand has only to let Daniel do as he wishes. Perhaps another day he might consider stopping him, but today he parts his lips and lets Daniel trace the shape of his bite with a surprisingly gentle touch. He lets Daniel press the pad of his thumb to a fang. Lets him pierce skin with slow awe. Lets him press the bead of blood flat to his tongue, like a single drop of rain in a drought.

Then his hand is gone, falling to his side, and Armand is… something too broken open to name.

There are those of his kind who make leisure of eating without killing. There are even those of his kind, rare they may be, who do not kill at all. Armand is neither. To take only partially from someone always feels a little bit like leaving something with them, even without sharing his own blood. It’s–

Whatever rationalizing Armand is trying to do, it’s interrupted by the tilt of Daniel’s head, the transparent baring of his neck. “You’re hungry. You can, if you want.”

Perhaps Armand should protest or confirm that he understands what he’s offering, but he’s hungry. He’s thirsty. He is more monster than man, today. More enamored than he is sacrificial. He leans in closer still, hand winding into the hair at Daniel’s nape. He breathes deep at the hinge of Daniel’s jaw, and Daniel holds his breath. Armand can see the ugly scar where Louis tore at him sloppily and where Armand cared little for minimizing the damage himself.

He presses his lips just there, feels the shiver travel from the uneven skin all the way through Daniel’s body. The moment bends but does not break. A sharp tug of curls and Daniel’s head rolls the other way. Untouched, unbroken, unscarred skin. His tongue moves slow to seek vein, feels the pulse of blood on its journey back to Daniel’s heart. The neck is easy to kill with, easy to drain. It’s finer work to do otherwise, and he has not practiced so very often.

He’s careful now, hushing Daniel’s soft, impatient sound. Slotting his mouth over the smaller branch of the jugular, sinking fangs in slowly, slowly. His mouth floods with blood, sweet and hot and so trusting. Daniel sucks air in sharp and Armand can feel the jump of his throat against his mouth.

‘Yes?’

“Fuck,” Daniel offers aloud. It’s acceptable. His mind gives Armand all the information he needs.

Perhaps it’s different, so freely given. Perhaps it’s different, from a human he loves. Perhaps it’s not different at all but Armand would like it to be and makes it so. What matters is that it is stunningly, overwhelmingly different. He sucks, swallows, listens to Daniel’s broken moans. All that blood, singing for him, pouring into him like it wants him and of course it does. Daniel wants him and this is Daniel. Of course the blood wants him.

Sticky, hazy, unwitnessed time slides by. Daniel gets his thigh between Armand’s, his hand snaking behind him to press flat against the small of his back, rocking into him with an instinctive shift of hips. He’s hard through his jeans, mumbling things that make Armand feel turned inside out, an endless stream of “yes, baby” and “holy shit, god yeah,” and “feels so good.”

Then his sounds are shapeless and slurring and Armand is pulling away before, before, before, even though all he wants is everything.

He stifles Daniel’s whine with his mouth, still blood-warm tongue searching and dragging and taking Daniel’s air, too. There’s so little room. He shifts, leans back against the sink. Daniel is a needy, dizzy thing under his touch, riding up against his thigh and holding a fistful of fabric to keep Armand close even when it makes it harder to get the friction he so desperately wants.

It’s human and dirty and incredibly fragile, all that pleasure. Armand feels it too, swims inside of it with Daniel’s blood drifting through his veins.

When Daniel comes, he swallows that sound too, and he wishes he could taste. He says as much in Daniel’s head while he’s still riding out the final waves of orgasm.

“Yeah, fuck. Bet you do.” Said in any other tone, it would be in keeping with Daniel’s usual bravado. Said the way he does it now, it’s so near to awe that Armand pulls away far enough to look at him. He’s flushed and glassy-eyed, blood running in a single slow rivulet down his neck, breath still coming quick. “What about y–”

“Some other time. The plane is landing soon.” He’s had more than enough pleasure for the moment. Feels too broken open now as it is, raw and like he owes Daniel some sort of debt he didn’t ask to take on. “I would have been fine.”

“Okay?” Daniel’s fingertips are making absent, steady circles at the base of Armand’s spine. The touch is still new, makes it harder to focus on what he’d like to say.

“I was hungry, not starving to death,” he clarifies.

Daniel laughs at that, bright and loud. There’s a flight attendant currently considering knocking and Armand almost wishes that she would. “Yeah… didn’t exactly offer it to save your life.”

He knows that much. “You didn’t offer only for selfish reasons, either.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re an idiot, and then you go and say something like that,” Daniel says, warm and affectionate, dipping in to kiss him long and lazy before he pulls away to add, “You know, there’s something that exists between complete selfishness and sickening altruism.”

“And what’s that?”

“Everyone.”

The flight attendant does knock then, voice strained and awkward as she says, “Just letting anyone in there know that we are… preparing for landing and everyone should return to their seats. If anyone is–”

“Thank you,” Armand interrupts, makes his voice a curt dismissal that can be heard even through the door.

It’s a shame to heal the puncture marks, tidy and carefully laid as they are, but Armand slices the pad of his thumb to press his blood to skin. Daniel catches his wrist after, intent clear, scowling when Armand shakes his head.

“Why not?”

A thousand reasons and most of them because Armand is afraid. The only one he gives is the easiest of them. “Because I love you.”

“Yeah?” Daniel says, grin spreading wide and satisfied across his face. “Lucky me.”

---

By the time the plane lands, Armand knows what he wants, at least in part.

When Daniel stands to leave, Armand’s hand reaches out before he thinks better of it and lets it fall again. It serves its purpose either way. Daniel pauses, looking at him in silent expectation.      

“I want to love you again, Daniel.”

And, because Daniel will always have an uncanny knack for twisting knives he doesn’t even know he holds, he says, “Oh, great. Lucky me.”

 They’re in New York now, and Armand briefly entertains the idea of staying on the plane while it turns right back around before he says, “Come. I have your proof.”

“Leave your things in the car,” Armand says with a lazy handwave, stepping out of the cab.

Daniel follows, even as he says, “I’m not going to do that.”

“The driver will wait for as long as we need.”

“You can’t just–”

“And I’ll pay him for it Daniel, please. Do you really think–”

“So little of you? Dunno. One can only hope there’s always room to think even less.” Daniel shrugs his shoulder and Armand closes the door behind him. By the time they’ve made it five feet down the path, the driver is asleep with the doors locked.

It was afternoon when they left yesterday, and it’s evening now. The air here is damp and cold in comparison to Dubai. Everything around them is green and living, vibrant even in the overcast grey. Daniel doesn’t ask the questions he’s clearly preparing to just yet, so they walk in silence for a while.

“Are you cold?” Armand finally falls back on the familiar ground of courtesy. It had made a tidy shield in Dubai. Here it doesn’t provide the same comfort. He supposes that has a lot to do with the fact that the ground here is older and more familiar still. They’ve walked here before, so many times. Just here, on this path, in this park.

Daniel doesn’t answer the question, but he finally delivers his own. “Why are we in the Village, Armand?”

“You said that you wanted proof.”

“Right. And you said that you couldn’t give me any, so why the change?” There’s a trace of anxiety in Daniel’s voice, a small but present wariness.

“Because,” Armand says as if it’s obvious. “I remembered something.”

“Brag about it more, would you?” Daniel says darkly. His familiar ground is sarcasm. Armand gets the sense it’s working as poorly for him now as Armand’s courtesy.

Armand’s hands slip into his pockets. “It’s changed, here.”

This gets him a laugh that’s only half derision. “Yeah has it? Since when, the stone age?”

“There’s no need to be rude. I only meant the 70’s.” He’s been to New York since then, but never here.

Daniel stops short – a woman pushing a stroller behind them nearly crashes into his back, cursing under her breath as she maneuvers around where they both now stand still. He waits until the woman is out of earshot before he says, “Is this fun for you? Making cryptic comments about the time you brainwashed and fucked–”

“No, I can think of a number of other things I would rather be doing.” Armand intends it to be the truth but he isn’t certain it manages to be. “Unfortunately, most of them are no longer an option as you systematically disassembled my life over the course of two weeks, so here we are.”

“So it’s revenge, then.” Daniel says it as if he’s confirming a theory, and Armand cannot fault him for reaching the most logical conclusion.

“I told you what it is.”

“Right. You want to–” He stumbles over the words, “Love me again.”

He can’t fathom why it sounds so foolish when Daniel says it, but made so very much sense when he had declared it earlier. He knows the things that Daniel has heard have given him reason to think Armand a horrible person, but there’s something wounding about the level of skepticism he feels at the idea that Armand might be capable of love.

“You allowed Louis weeks to tell the story of his greatest losses,” Armand says. “Grant me a fraction of that time within which to find the words to tell you one of my own.”

Daniel doesn’t say anything for a long time. A single drop of rain lands on Armand’s nose. Daniel begins to walk again. “They renovated the park a few years back. Moved the fountain by a couple dozen feet or so.”

It’s not an agreement, but it’s a temporary truce. Armand doesn’t tell Daniel he already knows this, doesn’t think it would help things any. It’s seeing it with his own eyes that makes the change strange. Walking in a familiar place that has transformed in his absence. Metaphors are a very human thing; he tries hard to ignore the obvious one.

It takes time to find what he’s looking for and Daniel doesn’t attempt to break up the silence.

“Here,” Armand says, finally, stopping in front of a weathered wooden bench.

“Here?” Daniel raises an eyebrow. Steps closer. Runs his fingers over the plaque attached to it as if checking that it’s something tangible and not a hallucination. “What–”

“We lived together in the Village, for a time.”

This particular detail is handled relatively well, all things considered. It’s getting increasingly difficult to predict which revelations will upset Daniel, and which ones he will take in with numb disbelief.

“And someone… put your name on a bench.”

Armand doesn’t bother to smother a smile. “Yes.”

“Someone with my– I put your name on a bench?” The question is asked with a mixture of incredulity and confusion. Daniel looks in his direction but doesn’t quite look him in the eye.

“You did.”

“Why the fuck did I put your name on a bench?”

“I recall it being a gesture of apology, but it’s possible it was intended to prove a point,” Armand muses. An oversimplification, but not a lie. “I thought it romantic.”

Daniel does meet his eyes now, and in amongst the anger, the disgust, the confusion, there is also, finally, resignation. “Yeah well. Between Lestat and Louis for exes, I’m not all that surprised.”

He sinks down onto the bench, defeat in the line of his shoulders, and for a moment there is no difference at all. Time bends to Armand’s will, folds neatly in half, paints Daniel not young and not old, just as himself on a park bench. Beautiful.

Armand sits next to him, runs the tip of his pointer finger over the simply engraved forever for Armand, D.M. and tries to decide whether it is romantic to him now. It’s the sentiment of a young man with no concept of forever and no knowledge of its horrors, only an aching, desperate desire to greet it. And yet it is still here, etched under Armand’s touch.

And yet, it is proof enough for Daniel, who says, “Alright. Say I believe you.”

“You do believe me, Daniel.”

“Say I believe you,” Daniel repeats, firm and measured and clinging to what little power he can still hold on to in this moment. “How did this happen? How did you go from torturing me for six days in an apartment on Divisadero to living with me? And why the fuck don’t I remember any of it?”

There he is. The journalist reemerging in earnest to provide a surety the man alone cannot.

The clouds break open with fat raindrops and Armand looks up at the sky, feels them land cold on his cheeks and nose. In his eyes. Trickling into his ears. “Should I tell you here, or do you want to go back to your home?”

Daniel doesn’t accuse him of delaying this time. Of taunting him with what he knows and Daniel does not. He just pushes himself to standing and says, “Yeah. I wanna go home.”

Chapter Text

By the time they get there, the sky is rendered dim by the mixture of clouds and the setting sun.

It’s always a relief, the dip of the sun below the horizon. Being able to survive it has never made it comfortable. Like a too small pair of shoes, as much as he wants it to fit it never does. The way it warms his skin feels artificial. The light makes everyone but him more beautiful. Its memory is so very long, longer still than the memory of his own body. The light knows he is an imposter, a dark thing that turned his back on it too many years ago

Daniel’s home smells stale, like a place the light hasn’t touched in a long time. The curtains are all drawn, the lights off. Armand takes a breath, another, another, until he can peel back the layers of stagnant air and find Daniel underneath. He’d never bothered to pinpoint what Daniel smells like, because it would likely take a small infinity to capture the right words in the right languages.

In this, Daniel hasn’t changed at all.

Daniel moves about the apartment, turning on lights that wash the living room in warm orange glow. It’s filled with books, with loose papers, with trinkets. On the table an unfinished puzzle.

“A bit messy for your tastes, I’m sure,” Daniel quips. Just to fill the silence, Armand thinks.

“What are my tastes?”

“Carceral? Sterile? Lobotomizing?”

Armand picks up a piece, turns it between his thumb and forefinger. It has always been this way with Daniel – the push and pull. Sometimes tender, often just like this, with words chosen to sting. Armand’s words are chosen to bite in return. “Our home looked much like this.”

Of course, it’s not as if they don’t hurt him, too.

It’s a poorly made puzzle. One of the sort where the pieces fit in more than one place. The colors don’t match, the edges don’t blend. Armand leaves it in the wrong place anyways.

He hears the in-out of Daniel’s breath, slow to calm himself, loud enough so that Armand will hear it. Louis had been a buffer, Armand is beginning to understand. A distraction made up of the story he was intent upon telling. Without him the pieces of a history he was never a part of feel more vibrant, more present. Their shared life is in the room with them, even if the people who lived it are not.

With Louis there, it was easy to think Daniel a stranger. Easy, if Armand required it, to think of Daniel as just that boy in that cheap apartment in San Francisco.

Without him here it becomes so much easier to see the yawning gap in between. To recognize Daniel by the sound of his breathing, by the smell of him alive all over his home.

He isn’t sure what’s meant to happen next, and that’s a strange, uncomfortable thing. Uncertainty stretches his skin taught, sets the vertebrae of his spine stacking straight and sharp. He wants to wander. Wants to pick apart every piece of Daniel’s life here, study it. Wants to find what’s out of place, what fits at first glance but doesn’t blend. The tapes on the dining table, the letter written in Louis’s hand. Bottles of pills on the side table, decaffeinated coffee in a tin on the counter.

Briefly, he considers stopping time to do it. He would, too, if he could be entirely certain that Daniel wouldn’t notice. At this point he can’t be, and he’s absolutely sure that if he did it, it would only lead to more bickering and disappearing behind closed doors.

Daniel knocks shaky knuckles against the table once, then moves past it. Settles down on the couch as if nothing is strange and out of place. As if Armand has been here a thousand times. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even give the impression that he would have anything to say.

This is a tactic. Armand knows it’s a tactic because Daniel told him about it, loved to use it. Sometimes, he would say, you just have to wait and let silence do the work.

He would inevitably try it with Armand, and Armand would roam around in Daniel’s mind, entertain himself with his thoughts, until he found something that simply had to be addressed aloud. Effective, even for a vampire. Perhaps especially so.

Now, all Daniel’s focus is intent upon blocking access to his thoughts. The weight of effort thrown behind desire in full force. Armand could press it, of course. Could always force it, bruise it, break it. He can count on one hand the number of times he pushed into Daniel’s mind when he was actively willing him not to. He does not wish to do so now.

So he sits down on the other end of the couch to wait, one leg crossed over the other. It’s comfortable, worn in. He runs his index finger along a seam on the arm, and he looks at Daniel, and Daniel looks back.

There’s nobody to stop them. No buffer. Just a stubborn need to exist in orbit that he is beginning to believe Daniel mirrors.

“This isn’t an interview,” Armand finally says.

Daniel doesn’t bother to disguise his triumph. “No.”

“Which question would you like me to answer first?” He doesn’t know how to answer any of them, or he might have already done so. He had never imagined telling Daniel. This was a permanent decision, when it was made. There was no contingency plan.

“San Francisco.”

“What about San Francisco?” Armand already knows, of course. “What you know of what happened with Louis is the truth.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Armand shrugs his shoulder. “You are free to believe as you’d like. It is the truth. The last Louis saw of you, to my knowledge, was you slumped against the steps of the drug den where we left you.”

“And you? You what, waited for him to leave then snatched me right back up? Kept me–”

“Would you like to imagine how the story went, or would you like me to tell you?” Armand asks it with a genuine curiosity. It’s not Daniel’s usual practice to jump to conclusions. He’ll guess at things, certainly. But only to press out something honest. To squeeze truth from the denial of it.

Daniel considers it, too. Armand wonders how many times they will have to come to the decision to have this conversation before they finally have it. Daniel’s hand is a closed fist, shaking against the arm of the couch. Armand wants to take it in his, wants to sing sweet things to his nerves until they’re calm. He could, if Daniel would let him. Just as Louis so easily made it worse, Armand knows how to make it easier.

“Okay. Yeah, fine.” Daniel shifts his weight, sinks deeper against the back of the couch.

“Never, in all the time after that week in San Francisco, have I held you captive.” He had wanted to, so many times. When Daniel was stumbling down back alleys with glass pipes. When he was throwing up on the bathroom floor after three days almost entirely gone from his own mind. When he asked Armand to keep him safe. When he couldn’t ask Armand but wanted to, anyway.

It’s an effort to draw his mind away from it to keep going: “You can continue to tell me that I did, but the facts of this story do not change. I am not Louis, and I recall it all very very well. If you would like to waste our time, go ahead. I have more of it than you.”

“Low blow,” Daniel says. “But alright. Contested Fact #1: we were together. Contested Fact #2: I was not there entirely against my will.”

“You were with me entirely of your own will,” Armand corrects. “Mostly. Eventually.”

Daniel nods as if this is of no surprise to him, and Armand wishes he had lied. “And at first?”

“At first you were terrified.”

---

The hours are boring, slow, eternal. Louis rots away in charred skin, no longer so broken that he wails in pain, but still so broken that he has curled inside himself. Most days, he does not move at all. Most days, he doesn’t even open his eyes when Armand opens his coffin, cuts his own skin, gives dutifully of himself to Louis. He does not speak, he only drinks. His thoughts are pain without form, grief without shape.

Boring, slow, eternal.

Armand hates San Francisco. Hates that Louis has made him hate it, this city so full of life and colour. America feels too young for him, but there’s something old here. Something raw. Now, raw more like a rotting wound and less like sweet fruit.

He’s surprised to see the boy, sitting on the pavement, leaned up against a light post, scribbling frenetically in a notebook whose spine is barely clinging to its pages. He had really thought he would have died, shortly after. Of drugs and low blood volume combined, or his obvious stupidity.

It seems such a waste to Armand. To drink someone down to a shell but keep them holding on. He can hear his ache, his uncertainty. The way he can’t quite figure out why he’s breathing at the moment; trapped in feeling the desire Armand opened like a blossom in his chest, but with no memory of how it got there or what it is.

A weak testament to companionship this boy is, barely half a breath from dying, the drugs that could easily do it sitting in his right back pocket this very moment. Mixed up between an implanted desire to persevere and a cultivated but more familiar desire to give up. An unfair limbo for him, and now one that’s Armand’s problem as well.

He should have sent the boy off hitchhiking. Somewhere he could forget he exists entirely.

Now, instead, this piteous sight. Rail-thin, shaking, freezing cold.

Armand would do many things for Louis. Has done many things, for Louis. But this he will not do.

He will either kill the boy or make him wish to live. He hasn’t decided which, just yet, when he approaches. The boy – Daniel, yes – doesn’t look up when he approaches. Not even when Armand stands right at his feet. He kicks the bottom of his shoe and, of all expressions Daniel could possibly wear, he looks up with one of irritation.

“I’m bu– what the fuck?”

The recognition isn’t particularly surprising. It’s better to leave a small remnant of memory for the mind to anchor itself to than it is to leave it adrift in a sea of empty recollection. That Daniel already knows to be afraid is–

“Is this another– you’re not real.”

Great. He’s not only lost most will to live, he’s also rapidly losing his mind. Armand hasn’t had particular reason to play with the minds of mortals to this extent. There are flaws in the method, things he should have done better, and that is irritating beyond his current tolerance for it.    

“Aren’t I, Daniel?” Armand says, low and gentle so as not to startle the frightened animal. His eyes are so wide. Pretty eyes, in that particular way some human eyes are. Not vivid and unnatural. Beautiful like a lake or a sky or a forest. He’s not Louis’s usual type. Of course, as of late, Louis’s usual type has primarily amounted to any man who might theoretically enjoy intercourse with him. Which, in San Francisco, is a large enough proportion to have kept him occupied for–

“Nope. Been seeing you and your freaky boyfriend’s faces all over and you’re never real.” Daniel, for all his mind-numbing terror, is so confident in this. So attached to the idea that at least he can differentiate what is of reality and what is not.

Armand kicks his shoe again, harder. Hard enough to rattle him, have him pulling his knees up to his chest. “I assure you, this time I’m real.”

“If you’re pissed at me for– going with him, or whatever–”

“Why would I be angry with you?” He was never angry with the boy. “You mean nothing to me.”

Daniel’s face shows some unfathomable mixture of relief and offense. Human vanity, an enemy to survival. “Oh. Yeah, that’s cool. I wouldn’t– If I were–” He pauses a moment. “Are you certain you aren’t a hallucination?”

And that question, meaningless from the addled mind of a man barely just out of his childhood, sinks in deep the way only mundane questions ever do. He isn’t certain. Not really. How would he ever know if his entire existence was confined to a pocket inside someone’s mind? Most days he is someone else’s vision of himself.

“You should have left San Francisco,” Armand says.

Daniel’s thumbs tap a frantic, alternating rhythm against the tops of his knees, and he doesn’t quite seem to be able to encourage himself to blink though Armand is sure he’d like to. His whole body is buzzing and restless, unable to relax for weeks even when pumped with alcohol or heroin or quaaludes.

“Not exactly swimming in cash, here.” Daniel gestures to the ground around him as if to emphasize the obvious.

Armand sinks to a crouch at Daniel’s feet. Looks him in the eyes. The mind of someone utilizing stimulants in disorganized, overwhelming. A hundred concepts all at once, all of them terror, many of them resignation, some of them survival. An unsurprising but subtle thread of desire Daniel does not even name himself.

He can’t fathom why, when he so clearly wants to die, Daniel is continuing to live. Has a notebook in front of him with an attempt at actual ideas, even. Louis isn’t usually skilled enough to implant that sort of long-term motivation.

But then, just as Armand had not created Daniel’s desire to die from thin air, he supposes the desire to live might have been there, too.

“Would you like to live, Daniel? Or would you like to die?” Armand asks, gentle. “I insist that you choose.”

“Uh… preferably live.” It’s a lie delivered with the confidence of someone who thinks it’s the truth, but still there is the shadow. The longing. Armand knows the longing. “If you’re giving me a choice.”

“I’m giving you nothing,” Armand says, even as he pulls a handful of bills from his pocket and drops them into Daniel’s lap.

Daniel wants to point that out. Armand can hear him wanting to point it out, thinking better of it. Instead, he says, “What’s this for?”

“Leave town.” Armand waits until Daniel nods his agreement, then stands. “And Daniel? If you use that money for drugs, I will know.”

---

“Hello? Armand.” Daniel is snapping his fingers nearby – not in front of Armand’s face but close enough that he could reach out to grab them. He wants to. Wants to snap a bone in his pointer finger just to feel the crack of it, the body so human and fragile, the body that made it this far.

“Yes?”

Daniel rolls his eyes, pointed and slow. “Really? You gonna continue, or is terrified the entire story? Because I’d believe that much.”

“That’s what you want to believe,” Armand corrects. Daniel doesn’t look pleased with the implication, but he doesn’t argue either. “I found you on the street by chance, a few weeks after we left you.”

“By chance.”

Armand has always believed it to be by chance. He hasn’t pinpointed the moment he began to spare a single thought for Daniel, but he never believed it to be San Francisco. Not truly. “Coincidence.”

“How many times did you walk past random kids on the street and pay no attention to them?” The gears whirring in Daniel’s head. The why why why of his inner mechanics grabbing onto detail like the teeth of one cog grab to another.

“I was bored, those days. Waiting for Louis to emerge from his misery. I did not go looking for you, but perhaps I was aware of the possibility that you might continue to exist amongst the many,” Armand allows. “You were half dead and half mad. I gave you money, and I told you to leave the city. That’s the end of San Francisco.”

It had seemed wise not to return, and Daniel never suggested it.

“So where did I go next?”

“Think about it, Daniel. Where did you go next? There should be pieces still. Especially of that time.”

“Give me a break. Even without your fingers digging around in my brain, it’d be hard to remember.” Daniel tries anyways, while Armand considers the visual. “Was it… Phoenix?”

Armand smiles, sinks deeper into the couch. “Very good, Daniel.”

“Patronizing asshole,” Daniel says. Armand can see the lightest flush spread over the back of his neck. Pavlovian conditioning, outliving even memory itself. “Why– the sun.”

“Yes, the sun. Clever, in theory. You had no memory of seeing me in the sun. You knew what Louis had told you, hazy though the details were.” It hadn’t gone so far as to impress Armand then, but it did continue to confound him. The boy who did not want to live, who wanted to live so very much. “If I recall, you also found a very cheap flight there, a weeklong motel rental, and still had enough left over to buy crack.”

“That… tracks.” Daniel kicks his feet up onto the coffee table, so clearly more comfortable here that Armand almost believes the journey to have been worth it. “How long did it take you to find me?”

“A better question would be how long it took me to reveal myself to you again,” Armand suggests. Daniel tilts his head, a silent ‘well then?’ that Armand doesn’t need to read his mind to hear. “Two days. I let you get well and truly obliterated first. Kept waiting to see if you would–”

“Die?”

“Yes. Or live. You didn’t seem particularly committed to either.”

“Are you?” It’s the sort of question a younger Daniel would have been brave enough to ask, but would never have known to think of. It surprises Armand now, that simple parallel. He’d never drawn it then – it hadn’t been in his nature to make comparison of mortal human lives and his own for many years by that time, and he was only just beginning to pay humanity any real mind again.

Daniel looks at him unblinking, some of the irritation stripped away in favor of genuine curiosity. Armand isn’t sure how to answer him. He doesn’t know the answer to it. In this moment, being whatever version of alive he can call what he is means sitting next to Daniel on a soft couch under warm lighting, finding a hundred different ways to tell Daniel I loved you once, I did. In the next, it might simply mean an eternity with no promise of companionship. With no witness.

He doesn’t find the answer quickly enough. The moment breaks. The next one is simply more of the same.

“What did you do when you found me?” Daniel asks as if he keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for Armand to admit to tying Daniel up and leaving him in a basement somewhere. This is where it feels most difficult. All those years of proof that he would not hurt Daniel replaced with a single memory that proves the very opposite.

“I gave you more money, and I told you to leave again.”

Daniel gets a look on his face then like he understands, like he knows something. Like he isn’t  just willfully interpreting this as the confirmation that Armand did, in fact, find a way to torture him. Armand is willing to admit, perhaps, that it may have seemed that way to Daniel at first.

“And I went to…?”

“Toronto.”

“And?”

“Your deductive reasoning skills are excellent, Daniel. I’m sure you’ve pieced together this much.”

“A game of cat and mouse then. For how long?”

“Months. All over the world.” Armand feels fond when he thinks of it. Those early days were very simple. Before he came to care for Daniel, when he was only following him around the world trying to figure out how his strange mind worked. Learning, much to his annoyance, all the things that made Daniel so very fascinating.

Daniel’s foot shakes. Not in the uncontrolled tremor that his hand does, just in that always-moving always-buzzing always-present way in which he tends to move. “Okay. Why did you do it?”

There are a lot of answers he could give, and all of them honest to a degree. The boredom. The loneliness. The curiosity.

The entertainment, too. The way he would spend days or weeks watching Daniel interact with the world. Witnessing his better moments, his interviews and explorations. Appearing during the worse ones to find him passed out in houses and behind bars and on sidewalks. A short distance from being the victim of a far more mundane end.

Instead, he says, “It’s very easy to convince someone to die, you know. Far harder to convince them to live. I’m not sure I ever did, with you.”

---

Months. For months he finds Daniel at the halfway point between living and dead, and for months he asks him the same question. “Would you like to live Daniel? Or would you like to die?” And for months Daniel says some version of ‘yeah, let me live,’ and Armand gives him money, and he disappears to some other city. Some other country.

Daniel makes friends everywhere he goes, but he doesn’t seem to really know anybody. He doesn’t visit family. He doesn’t make phone calls often. He occasionally keeps it together in one place long enough to write a freelance article for a local paper, if he’s in a place where he speaks the language. It seems a lonely, desperate existence. Armand doesn’t know what his life looked like before, of course. Doesn’t know how much of this is because Daniel feels forced to leave, and how much of it is simply because he’s looking for excuses not to stay.

By now his fear has levelled out. His heart still races, but the terror that used to nearly overwhelm his nervous system doesn’t come anymore. Armand thinks he should mind far more than he does.

This time he finds Daniel in Barcelona, staring down into a half empty bottle as if it’s the barrel of a gun. It’s only been two days since Armand sent him away from Madrid. Usually he follows him for a while before he let’s Daniel know his presence. Watches. Tries to pinpoint what it is that’s keeping him going.

This time he finds Daniel right away. Staring into a bottle like a gun. And he asks, “Would you like to live, Daniel? Or would you like to die?”

This time Daniel says, “ask me again tomorrow.”

And this time, Armand sits there beside Daniel, too far back to touch the ocean even as the tide comes in, close enough to see it. To remember it as a sort of old friend. Time drifts by and it’s so quiet, here. Daniel’s mind, even, is a still thing. Not at peace, but not scrambling the way it often is. He’s not high, just pleasantly warm from the red wine he’s been drinking.

The night tips over into the new day. Daniel’s watch reads 12:07.

“Would you like to live, Daniel? Or would you like to die?”

“Live, I think.” Daniel says. Tipping that bottle of wine back, drinking long, Adam’s apple bobbing with every swallow. “I must want to live, right? I keep on doing it, for some reason.”

“Der Wille zum Leben,” Armand says. “The-will-to-live.”

Daniel snorts a laugh, a loud, unexpected thing in the quiet they’ve sunken into for so many hours. “Vampires read philosophy?”

“Some. Schopenhauer posited that the irrepressible, blind urge to survival is accompanied by an existence designed for suffering.” Armand cannot recall the last time he discussed philosophy with anyone. It was almost certainly with Louis many years ago. Things were different between them, then. Or at least they had appeared so.

Daniel taps his fingernail against the glass. Armand isn’t sure what he expects, but it isn’t the lucidity with which Daniel says, “If I had a blind urge towards survival, would I do the things I do?”

“If you did not, would you continue to demonstrate enough restraint to keep them from killing you?”

Philosophy is a strange thing, stretched out into an immortal life. The life that seems so very different between his kind and mortal humanity at a surface level becomes much the same when discussing the motivation, the meaning, the reality of what is and is not. Concepts too expansive for humanity to wrap their head around are no more digestible to him now than they were five hundred years ago.

Perhaps they are harder to understand, even.

Daniel lays back against the sand, too comfortable now that time and proximity have set his body at ease. Armand’s own will is that which would kill someone like Daniel in order to live.  

Not Daniel, though. Not in this moment.

“You know,” Daniel says, a giddy sort of humor in his voice. “I think if I was demonstrating restraint, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

Armand cannot argue that point. Daniel can’t run from him, not truly. But that he does not try with any real commitment has become a source of endless bewilderment for Armand. “Do you think want and will are different?” he asks instead.

Daniel closes his eyes in Armand’s peripheral and says, “Don’t know, man. You’ve had a good– how old are you?”

“I was born in the 1500’s,” Armand supplies.

“Cool. Yeah. That’s fucking insane.” There’s a familiar thread of excitement there, less frenzied than Armand heard on the tapes, but still so vibrant. The novelty of immortality that only the mortal can entertain. “Anyways. You’ve had a lot longer to figure that shit out, so why don’t you tell me?”

“I think–” Armand chews the inside of his cheek, sinks blunt teeth into the soft flesh there until he can taste the blood he’s taken in the name of a very long half-life. “Ask me again tomorrow."

Chapter Text

London is cold and damp and miserable. Armand hasn’t had to worry about any of those things in a long time, but he does now with Daniel. The weather makes him needy and irritable, both of which Armand remains inexplicably charmed by. Sickness makes him even moreso, tucked into the hotel bed with a headache marking the last remnants of a cold.

“Come here,” Daniel says, voice muffled by the blanket.

“No.”

“Why not? Don’t you love me?” Needy.

“Of course I love you,” Armand closes the book in his lap – this month he’s reading Westerns – and looks to the bed. He can only see the curls atop Daniel’s head. “But you kicked me out of bed 28 minutes ago.”

“But hey, who’s counting?” Daniel mutters. Louder, “That’s because you’re freezing cold.”

Irritable.

Armand nudges Daniel’s foot with his own, legs propped up on the bed, armchair pulled close enough to do so. “Apologies. I’ve been a bit occupied.”

A beat of silence, then, “You’re right. You should eat. It’s been… okay. I don’t know how long it’s been because I’ve been passed out on cough syrup for most of it. But awhile.”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s a cold, baby. It won’t kill me.” Daniel tugs the blanket down to look at him. “Go. So you can get back here and keep me proper company.”

Inexplicably charming.

---

He takes less time choosing than he might ordinarily, only goes through the motions. It’s strange, loving a mortal. Louis has always been far weaker than him but barring the presence of other vampires (and his brief foray into the sun) he’s perfectly capable of caring for his physical safety wherever they go. Daniel… seems to seek out opportunities that could easily lead to his death.

At this point, Armand half suspects that he willed himself to illness.

He’s seen far worse sickness than a cold, of course. He’s borne witness to plagues, smelled death in the blood of thousands at once. It’s simply different, with Daniel. Daniel is his.

Daniel is asleep when Armand gets back to the room, quietly slipping off shoes (Daniel’s), and jeans (also Daniel’s), and his shirt (bought for him by Daniel, so technically not Daniel’s), and crawling into the bed. Daniel drifts into him like a magnet, fits against his body like a puzzle piece locking neatly into place. His hand slides up to lay flat between the wings of Armand’s shoulder blades, his face tucks into his neck.

He stirs slowly, a soft hum low in his throat when he’s conscious enough to mark Armand’s presence. “Oh hey,” he whispers.

If Armand could exist in only one place for the rest of his remarkably long life, he thinks he would be happy to live in the rough scratch of Daniel’s sleep-lazy throat. He says as much in Daniel’s mind, just for the pleasure of feeling him press closer even as he tries to protest.

His fingers slide into Daniel’s hair, careful against his scalp, careful not to tug at curls that are wont to tangle miserably. For a while they stay that way, as close to human as Armand thinks he has ever been.

“How do you do it?” Daniel finally murmurs into the thick dark of the room.

“Do what?” Armand asks, though he already knows. He keeps hoping that pushing back on his questions will make Daniel more likely to shy away from asking questions at all, but it has yet to be effective.

“You know. Kill people.” Armand can hear Daniel’s heartbeat, can feel it against his skin. “I mean… is it– do they–”

“Hurt?”

“Know. Do they know they are going to die?”

It’s the first time Daniel has asked. The first time they’ve said the quiet, evil piece out loud into a room and made tangible the murder that is usually just referenced as a meal. Armand takes a moment, searches for the answer. “All vampires have preferences. Some of them like to surprise their prey, others like to–”

“I don’t care about other vampires. I asked you.” All the blood in the world couldn’t replace the warmth that blooms in Armand’s chest.

Of course, answering him is a poor choice, but he finds it very difficult to refuse Daniel any of the things that are within his power to grant.

“You remember we talked months ago, about the-will-to-live?”

Daniel snorts, a hot breath of air near the base of Armand’s throat. “Yeah. Back then I thought philosophy was the weirdest thing about you.”

“What’s the weirdest thing about me?”

“Gun to my head, I’d never be able to choose. Don’t change the subject.”

He would very much like to change the subject. Wonders if this is one of those conversations where everything after will be permanently, irreparably, miserably altered. “I find that in the person. The-will-to-live. And I turn it off.”

“Damn th–”

“And then I find all of their suffering. Their anger, their pain, their fear. And so much loneliness– these times are lonely, Daniel. Everyone just aching for anything that makes them feel less so.”

He remembers Daniel, who fought so hard not to give up that will. Who clung to it with two hands and a half-formed hope that he had things to say to the world. Who still, like all people, would have died having given himself over to Armand’s offered void if not for Louis. He has enough distance from that day to be grateful to Louis for it now.

“The suffering is excruciating. It’s endless, it’s always existed inside of humanity.” He knows it. He has so much of it in him, now. “I offer them a reprieve. A gentle exit from all of it. I take everything that they are and in return I give them… an easeful death.”

“Easeful. That sounds…” Daniel trails off, lets his mind speak for him in shapeless musings.

“No, Daniel,” Armand murmurs, pushing him to his back, straddling his hips. “I am still a monster.”

His hand find’s Daniel’s throat, curves gently along the column of it, feels the pulsing highway of blood, and the thick swallow, and the gentle vibration when Daniel says, “I know.”

“Do you? Or do you imagine me to be separate from it? My hunger, my need to kill.” Do you love all of me? he wants to say. Could you? “What of the lives I have taken? Mothers, children, activists, scholars. I could not count them, and I do not feel remorse.”

Daniel’s hand wraps around his wrist, not pushing him away, not coaxing him further, his thumb stroking back and forth across the sensitive skin until it settles on Armand’s pulse. “I think you do, though. Feel remorse.”

“You just want–”

“No. You feel it and it’s what makes you miserable as all hell after you’ve fed. Why would I want misery for someone I love? I’d pardon you for all of it if I could.”

Armand cannot find the lie in Daniel’s mind, nor can he trust it as truth. With a thought, he flips on the lamp next to them, watches Daniel’s pupils shrink. “I’m not miserable now.”

“You are, a little.” Daniel’s mouth turns up in a smile. Teasing Armand, with a hand wrapped around his throat. Joking with a monster who would love nothing more than to climb inside.

Armand leans down to kiss him, then. He tastes like sickness, like his too-short life. Perhaps Daniel is right to think him miserable. It’s harder to remain that way with Daniel’s tongue stroking the inside of his mouth, with Daniel’s hips beginning to shift beneath him, with Daniel’s joy at being this close a tangible and contagious thing.

‘I want to try,’ Daniel thinks. ‘Please, let me–”

He has asked before. Has asked many times, since the first moment he offered his own blood weeks ago. It was no small thing to drink from Daniel, and it is no small thing to consider letting him drink in turn. He hasn’t explained his refusal to Daniel, his repeated ‘not yet’ each time Daniel asks.

Armand assumes his reasons to hesitate will only make Daniel want it more. To exchange blood goes beyond the intensity of simply allowing Armand to drink from him. It is addictive. It is all encompassing. And more, it will mark Daniel as Armand’s in a way that cannot be taken back.

It’s selfish to take him, and he does it anyway.

“Okay beloved, if you wish.” Armand rearranges them again, sitting with his back to the wall and Daniel straddling him instead. The boy is buzzing with anticipation, still sleep-drowsy and drunk on lazy kisses. “Beautiful.”

Daniel flushes, pretends not to preen under the praise. He is already Armand’s.

It’s so simple, after that, to sink his nail into the tender flesh of his wrist and feel the still body-warm blood well up. To wind his fingers into the hair at the back of Daniel’s head, and press his wrist to Daniel’s mouth.

A soft sound of uncertainty, the glimpse of the rust-flood in Daniel’s mind, a murmured, “Shh, drink.”

And Daniel does. Sees the fear and the pain and the suffering Armand has taken and takes it in turn, with a dizzying horror and a firecracker joy and the sort of trust in Armand that he did not know could exist without the use of the mind gift. All along, eyes wide open and locked with Armand’s own.

It does change everything, irreparably, miserably, exquisitely.

The years with Daniel, are impossible to summarize.

It is one of Armand’s most significant stories, but it’s too small to tell. Too close. All this time it’s been folded up small somewhere inside him. Not his head or heart where he could so easily stumble over it. But parted out everywhere else. Perhaps wrapped around his ligaments, sealed against the bones of his ribcage, etched to the inside of his skin.

Close, where it feels like unearthing it is surgical, is excavation. Impossibly imprecise. No matter how carefully he tries to separate it from his body, it makes him bleed, it sticks too close.

He spends the next hour listing countries and cities where they went without explaining what they meant, how they pressed their hands to the ground in a hundred places, the way every one of them still bears their fingerprints. He tells Daniel how, with no particular reason and through no particular intent, Daniel stopped being terrified that he would kill him and Armand stopped wanting him to be, but he doesn’t talk about the new fear. The soft, bird-boned fear. The split open, laid bare fear of the inevitable.

Armand gives the facts, but stripped of their meaning he knows there is no honesty to them. Daniel knows, too. He’s just likely too tired to push or too tired to care.

Frustration feels rare to Armand, these days. Any emotions that spark more than a passing recollection of energy in his body are rare, really. It takes him off guard now, building in his teeth, his chest, his knuckles. He rubs his right thumb along the line of his left where both hands sit in his lap, catches Daniel’s eyes drop down, back up.

“I don’t know how I’m supposed to explain,” he admits.

“You could have said nothing,” Daniel says.

“I know that.” Armand doesn’t have patience today. Realizes, with a distant sort of interest, that he feels no reason to have it. It’s not as if anything will implode now that hasn’t already.

Daniel raises his eyebrows, “Yeah? Well. Again: consequence.”

“I’m not a child. You don’t need to scold me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Daniel says, hand flexing against the arm of the couch. He was never very good at hiding his weariness from Armand, but his body gives him away far more easily now. It’s anyone’s guess how long it will take before he can be convinced to sleep, however.

“How did we go from you stalking me all over the globe, to us renting an apartment?”

“How does anyone do anything? You’ve been married. Surely you can recall how it is to fall in love.”

Daniel makes a noncommittal sound, something close to a hum. His mind wanders, flashes of muted recollection, glimpses of doubt. It’s wrong, Armand supposes, to bask in the clear divide between the way Daniel once thought about him and the way he recalls his ex-wives. Even now, with no context and no memory, Daniel is flooded with guilt.

That and exhaustion turn his voice sharp. “I can’t recall how we– you took that.”

“If you asked me how anything else happened, I could tell you it. I could call it up in tidy words, could paint it. If you want to know the very moment I loved Louis, the very second I decided to lie to him, the exact heartbeat in which I– anything. I could pinpoint anything.” It comes out too much like a plea, and Armand thinks he would mind less if Daniel’s instinctive response was not to suspect ulterior motive. “But this? I don’t know how, Daniel. I don’t know when it happened, only that it did.”

“We’re going in circles here,” Daniel says. Armand opens his mouth to answer and Daniel shakes his head. “No, just… Okay. I think I can imagine why I played along. Beyond the obvious crippling fear. But why–”

“–did you let it become more?” It’s a testament to how frustrated they both are that Daniel doesn’t bother getting angry with him for pulling the thought from his mind. It’s a strange question to ask, considering Daniel insists upon not believing any of Armand’s answers. He sifts for the right one anyway, and it just so happens to be something honest. “You wanted to be special, Daniel. And you were very special to me.”

This small piece of the story is peeled away from Armand’s left rib, sews itself to Daniel instead. It becomes his to carry now, this bit of truth. A thing Armand does not need to keep. It has very little to do with him, after all. It’s a desire as old as Daniel is. Most of it still lived in him all this time, anyway. A piece of larger longing returned home.

Daniel has his eyes closed now, pinches the bridge of his nose, waits a long time before speaking. “Remind me again, why you want to do this?”

“I miss the way it felt to love you,” Armand says simply.

“Yeah? And how’s that?”

“Like absolution.”

Daniel scoffs, a hot puff of breath, and Armand bleeds and bleeds. “Yeah. That explains it.”

He doesn’t want to know. He asks anyways. “What does it explain?”

“You didn’t love me, not really. Love like what you want me to believe in doesn’t just go away. And it’s not something you just force yourself to feel again.” Daniel speaks to him slow, almost gentle, and that makes it worse. “You just want it now because you feel guilty again.”

No, Armand wants to say, it wasn’t that sort of absolution.

“And you know what?” Daniel continues. “I had no business giving you any absolution then, and I’m not fucking doing it now.”

No, you’ve got it wrong. He would understand. He did. These pieces he cannot cut out, cannot expel. Instead, he says, “Perhaps you should get some sleep. We will continue this when you have rested.”

He expects Daniel to argue, but instead he just breathes out in a long exhale and says, “Yeah. Let’s do that.” He’s slow getting to his feet and Armand wants to help him. To offer a hand, to touch. “And Armand?”

“Yes, Daniel?”

“I’m not looking to feel special, these days.”

It’s meant to be a rebuff. To discourage him, likely. It would work better if it were true.

There isn’t any particular reason to be bothered by it. It’s not something that has bothered him greatly before. Bodies are only bodies, made up of instincts to fight, to flee, to fuck. Daniel certainly has all three, always has.

Armand isn’t certain why this sets him on edge, then.

Perhaps it’s that he searched three different clubs before he landed on this one, because Daniel’s smell had been all over all of them. Perhaps it’s because they’re on the west coast, and LA is too close to San Francisco, and watching Daniel in this moment is too close to Louis. Perhaps it’s just that the boy he’s dancing with is beautiful, and Daniel is smiling at him with bright eyes.

Perhaps it’s that all of these things are occurring after a fight that’s left Armand feeling hollowed out and tired.

‘He wants to fuck you, you know.’ Armand watches Daniel look around, search for him in the crowd. The boy – a pretty, blonde thing – draws his attention back with a hand on his neck, a whisper in his ear. ‘He’s thinking about it. About what you’d sound like, how you taste. Should I show him?’

The song changes. Daniel doesn’t walk away.

‘Do you want him to fuck you, Daniel? Do you want him to bend you over the counter in the bathroom? Or perhaps you want him in the alley, on your knees? Or you’d like to use him right here, get off and leave him wanting while you go snort another rail?’

The flood of desire is instantaneous, the images slower to coalesce. When they do, the boy is not in them in Daniel’s mind. Only Armand. Only Daniel.

‘You’re jealous,’ Daniel thinks, with a triumphant, unashamed sort of delight.

‘And you’re vicious and cruel,’ Armand returns.

‘Don’t pout, come dance with me.’

The boy is still talking to Daniel, still rattling off clumsy attempts at seduction even as Armand slips between them, loops his arms around Daniel’s neck. The words die on his tongue but he doesn’t leave, he watches the two of them begin to dance, wide-eyed and unmoving.

Daniel’s voice is low and warm in Armand’s ear when he says, “Now who’s being cruel?”

‘He’s going to watch, that’s all. Nothing cruel in being made to watch two beautiful people dance, is there?’

And Daniel, ashamed of it though he may be, basks in the compliment, in the attention Armand gives only to him. They dance, Daniel’s hand sliding down low enough for fingers to dip into Armand’s waistband. They dance, Armand slotting his leg between Daniel’s. They dance, the boy watching with some strange mixture of horror and desire.

At some point, Armand simply forgets the boy is there. Forgets to dismiss him, forgets the world is around them. He does not need the world, though perhaps that had been part of the crux of their argument.

‘You wish to make friends, Daniel? To build a life?’

“Not right now,” Daniel murmurs back, mouth pressed warm and wet to the hinge of his jaw. The truth of it is there still, beneath the driving beat of the music and the driving beat of Daniel’s own heart. The loneliness. “Right now I want you.”

Then Daniel is nipping at his earlobe, hard enough to sting, and Armand sets the truth aside in favor of pleasure. He fits Daniel’s mouth to his own, claims him, is claimed in return. Feels their desire mirrored, feels his resolve slipping. He prefers not to drink from Daniel when he’s high. Doesn’t like the taste of cocaine on his tongue, or the way it sets the mind frantic.

But Daniel doesn’t seem frantic now. His anger is drained out of him, not magnified.

“Show him,” Daniel says.

It’s not what Armand had intended when he offered to show Daniel’s admirer how he tastes. He searches Daniel for motive. Looks for any indication that he wants the boy, that this is about something beyond the two of them. All he finds is hunger, an unwavering desire to belong to and to have.

His teeth sink into Daniel’s neck with a certainty that comes from practice, and his mouth floods sweet and dark, and if anybody around them notices him drinking he doesn’t care. He expects the chemical taste of cocaine, the burn of alcohol. When he gets neither, it takes him longer than it should to notice the earthiness beneath the metal.

‘Daniel.’

This earns him a low groan and nothing more.

‘What did you take?’

This earns him a lazy image: the outstretched offering from the blonde boy an hour ago, the taste of dirt on Daniel’s tongue.  

Armand withdraws, drags the flat of his tongue over the wound while Daniel whines his protest. ‘Mushrooms?’

“Oh. Shit.”

He should have noticed, earlier. Can’t entirely blame Daniel for being who he is. He tries to recall if he’s ever drunk the blood of someone high on mushrooms before. If he has, it’s been many years. There’s something strangely vulnerable in not knowing. It certainly won’t cause him harm, any more than any other drug, but he still feels off-kilter.

Daniel has developed an uncanny knack for reading Armand with a near vampiric accuracy. He draws his thumb across Armand’s mouth and smiles so tender, and Armand thinks that smile could be a drug in and of itself. “My bad, baby. Don’t worry. It’s good.”

Armand would like to tell Daniel that he isn’t worried, because he really has no need to be. But it feels good, that comfort. That surety with which Daniel holds Armand’s centuries of life in his hands as if they weigh nothing at all.

His mind is disorganized, shifting from one thought to the next without reason. Drawn into Daniel’s, images of both his own and Daniel’s mixing together pleasantly. It feels good to be so a part of him. He let’s Daniel carry them both along with the music, let’s himself drift in the familiarity of Daniel’s touch until it turns him pliant and soft.

They sway to music far slower than what plays and he has the vague sense of someone bumping into them. Swearing at Daniel.

Then Daniel’s soft, “Holy shit,” in the sudden silence.

He doesn’t want to pull his face away from its home on Daniel’s shoulder, but he does anyways, looking with only minimal interest at the room frozen around them before his gaze settles on Daniel with sudden seriousness. “Are you still angry with me?”

“I’m always mad at you,” Daniel shrugs. “You’ve ruined my life.”

There’s truth in that. Armand won’t deny it, cannot even bring himself to apologize for it.

Daniel looks angelic like this, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, damp curls sticking to his forehead. “Is it because you don’t think you’ll love me for long enough?”

Armand’s mind is made slow, too disorganized by the mixture of drugs and blood and keeping a club full of people entirely still. “What?”

“You won’t turn me. That’s why, isn’t it?”

When he understands, he does so all at once and with a shock of laughter escaping him. He holds Daniel’s face in both hands – his beautiful face, with its tiny lines of age beginning to collect in places where their life together wrinkles his brow or the corners of his eyes – and presses his mouth to Daniel’s to smother the sound.

‘Daniel. Lover, beloved, source of all my joy and aggravation.’ He can’t be sure whether he actually says it in Daniel’s head, or whether he announces it into the minds of the hundreds milling about them, but he doesn’t care. ‘It is because I will love you forever that I will not make you in my image.’

---

Armand wanders the streets while Daniel sleeps, uses nostalgia like a weapon turned inward. Slicing and prying memory from where he’s kept it so carefully. From where he has thus far allowed himself to pick and choose that which would make life bearable.

This city holds a thousand memories, but it calls to mind a million more. He doesn’t want to tell Daniel; he wants Daniel to know. Wants Daniel to carry with him the same ache of what was had and lost. Wants him to be able to see the things that made the scars in his own mind, not only sense the lack.

He has not allowed himself to want so many things in a very long time. Daniel makes him greedy now, just as he did then. Makes him hunger the way that living things do, for human things, for life.

To live is to suffer, and this pain cracks his ribs, pulls his fangs out by the root.

Hours and hours he walks, he remembers, he feels. Until the sun begins to rise and dismisses him from the world with the reminder that Daniel will wake soon.

If he feels a tightening in his chest as he returns to Daniel’s apartment, a familiar old excitement, then that is for nobody to know but him. Not the moon, not the sun, not even Daniel.

He is awake and drinking coffee in the kitchen when Armand returns.

“Thought you might have run away,” Daniel says, carefully neutral.

“I only went for a walk. I wished to revisit some places.” 

“That’s a shame.” Daniel tries for disappointment but looks distinctly relieved. Attempts to cover it up by taking a sip of coffee. “So? Were you successful in reviving your delusions?”

“Mm,” Armand hums. “I was thinking about what you said.”

“I say a lot of shit.”

“You said if I had truly loved you, it would never have gone away, and I think you’re correct.”

“Sure, yeah, it happens once in a while.” There’s that carefully neutral tone again, the transparent attempt at apathy. “It’s alright. Everyone mistakes infatuation for love every once in a while.”

“No, I did love you, Daniel. I just simply never stopped.”

Chapter Text

Daniel’s mug hits the counter with a loud crack, coffee sloshing over the sides. Armand sees a glimpse of real anger now, flashing hotter than it has since Daniel first remembered San Francisco. He likes Daniel angry – he likes Daniel all ways, he supposes, but angry he can become something else entirely. Can deftly connect his intelligence to his capacity for cruel words in a way that few manage in as short a time as he has lived. It’s always dazzling to watch.

“Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, telling me all this shit might not be good for me?” Daniel asks. His hand wraps around the handle of the mug again, freezes there like he can’t decide whether he wants to take a sip or throw it. It might help to throw it, Armand thinks. Might give him some direction in which to send all the energy vibrating inside his body. “Well? Did you?”

There’s a counter between them and he’s disappointed by it. Thinks, perhaps, if they were just a little bit closer Daniel might reach out. Grab him by the shirt, jab his finger into the center of his chest, take a swing at him, maybe. Anything would be good, would be tangible when Armand has spent far too much time in the clouded memories in his own head.

He didn’t think of it, no. Not when he first mentioned it, so desperate to have Daniel stay that he chose the one thing he knew would work. Not on the plane, or on the bench in the park, or last night on the couch.

He simply stopped short of giving Daniel back the memories, and that had felt generous enough.

“I–”

“Not Louis. Don’t need excuses.”

It’s bait. It’s not as if Armand is unfamiliar with the methods Daniel will use to start a fight. Find the weak spot, dig his fingers into the gap, pry it apart until the emotion opens itself up for him. It wouldn’t work as well if he wasn’t so accurate in his aim. He’s accurate for all the wrong reasons in this case, but it doesn’t matter.

Armand presses both palms to the counter. Feels the granite, hard and smooth against his skin. “You have never been Louis.” And you’ve never needed excuses before, he wants to say, but you need them now so let me give them to you.

“I’m sure I made a better consolation prize back in ’73.”

He isn’t sure what the right thing to say to that is. There’s no right thing, perhaps. Only a series of wrong ones. He cannot lie and say that he doesn’t miss that Daniel. Cannot claim they are one and the same because by the very nature of what Daniel cannot recall, they are made separate. But the Daniel that stands before him now isn’t worse. Isn’t a disappointment.

He chooses the best of the bad options. “You weren’t a consolation prize then, and you aren’t one now. Louis is separate. And– there’s no comparison worth making. Certainly not when you only know fragments.”

“Does anyone ever know more than fragments with you?”

Armand’s nails tap against the stone. He resists the urge to sink them in, to leave tangible scratches in the surface of Daniel’s life. “Is this your plan for the day? Trading barbs back and forth?”

“As fun as that is,” Daniel says, and perhaps even without sarcasm, lifting the mug to his mouth again. Before he takes a sip, he says “No. I have shit to do.”

“And what is that?” Armand straightens.

“Oh, I don’t know. Send a couple texts to daughters that won’t answer but might report me missing if they don’t hear from me at all. Replace my fucking laptop and figure out how to get the files that are doubtless in a cloud I don’t have direct access to. Start writing a book. Call my agent. Call my doctor. Check my bank account to see if I’ve actually become obscenely rich over night. See if you legally have to pay taxes on money wires from dead men in Dubai.” Daniel gets increasingly more harried as he makes his way through the list. A far cry from how controlled he is when commanding an interview.

Armand supposes the shock might be beginning to wear off.

“Alright.” Armand tries for gentle and it earns him a scowl. “I’ll have a laptop delivered. Your doctor has already been made aware of your return. And the Talamasca will doubtless already be waiting for you to sign in to your accounts again with their conditions for access. The texts are easy. The money is in your account. Everything else can wait.”

Daniel opens his mouth as if to protest, then closes it again when he cannot decide what to protest first. What his mind lands on, instead, is a question.

“I have no relationship with the Talamasca. Just an understanding of how they operate–”

“Stay out of my–”

“Head. Yes, I know. Anyways.” Armand knows he’s doing little to make Daniel less annoyed with him. It’s the easiest state for him to be in. It hurts the least. “Don’t give in to any demands. They won’t risk publishing without your involvement. Any power they have, they have because they know when to let someone else take the fall.”

“Like Rashid,” Daniel says blankly.

“Rashid is fine,” Armand says, perhaps a little sharper than necessary. “You, however, are–”

“A captive in my own home while an ancient vampire tortures me with stories from a romcom he made up in his head?” Daniel’s mouth curves to a smile and it’s too close to teasing for Armand to get hung up on the willful disbelief Daniel keeps clinging to.

“You aren’t a captive.”

“Right.” Daniel dumps the dregs of his coffee in the sink, setting the mug back beneath the coffee maker, starting another coffee brewing. “And if I leave right now?”

“I’ll come with you,” Armand says placidly.

“And if I ask you not to?”

Armand lifts on shoulder in a minute shrug. “Don’t ask me not to.”

Daniel has his back to Armand, but he can hear the careful in-out-in before the response. “Great. At least this time I’m not covered in my own blood.”

He forgets, sometimes, that this Daniel knows about San Francisco. It takes the slowly creeping lightness and crushes it under the decades old weight of his own actions. And that’s what Daniel meant for it to do.

“I’m–”

“Don’t.” Daniel cuts him off, and he’s grateful for it. He can’t be the sort of sorry for it that Daniel would need him to be. He would have to regret everything those few days led to, and he’s never been capable of doing so. “Just get some rest. You look like shit.”

Daniel spares a glance over his shoulder and Armand can’t tell what his expression means even when he tries to find the answer in Daniel’s mind. He considers when the last time he slept was and comes up short of an answer for that, too.

He chooses his next words carefully, unsure how they’ll be received. His attempts at honesty have thus far been unsuccessful. “If you want me not to tell you anything more, I’ll stop.”

To promise he will leave would be disingenuous, but this much he can offer.

Daniel is quiet for a while. Long enough that Armand begins to count the passing seconds for something to occupy his time. Then, simply, “Duly noted.”

Armand does attempt sleep, laying on the bed in Daniel’s spare room with the curtains drawn and the door closed and Daniel in his living room trying to sift through the necessary pieces of his life.

Sleep is exceedingly vulnerable and Armand has not slept anywhere but in that too-big bed in Dubai in decades. He can count on one hand the number of nights in that time that he has slept without Louis next to him.

He knows Daniel sees their union as one of barely contained misery. He knows Louis now sees it as just an extended lie. But Armand cannot see it either way. He cannot see it as one singular thing, but if he had to choose, he might choose to call it stable. The predictable safety of a routine, a space that remained the same even if that sameness made it boring. Made the months drag. Made the years blur together.

Now everything is thrown into uncertain disorder and he can’t decide if he’s upset about it.

 He lays on the double bed, with a worn comforter, in a guest room that’s heavy with unfulfilled hope. He imagines Daniel decorating this room, hoping for a daughter or an old friend to pay a visit.  

It reeks of loneliness and that suits Armand just fine at the moment. He stares up at the ceiling with unblinking eyes because every time he closes them a new image appears behind his lids, dragged from the depths of memory. Now that he’s given his mind permission to acknowledge some of the past, it seems to demand that he see everything.

Knowledge has weight, heft, substance. Daniel – and Louis too – hate him for that which he has made them lack. As if they have any idea how carrying it all has ached, how impossible it has been to let it go.

It’s natural, of course, for the mind to seek an enemy. He knows why their minds choose him, and if he deserves blame from anyone, it’s either of them. And he’s tired, and lonely, and closing his eyes only lends itself to the reminder that for a short time, he almost forgot what loneliness felt like entirely. In a home not far from here, that looked not so different from this one, where he often slept with Daniel only a wall away.

A consequence, as Daniel has been so determined to impress upon him.

---

“This isn’t a hotel,” Daniel says, stating the obvious as he stands in the doorway of an old apartment. It’s dingy and it smells like dust, but Armand has never minded the smell of age. The cracks in the dry wall, the worn wood of the floors. So much of America is new and cold. There’s a warmth to spaces like this, a familiarity.

“No,” Armand confirms.

“And it’s got no furniture.”

“Correct.”

They’ve stayed in apartments while overseas. Rented rooms in towns that had infrequent travellers. He watches the gears whir in Daniel’s head with a rapt, anticipatory joy.

“Feel like explaining?” Daniel asks, still standing in the doorframe. Armand prods at his back, coaxes him inside, the door shutting behind them with the whine of old hinges. He thinks about their last fight. About Daniel’s loneliness, his separation from the human world, his belief in his inability to truly exist in Armand’s.

It would be best for Daniel to leave, but they both know he won’t. Here at least, he can have a piece of the world. Maybe travelling has worn him down, and staying in one place will make it easier.

“You liked New York, last time we were here.” He slips his hand into Daniel’s, drags him forward to make a short tour of the little apartment.

Daniel snorts a laugh and lets himself be led. “I think everyone likes New York.”

“Well, now we live here,” Armand announces. “We have to go shopping to get furniture but–”

His words are cut off with Daniel’s mouth on his, severe and bruising. Daniel’s free hand grips his jaw with bruising force, too. He kisses like this when he feels too much. When the bigness of what they are to each other butts up too close to his youth, leaving him with a rare and frustrating inability to choose the words he thinks are adequate.

Armand leans into it, nips at Daniel’s lip, sucks his tongue into his mouth, presses back and back and back until Daniel hits the wall behind them with a groan. ‘I love you,’ he thinks, ‘I love you, does this make you happy?’

Daniel breaks away to look at him, then. Cheeks flushed with blood and lungs short on air and all the more beautiful for it. “You know. People usually ask someone to move in with them first, before they rent the place.”

He busies himself with getting Daniel’s shirt off, button by button, swatting Daniel’s hands away when he tries to speed the process. “We have lived together for years, Daniel.”

“Yeah but… now we have an apartment.”

“Mhm,” he says it against Daniel’s collarbone, mouth pressed over a sun spot there that wasn’t present when he met him, cold fingers trailing up his side to feel him tremble.

“In New York. In the Village.”

“I had assumed you would–”

“Yeah, yeah. You assumed I’d love it because you met me at a gay bar in San Francisco,” Daniel pulls hard at Armand’s hair. Pinpricks of pain bloom across Armand’s scalp and he rakes blunted nails over Daniel’s ribs. “Fuck, ouch.”

A laugh bubbles up from Armand’s chest. “They’re trimmed, Daniel.”

“Still hurts,” Daniel says, even as he groans low when Armand does it again, harder. “I do, by the way.”

“Hm?” He’s distracted, unbuckling Daniel’s belt, opening the button, sliding his hand down Daniel’s jeans without preamble or hesitation.

Daniel’s head cracks hard against the wall, his voice tight when he says, “The apartment, idiot. I love it.”

The floor creaks when Armand sinks to his knees, teeth sinking into to curve of Daniel’s hip, blood in his mouth, the soft hiss of Daniel’s pleasure and pain mingling together. ‘And me? Do you love me?’

Gentle hands, then. In his hair, ghosting across his jaw, coaxing him until he releases Daniel’s skin from his teeth to look up at him. He sees himself then, through Daniel’s eyes. Wide-eyed, fangs bloody, beautiful.

“Yeah. I love you too, you needy creature.”

And it’s not enough. This apartment, this life, the blood he can give and the blood he can take, all the overflowing love. It’s never going to be enough. But it’s close enough, right now, that both of them pretend.

---

Armand must sleep, because he wakes in mid-afternoon with the sort of strange disorientation that comes from waking somewhere one does not expect to be.

Daniel’s smell is in his nose, in his pores, underneath his skin. For a moment he has to locate himself in time, drag himself from memory to present with a jarring force. He still feels tired, wrung out and twisted up by too much change in too short a span of time.

He can hear the low sound of Daniel’s voice through the wall, talking on the phone with someone. An agent, perhaps. It’s about the book, though Daniel skirts carefully around the subject of focus. It’s almost enough to warm Armand to the idea of a publication – the fact that Louis won’t want it anymore. Never wanted it, really, he thinks. It had only ever been a way to get the answers that he had wanted to the questions that he was always afraid of asking.

The call has ended by the time he gets to the living room to find Daniel sitting at his dining table, booting up a computer that must have arrived while he was asleep.

Armand resists the urge to lean over his shoulder to watch and settles into one of the chairs nearby instead. He doesn’t locate himself with the table between them, this time.

“Sure, have a seat,” Daniel’s voice does all the eye rolling for him, without him having to look up from the screen to achieve the effect. He’s freshly showered, freshly shaved, smelling like false chemical sandalwood. Beneath it, still Daniel. It surprises Armand, how prominent that smell is now that he’s paying attention. How swiftly it takes him back to another life. Daniel used to let him choose his aftershave, his shampoo, his soap. Armand would have preferred if he used no scent at all.

“Did you make progress?” Armand asks, conversational. One day he’s certain he will succeed in pulling it off without Daniel’s hackles rising.

Not today, apparently. “Yeah. Threatened a global secret organization into submission, wrote a biographical novel on a bunch of literal monsters, ended world hunger.”

“Curious. Does your solution for world hunger include vampires?”

Daniel’s huff of laughter surprises a smile of Armand’s own from him. “Made a few calls. Getting this thing set up, logging in. Wish Louis had just left the laptop – I don’t think he has a damn clue how annoying dual authentication is.”

“Mm… no, he doesn’t,” Armand affirms. “His solution to forgetting his phone password is sometimes simply buying a new one.”

“Well. That probably makes him about the same as any other CEO of a corporate empire.” It’s almost easy, in this moment. So much so that Daniel must catch on, because the next thing he does is light everything back on fire again. “Why did you let Sam live?”

Excellent question. All the more reason to wish he had not asked it. Armand leans back in his chair, arms folding over his chest. “Fondness, perhaps. For his art. He’s incredibly talented.”

“Right.” Daniel pauses for a moment, typing something, then says, “Or he’s a great escape hatch.”

“Mm,” Armand hums, noncommittal. Considers what it is Daniel is implying.

Daniel looks up at him for the first time since he sat down, leveling him with the sort of intensity that can only mean he’s assembled the pieces of some narrative, finally formed a conclusion. “You did that with Lestat, once. Goaded him, led him to the coven, let him in, all so he could take it apart and remake it for you. And with Louis. I’m not convinced you knew what you wanted there though, did you?”

“This story has grown tiresome,” Armand cuts out.

“Oh yeah, I bet.” Daniel looks back at his screen again, carefully calm though Armand can hear his heart speed up with confrontation. In fear, excitement, or something else, he can’t quite be sure. It could be many things with Daniel. He protects his mind well when he’s waiting for a reveal – funny, the things a person can find so necessary to keep safe. “So that was your backup plan, then. Keep Sam around, have him show up with the truth if you ever needed out and couldn’t do the dirty work.”

“No.”

“You didn’t just forget he existed, Armand.”

“I–”

“Or was it me. That’s what I was for.” Daniel speaks with a bitterness he’s bound to deny if Armand points it out. “Because surely you had to have known what was happening. You dip your fingers into my brain whenever the fuck you feel like it.”

“I don’t always– I wasn’t looking for that, in that particular moment.” That, at least, is the truth. Of course he wasn’t looking for it. If he’d have seen it head on, he’d have felt compelled to do something about it. He prefers not to feel compelled to do things with irreversible results.

“I don’t buy it. Did you do it on purpose?”

“No.”

A deep breath, a measured pause, a deliberate repetition. “Okay, asking again. Did you let me figure it out on purpose?”

“I don’t know, Daniel!” That not-knowing comes tumbling out of him, too loud and too desperate. Enough of an outburst that Daniel’s muscles tense. Enough of an outburst that when Daniel looks at him again, there’s understanding there.

Satisfied with being right, Daniel relaxes again. Shifts from pretending to focus on the computer to actually doing it. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

“You’re just going to watch me work?” Like nothing has happened at all. The conversation and all its implications dismissed as easily as if they had just discussed the weather.

Armand lets his arms unfold, leans forward to rest an elbow on the table and fit his chin into his hand. Serene. He’d like nothing more, in fact. “Yes, thank you for offering.”

---

Daniel is annoyed at first and he makes it known. He chafes under Armand’s gaze, shifts in his seat, sighs loudly. Armand gives no indication that he either notices or cares. At some point Daniel gives up, shuffling through his bag to pull out what notes he was able to salvage from the penthouse and beginning the process of transcribing them.

It’s a small joy, watching Daniel work. He sinks into a place where the world falls away, where the inside of his mind settles, narrows down to razor focus. Falling into that space in Daniel’s mind is something close to meditation for Armand, and he has had few chances to watch him so openly since he arrived in Dubai. Certainly, acting as Rashid has granted him the opportunity in small bursts. As had watching him when Louis was telling a particularly long or over-detailed part of the story.

But he’s different when interviewing than he is like this. Interviewing, he’s all outward energy. Quips and sarcasm, weaponized eye contact, leaning in to demonstrate his attention, leaning out to make clear his disinterest. It’s something not unlike a stage performance.

All that energy is folded up now. Concentrated inside him and aimed at putting the collected pieces together. Lazy, half-scrawled notes unfold into themes and common threads. A list of items to confirm begins. Another for things he wants to remember when he has access to his proper interview materials.

For two hours neither of them moves, beyond Daniel’s steady typing or his turning over of a page.

Daniel’s phone chimes, interrupting his focus, and he checks it with passing interest. His hand shakes hard, too much time spent typing without paying his body any mind. He flexes it, shifts, closes it into a fist while he types an answer to the text he’s received with his other hand.

The spell is broken. Daniel hides pain well, but Armand sees it tightening his expression. Can find Daniel’s bitter frustration in his mind when he looks for it.

“Let me help,” he hears himself saying, hand reaching over the expanse of the table and stopping before it makes contact.

Daniel jumps, as if he’d forgotten Armand’s presence. “I don’t need your help.”

It isn’t a no. Armand is slow to close the last of the distance, and Daniel doesn’t move. Curiosity perhaps, ever the strongest emotion within him. His skin is hot when Armand touches it, his fingertips running over the topography of his knuckles, the hills and valleys with all their scars. They touched Armand once. Were as familiar to him as his own.

When Daniel still doesn’t move, he takes his hand in earnest, holding it between both palms, enveloping it with his fingers. “You’ll have to let me into your mind, Daniel. I’m not a healer – I need to speak to it. Tell it what to do.”

It might be more accurate to say that he needs to sing to it. Cajole it into submission, into trusting what he tells it more than it trusts itself. Daniel is very still again. All that focus now on Armand, so bright-eyed that he feels like he’s burning under the sun. But he lets Armand in. Lets him coax muscles lax and tell nerves to stop firing for a little while. Gives him ready access to the framework of his own body, not because he knows Armand could take it, but simply because he wants to know what it feels like now.

The effect is gratifying and instantaneous. Even with his attention focused just on Daniel’s hand, his body relaxes, he exhales relief.

Daniel is different now, in ways Armand is reminded of constantly. But his eyes are the same and his smell is the same. He’s beautiful and brutal and quick to tempt Armand into a smile. And here, wide open to him, in a small, shared moment of peace. He doesn’t want to let go.

He squeezes Daniel’s hand, once, gentle, and lets it drop carefully back to the table.

“It won’t last, but it is a temporary reprieve at least,” he says softly. He waits for Daniel to say something. To make a joke, to find something to be angry about. Instead, all he does is frown down and his hand as if it’s betrayed him. Armand, for once, doesn’t really want to know what he’s thinking.

Daniel must make a decision or come to some resolution within himself, because he closes the lid of the laptop with a click and says, “I need a drink.”

---

They settle, again, on opposite ends of the couch. Daniel has a glass of whiskey in his hand, having remarked absently that he doesn’t know if he’ll ever drink another martini. Armand has the tingling recollection of Daniel’s skin on his palms.

Sitting here is comfortable now, made routine by a single repetition that feels like the echo of hundreds before. Daniel looks more relaxed too, though perhaps not very happy about it.

“So, say we loved each other–”

“We did love each other.”

“Say we had this wonderful love affair, travelled the world, rented a cozy little apartment–”

“We did have–”

“What went wrong?”

And that’s the question, isn’t it? The big, looming, touch-tender thing that Armand prefers not to come into contact with. Daniel knows too, tipping back the glass like two ounces of liquor will be enough to steel himself for whatever it is Armand has to say.

There’s some small irony in that. “There were multiple factors,” he begins. “Two, mainly.”

Daniel coaxes him with an “okay?” when Armand doesn’t continue right away.

“The first,” he goes with what he thinks might be the more palatable, “was that you wanted me to make you a vampire.”

 Daniel nods, like he isn’t surprised. It makes sense – the clearest, most concrete image he has of himself from that time is his own voice on a tape, begging Louis to turn him. “And you wouldn’t.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. It’s abhorrent.” Armand believes that, even now. “And beyond my usual qualms, you were young and I loved you. I would have been stealing your life from you.”

He thinks, unwillingly, about Daniel telling him that he had ruined his life. But Daniel is here today, next to him on the couch, having lived that life after all. He reminds himself of that, and he reminds himself that in this matter Daniel could never have understood the weight of what he was asking for.

“Let me guess. All that logic was lost on me.” Daniel sounds almost amused.

“You thought I simply did not want you with me for all of time.” He smiles, fond and absent.

“And?”

“And what, Daniel?” Armand already knows. There’s that cruelty in him again, slipping between the cracks, a knife stabbing at Armand through slats in a wall.  

“Did you want me with you for all of time?”

It said as a mockery and it wounds like one too, but Armand bears enough scars not to care. Besides, his response is as much a weapon as Daniel’s question. “For all of time and beyond its end. Would that you had been made immortal before I met you. Or that I could have been made mortal and unafraid.”

Daniel is almost convincing in his indifference. One single, uneven inhale of breath gives him away. Armand wonders if, in all of Daniel’s recalled life, he has ever had anyone express a genuine wish to be with him forever, or if that’s an experience known only to the young, carved out part of himself.

“It’s a pretty picture, Armand.” He sounds almost apologetic when he speaks. “But I just… don’t buy it. I can’t.”

“Try.”

“You’re sure you can’t just give my memories back?”

He thinks about it. The wall in Daniel’s mind. What it took to build. He cannot say for certain. “It’s not an option,” he says.

“Right. Okay.” Daniel shrugs it off. Armand wonders if he really wants them back at all. “What’s the second reason?”

“Vampire blood can be addictive to a human companion.” Armand is aware that he’s externalizing, aware that Daniel will mark the phrasing. He’s hesitant to elaborate, and Daniel will have caught his meaning already anyways. “Which was not in and of itself a terrible thing.”

He never thought it to be. Daniel certainly didn’t.

It was the way it collided up against everything else. The way Daniel chafed against the confines of his own mortality, let it rub him sandpaper raw for so long that he was more road-rash than person. He wanted to be with Armand but away from the blood. He wanted to be with the blood but away from Armand.

“What was the terrible thing?” Daniel is sad and unsurprised. Closer to believing than Armand thinks he has been until this moment. It makes him wish, of all things he has shared, he had withheld this one. The truth is rarely worth the pain it causes, but the men he loves always seem to want it anyways.

“I’m not sure I ever really understood.” Armand shifts, turns so his back is against the arm of the couch, his shoulder sinking into the cushion until his cheek brushes the fabric. He doesn’t want to look at Daniel in his peripheral. Not now that he’s spent so many hours watching him. The difference, of course, is that Daniel is looking at him too. Studying him with the same intensity as he had the screen.

He can feel it, he can feel it. Whatever made them good before, here in this room. Whatever outlasted all the pain. He wants Daniel to feel it too.

“Tell me about it. I might understand,” Daniel suggests. If Armand stretched out his legs, he could touch Daniel. Could drag the divide closed, if only for a moment.

It’s a wise enough suggestion, giving Daniel the information he needs to comprehend his own struggle. Because it had been Daniel’s struggle, then. There were two problems. There were a hundred. All of them were Armand. “You said… our relationship trapped you in a liminal space.”

“Airports. Summer camp after everybody goes home. Hospital waiting rooms,” Daniel supplies with a nod. “Yeah. I’d have liked that, at first. A whole life lived in transition, and I didn’t even have to feel the semblance of responsibility for it staying that way.”

“You couldn’t have a human life without craving what I could give you. And I wouldn’t give you an immortal one, so a lifetime by my side was, to you–”

“Horrifying. To grow old while you stayed–” Daniel cuts himself off with a humorless smile.

“I would have loved every moment.”

“Yeah, nothing like watching someone get old and frail.” Sarcasm makes a poor shield for this particular pain. Daniel’s hand has not resumed it’s shaking, but he flexes it on the arm of the couch anyways.

“You’ve become more beautiful than I pictured you would.”

Daniel looks as if he’s waiting for a punchline, and Armand looks back in unblinking sincerity. They get trapped there, in a competition that has no rules and no winner, until Armand smiles, bridges the gap just enough to poke at Daniel with his socked foot, and says, “You’re also not frail.”

“God, how do you do that?” Daniel scowls back at him.

“Do what?”

“Look like– you’ve really perfected the wolf in sheep’s clothing look.”

Armand can’t remember ever having practiced. It’s the nature of who he once was paired with the nurture that came after. All he says is, “I was prey, once.”

He’s not sure he ever forgot how to be.

Daniel looks away. Tears himself away. Says his next words while looking up at the ceiling and rubbing the side of the empty glass absently along his sternum. “You were right, you know. There’s… this space. I can’t fill it, I never could. And I’ve never– I thought San Francisco explained it, when I remembered. You told me then–”

“Your own fears echoed back to you, Daniel. Nothing more.” Daniel is many things, but the only resemblance he bears to a black hole is that he draws people to him. He thinks, again, of the galaxy of Daniel’s mind. Wonders if he would ever consent to being shown, again.

“But that wasn’t it, what I was feeling. Because I do remember a time before it.” Daniel seems to be working out what he wants to say as he says it, speaking slow, taking pause. Armand waits in the silence for him to continue. “The emptiness was– is– you.”

“I keep trying to pinpoint it in my head. The lack,” Daniel continues. “Trying to fill it up with the shit you say, see if it fits in the space. But I can’t see the space, it’s like I slide right past it.”

“The presence of absence,” Armand supplies, with a passing fondness for another time when he was, again, another person.

Daniel shakes his head, eyes still focused on the painted ceiling. “I bet that shit impressed me a whole lot back then.”

Armand gives in to the urge to smile again. “No. Not even then.” A beat, then: “You believe me, now?”

“I believe I was there,” Daniel allows. “That if we were there– together, for so long, there must have been–”

“Love?” Armand knows the suggestion will annoy Daniel, and it does, but Daniel doesn’t leave so it feels something like success.

“Something.”

“What makes you believe it, now?” What he means, of course, is why admit it now? Daniel has believed him since he said it. Has believed him over and over again as he told him pieces. When he showed him the bench. When he made him coffee.  

Daniel lifts his empty glass up, taps it twice with the pad of his finger. “The craving. It’s a lack that I can name.”

“Is it terrible, still?” There are certain feelings that are hard to read from a human mind. Craving is among them – it’s a hunger, of course. It just has a tendency to pale in comparison to his own. Daniel’s had been strong, is strong, but he cannot properly quantify it.

“I used to use heroin,” Daniel says. Armand is aware. Viscerally. “And I still think about it almost every day. But in comparison, craving heroin feels like having a hankering for a chocolate bar.”

Daniel is looking at him with unvarnished longing, stripped down to honesty for once. Armand wants to give him everything, return to him what once was his. He thinks if he offers right now, Daniel will say yes.

And he would be his again. Just not the way Armand wants him to be.

“I can show you some of my memories,” Armand offers instead.

It’s a testament to how raw Daniel is that he simply nods at Armand numbly. He used to get like this, then. Pliant and waiting. Muscle memory, Armand supposes. He was pliant and waiting for Daniel too, once. Could so easily be again that he knows this is a bad idea. Again and again and again.

“Daniel.” His voice is sharp, Daniel jumps, eyes clearing.

“Uh. Yeah… Yeah, sure. Do that.”

Armand moves, then. A fluid shift to his knees, the caps of them brushing Daniel’s thigh. So quickly that Daniel doesn’t have time to startle in earnest. His pulse is racing though; Armand resists the urge to reach out and press his fingers to a pulse point. He thinks he could still find all of them by feel alone, with every other sense cut off.

“Fuck. A warning–” Daniel collects himself. Glares at Armand. “So you can read my mind from ten miles away but putting something in it requires you to practically climb into my lap.”

“It doesn’t, but if you’d like me to then I could be convinced.” Armand offers up what he knows is a sweet smile, and Daniel does an excellent job of pretending he doesn’t notice.

His hands find Daniel’s cheeks, earning a hiss in response. “Fuck you’re cold.”

“Shhh.” His fingers stroke over Daniel’s cheekbones, soothing, repetitive. Then, “Tell me what you want to see.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Could you clarify whether or not you want me to speak?” He thinks Daniel needs this. The irritation, the sarcasm. The more he relaxes in Armand’s presence, the more he leans on it to keep himself sane.

“The memories, Daniel. Which– no, I can’t show you them all.” He could, of course. But it would be more overwhelming than just returning Daniel’s access to his own. “Highlights? Yes. Alright. Close your eyes.”

For once, Daniel doesn’t attempt to rebuff him for reading his mind. For once, Daniel listens without protest. For the second time today, the second time in decades, Daniel welcomes him into his mind.

Laid out on a California beach, staring up at a sky the colour of buckwheat honey, tinged red by fire smoke on a hot summer evening. Daniel, reading to him from a dog-eared poetry anthology with his head on Armand’s stomach. Soft curls on Armand’s fingers. Daniel, murmuring, “this one makes me think of you. This part: who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations. The past, the future, dwelling there, like spaces, inseparable together.” Daniel, growing shy and silent while Armand wills himself not to cry bloody tears. Daniel, huffing a laugh, making a joke, turning the page to read Ginsberg’s ‘Sphincter’ and break the mood / That third kiss, halfway home in Pilsen, giddy from the first, from the endless second / Kissing now, like coming home, crossing threshold, hallowed ground / Holding hands in Berlin / Holding hands in Stockholm / Holding hands in Vienna / In Dublin / In Amsterdam / Paris / New York / Holding hands in the quiet dark, when nobody can see them, when Armand whispers things that are not quite memory but shadow of memory and Daniel does not flinch away / Walking into their apartment to the party he planned for Daniel, dozens of voices in the warm yellow glow of their living room. The radio playing, the house a burst of music and joy and colour. Daniel at the center, always the center, laughing with head thrown back and tears at the corners of his eyes. Daniel, turning to find Armand in the crowd, leaning into him, hooking a finger through his belt loop as if to say ‘don’t go don’t go,’ as if there is anywhere Armand has ever wanted to go that is not right here / A hospital in Vancouver, tucked away in the busy ER, pulling out the half tied stitches in Daniel’s arm and replacing them with his own blood. Scolding him for running off. Scolding him for getting into a fight. Scolding him for waiting for Armand to find him instead of having someone call the hotel. His tongue along the knitted seam. The sweet flood of blood singing to the tune of gratitude and apology and fascination. / Blood on the sheets / Blood in the bathwater / Blood in drying fingerprints on thighs and ribs and necks / The first time he knew Daniel loved him / The last time he knew Daniel loved him / the screaming and screaming and screaming.

Chapter Text

For a moment Armand is still trapped there in all the places they used to love. Trapped in that apartment in the Village. Trapped with screams ringing in his ears. Sharing a memory is not the same thing as calling one up. The latter allows his mind to fill in the blanks, to look back on bits of history as if read from a book. The former is visceral. Needs to be, for it to feel real.

He should be concerned for Daniel; he’s done a poor job of keeping his thoughts controlled, keeping his offering of memories neatly packaged and presented with care. It’s a flood when even a drizzle of rain would have been too much. It pours and pours.

But then Armand isn’t there anymore. Daniel’s skin is warm and dry under his hands. The room is quiet, and nobody is screaming. When he opens his eyes, Daniel is looking back at him and perhaps Armand is not known, but he is not a stranger either.

Not a stranger at all, really. Daniel looks at him as if– he looks at him. Really looks.

Armand’s thumbs continue in their careful back and forth. A metronome set to the pace of Daniel’s heartbeat. Suspended in this moment, Daniel does not stop him, only blinks his eyes in a lazy attempt to clear the daze. Time has carved rivers into Daniel’s face, the directionality of life etched into each line. Armand can remember what they were, once. Narrow like creek beds, shallow like a late-summer stream.

Time never touches him. He is dry ground, drought, not a drop of water in sight. If it did, he imagines it might look similar, not because he and Daniel do but because he thinks it might be nice for time to have changed them in the same ways. An old fantasy, the sort of foolish dream a child has. It’s enough, for now, to feel age on Daniel’s face.

I was here, Armand wants to say, with his thumbs marking out crow’s feet. I helped make this.

Daniel does with eyes what Armand does with his hands, roving slow over his face, dropping to look at his mouth, drifting back up again to gaze at him with something too close to inquisitiveness to make his vague attempt at a glare a convincing one.

It could be minutes or it could be hours. Time never touches Armand, anyway. He has the sudden strange urge to keep it from touching Daniel, too. A terrifying thought and an impossible one. Here with the only person who has ever made him wish that he could share the gift, wish that it was not actually a curse.  

Instead of allowing himself to entertain the idea, he peels back the layers of Daniel’s mind piece by piece until the guards are removed, the shields are dropped, the thick layer of nonchalance is wiped clear. Beneath it fear and curiosity and anger battle to see what might be the prevailing emotion to dictate Daniel’s next action, while a tiny, barely hanging on tenderness drifts in and out and around and all over everything.

He’s seen glimpses of this before, of course. Fleeting hints that affection is not nearly so impossible as Daniel would like to believe it to be.  

And now he sees Daniel so close that the flecks in his eyes can be counted. So close that the exhale of each breath can become Armand’s next inhale. So close that he ceases to be a version of himself in time but becomes all of them.

“Oh,” Armand says in quiet surprise, “there you are.”

The words land like a strike and Daniel jerks away from his touch, face pulling out of the gentle cradle Armand’s hands have made. They hang in the air for a moment before dropping, folding neatly together into his own lap.

Daniel stands, puts space and a coffee table between them. “You don’t get to do that. Dig around in my fucking head without asking.”

Anger it is, then.

“My apologies, I–

“Is that what this is all about? Seeing if you can brainwash me into–”

“It’s a habit, Daniel!” Armand relaxes back against the couch with one leg crossed over the other, posture at odds with the sharp edges of his words. He brings the latter in line with the former, softening when he says, “For years your mind was open to me. You welcomed it. I don’t want to… if I intended to brainwash you it would already be done.”

Daniel nods, “You’re right. That would be too easy for you. You’d like me to do it to myself – that’s the sort of shit that gets you off.”

Categorically false but with too strong a thread of truth to deny it in any way Daniel will accept. Armand doesn’t want Daniel to brainwash himself, of course. He simply wants him to–

“What did you think those memories would do? Make me want you now? Love you now?” Daniel says it as if the word love leaves a foul taste on his tongue.

Armand looks somewhere over Daniel’s shoulder, like blurring the edges of his image of Daniel will make anything easier. “I don’t know. No. Perhaps.”

“Yeah well, I don’t feel anything in those memories.” A lie, but that doesn’t make it easier to hear. Daniel felt what Armand felt, and he ignores it now because to accept it would probably ruin his rare, clumsy attempt at compartmentalizing the thoughts in his own mind for once. “There’s nothing there. You just gave a kid fucking Stockholm Syndrome, mopped his brain up with some bleach, and turned him loose to become a fucked up lonely old man.”

This was a bad idea. Armand let things get too close, too raw, too quickly. In this regard, Daniel is no different today than he was then. Being laid bare leaves him feeling exposed and he lashes out. Like a cornered animal, all teeth. Armand resists the urge to point any of that out, and instead asks, “is it so hard to believe that you could love me without coercion?”

“Don’t pull that shit with me. That doe-eyed, woe-is-me, I try so hard but nobody will love me back shit.” Daniel moves as if to walk away, making it to the other end of the room before he pauses. Armand watches anger drift away and fear take its turn. “What was the screaming?”

“The what?” Armand doesn’t know why he bothers pretending. Daniel barely believes the true things he says, let alone the blatant falsehoods. Maybe its just entertaining, all the verbal back and forth. It’s been a long time since anybody took any interest in active participation.

“The screaming. I heard screaming when you showed me... all that.”

Armand shakes his head, shifts in his seat, “I don’t know what that was.”

“Yeah, I call bullshit,” Daniel just sounds tired, now. With fear gone as swiftly as it arrived, now drained of all other emotions he is left with only his own enduring need to know things.

“Fine. I slipped.” Armand shrugs one shoulder, an upward motion of only an inch. “You should never have heard it and I wish that you hadn’t.”

Armand wishes he never had, either.

Daniel points at him with a steady, steady finger and raised brows, like he’s proven a point. “That. That, right there, is why it’s so damn hard to believe.”

Then he’s gone from the living room, his bedroom door shutting with a pointed click before Armand can do more than flinch inwardly. He is left staring down at his own hands, Daniel’s scent clinging to the whorls of his fingerprints.

“You’re dying, Daniel,” Armand says like it’s nothing. And maybe it is. Maybe it will be, in the grand scheme of eternity. He has never known luck like that, though. Pain from fifty years ago, a hundred, four hundred, it all still feels as fresh as it did in the moment. Even when the details blur, the pain stays new and razor sharp.

“You said that last month,” Daniel mumbles, face pressed into the curve of Armand’s neck, draped atop him on the couch. If he were alive, Daniel might crush the air from his lungs. Of course, if he were alive, Daniel would not be dying.

“It was true then and it’s true now.”

Daniel is quiet for a long time, contemplative now in ways Armand does not think he was when they first met. Or perhaps more earnest with it, more willing to drop the false pretenses he once used to get a fix. Time changes humans so swiftly. Each day it’s as if they become new.

“I thought it would make it better,” Daniel says finally. “The apartment.”

“If you don’t like it here, beloved, we can leave.” Armand’s fingers brush too light over Daniel’s ribs, the muscle shuddering under his skin. Daniel’s huff of breath is a soft protest, then he’s rolling off of Armand and onto the floor, sitting with knees tucked up to his chest. Armand doesn’t sit up, just shifts to his side to keep his face level, eye to eye. “I’ll take you anywhere you’d like to go.”

“No, I love it here. This year has been incredible, this place is– there are so many stories to tell.” Daniel’s eyes brighten even in saying it.

Armand thinks Daniel falls a little bit in love with everyone he meets. That’s how he finds what’s raw in them, what matters beneath everything else. Not with the exacting analysis or cruel barbs, though he wields those just fine, but with the tenderness that can only come from loving. Gentle when he needs to be, firm when he needs to be, but always with care even when he might deny it.

Armand feels the lack of contact between them acutely. Would spend every moment of the day touching Daniel if he could. Now, he reaches out to tap him on the nose. “Then you should tell them.”

Daniel catches his hand, kisses his fingertips, says, “Make me yours and I’ll have forever to tell them.”

“You’re already mine,” Armand says. Wary, because he knows where this conversation goes. Weary, because they’ve retraced these steps so many times.

“But you’re not mine.” Daniel marks it as a fact, and this is a fresh angle. Before Armand can construct a rebuttal, he adds, “That’s the problem, I think. There’s nothing for me that I can have, that’s my own, that I get to keep. Other people’s stories, this apartment, you. It’s never going to be mine.”

“My heart is–”

“Please,” Daniel cuts in, his voice like a bruise. “Don’t.”

“What would you have me do? What in my power will alleviate your pain? I would do it.”

“Make me like you,” Daniel says it so soft, so gentle. A pleading, lilting request. Says it the way he asks Armand to touch him, to drink from him. With a quiet awe and a steady certainty. Armand is afraid that one day, he’ll have been so well conditioned into granting Daniel’s requests that he grants even this one without second thought.

“I cannot.”

“Then let me go.”

But it’s Daniel who has his hand gripped tight around Armand’s. It’s Daniel who comes back each time he leaves. Sometimes for love, yes. Always for blood.

It’s Daniel who slides his nose along the bend of Armand’s wrist, whose tongue probes for a pulse he has learned to locate not by instinct but through frequent practice. His words are said there, right to Armand’s vein. “I can’t even say I wish I had never tried it, you know?”

“I should never have exchanged it with you.” Armand can say it. He cannot mean it, of course. But he can say it and bear some of the blame.

A beat of time, Daniel breathing warm against his skin, the moment before the moment that cannot be taken back.

Then: “I could make you forget all of it if you wish to. You could have a life again. Could go find something to keep.”

---

Daniel doesn’t speak to him for a week, but for once he doesn’t leave. Everything about their life stays the same, except that Armand doesn’t hear Daniel’s voice. He answers a thought once, and Daniel’s mind slams shut with a certainty it never has before. This is a new anger. A simmering, achy thing, born of resignation that Armand isn’t quite ready to acknowledge.

He doesn’t drink from Armand either, doesn’t ask to though he must want it terribly. Withdrawal leaves him pale and shaking, too tired to focus on anything, miserable. The distance between them is tangible, even when they touch.

On the seventh day, Armand leaves to eat when Daniel falls asleep, returning to their apartment in the early hours of the still-dark morning to slip into bed. He curls himself around the still sleeping Daniel, sinks fangs into his own wrist until the blood begins to trickle.

The moment he presses his wrist to Daniel’s lips he wakes, tension arcing through each muscle as consciousness and the pain that comes with it return. “Let me feed you, sweet, stubborn boy.”

Daniel drinks, grips Armand’s arm to keep it close even though he shows no signs of moving. Relief is instant, palpable. Pleasure is a quieter thing, a steady current flowing from Armand’s veins to Daniel’s tongue. His mind opens up again, reaches out in silent request, in happy offering.

Armand sinks teeth into Daniel’s neck and the circuit completes like lightning coming home to earth, tearing a needy sound from Armand’s throat and a matching one from low in Daniel’s chest.

‘This is yours, Daniel. For as long as you live my blood is yours.’

Daniel tears his mouth free at that, rare to be the first to pull away, and for a moment Armand thinks he’s angry. Then Daniel is dragging Armand’s hand down and down, wrapping it bloody and firm around his cock, arching back into him in an unspoken plea.

They fuck like that, wet and silent and desperate, pressed together side by side as if they can will themselves into unity. Armand tries to remember if it’s ever hurt so much to love someone. Hides red tears in the mess of Daniel’s hair, presses into him for a small eternity, until all the time they have together runs out and even the time Armand makes for them ceases to be enough.

Even when Daniel comes, he does so in silence.

When he speaks for the first time in seven days, he does so hours later with his forehead pressed to Armand’s and his hand wrapped around the back of Armand’s neck.

“Okay. Make me forget.”

---

Armand suggests waiting a little longer but Daniel refuses to entertain the idea. Says heartbreak is pain like a band-aid – he’s gotta rip it off and get on with life. Armand isn’t sure this can be classified as heartbreak. He isn’t sure any of the languages he knows have words for what this sort of ache is.

Still, it’s what Daniel wants. They sit on the floor in their living room and it feels too mundane a place to become the center of one of his most painful memories. Too mundane a place by far for it to be one of the few moments where he is an active contributor to his own suffering.

Armand has Daniel straddling his legs because he needs him close. Feels the weight of him, the tangible warmth of him, the beat of his heart under his hand.

He’s searching for words, as best he can. The right words, any words, something that matters. But none of it does, because Daniel won’t remember it. Daniel won’t remember. Daniel won’t remember. Daniel won’t–

“Baby, look at me.” Daniel uses endearments sparingly, usually prefers to show his affection in other ways. The use of one now drags Armand’s attention back to him. “Good. You have to keep it together, okay? Or I’m gonna change my mind. You understand?”

Armand nods numbly because he has no other choice. Pulls air in through his nose and pushes it out through his mouth more in an effort to please Daniel than anything else. It doesn’t help.

“Good. I need you to remember three things.”

Armand wonders when Daniel grew up. When he went from the naïve twenty-year-old he met in San Francisco to this man in front of him. Most days, of course, he’s still a mess. Drunk and scattered, chaotic and overzealous. Idealistic beyond the point of endearment. But sometimes, like now, he’s a man with a whole life ahead of him and Armand does not regret ensuring him that time in which to keep on changing.

He realizes belatedly that Daniel is waiting for him, so he nods again.

“You’re not going to give me the memories back, no matter what. Not even if I come looking.” Daniel won’t be able to come looking, won’t have any reason to, so this is a simple request to grant. “Yes?”

“Yes.” Armand’s hands find Daniel’s neck, his thumbs slotting along the line of his jaw as if they were made to fit there.

“The next one will hurt but you owe it to me. You ruined my life, and you owe it to me.” Daniel doesn’t sound angry, but he’s correct that what he says does hurt. Truths tend to do that just as well as lies do. “I want you to remember, later, when you’re trying to rewrite this shit: you chose this too. There was another way, but you chose this one.”

Like a knife. Dull and twisting. It would hurt more if pain wasn’t already everywhere in Armand’s body, swimming in his blood. “Yes,” he repeats. He wants to kiss Daniel again. Doesn’t think he’s done it near enough to survive eternity without. If he does it now, he’ll lose his resolve.

Daniel’s hands cover his then, firm and gentle, and all the love he carries is wide open for Armand to touch. “You’re going to take all my memories. But you have to find a way to leave the love. That’s mine, that’s something I have to keep or I won’t be me, after.”

His voice only breaks on the last syllable. He doesn’t cry, and Armand is grateful. He would hold him if he did, soothe him, but it would only make this nearer to impossible. It’s a brief pain, for Daniel. If Armand does this correctly, Daniel will have it easier than he does because he won’t remember. Doing it correctly but leaving the emotion as Daniel has asked – he’s not even certain that he can.

“Armand. Answer me.” It falls short of being an order, comes out as a plea.

He has only ever been able to deny Daniel one thing, and this will not be the second. “Okay. Yes, beloved. I will. Unless it kills you, I will.”

The memory leaves him peeled down to bone, leaves him excoriated. It was the last one to be packed up, and thus is the last one to demand his attention now. The only one that he can never call bittersweet, that he has never let himself think about even in passing. There was nothing good in saying goodbye to Daniel.

He’s dragged from his own pain by Daniel’s, hears him cry out and casts his thoughts down the hall. A nightmare. Nothing new remembered, only San Francisco. San Francisco, and borrowed memories from Armand mingling in, turning it from the simple, pure terror of a memory without any grey areas to a confusing and equally frightening mess of pleasure and pain.

Daniel’s bedroom door is left unlocked, perhaps just with the awareness that a lock on a door won’t dissuade Armand anyways. He stands there for a while, silhouetted in the doorway, waiting to see if Daniel will wake on his own. He does eventually, stirred by the light streaming into the room from the hall, casting warm orange light across the furrow of his brow.

“What the fuck?” Daniel only sounds half surprised, but he scrambles to sit up with remarkable speed.

“You screamed,” Armand says without preamble.

“Hm? In my sleep? Yeah, see, lately I’ve been living out an actual real life horror mo–”

“The screaming you heard earlier was you. Screaming.”

Whether it’s horror or the haze of sleep that slows Daniel’s mind, Armand does not know because for once he does not look. Daniel rubs at his eyes, reaches for his glasses to put them on, and says, “What do you mean I heard myself screaming?”

Armand crosses his arms, holds his own elbows, imagines he might be able to hold himself back from what he’s already more than halfway to doing. Telling this story is going to lead to choices he doesn’t want to make. He tells it anyways.

“I suggested making you forget, and you agreed. We were in New York, then.”

Daniel shakes his head, slow and disbelieving, “I wouldn’t have said yes to–”

“You were in pain all the time. When it wasn’t physical it was emotional, spiritual, even. Your desires were killing you.” It’s a vast oversimplification, but what does it matter? The nuance is lost on Daniel without the history that it’s attached to. “So we sat in our apartment, and I wove the wall that would keep you from your memories. Stronger than San Francisco, clearly. It needed to be. We had spent so much time together by then.”

“And?” Daniel sounds distant. Armand has his eyes closed, won’t look at him. Can’t look at him. Sees only the past playing out behind his lids.

“And you screamed, Daniel. Like a wounded thing. Like I was pulling your spine apart one vertebra at a time, or peeling the muscle from your bones, or squeezing your heart with my bare hands. I have heard pain so many times... I had not heard that particular pain before, and I’ve not heard it since.” Half of a lie – he can hear it still. “You screamed and I emptied you. You screamed until you could not anymore, and I emptied you still. And when I was finally done, you were emptied of us and you did not know me anymore.”

Daniel had been easy to coax, after. Drowsy and compliant. Armand had put him on a train with a vague idea for a story Daniel had mentioned interest in and a wallet full of cash. He had disassembled their apartment, dissolved their lease, taken apart all the little pieces of their lives.

Louis had called to him. He had gone back.

That was all.

“How long?” Daniel asks.

“Hm?” Armand opens his eyes, blinks at him.

“How long did it take you to do it?” Daniel has one leg bent, arm draped across his knee. Once, Armand might have crawled into bed. Had a conversation like this one with his head on Daniel’s chest. He can hear his heartbeat from across the room, but he cannot feel it. “Erase all those years.”

“17 hours and 13 minutes,” Armand recites. “Give or take.”

“Right… give or take,” Daniel echoes back with what Armand thinks is a half-hearted attempt at sarcasm. “This is fucked.”

All of it is, but Armand waits for Daniel to elaborate on which particular part is upsetting him at the moment. He chews the inside corner of his lip hard enough to make it bleed.

“No wonder I could feel it all these years. You fucking dissected me.”

It’s apt terminology, considering Daniel can’t even see what it looks like. The scars, the looming void within which everything still remains where he locked it away. He’s never thought about it that way before. All the pieces still there but separated as if in jars. Or frames. It would make sense for him to have followed the framework he’s often used for his own mind. He can’t recall thinking about it at the time.  

“It was the only thing I knew to do that would help you.” Armand lies, Daniel’s words echoing in his ears. There was another choice; it just wasn’t any choice at all. “Maybe it was– the wrong thing, but–”

“You’re a monster, Armand. All you do is wrong.”

But you loved me, he wants to say. You loved me. I didn’t get that wrong. He casts his eyes down because he knows they’re too big, knows Daniel will only accuse him of performing that pain which he has no reason to fake.

Daniel taps his fingers against his knee, the soft sound of skin on fabric. “You called it a wall.”

He tells himself that he keeps forgetting how perceptive Daniel can be, but that’s a difficult thing to forget. Maybe giving him what he needs to ask the right questions has been intentional since the day he showed up in Dubai. He’s too worn down to care. “I did.”

“Are they still there?” Daniel asks then, sharper. Insistent. Hungry, even. “The memories. Are they still in my fucking head?”

Armand says nothing.

Daniel correctly interprets his silence as an admission. “If I asked you to fix it? To give them back?”

“I cannot.” He wants to. He wants to the way he wants blood. Insistent. Impossible to quell. He’s old enough to resist the urge, but not old enough to resist it without a cost. He clenches his jaw so hard he wonders if it might snap.

“Why?”

“It could kill you.” He thinks he knows enough to keep Daniel safe, now that he’s spent more time in his mind as it is today. It listens to him, still answers when he calls to it. There is no reason to believe he couldn’t manage it without causing permanent harm. “It could make your craving stronger again, and that could kill you too.”

Daniel laughs, humorless and weary. “Nope, I’m dying anyway. Try again.”

Armand scowls at that, briefly distracted from the torment of his own waning resolve. “You have many years left, Daniel. Even with your illness."

“And when I publish the book and all the pissed off vampires come to get me?” Daniel says it like it’s nothing to him, but Armand catches the little flash of fear. Daniel doesn’t want to die. Armand isn’t sure anymore that he ever really did – his desire to live was certainly greater in the end.

“They’ll regret the attempt,” is all Armand says, shrugging one shoulder.

“If I can’t kill him nobody can, hey?” Daniel quips, just bright and unexpected enough that Armand is surprised by his small exhale of laughter in response. It’s disarming. Daniel goes in for another strike, slides right between his armor. “Tell me the real reason you won’t do it.”

Armand leans against the wall, just beside the door frame. “I promised you that I wouldn’t.”

Daniel is standing now. Again with the surprising speed. The room seems to shrink around him now that he’s on his feet. Makes it feel like it would be nothing at all to close the distance between them. He doesn’t look surprised by the reason, but he does look angry. “Since when have you ever given a shit about a promise?”

He had forgotten just how quickly Daniel’s moods could shift. Not like Louis’s, which can be muted for years only to become atomic with little warning. More like Armand’s own. As if all the emotion in him is constantly swirling together below the surface and each one can spring up out of the water to replace the last without warning. He missed that, too. The ebb and flow of their emotions together. The ability they had to drag one another into or out of them at any given moment.

“I’ve never broken the promises I made to you.”

“Yeah, declarations mean fuck all when I have no memories to support them.” Daniel takes a few steps forward, reminds Armand of a shark circling prey. This is the setup, Armand knows. The steps leading up to the big reveal. He waits dutifully to play his role. “You say you still love me, Armand. But you’re choosing him. And he doesn’t even exist anymore.”

It shouldn’t hurt. It’s logic and truth sculpted into a dart, aimed expertly at Armand’s chest. “That’s not–”

“Or you’re choosing yourself as usual,” Daniel says with a shrug. Close, now. A finger jabbing at his sternum, rubbing salt in the wound. “If I remember it all, what will I need you for, right? My ignorance is the only weapon you have left and you’re clinging to it for all–”

“Fine.”

“Hm?” Daniel looks expectant, like he’s waiting for his confirmation. It’s almost satisfying to provide the opposite.

“Fine, I’ll do it. I’ll make you remember.”

Daniel spares a beat for surprise, and then his mouth stretches into a grin. A real one, too. Warm like his skin, like the smell of him, like the way his mind feels. “I haven’t decided if I want you to, yet.”

Maybe it’s giddiness at that smile aimed right at him, or maybe it’s just exhaustion, but either way Armand begins to laugh. Daniel’s hand is pressed flat to his chest now; he feels it right where the laughter bubbles up and spills out. “Of course you–”

“Shut the door,” Daniel says, firm but unexpectedly gentle. Armand obeys with a twitch of his pointer finger before Daniel even begins to state his reason. “I can’t– I don’t want to see you.”  

And then his mouth is on Armand’s, decisive, insistent, and the reason doesn’t matter to him even if it’s painful too.

Daniel kisses him like it’s owed to him, like he’s collecting on a deal, and perhaps he is. Perhaps Armand owes him this and everything else. He’s certain that if asked right in this moment, there’s little he wouldn’t give. Armand kisses him back like making too swift a movement will send Daniel running, until Daniel’s teeth are sharp in his lip and he doesn’t care, can’t care. He opens his mouth to Daniel and Daniel groans low in his throat and Daniel tastes the same way he always has and Daniel, and Daniel, and Daniel.

And oh, time does touch Armand and this is how. Here is how.

Like coming home. Everything he gave up, everything he made himself stop thinking of years ago, it’s in the room again. It’s in his mouth again. It spills and spills and spills from all the hairline fractures that have built up over the weeks, until anything left in the way of its escape crumbles to dust. He feels as if, for a brief moment, every part of him is made whole. As if he is no longer divided into halls and rooms, tucked behind locked doors.

When Daniel breaks away, the separation between their bodies is entire and Armand feels cleaved in two.  

“Alright,” Daniel says, voice even despite the hammering of his heart. “Give them back.”

It wasn’t real, that coalescing. Only an illusion, a temporary escape from the loss, from the lack. It hurts, and Daniel causes that hurt without thought, and Armand cannot even blame him because there is no way for him to really know why or how or how terribly.

That’s all that makes him do it, in the end. Not his agreement that he would, not Daniel’s need to know his own history, not even the stubborn hope that still writhes in his chest. Just the desire to hurt.

And it does hurt.  

Chapter Text

| PART II |

THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS

The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects,
so what’s there to be faithful to? “I am faithful
to you, darling” I say it to the paint. The bird floats
in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it.
The man stands, the day shines. His insides and
his outsides kept apart with an imaginary line—
thick and rude and imaginary because there is
no separation, fallacy of the local body, paint
on paint. I have my body and you have yours.
Believe it if you can. Negative space is silly.
When you bang on the wall you have to remember
you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead,
yell at yourself. Some people don’t understand
anything. They see the man but not the light,
they see the field but not the varnish. There is no
light in the paint, so how can you argue with them?
They are probably right anyway. I paint in his face
and I paint it out again. There is a question
I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?

-- By Richard Siken, from War of the Foxes

There’s no delicate way to do it. When Armand begins to pull down the wall, memories pour out like a spillway on a dam. And then the dam itself breaks and there is no control, just a flood of everything. He can’t slow it down, can only sift through it in hopes of nudging memories into place.

Like water on dry earth they don’t sink in right away, instead lingering on the surface, uprooting everything around them and setting other memories adrift.

Somewhere, in the world that must still exist outside of Daniel’s mind, the two of them may have sunken to the floor. Armand may be holding Daniel’s face in two hands, as if to hold him together. The pain might be silent this time. Any attempt at screaming might die in Daniel’s throat, might leave him gulping fishlike for air.

It’s hard to say, really. Directing the flood means standing in it, neck deep in churning water and wading through debris.

 Daniel keeps trying to talk, but any words he can gather are saturated and heavy and don’t come out. They don’t even quite materialize in his mind, but Armand understands the fear, the panic.

‘I can’t stop it, Daniel. It’s okay, just let it happen, relax into it.’

There’s little else he can do to provide comfort without losing focus. He wonders if this would have been easier with Daniel unconscious, and he has the answer almost as swiftly as the question materializes.

It doesn’t get easier.

It does, however, let Armand work without the constant thrashing of Daniel’s conscious mind to distract him.

The smell of Daniel, the taste of Daniel, they are nothing in comparison to this. To be surrounded by him, the whole of him, is overwhelming. He could get lost in the current easily if he let himself. Could float from memory to memory, swim through the warm waters of Daniel’s overflowing mind left to its devices. It might sort itself out in time. It might also drown itself.

Armand comes back to himself then, crouched where Daniel leans up against the mattress with Daniel’s head clutched between his hands. Curls and a skull and beneath it a brain made of cells, fed with oxygen carried on his sweet blood. Daniel’s mind is not an ocean any more than it is a galaxy. It’s a stunning network of neurons and synapses and electricity and chemicals; he knows how it should look. Knows how to sift through with the gentlest touch, how to fold two separate parts into one another.

It took 17 hours and 13 minutes to excise every part of himself from Daniel’s mind and seal it off in darkness. It only takes 27 minutes to put it back. A bomb, he supposes, can take days or months to build but will detonate in seconds.

Things slot back in place, a calendar of years forming a blurry but stable structure in the distant history of Daniel’s life. Daniel remains unconscious, even then. Armand releases his hands, lets Daniel’s head loll back against the mattress. His nose is bleeding but his breathing is steady and normal. His skin is clammy, but he has no fever. There is no reason for Armand to feel as afraid as he does but he does and he does and he does.

Armand dabs at Daniel’s nose with his sleeve, tugs a blanket from the bed to lay it over Daniel’s lap. There is nothing more to do.  

He settles down cross-legged, elbow on knee, chin in hand, the smell of Daniel’s blood held close to his nose. He keeps it there like a burning candle, sits his uncertain vigil.  

Death is familiar to Armand. It has to be for his own survival.

But he was far younger when he first came to know it, has known it all his life. Children died easily in those days. On the ships, in the brothel. By the time his own death had come for him, he knew it intimately and feared it equally. Eventually he became it, embodied it, needed the very same thing he was running from in order to keep outrunning it.

His relationship with death is, perhaps, his most intimate and most steady. It is this that keeps him from granting Daniel’s request long after the weight of a promise or the conviction of his own beliefs has worn off. It isn’t a relationship he would wish upon anyone, and to wish it upon Daniel– he wishes it was unfathomable. Wishes he could stop picturing Daniel that way. Wishes are a child’s game, made upon stars and bones. They do him no favors and provide him no comfort, and he makes them just the same.

On the surface Daniel would not be so different. Certainly not at first. Fangs, long-nails, less-human but likely still striking eyes. The surface means nothing at all when beneath it lies the promise of forever, and the threat of it too.

Daniel thinks Armand does not want him for eternity, would grow weary of him. There is no use in telling him that Armand fears the opposite. That he will want Daniel well beyond the boy’s capacity to stay with him.

Perhaps loneliness has known him longer than death. Perhaps both of them simply love each other more than they have ever cared for Armand.

Both stand at the very threshold of his world as he steps through the door. Daniel’s slow pulse. Daniel’s grey face. Daniel’s hand limp, knuckles brushing the floor where his arm hangs off the couch. Daniel who keeps on trying to die. Daniel who can’t decide what he wants, stuck in a perpetual cycle of not-dead-yet, the smell of heroin hanging chemical-sweet in the air.

Daniel, who Armand loves and who loves him in return.  

Whose heartbeat only quickens because Armand tells it to. Who sucks in a true breath because Armand forces lungs to expand. Whose blood clears the drug more swiftly when Armand drips his own into his held-open mouth.

Who pretends it’s nothing when his eyes crack open. “Oh hey. Was a little–”

“Dead. You were a little dead.” His cold fury is lost on Daniel, still blissed out on the dregs of opiates and the blood Armand fed him. He feels the hinges of Daniel’s jaw in his hand, skin so easily bruised, and wills himself to let go.

“I mean if anyone here is a little dead you would–”

“You’re a fool Daniel, and I will not watch you–” It’s a mistake. Armand chokes off the words before any more can escape, but Daniel is already filling in the blanks.

“Die?” Daniel whispers. “Of course you will.”

Armand flinches, shifts from his crouch at Daniel’s side to stand over him instead. Daniel’s eyes track lazily. Armand wants to hurt him but that’s what Daniel wants, too. To be hurt. To feel something. An endless shifting through extremes. Nothing to everything and back again.

“Get up,” he says. “You smell like rot.”

“Says the one who eats–”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten what I am. That’s my mistake.” He curves his hand around Daniel’s bicep, dragging him to his feet and letting him go. Daniel sways a moment, looks as if he would like to sit back down. “Take a shower. It’s not a negotiation.”

When Daniel doesn’t move, he pushes him forward, sends him stumbling towards the bathroom with perhaps more force than necessary. Stopping in the doorway, Daniel asks, “are you… coming with me?”

“Why? Are you a child? Are you so incapable of caring for yourself?” He’s being cruel. He’s not even certain why, beyond the desire to harm. Better with his tongue than his teeth, perhaps.

From Daniel, indignance, then hurt, then sudden understanding. He turns, backtracks, reaches for Armand. Armand slaps his hands away, and he reaches again. And again. And again. Until his hands are on Armand’s face and it feels too difficult to keep pushing him away.

“You’re not angry,” Daniel says, slow and sure. “That’s not what this is.”

Just like that, Daniel unnames the emotion and Armand does not know what to call it. Knows that it wants to spill from him, keeps trying to escape from his chest. Soft and defeated and set adrift, he asks, “Are you trying to punish me, Daniel? Have I loved you so poorly that you want to hurt me?”

“I think you love me as well as you know how,” Daniel says, hands falling away. “And I do a lot of things to hurt you. But the drugs? That shit is just who I am. Not everything is about you.”

There’s a bitterness Daniel’s voice that he hears often these days. It might always have been there, but Armand notices it now, as honest as the words are. It hurts worse when Daniel is honest, means the things he says, picks them with precision. He does that more often now, too. The naivety of youth more frequently replaced with an almost preternatural knowledge of how to hurt and how to help in equal measure. Armand is still trying to figure out how much of each Daniel is giving now.

He searches for something to say. Maybe to confirm that he knows it’s not about him, or that he doesn’t think Daniel is somehow inherently an addict like he believes himself to be. Perhaps to ask what things he does to hurt him intentionally. To ask if there’s some way he might learn to love Daniel better.

Instead he says, “What if you were dead, Daniel? What am I to do if I find you dead?”

Daniel looks at least briefly unsettled, now that the gravity of the situation has settled in a little more. It’s swiftly replaced with the same old frustrations, the same repetitive argument. “I’m going to die anyways. You understand that? You want me to stay mortal so damn bad then something is gonna kill me one day.”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand, Daniel. And you don’t want to understand.” Armand begins to wonder why he’s bothering to participate in these arguments anymore. Daniel could repeat everything he will say all on his own. He nudges Daniel more gently this time, fingers just below his collarbone until he’s standing in the bathroom. “Shower.”

 Daniel catches Armand’s hand. “Stay.”

Armand can’t figure out if that word is meant as a simple request specific to this moment, or if it’s bigger than that. He’d like to remind Daniel that he’s never the one who leaves, not really. He’s rarely far from Daniel, beyond leaving the Village to hunt.

He lets Daniel tug him backwards into the bathroom without asking for the clarification, door shutting behind them with a click to keep the draft out.

He leans against the counter, tugs his hand back to fold his arms over his chest and appraise Daniel with a clinical formality while he begins to undress. He’s lost weight, lately; the drugs and the blood dull his appetite, and Armand is no good at doing more than coaxing him to get food. He’s paler than he once was, too. It’s not as if they cannot go out together in the day, it’s just that Daniel has simply drifted with Armand’s presence for so long that he has become accustomed to the routine of the night. Armand supposes it helps that in moving to the Village, they’ve found many other people who exist more comfortably in the dark.

Perhaps if he has someone make food, deliver it. Perhaps if they wander through the park more often in the daytime, where the sun can touch Daniel’s skin and remind him why he should not wish to be confined to a half-life of half days. Perhaps if this thing or that were different. Sometimes he goes so far as to imagine draining every drug dealer and a 300 mile radius.

He would love nothing more than to be by Daniel’s side while he lives out all his mortal years, but Daniel– Daniel is testing and pushing and seeing how close he can get to death’s threshold. Daniel trusts Armand to save him. Daniel doesn’t trust Armand to know this eternal life is a curse upon those who are given it.

Daniel looks at him now, stripped bare and too thin and still beautiful, as if he’s waiting for instruction. He serves so well when he chooses to. Armand does not wish to be served today, but Daniel is still shaky-legged and caught somewhere between sinking and floating while he waits for the inevitable comedown, and Armand can see why Daniel might think that’s what he wants from him. Might imagine it to be some sort of atonement.  

This, of course, leaves them caught up somewhere in the middle ground. It used to stun Armand that there was any middle ground to be found at all. That there was a space between complete submission and total power. Now, they settle here often, both in life and in bed.

He lifts his hand, turns the shower on hot enough to scald, sees the steam rise and spiral in the air. “In, Daniel.”

It does not surprise him that Daniel goes willingly now. He’s gotten what he wanted from Armand. His blood and his company and his pain. All that’s left is forgiveness he hasn’t asked for, yet.  

Daniel hisses when he steps into the tub, “fuck, Jesus.”

“Is it too hot?”

A pause, a deep breath, “No.”

“You must tell me if it’s going to burn you.”

Daniel steps fully into the stream of the water. “It’s fine.”

“Good.” Armand slides the curtain closed, loses sight of Daniel on the other side but hears the confused protest in his mind. He’s used to Armand joining him. Accustomed to Armand washing him, shaving his face, massaging soap into his scalp. Dressing him if they’re going out, wrapping a towel around him and bringing him to bed if they aren’t. He’s never admitted to loving the attention, but Armand doesn’t need him to say it out loud.

Left behind the curtain, hot water stripping his skin clean, body fighting an endless battle against the chemicals still shuffling through his bloodstream, Daniel stifles a whimper. The fragility of his life catches up with him in the shock of heat. The flimsy shield drops away, and what’s left is the weight of his despair.

Armand leaves him to it for a while. Lets it crush him. When it feels too cruel, he recalls the blue of Daniel’s skin now made red and alive in the water. Time stretches out. Daniel grows anxious, heart racing.

“Please?” Perhaps he hears it soft over the shower, or perhaps he hears it in Daniel’s mind, but he does hear it.

It’s only then that Armand speaks. “You’re so desperate not to be lonely that even here it frightens you. A shower curtain between you and the world is too much.” The words are as cruel as the silence, but it doesn’t help him hold to his anger the way he’d like it to.

Daniel takes any response as permission, pulls the curtain open, reaches a wet hand out to wrap around Armand’s wrist. Armand lets himself be pulled. Allows Daniel to coax him into the water fully clothed.

“It’s too much between you and I.” Daniel knows he’s charming, knows how easy it is to cajole Armand with sweetness. That doesn’t make it a lie. His fingers cling to the quickly drenched knit of Armand’s sweater. “Don’t you want me by your side?”

“Death is a heavy curtain, Daniel. It will fall between even us.”

“I don’t think so. Not if–”

“It always does. You will grow tired of me. Bitter when you realize you’ve missed out on life.” They’ve had this conversation before.

Daniel leans into him, tired from standing on his feet when his muscles are still lazy with fading drugs. Armand takes his weight, arm looping around his shoulders, another around his hips. Daniel’s voice is quiet, muffled where it’s tucked against the wet skin of Armand’s neck and dampened by the water. “Say that’s true: then you lose me either way. Why not choose an indefinite number of years over a finite one?”

“Because, beloved,” Armand says, “at least in one version of events, you might love me as long as you live.”

Daniel doesn’t say anything in response, and it’s a bitter victory, this selfish honesty. Armand pulls back far enough to find the soap, lathering it between his palms before putting hands to skin in something not unlike apology. Daniel hums into the touch and it’s hard to stay angry when he’s warm, beating heart racing to meet Armand’s hand.

Perhaps Daniel was right, and he was never really angry at all.

Neither of them speak again until they’re finished, curled up under enough blankets that it would be smothering if Armand actually needed to breathe. He still can’t figure out how Daniel manages it.

“If you must use heroin, wait until I’m here with you,” Armand says, Daniel’s mouth pressed against the nape of his neck, Daniel’s hand pressed flat to his chest.

“I only want it when you’re not here,” Daniel says, a sweet kiss pressed behind his ear as if this is a romantic thing to say. It is, of course. That might be one microscopic part of the greater problem. “I’m sorry that I scared you.”

“I wasn’t–”

“Shut up, just let me–” Daniel cuts himself off this time, a breath of pause before he continues. “I’m sorry. I was trying to hurt you. Not by doing it, but after? Yeah. Yeah I wanted it to fucking hurt you.”

Armand thinks about brushing it off. It would be so easy to say it was nothing, or deny him forgiveness, or call up anger as an easy armor again. Instead he doesn’t speak, just wraps his hand around the one Daniel has to his chest and holds it hard enough to hurt. And Daniel understands, he thinks. It changes nothing, but Daniel does understand.

It took 17 hours and 13 minutes to make Daniel forget, and 27 minutes to make him remember. It takes 2 hours and 47 minutes for him to wake after.

His eyes peel open slowly, unfocused. The room is still mostly dark, only a sliver of light coming in from the door Armand cracked open a while ago. That orange light slants across Daniel’s face and Armand… Armand doesn’t know if he’s relieved or terrified or angry to see Daniel awake. To see his eyes become his eyes.

“Fuck,” Daniel says, eyes adjusting, hand rubbing at his head. “Fuck my head–”

Armand reaches out a hand, though he’s not entirely certain what he intends to do.

Daniel flinches away, uncharacteristic panic in his voice, “Don’t. Don’t touch me. God, holy shit my head is on fire.”

“Okay. Alright.” Armand tries to make his voice soothing and thinks it might even work – this is more concerning than the panic itself. “Can I get you something for the pain?”

“Yeah, think you’ve done plenty already.” Daniel closes his eyes and that must help because his shoulders relax, his breathing comes a bit more even. Armand clasps his hands in his lap again. “That sucked.”

“I did mention that it–” Daniel kicks out blindly with a foot, connects weakly with Armand’s knee, effectively cutting him off without words. “You’re going to hurt yourself more than me.”

This earns a low groan, Daniel peering at him for a moment from between the fingers of the hand that still clutches his head. “Looking at you hurts like hell. Hearing you, too.”

Armand doesn’t have enough knowledge of the human mind to know the explanation for that. As skilled as he is at navigating through, bending to his will, coaxing in one direction or another, he has a limited understanding of function and form beyond his own use for it.

“Would you like me to leave?”

“We’ve been over this one, haven’t we? You won’t do it even if I say yes so–”

“The room Daniel. Would you like me to leave the room?”

He expects the answer to be an immediate yes. That would be the easiest thing, for Daniel to do exactly what he has come to expect this Daniel to do. Instead there’s a long pause, a drawn out hesitation that makes Armand think of things he can’t afford to let himself think about. Daniel’s voice comes out rough and defeated when he says, “Just… be quiet. Don’t say anything, don’t make me look at you.”

Armand wonders what Daniel sees when he looks at him now. Approximately 198 minutes ago, he did not want to see Armand because he did not want to see the monster he desired while he admitted that desire to himself. A simple reasoning, if a painful one. Now, he cannot say what Daniel sees because Daniel’s mind is closed to him again.

Pushing past it would take no effort now. Daniel is running on pain and adrenaline. He stops himself not because Daniel doesn’t want him there, but because he’s afraid of what he will find. Afraid that even with all the memories back, Daniel will still hate him. Afraid that he’s only given him more reasons for it now. Afraid that he’s afraid, even.

The silence drags on and the night bleeds out before his eyes. The sunrise is a muted thing, no warm glow, no orange or pink, only a slow transition from black to blue. It’s almost fully risen by the time Daniel opens his eyes again They’re rimmed in red, made a brighter green in contrast, and they settle on Armand’s own with a steadiness that nearly hides his apprehension.

“How come I don’t remember everything now?” His voice is hoarse, rough with pain and too many emotions to separate isolate any one of them out from the rest.

Armand resists the urge, again, to press into Daniel’s mind and confirm that everything is in its right place. He already knows it is. Spent those two and a half-frightened hours checking and double checking.

“This isn’t a superhero movie, Daniel. There’s no montage put together for you.” He doesn’t mean to sound quite so exasperated. Or he does, but half regrets it for the glare it gets him from Daniel. “They’re memories. They will come to you just as memories do, when something makes you think of them.”

“Well right now you make me think about all of them at once and it has me longing for an icepick to the–”

“Okay,” Armand finds himself saying again, in that same soothing tone. It works again, too. If only for the brief moment before he speaks again. “I’m going to leave.”

Daniel, to his credit, masks his emotion incredibly well. If not for the increased beating of his heart, Armand might not know the statement bothers him at all. “So you’ve made the mess, and now you’re going to just up and–”

“No.” Patience. He needs patience. He tries to find some well of it inside him but comes up dry. Waiting has frayed his nerves, wound him tight. From the fear of two and a half hours or fifty years, he couldn’t say. “I’m going to go find myself clothes and find you something to eat, and I’ll be close enough that I will know if you need me.”

He expects Daniel to protest the latter, to say that he doesn’t need Armand. Instead, he just asks “Will that help?”

“I don’t know. Contrary to your belief, and fine, yes to some evidence, I don’t actually remove or return memories with great frequency.” He gets to his feet, flexes fingers and stretches limbs that have stiffened from lack of movement. “But perhaps my being here is… placing your mind under unnecessary duress.”

Daniel opens his mouth and for a moment, he looks as if he might argue. Then he must catch up with his impulse, because his jaw shuts with a hard click and he simply nods his head to convey his agreement.

---

Some quick math tells Armand it’s been far too long since Daniel ate anything of real substance. He’d rather not postpone any longer, but he also doubts it will be possible to convince Daniel to eat until he’s had enough time to at least begin feeling in control of his thoughts again.

He does need clothes for himself, so he buys them. Kills more time than he needs to. Wanders the streets, expanding his awareness outwards to be ready should Daniel call to him, and to make himself aware of any vampiric presence in the city. He’s lost track of which borough the New York coven makes their home in, but it’s of no concern to him anyway.

Modern times have shifted the overtly formal expectations of the past. Really, he thinks any coven in an American city as large as this one would be angrier at being forced to interact with a visitor, and he has never hesitated to kill when he must. Fledgling vampires can be unpredictable however, and they flock to places like this where the kills come easy and they can be sloppy with their clean up. He doesn’t need them anywhere near Daniel.

It’s familiar work, which only serves to unsettle him further.

By ten, he’s given Daniel all the time he can, or simply as much as he’s willing to. He returns to the apartment with coffee and an assortment of breakfast items from a nearby café, with a delivery order of groceries scheduled to arrive at the door later. Daniel will be annoyed, but too preoccupied to truly protest.

“You’re back.” He isn’t sure how Daniel manages to sound equally disappointed and relieved, but he’s at least pleased by the latter.

“Yes. I did tell you I would be.”

“You’re not exactly the most–” The word trustworthy dangles loud in the silence of the unfinished sentence. Daniel winces with the weight of remembering, and Armand cannot find it in himself to feel remorse for it.  “Fuck I hate this. Is that coffee?”

Armand slides the paper cup across the counter and Daniel drinks without hesitation. It seems prudent to say nothing, but he does the opposite. “You should eat, too. You haven’t–”

“I understand why you did it now,” Daniel cuts in. “I remember… agreeing.”

Armand remembers everything, but that moment he remembers with sharp clarity. He wonders how Daniel expected it to have gone, if he imagined that it was an impulsive decision made in the heat of an angry moment. He wonders what he thinks about the truth of it now that he knows.

It’s not the time to ask so watches Daniel with searching eyes, waits for him to weave the thought he’s trying to put to words. When Daniel doesn’t immediately add anything, he turns away to pull a plate out of the cupboard and begin piling things onto it. Pastries, a breakfast sandwich, a small and quickly cooling container of oatmeal, some fruit.

Daniel watches him with some bemusement, accepting the plate with a too-loud sigh. “See this is… on one hand, this– there’s nothing strange about it at all, there are a hundred blurry memories of the same thing. And on the other hand, it’s freaky and unsettling to have the vampire who tortured me serving me breakfast like a worried grandmother.”

“I am not–”

“I know why you did it. And I know I told you to.” Daniel switches topics again, and Armand is getting whiplash. "And I’m fucking– if I could, I’d hurt you.”

There’s truth in that. In the renewed shaking of Daniel’s hand and the tension in his shoulders and his expression caught up somewhere between fury and despair. Armand grips the counter with both hands, leans a little closer, lips turning up in a close-mouthed smile. “Oh, I’m certain you can hurt me. You’ve never had much trouble finding a way before, just give it some time.”

“Right,” Daniel says with a slow, single nod. “What did you think was going to happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you gave them back. Did you think I was going to trip over myself to tell you how much I loved you? Throw myself into your arms weeping about how glad I was to–”

“No. That would be ridiculous.” And it’s true. He never thought that would be the result. It still aches that it isn’t, anyway. “I never planned on giving them back, Daniel. They were taken for a reason.”

“Right. So I could live.” He says it with the same disgusted tone he used when he said the word love yesterday. As if it’s something he doesn’t even believe possible. Armand feels like he’s arguing with two Daniel’s at the same time. Perhaps that’s how Daniel feels now, too. He wouldn’t know, because Daniel doesn’t want him in his mind. It hurts more now that he knows Daniel remembers. Everything hurts more now.

“Yes. And you even– you told Louis that–”

“Yeah. So you took my memories so I could live, and you gave them back so I could realize just how much of a hopeless failure that endeavor was.”

“Swing a little harder, Daniel. Not sure you’ve made an impact yet.”

Daniel already knows he’s hit, though. Of course he does. All the instinct age has brought him coupled with what now amounts to more combined knowledge of Armand than even Louis has. Only hours with all that power at his disposal and already he knows what to do. Takes the sacrifice Armand made, the pain he endured for it, and calls it a waste. Calls it nothing. Renders it pointless.

“It wasn’t enough to ruin my life once, or twice, even. You had to catch me at the very end and show me how ruined it really is. Ruin it again.” It would be better if the words were only meant to hurt, but they’re also true. Not his intention, but true all the same.

“I gave you back your life,” he says, the words whispered and weak.

“You gave me nothing. I made some sort life for myself and look how well that turned out.” Daniel gestures around himself as if to make the point. Some distant part of Armand resists the urge to note that Daniel’s house is beautiful, his life rather successful. “A job I loved but did not want. Wives I loved but did not want. Daughters I love but did not want. My whole fucking life has just been a thing I learned to love because I couldn’t have what I wanted. Couldn’t even name it.”

“And now you can.”

“I don’t know. Depends. Do you even have a name?”

“See Daniel? You found your mark after all.”

Chapter Text

If these past weeks have felt like months, then this day feels like a lifetime. Feels like someone took it and stretched it out into what feels like eternity even within Armand’s broad scope. Perhaps what makes it so is the silence. Perhaps the anger that radiates from Daniel like a shield. Perhaps his own wounded heart. Lately he can hardly parse what he wants, only ever realizes it the moment he gets the opposite.

Daniel sits on the couch, staring at his own hands as if they hold all the answers. There was a time for Armand when they nearly did. The tremor is back in earnest now, rattles all the way up Daniel’s shoulder; his heel taps against the floor, shakes everything that wasn’t already moving. The room vibrates with it – the uncertainty, the swell of too many emotions, the push-pull of past and present colliding.

Armand hears the groceries arrive just after four, hears Daniel’s heartbeat rise in panic when Armand goes to bring them in. This, at least, is something Armand knows how to do. He has been needed whilst being despised enough times to have learned to carry the weight.

It’s owed to Daniel, he thinks. Payment for the promise broken.

He puts the groceries away while Daniel does his best performance of someone not deeply amused by a vampire reorganizing his cupboards. At least twice, Armand catches Daniel looking at him from the corner of his eye. Once with the beginnings of a smile, once with barely masked horror.

When the task is finished, has been stretched out for as long as he can manage, Armand snags a book from the shelf and settles in to read it at the dining table. It’s of little interest to him – some very characteristic biography on the opioid epidemic in the states. The margins are littered with notes, sentences highlighted, pages dog-eared. He gets the general sense that Daniel doesn’t agree with much of what the author has written.  

Daniel gets up shortly after Armand begins reading, makes himself a sandwich and another coffee. This one he spikes with whiskey. When he finishes, he simply returns to the couch to stare at his hands again.

And on it goes, just this way, for hours and hours. Until the sun is gone, the night once again enveloping them. And as it has before, it grants them strange reprieve.

“You used to eat more often,” Daniel says, as if he has not been silent for hours. As if the last thing he said to Armand was not cleverly designed to carve into him.

“Would you like to know why?” Armand asks, closing the book and dropping it on the table with perhaps a bit too much eagerness.

A pause. Then: “Sure. Why not?”

He does his best to appear nonchalant when stands, settling on the couch beside Daniel and angling his body towards him. Daniel’s raised eyebrows tell him his acting is poor, but he at least spares him from verbally pointing it out.

“It was practicality and an abundance of caution. The exchange of blood made my hunger… more insistent over time.” He pauses, images of a dozen moments flashing in his memory. “And you had a tendency to do things that made you bleed at inconvenient moments.”

“Yeah. Mortals. We tend to do that.”

“You also aren’t– forgive me– weren’t fond of the cold.” Armand pauses a moment, tries to decide whether pressing further will earn him twelve more hours of silence. It seems worth the risk. “I’m sure you recall.”

It’s not anger he earns, but pain. Some specific memory breaking free of all the rest. “Yeah. Hazards of dating an animated corpse.”

A weak enough attempt at a jab that Daniel doesn’t look disappointed when Armand smiles in response. “It had its benefits in warmer climates, didn’t it?”

“Remind me.” For a moment, it’s almost fond. If Daniel notices the shift in himself, he doesn’t choose to show it.

“California, Nevada, Italy, Spain, one particularly hot month in–”

“Turkey.” Their smiles are a shared thing, too familiar to be shy, too plagued with time and circumstance to be unfettered by reality even now. But it’s there, this thing. Whatever they made together all those years ago. And Daniel here with him, angry, confused, hurt, but whole.

Armand looks away before he has to see Daniel’s expression shutter.

“Yes. Turkey.”

He hears Daniel shift his weight, lean back against the couch with a sigh. “Armand.”

Daniel – this Daniel, here, in this life – has said his name plenty of times. Usually with disdain, though occasionally with curiosity. The way he says it now is different. Is enough to drag Armand’s eyes back up to him. “Yes?”

“I’m not going to apologize,” Daniel says. “But I hadn’t remembered yet.”

“Hadn’t remembered what?”

Daniel doesn’t answer directly, just shrugs his shoulders with the sheepishness of somebody who doesn’t want to feel bad but clearly does, and says, “I’ll call you by the name you chose to keep from now on. It was fucked up for me to–”

“Careful, Daniel. You’re coming very close to an apology.” The teasing gets him a smile and a scowl in quick succession. He’d like to reach out a hand to feel both on Daniel’s skin – to learn the shape of those expressions on his face now that it has changed so much.

 “Wouldn’t want that.” Daniel leans forward, plucks the remote from the coffee table, and turns on the television without ceremony. “Preferences?”

“I wasn’t aware anyone still utilized cable.”

“Shut up. Streaming is a money-grabbing scam.” Daniel begins flipping through channels, flashes of commercials, reruns, cartoons, and sports popping up only to be replaced with the next in quick succession.

“You’re a millionaire now, you know. A subscription would be a drop in the bucket.”

If the reminder surprises Daniel, he doesn’t let it show. Instead, he just asks, “You’ve got all of them, don’t you?”

“Most,” Armand admits.

Another smile, there and gone (but there and there and there). “Great. Then I assume you can just share your passwords.”

“Of course, Daniel.”

They’re quiet again, after that. It’s comfortable this time, in a way that makes something hurt right between Armand’s lowest ribs. They don’t bother with the miserable process of logging into anything, instead watching back-to-back reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air until Daniel falls asleep with his head lolling back against the couch and Armand switches off the television. He drapes a blanket over Daniel’s lap, feels a precious sort of tenderness he doesn’t let himself acknowledge when Daniel is awake.

He could go out. Should, perhaps. It would be prudent to feed sooner than he might otherwise, having healed his injuries in Dubai and expended significant energy managing Daniel’s mind in the days since.

Instead, he stays there on the other end of the couch, listening to the almost-but-not-quite snore of Daniel’s breath and thinking about that month in Turkey for the first time in many years.

“Come my love, you’ve slept enough.” Armand tugs at Daniel’s arm, ignores his groan of complaint.

“It’s too hot,” Daniel grouses. “Can’t we just stay here in bed?”

Armand considers it briefly, looking down at Daniel stretched out on the mattress, sticky with sweat. It’s tempting. However, “You promised if we came here, you wouldn’t spend the whole trip indoors.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.” Armand pulls again, harder. “And you made me promise not to let you, either.”

“I don’t believe you.” Daniel sits up, at least. Armand supplies proof, direct to mind, and Daniel rolls his eyes. Insolent in a way that should irritate Armand but only makes him want to swallow the air that he keeps in his lungs. “We can go out tomorrow.”

“It will be just as hot tomorrow. And the next day, and the next. The night is cooler, is it not?”

“Easy for you to say.”

Armand leans in for a kiss, slides a cold hand around Daniel’s throat, squeezes hard enough that Daniel gasps for air when he lets go. “Must you complain all the time?”

Daniel grins up at him, red-cheeked and big-eyed, and says with complete certainty, “Yes. That’s what you love about me.”

“I love everything about you Daniel, but that perhaps the least,” Armand lies. “Come. I want to show you something.”

“You always want to show me something,” Daniel says, but he still drags himself off the mattress on the floor and pulls on clothes.

They’re halfway out the door before Armand nudges Daniel in the side and says, “Your wallet, Daniel. And your passport, unless you’d like them stolen again.”

“One time. It was one time, and I told you I was still too drunk to leave.”

“Hush, you’ll wake everyone.”

---

Despite his fascination with the idea of being a vampire, Daniel generally prefers for them to do things in the most human way possible. They walk often when he could almost certainly commandeer cars with no effort. They pay for the large majority of the food and drink Daniel requires when Armand could just as easily steal it. Armand’s use of his gifts often amounts to parlour tricks for Daniel’s entertainment. Of course, the flights and hotels are paid for with stolen funds, but that’s not something Daniel ever questions.

Today it’s no different. They walk the streets of Istanbul for an hour when he could easily find them a cab, but Daniel doesn’t protest when Armand flips the locks with a thought and leads them both into the Hagia Sophia.

He’s been here once before, decades ago. It looks the same, the way very old places can be relied upon to do.

Daniel disguises his awe as is his way, huffing a laugh. “A church?”

“A mosque, now.” Armand corrects. “And don’t pretend you do not find it beautiful.”

He feels most at home when they leave North America, in ancient places like the one where they stand now. The mosque far predates him, some testament to what the non-living can withstand, perhaps. He made the mistake of spending the hours while Daniel was sleeping considering his own existence, feels the melancholy weight of it more present today than it has been in a long time.

A wave of his hand lights only enough of the chandeliers to illuminate the domes in low-golden glow. It’s close to how it was meant to be viewed at night – not quite candlelight, but good enough. Beautiful the way the night sky is beautiful – half incomprehensible, larger than any one person is meant to grasp. A strange magic to witness in a place that was crafted by man, with man’s limitations.  

Daniel’s silence is as much an agreement as any, his fingers tightening around Armand’s as he trails through the space. The light glances off of the sweat on his brow and he looks just as incomprehensible to Armand. More, perhaps.

“What’s the point?” Daniel asks.

“Of building beautiful things?” Armand muses, surprised at the question. “A distraction, perhaps, from the ugliness of the world.”

“Not that. Of building something like this to worship a god that doesn’t exist. Keeping it up for all these years as a place of worship for a different god.”

Armand shakes his head, presses his lips to Daniel’s salty temple, murmurs his words there. “They’re the same god. And mankind has worshipped in some manner or another for as long as it has existed. Point or no.”

“Were you religious? When you were still alive?” Surprised a second time. A hundredth. An infinite number, really. Armand doubts Daniel will ever stop surprising him.           

It’s a difficult question to consider only in the past tense. Faith is different as a vampire. Belief. Piety. If he is to live forever, he will never meet the god he prays to. And still, he prays. Sometimes to an Abrahamic god of brimstone and terrible power. Sometimes to a more hopeful version, a more loving version.

Sometimes he finds a god in other things. In blood. In art. In his own two hands.

God has never spoken back, never shown him any sign that he cares for Armand, which suits Armand just fine. He does not care for God, either.

Still, he prays.

“I was,” Armand says, when Daniel nudges him with an elbow. “I don’t know that religious is the right word, but I still–”

“You believe in god?” Daniel sounds shocked, says the name with the irreverence of a boy who has no concept of a world where to do so would be unimaginable, unforgivable. “How could you think there’s anything out there?”

“Because I exist, Daniel. How could there not be a hell for me to go to should I die?” Sometimes he believes this is already hell, and sometimes he knows hell will be far worse. To be immortal is not, truly, to live forever. It is only to endure for as long as possible, forestalling the inevitable torment until some distant tomorrow where it might become bearable.

“So you believe in a god that would sentence you to torture and agony?”

“Faith is not faith if it is contingent upon liking that which you believe exists.” Armand leads them both across the cathedral as he speaks, up the ramp that will take them to the second floor. He comes to a stop when they are overlooking the space from this higher angle, the shadows and light shifting to change what they can see. He supposes he could fly, could take Daniel with him to get a closer look at the paintings that are still further above, but he’s grown fonder of the human approach these months.

“This right here is all we get, I think,” Daniel says. It makes sense that he would think this way. It is the way Armand has seen him live; eking out every bit of holiness from the world right in front of him for lack of belief in anything else. “I’d rather believe in what I can see. Touch.”

This said with eyes not on the ornate carvings and paintings, but on Armand. They’re filled to the brim with the sort of unwavering earnestness that can only come from a mixture youthful infatuation and giddy love. It makes him feel impossibly warm, that sort of belief. He does not deserve it.

“How am I any better than God?”

“How are you any worse?”

If Armand was less horrible, he might attempt an argument to dissuade Daniel of the notion, but as it stands he doesn’t think there’s any point. Daniel knows what he is, keeps forgiving him anyways. Absolving him without ever asking if he’d like to be given mercy. He doesn’t feel like arguing in vain tonight.

Instead, he sinks to his knees in this ancient holy place and prays with his mouth, with his tongue, with his fangs sinking reverent into the inner crease of Daniel’s leg. Gives back everything he can and knows it isn’t enough, that he doesn’t believe it can be.

Here at Daniel’s feet, he tastes the blood and body of something that won’t save him but will certainly help him to endure.

They will return every night for two weeks after that, to fuck on old stone in the still sweltering heat, and Daniel will tell him each time that he is neither saved nor condemned. That he simply exists, and that he is worth believing in for that and that alone. The night Armand catches himself believing it is the last night he lays eyes upon the cathedral.

Daniel wakes sometime past four in the morning. Armand has enough warning before his eyes open that he could look away. Hears the change in his breathing, the shifting of his weight, and could pretend he hasn’t spent the better part of the night with his head on his arm, watching Daniel sleep. He doesn’t bother.

“Creepy,” Daniel croaks when he sees him, clearing his throat with a cough into the closed fist of his left hand. He stretches, spine arching, neck rolling with a loud crack. Armand can’t bring himself to blink, let alone turn his head. Daniel eyes the blanket on his lap with a strange expression, picking at the fabric between thumb and finger as if it will tell him how it got there.

“Apologies,” Armand says, a dry and transparent lie. “I did not mean to frighten you.”

They both know Daniel isn’t afraid, not really. Not the way he should be. If he ever had been he would probably have been dead long before now. He rubs at his temple and Armand wants–

He stands, makes his way to the kitchen and returns to Daniel with a palm full of pills and a glass of water. Daniel doesn’t immediately reach out to take either, instead looking from them to Armand with transparent suspicion.

Armand breathes an annoyed sigh. “I’m not going to poison you, Daniel.”

“I know that,” Daniel snaps. His fingers brush Armand’s palm when he takes the pills, little shocks bringing Armand’s nerves to attention as if they have been waiting for a sign to wake. No use telling them not to bother. “Poison is too detached for you. You’d probably go for strangling or something.”

He waits for Daniel to drink, to swallow the pills, to lift the glass to take another sip, and then says, “I’d simply drain you, Daniel.”

Daniel chokes, coughs into his elbow while Armand pries the glass from his fingers to set it on the coffee table. When Daniel recovers he looks up with a scowl and a sharp, “fuck you,” and it’s almost convincing but now he smells like desire. A short journey, always. Shorter now that Daniel can remember how good it felt to get what he wanted.

“You could, if you wanted. Would that help, do you think?” Armand cocks his head to the side, curious. Hungry, too. He should have eaten but it’s nothing he has not supressed a thousand times before. “You don’t know what you want, but your body does. It always does.”

“It doesn’t know shit. It’s seventy years old,” Daniel huffs, folding arms across his chest as if they can muffle the sound of his heartbeat.

Armand sinks to his knees, crowded into the narrow space between the coffee table and Daniel’s legs, careful not to touch him. Not now, not yet. The edge of the coffee table bites into his spine. “I can smell it on you. How much you want to say yes, how badly you’d like to be close, how you wish you could taste again. Say the word and–”

“No,” Daniel chews out. A half-beat of pause, enough space to ache but not quite enough to truly wound before he adds, “I don’t think it would help.”

Heat radiates from Daniel and Armand wants to feel it. His hands press hard to his own thighs and Daniel looks at him with that sharklike curiosity, circling and circling and circling.

“You’re not fucking with me,” Daniel finally says.

“No. Why would I?”

“Because that’s pretty much all you do with people?” Daniel asks it like a question, like he’s not sure of the answer. “Fuck these memories, I can’t keep track of what I know and what–”

“It’s all what you know.” It comes out gentler than he means it to. It’s not that he wants to be harsh with Daniel, though he often is. It’s more the look Daniel gives him when he’s anything but the purely violent creature Daniel wants to imagine he is. Like he’s caught up somewhere between pain and anger and his own tucked away tenderness. Betrayal too, like Armand is trying to complicate things further.

Daniel exhales, long and loud. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”

Reaching out to Daniel’s mind is careful work, in this moment. It’s not closed to him now, less because he’s welcome there and more because Daniel is too tired to keep it shut forever. Armand feels tired just brushing up against it, feels the mess of uncertainty, the never-ending spiral in and in and in.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m not fucking with you now. In this moment. Stay there.”

This earns him a glare, “Yeah. Easy for you to say. You’re not–”

“Five hundred years of the past, Daniel. I think I know a little bit about surviving the flood of memory.”

“It feels like a fucking tsunami,” Daniel says. Allows Armand this small chosen window into the truth, even when the structure around it is currently being held together with a mixture of anger and sheer force of will.

Armand considers this for a moment, then gets to his feet so quickly that Daniel jumps. He swallows the urge to laugh, knows it will be interpreted incorrectly, and instead holds out a hand. “Alright, come on then.”

Daniel eyes his now empty hand with the same suspicion he had when it was filled with pills. “Where?”

“We’re leaving the house. It’ll help.” He says it with a certainty he doesn’t quite feel, but distraction has always been effective with Daniel in the past.

“I’m not taking another walk through memory fucking park,” Daniel says, even as he takes Armand’s hand and lets himself be pulled to his feet.

They make it all the way to the door before Daniel shakes himself free of Armand’s grip, and he doesn’t have it within himself to care. He’s too filled with the warmth of that small, stolen touch. He should have eaten something. It’s ridiculous and dangerous to be feeling this way with so little reason.

“Just a walk down the street. More coffee, perhaps.” Careful, light.

Daniel slides his shoes on, pulling a hoodie over his wrinkled t-shirt and muffling his words. “It’s four in the morning.”

He was neither born nor reborn with the sort of patience that is required to deal with Daniel Molloy. His tone reflects as much when he answers with a clipped, “Fine. No coffee. Let’s go.”

It’s hard to stay irritated when the warm, low sound of Daniel’s laughter follows him out the door.

---

Daniel will never admit to it, but Armand can tell leaving the house is effective. It gives him something to do that keeps him from being able to dive too deep in the waters of the past, and the tension that he’s been holding every waking hour since Armand returned his memories is lessened, dropping out of his shoulders as his muscles loosen.

At first, Armand sets the pace slow enough that Daniel barks at him that he’s “old, not fucking dead,” at which point he picks it up just a little too fast. He slows again when he’s proven his point. The meander had been for his own benefit, not just Daniel’s. If he wanted to go anywhere fast, he would go far faster than Daniel can.

They walk without speaking and it’s a comfortable silence, just like the one on the couch last night. Muscle memory kicking in, taking over, letting all the mess of the conscious mind drift into the background for a while. They’ve walked side by side through city streets almost more than they have done anything else.

The world is beginning to wake by the time Daniel speaks. “I keep trying to figure out why you didn’t just stop it– the blood thing– if I was dying and it was all so terrible.”

It wasn’t all so terrible, Armand wants to say. It was beautiful, too.

“And what possible reasons have you come up with?” He asks instead.

“Well. Could just be that you didn’t give a shit. Had ready access to drinking my blood like a juice box and–”

“That isn’t–”

“I know.” Daniel doesn’t sound happy about it. “I think you cared. Or at least, I believed you did then and that’s the best I have to go off of. But that means you let it happen even though it kept hurting me, and even though hurting me… was not preferrable to you.”

Daniel comes to a stop, so Armand does too. “I’m sure you’ve already decided what the reason is, so why don’t you save us the suspense?”

“You were addicted to it too,” Daniel says. And yes, it’s clear he believes it, that he’s decided it. The idea is a new one to Armand, one he hasn’t considered. Vampires need blood to survive, but Daniel’s blood– “The way it made you feel, the exchange of it. You needed it too.”

“It’s not… it’s not only a drug. It wasn’t for me, at least. It was–”

“Trust. Yeah.” Daniel sounds almost wistful, and the desire is there but a softer longing lingers too. He picks at a hangnail, a bead of blood welling then sinking into the crease of his nailbed. He watches Armand as he does it, waits to see that which he already knows he will find. “You still want it.”

“Of course I do,” Armand shrugs in a weak attempt at appearing casual, even as his tongue runs over the sharp point of a fang. He wills it away because he can. Because no matter how badly he does want, he’s still five hundred years old. Hunger is an old, toothless enemy now.

Apparently satisfied with his observation, Daniel starts walking again. “I used to think you just gave me your blood to keep me. And I wanted it, so I didn’t care why you gave it to me.”

He can’t formulate a protest. There is truth in it, and Daniel knows that much. There’s no part of him, past or present, that doesn’t know the ways in which Armand can be selfish.

“But you also gave it to me because you loved me.” In another world, another version of the story, Armand imagines Daniel says this with awe, or love, or realization. Here he says it with a bitter resignation.

“You believe it, now?”

“I think you loved me as well as you knew how.” If it hurt before when Daniel would unknowingly repeat himself, then it is excruciating now that there is a possibility he might actually recall his own words.  Whether he does it by intention or by mistake, it makes Armand’s chest feel like it’s caving in. Daniel doesn’t leave much space for him to dwell on it. “Which was it, when you offered earlier?”

“What?”

“Was it to keep me again, make it impossible for me to leave?”

“I shouldn’t have offered, Daniel. I wasn’t thinking and I wouldn’t have–” he stops himself before he can say what he cannot be sure is the truth. He might have done it then, had Daniel said yes. “I don’t want to force you to stay with me. Not… not like that.”

“It wouldn’t kill me, this time.” Daniel says it like he’s trying to convince someone. Armand cannot tell which of them he wants to convince. “It’d be easier if it was only a drug, you know? I’ve quit drugs before.”

“You quit–”

“No, you quit.” And there it is, on full display, the incandescent anger back again from wherever it has been pushed to this morning. “I was just collateral damage on your road to recovery.”

It isn’t true, isn’t an apt comparison. Armand doesn’t say as much, now. Just walks and walks and walks.

Chapter Text

Of all the things he has organized – theatre productions, group hunts, dinner parties – Armand does not believe he’s ever organized a birthday party. It’s not as if he’s had much reason to. He supposes he hasn’t exactly organized this one, so much as been harangued into it by the cluster of humans Daniel has become friends with of late.

He keeps insisting that they’re Armand’s friends too, and Armand keeps insisting that he only refrains from eating them for Daniel’s sake.

It’s been months now. Long enough that he can admit he has developed a mild fondness for some of them, if only because they bring Daniel so much happiness. Not because Andy is teaching him how to bake, or because Mary brings him books that she thinks Armand will like, or because Thomas brought them tickets to see Grease on Broadway last month just because he mentioned it in passing.

If he thinks about them for too long, it opens up a vast pit of old grief inside his chest that he can’t navigate. It is enough to have all this love for Daniel without stumbling his way into feeling love for a half dozen other mortals who are equally bound for death. He refuses to entertain the idea.

Still, their excitement is infectious when crammed into the small space of Daniel and Armand’s apartment. It fills up the room, brightens it just as much as the haphazard streamers and the multicolored balloons do. More perhaps, because he still thinks the decorations are unnecessary. He swapped out the couch entirely once without Daniel’s notice.  

“When is Daniel coming home again?” Mary asks.

Armand pauses a moment in his anxious fidgeting with the rolled cuffs of his shirt, reaching out to Daniel to locate his thoughts among the many thousands. It would be impossible without his blood in Daniel’s veins, and with Daniel much further away. As it stands, he finds him somewhere a few blocks over, dragging his feet on his way back from the liquor store, and hurries him along with a firm ‘if I have to be here then so do you.’

“About four minutes,” Armand says aloud, missing how abnormal his specificity is until he sees Mary’s look of confused surprise.

“Right. You two are weirdly close, you know that? Like. It’s not normal.”

Armand offers a close-lipped smile in the place of a response.

A sheepish boy whose name he can’t remember asks, “Should we hide?”

He’s fairly certain he’s Mark’s boyfriend, so Armand resists the urge to be rude and instead just tells him, voice carefully level, “The party isn’t a surprise.”

“Yeah, Tyler. Armand wouldn’t let us make it a surprise because he hates fun.” Tyler. Right. Mark slides an arm around the boy’s shoulders and grins wide in Armand’s direction. All teeth and big eyes lined in black. He knows it’s only a joke, can confirm that in Mark’s thoughts, and it still chafes at him. He wonders, more often than he’d like to admit, if Daniel is as like to find him boring as Louis has.

Whenever he asks if Daniel has grown bored with him, Daniel laughs so hard he cannot breathe, which is both offending, and goes a long way towards reassuring him that it’s not the case.

Besides. Had this been a surprise, there would have been a not insignificant chance of Daniel showing up too high to function. He keeps the worst of his drug use from his friends. Sticks to shots and cocaine and the occasional offered quaalude. That had been part of the reason Armand agreed to a party at all, in fact. Birthdays in the past have not been Daniel’s preferred occasion on which to practice restraint. It gets worse, the older he gets.

There is no appeasing Daniel on days where he is most aware of his age, of Armand’s refusal to take the gift of time’s passage from him.

He almost loses himself to the melancholy, but then Daniel is walking through the door grinning wide and enthusiastic, and the room fills with shouts of “Surprise!” anyways, and he swallows all of it back down for a while.

---

He’s outside so that he doesn’t kill Frederick. He doesn’t know Frederick particularly well, which makes it far more difficult to want to spare him for any reason beyond not ruining the party Daniel seems to be enjoying so much.

It’s not that he minds when people flirt with Daniel – it happens often, and it’s a natural side effect of living where they do. He’s sweet, funny, beautiful. Armand can see why so many people are charmed by him, when he listens so intently to what they say with a face like that. He wouldn’t even mind if Daniel wanted to take any of them to bed.

But he’s soft tonight. The day presses on his own bruises and in this ache, at least, Daniel will never be a comfort to him. He will only ever tell him his sadness is a sign that he should just do as he wants him to.

Frederick’s disdain had been palpable, his jabs delivered with intent. “You’re a little young to be strapped with a ball and chain, aren’t you Daniel?” He had said. “You should be having fun out in the world, not trapped under the watchful eye of–”

He hadn’t caught the rest.

Petty and meaningless words from an intoxicated man barely in his thirties, who only wants to take for himself what belongs to others. When Armand looks into his mind, he can see all his insecurities. His fears that he can only offer a good fuck, a good time.

It doesn’t matter either way. Daniel has no interest; Daniel’s mind is full only of an endless wish to be Armand’s, and that’s exactly what he is.

What matters is that he is too young to be throwing his life away, to have placed himself in the possession of a monster. He should be with assholes like Frederick, or nice boys like Mark, or with a bright girl like Mary.

Mary who, as if on cue, appears beside him with an offered cigarette at the exact moment he has begun to picture Daniel dead at 27.

“Thank you.” He accepts it, touches it to the lit end of her own in a way he hasn’t done in a long time.

“No problem, figured you could use some company out here while you sulk.” Mary is blunt. Says things in a thick, buttery southern accent that helps her get away with pulling no punches. “Freddy’s an asshole.”

“Mm. Who?” Not his best work. He inhales deep, exhales slow, imagines that the nicotine can do anything for him other than make him smell of tobacco for the rest of the night.

Mary snorts a laugh, nudges him with an elbow. “Yeah. You have no idea who he is and that’s why you’re out here moping about it. Sure.”

“Maybe he’s right.” It doesn’t matter, of course. Armand has no intention of letting Daniel go. Doesn’t think he was built for that sort of sacrifice. “How do you deal with life being so short?”

“Uh…” Mary puffs at her cigarette for a long moment. He can smell the alcohol in her blood, hear it gumming up her thoughts into something that drifts in all directions instead of forms an easy thread. “The same way you do, probably?”

“That I doubt.”

A long pause then. He hears it on her thoughts before she says it aloud, and he should stop her, but he can’t find the motivation. “Is Daniel okay?”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“Because you’ve been looking at him like one of you is dying lately, and he’s the one whose got dark circles under his eyes most days and has lost a good ten pounds.” Mary is more perceptive than the rest. If he thought their life here had any chance of lasting long enough, he might be worried that she would notice his distinct lack of aging.

“He’s fine, we’re fine.” Armand stubs out the butt of the cigarette with the ball of his shoe and says more than he should. “Sometimes I just imagine what it will be like to live without him one day and–”

“Yeah.” Mary follows suit with the butt of her own, brushing her hands off on her jeans. She doesn’t bother telling him he’s worried about nothing; she likely doesn’t believe it’s nothing. Mary has grown up in a world where people do die young with enough frequency that she’s familiar with the fear. “If it helps, I think after someone dies, they can keep on living for a whole lot longer as an idea in someone’s mind.”

It falls just short of comforting, but he likes the thought well enough. He tucks it away for later contemplation and follows her inside to steal some of the warm glow of the night for himself rather than linger in grief that hasn’t come for him yet.

Daniel, laughing in the kitchen with an empty glass in his hand, finds Armand’s gaze so swiftly that he briefly entertains the idea that he has spontaneously developed the ability to read minds. Daniel’s laughter dies, turns into a wide smile that’s only for Armand, and he’d remember him just like this forever if he could. None of the fighting, the running, the drugs. Just this open, vibrant man in front of him.

“Hey, where’d you go?” Daniel says when Armand makes his way to him.

“Wanted a smoke,” Armand shrugs, an arm sliding around his waist because here in their home, where Daniel never minds everyone watching, it can. His mouth fits tidily against the curve of Daniel’s shoulder, Daniel sinking back against him with the loose-limbed ease of someone who has had the exact right amount to drink and fully trusts that their weight will be held for them.

Armand adds the truth of his absence silently, smiling wide and toothy at Frederick as he does. ‘Thought you might not want me to kill your new friend Freddy on your birthday.’

Daniel chokes back a laugh that’s just for him and it’s gratifying enough to wipe away the rest of his dark mood. “Yeah? Well nobody here can make a martini like you can, so I was hoping–” he cuts off, waving his empty glass in the air. Somewhere in the apartment a glass smashes and someone drunkenly cuts their fingers on the shards, and Armand doesn’t care.

“I’ve shown you, beloved. You can make them just the same.”

He makes it anyways, wedging Daniel between himself and the counter to do so, whispering the instructions into his ear like a love poem. And he thinks perhaps it is, to have learned each other this way. To know without question exactly how Daniel wants his drink made, not because he’s pulled it from his mind but because he’s made it a hundred times.

Nobody here matters. Not really. Not with the whole of his world narrowed down to a single burning point.

The days are long and the careful balance they have found is fragile. They spend a lot of time saying nothing at all, with the tv or radio on in the background for noise. Sometimes Daniel works with headphones in, now that he has his files back. Armand would hate it more if he didn’t look so relaxed while doing it. Comforted by the escape of someone else’s life, someone else’s problems.

It’s Armand’s life, on many of those tapes. They were recorded in the skeleton of that life, in the bones of something that he thinks might have died long before Daniel got there.

He doesn’t want all the unencumbered time to think, so he spends it organizing the cupboards again. Organizing Daniel’s books over and over until Daniel tells him to stop. Organizing the bathroom closet. Refolding towels, clothes. Reading. Parsing the origins of the multitude of knick-knacks on Daniel’s shelves. Ordering a number of items online because he’s not particularly motivated to leave.

Every so often Daniel will stop what he’s doing to ask him a question. Something about the interview, usually. When it is, Armand will glare and tell him to “call Louis, he’s the one who wanted everything to be exactly right.”

They aren’t always about Louis though. Occasionally, Daniel will surprise him with a question about a memory of his own. Something as simple as “so we went to France three times?” or “what year were we in Germany?”

Sometimes it’s more mockery than question. Once, turning to him with a mixture of amusement and disdain, he says “Seriously? You paraphrased Sartre to me how many times over the years and never thought to tell me you knew Sartre?”

It might be easy, if not for the tension hanging in the air. The craving Daniel swallows down if they look at each other for too long. The hunger Armand bites back when he catches a flush rising beneath Daniel’s skin, or a glimpse of memory in his mind. Daniel never asks about those parts. Not the skin, nor the blood, nor the heat. But he thinks about them the most, beats them down again and again in his mind only to have them surface with more insistence each time.

They’re caught in limbo, waiting for the other shoe to drop. By the third day, Armand has begun to grow impatient. He wants to know things that he cannot know yet. Knows that Daniel hasn’t even begun to wrap his head around everything he has memory of, that it will take time for him to know what he’d like to do with that memory.

Armand has, on occasion, imagined his long life as some kind of prolonged purgatory. If it is, then this is one duplicate realm nestled inside another. He thinks he would prefer pain.

He thinks it, of course, until that’s what he gets.

---

Daniel is angry this morning. Angrier than usual, by Armand’s estimation. He leaves his room red-eyed, lifts his chin as if to dare Armand to comment on it, then launches into his attack before he’s even made his coffee.

“It’s a bit pathetic, don’t you think?” Daniel doesn’t sound angry, of course. He sounds controlled, conversational.

“What is, Daniel?” Armand can’t muster up much more than exhaustion.

“You just hanging around here, waiting for me like a stray dog.”

Armand has been a dog, before. It’s not the insult Daniel wants it to be. “Really not your best work. Would you like to try again, or would you like to just tell me why you’re so angry with me this time?”

“Do I need a reason?” Daniel asks, when Armand knows he really means I have so many reasons how do you expect me to choose? Even Armand would have to concede there is some legitimacy to at least a handful of them.

“No. But I think you do have one.” Armand settles into a chair at the table, legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded together in front of him. “I thought, perhaps, things were getting a bit better.”

Daniel’s anger gives way to incredulity for just a moment. “Seriously? Three days, and you thought–”

“I misspoke.” There’s no one right thing to say to Daniel at any given moment. There are half a dozen of them, and usually plenty more wrong things. What’s more, anything that’s right in one moment could just as easily be wrong the next. “I only meant to say that I thought we were finding a common ground.”

“Maybe we were,” Daniel allows. He stays standing, pressing his hands flat against the other end of the table and staring down at its surface.

“Alright, then what’s changed today?” He is not like Daniel. He does not know the right questions to ask, how to ask them the best way to ensure he gets an answer. He won’t ask a third time.

“I woke up thinking about when we lived here,” Daniel says. And there’s no anger there, just a choked sort of pain. He’s white knuckling whatever he’s trying to say, shoulders shaking with the effort of pressing down as if the table can keep him from coming apart at the seams. “We had friends.”

This isn’t the sort of pain Armand can help with. Or he can, but all the methods he has are like to make Daniel sick if he suggests them. He can do little more than watch it happen. “Yes. Many.”

“Do you know what happened to any of them?” And there’s the anger, ready like a shield, already prepared for the answer he assumes Armand will give.

And he’s right, too. “No. I never checked.”

“Yeah?” Daniel looks at him now, something sharp in his eyes. “You want me to fill you in?”

He doesn’t. He really doesn’t. But this is a ride he can’t get off of and Daniel is the one at the wheel. It’s not as if Daniel waits for an answer anyways, instead leaving the table to sift through the books Armand has organized (in order of ISBN, this time). He tosses book after book on the floor until he finds what he’s looking for, dropping it on the table in front of them.

“There. That’ll fill you in.” When Armand doesn’t look, doesn’t reach for it, Daniel tells him anyways. “Those friends we made in the Village? The ones who came to our house with gifts and looked at you like a fucking god and helped you throw me a birthday party? They’re dead now.”

“Ah.” A poor reaction. He should be grateful, really, that Daniel is too caught up in putting words to what he’s feeling to notice he has said anything at all.

“Most of them anyway. Statistically. They probably died a few years after you fucked off with half of my life, and I didn’t even fucking remember them.” Daniel sinks into the chair, and it does nothing to reduce the anger. It just folds up with him, concentrates to a point at the center of his chest where Armand can feel it radiating, overheating like a nuclear core. “I barely remember them now. Wrote a whole book and didn’t mention a single one.”

Armand does look, then. He isn’t surprised to see Daniel’s book there. He hadn’t been surprised when it was published, either.

“How do you think that felt for the ones who lived long enough to read it?” Daniel doesn’t even really seem to be directing his words at Armand anymore. “God, what if I’ve seen some of them?”

“Human memory is fallible. They can’t expect–”

“Shut up. You don’t get to try to comfort me when you did this. And you didn’t even care to–”

“I was grieving your loss, Daniel. You. My– any other loss paled in comparison.” He cannot think about it now. Will not. It still aches, uprooted as it is from the place where he tucked it for so many years. Now he doubts it will fit back in again, thinks he will feel the pain of it forever.

“Bullshit.” Daniel’s hand smacks hard against the table and Armand grows tired of biting his tongue.

“You can be angry with me for the things that I did, but I will not be a receptacle for your guilt. You chose to give up those memories, never so much as mentioned any of them. And you know that. You remember choosing it, so you can stop acting as if it was something done to you without your cooperation.” Armand leans forward, slides the book back towards Daniel. “Why didn’t you go back?”

“How could I go back if I couldn’t–”

“I took your memories Daniel, but I didn’t carve out your sexuality. I didn’t force you to stand on the outskirts of your own community claiming only allyship for decades. You separated yourself from it by your own choosing.” Armand supposes it’s his turn to hurt someone with the truth. It doesn’t feel as good as he thought it might, with Daniel looking at him like that. He isn’t crying but his eyes are wet.

“I could have– I should have–”

It takes the fight out of Armand all over again. There are things worth blaming Daniel for, but this isn’t one of them.

“You might have died with them. You might have lived, too,” Armand allows. “I don’t regret that the blurring of your memories with them was a fortunate side effect if it’s something that kept you safe.”

Daniel throws the book at him, then. He’s quick about it, almost enough to catch Armand by surprise. He shifts to the left, lets it sail over his shoulder and land open on the floor.

“Does that help?” Armand asks, genuine. “You can throw more if you’d like.”

“No,” Daniel sighs. “Still feel like shit.”

Armand considers him for a moment. Tries to decide if he will make things better or worse by saying what he’d like to say. He doesn’t come to any conclusion, but he says it anyway. “It’s not working because you’re not angry, Daniel. It’s grief you feel.”

“Since when are you the expert in emotions?” Daniel almost sounds amused. Or he would, if he didn’t sound entirely wrung out and heavy with despair.

“I spent 77 years with a man in love with his own grief,” Armand shrugs. It doesn’t hurt to say it, the way he thought it might. Perhaps one day losing Louis will hurt the way he thinks it should, but now it is still numb, overshadowed by the immediacy of everything he feels for Daniel right now.

Daniel, however, clocks the slip. The miscalculation is more force of habit than anything. It takes getting used to, being around someone whose emotions tend not to keep them from paying attention to small details. “Where you with him, while you were with me?”

“Is that a conversation you would like to have now?” Armand isn’t sure it’s one he’d like to have. Isn’t sure he owes it to Daniel to explain the complexities of his relationship with Louis. He won’t apologize for finding ways to survive after New York. Still, he’s willing to dangle distraction like a carrot on a string if Daniel would prefer it.

He isn’t surprised when Daniel chooses the stick instead. The pain. “I can’t even… I can’t remember all of their names.”

“The memories have atrophied the way all memories do. They weren’t frozen in time, and without your conscious decision to save some in particular, that degradation has been… randomized.” Armand is certain of only part of what he says, but if it provides any comfort, he’s not sure that matters. “You couldn’t have saved any of them, Daniel. This way, at least, you can pretend you might have tried. Is that not better?”

Daniel doesn’t answer, just rests his head in his hands. Seconds turn to minutes; he hovers on the cliff’s edge and Armand waits to see if he will jump into the ocean of grief below it.

When he finally does, he cries without making a sound. Armand can smell the salt, can do nothing to help him that he thinks Daniel might appreciate. He can only stay, bear witness to the compounding of a near decade of loss great and small. Collateral damage.

In that, at least, Daniel is right. Armand hadn’t cared. He hadn’t wanted to, even when they were there, living their lives together. He remembers those faces and names the way he remembers so many before – like characters in someone else’s story. They belong to past versions of him. He does not carry the grief of their losses forward. He doesn’t have the strength.

---

It takes a long time for Daniel’s shoulders to stop shaking, for the soundless sobs to calm, for his breath to return to some semblance of normal.

Armand gets him a glass of water because he doesn’t know what else to do. When he leaves it on the table, Daniel wraps a hand around his wrist before he can walk away, grip vice-tight on his arm. He leans back against the table between them. If he moves his foot only an inch, it will touch Daniel’s.   

“I’m still pissed, too,” Daniel says, voice scraping out like sandpaper. “I can be sad and fucking angry at the same time.”

“I know, Daniel.”

“You took everything out. All of it. And–”

“I know.”

“And what was left in that fucking hole you made was just Louis’s words. Just my job. A bright young fucking–”

“You chose to be who you are.” Armand slides his wrist from Daniel’s grasp, but only to take his hand in earnest, to hold it firm between both palms. Daniel lets him. “We couldn’t change your personality any more than I could force you to want to live or die. The mind gift works best when it takes what is already there and strengthens it, highlights it, puts it beneath a bright spotlight. That was still always you. What you wanted from life.”

“Bullshit. Bullshit.” Daniel says it twice, like he’s trying to believe it. “Because now that I’ve got all of it back, I–”

Armand waits for him to finish the sentence, but it dies in Daniel’s throat. Daniel takes his hand back, and Armand doesn’t let himself miss the contact. Instead, he just prompts, “You what, Daniel?”

When the words come, they come like they’ve been torn from the inside of Daniel’s ribs. Like they’ve been there all along, just waiting to be uttered.

“I missed you this whole fucking time. The hole got bigger, the emptiness in me. The memories aren’t enough to fill it up and now–” A choked pause, and then, softer. “Now I want more. And I hate you for it.”

Chapter Text

It was never going to be enough to only meander through Daniel’s mind to recall the shape of it. Or to tell him their histories, to recall what that love felt like in vivid detail. It would not have been enough, even, to touch him sparingly and with caution. To be near him and know that this was all of him, whole after all this time, for the first time since the day they met.

It’s not a thing easily rationed, this love. Restraint, as always, is a wholly human practice.

Daniel wants more, and Armand wants everything.

All the contemplating, the deliberating, the analyzing. The times Daniel has asked him why and he could give only half answers. All he wanted, all he wants now, is everything. Everything.

“Tell me what more I can give you, and I’ll give it,” he hears himself say, distant through the rush of blood against his eardrums. A hand – his hand – reaches to cup Daniel’s face, to rest against skin so hot it feels like a burn. Perhaps his own skin is just so very cold, now.

When Daniel turns his head, mouth pressed to palm, eyes shut tight like it causes him pain, that is some kind of everything.

Another kind of everything, when Daniel’s mind opens for him like the parting of the red sea, like a promise of home he has only heard about in the retelling. And this version of Armand has only heard about it in his own retelling. Is not who he was, when he lived there as welcome companion. It’s a different place when offered freely and entire. To say that he has missed it is too small, is an inconsequential word held up against an overwhelming feeling.

Daniel thinks in words but not sentences today. Want and Need and Hate and Terror and Horror and Grief and– and yes, there, as bright blind shining as it’s ever been, Love, too. All circling that pitch black cavity Daniel has made tangible in his imagining of it.

‘I’ll give it, Daniel. I’ll give you more. I’ll find a way to fill it.’

“You can’t,” Daniel says, almost gentle, his hand reaching up to cover Armand’s, to tug it away.

“I can, but you don’t want to let me.” This earns him a flash of anger, but his hand doesn’t leave Daniel’s grip. Daniel’s fingers worry over the ridges of Armand’s knuckles and yes, yes, everything. “Let me. What is there to lose?”

“That you haven’t already taken, you mean?” Daniel looks at him and years don’t matter. Or they do, but only in the best ways. Armand has spent so much time lately, pretending to be sorry for what he did. As if it isn’t the very reason Daniel sits here in front of him, breathing, alive. As if he was mistaken in the knowledge that Daniel would have died if he hadn’t done it.

“I would do it again,” Armand says, just to gauge his reaction. “Not now, of course. But if you sent me back there, I would do exactly as I did.”

“There it is,” Daniel says, pleased in a way that surprises Armand in its genuine warmth. This feels like a test of sorts, and Armand doesn’t have the answers he needs to pass. Daniel’s mind is all words, no sentences. No instructions. No narrative plotted out for him to follow. “Something honest for once.”

“That’s what you want, Daniel?”

“I’ll probably regret it, but what else is new? Yeah. Give me honest.” Daniel looks down at Armand’s hand, as if he’s only just realized he is still holding it. Armand expects him to let go, but instead all he does is turn it over, palm up. Study it like it has the answers his own hands haven’t been able to give him.

For a moment, Armand gets lost in that. Just that. Just more of everything, that’s all.

Then Daniel is looking up at him again, eyebrows raised in a challenge.

“I’ve told you the truth,” Armand protests.

“Yeah maybe. But you haven’t been all that honest.” Daniel’s thumb in the dip of his palm. Daniel’s thumb dragging up the length of his index finger. Daniel’s thumb skimming the bend of his wrist. Subtlety was not Daniel’s strong suit, all those years ago. Seduction for him then amounted to vivid images projected in Armand’s general direction, shameless stripping, or a very pointed please.

He can’t quite be sure this is seduction, but he’s hungry enough, wound tight enough, that he can’t call it ineffective.

“Alright. How should I be honest then?”

“You need me to tell you?” Daniel huffs a laugh, “God, you’re so fucked up.”

“What,” Armand says, jaw flexing, “would you like for me to be honest about?”

A nail bites into the soft skin of his wrist and it’s not enough to really hurt, but it’s enough to catch his attention. “Tell me what you want.”

This is easier than their other conversations, and that alone makes it dangerous to trust. He’s comfortable here in the exact space Daniel has created, comfortable when provided with clear instruction. Daniel rarely seems to want him comfortable these days. “Now? Or in general?”

“Dealer’s choice,” Daniel says, and his sharp grin tells Armand that he knows.

He can choose to play, or he can choose to drop the subject. Take his hand back, straighten up from where he leans back against the table still. Put a few feet of space between them. Focus on something other than the exact rate of Daniel’s heartbeat. Maybe get something to eat, for god’s sake.

“I want you to tell me what you’d like me to say, so I can say the right thing.”

The answer startles a genuine laugh from Daniel. Not one of disdain or judgement, just something low and warm he’d like to chew on. “Won’t be doing that for you, but thanks for saying so. What else?”

His fingers are travelling now, a slow journey along Armand’s forearm. Everywhere Daniel’s hand goes lights up. His touch like heat lightning, all the shock and torch with none of the downpour that cools it.

“More of that,” he says with a glance downward. Daniel’s touch skips, stutters, but it doesn’t leave.

There it is, of course: more.

“You keep waiting for some ulterior motive but Daniel, you are both the motive and the objective. And I think you already know that.”

“Game over,” Daniel quips. Armand isn’t sure what Daniel thinks he isn’t being honest about, but it’s not worth arguing the point.  

“The dangers of a lack of prior negotiation, I suppose.” Armand shrugs a shoulder – the one opposite to the arm Daniel has maintained contact with, even now.

Daniel shakes his head, “That’s what this is. Rules are simple. What we both want, we get.”

Perhaps still not so subtle, then.

More.

Maybe not everything, but more.

He isn’t delusional, at least at the current juncture. He knows all the problems still wait on the other side of whatever this is right now. Knows it’s something carved out, something Daniel is trying to use to figure out what to do. What he needs consolidate parts into a whole.

Despite offering it days ago, Armand isn’t entirely sure it’s the best way to find clarity, but selfishly, he doesn’t care.

“That’s it?” Armand asks.

“That’s it, that’s all. Keep it simple and all that shit.”

Nothing about this is simple, except perhaps Daniel’s fingertips trailing up the inside of his arm, ghosting under his rolled up sleeve to press into the dip of his elbow. “Alright.”

“You used to be bossier, I think. Or maybe I just remember it that way.” Daniel is conversational, easy. Now that Armand has seen him interview someone in earnest, this doesn’t feel all that different. He takes his time, disarms Armand so slowly that he knows it’s happening and still doesn’t care.

“Would you like me to be domineering?” Daniel was young when they were together. Inexperienced and eager to please, though just as like to complain the whole time as to submit without question. Armand liked him that way, likes him this way too. Thinks it would be difficult to find a version of Daniel he could not like.

“Depends. Is that what you want?”

Armand has had plenty of power struggles, but he’s not sure that’s what this is. He keeps trying to cede power to Daniel and Daniel keeps handing it right back, but no matter what they do with it, it’s certainly here in the room with them either way. Present and buzzing, an electrical hum not unlike the current connecting Daniel’s hand to his skin just now.

“Not today,” he says.

“Then no, that’s not what I want right now,” Daniel is grinning again. Armand tries to recall if he’s seen him smile this much since they got to New York. He doubts it. “Simple rules, try to keep up.”

“Now you’re just being rude.” Armand wraps his hand around Daniel’s arm, just behind his elbow, pulling him up without warning but with little resistance. If Daniel minds, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he sways into Armand’s space, legs brushing his own. He’s at a height advantage with Armand still perched partway on the table.

“Never claimed to be anything but.”

Armand doesn’t remember it being this way the first time around. Doesn’t remember being afraid to take what he wanted, or afraid that Daniel might not want it too. He supposes it was different then. What he’d thought was love had yet to grow from one dimensional fixation into what it would eventually become. There were no real consequences, there was still room to feel pain without it being incapacitating.

Daniel must feel it now, too. His heart is racing.

They slipped past any point of return long ago, but he thinks if they do this now, they won’t be able to continue acting as if the damage hasn’t already been done. This is in Armand’s favor, so he isn’t sure why he can’t quite cross the invisible line yet.

Daniel resumes his slow exploration and Armand’s useless heart is racing too. Daniel’s touch is deliberate, tracing the shape of his shoulder, pressing deep into the muscle at the juncture of his collarbone. Watching for a reaction Armand isn’t prepared to give him, just yet.

“What do you want, Daniel?”

“Thought you already knew everything.” Daniel’s made it back to bare skin now, fingers hot like cigarette burns along the line of his clavicle. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

Not so long ago that he would normally be feeling this way.

“Malik,” Armand says. Knuckles drag up and over his Adam’s apple. “Mm… Desire is a nonspecific emotion. I know what you want in a broader sense, what your body tells me, but I’d have to dig further to know what exactly it is right now, and you haven’t been particularly fond of that approach of late.”

“Are you going to eat me?” Daniel’s hand wraps around the column of his throat, rough skin with that same gentle touch. He doesn’t squeeze, just spreads his fingers, strokes the pad of his thumb under the ridge of Armand’s jaw. Armand gets the sense that he’s testing the feel, making comparisons, aligning memory with reality.

Armand doesn’t think the question deserves an answer, but he gives it anyways. “No, Daniel. I’m not going to eat you.”

“You want to, though.” It’s said with a particular confidence that Armand knows Daniel falls back on when he’s uncertain. Decades of age haven’t changed Daniel’s blood, not even with the medication laced within it. He has nothing to be worried about; there’s nothing that would stop Armand from wanting it.

“Would you like me to drink from you?”

Daniel’s been drifting closer, is leaning into him now, his other hand braced on the table. He considers the question for long enough that Armand knows the temptation is there. Of course it’s there. Then, “Not today.”

“Then no, that’s not what I want right now.” Armand catches the look of amusement before Daniel gets a chance to tamp it down, seizes the opportunity to press just a little further. “Really, you should try to keep–”

For the second time, Daniel kisses Armand while he’s smiling. This time, Daniel is smiling too, the curve of their mouths together making the contact clumsy and sweet in the way only Daniel has ever kissed him. This time Armand isn’t afraid to touch him, isn’t afraid to shatter the illusion of a fragile peace.

There is no peace, but there is Daniel’s mouth on his, Armand’s tongue sliding against Daniel’s, Daniel’s hand curving around the back of his neck to keep him close. A pointless touch. Armand won’t go anywhere but further in, wants to crawl inside Daniel’s mouth, wants to slide fingers up underneath his skin to hold him by his very framework.

He settles for deepening the kiss, and for showing Daniel as much in his mind, and for swallowing the trembling, half-horrified groan his honesty gets him. It’s more than enough, perhaps more than he can take today. Daniel has always been enthusiastic, but this is all of that packaged to a single point of intensity, a deliberate, single-minded focus.

Armand can see it. That intent. The house could burn around them in this moment, and he thinks Daniel would still be here, tongue sliding against his as if time has no meaning. This alone would be a dangerous drug, if Daniel did not need to breathe. They could stay like this forever.

They can’t.

He can render entire rooms of people mute, can throw objects far larger than him dozens of feet with the flick of the wrist, can stop time, can do the bidding of death itself.

It’s a feat of near impossibility to drag his mouth from Daniel’s, and when he does it’s only to readjust, sitting on the table in earnest. Daniel takes no coaxing. This is muscle memory. He steps between Armand’s legs, broad hand now curving over Armand’s thigh, and it gets harder to remember how he survived without this.

He slides his nose along Daniel’s jaw, inhales deep just behind the hinge of it. And while he’s being honest– “You smell good, Daniel. I’ve missed it.”

“I smell like I haven’t showered. You’re just hungry. And a creep.” A thousand different things, in just those words. Bitterness, fondness, an unfamiliar shyness, too.

Armand nips sharp at the skin there, huffs a laugh at Daniel’s startled jump. He’s too busy with his tongue to answer out loud. ‘Quit reminding me.’ Then, ‘You smell like yourself for once, and not a rancid mixture of manufactured chemicals.’

“Great,” Daniel says, low and distracted, clinging to the thread of conversation like a life raft at sea. “I’ll mail a complaint to Old Spice. Let them know that vampires don’t approve.”

‘Nobody uses the postal service anymore.’

Daniel’s fingers wind through the hair at the nape of Armand’s neck, pull sharp and exquisite so he’s looking him in the eyes when Daniel says, “God, for fuck’s sake, shut up.”

And they’re kissing again and he could speak, could form a thought and send it right to Daniel’s open open open mind just to prove a point. But why would he want to?

His body says enough; it’s always been his first, best language. Daniel understands it as well now as he did then – better, perhaps. Armand sinks teeth into Daniel’s lip, and Daniel opens his mouth to let him in closer. Armand hooks a leg around him, foot putting gentle pressure on the back of Daniel’s calf, and Daniel shifts closer still. Armand’s fingers trail up under the hem of Daniel’s t-shirt and Daniel’s hand moves up his thigh, not close enough but closer, closer.

Never close enough, but always closer. There is always a way to get closer.

He doesn’t realize he’s not breathing until Daniel pulls back again, studies him with amusement. “I forgot you do that.”

“What?”

Armand waits for memory to ruin it again, to take what feels good and make it something painful or shameful or angry. It doesn’t. Not this time, at least.

“You get so quiet,” Daniel says, like he’s putting together pieces. Like he’s stitching past to present the same way he might string a narrative. Maybe that’s what this is about, this morning. “I used to have to watch you sometimes, just to see you react, figure out what you wanted.”

“You told me to stop talking,” Armand says. It comes out like more of a complaint than he means it to. Perhaps because Daniel digs a thumb hard into the pressure point on the inside of his thigh, hard enough to bruise even if the mark won’t last.

“Don’t need words to make noise.”

Pain is pain is pain, no matter the magnitude. He sucks a breath in by instinct. Holds it and holds it and holds it until Daniel lets off and smiles at his audible exhale.

“Good.” Daniel says it like that– like he’s surprised, maybe– and Armand wants to be good, and this is something no number of centuries will unravel from him. The impossibility of goodness, the certainty of his desire for it anyways. “If we fuck, are you going to be weird about it later?”

Maybe it’s not meant to be funny. He gets the distinct feeling it isn’t, judging by Daniel’s look of annoyed incredulity when Armand starts laughing. But it is funny, and he is laughing. It bubbles up, spills out of his mouth.

And Daniel is misunderstanding, face shifting from uncertainty to resignation. His hand shakes where it rests on Armand’s thigh and he drops it to his side where it can’t touch him. It’s too easy to forget that beneath everything Daniel is still a boy, wearing the sort of apathetic mask one only ever learns to craft when they care far too much. And right now–

“Daniel,” he says, still trying to collect himself, “I’m laughing because of course I’m going to be weird about it. Not because I don’t want to. And I do want to. Want you.”

“Alright, stay out of my head,” Daniel mutters, as if it isn’t still wide open and thrown at Armand’s feet in offering.

He presses hands flat against Daniel’s chest, makes just enough space to slip off the table. “I don’t need to read your mind for that. I know you.”

“You–”

“You know what I want, Daniel?”

“What?”

He traces the line of Daniel’s jaw with his knuckles, looks at him up close in the bright light of day. “I want to pretend that the rest of it doesn’t matter. I want to take the man I love – whose touch I have not known in decades – to bed, while the past and the future hang in stasis outside the door either in deference to us or by the force of my will. No preference as to which.”

Daniel stares at him unblinking for a long moment, and Armand almost expects it to be him who laughs now. Instead he just says a quiet, “Fuck.”

“If you don’t want–”

They’re kissing again, Daniel’s mouth a needy, impatient thing now that they’ve come to some agreed upon conclusion. His hand splays across Armand’s back and he sways backwards, drifts in the general direction of the hallway without much progress until Armand finally pulls himself away to lead him there.

Armand catches the hem of Daniel’s shirt as the door slams shut behind them, dragging it up his ribs and over his head without ceremony. His own follows, because he knows if it doesn’t Daniel will complain, and then they’ll be that much further from where he’d like to be. Their pants should go, too, but Daniel has already reeled him in for another kiss, fingers through his beltloop, and he can wait, he can wait, he can find a new well of patience within himself.

He feels the shudder travel up Daniel’s spine, feels the heat of Daniel’s skin in contrast with his own, hears Daniel’s hiss of protest. He would apologize, but there’s a trembling thread of excitement there, too. The thrilling reality of what he is, made impossible to ignore when they’re this close and Armand is this much the monster.

Hands on Daniel’s face, Armand walks them back until the backs of Daniel’s knees hit the bed. The scowl on Daniel’s face (and resounding fuck you in his head) tells Armand he’s far too gentle when he presses him back down to the mattress.

If he were going to care, he would need to be somewhere other than on his knees between Daniel’s legs. As it stands, that’s exactly where he is, so he ignores Daniel’s silent protest and sets to work returning home. First with his fingers, then with his mouth, he relearns the places he once memorized.

And Daniel, always an endless surprise, lets him.

The landscape has changed but it’s the same hallowed ground. The ridges of his collarbones, the soft valley of his stomach, the ribs beneath his skin weathered into rolling hills. His veins are easier to trace now but they mark the same trails they always have, rivers flowing into the center-sea that beats a steady wave upon the shore. He was dying last time Armand saw him and he’s dying now, but not yet. Not soon.

“Fuck,” Daniel murmurs finally, with Armand’s tongue on his nipple, Armand’s hand hooked under his still clothed thigh, Armand’s mind keeping up a running commentary whose highlights are beautiful and wanted you and mine.

Interrupted now, Armand instead asks, ‘What do you need? Tell me and I would give it to you.’

 “More.”

He bites, careful, just hard enough to have Daniel arching into the touch, fingers tangled through his hair. He sucks a bruise into Daniel’s hip, can almost taste the blood where it pools near the surface. Daniel’s groan makes him leave another over the flesh of his stomach, another on his ribs, another–

“Think you gotta bite, first,” Daniel’s voice somehow manages to be both dry and ragged, his smile wide and pleased when Armand looks up at him.

“Yeah?” A smile of his own, fangs and all. It would be easy, so easy. Daniel wants it, not just in the abstract but now and now and now. He tells him with his mind, tells him with the shift of his hips, tells him with the barest hint of a nod.

‘Not today, beloved.’

Instead, he hooks his fingers into the waistband of Daniel’s sweatpants – gone are the days where Armand felt inclined to wear his clothes, certainly – and feels Daniel’s flood of disappointment but also the soft slant of quiet gratitude. Daniel lifts his hips with little prompting and the pants end up in a pile on the floor with the rest.

Armand moves to crawl back up, mouth curving over Daniel’s kneecap, and Daniel presses a foot to his collarbone. “No, you too. Fair is fair.”

“You’re impatient.”

“Yeah, well only one of us has a clock ticking close to midnight right about now, so I think I get to be.”

He huffs a laugh because the other option is despair, and does as he’s been asked. “Perhaps closer to 9 or 10 pm.”

It does nothing to speed things up, really. He’s not so much concerned with himself at the moment, as fixed as he is on seeing how many places he can put his mouth before Daniel either pleads with him or orders him. Either would be fine, today.

Lips on the arch of his foot, the round of bone on his inner ankle. Tongue dragging up through coarse hair on his shin. Teeth making a line of tiny red welts up his inner thigh. Daniel is hard now, has been for a while. He shifts, groans, grips the blankets, but he doesn’t form words.

So Armand begins again. Lips, tongue, teeth. Daniel chokes down something not unlike a whine and Armand wants to reach down and drag it back from out of his throat.

Lips and tongue and teeth.

Until Daniel’s fingers catch his hair, twisting, and he says, “Armand.”

And that is neither an order nor a plea, but statement of fact. Here, another kind of everything.

His hand is warm where he’s had it tucked beneath Daniel’s thigh, gentle as it runs up over Daniel’s hip to grip him at the base. It’s in distinct contrast, he knows, to his mouth closing over the head, tongue flat to tip.

There aren’t many things to rival Daniel’s blood, and this comes as close as anything.

“Jesus, fuck,” Daniel hisses, bucks up an inch before he stops himself. Impressive, really. That sort of restraint when he’s as gone as he is. Wasted on Armand, who thinks it might be nice to die this way, if he could. “Your mouth is fucking cold.”

“Mhm,” Armand hums. Then, in silence, ‘You’ll warm it up, Daniel.’

It’s the only warning he sees fit to give before he takes the length of him, nose pressed to the trail of hair on his stomach, arm braced across Daniel’s hips more for Daniel’s sake than his own. Daniel doesn’t make a sound, just breathes out in a hot punch of air and drags his fingers over Armand’s scalp in a gesture too tender to match the string of curse words that materialize in his head.

‘Out loud, please.’

“Fuck you.”

Armand drags his mouth slow, takes his time, sets a rhythm that’s brutal only in its endlessness. And Daniel– well, he’s cursing him out loud now, in earnest, and he’s beautiful like this. He’s always been beautiful like this. He takes so little to unravel.

And no matter what Armand does – twisting, sucking, swallowing him down – that hand on his head stays as gentle as if he were made of glass. Sweet as he’s ever been, no matter how much he tucks it away, no matter how much cruelty he deflects all that sweetness with. It’s been so long since Armand was touched that way, like he–

“Hey. C’mere.”

That hadn’t been the plan, really. But it’s hard to deny Daniel when he sounds like that, so he doesn’t. He crawls up the bed, guided by Daniel’s coaxing hands until he’s straddling his hips and smothering a soft groan against Daniel’s mouth.

One hand wings between his shoulder blades, presses, and then they’re shifting, side by side and face to face and the only kind thing the sun has ever done for him is let him see each fleck of color in Daniel’s eyes. It’s so simple, the way Daniel fits into his spaces, slots against his hips, shifts a leg between both of his. It doesn’t take any work at all.

All the impatience is gone from Daniel, his tongue a slow slide again, his steady hand making an easy journey over Armand’s skin, his other back to tangling in Armand’s hair. Maybe he’s realized that time doesn’t actually stop forever, that they simply make it stretch as long as they can. That Armand’s command of it is as limited as his command of anything else – only an illusion. It’s to be taken advantage of while they have it, but not necessarily at a rush.

There is both too much friction and not enough, and he’s about to say as much when Daniel’s mouth is replaced with an offered thumb, pressing down on his tongue. He only closes around it for a moment before it’s gone, replaced with fingers that curve over his tongue, back and back. His hand tastes like salt and skin and that indefinable thing which is unique to only Daniel.

If Armand could swallow him whole he would, but this will have to do.

It’s one thing to control his hunger when he’s near to Daniel, or when he’s focused on Daniel’s pleasure, or when it hasn’t been so very long since he could taste it. It’s another when Daniel is feeding his fingers down Armand’s throat, filling his ear with soft encouragements they both know he doesn’t need. It’s dizzying.  

When he is apparently satisfied, Daniel withdraws his hand, smiling against Armand’s quiet protest. Another moment later, that hand wraps around Armand’s cock and he knows it was never going to be enough to live out his days without this. It never will be after, either, but this is all he gets. Not everything, just this.

“I want–” Daniel pauses, breath hot on his temple. “This good?”

Good is a ridiculous word. He’d say as much, but he’s preoccupied with the process of spitting into his hand and dragging it along the length of Daniel’s cock. There’s more slide there, still wet from Armand’s mouth.

He shifts hips, slots closer, and Daniel’s hand falls away because even years later, this is muscle memory too. They have learned each other this way, not because of Armand’s ability to read minds and project thoughts, not because of the blood exchange, but simply because they’ve done this a hundred times.

And here, at last, something worth praying to. The god of mouths, of hands, of wet pleasure. The god of a living heart where one might not always be and another that has been for too long, both beating in tandem because he wills it. He’ll worship this temporary god, be it the-will-to-live, or the suffering, or the art and beauty which eases the suffering. It doesn’t matter, nothing matters. Not outside of the stutter of Daniel’s breath, the bite of his nails where they dig into Armand’s hip.  

 He’s close and Daniel is closer, forehead pressed to Armand’s and eyes shut tight.

Perhaps it’s too much to ask, perhaps it’s outside of the realm of even what they can wrap up inside of an illusion of ease. He risks saying it anyways. ‘Look at me, beloved.’

And what they both want, they get. Daniel opens his eyes and pleasure is secondary to devotion. The former sends them plummeting only moments later, one and then the next, caught in the riptide tumble of waterlogged, short-circuit nerve-endings. The latter belongs only to Armand for now, and that’s alright.

It isn’t everything, but it’s more.

He thinks, in this warm bubble of hopeful idealism, that there might be just enough time left for the rest.

Chapter Text

Of course, in all the time he’s lived, Armand has never known a bubble that stayed unbroken. That didn’t press up against a sharpened blade of grass, or get crushed between a chewing jaw, or disintegrate from the simple weight of air.

This bubble doesn’t stay. This small sphere of relief, built with walls too thin to hold out against the pressure.

He can feel it falling apart before it happens, fingers trailing over the scar on Daniel’s neck, a crease forming between Daniel’s brows like it hurts him. His eyes are shut, his mind– yes that closes now, too. The absence leaves a hollow in Armand’s chest, and maybe that’s what Daniel wants. A punishment. Here, see. Here is how it feels.

As if Armand knows nothing about emptying.

They’re still wrapped up in each other, clinging to the last of their stolen, clawed up euphoria. A shiver runs down Daniel’s spine and this alone could be the thing that ends the moment. Just his own cold skin.

“You never left any other marks,” Daniel says, his voice a rough, pried open thing.

“I left plenty, if you recall,” Armand tries for lightness and lands just short. Daniel, eyes still squeezed tight, grants him the courtesy of a curving smile. “Just none that would stay.”

It’s not an answer to the unspoken question, but maybe it is. There are things Daniel expects Armand to understand about himself that he simply cannot afford to understand. He knows nothing of the effort one has to put into hiding from one’s darkest things. Or hiding within them.

Most of his darkest things were already hidden for him. To point it out would be imprudent when Daniel’s fingers are mapping an absent trail along his spine. A little longer. A little longer.

“Why did you keep San Francisco from me?”  

“I don’t recall now, it was so long–”

He sunk his teeth into Daniel hundreds of times, but he sunk his teeth into Daniel once that matters now. The bubble pops. Daniel pulls away, takes his gaze, his mind, and finally his touch, and tucks them all back behind far stronger walls. He will look at Armand, of course. But not with eyes that hold him so tenderly he’d like to die within them.

“Yeah. There he is, back to normal,” Daniel sounds bitter, sounds hurt, sounds– the memory of San Francisco makes him afraid of Armand. Years ago, he was afraid of vampires, afraid of what had happened with Louis. He had a reasonable, broad, animal sort of fear. That of instinct. That of prey.

This Daniel, now, has a fear all for him. Exactly the shape and size of a hand stroking his neck or a seized up muscle or a television screen.

“Why would I give it back to you Daniel? That suffering?” Armand sits up, draws a leg up to his chest. Watches Daniel fumble around the floor for his pants. Building and building and building that wall.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe so that I’d know I was sleeping with a fucking psychopath?”

“You knew what I was. You’ve always known what I am.” And Daniel doesn’t like that. Not this Daniel, who white-knuckles his own morality like it doesn’t make him miserable to be anything less than brutally, beautifully honest.

Daniel huffs a laugh and it’s all derision. The perversion of the warm, liquid sound Armand has heard so much of this morning. “No. I haven’t. Because if I knew then, when you found me on that fucking street, I’d have just let you kill me.”

An answer, then. Daniel has always been good at coming to his own conclusions. It’s a wonder he ever needs Armand to answer him at all. Daniel scoops his t-shirt off the ground, wipes roughly at his stomach as if he does not wish to taste the blood there. As if the weight of the craving isn’t still heavy heavy heavy under his skin.

Armand, for his part, has no need to resist. Runs fingers over his abdomen and slides them into his mouth with practiced nonchalance. Pretends as if the taste of Daniel, any part of Daniel, doesn’t make him want to weep.

Daniel pretends not to watch.

They’re good at that, today.

“So you would have had me sentence you to death? That’s what you prefer?”

“That’s not the point Armand. The point is that you took the memory. You made the choice for me without me ever fucking knowing.” Daniel scrubs a hand through his hair and Armand does his level best not to focus on how much he’d like to do the same.

“And you lived, because of it.”

“You don’t get it. You play with people in your little fucking sandbox, acting like God, because–” Daniel cuts himself off. A rare demonstration of hesitation to speak, all the more surprising in that it takes place while he’s vibrating with anger.

“Oh go ahead, Daniel. No need to hold back on my account.”

The fight goes out of Daniel, then. It makes it worse when he finishes the sentence, a tone too close to sympathetic. “Because that’s what was done to you.”

“You know nothing of what was done to me.” It comes out cold, the way he wants it to. Slips up from the burning pain of it in his chest and gets cooled by the ice of his throat before it’s uttered.

“I know that it screwed you up,” Daniel says. “And I know everyone you’ve ever known since has just let you stay that way. Myself included.”

“I–”

“But you’re not a kid.” Daniel has his hand on the door. Armand chews the inside of his cheek until he can feel the slice of teeth in skin. “The shit you’re dealing with now, it’s because of your own choices. If you won’t even acknowledge that, then there’s really no point in you staying here.”

The first time Daniel asks Armand to give him the gift, Armand leaves without a word. There isn’t a word to say, really. Beyond ‘no’ which feels microscopic. Too small to properly represent the weight of his refusal.  

“I could be with you forever, then,” Daniel says. “I would never grow older than you, we could–”

Armand is out the door before he can finish the sentence, winding down the hall, down the stairs, out into the creeping evening. It’s fitting, really, that they’re in Venice. Be it punishment or reminder.

It’s not as if he hadn’t expected it – Daniel thinks about it all the time. It is, perhaps, the natural response to knowing that vampires exist. Armand has spent little time around mortals in this way. Has steered well clear of the possibility. All he has to go off of is his own naïve desire, his own obsession and love and addiction creating an all-encompassing need that led him to half-living hell.

The city is somehow both unrecognizable and entirely unchanged all at once. It feels the way it did then, but Armand does not feel as he did. He was just a boy then. Even after Marius gave him the gift, he would continue to be a boy. A boy’s mind in a body that only half-convinced the world of manhood.

Thinking of it makes his skin itch. Makes him feel like there’s something inside of him that needs to crawl out, or like he is stuck inside of something. Captive to this body, or holding this body captive.

He walks for hours, trailing fingers along stone, mapping the canals he once knew. The long distanced descendants of people who knew him as a child might still live here. The blood relatives of the men who–

A strange thing, memory. He both thinks of his time here fondly, and wants nothing more than to find and kill any of those that might have come from that which he knew.

It had seemed a good idea at the time. To return to a place he loved with a boy he loves, to see it through his wide eyes. But each time he looks at Daniel here, he has the nonsensical desire to take him away. To shield him from Venice in all its old beauty, for fear that it will sink claws into Daniel the way it once did him.

And now Daniel is asking, here of all places, to be made like him. To be turned into this strange perversion of God and death.

He goes to watch the boats, as he once did, as he often does. He’s never certain if he does it as a comfort or a cruelty, but today it is neither. Today he feels nothing at all as he watches the sun sink below the horizon and paint the sky in broad strokes of orange.

First he feels Daniel, then he smells him, and then at last, he sees him in his peripheral. It’s surprising enough to be the one found instead of the one finding that he sets aside his anger and melancholy for long enough to ask, “How did you find me here?”

“You like boats,” Daniel says with a quirk of the mouth, a shrug of his shoulder.

As if it’s nothing, to know this thing. To know enough of Armand that he can imagine where he might go. He can count on both hands the number of people who have known him with near that accuracy. Half of them are dead. The other half–

“I don’t know if I like them. But they… they call me.” He feels too fragile for Daniel right now. Too softened at the very center of his sternum. Lately, Daniel has been far too adept at pressing in, sliding between, tucking behind. If he comes to him soft, Daniel will come to him ready for surgery.

Daniel’s shoulder brushes his and it’s hard to imagine walking away now, soft or not. That’s the problem, of course. It’s gotten too difficult, too painful, to picture a life without Daniel in it. And Daniel suffers for that, as much as Armand does. Sometimes he looks at Daniel and sees himself. Sometimes he looks at his own hands and sees Marius.

These things make his chest ache, make his eyes water, make something unnamed twist around in his stomach where it turns all joy to rot. He loved Marius. And Marius loved him.

And the thought that what he shares with Daniel bears any similarity makes him ill.

“The sky is the exact same color as your eyes tonight,” Daniel observes. Like he’s pointing out a weather forecast or reading out a news headline. This is his way, Armand has begun to understand. He of the shy flush and the bravado and the dry delivery; his romance comes out like this, like irrefutable fact.

“You wouldn’t see it again.”

“You can–”

“Few vampires live long enough to see the sun again. By the time they do– by the time I did, there was no joy left in it. The sun hates me. Is sickened by me.”

Daniel shifts closer, bumps against him. Another time, Armand would take a moment for his sweetness. Today he stares stony faced out at the water while Daniel does his level best to convince him of the impossible. “I won’t need it when I have you.”

A ridiculous, naïve thought. A child’s idea of love and romance. So familiar it makes his teeth ache. He forces a laugh, a choked and desperate sound inside his throat. “You foolish boy, you have no idea what you want.”

“I want you to make–”

“If you loved me, you would not ask this of me.” It comes out as a plea. He’d prefer to make himself angry. To yell and snap and snarl until Daniel relearns the fear that has kept generation upon generation of his family line alive. Perhaps then he will stop trying to end it.

“I ask because I love you.”

“You ask because the temptation of our power is all consuming. Because you only know to think of the bloodlust as an intoxicating thing. Because you–”

“And because I love you.”

Daniel is obstinate, and Armand remembers being the same. Remembers it so well that it hurts, so well that he thinks pieces of himself are about to break off and spill out of his mouth. He has not lived this long by allowing past selves to appear whenever they wish.

He swallows, straightens his spine, makes formal the decision which he has already known. “I won’t do it, Daniel. I cannot.”

For the better part of the day, Armand stays there, naked on Daniel’s bed and surrounded by the smell of him. A hole feels carved out of him, the pieces of flesh scooped from his chest cavity and carried from the room. He can hear Daniel in the other room, typing at his laptop. Can hear him making phone calls. Cooking lunch. Cooking dinner. Playing the over-cynical and over-emotional rock music that Armand associates vaguely with the 1990’s.

A pointed separation, this.

Daniel returned to reality, Armand still here clinging to the past and to their brief reprieve. The metaphor is not lost on him, nor is Daniel’s effective, if perhaps unintentional wielding of it.  A choice left for him when he does not want to make any.

But what choice does he have? There is nowhere that he would go, except perhaps to grovel at Louis’s feet. He finds himself tired of apology. With enough time, he’s certain that he could convince Louis to at least tolerate his presence. Vampires live very long lives – Lestat, who once despised him, will at least answer his call when he searches him out.

Vampires live very long lives, and Daniel is nearing the end of a short one. Even if he wanted to be with Louis now (and of that, he cannot quite be sure), he would not sacrifice this.

He feels unsteady. Feels like his very bones are trembling beneath some great invisible weight. Maybe they are. On the outside, he does not move.

So. What choice does he have? He’s good at giving people what they want. This is his skill, more than any power he has accumulated in his very long lifetime. A thing he learned so young that he doesn’t remember the learning of it, only the use of it to–

What choice does he have?

Daniel wants things Armand doesn’t know how to offer. Daniel wants things that make Armand feel shame in the soft marrow of this body that was once his. Daniel wants things that make it impossible to keep on enduring, impossible to keep things in their proper order in his head. Daniel wants him honest and he only knows that in too-small doses.

Still. He gets up with the endless clock of the sun, the nighttime alarm of it’s fall from view, and pulls on clothes. He has no choice.

---

Daniel doesn’t look surprised when he drops down on the other end of the couch. He’s built a whole career on that, Armand supposes. On not letting himself look surprised.

“I wanted you to love me,” Armand says. A grand admission, a truth scraped out of his bones and served for Daniel like a meal. He still feels shaky, little earthquakes in his stomach, in his spine, in his throat. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. Because I was afraid that when you knew, you would not love me.”  

And Daniel, unimpressed by his offering. He flicks the tv off, raises his eyebrows, waits for more.

Armand cuts a dry, frustrated sigh, and he surrenders. “Perhaps I do play with people, Daniel. This game is the only way I know how to live. But I did not want to with you. I wanted not to have to, and I thought– if you couldn’t remember that terrible, awful thing, I would not have to spend forever–

“Atoning?”

Have I atoned?

“You weaponize words the same way I weaponize thoughts, you know?”

“I know,” Daniel says, neither proud nor apologetic. Then: “I would have forgiven you for it in those days. Without hesitation, I would have shrugged away my fear because I was so damn obsessed with you.”

“And now? Do you forgive me now?” It comes out too eager, he knows he looks too hungry for it. He’s tired of this end of the couch. His bones are shuddering, his chest is carved out. This distance between them was never enough but it certainly isn’t now that he has fresh memory of closeness.

Daniel shifts, uncomfortable where he sits. Sore, maybe. His hand shakes violently on his knee and Armand thinks he might reach out and take it, soon. Might see if Daniel will stop him.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“So you know what happened, and it has stopped you from loving me. How am I to live a life where honesty makes–”

“Sorry, I missed the part where I said that I don’t love you.” Daniel sounds just annoyed enough that Armand isn’t sure the words are intentional. Armand would like to bask in them anyways, would like to let them fall on his face like the warmth of the sun once did when it knew and loved him. “It’s not about loving you. It’s about trusting that you won’t play Jenga with my brain whenever you think I can’t deal with the truth.”

Armand isn’t sure he knows what that is, but the gist of it is clear. “Honesty, then.”

“I like you honest,” Daniel says with a shrug. “Didn’t I just tell you that earlier?”

“The context was–”

“The same, Armand. Don’t pretend sex is that easily separated from the rest. Dumb isn’t a good look on you.” Close enough to fond.

He’ll take what opportunity he can. “Let me help you again. Let me ease the tremors.”

Daniel glances down at his hand as if he had forgotten it entirely, then looks back up to Armand with those same searching eyes. Always a puzzle to solve, always finding pieces Armand has long believed lost. “Are you asking because you want to help, or because you want an excuse to touch me?”

“Both.”

His eagerness this time earns him a smile. A real one. I like you honest, Daniel had said. His hand is held out to Armand, and the distance is easy to close. His mind is held open to Armand, and the distance was never really that great to begin with.  

It is slow work, to do this right.

Slower still because he has things he needs to say.

“I was thinking about Venice today. When we went together.” He’s carefully neutral, waits to see if Daniel will tease the thread.

And he does, of course he does. “You never told me then what Venice was to you. I might have known not to ask there of all places.”

Armand smiles, recalls the many requests that would follow the first. “You were never all that concerned with the appropriateness of the timing or location.” It takes effort to continue, and it’s an effort he knows will not be acknowledged. “You reminded me of myself, then. Just there, in that place.”

If Daniel makes a face at that, Armand does not see it. He’s focused instead on relaxing each of Daniel’s fingers one by one.

“It’s best that you asked me there first. If you hadn’t, I might not have remembered how certain I was that I wanted the gift, despite how miserable it has made me.” It does not always make Armand miserable. This much he thinks Daniel knows. But then, the joy he takes in it, the pleasure, that sometimes makes him miserable too. “I loved you enough, even then, that I might have convinced myself you knew what you wanted.”

It might not be the best choice of words, but Daniel doesn’t sound angry when he says, “I knew what I wanted. I just didn’t want it for the right reasons, then.”

The word then is a thrumming heartbeat, a steady single-syllable beating through each conversation they have, but especially this one. The yawning gap between then and now. Daniel’s hand has stopped its shaking. Armand doesn’t want to let it go.

Daniel’s free arm slides around his shoulders, takes him by surprise, tugs him down to nestle against the warmth of Daniel’s body. He buries his nose against Daniel’s neck, inhales deep and long and forever, feels himself fall still again at last.

“Well damn,” Daniel says, perhaps to himself.

“What?”

A pause, like Daniel is deciding something. Armand could pull it from his mind but he likes it best when it’s offered to him. I like you honest. “I used to think you did it for my sake. The whole clinging to me like a boa constrictor after we fucked thing.”

Armand takes issue with the choice of comparison. He certainly would never have squeezed Daniel so hard. That’s how bones get broken, and humans do not heal them all that quickly. Still. The moment is soft and sweet again for now, so all he says is, “And now?”

“I’m grown enough to know you need it too.”

“I don’t need anything.” He’s quick to say it. Quick to mean it, too. In theory he can survive with nothing at all. Could live on crumbs, on the dried blood that clings to cement in dirty alleys.

“Sure. Hard to be honest with me when you do so much lying to yourself.” There’s no heat in it. Daniel’s hand is working over his scalp again. “I shouldn’t have done it like that. Knew you’d be vulnerable and thought that would get me the answer I was looking for.”

“I wasn’t–”

“I’m not sure what the fuck to do, if honest is the word of the week.” Daniel’s heart beats faster than it should. The anxiety rolls off of him in waves. “There’s about a hundred pieces of me scattered on the table and at least half of them are terrified. Of you, and of loving you. I’m too old for this.”

A younger Daniel would only have said such things drunk or high. The Daniel of two weeks ago would not have said them at all.

The Daniel that says these things to him now is new altogether. Is the sum of a whole, even if he hasn’t completed the calculations yet.

“Probably gonna keep fucking up. Gonna keep being mad and mean. And you deserve a fuck of a lot of it.” Daniel doesn’t leave room for Armand to argue, but he wouldn’t argue it anyways. “But what I said this morning wasn’t right. Not the way I said it anyway.”

“It was true.” It hurts to admit. To recognize that he is fundamentally altered, that something has been broken in him so long that he doesn’t even know what it is.

Daniel drops a kiss on the top of his head. “Yeah I’m pretty good at the truth, actually.”

“Unfortunately.”

“I think I’ll be pissed at you again in and hour.”

An hour. So little time for them, but so much carved out for whatever this is. He can feel the hesitation in Daniel’s touch. Can hear his uncertainty in his mind, the always warring parts battling inside him.

And here, something truly honest. Something bruise tender to the touch, not meant to be said aloud. Not meant to be heard:

‘Will you still love me in an hour?’

Daniel gives him nothing for a moment. Does not move, keeps his thoughts tucked tidily away. His voice is quiet when he does speak. Is raw. “I told you to leave the love, you remember?”

“Yes, I remember.” Of course he remembers. Of course he does.  

“Yeah. I don’t need you to tell me you kept that promise – it’s all still there,” Daniel says, dry and resigned and perhaps a bit drowsy. “Don’t think it’s going anywhere even if I want it to.”

Chapter Text

Honesty sounds better in theory than it does in practice, and Armand didn’t think it sounded particularly compelling in practice, either.

He says as much when Daniel emerges from his room in the morning, hair sticking up at haphazard angles, stubble overgrown. He’s handsome like this, too. Heavy-lidded and loose-limbed from sleep. Armand would like to reach out to him, to touch him, but he’s doing his level best to contain the urge. He’s still not entirely sure why. Daniel has yet to stop him when he does.

“Really, Daniel. I’m not sure what you hope to achieve with–”

Daniel holds up his hand and says, “Okay just a minute. Let me wake the fuck up.”

Armand watches him brew coffee, mix in a little bit milk and sugar, settle down at the table. He’s impatient, has spent the night pacing the living room, trying to formulate some argument for why he can’t be honest with Daniel. Why being honest will ruin anything they’ve salvaged. Of course, giving reasons would require honesty and this is the cycle he’s been stewing in for hours.

The paper is already at Daniel’s seat at the table, and he gives it a double take.

“Did you steal my mail key?”

“I–” Armand starts, stops with an exaggerated sigh. “I’ve had a copy.”

“Knew it.” Daniel unfolds the paper, takes a sip of coffee, and appears… completely unbothered. The anger or frustration or conflict Armand waits for never materializes. “Was that difficult?”

Armand looks for mockery or sarcasm and finds none. Only drowsy curiosity. “Yes.”

“Alright, baby steps then.” Daniel pushes out the chair nearest to him with a bare foot, eyebrows raised when Armand doesn’t immediately take a seat. Because it’s for him. The chair.

All the intensity of yesterday is gone and left in its place is some pleasant, nearly docile version of Daniel. Armand settles into the chair and waits for the catch.

And there is a catch, always. Daniel takes another sip of coffee and says, “Do you know what I woke up thinking about, this morning?”

“I suppose you’ll tell me.”

“No mind reading today?” There’s the mockery, gentle though it may be.

Armand considers diving into his mind just for spite, doesn’t think Daniel would even be all that bothered by it, but forgoes it in favor of flicking a finger to give the coffee cup a nudge just as Daniel lifts it for another sip. It spills down Daniel’s chin, drips onto his t-shirt, earns him a scowl that’s trying very, very hard not to be a smile. Armand grits his teeth, resists the urge to lean forward and lick the coffee off.

“Mature.” Then, “I was thinking about Denver.”

“Doesn’t make my top twenty US cities, but not the worst, either. Beautiful scenery however.”

“Very compelling. You should take up travel writing.” He doesn’t need to read Daniel’s mind to know that he briefly considers throwing the coffee mug at him. Instead, his foot presses up against Armand’s shin. “Do you remember when we went there?”

“We didn’t go there. You left Dallas in a fit of stupidity, without telling me, and I found you in Colorado a week later.” Not his favorite experience. Perhaps why it doesn’t make the top twenty city list. He’s never thought to compare each of them to the time he spent with Daniel in any given place. He makes note to do that later. “I had to pull you out–”

“Of a drug den, yeah. And I had pneumonia.”

“Are we coming to a point or are we reminiscing?” Armand asks. Daniel’s foot is still there, still pressing against his leg, a sparking point of contact. “I can think of far better destinations if it’s the latter. Do you remember when we visited the cathedral in Cologne and–”

“Yeah I remember. Highlight of the European tour of churches we should fuck in, but no. That’s not what I’m getting at.” Daniel rubs at the back of his neck anyways, heat rising to color the tips of his ears. “Two weeks. We stayed in that hotel room for two weeks.”

“The doctor told you to–”

“Yeah, and you took it so seriously that you didn’t let me so much as smell fresh air for fourteen days.”

Fifteen. It hadn’t been a pleasant time. He’d rather not think about it, really. Daniel, too thin, hacking a wet cough and making a soft whistle with every inhale. He did a lot of almost dying back then, but this had been particularly painful to bear witness to.

“How long did you go without eating, then?” Daniel interrupts his recollection and Armand understands. “Three weeks?”

“Around that.” Twenty  days. Not long enough to cause him any real harm at his age, but long enough that by the time Daniel started feeling better, he was getting looks of concern in return. He hadn’t been particularly discerning about his choice in a meal, then.

“And why is it that you waited so long?”

Armand doesn’t think it pertinent. Not that he knows where exactly this conversation is headed. “I–”

“Honest answer.”

“I was worried about you.” It comes out through gritted teeth, but he says it. Daniel kicks up both feet to rest them in his lap and he gets the distinct sense that he’s being rewarded for good behavior.

“Right. Yeah. And you look – no offense – like shit right now.”

“I can go far longer without–”

“I get it. You’re so old and so super powerful and so so invincible. You still look like shit, and you’ve been hungry for days.”

Clever of Daniel to hold him here with physical contact. He’s not sure he wouldn’t have removed himself from the conversation by now if it weren’t for that. “Your point, Daniel. Stop circling, land the plane.”

“You need to– eat. Today.”

His eyes lock sharp on Daniel’s then. “Why?”

“I have some tests tomorrow, at the hospital,” Daniel says, carefully nonchalant. This much Armand was already aware of. It’s not difficult to keep track of Daniel’s data in his doctor’s system. In the name of honesty, Armand doesn’t act surprised. In the name of their tentative peace, Daniel doesn’t respond in anger. “When I go, I generally get a Covid test.”

“Are you sick?” There are illnesses Armand can smell in the blood, but Covid hasn’t yet been one of them. Daniel seems fine – his heart rate, his blood pressure, his temperature all seem normal – but Armand’s stomach twists all the same.

“No I feel fine, but it’s not an impossibility. If I happen to get a positive or some other test result comes back less than stellar–”

“You want me to kill someone just in case you’re sick?”

“Or you could just not put it like that, but okay,” Daniel mutters. “I just don’t want you getting weird about it if I am, and then–”

“That’s… very considerate of you.” Armand doesn’t intend to sound so surprised.

Daniel rolls his eyes in return, but fidgets under Armand’s gaze. He’s as unaccustomed to Armand’s compliments as Armand is to his easy willingness to touch him. “You’re annoying when you’re starving.”

“I’m not starving. I’m perfectly fine.”

“And if I get a shit result on a test, are you gonna be normal or are you gonna insist on keeping me in view 24/7 like I’m a small child?”

Armand would really like to answer that with the former option, but in the name of honesty, he withholds an answer entirely. “Fine. I’ll go hunting.”

Daniel grins wide and satisfied and it’s easy to forget that all his anger and hurt are likely to return without warning before the day is at an end. It’s also clear that Daniel was never quite so as sleep-drowsy and half-awake as he pretended when he emerged from his room.

“Great. Problem solved.”

“And I’m coming with you to the hospital.”

Daniel argues the point half-heartedly. If he’s already accepted that Armand is unlikely to leave him alone if he’s even the slightest bit sick, then he had to have known Armand would insist upon accompanying him, too. He’s a smart man.

Armand leaves the house in the afternoon, feels an uncomfortable tightening in his chest when he shuts the door (and flicks the deadbolt, just in case Daniel forgets to do it himself). It’s one thing to know that Daniel will die in the coming years. It’s another to think about how vulnerable he is now to all the small threats of age and time.

How easily those old fears reemerge. It was easier to keep from thinking about them when Daniel could not remember anything. When Daniel looked at Armand like a stranger, and Armand could convince himself that Daniel was not really Daniel at all.

A strange thought, now. He can see all of the things that were carried forward even without those memories. Little gestures, interests, skills. His smile never changed, nor his humor, nor his dogged pursuit of something true.

Armand forces himself to take his time on the hunt. To search minds slowly for one that he most wants to touch. It’s been years since he hunted this way, but there is no thrill in it for all the time that’s passed. Then again, he’s not entirely sure there’s thrill in sending foolish people roaming through the streets on a race to an end destination they’re unlikely to get to, either. It’s just something to do.

Some way to make it fairer, perhaps. Some way to assuage the imaginary guilt he pretends that he still feels for the murder of thousands. Families have missed them, certainly. The world has not.

He’ll be taking the kill raw today, without granting his meal any semblance of chance, choice, or fairness. He has only to decide what he wants it to taste like. Whether he wants the despair that comes with someone who is so ready to be gone from this earth that they invite him willingly as shepherd through death, or the slow sinking realization from someone who comes to accept their wretched soul and surrenders to his death sentence.

Or, perhaps, the rarer longing that comes from grief.

A woman in her mid thirties is curled over herself in an alleyway, choking back the sobs that come with sudden recollection. She’s well dressed, her hair neatly twisted into a bun, her shoes too fine for the stink and grime of the alley, but she does not care.

She aches with it. The black pit of loss in her stomach, the vice grip of grief in her throat. That certain special sort of death wish that comes from wanting to be close, once more, to someone beloved. It’s not a chase. He doesn’t even have to work to convince her, only has to give her mind a gentle nudge towards trusting that he will carry her there gently.

When he drinks feels the ache of it, sees the face of her lover lost, and he does find himself hoping there is some place where they reunite. When her heart begins to slow and her mind begins to die, it all blurs into color. Grief is not black or grey or brown. It is a brilliant technicolor, always. Grief is the color of everything.

And when she is dead, he is no longer hungry. Is hot with blood, veins coursing with the pleasure of something like life in them. Feeding always feels good. A gift, he supposes, for the horror it might otherwise cause. Still, he has been old for a very long time, and this is a lazy pleasure.

There is no thrill in it. It’s just something to do.

He is only just through the door to the apartment when Daniel grabs him, hands spanning large and firm on his face. Armand flicks the door shut behind him to avoid being pushed out into the hallway, shoulders hitting the wood hard. Daniel’s mouth engulfs his, claims it. None of that slow, deliberate warmth from before, just a silent demand for more and more and more.

Armand lets him take it. Lets himself be wedged up between the soft heat of Daniel’s body and the distantly cool wood of the door. For a moment all he manages is a soft whine, an animal thing that Daniel sucks hungrily from his mouth.

He can smell Daniel. The heady, insistent smell of hours of desire clinging to his skin.

‘You like it, don’t you? Like the idea of me out there killing, drinking the life from someone.’

He would speak it aloud, but he’s got no inclination to take his mouth back from Daniel. He can have it forever, if he’d like. Strange thing, devotion. Once it comes to him it owns him whole and entire. Daniel groans low and anguished but he doesn’t pull away.

‘What is it Daniel? The thrill of it? The wrongness? That you know I could do the same to you but instead let you steer me?’ Daniel doesn’t respond, except perhaps to kiss him harder. ‘The way I feel warm, for once? More human?’

Daniel does tear himself away at that, only far enough to look Armand in the eyes when he gets the words out. “Not the last one.”

Before Armand has the chance to put a name to the warmth that blossoms in his chest, Daniel’s mouth is on his throat, and he remembers he has hands of his own. He slides one into Daniel’s hair, careful, so careful, with his nails at Daniel’s scalp. The other hand slides up under his hem to feel skin. Their temperature is closely matched now, but Daniel’s skin is still softer. He presses a thumb into Daniel’s hip to feel the give of flesh, the ease with which Daniel groans into the bruise he paints there.

And, because he thinks he can get away with it, he fishes for more. “Do you not like me warm?”

Daniel’s breath is hot on his ear, his tongue sliding along the shell before he says, “Sure, like you warm. Cold. It’s just not about being more human.”

He was always more earnest like this. That hasn’t changed.

Desire makes Daniel hungry, makes him needy, makes him take. Armand doesn’t mind giving.

“Do you want me to tell you about it? About her? How she sounded when she took her last breath? The way she relaxed into my embrace as if it was the first she had felt in months?”

And Daniel, sweet, kind, wretched Daniel, he does want that. Hates himself for it, a little. Perhaps more than he used to. But wants it all the more. Armand can feel him growing hard against his hip, can hear the pleasure-rush of his blood and race of his heart. Armand would like to see his face, but Daniel keeps him close where the little air between them grows hot, ruts against him with his teeth sinking into the meat of Armand’s shoulder.

“What about how she tasted, Daniel? Like–”

Jealousy flares shapeless and wordless in Daniel’s mind, too loud to pretend Armand isn’t listening. He pulls at Daniel’s hair, finds his face flushed and pupils blown.

“Oh,” Armand murmurs. Because Daniel is lovely, and Daniel is jealous, and Daniel is here. And because Daniel wants with a sort of exquisite longing that is unlike anybody else Armand has ever known.  

Daniel is also scowling. “Shut up.”

“It wouldn’t be wise.”

“Stay out of my head.” Daniel hardly bothers to put any heart into the demand this time. Perhaps because he hasn’t bothered to put any effort into closing his mind, either. “Why wouldn’t it be wise?”

“Your illness–”

“Parkinson’s. You can say Parkinson’s.” Daniel is on edge, something just shy of self-conscious. Armand was never particularly skilled at navigating the line between an unspoken request and a thought Daniel hadn’t been prepared to share. Perhaps this was the latter, but he gets the sense–

“Yes, obviously I can say Parkinson’s.” Armand rolls his eyes. “I don’t think reducing your blood volume without replacing it would be–”

“Then replace it.”

“Daniel.”

“I’m dying already. I can’t die more. So what does it matter?”

It matters a great deal. Daniel knows it, too. Has clearly been thinking about it when Armand is not there to listen in. To exchange blood was never just about the pleasure or the drug even when Daniel did not understand the meaning of his own offering, but exponentially more so now that he does.

“Is it a relapse?” Armand asks and Daniel flinches. Before he has the chance to back away, Armand’s hand cups his jaw, gentle. “It isn’t a judgement, only a question.”

Daniel huffs a laugh, muscles relaxing. “Yeah. Pulled straight from my own playbook.”

His sobriety means little to Armand in the grand scheme of things. Daniel is right that he’s already dying, and Armand’s blood is more likely to help him than to hurt him at this point.

“I don’t know,” Daniel finally says with a shrug. “Being with you at all is kind of a relapse, isn’t it?”

Like a bucket of ice water. Armand’s hand falls from his face and he pushes against Daniel’s hip until there’s space between them. “That’s what it was to you? A vice?”

“God, I don’t–” Daniel stops himself, takes a breath. That familiar in-out-in. “What do you want me to call it Armand? A hallmark love story? You had to hide my fucking memories for my survival. That’s not–”

“Romantic?” Daniel thinks it is, and they both know that. In his twisted-up heart, this is exactly what he wants. What he always wanted. What his relationships over the years could never offer. “So why do this at all then? Why submit yourself to it again?”

Armand regrets pushing him away. Wishes they were still touching, even now, even when it hurts. Things get so tangled up with Daniel. For a moment he wishes he’d never given back the memories, never come back to New York at all. But the pulse of stolen grief is still steady in his veins, the sweetness of it like fermented fruit on his tongue. A reminder, a warning.

He wants this. The ache, too.

“Because I want to,” Daniel shrugs.

What they both want, they get.

He should push harder, should make sure, should give Daniel time and space to decide. These are human things, things of restraint. Armand is not human and Daniel doesn’t want him to be, so instead he reaches out with grasping fingers and pulls Daniel back into his orbit.

“Am I forgiven?” Daniel murmurs against his mouth. It’s only half a joke.

“Do you love me?” Armand asks in return, half expecting Daniel to find some way around an answer. He presses his mouth the Daniel’s jaw, to the shell of his ear, to the soft skin below.

It’s a strange thing, Daniel’s honesty. All that anger and hate always present.  

“Yeah, I love you.”

But this, too. Liquid and earnest.

“Then I would forgive you anything,” Armand murmurs, sucks beneath the hinge of Daniel’s jaw, hears his soft exhale. He returns to their conversation as if nothing has happened in the interim. “So you don’t want to hear of her blood then. Would you like to hear of yours?”

“You haven’t tasted it in what, forty years?”

“Nothing, to a vampire. I still remember.” It was an eternity, in reality. A lifetime. His tongue slides along Daniel’s pulse, feels the skip and shudder. “And I can smell it, on you. Can smell how it still wants me.”

It sings to Armand, but he doesn’t know how to explain that to Daniel, so he doesn’t try.

“You say it like it’s got some creepy separate consciousness,” Daniel mumbles, but he doesn’t sound frightened. He doesn’t feel frightened, under Armand’s slow touch.

“It isn’t. It’s just you, without any of the things that might make you hesitate.” And then, because he’s not sure whether Daniel understands, he says, “My blood still wants you, too.”

Daniel, irreverent the way he gets when he is feeling too raw, says, “Right then let’s get on with it.”

When Armand pulls back this time, it’s to laugh. He catches Daniel looking distinctly fond when he does, presses a warm happy kiss to his stubbled cheek. “Couch or bed?”

He takes too long to answer, so Armand tugs him to the couch, presses him down to sit in the center. “Couch, I guess,” Daniel offers, dry and amused. Armand straddles him, welcomes the curve of Daniel’s hands on his thighs like some sort of grounding, levelling force.

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where would you like me to drink from you?”

Daniel looks at him the way he does so often, lately. As if he’s superimposing two images over one another, trying to see where they line up and where they don’t. “You didn’t use to ask.”

“I’m asking now,” is all that Armand offers.

A pause. Silence while Daniel makes his decision, angles his neck, takes Armand’s hand to place it over the ragged scar there.

“What is this, punishment?” Armand wouldn’t mind, if that’s what Daniel wants. Needs. It’s easier to atone when he is given the ways in which to best do it, provided with a clear path.

Daniel shakes his head. “No. You just… never did, before. After San Francisco I mean.”

Armand did, once. It’s for the best that Daniel doesn’t recall, so he doesn’t rush to enlighten him. Instead he asks, “Why then?”

“I look at it in the mirror and all I can think about is San Francisco.”

Yes. Armand supposes that would make sense. He’d like to come up with a reason not to, wants to tell Daniel to pick anywhere else. But he gave him the choice. Armand’s thumb strokes over the scar, traces the shape, feels the vein beneath. “It might hurt more.”

“Pain’s good,” Daniel says, and yes. There is the desire again. Spiking through Daniel, spiking through Armand, spiking through the air around them like a thousand pinpricks to his skin.

 He lowers his mouth to it. His tongue. Let’s Daniel feel the sharp points of his fangs long before they sink in. Still, he doesn’t bite. Cannot bite. Then Daniel’s hand is in his hair, that same gentle, guiding touch, a silent, soothing thing.

Decades after the last time he did only hours before he made Daniel forget him, Armand sinks his fangs slow into Daniel’s flesh. Nicks the vein. Ceases to exist as a separate being.

The blood is hot, flows steady into his mouth. Someone is moaning and it might be him, or it might be Daniel. Someone is crying and that might be him or Daniel, too. The hand in his hair is still moving in that soothing way and the hand on his thigh slides up, hooks under him, pulls them closer together until Armand is curled around Daniel.

“It’s okay, go ahead,” Daniel mumbles.

It’s only then that he realizes he’s not been drinking in earnest, and now he does, swallowing mouthful after mouthful with a shuddering spine. One hand pressed flat to Daniel’s heart, the other needlessly holding his head to keep his neck bare to him. His body shifts to the rhythm of each swallow, which is set, of course, to the rhythm of Daniel’s steady beating heart.

He tastes like home.

He thinks it moments before he hears Daniel’s unspoken question. ‘What do I taste like?’

Home is not a description of flavor. Armand drifts hazy on waves of pleasure, takes his time finding words for an answer he’s known for years. Daniel doesn’t seem to mind, murmurs mindless things while he clings to Armand and groans and sighs and drifts right along with him.

‘Like nectar from a flower.’ Then, because he feels cut open already, feels like pouring, he adds, ‘I remember very little from my childhood. But I recall when I was very young, we would pick the Ixora flowers and suck the nectar from them. It is like that, I think.’

“Fuck,” Daniel says, voice so ragged, so wrecked, that for at least this moment Armand wants to see him more than his hunger wants him to keep drinking. He presses his thumb to Daniel’s neck, stops the wound. It’s sloppier than he likes to be, and Daniel’s shirt will stain, but it’s impossible to care with Daniel looking at him like that.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I want–” The words don’t come out, but Daniel’s mind pulls up the image well enough.

Armand sinks fangs into his own fingers, sharp and tearing and deep, tastes his own blood already made honey-sweet by Daniel’s. He thinks, again, about questioning Daniel once more. About making sure he’s considered the consequences.

And then he thinks about Daniel needing him. Thinks about Daniel always coming back to him, all those years ago. Coming back to him, even now.

And he’s selfish, so instead all he does is sink his fingers into Daniel’s already open, waiting mouth.

Daniel sucks them down. Muscle memory. His eyes water before they shut, he rumbles something needy low in his throat, and then Armand is tucked back against his neck. Drinking again again again.

This is a closed circuit. He imagines they could be this way, forever. Blood shared between the two of them to create a single organism, make one being from two separate souls. More of him inside Daniel than exists in his own body.

They can’t, of course. There is no way to do so without risking the dark gift.

A minute more, maybe two. It’s not enough time and it never will be. It’s enough to get Daniel there, though. To send him shuddering and crying out in orgasm from the mixture of friction and adrenaline and blood-rich pleasure.

When he finally breaks free, Daniel is breathing heavy, fumbles with the button of Armand’s pants, then the zipper. Armand doesn’t need it, couldn’t possibly need more pleasure than Daniel has already given him today, but he’ll take it anyway. More and more and everything Daniel is ever willing to give him.

He lets Daniel take his still bleeding hand, wrap it around his cock, guide it in a steady stroke. When he leans in to press his forehead to Daniel’s, Daniel’s mouth finds his instead, tongue sliding along Armand’s like he’s trying to taste the two of them together and yes, yes, Armand can taste it so Daniel must taste it too. And yes, and yes, and yes.

He comes silent and shaking, too dizzy with feeling to protest when Daniel licks his fingers clean.

Daniel holds him, after. Stops him when he moves to climb off of his lap. This time, Daniel has no questions and so Armand cannot answer them poorly. They drift properly through aftershocks. Let the waves of pleasure rock up like a gentle tide on the shore until they draw further and further out.

Sometime during that floating, hazy afterglow, Daniel presses his mouth to Armand’s temple and mumbles words that get muffled against his skin. He can make them out, anyways.

“Yeah. Wouldn’t call that a vice.”

Chapter Text

They go to the hospital, and it’s the first time Armand has been inside one in decades. He sits with Daniel in the waiting room, and in the interest of ensuring competency, scans the thoughts of every medical personnel he thinks has any chance of coming into contact with Daniel.

The bloodwork will have to wait because he’s fairly certain it wouldn’t come back normal, which makes the trip half moot. Perhaps the timing was not the most ideal, but Armand cannot say he regrets it. The phantom taste of Daniel’s blood still clings to the roof of his mouth, long after he knows it’s gone. Daniel’s fingers keep brushing over the scar on his neck, newer wounds neatly healed on top of the older one that never will.

“You didn’t have to come,” Daniel says for the third time. What he means, of course, is you should have stayed home.

“You’ve mentioned. I’m aware that I am here of my own accord and not being held hostage,” Armand clips back, distracted by a nurse down the hall who seems far too engrossed in composing the next text in her argument with her mother to be doing her job adequately.

“They probably think you’re my fucking aid. Or worse.”

Armand huffs a laugh at that, grants Daniel his full attention if only to say, “Does it matter?”

“I mean…” Humans have all sorts of strange hang ups that Armand will never understand. He’s been removed from their customs for too long, never lived a particularly normal life beforehand anyway. Age hadn’t seemed a bad thing to him then, but the world today moves fast, and people seem desperate to halt the passage of time on their skin.  

“It’s a gift to grow old, Daniel,” he says, not for the first time.

“Yeah? Tell that to my fucking joints.”

“Are they in pain, today?” Armand reaches a hand out to Daniel’s shoulder, presses gentle fingertips into the muscle.

Daniel almost sinks fully into the touch before he remembers himself. Remembers where they are. Perhaps remembers that this is not something they do casually, anyways. “Great now they’ll definitely think–”

“Why should you care?” He’s genuinely curious, would like to understand why it really matters. These people are strangers. They will forget the two of them even exist by the time they return home. At most, they would be an anecdote shared over drinks with friends, or a piece of gossip between coworkers in the break room.

For a moment, Daniel looks like he’s genuinely considering answering. Then he just shakes his head, shakes off Armand’s touch, and says, “Forget it. Human thing.”

It would sting if it were not such a very very old wound. It would take more than just a dig to make that particular scar ache again.

A technician arrives to call Daniel in and this time, when he insists on going alone Armand allows it.

---

In the parking lot, Daniel begs a cigarette off of a woman dragging around an IV pole. When Armand raises an eyebrow, he just shrugs and says, “Tradition. Got a light?”

Armand rolls his eyes but lights the end for him, cherry glowing red hot. He watches Daniel inhale, leans close enough to feel the exhale on his face.

“I wanted it for all the wrong reasons then,” Daniel says, a non sequitur that takes Armand only a moment to piece together.

“What were they?” He asks as if he does not know. As if he did not hear them from Daniel’s mouth and from his mind a hundred times.

Another drag. Another puff of smoke. Armand breathes it in, just to hold the air from Daniel’s lungs inside his own. “Power, mostly. Some sense of security or safety or purpose I didn’t think I’d find in my lifetime. Didn’t think I’d make it to thirty, back then.”

“You almost didn’t,” Armand points out.

“It seemed romantic, in a stupid, storybook kind of way. Fun, too. Like an escape from the monotony of a boring life.” Boredom. Armand huffs a laugh and Daniel joins him. It’s the sort of naivety that only a person in their twenties could manage, to believe that immortal creatures would somehow experience less boredom with infinite time. “I was an idiot.”

Armand has called Daniel foolish more times than he can count, but he feels suddenly protective. “You were young. Hopeful. You still believed in magic like it appears in the movies.”

“Yeah, an idiot. By definition.”

“It was refreshing. It had been a long time since I could see the world that way.” He doesn’t mean to sound wistful. Sees the moment Daniel closes off, shuts him out. That Daniel existed inside very narrow parameters, and Armand took that idealism from him more than once.

He rewinds the subject backward a few steps. “Are there any right reasons to want it?”

“Eternal good looks, probably.” Daniel quips, and sure, Armand knows a deflection when he hears one, but he’s not sure he wants the serious answer. Should not have asked, likely.

“Something I still don’t understand, though…” And here it is, at last. The point of the conversation, delivered via the least direct route. “Why did you refuse?”

“Surely you remember–”

“The reasons you gave me, yeah. But they don’t quite add up.” Daniel is done his cigarette now. Crushes it under his shoe and leaves the butt lying on the ground beneath the No Smoking sign. “Make yourself an eternal companion, tied to you by a blood bond, and never have to be alone again? Seems like it’d be right up your alley.”

“It would not guarantee companionship. You have seen that much now.” It’s Armand’s turn to deflect, this time. “Even if it had… I would not wish it upon anyone. It is a curse. It was for your own good. You had already been tied to me by the blood exchange and that alone was causing so much–”

“Right. Yeah.” Daniel is looking at him unimpressed. The wheels spinning and spinning in his head the way they do when he’s putting together a narrative, whether it’s true or not. It’s rarely in Armand’s best interest to let him do it, but short of erasing his memory to turn the clock back on this conversation, none of the options he has for stopping Daniel from following his own train of thought are viable.

He waits. Daniel’s voice is bitter when he presents his theory. “No guarantees, hey? You didn’t refuse to turn me for my own good. You refused because you were afraid I would leave after, that you couldn’t control me. With me hooked on blood, you at least knew how to keep me coming back.”

It’s not true. Or it is true, but it isn’t the right truth.

He falls prey to the accusation anyways. “And I was right. You left.”

“You erased my fucking memories!”

“You asked me to, so I did.” On and on, no matter how many steps they take forward, they’re brought right back here.

“You made yourself right, Armand.” Daniel says it loud enough that the lady with her IV pole startles and begins to shuffle away, eyes averted while she clearly continues to listen in at a distance. “You do this to yourself over and over. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the ancient lonely boy.”

Armand bites his tongue. It floods with blood, sweet and hot, and he wonders how much of Daniel is still left in him today. Wonders at the science of this thing he is. The way the monster works, how much boy could possibly still remain after hundreds of years.

“That’s not it, Daniel. That’s– yes, I feared that. I did. But–”

“Tell me why, then. Give me a reason better than that.” By the time Daniel has finished speaking, his voice is lowered again, his tone evened out. He’s not an interviewer, really. At his core he’s an interrogator. He swings widely between moods, often just for the sake of a reaction that he succeeds in getting from Armand far more frequently than he would like.

This, though... this isn’t something he knows how to explain. He knows that Daniel wouldn’t have understood it then, wonders if maybe Daniel can even understand it now. He knows more today than he did. Not just about his own life, but about Armand’s. It still amounts to very little.

“I refused your request because I wish that I had been refused my own,” Armand finally says, quiet and cold. The meaning is emotion enough. He need not add to it with the broken, jagged sound that threatens to bubble up from his throat.

Daniel is quiet for a minute. Lets it sink in, lets Armand sit in it with him.

Then finally, he simply says, “Yeah. That’s a better reason. Shit.”

“You know, I’m still not sure I get it,” Daniel says a few days later, looking over the screen of his laptop to where Armand watches him. He’s been trying to determine, lately, if he can figure out what Daniel is typing just based on the sound of his fingers on the keys. For now he just matches the sounds to the words he sees pop up in Daniel’s head as the narrative forms, but he’s pretty sure that given enough time he’ll manage it.

It serves virtually no purpose when he can simply peruse Daniel’s mind, but it fills the time. Besides, he likes the sound. The gentle tapping like rain on a windowpane. The gaps of space where Daniel pauses to search for the right phrasing, or reread, or consider another idea.

“Hm?”

“What were you doing?” Daniel must be growing used to Armand’s presence in his mind again, because more and more often lately he finds himself thrown into the midway point of a conversation he hasn’t been privy to, missing the preceding thought that might provide context.

“When?”

A sigh, then. Armand stifles the urge to tell Daniel he can’t be annoyed with him for not reading his mind half the time, and annoyed with him for reading it the other half. Primarily because he can already hear Daniel telling him that yeah, it’s well within his right to be annoyed at Armand for whatever he wants, thanks.

“With me. Slumming it with a human for years.” Daniel says it like he doesn’t care. It’s easier for him that way, Armand thinks. When Daniel was young, he didn’t like to be serious for any length of time so he would crack a joke, lighten things up. Now, Daniel is serious quite often, but doesn’t like to be made vulnerable. He wields apathy just as often as humor.  

Two halves of the same coin. Both make for some kind of armor, though one is far easier to relate to than the other.

Armand regards him for a long moment, until Daniel finally blinks. “You want to know why I was not with Louis.”

“I mean after two weeks of on and off dinner theater in which you insisted that you were the love of each other’s lives for 70-some-odd years… yeah. Curious how I fit into the equation.”  

A matter of time, he supposes. Really, Daniel has waited longer than Armand might have thought he would to raise the question. If he didn’t know Daniel better, he might almost call it tact. He reaches over, presses the lid to Daniel’s laptop shut. “You didn’t. Fit into the equation, I mean.”

Daniel doesn’t give him any real reaction, just scowls down at the closed computer for a moment, then leans back with his arms crossed over his chest, expectant.

Always more, with Daniel. And now, here, something Armand isn’t sure he’s prepared to give.

“Louis was in excruciating pain for a long time, after. And when he was outwardly healed, he asked me to remove his memory because he couldn’t live with it. With what drove him to do it, with the things he did and said.” This isn’t entirely his story to tell, but he thinks it’s fair considering Louis insisted upon sharing so many parts of Armand’s.

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I was telling the truth with you, wasn’t I?” He wonders, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, if Daniel will ever trust him again. If, just like with Louis, he will be forever trying to erase that which those around him deem to be his mistakes.

Daniel shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah. Not sure that counts for shit here, but far be it from me. Had enough digging around in your relationship. I just want to know what it had to do with me.”

“It had nothing to do with you,” Armand says. “Without the pain of reality, Louis was left with the same rot from before. He repeated San Francisco in Los Angeles, then New York, then London.”

If it were Armand who had systematically murdered hundreds of gay men in the 70’s, he’s fairly certain Daniel would not hesitate to cast his judgement vocally. As it stands, Daniel winces but says nothing at all, keeps anything he thinks about what Louis has done tucked away in his head. It leaves a bitter taste on Armand’s tongue.

“I saw him some, in the first year. Checked on him to–”

“I bet.”

The flat of Armand’s hand hits the table, loud and cracking in the quiet of the apartment. Daniel doesn’t jump, but his jaw twitches. When Armand speaks his voice is carefully tranquil. “Perhaps we can save this question for one of the days where you hate me slightly less.”

Daniel considers it, then shakes his head. “Nah. Don’t think so. Keep going.”

He considers leaving. Really thinks about it. “I checked on him, but less and less as the years went on. He did not want for my company, then.”

“So you passed the time with me while you waited for him to take you back.”

Armand does leave, then. Not far, but out to the street where everything doesn’t smell of Daniel. Where he does not have to be held responsible for everything he says and exactly how he says them. Where nobody knows him well enough to know where to press down or how hard.

---

They’re watching the news, even though it never fails to make Daniel miserable and Armand annoyed. The screen is a flash of color images. Jungle green, army green, blood red, burnt black, orange orange orange. A newscaster says something over the clips about death and freedom and bravery, and it means nothing. It’s only words.

He glances at the remote and a moment later it’s in his hand. Another moment, and the stream of sound and light is cut off. Daniel grumbles a protest from above him that he can’t possibly mean in earnest, but his fingers still massage Armand’s scalp, stroke gently through his curls. He’s always so careful not to catch on them, as if such a small pain is something Armand could not endure.

“It’s a waste,” Armand says. “All that death and for what?”

“You heard them, for freedom!” Daniel says with mock enthusiasm. Miserable. Just as he expected. “What do you even care? You eat people.”

“That means I cannot care for their wasted lives?”

The silence speaks volumes. Armand wishes, suddenly, that the tv was still on. It’s not so much that Daniel thinks him a monster – Daniel knows what he is, has not cared for a long time now. It’s that when Daniel says things like this, what he really seems to mean is that Armand must not truly care for him. And he’s not in the mood to provide that reassurance when he’s rather searching for some of his own.

“Have you never looked at an animal with fondness, Daniel?” Armand says instead. “Cows, pigs, deer? A dog, even?”

“That isn’t the same.”

“You’re right. The animals you kill and love cannot speak. You cannot know their hearts and desires. Even if you could, you would not. You pick them up in pieces at the supermarket.” Armand sits up, Daniel’s fingers untangling from his hair, and straddles Daniel’s lap instead. “Vampires are hunters. We hunt and we eat. It is both sustenance and hobby, but that does not mean we must have hatred for human beings. That does not mean we would wish to see them all dead.”

Of course, they could not survive without human beings, but it’s not only that.

“Cool. So we’re cattle.”

“No.” Armand presses his hand flat to Daniel’s beating heart. “Not you.”

Daniel’s foul mood is already lightening, drifting away with eyes locked on Armand’s. He’ll be glad to leave this conversation alone if Daniel will let him. “No? What am I then?”

Armand smiles, grips Daniel’s chin in his hand. “You’re mine beloved. For as long as you wish to be.”

 ---

Daniel finds him sitting on the pavement, back against the brick, and for a moment Armand doesn’t know what year it is. What city they are in. Daniel’s knees crack when he sits.

“My head has been hurting for hours,” Daniel says, in lieu of an apology. It’s effective, because now Armand is busy worrying about why that is. Reaching out with mind and fingers to press up against Daniel’s skull. “Okay, okay. Relax, I took an aspirin.”

He doesn’t flinch from Armand’s touch though. Leans into it, even, if only by an inch or two. “Why didn’t you say?”

“Maybe because you spend most of your time digging around in there anyways, so I thought you’d know?” Daniel bites it out, then takes a deep breath. “It happens a lot, lately.”

“Define lately.” Armand can already hear the answer.

“The whole memory thing. It’s fine, just makes me–”

“Rude?”

Daniel closes a hand around the one Armand still has on his temple, tugs it down but keeps it in his lap. “I was going to say heavy handed.”

They sit in silence for a while. The sun is still high in the sky, the summer air hot through the haze. People cross the street before they reach the two of them on the sidewalk, and Daniel does him the courtesy of not asking why.

“We should leave the house more often,” Daniel muses. Armand lets the word we carry more than half of his anger away. “I’ll be at least thirty percent less shitty if you finish telling me now.”

He isn’t sure that’s true, but he supposes the only way out is through.

“By the time you and I moved here, I hadn’t spoken to Louis in a year,” Armand continues, measured. “I didn’t feel the need. I did not wish to be with him. I knew he was alive and well because I could trace his crimes with little measurable effort, and that was enough to assuage my guilt.”

He feels Daniel’s hand tighten around his. Feels him biting back his disbelief. If Armand must learn to be more honest, he thinks Daniel must learn to be less so, on occasion. “I don’t know what would have happened if you retained your memories. You would likely have died. If you hadn’t– I like to think I would have stayed with you into–”

He cuts off because it hurts. Because there’s a version of this story, no matter how improbable, where they’ve had all this time together.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself – I’ve got two divorces under my belt.” Daniel says it like he’s trying to lighten the mood, but unfortunately, it’s less effective when they both know that he blames Armand for those failings in the first place. Sometimes he wonders what Daniel’s love would have been like if it was never spent on him. “So then you erased my memory and– and what? How did you end up back with Louis?”

“He called to me, and he asked me to come home.”

“And you went.”

“And I went,” Armand confirms. It’s hardly a story, hardly a shock.

Daniel is quiet for a moment, his thumb marking a steady journey across Armand’s knuckles. Back and forth and back and forth, lulling him into an easy submission. One he gives willingly, one he’s not entirely sure Daniel is even aware he’s asking for. Daniel’s voice is quiet when he asks, “Why?”

“I loved him. And I knew he would at least pretend to love me. And he’s immortal.”

Daniel’s mind skitters through different options, tries to sort out what thread he most wants to follow. Stutters on the past tense. Catches momentarily on the question of Louis’s love. Pushes bravely ahead to the question his younger self would be proud of him for asking. “Great. So that makes me twice the rebound, then?”

“What?”

“It makes sense. Wait it out while he gets over the worst of his anger, hang out with me until I’m too close to dead to be any fun, then throw yourself at his feet in–”

“Enough Daniel. Enough.” It won’t be, though, will it? That’s not how either of them were built. Daniel’s tongue is no less a weapon than Armand’s fangs. It hurts more now because he can tell Daniel believes it to be true.

He hasn’t spent enough time thinking about any of this to have a good answer. A curated one. “It hurts. To think of your death, it hurts.”

He doesn’t notice how hard he’s gripping Daniel’s hand until his fingers are being pried up by Daniel’s free hand. Little drops of red cling to Armand’s nails. When he tries to take his hand back, Daniel just grabs onto it again. “Hey, hey. Look. I didn’t mean to–”

“Yes you did,” Armand says bitterly.

“Okay fine, I did. And I shouldn’t have.” Daniel takes a breath again. Again again again. That steady in and out. This time he waits for Armand to join him. It’s needless, purposeless. He still feels the vice in his chest loosen all the same. “You do realize your relationship just ended, right? A whole three minutes ago in vampire time?”

“I know that,” Armand admits. “I just don’t feel anything about it.”

It’s often been that way. There’s no void to fill. Just a version of himself committed to a frame, hung up in a museum in the back of his mind. It worked with the coven. Worked with Lestat. Worked with– It was never all that effective with Daniel, but it works just fine with Louis now.

“I’m gonna be honest… I think that’s a fucking problem.”

“You’re dying, Daniel. As you so often feel the need to remind me. Shall I waste that time wondering why I do not feel things as you think I should? Why I only want to be at your side right now, and care so little for what I’ve lost?”

“How do you think this ends, Armand?” Daniel doesn’t sound angry this time, just sad and tired. “Do you know what end stage Parkinson’s looks like? I won’t be able to walk. Won’t remember shit, permanently this time. Will probably piss myself. Does that sound romantic to you?”

Daniel used to make arguments like this when he was young, and they had no teeth then. When Daniel couldn’t comprehend an aging body any better than Armand could.

It has teeth now.

Still. Devotion is easy. Devotion is something he does as simply as breathing, when given the chance. “It ends with your death, Daniel. Not a moment sooner.”

That night Daniel pauses in the doorway to his bedroom, looks back at where Armand sits on the couch with a book in his hand.

“Come to bed,” he murmurs.

So, Armand does. Pulls down the covers and lays on one side of the bed, staring up at the ceiling while Daniel brushes his teeth, changes his clothes, takes his night medications. He feels the mattress dip when Daniel settles into bed, sees him in his peripheral.

There’s a pause. Some lingering, hanging thing. A sword, a noose, or perhaps only Daniel’s hand above his body. Then that hand is curving over his stomach, tugging him by the waist, pulling him back against Daniel’s chest.

He has not been held in so long. Not really. Not for closeness and comfort, and without intent.

He relaxes into it, feels Daniel’s mouth pressing against the curve of his shoulder. The blankets fall heavy over both of them. Layer upon layer of fabric. He takes Daniel’s hand, holds it to his chest.

It’s quiet. Daniel isn’t asleep, yet.

“There are these little things I keep running into,” Daniel murmurs. “Things I do that I never understood.”

“Mm,” Armand hums, in place of a real answer. It’s hard to find words, and what good have they done him today, anyway?

“I’ve bought so many books on philosophy I never gave two shits about reading,” Daniel muses.

“What else?” Eager, now, despite himself.

“Every time I leave the country, I find myself in a fucking art museum.”

Spaces carved out in Daniel’s life that couldn’t be removed, couldn’t be filled. Gaps the size and shape and likeness of him. “And?”

“No normal person needs eight blankets on the bed.” Daniel huffs a laugh, his breath warm against the back of Armand’s neck. “My wives fucking hated it.”

That’s warm, too. In the low pit of Armand’s stomach, like an ember burning and burning and burning. “My apologies.”

“You aren’t sorry.”

“No, I’m not,” Armand confirms, soft and amused. “Go to sleep, beloved.”

Daniel nestles in closer and soon his breath comes with the slow, thick sound of sleep. He doesn’t snore, even now. Just almost. Just a loud enough inhale that it buzzes against Armand’s eardrums, sets the rhythm of his night to Daniel living and living and living like a steady drum.

Armand does not sleep, will not sleep. The night goes on forever. The sword does not fall and Daniel keeps on breathing.

Chapter Text

At dawn, Daniel begins to stir. Muscles tense, a soft sound crawls from his throat that isn’t a whimper but isn’t not a whimper, either. When Armand twists to look at him properly in the dim light, he’s sweating, eyes clenched tight. His heart races like he’s running from something.

He doesn’t need to crawl into Daniel’s mind to know that he’s the one Daniel is running from. He’s more than familiar with what that looks like.

He smooths a hand over Daniel’s cheek, murmurs soft things, gentle things. Coaxes him from the darkness of it into the slow blooming light of day. It doesn’t matter how gently he does it – Daniel wakes with a start, a gasp of breath. His hand goes to his chest to rest flat over his heart and his eyes stay shut until it’s slowed.

“Nightmare?” He asks, like he doesn’t know.

“What gave it away?” Daniel mumbles, dry as ever.

“Tell me what it was about.”

Daniel’s eyes open to look at Armand and what he sees there is fear and he knows. He always knows. “It was about you. San Francisco.”

To regret even one of his decisions would start a long list. Would eventually leave him crushed under the weight of his many wrongs. The remnants of a human mind were not made to house the weight of more than one lifetime of sin, and he’s got many lifetimes for which he’d have to repent if he were to dedicate himself to the act.

But if he were to begin in earnest, sometimes he thinks San Francisco is where he might start.

“How often do you dream of it?”

“It started when I got to Dubai. Now? All the time.” Daniel turns his head, presses his mouth to Armand’s palm in something not quite a kiss, then sits up. The blankets pool around his waist. Armand watches with his head propped up in his hand. “I– fuck you, for that.”

“Would it help if I apologized again?”

“Probably not,” Daniel shrugs. “Can’t you do something about it? Tell my brain to let it go or something? I miss fucking sleeping through the night.”

“The only thing that worked for the nightmares in the past isn’t something–” Strange, the way letting one’s guard down once leads to more and more of it. Whenever he does, he finds himself backed into a corner without ever having realized he’s done it in the first place. He realizes now, a beat too late, that he’s said something he shouldn’t have said. Cutting it off does nothing to reverse the impact.

“The nightmares in the past.” It isn’t a question. “Where I dreamed of San Francisco.”

It doesn’t seem to matter that Armand doesn’t answer. Daniel is having a conversation with himself now. Armand sits up, legs crossed on the bed.

“The nightmares I have no recollection of.”

“Dreams aren’t particularly likely to–”

“Yeah, see. I remember mentioning them to you a few times, though. But the dreams themselves? Gone. And afterwards? Kind of a blur.” Daniel pieces it together quickly. Far faster than Armand can possibly compile a defence. This detail, withheld not with intention, but simply because it doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t matter, if Daniel had never learned it.

“Memory is–”

“Don’t.” Daniel doesn’t move, doesn’t change his posture. But somehow, Armand watches him put all that armor on. Watches as he’s locked out again. “What worked in the past, Armand?”

He looks down at his hands because it’s easier than looking Daniel in the eye when he’s made himself cold, sharp. “I made you forget, again.”

If he digs his nail into his palm hard enough, he’s fairly certain it will go all the way through to the other side of his hand. Daniel doesn’t reach out to stop him. Doesn’t touch him. Just snaps his fingers and says, “Quit that shit. How many times?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then guess.” This is already beyond his control. A grenade with pin pulled out. It just hasn’t quite gone off yet.

And for what? For something that means nothing in the grand scheme of life? Something that changed nothing? Armand shifts his weight and leans into the explosion. “Half a dozen? A dozen, maybe.”

 “Get out.” The Daniel he knows isn’t here, now. Not any of the versions of him. Only a hardened shell with cold eyes and an order Armand doesn’t have to follow but cannot figure out how to refuse. “I don’t care where you go. I don’t care if you lurk outside the building, or get a hotel ten blocks away, or you get the fuck out of New York entirely, but I don’t want to see you and I don’t want to hear you.”

“Wh–”

“If you ever want me to consider the possibility of speaking to you again, you’ll do it.”

He could make Daniel speak to him.

He gets out of bed and leaves the room, anyway.

He doesn’t expect it to go on for as long as it does. One day, and another, and another. A week. For a while, he doesn’t leave. He just tucks himself away in the spare room. Daniel doesn’t bother to look for him, whether he knows he’s there or not. When he does leave, he doesn’t go far.

What would seem like no time at all is made torturous by its finite nature.

On the grand scale of his own life, a week is nothing.

On the grand scale of what remains of Daniel’s, it’s quite nearly more than he can bear.

Nearly, because there’s nothing Armand has yet found that he cannot bear. A curse of its own, his survival. His perpetual enduring. If he could stop he would.

There is a church nearby, and it’s as good a place as any to contemplate his sins and burdens. Quiet and old and empty at night, when he drags himself out of the apartment after Daniel falls asleep. There are mosques and synagogues too of course, and he doesn’t have a particular preference anymore. He only chooses the church because the other options are further away than he would like to go. It feels foolish to imagine that staying close will make a difference. Daniel isn’t going to run to him, be it down the hall or down the street.  

For the first time, he misses Louis with a sort of aching nostalgia he cannot quite name. There was a certainty in the life they built together, for all its faults. A monotony, perhaps, but a stability too. Someone to speak with every day, with whom he always knew what to expect. If Daniel were gone, if Louis would have him, he would not suffer so terribly in returning.  

Daniel is never what he expects and Daniel doesn’t let him take the role of leader and Daniel doesn’t let him play passive participant.

Armand doesn’t know where that leaves him. Here in this church, he supposes. In an old wooden pew, looking up at a sculpted crucifixion, wondering where he will next find God if not here or under Daniel’s touch.

On the eighth day he decides that even if Daniel refuses to speak to him for the rest of his days, he will not resign himself to not seeing his face again. To listening to his heartbeat through closed doors and drywall.

On the ninth day, he’s sitting on the couch when Daniel gets up in the morning.

Daniel doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t even really look at Armand while he makes his coffee, dragging up a chair to sit facing Armand instead of taking his own seat on the couch. He sets it up backwards, straddles it and leans his arms on the back.

“Told you I didn’t want to see you,” Daniel says, casual. Conversational. Sipping at his coffee like this is a business meeting.

“Yes. I decided that does not work for me.”

Daniel surprises him, a smile unfolding across his level expression. “Thought you might just let it happen.”

“Was this some sort of test?” He sounds angry despite his best efforts because he is angry. Can’t understand why they must keep returning to the past, finding new bitterness each time.

“No. I told you to leave because I was pissed.”

“And now?”

“Not sure yet. Depends.”

Armand hasn’t slept in days. Feels the weariness, the pull of the sun, in a way he doesn’t usually. “What upon?”

“Why did you do it?” Why and why and why. Daniel always wants to know, and Armand is never as certain of the reason as Daniel wants him to be.

“I already told you. If you knew– I wanted you to love me.” It’s easier to reveal a truth a second time, he finds. It’s made docile, all the teeth taken from it.

Daniel, of course, doesn’t generally care for what’s easy for Armand. “Right. But why erase my memories again and again? Why not tell me? Test whether the truth did anything to stop me from loving you.”

“Because–” He cuts off. Searches for words he doesn’t have. Answers he doesn’t have. “I don’t know.”

“And why didn’t you tell me when we first spoke about those memories?”

“I don’t know.” Armand expects Daniel to push harder. To accuse him of lying or to lash out in further anger or perhaps even to mock him.

Instead all Daniel does is take another sip of coffee and begin the process of systematically tearing down his worldview as if he has not comfortably held to it for centuries. “Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. And that’s our problem.”

“What is?”

“You don’t trust me, and that means I can’t trust you. You’re always going to take the way out that you’re used to, even if you have no idea why you’re doing it or whether you even should.”

“I won’t–” he almost promises he’ll never do it again, but to do so would be a lie. Just because a good reason to do it again hasn’t yet arisen, doesn’t guarantee one never will.  

“Thing is, even if you never did it again, I’d always be wondering if you had.”

Armand doesn’t know where this conversation is going, but he gets the sense he’d prefer it not to go there. He doesn’t know what to say to stop it, however, so he says nothing.

Daniel finishes his coffee, sets his empty mug on the floor by his foot. “I don’t know how to be with you if I can’t trust you. And I definitely don’t want to be with you if you can’t trust me.”

“So you wish for me to leave, then?”

“That’d be an easy solution, sure.” Daniel nods. “You interested in entertaining the idea?”

Armand scowls, folds his arms across his chest. “No.”

“Alright then you have to listen to mine. No interruptions.”

This isn’t good. He doesn’t need to be in Daniel’s mind to know whatever he’s about to suggest, he doesn’t think Armand will want to agree to it. “Fine.”

He sees Daniel’s chest rise and fall, hears the deep breath he takes, sees his leg bouncing in constant motion. Daniel is nervous, he realizes. All that carefully concealed tension isn’t anger, it’s nerves.

“I can’t trust you if you can fuck with my mind.” A restating of the obvious, with no particular solution. Certainly, Daniel can close him out as a formal practice, be he doesn’t actually possess the ability to stop Armand if he really wants to. Even the barriers around Louis’s mind would eventually break if he wanted them to badly enough. There is only–

“Well isn’t this nostalgic.” Armand hears his own voice, but he’s not sure it’s coming from his mouth. He’d have to be able to feel his own body for that.

“Let me say it before you start with your argument,” Daniel says. His voice comes out too close to a plea to carry authority, but Armand grits his teeth and withholds his protest anyways. “I want you to make me a vampire. And I want it for the right reasons this time.”

“Stopping me from having access to your mind? You would have me condemn you to eternity all so that I cannot–”

“No. I’d have you do it so–”

“There aren’t any right reasons, Daniel. The answer has not changed, will never change.” Everything feels very distant. Armand feels like he’s been pulled out of the linear river of time and dropped into a swirling ocean of it instead. Weeks. Weeks and they have wound up exactly where they were before.

What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Daniel, for his part, looks entirely unsurprised by his response. Why would he be? They’ve been here a hundred times, and he brings them here again. “I’m not a kid anymore. When you’re ready to have this conversation as equals, we can talk. Until then I have shit to do.”

Just like that. Dismissed. Back to church he goes.

Armand holds his resolve for three more days before he grows too tired of missing the feeling of Daniel’s eyes on him. It’s as if he has lost a piece of himself that he only ever seems to find when Daniel is looking at him. That’s the only reason he does it. Not out of any belief that discussing it will change the outcome.

He settles into a chair at the table, one right next to Daniel where he cannot be ignored. Daniel, of course, does his level best to ignore him anyway. Continues typing away at his keyboard, clicking through audio clips. One day, perhaps, Armand will tell him that he can still clearly hear the sound through Daniel’s headphones. His own voice, Louis’s, Daniel’s. It feels so long ago already.

Daniel types for a long time, attempting to prove his point in such a transparent way that it only makes him look more aware of Armand’s presence. When he finally closes the lid, he takes off his glasses and turns in his chair to give Armand his full attention.

Some place in Armand’s body turns right again, like his spine slipping back into alignment. It must have been that way for so many years, for so long that he grew used to it. Only in having it righted again for a few weeks has he been able to feel it again upon leaving.

“You told Louis you did not want the gift,” Armand says.

“That isn’t what I said.”

True. But it would be easier that way. If he could claim Daniel had no interest, that he was only just now changing his mind. “Tell me why, then.”

Daniel shrugs a shoulder, knocks his foot up against Armand’s like it hasn’t been nearly two weeks since they last touched. “Because I love you.”

Out of time again. In the ocean again. Drowning again.

“I ask because I love you.”

“You ask because the temptation of our power is all consuming. Because you only know to think of the bloodlust as an intoxicating thing. Because you–”

“And because I love you.”

“What else?” Armand says, because it can never only be that. To love him isn’t enough reason to accept what Daniel finally knows to be a curse. Cannot be.

“That’s it. I can list a dozen reasons for doing it. But all of them boil down to that,” Daniel says it like a matter of fact. Like something simple and irrefutable. “I want us to trust each other, because I love you. I want to get back the years with you that you owe us, because I love you. I want to be your equal, because I love you.”

“Foolish reasons to resign yourself to forever as a monster.”

Daniel nods, huffs a laugh, “Yeah. Fuck yeah they are. But I’ve been thinking love is kind of the only good thing to do it for. Nothing else can even begin to outlast the bullshit.”

He thinks of Daniel, all those years ago on the tapes, telling Louis he paid a biblical price for love. And here he is, happily offering payment of his own. Offering his life to Armand. Offering his death to him.

And Armand cannot believe it, nor accept it if he did.

“Louis would do it for you, if you asked.” Louis and his guilty conscience. Louis and his misplaced sentimentality, his sense of debt, his love for Claudia and Paul and everyone else he has ever lost sublimated onto Daniel. His love is not false for it of course – simply more dangerous.

“I don’t want his blood.” Daniel shakes his head, and Armand ignores that warm glow that blooms in his stomach. “And it wouldn’t solve the problem.”

“That you cannot trust me.”

“That you refuse to trust me, Armand.” Daniel says his name, sometimes, as if there is a universe inside of the sounds. One his mouth cannot fathom but shapes into being anyways.

He takes Daniel’s hand and Daniel lets him. Doesn’t ever seem to care to stop him, in fact. “You cannot understand what you’re asking for.”

“I do, though. You can tell me about all of the consequences for me later, all the things that I would be sacrificing, but I know what I’m asking you to do.” Daniel’s fingers lace through his. “I’m asking you to give up control. And even if you didn’t have all your hangups about vampires and morality and your own shitty experience, just giving up that control would still be too much. I know. Trust me. It’s not rocket science to figure that out.”

“I don’t care about c–”

“Yes. You do.” Daniel’s tone isn’t gentle but his hand is. “If you turn me you have to just go on faith that I’ll stay. No mind control, no disease to blame. That scares the shit out of you.”

“Tell me more about the inside of my mind, yes?” Armand says, bitter. “Tell me about all the things you think frighten me.”

“Yeah? I think what you’re really afraid of is that one day someone is actually gonna put down the brush they want to paint you with and stick around long enough to peel back all the layers of dried up paint to find whatever is underneath, instead.”  

Close, perhaps. He looks down at Daniel’s hand in his own. He has big hands, has calluses where he holds a pen and scars on his knuckles. Sometimes when Armand lets his mind wander too far he almost thinks Daniel would be able to carry the weight of his long life with those hands.

“There’s nothing underneath. Canvas and a frame.”

Daniel gets to his feet, startling him. He lets himself be tugged up in turn, dragged to the couch to sit facing Daniel with his legs tucked beneath himself. “You’re right. Fuck that metaphor, you aren’t a painting or a canvas or a fucking model. Nobody needs to paint you.”

“I don’t know what I am if not that,” he admits. As if it doesn’t matter. As if he hasn’t spent centuries trying to figure out whether he still exists when nobody is looking at him.

Daniel nods, unsurprised. “I don’t know either, I just know you’re here in front of me, and you’re too many things to paint. Or photograph. Or put in a book.”

“Then what does it matter? If nobody can see–”

“Do you want to be seen or do you want to be known?”

He has never given the distinction any real consideration, but the idea horrifies him now. Makes him feel as if all the blood has frozen to ice in his veins.

Maybe Daniel understands that as well as he seems to understand everything else, because he doesn’t make Armand answer. Instead he says, “Because I want to know you. I want to know all the things that you’re made up of. Every beautiful mask and every fucked-up thing underneath. And I’m asking you to give me some time to do that.”

Daniel and his infinite curiosity. Daniel and his endless need to know.

“Yes. And what happens when you know everything there is to know? When you get–”

“Bored?” Daniel gives him a smile he swears is almost fond. “That’s the risk, I guess. You could just as easily be bored with me. I’m a twice divorced old man. Before Dubai, I was doing puzzles and writing letters of reference for kids who have no idea what the word journalism means. Not exactly the stuff of intrigue.”

It’s not the reassurance that Armand wants, but it does loosen something in his chest, somehow. Takes the sense of immediacy out of the room. He wouldn’t mind, sitting here at this table doing a puzzle with Daniel.

“I still don’t know if I can do it. What you’re asking.”

He expects Daniel to argue more. To return to his anger. Instead he just squeezes Armand’s hand and says, “Yeah I didn’t expect you to say yes right away.”

“Am I to leave again, then? Until I can come back with the answer you’re looking for?”

“You say that like you actually left in the first place.” Daniel looks faintly amused.

Armand offers a half-hearted protest. “I did leave.”

“Yeah? How far did you go?” Daniel seems to realize he won’t answer, huffing a soft laugh before sobering again. “Look, I’m not an expert in relationships. I fucked up a couple marriages real good, pissed my family off with a tell-all autobiography of my fucked up childhood, and most of the friends I’ve got left are just acquaintances in other countries. I get that my track record is–”

“I don’t care,” Armand interrupts. “Not about that.”

It’s never crossed his mind that Daniel would leave him because that’s what he’s done before. That would found his fear in something tangible, when it’s always been a phantom in the air around him, haunting every choice he does or does not make. It isn’t born of the shortcomings of others. Leaving is to be expected – simply a thing that people are wont to do, which he does his best to postpone.

Daniel is still holding his hand, still has it in his lap while they face each other on the couch, and suddenly all Armand is certain of is the heat of his skin and the nearness of him. He moves too quickly, doesn’t give Daniel the time he needs to catch up, but still when Armand presses his mouth to Daniel’s he does not startle.

He just kisses him back, bruising and raw as if he’s been holding onto that missing piece and is trying to give it back now.

If it was real, if it were a thing Armand could touch and hold and see, he doesn’t know that he would want it back. It feels just as right with Daniel as it does in his own body, so long as they’re together. So long as they’re touching or Daniel is looking at him.

Hand sliding from shoulder to chest, he feels the beating of Daniel’s heart under his palm. He lets himself imagine, for a moment, what it might be like to know that it’s his blood that keeps it beating. That it will beat on and on and on. Then, with fingers splayed over Daniel’s ribs, he drags his mouth away to say, “Have you been eating?”

“Fuck off.”

“No thank you,” He quips, short and self-satisfied. “You’ve been skipping meals.”

“What, you wanna track my weight? Keep me fattened up to–”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Daniel. I only want you healthy.” Perhaps a poor choice of words. Daniel won’t ever be healthy, but not eating will only make it worse.

Daniel, fingers tangled in his hair (and how did they end up there and how didn’t Armand notice?) rolls his eyes and says, “Ship sailed on that one.”

“Come. We’ll go for dinner.”

“Or you could…” Daniel’s eyes dart to his neck and Armand is glad for skin that cannot show the flush of blood beneath it. It would make it far harder to deny Daniel if he could see the effect that he has, and it’s already difficult enough.

“Not right now.”

“So later, then?”

“If you’re good for me, and eat as I tell you.”

Daniel opens his mouth as if to protest and closes it again with a soft click. He is not so lucky; his skin shows the flush, from cheeks to chest to the tips of his ears. Armand presses a kiss to each and lets Daniel pull him back to his mouth for long enough that he nearly forgets his intention.

It could be like this, Armand finds himself thinking. It could look like this forever.

Chapter Text

“Alright. Ask your questions.” Daniel dumps whiskey into his coffee, still rubbing sleep from his eyes as he takes his first sip.

“Hm?” Armand slips behind him, presses his mouth to the curve of his neck and feels Daniel lean back.

“Or give me your lecture. Whichever one you’ve been preparing all night while I slept and you stared at me like a fucking weirdo.”

It’s too accurate to contradict, so Armand doesn’t bother. That happens more and more lately, he’s noticing. Daniel points something out that’s so blatantly true that refuting it would be pointless. He slides his nose along skin, inhales the earthy sweetness of Daniel’s pulse point and loses track of what he meant to say in the first place.

Daniel picks up on the distraction, and because he knows exactly what causes it, he tilts his head to give Armand more access. “You can,” he murmurs.

“I took plenty last night.” Saying it out loud makes it concrete. It’s not that he can’t restrain himself, it’s only that Daniel likes to make it very difficult for him to want to. He always has. He presses a kiss to the nape of Daniel’s neck and pulls away. “Finish your coffee. We’re going out.”

An argument attempts to take shape in Daniel’s mind, but it never quite materializes. Instead he leans against the counter and takes another sip. “Should I get more drunk for this conversation or is the one shot enough?”

“Daniel, there’s no world in which that was an ounce and a half.”

“Well, my tolerance hasn’t been quite the same since the fortnight of bottomless martinis, so.”

Armand huffs a laugh despite himself and shakes his head. “If you’re too drunk to remember, I’ll just have to tell you all over again.”

Half an hour later they’re at a park, wandering the path. It isn’t the park with the bench, though he briefly considered it. Too heavy-handed, perhaps. Besides, Daniel’s promise of forever then might only bolster his offering of forever now.

The sun is never his friend, but today it is at least an accomplice. Light trickles through the leaves, creates a pretty lace pattern on the pavement. Children play on playground equipment, screaming and laughing while they chase each other. Groups of friends gather on the grass to share food. Shy couples follow the paths with fingers brushing.

It’s idyllic. A bold and distinctly human response to tragedy. Evidence of the power of the human will; a stubborn return to life as it was.  

It’s clearly not convincing Daniel, who looks at Armand with eyebrows raised and says, “Yeah? You mind control them all to put on this performance, or did you just get that lucky?”

Of course, if he noticed at all, it’s not quite a lost cause. “Only coincidence, Daniel. I could tell them to act, but I couldn’t make them good at it. Perhaps if I had, the Théâtre des Vampires would not be forgotten to history.”

“I think on this one I’m gonna go with Louis’s retelling… doesn’t sound like the scripts were all that salvageable. No offense.” Daniel says it with all offense and Armand takes it on Sam’s behalf.

“Louis lacks appreciation for the play as an artform. Sam’s scripts were–”

“Murderous?” Daniel offers. “What is it with you and him, anyways?”

“Hm?”

“Anybody else would be dead just for knowing what he knows, let alone selling you out to–”

“Don’t distract me,” Armand interrupts. It was nearly effective, too; Daniel looks like he knows as much. Armand gestures to a bench nearby. “Sit.”

Daniel does as he’s told, though not without a mocking, “Yes sir,” that Armand is suddenly fairly determined to have him repeat in earnest some other time.

For now, he sits down next to Daniel, and he begins. “If it was only about the sun, we wouldn’t warn against it.”

“Alright, then what’s it about?”

“The day. Not only will the sun kill you, but it will steal daytime from you. For the first few years, you’ll be tired when the sun is up. Will answer to its pull as if it were a drug.” It’s difficult to remember the worst of it now. His relationship with the sun has changed so much over the years, though even now he will never walk the day at ease again. It itches, stings. “But more than that, the world exists differently in the day.”

Decades ago, Daniel would have brushed him off entirely. Perhaps Daniel today is truly trying to understand, or perhaps he only means to convince Armand that he is, but either way he has his attention.

“Children playing, families gathering. Markets and birthdays. Weddings. Meetings. Funerals, of course. So many of the most human parts of life happen in the day.” Armand hasn’t cared for any of them in so many years that it’s inconsequential to him, but he knows how it has wounded others. Has tasted their yearning for so long.

Unfair that he should walk in the sun when he has no need for it. But then, he did not live a human life so very full of daytime joy, so perhaps this is some perverse attempt for the universe to balance the scales. Here: the thing you never had, a torment now that you have it.

“Don’t get invited to a lot of weddings these days,” Daniel says. “But I see your point.”

Daniel’s arm stretches across the back of the bench behind him, his thumb brushing against Armand’s shoulder every so often. “Your children will die. Their children will die. One day you will lose track of your bloodline entirely, and you will become untethered from the world. You will be familyless.”

This conversation was never so straightforward when Daniel was younger. Was usually delivered in pieces, often shouted, sometimes whispered as quiet plea. Never laid out in careful step by step. Armand is reminded, instead, of the long-ago conversation he had at Louis’s behest. Louis had been right, of course. He was never going to say yes to her.

Daniel doesn’t answer for a long time. Perhaps imagining it, all those deaths. All that loss. Armand does not know – he stays out of Daniel’s mind for this, for now.

Fingers ghost over the back of Armand’s neck and Daniel says, “Your bloodline. That’s what I’ll be a part of.”

The sound of it– he is not immune to the instincts of his kind. It is natural that they control life and death, can remake as swiftly as they unmake.

But to think of his bloodline is to think of his own accepting of it. He has not thought of it in so long. Doesn’t go to that place, in his mind, in his body. Would that he had been denied it, barely older than a boy and so in love that he believed it would keep him from feeling the curse’s cold fingers around his throat.

He had thought, once, to have found an equal in Louis. Someone who could understand. He knows now that while Louis has always hated being a vampire, he cannot understand. Armand hates being anything at all.

“Hey. No disappearing on me,” Daniel says, prodding at the muscle along the line of his shoulder.

Startlingly apt for someone who cannot and never will read his mind. “It is no bloodline to aspire to.”

He exists in the careful balance between knowing and not knowing, where his past is concerned. If he thinks about it for too long, he slips back to that place of enchantment and desperation. If he observes it with too much detachment, it becomes a horror he cannot begin to endure even in hindsight.

And endure he must, so he holds thoughts of his youth and humanity and inhumanity on a knife’s edge of careful, mild interest and distant, waning affection.

“Honestly? I really don’t give a fuck about all the vampire hang-ups about whose blood is whose and who made who for what. I just want it because it’s yours.” Daniel. Ever irreverent in the face of that which would inspire awe among most – mortal and immortal alike.

“You have my blood. It’s already yours.”

Daniel shifts his weight, settles his hand on the back of Armand’s neck, all qualms about the world’s eyes forgotten in favor of the thirst that rises in him now. Armand does not need to find it in his mind when he can smell it on his skin.

“Yeah. You said that to me once,” Daniel says. “But I definitely watched Louis suck it back like a cherry Slush Puppy a few weeks back so–”

“And he tasted you, in it. He did not know it of course – never committed your blood to memory, the way I did. But the honey in my veins was born of a sweetness in yours.”

Ever pragmatic, Daniel makes a sound of disbelief and says, “wouldn’t he notice that it changed when you shacked up again?”

“I’m sure he did. But Louis– he’s always been concerned with his own journey. I think he believed his own taste had changed. Or perhaps he told himself everything was the same.” Armand doesn’t recall a conversation about it, but then, he has long been in the business of ignoring it himself.

Perhaps it isn’t real. Perhaps only a fanciful, overly sentimental imagining.

“I don’t–”

“You have to understand, Daniel. Nothing has changed me in 500 years. I can cut my hair and it will grow back by morning. I bear no wrinkles, no scars. Like all of my kind, I grow stronger with age, but my mind remains trapped in the pain of my past no matter how far I go from it.” Soft things, tender things, bruises he does not admit to but must admit to now for Daniel’s sake.

Daniel, for once, does not interrupt. He almost wishes he would.

“I have not changed. And yet, loving you – the love I have for you is in me. Carved into me, cemented to my bones. Even now.” He pauses, leans back into Daniel’s touch for a moment, as if it can ground him. “You will live on even when you die.”

“Romantic bullshit, Armand. I don’t want to die.”

He understands, now. What’s happening here. Daniel is not giving Armand the opportunity to talk him out of wanting the gift. Armand is giving him the opportunity to convince him to give it.

Dragging Daniel to lunch and talking with him about all of his favorite foods is even less effective. It might be more convincing if he wasn’t already so conscious of the ways in which blood can vary, can have its own unique flavors. Armand cannot say he’s ever missed the taste of food so dearly. It doesn’t come anywhere near the top of the list.

“Your martinis won’t taste like anything,” he tries after, when they’ve returned home and are sitting again at the dining table with glasses of white wine. A bottle from Daniel’s first wedding, he had said.

The grin Daniel gives him is too wide to not be anticipatory before he says, “Well you did tell me that Lestat tas–”

“If what you’ve learned of Lestat has made you want to fuck him, then all means be my guest.” There are people Armand can imagine Daniel loving, yes. People he thinks Daniel would leave him for given enough time. Louis, perhaps. Lestat, however, isn’t one of them. Probably. Hopefully.

He catches himself, as he has too many times already today, thinking about Daniel on a non-existent timeline. Thinking beyond the immediacy of his short remaining lifespan.

“You ever notice you have a tendency to pick up your ex’s leftovers?” Daniel prods, perhaps unsatisfied by the reaction his first jab has received. “I’ve got a couple ex wives that are–”

“Well it has been a while since I–” Daniel kicks him under the table, hard, right where his knee meets his shin. “Ouch, Daniel. That’s unkind.”

“I’m sure you’ll recover,” Daniel says with a shrug.

“Rude,” Armand complains, and he half means it. It was easier when Daniel was still frightened of him. Now his heart still occasionally races with the danger of Armand’s presence, but his mind doesn’t agree. “Do I have to teach you manners? Respect?”

A skip in his heart rhythm, yes. But not fear. “I’ll let you teach me anything you want.”

The word if hangs unuttered and oppressive in the air.  

Another point to Daniel. Another and another, tally marks adding up on his side of the board. There’s a way Armand thinks he can still win this game. He’s just not quite ready to try it yet.

Daniel must take his silence for something it isn’t, because his brow furrows and he tilts his head just so, and Armand knows he’s about to be interviewed but God only knows what about.

“You liked to be in charge, back then, right? To teach me. That wasn’t a part of some act?” That wasn’t a question he expected Daniel to ask, though he supposes he should have. They skirted around the subject a while ago, and he’s been happy to bask in the contact no matter which way it comes. Always would be, he thinks.

“To say I liked it would be an understatement,” Armand confirms, fond. “You were difficult, but you suffered beautifully.”

Daniel flushes, then. As if he wasn’t the one to bring it up in the first place. Then he clears his throat and presses onward. “And with Louis–”

“I was very pleased with our arrangement, and I would not like to replicate it again,” Armand is quick to answer, surprised to find he means it. It was never honest, anyways. The damaged trust that has come from the semblance of ceding control at times when he never really did, and the bitterness that came from doing it when he did not wish to. Whatever he thought he needed, it wasn’t that.

“Uh. No, yeah. Wasn’t suggesting–” Daniel scrubs a hand across his face. “I’m too old to give a shit about this. God. What I meant to ask was whether you also like to submit. Whether you have a preference. When we were together you never really–”

“I did, sometimes.” Rarely. Not for any reason other than that Daniel had not pressed for it.

The topic of sex doesn’t intimidate Armand. Couldn’t possibly, by now. But it’s different, talking about it here in the bright light of the day, sitting at a dining table, Daniel looking at him with bright, scrutinizing eyes. Waiting for him to answer the poorly delivered question.

He does, eventually. Sliding his foot up Daniel’s shin under the table and saying, “It would be a pleasure to submit to you. All that I prefer is–” he hesitates, for only a moment. Daniel clocks it. “Everything.”

Daniel falls asleep on the couch just after sundown. Armand would like to place the blame on him for that, but unfortunately has to ascribe to the fact that he’s made Daniel watch the same 22 minute episode of Fraser six times. He almost considers not waking him, but if he doesn’t now he might never do what he needs to do.

“Daniel. Beloved, wake up.” He prods at Daniel’s arm. Perhaps a little too hard, because Daniel wakes with a start and a scowl.

“I’m not watching it again. It’s gonna give me worse nightmares than you do at this point.”

“Rude. Again. I should force you to watch it, perhaps.” Armand wonders, briefly, if that’s a step too far.

Daniel just snorts a laugh and says, “Get some new material, babe.”

Babe. And yes, that’s new. Baby had been a rare treat, and he decides babe is just as good. Rewards it, even, with a lazy kiss.

“Mm… distracting.” Armand drags himself away, flicks off the tv, and settles down at the opposite end of the couch. “I have more questions for you.”

“Ah. Right. This is payback for all my sins, isn’t it?”

“How do you intend to feed?”

Daniel. Sweet, dark Daniel. His pupils blow wide and his heart speeds up and this is what Armand is worried about. That arousal will cloud his understanding of what it really means to live as they do, that the Pavlovian response to the idea of blood is far too tied up in their exchange for Daniel to process it realistically.

“I mean. It’s not a complicated science?”

“Ask Louis if it’s complicated.”

Daniel’s nose wrinkles, distaste immediate. “Yeah the plan isn’t gonna be to half starve myself on animal blood and break up the monotony with a targeted serial binge once or twice a decade.”

A start, at least. He’s grounded enough to know what absolutely won’t work. “So you’ll drink from humans then. Will you kill them?”

“Will I be able to help it?”

“Eventually,” Armand concedes. “For some it comes easily, for others it takes more time. We cannot know what it will be for you.”

He’d rather not speak as if anything is guaranteed. As if he’s entertaining it. But if he doesn’t speak of it as real, it is only a fantasy. An idea. Daniel needs to understand it tangibly.

“Then I guess I’ll have to kill them,” Daniel says, a shrug too nonchalant for Armand to ignore.

“Take this seriously, Daniel.”

“What, like you are?” It’s a blink-and-miss-it sharpness, gone as quick as it came and replaced with something softer. “It’s worth the sacrifice.”

“What is?”

“Don’t be intentionally obtuse, it’s not convincing.” Daniel rolls his eyes and he’s beautiful and he’s offering so many things Armand is sickened with himself for wanting, just like this. Like it’s no harder than breathing.

“How will you choose, then?”

This question does give Daniel pause. And it should. Perhaps Madeline’s nonchalance all those years ago had indicated that she truly could handle the gift. Or perhaps the weight of her guilt would have suddenly struck her, when the warmth of new love had cooled. They’ll never know.

He’s seen many claim to feel nothing, to care little for the manner in which they must survive. All have either become so murderous that they could not be contained, or so filled with guilt that they could not survive. It does no good to ignore what they do. Certainly not early on, when a fledgling is so close to their own lost humanity, when they can still picture the faces of the humans they have loved.

In a sign of maturity that seems to surprise them both, Daniel asks, “How should I?”

“It’s as personal as how you perform the kill itself,” Armand says. “What I do is– mm. Perhaps not what I might recommend.”

“Eating the rich, or eating the suicidal?”

“The latter.” To grant what he remains too cowardly to give himself is punishment as much as nourishment. He enjoys it. He hates himself for it in equal measure. Killing those who live in excess and contribute no beauty, only suffering? That’s easier. “Though… when the rich go missing it does not escape notice, and the fledgling appetite is far greater than mine.”

Daniel snorts a laugh, “Yeah, yeah. You eat like a fucking bird. We get it.”

Here, again, wobbling on the edge of a blade. Searching back and back in his memory, drawing up things from those early years. “When I first took the gift my maker taught me to I hunt the wicked. Those that are no great loss to the world. Lazy, cruel, greedy, uncreative.”

“Yeah, I hate when people lack creativity.” Daniel delivers it with such stoic authenticity that Armand catches himself nearly nodding in agreement before he realizes he’s being mocked. And that’s perfectly fine. If Daniel wants to make a joke of it, he’ll let him until he cannot anymore.

“Come,” Armand says, standing, holding out a hand.

“Where?”           

“We’re hunting.”

Daniel doesn’t question it until they’re outside and four blocks away on foot, but Armand knows it’s coming long before that.

“You never let me watch you hunt before.”

Correct. Armand doesn’t particularly like to have anybody watch him hunt, but Daniel more than most. If only because he used to be far too intrigued by the process for his own good.

“You’re not watching, Daniel,” he says. “You’re hunting.”

“Not sure that’s gonna work so well.” Daniel isn’t taking him seriously just yet, but he will. He will, and then perhaps he will realize he does not want what he thinks he wants.

“My talents are yours for the night.”

Daniel stops walking at this, arches a brow. “Yeah? Your talents?”

To Daniel’s credit, it does very nearly tempt Armand to turn back around. Or to find an alley. He’s not particularly selective at the moment. “Come. You have to find someone.”

“Hunting by proxy. Fucked up even for you,” Daniel remarks, but he does not say no. Not yet.

“Where would you like to look? A bar? The subway? A late-night diner?”

“Hell, why don’t we just DoorDash someone right to the apartment?”

Armand tries to use context clues to figure it out, but he gives up. “What’s that?”

“Seriously? Did you guys ever leave Dubai?”

“It’s not as if–”

“Whatever. Think of it like the pizza delivery guy, but with options.” Daniel pauses at the corner, looks down each end of the cross street. “Wouldn’t work great though. I think they use GPS tracking for safety.”

It’s surprisingly cool out now that the sun is down, clouds drawing over the sky. He wonders absently if it might rain. Daniel didn’t take his coat. “You’re stalling, Daniel. Where are we going?”

“The train.”

That’s where they go, down the stairs to a small platform that smells like spilled alcohol and urine. Pleasant. The last time he was in a subway station, he’s fairly certain it was with Daniel; he was always inexplicably fond of taking the train. Armand didn’t understand it then and he doesn’t understand it now.

It’s endearing when Daniel scans his card to get in, however.

The station is quiet so they don’t linger, instead stepping onto the next train that arrives. A handful of people are already there. They take a seat in one corner where they can observe the rest of the car.

“What now?” Daniel says. Armand doesn’t think he’s grasping the reality of the situation yet, but that’s alright. It’ll become real before long.

“Now you must choose,” Armand murmurs, lips brushing Daniel’s ear. A few people send a glance their way, but nobody spares a second. “Do you want to go on visual alone, or would you like me to share what’s in their minds?”

Daniel doesn’t answer. His hand is closed into a fist, shaking on his leg.

“That one, there, she’s thinking about her date tonight. Considering missing the stop, going back home to eat leftover Chinese food and text her ex, instead.” He gestures with his chin to a woman in her twenties, scrolling absently on her phone with headphones around her neck.

He nods next to a middle-aged man sitting straight-backed in his seat, staring off into the middle distance. ‘He has to call his doctor back for test results. He’s been waiting weeks, and they keep calling. Prostate cancer runs in the family, and he keeps thinking ‘if I just pretend it’s not happening, it isn’t happening.’ He knows, though, in that strange human way. It will kill him.’

Daniel’s jaw clenches in Armand’s peripheral, but he does not say no. Not yet.

‘Those friends, there. The girl is getting off at the next stop, her friend is continuing on. He’s been sleeping with her high school sweetheart. He isn’t sorry, he’s in love.’ The man’s smile falls the moment the train door shuts, his hand caught a moment too long in a wave to nobody.

“None of these people are evil,” Daniel says, voice low beneath the sound of the train on the tracks.

“All have the potential to be,” Armand says. Then, in silence, ‘Not everyone you eat will be Dahmer or Bundy.’

Luck, it seems, has chosen Daniel’s side this evening. A boy steps onto the train – no older than twenty-one, twenty-two. Sweating and pale, shaky handed, a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans and covered by his t-shirt.

He’s thinking about it. He’s thinking about it very loudly.

‘He’s going to rob a market with a gun he stole from his father. They fired him for being late last week, and he can’t make rent.’ A pause. Now Daniel is thinking very loudly, too. ‘So they deserve to be shot? You could even be saving lives with your kill, Daniel. Do some good, perhaps.’

Daniel’s snort of derision is loud enough that it draws attention back their way.

And the man – the middle-aged man in the poorly fitting suit with too many voicemails from his doctor – makes eye contact. Smiles, even.

And Daniel knows. And he chooses.

They follow the man onto the platform, keeping a safe distance when they get up to the street.

“Now what?” Daniel asks.

“Now you decide. Do we follow him home? Have him invite us in? Break in? Do you want to corner him in an alley?” He lists options off on his fingers with detached efficiency.

The breath Daniel takes is audible. In-out-in-out-in. But he doesn’t say no. Not yet. “Does he live alone?”

“Smart man. Yes, he lives alone.” Praise has always been effective with Daniel, and he thinks it’s working now. Perhaps. Daniel’s thoughts are everywhere, his heartbeat coming too fast. It’s getting realer now. Armand studies him for a moment. “Come. Let’s introduce ourselves, see if he might have a drink to spare.”

The man startles when Armand touches his elbow, but settles easily. There are minds that are difficult, and there are minds that he slides into like a knife through soft cheese.

“Hello,” Armand murmurs. Soft. Soothing.

“Can I help you?” Of course he can. He can fix this whole sorry problem, with his kind hazel eyes and nervous shuffle.

“I’m Armand, and this is my–” He pauses, considers. “Daniel is mine. And I would very much like for you to help us.”

“Uh. Okay.” Half fogged by Armand’s coaxing, half simply confused by the strangeness of the encounter.

Daniel is just behind him to his left, a flare of heat sparking off of him as he listens. Armand is just about to prompt him to say something when he does it on his own. “What’s your name?”

“Kyle.” The man – Kyle – holds out his hand to Daniel to shake. Then Armand. It’s all very well-mannered. His hand is clammy against Armand’s skin, and Armand strokes the inside of his wrist with his pointer finger.

“Let’s go upstairs, yes?”

It’s likely too easy, but Armand can teach– he catches himself. He won’t need to teach Daniel how to do this. The aim is to show him why he doesn’t want to condemn himself to an eternity of it.

~*~

Kyle’s apartment is impeccably clean. He has a fish tank in the corner, where a single beta swims round and round. There are bowls on the floor but no sight nor sound of a cat. The paintings on the walls are bland reproductions. A take-out menu is stuck to the fridge with a photo magnet of a child – maybe eight or nine – smiling from inside the frame.

He takes in these details with passive interest, and he listens to Daniel take them in, too.

“Who’s the kid?” Daniel asks.

“Uh… my nephew. Lives in Syracuse with his mom.” Malleable like soft clay, already answering every question without hesitation. Then again, most people are inclined to answer Daniel’s questions. A skill that exists without any need for magic. Armand just removes the barriers that would have delayed the man’s trust. “Don’t see them much, just get the photos in the mail, you know. But I figure if–”

“Kyle, please, have a seat.” Armand gestures to the couch – an ugly, light grey that barely sinks when Kyle sits down.

Armand turns to Daniel, gives him his full focus. “We can still leave, Daniel. He won’t remember anything.”

Emotion is pouring off Daniel in waves. Fear, self-disgust, curiosity, and a tenderness Armand cannot account for until Daniel is reaching out to brush fingertips over his jaw. “It’s a test. I get that. I’ll pass.”

“It isn’t a test, it’s–”

“Informed consent?” Daniel and his bravado. An endless well of it. Armand smiles, anyways, because he thinks that’s what Daniel might be looking for. “Let’s get it over with.”

“What exactly are we–”

“Shhh, patience Kyle.” He had wondered if this would bother Daniel. It never used to, but that Daniel had no recollection of it turned towards him. This Daniel narrows his eyes, lets out a soft puff of breath, but doesn’t say anything. “Do you want him asleep or awake, beloved?”

“I don’t want him at all.”

“But you will.” He studies Daniel for a long moment, Daniel’s mind open for him not because it is soft and malleable and easy – not anymore – but because Daniel welcomes it. “Oh. You’ve lied, just now. You already do.”

Daniel breaks eye contact, looks over at Kyle sitting patiently with his hands folded in his lap and the same upright posture he had as he sat on the train. As if to prove a point he has no need to prove, Daniel says, “Asleep.”

Armand crouches at Kyle’s feet, grasps his chin with a gentle touch. He has the beginnings of crows feet in the corners of his eyes, a hairline valiantly fighting its own recession. “You’ve been good Kyle, thank you. You want to help us, right? I know you do.” Kyle nods his head, mouth quirking into a lopsided smile. “It will be very easy. All I need you to do is sleep. Can you do that?”

Mind like soft cheese, Armand’s voice like a knife. Kyle falls asleep and Daniel breathes an audible sigh of relief. He’s still across the room. Armand settles on the couch beside Kyle, and in that same gentle voice but with none of the supernatural power behind it, says, “Come, Daniel.”

When Daniel listens, Armand pulls him down to straddle his lap, ignoring Daniel’s grumble of protest except to say, “Your knees have had worse.”

“Yeah a good few decades ago.” It softens the terror, for a moment.

Again:

“It’s not too late. We can still leave.” Daniel just shakes his head. “Alright then. His neck or his wrist?”

“Wrist.” It’s a quick answer. One Armand considers exploring later on. For now, though, he simply takes one of Kyle’s wrists in his hand.

“It would do you no good to drink from him, of course. You know as well as I do that it only makes you sick.” Daniel isn’t looking at Kyle, is looking into Armand’s eyes as if staring with enough determination will eliminate his peripheral vision. “So I will drink from him, and you will drink from me. And I will project to you what I see in the blood. Okay?”

Daniel’s mouth goes slack in a rare demonstration of true shock. Armand waits in earnest this time, for the refusal. “That’s fucked even for you.”

“We could still–”

“Okay. Yeah. Do it.”

He makes the cut in his own neck, first. A careful incision, blood trickling down his collarbone and under his shirt. Daniel’s tongue follows the trail, muscle memory again, before his mouth covers the wound.

Armand doesn’t wait for the rush to hit Daniel. He sinks his teeth into the meat of Kyle’s wrist and he begins to drain.

The images are nothing to Armand. Kyle is a mundane man with a mundane life, and he would have died a mundane death in a hospital or in this house. Perhaps with his sister at his bedside. Perhaps alone. He had a childhood. He had a first love. He went to college and worked a shitty first job as a grocery clerk. Another love. An affair. A heart that had no right to be broken. A cat he picked up off the street outside. A job he does with mediocre adequacy.

He is not a bad man or a good man. He is just a man, with blood that pours down Armand’s throat in a warm rush in flashes of grey and green.

But to Daniel– it hurts him, it does. Even through the hot pleasure the blood brings him, the images surprise Daniel with their intensity. But he does not pull away, so Armand does not stop.

There’s a lot of blood in a human body. Daniel’s wasn’t made to take all of it, and he doesn’t need to. He only needs to take the trickle of it from Armand’s throat and feel the spark die. But it’s still more than he’s used to, comfortable with.

Discomfort overtakes the horror of it all. The simplicity of biological need, of a physical limit being neared but not quite overtaken.

I don't think I can, it’s too much blood.

‘You can, Daniel. It’s not more than you can drink,’ Armand says, gentle fingers threading through his hair. ‘You’re so good, beloved. Almost.’

He’s hardly paying attention when the last light drains, the last burst of image and form in quick flash and then nothing at all. Because that’s what death is. Nothing at all. It’s automatic to drop the man’s wrist when he is finished. Both hands find Daniel’s face, pull him up to look him in the eyes. He’s crying, his mouth bloody and red.

For a moment, Armand thinks it has broken him, and instead of feeling the relief he should he only feels disappointment. Perhaps remorse, even.

Then Daniel’s mouth is on his, insistent and needy, and he understands what has yet to be spoken.

It’s still not too much. It’s still not more than Daniel is willing to take. Willing to sacrifice.

Not even now.

~*~

Daniel is comfortably blissed out, so Armand doesn’t bother trying to make him tidy up. This part is more a nuisance than anything. If the kill itself does not phase him, he’s fairly certain he would recover from body disposal. He wipes down surfaces first, checks for any stray signs that they have been here. His fingerprints and DNA mean nothing, of course. But Daniel’s are another story. It would be unacceptable to place him in any kind of risk for the sake of proving a point.

He leaves him there on Kyle’s couch with a promise to return within the hour. He would prefer not to leave him at all, but the other option is to wait for him to clear enough of the blood that he can walk in a straight line.

When he returns, Daniel cracks his eyes open just as he had a few hours ago on his own couch. His pupils are wide, his cheeks flushed, blood on his shirt. “Oh hey,” he murmurs.

“How do you feel?” Armand perches beside him on the couch, one foot tucked under himself and the other on the floor. Daniel reaches out to touch his cheek with a quiet sort of awe. “Ah. Still high, then.”

“Yeah well. Went from a drop of rain to a fucking flood on the dosage scale. So much for start low, go slow.”

Nonsensical, mostly. But a gentle press into Daniel’s mind reveals nothing amiss. A muted swirl of complicated feelings, a fond annoyance, a steady thread of desire beneath.

“God. Is it fucked up that I–”

“No,” The scale of fucked up is helplessly skewed in Armand’s mind, but any other answer likely won’t do Daniel any good right now. “It’s only the blood, my blood. Nothing more.”

It must comfort him enough, because Daniel tugs him in for a kiss that punches the air from both of them. It goes on and on and on, that kiss. Until he finally tears himself away.

“Are you ready to leave?”

“Yeah. Yep.”

“Meet me down the block, then. I have to do another sweep.”

He expects Daniel to argue, but the blood still has him warm and willing, and he’s out the door in moments. Armand follows not long after. Short of burning the building down, there is absolutely nothing he could do to make themselves more untraceable.

Daniel is silent on the journey home, leans heavy against Armand’s shoulder on the empty subway train and lets Armand hold his hand on the walk without question. When they get through the door, Daniel shuts it with a click and looks at him.

His eyes are both bright and exhausted. Armand feels the familiar urge to touch them.

“Did I pass?” Sarcasm, yes. But beneath that, something hopeful Armand can’t answer to.

“It wasn’t a test,” Armand repeats instead.

“Asshole.” There’s a flash of something else now, in Daniel’s eyes. The barely supressed want he’s been sitting on all day. That he’s been choking down all night.

This much, Armand can answer. He steps close, backs Daniel up against the wall in the hallway, slides a hand through the hair at the nape of his neck. He grips but he doesn’t pull. Not just yet. “Rude.”

“You like me rude.”

He likes him every way, but it’s hard to deny that he’s fond of this. Bold even when he was fearful, now unrestrainedly brazen. Armand does pull now, hard enough to earn a groan. “I want you to be good now Daniel. Like you were earlier. Will you do that?”

Normally, it would be too easy for Daniel to give so readily. Daniel enjoys the bickering too much, likes the ache and bite that comes with it and after. Or at least, he used to.

Today Daniel is strung out on blood and fear and his own capacity for violence, so he gives readily, nodding his head even as the muscle in his jaw works overtime to keep from rebuttal. It’s like slipping into an old, long forgotten skin. Armand twists his hair harder, slots a leg between Daniel’s.

“You used to get off just like this, do you remember? Nothing but my thigh and a little pain.”

“Yeah,” Daniel croaks. “Not sure that’s quite possible these days.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, I think you could.” Armand shifts to prove his point, can feel Daniel hard against his leg. “Perhaps not tonight.”

“Why does that feel so condescending?” Daniel muses. “Oh. Right. Because it’s you.”

Another sharp tug, another groan, a wide wide smile pulling at Daniel’s mouth, and then they’re kissing again. He doesn’t bother to break away when he steers them down the hall and to the bedroom. He barely bothers for long enough to get Daniel’s shirt off, his own. Daniel laughs into his mouth when he wrestles them both out of their pants. Socks can stay. He doesn’t care.

This time, Armand doesn’t go slow. He doesn’t take careful inventory, doesn’t map that which he has already become reacquainted with. He presses Daniel down to the bed and sucks him to the root and Daniel bucks his hips and those gentle hands find his hair and everything is good.

Daniel is so good.

‘So good for me, beloved.’

“Not for a fuck of a long time at this rate,” Daniel manages, huffing a laugh that is all pleasure and not an ounce of shame.

Forever, at this rate. And that thought startles Armand enough that he pulls off, looks up at Daniel with unblinking eyes, and distracts himself by saying, “Can I fuck you now?”

“Sure, why not?” Daniel manages his dry delivery even now, stomach rising and falling with every breath, cheeks flushed bright. Then, with perhaps a bit less bravado. “It’s been a… while.”

Armand isn’t phased; this is routine too. In the way things are when bodies know one another. Have known one another. Armand gets up, digs around in Daniel’s nightstand for a bottle of lube he’s fairly certain wasn’t there a few weeks ago and knows will be there now. He drops it on the bed with a soft thud.

“Clippers?”

“What?”

“Nail clippers, Daniel.”

“Bathroom. Lefthand drawer.”

Speed is usually the gift he cares the least for. There’s little need to rush when he has all the time in the world. Tonight, however, it has the benefit of not leaving Daniel alone with his thoughts for too long. He’s never sure when old thoughts will creep in, with Daniel. When the hatred will take center stage. It’s been too good, today. He’s not sure he can trust it.

When he returns Daniel is propped up on an elbow, watching. Admiring, Armand realises. Nothing he hasn’t come to expect from everyone who has ever seen him stripped bare. Except for the softness there, the fondness. The amusement.

“Alright, hurry up before you grow them back like the freak you are,” Daniel murmurs, stirring him out of his brief reverie.

He does return, sinks those now blunted nails hard into Daniel’s thigh, catches the sharp gasp on his tongue. “If you’re going to be rude, Daniel, I can take so long that they actually do.”

“As tempting as that is,” Daniel says, and oh, he means that too, “a few decades is probably enough for now.”

And it is, of course it is. A lifetime ago, a small eternity. Armand almost gets caught up in it.

For all their impatience, he still goes slow. Takes the time he needs to open Daniel up slow, until he’s relaxed around Armand’s fingers but whining into his mouth. A little longer for good measure, just to get that hard-earned, “Please.”

A pillow propped under Daniel’s hips despite his annoyed protest, and then Armand is slipping inside, dragged in like a magnet.

Pleasure is one of the rare gifts in this long life. Found, most often, in the bloodstream of a victim or volunteer or companion. For some, that’s more than enough.

For Armand, the pleasure of a body moving with his body has always felt more exquisitely raw. To bury himself in the heat of someone, or to feel them sink into him, or to rut blindly against skin, he rarely cares what gets him that closeness. Just that something does. Just that someone one else is here with him, and he has shape and form and exists, and so do they.

And they do, they do.

“Fuck, God,” Daniel rasps.

Armand doesn’t move yet, just stays buried deep with hips flush against Daniel’s. His hand wraps around Daniel’s throat, feels his pulse as surely as he can hear it. “Do you feel that?” He murmurs. “Me inside you, my blood inside you?”

Daniel makes a strangled sound that doesn’t quite resemble words.

“Yes or no, Daniel. Do you feel it?”

“Fuck you.” Then, “yes.”

He tightens his hand for Daniel’s attitude, kisses him for his obedience. Both have Daniel attempting to buck upwards. One hand wraps around Armand’s wrist to keep him there, one hand winds into Armand’s hair to keep him there. To keep him there, as if he would leave now.

He goes slow when he does begin to move. Rocks his hips until Daniel’s mind turns from curses to pleas to shapeless, wordless need. Only then does he thrust in earnest, drawing out nearly all the way before he buries himself back inside again. And again and again to the sound of Daniel’s breath punched from his lungs.

Again and again and again, while Daniel’s teeth sink hard into his lip and his mind opens and opens and opens like a fractal star.

His cock in Daniel, his blood in Daniel, his mind in Daniel.

All of it welcomed with those warm eyes and that wet mouth and those gentle hands.

He can tell when Daniel gets close by the furrow of his brow, the tension building along the stacked vertebrae of his spine, the snap of his teeth as they close together. He’s stuck there at the very edge.

“Fuck, I need–”

“What do you need, Daniel?” Some other time, he might make him say please. Might remind him to use manners and pretend he does not love his lack of them. Now, though, he just wants to feel Daniel’s pleasure from inside out.

An easy request: “More.”

Armand’s hand leaves Daniel’s throat, wraps around his cock instead. Once, twice, three times from base to tip and Daniel is plummeting with a muted groan. Armand watches in awe. Hundreds of times, he’s seen this. A thousand more would never be enough.  

He could have that.

He could take that.

He comes with a soft whine buried into the crook of Daniel’s neck and Daniel murmuring soft unintelligible words of comfort or encouragement. His fangs nick the skin of Daniel’s throat and he laps lazily at the blood that beads there, whispering some apology Daniel waves away.

If he had his way, Armand would stay just like this for hours, softening inside Daniel and draped across his body and tapped into his circulatory system by way of shallow cut.

Daniel gives him ten minutes while he catches his own breath and then tugs at his hair pointedly until he slips out and curls himself against Daniel’s side instead. It makes for a passable consolation.

 He should say something. Should talk to Daniel about what happened earlier, make sure he’s really cemented it in his mind. Use it as the tool he intended it to be.

He doesn’t want to, so he doesn’t.

Daniel doesn’t sleep so much as he dozes, waking every so often to ask him something or complain about some ache or another or just to pull at him as if he could get any closer.

Sometime before dawn, with Daniel’s fingers dragging up the scaffolding of his spine, Armand says, “Nobody both wants to love me and succeeds at it.”

“Hm? Lets try that again in words I can understand.” Daniel’s voice is hoarse and thick with sleep.

“Those that wish to love me find themselves incapable. Those that do love me wish that they did not.” If he delivers it like it’s obvious, it doesn’t seem like such a raw thing to say.

“Yeah? And how many people have you let try, hm? How many? Lestat. Louis.” Daniel holds up fingers, waits as if to prompt him to continue.

“M–” And no, this is not the place for Marius’ name. Not in this bed, in this room. The knife edge gets sharper, he wobbles more and more. The past looms heavy on nights like these. But he will grant Marius no place here. He settles for, “My maker.”

The list is so small, in the scope of things.

“You don’t have to talk about him,” Daniel says. “You’ve missed at least one.”

“You? Yes. I’m aware that you wish you did not–”

“I never said that.” Armand searches his memory and finds no proof to his claim. “Would it make life a hell of a lot simpler? Yeah, probably. But I was never a big fan of simple.”

“Clearly.” Armand rearranges, shifts so that he’s able to lay on Daniel’s chest and look at him. As if reading his expression can give him any more information than reading his mind does.

Daniel’s hand, having stilled to give him space to move, begins its path again. “I’d rather love you with eyes open, though. I do when you let me.”

They’re open now, bright in the lamplight. “I don’t think anybody can.”

He had let himself forget this part of being with Daniel. Perhaps forced himself to, out of necessity. Daniel makes him dangerously close to human. Strips all the layers off of his emotions and leaves them naked in the open. Being more human does not make him less a monster, it only turns him into a monster without the leash of one particular need.

Too honest for his own good, for anyone’s.

It’s too late now, too.

“Why? What’s so horrible that you think you’re doing a bang-up job hiding?” Daniel says it like he’s foolish for imagining he could hide anything from Daniel at all. “You tortured me. Stalked me. Got me hooked your own blood, then stole my memories when I couldn’t live without it. You got a girl killed, you lied about it for so long and so insistently that you gave your husband a fucking complex, you–”

“Are we to remain here until you have listed all my sins? Do you wish for me to supply you with more?” Distant and hurt and cruel, but Daniel doesn’t do anything in response except continue.

“We murdered someone just for being on the wrong damn subway car. I drank blood right beside him while he died. And fuck, it was not just your blood that turned me on.” Daniel still looks faintly perturbed by this. “And I still love you.”

“That isn’t–”

“So what else could you possibly have going that I can’t handle? Did you burn a village down? Murder everybody’s first born sons? Threaten to tear a baby in half?”

“Any suggestions not pulled from the Old Testament? Any other horrors you would like to imagine me capable of, so as to convince yourself that I am–”

Daniel’s hand covers his shoulder, pushes. He’s not entirely sure he wants to move, just now, but he rolls over onto his back. Daniel follows, rolling onto his side and splaying his hand across the bare skin of Armand’s stomach. A point of heat against net neutral. Pressing down. Testing.

It feels good, because it’s Daniel. Otherwise, it’s only uncomfortable. Puts strange pressure on his organs, pushes at his diaphragm. Makes it hard to draw air, which in turn makes it hard to speak.

To truly hurt him would be difficult for Daniel, without tools at his disposal. But these are small things he learned years ago, and perhaps others he’s picked up along the way. Spots where pain and discomfort take very little physical force. Armand grounds himself with the touch.

“Are you finished?” Daniel asks. “Or do you want to keep willfully misinterpreting me?”

His hand lets off, Armand breathes deep. “It is not my past sins I worry about, but those I will commit in the future.”

“Oh yeah? Got them penciled in on the calendar?” Daniel’s hand roams, now. A gentle, searching thing. Over his thigh, his hip, his ribs. He supposes Daniel hasn’t had much occasion to do so recently. Nothing about his body has changed – it hadn’t occurred to him that Daniel would want to with any particular enthusiasm.

“I could do it for ten years. Could limit my sins so that you might continue to love me.” Daniel’s hand stills. “But forever? No.”

“You think I want you to play the good housewife for eternity?”

“Well that isn’t how I would–”

“Everything I say.” Fingers trailing over his collarbones now, a thumb pressing right into the meat of his trapezius, squeezing until the world narrows down to that touch and Daniel’s voice. “You ignore everything I say.”

And because he can, this time, Armand breathes into the pain. There are certainly far worse aches, but he’s seated deep in his body tonight, alive with the memory of someone else’s life and the looming weight of his own. He feels it well enough.

“I’m listening,” Armand murmurs. Turns his head so that his nose brushes against Daniel’s.

The pressure lets off again and Daniel hums low in his throat, thoughtful. “What did you hear, then?”

“That you think you will still love me when I am–” those fingers again. Pointer and middle, digging into the skin just below the hinge of his jaw. The rest of his sentence trails off. Clear correction in the form of a pinpoint locus of warm pain. “That you will still love me when I am cruel.”

The reward is just as sweet, Daniel’s mouth soft on his, his hand relaxing to instead circle his throat like an embrace. It doesn’t last long enough.

“What is it about that, hm? Why does it help?” Daniel asks, always ready to take a detour the moment the whim arises.

“At all times, I am either hearing half the building, or preventing myself from hearing it. Keeping track of passing thoughts. That which allows me to smell your blood also allows me to smell everything else. Then there is the rest. Five hundred years of history, none of which I particularly want to think about, all clamoring to take priority in the remaining cognitive space. It can be–”

“Overwhelming?”

“Mhm,” Armand hums his confirmation. “Pain is a focal point. It narrows everything down.”

Daniel nods, “Yeah that makes sense. Tell me again, what you heard me say.”

“Why? It doesn’t make me more likely to believe it.”

“I think you turn shit around in your head sometimes before it even makes it to your conscious brain. You hear what fits with your narrative.” Hand sliding down from his neck, now, to rest on his sternum. “I can’t get anywhere if I don’t even know we’re talking about the same thing.”

Daniel is clever to do this here. If they were clothed and distant, Armand doesn’t think he would have the motivation to continue the conversation.

“You’re saying… that you will still love me when–”

Knuckles along the knobs of his sternum and this hurts in earnest. Hurts enough that he hisses through gritted teeth and arches into the touch. It would bruise a human. This is more than focal point, Daniel’s leg hooking over his, Daniel’s eyes watching him hawklike and patient. The pressure lets off, leaves an ache behind the same way touching ice might.

“I don’t–”

Back, again. Harder, circular and unforgiving. Daniel’s voice is gentle, though, when he prompts, “Think about it. You do know. Tell me when you’re ready.”

Armand shuts his eyes, lets the pain carry him, lets it narrow everything down to a pinhole of light in the form of Daniel’s broad knuckles digging into bone.

‘Okay.’

Daniel stops. Unclenches his hand and lays it flat to Armand’s chest. Kisses him soft and slow until he opens his eyes.

“You will still love me.”

“Yeah. Took a minute, but you got there.” Daniel looks vaguely amused, but there’s a flush in his cheeks. A heat in the green of his eyes.

Armand strokes fingers over his cheekbone, feels the give of time there, and offers up something honest for the taking. “I can’t believe it. It isn’t in my nature.”

“That’s alright. You don’t have to believe it yet; I’ve only just gotten started.” Daniel’s mouth finds his throat. “Give me some damn time to do it.”

So on Daniel goes. Pain and pleasure in an endless loop, doled out with a deliberate focus. A singlemindedness that translates so well, here, that Armand forgets they haven’t been doing this all along.

When he’s too hot with pleasure to feel the pain Daniel can readily give, Daniel makes that pleasure its own careful torture. Brings him over and over to a threshold and keeps him at it. Armand will not beg, today.

He will get close, though. He will whine and buck and clutch at Daniel’s hand while Daniel smiles against his mouth and licks his tears and murmurs promises he’d never repeat elsewhere.

He still doesn’t believe it. But he believes, given enough time, one day he might.

“Daniel,” Armand says. He does not beg. Not today. Daniel gives him what he needs anyways. Drags it from him with a firm hand and his tongue buried in Armand’s mouth to catch the broken sound he makes.

And after, when they’ve caught their breath, when they’re laying in a tangled heap of limbs, he knows. Perhaps he has known for weeks. Perhaps he knew the first time he saw Daniel again. Perhaps he knew still further back, in an apartment in the Village. In an apartment in San Francisco. In the strange, ethereal place where time does not exist and he walks through the gate into the garden of eternity over and over and over again.

He is too selfish to let Daniel die.

“Okay. Okay, beloved, I give in,” Armand says, resigned and relieved as the sun finally takes hold outside. “I’ll condemn you to it if that’s what you want.”

Daniel huffs a laugh, soft and warm against the top of Armand’s head, and says, “What I want is you.”

Chapter Text

On the First Day, God Killed Himself

& on the second day he got jealous & bothered & brought himself back to life / threw himself up like day-old mexican food / & on the third day he turned the size of pocket knife / turned the size of burial / turned the size of stinger & gasoline & northwest compass / & on the fourth day he put his hands on a boy’s chest in the backseat of his mother’s car / said I never thought I would turn out like this / & the boy laughed / said there’s a whole life in that / in not thinking you’d turn out like this / & on the fifth day he filed his nails until they were sharp & hungry & writhing / full of rooms & curses / full of bruises & pulses / full of everything he’d ever survived / & everything he'd ever died for / & on the sixth day he was finally forgiven / & on the seventh day he looked straight into the sun / said I didn’t mean for it to turn out like this / & the sun laughed & laughed & laughed / said there’s a whole world in that / in not meaning for it to turn out like

-- Topaz Winters, from Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing

“Why does it have to be right now?”

“Why not now? Why wait?”

Armand can think of a dozen reasons off the top of his head, but Daniel hasn’t listened to them so far, so why should he now? They’re both afraid of the same thing for different reasons, he supposes. That one of them will change their mind.

He hopes Daniel will. Daniel hopes Armand will not. Two sides in opposition in defense of their shared love, perhaps.

Daniel takes his silence as forfeit. He claps his hands together and says, “Great, that’s settled. How do we do this?”

An excellent question that Armand knows how to answer in theory, but not in practice. He hardly remembers his own turning. Cannot or does not wish to. Either way, it’s of very limited assistance. His distaste for the process in general certainly hasn’t positioned him as a close observer in the past. Wherever possible, he has not been an observer at all.

There is much to consider. How best to ensure Daniel takes to the gift (he will, he will). Where they should be in the moment, where they should be in the coming months. Small details, like Daniel’s hair, whether he wants a trim. Monumental ones, like the sun. Five hundred years, and he is not equipped. Five hundred years and he knows only how not to–

“Hey. None of that,” He hears Daniel say it as if through a wall. Distant despite the fact that only a moment ago, he does remember Daniel being right next to him. And oh. So he is.

Or was.

Now Daniel is in front of him, and Armand realizes he’s been staring unblinking at the refrigerator for far too long. Now he stares unblinking at Daniel instead. Daniel, who slides a hand around the back of his neck and says, “You need to keep it together. I’ve got fuck all to go off here, so it’s on you.”

“Or I could–”

Daniel’s mouth is on his, harsh and unyielding, and who is he to stand against that? Who is he to resist when he has already yielded? He was made, this way. Before he was remade, he was made just like this. To yield. There are worse things to yield to than Daniel’s eternity.

When Daniel pulls away, his panic feels distant again. Out of grasp, tucked tidily back into his smallest rib. It will return, but not now and that’s enough.

“You need to pack,” he says, watching Daniel’s eyebrows draw together in his attempt to follow a thread that hasn’t been tied to anything. “Unless you should not like to return here in this decade, you might wish to vacate New York while you… adjust.”

“Right. Just in case I kill my neighbour, or?” It’s offered up with sarcasm, served up like a joke.

Armand nods his head, folds his arms, and says, “Yes. Exactly.”

“Fine. Where, then?” Daniel must notice Armand’s surprise because shrugs a shoulder and says, “What? I took off to Dubai with less forethought.”

“Is that meant to be comforting?”

Daniel studies him for a moment – that look he hates, that look he loves, like he can take Armand apart if he just finds where the seams are already weakened. “Do you wish I hadn’t?”

“No.” He answers too quickly for Daniel to believe him, whether it’s the truth or not. He isn’t certain of the honest answer. Hasn’t given himself time to think about it. He finds more and more often lately that he doesn’t always know what the truth is meant to be. Anything can become true if he tells himself enough times.

Of course, Daniel doesn’t seem to prefer this approach.

“Great. Say it again with some feeling this time,” Daniel says, dry.

Armand rubs a thumb over his elbow. Daniel turns to brew coffee. Absently, he wonders if Daniel will have to find some way to fill that habit later. If he will brew it anyways, sip it down for the comfort and not the taste. It gives Armand time to consider the question, so this time around it serves dual purposes.

“It was very simple, life before. We were used to it; we had a rhythm, Louis and I. He might not agree if you ask him now, but it was no prison. No horrible thing. And had you not come back, you would not be asking me to curse you now.” Armand is carefully conversational; to be anything else would make the things he says harder to voice. “But no. I do not wish you had not come to Dubai.”

Daniel sends a quick grin at him over his shoulder.

“Is that what you wanted Daniel? Some confirmation of my selfishness?”

He doesn’t need to see Daniel to know that he’s rolling his eyes. “Not every question has some hidden motive. Some questions are only questions.”

“Not this one,” Armand presses. It’s only a hunch, really, but Daniel stills and confirms it to be true.

Daniel measures his words. Holds them back while his coffee finishes brewing, while he fixes it, while he leans against the counter across from Armand and takes a sip. When he speaks he does so with his own practiced nonchalance. Perhaps one day they will both be broken of the habit, but today it remains second nature.

“Still trying to figure out if I’m a consolation prize.” A pause, then, “Probably wouldn’t make a difference but–”

“You think I would agree to make you a vampire to… console myself? After 500 years you believe all that it would take is to be alone?” He has been alone, before. He has survived it. “So smart, and yet you still find so many ways to be–”

“Okay thanks. Some people would just say of course I love you, honey. I want to be with you forever baby, don’t doubt that.”

“Is that what you wish for me to say?” Armand tilts his head, tries to sort out how much of Daniel’s irritated expression is a part of the sarcasm, and how much is genuine. Beneath it, something much more raw. “You have only to tell me, beloved, and I will always say what you wish.”

Daniel lets out an exasperated puff of air, but he softens, too. “Nah. Hasn’t worked out well with other people, anyways. Just say what you mean.”

“I love you. That’s all I’ll ever mean.”

It’s rare that he can surprise Daniel into a reaction. Into speechlessness. He’s ready, often, with a quip to make things light. To make them mean less than they do. Now he just stares at Armand with lips parted and eyes crinkling just a little bit at the corners, and there it is. The right thing to say.

He likes that Daniel makes him work for it. For the right words.

Eventually, Daniel shakes his head as if to clear out what’s inside of it and says, “Okay. Tell me where we’re going.”

Daniel lets him book first class tickets without complaint this time, confirming Armand’s suspicion that he was just being petty on their flight from Dubai. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as luxurious as the last flight. Fortunately, it’s far shorter, and Daniel isn’t pointedly refusing to talk to him this time.

“What happened to the cat?” Daniel asks after they take off.

“Hm?”

“The cat. That guy had a cat.” He says it like he’s trying to piece things together, and Armand supposes that might be true. Daniel was certainly intoxicated at the time, and in hindsight… perhaps more than a little bit terrified.

Armand turns in his seat, tucks a leg under himself with his shoes kicked off. “There wasn’t any cat in the apartment at the time. I would have been able to hear its heartbeat.”

The soft breath of relief Daniel lets out is endearing, if a little nonsensical considering his general lack of remorse for the murder itself. When he smiles, Daniel scowls back. “Shut up.”

“You aren’t curious about the fish?”

“It’s a fish.”

“Ah I see. So the line of ethics is drawn somewhere after cats but before fish.” Armand rests his head against the seat back and Daniel rolls his eyes. Lots of that, lately. Usually paired with thoughts too fond to convey appropriate levels of annoyance. “Will you prearrange care for domesticated gerbils?”

“Fuck you. You thought to check that the cat was gone.”

“Perhaps I was only seeking dessert.”

Daniel doesn’t dignify that with a response, just turns his attention back to the inflight media with a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.

Ten minutes later he asks, “Why Scotland?”

They’re finding some kind of equilibrium, slowly. When Daniel asks questions now it doesn’t always feel like it comes from a place of suspicion. Pieces of their life together all those years ago have begun to creep back in, and this is one. Daniel’s blind willingness to get on a plane to wherever Armand wants to take them next.

“Mm… we bought property there in the nineties.” Armand shrugs a shoulder, tries to recall the exact details. As with many memories, they take longer to come to him than the duration of this conversation.  

“Yeah. I imagine you own property in plenty of places.”

“This one is in my name.” Well. Not exactly his name per say, but an identity assigned to his likeness at least. “Edinburgh will be busy this month – they have a festival attended by many each year, which makes it a good location for–”

“Disappearing.”

Armand nods. “Yes. And while there are places receiving less daylight now, the nights will be a bit longer here in the fall and winter than in New York.”

“Right… So you expect me to stay for months.”

“It’s not a prison, it’s only a convenient place to return to.” Armand pauses a moment, considering. “We never went to Scotland.”

Daniel looks as if he’s trying to decide whether he would like to be annoyed or not, but it’s not as if he has any real grounds upon which to place his argument. He left the decision up to Armand. Eventually, he shrugs his shoulder and says, “Sure. I’ve never been to Scotland.”

When they bought this house, it was rundown and farther from the city than most tourists preferred. Louis’s nearly sixth sense for market trends was the reason they shopped for real estate there in the first place, but it was upon Armand’s insistence that they buy this property in particular. Thus, the risk was in Armand’s name, as well.

It needed work. Extensive restoration, managing of the overgrown grounds, forest management to clear out deadfall in leave space for trails to be cut. It took months, and for much of that time Louis had been elsewhere. As a result, the cottage bears little sign of him.

Daniel is almost insultingly surprised when they arrive, taking in the stone exterior with faintly amused skepticism.

“You sure you didn’t just buy this a few days ago when you decided on Scotland?” He asks.

“Fairly certain, yes. I had to cancel months of Airbnb reservations, if you’d like demonstrable proof.”

“Air– congratulations on contributing to the collapse of the global housing market.”

“The combined portfolio contains plenty of rent-fixed apartments.” The combined portfolio is, in fact, going to give Armand a headache if he thinks about it any further.

Perhaps Daniel infers this, because he gestures to the front door and says, “Alright, lead the way.”

It’s been years since he visited, but it’s mostly as he remembers. Some belongings will have to be brought out from storage – rarer pieces, items best not left in the trust of wealthy tourists on vacation. It has the same warmth to it as he recalls, and he knows now that it’s much like the warmth in Daniel’s home, like the warmth in the home they once shared together. Deeply colored wood, landscapes rather than portraiture on the walls, comfortable furniture.

When he had finished it, he had not wanted to stay.

He looks to Daniel now and waits for a reaction. Daniel, who drops his bag at the door and wanders through the house with idle curiosity. Kitchen, living room, bedrooms. The last is the study, with its antique desk and oversized chairs and walls lined with books.

“This is the only room with protection on the windows, but I’ll have it installed on the others. The rest of the house is equipped shades that will keep the sun out.” Perhaps he should have arranged for the work to be done ahead of time, put Daniel off for a few more days. Again, he is out of his depth. Unequipped for this. He runs a finger along the window frame. “We could–”

Daniel is behind him, now. Snaking an arm across his shoulders to pull him back against his chest, pressing his mouth to Armand’s neck. “It’s as good a place to die as any.”

He can feel the rough drag of stubble on his skin. Outside, the sun is not yet sinking but it is far past its highest point. He is afraid to ask. He asks, anyway. “Do you want to wait until tomorrow? Rest awhile? We can order some food, or we could go–”

“No point putting it off.” There are plenty of reasons, but again, Armand finds himself unable to provide them.

If Daniel changes his mind now, it will be when it is too late. He’s far too stubborn to fold sooner, to give in now.

Armand reaches up blindly, fingers landing on Daniel’s jaw, and says, “I’ll help you shave.”

He expected an argument from Daniel, though he cannot say why. He used to shave his face all the time, but he has not done so in many years. It’s regrettable that this will now be the last.

Daniel leans up against the bathroom sink, the tap running warm beside him. A razor, a towel, shaving cream, all laid out and ready. He isn’t sure why he hesitates now, fingers on the line of Daniel’s jaw, Daniel looking at him with a curious expression.

“What are you stewing about now?” Daniel knocks his foot against Armand’s.

“I’ll miss this. I did miss this.”

“Miss what?” As if it isn’t obvious by the context. “Shaving my face?”

Armand nods, “Yes. I’d do it every day given the chance.”

Daniel looks, for a moment, as if he’s about to ask why. Armand doesn’t know that any of his reasons make sense. Something about the trust inherent in the act, perhaps. The way he could bring a blade to Daniel’s skin over and over again and he would never flinch as the monster that wanted his blood resisted the desire to cut him. The care in it. This gentle and everyday act of humanness.

Instead, Daniel takes his hand, presses his lips to Armand’s fingertips in a gesture that’s always far too sweet, and says, “Leave it then.”

“What?”

“Leave it. You can shave it every day forever.” Daniel doesn’t seem perturbed, and Armand once again wonders if he’s understanding the reality of the situation. He isn’t sure that understanding is even possible. “And if you get bored and slack off, then who cares? It’ll stay that way, or I’ll shave it myself.”

Such a permanent thing, and he offers it without hesitation. “But you–”

“I’m an old man, Armand. With or without facial hair, I’ll look… the way I do,” Daniel shrugs and this time, Armand doesn’t care about the shaving. He cares about that hesitation. That little notch of earnestness tucked behind the nonchalance.

“Daniel, with or without it you’re beautiful.”

“Yeah. That’s great. Love makes people beautiful in your eyes etcetera and so on and whatever.”

Armand shakes his head, “No. I mean, of course I’m certain it does. But you are beautiful regardless. It isn’t obligation that makes me believe so. You were beautiful in San Francisco, beautiful in the years we spent together, yes. But age– do you know what a gift it is to wear years on your face? How many would covet that for themselves?”

Daniel remains transparently skeptical. Armand frees his hand from Daniel’s grasp and traces over the lines of his face. “Time has known you. Claimed you. Caressed your skin and your bones. Even when you escape it you will have once belonged to it in a way few of us ever did.”

He chafes under the observation, cheeks rising with a flush Armand can hear him trying to will away. “Okay okay, I get it.”

He doesn’t yet, but he will. “Come. You’ll be mine now, instead.”

Armand waits for Daniel to decline. To turn him down. To decide, as he should, that he does not want this after all. Instead he just straightens, slips his hand into Armand’s, and says, “Hot.”

He closes the shades in the living room. Moves the coffee table to the side so the center of the floor is free. The rug is worth a fair amount of money, but replaceable, so he leaves it for comfort. He starts the fireplace. Turns on the lamps. Soft instrumental music plays through the stereo – something modern Armand doesn’t recognize, but finds quite beautiful nonetheless. 

With each step, he waits for Daniel to mock him. To make a sarcastic comment about the music, a quip about the mood. Instead Daniel just watches him, leaning against the doorframe with an inscrutable look on his face.

He thinks about Louis turning Madeline, about his hope that he could do it in a good way. About his despair after, despite his best intentions. About Armand’s own becoming, sick and clinging to life. About Claudia’s, twice burned to death. Louis, desperate and grief stricken. Lestat reliving the horror of his own turning hundreds of years later. On and on and on.

None of them Daniel.

None of them looking at him with clear green eyes and a calm heartbeat and a near lifetime behind them.

You need to keep it together, Daniel had said. He’s right, of course. Armand just doesn’t know how to do that when he feels like his ligaments are about to loosen like old elastic and disconnect his bones from one another.

“Your move,” Daniel says.

And so it is.

Armand tugs his long sleeve off, draping it over the back of the couch. He settles onto the rug, somewhere just off center, knees just bent. “When you’re ready. If you’re fond of that shirt I suggest you remove it.”

Daniel doesn’t come to him right away. Stays right where he is, breathing that in-out-in. Whatever he’s waiting for, Armand will not rush him. They could do this tomorrow. The next, the next, the next. He almost opens his mouth to say so, then Daniel crosses the room. He removes his button down but leaves the t-shirt that’s underneath.

He offers his hand to help Daniel sit and for once he takes it without complaint, legs draping over Armand’s thighs. The music is still playing but suddenly everything seems very quiet. And it will now, won’t it? Silence where Daniel’s mind used to be. A fair punishment, he supposes, for the sin he will now commit.

It’s too reminiscent of another time. Of another floor, of Daniel placing his life in Armand’s hands before. He still hates Armand for that, now. Less and less each day, but the hate is there alongside everything else.

Daniel’s hands find his face then, bring him back. “Keep it together for me.”

“You said that then, do you remember? When I– you said that if I didn’t you would change your mind.” A vice tightens around his throat, vocal cords and all. He cannot do this if Daniel is uncertain, and he wants to not have to do it, and he doesn’t know how to survive not getting this now that he’s imagined he could.

“Slow down.” Thumbs across his cheekbones, once, twice. “I’m saying it now because I don’t know how helpful I’ll be once you get started, so I need you not to freak out, and to tell me what to do.”

“You’ll fall unconscious,” Armand murmurs, automatic. “But I will be with you in your mind until you take the gift.”

“So I just have to… what?”

Armand covers Daniel’s hands with his own. “You just have to trust me. I won’t let it fail.”

Daniel doesn’t make a joke of it, doesn’t shrug it off. He just nods his head, somber, and lets Armand tug him forward into an easy embrace. He slips into Daniel’s mind like parting the clouds, like diving under the surface of a great sprawling lake. Like drifting off into the sprawling, weightless, stardust of the universe.

“When you’re ready,” he says again.

Daniel’s hand winds into his hair, those gentle fingers pull him close. He does not need Daniel to say it out loud. He knows.

His fangs sink into Daniel’s neck, slice into his jugular.

The blood pours and pours and pours.

It looks just as it had the last time they were here. Great sprawling ceilings, marble all around. Mosaics and paintings ornamenting the space, filling it with the sort of beauty that can only belong to things that have meaning. That have history and are given it by generation upon generation.

Elaborate patterns in blue, red, black, and gold, shining in the trickling sunlight, not a soul in sight nor sound.

He gazes upward at the center dome, its four strange angels marking each corner.

“It doesn’t look exactly the same,” Daniel says. A correction to a thought Armand had not spoken aloud. Here, for once, he does not have to speak his musings, to form them into words. “We only came at night.”

“Would you prefer it? Say the word and I can make it so.” Here in this place where Daniel’s blood sings and his own sings back. Strung up between breaths, between heartbeats, between souls. Anything. Anything.

“Anything?” Daniel asks. Armand drags his eyes from the paintings, looks to Daniel now instead. He is neither young nor old here. He is only Daniel, only everything and all things here in the sunlight of a solstice noon.

“Yes, anything.”

For a moment all they do is smile, the two of them here in this place outside of all places. Or perhaps inside all places, inward inward inward like a fractal infinity. Beneath a dome of angels, beneath a long-sun sky.

“Is this what it’s like in your mind?” Daniel asks, curious and something else. Something softer.

He’s not touching Daniel, he realizes. He would like to be (somewhere he is, yes, somewhere else where Daniel’s heart is pounding a desperate rhythm and his body is going slack, yes). Here though – here Daniel reaches out fingers, snags him by the elbow, pulls him closer.

“This is your place, in my mind. Where I keep you.”

“Like a prisoner?” A wry smile. Daniel leans into his hand when he reaches out to touch it.

“Like a precious thing.”

Daniel looks down at their feet. At the beautiful marble circles that make up the Omphalion, the Navel of the Earth. “Are we meant to be standing here?”

Armand wonders if there has ever been a time where Daniel has cared whether or not he was breaking a rule. He certainly didn’t when they were here. “This place is yours and it is mine, Daniel. We can stand wherever we wish.”

Daniel nods but he’s already distracted. Looking up at the dome again. “It’s changed,” he murmurs.

Christ Pantocrator at the center now. If he is to look away and back again it might be a cross. It might be some other image lost to time and memory, blurred even to them by the uncertainty of human and inhuman knowledge alike. It might be open to the sky, crumbling around them. Chipped or as fresh as it was the moment it was built.

“It’s always changing.” Such is the way of devotion.

A soft hum in the back of Daniel’s throat. It tastes of his blood, a sweet broken open sound. A song in Armand’s ears. “Do you hear it, Daniel? Do you hear how your blood has been singing to me all these years?”

Daniel closes his eyes as if to hear better, brow furrowing. “I don’t– I don’t hear anything. Is that–”

“Shh. It’s alright, Daniel, look at me.” And Daniel does. Lets himself be calmed and soothed.

“Why here?” Daniel asks, then. “Why keep me in this place?”

What a thing, to ask the conscious mind what the unconscious mind has done. He has not returned here, had not know this was what it looked like. Armand searches for the reason, takes Daniel with him. Their fingers laced together, the fingers of Armand’s free hand dragging along the walls. Feeling that which he cannot see or hear.

Because here he was neither saved nor condemned. Because here Daniel believed in him, or he believed in Daniel. Here he prayed. Here he worshipped. Here– “I found God.”

Daniel huffs a laugh, sways into him, bumps his elbow up against Armand’s ribs (from inside out? Perhaps, perhaps. His ribcage expands and expands and expands).

“I’m not God, Armand.”

“You can be. For me. Forever.” Armand turns then, seizes Daniel’s face in both hands, presses him to the marble wall. “You can live, my love, and when you die you will be here and I will–”

“Nah. Sounds shitty compared to reality with you.” Daniel shakes his head and Armand’s hands move with it. “Worship me if you want, but worship me where I can worship you, too. There’s nobody here, Armand. Not you, not me, not God.”

A strange thought, that. This place is empty except for them here, in this temporary moment. Perhaps it stands, still, when they are not here to bear witness. But an empty cathedral has nothing to pray to. Daniel kisses him like he needs no air for it and he soon won’t; somewhere, his lungs nearly forget to draw air. Oxygen has little place left to go. Armand makes it go, anyways.

When Daniel pulls away, he looks over Armand’s shoulder, to the door. “What’s outside?”

“The outside. The sun. The world.” Armand feels the pulse at Daniel’s neck, thready and faltering. “Beyond that, a gallery. We’re only inside a painting, you see.”

“I don’t want to be a painting. You don’t want to be, either.”

“No. I suppose not.” What else is there to be, then? How else is he to take care of what’s precious? Daniel presses hands against his chest, and then he takes his hand again and he begins to walk towards the exit. “Where are we going?”

Daniel doesn’t answer him, just swings the door wide into the nothing. Drags them into the dark. So dark, so full of nothing and nothing and nothing. The great empty space, a black hole. Whatever a black hole becomes when it, too, ceases to be.

“Daniel.”

He grins. Armand can see him, he realizes. Daniel there as sharp and sure as ever, even in the dark. “Trust me, babe. All you gotta do.”

Armand cannot. He cannot.

He does, for this moment at least, somewhere outside of time and inside of both of them.

“You look different here,” Daniel says. “I don’t know how, but you do.”

They continue on, and the darkness becomes universe, and he knows it better than he knows any part of himself. Daniel’s mind, as he once painted it for him. Glittering stars set against a kaleidoscopic aurora of colour and feeling.

They walk and walk and walk until they come to a forest – no, a park. A park with a simple path, turned red-orange in the dappled light of golden hour.

It looks just as it did when they lived here. When they used to begin their evenings this way, hand in hand where it did not matter if they did so. Where it mattered most that they did so.

Their footsteps are slow beats upon the ground. Unsteady where they linger to look at this tree or that building, picking back up when they carry on. It takes as long as it takes to get to the little bench. The simple wooden thing, freshly stained with shining plaque in one blink, weathered and well-worn in the next.

Daniel brushes his thumb across the inscription, across the engraved promise of forever that naïve version of him was so ready to give without comprehension.

“Was it naïve, if I’m still sitting here ready to give it now?”

Armand lets himself be pulled down to sit next to Daniel on the bench. “You would die for your devotion?”

“I’d live for it, Armand. Listen,” Daniel murmurs. Armand does listen. “I can hear it now, the song.”

They look out together as the sun sets across the park and its old trees. Look out through the galaxies, through the galleries, through the churches and mosques. At the planes and hotel rooms and the apartment they held together with love and blood and desperation. At the long line of Daniel’s neck, at the broken open cage of Armand’s ever-expanding ribs. At the trembling of Daniel’s hand in his own and the hollow the hollow the hollow that lives somewhere so far in Armand’s bones that he has never known it could fill as it does now.

Blood everywhere, singing.

The image giving way to nothing. The sound giving way to silence. All he knows and has known giving way to a feeling so immense it requires those hollows, those broken open ribs, just to make him big enough to hold it.

And there, lingering on the edge of it all, on a bench in a mosque in a universe made of twin-strand devotion he can no longer separate, they share the last thoughts they ever will.

“Shall I remake you now, beloved?”

“You already have.”

Chapter Text

The work is not finished the moment Daniel’s mind closes to him. He knows this, and it’s the only thing that keeps him from collapsing into the horror that threatens to take him over. That and the weight of Daniel in his arms, still somewhere adrift in unconsciousness with his mouth pressed to the clotting gouge Armand made in his own neck.

“Wake up, beloved. Come back to me,” he murmurs. There’s a tremor in his voice he hates himself for. There’s a fear in his chest that he hates himself for. There is so much for him to hate himself for, and no time to do it now.

Daniel does stir against him, a soft groan pressed against his skin.

Armand strokes fingers through his hair, holds his head close. “Drink, Daniel. The more you drink the stronger you will be.”

He cannot hear Daniel’s thoughts. Cannot know what causes his hesitation. And how cruel, this. The thing that Daniel wanted from him he has now: silence. Silence, and Armand doesn’t know what to do for it but wait.

Teeth – fangs, long and sharp – sink clumsily into his skin, slow at first. Uncertain. His blood begins to flow, Daniel swallowing with a lurch of his body against Armand’s, a shudder. Then Daniel is gripping his hair, tugging his head to one side, drinking and drinking and drinking as if he’s done this his whole life.

Instinct, Armand knows. They’re made for this. He made Daniel for this.

It feels good, of course it does. He floats somewhere outside the pleasure, drifts somewhere in quiet detachment. He’s absently aware of his fingers stroking down Daniel’s spine, of the blood drying to his own face, of the smell hanging in the air  with an almost cloying sweetness.  

“Take what you need, my love.”

Take it all, he thinks. Take it all and punish me for this.

Daniel cannot hear him, of course. But he slows, still. Hungry and ceaseless, but gentler now. His other hand slipping into the space between them to press over Armand’s heart in a gesture he does not need to hear to understand.

It’s an eternity later, when Daniel pulls away. Or minutes. Armand does not know time now, and time does not know him, and soon it will no longer remember Daniel.

Daniel, whose mouth now slides insistent against his, whose fangs press up against his lips, catch on his tongue when he slides it into Daniel’s mouth. And this, Armand feels at last, like the pulling of a tide. It doesn’t feel so awful like this, with the taste of Daniel and himself mingling in his mouth. The ache in his chest gets buried under everything else. Pleasure and love and relief. Daniel, strong and growing stronger even now, heartbeat loud inside his eardrums.

When they break apart, Daniel doesn’t go far. His forehead falling against Armand’s, and here he finds another difference: his skin the same temperature as Armand’s own. A monster now. A monster forever, because Armand was too selfish to let him go. The ache reveals itself again.

“Babe?” Daniel murmurs, voice sandpaper raw and lazily unimpressed. “If you could calm down for just half a minute and ride the high with me, that’d be great.”

The high.

Yes, he feels it now. Now that he’s looking, now that he’s been reminded.

He thought he could feel the emotions of others, before. Their terror, their desire, their anger. Of all people, he has known Daniel’s emotions perhaps best of all. And has he not felt what Daniel feels for him a thousand times?

This is unequivocally different, he sees now. Those were ideas. The concept of an emotion, the intellectualized definition of it given shape and form inside a mind. Translated from body and put to language.

This is bodyfelt, is inside him.

Everything Daniel feels spreading out through his veins, pumped through his body by their shared blood.

Bliss and awe and yes, tucked away, a thread of quiet uncertainty. Pleasure and fondness and hunger the likes of which Armand has not felt in centuries.          

“Yeah, there you go,” Daniel says, as Armand relaxes into him. Relaxes into it. They were made for it, for this. As natural as anything, the bond between them a tangled thread, a rope, a weld of metal to metal. Stronger every moment, stronger the more he focuses on it.

It feels as if– “I can feel you,” he murmurs. A soft amazement, a warm flood of amusement from Daniel in return. Their noses brush when Daniel nods his head. They could stay here forever and it would be easy. Trading tender things back and forth, fragile things, pleasant things. Nothing bad could get in if they did that, he thinks.

He wonders how long the two of them would survive just on one another. He wonders if any vampire has ever tried to live only from another. Perhaps if they were closer in age.

Now, Daniel is a fragile thing. Stronger than a human, yes. But weaker than most every other member of their kind. Still at the threshold, still waiting to truly step through the door.

Maybe Daniel feels the interruption, the distraction, because he heaves a soft sigh and says, “Fuck. Now what?”

“Now,” Armand murmurs, “You’ll probably feel very very poorly.”

“Poorly? Who says that shit anymore?” Daniel pulls back then, a smile in his voice, and Armand wants to see it. Wants to see him smiling, wants to know.

He opens his eyes for the first time in hours, and Daniel is there. Smiling a fanged smile that still takes familiar shape. Crinkles around his eyes deepening with it. The tilt of his head just exactly the same. But on that face, on that same, familiar, beloved face, Armand’s own eyes look back.

The horror bubbles up from his chest like lava, hot, insistent, too quick to swallow. It cools in his throat, thick and stifling.

He doubts Daniel needs the bond between them to notice.

“That bad?” Daniel asks, and yes. Yes, he feels the spike of fear, of hurt, but he cannot do anything for it. Yes, it’s that bad. Yes, it’s– oh, there’s a part of himself who wanted this, who wants this. Who sees orange eyes blinking back at him and can only think about how plainly it marks Daniel as his for all the world to see.

Marks him as– “I’m sorry.”

And he means it. Perhaps for the first time, he means it.

“Armand. You have to use proper words if you want me to understand what’s happening. Whole sentences.” And then Daniel blinks again and his eyes are blue-green, crystalline, the color of a glacier-fed lake. Beautiful and inhuman, but familiar enough that Armand feels the panic loosen in his chest again.

Now is not the time. Now–

“I’m gonna throw up now,” Daniel informs him, with a matter-of-fact sort of certainty.

“Okay. Okay, stand up.” Armand gives the order, but he has to help Daniel anyways. He sways on his feet, dizzy with a body that is and is not his own. That is changing in this very moment, each cell shifting to accommodate a new identity. DNA altered at the very core. There’s something changed in Armand, too, but there’s no time to linger on what exactly it is.

He drags a hazy, distant Daniel down the hallway and into the bathroom just in time for him to curl in on himself and retch violently over the toilet. His body rejecting itself, rejecting that which makes him human. He will take to it – he has to take to it – but still Armand finds himself swallowing back terror. In-out-in-out-in, he breathes because he doesn’t know what else to do, doesn’t want Daniel to feel what he’s feeling but hasn’t learned any way to stop him.

Daniel deserves better than this, he thinks. Deserves a certainty that Armand can’t offer him.

Eventually Daniel straightens again, flushing the toilet and wiping his bloody mouth. “Can you stop feeling sorry for yourself?” he grits out.

“I don’t–” yeah, okay. He’s starting to see why Daniel might prefer feelings over thoughts. The rawness of them, the inability to reshape them into anything but what they are. He doesn’t bother continuing the excuse, instead slides his fingers under the hem of Daniel’s shirt and pulls it off.

Daniel doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest, just shivers when Armand’s nails slide over his skin. He’s covered in blood. His own. Armand’s. He reaches up to touch Armand’s face, and then his neck. His thumb comes up coated in blood, and Armand realizes belatedly that neither of them have bothered to close the wound Daniel made there.

“I can–”

Armand shakes his head, “Don’t worry about it. It’ll close soon, it’s only delayed by the amount of blood I’ve given.”

He almost says lost, but it’s not, is it? It’s in Daniel, now. He can feel it there.

Daniel nods, licks his thumb clean, and then turns to the mirror. Armand briefly considers smashing it, but he’s at least fifty percent certain Daniel would be angry with him for it, and now would be an inconvenient time for an argument. It feels strangely intimate, watching Daniel see himself for the first time. He takes it in with a level detachment born of shock, thumb to his own fang, eyes blinking at the mirror.

Armand reaches out in an aborted attempt to touch, hand falling at his side before it can brush against Daniel’s elbow.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Armand says.

“Say please.” Daniel glances at him and again, his eyes turn. The flash of color distracts him, drags his gaze right back to the mirror to take in that amber-orange. “Oh.”

It’s not as if he’s had time to imagine a reaction. Still. “Oh?”

“Kind of a bright neon sign, yeah?” Daniel says it with eyebrow raised, like Armand had a choice in the matter. Like he set out to do this. He’s never known it to happen before, and he doesn’t know what it means, and he doesn’t know enough about any of this to– “Armand. Breathe.”

“I don’t need to. And neither do you.”

Daniel looks to be preparing a rebuttal, but he winces instead. “Fuck, hold that thought.”

He’s throwing up again, heaving blood and whatever else is left in his system. Emotion flattens, compresses, and all either of them feel is pain. Armand feels it like a phantom limb, a thing he cannot soothe.

In a futile effort to escape what he already knows he cannot outrun, he ducks out of the room for a moment, finds a phone to check the time. They’ve lost hours to the inside of their own minds. It seems strange that it takes only that long to tie two souls together. For one soul to drag the other down to hell.

There’s blood on the rug, blooming red-black in the center where they sat, swallowing up the ornate patterned mandala with its harsh stain.

There’s a heart beating in his chest alongside his own, steady like footsteps on crunching gravel.

And there’s Daniel, in the bathroom, curled up on the floor leaning against the oversized tub.

“This fucking sucks.”

“It won’t last long. Come, let me finish undressing you.”

“I can manage it myself, thanks,” Daniel says, even as he stumbles to his feet and lets Armand steady him. He does manage the buttons of his jeans on his own, steps out of them. He’s barefoot – Armand can’t remember when that happened. Had he taken them off before? Had Armand been paying so little attention?

It doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter. He’s having a hard time sifting his thoughts right now, cannot seem to separate them out into tidy piles and stow away the ones he doesn’t want to deal with.

He runs the water hot, lets the tub fill. Daniel’s arms slide around him, tugging him back against his chest, and it’s better like this. In contact. When they touch he almost forgets his sickened horror entirely. And hasn’t it always been that way?

He takes Daniel’s weight, as unsteady as Daniel still is, but he lets himself be held too.

Daniel’s lips are on his throat, his fingers skimming over Armand’s stomach. He feels the inhale as much as he hears it, smiles despite himself.

“Think I get the smell thing, now.”

“Does it taste different, now?”

Daniel’s tongue drags across his skin as if to check, though his face is pressed to clean and unbroken skin. Armand feels the shiver to his toes. This is Daniel as he has not known him in many years. Stripped of his hesitation, be it caused by uncertainty or by bitterness, and left with the best parts of his honesty. The change still works through him, has him comfortably high.

“Yes and no. It tastes like you, like I remember. It’s just– more.”

I want more, Daniel had said.

Daniel’s fingers drift, undo the button on his pants, the zipper, and it’s easy to let himself be stripped bare even as Daniel leans on him.

“You’re a fucking mess,” Daniel says. Armand looks down, takes in his body covered in drying blood, still sticky in the places where it soaked through fabric. Most of it is his own. Some Daniel’s, where it trickled down his throat, where Daniel pressed against him.

“You’re no better,” Armand counters, turning in Daniel’s embrace and coaxing him backwards. “Get in. It will feel good.”

Daniel does as he is told without protest for once, hissing as he steps into the water. “Jesus, does it need to be so hot?”

Armand flips off the tap and huffs a laugh. “It won’t burn you. It only feels as if it will.”

Pain is a tricky thing in a vampire’s body. Sensitive to everything, especially in the beginning, they feel everything. Very little causes lasting injury. For some, that’s unbearable. For others– Daniel groans as he sinks in fully.

The water blooms with a cloud of red. Armand would like to remember Daniel like this, in this moment. All pleasure-pain, buzzing quietly with the magic of the dark gift, with the blood from Armand’s own veins, with a small smile on his face that’s all his own.

Daniel’s eyes drift open, having fallen closed, and Armand shuts his own for a long moment. A snap of his fingers has the harsh overhead lights turning off, darkness falling around them. He feels Daniel’s surprise.

“You can always see this well in the dark?”

“Mm… it’s all relative to me now, I suppose.” Armand steps into the water, arranges himself facing Daniel. There’s plenty of space, but he still sits just as they had in the living room, reaching for a washcloth on the side of the tub. He brings it up to clean Daniel’s face, his shoulders, his chest. “How do you feel?”

“What, you can’t tell?” Daniel’s eyes are closed again, and he sways with Armand’s touch. Loose-limbed, relaxed. The water helping with the pain by way of distraction more than anything else.

He scrubs at Daniel’s skin gently, washes drying blood from his hair, from behind his ears. He should be clean, Armand thinks. Should be clean on this day where he has been made new. It shouldn’t matter, doesn’t really, but he wants it anyway. “I cannot read your mind, and your emotions– it’s hard to separate them from my own. I can’t–”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.” Daniel nods, catching Armand’s wrist, prying the cloth from his hands. “Just wasn’t sure if all your mind bullshit made it easier to figure out.”

“I know nothing of this, Daniel. Nothing.” It comes out like a plea and he hates himself for that. So many reasons to hate himself today, and no space left to feel the regret that he thinks he probably should.

Daniel brings the cloth to Armand’s neck, washes him far more gently than he has any need to, than Armand likely deserves. His hand still shakes, just so. Not a violent thing, a subtle tremor that Armand isn’t sure he’s imagining; it could be born of the change, still.

“You’re scared,” Daniel says. “That much I can figure out because I know that I’m not.”

“What are you, then?”

The answer doesn’t come for a long time, Daniel drawing the cloth across his skin over and over and over again, until finally he drops it into the red-tinted water. “Hungry, I think.”

“You think?” Armand searches for the feeling, this time. And yes, it’s there. Not so strong, but a building thing.

“It feels more like a craving than hunger, I guess. Like I need a hit before I get sick. Like it used to be with heroin or with–”

“Me.”

“Your blood. Not you.” Daniel says it as if it’s an important distinction. As if what Armand is made up of is not what he is. A strange thought.

He doesn’t linger there. Instead he stands, steps out of the water, dripping onto the tile floor. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He returns wearing fresh clothes, clothes for Daniel placed in a folded stack on the bathroom counter. “Dress and come out when you’re ready. We’ll get you food.”

“A person, you mean.”

“Interchangeable,” Armand shrugs, shutting the door behind him. Perhaps too harsh, too soon for him to be so blunt. Daniel doesn’t seem to mind – he hears his huff of laughter through the door, the spike of excitement that sparks from him. Daniel will make a good monster, of course. He never doubted that.

He’s only ever doubted that the man could withstand it.

---

The doorbell rings, timed surprisingly well considering Armand had no real scope of how much time they would need. A woman in her late thirties stands on the doorstep, smiling with tired eyes, a suitcase in hand.

“Oh hello. I thought the check in was contactless, but the code didn’t work so I thought–”

“Yes, apologies. I stopped by to check that the property was clean and set up for you,” Armand says, smooth and smiling back. “Ms. Moore, yes? I’ve had to do some extra cleaning. Can I get you something to drink? I imagine it’s been a long drive.”

“That would be wonderful actually, thank you.”

He leads her to the kitchen, gestures to a bar stool, pours her a glass of wine. No use frightening her needlessly unless Daniel would like to. His kill, after all. Armand only wishes to save him the chaos of a city hunt, the noise and reek and overwhelm that comes with it.  

Daniel, who steps into the kitchen now with a look born of predatory instinct. There will be time to teach finesse, teach subtlety. Now, Armand just smiles again, real and warm this time. “Ms. Moore, would you excuse me for just a moment.

“Tell me you didn’t actually order delivery,” Daniel murmurs, dry with humor but clearly distracted by the beating heart with its back to both of them.

“A convenient booking I refrained from cancelling.”

“Convenient.”

“If you don’t–”

Daniel is already across the room, arm barred across the woman’s shoulders, teeth sinking into her neck. Instinct.

She screams, but it doesn’t matter. She struggles, but that doesn’t matter either. Daniel isn’t vicious or cruel, he’s simply… efficient. A gift of the blood – hunger overtakes everything else, in the beginning. Keeps guilt or fear or uncertainty entirely at bay.

It takes little time for her to fall unconscious. Armand watches from afar until she does. Takes in the violent beauty of it, the simplicity. There’s no finesse, of course. Daniel still doesn’t quite know where the veins are, doesn’t know how to drink without spilling, but he doesn’t waste much.

Armand crosses the room, then. Fingers caressing Daniel’s cheek, drawing down the line of his throat where he swallows greedy and too fast.

“Slow down. Listen to her heart. You will want to know, when it stops.” At first he doesn’t think Daniel has heard him, doesn’t think he will listen. But then he does slow, sucking an instinctive breath through his nose. “Good, yes. If you drink for too long, she will be dead and her blood will make you sick. If you stop too early, you will have to kill her some other way. It’s unsatisfying.”

Amusement breaks through the bloodthirst, through the warm pleasure of a draining life. He wants so badly to hear what Daniel is thinking. To see as he sees, the memories of this woman pouring into him, finalizing his crossing of the threshold into eternity.

“Good. You’re doing so well, Daniel. Do you hear? She’s very close to death, now.”

A little blood from a dead body will hardly kill Daniel. Likely wouldn’t even make him ill, as full of Armand’s blood as he is right now. He stays close anyways, just in case Daniel does not stop.

He does stop. Not perfectly, not on the very last beat, but close.

Close enough that she will die. Too little blood left to carry oxygen. No longer breathing, anyways.

Daniel releases her, stumbles back in a dizzy sway. The body tips off of the stool, lands in a thud on the ground. Armand could have caught it, he supposes, but he steadies Daniel instead. Catches his wince at the loud sound. “Fuck.”

“You did well.”

“Don’t ask me how I feel about it,” Daniel says, looking not at the body but at Armand, who strokes his face and catches drops of blood. “I don’t think I know yet.”

“You don’t need to,” Armand says, licking his fingers clean. The blood tastes mundane, bland. Like momentary fear, like grains of white rice or dry bread. A staple, more than anything. A necessity. A stroke of luck, neither too horrible nor too wonderful. Extremes would be overwhelming, now. Had been, for Armand, if he spends long enough thinking about his own introduction to this new dark life.

A different sort of hunger flares from Daniel now. Hot and sharp, a momentary warning before Daniel’s mouth collides with his in needy, searching greed. It pulls a groan from his chest. He’ll give and give and give to Daniel now, yes. Later, yes. Forever, yes.

Daniel hums warm and low against his mouth, sucks at his tongue, holds his face as if Armand is going to withdraw at any moment. And perhaps he should. Perhaps he should be more careful with Daniel now, both fragile and strong and still so very new.

Instead, he just sways into the kiss, feels Daniel’s skin through their clothes, just a few degrees warmer than his own. Not human, but flush with human blood. Getting dressed was a waste, seems pointless now as he pulls at Daniel’s t-shirt and undresses him again.

The weight of his want is so big he doesn’t know what to do with it. Doesn’t know where to put it. Realizes, a moment later than he might otherwise, that it’s combined desire. That neither body can hold all of it alone. He sucks hard at Daniel’s pulse point, tastes the blood welling beneath his skin. Daniel’s nails – sharp, now – dig into the skin of his hip.

“You’re– Daniel that hurts.” It comes out as a dripping whine, a pleading gasp when he means for it to be chastisement.

“I can stop,” Daniel offers, mouth dragging over the shell of Armand’s ear.

“No, no. Don’t.” It’s a messy thing, this desire. He cannot tell where one of them begins and the other ends, and Daniel doesn’t seem all that certain either. Stopping doesn’t seem like the right answer. In fact– “More, Daniel.”

“Bed?”

He feels too impatient for all this. The bedroom feels a mile away. And then it isn’t, because he is very fast, and Daniel is no longer so easy to break.

“Holy shit,” Daniel laughs, a breathless, giddy thing, before he pushes Armand back against the bed and trips his way out of his clothes while Armand takes off the rest of his own. It’s not nearly so easy in bed, but he doesn’t care about anything just now.

Nothing but Daniel, too far from him in this moment. A few feet between them is too many. Anything but no space at all is too much. “Daniel,” he hears himself say. There’s no meaning to it, syllables dripping with feeling that doesn’t take form. “Daniel, Daniel.”

And there Daniel is, crawling over him, taking him in with an expression caught up between awe and hunger and fondness. Seeing him through eyes that can’t seem to settle on one colour for longer than a minute or two.

Still too far away. He wraps a hand around Daniel’s cock, watches his eyes flutter shut, hears the groan that drags from his chest. “Look at me,” he pleads. “I need to–”

“Torment yourself?” Daniel asks, even as he bucks into Armand’s touch. Even as he opens those eyes at Armand’s behest, a swimming yellow-gold. “It’s my eyes, isn’t it? That’s what’s fucked you up so much.”

“I’m not–”

“Liar.” Daniel kisses him then, too tender for the heat in his voice and the heat in their bodies. Daniel’s hand, broad and firm, travels down his ribs, over his hip, grips his thigh to make room for him between Armand’s legs. “Do you want me to fuck you?”

A non sequitur or perhaps a return to the subject at hand. Armand can’t tell anymore. Everything is made nebulous by want and dull pain and Daniel’s pleasure beating away inside his own chest. And fear, too. He is so afraid, even now.

“Yes.” And then, on the chance that it’s not obvious, on the chance that Daniel needs to hear it, “Always.”

Daniel’s fingers are surprisingly gentle when they trail up his inner thigh. “Is there–”

“Blood, beloved. Just–”

“Fuck, that’s–”

“Nothing new,” Armand counters.

Daniel huffs a laugh. “Yeah, maybe when I was a freak of a twenty-five year old.” Even as he says it, he sinks a nail into Armand’s skin, a sharp flare of pain as his skin wells with blood. The sweet smell fills the air. “Okay?”

“Better than–”

He coats his fingers and then takes his time opening Armand up. Slow and tentative, uncertain. It hurts anyways of course. Daniel’s nails are sharp. A good pain, mixing with pleasure and dragged out into a delicious stinging. Armand takes it in silence until Daniel tells him otherwise.

“Let me hear you, babe. Gotta give me something to go off of.”

And then he’s really not quiet. Tells Daniel when he needs more (now), when it feels good (always), when he’s beyond ready and nearing needy (please beloved).

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Come here.” Daniel’s fingers are gone, his weight on Armand’s body is gone, his mouth is gone. It’s disorienting, for a moment. Armand tries to remember when he last slept, blames that for the foggy haze that slows his mind as he blinks his eyes open, sees Daniel sitting up, and realizes what he wants.

He moves when he understands, straddling Daniel’s lap, hooking his arms around his neck, Daniel’s hands splaying over his thighs. He sinks onto Daniel like he was made for it, and who knows? Perhaps they are, now. A too-sweet, over-romantic musing. He mumbles it out loud into Daniel’s ear anyways, and Daniel doesn’t laugh at him, just grips him harder.

When he tries to lift up again, to set a rhythm, Daniel holds him in place.

“Look at me,” Daniel echoes Armand’s earlier words. Delivers them not as a plea but as an order. “Feel it.”

“I do, I–”

“No, feel it.” One hand leaves his leg to tug Armand’s from around his neck, to press it instead to Daniel’s chest where his heart beats and beats and beats.

Five hundred years, Armand’s heart has beat the same lonely rhythm. Five hundred years, and every moment has been captive to the pounding, pulsing need. To the question that has forever gone unanswered. Do you love me do you love me do you love me?

“You can feel it now,” Daniel murmurs, irises nearly clear, pupils blown wide like two yawning holes Armand wants to fall into. Already has fallen into. “How much I love you.”

Daniel’s heart beats and beats and beats.

And yes, Armand can feel it. Daniel inside him, his heart and its steady I do I do I do, so certain that not even Armand’s own can find a way to doubt it.  

Chapter Text

If it was just like this for the rest of time, Armand doesn’t think it would be so terrible. Doesn’t think his crime would be so unforgiveable. Daniel tucked into his side, face hidden in the curve of his neck to block out the meager light that still trickles in from under the bedroom door. Waiting for the sun to rise, for the first day to close out and lead into the next and the next and the next. Sated. Bloody.

It won’t be just like this.

Armand knows better than to wish it, but he does anyways. Perhaps he can drag it out for weeks, for months. He will never be able to drag it out for all eternity.

One day the world is going to get back in, with its cruelties and disappointments. With its temptations. With its cold shouldered reality.

“Isn’t there a body we have to deal with?” Daniel mumbles against the skin of his throat.

“I’ll handle it later. When you sleep.”

He gets his first hint of true alarm from Daniel, then. Easy to pluck out in the quiet with most other senses muted. It’s strange, this bond. Gives him the hint of information with none of the explanation. He never thought to wonder at its purpose, doesn’t remember it feeling quite so strong with his own maker.

But then. He remembers so very little from those years that isn’t pain.

Daniel’s honesty has limitations, and his bravado is one of them. His pride. He doesn’t speak his fear aloud and Armand cannot drag it from him unwillingly.

“Daniel. If you have a question, ask it.”

“Oh, so now interviews are acceptable?”

Armand doesn’t laugh, but Daniel smiles against his skin in triumph anyways, privy to amusement even when it is not made visible. “When has it ever stopped you anyways?”

More bitter, perhaps, than he would like. There’s a gray cloud looming over everything. Not a downpour, but the threat of it. That might be worse. He knows how to weather a storm, knows how to endure the misery. He doesn’t know how to do this waiting. Cannot recall the last time life narrowed down to just him and someone else this way for any tangible length of time.

Certainly never with Daniel years ago. Not with Louis, for all the lies Armand allowed to fester between them. Lestat– comical to even consider it. Marius? More painful than anything. So many times, these past days, he’s thought Marius’ name. More than he has in the last decade combined. An unexpected side effect of finding himself in nauseatingly similar shoes.

“Does it ever turn off?” Daniel props himself up on an elbow, looks at Armand with eyes that are thankfully, blessedly, nothing like his own. He wants to know why that’s happening. Wants to know if it will stop. Is afraid of what the answer will be when they figure it out.

“Does what turn off?”

“Your brain,” Daniel says as if it’s obvious.

“You vastly overestimate how much I can glean without your thoughts,” Armand muses. “How do you know whether or not–”

“Deductive reasoning tells me that the rolodex of emotions you’re flipping through are each connected to a thought.” Daniel seems unperturbed by the bond. Curious, perhaps mildly irritated. Armand can’t quite tell.

“You asked that, before. What my mind is usually like.” It’s a strangely hazy memory for something that had felt so clear at the time. More real than Daniel’s skin against his own feels now – and that, too, is very real.

Daniel pauses for a moment and Armand can see his tongue running over his teeth behind closed lips. A good way to cut it open, but there are things Daniel must learn that Armand doubts he will respond well to Armand teaching him. In this, he feels strangely alone. Wishes there was someone to tell him what he’s meant to do, how he’s meant to do it.

He’s killed more fledglings than he has ever been around, and even those are fewer in number than one might imagine.

“Yeah. The mind-mosque,” Daniel says, interrupting his train of thought. “Is it a mosque, even, if you’ve built it for me?”

Distantly, he’s aware Daniel is teasing him. That he means nothing by it. It stings, prods at something that hasn’t healed over in his chest. “You should sleep. The sun is over the horizon, you’ll feel its pull soon.”

He moves to leave and Daniel’s hand – far faster than he’s accustomed to – shoots out to catch him by the shoulder and press him back to the bed. “You were bad enough at hiding things before. Now I can feel them.”

Laid out so simply, Daniel’s words make his stomach turn. “Yes, I understand. You’ve got the upper hand now, you’ve won the advantage. Are you glad of it?”

“Oh for fuck– you can’t be serious.” Daniel looks incredulous. Armand blinks back at him, carefully expressionless as if it matters at all when his emotions are apparently laid out more plainly for Daniel than they are for himself. “You’re serious. Okay.”

Daniel takes a deep breath, holds it for a long time, perhaps realizing he doesn’t need the air at all. He breathes out in a slow exhale, air cool where it ghosts over Armand’s skin.

“I’m glad you can’t pick at my brain anymore, yeah. Not gonna pretend I’m not.” Confirmation received, Armand moves to leave again and is again met with Daniel’s hand. He could still go, of course. But it’s not as if he actually wants to. Daniel’s hand slides to his neck, thumb on his jaw, fingers curving around the back of it. “Hold. On.”

“Why? So that you can–”

“Because you’re trying to start a fight, and I’m trying to navigate the fact that I can hear the clock in the fucking study from here.”

Armand can too, if he lets himself. He doesn’t. He knows how to keep it out. “It’ll settle with time. With rest, too. That’s why you should–”

“Am I really dead to the world, when I sleep?” Daniel asks. And there it is again, that thread of anxiety back beneath layers of frustration. “Light me on fire while I’m sleeping kind of dead to the world, I mean?”

“I’m not going to light you on fire.” Armand huffs a laugh, but he understands, now. “But yes. When you’re safe, you’ll likely sleep without stirring until the sun sets again. You’re young and tired. If you were in a coffin, it would be guaranteed. If you were on a plane or a train or otherwise squatting somewhere uncertain, it would be much like napping as a human. Less restful, but less risky.”

Daniel is quiet for a long time, thumb rubbing absently along Armand’s jaw. When he speaks, it sounds as if it pains him. “Stay. For the first– just– fuck it feels weird. Like I’m not gonna wake up or something.”

It’s instinctive, Armand thinks, for a vampire to protect itself in sleep. Covens still have locks installed inside of their coffins because they do not trust each other to that extent. There are few companions who share a coffin. He rarely stayed in the room with Louis throughout the night if he was not going to sleep, as well. It goes against that instinct, to be so vulnerable when someone else is present to see it.

“You’d like me to watch over you,” Armand murmurs, not in question but in observation. “To make sure you stay safe.”

“Fuck you,” Daniel mutters, but he’s already settling back down against Armand’s side, hand relaxing to lay flat on his chest and face tucked into his neck again.

“You only needed to ask, Daniel.”

“Didn’t give me a fucking chance with all those conclusions you were jumping to.”

He shouldn’t reward Daniel’s attitude, but that’s never particularly stopped him from doing so. Armand pulls him in close, strokes the length of Daniel’s spine while Daniel’s legs tangle up with his. It doesn’t matter, like this, if Daniel is young or old, human or vampire. This piece is just the same each time he does it. Habitual contact, so easy that it feels monumental, so simple it feels earth shattering.

“Feels nice,” Daniel murmurs. “Everything feels nice.”

“You’re still high,” Armand informs him. “I probably shouldn’t be expecting tact from you now when you don’t use any at the best of times.”

“Now who’s rude?” There’s no heat in it. Perhaps it’s the blood, keeping Daniel so comfortably level. “I liked the mosque, for the record. Wasn’t shitting on the mosque.”

“It was only a metaphor. I did not choose it.” Not consciously, at least. He certainly hadn’t intended for it to happen that way. When he thinks of the old cathedral, of the weeks they spent there so many years ago, he can sort of see why. Can tease out the strands of meaning if he wants to take the time to do it. Later, perhaps he will.

“I thought it might have been a dream.”

“It was. But a shared one.”

“Don’t think I have it in me to have an existential crisis about whether that makes it real or not, to be honest.” Daniel’s voice is muffled against his skin, feels a bit like it’s coming from the inside of his own throat.

Armand stares up at the ceiling. Imagines it as a dome, as a crumbling, ancient thing. As a wide-open blue sky that doesn’t burn either of them. Another thing lost, that shared place with Daniel. It goes wherever those decades did. Out of reach forever. Grief is a long-forgotten emotion, and Armand feels clumsy with it now.

“I dreamed, too. When I was turned. I don’t really recall it – I was so ill, when it happened. I don’t know how real it was.” His hand pauses for a beat in its journey up Daniel’s spine before continuing. “It won’t matter to you, a century from now.”

“Was that meant to be comforting?”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“Right. Yeah, of course. Just checking.” Daniel presses a kiss to his neck, his jaw. “It was quiet there. Your emotions aren’t.”

“This isn’t sleeping, Daniel.” He wants to mean his disapproval in earnest, but in truth he doesn’t mind the company. Not now.

“Humor me.”

As if he hasn’t been humoring him for days. Weeks. Years. “I used to believe they would dull, over time. That my mind would quiet and my emotions would settle. They do for many vampires. Perhaps they still will.”

“But they haven’t yet,” Daniel says it in confirmation of something he must already know. “I get it now, a bit. Why you’re so fucking weird about everything.”

“Oh, thank you. That’s so–”

“They’re loud, Armand. Really loud. I’m not saying bigger because I don’t know if that’s it, but yeah. Like they’re all yelling at me from inside my chest.”

It’s instinct to apologize for it. For the inconvenience of it. He opens his mouth to try and finds it met with Daniel’s instead. His hunger, at least, is always easy to pick out; offers something that he can hang his certainty on. Armand feels hunger, feels desire, of course he does. But it pales when held up against Daniel’s. Even now, still full on mortal and immortal blood alike, he wants so much.

“Gets quiet when we’re like this, though,” Daniel muses, lips still close enough to brush Armand’s. “Not less. Just like a whole fucking crowd hushed and waiting.”

“Are these the metaphors the world has to look forward to when they read your book?” He does it to distract. A transparent attempt at doing anything but continuing to talk about all of the things Daniel has managed to glean from him in the mere twelve hours he’s had access to the bond between them.

Daniel lets out a surprised snort of laughter and settles back down into the crook of Armand’s neck for a third time. “Depends. Am I gonna be blitzed out on your blood the whole time I’m writing?”

If Armand had a choice, Daniel wouldn’t write it at all. He won’t, if Armand can find some way to manage it. “My blood likely won’t always make you feel this way. This is the gift at work.”

“New unattainable high to chase. Got it.”

“Are you truly not tired?” He should be, by now. The sun will kill them without mercy, but it warns them first. The inherent understanding of its positionality is vital, weariness a signal to bed down into the safety of the dark. “Do you feel the pull of it?”

Daniel is quiet for a moment, considering. “Not really. I mean… yeah, nope.”

“Perhaps… it comes with time. I cannot recall.” His frustration bleeds into his voice. “Come.”

“Maybe I just can’t sleep because you refuse to settle down, yeah?” Daniel grumbles in protest but lets himself be dragged from bed to stand by the window.

“Perhaps your body needs to feel it, first. A learned response.”

“You want me to– of course you do. Don’t know why I’m even asking.”

Armand doesn’t respond, just holds out his hand until Daniel gives him one of his own. This would be easier with curtains, but the stiff blinds are far more reliable in the long run. He considers for a moment, then pulls one back just far enough to shove Daniel’s hand behind it and into the light.

Daniel stifles his cry admirably. At first.

It has been many years since the sun burned Armand. He still remembers the feeling, the visceral pain of it. The way the sun rips with teeth, pries up skin with fingernails. It doesn’t simply burn, it eats. Devours. When they die by the sun, they die the way they kill.

Daniel could pull his hand away. Armand wouldn’t stop him. He lets Armand hold it there anyways, the good sufferer that Armand knows he can be. He need not be, for this.

Armand pulls Daniel’s hand back for him when it’s clear he will not. It feels the sun for only a few seconds, but the skin of Daniel’s hand emerges cratered with blisters. It shakes. Daniel doesn’t look at it, but at Armand with his mirror image eyes. Armand bites into the meat of his own palm, spreads blood across the broken skin of Daniel’s. A balm to a wound. It won’t heal it the way it would if it were just a cut, but it will help the pain.

“You understand?” Armand asks.

“I mean. Yeah. Definitely not the way to go.” Daniel lifts Armand’s hand to his mouth, tongue dragging across his skin. Surprising restraint. Perhaps habit, the muscle memory of drinking before he had the teeth for it. It brings with it a brief, distracting spike of pleasure. “Still not feeling the inescapable urge to nap, though.”

  Of course, that would be ideal and ideal has not been the trajectory of Armand’s life thus far. Why should it be owed to the extension of it, either? Daniel, punished for Armand’s sins as if his own punishments were not enough. He swallows it down.

Now that they’re standing, he’s far more cognizant of what a mess they are. The bedding, too. “Come then, if you aren’t tired.”

There’s no tub in the ensuite, but the shower is spacious and far more modern than the rest of the house. There are times for nostalgia, and there are times where he would like to enjoy the advances that have been made in the current century. This is certainly the latter.

He runs the water and doesn’t wait for Daniel before stepping in. The loss of contact spawns a tangible ache in his chest. The return of it, Daniel slipping in to press his chest to Armand’s back and wind arms around him, is an instantaneous relief.

“I’m gonna wonder some shit out loud, and you’re not going to make it the end of the world if you don’t know why, yeah?” Daniel’s voice is low and warm in his ear, makes it impossible not to sway back into his touch. There has always been push and pull between them, even when Daniel was barely a man, still uncertain of everything except his own desire.

Today, that push and pull is constant. Flips like a coin spinning in the air, lands one way only to be tossed again and again. He needs it to stay still, more than he needs it to be one way or another.

“I don’t make things the end of the world I just–”

“Bullshit.”

It does get harder to think of anything at all when Daniel’s mouth is on his neck. On the curve of his shoulder. At the top of his spine. The water circles the drain, tinged pink. Daniel’s wounded hand grips his hip hard enough that it must hurt. The other laces through Armand’s, folds it across his chest.

“You’d feel as good as I do right now if you just let yourself,” Daniel says, conversational. “I can tell, because every so often you forget to self-flagellate and you do feel good.”

“I don’t–”

“You don’t what? Self-flagellate? Of course you do, you beat the shit out of yourself.” Daniel’s fingers dig into Armand’s hip. He knows they’ll pull a temporary bruise, gets a little lost inside that idea. If he pushes harder, maybe it’ll last. If his nails dig in, catch bone. “That’s part of why the pain helps, isn’t it? Lets you leave it to someone else to do the punishing.”

For all the time he’s spent in the exchange of pain and pleasure and power, he can’t say he’s lingered much on the reasoning. It’s a lifeline. When he finds it, he grabs it, no matter what form it takes. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

Daniel’s fingers turn gentle. Barely a sensation beneath the stream of the shower. “Yeah, here’s the thing. I don’t want to punish you.”

Armand huffs a laugh, “That’s a lie, Daniel. It’s not been so very long since I was in your mind that you can convince me of that.”

“Okay. Here. I don’t want to punish you here.”

Here in the metaphorical sense, he assumes. Not here in the shower or here in the house or here in this country. Here, with familiar hands on bare skin, Daniel half-hard against him. “You’re under no obligation to cause me pain.”

“That’s not what I said.” It’s hard to read Daniel without looking at his face, but he’s afraid of what he keeps finding there. Afraid Daniel will keep noticing. “Pain for pleasure? Of course. Pain to make things quiet? Sure. But don’t make me a proxy for your own self disgust.”

He wants to argue that he hasn’t, that he isn’t, but he cannot say with certainty.

“Okay. I won’t.” He concedes. He turns, presses Daniel against the glass. Holds him there when the swiftness of the motion has him slipping. “What is pain for you, then?”

Daniel grins, wide and shameless because why should he have any? When has he ever?

“It’s always been pleasure for me. I blame you for that.” There’s no anger in it, only warm amusement.

“I was far from the first person to cause you pain.”

“I was twenty,” Daniel counters.

“Twenty in San Francisco. In the seventies.”

This earns him a shrug, another unbothered grin. Time has dulled the true pains of those years for Daniel. Armand knows it was not so easy as he would like to pretend. By the time they met, Daniel had done far uglier things to sate his cravings than tolerate Armand’s presence.

Daniel interrupts his stream of thought. “Lots of unpleasant encounters, less than courteous blowjobs, yeah. But pain like you’re getting at? Not so much. I’d have let you do just about anything to me with the belief that you’d make sure it felt good back then.”

 He doesn’t know what to do with that information. With any of what he’s gleaned in the last few hours. And now? He wants to ask. What would you let me do to you now?

“Why are you so willing to tell me these things, now?”

“Good question.” Daniel kisses him and Armand assumes it’s designed to distract, is surprised when he pulls way to answer long minutes later. “Half of it has to be the blood, I’m sure. I feel like – this feels like it isn’t really happening. Other half? Instant gratification.”

“How?”

“I feel the words land. On you, I mean. Spent a lot of years trying to figure out what reaction the things I said would elicit.”

The journalist and his curiosity. He doesn’t even need his questions answered, now. He’ll be a dangerous thing when he masters the mind gift. He’s a dangerous thing in this moment.

“Were these your wonderings?” Armand asks, recalling the thread.

Daniel looks briefly confused then shakes his head. “Got sidetracked.”

“You could speak them now.” He still doesn’t want to hear them, and he still cannot promise Daniel the reaction he wants, but perhaps it’s better they have these conversations while Daniel’s emotions are still tidily muted.

“Oh, I have your permission?” Daniel lets out a sound caught up somewhere between snort and scoff, flipping off the tap. He leaves Armand with little option but to follow him out of the shower or suffer the strange new ache that comes from separation. It must dull with time, or he would have heard more tell of it, would have remembered. Time is something they have in great quantity now, and Daniel certainly doesn’t seem to might when Armand uses the towel as an excuse to touch him. There is no need to solve everything at once.

Daniel breaks away only long enough to rifle through his duffle bag and pull sweatpants on, settling against the headboard and tugging Armand down with him. He’s doing a lot of that, today. Uncharacteristic in his own bids for contact. It warms something in Armand’s chest as he settles into Daniel’s arms.

The coin suspends in air, no side chosen, no constant motion. It will soon return to movement as all things do, but for now it settles into balance. Is held in stasis by the force of shared will.   

“Is the eye thing normal?” Daniel doesn’t give any warning, just launches into his questioning headfirst.  

“Is our kind normal at all?” He hedges.  

“You know what I mean.”

He was right, unfortunately, about Armand’s reaction to not having any clear answer. He again wishes that there was someone to call. To ask. He feels inadequate. Foolish for spending all of these years despising the idea so much that he never bothered to learn anything about the process. As if knowing nothing would make him strong enough to resist participation.

“I’ve not heard of it. And I don’t know why it’s happening.”

“Why does it upset you?”

“It doesn’t.” Upset is the wrong word. He’s honest on a technicality, his alacrity hinging upon semantics.

Not worth the triumph, of course, because Daniel responds in kind. “Sorry, you’re right. Upset isn’t a feeling. What I get is a mixture of horror, disgust, guilt, and–”

“You will not punish me, but you will weaponize the bond between us.” He’d like to sound angrier, but he can’t really bring himself to be. He’s settled into the slow-moving flow of Daniel’s emotional river now. It’s easy enough to surrender to, with his ear pressed to Daniel’s chest, Daniel’s fingers stroking through his hair.

“And you never weaponized your own power against me, right?” A lazy sort of bitterness, a half-hearted tug on a curl as if Daniel can’t even be bothered with this level of conflict. Armand tries to recall if he’s ever seen him like this. All the bliss of his drugged, youthful self paired with the easy precision of the man he eventually became without the drugs. Without the blood.

Both, now.

“I weaponized my power for you Daniel.”

“I really do think you believe that,” Daniel allows. “Answer the question.”

He almost says he doesn’t know, but he has an idea. Enough of one that it would be a lie. “It’s not enough to have made you a monster. I’ve made you one in my image.”

“And you’re uniquely horrible among all others.” The sarcasm is readily apparent.

“Do you not think so?”

Daniel is quiet a moment. His heart beats steady under Armand’s ear. “I don’t know if you’re going to be relieved or offended by the answer but… not really. You’re weird as fuck in other ways, but the evil thing seems pretty par for the course. Might need a broader sample size to be sure.”

That sounds just a touch too close to an idea for a sequel to a book Armand has no intentions of ever seeing published. “Don’t search out other vampires.”

“See, you’ve got the overcontrolling maker thing down already,” Daniel quips. “And you said you had no idea what you were doing.”

“They’ll kill you now. You’re an infant in our world.” The last time he was here, there was no coven. Only strays running rampant. He doubts that the growth of the vampire population has done anything but destabilize things further.

Daniel, foolish as he remains, doesn’t show any signs of fear. “You would let them kill me?”

He’s already worked out a plan for clearing the city, but he won’t give Daniel the satisfaction of knowing. “I can protect you from fledglings. From vampires born in the past few centuries. I am not invincible.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

“Am I?”

“Just because I inherited your eyes doesn’t mean I’m like you in the first place.” Daniel drags them both back to the topic at hand. Perhaps Armand is sharing in the high – neither of them can seem to keep the thread untangled for longer than a few moments. “My daughter has mine and she doesn’t so much as drink at parties. Volunteers at fucking soup kitchens.”

Armand tries to remember whether Daniel has told him anything about his daughters before. It seems an inopportune time to point it out. It’s doubtful that Daniel will be anything but defensive if he thinks Armand takes interest.

“I am more like my maker than I thought I was.” Armand hears himself say it, but can’t figure out where the words have come from. Certainly not his own mind, his own chest. He searches them for falseness and can only find the truth.

Daniel stills. Doesn’t even breathe. A beat, and then another, and then another, before he says, “We should unpack the hell out of that. But we aren’t gonna do it now.”

He has the inexplicable urge to thank Daniel, but he swallows it down. None of this would be rising up at all if it weren’t for Daniel. He doesn’t need to be grateful to him – he should be angry with him.

Instead he’s just drifting, drifting, drifting.

Until Daniel grows restless, shifts his limbs, flexes his fingers. Breathes out in loud exhale.  

“You’re hungry,” Armand murmurs. “Already.”

“I’m never not craving it. It hasn’t changed now, it’s just–”

“Louder.” He shifts, offers his wrist. “We will hunt when the sun sets. Drink, for now.”

Daniel doesn’t hesitate, and Armand doesn’t expect him to. Restraint is a human thing, and Daniel is no longer human. His fangs sink into Armand’s skin and this time, without the distraction of worry or horror, Armand lets himself feel the pleasure of it.

He shifts his head to watch, to see the bob of Daniel’s throat as he swallows. He imagines he can follow its path through Daniel’s body. His own blood pumping through Daniel’s veins, keeping his heart going, keeping his mind alive. It’s a powerful thing, this exchange. What the blood is given for matters, how it is given matters. Or at least, he always imagines that it does.

“It will make you strong,” he murmurs. “My blood is good for that, at least. It’s strong.”

He will need to hunt at sunset too. Will need to replenish what he lets Daniel take now, what Daniel took before.

“It was always yours,” he says. “It was always yours and now it always will be.”

With a shudder and a quiet groan, Daniel tears himself away. Catches one rivulet of blood with his tongue, takes Armand’s hand in his own to hold it again against his chest. “Romantic bullshit.”

“I think you enjoy it,” Armand says, too lazy to stretch up and kiss Daniel as he’d like to. He settles for pressing a kiss to their clasped hands. “Now sleep beloved. I’ll keep you safe.”

Daniel doesn’t lay down, just shifts his weight against the pillows behind him and holds Armand a little tighter. Like it’s he who must do the protecting. “For the record,” Daniel whispers, half drowsy with exhaustion that’s finally found him, “I still wouldn’t want anyone else for my maker.”

Armand listens to the beat of Daniel’s heart as it slows and slows. Listens to Daniel’s soft breathing as he drifts off to sleep. Keeps vigil as Daniel closes his eyes upon the last day of one life and the first day of the next.

Chapter Text

Daniel wakes just before dusk after managing a few hours of sleep at most.

Armand is decidedly not going to worry about that or anything else. The time has given him space to sort things out again. All thoughts in their proper places, all emotions carefully assigned to each new revelation and packaged away. It’s easier to do without the noise of Daniel’s emotions winding through his own, making it hard to know who a feeling belongs to. He wonders if he will feel Daniel’s emotions if he dreams.

“Hey,” Daniel says, coming to with his fingers still twisted up in Armand’s hair and carefully untangling them so he can rub the sleep from his eyes. “Should I be saying good morning now, or?”

Of all the things to concern himself with, Armand shouldn’t be surprised Daniel chooses semantics. He huffs a laugh and shifts, sitting up on his heels and stretching out his limbs. It would take far longer than a few hours to generate any real stiffness in his muscles, but it still feels good. Like the memory of satisfaction is enough to become the real thing. “Do you feel rested?”

“Not sure. I mostly just feel–”

“Hungry. Yes.” That much Armand can parse readily. Daniel’s hunger makes his own seem inconsequential, looms large over everything. “You’ll have to wait; the sun isn’t down yet. How is your hand?”

He already knows it looks better, of course. Watching it heal was something close to meditative; thoughts in proper places, tissue knitted together, feelings neatly packaged. Daniel flexes it, open, closed, open again. There’s a faint tremor there still, and Armand doesn’t want to be the first to acknowledge it. “Feels like I’d never know you shoved it in a giant furnace.”

“Good,” Armand smiles placidly. “There’s a body that must be disposed of. I’ll deal with it and by the time I’m finished it should be dark enough for us to leave.”

“I can clean up my own–”

“I’m not calling into question your ability, Daniel. Only your ability to do so in the sun.” He attempts to sound less condescending, he absolutely does. But the scowl he receives in return tells him he’s failed. Hungry, and almost certainly no longer high, either. Angry too, though the reason for it could be attributed to so many things that he doesn’t begin to make a guess at why.

Pleasant while it lasted. He moves to get out of bed and Daniel stops him with a hand around his wrist.

“What?” Armand asks, sharper than he intends.

“Don’t make it about you. It’s not.” Daniel looks like he’s waiting for some sort of confirmation that Armand can’t give him. “The shit mood. It’s not about you. Not everything is.”

“Thank you, Daniel. Duly noted.” He isn’t in the mood for another analysis of his own murky emotions, nor does he think Daniel will have the patience to put off eating for any longer than he needs to. He takes his arm back from Daniel and slips out the door.

---

Daniel paces in the bedroom for the hour it takes Armand to handle the body. He can hear his bare feet on the floor, back and forth and back and forth. The anxious buzzing of his nerves, the rattling of his bones, the need, all felt within the confines of Armand’s own body, too.  

It would have been wise to wait a few days to turn Daniel, until they were settled here and could arrange for smaller comforts. Coated windows. Blood donations.  

But then, it’s not been twenty-four hours since Daniel drained a good fraction of Armand’s blood and the entirety of an average-sized adult. Armand hadn’t anticipated this sort of hunger, something beyond the realm of average need. More than once, he must remind himself of his intention not to worry about anything today. Certainly not where Daniel can feed on it that emotion in place of food.

He opens the door and Daniel is just on the other side. He takes Armand’s face in both hands, kisses him soundly, and something settles inside Armand’s chest. Inside both of their chests, maybe. The need for contact only made readily apparent when they return to it.

A piece of me is with you, he thinks.

Some other time, maybe he will say it out loud. Will press Daniel back against the bed and show him where in his body he thinks part of him lives now. At the moment, his own annoyance still sits alongside his relief, and Daniel is still angry. And hungry.

“Let’s go,” he says, lacing fingers through Daniel’s.

“Gonna call an Uber or something?”

“I thought we’d take the car, but if you’d like to wait then–”

“A car? Where the fuck was the car?” Daniel slides on sneakers with one hand still in Armand’s, and as determined as Armand is to remain upset with him, it’s painfully endearing. As is Daniel dragging them both backwards just as they step through the door to needlessly snag his jacket off the hook.

“There’s an outbuilding in the back it was locked in. It would be unwise to live in a house so far from the city proper with no mode of transportation, no?”

Daniel rolls his eyes, squeezes his hand, only drops contact long enough for them both to get into the car. It curves over Armand’s thigh when they’re settled, transparently possessive as if there is anyone here to witness it. Perhaps it’s meant for Armand to witness. He can never quite decide if he has always loved Daniel this much and had forgotten, or if this feeling has become something more altogether. He can’t imagine finding the strength to let him go now, to look him in the eye and find a stranger looking back.

But then, he no longer has need to find it.

“Do you even have a license?” Daniel interrupts his musings with a look of skepticism, eyebrows raised while Armand turns the ignition and adjusts the mirrors.

“The correct question would be how many licenses do you have?”

“And the answer?”

“Fifteen forgeries, four legitimate cards that have since expired, and one valid driver’s license issued by the government of Great Britain.” He hasn’t driven in years, but that’s of no consequence. It’s not a difficult skill to recall when he needs it.

“Right. And the last name on those documents is what, exactly?”

It’s a clear night, the moon hanging low and nearly full in the sky, the road winding towards the city. Daniel’s leg is shaking, a perpetual motion in his peripheral. He’s tempted to pull the car over and offer Daniel a vein just to save him the discomfort. But that’s all it is. Discomfort, not suffering. The thirst will settle in time and Daniel will have to learn to tolerate it.  

He feels the leather of the steering wheel, the stitches on its inside edge. “I do not have a surname, but I have a variety of aliases. Louis remains fond of using his full name when he can get away with it, but I have no such attachment.”

They’re back to names again. He clenches his teeth, waits for a snide comment that never comes. Daniel’s thumb makes circles on his leg, slow and out of time with his endless movement. Vaguely soothing.

“Yeah well, not all of us get fancy French family names, right?” Daniel turns on the radio, reaching at an awkward angle to turn the dial with his free hand. He flips through stations, settles on classic rock after going through all of them thrice. It plays for a grand total of nineteen seconds before he turns it back off again.

They sit in silence for a heavy eternity that by Armand’s count is one minute and twenty-four seconds long before Daniel bites out his question; “When does it all stop being so fucking overwhelming?”

He considers the question. Widens his senses to take in the sounds, smells, and sensations around him as they drive. The feeling of the steering wheel, of his clothes on his skin, his tongue in his own mouth, Daniel’s hand on his leg. The whine of the engine, the tires on the pavement, scraps of noises from their surroundings there and gone as they outpace them. The car smells of dust, leather polish, detergent, blood. Chemical, like the cleaning products are breaking down into component parts.

He could lie, but Daniel would only guess anyways. “It never goes away entirely, but you’ll get better at managing it. Parsing what’s important reflexively.”

“How?”

“Time. Practice.” When Daniel heaves an exaggerated sigh, he makes an attempt at elaborating. “Take driving. When you first began to drive, you had to think about everything all the time, yes? Your foot on the pedal, the mirrors, the speed limit, other vehicles, your blind spots, the directions. And then you did it, over and over, and it became automatic.”

“Right. First of all, you’re going like 30 miles over said speed limit so maybe a little less automatic would be ideal,” Daniel points out, hand lifting for a brief moment to point at the speedometer. “Second of all… a car metaphor? Really?”

“Forgive me. Would you like another? Perhaps it’s like reading a book. Typing. Going to the airport and getting on a plane. Washing the dishes. Maybe you would prefer–”

“Okay, I get it,” Daniel interjects. “So it’s like life.”

“It is life, Daniel. A month from now, maybe two, you’ll forget you ever heard things as you did, saw things as you did. Over time even your memories will be recolored by your current existence, rewritten to be imagined in this body, this life. Imperfect but mundane.” He speeds up just for the sake of the eye roll it earns him from Daniel in his peripheral. “Your mind wants a return to status quo, and in lieu of the old one, it will invent one anew.”

The suburban road unbends swiftly to city proper. They’ll work inward, find where the downtown is lively, where its alleyways are dark. Daniel’s body is wound tight next to his, readied like a compressed spring.

“Great. More memory fuckery.”

Armand has to look at him to be certain he means it in jest. The slow boiling anger has remained since he woke, makes it hard to pick out any new emotion that comes to sit alongside it. Mind reading is useful, provides empirical data with which to respond accordingly. The bond is as much a hinderance as it is a help, as like to reading minds as tarot is to mathematics.

Armand picks a side street somewhere far off enough that they won’t be noticed, near enough that they won’t have to walk for long to find people. “We’ll stick to what’s simple, for now. Pick people lingering at the edges, who–”

“Won’t be missed yeah.” Daniel is impatient, isn’t listening. Or he is listening, but he’s only listening to his own hunger. Armand parks, leaves the car, leaves Daniel’s touch for long enough to miss it. That number appears to be calculable in milliseconds.

Daniel doesn’t hesitate to follow suit. He also doesn’t reach out to close the distance again.

“Without access to your mind, I do not know how swiftly it will take to begin entering others,” Armand speaks conversationally, begins down the sidewalk. He anticipates that Daniel will be quite proficient, if only because it is in his nature to pry minds open, but there’s no use speaking aloud what are only guesses. “I have not yet had the time to open my mind and feel for the presence of others of my– of our kind– here. So, I would recommend you do not experiment yet for fear of casting too wide a net.”

“Good old-fashioned creepy stalking only then, got it.” Flippant. Everything is such a clever joke to Daniel, when he’s in a mood like this.

Armand resists the urge to tell him to take this seriously, if only for the certainty that saying so would guarantee Daniel does the opposite. “The woman last night screamed. You must avoid that in public.”

“No, I thought I’d just see how much noise I could make, draw a few cops, start a chase.” Unnecessarily sarcastic, in Armand’s opinion. It’s not as if he hasn’t seen these mistakes made before. He’s killed fledglings for their inability to learn discretion. “Are you gonna eat too?”

“Perhaps. After.” He should. He’s planned on it.

“You should,” Daniel echoes things he cannot hear, and Armand finds his mood temporarily thawed by the insistence.

He chews at the inside of his cheek, slips hands into his pockets. Daniel is a presence at his right side, too far for true contact but close enough to feel the movement of the air around him. “It has only been a few days.”

“And yet, you were healing slow as hell yesterday and that was before you gave me more blood.” Daniel is correct with a frequency that isn’t good for his ego, Armand decides.

“One thing at a time.”

---

It doesn’t take Daniel long because he’s too hungry to be choosy and has no real context for what each choice entails anyways. Armand refuses him the first two he points out, one drunk, one about to be pleasantly high on an overlarge dose of benzodiazepines. It’s convenient in that he can teach Daniel how to smell both, as hesitant as he is to jumpstart what’s bound to become another phase of youthful exploration.

The third is a man Daniel nods tilts his chin towards is in his thirties, leaned up against a signpost and scrolling absently on his phone. He’ll do well enough.

Daniel watches him, and Armand watches Daniel. When he offers no protest, Daniel begins to hone in. Outside amongst the general populace, the changes are made much clearer. He moves with an ease he has not in a long time, a body cooperating with his inborn confidence rather than working against it. He walks now the same way he fucks – a certainty in his bones, a trust in his own ability to take up exactly the right amount of space.

He’s always been charming, but it’s been years since Armand had occasion to witness him using that charm for anything but intentionally antagonizing one or both of them in Dubai.

Armand keeps his distance, listens to the thread of the conversation via the man’s mind. Unsurprisingly, he finds Daniel handsome. Keeps getting distracted by the flash of Daniel’s lake water eyes, the safe warmth in his smile. It’s a shame Daniel isn’t in the man’s mind himself to receive the compliments.

As it is, Daniel asks questions. It’s rare, Armand thinks, for someone to take so much interest in a stranger these days. He used to think it in the seventies when he watched Daniel in crowds, and it’s only magnified by the isolation humans experience now. This man is aching to be heard, longing for someone to care.

And Daniel does care. He’s all animated curiosity and genuine interest, authenticity helping his cause just as much as any mind control would.

“I’d love to hear more about that,” Daniel is saying. “There’s a bar down the street, drinks on me. Unless you’re waiting for someone?”

Attention is currency. Daniel’s is single-minded and worth as much as gold. Sure, the man hesitates. Considers how strange it is to agree to have a drink with a man so many years his senior, as if the only reason to meet a stranger is to let them fuck you out behind the dumpster later. He has a ring on his hand, a picture of his wife on his phone’s lock screen. He wants that attention, wants someone to listen.

He agrees because he was always going to agree, as inevitable as if fate had written it. Armand follows, still at a healthy distance, while Daniel leads him down increasingly less populated streets. He keeps up a steady stream of questioning that has the man pleasantly distracted from noticing their trajectory.

It happens quickly, when they step into the shadow of a tall building and outside of the reach of a streetlamp. Daniel shoves the man into a narrow alley and covers his mouth and nose to stifle a yell. He’s stronger than the man, body pressing him to the brick, not flinching at the half-hearted kicks that collide with his shins. The man can’t get enough air to stay focused on effective struggle, and Daniel is keeping up the questioning even as he goes unanswered. Making guesses, coming to conclusions.

It’s alright, Tom. You’ve got life insurance, yeah? Your kid’ll be set for college. How old did you say she was? Ten?

The fight goes out of the man, perhaps in response to the conversation, perhaps only in response to the flash of fangs in that safe, warm smile.

Armand ducks into the alley and for the first time in an hour, meets Daniel’s eyes, has that smile directed at him.  

And then it happens slowly. Daniel takes the time to find a vein, to sink fangs in far more tidily than he had yesterday. A quick study. Armand feels a strange flare of pride he has no right to lay any real claim to.

Daniel isn’t cruel; he does not bite for pain and he does not hesitate needlessly. He drinks and drinks, drags death out in a gentle, well-timed eternity as the man drifts into unconsciousness. His stories play out in his dying mind, the last flare of neurons being utilized to feed ravenous curiosity.

The mind gift is second nature to Daniel, then.

Armand is not surprised.

There’s no sentimentality when Daniel is finished. He drops the man’s body with a thud and turns to lean against the brick beside him, looking at Armand with blood still on his lips, his chin, his teeth, his tongue.

For a moment, Armand feels caught by him. Held just like prey, trapped under the blue green of his sharpened eyes. He, too, would follow Daniel to dark places. Would answer his searching questions, would give Daniel his stories like food in famine.

Hasn’t he already?

Then Daniel is reaching for him, or he is reaching for Daniel, and stories are nothing in comparison to mouths. To the push pull of touch between them, the easy slide of two bodies fitting into place just the way that they belong. Armand licks the last of the blood from Daniel’s face, from where it gathers in the corners of his lips, from the indents of his teeth.

Daniel makes soft sounds of pleasure and Armand rewards them with his own blood, drawn from his tongue by a slow drag over one of Daniel’s fangs. He worries at Daniel’s lip until it, too, bleeds. They bleed and bleed and it’s tender lightning. There is a newness to everything now, perhaps brought on by the new way Daniel experiences the world. Everything is rendered in sharper focus.

It’s an effort to pull away and when he manages it, he doesn’t go far.

“Are you sated now, beloved?”

The flush of new blood sits close to the surface of Daniel’s skin, has turned his cheeks pink. When the question sinks in past the pleasure, the rush of desire fades back, leaves something uncertain in its wake. “I should be, right?”

“Are you?” Armand counters, repeats. Appetite is an uncertain thing, but had he considered it more he might have realized far earlier about that Daniel’s would likely present itself this way. Rarely fully satisfied in his old life, perhaps to be mirrored in this one.

“Fuck.” Daniel scrubs a hand over his face, the other fisted at his side.

“You’re angry,” Armand says, fingers reaching out to take the hand, to loosen his fingers. “Why?”

Daniel only pulls his hand back, straightens up from the wall of the building, nudges at the body that lays by their feet. “What do we do with him?”

“Daniel–”

“Not now. Please.” It’s both harsh and pleading.

And how is he to deny Daniel anything he asks for, from now to the end of forever, when he has not managed to deny him even forever itself?

“Alright. Alright, lets go then.”

---

Daniel’s second kill is as smooth as his first. He drains the woman partway before his body must finally tell him he’s had enough. They could perhaps wipe her mind, leave her here in this alley to recover, but it wouldn’t guarantee her safety anyways. Armand still needs to feed and he’s less than inclined to prolong the night by going through the process of finding another victim for himself. It already feels as if its hovering on the edge of ruin.

When Daniel offers with an outstretched hand, he accepts. Slides his mouth over the bite Daniel has left behind, sinks fangs in himself so that there are four tidy punctures all in a row. It’s pretty, he thinks later when he pulls away. There’s something vaguely romantic about how neatly the imprint of his fangs fits between the imprint of Daniel’s.

Blood drunk and satisfied he points it out and Daniel huffs a laugh, tells him he’s hopeless, kisses him hard just as the moon washes light into the alley where they stand. Daniel treats hunting as foreplay with enthusiasm, but seems disinclined to go so far as to actually fuck near the bodies. This is, of course, an acceptable place to draw the line. It just also happens to leave Armand breathless and distracted by the time Daniel pulls away.

“Now what?” Daniel asks. “Do you still need to…?”

“No, I’ll be fine.” Armand could drink more, certainly. But he doesn’t need to, doesn’t feel the urge to. The idea of going without Daniel is presently unappealing, but the idea of hunting in front of him still feels strange. It’s one thing to act as the proxy for Daniel’s decisions. It’s another to let him see the way he kills when he is left to his own preferences.

Of course, he has seen it, Armand recalls. He’s been on the other end of it.

“Let’s go home.”

---

Daniel is quiet until they reach the car. The sort of quiet that comes with a price, that has a weight. It’s measurable. Armand starts the car but doesn’t move to pull away from the curb. Daniel doesn’t touch him, and it aches twice over.

“When I was nine, I found this field mouse. A scrawny, dirty little thing.” Daniel says it like he’s talking to himself. Like he’s recounting it for a tape recorder. Armand can count on one hand the number of times he’s heard Daniel talk about his childhood at length. The biography, he supposes, must have some mention in it. He never read it.

He waits for Daniel to continue, twists in the driver’s seat so he can look at him. Daniel stares straight ahead out the windshield.

“Put it in a shoebox on the porch, was gonna go check on it after dinner and give it some food. But my dad was– who he was– and it was a shit night. Got yelled at for complaining about doing the dishes, I think. Or maybe I didn’t clean my room?” Daniel’s brown creases, reaching for a memory that must seem as if it was lifetimes ago.

Armand tries to picture Daniel as a boy. He’d like to see a picture, one day.

“I didn’t remember about the mouse until I was in bed. I could have snuck outside. Dad was passed out by then, probably wouldn’t have even gotten in trouble if I told Mom– I just didn’t care.” Daniel’s hand is in a fist on his leg. Armand wants to reach out, to take it, but the gap has yawned too wide now. He does not know how to close it. “Could’ve checked in the morning too, but I wanted to see my friends before school.”

Silence stretches out, as if the story is finished. He knows it isn’t.

“When did you check on it?” Armand finally asks. Daniel won’t turn his head to look at him, just stares through the glass with nothing in his expression that gives anything away.

He shrugs one shoulder, relaxes his hand so that it lays flat on his leg, and says, “Never. Dad found it dead two weeks later and I didn’t even feel bad.”

“You didn’t kill it on purpose,” Armand says, as if Daniel should need the reassurance now with four bodies to his name.

“No. It just died because my own shit was more important,” Daniel confirms bitterly. “For ages I felt so bad about not feeling bad. Maybe I still do. It’s almost worse that I didn’t care at all, isn’t it?”

Armand is inclined to think in metaphor. Daniel thinks in stories, in the web of connections between them. Sometimes the two overlap, but today Armand isn’t following. “You were nine.”

“I’m not now.”

“Ah,” Armand murmurs, understanding coming too late. There’s something in Daniel that takes the shape of guilt, though perhaps he would not name it that if asked. “This is about the ones tonight.”

Daniel huffs a humorless laugh, just a soft exhale through his nose. “You think?”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

 “I don’t feel bad about them, you know? I just feel bad about not feeling bad. I know their names, their lives, and I don’t care that they’re dead because of me.” Daniel finally looks at him, almost plaintive, and this is a moment where Armand would have read his mind before. Where Daniel would have welcomed it, so that Armand might understand.

He cannot. He only has the not-guilt-but-like-guilt emotion he feels rolling off Daniel in waves, and his own very-like-guilt-probably-actually-guilt in his chest. They aren’t the same thing.

“Are they not the same thing? Does the reason you feel bad matter that much?”

“Probably not,” Daniel allows. “Still gonna do it anyways.”

“So why feel bad at all?” Armand does reach for Daniel then. Draws fingers across the rough stubble of his jaw. “You didn’t kill for no reason. That part is important.”

Daniel leans into his touch, shuts his eyes for a moment. Whatever he’s lingering on, whatever is gnawing at him from the inside out, he doesn’t share it with Armand. Instead, he presses his lips briefly to Armand’s fingertips and says, “It’s too loud here.”

And so it is. The sounds of traffic, of televisions in the houses next to them, of people chattering and electricity buzzing through the powerlines. It lacks the bustle of New York but it’s far from quiet. “Close your eyes.”

He puts the car in drive, pulls away from the curb, curves his hand over the base of Daniel’s neck.

“Why?”

“There are two ways to deal with the overwhelm when you cannot selectively block it.” Even Armand falls back on them at times. Simple, human processes. “The first is by removing a sense. The easiest, of course, is your sight. You can also stop breathing to limit your sense of smell but–”

“That feels fucking weird.”

“It will, for a while.” He strokes fingers over Daniel’s skin, feels him relax into the touch. “The second is to focus on one sense. To narrow it down.”

“Pain.” Daniel catches on, fills in the gaps. A quick study. Another brief flash of pride. This time he doesn’t think it escapes Daniel’s notice, glances in his direction to see the curve of a smile on his face.

“It doesn’t have to be pain; pain just works well. Any sensation will do.”

“Okay, but–”

“Hush. It won’t work at all if you keep adding to the noise.”

Daniel opens his mouth as if to argue, likely just on principle, but Armand’s nails are on his scalp now. Not sharp enough to cut or to hurt. Just enough for Daniel to feel them there, small points of pressure to draw focus. His eyes fall shut, his breathing slows.

His body settles down, and only in their absence does Armand recognize the anxiety, the ache, the noise. He resists the urge to chastise Daniel for it now, just drives home with one hand in Daniel’s hair and the other on the steering wheel, his own breath slowing to match.

---

“You should tell me when it gets like that,” Armand says when they get inside.

“Like what?” Daniel’s attempt at being dismissive is both unconvincing and transparent. He kicks off his shoes.

“Too much.” Armand drops the keys on the table and studies Daniel for a moment before taking his hand. “Come. I’ve already been negligent.”

“Imagine if you asked me to go places with you instead of making demands while you’re already dragging me there,” Daniel grouses even as he lets Armand tug him to the bathroom.

“Sit,” Armand gestures to the counter. “And don’t pretend that you mind when I tell you to do things.”

Daniel does as he’s told with a sigh that’s clearly intended to tell Armand just how much he does not want to. He’s got his gaze fixed on Armand though, a mixture of curiosity and anticipation that Armand knows well enough to read without any extra data input. The razor is still there where they left it what feels like weeks ago. The towel. The shaving cream.

Daniel spreads the latter over his face when Armand hands him the can. Armand runs the water, steps into the space Daniel makes for him between his knees. Muscle memory. Sweet boy, still as a statue, trusting as a lamb when he brings the blade to his skin. Decades haven’t changed that. Centuries probably couldn’t, now.

Daniel could not trust him with his mind, may not always trust him with his heart, but with his body? That’s solidified, concrete, instinctive.

“If you don’t tell me when it gets to be too much, I can’t help you.” He does his best to keep his tone neutral, makes his voice quiet.

He draws the blade over Daniel’s jaw in a slow drag. Daniel waits until he rinses it under the tap before he speaks his rebuttal. “You don’t need to help me.”

“Yes I do. It’s my– you’re mine, Daniel.” It’s frustrating, not having the right words for it. What was true before he turned Daniel has only become truer now. “My lover, my fledgling. I have to know so I can teach you, and the only way for me to know now is if you tell me.”

Again, repetition of a pattern; Daniel speaks only when Armand lifts the blade. Armand decides just how long he will take to do so. Push pull. Push Pull. Push. Pull.

“I’m not a child,” Daniel says.

Armand can see his own face darken in the mirror. He wonders if he’s always been so obvious with Daniel, or if it’s only now that all his walls are left in shambles. “No. You’re not a child.”

He thinks to continue that line of thought, then thinks better of it. He presses two fingers beneath Daniel’s chin, tilts his head back. The blade drags over his throat and Daniel does not move. Even as a vampire, Armand could still kill him like this, but Daniel does not move.

And yet, he will not trust Armand with something as small as his own discomfort. Was always more able to trust Armand with things of death than he was with things of living.  

The next time he brings the razor up, Daniel wraps a hand around his wrist. Looks at him with the eyes of a shark, circling circling circling. “Were you?”

“What?”

“Were you a child?”

Armand’s chest hurts. “You’re already aware that I was twenty-seven when I was turned.”

Daniel’s voice is firm, but his touch is gentle, his thumb making tiny circles over Armand’s pulse point. “You know what I mean.”

“Then you already know the answer, so you ask to what, cause me pain?” It’s too much to look Daniel in the eyes. To see his own blink back. “To punish me for the crime of prying into your own wellbeing?”

“No. Fuck– no, I’m not trying to cause you pain.” Daniel sounds frustrated. His touch stays so gentle Armand wants to swallow the blade in his hand. “I’m trying to figure out why you’re so afraid that you’ll be like him.”

Him. Marius. He loved Marius.

He loved Marius, and the idea of speaking his name aloud to Daniel now feels like choking on razors.

“Okay.” Daniel must sense the rising panic. It isn’t in his nature to apologize, but Armand hears it in his voice anyways. He lets go of his wrist. “I’ve had a headache since I woke up. Not a big deal, all the noise just made it–”

“That shouldn’t be happening.”

“Yeah, well.” Daniel shrugs a shoulder. “It’s not worse than the ones I was getting before.”

Before. Before, when Armand unleashed a near decade worth of memories in a single flood. He can’t figure out what to say that isn’t an apology he will not be able to mean and Daniel will not be able to believe, so he brings the blade back to Daniel’s skin.

This task has been hundreds of things to him. Has been tender. Curious. Erotic. Intimate.

Today it is a stabilizing force. Meditative. He’s careful not to miss any patches of skin, careful not to draw blood, careful not to startle Daniel when he shuts his eyes and has no way to know where the blade will go next.

Daniel doesn’t speak again until he finishes, and when he does, he does so with his arm wrapped around Armand’s waist as if he thinks he will try to leave.

“It’s not about you,” he repeats his words from earlier, and yes. Perhaps he was wise to predict that Armand would leave. He wants to. “You were right in Dubai. The drugs I used fucked with my head far more than you ever did.”

“Yes. And my blood was one of those drugs.”

“What did I say?” Daniel’s patience is thin today. His frustration simmers, his jaw muscle twitches beneath freshly shaven skin. There’s shaving cream still lingering in narrow stripes on his cheeks. Armand collects each patch with his thumb just to postpone his own answer, wiping his thumb over and over on the towel beside them until he has no excuses to remain silent.

“You said it’s not about me, but it–”

“I need it not to be, okay? I need to separate you from the addiction, from whatever the fuck it’s done to me that I have to live with.” Daniel’s free hand grips the edge of the counter, white knuckled in Armand’s peripheral. “If you want me to tell you, then that’s what I need.”

He wipes his hands on the towel again. He wants to leave, wants to be anywhere but here now that his task is finished and the distraction of it is lost to him. “So you want me to be honest with you, except when you’d like me to lie.”

For a moment, he thinks Daniel will fold to it. Will admit the incongruence in what he’s asking of Armand. Then he just shrugs, impassive, and says, “Yeah, you got it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Daniel has the good sense to look at least moderately apprehensive.

Armand doesn’t have the energy to argue about it, doesn’t even know what argument to make. And there’s the not insignificant matter of Daniel’s fingers slipping just beneath the hem of his shirt, an absentminded search for skin that he doesn’t think Daniel even notices. If he did, he would stop. Would pair his annoyance with action, his trepidation with withdrawal of contact. An argument might lose Armand that contact.

“Isn’t that what you want?” Armand asks, measured in his curiosity. “For me to be okay with what you ask of me?”

“No that’s not what I–” Daniel cuts himself off, glares. “Fuck you.”

They could fight. They could bicker, argue, say sharp and angry things that both of them will mean and neither of them will take back for all the regret they will feel about it later. It wouldn’t be the first time, would only be a return to business as usual. He doesn’t even mind fighting with Daniel, so much. Not when he can’t currently go anywhere that Armand won’t find him.

“I can’t help you with the cravings either, if you won’t talk to me about them,” he says. Perhaps in answer to the temptation, perhaps as an alternative to it. He hasn’t decided yet.

“You can’t help with them anyways.” Daniel is quick to say it. Quick enough that Armand believes he means it.

Decided, then. “Why not?”

“You’ve never had something–”

“Control me? Decide my life for me? Dictate my days and years?”

Daniel’s hand curves around the bone of his hip. His other still grips the counter. Hung up between two options. Push. Pull.

“Loneliness? Fear?” Daniel offers up his guesses, waits for Armand to refute them. He will not. “Those are different.”

“How?” He gives in to the urge to touch, hands on Daniel’s thighs, thumbs on the inner seams of his jeans. The pads of Daniel’s fingers trace over his ribs. Armand can feel Daniel’s forearm against the bare skin of his back where his shirt has ridden up. Whether it’s touch at odds with their conversation or touch an extension of it, he cannot tell. It doesn’t matter.

“That’s running away from something,” Daniel says. “Addiction is running towards. It’s chasing.”

Armand doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t want to admit that. He misses being able to slip into Daniel’s mind. To strip back the confusion that language so often adds and see meaning laid bare. The loss of it crashes like a wave on the shore, drags him out beyond where he can touch ground.

“You’ve caught it though, haven’t you?” Armand asks. His hands slide high on Daniel’s thighs, thumbs pressing to the pulse of femoral arteries. A little harder, and he could block blood flow. A little harder still, and he could pierce skin right through denim. “It’s not as if there is a shortage of blood and it’s not as if an excess of it will kill you.”

“Sure,” Daniel says. His hand finally leaves the counter, slides to Armand’s neck, finds his pulse with an ease born not of instinct but of years of familiarity. He cannot tell if their blood pulses in sync or if it only feels that way, but he imagines it as a complete circuit. Pumping through two hearts instead of one. “That’s why it needs to not be about you.”

He kisses Daniel because he still does not understand. He doesn’t know why Daniel kisses him back, but he does it with a willing tongue and a sigh of relief made palpable.

Armand lets it unknot the cord around his windpipe, lets it relax the tension that’s been building and building. His body moves, again. Not as a set of individual decisions, isolated actions, but as a whole. He never notices the stillness in himself until it passes, and he feels like a body again, rather than a thing that occupies one.  

“I’m going to regret suggesting this,” Daniel murmurs when he pulls away, “but let’s watch a movie or something.”

A peace offering. A reprieve. An easy escape hatch from a conversation Armand doesn’t want to keep having and Daniel did not want to have in the first place.

Armand doesn’t care which it is. Whatever option, it works as well as Daniel clearly intends for it to, because he’s dragging Daniel to the living room before he’s even made a conscious decision to accept it.  

Chapter Text

It’s easy to find a routine to ground themselves in so long as they tiptoe around anything that might uproot it. Armand is intimately familiar with the process, adept at keeping the balance with meticulous self-discipline.

Daniel, on the other hand, chafes within the confines of their careful truce. Swallows things down with such frequency that Armand is surprised he needs to eat anything at all when he’s feasting on his own choked back words.

They hunt. They fuck. Daniel writes when he can focus on writing, reluctantly gives in to Armand’s plea that they watch The Purge again when he cannot. It only takes a few days to arrange blood bags to take the edge off of his thirst, and while Armand thinks it might be the breaking point in their unspoken agreement, Daniel only glares at them in the refrigerator and dumps some into a cup of coffee.

He doesn’t sleep well, and he doesn’t sleep at all unless Armand joins him, so each morning at dawn Armand does just that. He cannot say he minds. He’s yet to adjust to the strangeness of having a piece of himself out of reach, out of sight.

On the fourth day, with Daniel curled around him like he will leave if he’s not held in place, Armand falls asleep for the first time in so long that he cannot quite pinpoint the last time he did.

-

His dreams are gnashing, hungry creatures. False images superimposed upon memories. Ghosts walking in places they never lived. Faces from Paris, from Venice, moving about the cottage, waiting inside Daniel’s apartment, walking along the path in the park. He’s tied to a coin that spins and spins, that cannot land, that’s made of silver or of gold or of ashes.

He is made of a warm mouth and pleasure and he is so afraid to die. In the belly of a ship. In the back rooms of a brothel. In the bed he called comfort for all his remembered youth. He is not afraid of hunger, of thirst, of pain. Only death, greater death, finite death.

A heart beats in his chest that doesn’t belong to him, that never belonged to him. He has never existed beyond mouth and pleasure and fear, or if he has, he cannot recall. But he is a good mouth. He is a good pleasure. He is a good fear.

A coin that spins and spins and cannot land. Made of his own teeth in the flesh of Daniel’s throat, his stomach, his thigh. Made of his own blood dripping into Daniel’s supplicant mouth and the beat beat beating of his own stranger heart out of time with Daniel’s. The ghosts are in the room with them but none of them will look at Armand.

They will look at Daniel.

They will look at Amadeo.

Youth spans centuries. Dies as easily here as it did there, so willing to be swallowed by eternity. Eternity, so hungry it must make mouths of them all.

And hasn’t his mouth been good? Hasn’t it been?

Daniel’s blood is honeyed, so sweet that Armand can no longer tell whose it really is. It doesn’t matter. Hunger doesn’t care, wants only to deliver what eternity asks of it. Asks of him. And he is nothing if not willing.

-

“Hey, hey now. None of that sweetheart, wake up,” Daniel’s voice in his ear draws him to consciousness. To this bedroom in Scotland, far from Paris, from Venice, from New York. Daniel’s arms are a vice around him, his body welcome and solid against his back. “I’ve got you.”

Armand is half-hard and ashamed and the room smells so strongly of blood that he has to run his tongue over his teeth to feel their blunt edges. He cannot speak, can only stare at the far corner of the bedroom and look for ghosts that do not materialize.

Daniel’s grip loosens, and Armand wonders why it had been so tight in the first place with an absent sort of curiosity. It floats through him as if down a river, passing before he’s had a moment to consider reaching out to grab hold of it.

What he does grab hold of is Daniel’s hand when he feels him shift.

“I’ve got you, I’m not going anywhere,” Daniel murmurs. Armand tries to recall if he’s ever heard Daniel’s voice like this before. Like one might talk to an animal caught in a trap before one kills it. Or frees it, perhaps. So sweet he’d submit to either end. He strokes soothing fingers over Armand’s knuckles with one hand until Armand loosens his grasp on the other. “Just trying to get a better look at what you’ve done, babe.”

I can’t show you, Armand thinks. I can’t put it in your mind.

He probably wouldn’t even if he could. Some sins are forgivable in abstract but unforgivable when witnessed.

But Daniel is only moving his hand out of the way, leaning over his shoulder, running fingers over the expanse of his chest. They catch in craters. Pain flares brief and incandescent.

“Fuck, what were you trying to do?” Daniel asks the question but Armand doesn’t get the sense that he’s expecting an answer, which is good because Armand’s tongue still feels too heavy in his mouth to shape words. English feels thick and unwieldy, like it won’t bend to the shape he needs it to make anyway.

Besides, he does not know the answer, doesn’t even know what Daniel is talking about. He reaches up, traces fingers over Daniel’s, feels his own skin in the spaces between with clinical detachment. Daniel shifts to stroke his face, wet fingers tracing over his cheek, his jaw, his forehead. Armand’s nails fit to the wounds, slide along the grooves with a sharp sting. All lines go to center, go to where his heart beats and beats and beats.

They stay that way for a while, Armand’s fingers retracing his own broken path over his flesh, Daniel’s hand slow and soothing on his face.

Armand takes Daniel’s hand, presses a kiss to his palm. Another. A third.

“Apologies,” he whispers.

“God why are you– right, never mind.” Daniel presses a cool-mouthed kiss to his temple. “Don’t be sorry. Stupid thing to be sorry for.”

It seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to apologize for, to Armand. Waking Daniel in the middle of the day to the smell of blood, to Armand’s clawing of his own skin. Daniel’s reluctance to speak above a whisper is more jarring than the pain itself.

“I felt it,” Daniel answers a question Armand hasn’t quite formulated yet, his thoughts still dense and slow and fogged. “Your– I don’t know. Fear, maybe? You were so quiet I almost thought I’d made it up until I heard the– your skin.”

Fear. Maybe.

That’s what gave him away. Not his blood, not his voice, just his fear. Maybe.

Armand turns, twists to face Daniel. Runs his fingers over the lines on Daniel’s face, the creases in the corners of his eyes. Daniel does not always allow him this obvious adoration, but right now he doesn’t complain or pull away, just closes his eyes to the touch. They’re becoming familiar now. Soon Armand will be able to map them from memory, draw them blind.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Daniel asks.

A strange question for Daniel to ask. If there’s something he wants to know, he rarely cares whether or not it’s what anyone else wants to talk about. The line of questioning is generally not dictated by anything but Daniel’s determination to get the information he’s looking for.

Of course Armand doesn’t want to talk about it. What Armand wants to say is that he doesn’t know what it is. Wants to find some words to wave away the dream as a dream, as only the confusing series of images that it would appear to be for any outside observer.

But that’s not the question Daniel is asking, really. And this has nothing to do with want.

“I was a child,” he hears himself say. The easiest thing. The hardest thing. “You must understand, Daniel. I cannot– I don’t know how to–”

“Shh, hey.” Daniel’s knuckles on his jaw, a steady back and forth until Armand opens his eyes again. “You don’t have to talk about it, but if you do it’s not for me. That’s not why I’m asking.”

His skepticism must be apparent because Daniel rolls his eyes and continues; “I mean am I curious? Yeah. Probably my cardinal fucking sin. But I’m not asking because I need to know. I’m asking because I think until you figure it out, you’re gonna keep on trying to rip your heart out of your chest.”

“I don’t think that’s what I was–”

“Does it matter? Is it even the worst thing you’ve done to yourself?” Rhetorical questions. Armand is glad. To search his memory and find the answer would take far too long. Would require a formal metric to analyze and compare. He doubts it breaks the top hundred.

He stays quiet for a long time, and Daniel doesn’t rush him. Perhaps he does mean it when he says that Armand doesn’t have to say anything. The words rise up from his throat but his mouth doesn’t want them. He can either spit them out or swallow them down but he cannot refuse to make a choice.  

“If someone pulled your fingernails off at the root for half your life, would you be bothered by a torn hangnail?” He makes it casual, as if this is just another philosophical debate about meaning or will or evil.

“If I answer honestly, am I going to regret it when you clarify the metaphor?” Daniel counters, tone dry and carefully light.

“Probably.”

“Then I’ll abstain from answering,” Daniel softens his refusal with a kiss to Armand’s brow, a hand sliding up his back. It’s easier close. Easier in the dark. “This isn’t a hangnail.”

He’s right, of course. It’s not something so easy to point to. Armand heaves a sigh.

“I don’t recall much of what I experienced when I was very young. I know… the shape of the pain, not the image of it. When M– when my maker found– purchased me, it was still fresh.” Marius’ ghost might be in the room, but Armand still refuses to allow his name in their bed. He stumbles over language, the story loathe to be recounted in a tongue it does not know. “He took me from that pain and he fed me and clothed me and showed me kindness.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

Daniel’s commentary had been frustrating to Louis at times, but Armand finds it strangely comforting. There had been no Daniel in Venice, so Armand does not go there even when his mind wants him to. He pulls the patchwork memories here instead. Rips them from their home, their language, their context, as was once done to him.

“I had not known life could be anything but torture. Or if I had, I could not remember it by the time I came to Venice.” He had not known a body could be for anything but pain, either. This, he doesn’t speak out loud.

Daniel looks at him as if he’s guessed, anyways. It’s not pity but it lands somewhere close enough that Armand doesn’t want to give him a chance to respond. He gives a one-sided half shrug of his shoulder and tries his level best to convince Daniel it doesn’t matter the way he seems to think it does. “A bit of blood? A mild sting? It seemed a small price to pay for tenderness and pleasure, for the absence of real pain.”

“Metaphor?” Daniel says it with a grimace, already knows the answer.

“Sure. If you’d like it to be.”

“So he paid for you. And his friends paid for you. And you paid for all of it.” When Daniel puts it like that, it twists wretched and true in his chest. That’s what Daniel is best at, of course. The wretched and the true. “Who paid you? Hm? What did you get?”

“Love?” He doesn’t mean for it to sound like a question.

“Did he love you, M–” Reflex has Armand pressing his thumb to Daniel’s lips to stop him. “–your maker?”  

There was a time he might have answered without hesitation. Even now it feels like a betrayal to hesitate. But would he not have felt it? Would he not have felt it with the excruciating and undeniable certainty he feels now from Daniel?

He cannot remember. He thinks he should. Thinks, perhaps, if he digs deeper into memory, so far down that it turns into feeling, he might be able to parse an answer.

“Okay, too far. Yeah.” Daniel’s thumb traces the knobs of his spine, gentle pressure. His nose bumps up against Armand’s. “Come back, stay here with me.”

Armand kisses him because he doesn’t know how else to return. It’s tender and without intent, but never without desire. Nobody kisses him this way but Daniel. Nobody he can recall ever has. It goes and goes and goes like water eroding rock. Softens him and softens him until he can’t recall why he ever needed to harden in the first place.

“We can leave it, for now.” Daniel’s offer of an out is so uncharacteristic that Armand almost considers taking it for the sake of easing Daniel’s apparent concern.

“No. It’s fine.” They’ve come this far and he’s not yet been struck down. Nothing has appeared from the heavens to sentence him to hell. His heart does not rebel against him for his blasphemy, his mouth does not turn inside out for the betrayal of his tongue. “He was so far above me, Daniel. It seemed a miracle that he should look at me, let alone–”

He cuts off. Daniel’s jaw flexes under his hand. “How old?”

It’s tempting to play the fool again. What Daniel had not let him get away with days ago, he might let him get away with now. And then they will return here over and over, to the past that’s chased him for five hundred years.

“Fifteen? Sixteen, perhaps? The times were different when I was–”

“Yeah, and when I was a kid segregation was still in full force and it was illegal for men to have sex. Fuck the times.” Daniel’s vehemence surprises him. “You get that it was wrong, right?”

His stomach turns over. “I can’t– I–”

“Okay, that’s okay,” Daniel gentles again. “You don’t want to be like him. Why? Start there.”

“I have already become–” This is hard. He feels like a buried thing. Like he’s excavating or being excavated. Beneath the cities of Rome, of Cairo, of Greece, lie the ruins of cities that are older still. Cities built on the foundations of half-forgotten civilizations. He feels like that. Like he’s unearthing what he was built on. “You were too young when I gave you my blood. When I–”

“I was twenty-two and the sum total of my trauma was a shitty alcoholic father, some run of the mill depression-fueled drug use, and getting chewed on by your husband. Far cry from comparable to fifteen and–” That Daniel will not finish the sentence makes it worse, somehow. If Daniel cannot say it, how is Armand meant to endure facing it?

Daniel continues before he can spiral further into that thought. “I’m not letting you off the hook for the shit you fucked up, but it wasn’t like that for me. It wasn’t a transaction to get out of a worse spot, it was a real choice. I know the difference.”

The implication, of course, being that Armand does not. Piece by piece, Daniel takes him apart and displays the fragments. Whereas Armand cannot see the whole, those pieces make sense. Have shape and form.

“I made you one of us.”

“I was dying.”

“So was I.” He thinks so, at least. He remembers the fever. Remembers Marius insisting that he would not recover. Remembers the fear of facing death without ever having known life. How badly he had wanted the gift then, before he knew what it would make him. Before he understood that it would still leave him as alone as he had always been.

“I’m old, Armand. Not to you, but by any definition of humanity, I’m old. I lived what feels like a fucking long life. And I’m not you.” Daniel lets it sink in. Waits to see if Armand will argue, perhaps. He has no choice but to believe Daniel now, with the damage already done. Again: “Do you think what he did was wrong?”

“I owe him my life.”

“You owe him nothing.” Daniel’s hand around the back of his neck, a stabilizing force, a tether to now now now even while he floats through a long-gone century. “Was it wrong?”

“He saved me”

“Do you feel saved?” No. No, he has not felt saved. Or if he has, it’s not by Marius. No. He shakes his head, the word too big in his throat to speak aloud. “How many people can you give a life to, Armand? If you give all of them away, what do you have left for yourself?”

“You, now, I suppose. Until–”

“Hey, no until,” Daniel’s voice, as firm as it had become, softens again now. “You’ve got me. But you should have you, too. You don’t have to give yourself away. Not like… when people say they belong to each other, it shouldn’t be like that.”

“Am I not yours?” It comes out like a plea despite all efforts to keep it from escaping him in the first place. Armand holds Daniel’s face; Daniel turns to kiss his palm. To smile against his skin despite everything else. Their hands are both covered in blood, sticky and leaving fingerprints wherever they touch.

“Yeah. Yes. You’re mine.” A flare of hot joy in his chest that might be his own or might be Daniel’s. “But you’re yours first. You understand?”

He doesn’t. He wants to.

“No,” Armand admits.

He waits for Daniel to be angry with him for it, or to explain it again, or to withdraw. Instead he just nods as if that’s what he expected anyways. “Figured as much. We’ve got time.”

“You figured as much?” His own voice sounds petulant to his ears, offended for the sake of being something other than raw.

Daniel doesn’t rise to it, today. “It’s all commodity to you. Pleasure, pain, your body, love, yourself. One thing traded for another. Payment for services rendered.”

“What else would they be if not commodities?” This feels like a continuation of conversations had decades ago, and Armand feels even more foolish now than he did then.

“Nobody has to lose anything. It’s free. I don’t know how to–” Daniel sucks in a deep breath. Exhales slow with eyes closed. When they open, they’re liquid enough to swim in. “Let me show you.”

How? He wants to ask. How will you show me when I cannot hear your mind? Instead, he says, “Okay.”

“Are you agreeing because you think I want you to, or because you want to be shown?” Daniel has that look he gets sometimes. Like anything but the plainest truth will be tossed away, like he won’t settle for something less. It’s almost as easy to bend to as an order might be.

“I want to understand,” Armand says.

“Okay.” If Daniel is pleased, he doesn’t let on. “What we both want we get, you remember?”

“Yes.”

“If we both get, then does anybody lose anything?” This isn’t showing. Maybe Daniel reads his confusion because he grins. “Have some patience for once, I’m getting there.”

He doesn’t feel like having patience. He feels like– Daniel humors him when he presses his thumb to Daniel’s mouth again. Parts his lips and lets it slide over his tongue, sucks it in slow reward, nips at the pad of it when Armand pulls it back again.  

Armand refocuses, considers for a moment. “Well yes, if one of us wants pain and the other wants–”

Daniel blinks at him slow, heavy-lidded. Catches back up to the thread of the conversation even as his hand slides the length of Armand’s back, the curve of his ass, the meat of his thigh. “Sure. If there’s a power exchange happening. Does there need to be?”

“Isn’t there always?”

Daniel nods, but Armand doesn’t get the sense that he agrees. “Yeah, thought that might be it.”

“You don’t need to boast about everything you get right, you know. There won’t be a prize at the–”

“You’ve only been touched that way, loved that way.” He opens his mouth to protest the implication and Daniel shakes his head. “Hold up. It’s not a judgement. That exchange is great, you know I think so. But not if you don’t think there’s another option.”

He’s afraid, he realizes. That’s what’s in his chest. A fear that he won’t understand even when Daniel shows him. Daniel’s mouth is soft when it slots against his, slow and undemanding. He doesn’t use teeth, doesn’t push or press. Goes on and on like he refuses to be the first to pull away. Armand almost resolves to test the theory, but there’s still that knot of fear that won’t loosen.

“I don’t know what I should–”

“Trust me. That’s all. And I’ll trust you just as much, and that trust doesn’t go anywhere. It’s shared. Simple math.”

Simple math. As if someone did not once invent the concept of subtraction. As if nothing must have any assigned cost at all.

“Can I show you?” Daniel asks again.

Outside it’s late afternoon, the sun beating down upon the earth. Inside, in this room where he can still feel ghosts that will not look at him, the night goes on forever. Daniel offers a light within it if Armand wants it, and he does. He does. “Yes.”

Daniel’s fingers place gentle pressure on his collarbone until Armand follows his silent request to lay back against the bed, and then Daniel isn’t touching him at all. He’s propped up on his elbow watching Armand. It’s a strange feeling to be looked at the way Daniel looks at him now, makes him want to shift and fidget under his gaze.

“You’re beautiful. You know that, obviously. But I think– it’s how you live in your body that makes me want you most.” Daniel is conversational, casual and relaxed while he sets out more fragments for Armand to see. He’s familiar with dialogue as a method for coaxing the mind to peace, but he isn’t sure he’s ever had it wielded against him the way Daniel does now. “For someone who doesn’t seem to think they’re owed themselves, I think you actually love it, your body. Not such a common thing.”

Daniel still doesn’t touch him, but his eyes do. Not with the disconnect of removed observation, but with the casual familiarity of someone who has known what it is they look at. Has felt.

“You’ve got this thing you do – like now, yeah, with your thumb or your fingers. That’s okay sweetheart, you don’t have to stop – like you’re trying to self-soothe. Trying to give yourself comfort. Is it okay if I touch you?”

 Armand huffs a dazed laugh, too busy trying to catalogue all the things Daniel has said to linger on any single one for long, too charmed to get caught up on the abruptness of the question. “Of course.”

“Is it okay if I touch you and it doesn’t hurt?” If the first question was unnecessary, this one is foreign. Not in the sense that he expects to hurt all the time (he doesn’t and he hasn’t) but in the sense that he’s startled by his hesitation to say yes. “You can say no.”

“Why wouldn’t it be okay?” The words could sound sarcastic, dismissive, but Armand means them in earnest. Hopes that Daniel can tell him something about himself when asked for once, rather than uninvited.

Daniel is as pliant as Armand is today. Willing to indulge him. “Pain helps you sometimes, with the emotional quicksand. But I don’t want to hurt you tonight, so you might not have anywhere to anchor yourself to.”

Armand’s thumb is still rubbing back and forth between his collarbones and he stops with conscious effort. “Can I anchor myself to you?”

Daniel’s lips part in vague surprise but all he says is, “Of course, babe.”

“Then yes.”

“And you’ll tell me if something does hurt?” Daniel waits for his nod, follows it up with a painfully earnest, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

Daniel just smiles, shakes his head. Whatever Armand expected it was not this. Daniel’s fingers running slow down the length of his own, tracing the shape of his knuckles, turning his hand over to press into the dip of his palm. It’s not so different than what Daniel had done weeks ago, but this time it’s not a seduction, nor an exploration, nor a laying of claim. He can’t be sure what it is.

“I had no way of understanding before, just how gentle you always were with me.” Daniel continues, that same conversational tone.

“I wasn’t always.”

“Not when I asked you not to be, sure,” Daniel allows. San Francisco remains an unspoken exception, today at least. “But the rest of the time? It would have been easy to be rough even when I didn’t ask for it. I would have made it even easier.”

“That would have been–”

“Wrong? Yeah. Agreed.” Dry and not so subtle; Armand ignores the bait in favor of breathing a contented sigh when Daniel rubs a thumb over the pulse in his wrist. “But it’s pretty damn easy to make the mistake. How many times have I already nicked you with a nail or a fang?”

It’s to be expected for a fledgling, in a new body, with new strength. Daniel is far more controlled than he’s giving himself credit for. Even now. Especially now. His hand travels over Armand’s arm, his shoulder, his neck. Strokes his jaw. Holds his face gently. So gently.

“I hate that anyone has ever hurt you, you know that? It’s a fucking weird feeling.” Daniel’s pointer finger smooths over his brows, slides down the bridge of his nose, caresses his cupid’s bow so briefly that he doesn’t have time to open his mouth to the touch. “You deserve to be hurt by a lot of those people a helluva lot more and I still hate it.”

“I’ve not been hurt half as much as I’ve caused it,” Armand murmurs.

“Not sure that’s true, but I’m a little biased at the moment. Ask me again in a few decades when I’ve dug more shit up,” Daniel catches Armand’s huff of laughter with the brush of their mouths, feather light. “Don’t let it give you a weird complex though. You’re still a monster, I’m still well aware. We’ve been there, done that line of conversation.”

“I wasn’t going to–” Well. It wouldn’t be the first time he has worried himself with whether or not Daniel understands the worst of him. It won’t be the last. It doesn’t seem a priority right now with Daniel nuzzling into the curve of his neck to inhale like he still needs oxygen and can find it in Armand’s skin. Seems wholly unimportant, with Daniel’s tongue on the shell of his ear.

“Am I allowed to touch you?” Armand asks.

Daniel pulls back, just far enough to study Armand for a moment. “There’re no rules, so that’s the wrong question.”

“I’m going to teach you another language just to get a temporary reprieve from your obsession with semantics,” Armand complains. “May I touch you?”

“Yeah babe, course you can.” Daniel sounds far too pleased, but Armand can’t be bothered with further protest. Instead he buries his fingers in Daniel’s hair and catches his mouth again, lets Daniel kiss him like he’s fragile and breakable and soft enough to crush. Maybe he is, today.

A thought comes to him, delayed, drifting in on the next soft wave of warmth. He takes his time speaking it aloud. “And you don’t want me to hurt you, either.”

Not a question. Daniel answers it anyways, “Not today.”

It’s no loss, he doesn’t feel particularly inclined to anyways. He doesn’t understand yet, but he’s getting closer, maybe, as Daniel shifts to hover over him. It’s nearly chaste – as close to chaste as it can be here in their bed, naked and covered in blood. They kiss for so long he nearly forgets there was a purpose. For so long he stops wondering if they will do anything more. Daniel’s hand curves over his neck but it only rests there a moment before it slides up to cradle his head, as if he does not trust the pillow to be sufficient.

“I love you,” Daniel breaks away to murmur, mouth finding the skin of his neck when it returns to him. His nose again pressing to Armand’s pulse in another long inhale. “Do you believe that?”

“Yes.” He has no choice but to believe it. The confirmation comes out breathless, Daniel’s lips drawing most of it toward a soft gasp when they brush over his throat. The touch goes on forever. It isn’t a tease, it’s a gentle unraveling. For a while he forgets he has ever felt anything else.

“Good.” Daniel’s mouth is on his collarbone for only a moment before he pulls back. Armand’s eyes crack open to watch himself be watched. “There aren’t any rules.”

“Right.”

“So I want to break one,” Daniel says, smiling again. Every single time he does it the way he does now, Armand feels as if it’s a gift. And this, yes, this has no value. Cannot be appraised.

“I suppose that’s characteristically contradictory of you.” His voice sounds distant and too blissed to be convincing.

Daniel ignores his complaint, brushes his fingers along the outer perimeter of one of the gouges in Armand’s chest. He had forgotten them; they’re already beginning to close up by now anyways. “I want to heal these.”

Daniel’s blood direct to the wound would speed the process, yes. The strange magic of vampire blood, specific not just to their species, but to each one of them. Like his own body recognizes what is and is not explicitly his. It isn’t necessary, however.

“You’d don’t need to–”

“I know. But I’d like to. Which will hurt me, just a bit. I don’t think it counts though, really. I should have done it already before I stared any of this. Still forget it’s something I can do.” Daniel sounds like he’s waiting for permission again and Armand doesn’t know why.

“Okay.”

“You’ll still tell me if it hurts you?” Perhaps that’s why. At this point, he doesn’t think pain could reach him without a concerted effort anyways; his nerves are preoccupied. He nods his head and Daniel straddles his thighs in earnest, no longer hovering or holding space between their bodies. They’re both hard and have been for long enough that Daniel pauses to pay the attention they’re both due, taking a moment just to rock against him.

The lazy slide of Daniel’s cock against his own is a particular sort of pleasure. So many comforts are gone from them – a warm drink, a warm blanket, a warm ray of sunlight. This is a more than acceptable replacement. Daniel watches Armand until he gets the soft sound he seems to be looking for; it doesn’t take Armand long to give it. Again and again and again until it begins to turn gasping and threatens to interrupt whatever plan Daniel has laid out for them.

Daniel must not mind because he doesn’t stop.

“Daniel,” he murmurs, fingers reaching up to stroke his cheek in protest or plea.

“Mm? Does it feel good?” Daniel and his questions. Even here. “Tell me.”

He nods and in response, Daniel leans in, presses his mouth to his temple again. “Do you want to come like this sweetheart? We have time.” Armand tries to get away with another nod, feels the shift of Daniel’s mouth as he moves. “You tell me and I’ll make you feel good.”

 “Yes”

The syllable is barely uttered before Daniel redoubles his efforts in earnest, and arm slipping beneath Armand’s waist to tilt his hips up. It has the clearly intentional effect of keeping Daniel from pressing up against the wounds on his chest.

“Hate when anybody hurts you, love when I get to make you feel good,” Daniel’s voice is rough, a welcome confirmation that he is not unaffected. Armand rocks up into him, settles into his rhythm like second nature. “Especially when it’s like this. Were you sweet for others like you are for me?”

Armand loves Daniel possessive, something just shy of jealous. It’s been a long time since he’s had him this way. It’s not a lie when he punches out a gasping, “No. Just you.”

“Just me?”

“Just you,” Armand repeats. And then it’s a mantra, a litany, a thing to grab on to when pleasure takes him under. “Just you, just you, just you.”

He’s still breathing hard, still clearing spots in his vision, when Daniel shifts again. Gentle, barely there fingers on his ribs. Asking permission, again. Armand’s nod is sufficient this time.

He expects Daniel to cut his finger, his palm, perhaps his wrist if he wants to be messy and unmeasured about it. Instead, he lowers his mouth to the center of Armand’s sternum and licks along the length of one wound.

The blood is on his tongue, and no, oh this could never hurt. He groans and Daniel pauses, looks up at him with an expression so soft that Armand gets why he’d questioned whether he was okay without the pain. He does want to hurt, just now. Wants something to do with the well of emotion that’s filling up and threatening to spill over.

“Does it hurt?” Daniel asks.

“No. It feels–” he chokes off his answer, Daniel’s tongue already back on his skin. He tries to remember if anyone has ever healed him for no tangible reason except to know that he has been healed. He feels no hunger through the bond. Feels something like desire but softer. A longing, a yearning. Feels little else but tenderness and the certainty of love.

Daniel touches him as if it matters how he is touched, when he is touched. Goes on for so long that he almost believes him. He tastes of their comingled blood when his mouth finds Armand’s again.

“I love you,” Daniel repeats, words half-smothered in the kiss. “I love you.”

He loves Daniel, too. Daniel knows that. It’s no grand gesture to tell him so, when a lack of love was never Armand’s greatest sin or failure. Instead, he holds Daniel’s face and murmurs praise and gratitude; “You love me so well, beloved. I’ve never– not the way you do.”

It’s a rare joy to see Daniel in awe. To shock him with a kindness that means something to him, touches something that’s usually hidden. Daniel has unraveled himself for Armand, too, he realizes. This is a gift that Daniel is giving him, this vulnerability. He just doesn’t understand how Daniel can do it without losing anything. Can do it without believing it has a cost.

Daniel’s hand drags down his ribs, over his hip, “I want–”

“Yes.” I want I want I want. Is there anything they understand better about one another? They have known each other’s want for longer than anything else. Like looking in a mirror, flipped images of the very same thing.

“You don’t even know what I’m asking,” Daniel protests.

“There isn’t a thing you could want from me that I would not give.” Armand wonders how many times he will say the same thing over again. How many different ways he can say I love you. They have time to try them all.

“Not from you,” Daniel says. “With you.”

He looks at Armand as if he might say no to that. As if it doesn’t make sense to Armand, suddenly, how lovely it could be to have something shared. To let it fill the space around and between and within them and to not lose any of it in the process.

“Please.”

An unfair word, perhaps, when he knows what it does to Daniel. He doesn’t regret it because it has Daniel reaching into the drawer to pull out a bottle and nail clippers. Neither strictly necessary, but he thinks if he says so, they’ll have to start all over again with the pain conversation and he–

Pleasure comes in as many forms as pain, as loss, as fear, as love. Daniel has learned so many ways to bring it to Armand that sometimes he wonders if he imagined the forty years they spent apart. Today’s pleasure has been so simple. The gentle, endless patience of Daniel’s mouth and fingers and hips. Unfolding, unraveling, unmooring him.

Now his fingers open him, coax him to groaning. Now his mouth murmurs praise like prayer against the curve of his ribs, while Armand rambles back promises Daniel will pretend he does not mean.

Daniel sinks into him slow, tells him how good it feels, how perfect he is. Touches him like it’s the first time they’ve ever been so close, and maybe it is. He doesn’t know anything but Daniel, just now. Daniel with his arm under Armand’s shoulders to pull him closer closer closer. Daniel with his slow rocking, with his painless excavation of everything soft Armand was ever built from.

Armand doesn’t lose anything to this. Doesn’t gain anything either. It exists without cost, this love, this pleasure, this tender unbending of all the things that had to be made small so they might fit anywhere else. Like devotion, it does not lessen when he gives it.

He doesn’t realize he’s weeping until Daniel is licking his tears, kissing his cheeks, his temples, his jaw.

“Does it hurt?” Daniel asks.

He wants to say no. He wants to say yes, but it doesn’t count. He wants to say I didn’t know it could be this way.

Instead he just takes Daniel’s face in both hands and shakes his head. Maybe Daniel understands. Maybe Daniel can feel the things that words are no good for, because all his does is kiss Armand until he forgets every language he knows and comes with a wordless cry.

All he does is love him to the threshold and over it, again and again and again, until the pleasure is too close to pain to continue.

All he does is praise Armand for saying so, for letting him be gentle.

After, boneless and tucked back into the soft cage of Daniel’s arms, Armand lets himself know the truth of his suffering if only for a moment. The rubble he built his history on top of and the things that made him that way. The people that made him that way. The feeding of eternity with mouth and fear and pleasure while he has been allowed to starve.

He waits for so long that he thinks Daniel is likely asleep. Chews on the words until they’re almost meaningless, ground down to only sounds.

“What he did was wrong,” he whispers.

And those words do have a cost, have a price numbered in silver or gold or teeth, but it’s no more than he’s paid a thousand times over for swallowing them. God does not strike him down, the ghosts do not devour him.

Daniel doesn’t say anything but he holds him like a vice with a hand over Armand’s heart to keep him from clutching at it, and that has no cost at all.

Chapter Text

“If you sigh one more time, I’m revoking your study privileges and locking you in the pantry,” Daniel grouses. Armand would love to see him attempt it – not because Armand would fight back, but because Daniel has proven himself no more willing to give up constant proximity than Armand is.

“You said it would be an hour. Two at the most.” Three hours ago. He thinks he’s been plenty gracious.

Daniel looks at him now, at least. Glare or not, so long as he’s finally drawn his attention away from the screen Armand counts it as a triumph. “I would have been. But you keep breathing so loud I can’t focus on shit. And don’t tell me it’s uncomfortable not to – you went half an hour easy in the shower last night.”

Armand smiles wide in recollection, shifts one of the feet he has resting in Daniel’s lap so that it’s pressed up against his inner thigh. “Well I’d certainly hold it again for that.”

“Shut up. I’m begging you.” The visible swallow gives Daniel away.

“Not yet, but we can get there.” Low hanging fruit, but at this point they’ve moved somewhere beyond the definition of Pavlovian. Maybe conditioning becomes nature when someone is turned. It doesn’t account for his own reactions, but it might account for Daniel’s.

Daniel, who drags his eyes back to his screen but types at approximately seven words per minute while he wrestles with a mixture of irritation and desire. He can’t read Daniel’s mind anymore, but he’d place bets on six of those words being fuck. It’s anyone’s guess what the seventh is.

“Can’t you find something to do?”

“I found something to–”

Daniel’s nail digs sharp into the sensitive skin of his arch, not enough to break through but enough to sting. “Don’t say it.”

He doesn’t say it. But he does press into the touch until Daniel’s nail punctures skin and the smell of blood fills the air. “Have you grown tired of me already?”

“I’m not doing this,” Daniel shakes his head, drops his hand back on the keyboard with it still bloody.

“Doing what?”

“Humoring your bullshit,” Daniel types a few more lines. Deletes them all. Taps at the letter ‘F’ on the keyboard with his bloodied fingernail without pressing down. And then, of course, he humors Armand anyway. “You used to have activities on fucking rotation, what happened to those?”

Armand remembers having pastimes but he cannot quite recall what they might have been. His time seemed full in Dubai, but he isn’t certain what filled it. The art dealing, perhaps. Management of staff. The constant weaving and reweaving of the tapestry of his and Louis’s history. In hindsight it all seems rather empty.

Before, of course, there were museums and concerts and galleries. Plays. Clubs. Cafes. Movies at the cinema, movies at home on the couch. At least half a dozen attempts to master cooking anything that wasn’t primarily made up of blood. Observatories and airplanes and aquariums. Anything that could be watched, heard, touched, learned.

“You used to join me.”

“I still will. When I’m finished writing.”

“I don’t see the point in you writing it at all.” They’ve had this conversation more than once already, and it takes a variety of regular forms. There’s the version where Armand questions whether it’s for financial gain. The version where he goes over the risks to Louis and to Daniel. The one where he aims nice and low, asking about Daniel’s daughters and what they will think, how they will react, how the world will treat them.

This time around his argument is particularly weak. “Why not choose something else? Something more–”

“Interesting than vampires? Sure. You find it for me and I’ll write it.” Another sentence typed. Another angry jab at the backspace key. “Better yet. You can help me.”

Yes, help Daniel sign his own death sentence, just as Louis before him. How incredibly fitting that he be made to repeat his smaller sins in perpetuity. “I rather think I’ve helped enough.”

He thinks he’s been managing this conversation quite well considering the subject matter. Daniel’s snort of disbelief, however, marks the end of Armand’s stretched patience. He moves to drop his feet to the floor, Daniel’s hand wrapping around an ankle before he makes it more than an inch.

“Make up your mind, Daniel,” he says, finger tracing the whorls of the wood that makes up the arm of his chair. “Do you want me here or do you want me to leave? I won’t play a ghost.”

He would. He would if Daniel would ask it of him in earnest.

“Stay. I’ll stop soon.” Daniel’s thumb strokes over the bone on the inside of Armand’s ankle. “Read a book. Do whatever it is you do on that tablet of yours. Brainstorm new ways to torture me for daring to not entertain you, whatever.”

“But stay?”

“Yeah. But stay.”

He should leave to prove a point, maybe. But then he might have to decide which point he’s trying to prove when he isn’t quite certain. His mood is foul for no reason he can pinpoint, the general sense of melancholy both familiar and unwelcome.  

The book that he catches in his hands is chosen at random. A battered paperback that was in the house when they bought it years ago. There are books on these shelves worth thousands, and there are books on these shelves that were picked up from local author sections, or bargain bins, or purchased handmade. The catch-all space for what parts of his collection weren’t carefully arranged for the sake of an aesthetic.

Daniel looks at him with something just shy of incredulity and says, “Seriously?”

“If you’re going to take issue with the manner in which I grant your requests then I don’t see why I should–”

“Sure, whatever. Frankenstein?”

“What’s the matter with Frankenstein?” The spine on the book is cracked, the back cover missing. Either a hundred hands have touched it, or a single pair has touched it over and over again. The handwritten inscription on the inside reads Happy Birthday Amy.

Daniel’s nose wrinkles in distaste. “Monster novels just seem a little on the nose, no?”

“Says the man writing one.”

“It isn’t a novel.” Daniel’s hand has yet to stray from Armand’s skin, and he’s not likely to be the first to point that out. The touch takes the edge off of his unease, settles something in his bones that wants to rattle and rattle and rattle until they split open.

“Whether something is truth or fiction depends as much on how it as read as how it is written,” Armand counters, cracking the book open, folding it in on itself. “Your autobiography for example.”

“That wasn’t fi–” Daniel cuts off, begins again. “You know what? Fuck you. I’m gonna be piecing that shit together for the next two decades.”

“Does it still give you headaches?” He feels a twinge of guilt now that he hadn’t when he first returned the memories. How different things would be if he’d never given them back. He might still have had Daniel, but he would not have had Daniel like this.  

Daniel shrugs his shoulder, hand returning to the keyboard. It’s not a punishment but it feels like one; Armand is trying to relearn how to identify the difference. Perhaps he never knew in the first place. “Most things give me a headache lately.”

It’s difficult to determine whether Armand’s presence makes it better or worse for Daniel. In part because neither of them seem particularly inclined to test the idea. And also, maybe, because Armand has not addressed that he’s had the idea at all. The bond generates a compulsion to be close, and it’s backed up by the genuine pleasure of proximity. Absence does the opposite. He’s not sure Daniel would take to it even if it did lessen the pain. Trading one ache for another, hollower one.

“Does it hurt now?” Armand keeps his eyes on the book. Reads the first paragraph over and over.

Daniel’s silence is telling, but he doesn’t like when Armand pushes the issue. An absurd level of hypocrisy, considering his penchant for both issues and pushing. Pain is a tricky thing to read, Armand has learned. At least from Daniel, who mostly covers it up with frustration bordering on anger, or craves blood so strongly that nothing else breaks through. He has no other frame of reference for comparison, nor will he ever.

The soft sound of Daniel’s typing is comforting when he doesn’t think too much about what he’s writing about. Thought made audible, if not truly decipherable. He’s still warm with the evening’s kill, a comfortable heat against Armand’s bare feet. Armand is almost willing to settle for this, for now, until he catches Daniel in his peripheral. He’s pressing the pad of his thumb to the dip of his browbone, his nail close to his eye.

“You should take a break,” Armand murmurs without lifting his head.

“I’m fine.”

Armand makes a noncommittal sound in response.

Daniel’s hand is back on his foot again. Skin to skin, a knuckle driving into the curve of his arch where his blood has since dried and his wound has long closed. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Armand asks, halfway to a groan. Maybe one day Daniel’s touch will stop feeling like a perpetual feedback loop of all things good, but it hasn’t happened yet.

“Hold back. Pretend like you don’t have anything to say.”

“I don’t always know if my opinion will be welcome.” It comes out bitter. He doesn’t mean for it to be. More often, lately, things don’t come out in the shapes he has molded them into.

Daniel laughs, a rich warm sound in the quiet. “It won’t be. Give it anyways.”

“My opinion is that you’re not fine, and you should take a break while you can still salvage your mood and our day.” Petty, perhaps. Not exactly how he might have phrased it before having it prodded out of him.

“Good job. My turn.” Daniel grins wolfish, grins predatory, grins like he’s about to sink his teeth into something. “I think you’re the one in a shit mood, but blaming it on me means you don’t have to do anything about it.”

“I am doing something about it. I’m annoying you into giving in to my demands.” It’s already working to a degree, he supposes. Daniel’s fingers are massaging his foot in earnest now, the touch that started as a jab turning into something with lazier, more absentminded intent.

“Demands for what? Sex?” Daniel looks half exasperated and half amused. They spend a lot of time in this place – an argument hovering just out of reach. It’s fun when they can strike the balance. Dangerous like matches and gasoline in a log house. “We’ve fucked more in the past few weeks than I have in a decade.”

“Well that’s not exactly saying–”

“Oh, fuck you. Like your 21^st century count is much higher.”

“That’s not what I meant anyways.” Or at least, it’s not that specifically. And there wasn’t a lack of sex between him and Louis in the last few years, so much as a lack of most of the things that make it more than an idle pastime. Hindsight is a strange thing, reveals that they hadn’t been putting all that much effort into doing more than the bare minimum. So much time spent on trying to salvage the relationship, so little time spent being in it.  

“Then what did you mean?” Daniel drawls, like a recited line.

“I want your attention. All of it.” A single-minded sort of attention, nothing creeping in between the cracks.

Daniel leans forward almost imperceptibly in his seat. “You’ve got better ways to demand it than annoying me, don’t you?”

Perhaps it is a challenge. Perhaps it isn’t.

Either way, Armand drops his feet back to the floor, crossing one leg over the other, and Daniel returns to typing with a shrug of one shoulder. They both pretend as if the conversation is over, as if it’s reached a resolution. Instead, it becomes a silent one.

Armand redirects his focus to the book with the suggestion of a smile. He waits until he can hear Daniel’s foot tapping against the floor, until Daniel is unsettled and anticipatory despite his best efforts not to care. Then he chews at the inside of his cheek until the skin breaks. Sees the there and gone shift of Daniel’s eyes from the screen to him and back again.

This game worked well when Daniel was still human. It’s even easier now that Daniel can smell the blood he wants so badly; he inhales audibly when Armand wets his lips with it.

And that’s all Armand does for a while. Until the typing starts up again, goes from sporadic to steady. Until Daniel’s muscles begin to uncoil and his leg stills.

Then a casual scratch of his forearm, blood welling as if he’s forgotten how sharp his nails are. He pays it no mind, of course. That’s part of the game. To care so little for his blood spilled, wasted. Dripping onto the fabric of his clothes, drying to his skin. Daniel’s tongue runs the line of his teeth, and Armand doesn’t need to read his mind to know he’s finding it harder to split his attention.

Desire is a hot, hungry thing. Craving only multiplies it. In Daniel, that multiplication is logarithmic.

Armand chews on his thumb while he flips through pages. Gentle at first. Not enough to break skin until he knows Daniel is watching him.

His own blood is a meager substitute for anybody else’s, of course. It doesn’t taste bad, but there’s little pleasure in it other than what he gleans from Daniel. First the sharp of his teeth in his thumb. Then to the second knuckles of his pointer and middle, with the sticky blood on his arm held aloft for display.

Daniel doesn’t pretend not to be interested anymore. He pushes his laptop aside, folds arms across his chest.

He misses having access to Daniel’s mind every day, but now he misses just misses it for the simple convenience of being able to talk to him when his mouth is otherwise occupied. Oh well. Lack of speech is just as effective as a steady stream of it, he supposes. The more attention Daniel gives him the less he gives in return, and he’s not ashamed to admit that he finds vicious satisfaction in the reversal.

His fingers are still bleeding when he pulls them from his mouth, scraped from second knuckles to nailbeds in twin lines.

“Asshole,” Daniel says, too ragged to be convincing, but reliably defiant in that way Armand loves so much. He’s heard Daniel beg and threaten him in the same breath. “Come here.”

“No.” Armand drapes one hand over the arm of the chair, a steady dripping on the floor that Daniel follows with his eyes. “I’m busy.”

“I hate you.”

It’s only a matter of waiting Daniel out. Not a battle between Armand’s will and his own, just the internal warring of Daniel’s stubbornness and his desire. The latter always, always wins.

The cracks show early, today.

“Can I–”

“I don’t know. I do think I’d like to hear you beg for it today,” Armand muses. “Do you want to beg for it?”

“Fuck you.” Daniel is coiled like a spring,

“Not yet?” That’s good, of course. Daniel’s submission is always best when he really has to work to earn it from himself. Pride inevitably bending to the relentlessness of base desire. “That’s alright beloved, I have time. You might find yourself hungry though.”

As if he cannot already feel it in the pit of his own stomach.

“You could always clean the mess on the floor if you get desperate, I suppose.”

A younger Daniel would already be out of his chair when given the permission, beautiful and eager. Now, Daniel bites his own cheek to swallow both his rebuttal and his temptation.

Time takes on new shape. Stretched out and languid, an hour slides by more enjoyably than the three before it. His wounds heal and he opens them again, again, again. Daniel holds out long enough that Armand feels the insistence of his own want low in his own stomach, the restlessness of it just beginning to chew away at his patience when Daniel finally gives in.

“Please.”

Only the start, of course. That single syllable. But it’s the first and hardest, and it deserves reward. “Come here Daniel.”

The flash of defiance in Daniel’s eyes rarely disappears entirely, and that’s what makes the rest so lovely. Daniel closes the distance quickly, but this is an old game. He knows not to touch.

“Do you want me to ask you, or do you want me to tell you?”

How much? That’s the real question. How much Daniel wishes to submit to himself today. How much he will give to Armand. Either amount is more than he’s earned any right to expect.

Asking is more difficult for Daniel, he knows. That’s why the first plea takes so long. If Armand tells him, it can be turned into one submission. A single act he has already succeeded in. If Armand asks, it is dozens. Two different routes to the same end result.

“Tell me.”

“On your knees then,” Armand says. He uncrosses his legs. Makes room for Daniel on the floor between his legs. His fingers, still covered in blood, fit under Daniel’s chin, tilting his head up to take him in. His eyes are clear and soft, his mouth relaxed. If Armand couldn’t feel him, he almost wouldn’t know how badly he wants this. “Open.”

It’s rare, this unhesitating willingness. Armand doesn’t take it for granted. He presses his fingers into Daniel’s mouth, wet and warm, and still Daniel waits for his next instruction.

“There you are, my sweet boy.” The protest his endearment might usually generate doesn’t materialize, replaced instead by a shuddering breath. “Go ahead.”

Daniel is gentle, even in his hunger. He doesn’t open new wounds, simply licks the old ones clean, sucks until they close, keeps going until Armand withdraws his fingers. He strokes Daniel’s cheek, feels him lean in, and wonders how far all this sweetness would go today if he let it. If Daniel would sit here at his feet while he finishes his book and pets his hair. If Daniel would lick the floor if he asked him to.  

Perhaps some other time. Today he closes the paperback and tosses it onto the desk. Daniel watches him with that singular attention he’s been wanting so very badly. He’s waiting. “You’re so beautiful.”

“I’m not–”

“You are to me. Don’t argue.”

Daniel grins, cocksure. “But that’s what I’m good at.”

“One of the things, yes,” Armand allows, a smile tugging at his own face. “I’d like your mouth for something else at the moment.”

He’s meant to be telling Daniel what to do, so he stops short of turning it into a question, and watches Daniel’s eyes travel down and down. Daniel’s voice comes out half choked and half cocky when he says, “Yeah, I can do that.”

“I know,” Armand murmurs. Daniel’s eyes dart back up, searching for sarcasm, perhaps. Armand isn’t anything but earnest. He strokes Daniel’s jaw, brushes hair from his forehead, presses gentle fingers against all the places where he knows Daniel’s pain blooms. “Does it still hurt?”

“I’m fine.” Ah. An emotional sore spot, too.

He’s under no obligation to answer Armand’s questions, so Armand rephrases. “That isn’t want I asked you Daniel. Tell me if it still hurts.”

Daniel shuts his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath. “Some. Not much. Your blood helped.”

“Thank you,” Armand says. Because difficult things deserve rewards, and because he likes the way Daniel’s eyes widen when he says it. He would prefer Daniel’s pain banished entirely, if only temporarily. “Stick out your tongue.”

When Daniel obeys, Armand bites down on his own. Feels the flash of pain and then the flood of blood where it wells against the roof of his mouth. He leans forward to hover over Daniel, holds his jaw steady with a hand even though Daniel stays so carefully still that he doubts he needs to, and he drops the blood onto his waiting tongue.

“Swallow.”

Again. And again. And once more. Daniel doesn’t let any spill, just catches and swallows with something between hunger and awe and embarrassment flooding his eyes.

“Does it still hurt?” He repeats, releasing Daniel’s face.

Daniel presses his forehead to Armand’s thigh, huffs a shaky breath and says, “Fuck no. Shit.”

It might be easier to do this standing, but there’s a closeness to where they are that Armand doesn’t want to part with. He unbuttons, unzips, pulls himself from his pants half-hard. Never for lack of interest, of course. It’s only that right now his attention is divided, his priority is Daniel. He strokes himself lazily, base to tip, watching Daniel’s focus narrow down further until Armand is hard in his own hand and Daniel is clenching his hands into fists to keep from reaching out.

“Open.” There’s a beat between Armand’s uttered command and Daniel’s obedience, but he does it. Armand collects the bead of moisture from his cock with the pad his thumb, presses it to Daniel’s tongue. Daniel’s mouth closes around it, needy. Taking what scraps Armand offers greedily and gratefully. His hunger lives in the trembling of his muscles, in the tension at the roots of his teeth. Armand knows how hunger feels.

“That’s enough.” It comes out breathless, comes out pleased.

And Daniel listens. So pliant today.

But then, the blood has often made him this way. For someone so acerbic, he eagerly turns towards honey here, soft and malleable. Armand’s fingers slide against his scalp, tugging the hair at the back of his neck.

“Can you control your fangs?”

Daniel huffs a laugh. “Fuck I hope so.”

“At your leisure then my love.”

He wastes no time, shifting his weight to get closer, tongue running the length of Armand’s cock and punching out the first low sound of pleasure from Armand’s lungs with remarkably little effort.

Eagerness was always one of Daniel’s strongest qualities, Armand thinks. A person can handle a cock with all the skill in the world while exuding disinterest. Adept, but aloof and calculated. It will feel good, of course. Just good. Only ever good.

But not Daniel. Never Daniel. His enthusiasm always more than made up for that which he had not yet mastered when they met. Now it mingles with a deliberateness that elevates that enthusiasm to something closer to worship. Turns Daniel’s mouth fervent, devout. An altar or an offering or both in equal measure.

Daniel tests the limits of his gag reflex, sliding down and down until his nose is pressed to coarse line of hair on Armand’s stomach. It’s still there, clearly. Daniel’s throat spasms around his cock, drags a sound from Armand that starts as a laugh and ends in a moan. Daniel pops off, looking faintly annoyed.

“Of all the shit that sticks around, this does?”

“It’s a reflex. Have your other reflexes left you?” Armand shrugs one shoulder, Daniel busying himself with dragging Armand’s pants off his hips to sit mid thigh, pressing his mouth wet and languid to the skin he reveals. “You don’t need to breathe, however, so it’s easier to get past than it was before. Continue if you’d like.”

Clearly not the sort of nonchalance Daniel is looking for. He redoubles his efforts until the only sounds Armand makes are half swallowed and desperate. Until they can’t be swallowed at all, and Daniel is answering them with soft moans of his own that reverberate right through the center of him.  

Pleasure tightens, coils, has him tensing his legs to keep the reflexive desire to move contained until Daniel massages a thumb into his thigh and pulls off long enough to say, “S’good, babe. Go ahead.”

Armand misses being able to hear Daniel’s thoughts like this, yes. But the shattered rasp of his voice more than makes up for it.

He bucks into Daniel’s mouth and Daniel takes him, of course he takes him, beautiful with eyes watering red and waves of reciprocal pleasure and pride rolling off of him. Again, again, until Daniel is coughing and Armand is close. He strokes his fingers over Daniel’s cheek, down his throat. Daniel’s choked whine against the skin of his stomach is what sends him over, and Daniel swallows that too.

So hungry, his boy.

Sucking him back until he’s spent and oversensitive, until he coaxes him off with a tug of his hair.

Daniel doesn’t go far, breathing heavy against the tender skin of his inner thigh, face hidden from view. His lips are moving in some soundless repetition of a word. Armand could demand it of him, but it’s so much lovelier if he waits for it.

He doesn’t have to wait long, Daniel’s whispered, “please, please, please,” sending warm satisfaction from the flesh he breathes it all the way up to Armand’s chest.

“Please what, sweet boy?”

Daniel is too far gone now to show any indignance at the endearment, only tilts his head to press his cheek to Armand’s thigh and gaze up at him hazy eyed. “Please– please I don’t care what. I don’t–”

“Shh, okay. Do you want to come? Do you want to drink?”

“Yeah. Fucking–” He cuts himself off. “Please.”

Armand shifts, widens his legs, guides Daniel’s mouth to the pulse point of his femoral. “You can touch yourself. Don’t come until you’ve had enough.”

“Never, then?” Daniel murmurs against his skin. Armand laughs, can feel Daniel’s smile curve against him in response. His fingers slide through Daniel’s hair in a touch meant to ground them both as the giddiness of pleasure threatens to send them adrift and floating.

“Drink.”

And Daniel does. Beautifully. With the same deliberate eagerness, a hand pressing flat to Armand’s stomach for leverage.

Armand doesn’t love to offer this vein, generally. It creates a sort of distance he doesn’t often want. But Daniel shrinks it so well that he feels close. He makes sure Armand can feel his forearm against his shin when he slides his hand into his jeans to fuck his hand. Makes soft sounds of pleasure that come close enough to asyllabic praise that he feels them in the warmest parts of his chest. Looks up at him with eyes that change from blue green to orange.

He’s learning to love the colour. Call it conditioning, perhaps.

He would let Daniel drink until he had nothing left to give, but Daniel stops far sooner, just as Armand is beginning to feel the vague weariness that comes with blood loss. This in and of itself is a comfortable pleasure, an embrace that has his cock twitching halfway back to life against Daniel’s cheek.

Daniel’s bitten tongue heals the wound and only then does he let himself come, with a muted groan and a full body shudder and a wave of euphoria that crashes into Armand like a tsunami.

Neither of them move for a few moments, and then Daniel only shifts to pull his hand out of his pants and offer it to Armand to lick clean. Armand does, slow and thorough. Releases it just to stroke his own thumb along Daniel’s jaw, a gentle touch in response to the hazy, half-lidded gaze Daniel has trained on him.

“What do you think, beloved?”

Daniel laughs, warm and lucid. “I think I should know better than to fucking humor you.”

“Really? Because it seems to me that you got your break, your head feels better, and you won’t have to get up to drink cold blood from the fridge.”

A brief pause, a roll of his eyes. “Don’t look so fucking proud.”

“You’ve had your rest now. Would you like to return to your work?”

And yes, perhaps it is a test. Perhaps it’s petty and needy. But he’s not likely to be sorry for it when Daniel shakes his head, shifts to sit more comfortably, and says, “Nah. Read to me.”

So he does. Daniel’s head leaning against his thigh so he can stroke fingers through the silver of Daniel’s curls, reading page after page at a volume barely above a whisper. Until Daniel drifts to sleep, and after, too.

Chapter Text

August has given way to September, the leaves beginning a slow crawl from green to red and gold. Armand crept from bed half an hour ago, slipping out from under Daniel’s vice grip with a great degree of care and some help from Daniel’s exhaustion. He still doesn’t sleep well most days, though Armand doesn’t think he minds all that much. He’s never known Daniel to reliably require more than four hours a night. It had been convenient when he was still human. Today he’s only been asleep for an hour.

Armand ignores the tugging in his sternum, like a fish on a hook, and looks out across the sprawling yard and the forest behind. The sun filters through the trees, paints the image in front of him into something idyllic and out of time. If he wants to, he can break it down into its component parts. Separate out all the pieces until they are only shapes, isolate the colors to make them replicable by brush.

Muscle memory. No matter how many years he goes without picking up a paintbrush, he doubts he will ever forget how. He wishes that he could, just as much as he wishes he could forget most anything.

He doesn’t break it down today. He gazes at the whole, the sun in her aloof beauty, the breeze teasing through the leaves, the soft sounds of the world as it beds down for night. He would have watched it with Daniel, once. Some day he will again, if only from careful vantages and with mindful attention to the time.

There are moments where he does not feel guilty for it, he just hasn’t lived them yet. With enough time one can cease to feel guilt for anything, he’s just never had quiet enough time.  

He doesn’t wait for the sky to turn full-dark before slipping back into the house, back into the room, back into the bed. Fingers lazily tracing over Daniel’s back, drawing lines between freckles to create constellations.

“Wake up, beloved,” he murmurs.  

Daniel groans, stretches arms over his head, catlike and lazy, and sinks deeper into the bed. His sleep-rough “why?” is muffled against the pillow.

“The sun has gone to bed and the night is ours.”

“A normal person would just say it’s night now,” Daniel grouses, rolling onto his side to glare at him, dislodging Armand’s hand from his back in the process. He tugs at Armand’s wrist instead. “And it’s barely that. C’mere.”

As motivated as Armand is to get out of this cottage on an excursion that isn’t solely focused on indiscriminate killing, it’s hard to ignore the temptation. Daniel is affectionate when he first wakes, and Armand lets himself be pulled into his orbit. He kisses Armand’s fingers, his temple, the top of his head, until he’s coaxed Armand back into the circle of his embrace.

“You’ve been up already,” Daniel notes. “You smell like– outside.”

“Such poignant description; they really should give you another Pulitzer.”

“Asshole,” Daniel says, but there’s no tooth to it. He moves back far enough to level Armand with the full force of his curiosity. Awake, now. “You’re restless today then. Why?”

Because things are too good. Because Armand cannot recall the last time he wasn’t clinging to something with bloody fingernails. It feels wrong, not to have something he must work to hold. Daniel is just here, in his arms, inside his chest. He’s missing something, he thinks. Forgetting to do something important, to set things all in proper order so he can control each moving part.

The parts aren’t moving. They hang in stasis. They live inside a bubble that waits to burst.

He isn’t going to tell Daniel any of that, of course, so instead of answering his question he just says, “I want to be somewhere older than I am.”

“Everywhere is older than you are.”

Armand pinches the skin over Daniel’s ribs. Hard. Daniel slaps his hand away as if even this small touch does not spark desire in his chest. “Rude. You know what I meant.”

“Yeah, I do,” Daniel heaves a sigh, long-suffering and more dramatic than is warranted. “You meant that we’re going to a fucking church.”

“No, lover,” Armand corrects pleasantly. “We’re going to an abbey.”

First they go to the harbor. A harbor, he supposes, though all are one great connected thing in his perspective. A map of invisible routes, of paths followed as surely as any road or trail. The water is placid. Tame. The sky clear. The night conspires to be sweet for them, open-armed and gentle-voiced and so unlike the day.

Daniel wanders off down the road, doubtless in search of some poor stranger to subject to his own personal version of a polygraph. He’s getting quite proficient, but Armand never doubted he would be. Usually, he follows along. Watches Daniel work what is one part mind gift and nine parts practiced skill in order to glean everything interesting that he can from his meal.

Armand supposes, in a way, it gives their stories somewhere to go. Any unique knowledge Daniel might ever happen upon can be tucked away in his immortal mind. Little histories that would likely have gone unrecognized even if they had not died early deaths. Something they saw or heard or thought that was unique to them.

It’s a terrible, beautiful thing to watch. Sometimes if he slips into their minds while they die, it’s almost as if he can feel Daniel’s mind there too. A familiar presence he cannot make out the shape of in shadow. The recollection of the memory of a thing, and not the thing itself.

Tonight, Armand remains at the shoreline, watching the gentle sway of boats moored to the docks. These aren’t grand ships, of course. Little hobby boats with sails or small motors. Some with enough space to sleep, others so small that they barely lift their cargo above the sea. None with great yawning ribcages and hungry, hollow bellies.

Sometimes he can almost remember the cradle, the rocking. The smell of sick.

Mostly, though, he remembers Venice. The constant clamor of tools and men, the insistent desire to build and build and build. To build so that they might see, to build so they might leave. Or by then, perhaps, to build only so that they might possess. 

They were warm, bright days in his recollection. This he cannot find the words to explain to Daniel. That they were not terrible, that the cruelties of those years were felt as kindness and that they oft feel like kindness still. Sometimes he wonders if he might find a way to explain that to his own body, as well. To the beating of his heart as it tries to run from what he has become.

It doesn’t matter. The harbor was neither cruel nor kind. It simply was. He can recall feeling lighter there, and that’s almost like feeling lighter now. The recollection of the memory. Not the thing itself.

Daniel bars an arm across his chest and Armand leans into him. He smells of smoke and red wine, a little drunk on the blood of his victim but not enough to be anything but sturdy at Armand’s back. “Do you come here to torture yourself?”

“Hm?” An interesting question. Harder to follow when he’d far rather pay attention to the warmth of Daniel’s lips behind his ear. “I’ve never been here before.”

Not in memory, at least. He supposes he’s been most places by now, but likely not this exact piece of ground regardless. Daniel’s thumb rubs a circle into the ball of his shoulder, an absent touch wrought from a few extra chemicals alongside his regular feast. “To the harbor, I mean. You went often before.”

Before is a heavy word for them. He looks out across the dark water and searches for an answer. “It doesn’t hurt. Not really.” Not more than anything else does. Daniel makes a skeptical noise in his throat. “Why do you think it should?”

“Well. Maybe the trauma, for starters.”

“I don’t think the concept of trauma applies to vampires in the same way it does humans.” A lie so blatant it earns him a snort of laughter rather than disapproval. “You think I should hate ships because I was sold.”

Daniel’s discomfort at the word is a tangible thing, but he won’t protest it’s use. “Maybe I think I would, yeah. Not here to tell you how to feel.”

A new revelation for Daniel, who understands an emotion best when he can match it to his own. Armand hums his acknowledgement, sways a little, Daniel swaying with him. Like a ship rocking far from shore. “Have you ever looked from the window of an airplane, in awe of the world above the clouds? Of the ingenuity, the strangeness of humanity’s endeavor? Sat in uncomfortable amazement with the knowing that humans were likely never meant to see the world in such a way?”

“Yeah, sure,” Daniel allows.

“Imagine there were no planes. No trains, or cars, of course. What might it be like to see a ship then? To watch it sail, see it bring grand things from far off places to your shores?” He supposes someone older than him would feel the same awe at a wheel. At a horse even, perhaps. “Imagine how strange it might seem then, in that stationary world, to look out at a great wide sky made of water and wonder at the lengths humanity has gone to for freedom or greed or love or curiosity.”

Daniel doesn’t answer him, but he doesn’t need to. The warmth in Armand’s chest, the fondness, the feeling of the memory of lightness, all multiply as Daniel listens. Little histories he gathers from Armand just as beautifully and terribly as he does from any other.

“A ship is a possibility. A perhaps.” He turns to face Daniel, to press his mouth to the hollow of his throat. “And as with all things man creates, it is mankind itself that decides whether it is to be a vessel for kindness or cruelty.”

“You’re sentimental tonight,” Daniel observes

“Nostalgic, maybe,” Armand allows, shrugging out of Daniel’s arms and heading towards the docks. “Come, I’ve chosen one.”

Daniel is far more alert now than he was when they left the cottage. Armand is accurate to the minute in guessing when he will ask. “So where exactly are we?”

Armand sends the rope to shore, climbs off the boat, and offers his hand to Daniel, who takes it with a look caught somewhere between exasperation and fondness. One day, he thinks, he’ll be able to convince Daniel to stop pretending he doesn’t want to be fawned over, doted upon. Likely on the same day Daniel’s tenderness towards him stops being so surprising.  

“Inchcolm Island,” He announces as knots the boat at the little dock and heads up the path.

“Right, yeah. And I see the monastery and everything, obviously. But why are we here?”

“That wasn’t the question you asked,” Armand points out, slotting fingers into Daniel’s. “Are you getting sloppy? Out of practice?”

Clearly Daniel doesn’t think this warrants an answer at all, because he doesn’t provide one. Instead he just lets the silence drag out between them with the apparent knowledge that Armand will, in fact, fill it eventually.

“I told you earlier,” he says.

“Yeah. Somewhere older than you, right?”

He’ll make Daniel work harder for the answer, if only by virtue of not quite knowing it yet himself.

The light from the moon illuminates the abbey. Its architecture is beautiful but simple, nothing like the cathedrals they’ve visited elsewhere. Grey and made for function. Half in ruin. Armand trails fingers over the stone, feels the cracks and chips.

The earth is trying desperately to swallow this place, and humanity refuses to let it. An unwinnable war on the part of humans, certainly. One both brave and full of hubris.

“Why?” Daniel squeezes his hand, draws his attention back.  

“Look at all this work. Imagine what it would have taken. What it still takes, even now.” This, too, is not an answer. A distracted musing, perhaps. It’s been so long since he walked amongst older things. It doesn’t provide the comfort it once did.

“All for some made up man in the sky.” Daniel is ever irreverent. Armand isn’t certain he really believes as little as he pretends, but he’s yet to convince him to admit to it.

“All for something that might never love them back,” he counters. “Is there not meaning in that?”

Daniel is quiet. Surprises Armand by taking the time to consider the question in earnest. The silence here is peaceful. Somewhere he’s certain someone sleeps on the grounds, and perhaps whoever it is will wake and find the two of them, but for now they can imagine they are alone.

“I think you’d probably like for there to be,” Daniel finally answers. It’s not gentle, but his honesty rarely is. Such is the risk of asking questions of Daniel Molloy. Be it the grown man, the vampire, the naïve boy – all roads with Daniel lead to the sort of honesty that hurts like a finger driven into a half-closed wound.

“I forget, Daniel. Have you ever loved anything that did not love you in return?” Cruel, perhaps, but Daniel doesn’t let go of his hand.

“Don’t think heroin was particularly fond of me.” Daniel shrugs his shoulder, nonchalant and carefully disengaged. “Haven’t loved all that many things.”

It’s too easy, lately, to let himself forget what he took from Daniel. Given willingly, yes, but still taken. The void he had spoken of. The emptiness. The things Daniel had forced himself to love in hopes of filling it.

Strange, to feel almost as if he wants to apologize for his own reciprocation. He has no right to question Daniel’s devotion, even if it is only by implication. Daniel would have died for his love then if Armand was willing to let him. There is nothing Armand would not do for devotion – except that.  

“To love a drug is nothing like loving a god,” Armand says. He isn’t sure if he means it as apology, comfort, or challenge.

Daniel, given the option, takes it as none of those. “And Louis, Lestat, Marius? Did you love them like God?”

Armand doesn’t wince when Daniel says Marius’ name, though he supposes Daniel must feel the sting of it anyway. The bond, these emotions, they are nothing like thoughts. He has yet to find a way to block the sharing of them. The two-way current that runs between them acting as an ever-present window into something more honest than words but far less decipherable.

“Do you want me to be honest? The answer will only make you angry.”

“Me? Angry?” Daniel’s sarcasm had him huffing a laugh against his own better judgement.

The outline of a ruin sits to one side of the building, green grass in its center, the walls shrunken down to only that which frames the space out and divides it from the grounds. He settles at the edge, sitting with his back against the few feet of wall that still holds itself stubbornly upright.

Daniel settles next to him.

They’re quiet, again.

“I loved them more than God, perhaps. Or as if God had sent them as proxy to teach me how to do it properly.” It’s hard to explain. He isn’t sure it should be explained. He loves them still, all of them; he probably always will. False idols, replaced one after the next after the next.

“Like Jesus?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds a little–”

“Fucked up?”

“I was going to say complex.” Patently false. He, too, might have chosen fucked up as a descriptor. He refrains from reminding Daniel that he is counted twice over among the numbers of those he has loved.

“Yeah. Messiah complex, maybe.” Daniel laughs at his own joke and Armand does not. “Isn’t that sacrilege?”

Armand pulls one knee up to his chest, clasps his hands over it. “I spent centuries in a satanic cult, Daniel. That ship has sailed.”

Daniel’s shoulder brushes against his and his thoughts spin and spin. Armand doesn’t need to hear them to know that. Whatever answers Daniel is looking for, he hasn’t figured out the right question to ask yet.

The next question is the wrong one, too. “Is it worth less, if you’re loved in return?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.” Armand rests his head on his knee, gazing at Daniel. He’s cast in shadow, the moon somewhere behind them.

Daniel is not looking back at him. Is looking down and away. “The work. The sacrifice. If the God loved you back, would it mean less?”

“I think we can forgo the riddles,” Armand murmurs. “You’d like to know if I love you more than God.”

“That’s not exactly– is there a reason we had to come here to discuss philosophy, or is this just a distraction from whatever it is you’re getting out of coming here in the first place?” Daniel’s voice is sharp. If Armand uses philosophy as diversion, Daniel uses biting words as deflection just as frequently.

It’s a tender question for Daniel. Something more vulnerable than he thinks Daniel meant to ask, caught up on too much conversation about those who came before him. There are times where both of them forget that Daniel is not objective. That he can no longer remove himself entirely from the fabric of the story. He has stained all of it now, his blood reaching, grasping, spreading out across all parts of the tapestry.

That objectivity was always an illusion, of course. But it was an easier one to conjure up before they started unravelling so many threads.

“It would be an afront to God to compare him to you.” He cannot imagine a force, earthly or otherwise, that could drag his attention away from Daniel right now. His hair silver in the moonlight, his face scowling and too stubborn to fold to what Armand is sure he views as exaggeration. “To so blatantly set him in competition with my favorite when he is bound to lose.”

“Flattery will get your dick sucked,” Daniel quips. Because he’s sensitive tonight. Still a little buzzed. Unwilling to let the truth of the words land.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I believe that you think it now. When things are good, with this fucking bond working overtime to keep you wanting me around.”

Daniel knows Armand loves him, as surely as Armand knows he is loved by Daniel. An unavoidable truth they feel each night, each morning, each moment in between. But the bond is not a tool of divination and it cannot predict future. The narrow nowness of the truth is what keeps Armand restless and waiting for the detonation.

How is he to account for the future, then? How is he to assure Daniel that he’s become the red and silver thread the rest of Armand’s life will be made up of? He has no good answer yet, so instead he kisses Daniel’s hair, coarse against his mouth, and tells him, “Yes, I would give you a monastery, a cathedral, an island even, if you did not love me. Because you do, I would give you anything you asked. I have done.”

They stay there as the moon arcs across the sky, until it’s directly overhead and beginning its slow fall. Talking of idle things, of histories so large that they do not ache. Meandering through their own, too, as Daniel begins to fill in the more natural gaps in his recollection. Spaces Armand did not, for once, create, but can instead begin to patch with his own careful weaving of time. Where did we go in spring of ’77? What was that show we saw in Chicago? Daniel has carried many of the pieces for years, with Armand simply removed from them.  

They don’t go inside. They don’t walk where the monks have prayed their morning prayers, held their masses, wept for their devotion. Perhaps some other time they will return and Armand will show this place, show its God, a devotion greater than even he thought possible. Not tonight.

When they leave, it’s with the unspoken agreement that they’re both ready. The easy shift of two bodies that know each other well, speaking language in silence.

He takes the boat to the middle of the water, the swaying in the shifting center between two steady pieces of land. Daniel leans back enough to look comfortably up at the sky, drags Armand back with him to rest against his chest. They don’t speak again for a long while.

The sun is stolen from their kind. Hides herself away only to lash out in anger when they seek her. But the moon, the stars? They are a gift uniquely given. He can feel Daniel’s awe as he looks – truly looks – for the first time with his new eyes. Layer upon layer of pinpricks of light. Colors that the human eye can’t quite see. The dust of the galaxy drifting above and all around.

Daniel lights a cigarette – stolen, clearly, from his last meal. Armand feels the rise and fall of his chest as he inhales, exhales. Watches the smoke trail off into the night.

“One day I will take you to see the aurora borealis,” Armand murmurs. “We’ll go stay farther north in the months where the sun hardly rises and make the world ours, there.”

“Sentimental,” Daniel repeats, but he does a poor job of sounding unmoved. He holds the cigarette to Armand’s lips and Armand inhales, feels the heat of the smoke in his lungs. “Not a lot of people that far north.”

“I’ll keep you fed, beloved.” He almost tells Daniel that he won’t ever let him go hungry, but it’s an impossible promise to make. Daniel has never been truly sated. Perhaps he will never be.

They finish the cigarette in silence once more, alternating long drags until it is ash on the bottom of the boat and nearly burning to the filter. Daniel stubs it out on the side of the boat and slips it into his pocket. According to him, vampires have an even greater imperative to give a shit about the environment than humans, because they’re far more likely to live to see the end of it. Armand hates to think of that reasoning too much to engage with opposing it.

“So,” Daniel says, hand sliding under Armand’s shirt to spread flat across his diaphragm, “are you going to tell me why now?”

“I used to find comfort in places so old that they hold thousands of memories,” Armand says. A half-answer, still, but he isn’t sure he has words for a complete one, nor is he sure that he ever will. “The word nostalgia is meaningless on a human scale in comparison to a vampire’s.”

“To yours,” Daniel corrects. Ever disinclined to let Armand slide out from under the weight of his own musings.

“Yes, to mine.” He shuts his eyes, trails his fingers along Daniel’s shin. “There is no scent that does not remind me of something. No sound, taste, sight. There is no color that does not resemble the eyes or hair or flush or bruise of somebody that I have loved or despised.”

The lapping of the water against the side of the boat is a half dozen memories. The smell of smoke, a hundred. Daniel’s fingers stroking absently across his skin, a number he cannot count to.

“You’re in everything.” He doesn’t give himself permission to say it. Words, lately, often come out the moment they take shape in his mind. He’s sure that it is in no small part due to the way Daniel often rewards them.

“You say that like I’m not right here.”

And so he is. Forever changed by the choices they made together. By the one Armand continued to make for him, every day for decades. By Armand’s own blood, then and now. Armand twists, careful not to dislodge Daniel’s hand, so that he can rest his cheek to Daniel’s chest.

He doesn’t know how to answer the unspoken question Daniel is asking him, so he returns to the subject at hand. “When the nostalgia grows heavy, I come to places so old that they hold thousands of memories.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps because it all will eventually come to ruin, be forgotten by the earth. Or perhaps because it still stands in the face of that inevitable forgetting.” He muses, seeks to explain the unexplainable. Daniel’s other hand comes up to stroke his hair, his cheek. “Perhaps only for the certainty of knowing that things have endured far longer than I and people have not yet forgotten them. That I may not be forgotten so long as I am seen and heard and felt.”

“You said you used to find comfort. Not anymore?”

“No.” Tonight has changed nothing. When Daniel is touching him, he feels steady. When Daniel is not, he feels like a ship tossed on rough water, rattling and nauseous and about to go under.

“Where will you find comfort now?”

“As if you do not already know the answer to that,” Armand laughs, soft and sad breathless. “As if you cannot feel it when I am here within your arms.”

Chapter Text

The cruelest thing about perpetually waiting for the bomb to detonate is that because he’s always expecting it, he’s really never prepared for it at all. All that expectation leads to nothing useful, means that when it happens he’s just left in the rubble wondering how exactly things crumbled as they did. Never surprised that it happened of course, just surprised by the details. The hows, the whys, the timing.

It happens like that, again.

One moment things are – well, he won’t say good. But they just are.

And the next moment, things are not.

“That’s the fourth meeting that I’ve had cancel on me,” Daniel says, scowling at his computer and drowsy with the call to sleep. It’s late morning, well past when he would usually have succumbed to the sun for at least a little while. It puts him in a foul mood, which puts Armand in a foul mood when he had actually been quite pleased.

“Did they reschedule?” He asks, leaning up against the doorframe with a glass full of blood in his hand. He’s yet to decide if he actually wants to offer it considering that Daniel is now looking at him with the same expression he levelled at the computer screen.

“The email leaves the possibility of rescheduling open-ended.” Daniel slams the lid shut hard enough that Armand is fairly certain he’s hurt his own ears with the sound it makes. “What are you doing?”

“Bringing you some–”

“Fuck off. Try again.”

“I have not, in fact, been keeping secret some ability to still read your mind, so if you would like to clarify your question I will endeavor to respond to the best of my capabilities.” Sure. He knows he sounds tightly formal, that Daniel won’t be pleased. But he’s already displeased now.

The irritation burns hot, bright, insistent in Daniel. And so it burns in Armand, too. Somewhere alongside his own anxiety and the insistent, ever-present sense of impending catastrophe.

“Yeah, go ahead, be pretentious if it makes you feel better.” Daniel does an excellent job of looking relaxed. Leaned back in his chair with one ankle crossed over the other. He looks particularly handsome today, though God knows he won’t admit to dressing up for a meeting. “Who are you threatening to keep these meetings from happening?”

Technically nobody. He’s not fool enough to use his own name and contact information. And he’s not exactly threatening them; he’s simply paying them not to show up. Sure, major publishers wouldn’t have a price. But their employees most certainly do, and it’s easily afforded. It helps that the pitch itself is insane from an outside perspective, so the risk likely doesn’t seem worth the reward when a far more easily attainable one is offered. He’s really only buying himself time to figure out how to disabuse the Talamasca of the notion that this book is a good idea.

He says exactly none of this to Daniel.

“I’m not threatening anyone.” It’s not a lie, and it comes out smooth and easy, if a little cool. Then again, he’s offended by the accusation even when it’s close to accurate, so he can imagine he would be doubly offended if it was unfounded.

Daniel doesn’t believe him no matter how convincing he aims to be, because Daniel rarely assumes that Armand’s first answer is the truth. And he can’t entirely blame him for it.

He expects the bomb to detonate then.

And it doesn’t.

Instead, Daniel just heaves a sigh and gets up to take the glass Armand still holds like a peace offering for a war they aren’t meant to be fighting.

Daniel doesn’t go straight to bed, despite his apparent exhaustion. This is the well-established routine by now, of course. He fights sleep like a stubborn toddler until he’s sad or angry or giddy with the lack of it, and Armand tries a roulette of options to try placating him. There’s less daylight now, October upon them, Autumn in full swing. It allows for productivity, but it narrows the window of time Daniel has within which he’s motivated to capture what little sleep he can.

He doesn’t bother trying yet; instead, he ducks into the bathroom. Armand follows him without question or invitation, and Daniel doesn’t look surprised.  

“Are you angry with me?” He asks.

Daniel rolls his eyes. “Would it matter? You’re not admitting to anything either way.”

It would matter, of course. It would help Armand determine just how much work he should do to put Daniel at ease. “I’d rather you weren’t, so yes. It matters.”

“Now you’re just lying outright.” Daniel presses him back by the shoulders, crowds him up against the wall. “You like it when I’m pissed.”

He likes it when Daniel is pissed and like this, yes. Hungry for the fight, for a container into which he can pour all his frustration. Armand has space, and if he didn’t, he would make some. “But are you angry with me?” He doesn’t mean to ask it. He means to be helpful, useful, a place where Daniel can put the things that chew at him from the inside out. Instead it comes out soft and weak.

“Again: does it really matter?”

Armand takes stock. Daniel already half hard against his hip, his hand coming round the back of Armand’s neck to tug at his hair. His eyes already searching out Armand’s mouth. Desire in all its melted, curling up edges, burning hot between the two of them where it seems to fit the best.

He closes the distance, presses his mouth to Daniel’s in an unspoken but readily comprehensible no. It doesn’t matter. Not for what Daniel is asking. He’d give himself to Daniel in every mood, in every circumstance.

Daniel’s mouth starts out bruising but it turns gentle too soon. So early that he feels cornered, foolish. He’s proven a point he did not know Daniel was making. They’re at odds today. They should be asleep, erasing this strange sense of foreboding that hovers within the both of them. Instead they’re here, with Daniel refusing to kiss him properly, playing games neither of them will admit to.

Here, with Daniel kissing him chaste, and pulling away, and looking at him with eyes that don’t match the touch at all. “See. This is the problem.” As if there is a single problem. “You fold so fucking quickly. Not a damn vertebra left in your backbone.”

“So it’s wrong that I’m willing to compromise?” Armand considers pushing Daniel away. It’s not the preferrable option. Instead his hands go to Daniel’s buttons, slipping them from their loops one by one.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s kind of wrong when I didn’t ask you to.” Hadn’t he? Armand cannot recall. “And you’re not compromising anyways. Just convincing yourself you wanted whatever was offered all along.”

There’s something behind the words that Armand cannot pinpoint, and if he can’t define it he cannot speak to it. He slides Daniel’s shirt off his shoulders, takes off his own. “What do you want me to say?”

Daniel doesn’t answer him, at first. He unbuckles his belt, strips off the rest of his clothes, and starts the water running. “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

He’s so good at making his words painful, and Armand has only made it easier for him. Let his armor be peeled off layer by layer until it got down to skin. And now, another edge coming up, Daniel’s words like fingers prying that skin from muscle. And for what? For this? For the bite of Daniel’s words to connect with viscera and bone?

“Of course not. You prefer to hold onto your secrets now. It’s a good punishment.”

“You can’t call it a punishment to not have access to my every thought.” Daniel sounds more tired than anything else. “It’s fucking normal not to be able to read minds. You remember that?”

“No,” Armand says simply.

Daniel breathes. In-out-in. He gets into the shower and leaves Armand to decide whether or not he will follow. For once, Armand considers leaving him to it. A moment later he strips off the rest of his clothes and gets in, and Daniel wraps arms around him like a peace offering.

And still, the bomb does not detonate.

In bed, it feels fine. It feels good. It feels as lovely as it ever has, tangled around Daniel like a vine reaching up towards the sun.

Daniel disarms him with soft hands and soft mouth and a sweetly bitten tongue, makes all thoughts of war drift far from sight. Makes a fool of him again when he pulls back to murmur, “tell me you didn’t get the meetings cancelled.”

His silence is as good as an admission, but he’s too busy trying to catch up to the new rules of engagement to care now. That’s the problem with Daniel; he will do anything for the answers he wants, leaves Armand stumbling on untrodden ground to try and give him ones that don’t tear things apart.

“So it’s alright if it’s a transaction when you do it, then?”

Daniel’s thumbs, having been stroking his jaw in that steady, hypnotic way Armand is certain he’s learned from watching him, stop moving now. “What?”

“You. Buying answers to your questions with tenderness. Is that not a transaction?”

Daniel’s silence is as good as an admission, too. If neither of them move, Armand wonders if they will still be heading at a breakneck pace towards an argument neither of them are prepared to have. He’s not even certain what it’s about. They used to argue, of course. About Daniel’s death wish in one way or another, about Armand’s refusal to allow him either avenue to fulfill it.

That argument has been firmly laid to rest alongside Armand’s butchered resolve.

One could, perhaps, call the days following Dubai an argument. It reads more as foreplay in hindsight.

This does not.

“I didn’t mean to–”

“Yes you did, Daniel.” Armand’s hand is between Daniel’s shoulder blades, his leg hitched over Daniel’s thigh. Their noses brush and Daniel’s heart beats in steady rhythm with his own and all of it feels very far away. The walls feel terribly close. “I am exactly as you expect me to be, and you use that to your advantage when it suits.”

“Wh– Jesus Christ.” Daniel’s thumb presses hard into Armand’s jaw, and he seems to notice, letting it fall away. “I’m too old for this shit, and you’re way too old for this shit, so what’s happening here?”

What is age, Armand wonders, if time cannot touch him? What does it even mean anymore if he comes back to the same place over and over again. Frightened rabbit in his chest, gnawing creature in his belly. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

This, at least, is honest. Daniel seems to think so too, because he noses up against Armand’s cheek, his jaw, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Is it a fight, then? Should we maybe turn the lights on, warm up the vocal chords? I’m just trying to figure out the rules here.”

“Not yet,” Armand says. If force of will is enough to keep them alive, it must be enough to keep the storm at bay. As if that’s how any of this works, how any of this has ever worked. “Why can’t you leave the book? Why do you need to write it so badly?”

He knows the answer already. Daniel’s curiosity is a tyrant, demanding and indefatigable, but it has been sated and he remains hungry. It’s not enough for him to ask the question, he must tell the world the answer. Must be seen, heard, felt. Perhaps it is enough for Armand to have one person know he is there, but it has never been enough for Daniel.

“Is there an answer I can give you that will make you stop fucking with it? Because at this point I’m pretty sure I’m wasting my breath.”

Then don’t breathe, Armand wants to say. Be here with me where you don’t need air, where the world isn’t going to collapse around everything I’ve ever loved the moment you open your mouth.

“It should be enough,” he offers instead. “I would have been enough, once.”

He expects the anger, but he does not expect the hurt. A gut punch sort of ache. Daniel pulls away as if Armand has slapped him, puts a space between them that’s big enough for a third. “I won’t compete with a past version of myself for the rest of time, Armand.”

Daniel says his name like a knife, like he’s throwing it off of his own tongue so it might land in Armand’s chest. And it does, of course, because that’s where Daniel’s pain is. Armand doesn’t understand.

“You aren’t competing with anyone.” A pause. A heavy weight and the kicking, scrabbling, panicked flutter of the rabbit in Armand’s chest while he tries to get out from under it.

“You want the boy who dropped his life for you for a decade. Who had nothing but you left, and who had to give even that up to start over again after.” Daniel doesn’t look at him, stares up at the ceiling where a whole other life plays out. “You weren’t there, were you? When I was coming down.”

“No.” Because what else is he to say? He put Daniel on a bus and he didn’t even watch it pull away. It hurt too much.

Daniel’s hand is on his chest, splayed flat against his heart. “The withdrawal took months. Worse than fucking heroin, but that’s what everyone thought I was on. What I thought I was on. So I thought I was just losing my fucking mind when it didn’t get better. Curled up in some old lady’s basement detoxing with a notebook in my hands, trying to figure out how to pay her for letting me scream my throat bloody in her spare room.”

“I didn’t–”

“Know? Of course you did.” Daniel laughs, short and humorless, turning his head to look at Armand. “I would have died if it weren’t for the shit Louis put in my head. Wouldn’t have cared enough to eat or sleep. And you wouldn’t have cared.”

It hurts, because it’s not true. Or because it is. It’s always hard to say where the pain comes from when Daniel causes it. “I would have.”

“You would have preferred me dead to me becoming like you. Like this.” It isn’t something Armand can argue with. He’s said it before, he’s meant it before, he doesn’t believe it now. “And now I am, just not the way you want me. Could’ve had that boy, with all his eager, infatuated tunnel vision. But you didn’t want him bad enough.”

“That’s not true.” Pieces of it are, and Daniel is too good at knowing when Armand is lying. It doesn’t matter that the important parts are false, that the now is false. Daniel only only only wants what’s honest. Hungry, bottomless pit that he is. That Armand has damned him to be forevermore.  

Daniel is quiet for a long time. Cold like a glacier, slow moving, unwilling to thaw. It’s not the first time he has seen him this way, but he’s grown so used to Daniel’s warmth that it hurts. When Daniel finally speaks, it’s with a thick tongue and a hollowed-out chest. “You don’t get to punish me for who I became in your absence.”

Armand could argue. Of course he could. He loves who Daniel has become, loves him dry and sharp and ornery. Loves the way he wields words now, the way he sees the truth of the world. Loves dozens of things that he never would have found in Daniel before, or that were still stunted and half-formed in youth. Loves that this Daniel can stand as close to his equal as he thinks perhaps anyone has. Can balance with him at the edge of the knife.

But none of that matters if Daniel does not want it, does not like it. The inevitable, here at last. He thought it might hurt less if he expected it, but it still feels like razors slicing between his ribs.

“I’m tired,” Daniel says.

“Do you want me to leave?” Armand asks.

“I don’t care.”

And still, the bomb does not go off. Nothing explodes, nothing crumbles, nothing collapses around him. He just gets up from bed, leaves the room, shuts the door behind him. He just takes the keys from the counter and tries to find somewhere that might hear his penance.

It should be easy. It would be for the best. Daniel, gone long enough now that Armand is sure this could be the end of it, and by the boy’s own choosing. They fought in Kansas City, Daniel packing his things again the way he always does, setting out for anywhere that Armand is not.

And as he always does, Armand had waited there for a week.

It’s been a month, now. Armand knows where Daniel is, of course. Has followed him from Kansas City to St. Louis to Indianapolis. Now Detroit.

Perhaps if he hadn’t chosen Detroit. Perhaps if he wasn’t presently tucked away in the attic of a drug den with a needle in his arm looking for something to fill the void. It doesn’t and it never will. Armand has seen Daniel’s mind on most every drug known to man, and he’s seen his mind when it was being fed by Armand’s blood.

Nothing compares and nothing ever could. Such is the life he has resigned Daniel to.

And still. Perhaps, even here at the very threshold, he would be able to stay away. Would be able to let Daniel go on living or go on trying to die or whatever in between he chooses for the remainder of his human lifespan. If not for the pleading, painful pounding of his name in Daniel’s head.

Over and over and over again.

Please Armand, please find me. I can’t find you. Armand. I shouldn’t have left Armand. I love you I love you, Armand you can’t leave me here or I’m going to die.

Death is a gift Armand gives many of his victims. A gentle drifting into the unknown, the end of ends. He offered it to Daniel once, and Daniel accepted, and he did not deliver on his promise. He made new ones, instead, to Louis. Ones he hasn’t cared about in years.

He won’t give it to him now, either. Instead he slips his way into the house, shoves a good number of half-conscious, faceless humans out of his way, and crouches down next to Daniel when he finds him upstairs.

“Daniel, beloved,” he murmurs, a hand on Daniel’s cheek.

Daniel’s eyes crack open, half exhaustion, half dreamy awe. “Oh, hey baby. Whatcha doing here? Been a while.”

“34 days,” Armand notes, gathering up sharps with his free hand and tossing them across the floor.

“Nah. Just saw you yesterday. Didn’t touch me though. That feels nice.” Daniel has a beatific smile on his face. It’s not enough to make up for the hollows of his cheeks, the darkness under his eyes. Being with Armand is killing him and being apart from Armand is killing him faster.

He was hallucinating, obviously. It’s easier not to try to reason with Daniel like this; he’s barely conscious enough to make words. “Can you stand?”

Daniel tilts his head, processes the question so slowly that Armand almost considers repeating himself. “Nope,” he finally says, popping loudly on the ‘p’ and stretching his smile into a grin. “C’mere. Sit with me.”

This house is full of weak heartbeats and unwashed bodies and despair. Armand doesn’t want to stay here. But Daniel’s hand is warm where it covers his own, wrapping lazily around his wrist to tug him close, so he settles down next to him. Daniel leans heavy on his shoulder and Armand rearranges them both, Daniel’s head in his lap so he can stroke his hair.

After that, Daniel’s thoughts drift off into blurry, barely coherent things aimed in his approximate direction. Warmth. Love. Hunger. Relief. Most of these things, Armand does not deserve the credit for. He strokes Daniel’s hair anyways, brushes greasy curls back from his sweating forehead.

“S’actually you this time,” Daniel says, an eternity later with eyes cracking open to gaze up at Armand’s face. Armand tries to rearrange his expression into something other than what it is, but he sees the fear on it inside Daniel’s mind. “Aw. Don’t look like that, baby. Hate when you look at me like that.”

“Then stop giving me reason to.”

He doesn’t have to give Daniel blood. It would be enough, for now, to be here watching over him. Perhaps eventually the pain would pass and the cravings would abate, and then Armand could leave Daniel to a life better than this.

“Thought I was gonna be somebody once,” Daniel murmurs, following the winding trail of his own intoxicated musings. It’s a gentle knife, an unintended knife, but a knife all the same. “Turns out I’m just supposed to be yours.”

“You can be both,” Armand says. He thinks, if he wants it badly enough, perhaps he can make it true.

Daniel smiles up at him indulgently. “Yeah, sure.”

Somewhere else in the house a heartbeat drops out from among the many, but it isn’t Daniel’s. Daniel’s heart goes and goes. Armand doesn’t have to give him blood. He shouldn’t be here giving him that glimpse of hope that’s back in his eyes, either.

“Thought you weren’t gonna come back for me this time,” Daniel murmurs. And then, with an earnestness that condemns them both, he says, “You’re the only thing that makes the pain stop.”

And Armand opens his vein.

There are dozens of churches in this city. Mosques, too.

Armand finds himself in one after the next after the next. In pulpits, in cemeteries, on his knees, inside confessionals with nobody on the other side to hear him. He goes to these places because he does not know where else to go to feel the weight of what he has done. He doesn’t go to be absolved, to be pardoned, to be given forgiveness by the wrong gods.

It takes days. He tries all those he can find.

There is nowhere that he can make himself pray. Nowhere that does not feel cold and empty and devoid of any grace. Perhaps Daniel has been right all along. Perhaps nobody has ever been listening.

It has been a long time since he asked God to love him back anyways.

It’s a strange thing to be proven right. Both satisfying and sickening in equal measure. He had begun to hope for everything he had ever known to be proven false. He had begun to almost believe it possible. Hubris, he supposes. The idea that he might be the exception. That he might love something so well and so whole and so consuming that something could love him back in spite of the sin of having guaranteed it hell.

And sure, Daniel loves him still now. Armand can feel that. Can feel, tucked behind his own misery, the mixture of anger and hurt and fear that make up Daniel’s love for him. But that love is not impenetrable. Not impossible to shake or dissolve or remove.  

No love is.

Unlike matter, it can be destroyed. Unmade.

And what he’s done – what he’s made Daniel into – sends aftershocks that would crumble even the sturdiest of foundations.

He has to live with them. Daniel has to live with them. It hurts to be apart from him, in a physical, visceral way. Like everything inside of him has been scooped out and left behind in their bed. Like all the good in him, all that might ever be given forgiveness, is somewhere outside of his body.

Daniel probably is the best of him, and he’s the product of the most selfish thing Armand has ever done. Twice over.

He would find something to pray to. Find somewhere to beg forgiveness. If he was sorry, if he could regret it, if he was a better stronger version of himself. If he thought that it would change anything for either of them. But none of those things are true, and so he finds nowhere. No scripture, no holy man, no great revelation.

Only ache in his chest, and a hunger that belongs to both of them, and a weariness that demands even he succumb to sleep.

He goes back to the cottage, and he knows before he opens the door. Knows, because he can’t hear Daniel’s heart beating, and because the hollow ache is only growing bigger, louder. And because it’s what he should have known all along.

Perhaps he did. Perhaps that’s why he left at all.

It doesn’t matter.

Daniel’s laptop is gone, his duffel bag is gone, the blood in the fridge is gone.

Armand stands alone amongst the rubble, trying to figure out the exact moment when the explosion went off.

Chapter Text

You’d be better off alone.

Armand had told Daniel that, once. Or Daniel had told Armand. Or maybe he had simply imagined them telling each other things that they should. Things that people who love each other should say and mean when instead all they do is hurt one another over and over again. Daniel has been gone again, lies in this bed with him now weighing twelve pounds less than he had three weeks ago. His stomach is made of rot and Armand’s is made of the knots he keeps wishing he could tie around Daniel’s wrists to keep him in one place.

Come to think of it, Armand isn’t sure what people who love each other should do at all. He had excellent teachers if love is meant to be ache and ruin. He had poor teachers if love is meant to outlast all things. If it is meant to be the great overcomer.

He’d like for his love for Daniel to overcome, but it hasn’t been doing that, has it? It’s been withering, rotting on the stem, succumbing to blight. One day, it’ll be decomposed soil. It’ll be nothing. Daniel will die, by one fate or another. By his own foolish hand, by withdrawal, by the ravages of impatient time.

And Armand will be alone, as he has been. And he won’t be better off. Never has been.

Alone on a dirty, stinking ship, crossing an ocean so big his little eyes would not fathom it even if they let him above deck. Folded up inside himself to keep intact the bits of him that have since survived all these years. Not unharmed, not unscathed, not unscarred. But at least intact. At least not stolen entirely.

Alone in a brothel, where– alone. Just alone.

Alone in his knowledge. Alone in carrying the burden of the truth of Marius, knowing his great wide love and knowing that it was too big for a human to hold. Knowing its limitations – time, of course. Time. Amadeo would grow old and die. Amadeo would become a man. Amadeo would leave. Amadeo would be trapped in the in between begging for a grace that was eventually bestowed upon him only by chance.

Alone by a bonfire. Alone in a dungeon cell. Alone with the bones of the life he once lived, of the closest to comfort and company he had come to know in the years before or since.

Alone in a coven.

Alone in a crypt.

Alone in a theatre troupe that did their very best to love him and could no more love him than he could them.

Alone with Louis. Alone with his thoughts, his crimes, his earnest shame.

Alone with his gods, great and small. His collection of the worshipped, who could not begin to worship him in return. Love him in return.

Perhaps he is still alone with Daniel. But with him winding limbs around him to tangle into bed, with his endless questions and queries and kindnesses, it’s doesn’t feel that way. Daniel has a soft mouth and gentle hands and the sort of whine that means ‘I’d give you anything’ and he isn’t as devoted as Armand knows himself to be, but he could be. Armand knows he could be.

He was never made to be strong enough to choose his own loneliness. He has a name when he is called by it. Has skin when it is touched, a mouth when it is in service. Teeth when they are sinking into flesh, a body when it is offered blood. A heart when it has something to beat for.

Daniel might be better off alone. Armand knows he would not be. Will not be.

As he always does, Armand waits for a week. And then, because Daniel has changed in ways not yet fully known to him, he waits an extra day for every decade they were apart. Daniel doesn’t come back to the cottage. It smells like Daniel here, feels like him. For a near century this cottage has stood, and in only months Daniel has taken over every part of it.

Armand could call, perhaps. Could trace Daniel’s phone if he has been foolish enough to leave it powered on. But Daniel is as free to leave now as he ever was before – Armand won’t stop him from going, won’t drag him back to his side if he does not want to be there.

Distance is a physical thing. It takes shape inside his chest, has a tangible presence that he feels as if he can wrap his fist around. It’s pain, yes. Just ordinary pain, the sort of pain he hasn’t been phased by in many years. But it’s got the persistence of hunger, the insistence of thirst. To ignore it feels as wrong as it would be to starve himself.

Wronger, perhaps. Armand does not need to eat often. He feels as if he needs Daniel constantly.

Daniel’s emotions are a soupy, swirling mass within the very center of it all. Separating them out into defined components was difficult even with Daniel’s heart under his palm, and it’s impossible so far from him. All he can parse is that the combination leans more towards bad than good. Armand takes comfort in it when he supposes he should be sorry for it.

He is not a big enough person to wish no suffering at all upon those he loves. And why should he? This life is not without suffering for him. Nor was the last. Or the one before that, before that before that before– why should they not have to suffer, too? Daniel could always suffer and endure through it, and he can survive it now in ways that he would not have done as a human.

It takes another week for the haze to clear enough that he does find things to worry about. The book still, which he has no doubt will continue making progress towards publication unless he decides to pick himself up off the living room rug and do something about it. He’s fairly certain he can talk most any publisher out of it, but if the Talamasca is determined then they will pose an entirely different challenge.

Then, and perhaps more vitally, there are other vampires to concern himself with. The older ones might smell the bloodline on Daniel even now, might hang back for the sake of avoiding conflict. But fledglings have no such knowledge – it’s not inborn, it’s learned. Trained.

Armand’s blood makes Daniel far stronger than most of them, but he’s cocky and he’s prideful and his survival instincts have always been sorely lacking. It takes luck and intent to kill another vampire just as much as it does skill.

And still, there is worse risk. Worse, worse– worse than the book, the Talamasca, the idiot spawn of idiot vampires. There is Daniel.

Daniel, who has always been his own biggest enemy and is now so hungry it makes Armand’s weeks of abstinence feel like nothing at all. So hungry that Armand can’t be certain he will be careful. Can’t be certain he won’t find himself out in the day, or arrested and thrown into a prison where he will burn at first light, or–

So he picks himself up off the floor.

He won’t go back. But he will make sure they share the same continent. The same country, maybe.

He never asked Louis what it felt like when Madeline burned. He’s not sure Louis even noticed it, so caught up in his pain, perhaps in Lestat’s. Louis did not love Madeline, he loved the idea that she might solve his greatest problem, provide an escape from his biggest shame.

Armand loves Daniel. He loves Daniel and the space he takes up inside his chest, the hollow behind his ribs that was formed in the process of Daniel’s remaking. Carved as if from stone. He wouldn’t fill it at the cost of losing Daniel, no matter how badly it hurts.

So. He picks himself up.

He books a flight. He drags himself back to the states.

---

It hurts a little less. Almost imperceptibly, so subtly that within a day he’s sure he’s imagined it because it still feels like he’s caving in on himself. And Daniel… Daniel isn’t any better now. Armand thinks he’s worse. He vacillates wildly between overwhelming hunger and almost complete oblivion, emotions dropping down and down and down until Armand can hardly feel them at all beneath the rabbit-racing of his own panicked heart.  

He’s on the very threshold of November when he realizes that Daniel doesn’t have any effective method for reaching out to him even if he’d like to. It’s not as if they carved out the time to exchange cell phone contacts while they were constantly in one another’s presence. It used to be that Armand would follow him more closely, would know when Daniel was calling out for him with his mind.

That’s obviously not an option anymore. The recollection stings just as much the thousandth time as it had the very first.

Armand’s next best option serves a convenient dual purpose: it also sates his own hunger. The first time it’s convenient coincidence more than anything. He settles in Atlanta for a few days and decides he has no option but to eat. There’s a line, even for him, where hunger becomes starvation. And starvation becomes dark memory, becomes a twisting thread that leads too far back for him to catch the end of.

The man he follows is thinking about work. Thinking about a story.

At first, he just follows him to listen in. To slide into his mind so that he might pretend it’s familiar. Manages to half convince himself that Daniel’s mind is not as singular as he knows it to be.

Then he follows because though the man is stupider and far less dogged, in at least in one thing, they are similar. He is a journalist. No Pulitzer to his name, but he’s certainly not unsuccessful. He’s in his late twenties. By forty, perhaps, he could make a name for himself. He won’t.

Armand corners him in the dark shadows of a park at dusk. Lures him sweetly down the path towards his own death. He’ll serve a purpose. He’ll become his own last story. He’ll– well, it doesn’t particularly matter what he’ll do.

Where Armand is usually fastidious in his disposal methods, he leaves the man where he knows he will be found.

He wonders what it is Daniel feels from him. If he can feel the hurt, the anger, or if he only feels the rush that comes from the blood. Armand can always feel when Daniel has hunted, but Daniel’s experience of drinking is far more visceral than his own. Painted bright with newness and sharp with dependency.

He stays in Atlanta for four days. More than enough time for Daniel to come to him, if he’d like.

The next kill is in Miami. A more established journalist this time, a woman with a career behind her. Grandchildren.

Perhaps Daniel has met her, even. No immediate memories come to mind, but he doesn’t call them up either. If they are friends, perhaps anger will drive Daniel back to him. If they are not, then it’s of no consequence

Again. Four days, more than enough time. If Daniel would like. If Daniel needs him for anything.

Of course, Daniel is unlikely to notice the first journalist to go missing. Or the second. He’s confident that by the third Daniel will begin to catch on. Perhaps friends will mention it in awkward emails, or he will stumble upon posts on social media, or he will read it in a newspaper by fluke. If Daniel wants to know, he will.

Armand finds the young man in St. Louis. Barely out of school. He doesn’t have the talent Daniel had at that age, but he has more money. It might have brought him somewhere eventually, as money is wont to do.  

Four days. Plenty of time. Daniel only needs to want to find him.

---

Daniel is a black hole inside his chest. Daniel is a fading light, is the shape and smell and sound of gray within the space he takes up. Which, Armand supposes, is all of it. He has all the space. Bleeds out from Armand’s chest cavity to everywhere else.

He’s sure his marrow has long since disintegrated. Daniel is there.

He’s sure there’s room under his fingernails. Daniel is there.

He’s sure his tendons are stretched thin. Daniel is there.

The slippage of time and the pain of distance render details hazy and formless. If Armand works at it, he can recall the argument, if it could even really be called that. He’s sure there are parts of it he should pay more attention to, but all that ultimately matters is that Daniel does not like what Armand has made him. There’s no return from that. Dooming Daniel to this endless hunt for something that does not exist, for a drug that is no longer available to him in the way it was when he was still human, it is an unforgiveable act. He always knew that.  

Sometimes he imagines what Daniel might say to him. Not the way Louis had with Lestat – no hallucinations, no losing track of his own mind or searching for something to separate himself from his more unsavory thoughts. Just the way a child might imagine a friend. Might find some way to fill the loneliness of long days with the sound of something familiar.

When he’s weary on his feet and trying to imagine a way through the next decade or century, it’s: “You should sleep. You’d be less miserable if you slept every once in a while.”

When he’s trailing fingers along the stonework of a church and considering the tidiness of an oblivion, it’s: “You can’t seriously think there’s nothing contradictory about believing in the shit Nietzsche says and also praying at every church we walk past.”  

And when he’s hunting, drinking, memorizing the sound of last breaths, it’s a dozen things or more: “I love you.” And “you’re fucking dramatic.” And “I can taste him on you.” And “she took a class from me once, y’know.” And “what if we see a movie after this?” And “he was on vacation in Bali – we should go to Bali sometime. Or the Caribbean or Cuba or somewhere with a beach.” And “yeah, yeah I do fucking love you.”

He can’t really hear him. He certainly can’t see him.

It’s just the shape of the shape of a thing. The memory of the memory of comfort, of home.

---

He’s sad but he isn’t stupid. He kills strategically, finds cities that don’t have distinct signs of the presence of covens, that aren’t known for demonstrating a great amount of suspicion or superstition. There is being obvious, and then there is inviting conflict. Armand doesn’t have the patience for dealing with the latter, so he avoids it where he can.

He can’t recall the last time he ate with this much frequency. The last few months with Daniel, of course, he’d had more than he might usually. Finishing what Daniel couldn’t or joining him in the invitation when given it. There had been something so sweet about feeding with Daniel. Coming as close as he might ever get to being in Daniel’s mind again, if only by the thread of the human soul connected between them.

There is only ever one death knell, though. It cannot be shared. When the thread snaps, it is in one direction. Not both. As close as he can ever get, and still never close enough.

Armand does, occasionally, wonder what might happen if Daniel never decides to find him. Eventually he might run out of journalists, though he supposes there are always more beginning every day. Daniel might eventually leave the country, which would widen the pool. At some point, some old vampire or another might begin to pay idle attention, which could stir up more trouble than Armand has the energy for.

At least then he would have someone to speak with though. Someone at least minimally more worthy of listening to than the desperate, greedy minds of the people he hunts. Daniel has no equal, of that he’s often been sure. Now he’s done adequate research. Has delved into the best and brightest minds of three generations and found no comparison worth making. Armand cannot begin to imagine what Daniel will be capable of fifty years from now.  

He could move on to authors for a while, maybe. Autobiographers. He tries to recall if he’s ever hunted this way before. Chosen a theme or characteristic or defining feature beyond either irksomely cruel or simply so sad he can feel it. At some point, the blood stops tasting like anything. Tastes like human food, like chalk or washed sand. There’s no joy in it. It’s only something to do.

If he imagines Daniel reading the paper, scrolling through news articles, seeing the murders and knowing they belong to him, then that’s nobody’s business but his own. The inside of his mind as comfortably sealed as it has ever been, even if there is a gaping wide wound in his chest.

---

The seventh person Armand hunts is as non-descript to him as all the others. A man in his mid-forties, once divorced, engaged again to someone a decade and a half his junior. He’s never home, but his fiancée takes the kids on all his weeks anyways. His ex-wife gets along with her well. He’s working on his third book, imagines he will publish it and then find somewhere to settle down and teach. Get on a tenure track, move away from the bustle and grind that is journalism, resign himself to the humdrum monotony of age.

He’s had a mediocre career. Enough that his family will speak of it with pride at his funeral, but not earth-shattering. He will come as no great loss to the broader community. He doesn’t have the drive for that, the bottomless hunger for knowledge, the willingness to get it at any cost.

He’s in Houston trying to build up a story about big oil. Armand doesn’t need to tell him that book has been written tenfold. That he doesn’t have a fresh angle, nor does he have the charisma to convince someone else to give him one.

Armand tells him anyways, because that’s how this works.

“I think I’ve done alright for myself,” the man – John, yes, that’s it – murmurs, dazed and comforted by Armand’s touch. He doesn’t fight back. He won’t.

“Yes. You’ve done very well, John. Your children will remember you fondly if you go now. Why not let them? Your life has only dust ahead; you’ll be shelved like an out-of-date title in a high school library.” This doesn’t take long. It’s taking too long. Armand almost doesn’t have the patience for it, even when they make it easy for him. It’s hard to care much about anything but the cavern behind his sternum.

“I don’t want to get old.” And yes. That fear, that fear has dragged so many into his arms. Just the simple, human desire to avoid the inevitability of age. The vulnerability they think comes with it. The ugliness they are so terrified of. Selfish, mortal fears.

“You don’t have to, John. I can take that from you.”

“Please.”

So easy. So simple. Such a gentle kind of death. He sinks his fangs in and tastes the resignation, the relief, the end of potential. Perhaps his students would have become great writers, one day. Would have written the sorts of words that reveal to the world its own secrets. One will never know.

He feels Daniel here, in the city. First felt him here two days after his last kill. He has waited and waited and waited.

He can smell him now, too. Blood and tobacco and the floral sweetness that is uniquely Daniel, only Daniel. And himself, too, even now. Honey. Behind all of it clings the hint of false-sugar sweetness of Marius’ bloodline.

“A bit lazy, no?” Daniel drawls, an attempt at dry. At disinterested.

But he is here, and he must be interested. He is here, and his voice sounds ragged, and his heart is beating too fast for anything but fear or anticipation. Daniel has not been afraid of Armand in a very long time.

John’s body lands on the pavement with a crack.

“Daniel,” Armand says. He wants to say more. Something scathing, or clever, or cruel, or even gentle. But all that comes out is a weak and desperate and needy “Daniel. Daniel. Daniel.”

It might have been better once, to imagine themselves separate. To be alone.

It isn’t now.

Chapter Text

All at once his head is cracking against the brick and his hands are clutching the fabric of Daniel’s jacket and Daniel’s mouth is on his, and the memory of separateness becomes distant, hazy, false. He can’t imagine they were ever apart, can feel the pulsing bright-line tether between the two of them shrink and shrink until it’s the exact depth of their two chest cavities.

He isn’t sure what feelings belong to Daniel, what feelings belong to himself.

More accurately, everything that is his is Daniel’s, again. Always was but now Daniel holds it all in his hands.

“Shut up,” Daniel hisses against his mouth, hand wrapping around his throat.

It takes Armand longer than is remotely reasonable to realize that he hasn’t been saying anything out loud. “What do you–”

“Your feelings are so fucking loud. You know that? How do you fucking sleep?”

He doesn’t. Daniel knows that, already, unless his memory has suffered a new and spontaneous lapse. A brief flash of fear cuts through the joy and the ache and the anger. Daniel must misinterpret it, because his hand loosens its grip. Armand doesn’t need to breathe – supposes perhaps he needs some sort of blood to flow through to his brain, though he’s not sure it’s much. He’s not died yet after all.

Daniel isn’t strong enough to take his head off entirely.

It’s laughable that he should worry. So Armand laughs.

“Fuck you,” Daniel cuts out. Shakes him. Armand could hold his neck still, of course. Could stop his head from cracking back against the brick again. Again. Daniel doesn’t hurt him. Armand hurts himself. Pain meant to make everything quiet, meant to smother the noise.

In the corner of his mind where Armand still exists as a separate entity, can still process logical thought, it all registers as the anger it’s meant to. The rest of him, though, is a whining, wanting thing with no regard for logic or reason. That whine, that want, that thing – it writhes in Daniel’s chest, too. Armand can feel it. The monster in him and the monster in him and the monster in them. Reaching, reaching, reaching.

Laughter dies swift and complete, choked off by desire. When he kisses Daniel again it’s not seduction it’s starvation. He can’t tell whose. He can tell whose.

Theirs. Of course theirs.

There’s no undoing himself from Daniel’s blood, after all. Not even a meticulous excision of memory could remove him from Daniel now, or Daniel from him. And he’s finally ready to admit that he wouldn’t do it, even if he could. That what he made Daniel is something he loves, he wants. Shame tells him to regret it, tells him to drum up remorse, and he can’t. He’s tried and he can’t.

Daniel groans low and desperate into the cavern of his mouth, breath hot with the blood he must have gorged himself on before he came to Armand. His hunger is a coiled thing, docile but waiting. Never sleeping, never dead.

And Armand cannot be sorry for it.

And that’s the problem, he thinks. Daniel is a mass of dark green and blue and black, little more than a bruise inside his own chest, and Armand is still not sorry for making him that way. Armand is a black hole, a place where all things go to die. It’s no wonder his blood in Daniel’s body is greedy and bottomless.

And he isn’t sorry.

He’s just–

“Shhhh,” Daniel says. It’s gentler this time, almost pleading.

“I can’t,” Armand says. “I can’t. If I could I’d–”

He’d what? Stop? Stop feeling it all, the rage and the fear and the despair and the horror? A lie, of course. He’s been numb before. He doesn’t want to be numb any more than he wants to be dead; enough to ache for it but not enough to trade his life for it.

What they’re doing now isn’t kissing, isn’t fucking. Lives somewhere in the space between. Wet, slack mouths, pawing hands, aimless rutting. Sex is a joining together. This is a crawling inside. A magnetic pull to center, an inevitable, compulsive return to orbit. The parts of Daniel that are living in Armand drag themselves desperately back to their home in Daniel’s body. The parts of Armand living in Daniel pull all of Armand back to that home, too.

Home at the hollow of Daniel’s throat, in the capillaries of his eyes, the stretched tendons of his ankles as he rocks forward onto toes to cram himself against Armand’s body.

Home and home and home.

One of them is crying. Or both of them are, from one pair of eyes. It doesn’t matter except that it’s Daniel, and Armand can’t recall the last time he saw Daniel cry. He pulls back to see it now, to drag his fingers through the red tracks with unvarnished awe.

Another time, Daniel would turn away. Another time, Armand would try to soothe him.

Now they are too animal to do anything but collide again and again and again. It hurts and he lets it go on hurting. It burns and he lets it go on burning.

Daniel’s mouth presses to whatever skin it can find, finds more by dragging Armand’s collar to the side, or sliding his sleeve up his forearm, or pulling the hem of his shirt free from his belt and ghosting heat over Armand’s stomach. His fangs are careful and unwounding, and yet leave a wound all their own.

Daniel needs him, needs the proximity. Armand can feel that much.

But he does not want him. Does not want his blood, hovering under the surface of his flesh in blatant and flushed subservience.

Or does not want to want it. The distinction is unclear, is wrapped up in the instinctive hunger and buried beneath a mountain of hurt and anger so tall as to put the Himalaya to shame.

“I almost climbed Everest once,” Armand hears himself say. A breathless, distracted statement. Nonsensical and detached from current reality and somehow exactly what cracks through the heatwave of Daniel’s bottomless rage and leaves him blinking slack-jawed at Armand. It is the sort of bemused expression Armand can rarely startle from him in this century and quite frequently did in the last.

“It’s bullshit that you’ve had sticky fingers all over my brain and I never got in yours just once to see how you make leaps like that,” Daniel manages a half beat later. His hand is a bruising force on Armand’s bicep, grounding and pure. His other is decidedly far too gentle where it tangles in Armand’s hair. It always is.

Whether it’s frustration or relief or exhaustion or something entirely unnameable, the emotion that surfaces has Armand huffing a skeleton of a laugh and answering more earnestly than he might otherwise. “It wouldn’t help. I don’t know, either.”

He can see Daniel running logistics, synthesizing what he knows to be true about the laws of nature and the laws of man. “There’s no way you were actually going to climb Everest.”

 “I had the plane ticket booked,” Armand offers, shrugging a shoulder and blinking at Daniel with a mixture of giddiness and hazy detachment.

“Yeah… think almost is a stretch then.” Daniel’s hand loosens its grip and Armand’s eyes widen in result, his own fingers clenching tighter to the leather of Daniel’s jacket. The fear that Daniel is going to leave again doesn’t register as such until Daniel is rolling his eyes and leaning weight into his body and saying, “babe, I need you to get your shit together or I’m going to throw up.”

“I don’t think vampires can–”

“Tell that to the hotel floor.”

Any other time (alright, perhaps almost any other time) Armand would spare some curiosity for the new revelation. Daniel, special in all ways, always, but particularly in the ways that he was built to suffer. It’s a life rope tossed into rough waters, which is to say Armand can see the attempt at giving him a tether but cannot do anything to grab onto it.

It’s not by choice.

“Sit down,” Daniel says, cutting through the current with the sort of authority he rarely bothers to use but seems to know he always carries at his disposal. Armand sinks to the pavement below, has a moment to take in the body beside him with distant detachment before Daniel is dragging the corpse further into the alley by the ankles.

Numb to it, now, in a way Armand doesn’t quite recall him being before.

He isn’t sure if he feels proud or sad. He wonders, with a strange and backwards curiosity, if this is how parents feel when their children become adults. When they stumble out into the world to make mistakes and survive in spite of their makers.

He doubts that Daniel would be particularly fond of the comparison. He’s yet to see the way centuries melt down structured relationships into half solid, molten masses. How those masses are forged into new shapes, into tools or weapons or precious things they never resembled before.

Daniel sinks down into his lap a moment later, a solid weight pressing the backs of Armand’s legs into the cold cement. He does it with a groan, like his joints still ache. Perhaps they do. More likely, its habit left over from all the years where they did. The warm glow of fondness in Armand’s chest might make Daniel angrier than even the pride would, if Armand thought Daniel could separate it out from everything else.

It would be easier to sort grains of sand into a gradient than it would be to sort the vast whirlpool of emotions swirling in the center of their chest. One chest. Armand is in there, he swears it, wedged around Daniel’s heart and between both lungs and behind the ribs and close enough to the spine that he could tug the cord if–

“Hey,” Daniel’s voice isn’t loud, isn’t sharp, but it is immovable. Impossible to ignore or argue with, now that he has again known its absence so completely. No imagining of it, no clumsy recollection, could begin to compare. “I’d like to be pissed at you, and your fucking insanity is kind of getting in the way.”

“Apologies,” Armand says, even though it’s a lie. The accusation and the amends. He can feel Daniel’s anger just fine, in fact. The simplest to pick out of all the emotions. A boulder held up against particles of silt.

“Like cutting my nose off to spite my damn face,” Daniel grumbles, and Armand assumes it’s not meant for him. A foolish expression, really. As if such a simple phrase could do anything to dissuade anyone from making themselves ugly for the sake of exacting pain.

Daniel cannot make himself ugly in Armand’s eyes no matter what he does to himself, and he must already know as much.

Armand thinks, perhaps, he’s missing the point. It’s rather difficult to discern at the moment. He doesn’t think the bond was supposed to be like this. Perhaps there was true merit to the idea that older vampires should not make young. Just as humans reach an age where they are no longer meant to bear children, where they are meant only to teach the generations beyond their own progeny.

Too much distance maybe. Or too much power with no control. Daniel perhaps unable to navigate the breadth of it, unable to stop the flow of the current. He acts as conduit instead, and whatever Armand sends to him, he sends back in multiple, and on and on and on they go until they’re here: Armand dizzy and Daniel– well, mostly annoyed, Armand thinks.

“I think the problem might lie with me.”

He doesn’t realize he’s uttered it aloud until he hears Daniel’s snort in response. “Yeah, no shit. Big of you to admit it for once though.”

As with most things, the only way out seems to be through. All things tend toward entropy, all things reach and grasp desperately for some sort of net neutral. Even emotions.

True zero would take millennia.

Balance comes far sooner, if only in the form of forced urgency. The sun begins to hint at her insistent climb within the hour, and purpose interrupts the pulse of every other emotion there is. Daniel seems content to sit and let himself burn, though Armand suspects it’s a very tidy performance. Effective. Frustratingly so.

Survival is less a feeling, more an imperative.

His own survival is rather tethered to Daniel’s at the moment, and thus the simplicity of it allows for compartmentalization of all else. There’s room in the hollow of his chest, of course; most all of what Armand is has fled his own body for the complex lattice of Daniel’s circulatory system.

The effect is not instantaneous, but it is pronounced. Daniel’s relief is palpable.

“We need to relocate,” Armand murmurs.

“Oh so it’s we again?”

Was it ever not? Armand wants to ask. Have we ever been separate or have we only been stretched across the earth? Truly, I cannot recall.

They don’t have time for the answer, and Armand isn’t sure he can endure it anyways. Instead he just squeezes palms on Daniel’s thighs until Daniel gives in and gets to his feet. Armand follows closely enough that they nearly knock heads, and when he slides fingers through the spaces between Daniel’s, it is with a firmness that leaves no room for argument.

Contact is not optional, it is requisite.

Daniel doesn’t protest. Daniel squeezes his grip tight enough that Armand thinks his bones might fracture. He wishes they would.

It’s Armand’s hotel they end up in, if not by proximity than by the assumption that Daniel’s is in a far worse state of disarray.

Armand has only been inside long enough to leave behind a suitcase. The room is bigger than it has any need to be. Nicer. The sort of place Daniel would have teased Armand for in his youth, but can admit to enjoying now that he’s grown out of his insistence for enduring lumpy mattresses and questionable cleanliness.

He doesn’t admit to enjoying it now, but Armand thinks he’s simply too busy considering whether he is free to exercise his righteous anger now that Armand is no longer a wildfire burning hot enough to generate his own weather.

Armand beats him to it. “It took you so long,” he says. A question. An accusation. A confession.

For the second time tonight, Daniel looks at him with slack-jawed incredulity. “Are you– of course you’re serious.”

“Why would I be joking, Daniel?” It’s meant to be sarcastic, sharp, spiteful. It comes out with an earnestness Armand wants to catch between tongue and soft palate and swallow back down.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because you fucked off and left me stuck in a cottage in Scotland?” Daniel’s tone betrays him, too. Doesn’t quite match the anger he’s clearly trying to drum up.

It takes Armand a moment to piece together what Daniel is implying. “I left you with a fully stocked fridge and money and–”

“You still left.”

“Yes, it isn’t a very nice feeling, is it?” Spite does escape now. For all those times Armand watched Daniel walk out the door, there’s a sick sense of satisfaction that this time Daniel had to deal with the same. But then, Daniel got his revenge far more swiftly, didn’t he? “I was back within the week.”

“So?”

“And you were gone.”

Now they’re just stating the obvious. Anger burns hot but hurt burns hotter, and again, Armand can’t quite recall why any of it happened in the first place. Daniel leans against the dresser, folds arms across his chest. It brings them out of contact and sends Armand’s pulse sprinting loud in his own ears.

“I went to a meeting in person, so you couldn’t cancel it,” Daniel says with a shrug. “I assumed you’d follow me at some point.”

“Oh.” Armand missed the invitation, somewhere along the way.

It’s rare, for Daniel to offer his own vulnerability. He usually does it artfully, to get what he wants in return. This time, Armand doesn’t think it’s tactic so much as it is exhaustion. “Or I figured if you didn’t, you didn’t want to.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to?”

There’s an almost awkward pause in conversation now. Daniel looks at him the way he used to when the words wouldn’t come out. When Armand would have to crawl in to find them himself. That gateway is no longer open to him. Armand cannot see inside Daniel’s mind, so he tries to see inside his own instead. It’s so hard to remember what they fought about. Panic blurs the edges of it, the middle of it, leaves only the bits where they talked around the problems they couldn’t talk within.

It isn’t about the book. It isn’t about the drugs – the heroin or the blood. It isn’t even about the past, or the memories Armand took, or the promises he made to Daniel and broke at Daniel’s own request.

He knows what it isn’t, but he doesn’t know what it is.

So he speaks only to the fear that’s in the air now, to the insecurity Daniel let spill. “There will never be a time when I do not want to find you, Daniel. Can you not feel it even now?”

Be it feet between them or miles or oceans, he wants what he always wants. To be so close to Daniel that he fits the whole of himself inside.

“You’re looking for a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore.” Daniel doesn’t look him in the eye when he says it and ah, yes, here. This is what they cannot talk within. This is what Armand doesn’t know how to speak to. How is he meant to explain that he loves the boy and the man and the vampire equally? Immeasurably?

It dawns on Armand that he does not have to wait for Daniel to reach for him. That he did not have to wait for Daniel to find him, even. He closes the gap and Daniel’s hands drop to his sides automatically. He presses his hand to Daniel’s cheek, and Daniel leans into the touch. “You’re wrong, beloved.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m– this is stupid. There’s no–”

“Hush,” Armand says. Daniel obeys with the expected flash of defiance and Armand resists the urge to praise him for it. They could so easily become distracted from this. He feels it, even now, the pull of desire. The temptation to take the easiest path to coalescence. “I do think of you differently. The boy. The man I met in Dubai. Even now, you are made new by the dark gift. But you are still Daniel. I do not love one more than the other.”

It’s impossible to explain. His attempt isn’t working. Daniel looks skeptical but just shrugs his shoulder and says, “Sure. Not gonna argue like an insecure teenager about it.”

As if they did not already, in fact, argue about it and proceed spend months apart as a result.

“One does not choose favorites amongst the holy trinity when one loves God.”

Daniel’s eyebrows raise, “that’s not– what happened to not insulting God with comparisons?”

“Your foolishness demands it, clearly. I’ll risk his ire to soothe your fears.” He studies Daniel with tilted head, thumb stroking the lines on his face. They will never change again. He wonders what Daniel sees when he looks at himself in the mirror. “How long did you carry this without telling me?”

“You’re one to talk. He of secrets and long drawn-out silences and cryptic half-answers,” Daniel huffs. Armand pinches his earlobe between thumb and forefinger to earn himself both scowl and answer. “Sure, yeah, you love me. But you think I don’t feel the regret?”

Regret. Strange.

Armand searches for it now just as he has in the past, and just as he always has, he cannot find it. Guilt, perhaps, but not regret. He can admit that naming his own emotions is not always his best honed skill, but this much he is certain of.

“You think I regret turning you?”

“Or not turning me sooner.” It’s meant to be flippant, Armand knows as much. But Daniel’s hand is clutching Armand’s hip too hard and the emotions shared between them are all a fog of unpleasant uncertainty. It isn’t regret, but Armand isn’t sure what it is.

“I miss the life we had then, of course I do. And the years in between that I did not bear witness to. And the inside of your mind, most of all.” Armand runs fingertips over Daniel’s temple, as if touching could come close to knowing. “I miss it, it is an unending ache. But I have borne far worse pains. I would not have you any other way, I would not lose you just to regain–”

“Oh. Shit.” Daniel wears an expression of mild irritation and faint surprise. It’s swift to turn to triumph, knowledge successfully acquired, ready to be wielded. “It’s grief.”

“Stop telling me how I–” Armand would like to mean it, but unfortunately in this Daniel is more frequently right than he is wrong, when not clouded by his own insecurity. “Sure. Call it grief then. Are you satisfied? Do you believe me now?”

Daniel doesn’t answer him in so many words. He simply leans in to press his mouth to Armand’s in a kiss so tender it puts all the gasping, grasping, bruising touch before it to shame. Renders it all meaningless and inept. This, this, this is how they return in earnest. Not sorry for the violence they can find in each other but desperate for the peace they cannot find anywhere else.

They have it in small glimpses. Flashes of light, drops of blood, embers of warmth. But they have it all the same.

“Sweet, stupid boy,” Armand murmurs against Daniel’s mouth. “I have given up all my greatest convictions for you and still you doubt that I would love you as you are?”

Daniel nips at his lower lip with blunt teeth, “You don’t have the monopoly on insecurity you know.”

“I’m not insecure, I’m–”

“Equally stupid with a heavy dose of insanity to make it interesting?”

Armand laughs at that, feels the bubbling warmth of true amusement for the first time in months. This, too, is something he has not found anywhere else. Daniel tries to hide his own, but he’s poor at masking his expressions even when he has reason to, and now he certainly doesn’t.

“Come, love,” Armand pulls away, smile still tugging at his mouth. The sun is coming up, trickles through the slats in the blinds and demands that they relocate. The bedroom has proper curtains, and Armand leads Daniel there by the wrist. “I do not intend to let the sun have even a piece of you today.”

“Yeah, that? We still have to talk about that.” Daniel puts up half-hearted resistance, stalls them out in the doorway.

Armand doesn’t even care what that is. Cares only for the plurality of the word we. “We can speak of whatever you wish, but we’ll speak of it in bed.”

It’s Daniel, in the end, who presses them both down against the mattress and kisses Armand as it was if he, not God nor nature, who invented the concept of symbiosis.

Chapter Text

“Wanting you all to myself has nothing to do with wanting you to be young again, Daniel.” Armand sounds exasperated even to his own ears. He still doesn’t really care what that was meant to mean, but clearly Daniel does. His head rests on Armand’s stomach, his fingers lazily tangling with Armand’s where his hand has been successfully captured in the air.

They’ve rubbed the rough edges off of their desire, now. Sanded them down smooth and round with the fine grit of hands and mouths. He doesn’t feel quite so near to crawling out of his own bones as he did before, resettled as they are back into familiar foundations. Perhaps not entirely stable ones, but weather-worn and time-proven.

“Sure, I get that now. So, what does it have to do with?” Daniel rattles off the question as if they aren’t naked in bed. As if they are sat across the table at a bar, wandering down the street, or perhaps even back in Dubai on that sterile couch in that sterile home trying to sterilize history.

Here, the warm light from the bedside lamp casts long shadows and Armand is grateful for the meaninglessness of time. Daniel has been gone from him for months, has been gone forever, has been gone for but a breath in the long span of his existence.

It sands the rough edges off of the ache in his chest, too.

“Wanting you to be mine?” He meets Daniel’s nonchalance with his own, as if they both don’t know they’re so frequently the opposite.

“Wanting me to be only yours like a three-year-old with an action figure.” If it’s meant to be disapproving, then Daniel should do a better job of disguising his smile. Armand drops Daniel’s hand in favor of tracing the curve of his mouth with idle rapture. Daniel humors the touch until it becomes clear it’s meant to be a distraction, nipping at the tips of his fingers until he snatches them away. “Answer me.”

Armand’s hand comes to rest on his own chest, at the center of his sternum, like the pressure of it will hold all the parts of himself in place. “Maybe I don’t trust others not to break my toys.”

Someone else, Armand knows, would be offended by the comparison. Daniel expects it, doesn’t fall for the bait. “So you’d rather I sit on a shelf and collect dust?”

“Are you upset that I don’t play with you enough, beloved?”

“Okay.” Daniel’s voice is a warm mixture of exasperation and amusement. “We might live forever but the metaphor doesn’t have to.”  

“You started–”

“I’m going to regret this later but be serious, for just a minute.” The sooner Daniel regrets it, the better for both of them, probably.

“This book, you understand, could mean the deaths of the only people on earth whom I love. Who even know that I exist.” The truth feels like a hand wrapped around his throat. Like it’s squeezing so tightly that his own body forgets it doesn’t need air.

Daniel is quiet for a moment, but flippant when he does speak. “You’re being dram–”

“I’m not.” Armand does not know how to explain it without telling stories he does not want to tell. Daniel lacks context, has only the magnified view of a small segment of the whole. Creating a narrative with so little is like trying to construct a painting from only a single brush stroke. “You can’t understand.”

“Well not if you don’t help me, no.” Daniel turns, rough stubble on Armand’s skin. Armand doesn’t look at him. The ceiling is textured with whorls of plaster, specks of dust clinging to the edges. He has the sudden urge to clean them. His thumb taps out a rhythm over his sternum.

“It’s happened before.”

“What has?”

“Everyone I knew died. And he did too.”

There’s a pause. Daniel’s voice is tight and carefully level when he says, “Marius?”

A small crime, to utter his name in this bed. Armand forgives him it. “No, Amadeo.”

He doesn’t let himself remember. Doesn’t make space in this room for the horrors of long-ago losses. If his own will has been enough to get him this far, it will be enough to keep him from thinking of that which he still can’t be sure he survived. Daniel’s fingers drag over his knuckles and Armand doesn’t need to look at him, doesn’t need to read his thoughts or feel his emotions, to know this touch as pity.

And perhaps he’s earned pity, if nothing else.

“Say we ignore the fact that you really aren’t separate people.” Daniel’s voice isn’t particularly gentle. Armand is glad for that. “You think Amadeo died because everybody who knew him did?”

The thing about the methods Armand has learned in order to stay alive is that they sound foolish spoken aloud. He isn’t delusional, really. He knows that– “He no longer exists.”

“I lied. We aren’t going to ignore that, actually.” Daniel’s hand slides off of his, over his clavicle, up his throat, grips his jaw. “Look at me.”

It’s easier with an order. It always is. Armand drags his eyes away from the ceiling, meets Daniel’s own. He isn’t surprised to find softness there. He feels it in the center of his chest where his own hand is still pressed. Feels it wherever the soul is meant to be, wherever whatever they are goes in place of that soul to fill its gap.

“You knew him. Know him. Fuck–” Daniel closes his eyes and Armand resists the temptation to point out the hypocrisy. He only has to swallow his words for a moment before Daniel is sitting up, the anchor of his head gone from Armand’s body, setting him adrift before he’s pulled to sit, too. Daniel settles against the particle board at the head of the bed. “Come here.”

Armand straddles Daniel’s hips, tangles arms around his shoulders, settles his weight down. It’s one thing to lay naked and lazy in bed. It’s another to press so close. Desire might be smooth, now, but it is still corporeal. Still makes demands.

Daniel allows the kiss, then loses both of them in it. Can only ever play act at hesitation and restraint now; it’s a human thing, after all. Something he left behind early. Left behind perhaps even before he left old life for new. He tastes of the blood runs through his veins, under still unbroken skin. Armand isn’t sure yet, why Daniel has neither offered his blood nor asked for his. He hasn’t quite shaken the fear that Daniel doesn’t want it anymore, no badly how much he seems to need it.

What Daniel wants, just now, is an answer for a question he’s not asked yet. Curiosity fights a battle with desire, wins every time. Daniel pulls his mouth away, looks up at Armand with irises so eclipsed by his pupils that Armand can hardly see the amber of them. This is the problem with the bond. The blessing of it, too. It demands so much attention that it leaves little room for anything but devotion, whole and entire.

“Tell me what you know.” Not a question. An order. Easier, perhaps.

Armand still sidesteps. “My love, that would take centuries.”

“About yourself.”

Nothing could make it easy to answer, not in earnest. No question, no demand, no gentle pondering. Armand doesn’t know anything of himself. Or that which he knows, he wishes he did not. “I cannot.”

“You can.” Daniel’s eyes are clearer, now. Sharpened with the focus of the hunt, not like wolf but like hawk. “You’re just afraid it’s gonna make it impossible to believe the shit you do.”

And Armand is afraid, of course he is. “I’m not.”

“One thing. Just one thing you know about yourself.”

“I love you.” It is, many days, the only Armand thinks he really knows anymore.

“That’s cheating,” Daniel says, but flashes a brief grin regardless. “But sure, fine. If I die are you gonna stop?”

Laughable, if not for the very real possibility of it happening. Daniel lacks the fragility he once did, all those years ago, but he is still far from invincible and has a stubborn penchant for acting otherwise. “Of course not.”

“Great. Problem solved. Even if everyone who knows you dies, you know that. You know you.” As if it’s so simple. He opens his mouth to argue but Daniel has already forged ahead. “And maybe if you weren’t so busy being terrified, you’d make a few more friends.”

“I don’t want friends, I want you.”

Daniel’s head tips back, eyes to the ceiling as if it can give him answers. When he looks back at Armand it’s with exasperation. “You do have me.”

“Do I?” He seems to recall very much the opposite, only twenty four hours ago. It’s distant now but only because they’ve closed the door on reality again. Climbed into bed where the world cannot touch them like they have so many times before. And like so many times before, it still waits just beyond the room.

“How do you want me to prove it to you?”

“Don’t wri–”

“Not that.” Daniel’s voice is firm, but it isn’t sharp. His hand is gentle on Armand’s cheek. “I can be yours, but I have to be my own too, yeah?”

He wants to argue, and he resists. Not for any reason of conscience or morality, but because in a brief moment of his own settled emotion, he can see into Daniel’s with enough clarity to catch the glimpse of fear. Perhaps Armand could argue his point, perhaps he could wear Daniel down, stop him from writing the book. Not everything is worth the cost, and if this is what keeps Daniel tethered for now, then the cost of asking him to abandon it is too high even for Armand to barter.

“Fine. Then don’t leave again.”

“You le–”

“I went into the city after you dismissed me from our bed,” Armand clips back. Daniel’s eyebrows raise, but he doesn’t argue. “You went to another continent.”

“You’ve always followed me before.” Daniel doesn’t sound like he’s buying into his own argument. An uncommon occurrence, really, when he owes much of his success to his false confidence. “Why should this have been–”

Armand catches the rest of the sentence on his lips, dips into Daniel’s mouth to slide tongue along tongue until all the fight has gone from both of them again. His patience has shrunken, has been all used up on entertaining the folly of a world without Daniel in it.

“Don’t leave again,” he repeats, this time with mouth to the hollow of Daniel’s throat.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure, fine, whatever you want.”

It’s not even noon. Daniel’s hunger is already a stirring thing. What is meant to be nocturnal instead keeps the schedule of a newborn. Is near constant. Is worse, Armand thinks, than when they parted. “How much?” he asks, fingers carding through Daniel’s hair.

“Hm?” Daniel is nearly convincing. Almost relaxed.

His thighs are coiled under Armand’s, his voice drawn taut. “How much have you been drinking?”

Shame is an emotion Armand knows well, but it burns differently when it belongs to Daniel. He used to see it in Daniel’s mind, sometimes. Felt it then, in the way that he had felt anything from Daniel before the bond. It’s worse here. He feels it in his cheeks, his palms, under his tongue.

Daniel doesn’t give him a number. Armand supposes he could ascertain for himself given enough time, if he had enough motivation. The mingled smells of more than a couple humans could be carefully separated if he wanted them to be. It’s of no importance, really. Daniel just looks at him, hollow eyed, and says, “I can’t get full.”

He has made his peace with being selfish. He presses his hand to Daniel’s chest, to where he knows the hunger lives. “Do you regret what I have made you? Do you grieve for the death you might have had?”

Some things aren’t worth what they cost. Perhaps for Daniel this is one of them. Immortality. The trust he wanted to find. The trust he wanted Armand to give to him. Some certainty of his own mind and identity that he regrets sacrificing all those years ago.

But Daniel is already shaking his head, covering Armand’s hand on his chest with the broad expanse of his own. “No. Full stop.”

“Then–”

“I’ve never been full. Wouldn’t have made a difference.” Armand thinks of the void Daniel imagined for himself when he first understood that his memories had been taken. Thinks of the black hole he plucked from Daniel’s mind all those years ago in San Francisco. Wishes he could explain, now, that it wasn’t born out of the observation of anything but Daniel’s own fear.

Or perhaps, that it isn’t such a horrible thing, all his hunger. All his desire. There is room enough for Armand, in him. Room enough for him to bring his dead, too. That is no small thing.

“Does it hurt?” Armand already knows it hurts. What he means is how much? What he means is will you survive it?

Daniel is honest often, but rarely with the softest parts of himself. “It’s easier, with you around.”

Armand is honest rarely, but when he is it is always soft. “Then I’ll never leave.”

Daniel huffs a laugh because Armand’s softest bruises are beyond what Daniel believes himself capable of leaving in his wake. Perhaps, in time, he won’t need to press down on them for proof that they exist at all. It’s of no consequence when Armand would gladly bear the ache of them forever.

“Yeah? What happens when you get bored, decide you need another life reset?” Daniel sounds bitter. He is bitter. Maybe a part of him always will be. As if he did not ask Armand to do what he did. As if Paris or Dubai bear any similarity to what happened between them.

“Do you think I’m that fickle?” He’s not sure what he will say if Daniel says yes. Daniel probably knows him better than he knows himself. Perhaps he will have to consider trusting his assessment.

Daniel’s fingers fold around Armand’s own and he gives his answer like a terminal diagnosis. Gentle. Clinical. “I think you’re a different person every day and at some point, you’re going to realize I’m not.”

It’s unwise to laugh, but Daniel did, so Armand thinks he’s owed the same grace. It doesn’t matter either way. The laugh bubbles up from his chest, escapes his lips without permission. There was a time when he did not know he could laugh this way. There was another time when he did not believe he would again. His head falls against Daniel’s shoulder, buries it in the crook of his neck where most all of his laughter has been planted before.

Both Daniel’s hand and his own are trapped between them, but Daniel’s free one strokes through his hair for a moment before he tugs at it gently to coax Armand back. “Alright. Okay, that’s enough.”

“You still think I see you as temporary.” He means for it to come out accusing, but it’s still half swallowed in laughter. Daniel’s scowl is all the confirmation he needs. “Ridiculous. You’re the oath I broke, Daniel. Kept for five hundred years, carried from life to life to life. Do you know what it takes to overcome something that has stood intact for so long?”

Of course he doesn’t, he cannot imagine it yet. Armand waits for Daniel to shake his head anyways, laughter rising up anew when he does.

“Let me in on the joke,” Daniel finally says, half amused and half disgruntled.

“There isn’t one.” Or there is, but he doesn’t have the words to explain it without turning it to something somber. “You’re young. A long human life has given you the illusion of stagnation.”

“I think you fulfilled your condescension quota when I was in my twenties.” Daniel is distracted now. His thumb drags under Armand’s eye, collects the tear there. Armand expects him to lick it but instead all he does is stare.

It’s a raw look. A wanting one. Armand thinks back to their conversation when Daniel was first turned. Thinks about Daniel insisting that he needed his craving for blood not to be about Armand. He makes a calculated guess. “My blood makes it easier.”

“Back when I’d detox off of heroin, you remember I’d use coke?” Daniel sounds distant, is still looking at his thumb. Armand leans forward, swipes his tongue over the blood there, brings his attention back.

“Yes, I remember. You said it helped the cravings. Does my–”

“Your blood is the heroin in the metaphor.” Daniel looks now as if he’s waiting for Armand to be upset. Waiting for Armand to be as bothered by this information as he seems to be.

He would have to wait an eternity. There is no real harm, now, in Daniel needing Armand’s blood. He will not die without it, like he often seemed he could as a human. “I’ve told you my blood is yours.”

“Until it isn’t.”

“Until I’m dead and for as long as it remains within you after.” He has little else to give to Daniel, now. “Should it ever come to be anyone else’s, it will be by your own choosing.”

“You mean– yeah, no thanks.” Daniel looks vaguely disturbed by the idea. Armand isn’t immune to the relief, if only temporary. He doesn’t particularly wish to share Daniel with anyone, but he certainly doesn’t wish to compete with a fledgling. “And if you do die?”

Armand smiles, then, in the face of Daniel’s tightening fear. “You’ll find I’m quite good at surviving.”

“So I’m just supposed to what? Trust that you’ll be here forever? Take it on–”

“Faith?” Armand watches Daniel make the connection in real time. “Yes, beloved.”

“I walked into that one,” Daniel concedes.

“To your credit, you are hungry, and–” Armand shifts his weight, presses close, watches Daniel’s eyes flutter shut. “Well.”

“Shut up,” Daniel murmurs, a hand grasping at Armand’s hip in transparent encouragement. And yes, this desire has no rough edges. Makes no real demands. But there is no reason left to resist giving in to its enticement. Armand sinks fangs into the meat of his own palm, tastes the blood as it wells up. Daniel’s eyes are open if only for a moment. Watching rapt as Armand wraps his hand slick around both of them and sets a leisurely pace.

He watches Daniel even when his eyes close again. Bears witness to his open pleasure, slack mouth, white fangs. The lamp is nearly the colour of the low sun, gold and warm and washing over Daniel’s face.

“Beautiful,” Armand murmurs.

“Missed you,” Daniel says right back, cracked open and vulnerable the way he only ever is for Armand. A gift given to him each time, not with the belief that Armand will not break him but with the belief that if he does it will be good. His mouth falls to Armand’s collarbone but he does not bite, instead gasping cool breath against Armand’s skin and murmuring sounds that never quite coalesce into words. The meaning is there. The feeling.

Earlier they were impatient. Tender but needy.

Now the pace is set not by Daniel’s hunger, but by his trust that Armand will sate it. Not by Armand’s need to be under Daniel’s skin, but by his trust that he already is.

His lips press to Daniel’s temple, his hairline, the top of his head. “Can I–”

“Yes,” Daniel murmurs, half distracted with tongue and gentle teeth marking and remarking the skin of Armand’s shoulder.

The request is a formality, anyways. There is very little Daniel has ever denied him, and nothing he has denied him here. Armand leverages a hand on Daniel’s shoulder and sinks down, lets his groan join Daniel’s partway.

“Fuck,” Daniel breathes. The same sort of quiet awe, each time. As if, despite all evidence, he still does not quite believe Armand is corporeal.  

Daniel likes to be as close as Armand does, he just rarely admits to it. His arms snake around Armand’s hips and across his shoulders. Skin on skin on skin. Time drifts hazily by and neither of them move. Armand isn’t sure he ever wants to. He kisses Daniel’s hair, his forehead, his shoulder. The lobe of his ear, the shell of it, the hinge of his jaw. They have wasted so much time, and yes, yes, they could have forever but even that would not be enough.

“Babe, I–” Daniel chokes it off and Armand pulls back far enough to look at him. Strokes his thumb in gentle circles over his shoulder, noses his way into a kiss that he ends far before he’d like to.

“You only have to ask, Daniel. It’s already for you.” Really, Daniel need not even ask, but Armand will not waste the opportunity to hear him do it anyway.

“Please,” Daniel shifts, arches up as if he can get what he wants just by reaching further. And he can, of course. “Your blood.”

“Yours,” Armand corrects. “Drink.”

Daniel doesn’t rush. Takes his time despite the barely contained tremor in his hands, slides his nose down the column of Armand’s neck, skips carotid and seeks subclavian instead. Finds it with his tongue over the line of Armand’s collarbone and spares another moment to whisper, “what’s mine is yours, sweetheart” before sinking fangs into skin so gently that the pain is a suggestion rather than a requirement.

It takes Armand a beat to understand, wrapped up in the pleasure rush of Daniel’s first taste in months. When he can clear his mind enough to focus, he mirrors Daniel, finds the matching vein with half as much effort. He knows the map of Daniel’s body better than his own by now. Could draw each vein and artery with eyes closed, perhaps.

Daniel’s blood is sweet and light and familiar the way Armand imagines home is meant to be. Daniel drinks and Armand drinks and it would be too much pleasure to move. Would be beyond what Armand thinks might be the survivable limit. He’s grateful Daniel seems to think the same – he would not stop him if he disagreed, would leverage trembling legs if Daniel asked.

He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t pull away to say anything at all.

They could do this for eternity, perhaps. At some point, Daniel’s blood begins to taste of his own. At some point, he can no longer taste the difference, identify any edges or boundaries. Even the blood cells themselves, he thinks, must become some stitched singularity. Closed circuit, Daniel’s body washing Armand’s blood clean like dialysis, dissolving impurities, taking everything bad and making it sweet again.

He will never again know the inside of Daniel’s mind, but he knows his heart, what passes for his soul, whatever thing it is that makes them who they are beyond a brain and body. He has, in the past, thought minds to be something close to the truest thing. Has thought they could reveal the deepest part of someone with enough careful excavation.

The bond bypasses thought entirely replaces it with feeling, but it is love and decades of familiarity that translates the emotion. There is so much of it. A loud roar in Armand’s ears, a singing in his own veins.

And yes, what is Daniel’s is Armand’s, and what is Armand’s is Daniel’s, and because what they both want they can have, everything is theirs. Everything. An abundance of everything in such excess that Armand wonders if he has ever truly understood the meaning of what he longed for.

After, in a sticky tangle of limbs, Daniel strokes his hair with the same gentle fingers he always does. Never catches on a knot, never lets his nails scrape Armand’s scalp. So small, this kindness. It would not bother Armand if he was not gentle, is born of no preference of his own, but it is so reliable and so predictable that by now he knows it is done with conscious intention.

It is a tenderness that he isn’t sure he will ever earn, made all the more valuable for the fact that he knows it is given deliberately.

He wants to say so, but he’s trying not to think so much in terms of checks and balances. If he doesn’t say it out loud, it doesn’t count.

Instead he kisses what his mouth is closest to – the stubble-rough expanse of Daniel’s jaw – and asks, “Will we do this always, do you think? Doubt one another?”

“Depends,” Daniel murmurs back.

“On what?”

“On whether or not the sex we have after keeps being that good, probably.”

Armand snorts a laugh into the crook of Daniel’s neck, tastes decades of his laughter there where his lips brush skin, and Daniel joins him with the rich sound of his own. And yes, there, tucked into this bed – their bed, no matter what hotel room or apartment or house they’re in – he feels an old, familiar happiness return like spring after a long winter.  

Chapter Text

the mute nonsense known as Eternity

To know Daniel in his youth was to be dragged into viscerality. To stumble endlessly after him towards a world so chalk full of newness that he was never tired of it, no matter how brutal it could become. To teach him, in return, how to live in what does not exist. In stories and art and myth.

It had never seemed possible, to Armand, that someone else might love the world enough to survive its horrors. Because that’s what Armand does, he realizes now. He loves the world too much to leave it, is too fond of it in all its brutal, unforgiving beauty.

Two facts, now, he knows to be true about himself. He loves the world. He loves Daniel.

He supposes that makes a third true, too. Simply that he loves.

To know Daniel now is to meander timelessly through existence. Like a stroll through the park, like a fortnight spent in a single cathedral, they’ve been taking their time with the world. With this long life.

“Sweetheart, wake up,” Daniel says, and this will feel new for the rest of Armand’s life. This softness Daniel uses sparingly, wields to either bring Armand comfort or to coax him into accepting discomfort for the sake of Daniel’s endless quest to know him. Either is acceptable.

Today, cracking his eyes open at dusk, he can’t say that it is either. Today, Daniel is smiling down at him like a younger version of himself. A rare glimpse of the boy who lives inside the man who lives inside the monster Armand knows that he loves.

“It’s early,” Armand murmurs, reaching up to slide fingers against Daniel’s scalp. It takes no coaxing to get Daniel to kiss him. It never does, now. It hasn’t been so very long since this was an uncertainty that Armand does not marvel at the certainty it has become. Daniel tastes of blood, so he must have already been awake for a while. A rare event.

“It’s our anniversary.” Ah. So there’s the reason for the softness. A gift in and of itself.

“You’ve chosen it then, beloved?” At first, they steered clear of things like this. Very human dates on a calendar. Ideas of families, weddings, birthdays. Armand was afraid the reminder of them would make Daniel long for a humanity that wasn’t his. And Daniel… well. Daniel, Armand thinks, just still doesn’t quite want to let himself be that sort of person most of the time.

Then, when it came up, the old bitterness came up with it. Where is the beginning, when Armand carved it out? Where is the beginning when Daniel was willing to ask him to? Where is the beginning when it was born of so much violence and ache that even they who love violence and ache do not wish to celebrate it?

He left it to Daniel to decide where they began. Could no more easily identify when he first loved Daniel than he could be certain that he has not always.

He thinks, perhaps, deciding where they began means deciding where Daniel begins, too. How much of himself he’d like to carry into the future. They aren’t the same, they’re simply connected.

When Daniel doesn’t elaborate, Armand prods at his ribs, “Are you going to tell me, then?”

Daniel rolls away, off the bed, and he supposes that’s the answer for now. That’s alright. He’s grown more patient, of late. Is not quite so afraid of the answers that he begins to fill them in before they’re given, doesn’t grow quite so unsettled. A little easier to manage when the very nature of Daniel choosing to celebrate their anniversary means he must still want to be with him for the time being.

“Get dressed, we’ve got a ways to go, and I need to eat.” Daniel is still working on not caring about the constant hunger. It doesn’t bother him so much physically, Armand thinks. Nor ethically. It bothers him because he wanted the gift to be his escape from the lack of control he had long felt over his body, his desires. It wasn’t that.

No amount of preparation makes one ready for this life.

Barcelona is warm this time of year, but not so hot that it smells of sweat. The air keeps the heat of the day well enough that Armand feels it on his skin. They’ve been here for weeks, lazy and aimless in their exploration. Some evenings they go out. Some evenings they stay in and Daniel writes and Armand listens to the tapping of his fingers on the keys.

He has other hobbies, of course. He’s been trying out paper cutting lately. Delicately carving images out of cardstock and printer paper and tissue paper. It’s delicate work. Gentle work. Requires a sharp blade but a careful hand.

Daniel says that it’s on brand for Armand.

Armand isn’t sure what brand he’s meant to have, yet. Has yet to settle on an interest with the same level of commitment that Daniel still has for writing. Except Daniel, of course. Daniel is an interest that continues to amaze him long after it makes any sense that he should.

Daniel drags him through the streets with purpose, today. There’s a bright flare of warmth in his chest and Armand cannot separate what parts of the light come from Daniel and what parts are his own. The bond is settled now, not weaker nor quieter, but easier to predict and understand. They don’t deny themselves things that would bring them comfort or ease when emotions grow too loud.

“Where are we going?” Armand asks, just for the joy of Daniel’s annoyed eyeroll.

“Even my kids didn’t repeat questions as often as you do.”

The streets aren’t quite quiet yet, but they’re getting there. They’ve shared a drink (at the bar) and another (in an alley), and Daniel’s fingers feel warm in his own. Armand likes it when he can convince Daniel to drink more than him. Likes to feel the blood hot under Daniel’s skin. It doesn’t make Daniel’s jaw clench when he asks him to, anymore.

“Says the journalist. Last week you didn’t like my answer about the ethics of intellectual property so you asked me again six times.”

“Sure. Yeah.” Daniel’s laugh is incredulous. “I asked again because you kept telling me that intellectual property is just another symptom of capitalism.”

He’s not entirely incorrect in his recollection. “It is.”

“That’s not going to help me sell a book.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t write it, then.” It would be funny, if it weren’t still a point of soreness between them. Sure, the dust settled from the first book. Yes, Louis and Lestat remain, to his knowledge, perfectly safe. Yes, Daniel is right here with a hand in Armand’s and not ashes in some fool’s fire.

But it could have been different.

He humors Daniel in writing a sequel only because if he doesn’t, Daniel is going to find something else to write about. Eventually, it’s bound to happen anyways. Armand has no intentions of becoming a useful source.

“Maybe I’ll just find someone else to interview, then,” Daniel says, flippant. Unbothered. “I hear Lestat is starting up on tour so–”

“Daniel.” That isn’t a sore spot, it’s a still open wound.

Daniel isn’t going to apologize, and Armand doesn’t expect him to. Instead he just says, “Almost there.”

He knows, now, where they’re going. He just can’t quite pinpoint why, can’t quite drag the memory out of the depths of his mind and into the open.

The beach is empty and as beautiful as it ever was. Daniel settles onto the sand with a groan and Armand spares a moment to admire him. Cast in the blue-glow of a near-full moon, as beautiful as he ever was, too.

“Why here?” Armand asks when he sits down, knees close to his chest, an inch of space between them. Those early days had been such a blur. The grief of Louis’ disinterest still fresh in his chest. The loneliness that would only lapse for minutes every few days, when he would find Daniel in some new part of the world and demand a choice from him as if it really could prove something.

“Yeah, remember when you were terrorizing me by–”

“You weren’t exactly terrorized,” Armand points out.

“Because I didn’t have all the necessary information,” Daniel says. “Are you gonna listen or are you gonna interject some more?”

“Alright, fine.” He has no intention of keeping his word should something that requires further interjection arise, but Daniel lets him get away with the lie regardless.

He reaches fingers out to take Daniel’s hand, tugging it into his own lap to trace the lines on it. Daniel, as easily distracted now as he ever was, leans in for a kiss. Another, another, another. When he pulls away, he lets Armand keep his hand close. “That’s also interjecting.”

“You–”

“Sure, whatever you say.” Daniel has a grin on his face. Armand can see it in his peripheral, and it does little to make him want to show restraint. “You remember you used to ask me that fucking question all the time?”

That question. Yes, of course Armand remembers.

“Would you like to live, beloved? Or would you like to die?”

“Live,” Daniel answers, as if it takes no thought when even now Armand knows it’s not ever so simple. “Not an exact quote, but sure. Close enough.”

“I was certain one day you would tell me you wanted to die,” Armand muses. “So that I might finish what I began.”

Daniel hums low in his throat, as if it doesn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps it doesn’t. “That was the last time you ever asked me. Why?”

He doesn’t need to think about the answer. He thinks about it anyways, that warm night decades ago. Daniel and his bottle and his quiet despair. The questions Daniel had asked him in return, the understanding he couldn’t possibly have, but made convincing anyways.

“I didn’t ask you again, because I didn’t want to know the answer anymore,” Armand murmurs. “I wanted you to live.”

“Yeah,” Daniel says, smug and fond in one of Armand’s favorite combinations of his voice. “Thought so.”

Armand can’t find the words, just yet. Isn’t sure Daniel wants him to anyways. Instead he just lifts Daniel’s hand to his lips. Kisses his fingers, his palm, his wrist. Finds his mouth. Let’s Daniel press him down against the sand, feels the weight of him settle them both into the ground.

Daniel drinks from his neck, slow and sure, like he knows the blood will always be there. Like he believes there’s no need to prepare for some future famine. It’s not like this, some days.

Some days Daniel is still furious, refuses himself and Armand that which would bring him relief. Armand will fight with him, will let him rage against his craving and against Armand for ever having ignited it within him.

Some days Armand’s body and blood don’t even feel like his own, so he cannot give them to Daniel, does not believe he is more than the ruin some other life should have been built upon. Daniel will kiss him soft and tender and gentle until it’s his body again, until it can be his to gift.

But today, it is like this. An easy, hungry thing. Simple desire and the assurance that it doesn’t come at a price for either of them.

This love is a geography. Is land with a language of rivers and valleys and trees with deep roots. Each day they learn to speak it. It shifts like tectonic plates. It erupts and new islands form. It changes and they change with it. They map it out with fingers and teeth and tongues and a single heartbeat at the center of Daniel’s chest.

It has grown so large Armand does not now how it once fit inside a painting. So large that he does not know how he once imagined it could fit inside a cathedral, could be confined to some singular form of worship.

He cannot see inside Daniel’s mind anymore, cannot witness the galaxy expanding, the stars blinking into existence, the sun and her warmth shining into even the darkest of corners. He has yet to go a day without missing it, but he thinks one day he will. One day they will become galaxy, will become universe, and by seeing what their love has become and mapping it and learning it, he will know Daniel’s mind once again. It will be as his own.

He will know Daniel’s mind again. He will know his own for the first time.

All of this, he tells Daniel in a murmur so soft he knows Daniel can only half make out the words. Whispered into the night like a promise. Daniel will pretend not to have heard any of them. Will pretend he doesn’t feel the ever-expanding warmth at the center of his own chest. Will pretend he doesn’t feel it filling up the spaces that were empty, once.

Later, boneless and drowsy and tucked against Daniel’s side, listening as the waves lap ever closer to shore, he speaks words Daniel will acknowledge instead.

“I’m impressed, Daniel. You continue to assure me you aren’t a romantic.”

“And you keep making it too easy to impress you.”

Armand has been a thousand selves and he will be a million more. He tucks them away tidily in boxes and frames, and Daniel moves through the halls throwing open doors and smashing glass. And despite the wreckage, despite how often Daniel gets cut, he has yet to meet a version that he does not seek to know incessantly and entire.

Armand stretches up, presses a kiss to Daniel’s jaw, studies the golden flecks in Daniel’s eyes. “I love you, Daniel. It’s as simple as that.”

Daniel, grinning wide and boyish, says, “So I didn’t need to buy the boat, then?”

And sometimes, on rare occasions, on warm nights like this, Daniel finds a way to speak to every single one.