Chapter Text
“So,” Daniel said.
“So,” Armand echoed coolly. He took a sip of his martini, cradling the glass between his fingers with all the grace and poise of Princess fucking Diana, as if not two hours before he’d been catatonic in a ruined hotel room.
He’d dressed under Daniel’s watchful eye and patched up his wounds himself. In the haze of Daniel’s memory, an inversion of this moment swam into focus: his twenty-something-year-old self shivering in a motel bathroom while Armand dabbed his forehead with a wet cloth, amber eyes wide and shining like jewels.
“Where are you, when you get like that?”
Armand glanced away from the mirror. There was a spot above his eyebrow that he’d missed, or had left on purpose. “... It changes. Oftentimes it all blends together. Sometimes it's nowhere at all.”
“Where were you today?”
Armand did not answer, and Daniel didn’t press the matter.
“Drinks,” Armand had announced once he was presentable once more, a vision in loose linen and cotton and brown leather loafers. His shirt was a deep navy with a plunging neckline, and the delicate embroidery along the collar lured Daniel’s eye down the slope of Armand’s chest, where faint wisps of hair peeked out. “On me.”
“I should fucking hope so.”
And here they were, on a rooftop bar with the smallest remnants of the sun prickling Daniel’s skin.
“How’s this work?” Daniel gestured to his vermouth-heavy martini. “Alcohol, I mean. Cigarettes, too.”
“The artistry of food and drink may be lost on us,” Armand said, “but poison is forever.”
The levee of Daniel’s mind, one he had long since bitterly accepted, had crumbled under the weight of Armand’s blood that night in Dubai. Now he remembered — the hours spent talking, arguing, fighting until the first few fingers of daylight crawled over the horizon; Armand’s frenetic obsession with creating magnificent but foul-smelling colors in the blender; expensive phone calls to Paris, Rio, Hong Kong; the boyish glee in Armand’s eyes combined with something old and dark.
“Yours were better,” he said with a nod to his drink.
Armand disregarded this, instead clearing his throat politely and saying, “I’m surprised you’re here.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “‘Cause I watched you DARVO your boyfriend in real time? Yeah.”
Armand did not acknowledge the slight. “Does Louis know you're here?”
Daniel tossed back the last dribble of his drink and motioned to the bartender with his empty glass for another. “Sure does. He was my ride to the airport.”
Armand’s brow furrowed. “He’s not angry?”
“At me? Nah.” The bartender swiftly and silently replaced Daniel’s glass with a fresh cocktail. “You, on the other hand—”
“But he had forgiven me—”
“Armand,” Daniel cut him off, “you killed his daughter . You would’ve killed him too. And then you lied about it. People tend to get pissed off when they realize they’ve been lied to for seventy-seven years. Don’t bullshit me. You do understand.”
Armand’s cheek hollowed as he chewed on the wall of his mouth. He turned his attention to his martini glass, where he circled the rim with a single finger. There was a thin crescent of blood caked beneath his fingernail.
“Five hundred and fourteen,” Daniel remarked, “but you act like a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar.”
“Fifteen,” Armand corrected. “I turned five hundred and fifteen while I was in Venice.”
“How do you know your birthday?”
“... I don’t.”
“Your ‘gotcha’ date, then.”
“Pardon?”
“When your maker bought you.” Daniel looked Armand up and down. The pristine clothes, the perfectly coiffed curls — an uncanny facsimile of a mature young man. But Daniel knew better. “You were the runt of the litter, weren’t you.”
Armand regarded Daniel with the coldness of a hungry predator. Daniel, perhaps foolishly, did not feel much like prey.
“He favored me.” Armand kept his tone even and calm, but beneath it was a shred of defensiveness.
“ ‘Favored ,’” Daniel repeated with ample sarcasm. “Got it. That’s what all of that was.”
Armand’s hand, in its elegance with its long thin fingers, was deceptively strong. It came down on Daniel’s thigh, his nails easily piercing through the tough denim. Daniel yelped, but the bartender paid no mind. In fact, no one did. Everyone in the bar was frozen. Daniel himself was having some difficulty moving.
“If you speak of my maker again without my permission,” Armand murmured, no more than a gentle whisper even as his eyes shivered with rage, “I will seal you away and starve you until you forget your own name. Until there is nothing in your little world you can depend on but me and my mercy.”
Daniel’s leg was warm and sticky with blood. Where was his fear?
“Were you always this defensive of him?” Daniel asked. “Or did something happen in Venice?”
Armand released Daniel’s leg and drained the rest of his martini effortlessly, the curve of his throat sliding up and then down as he drank. Time within the bar resumed, guests and staff picking up right where they had left off.
“What if it’s in their best interest?” Armand deflected back to the original topic at hand with shocking ease. “To lie.”
“That assumes you know their best interests more than they do. That’s arrogant, for one. Selfish, for another.” By contrast, Daniel spoke with a sledgehammer-like, concussive bluntness. “But you know that already.”
Lied? I’ve only ever spared you unnecessary pain, Amadeo.
“Don’t do that,” Daniel cut through the memory.
The faraway look in Armand’s gaze vanished, his focus sharpening back to the present. “Do what?”
“You go away somewhere,” Daniel went on, leaning one arm on the bar counter. His leather jacket had darker patches sewn in at the elbows. “You retreat into your head, back to memories of yourself as a victim, like that changes your current circumstances.”
Armand ran his thumb along the pads of his fingers, like a slow-motion snap. “And what circumstances are those, may I ask?”
“You’re evil, Armand.”
Armand couldn’t help himself; a smile cracked his stony mask of too-cool apathy.
“And here you are next to me,” he said.
The night stretched on, cloudy and starless. Daniel was a New Yorker at heart; stars were rare there, too.
Armand had spent hundreds of years without electricity. He’d grown up without polluted skies. There were constellations Armand had seen that no longer existed.
“What do you consider yourself?” It was a quarter past four and the bars were closed, but they had a good three hours before dawn. They sat on a set of stone steps that overlooked the Yamuna, cloaked in darkness. Without any moonlight, the river shifted and rippled like a giant, shadowy, velveteen creature.
“In what sense?”
“If I asked you where you’re from, how would you answer?”
Armand resembled nothing of the trembling figure on the tail end of a dissociative episode that Daniel had first seen that day. He was calm, contemplative — but not at peace. Daniel didn’t think he’d ever seen Armand at peace. There remained a restlessness about him.
“One of the things I’ve come to understand during my… sabbatical,” Armand replied delicately, “is that the answer depends on which version of me you ask. Arun considers himself a Delhiite, in spite of how little he remembers. Amadeo is Venetian. But not in the ways that people understand those places now. Time affects place. Their time has long since passed.”
“You’re good at that,” Daniel said, knocking a cigarette from his pack.
Armand extended a single pinky, lit with a candle-sized flame. “Elaborate.”
“Circling.” Daniel accepted the gesture, then took a drag from his cigarette. The smoke plumed into the air, noxious and blue. “Distancing yourself, compartmentalizing. It’s the function of your disorder.”
“I don’t consider it a disorder.” Armand nicked Daniel’s cigarette from his fingers with a thief’s touch. “Far from it, in fact. It’s a mechanism of survival. It’s all very organized, like a well-built wardrobe. Everything has its place.”
Daniel decided not to raise the subject of how Armand had appeared that evening, shivering beneath a bed in a trashed hotel room. That hadn’t seemed organized to him. But Armand versus the DSM-5 wasn’t an argument he was keen on starting.
“What about you?” He asked instead. “Armand. What about him?”
Armand considered his answer for a minute, long enough that Daniel assumed the conversation had died and Armand would broach a new and less sensitive topic once he thought of it.
“For a long while after the Children of Darkness dissolved,” he said finally, “I considered myself a Parisian.” He paused. “But Paris was a footnote, in actuality. I cared not where I was, but who I was with.”
“You were Louis’.”
Armand had the nerve to look wistful. “Never quite as much as I wanted to be.”
Daniel barked out a laugh. “You know what I think, Armand? I think you seriously fucked up.”
Armand blew a puff of smoke in Daniel’s face. “Impart your wisdom, fledgling.”
“He sat there on that bench,” Daniel said, shaking his head a little, “and told you he wasn’t running. He told you what he wanted, and for some godforsaken reason, it was you. There was no competition between you and Claudia. You manufactured it. His love for her was never a threat to yours.”
The river darkened Armand’s eyes, dimming the orange into a glittering and lethal bronze. In this light, one might mistake him as human.
“Seeing what I’ve seen,” Daniel went on, “and knowing what I know — it all congeals. Of course you’d create competition with a child. You think your entire five-hundred-year life peaked at fifteen. Was Amadeo the best version of you? The most fuckable?”
For a moment, Daniel was certain that Armand was going to twist his body into a pretzel and toss him in the river. But Armand merely sat there, smoking Daniel’s cigarette in deep, greedy lungfuls.
“I anticipated waning interest,” Armand said after a long stretch of uncomfortable silence, then ashed the butt next to him on the step.
“You all but ensured that, doing what you did.”
Armand did not strike him. Rather, he regarded him with faint amusement. Like a cat allowing a mouse to pummel its nose with its tiny set of hands, while it dangled by its tail from its predator’s jaws.
“You’re still an addict,” Armand said, bordering on cheerful. Although it was a truth about himself that Daniel had accepted, hearing another person say it was another matter. “All that’s changed is your drug of choice. Now you live to chase a story, don’t you? You can’t resist. Especially when it’s me or Louis.”
“You think awfully highly of yourself,” Daniel observed with feigned nonchalance.
“I don’t need to peel back to layers of your mind to understand your innermost desires,” Armand said. He was suddenly very, very close. “You’re much more transparent than you think. You want to provoke me so I hurt you.”
“I’m not a masochist.”
“Maybe not,” Armand conceded. “But you can’t resist a thrill.”
Armand took him by the arm. Daniel blinked, and they were in a new hotel room. Not teleportation — Armand had stopped time again, Daniel’s included, then waltzed through a silent world with Daniel in tow. And now Armand pressed Daniel against the wall.
“I felt you, before.” Armand was close enough that Daniel could see the miniscule veins in the whites of his eyes. He could smell the smoke, the vermouth, the blood. “When I was on top of you.”
“Vampirism gave me the sensitivity of a teenage boy,” Daniel said, doing his best to sound bored and not alarmed by the sudden change of scenery. “A gust of wind could get me hard at this point.”
Armand smiled, gorgeous and terrifying. “I don’t need to reach into your mind to know what a lie that is.”
“What exactly are you expecting to happen here?” Daniel demanded, pushing Armand back. Armand let him. “You wanna go back to the good ol’ days? I’m not that boy anymore.”
“I don’t want you to be.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. You just want a body.” Daniel let his head thunk back against the wall. “I’m not interested in being your rebound.”
Armand shook his head, frustration creasing his brow. “You aren’t—”
“ Please , Armand. In your world it’s fuck or be fucked, and I’m the nearest meat bag.”
“Daniel—”
“And, by the way, let’s not pretend you wouldn’t retch at the sight of me now. You know your pubes go white when you age, too? You wouldn’t know that, you Adonisian son of a—”
Then Armand grabbed Daniel’s face, nails sinking into his cheeks with an electrifying sting, and kissed him.
Daniel had made his peace with the idea that his last kiss had occurred long ago. The entire world had impressed upon him that, as long as he was old and sick, he would be undesirable. Not only that, but he would no longer desire anyone either. The latter he could quickly disprove. As for the former —
Well, Armand’s tongue was making a very persuasive counterargument for that one. Daniel, although cursing himself, was not too inclined to protest. That is, until Armand began to fumble for Daniel’s belt. He forced Armand two paces back, holding him at arm’s length.
“What are you doing?”
Armand looked confused. “Don’t be coy, Daniel.”
“When have I ever been coy? I’m just not interested in taking my dick out.”
Armand considered this, then shrugged and began undoing his own belt.
“I’m not interested in seeing yours, either!”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Armand,” Daniel laughed in exasperation. “I’m not fucking you. You’re not fucking me. Period.”
Armand’s expression took on far too vulnerable a shape, and irregular and unsettling on someone like Armand: guilt.
Let me make it up to you.
“That kid put some ideas in your head,” Daniel said. “About getting even with me, or whatever—”
“That’s not true,” Armand said in a rushed breath, bridging the distance once more. His palms pressed against Daniel’s chest. “I want you. I want you.”
“I—” Daniel broke off with a sigh and placed his hands over Armand’s. “Armand, I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you. This reeks of transaction.”
Armand’s lower lip wobbled. Real, but also strategically beneficial.
“You don’t want me,” he whispered.
“Don’t.” Daniel took Armand by the chin, closing his trembling jaw. He wouldn’t fall for it, the carefully calculated fragility. “Don’t do that.”
“What shall I do, Daniel? What do you require from me?”
“Honesty,” Daniel replied without missing a beat. “I don’t know you, Armand.”
Armand scoffed and drew away, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “You know me better than anyone,” he said with a dismissive wave. “You’ve seen everything.”
“I know what happened to you,” Daniel agreed. “But I don’t know who you are.”
“What, you want the story in my words? Do journalistic impulses ever die?”
“Not in my experience, no.”
“Is that why you came here?” Armand asked suddenly. The ring of color around his pupils thinned. “To get my story? Becoming an eye-witness account of my worst memories wasn’t good enough for you?”
Daniel did not pretend to be kind, but he did, against all instincts that told him he shouldn’t, care . And Armand lobbing such an accusation his way stung him more than he expected it to — namely, because he could not deny it.
Daniel’s silence was a sufficient answer. Armand’s jaw locked, his face shuttering into an impassive, hollow mask.
Half-blank, half-apocalyptic.
“I think you should leave,” Armand said, his voice eerily calm. “Before you whittle away the last shreds of my patience.”
“You’re wrong,” Daniel said.
“Am I? Enlighten me, then.”
“You don’t wanna share your history in your own words? Fine. I’m not gonna try forcing it out of you. I’d like to keep my hands.” Daniel crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t want your story. I want ours. ”
It was Armand’s turn to go silent.
"You scrambled my brain and for what?” Daniel let his arms drop to his sides again. “Why'd you take that from me?"
Armand crossed the room and busied himself with drawing the curtains closed against the approaching sunrise and flicking on the standing lamp in the corner. "If you can truly feel me as thoroughly as you say, then you already know."
"No, fuck off with your excuses.” Daniel followed, refusing the distance Armand attempted to create. “I wanna hear you say it."
Within Armand there was a tumultuous hurricane of doubt, guilt, fear — no, not fear, but certainty . Armand was absolutely sure that Daniel would leave, that there was no other end to this story because there was no other ending that Armand knew. It came off of him in waves, this fatalism, graying the room into muddy, dull hues.
"Don't spiral," Daniel demanded. "Just talk to me. I’m not going anywhere.”
It was funny, how that was just as much a threat as it was a promise.
Armand perched on the edge of the bed. Daniel imagined the formulas Armand must have been flipping through in his mind, parsing out the exact arrangement of words, the perfect thing to say. “You must understand,” he said, “I believed it to be a kindness to you. I believed it would make for a clean break.”
“Why break in the first place?”
Armand looked at him with too much sentimentality for a face as young as his. “We were already bending, Daniel.”
Yes. Daniel remembered; the hours-long screaming matches, Armand’s cold calculated gaze that shattered when Daniel went a step too far, the silent but furious tears that streamed down Armand’s cheeks as he grabbed Daniel’s arm with inhuman strength, forcing up his sleeve to reveal the bruising in the crook of Daniel’s elbow.
“I chose to observe you living your life from a distance,” Armand said. “Rather than possess you wholly and watch you die up close.”
“I don’t see it as a kindness,” Daniel said. “And you don’t seem sorry.”
“I’m not,” Armand confessed without reservation. “I’m not asking for forgiveness, either.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“You’d rather I apologize and not mean it?” Armand asked. “I thought you wanted honesty.”
“Why not turn me then?” Daniel said. “If you were so convinced I was going to die.”
“I told you before. It repulsed me.”
Amadeo’s turning was… vivid, in Daniel’s mind; Marius shaving Amadeo’s jaw clean, the ecstasy and horror of his human death, his bloody rebirth in the embrace of his maker.
“Fifty years later, here we are. What changed?”
Armand clasped his hands, squeezing them between his knees. “I had lost everything. I was desperate. I was scared. Sentimental, perhaps. And I was willing, in a way I had not been half a century ago, to accept your inevitable resentment and hatred towards me, as long as you survived.”
“Six months of radio silence and running from me doesn’t seem very accepting.”
“I wasn’t running from you. At least not entirely. I was running towards something. Belonging, or home. I didn’t find it.” Armand opened his hands like a flower blooming, palms up on his lap. “I was wrong, earlier, when I said I could not bear to see your hatred. I saw plenty of that in Dubai. It’s the knowing, the understanding , that I haven’t gained the stomach for yet.”
The barest trickle of sunlight had begun to warm the blackout curtains.
“You should rest,” Armand said before Daniel could come up with a response. “We can continue our conversation this evening.”
Armand didn’t sleep. He sat in the armchair, legs crossed, watching Daniel sleep the day away in a nest of blankets and pillows while the television played on low volume. Amadeo and Arun both continued to scratch at the confines of his mind, a constant revolving door of fusing and splitting apart. He hadn’t shaken the allure of Marius — nothing could, not forever — but Arun had made the potential consequences of that choice, for the time being, agonizingly plain.
Desire, for any of them, could never outweigh fear.
The television had queued up an old rerun of some reality show. In the previous episode recap, two women in flawless makeup and form-fitting clothes were in the middle of a heated argument, whose context Armand was not privy to, while a handful of other women in similar fashion looked on in varying degrees of discomfort. The theme song was some pop-y instrumental, with each of the women getting a tagline before the show’s title was revealed at the end: Real Housewives of Miami.
“Are there fake housewives?” Armand wondered aloud.
Daniel didn’t answer, obviously.
Armand inched closer to Daniel until he was at his bedside. He bent double, nearly nose-to-nose with his fledgling as he inspected every wrinkle; the crow’s feet by his eyes, the laughter lines by his mouth, the twin furrows that ran parallel between his brows. The skin of his eyelids was crinkled like crepe paper, so delicate that Armand could see Daniel’s eyes move underneath them as he dreamed.
He glanced back at the television. Stunning beaches and impressive skylines. Armand had never been to Miami. There was no past to haunt him around every corner.
He turned to Daniel again. He was alarmingly peaceful in sleep. He debated reaching out to Louis or Lestat, to thank them for bringing Daniel to him, but he doubted that would go over well. There was no telling whether those burned bridges would ever be rebuilt.
Was it possible to shake the destructive force inside him? He’d tried with Louis, but he’d become a pale wash of himself. Boring . If he wasn’t ruthless and cruel, he was overly obedient and passive. There was no middle ground between shattering any chance of love in his fist, and going completely limp. What would he be to Daniel? A crushing force, or dead weight?
Arun stirred, nervous. Amadeo beat against his mind’s walls in frustration. Doubt wormed through Armand’s chest. He leaned down and pressed his lips to Daniel’s forehead.
Miami might be nice.
Daniel woke up to an empty room, a mute television, and a one-way plane ticket back to New York.
“Fuck,” he swore. To his utter frustration and shame, sorrow flooded through him. The razor’s edge of grief. Armand had done it again — done the leaving before he could be left.
Louis.
Daniel?
He’s gone.
Louis sighed. I’m sorry, Daniel. He’s slippery.
“He’s afraid,” Daniel said aloud. “You can lead a five hundred year old horse to water…”
Where will you go now?
Daniel picked up the plane ticket. A bloody thumbprint marked the corner. Daniel pressed the paper to his nose, Armand flooding his senses. A promise of a different ending, some day. Some twisted vow to meet again.
“Home,” Daniel said. Twin vines of gloom and hope braided together inside him. “He knows where to find me when he’s ready.”