Chapter Text
Louis is nearly at the airport, the sound of his thoughts dampening at the speed of his hired car. Armand could still reach them if he wanted to, could find out how Louis solves the problem of shipping a coffin to a hotel (a vacation rental is the obvious answer, but Louis remains willfully ignorant of AirBnB). To what end, though? Louis is not running from Armand, he has made that clear enough. He is running to Lestat. Armand cannot prevent it any longer.
So, he lets silence take his mind. He sits with the sound of The Groan, perhaps triggered this time by his impact against the wall, and allows himself the performance of breathing to try and ground himself in the space.
“Jesus fucking–” Daniel Molloy’s poorly-disguised orthopedic loafers scrape harshly in the dust to his left. “Right, yeah. You’re still here. Great.”
Armand sucks the inside of his cheek between his teeth, staring harder at the opposite wall.
Why did he leave you here?
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Daniel calls out from where he’s already retreated to the adjacent room. “Or rather, your guess is probably the same as mine. Three’s company.”
Armand closes his eyes against a flash of fantasy in Daniel’s mind; Louis and Lestat tangled in white hotel sheets. He keeps them closed as he feels Daniel move cautiously back into the hallway.
“You’re in my head, aren’t you?”
The scent of fear in the air brings Armand back to his body better than cataloguing his own bruises and scrapes. He lets his head fall at an angle, looks up directly into Daniel’s eyes.
Is that a problem, Mr. Molloy?
Daniel turns away as swiftly as he can while keeping his addled balance. He tries to keep his steps measured, as if they don't both know that he is running.
The audacity of Daniel to be fearful of him now! But of course, he is as ignorant as an animal – or even more so, as a kept animal at least knows it is being fed. Daniel still believes that he only owes Armand for sparing him once at Louis’ request. He does not know how Armand has held his promise since then, to let him “live out the night” in the fullest sense.
Then it finally washes over him, Louis’ words: “You harm him in any way, I will kill you.”
As if Daniel were not a gift to Louis from Armand.
A gift now skittering about the guest room making strange and noisy efforts to keep Armand out of his thoughts:
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun.
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun.
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun.
Blood-splattered Rembrandt, he is not.
Eventually Daniel’s attempts at flooding the channel let up, and Armand listens more comfortably. He has already managed to book a ride to the airport. Armand will commend him for speed, at least. Now he tries to look for flights with shaking fingers, his other hand holding a bag nearly empty save for a handful of necessities. Leaving the charred laptop behind, then? Interesting.
Doesn’t have to be New York. What’s next and not- Barcelona? Sure. Fuck it.
I must recommend El Palauet for accommodations in that case. The Majestic is iconic, yes, but the suites leave much to be desired.
Daniel’s thoughts shatter into terror again and it hits Armand like a burst of fresh air. He rises. He brushes aside Daniel’s insipid panic as he approaches the room, needs it no longer. Daniel’s sweat, his stumbling feet, the rabbitlike beating of his heart – these are the comforts Armand seeks.
He only hesitates once, at the door, contemplating for a moment if Daniel would play along should he ask to be invited in, but decides instead to indulge in the cheap scare of entering so swiftly that he might seem to appear out of nowhere before Daniel’s mortal eyes.
However, Daniel is not surprised, or not in the way he should be. He is sitting on the bed, facing the window to the night skyline, and doesn’t so much as turn to look when Armand announces his presence by footfall.
He is terrified, but underneath lies something Armand can’t identify. He pries Daniel’s mind open again, and finds the frenetic parade of regrets and fantasies that he expects from his prey when they are cornered. Which means Daniel’s play at fearlessness is driven by something deeper. If Armand asked him to name it, or even commanded him to name it, Daniel wouldn’t be able to. He cannot possibly know, because no one is alive or undead who knows, that Armand cannot reach that place beneath the psyche where impulses are able to swim against the current. This does not stop the rage that boils within Armand at being mocked in this way.
“Rise,” he says.
“Make me,” Daniel answers.
Armand does just that, yanking Daniel to his feet with a flick of his gaze and turning him around just as roughly. He isn’t crying, but he’s close — his face blotchy and red with the effort of holding his mouth shut in a feeble smile. Armand does not need to read him to know that this sensation is what he has feared the most in the days since recalling their first meeting. At his advanced age, Daniel’s heart would probably give out before his body, were Armand to keep applying the force of his mind to it. That would not satisfy. Armand instead clears the bed in one motion, crashing them both to the floor with one hand cradling the back of Daniel’s head and the other wrapped around his torso.
“You-” Daniel starts.
Armand lets go of Daniel’s head and applies that hand to his shoulder. He begins to push slowly, but with enough intent that Daniel’s heartbeat flutters in recognition. Daniel doesn’t try to speak again, only pants for air as Armand twists his body. Armand could do it quickly, but his hands crave an intimate violence. Daniel struggling against him. Daniel’s hands scratching uselessly at his arms. The fibrous tearing of muscle and the scream it rips from Daniel's lungs. The resistance of the ligaments of the spine, the body’s final plea for mercy. Armand savors the feeling of rejecting it. Savors the snap at the deepest part of Daniel as if he were taking a hammer to a chain, and isn’t he?
The fight leaves Daniel immediately, his arms falling limp to either side. Armand sits up where he is perched on Daniel’s waist, looks down at his work. Daniel’s head is turned, eyes squeezed shut, and while his panting is picking up in speed it is also much more quiet. Armand listens.
…should have texted the girls…
“Yes, I suppose you should have.”
“Fuck you,” Daniel says, voice broken as if worn from shouting.
Looking over Daniel with a more aesthetic eye, Armand finds himself absently adjusting the wreckage. He carefully arranges Daniel’s arms in a more natural position at his side, combs sweat-slick curls back from his forehead with his fingers.
“Sh-shouldn’t...” Daniel groans.
Shouldn’t have been you, he thinks loudly. Should have been an aneurysm. Should have been an icy step on my stoop.
“Perhaps a long bout of gastroenteritis in a memory care facility in Syracuse.”
This is how you feel like a big bad vampire? Snuffing out a sickly old man?
“Do not sell yourself short, Daniel. You’ve had quite a remarkable role in this story for a ‘shitty kid from Modesto.’”
And then there's you, poster boy for the banality of evil.
Armand snatches Daniel up by his arms and drags him around the bed. He uses his physical strength instead of his gifts to carry Daniel down the hall so that he can feel the sagging weight of him and the friction of his rubber soles trying to grip the floor for his dangling feet. Daniel’s mouth stays shut, his mind incoherent but for an irrational instinct to play dead rising up, as it does with all prey eventually. Armand feels Daniel recognize their destination, though, and the spike of anxious anticipation makes him smile.
Kicking aside a book of old theater programs, Armand brings Daniel to the table. Daniel howls as he is propped up in a chair on his severed spine, begs with both words and thoughts, no, no, no, I can’t– until Armand shoves him upright and his back is flat, if not straight, against the chair. Daniel cranes his head backwards and opens his eyes wide towards the ceiling, stilled but for the labor of breathing. Adrenaline is beginning to take the reins. That suits Armand just fine.
He takes his time walking around the table to choose his seat. He rests his elbows on the surface and leans his jaw against his clasped hands before speaking:
“Mind if I ask a few follow up questions?”
Daniel laughs, one barking noise that Armand can feel him immediately regret only for how it shakes his broken body. He fixes a wet glare on Armand’s face and answers through his teeth: “Yeah. I’m all yours.”
Armand reaches out his mind towards Louis, a risk even with his talent for discretion. He finds a distant murmur, still on the move. No, Louis has not left any part of himself here to watch over his precious boy.
“It would appear so.”
“You could hold me up straight.” Daniel’s voice is flat under the crackling sound of its surface. “Hold the pieces up while we talk, if you wanted to.”
“Yes. I could.”
Daniel nods. The air between them shifts and Armand tastes the fear going sour in an instant, spoiling into disgust. Armand shifts in his seat at how viscerally he recalls the ambience of a dank, slanted room and a boy who would not accept his gift of an easy death. He worries his lip with his teeth before using his gifts to squeeze at Daniel’s spinal canal until he gets another gasp and shout for his trouble.
“I don’t know if you’ve read much of my work-” Daniel starts up again between gulps for air.
“More than I would care to.”
“I’ve written about this a few times,” he goes on, undeterred. “You don’t get good intel from torture. You just get whatever you want to hear. Which…well, I suppose that’s what you’re always after, isn’t it?”
Armand plunges into Daniel’s mind before he can say another word.
“Tossed aside like a rag yet again, Mr. Molloy,” he says, holding up the closest source of shame he can grasp. “It is curious that you would expect any differently from Louis when he made a direct request for your professional skills. At least when your other ‘friends’ have used you they have given you the dignity of pretense.”
Armand is met with silence that stretches on as if to challenge him.
Finally Daniel opens his mouth again: “Was there a question in there?”
“Do you believe that Louis cares for you more than he cares for any of the other assets in his collections?”
“Yeah.”
You are lying.
Daniel’s lip twitches into a smile. “Yeah.”
“To what end?”
“Can’t seem to move much below the neck,” Daniel says. “So you’ll have to imagine me shrugging here.”
Armand reaches in again. There’s an errant thought flickering there, as if it has a will to avoid detection. He catches it.
“Oh, Daniel,” he sighs, shaking his head.
“Oh, Daniel,” comes the mocking echo.
“You’re more upset that you won’t get to tell the story than you are that you won’t get to see your daughters again.”
A flash of anger in Daniel's tensed expression is quickly washed over by grief at the truth of the words. He breaks his sullen eye contact.
“I could offer you a devil’s bargain,” Armand suggests, tilting his head for effect. “Allow you to write the book on the condition that you never leave Lenora another voicemail, never write another text to Katie to be left on read until the next attempt six months later.”
“I won’t hold my breath,” Daniel says, blatantly side-stepping the implications. “Questions, Armand. Who. What. When.”
“Where, why, and how. Yes, I watched your distance learning videos. All ten. Concepts presented with the depth of a children’s picture book, in sessions short enough for the modern mortal attention span. What a legacy. Even I felt a twinge of embarrassment for you.”
There it is again.
“What?” Armand asks.
“Huh?” Daniel grunts, tilting his head one way and the other as if that might provide some relief from his pain.
“‘There it is again.' What do you mean?”
Daniel lifts his chin slightly. “Alright. Now or never anyway, isn't it?”
Armand leans back in his chair with a shrug. They both know Daniel doesn't have the leisure of time, but they can perform it if he wishes.
“It’s the expectations you have for me. It’s the narrative you’ve built around me. The way you’re slipping into calling me ‘Daniel’ now. Louis claims he followed my career. Was that another one of your self-inflicted marital duties? Keeping tabs on the sentient bag of leftovers?”
“Keeping tabs,” Armand repeats slowly as he tries to recall how he addressed Daniel in the guest room just prior.
“It’s hard to imagine The Vampire Armand allowing a mortal with the secrets of the night still buried somewhere in his head to simply-” Daniel’s shoulder lifts slightly for a beat before dropping again and he laughs through the spasming cough that follows.
“To simply roam around, no,” Armand agrees. “Too many risks.”
“You watched me then.”
“Yes.”
“To what end?” Daniel shoots back at him.
“You just outlined the stakes.”
“And you have killed for less, so why not me? I was a junkie without a mailing address, you could have taken me out after a couple months without Louis suspecting a thing. Honestly, it’s almost more suspicious that I didn’t die, but I guess…”
Louis' soothing voice in Daniel's head. “Listen as though I’m the voice of god or an angel talking to you.”
Heat rises up Armand's neck.
“August 13, 1974,” he begins, the sick heat dissolving into a warm buzz when Daniel’s jaw goes slack at the words. “For almost a year since the suicide of an acquaintance you have maintained a white-knuckled version of sobriety with regards to the ‘heavy stuff,’ but here you are: face-down on the floor of a basement flat on the second day of a heroin-induced slumber.”
“I never understood how that hit took me out so hard,” Daniel says. “It was you?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Armand chides. “Your charming host Frederick Walker was to blame, I’m afraid. He continued administering the injections as you slept.”
Armand can sense that Daniel’s limbs, still hanging lifeless, long to recoil at the revelation.
What the fuck?
“Why?” he asks.
“I too was curious, enough to take the time to examine his motivations. You may find it more upsetting that they were not grounded in the most obvious forms of depravity. He simply wanted to see what would happen if he did it, and he did not believe you would be missed.”
Well, shit.
Armand waits for something more analytical, but it doesn’t come. So, he continues:
“But he was mistaken. You were missed. Your roommate had already begun asking after you on the first morning, driven by guilt for not speaking his mind about your company the night before. Louis heard him, at one of the bars where he used to watch you.”
Louis watched me.
“I located you for him,” Armand went on, ignoring Daniel’s fixation. “Removed the problem, and left you in the stairwell of your rental complex instead of at the source of your ruin this time.”
“You killed the guy."
“Yes. Do you disapprove?”
“No,” Daniel admits simply, openly.
“Not long after that, February 14th, 1975 – Valentine’s Day, in fact – you nearly succumbed to hypothermia while sleeping under a bridge.”
The memory surfaces in Daniel’s mind. The slow syrupy panic when he realized he could not make himself stand up. A flavor of fear that was so immediately familiar to Armand that it seemed to call out to him in the night.
Their memories merge where he was lifted too easily into the arms of a shadow – arms not much warmer than his own.
“I know you,” the boy said, nearly biting his tongue with his chattering teeth.
“Bullshit.” Daniel breaks from the shared vision, shaking his head weakly. “Bullshit. That one is in the memoir.”
“But the basement bender stayed between you and your roommate, did it not?” Armand asks, amused.
“Then you’re pulling things from my head.”
Armand wonders at the sudden resistance, stronger than he had expected when he started down this route. “Is this so hard to believe, after everything else you have come to accept? Even as you sit here acknowledging that I can slip inside the boundaries of your mind? Don’t lie to me while I’m dying Armand, is what you want to say next. I’ll meet you there — why would I lie to you now, in your final moments?”
“If it’s moments then just give me the fucking lede.”
Fine then, Armand wrenches open the door.
“I spent five years in San Francisco scraping you off the pavement, until Alice came along to shoulder the burden and I was finally able to join Louis in Amsterdam.”
He isn’t prepared for what a rush it is to say the words out loud, to watch Daniel’s head reel with the implications.
Louis asked you to stay behind for me?
Armand opens and shuts his mouth.
Yes, Louis asked.
Didn’t he?
When? Armand imagines Daniel asking next. Where? Why?
“He did not have to ask,” Armand tells him. “His obsession with the idea of you was apparent. It would have crushed him to hear that the fate he thought he could ward off with some kind words had befallen you after all.”
You want to take credit for the fact that I survived the seventies.
“I explicitly gave Alice her due as well. She was the one who got you clean, after all, which was something beyond my powers.”
I relapsed three more times.
Armand tsks. “We both know that five is a more accurate count.”
Three rehab programs, whatever.
“I did have to step in once, in the interim between Alice and the second wife, but only to make sure your ‘insurance’ covered an inpatient stay.”
Fine, what else.
“Your flat.”
Don’t tell me I’ve been paying rent to billionaire vampires. That really will kill me.
“After the second divorce and the lost weekend in Santorini you did not bounce back like you had from previous relapses.”
So you sent poor Esther Hoffman to hospice to get me a rent-controlled apartment?
“Esther Hoffman did not exist.”
Daniel grunts.
I used to talk to her ghost about the shitty pipes, you fucking dick.
“What trouble have you had with the pipes?” The upkeep on the building is a constant headache due to its pre-war construction, but Armand has never cut corners.
Focus in, Annie Wilkes. I’m bleeding out here.
Armand loses his train of thought as his mouth suddenly waters at the reminder of the blood pooling underneath Daniel’s flesh. It vexes him to distraction. He is not hungry. He cannot be hungry after making a meal of Malik just days ago.
“For the most part, after 1996, the women in your life were able to handle you,” Armand explains. “2018 was challenging, however. I had been so blissfully free of your voice until the release of that podcast.”
Deep Dives with Allen Sparks.
“You recounted the entire plot of a film called Hell Comes to Frogtown, scene by scene.”
Which is the format of the show.
“Typically the host is able to speak more than twelve words in the span of 90 minutes, and the guest does not share explicit details of how they would survive in a gender-imbalanced apocalypse. Your behavior was disorganized and inappropriate even by the low standards your social circle have come to accept.”
I was strung out, yeah. Woke up with missed calls from twenty people. Alice got me help. Not sure how you plan to claim that one.
“Alice had been actively avoiding mentions of your name in the news and on social media for decades at that point. Your daughters were aware of the recording, but decided to withhold it to spare her feelings. Someone needed to bring the episode to her attention.”
“You’ve been talking to my wife?” Daniel breaks from his physical stupor to demand aloud.
“Ex-wife,” Armand corrects him. “And not even the most recent.”
“Why not Julia, then?”
Armand scoffs. “I knew I could trust Alice to take care of it.”
“Stop saying her name like that.”
“You want to stand,” Armand observes aloud. “You want to reach out and slap me, like you did when Louis was literally under your skin. So curious that this is the raw nerve in the bundle. Tell me, how am I saying her name?”
“Like she’s an old friend,” Daniel answers, eyes hard and unwavering. “Even if all of this is true. Even if you have been some kind of fucked-up guardian angel of darkness for fifty years-”
“Forty-nine.”
“You don’t know her.”
For a moment, the words hang between them like dust in the air. Armand doesn’t think about how much time has passed until the notch he has carved into his palm with the edge of his thumbnail starts to trickle blood down his wrist.
He smiles.
“Oh, certainly not like you knew her. Your ‘Spelman Girl.’ At least until ‘girl’ began to sound a touch too outdated even to Daniel Molloy, and she became your ‘Better Half’ — a low bar, you’d always say, and I must agree. Remind me, what was the passage from the memoir that made her put it down?”
Daniel cannot remember it word-for-word but he knows, as he should have known before Alice told him through tears on a late night call some fifteen years ago. Fortunately Armand read the book again just this week, after he could tolerate its presence on Louis’ nightstand no longer. He helps Daniel recall it:
I tell Alice that I will read her manuscript on the flight. This is my last chance, she says, after neglecting drafts one through four. I end up seated next to an EPA lab tech who will be the first source for my next book. I don’t read the manuscript. I don’t read the novel when it’s published. I hear it’s good, and I know it must be, because her short stories have always blown me away.
“We had two kids,” Daniel says. “You’re not going to win this.”
“Alice Molloy has published six novels, all quite well-received. How many of them have you read?”
Daniel Molloy says nothing. A remarkable moment. No words held back even, no particular thoughts other than the urge to move, to fight or flee.
“Can I tell you my favorite?” Armand asks, not bothering to wait for a response that won’t come. “Lowcountry Sway. She took a lot of risks there. The use of regional dialect could have been received poorly, given that she grew up only adjacent to the area. A shame she wrote it after the divorce. Perhaps you would have stooped to help her with the historical research, if you’d had the chance.”
Rage radiates from Daniel, so hot it almost seems to warm Armand’s skin. He smiles – until he hears the pivot in Daniel’s head, just before it’s spoken aloud.
“Did you fuck my wife, Armand?”
Predictable. “No.”
“Okay. Did you fuck me?”
Absurd. “No!”
“These just sure are a lot of big feelings to have about a house plant that you kept alive to prove something to your husband.”
“A house plant wouldn’t refuse water because wilting is ‘authentic.’” Armand scoffs, settling back in his chair.
“A bug in a jar, then. Something to entertain you on all those nights alone— shit, years alone apparently. You’re so proud of that number, 77, how much of it was even spent on the same continent?”
“We’re never really far apart. Not with what you can do,” Louis always told him.
“You know nothing,” Armand says to the space in between him and the mortal slowly curling into itself to die. “You know less than nothing.”
This conversation is pointless. Armand should have known it would be.
“Squash me, then,” Daniel says. End this thing.
“Of course you would ask for that.”
“Of course you would snap me in half and then complain that I’m crooked. You know what? I’ve gotta ask again, Armand. Did we fuck? Because it makes more sense than the alternative, where you let your immortal companion leave the country so you can keep an eye on your side piece who isn’t even a side piece.”
“You believed Louis when he said the two of you never ‘fucked,’ why not believe me?”
“Read that one back to yourself.”
“Obstinate,” Armand shakes his head. “Insufferable.”
“Stop before you make me blush. Hey, has this conversation ever gone well, the other times we’ve had it?”
“We have not spoken since San Francisco.”
“Uh huh. Handwaving five years by omission. Not a long time to a vampire, I’m sure, but a crucial one for me. A lot of holes there, and a creature in front of me who carves them out whenever it’s convenient.”
“Why are you so invested in another version of these events?”
“Because you’re too invested in me. The ‘I preserve his happiness’ shit might explain stopping me from walking directly into traffic, but making sure I end up in a five-star recovery program instead of a halfway house seems like it’s outside of the assignment.”
“Your path to ruin is always so predictable. Why should I wait until there are more pieces to pick up?”
“Oh, let’s look at the pieces too. My apartment? What was the path to ruin there? I wasn’t on the street.”
“You were running out of friends who could tolerate your presence on their sofas.”
“So my lack of dignity was something that jeopardized your Good Boy status with Louis?”
“Louis is only interested when you make the news.”
“And there it is.”
“Oh, yes. Say it a third time, please.”
“If Louis has only been on the lookout for the career highlights and the eventual revisionist obituary, then the rest has to mean something to you.”
“I had a hunch–”
“I might ‘prove fruitful in later times,’ yeah, but for what? A means to the end of your marriage? There’s something else to it. A project you keep around in the garage, a morality pet, I don’t know, but something you care about. You don't want me dead.”
“Is this your angle now?” Armand wonders aloud.
“Son of a bitch– You are in the process of murdering me, Armand. Forgive me if I occasionally remember that I want to live. Jesus— you—” Daniel’s eyes go wide. “Louis offered...”
Armand steels his face.
“You were going to let him do it?” Daniel asks.
“That choice was for Louis.”
Sure, because little Arun just follows the orders.
Armand closes his eyes against the rage beginning to coil in his stomach. He should have known from that night, from the first thread beginning to unravel, that every other term of their agreement in regards to the interview would follow.
“You cannot promise him a ‘steady hand,’ Louis. You know this.”
“It’s a roll of the dice, I know, but the odds are better than zero.”
“I’m sure that will be a great comfort to the boy when he is shambling after his meals.”
“I can keep him fed.”
“And safe?”
“And safe.”
“Like your other fledglings?”
Louis sprinted at him, eyes burning.
Hit me, hit me, hit me, Armand begged into his mind.
But his companion stopped short. The passion faded from his eyes as he turned away.
“Call Fareed.” he ordered. “Have him take a look.”
“Yes, maitre,” Armand answered, willing himself not to feel Louis’ disgust rippling out from his words.
“You think, because you have pieced together some artifacts from our past–”
Caught you in your lie.
“That you have some profound insight on what we have.”
Had.
“You know nothing of what we have been for each other, what we have shared.”
Daniel opens his mouth to speak and coughs instead. He tries to cut himself off with a grimace, shaking his head, uselessly flexing his shoulders and finding either no strength or no sensation to allow him to raise his hands. The cough settles, leaving pink-tinged spots of spittle shining on his chin, and he keeps talking.
“You’re right, I don’t know what you’ve shared, because Louis didn’t have much to say about it. Sure, there was Paris, with your editorializing, but once he has the opportunity to talk about the supposed good years, the decades spent traveling the world side-by-side, all he gives me is ‘yada yada yada?’ Ouch. That had to sting.”
Armand rises from his chair, takes a step away from the table before turning back, pinning Daniel to stillness again with his mind and reaching in—
Bloody fingers. Fidgeting himself raw, now.
He cannot stop himself from glancing down at his own hand, dripping faster now as he’s neglected to close up the scratch. He bites the tip of his tongue, licks it across his palm. He doesn’t have to read Daniel’s thoughts to see how the unflinching action knocks his gleeful pursuit of Armand’s ire off it’s course.
Enough.
Armand leaps atop the table, crouched before the mortal and ready to spring. Daniel cannot shrink back from the advance any more than he could brace himself to breathe a moment ago. He can only avert his eyes, and he does, wide and panicked and searching for exits that cannot serve him now.
And he keeps talking.
“Won’t ask me questions you don’t know the answer to. Can’t entertain mine without opening up a few ancient cans of worms. So, yeah. Guess you’re right. Not much else to explore here. Except…”
Armand leans forward, focusing in on the movement within Daniel’s veins. Silence falls between them. Even Daniel’s thoughts seem to hold for a cue that Armand won’t give him.
What happens next?
Armand lets out a dry laugh of surprise in spite of himself. He gives Daniel the dignity only of a small shake of his head as he hauls him up on to the table.
What are you going to do without even a bug in a jar for company?
Humoring Daniel’s metaphor, Armand sends back the image of a child picking the legs off of a spider. Daniel’s phantom sense of his body attempts to jerk away, shakes in his mind as Armand next climbs over his torso.
Seriously, Armand, where will you go? Who will you go to? There’s no flock left for you to shepherd this time.
“My covens,” Armand speaks aloud so that he might punctuate with his claws, finding their home in each of the mortal’s arms. “Were not destroyed by my hand. You know this in more detail than any person left alive.”
They weren’t created by your hand either, were they? Scraps left over for you every time, by upper management, by circumstance, by Lestat.
You expect to get a rise out of me with his name. To what end, I wonder.
You’ve left me with the choice to either get a rise out of you or shut up, what did you think I’d do?
Armand laughs again, looking around the room as if to find the source of Daniel’s audacity.
I’d rather go out making bad choices than no choices. Hell, at least Louis burnt some shit down in the middle of his moping. Five centuries doing nothing but REACTING to life?
“Surviving!” Armand hisses, the table splintering beneath them as he presses Daniel down into it.
Sorry, wouldn’t know about that. Turns out someone else was doing it for me.
So much time wasted.
I guess it will be, once you flush me down the drain.
Daniel’s eyes unfocus, his grip on his senses retreating as his body goes into a new round of shock. Still, his lips stay twisted into a grim smile that Armand feels an urge to claw off his face. There’s something much better he can do. Something far more satisfying that his gums nearly ache for, now.
“Look at your death.” He commands it inside and out.
Daniel looks.
Armand bares his fangs, lips peeled back past his gums, and finally catches the scent of Daniel’s fear again. Daniel shuts his eyes, screws up his features into something real and raw until he is irresistible.
Armand pulls him up from the table, close against his chest, and sinks in. Fangs seated to the hilt, he pulls deep through the old scar of Louis’ botched attempt. Blood hot and coursing and alive inside the body he has cracked open. He hears himself moan into the flesh. A sympathy pang to his prey swooning in his arms. The rising thrill does not last long. They soon plummet together, towards the darkness.
Louis’ fangs in Daniel’s neck in 1973. Armand’s fangs in Daniel’s neck in 1973. The sting of a needle in Daniel’s left arm, then his right, then his legs, then between his toes. Daniel’s head hitting wet pavement and the sound of a gunshot overhead. A shard of glass lodged in his thigh in the middle of a brawl he can’t remember if he started. The snap of his forearm when he hit the plate wrist-first in his last baseball game at Dell Webb Field.
Alice slapping his face. Crying. “I swear to God if you don’t wake up right fucking now.”
Julia slapping his face. Silent, until she drops her keys on the way to the door and screams like a wounded animal.
Dad slapping his face–
He should have texted the girls. Alice even asked him to do it, this time.
Lenora. Only four pounds and change. Docs won’t let her go home until she hits five pounds. A baby in their arms, Daniel and Alice suddenly can’t recall a single nursery rhyme between them. They sing “Satellite of Love.” They sing “Midnight Train to Georgia.” Daniel is Gladys and Alice sings the Pips. The baby is going to change his life. The baby is–
Katie. Colic. Night after night after night of her screams. Lenora joins in because she can’t sleep. No one can. Alice is bouncing Katie on her knee on the sofa at 2:00 AM. It’s just going to give her hiccups on top of the screams. Well, what the fuck do you want me to do? He opens the door. She begs him: Danny, I haven’t slept. He’ll be right back. He walks ten blocks to a park and lies down on a bench. He comes back three days later to empty rooms and a note on the fridge: Georgia.
Go back, go back, go back.
The first night in San Francisco, eyes open wide like he can use them to swallow up neon signs outside the cab. He is going to visit every dive. He is going to see it all.
Alice says yes after saying no twice. They both wear shorts to city hall in the brutal August heat. Alice has a sunflower in her hair. Daniel holds Lenora in his arms as he solemnly vows.
Go back.
The neon signs.
In San Francisco, in New York, in Vegas. In Helsinki. At the fairgrounds, the mall.
LED signs in Hanoi, in Taipei, reflecting in Alice’s eyes. All he wants to do is everything in the world, with her-
A hotel room in Manhattan. The ceiling…or the bed…no…the angle is wrong.
The boy is sleeping on his stomach, his back exposed to the night air creeping into the room. He snores, loudly. Armand wrinkles his nose as he flips through the notebooks on the desk, the napkin scribbles from jean pockets. Their bright young reporter is chasing a story about a strike in Chinatown, not looking for vampires. A coincidence. Nothing more.
Armand’s work is done. Yet here he stands, between the window and the bed.
Wake up.
He waits, watching the rise and fall of shadows on the boy's skin as he breathes, slow and deep.
Talk to me.
Walk with me.
Show me things in this city.
The boy turns his head and murmurs into his pillow. Armand leaves the notebooks and window cracked open behind him.
Jesus.
Go back.
Can’t even let me have my last fucking thoughts to myself you piece of
Silence.
Blood still pulses in the body, weakly, but the mind has gone dark. A whispered thought — why not follow? — much louder in this room than others. Armand must drop him, though, so he does. He leans back and tips his head towards the ceiling. His skull feels heavy, its contents seeming to slosh around inside. Levodopa lingering in the bloodstream? Or is it just the weight of two lives taken in such a short span, more blood than his body needs and more sensation than his mind is willing to parse?
He drops his chin down again, to look at what remains, and startles at the sight of Daniel’s slack-jawed visage. It’s…off, somehow. It’s wrong. As though he's been swapped out for a close facsimile right under Armand’s nose. Armand has seen this mortal near death enough times to know what it should look like and…
And here he is, reaching for its frantic little thoughts. All gone.
Then a twitch of the face muscles and an involuntary sigh spark recognition. Yes. It is the silence that renders him unrecognizable. The silence that blankets the two of them and the entire tower below. Evacuated after the shaking of their floor reverberated through steel, Armand learns with a quick sweep of his mind. A few residents still linger down on the street, but no one knows who has the authority to tell them safe to reenter.
Armand now only has the fading death rattle of Daniel Molloy for company.
He looks down at the body in his arms and tries to see it for the bundle of nerves and meat that it is. Daniel isn’t dead yet, but he is at the threshold. All Armand has to do is nothing at all. Let it happen. Let the breath still and the heart come to a stop. Let death have what it has been calling for since Armand first intervened. He has spent a mortal lifetime picking this creature up and setting it back down out of harm's way. Isn’t he tired?
“Finally rid of you,” he murmurs to himself as his fingers move absently through Daniel’s hair.
Daniel’s husk says nothing. The quiet Armand has been waiting for.
He watches as drops of blood hit Daniel’s pale face. He runs his tongue over his lips, as if to tell himself they might be the source.
Well, fuck me.
Daniel sees a light after all.
He was sure he was about to go out on darkness, and it actually felt more comforting than he had expected, but here’s that fucking light so he might as well go towards it.
Even though he “sees” the light he feels like he can’t open his eyes. Can’t move anything really. There’s a warmth passing through him though, that makes him at least feel aware of his body again – but he’s aware of the pain again too and that’s not right. That’s not supposed to be the deal, now, is it?
A sickly ebb and flow takes shape; pain seizes him then gets washed out by warmth, repeating and repeating and denying him full relief.
This isn’t death. This is a place he’s been before.
This is the hit that tells you the next one has to be stronger, the one that breaks your heart.
He can’t name the poison until his sense of taste comes flooding back in and he’s overwhelmed with copper tang. He’d smile, if he had any control. He’d cry.
Louis. You sentimental son of a bitch.
But when he’s finally able to open his eyes, it's the fiery orange of Armand’s staring back at him.