Chapter Text
Daniel dreams in amber. An entire world behind closed eyelids doused in orangey hues, darker here, lighter there. He dreams in film, wisps of images flickering, stuttering, starting again with a jump. A dream comes to him and he can recollect it in it’s entirety. Edges no longer blurred, beginnings and ends no longer warped, no longer crawling through a haze with gritted teeth, burdened with the ever present feeling of being taunted by his failing memory, the feeling like he’s grasping for something invisible just slightly out of reach. The amber’s not always warm, the dreams that find him not always entirely pleasant. Sometimes Daniel wakes still feeling nauseous despite being beyond illness. But it’s the Odyssey of Recollection; a bittersweet pill, the strongest drug he’s chased after in years. He sees now exactly why Louis needed retention - as a punishment, as a reminder of the longevity of eternity, all of its highs and lows.
Many of his first few undead weeks have been spent sleeping. There isn’t much else left to do in an empty penthouse that doesn’t belong to you, after all. Daniel will stalk the streets when the sun sleeps as he has to, yearning to satiate the burning hunger that sneaks up on him. But after his meal he returns to the Al-Sharif Towers. Confines himself to his coffin that isn’t his at all, attempts to train himself to ignore the faint scent still lingering on the silk within, pretending he doesn’t know precisely whose it is. But of course he does. He’ll never forget that scent hanging over him, the weight of the body it belonged to pressing down against him.
Armand had left him. Abandoned would be a more accurate word, carelessly and without notice a more accurate description. A singular night they had spent in each other’s company as maker and fledgling, Armand bestowing a surface level vampiric wisdom onto him that Daniel had already picked up from Louis’s interview. He remembers this, not simply because he can’t forget, but because his maker had carried within his words such a dissonance, such a smooth and complete melancholy, such an adamance to distance himself from what he had made. Starkly opposed to the barely concealed anger, jagged and raw, that had simmered in the air during those hours Armand spent sat within that cavity in the wall. The idea repulsed - repulses - me. The line rang through Daniel’s mind the whole time, sliding over his maker’s gloom. It defined it for him. Gave it clarity. And so it truly had been inevitable waking up to that almighty silence the following night, padding round the penthouse and discovering a yawning pit of loneliness.
He’d dreamt of Armand when he’d slept. And he’s appeared in every dream since, whether fragmented or fully fledged.
Would Daniel disparage the thrill it gave him every time to see him there? Standing on a street corner he’d never stood on, the searing heat of his gaze as he intrudes, lurking as a phantom around the scrim of his consciousness. He doesn’t, he can’t, because Armand knows. He can hear the erratic thrumming of Daniel’s heart and the curiosity that gives his blood its taste. It does thrill him. Mystifies him. Leaves him empty and complete all at once.
His hunts are scarce for a fledgling. Dubai reeks of blood and stirs a desperation in him, so it’s not for a lack of want for satiation. Rather it’s the greed in him. How he cherry picks his victims, sifts through an amalgam of thoughts to track down the weakest, the mirror images of his younger self who depend on the rush of a high to feel anything. Like a beacon they beckon him into deserted side streets and dark alleyways. Daniel approaches slow under the guise of a friend, a dealer, another addict in search of a fix, gauging a reaction. He appreciates the wary ones or those who keep to their silence, so he offers them a quick death. Those who are more confrontational earn a smarmy comment pulled from Daniel’s extensive repertoire before facing a gruesome demise. Nails slashing flesh, fangs tearing though sinew, vessels, bones snapping under his newfound strength. If they scream too much he rips their tongues out. And he latches onto the wounds he makes, laps up the blood with reverence, feels his bloodstream come alive with it. How the Gift craves it and how Daniel craves what it’s laced with; a match made in hell. Bliss until it isn’t.
Until his skin starts crawling and the air around him shifts to accommodate a presence. It feels real - like fingernails lightly scratching down his back, like eyes fixated on his form as he mauls his food. But Daniel turns to find those fingernails belong to no one, those eyes belong to no one. The shadows behind him have moulded to present the shape of nobody and have closed back in on themselves again.
It’s all the hallmarks of a hallucination and he knows it is. He knows he should attribute it to the drug-blood. But when the presence returns when he pretends to ignore it, when it stalks him back to the penthouse, when it climbs in his coffin and lies there with him as he drifts off to sleep… it becomes increasingly difficult to keep within the realms of logical reasoning.
The presence creeps up on Daniel now, hunched over the fresh corpse of an alcoholic as he is, growing woozy as thick blood travels down his throat, the warmth it brought fading with the eerie chill that harked the being’s existence. Daniel retracts his fangs slowly. Frustration simmers lightly under his skin, a fiendish emotion that follows him just as intently as this presence does. And it is frustrating within itself that he should feel such a thing and have it directed at his desires that split and expand into multitudes: the wish to be left alone by his mysterious stalker as he has apparently been destined to be, to cower from his vampirism and masquerade as a human and only act on his preternatural instinct when the idea of death once again suffocates him with its terrifying absence of life, but to simultaneously yearn for a connection, to live in hope that it is someone he can reach out to, learn from. Someone that may offer solace or advice or anything to quench the deathly loneliness enveloping him.
With subtlety he turns his head. And for once he beholds not a void, not a cold nothingness that laughs at him in its insubstantiality, but rather a figure. Standing at the mouth of the alleyway and shrouded in darkness. Ruminating, it seems, as Daniel is. Both taking in the scene before them.
Hesitation holds him in suspension. With the lack of light it’s difficult to make out whether the being is mortal or not, whether another drunk has chosen this alleyway to collapse into, to hide within the shadows and sleep. More food, Daniel supposes, if this is the case. But something tells him that it isn’t. That his night is about to get a lot more interesting in the worst way imaginable.
“Can I help you?” Daniel drawls.
“You wrote that book. The one about the vampires.” The figure says simply. He has a distinct voice, low and grating, laced with a faint Eastern European accent. He remains unmoving. Daniel can feel his eyes trained on him, off-putting and unnatural.
“A fan?” his lip quirks up on instinct. “You aren’t mistaken. But since you know me, wouldn’t it be reasonable if I knew who you were too?” Daniel rises from his knees, wiping the blood from his mouth. He dares not to wander from where he now stands. Apprehension keeps him tethered to the spot. But he knows nothing if not how to prod an unpredictable bear. “I mean, I’m assuming you want me to sign your copy since you’ve been following me for weeks on end. There’s easier ways to get my attention, but that hardly matters now. So who should I make it out to?”
The figure chuckles and Daniel has to suppress a shiver. “It’s true I’ve trailed you. Evidently not as successfully as I had thought. But I don’t want your autograph, Mister Molloy.”
“No?”
“No.”
He shifts as though he were a mirage and the vague shadow of his hand raises to where his face would be. And then flames erupt from his palm, their flickering glow illuminating his features. He is built cruelly, all hard edges, the ridge of his nose like a slab, his cheekbones hollow, the thin line of his mouth curved upwards. And his eyes. Though no mortal could ever dream of producing fire in the manner he had, this is the confirmation Daniel needed to solidify this figure as a vampire. They are carved from amethyst, the most brilliant purple he’s seen this side of the Atlantic. They twinkle with an amusement the rest of him seems unfavourable in catching up on. Daniel finds himself enchanted. Wants to ask a thousand questions to the man with those eyes just for the slightest insight into what mysteries they’ve seen.
“Not a fan then?” Is what he asks instead.
In a blur, the other vampire has his hand wrapped around Daniel’s throat, slamming him against the brick wall so hard that he feels a gash open at the back of his head, feels the blood trickle down his neck. Briefly dazed, he barely registers the snarling, the gnarled fingernails ghosting down his cheek, slicing skin in the wake of their path. It’s the eyes that drag him back.
“Law four,” the vampire growls. “‘No vampire shall ever commit to writing the history of the vampires.’”
“Ah.” Daniel says, the words from Claudia’s diaries floating to the surface of his consciousness mere moments before he’s thrown across the alleyway. He smacks against the back wall and hears the distinct snapping of bones. Pain blossoms in his chest. And the vampire persists, slinking his way towards him, happy to indulge in this game of predator and prey.
“You’ve heard us, yes? Our voices in your head. You know most of our brothers and sisters have begun the hunt for your interviewee, Louis de Pointe du Lac.” He looms over Daniel. Smiles a gruesome smile, baring yellowed teeth. “A desecrator, no doubt. I would let them fight over him. Rip him to shreds as they argue over who among them deserves the fatal bite. But you? You too are a desecrator, Mister Molloy, being burdened with the Dark Trick as you are.”
He waggles an accusatory finger. Daniel hasn’t the energy to move, to speak. He’s known no such pain in years. And although he knows it’s fleeting, he’s still newborn, still barely liberated from his mortality and all of its painstaking ministrations. He will feel it all because he knows nothing else, has been taught nothing else. There’s a strength within himself he tries to call to, but it’s embers are snuffed out the second he shifts, the second his broken ribs grind against one another. A pitiful groan slips from him and Daniel resigns. Sits and listens and seethes.
“Nobody is coming after you despite this. And I think: why? You, so pliable in your vampiric youth, a plaything for the older, more expired of our kind. Easy to break. Spending your days confined to the penthouse and your nights chasing after the dregs of society. No security, no protection. Abandoned by your Maker.”
“I…”
“Hush now.” The vampire’s voice is a whisper. He crouches down so that they are level, lifting Daniel’s chin up with a single finger. “It must happen, Mister Molloy. You cannot be allowed to live for your part to play in the publication of that book. And I must be the one to finish you.” He reignites his flame. It dances prettily over his skin. Daniel feels the heat of it and swallows thickly. “I wish I could make this painless and quick for you. But my fire is all I have, and so you must burn.”
Daniel drowns then. Drowns in acceptance of his fate. In resentment towards himself for his inability to prevent this, at how easily he gives up. He trembles as he always had when faced with the prospect of death, of finality. He trembles with pain. He trembles with the recollection of his darkest days as a human, suffering in disease, the nagging voice in the back of his head that had suggested giving into death simply to get away from it. That small part of him that stayed settled and was satisfied with the quiet, with nothing. Daniel draws it to him now, allows it to wash over him. Drown him.
He leaves enough resentment towards this strange figure and his relentless pursuit of his demise. And towards Armand for leaving him as this writhing and ineffectual thing, for his lack of guidance, ultimately for claiming the rights to his undead life as his presence remains elusive.
Daniel closes his eyes and thinks of many things. His career. The book. His misspent youth, the rewards he got for selling himself in San Francisco. Louis, Polynesian Mary’s and the days that followed. The daughters he’s had no contact with for years. His wives and the marriages he’d screwed over. Alice. Paris. Holding her hand, walking down the boulevard late at night. The purple dress he’d always loved to see her in.
He would die with the image of her fixed in his mind. He would not mind it.
And suddenly, from outside his consciousness, Daniel’s ears pick up on a scuffle. A faint yelp, an absence of the warmth of the vampire’s fire inches from his skin. He dares to open his eyes, but with blurred vision it’s difficult to decipher what’s happening.
Two figures - one pinning the other to the floor, on the other side of the alley. They are exchanging words. Heated words. Filled with menace and bite. One strings together a litany of these words, spat out like a command. Daniel knows nothing of what they are. He is certain of the hatred, though. He remains certain as a piercing scream rings out and a sickening slicing follows, overwhelmed by a suffocating silence signalling a definitive end.
Daniel blinks. And as he reopens his eyes for the briefest of moments, just before he’s claimed by unconsciousness, he’s faced with amber ones staring right back at him.