Chapter Text
Daniel’s hands have been shaking for two full days now.
He can pinpoint the moment it started, down to the second, the spike in volume; it’s all there ‘on the record’, after all. The wavering line of recklessness, the rise and fall no doubt mirroring his electrocardiogram. Trembling hands gripping his notes – grateful, for once, for the guise of his illness. Daniel, for all his gifts of perception, is not a mindreader; he can’t tell if they see him as a sick old man, desperate to make one final quick book buck or die trying, buried in the pages of an unpublished manuscript, or if they see him as a worthy opponent. One helps his case, the other fuels his ego. He’s not sure which is worse.
The whole interview has followed the same pattern, the rehearsed ebb and flow of scathing witticisms, of bold faced lies cut with a telling drop of eyes. He’s well versed in sight reading a room – better be, by now, or he’s chosen the wrong career – allowing himself a brief inspection of the notes before beginning to conduct their phoney symphony.
People are easy. Daniel usually gets a sense of the story they’re trying to tell within the first session, and a sense of the story they’re hiding after three. Vampires aren’t all that dissimilar, tales seeped in a bloodbath of melodrama. The difference is in the recollection.
A mortal brain is not built to hold a lifetime of memories – or anything from the mid to late 70’s, in Daniel’s case. They’re sponges, only able to preserve so much at once before they lose retention. Now: take that same brain, expand the lifespan by a couple millennia and see what sticks.
Louis is a masterclass in false memories. His recollections are convenient; the mess of centennial life diluted into a neatly packaged, easily marketable 400-something page memoir. The Louis de Pointe du Lac of San Francisco was a whirl of frenetic energy, a boy pacing the confession booth. The Louis de Pointe du Lac of Dubai is concise, words coming to him less as thoughts and more as recitation.
I don’t believe I want to give simple answers .
The subject of Daniel’s interview is a liar.
Which is why, as he senses the story derailing, he pushes further, fans the flame. The best work, he finds, is written in ash. Daniel walks into that last session, truth-bomb strapped to his chest, waiting for the optimum time to pull the pin.
It comes with the follow up questions.
There’s something to be said for a mortal managing to pull a fast one on two unspeakably powerful, immortal creatures. Or something to be said about getting lucky. Daniel prefers to believe that his suicide mission was premeditated.
How he managed to shield his thoughts from the vampires continues to astound him. Deflection, he supposes. Worked well enough with his ex wives. Still, the fallout is pretty cataclysmic, even if just for the structural integrity of the house. The gaping hole in the wall works far better for the room than blackmarket Francis Bacon’s, anyway.
He survives, somehow, deliriously unscathed. Left locked in a penthouse with a lion he’d just spent the better half of two weeks prodding with a very pointy stick. Louis promises travel, promises safety, if he leaves – an entirely reasonable request. Sensible, even.
So.
Daniel stays.
Which leads to now. Daniel’s hands, shaking where they grip the ballpoint pen. In the spare bedroom. In Dubai. Where he’s been. For two full days. Ever since Louis left him.
At the forty-eight hour mark, he has to start wondering how much of it he can really blame on the Parkinson’s.
“You’re still here.”
If the voice startles him – well, he was shaking anyway. Who can tell?
“So are you,” Daniel points out, keeping his back to the door. He writes out some lines of gibberish in his notebook, the scratch of ink on paper punctuating the silence.
It’s not that he hasn’t been expecting this; there’s been a vibe. The staff, on the brief occasions he’s ventured out of his guest suite, have been on high alert – nothing major, just survivors' instinct kicking in at the slightest noise, heads jerking towards doorways, windows, ceilings. There was also the fact that they were still working. Dead giveaway.
Daniel tears a blank page out of his notes, starts working on his obituary, instead.
How would he write his death? If this was the last string of sentences his age aching wrists could inscribe, where would he even start? He’s been given one hell of a head start; some faded part of Daniel’s psyche has known this day’s been coming for the past 50 years, like a scratch in his record, stuttering in circles over the should’ve could’ve would’ve .
It’s been a slow crawl to oblivion. Fitting that his first brush with death should come to finish the job.
Daniel writes: ‘The vampire Armand lurks in the doorway.’
Except, no. That’s not right. He scribbles out ‘lurks’ , replaces it with ‘lingers’ .
But that’s not right, either. He scribbles out ‘lingers’ , replaces it with ‘stands’ .
‘The vampire Armand stands in the doorway.’
That’s what makes Daniel look up, in the end – makes him cave in to the need to check over his shoulder. Armand feels smaller, somehow, his presence less oppressive. He wears his defeat like a cloak, like a boy shivering up in his cold concrete castle, and Daniel doesn’t feel bad for him – he doesn’t . And yet.
And yet.
Armand speaks softly, not wanting his voice to echo around the chamber. The only indication that he speaks the words aloud at all are his lips, bitten blood red, “You haven’t eaten.”
“Been busy,” it comes out blunter than he intends, but it doesn’t stop him from gesturing to his notebook pointedly, “You know, I’ve never had much appreciation for analog. Still don’t. Shit takes forever by hand.”
“You need to eat.”
He turns properly now, setting down the pen, “So do you.” There it is – the reason he looks so small. It seems they’ve both been ignoring their guts recently, “Who’s gonna cave first, do you think?”
“Your heart,” Armand’s copper clear eyes pierce through his shirt, through his skin, with all the intensity of a starved wolf considering a roadkill deer, “is under immense strain.”
Daniel snorts.
“Let me guess: the pounding of my unmedicated blood called to you from the other side of the building and you lifted off the ground, following the scent like a cartoon character floating towards a freshly baked pie. Am I close?”
The vampire’s eyes remain fixated on his chest. Daniel’s hit the nail on the head.
If he’s honest, his heart is pounding loud enough that he’s sure even Real Rashid can hear it from wherever he’s bunkered down. It’s less obvious when he’s writing, fixated on the scratch scratch pause of his pen, but when the quiet reverberates around the tomb – when the only occupants are Daniel and his laboured breath – the drumming starts in earnest.
How did Louis describe it? ‘As if some enormous creature were coming through a dark and alien forest.’
For an otherworldly being, the vampire Armand sure looked afraid.
The words are out of his mouth again before he can stop them: “Am I close?”
“Your body is running off adrenaline and dregs of vermouth, Daniel.” Armand replies plainly, still unmoving in the doorway.
“Sounds delicious.”
“It will kill you.”
Daniel pushes himself to standing, pushes the world hard enough it begins to sway. It’s a mistake as soon as he does it, but what’s another mistake at his big age, “I thought you’d want that. Think about it: I die, book doesn’t get published, you keep your promise to Louis in the clinging hope that he changes his mind and comes crawling back to you after, lest we fucking forget, your 73 year stockholmian trauma bond was blown wide open by little old me.”
A beat. Something dawns on him.
“You should want me dead. So who is it?”
The vampire, confused, cocks his head.
“Armand, Amadeo, Arun. Which one of you is keeping me alive?”
Daniel hardly gets the last word out before Armand is on him, nail bed blades cutting into his throat, “You forget yourself, Mr. Molloy.”
The room stops spinning, all his senses diluted down to the five points of pain; it’s useful, clear cut – grounds him in a way that really should worry him more than it does. It takes a moment for the sting to cut through the fog, but when it does, the delicious ache sending sickly-sweet sparks up his spine, a few things become apparent to him:
Firstly, Daniel might be a freak.
Second, the shaking has stopped. Daniel’s legs feel more sure than they have all week, the nagging twitch in his knees alleviated. His hands are remarkably steady where they hover in the air by the vampire’s hips; any hesitation in his fingers is all his own, consciously pulling back when they gravitate closer to ( cold, remember Daniel, cold, dead, decayed ) skin.
Third, Armand is holding him upright.
How often has Armand spared a life?
“You don’t scare me,” he means for it to come out as a taunt, sneering and glib. Instead, it leaves Daniel’s lips unbearably sincere, leaves them tasting like forgiveness.
Something crosses Armand’s face, then, and Louis has it all wrong. It’s not half-blank; it’s half-terrified. Half-angry on behalf of the monster he’s become, and half-afraid for the young boy he never grew out of being.
It’s something Daniel’s been trying to uncover in his research: who the hell this kid is. The whole second act felt like it followed a classic structure, a carefully orchestrated plan, beat to beat, down to the stage directions left in the margins. He’s seen this a lot in his line of work: pieces falling into place like dominos. It’s never usually the entire truth, but it reads better in print. Daniel can appreciate the art of self-editing, cleaning up the sides to leave a straight narrative – of course he can, he wrote a goddamn autobiography.
Some stories make sense; other stories make too much sense.
He’s starting to think this is the latter.
The Armand currently carving crescent moons into his veins is not the calculating mastermind laid out in his notepad; he’s not nearly as put together as all that. He didn’t set out to mindfuck their memories in San Francisco, didn’t plan for the fallout from the trial in Paris, he had no idea what they were getting themselves into inviting Daniel to Dubai.
Armand is not calculating, he’s reactionary. He acts with nothing but self-preservation, like a child running from raised voices to hide in a closet. Frighten the beast in the cage and he’ll draw blood.
Speaking of.
Daniel can feel warmth trickling down his neck. Sunset eyes dart from his face to his neck, nostrils flaring at the glint of red.
“Thought you weren’t supposed to touch me,” Daniel quips, because he, himself, has never once acted with self-preservation in mind, “or hurt me in any way, for that matter. Any more of Louis’s ten commandments you feel like breaking?”
“Shut up.” Armand snaps, but doesn’t move, transfixed by the way Daniel’s blood has started up his knuckles.
And he’s delirious, must be. The lack of food and water, lack of sunlight, medication, the gentle loss of blood. That’s why he asks, “Do you remember what I taste like?”
The fangs are out now, as much as Armand strains to conceal them. Daniel’s heart is pounding in the quiet of the room and his lips feel too dry and his tongue feels too heavy and he can’t help but give in to the urge to bare his throat to the wolf. The quiet he’s been longing for . And he’s panting; he thinks they both might be. He wants this. God help him, he wants this.
“Your thoughts– You’re thinking too loudly.”
“Yeah? Gonna put an end to that?”
Whatever it was holding Armand back, whatever resolve he’s been clinging to with white-knuckles, splinters. He lunges at him – not his throat, not at where Daniel has opened himself up to attack, but at his mouth. He finds himself gasping into the kiss, surprise making way for desperation.
For a man dying of thirst, of sickness and starvation and stagnation, Daniel Molloy kisses like it will save him.
It hits like a tornado. Distant one second, creeping and brooding but far enough off, enough that he has a chance to chuck a go-bag into the boot of his battered old Mustang and get the hell out of dodge. And in the next breath, the time it takes to choose between turning left or right at the intersection, the storm is raging overhead, lungs giving out like glass windows.
Daniel had read the emergency warnings, watched the news as weathermen charted the unlikely course of hurricane Armand – residents are advised to run, run and don’t look back; this storm is not the misunderstood beast you imagine; you cannot fix this one by asking it the right questions in the right order, Daniel Molloy . He saw it coming, had his escape plan ready, and instead implemented an illegal highway manoeuvre to u-turn straight into the storm’s ember-eyes.
His once fluttering hands now grip the vampire's hips, sure and certain, and it's like clutching at marble. Nails soft as human teeth bite pitifully into untender flesh. The immovable weight of him goes pliant – it forgives him his wrinkles, his time-tamed strength; it goes anyway.
Armand shifts his grip, never once loosening as his claws crawl from throat to nape. They pull and tug and try to slot themselves into the gaps between the other’s bones. Daniel’s patella finds a new home in the dip at the base of Armand’s femur; the carpals of Armand’s wrist fit neatly in between vertebrae c6 and c7. They mould into a messy amalgamation.
And it tastes like well-mixed martinis and full moons and cobwebs and tape recorders and coked-up gums and velvet lining and salt and copper and iron and–
“Daniel…” Armand is the first to pull away, pupils engulfed by iris, lips slick with Daniel’s… blood. He licks his bottom lip and it fills his mouth with metal. Oh.
Oh .
“Come on, boss,” Daniel says, nickname bubbling up from some unknown part of him, easy as bleeding. He adjusts his hold, hooking his fingers into belt loops and tugging and he should be embarrassed, should feel something – anything – other than this all-consuming need, “Use me.”
Armand tries to back away. “Daniel, I will not be able to–”
“Stop?” he guesses, reeling him back in. He ducks his head, burying it in the skin beneath Armand’s ear, mouthing hot wet kisses into cold dead flesh. “Then don’t.”
His kisses become bites, blunt little things that leave no marks. Armand lets out a small consolation sigh when he nips at his ear lobe.
“Sweet boy,” he mutters, cradling Daniel’s head as he starts to trail his tongue along the line of the vampire’s jaw, “so desperate. Trading sustenance for sex. For substances.” Armand pulls Daniel back from whatever trance he’s fallen into, fingers tangled tight in unkempt hair, until they’re face to face, “You have not changed at all, have you?”
He hasn’t. In that moment, he’s a boy again, bright young reporter with a point of view and a crippling substance abuse problem to boot. He’s 20 years old and stumbling, chin tucked to chest, into gay bars under the guise of looking to score – and when he’s approached, led by rugged hands into a series of dark rooms, bathrooms, alleyways, his shirt always comes off first, his knees hit the ground with little to no hesitation, and he’ll tell himself it's better than forking over the contents of his wallet.
He’s 30 and looking to settle down, even though his heart rate has yet to, nor the bleeding in his nose or his gums, and she seems nice, nice enough, and his hands shake as he offers her the drink, the date, the ring, and his bottom lip shakes when she says no, but it’s okay, she never really seemed that nice to him in the first place.
He’s 40, he’s 50, he’s 60 and life is a series of back and forth calls with his agent, his editors, his publishers, of writing newspaper articles, of getting blacklisted for said newspaper articles, of writing and writing and writing and ignoring, of ignoring that review on his first book, of ignoring those divorce papers, of ignoring the next, of ignoring his daughters and his wives and his needs, and his hands shake as she returns the ring, but it’s okay, his hands were already shaking in the first place.
He’s 70 and he has no right feeling this young, no right necking on this ancient twink, begging for something he can’t name, body trembling from a lust he hasn’t felt in decades – except that’s a lie, his body has been singing since he stepped into the penthouse, pulse pounding with anticipation; this interview was always going to end in blood, it just came down to which direction the blood would be flowing.
He’s 70, and he’s 20 and 40 and 10 years old all at once. Giddy and tired and high and afraid.
With the hand not buried deep in his hair, Armand is caressing his face, guiding him away from the copper tang of his skin and into the pull of his eyes. His thumb trails the edge of Daniel’s mouth.
Come on , Daniel thinks – every iteration of him – as loud as he can manage, come the fuck on.
“You have been so patient, Daniel,” he says, his words not so much cutting through the fog as building on it, until Daniel’s brain is working overtime to stay alert, to realise the glowing orbs wading forward through the tidal mist are headlights, to realise he’s the deer, to realise he always has been.
Armand’s hand leaves his face briefly to be brought to fangs. He tears a small cut into his thumb and brings it back to Daniel’s mouth. It rests there, blood pooling on his bottom lip; an unspoken offering.
Daniel understands what’s expected of him – always has.
He sucks the thumb into his mouth greedily, lapping at the wound as the taste of their blood mixes on his tongue. Liquid life, liquid lust. He fights to keep his eyes open, to keep them focused on the way Armand’s tongue contests its confines, traces the barbed bars of its enclosure for a weak spot. He wills it to escape, wills it back to his mouth, his neck; until the drink takes hold of him and his eyes shut from the euphoria.
Behind his eyelids he’s 20 again, except this time it’s different.
He’s 20 and spread out on bedsheets he doesn’t recognise, covered in blood he does, and sleep is a distant concept to him, chased away by bitter powders and bitten aches, by prying eyes and preying hands, and it’s been weeks of this, and it’s been months of this, and the fatigue runs blood deep, poisons the very core of him – so he accepts the haunting, invites the shadow in the corner of his room into his bed, wears the mark of the beast on a chain around his neck, and isn’t it something: to be loved by death itself.
The devil’s minion.
Daniel remembers. And remembers. And remembers.
And then he passes out.