i'm too embarrassed to put this back up on ao3
Daniel returns home from Dubai, newly dead and with his memories split open.
"Come on," Daniel goads. "Come the fuck on."
"Quiet," Armand bites, seizing Daniel's jaw in his hand, grip tight enough to tear off skin, and forcing it closed. Daniel swallows down an impending whine and obediently staples his mouth shut. Armand doesn't smile—not yet, not when Daniel hasn't earned it—but the corners of his eyes lift up, and that's almost just as good as far as Daniel is concerned. Armand says, voice like velvet, "Thank you, Daniel."
At the cold press of Armand's palm against his inner thigh, Daniel spreads his legs. Spreads them wider as Armand's eyes narrow into slits, wider still until he's sure that Armand can see the whole of him now: from dick to ass. Flushed and needy and struck dumb by how much he wants it, wants Armand to fuck him open. His hands shake as he grips onto his knees. His dick throbs against his stomach, hard since that very first kiss tonight when Armand picked him up at the side of the street, and his hole clenches around nothing. He still feels a little open from a few hours ago when he was bent over the back of a nameless man's truck, parked by the beach, salt breeze on his tongue. Armand had not been very amused when he went to touch Daniel and found another man's come trickling out of him, his thighs slick with it. Oh well, you snooze you lose, and Daniel needed a fix and a cock in his ass three hours before Armand bothered to show his smug face.
Still, though—that had been hours ago. Daniel blinks, sweat dripping into his eyes. A desperate feeling of emptiness crests over him. It's that feeling of needing something—Armand's slender fingers, his dick, a beer bottle, anything, anything at all—inside him that really makes him start begging.
"Armand, please," he mumbles, voice thick. He's so empty he can barely stand it. There's a gaping hole in him, a hole in the exact shape of Armand. "Fuck, baby, I'm dying here. I'm—inside me, I need you inside me, please."
Armand backhands him across the face. The whites of his eyes gleam in the rusty orange light of the motel room.
Daniel gasps, and his dick gives a spurt across his belly. "Shit," he pants. Jesus, his face throbs. "Man, what the fuck, I said please."
Is it worse or better knowing that Armand could have taken his head clean off? That every time he's with Daniel, he gentles himself just enough—enough pain for Daniel to feel it for the next few days, but not nearly enough to maim?
"I said quiet," Armand retorts.
"Fuck you, don't pretend you don't like it when I beg," Daniel slurs, hitching his legs up even higher.
At the back of his mind, he knows this should be humiliating. He's aware of what he looks like: some used-up whore Armand found on the street and brought back to his motel room for a good time. Daniel can't bring himself to care. He's already fucked up, spinning out from the drugs from the man in the truck, from the bar, and now from Armand, and it makes the motel room blur into a haze of garish orange: the carpet, the walls, the comforter, Armand's eyes. His head lolls back as he tries to remember where he is, only to find that there isn't much of anything in his brain other than the pounding rush of blood. Every touch Armand gifts him with results in a strangled noise dropping from his mouth.
"I like when you beg after being told to do so," Armand corrects. "But—alright. Be still now."
He works two fingers into Daniel with terrifying precision. Daniel's hips jolt upwards as he tries to get Armand deeper inside him. Another finger gets him thrashing.
It's still empty. God, it's still too empty. Too empty and not enough. Daniel wants to be stuffed full, so full that he can feel it in his throat, choking him up. He wants it to hurt. He wants Armand to make him bleed. He wants to be so wet for Armand that he's slippery with it, until Armand can just glide right in. He wants to feel Armand pulsing inside him.
Armand hums. "Not tonight, I'm afraid," he says, and quickly shushes Daniel when he whines with disappointment. Something just short of humiliation sticks to the back of Daniel's throat like it always does when Armand deals with him like this, like he's a naughty, sticky-handed child at a candy store who has yet to learn the difference between wanting and needing. Between things he can have and things that just aren't meant for him.
Armand holds a hand up to Daniel's mouth, and Daniel understands the message immediately, an easy play by now: he spits. Bringing the hand down past his hips, Armand wraps his fingers around the base of Daniel's dick, using his spit as lubricant. He strokes once, twice, three times, so goddamn slowly that it's painful. His legs tremble, and he needs to hook them around Armand's waist to keep himself still enough. All the while, Armand keeps his fingers moving inside him, pressing at Daniel's prostate with each thrust—it keeps going and going and going. It's endless.
It's strange how easily the shame of offering himself up so easily for Armand sublimates so easily into this hot, guilty pleasure that swallows him whole.
The pressure builds incrementally, a half-tone at a time, such that by the time Daniel is shaking with the need to release, stuffed to the brim with Armand's cruel fingers and reduced to grunts of uh-uh-uh, he barely even realizes it. Then, just as Daniel feels himself tipping over the edge, Armand bends over and hooks his fangs into the side of Daniel—and he drinks.
Daniel lets himself go. His vision fades fast; he's motoring through a drug-induced darkness, his heart pounding like a racehorse, his chest heaving. Pleasure courses through his veins. He comes, entire body jack-knifing off the bed. He comes and comes and comes, and it just keeps going, and Daniel starts wondering if humans can die from coming too hard, and then Armand's laughing into his neck like Daniel just told the funniest joke in the world. He holds Daniel through it, lapping at his neck. The bed feels soaked, but whether it's with Daniel's sweat or blood, he has no idea.
Armand—this undead, monstrous thing who can stop time and move it sideways and who, as it turns out, is the best fucking lay of Daniel's entire shit life—is entirely overwhelming. He has entirely overwhelmed Daniel. His body feels like one single exposed nerve.
Vaguely, Daniel wonders if this is him or just the drugs. It's difficult to separate one from the other these days, especially where Armand is concerned. It's always these two vices, these two fixes together at once—Armand, and the sweet oblivion he brings. He's always told himself that the day he quits one is the day he'll quit the other.
When he comes to, he's shaking. Teeth chattering. Armand is laid overtop him. He presses a chaste kiss to the corner of Daniel's mouth. It's tender and careful, but entirely too much at the same time. In this motel room, under the greasy yellow light, Daniel lies on his back entirely at Armand's mercy. Armand has Daniel strung up like a marionette, and here he is kissing Daniel like he would a lover. He has one of those, Daniel understands; another vampire who never joins him on these escapades but to whom Armand returns home to.
"Whatever you wish for me to be, Daniel, I will be," Armand murmurs, mouthing at Daniel's jaw now. "I can be your lover."
"Yeah, but you don't want to be. You don't really want it," Daniel mutters. He's worn out, and he can feel his eyes slipping close. He remembers that he has a job interview the next morning, what the fuck. Well, there's no way he's making it. One thrown interview in a mountain of thrown interviews; what's the big deal? "It's not gonna happen if you don't want it, man."
He doesn't stay awake long enough to catch Armand's response. As Daniel drifts off to slip, he dimly wonders if Armand will leave a stack of hundred dollar bills on his pillow this time.
It's early morning when Daniel wakes, his mouth dry as cotton. His head is pounding.
Armand is already gone. The other side of the bed looks untouched.
Shit—where was this? San Francisco? But in San Francisco, Armand always visited Daniel at his apartment, a shitty one-bedroom that he shared with three other roommates: two mattresses in the bedroom, two in the living room. The worn-down coffee table served as their only piece of furniture, and actually, calling it a coffee table is a little funny because the only thing they ever did on that table was apocalyptic amounts of cocaine.
So, it must have been after San Francisco, after California. In '75, maybe. No, even later than that—he tried getting sober that year and almost succeeded, except then Armand came back into his life with not just bags of powder, but also a needle and tourniquet and fuck, Daniel had never been good at saying no—not to anyone, but especially not to Armand. '76 then, he thinks. When Daniel left the coast for the middle of the country, chasing stories and people and highs. Scummy motels in Reno, Spring Creek, Provo, Rawlins. Starting every morning with a continental breakfast of chewy bacon and eggs with slimy whites, and ending every evening with Armand. It was the same play each and every night with Armand—Daniel mouthed off until Armand tired of his incessant whining at which point he procured a small rectangular bag of cocaine from seemingly thin air and watched with an intent, unblinking gaze as Daniel stumbled across the room to grab it. If Daniel was good, which admittedly he usually wasn't, then he got fucked. Otherwise, Armand left him on the hotel bed humping the air, his wrists tied together above his head not with rope but Armand's verbal enchantments.
Daniel can't remember if he made it to his job interview the next morning, or if Armand did end up leaving him the pile of cash.
It's sundown when Daniel wakes, his mouth dry as cotton. His head is pounding.
He's been back from his book tour for about three nights now and somehow still hasn't adjusted to being home in Brooklyn.
His skin feels three sizes too small and there's a baseline thrum in his body that tells him he's hungry. Embarrassingly, he's hard, and he's hard from the Armand in his memories, which pisses him off so fucking badly it makes him want to throttle someone. Armand, preferably—the real one, not the prototype in his memories. Usually, the memories he gets back when he's asleep aren't amateur pornography films. In most of them, Armand doesn't call him lover.
Daniel flips over in bed and stares up at his ceiling as he jerks off, amped up and really peeved about it. It's irritating enough that Armand upped and left immediately after turning Daniel; even worse to be left with a flood of memories returning to him, wave after wave after wave. Years. Entire years of memories. Entire years that Armand took from him—from ages twenty to thirty-two, he estimates.
Can I make a recommendation, Daniel? Louis' voice filters through the ambient buzzing in Daniel's head. A coffin might help minimize the—ah, disturbances in your sleep.
Daniel is not purchasing a coffin for his apartment. He's made complete peace with the deathly allergy to the sun and the killing humans for food and the vampire psychic network in his brain, but he draws the line at sleeping in a coffin in the comfort of his own home. His Tempur-Pedic memory foam mattress cost him $4,000 USD, before tax. It'd been a nightmare just to get it through three sets of doors up to his condo. He doesn't necessarily need it anymore, not with his back pain gone, but he is decidedly not swapping out this breakthrough mattress technology in favor of a cramped chipboard box. He'd bought and installed the sun-blocking shades that the Dubai penthouse had and called it a day.
Thanks man, but I'm good. It's the food processed brain that's causing the disturbances, not the mattress, he says, and then: I'm guessing you haven't heard from the owner of said food processor.
No, Louis replies, apologetic. He's gone to ground, it appears.
For three fucking years? I mean, seriously.
He's stubborn, Louis says.
Whatever. It is what it is. Daniel isn't some angsty, melodramatic teenager anymore; he can deal. This isn't exactly the first time Daniel's been ditched after a night of lost control and ill-advised decisions. At least this one didn't result in a pregnancy, even though Armand sure tried his fucking best. Small mercies, Daniel supposes.
Daniel sits up in bed and grabs the notebook sitting on his bedside. He flips through the filled pages, dense with his own handwriting, until he gets to an empty page.
Montrose, he decides. It must have been in Montrose. He remembers driving out a few days later, passing by a power plant that had still been in use at the time before the land flattened out with miles and miles of ranch and pasture. He thinks he'd been writing a story about the ranchers at the time. There'd been a record-breaking winter drought at the end of '76—bare hillslopes and drifts of soil littered the landscape in the high country, and Daniel spent months trudging through wrecked farm fields and dried-up vegetation, interviewing fourth-generation farmers, learning too much about snowpack and streamflow and state drought response plans.
In his notebook, he writes:
Montrose, CO. Summer 1977- Three nights in a Motel 6 with A. He doesn't fuck me even once- On assignment for the Longmont Daily — editor Rachel? Need to verify- Rain on the way in on Hwy 50. Is A sitting beside me? Zeppelin on the radio? A's request??? What?
These days, the memories are clearer. He can usually pinpoint the exact year and location, sometimes even the month and date. Immediately after Dubai, it had been like static being poured into his head with nobody there to teach him what to pull out from it. The earlier memories are hazy. Snatches of color and sound. Snowy winters. Long, sultry summers. The taste of sweat. Grappling in the dark. Cocaine simmering in his bloodstream. The suggestion of Armand's mouth on his skin. Sucking on Armand's thumb like a child as he comes down from a shattering high. Armand burning his fingerprints off in a fit of anger. Streaks of moonlight. It's 1973, then it's '74, '78. He's meeting Armand at the bar, in his motel room, in the park. He's dizzy with love; he wants to kill Armand; he doesn't even recognize Armand when he walks past him on the street. He gets called Daniel, not Mr Molloy. He's being pinned to the brick wall of some back alleyway behind his apartment in San Francisco—not inside because Daniel's roommates are home and Armand is rather prudish to be honest, doesn't like being naked in front of other people, not even really Daniel, and Daniel somehow finds this endearing enough to allow himself to be stripped naked and taped up in public like some backwater whore. Armand gets someone else to fuck Daniel that time, if Daniel's remembering this correctly, Armand digging into this poor guy's brain like a disgusting little parasite.
The years blur into each other. Armand is the only thing that anchors them down together. Mostly, Daniel remembers wondering if this thing between him and Armand would last this time around or at all.
It's an impossible task he's trying to do: piece together his own life.
"Feel free to drop a line if you're listening, asshole," Daniel bites into the silence of his apartment.
Predictably, there's no answer.
The scar tissue is tough already; it's been enough time. Daniel's stitched most of himself back together. He gets back a few memories a week and convinces himself that it's enough to satisfy him. He'd love to say that there's nothing left of Armand inside him anymore, that he's dug the shards of him out, but—
"I'm back home," he tells his apartment. Doesn't know why he even bothers. He'd have better luck winning the Lotto Max jackpot. If Armand wanted to find him, he would've by now. "Probably gonna be around for—a long while. If you wanted to—well. You know where I live." He bites the inside of his cheek until copper fills his mouth. He swallows, trying not to gag.
Then, he gets out of bed, pulls up his sun-blocking blinds, and goes hunting.
He and Alice pack up their apartment in San Francisco and move across the country the moment Daniel gets an advance on his book. He's been sober for years now and when Alice asks if he ever misses it, he lies and tells her no. Some nights, a lingering ache creeps into his bones and stays for days, for weeks. He misses something, he misses something more than he misses the drugs, he thinks, but he doesn't know what. Something he isn't quite sure he knows how to miss.
Kate is six now, Lenora just barely two. Lenora is a lively kid, all grins and laughs, but Kate is a serious and abrasive kid, quiet until she has a reason not to be: more Daniel than Alice, to the dismay of everyone in her life. Alice registered her in ballet classes in the hopes that it would get Kate out of her shell, a decision that prompted a week-long screaming match between her and Daniel.
The morning of the move, Alice wakes up early to make them all breakfast. She's in a better mood than she's been all year. When the movers arrive, she invites them inside for a plate of toast and eggs, a cup of coffee, and some fresh OJ.
"Finally, a new start, Danny," she says happily, wrapping her arms around Daniel's neck. "We'll have a new life. A better one, a happier one."
"Yeah," Daniel says, wondering if there's something permanently broken inside him.
Alice kisses him and murmurs, "Hey, I love you," and Daniel frowns—he can't shake the feeling that the words sound wrong coming out of her mouth for some reason.
"Hey, I love you," Daniel pants, and okay, maybe it's the drugs talking, maybe it's the Armand squirreling away in his brain talking, but fuck, maybe he is in love right now. He feels like he's in love right now, sitting in Armand's lap in the driver's seat of his car and sweating like a pig as Armand pushes past the resistance at Daniel's rim and carves his way inside of Daniel.
"Flattery will get you nowhere," Armand says, then yanks Daniel's head back, sucking at his neck and scraping the flat of his teeth at the junction of Daniel's neck and shoulder where he knows Daniel is sensitive. His hands are firm and tight on Daniel's hips, dragging him back down when he squirms at the unyielding pressure everywhere, and snarling, "Stay still."
"No, I mean it, baby—I love you, I swear—" Daniel gasps, cutting himself off when Armand grinds his hips up like he's trying to murder Daniel. His asshole feels bruised. He doesn't even feel like himself anymore, doesn't feel like a real person. Where is he? Who is he? He's a set of holes opening and closing on Armand's commands. He's a body for Armand to take what he wants from. He wants to take Armand home, and he wants Armand to string him up on his own marital bed, and he wants—
"And how, pray tell," Armand says against Daniel's open mouth, his dark curls fanned out against the headrest, "will that work with your wife and daughter at home right now? She's reading little Katie her favorite bedtime story—Goodnight Moon, is it? How darling."
As if Daniel knows what his daughter's favorite bedtime stories are.
"We can go to yours then," Daniel says. "Take me home to Louis. You're always talking some shit about how he doesn't appreciate what you—"
Armand rises to the bait: "Insolent," he hisses, "He does not say your name, and you will not say his," and grabs Daniel's jaw in his hand and forces his chin up, his mouth open. Daniel closes his eyes. In all his years of cruising, between all the benders of sundry drugs, nobody's ever spit in his mouth before. Daniel wonders if Armand is going to.
He doesn't. He scrapes his fingernails down Daniel's back and hitches himself closer into him, their sweat-slicked chests pressed against each other. Daniel can't tell if part of it is Armand fucking with his brain or if he just gets this crazy with Armand's cock inside him, but everything is so tight, just so impossibly tight that it's making Daniel's brains leak out of his ears. Armand goes at him harder, swallowing down Daniel's choked off moans, smoothing his thumb down the length of Daniel's convulsing throat as he drags himself out of Daniel before once again sliding all the way back in, home sweet home.
"Fine, whatever, I don't care how it's going to work—just fuck me," Daniel whines. Then, because if this isn't what love is, then Daniel doesn't know what love is at all, he asks, "Are you hungry?" and bares his throat at Armand: an offering.
Armand's fangs sharpen: he looks untamed, wild. A shiver shoots down Daniel's spine. Armand hooks his teeth into Daniel's neck, and—shit, shit, he's coming, his dick spurting over Armand's stomach.
Outside, the night sky opens up, and it starts to snow. It's early February, and a gray-skied winter has settled over the city. Daniel wanders towards the harbor where the ocean disappears into the abyss of the sky, a long dark line of forever. It's cold tonight, colder than it's been all month, and the wind is sharp and biting. Taxis roam down the road. Neon OPEN signs are still blinking from bar windows, drunks are still stumbling out from the door. The newly fallen layer of snow dampens the noise of the city into a false quiet, and the sidewalks are illuminated by the arcing yellow beam of the streetlamps. Daniel stuffs his hands in his pockets and prowls the streets looking for a hunting spot.
Typically, he likes to hunt by the pond at the park. At night, it's mostly drunks and midnight lovers—good enough for Daniel. Last year, he attempted Louis' ethical vegetarian diet plan for a sum total of three days before giving up and returning to humans. The squirrels in New York taste like boiled peanuts and car exhaust, which is just sickening. Beyond that, it's just a completely undignified experience scrambling up a tree to grab a squealing rodent. Daniel's puked on a guy's dick before and that was somehow less humiliating than chasing after a squirrel.
Tonight, though, Daniel walks south until he hits a five-storey hotel, a hotel Daniel knows well because in 1977 Armand watched him do a line and finger his ass on a queen-sized bed in a fifth-floor room. Fond memories for Armand, Daniel's sure. There's an alleyway behind the parking lot, and Daniel sets up camp there, slamming closed the lid of the dumpster and perching up on top and waiting patiently.
It's a slow night; there aren't as many tourists in New York this time of year.
As Daniel waits for some unlucky human to walk into his trap, he retrieves his memory notebook from his pocket again and scribbles down the loose memories that's been rattling around his brain for a while: in Armand's car in a church parking lot, passed out in the passenger seat as Armand drives him home to his wife, standing on his front porch watching Alice's dark silhouette in the lit-up window with Armand disappearing into the shadows behind him.
Then, another one, from much earlier: LA, September 1974. Shacked up at Bea’s place for a week between jobs and A sleeps in the closet. He drinks from me every night. Why does he stay? He thinks they might've been caught in a thunderstorm one night, Daniel huddling under Armand's coat and laughing at the state of his wet hair—he looked like a pissy drowned cat—but he can't be sure. He does remember laughing at Armand for being there with him in the first place, this creature of darkness in the glitter and grime of the sun-soaked city of Los Angeles. Other than that, though, there's nothing else Daniel recalls from that drugged-and-drained haze of a week; he isn't even sure if he did actually have a friend named Bea or if that's a name Armand put in his head, too.
He rifles through the first few pages of his notebook, searching for other memories of LA or of fall from that year, but he doesn't come up with anything.
At the sound of shoes scuffing against pavement, Daniel looks up. He quickly tucks his notebook back into his pocket and straightens up.
A well-dressed man in a heavy wool overcoat, warm and flushed and drunk from champagne at dinner, rounds the corner, heading for the parking lot. Daniel cocks his head to the side. He listens to the steady beat of his heart, blood pumping out of the aorta, capillaries nearly bursting underneath his skin.
Daniel draws his fangs out and leaps for him.
That first gush of blood hits him hard. Fizzy champagne and elation. It coats the inside of Daniel's mouth, hot and viscous. Tonight, Daniel is sloppy. Purposefully so. He holds the man down against the snow-covered asphalt as he writes. He drinks messily, taking these great big gulps, and the wet slurping noises cut through the quiet of the night. Blood splatters over his shirt collar, across the front of his coat, onto his sleeves.
The man takes one last heaving gasp, and he’s gone.
Daniel pulls away from the man's shriveled body. His body buzzes with warmth. Blood drips down his chin. Red blooms in the snow.
Daniel wipes his sleeve across his mouth and sits up, then heaves the man's body over his shoulder and heads home.
"What the fuck," Daniel yelps at the sight of Armand kneeling over him in the dark. He scrambles back in bed and pulls his sheet up over his chest. On the mattress beside him, his roommate stirs at Daniel's shout, but Armand simply says, "Rest again," and he's snoring again in half a second flat.
"You've been avoiding me," Armand accuses, voice mild but eyes like daggers.
Daniel attempts to ignore this. "Have you heard of something called the front door? Or maybe—ringing the doorbell? Literally anything other than standing over me like some kind of demon."
"You do not have a doorbell. I will consider the front door once you explain to me the reasoning behind your recent disappearance."
"I didn't disappear," Daniel protests hotly, but Armand just raises two neatly trimmed eyebrows and says, "Daniel," and Daniel deflates. "Alright," he concedes. "Alright, well. I guess you can say I've been busy. Of sorts."
"Of sorts," Armand repeats, irritation lacing his voice. He wipes away a smudge of residue from the coffee table, elegant in his movements. "Busy with what, exactly? Romping around the street like a harlot with your tongue out, looking for your next fix, perhaps? Tearing through the drugs again, letting it dissolve what little brain matter you have left into a puddle of—"
"Okay," Daniel interrupts loudly. "Fuck, okay. Just—relax. I lost my job, alright? I missed a deadline and I lost my job and nobody's gonna hire some junkie that misses deadlines."
Armand sits back on his heels. A faint pressure builds at Daniel's temples, the only warning he gets before Armand begins to rifle through Daniel's head like he's reorganizing a filing cabinet or something.
"Hm," he says when he finally lands on the incident that got Daniel fired, and Daniel winces.
"It was an accident," he tries to defend himself.
"I do not believe it was an accident, no," Armand says softly. He smooths a gentle hand over Daniel's head, tracing the shell of his ear with his thumb, dragging it down along the side of his neck to his collarbone, and then splaying his fingers over Daniel's shoulder. His other hand palms over Daniel's boxers and he's so delicate about the whole thing, as if he's petting a rabbit.
It had been an accident. Or, well. Maybe not an accident, but an honest mistake, at the very least. He'd promised himself he was going to work on his assignment—some puff piece about a new restaurant that was opening on Hyde, really fucking simple stuff—in the evening, maybe through the night if he needed to, and he'd turn it in bright and early the next morning. But one thing led to another and suddenly it was midnight in the bathroom of a sex club and there he was, puking his guts out in the toilet, the guy whose dick was in his mouth not even thirty seconds ago bracing behind him, an awkward hand on Daniel's bare back in a gesture of comfort and support. "Shit," the guy—Brandon? Brian?—said, "d'you want me to take you home? You look like you're in a bad way, man." Everything had been a haze at that point. Everything in his life had been a haze, really. Momentarily, he was reminded of his assignment. Fuck it, he thought. What was one more fuck-up in the colossal fuck-up that was this life? He batted it out of his mind. So, he'd said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand—
"Nah," Armand says in a perfect imitation of Daniel's drawl, and he digs the heel of his palm against the hard line of Daniel's dick, "I'm good, man. Just gimme a sec. I still wanna suck your dick."
Daniel flinches, and then Armand takes his hand off of Daniel, leaving him hard and blue-balled in his boxers. God.
"You've been busy seeking thrills from the very bottom of the barrel. I understand now."
"I've been out of a job," Daniel emphasizes.
"My point precisely," Armand snipes. "Was the cock worth it, Daniel? Did it fill something inside you? Make you less empty? Give you a sense of self-worth and dignity?"
Daniel holds his hands up incredulously, like: dude, what's your problem? A bad and pointless question that is; Daniel's going to be here forever if he starts listing all of Armand's problems, starting first and foremost with his obsession for not letting Daniel get more than four hours of sleep. "Like, I don't know, man," he says. "I just sucked his dick, so I guess it was about as life-affirming as any blowjob could be. You want me to tell you what I did to his dick or something?"
"The pictures in your mind are detailed enough, thank you."
"Huh," Daniel considers. "Really? It was kinda a blur. I didn't think I remembered that night all too well, actually."
Armand's throat makes an impatient creaking noise; he's clearly done with this conversation. "Why don't you head south to Los Angeles?" he suggests, and Daniel blinks, confused by this change of topic. "You have a friend there, I understand? Beatrice? An old classmate of yours."
"Well, yeah, but—look, man. I can't just go to LA. And how do you know about Bea?"
"You will drive down in the morning," Armand continues, like Daniel never said anything, "and I will join you shortly afterwards. Yes?"
"You're insane. You need to be fucking committed," Daniel says flatly.
Armand clicks his tongue and crosses his arms over his chest disapprovingly. "Really, Daniel. Resorting to petty insults so quickly? I expected more creativity from a mind as sharp as yours."
He doesn't wait for Daniel to reply, just wedges himself into Daniel's and commands him to rise from bed and head to the bathroom to shave and shower, then stuffs him into the front seat of Daniel's roommate's car and mindfucks him into driving five hours down to LA in a stolen car without a license. By the time Daniel arrives, he's soaked in sweat and he's got a headache from gritting his teeth so hard.
"You're a freak," Daniel complains when Armand shows up on Bea's doorstep the following evening.
"Thank you," Armand replies primly. "It is gratifying to know my skills are appreciated."
When Daniel returns to San Francisco after his bloody sexcapade in LA—that's really the only word he can use to describe those seven nights with Armand—his roommates are gone, leaving him the apartment and the car. He heads down to the sex club one evening and asks around looking for a Brandon/Brian because, well, he'd been a good lay despite everything and finds out that he's been missing for a while now.
And Armand, because he's Armand, is gone.
That was San Francisco, Daniel thinks to himself as the memory hits him. He always seems to know when they're in San Francisco. Like an X on a map.
He hops down from a bridge on the way back home, the snow cushioning his landing, then finds a bench for him and his victim from earlier tonight to sit while he digs out his memory notebook and frantically scribbles the details he remembers to the LA entry. At the bottom, he adds a list of questions to—well, hopefully to verify at some point: When did he kill my roommates? To what end? Follow up on Brandon/Brian… was the body found?
He touches his neck as if he's expecting to find the collection of puncture wounds Armand left in him over the years. There's nothing, of course—no line of stitches, no open wound, nothing that might give Daniel proof that these memories are his memories, that Armand was more than just an outline of a ghost in Daniel's life.
Daniel stands up and shoulders the now-cold corpse of his dinner and continues back home, walking along a chain-like fence. It's snowing again. Fat snowflakes drift from the sky, melting as soon as they touch the ground. It's still and quiet around these parts, and Daniel hasn't run into a single person yet. Blocky industrial buildings sit gloomily on the other side of the fence: fluorescent windows lighting up the night in symmetrical patterns of white-yellow squares, salt-streaked glass doors locked until morning.
Daniel stops in his steps suddenly. Inside him, in the cavity of his chest, he feels—a tug. In his ears, there's a slow steady beat that Daniel hasn't heard before but still feels intimately familiar, almost as if—
Daniel looks directly across the road and—
Armand leans in the doorway of a red brick building, lighting a cigarette. The orange-red flame burns into the dark. A gust of wind blows through between them. Snow starts to spit down faster now; drifts of it swirl down the pavement. Armand is so still, a dark smudge against the amberlit hallway behind him. He's little more than a shadow, a suggestion of a person, his outline blurred in the dark—an afterimage, lingering. But then Armand tilts his chin up and meets Daniel's eyes, gold on gold, and Daniel knows that he's real. Knows that he's real and true.
Armand blinks, and the world around Daniel comes to a standstill. The whistle of the wind cuts off. Snowflakes hang suspended in mid-air. The cars on the bridge come to a stop.
Daniel's throat closes. He crosses the street. He comes to stand in front of Armand. He feels like he's twenty years old again.
Armand doesn't say anything. He lifts the corpse from Daniel's shoulder and drops it on the ground. He flicks his cigarette and suddenly the body is subsumed in flames.
"Dragging a corpse with you through half of Brooklyn—you're getting sloppy," Armand says, and—the sound of his voice suddenly ignites something inside Daniel, the corpse flames licking up Daniel, too.
"First time I see you in three years, and that's all you have to say to me?" Daniel snarls, crowding into Armand, walking him backwards until they were inside the building now, the corpse still burning outside, Armand's back pressed against the wall and Daniel caging him in. "Hello, Armand. How are you doing? How's the wife, the kids? How old is little Wendy now? Must be middle school, I reckon. Wow, time really flies, doesn't it? I mean, especially when a decade of your life gets lobotomized out of your head. Any other good memories I've been missing out on that you wouldn't mind oh so generously returning back to me?"
Armand's face remains blank.
"Nothing? Nothing at all?" Daniel continues, ruthless, "Turned any vampires lately, or am I the only one still? But still not good enough, huh—"
"Daniel," Armand interrupts softly. He presses the palm of his hand against Daniel's shoulder, and Daniel breathes out, hard.
"I don't want your apologies."
"Alright," Armand says easily. "I will not offer them then. I understand."
Daniel snorts. "And some nerve you've got to show up here after three years of radio silence." He knows he sounds equal parts incredulous and bitter, but there's no helping it. He'd never been good at pretending, not even when he was still human. "What was the plan here, man? Turn me in a fit of insanity, dip before I could realize you stole ten years from me, and then come waltzing back into my life with—what, a bag of coke? That was how you always got me back, from what I can recall. Drugs, and a quick little fuck in a motel room. Same old dance."
Armand exhales. A long beat. Then, he says, "You asked for me back. Earlier tonight, I heard you in your apartment: drop a line." He gives a little shrug. "So, I came. Least I could do, I suppose."
Daniel gapes at him—that's all it took?—and Armand uses this opportunity to push Daniel back a few steps.
"Why don't you come upstairs?" Armand suggests, a hand already on Daniel's elbow, guiding him towards the stairs. Daniel lets him. God help him, Daniel lets him, even as he chokes down at his anger at Armand.
Armand leads them up four flights of stairs and down a dimly lit hallway. He pushes open the metal door at the end of the corridor and gestures for Daniel to enter.
At first glance, Daniel thinks he's stepped into Armand's art studio. A large wooden workbench sits in the center of the room, a mountain of half-completed sketches piling up on it; a line of easels sit with unfinished canvases by the window; more unfinished oil paintings, disintegrating clay sculpture, rough figure drawings litter the studio, no real order in their organization. But Daniel doesn't see any tools—no paintbrushes or pottery wheels or sketching pencils—and he realizes with a start that these aren't Armand's works; they're works of Armand. This isn't an art studio; it's a museum.
Daniel steps closer to the largest canvas in the room. It's a dinner scene, Daniel thinks, or it was intended to be before the painter abandoned it for one reason or another. The background is not quite finished, and half the dinner guests are simply blobs of color: a light peach for their face, then a green or red or black for their clothes. At the head of the table sits nn important looking man, but the painter has yet to serve him dinner; there's nothing on the plate. There's a boy in a prostrate position at the feet of the man, and there's something captivating about the half-bliss, half-anguish captured on his face—
"Oh," Daniel says dumbly. "This is you." He glances at the painting on his left, then surveys the rest of the room. "All of this is you."
"All painted by contemporaries of my maker," Armand says, then points at the man at the head of the table and names him reverently: "Marius de Romanus." He comes to stand in front of the half-finished painting beside Daniel, their shoulders brushing past each other. "Under his tutelage and care, I posed for many artists before he shared the Dark Gift with me—painters, sculptors, the very best Venice had to offer, and the middling mediocre hopefuls as well. It's taken me years to track down the unfinished pieces that still exist today."
"This is what you've been doing these past three years? Collecting all this artwork?"
"Of sorts," Armand says, tilting his head.
There are dozens of paintings, hundreds of sketches. Some of the boys have Armand's eyes, some of them have his body, his hands, his mouth. Different flesh parts of him scattered across the canvases of men Daniel will never know.
Armand traces the line of the boy's—his—back, his touch light. Then, he presses his fingers together, and the painting catches on fire in a searing flame of blue. So quickly, before Daniel can even register what's happening, the flame leaps to another painting, then another, then a chipped marble sculpture, onto the workbench until the whole room is ablaze, the smell of burning wood and paints filling it.
"Nobody has painted me in four hundred years, and nobody will again," Armand says, his voice like steel.
"What are you doing?" Daniel demands, stumbling backwards away from the blistering flames. "Armand—are you insane? You're going to set this whole place on fire. You're going to set yourself on fire."
"I will erase myself here as I did you, you standing beside me in witness, and we will be equals again after this," Armand says. The reflection of the flames dance in his golden eyes, and against the fire, he looks like an angel ascending from the rising sun. "My memories for yours. An equivalent exchange. You can remake me afterwards, however you wish; a soft man, a hard man, whoever, whichever part you need me to be—I will be him. I will be the fledgling to your maker, so to speak." He starts to reach for Daniel's hand, then stops when he gets close. "Lover. I remember you liked that," he adds softly.
"What are you talking about?" Daniel says, and his voice sounds strange. His ears start ringing when he finally comprehends what Armand is telling him, what he's offering him.
Sweat beads across Daniel's forehead, down his neck, down his back. The flames have reached the ceiling, and unless Armand managed to time freeze the entire city of New York, somebody's going to see this fire and send firefighters here any second now. It's an immolation. Daniel is going to burn alive. He's going to die here, in this mausoleum of Armand's past.
It occurs to Daniel belatedly that he's angry, that's he is truly, genuinely, incandescently angry at Armand. For the stolen memories, for the returned memories. For letting Daniel live out his life, clueless and half-sedated. For letting him delude himself into thinking that either of his marriages could've worked out, that a relationship with anybody other than Armand could've worked out, could've lasted. All the strange shadows in the corner of every apartment Daniel's ever lived in; all those times he woke up in the morning and found the bedroom window cracked open an inch when he distinctly remembered closing it the previous night; the scraggly scar on his neck and his inner thigh—it's never not been Armand. The mere idea of him is parasitic, latching itself onto Daniel, burrowing into Daniel's brain, and becoming an invisible, all-consuming presence in his life.
And here he is standing in front of him offering himself up on a funeral pyre.
"You piece of shit, I could kill you," Daniel seethes, his insides ablaze. "Remake you? Yeah, and what's going to happen when I start straying from the script? You gonna chop my head off and sew it onto Louis' body? Lestat's? I mean—what the fuck is wrong with you?" He rips his memory notebook out from his pocket and starts flipping through the pages frantically, reading entries as he goes: "San Francisco, November 1973. San Francisco, December 1973. Paris, 1975. Amsterdam, 1975. Brooklyn, 1980. San Francisco again, 1980—"
"This means nothing." Armand's voice trembles, like a deer listening for the hunter's bow.
"Don't do that. Don't play that part with me," Daniel warns. "This is not how you fix it." He gestures furiously at his notebook, then at the space between him and Armand. "You think I wanted to remake you when I was 25 and on my knees begging you to touch me and asking you to say I love you back? When I was 30 and blowing off my wife to see you? You don't think I wanted you even then? Even when you disappeared for months at a time and ignored my calls and fed me drugs like some kind of unethical fucked-up palliative care nurse—"
"You always asked very sweetly, and I did not know how to resist you—"
"Fuck you, Armand," Daniel retorts. "Fuck you."
"You came back to me only when you needed money or drugs. The only times you ever spoke of love—" Armand spits the word out, harsh and bitter, fangs out— "were when you were so high you couldn't even recognize yourself in the mirror." The flames behind Armand lash out with his words, spreading wide over his shoulders like a pair of fiery angel wings. "You don't even remember any of this."
"I remember enough," Daniel says. "I remember that I loved you—first, and last, and all the goddamn places in between. In San Francisco and Paris and New York. In fucking Montrose, Colorado."
Daniel blinks. He looks around. The room is a museum of ash and soot. All he can hear is the sound of his own ragged breathing. He says, into that burned, hushed quiet of the room, "I wanted you. Want you: present tense."
"You will come to resent me for who I am and for the place I have in your life, and that is the truth," Armand tells him, matter of fact, without any accusation. "I don't need to tell you this; you are intimately aware."
"Yeah," Daniel replies. "You've said. And yet…"
"I'm still here, aren't I?"
Daniel slices open the side of his neck and lets the blood gush out of the wound, oozing down his throat and soaking a deep red stain in his coat collar. He smears his thumb over the warm slick of his blood, then brings it to Armand's mouth and presses down insistently until Armand takes his thumb into his mouth and sucks around it, eyes fluttering shut.
"It's your blood inside of me," Daniel murmurs. "First and last. We're tied together."
"Daniel," Armand chokes out, strangled, and when Daniel slides his thumb out of his mouth, Armand reaches out to grip Daniel's coat so tightly that he rips one the buttons off.
Daniel shoves his memory notebook against Armand's chest. The pages are stained with his blood, crimson fingerprints smeared over the cover. "Take it," he says roughly. "Just—look."
Armand lifts his eyes up and and meets Daniel's for a moment before he cracks it open and starts to flip through the pages.
"You took me to Paris between writing gigs," Daniel says, nodding at the page that Armand's paused at. "In '75. August, I think. I got clean that summer. Tried to, at least."
"Yes," Armand murmurs. He traces over Daniel's slanted handwriting with a perfectly manicured fingernail, follows it across the page, lingering on the swoop of Daniel's g.
"I don't remember much. Just the plane ride there, really. A few glimpses here and there." Mostly, he remembers sensations, feelings: the wind whipping over the Seine, the hot and sticky summer air, the dark blue night skies, the warm glow of Armand's eyes on him. He remembers Armand guiding down cobbled streets, down flights of stairs. He remembers how gorgeous Armand looked in Paris, even more so than usual.
"The first evening, we had dinner on the Seine," Armand tells him. "It was a tourist trap, of course, but you insisted and I was not one to refuse you, not in those days. We ordered the entire menu—sea bream and risotto, beef steak, pan-seared aubergines, cucumber and artichoke tartar, their Provençal tart—"
"That was good. I liked that," Daniel interrupts, and he can see it in his mind now, the whole thing: Armand leaned back in the chair across from Daniel watching him inelegantly devour the lavish spread of food in front of him. And Armand's right; it had been the whole menu. There'd been fizzy champagne for Daniel and a dark bloody wine for Armand, then five rounds of dessert. Armand poured another glass of champagne for Daniel and asked, "What are you thinking about?" which made Daniel snipe back, Can't you find out yourself?
Armand looks at Daniel, and his gaze feels as warm as it had been in Paris. He stands so perfectly still: a painted portrait sitting in his gilded frame, quiet and disciplined and restrained. Shadows pleat across his face, obscuring his eyes and nose.
"So, you did stay out of my head sometimes," Daniel observes.
Slowly, as if afraid Daniel's going to bolt, he raises a hand and cups Daniel's cheek, thumb making half-moon motions over the crest of his cheekbone. Nicking the skin at his wrist, he uses a dribble of his own blood to close the wound on Daniel's neck, like a mother tending to her child, and when Daniel's mouth drops open on a sigh, something in Armand's face collapses, goes slack. He wonders what Armand sees when he looks at him like this: the boyish face from San Francisco, the lovestruck one in Paris, or this one—this one torn through by time, but somehow still here, turning to press his mouth against Armand's palm.
"On occasion, I liked to hear you speak your thoughts; to be voluntarily given them, and to be trusted with them. To be indulged, really," Armand says, letting his arm fall back to his side. He smiles, a tad contrite. "It's my only recourse now, it appears. What are you thinking about, Daniel?"
"I'm thinking about if Alice ever really said the words I love you to me," Daniel says, and then: "That's the same thing I said in Paris, wasn't it?"
An absolute silence reverberates through the room.
"Yeah," Daniel exhales. "Thought so." He takes a step back. Shoves his hands in his pockets and leans back on his heels. He nods at his memory notebook in Armand's hands, makes a grand, sweeping gesture at the ash-filled room around then, and says, "You can burn that with the rest of it. Show off your cool spontaneous combustion trick again, if you want."
Armand's eyes widen; he's surprised despite himself. "Your memories? You wish for me to burn your memories?"
"Can you give them back?" Daniel asks. "Can you give me back those ten years?"
"I cannot be in your head any longer," Armand says by way of explanation. "They'll return eventually, I imagine. Bits and pieces for now."
"Alright." Daniel shrugs. "So, it's whatever then."
"It's whatever," Armand repeats skeptically.
"You can't give them back to me anyway." Daniel swallows around the stone lodged in his throat, his pulse jumping into his mouth. "A truce, then. The next ten. I want your next ten years. Can you do that?"
Armand's throat works. His eyes are dark, half-lidded. He is so beautiful here, in this room, standing in front of Daniel and close enough to touch. The sleeves of his shirt are pulled up, exposing his wrist bones, his radial veins. The low light pours over his hair, the graceful slope of his nose, the delicate line of his neck. He is the ineffable truth, Daniel thinks. An inexorable, unavoidable force of nature. He's been here for what feels like the whole of Daniel's life. He is the most constant thing in it—more reliable than the sun rising each and every morning.
"Yes," Armand says, and his voice cracks down the middle. "The next ten, and the next million. You can have this lifetime, the full of it. The rest of forever. It's yours, as long as yours is mine."
Daniel burns. His skin trembles. The blood in him surges and swells, becomes a living thing.
"Dude, where have you been? We were about to call the cops." Remy's standing in the doorway of the kitchen with a spatula in one hand and a joint in the other, naked and with his dick swinging, when Daniel finally manages to stumble home after his week-long bender. He thinks it's been a week. Actually, his brain feels so scrambled that it could've been a month and Daniel wouldn't have known any better.
"Saw a guy set himself on fire in front of me," Daniel mutters, rubbing his eyes. He's dead on his feet. His limbs feel so heavy, his mouth like it's been stuffed with cotton. He can still smell flesh burning. His knees ache.
"Yo," Remy says, appropriately awed. Daniel probably needs to get new roommates. "That's sick, dude."
"I guess," Daniel groans, then goes to crash on his mattress.
The next forty-eight hours are the worst forty-eight hours of his life, and he spends nearly all of them alternating between curled on his mattress in a fitful sleep, and puking in the toilet, in the garbage, or on the floor of the apartment when he can't make it to a proper receptacle.
By the third day, however, Daniel wakes up feeling better than he has in years. He's back out on the street that night, a stack of empty tapes in his bag. He's not quite sure where he's headed, but he's not exactly surprised when he finds himself pulling open the door of Polynesian Mary's. He holds the door open for the dark-haired boy behind him, and—hey, he's pretty cute, in a serious, solemn kind of way.
"Hey," Daniel says, nodding at the boy. "Do I know you from somewhere? You look familiar."
"I don't believe so," he says, then holds a hand out. "Armand."
A searing pain tears through Daniel's head then, and he stumbles back, clutching his head and swearing. Armand catches his elbow and gently guides him to a seat by the bar, seemingly unconcerned by how Daniel's skull feels like it's about to split open.
"Deep breaths, Daniel," Armand soothes, and Daniel is out of it, but he's never been so out of it that he couldn't alarm bells going off in his head—
"How do you know my name?" he mumbles, teeth still gritted from the pain. "I never told you that."
Armand laughs softly. He grips the back of Daniel's neck with a firm hand and before Daniel can even take the time to gasp, the memories start flooding back.
areudirty
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kianamaiart
